Jan   Feb   Mar   Apr   May   Jun   Jul   Aug   Sep   Oct   Nov   Dec   Total
2002  50.0  80.0  78.7   3.5   4.3  21.9  10.3  58.2  26.7  25.0  83.2  75.6  517.4
2003  51.6 144.5  52.7 108.7  39.1  31.8  18.9  23.0   5.7  91.3  55.9  71.1  694.3
2004 192.1  77.8  65.2  22.4   5.4  20.4  43.3  49.6  45.9 111.2  69.0 133.8  836.0
2005  92.9  66.3  16.2  13.2  18.8  82.6  20.9  13.4  87.1  60.2 154.3  98.7  724.6
2006 109.5 115.2 110.2  22.5   3.6  45.8  46.4  30.8  44.8  29.8 133.6  43.8  735.0
2007  98.1 137.1  95.4  43.6  21.7  39.9   8.7 105.4  13.8  95.7 102.8 127.7  889.9
2008 133.6 203.0   3.8  68.9  10.9  60.4  25.8  35.0  54.5  57.1        (YTD) 653.0

The 135 year average for Armidale (in millimetres) is:

Avg  104.5  87.1  65.0  45.9  44.4  56.9  49.2  48.4  51.6  67.8  80.4  89.2  790.1

Given that much of New South Wales has been drought declared for much of this year, we’re doing rather well in the rainfall tally stakes - thanks mainly to summer storms at the beginning of the year. March was rather slim, though, at 3.8 mm (0.15 inches) which contrasted hugely with the previous month, February, at 203.0 mm (8 inches) of rain.

Since then an external UHF antenna has been installed to get a better signal from the 3G base station. The signal strength has increased from “low” to “low to medium”. It’s not the magnitude of signal gain that I was looking for, but, given the amount of gum tree foliage that the signal has to bore through, it’s better than nothing.

The antenna was installed by professional riggers sub-contracted to the broadband carrier; it sits extremely solidly on the roof. Given that the Telstra 3G wireless broadband terminates on the same or nearby tower to where our telephone-over-microwave service sits, I got the compass out and took a bearing. The microwave antenna is sited about 150 metres south of the house and has a clear line-of-sight to its base station. The UHF wireless broadband antenna was about 20 degrees too far to the south; I swung it around but, surprisingly, it made little difference - the quantity of foliage is being blamed for this.

The peak download speed to date has now been 2800 kbit/s with a peak upload speed of 1100 kbit/s. Compared to the 512k/128k satellite service, I’ve got nothing to complain about (so far).

My telephone service is delivered by a voice-over-microwave radio link.

For the past couple of years my internet connectivity has been delivered by 2-way satellite. While I can’t complain (OK, I can think of lots to complain about), it was better than a dialup modem - just. While I could live with a maximum 512 kbit/s downlink speed, the latency injected due to the huge distance the packets had to travel was a major pain in the neck.

Just recently, Telstra, the same local carrier, finally dropped the tariffs on its 3G wireless broadband service. For $129 (which, while expensive, is cheaper than the 2-way satellite), I have managed to get a peak downlink speed of 2600 kbit/s (2.6 Mbit/s) and a latency to my place of work that’s now 100 ms instead of 1700 ms.

I can now access the internet just like most of the rest of the people I know.

Oh yes, and while my monthly quota has now “jumped” from 5 GBytes to 10 Gbytes, I still feel like a poor cousin to those using Comcast in the USA who now have to live within a monthly 250 Gbyte quota. The poor cherubs.

Also rumoured is that the iPhone and iPod Touch will see an update in June that brings us 802.1x wireless authentication (which means that at long last these devices will work on enterprise campuses).

      Jan   Feb   Mar   Apr   May   Jun   Jul   Aug   Sep   Oct   Nov   Dec   Total
2002  50.0  80.0  78.7   3.5   4.3  21.9  10.3  58.2  26.7  25.0  83.2  75.6  517.4
2003  51.6 144.5  52.7 108.7  39.1  31.8  18.9  23.0   5.7  91.3  55.9  71.1  694.3
2004 192.1  77.8  65.2  22.4   5.4  20.4  43.3  49.6  45.9 111.2  69.0 133.8  836.0
2005  92.9  66.3  16.2  13.2  18.8  82.6  20.9  13.4  87.1  60.2 154.3  98.7  724.6
2006 109.5 115.2 110.2  22.5   3.6  45.8  46.4  30.8  44.8  29.8 133.6  43.8  735.0
2007  98.1 137.1  95.4  43.6  21.7  39.9   8.7 105.4  13.8  95.7 102.8 127.7  889.9
2008 133.6 203.0                                                        (YTD) 336.6

The 135 year average for Armidale (in millimetres) is:

Avg  104.5  87.1  65.0  45.9  44.4  56.9  49.2  48.4  51.6  67.8  80.4  89.2  790.1

It’s been quite wet of late with above average rainfall in the past 5 months. A moderate La Niña episode has been responsible for the turn-around from the past several years of drought. Forecasts suggest that we’ll see at least another 3 months of wetter than average weather.

“Man critically injured in train platform accident” (http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/01/19/2142088.htm)

“A man is in critical condition after colliding with a train on a platform of Carnegie Station in Melbourne on Friday afternoon.

Police say the 62-year-old approached the empty express train before he was hit.”

A man collided … (objects collide with objects; in common usage, people don’t collide with trains)

… on a platform … (the train must have risen up from the track)

… the 62-year-old approached the empty express train … (”approached”? - like he was going to ask it for the time?)

Monthly rainfall tallies for the past 6 years (in millimetres), as at 20 km east of Armidale, NSW.

      Jan   Feb   Mar   Apr   May   Jun   Jul   Aug   Sep   Oct   Nov   Dec   Total
2002  50.0  80.0  78.7   3.5   4.3  21.9  10.3  58.2  26.7  25.0  83.2  75.6  517.4
2003  51.6 144.5  52.7 108.7  39.1  31.8  18.9  23.0   5.7  91.3  55.9  71.1  694.3
2004 192.1  77.8  65.2  22.4   5.4  20.4  43.3  49.6  45.9 111.2  69.0 133.8  836.0
2005  92.9  66.3  16.2  13.2  18.8  82.6  20.9  13.4  87.1  60.2 154.3  98.7  724.6
2006 109.5 115.2 110.2  22.5   3.6  45.8  46.4  30.8  44.8  29.8 133.6  43.8  735.0
2007  98.1 137.1  95.4  43.6  21.7  39.9   8.7 105.4  13.8  95.7 102.8 127.7  889.9

The 135 year average for Armidale (in millimetres) is:

Avg  104.5  87.1  65.0  45.9  44.4  56.9  49.2  48.4  51.6  67.8  80.4  89.2  790.1

So, 890 mm (35 inches) of rain for the year isn’t too bad considering that this area was officially drought declared for part of the year. One good year doesn’t break the multi-year span of a drought, though. We just have to learn to live with less water in some years.

My solution to this issue was to turn to Google Reader (again). I had tried Google Reader some time previously but, at the time, I didn’t like its user interface. And some time before that I had used Bloglines as an online reader before likewise becoming frustrated by its user interface.

In the intervening time Google had released a new version of their Reader. And I liked it. Google looked after the periodic checking for new blog articles - my own bandwidth use was reduced. Google Reader used Ajax to feed me only a couple of handfuls of blog articles at a time, thus trickling the data to me rather than spiking my bandwidth use.

And them came feed overload. Each time I came across an interesting blog article from a person whose blog I wasn’t subscribed to, I would immediately subscribe in the hope of continuing to find similarly interesting articles.

After I had reached some 535 feed subscriptions I came to the realisation that the signal to noise ration wasn’t especially good. I was having to wade through far too many articles that I wasn’t interested in before coming across something that was of interest.

So began the Great Cull.

Over a period of weeks I unsubscribed from over 200 blog feeds - I’m currently subscribed to about 320. That’s manageable. It now takes me less time to reading a larger number of interesting articles. I win.