The Move to The Isa

Well I suppose I'd better explain my absence from this site for the last little while. My family and I have packed up home on the Sunshine Coast and moved to the outback, to Mt. Isa. I'd love to say that the reason that we moved was for philanthropic reasons, and I'm sure there's a little philanthropy in there, but we came, simply put, because the money's good. It's been quite an interesting experience, especially over the last week or so with the floods, of which I'll explain below the fold for those who are interested.

We packed up our house and came out to Isa in four days, a record even for us! Jodie was offered a great job on great money so we took the plunge. Jodie's job title is 'Stepper's Coordinator', which means she is coordinating the Stepper's program. This is on a Government contract, managed via the Mt. Isa Job Find office, and something that she is really enjoying. The Stepper's program is targeted at up-skilling at-risk Indigenous people in a culturally sensitive and appropriate manner. Over the last five weeks Jodie has been inducting her 'clients' in the systems and processes that they will be required to operate with(in). Jodie has proposed that the next step will involve the construction of an Indigenous Community Garden project and an Indigenous Community Art project. These have been given in principle support, which leads me to my next point...there is no staff in Mt. Isa. The staffing problems out here are stupendous! There really is no one to fill the majority of positions. The administrative workload that Jodie has to undertake alone (there aren't enough admin. staff) takes up half her day. Jodie's work aside, the staffing issues are apparent everywhere you go. Woolworths, for example, is disgusting and filthy. The floor has more stock on it than the shelves, and the stock that is on the shelves is arranged in a haphazard manner. It's not uncommon to go shopping there and fill your trolley entirely from boxes on the floor. KFC have been closed on multiple occasions since I've been here with a simple sign on the door stating 'We are closed because our staff didn't show up'. It's really quite incredible. As for my work, well I'll be starting something in March when I return from a short holiday in India. I'm not exactly sure what I'll be doing yet but I've had plenty of offers and recommendations. Much of what I've been looking at is community/social work and/or management roles in community/social organisations. I'll still be finishing of the last of my University subjects for the first half of the year so I'll choose the job with the best work environment rather than the money (Jodie's earning enough anyway). The last week or so has seen the drought in western Queensland break with close to 1000mm falling in seven days. We've been completely isolated as all the roads and the train route have been flooded over. It's been entertaining visiting the shops and seeing the signs on the shelves proclaiming that there is no stock as the transport trucks can't get in. Last night, after a bout of heavy rain (50mm in a single hour!), I went down to the main street to see the damage. All the shops in the main street were closed as the water had entered them. I couldn't see inside most of them, but I did get a glimpse inside the Westpac branch and the carpet was trashed with all sorts of bits and pieces washed inside. Further down the street I saw the cab of a raod-train stuck in an oversized pothole. The entire front left wheel had fallen in, right down to the chassis, and the front left wheel was buckled on a very obtuse angle. A crane was attempting to lift the truck out. But all this rain has left India and I stuck inside while Jodie's been off at work with not much to do. we were semi-house-sitting a friend's place but even with pay-TV it wasn't worth it - too many pets. We just settled on DVDs for India and I reformatted my notebook. The reason I opted for a reformat was (other than it's a fun geeky thing to do) that when I upgraded from Ubuntu 8.04 to Ubuntu 8.10 the repositories were unresponsive and a few packages ended up broken. 8.10 was still in Beta at the time and as the repos were unresponsive for around a week I had to manually compile Gnome. This broke a few Ubuntu packages (I don't know why) and for a while my notebook was not that fun to use. Also, with this reformat I've installed 8.10 32bit, whereas before I used 64bit. This makes things easier as I use a lot of Java based web apps which are difficult to get up and running on the 64bit system. I've been running Ubuntu on this notebook since I purchased it more than two years ago and the distro is certainly showing its maturity, both in terms of installation and in compatibility. Ubuntu was easy to install the first time round but much of the notebook's hardware didn't function 'out of the box' and involved a lot of configuration. I remember I had to recompile ALSA, I had to edit the audio configuration options (within ALSA conf) to get the headphone jack to mute when I plugged in headphones, I had to manually install the nVidia driver after downloading it from their website, and I had to use ndiswrapper and to wrap my wireless card's firmware, that I had to extract from a Windows XP installation, to get wireless networking to function. This time, however, nearly all of the hardware worked out of the box. Everything functions as it should except the nvidia graphics card and the broadcomm wireless card. But this has nothing to do with the distro, both of these companies' hardware drivers are closed-source so they don't 'ship' with Ubuntu. Thanks to the 'restricted hardware manager' though, it was simply a matter of selecting the desired driver for each piece of hardware from a drop-down list and selecting 'apply'. Isn't it great when everything just works. Anyhow, that's enough of an update for now. Now that I've got the net back on (no thanks to Telstra for stuffing me around with the line connection, and $300 dollars later - iinet were great though) I should be able to update here more often.