Retro skiing

Last week I had a chance to go skiing in Australia for the first time in nearly twenty-five years. I figured if I was going back to the early nineties, I'd wear one of my old ski suits from that era.

Chez retro? Chez chic? Nah. I can ski well enough that I carried it off, but in retrospect, perhaps not such a good idea. The suit is now permanently retired.

I got very lucky with the snow, with one of the best seasons Australia has had in years, and magnificent spring weather, and I thoroughly enjoyed skiing with my best mate Michael and hanging out apres ski with my old army buddies Peter and John.

All the runs I used to think were super hard are now dead easy. But I'm still counting the three days at Perisher Blue as a head start on my 2014-15 season tally. Bring on day 4 at Steamboat!

Mum

Today, April 1st, would have been my Mum's 71st birthday. Sadly she passed away three months ago, in the early hours of New Years Day, after a two and a half year battle with cancer.

Three days after, a massive bushfire tore through the small village where she had lived. This was what was left of her house.

As I remember Mum on her birthday, my thoughts are best expressed in the words I said at her funeral.

Today we are here remember my mother Barbara Hill with our words and our presence. They are never really enough to honor someone we love, but they are all we have left.

She was christened Barbara Ann Graham but she was known to her family as "Dick". I only discovered the reason for that two days ago when talking to Mum's brother, Geoffrey. It seems when she was small she had an Aunt Victoria nearby--Aunty Vic--but Vic came out as Dick and the name stuck.

My late father David, called her by many names, but they were all filled with love and affection. To myself and Joanne and James she was always Mum. To others she was a beloved mother-in-law, Auntie, sister, sister-in-law, and to many a true and loyal friend.

What do you say about your mother's life? My perspective on her is dominated by that wonderful experience of a mother's love - constant and unconditional. She worked incredibly hard at being a good mother. She often struggled to suppress her natural instinct to wrap us in cotton wool, knowing that she needed to let us fall, and that the best thing she could do as a mother was be there to pick us up. Her own childhood had its challenges--something I only came to fully understand in recent years--but she never used that as an excuse, but rather as motivation to always do the best she could by her kids.

Perhaps it is better to sum up her life in her own words: "I've lived a life I could never have imagined as a child," spreading her wings far beyond Pottsville, the sleepy seaside village in which she grew up. She could however see the irony in ending her days in the sleepy seaside village of Dunalley.

After raising a family Mum went back to study and became a librarian, a job which gave her real satisfaction and pleasure. Mum and Dad travelled extensively, although sadly Mum never got to make that one last trip. Of course if she had, I'm sure there would have been another "one last trip" because she wanted to see it all.

At heart Mum was a creator and an artist. There was pottery and painting and her garden--which went a little crazy once Dad wasn't there to restrain her--and her bonsai trees, some of which she had been growing for thirty years, living works of art that to me best captured the true spirit of a wonderful woman.

At least by Mum's telling, she was a bit of a rebel in her early years. That's pure hearsay--inadmissible in a court of law--but I can swear from first hand observation over many years that she didn't know how to give up. As was her nature she went out with one hell of a fight.

As most of you will know, a terrible firestorm tore through Dunalley on Friday and the residence affectionately known as "The Shack" is no more. I am so thankful Mum wasn't here to see the place she and Dad poured so much love into destroyed in one hellish afternoon. Without her presence, though, it's only a building that has been lost, a timely reminder of how much more we have truly lost in Barbara's passing.

World's worst telco

I haven't tried every telco in the world, but I would be very, very surprised if there is anyone out there worse than Australia's Telstra. Even AT&T aren't this bad and they are the template for "totally customer un-friendly former monopoly telco". I'm trying to use a Telstra pre-paid mobile phone while I'm in Australia - unfortunately Telstra is the only carrier with coverage at my Mum's house - and at every single step the processes and technology have failed to work as they should. Whatever is the opposite of the Midas Touch, Telstra has it; everything it touches turns to crap.

Brisbane boys

The forecast yesterday was for a foot of new snow overnight, so in anticipation I stayed off the booze at the Australia Day party we went to last night.

Whilst the predicted storm hit us and hit us hard it moved through quite quickly so we only ended up with four inches. Still it was nice, although it was a bit windy and cold up top. The trees to skier's left of Cyclone were particularly good.

Here's the GPS data.


From the 1:10 mark I skied with Matthew from my old home town of Brisbane who I met on the Sundown Express chair. I think I might have freaked him out a bit in the 2.30 trees but he was a good sport.

Thank you Comcast

Those are words I never thought I'd speak. Comcast have been my cable TV provider since 2002 and my high speed internet provider since 2004 and in that time have managed on many, many occasions to annoy the hell out of me.

But last night they redeemed themselves. I was able to watch the Australian Football League ("Aussie Rules") Grand Final live on ESPN360.com which I only discovered earlier this week is available free to Comcast subscribers.

I have a computer connected to my big screen TV that I used to watch it, so apart from the occasional jitter it was as good as watching it on TV back in Australia (apart from being the middle of Friday night instead of Saturday afternoon, but hey you can't have everything).

To obtain this level of performance ESPN must mirror the feed from Australia to the US and then serve it to end users from here, because I've tried streaming football video from Australia before and it's been unwatchable (bandwidth across the Pacific is lousy).

So once again for the record, just in case there is any confusion; Thank you Comcast.

Winter?

It's still summer in Steamboat with highs around 30C / 86F, and it's supposed to be winter here in Brisbane, but yesterday it was 36C / 96F!

Lions great escape

I went to a Brisbane Lions game last night for the first time in two years.

At quarter time when we were 47 points down I wondered why I bothered.

But the only thing better than watching a game that you know from the start your team is going to win, is watching a game that looks lost but ultimately isn't. The Lions looked a different team after quarter time and whilst they didn't hit the lead until well into the last quarter, by half time I was confident that they would get up.

Final score: Brisbane 16.11.107 d Port Adelaide 14.8.92

Go Lions!

Just a photo

I took this on a walk near my parents house (with my phone - apologies for the quality). The way the sun was shining on the grass caught me eye.

Springbrook

Yesterday we visited my sister who lives in Springbrook, right in the rainforest about 50 metres from the National Park.

After lunch and coffee (and cake), my nephew Julian and I decided to walk the Twin Falls circuit, although with my young and fit nephew it was more like a forced march than a walk; the National Parks' information says allow two hours but we did it in 57 minutes, including the additional 750 metres from the end of the trail back to my sister's house.

The walk starts at the top of an escarpment where there are sweeping views of the Gold Coast.


The first part goes along the top of these cliffs.


But the best part comes after you've descended to the bottom of the cliffs where the path passes through the fissures in the rocks on the way down. That's my nephew Julian disappearing into the rocks.


Then the walk takes you through a lush rainforest past and behind two waterfalls (hence the name Twin Falls).



Here's the track from the GPS unit.


I would highly recommend it, but please note the warning from the National Parks' website:

DANGER: Sheer cliffs and waterfalls. One slip could be fatal — serious injury or death may result from walking near the edge. Keep to the track. Supervise children closely.

Colour and movement

Check out this great photo taken by my nephew Julian. Amazing colours and he caught the dancer in mid air!


Here's the accompanying article he wrote for his university newspaper.

Open skies?

Australian newspapers are reporting on plans by Virgin Blue subsidiary V Australia to start trans-pacific flights in competition with Qantas as a result of Australia and the US signing an "Open Skies" agreement.

Unfortunately all this agreement does is allow US and Australian carriers to compete on this route without capacity controls. It doesn't allow for open anything.

What's the effect? Continued daylight robbery on the part of Qantas who compete only with United* for direct flights.

Let me demonstrate. Let's say I wanted to fly business class from Los Angeles to Sydney on May 20 returning June 17 (which I actually do, to attend my cousin's wedding and take care of some other stuff, not to mention catch a couple of Brisbane Lions games). It's going to cost me $US17,778!

Now let's imagine I want to make this trip from London to Sydney on the same dates, also in business class. Now before you see the price remember that this trip is about 75% longer. What's it going to cost me? £3,376 or $US6,621. That's about a fifth of the cost per mile.

The only difference is that excellent airlines like Singapore Airlines and Emirates compete with Qantas between Australia and Europe. Over recent year's they've lobbied the Australian government unsuccessfully to enter the trans-pacific route. The government's justification for keeping them out is that it's somehow good for Australian tourism and jobs. As far as I'm concerned the only jobs this policy is creating are for Air New Zealand.

So when the Qantas CEO Geoff Dixon says he welcomes the competition, what he really means is he's glad he can go on screwing trans-pacific business travellers and extracting excess profits thanks to this artificial market shortage created by the "wisdom" of government regulation. All I can say to Mr Dixon is "you're absolutely full of it mate".


* The world's second worst airline. Exceeded in their hopelessness only by Northwest.

2007 highlights

Well 2007 is nearly over. According to the official judge (my wife Marie) it's been a good year. Here's the summary and highlights:

• 37 days of skiing (21 in January-April and 12 in December) including my most epic day of powder skiing ever


• Seeing my first niece


• 125,000 miles of travel (so much for my resolution to travel less this year) including three trips to Australia and New Zealand, two trips each to Beijing and England, and one trip each to Paris, Hong Kong and Beirut.*

*I keep track of my flights at Flight Memory which has a neat feature to generate a map of all my flights for the year (below). Unfortunately it doesn't indicate how often I've flown a route, for example that I flew BNE-CBR about twenty times.

Back home

We've just arrived home after my five day trip to England turned into five weeks.

We flew as far as Denver last night and today took the shuttle van to Steamboat. Amazingly there was a family on board from the small town in Australia where I was born and went to high school!

Kids rockclimbing

It's school holidays in Brisbane this week and a climbing wall has been set up in the park behind my friend Raj's house. The kids loved it, especially our nephew Ramzi (seven) here on one of his multiple ascents.



My wife's godson Rohan (ten) made it to the top as well.

But the girls weren't intimidated. Here's my goddaughter Priyanka (eight).


And finally our friend Luisa's daughter Jai (nine).


Apologies to our newphew Alex (eleven) who was too quick on his way to the top for my wife to get his photo!

Steamboat rugby!

Australia may have lost the Bledisloe Cup and Tri-Nations to New Zealand, and will be lucky to make it to the semi-finals of this year's Rugby World Cup, but at least Steamboat are the Ski Town rugby champs!

The Steamboat team is having a great season. They are 14-0 after yesterday defeating Vail in the final. Their next game is against Aspen who are traditionally one of the strongest teams in the region. Beating Vail and Aspen back to back would be like beating South Africa and New Zealand in successive games.

Egg on Howard's face

Not surprisingly the incredibly flimsy case against Dr Haneef has completely fallen apart with the Director of Public Prosecutions dropping all charges.

Only ten days ago this man was so dangerous that the Government felt the need to revoke his visa and detain him under the immigration laws after a magistrate refused to play the Government's game and granted him bail. Now he's free in the community, the Immigration Minister having sought to save face by placing him on "residential detention" which seems to be something like house arrest but without the arrest part. All that remains is for his visa to be restored after a face saving consultation with the Solicitor-General.

John Howard would have you believe that all this has nothing to do with him or his Government. Let's look at the evidence.

You've got the Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews, a political light weight who was surely acting as the Prime Minister's puppet, cancelling Dr Haneef's visa in order to frustrate the decision of a court to grant bail.

You've got the Attorney-General Philip Ruddock, one of Howard's closest allies, complaining that the "presumption against bail" didn't work, meaning that the Government lied when the legislation was being debated in Parliament and they made all sorts of reassurances about checks and balances, because what they really meant was "no bail".

And you've got the PM bleating about needing to toughen the terrorism laws which was clearly intended to inflame the situation.

No, if he sounds like a fear mongering little bastard, and acts like a fear mongering little bastard, you can be pretty sure that he is a fear mongering little bastard.

There is a silver lining in this cloud because there are several players who come out of this smelling quite good especially the magistrate who called the Government right up front on the flimsiness of their case and granted bail to Dr Haneef, and his lawyers and the legal fraternity in general who were fearless in confronting the Government.

As for the DPP Damian Bugg QC, I have mixed feelings. I'm surprised that in such a high profile case he wasn't personally involved earlier, but once he did get involved and saw that there was no evidence he immediately did the right thing. I ought to point out for my US readers that the DPP is a career civil servant, not a political appointee or elected office holder. If this had been a US prosecutor pursuing a partisan political agenda I have no doubt that Dr Haneef would have spent months or years waiting to be exonerated.

Haneef case unravelling

Looks like the Australian Government's case against Dr Haneef is already beginning to unravel and the Immigration Minister's decision to cancel his visa is becoming even less defensible than the case of guilt by association I discussed yesterday. Even if that were a crime (and it still isn't in anything resembling a liberal democracy, at least for now), the alleged associations aren't even standing up to scrutiny.

According to a report in The Australian newspaper, Australia's leading national daily, under the heading Haneef dossier 'flawed', key pieces of evidence used to justify the visa cancellation and presented to the courts are completely inconsistent with the statements given by Dr Haneef to police.

In particular the claim in the affidavit that Dr Haneef told police that he lived in Britain with the two terrorism suspects, his second cousins is completely inconsistent with the record of interview in which Dr Haneef tells police that he lived at 13 Bentley Road, Liverpool, with several doctors, whom he names. None are the two suspects. Dr Haneef tells police he visited Cambridge on two occasions in 2004 and stayed for up to six days with Kafeel Ahmed and that he had moved out of 13 Bentley Road when Dr Sabeel Ahmed subsequently stayed there.

Similarly "While the police affidavit stated Dr Haneef had no explanation about his one-way ticket, the record of interview shows that he gave a detailed explanation to police while answering questions. Dr Haneef told police that as he did not have funds in his Australian bank account his father-in-law had booked and paid for the one-way ticket with an understanding that when I go there we can arrange for the coming back ticket." I'm actually guessing that wasn't the real reason, that he did panic and flee in fear - fear of being found guilty by association when he heard that his cousins had been arrested. Now why would he think that?

Wikipedia

I believe one of the most remarkable things to emerge from the Internet in recent years, amongst many amazing things, is the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia.

What's so amazing about it? Well it overturns centuries of thought about how knowledge is disseminated, that's what. In the past knowledge was the preserve of a small elite. Until a little over a century ago most of the world was illiterate and even with mass literacy in the 20th century 99.999% of people consumed knowledge but didn't generate it. Whereas Wikipedia is not only available to everyone but it's created by everyone.

So consistent with that theme, yesterday I made my first edit. You can see it here. The sentence on amending the Australian Constitution is my work.

Guilt by association

Recent developments have supported the conclusions I reached about the case of Dr Haneef, the doctor detained in Brisbane in connection with the UK car bombing attempts.

A number of documents pertinent to the case have since been leaked including the transcript of the police interview with the suspect (warning the file is 22Mb) and the documents used by the Minister for Immigration to cancel his visa and lock him up in an immigration detention centre, presumably until such time as the case comes to trial which could easily be as long as two years.

What these documents show is how incredibly flimsy the case is against Dr Haneef. Here's what the reasons used by the Minister for Immigration (marked as "Highly Protected", presumably to save the Government embarrassment) say:


Note that "Suspect 2" and "Suspect 5" are Dr Haneef's second cousins. Completely missing is any evidence or even allegation that Dr Haneef knew or should have known that his cousins were involved in terrorism. The Government isn't even alleging that the mobile phone and SIM card that he gave to his cousin was used in any way in terrorist activity. And read carefully the mention of a 300 pound loan to sit a medical exam. Dr Haneef is receiving the loan not giving it!

So what does this boil down to? Guilt by association pure and simple. A guy is being locked up because he stayed with his cousins when living in a foreign country and left them some things he didn't need when he left.

The positive side to this story is that the Australian legal community is as outraged by this case as I am. When the judge hearing the application for appeal against the visa cancellation tells the Immigration Minister "I'd fail the character test that you have applied" there is a small glimmer of hope. Not surprisingly the judged granted leave to appeal and it is scheduled to be heard on August 8 at which time one can only hope that the courts give the Immigration Minister an almighty kick in the pants.

I have absolutely no doubt that if this ever goes to trial Haneef will be acquitted. But if John Howard has his way, only after Dr Haneef spends a year or two in detention. And then what, they'll deport him for a crime he hasn't committed? Rule of law? Natural justice? What a joke.

As for Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd, he wins the gutless wonder of the year award for supporting the Government's action. From what I know of him I'm sure he is only doing this out of fear that he will be somehow painted as 'soft on terrorism' during the upcoming election campaign. Which somehow makes it even worse.

Take me to your SIM card overlords.

Fear mongering

Over the past two weeks I've followed with interest the case of a doctor in Brisbane detained in connection with the attempted terrorist attack on Glasgow airport.

I had hoped for an approach that strikes a better balance between the rule of law and security than we've seen in the United States' "war on terror."

No such luck. Not only was Dr Haneef detained for twelve days without charge, he was finally charged with 'providing aid to terrorists' because he gave his mobile phone SIM card to his cousin when he left England to move to Australia (presumably because it was no longer of any use to him).

Unless there is some other compelling piece of evidence against this guy that isn't being reported (and I'm pretty sure if there was the Australian Government would be shouting it from the rooftops), then we are living in a world, at least in the US and Australia, where the most innocent act can land you in jail for 'aiding terrorism'.

That's one of the basic aspects of a totalitarian state - that no behaviour is beyond the reach or the arbitrary sanction of the state, which keeps the populace in a state of perpetual fear and compliance.

Notwithstanding that, the Prime Minister is making veiled suggestions that Australia's terrorism laws need to be strengthened. Perhaps he wants to take a leaf out of his mate George W's book and set up a gulag on some remote island beyond the reach of troublesome courts. More likely he's just talking tough as part of his re-election strategy. After all it worked for him last time with the Tampa incident.

What a fear mongering little bastard our Prime Minister is.

Update (midnight): I thought for a moment that my worst fears where unfounded when a magistrate granted Haneef bail on a $10,000 surety. But only until the Federal Government promptly cancelled his visa so that they could detain him under the Migration Act.

This is a breathtaking abuse of power designed purely to invalidate the ruling of a court.

Firstly, immigration detention is designed for people who are in breach of their immigration status and are a risk of failing to appear for immigration proceedings.

Secondly, if he's in breach of his immigration status that's only because the government just cancelled his visa!

Thirdly, there are no immigration proceedings since the Government has no intention of deporting him before he stands trial.

Finally, he's now the most watched man in Australia so the chances of him absconding are about zero as the magistrate rightly observed.

All consistent with my original conclusion that this is nothing more than a cynical ploy by the Prime Minister and his henchmen( Attorney-General Philip Ruddock and Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews) to whip up hysteria so they can frighten the public into voting for them again.