The MacAlba

The rainfall chart for 2007 is now closed - the tally has been added to this table.

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 blog reading tool of choice for a long time used to be NetNewsWire. It’s a great piece of software and a great tool - I had purchased it after trialing it for a short time. But, being on a 2-way satellite link with a finite download quota, I began to resent the amount of bandwidth being consumed by NetNewsWire as it went about its business of checking for new blog articles every 2 hours. To be factually correct, much of the problem was due to bloggers not being aware of, or not being able to utilise, their ability to turn on data compression when their RSS feed was being checked.

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.

There’s no doubt that a few hundred thousand Apple iPhones have been sold in the USA over the past few days. It’s been highly anticipated and talked about and written about for months now. The new owners must be having a great time.

Then there are those of us in the rest of the world. Will it / won’t it be sold in Australia? The iPhone, currently, is a GSM device. Telstra, the largest carrier here, has pooh-poohed the idea of their supporting it - they’re moving away from GSM and CDMA to their new 3G network. If their advertising is to be believed, their nationwide CDMA network will be switched off in January 2008.

In the meantime, instead of the real thing, we’ll just have to make do by operating an iPhone by proxy. Here’s the link to the iPhone’s User Guide, read it, then imagine yourself using the new techno-thing.

If it’s any consolation, just remember that’s it’s never a great idea to buy something that’s version 1.0. Let others work out the bugs first.

I’ve finally upgraded the software that drives this blog. It’s now running WordPress v2.2. Let me know if you notice something broken.

The last 4 days have been pretty wet with 165 mm (6.5 inches) of rain during that period. I’ve now seen water flowing in places where I’ve never seen it before.

Monthly rainfall tallies for the past 5 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                                                        (YTD) 235.2

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

I borrowed an Apple 23 inch Cinema HD screen from another system today and connected it to my new MacBook Pro. I’ve not run a dual monitor system before and wasn’t quite sure how to work with such a setup (and still amn’t). I sat the LCD screen behind the MacBook Pro and configured OSX to have the laptop screen below the Cinema screen in the display preferences menu. This works as you’d expect from a technical perspective - but I don’t really have a feel for how work-day workflow should run.

What do I mean? If I start Microsoft Word, for example, and open a document, the file opens in the laptop screen. That’s OK - I can drag the newly opened word window up onto the Cinema screen. The window is the same size as it was on the laptop’s screen though. I then have to manually increase the window size to enable me to see the entire word document at roughly actual size. I haven’t yet found an “adjust window to actual sizeâ€? command in Word - there may not be one.

I’ve been giving Aperture, Apple’s post-processing tool for photographs, a trial run and have been really impressed by the brightness and clarity of my photographs on the big 23 inch screen. The big plus though, is the ability of Aperture to present me with a fluid, natural workflow. I’m (currently) convinced that this software will, in time, replace my current use of Adobe Photoshop.

I’ll probably end up purchasing a Mac Mini for home use and connecting a 23 inch screen to that.