The sales pitch, Kuta Beach

As Catherine Tate would say, how very, very interesting.

I went to Sanur this morning to check out the real estate business and called in to the Ray White office. With a name like that, I figured it must be a good trustworthy Aussie firm. So I got talking to the rep and although he’s Jakarta born and bred, he’s spent more than a year in Toronto, Canada, and speaks English like a native, with a mild Canadian accent.

As I said to him, it matters to me that we fully share the subtleties of the language when we’re talking complex finance and legals. He was good. His name is Dedy. Bit of a charmer, but then he’s a salesman, isn’t he?

So we talked for quite a while and it seems to be quite easy to arrange things, so he’s now looking for some long term rental places for me to look at in the next few days.

That done, I walked along Jalan Tamblingan to the site of the Shanti Villas I saw last month. Construction is still in progress, but this time I walked right in for a closer look and realised I had misunderstood the layout of the block. It’s even better than I thought.

Although I say I don’t want to buy, I’m even more impressed with these villas now than I was. I realise now that the villas are deep into the block and are partially complete with the roofs on already. That long foundation is just for an access road, I think.

Shanti Villas block now, looking toward the beach. Jl Tamblingan L and R (panorama distortion).

That means the villas are further toward the beach and away from the main road, which means they’re much quieter. That worried me last month, that there’d be too much noise from Jl Tamblingan and the restaurants there. But not so. It’s nice and quiet toward the beach.

So I stood there for quite a while absorbing the atmosphere and it felt really good. Then I went into the Santrian Hotel and had a look there – very nice. Looks a bit expensive for me, but very traditional Balinese. They gave me their brochure.

Then I walked the path to the beach and although it’s a bit primitive, it doesn’t matter. It leads through some lush trees and undergrowth and opens onto Sanur beach:

The new villas are under that enormous round tree at bottom left. The beach path leads to the right of it, below centre, below the kidney shaped pool.

I sat for a while absorbing the atmosphere here too.

Sanur beach in front of Shanti Villas.

Then I walked north along the beach path right up to Jl Pantai Sindhu, another 1.2Km, so in total, I walked nearly 2Km. For me, that’s pretty good these days. I was knackered and wet with sweat when a guy asked if I wanted transport and after haggling a bit, I said let’s go. Rp40,000 or $4.50 to get back to my hotel.

I’m now so impressed with that location that I may reconsider buying one of these villas after all. There’s a long way to go, of course: what does 10 year option mean? What’s the standard of construction like? Is one actually available? Are they all the same price? I’ll find out in the next few days.

While walking along the beach front, a woman started talking to me and I mentioned that I might move here to live. “Oh, you need housekeeper? My name is Annie. I need work.” Etc etc. She looked quite nice and spoke well, but after a while it became clear she just wanted me to come and look at her shop! Bloody hell, they’ll do anything to get you engaged in conversation and into the shop. Oh well.

Nap time, 2pm. Siang.

Yes, 21 December — now the days start getting shorter. Brrrr! Not long to winter.
Ha! Is this crazy weather or what? So dry in Perth that we’re asking for shorter showers and sprinkler bans. Devastating floods in Carnarvon, “just up the road”. Snow in southern NSW – at Xmas?? Floods all over the eastern states. Wild storms and huge rains in Bali (last week). Global warming, anyone?

Quite a pleasant day today. Lots of rain, but I love it. Thunder, lightning, great. Quite cool, only 28C or so, I’d guess.

I took the hotel shuttle over to Kuta and I was the only passenger. It seems strange that the hotel’s near full, yet I’m the only one around a lot of the time. I’ve just had dinner in the restaurant and apart from one other Indo guy who left soon after I arrived, I was the only customer. Huh?

Poor old Indos. It was the classic failure again. I ordered Bruschetta again (I like it and I think the tomato, olive oil and garlic is good for me) as the appetiser, and a Bintang, to be followed by Nasi Goreng Seafood.

So what happens? The Nasi Goreng arrives first, followed about 3 mins later by the Bruschetta.

This happens so often. They can’t seem to grasp the idea of the order of dishes, even though the menu says Appetisers. It seems trivial but it spoilt the meal for me. The Nasi Goreng was hot and spicy, but the mixture with the Bruschetta was just wrong. I was going to complain/explain, but the waiter was so friendly that I just didn’t have the heart.

Anyway, there was a pianist and singer there just for me, so I had to show appreciation. But in the middle of the meal, she decided she needed to do the “Check, one, two” PA routine. Not just once, but over and over again for 3 minutes or more. Pleeeease.

Gamelan orchestra jamming, 1985

I”m watching and listening to CNN at the moment, with the Aussie female newsreader. Analogue CRT TV seems so awful now after digital that I can hardly bear it. But I’ve just bought some DVDs (Love actually – Hugh Grant; Krakatoa, The Last days; Earth 2100; Green Zone; Centurion) so I don’t need to watch rubbish TV. I can watch rubbish DVDs instead.

I hope to talk to a real estate agency in Sanur tomorrow to see what’s available in long term rentals and what the process would be. I’ve had a substantial redraw facility on my CBA account for years and never actually used it before. It seems to me that if it came down to it, I could quite feasibly take out a 12 month lease on the spot just by using my ATM card. I’m not going to be rash, but anything seems possible these days with international and internet banking.

On that theme, I was at the computer about 6pm this evening and an email came in from Expedia.com confirming a hotel booking. Five or ten minutes later, my mobile phone rang and it was the Police & Nurses Credit Society credit card fraud officer in Perth asking me to verify this transaction! How about that? I was very happy to let him know I’m in Bali and thanked him very much for being so on the ball. Wow.

I was also at the hotel desk today and chatting to a guy I think must have been the manager. He seemed to know everything anyway. I said I’ve brought wire cables and padlocks to tie things down in the room for security, but the furniture in the room just doesn’t allow it. There are no holes for me to thread the cables through – it’s all so modern, smooth panels etc. He seemed bemused but said, just trust the heavy door locks. And use the room safe. Yeah, OK, but my camera bag won’t fit, nor will my laptop. Oh well.

Now for a DVD. Let’s see what a $4 HD DVD looks like on my BluRay drive.

Malam.

Poppie’s Lane restaurant, 1983. Open air cooking.

 Not that late, only 9.30pm, but …

• Just had a fantastic meal – bruschetta, superbly done, all olive oil flavour with really tasty tomato and garlic; salt and pepper squid, ditto; and three Bintangs. Total $19 including tips and tax. Replete.

• Surprising to see a woman (an Asian woman, at that) sit down at a table and light up a smoke. Not that I care (much) – but you just don’t see that at home any more, do you?
• I read the Bali edition of the Jakarta Post which includes the International Herald Tribune. I have no trouble deciding on my support for Julian Assange. Nomination for Nobel Prize in my opinion. How dare Vice President of the United States Joe Biden say he’s a terrorist, and in effect say, if he hasn’t broken any of our laws, we’ll pass new laws that will allow us to prosecute him!

  What!!!!??? Retrospective law? What happened to the First Amendment of the US Constitution? What happened to the rule of law? What happened to due process? What happened to presumption of innocence?

  The hypocrisy of the US is boundless. They have lost all my respect. They are no better than China, Yemen, Iran, Syria, all the deplorable regimes. Torture. Mass bombings of civlians and political assassinations. Capital punishment even for minors and mental defectives. Revenge, more like it. Cruel and unusual punishment is outlawed in their constitution for Dog’s sake. I am livid. As individuals, they’re OK, but as a country, I despise them. They’ve gone insane. Genocidal killers.

  I predict that Julian Assange will be killed, murdered, assassinated, executed, terminated with extreme prejudice, whatever you want to call it by the United States, that former bastion of freedom. I despise the country now.

Changing weather, Kintimani 1986

• One of the items in the paper was how bad the weather is in Bali at the moment – storms, torrential rains, flooded rivers, rough seas, pictures of piles of debris on the beach at Kuta. I’ve seen lots of rain, but I don’t mind. They mention part of the cause is the wild weather in WA (Carnarvon floods). Ooops, sorry Bali.
• Always mindful of security, I’ve brought wire cables and locks for the computer, suitcase and camera bag. But this room is so modern that there’s simply nowhere I can thread the wire cables through! Every surface is seamless and hole free. Huh! Luckily the door is solid and card operated and there’s a mini safe, but it’s too small to take much. Won’t take the laptop.
• Ditto for the fridge cabinet. There’s a fridge and mini bar, but there’s no handle or knob on the door of the cabinet. I just about break my fingernails opening the door!
• The bathroom is likewise super modern and super smooth, so much that the floor is actually dangerous. When there’s soap on the floor in the shower, I have to be super careful not to slip, BUT there’s nothing to grab onto. Crazy. I’ve told the desk and they very quickly sent a big rubber mat for the shower recess. But if I slipped and injured myself, I would seriously consider holding the hotel to account. It’s so obviously dangerous.
• Likewise, the towel rails/frames and the shower head. They are so high up that I nearly topple in reaching for them. Dangerous.
• Speaking of hypocrisy, I can’t claim innocence, but at the Perth airport duty free, there was a bottle of whisky priced at $2,999 awaiting a buyer. Having spent $50, I’m a hypocrite I suppose, but to spend $3,000 on a bottle of whisky when there is so much poverty … I don’t like it.

Rant over. Malam.

Aaaah, Peace At Last.

What a rotten night last night was. I won’t make that mistake again. You think a flight time of 8pm from Perth is good, but as I explained in the last posting, it meant I had to spend the night in the lobby here at the hotel, and it was awful.

I should have taken the room on offer, I suppose, but considering my booking was for $65 per night, and their “cut rate” for half a day was $72, you can see why I baulked. I managed to doze a bit, but I always wake feeling as if I’m choking – that’s sleep apnea.

I had a bit of breakfast when the restaurant opened at 7am, but the coffee was awful, the fruit was supposed to come with yoghurt but didn’t and although I pointed it out, they still charged the same price, and I didn’t qualify for the buffet because I wasn’t a guest yet.

However, by 9am I was pretty desperate and asked the desk when I could get my room. They said “one hour”, but soon after they came good and now I’m in room 204, same floor as the lobby, even though I feel as if I’m several floors above the pool.

The room is fantastic – this is a fully international standard hotel and even though it doesn’t feel Balinese, it’s very comfortable. I’ve got a huge velvet armchair – just what I like for reading and watching DVDs etc. The TV is an awful CRT set, but of course, with this laptop, I can watch anything, DVDs, even BluRays in HD, and of course streaming video from anywhere in the world.

Yes, the wifi works in the room and it’s quite fast, so I’m a happy man. It means I can post pics and video on this site.

It’s now 1.30pm and I’ve had about two hours sleep, so I’m feeling much happier. I might even order room service for lunch, something I normally never do, but I’m still in my jarmies and hope to sleep some more. Nasi Campur (mixed savoury rice) is $7.65 including the ++ (service and tax, the sneaky b…s), but what the hell, live it up!

I had a minute or two of sheer panic this morning though when I unpacked. I had all my CPAP gear, except one part of the mask, the important nose part. Aaaarrrgh! I thought I’d left it behind. Sheer panic! I nearly started making desperate phone calls to get someone to go to my place and find it and post it up here.

But no, I had put that part in my toiletries bag to protect it better, something I’ve never done before. Phew!

So the rain has finally stopped and although the sky is still grey, it’s brightening up, as am I.

Now to have some lunch and do a bit of exploring the neighbourhood. Unfortunately, this hotel is on a major “freeway” and I don’t think I can just walk down the street to eat. They run a shuttle bus every hour to Kuta and Sanur, so…

Selemat siang.

Sanur, Nusa Peneeda, 1986

[I’d like to add more pictures to this post, but I’ve been waiting 5 minutes for this one to load and it just took ages, so sorry, no can do.]

Oh my Dog,  that was a bit harder than I expected.

I’m now in Bali again, sitting in the restaurant of my hotel at 1.30 in the morning. I can’t check in until 2pm, so I have a while to wait.

But that’s not the problem. The problem started when the plane (AirAsiaX again) arrived, on time, at Denpasar airport. It was raining heavily and for some reason, the aerobridge didn’t come. So imagine standing in the aisle of the plane for 15 minutes, crushed by all the people around you, waiting for them to open the door. Not fun!

Finally it opened and I was one of the first out, being in seat 3C. But the walk to immigration seemed endless this time – we must have arrived at a different gate to November’s arrival.

Anyway, eventually I got the Visa on Arrival paid and joined the queues for Immigration.

This was where the real delays started. I thought maybe lightning had knocked out the computers, because we just weren’t moving! None of the queues was moving, not just mine. My back was killing me and I was pretty tired, so I was getting increasingly frustrated and shifting from foot to foot to try to ease the back ache.

It was not helped by a little Chinese kid who was staring at me, then pointing, then pulling his dad’s sleeve and pointing some more. Eventually his mum snapped at him and told him not to point, but I was pretty pissed off about it.

However, cinta Indonesia! (Love Indonesia, it means.) An airport guy in uniform saw my distress and pulled me out of the line and directed me to another queue for Indonesian passports! Yeah.  But not only that, he then directed me to go to the very front of the queue!

I was amazed and so pleased, I can’t tell you how much. I apologised to the people I’d bypassed, saying I’m sorry, I didn’t ask for this. Luckily, they were young and Aussies and they said don’t worry about it.

So after a short delay, I was through. This is respect for age, you see. You don’t get that in Australia, but here they recognise it and treat you nice. Noice!

My passport seemed to take far less time than other people’s, so I didn’t hold the queue up for more than two minutes, so it was great.

OK, then it was bag collect time, and at 1245am I was pretty tired. Annother porter saw this and took care of me, getting a trolley, collecting everything for me and putting it all through the Customs inspection. OK, it was probably a scam but I gave him Rp20,000 (about $2.50) as a tip and he seemed satisfied, so honour was served.

Then it was taxi time. Still raining heavily, I bought a taxi voucher and waited a few minutes. Once again, everyone helped me put the bags in the boot and we were off.

But the taxi driver had never heard of my hotel! It’s Harrad’s Hotel and Resort, a big hotel on the Sanur “freeway”. I spelt it out for him, tried every way I could pronounce it, but nothing did any good. He asked for the address. I had Late Rooms booking form, but it didn’t include the address of the hotel (or so I thought).

OK, stop and ask someone. Hmmm, not at 0130 in the morning in heavy rain. Phone number? Aha! Yes, I had one, but he dialled repeatedly and kept getting it fouled up.

So we drove slowly in the direction of Sanur and eventually he got through to the hotel. Aha, discotheque!

Huh? Apparently they’re building a new discotheque next to the hotel and this he recognised.

So after a petrol stop, we weren’t far from the hotel, and now, at 2am, with a beer and a bruschetta inside me, I’m feeling a bit better.

Unfortunately, the hotel wants Rp650,000 for a half night charge for a room! That’s $73! I said, “No way”, so that’s why I’m in the restaurant. Boring, but …

Anyway, I’m here to enjoy Bali and to look around for long term rental places. I talked to my friend about his place in Seminyak and I’ll go there and have a look at the area asap.

I actually have two hotel moves in the 24 days I’m here, but that’s OK. I have to move out of this Harrad’s on Tuesday 28th, and I’m booked into the Aston in Denpasar for 6 nights over New Year. It’s a pretty snazzy hotel, by the look of the web page, so it should be good.

Then I had a stroke of luck and found the Puri Dalem, which I stayed at twice in the 1980s, had a room from 3 January to my departure on the 12th, so that’s where I’ll be. I’m really pleased at that, because it’s where I got some of my absolute best beach shots in 1986 or so. I gather it’s been remodelled, but it’s still only $53 a night, so I’m happy.

Well, I hated to leave Minnie this afternoon, but I’m sure she’ll be OK. Next door are very good with her and I phoned my friend Edna Gracey, who also loves Minnie, and she’ll drop in and check on her.

So now I just have to wait the night out. OK so far at 0215! Crazy. Wow! If it was raining before, it’s bucketing down now. So loud I can hear it in the restaurant. Send a bit our way. In fact, what about a pipeline from bali to Perth? No crazier than Ernie Bridge’s scheme.

Malam.

A surprisingly cheerful bull. 1985.

 Kembali means “return” in Indonesian, and that’s what I’ve decided to do.

I wanted to go back anyway and a few things recently made me think, why not just go? I was on the web yesterday, (Thursday) and the prices were right, so I just booked. I’m staying at Harrad’s Resort Hotel in Sanur for eight nights from Monday 20th.

Would you believe I don’t have a booking after that yet? Heh heh. Nothing like living dangerously. Xmas and New Year are heavily booked and it’s hard to find a good hotel, but I hope to find one tonight. It may be a 3 star on the road into Denpasar, but it looks OK, so I’ll book a few nights and see how I go.

I also phoned my friend Peter Dunn today because he has a villa in Kerobokan and goes up there often. We’ve been friends since the early 1970s in Blythe Avenue, Yokine, so we go way, way, way back. Pete worked at TVW for a long time but has been a commercial director at STW9 for a long time too.

He won’t be there when I am, but I just wanted to see where his place is and what it’s like. It’s on the west coast north of Kuta near the Kerobokan jail where Schappelle resides. Hmmm.

He’s given me a map and address and the phone number of his daughter, who will be there, so I may get to see it. Also a powerpoint slide show of the villa. Nice! Can be done!

One slight problem is that the flight gets into Bali at 2345, so I won’t be out of the airport until 1am or so. It’s too late to get a room at the hotel, so I face sleeping at the airport until I can check in at midday on Monday. I believe the hotel may come to the party and make a room available at a reduced rate. I have to find out.

Uh oh. I’ve been finding myself increasingly weak in the legs, so I swallowed my pride and bought a walking stick today, a high-tech aluminium one, though!. The footpaths in Bali are notoriously uneven and high/low, and if I trip and fall, I go down HARD and can’t get up again. However, I may just use a photo monopod as a walking pole too. Still deciding.

A new problem has arisen: gallstones. I’ve been noticing dull pain in my left side below the rib cage and thought the worst, of course. The Big C? Family history.

So a diagnosis of gallstones was a relief, if you follow my logic. But it’s a new problem to understand and live with. I don’t know enough about it yet, but low fat diet is the mantra. Yeah. So what’s new?

In keeping with that, I’ve just cooked an Indonesian rendang curry, but using kangaroo. I hope I haven’t cooked the ‘roo too long so it goes tough. Looks great, though.

Meanwhile, I bought a new Pentax K-5 last week and a couple of delicious Pentax lenses, so I’m reducing what I take to Bali to one camera body and two lenses. Radical, huh? (Well, maybe one other camera. Well, …. maybe another one, too. Uh oh.)

Nusa Dua family 1983. This was a Pentax shot.

The point is, the Pentax still camera also shoots Full HD video, so I don’t need to take the Canon HF10 camcorder. I’ll feel naked! But I hope this will allow me to do more photography and video without feeling as if I’m bag-bound. Bali is just so photogenic that it begs to be explored. I hope to get out more this time.

Beach Cremation boys. Another Pentax 1983 shot. One of my favourites.

I’ll also be able to do slide shows and edit video, which I love doing. I hope to post the results more often than in November. We’ll see. I’ll have more time this time, three weeks of it.

The rendang curry is very nice, very hot, but the ‘roo is a little chewy. Very nice, but not as good as beef. More work needed.

Minnie’s barking. By a stroke of luck, my neighbours (who looked after her in November) are here until the day I get home, when they go to Rottnest, so it’s worked out perfectly. They have a beautiful dog, Lola, and She and Minnie get on fine, so although I hate leaving Minnie, she’ll be happy and OK. Next door’s kids love her too, so that’s great.

Oh the bugs in this BlogSpot software! How can they release such rubbish?

This time, I’m talking a Jaycar 802.11 high sensitivity WiFi adapter which I hope will allow me to stay in my room to use the web. The hotel in November was annoying – I had to go to the lobby to get within range. We’ll see what happens this time.

OK, enough for now. I’m taking my 2005 Bali slide show/DVD images and I plan to totally revamp it in BluRay HiDef with new material while I’m up there. The possibilities are now infinite. Video, motion, animation, web publishing, wow!

Merry Xmas.

This caterpillar will turn into a butterfly. Ain’t that amazing?

First, I had a call back from Vivid today. Last night they sent me a warning that I had almost used my second 3GB of data allowance and would have to spend another $29 to renew.

This is iniquitous. When I was with the previous ISP I used to buy 2GB of data a month and rarely used the full amount – usually about 1-1.5GB. Suddenly with Vivid I’m using 6GB a month?? I’m not doing anything different.

The guy on the phone from Vivid asked me what I remembered downloading. I listed about 1GB of programs and he said, er, did you visit a game site? NO! He wouldn’t reveal what had been going on but I suspect my connection is being hijacked by others. I don’t know how – I’ve got WEP enabled, same as my old modem.

Anyway, he gave me 1GB of extra data free, but I don’t think I’m going to continue with this. The signal strength is just too erratic. I never get better than a yellow LED, and it’s mostly red or it drops out. This is impossible.

So it’s back to the search for a stable connection. I think I’m just going to have to start shouting and stamping my foot to get a landline connection. Wireless is fine for cafe surfing, but you can’t rely on it.

Anyway, back to the main heading. I don’t mean a wi-fi connection.

Early this week I got a Facebook invitation to be a friend of a woman I used to know at Channel 7. She left in 1988 but we have a friend in common so we still know each other to say hi, which is sort of all we ever did any way. She married a very high achiever and highly intelligent guy who talks on “the wireless” (that’s radio to you young ‘uns) and lives in Melbourne now.

Recently I’d done a CD rip to iPod music thing for her via our mutual friend, hence the Facebook friend request.

As I say, we’ve always known of each other and said hello at all our meetings, including at the 50th anniversary reunion last year, but she was always so glamorous, so vivacious, so different world, that I never really got to know her. She was just this bright, gorgeous woman who disappeared in 1988. We lost contact except for our mutual friend.

So for once, I answered the request and said, sure, I’ll be your friend, and added a little note on Facebook about other news of our old life and friends. She replied very nicely and we started a little conversation on the Facebook page. I said, er, this is a bit public, I’d prefer if you contacted me by my email address if we chat more.

So she did email me, and the most amazing dialogue has developed. As I said, we had never really spoken before except to say Hi, how are you, bye, and suchlike.

Well, she has a very sympatico (that’s Spanish, yeah?) persona and we started really connecting, with her in Melbourne and me here in Perth. I’m not talking romance! This is better than that, a meeting of minds. She had lost contact with some old work colleagues and was happy to hear the latest news.

But more importantly, she was interested in my latest doings and enjoyed my prose, so I felt I could open up and talk. She studied psychology at Uni and has a good knowledge and a great mind.

Well, try and stop me! I don’t want to sound vain but I like to write and I like to be funny and she seems to enjoy it, so we’ve just found we can’t stop talking. And more importantly, we seem to have quite a lot in common, on several levels. We’ve both discovered that we have far more depth than either of us knew about. I don’t mean we didn’t know ourselves, I mean we didn’t know each other, and now that we do, we really like each other. Ain’t that amazing? Worked together from about 1977 to 1988 and never knew each other except to pass in the corridor. Now, 22 years later, we feel like long lost buddies.

Who’s this chap with the screwed up face? Moi, 1984, holding my Pentax Super A. Great camera, and the new one will be a Pentax too.

This story has a long way to run yet; it it started with a simple friend request on Facebook and I now feel like a caterpillar changing to a chrysalis and soon to be a butterfly. (A Monarch, of course.) I’m meaning in the “move to Bali, drop the carapace of Perth” sense. Maybe a bit more.

However, something’s not right. I’ve been feeling more and more tired, weaker and weaker, needing to sleep sometimes twice a day, unable to walk more than 20m without severe fatigue. I had an abdominal ultrasound today and I will await the doctor’s report, but a big red patch on the screen as I stood up and severe pain as she ran the probe over me makes me a little apprehensive. Moving to Bali might be a bit beyond me after all.

But tomorrow, Sunday, I’m going to buy a new camera, the perfect camera, and that’ll make it better! Hah!

This entry will test if anyone is actually reading this. No-one ever comments. I think I’m talking to ghosts. Is anyone actually reading this? Will anyone take 30 seconds to comment? Otherwise I’m wasting my time and may as well write a book or watch TV.

Cheers

I don’t think this is working. The change to Vivid Wireless and Gmail is just driving me insane.

Don’t believe the advertising! Speeds of 40Mb/s on 4G WiMax technology? Rubbish. Maybe if you’re 10m from a phone tower in a Liberal Party electorate with the wind at 13knots from the NE.

My experience so far is that I just cannot get better than a yellow signal strength LED (out of red/yellow/green) and mostly it’s red. Even if I can get a yellow, I only need to shift my body position and it goes to red. In other words, nowhere in my house or near neighbourhood can I get good signal strength, despite being only 1.5Km from the phone towers that I know about at Karrinyup. I can’t directly see them due to the trees, but they should be pretty close to line of sight from me.

Just to start typing this blog entry, it took me more than 5 mins of shifting the modem to get the Gmail system to stop saying “Wait”. I’ve had to power cycle the ViViFi modem because it lost the signal completely at one stage.

It can be good. I downloaded a software item yesterday at about 300KB/s or 2.4Mb/s, bu that’s a  far cry from 40Mb/s they advertise.

I’m also finding Gmail is as slow as a wet week too. I don’t think I can rely on it as my only email supplier. It’s useful as a portable email system, but I won’t be happy to be totally dependent on it.

This blog software is also so full of bugs that they ought to mount it as a display in a Natural History Museum. This is impossible! I’ve just tried to add a picture to this item, but after waiting 2-3 mins, I just can’t get any response from the Google Blogger. So no picture.

Another example, I just pressed Enter twice to move down two lines and the cursor just disappeared! I have to use the mouse to click on where I want to be to continue. I can’t work this way. I typed the entries in Bali in my room in TypePad and pasted them into the blog, so I didn’t notice it too much then. But I shouldn’t have to do that!

So the search resumes. I’ll have to go back to trying for a land-line solution, ie ADSL over the copper wires. WiFi is great for its intended purpose, but it’s not 100% reliable.

So for the Liberal Party to say we don’t need a National Broadband Network of optical fibre and we can just use wireless instead is just crap. They don’t understand technology. Fibre is rock solid, immune to interference, with HUGE capacity that doesn’t degrade.

I heard a good analogy on the radio a few days ago:

Railways were the big nation building challenge of the 19th century, connecting the cities of Australia with high speed high capacity transport.

Roads and freeways were the big nation building project of the 20th century, adding to the high speed passenger and freight connections across the country.

Nation wide fibre-optic connections are the nation building project of the 21st century. They are the 21st century analogy of railways and roads to increase our industrial and scientific capabilities.

The stupid opponents of the NBN are a ball and chain around our ankles. We spend more on gambling than the NBN will cost! High speed, high capacity fibre optic cable is necessary for our future.

Bunkum. Bunkus.