Driving on the wrong side of the road has now become second nature. It only takes one or two slip-ups to realize that your life depends on being on the right (oops, I mean correct, which is the left) side of the road. I did two slip-ups early on and I'm pretty well over it now.

But negotiating hallways in busy places is a different story. Your life isn't in jeapordy if you walk on the right hand side of the corridor. But everybody here walks on the left as well.

Well, not everybody as it turns out. The uni is full of exchange students from all over the world. You can see them coming - and they usually walk on the right hand side. It's bloody inconsiderate. My brain is already tortured with doing everything backwards and then one of these foreign students walks by on the wrong side and it just totally messes everything up. Then I have to consciously think about which side I'm on, and my brain is telling me I'm on the wrong side, even though I'm on the correct one. 

Work has been going well, at least as far as the employment part of it goes. The task list is a freaking nightmare.

I reported a week or so ago about the number of people (279) that had 'root' (administrator) access across the domain due to a programming error by my predecessor. But that's not half of it. Another 240 or so had no access whatsoever (and should have). Yet another 40 or so had non-zero duplicate login ID's ('uids' in Unix-ese). This means that any of them could write over or steal files from the other folks with whom they shared ID's. 

This is all due to programming errors by my predecessor. There are just under 2000 accounts, so a little more than one in four were hopelessly screwed up. 

I've also had to break in to about 40 machines because my predecessor didn't leave any password information for them and doesn't respond to (phone,email) queries. He's still at the 'Uni' (University) and somehow managed to get promoted to central IT services. Gawdd, I fear for the damage that he can do with even more access to the central infrastructure systems like payroll, purchasing, enrollment databases, etc. Most of the departmental machines (the ones I'm now caring for) have custom built scripts for performing user and system management. Those dealing with system management are as buggy as the ones managing users. It's some of the most horrid looking buggy code I've ever encountered - and I've been encountering buggy code for over half my life.

At least I'm not in danger of running out of things to fix any time soon. I'm amazed some of this stuff worked at all. In fact, most of it didn't - or just worked marginally enough that nobody ever noticed how flucked up it really was.

Oh well. Slowly but surely I'm getting all of this stuff whipped into shape. 

Zero horse float activity. All equestrian movement in Australia has come to a standstill following the discovery of equine influenza at the government's quarantine station, and more recently, at one of the major stables in Sydney. 

Turns out we're right in the heart of this matter. Our horse 'Teddy' arrived from California two weeks ago.  He was scheduled to be released last Wednesday - the day that the EI outbreak was discovered in a couple of his paddock mates. Now he'll be in quarantine at least another month - maybe longer.

It's gonna' pop through any day now - in fact today looks like a spring day. I must be careful what I wish for, though.

We've spent the last few months doing everything we could to stay warm. Sometime in the next three weeks or so we'll be suddenly faced with the task of keeping cool from the sweltering heat. We don't yet have air conditioning. I'm living at approximately the same latitude as Los Angeles.

Parts of Queensland are approximately the same latitude as Mexico City. Sydney would lie around Tijuana - and Melbourne on the southern coast would be somewhere around S.F. if the world were flipped. As I've explained before, I'm actually at an altitude more like Albuquerque, even though the 'LA weather' is only about ten minutes away, over the edge of the nearby continental cliff.

The birds are getting much more noisy in the morning. And these aren't little chirp, chirp songbirds. These guys are big and loud. The whip birds, the kookaburras, the r2d2 birds. It's impossible to sleep in on a weekend because of all the avian racket outside the window. They put the American rooster to shame (though there are a few of those around as well).  

You hear all the time about the pesky kangaroos in Australia. But I've only seen a handful - mostly on the drive to Canberra.

But every couple of days I see another dead wombat - the victim of roadkill. They litter the highways. Unlike the kangaroo, the wombat is a mostly nocturnal slow-moving beast about the size of a small dog, but a bit fatter. Maybe a badger would be a better comparison. The problem with being nocturnal and slow-moving is that they can't get across the street in time in the middle of the night to avoid getting squished.

The typical wombat builds tunnels and burrows for shelter. Miles of them, which makes them a pest in farm areas (where I happen to live). The horses and cows step into the holes and break legs. You can't fence them out because the dig right under it. They also like to burrow under houses.  They're just a fact of life, and whether you like it or not, they were here first. But they're mostly peaceful creatures, which makes it such a shame when you see yet another one that wandered across the highway and went splat. 

BELGRADE, Serbia (Reuters) -- A 23-year old Serb was found dead and half-eaten in the bear cage of Belgrade Zoo at the weekend during the annual beer festival.

The man was found naked, with his clothes lying intact inside the cage. Two adult bears, Masha and Misha, had dragged the body to their feeding corner and reacted angrily when keepers tried to recover it.

"There's a good chance he was drunk or drugged. Only an idiot would jump into the bear cage," zoo director Vuk Bojovic told Reuters.

Local media reported that police found several mobile phones inside the cage, as well as bricks, stones and beer cans.

I'm putting together a hilarious saga that I ultimately intend to submit to worsethanfailure.com...

Spent the last week analyzing the Unix systems here in the labs to get an idea of what was running on them, and also to do a security audit. First though I had to break into the boxes, as my predecessor didn't leave any system passwords. Turns out this was easy.

First thing I found on one of the systems is that the 'init' process was running under the account 'Katrina' (names have been changed to protect the innocent). Now 'init' is always owned by 'root' (the system admin account). So this means that somebody else on the system has the user id of '0', which is the administrator ID number on Unix.

As it turns out, I can change Katrina's password, since it's all stored in Windows Active Directory and exported to Unix via LDAP. So I did this and logged in as Katrina. Voila - I've got root access. Did this on several boxes to reset the root password.

Now there's no easy way to find a list of accounts, since this is all done in Windows and authentication is FM (freaking magic).  So I wrote a little 'C' program to find all this info spread around the university and generate what looks like a standard Unix passwd file, which is something I understand.

Next I ran a little awk script to go through and find out if anybody else had UID '0', or administrator access. I'm glad I did this. Turns out that 279 people have administrator access. (There should be exactly 1). Now we manage accounts here for about 1800 people, so somewhere around 1 in 6 have had elevated system privileges.  

These UID's were generated by a software utility my predecessor wrote to add all the Unix attributes to the Windows Directory. This utility has a lot of bugs, and this is only one of them. Duplicate UID's, non-existent home directories that never get created, no-UID (which defaults to 0), etc. 

Sigh... Anyway the short story is that I've got a lot of work left to do. 

Went over to the tombola tonight. Hey, we won two trays of meat (about $40 worth of steak and sausage) from a $5 raffle ticket. Coulda' been worse. Amanda was busy catching up on and spreading gossip. That's the favorite past-time in a small town.

Over on the far corner of the room were a few twenty-somethings. Completely out of place in the bowling club, though we get 'em in here now and again. The drinks are cheaper than the pub around the corner. I'd go to the pub myself - it's closer; except that they only serve Toohey's and Victoria - the local equivalent of Schlitz and Coors. There are only two Aussie beers that I can tolerate ("Pigs Fly" and James Squire "Amber Ale"), and I go where ever they've got at least one of 'em. 

My eyes were glued to the monitor above the jukebox. Oh yeah, vintage AC-DC. "You shook me all night long" - the concert footage. I remember it well. I was at the Back in Black concert in Denver way back when.

In the late seventies and early 80's, the U.S. rock music scene was exporting Van Halen.  Pyrotechnic guitar. Let's ignore Bruce Springsteen. England was still trying to show us up with Jimmy Page and David Bowie.  Germany chimed in with Michael Schenker and Scorpion. These were really out of place in the U.S. as we had no need for esoteric and intellectual rock-n-roll. What's the point?

But everybody had a place for Angus and Malcolm and their bare bones, no-frills 3 chord rock and roll from down under.  There were no airs about it, no 'fastest guitar on earth' to challenge. No intellectualism. Just rock-n-roll, cut to its basics. Simple, loud, driving. Ya' have to respect that. Especially when you add such eternal lyrics as "Too many women, and too many pills". 

--- 

On a related subject, as I listen to Aussie radio, there's a notable lack of rap music. That's understandable, there's no ghetto culture here. The dark skinned folks are usually aboriginal, and there is a lot of racial angst towards them - about which I'll write another time. What I would think of as 'Africans' are usually exchange students from England, and they're usually well respected here as part of the intellectual class.  They generally talk in thick British accents, which makes whatever they currently call 'street talk' in the states a foreign tongue completely. Nobody here can understand it.  The Prince of Bel Air and the Romeo Show might as well have been from Mars.

What I do notice about Aussie music is that there is an emphasis on trance and techno for the last fifteen years or so.  Obviously ecstasy and rave dancing were very big problems here at one point in time (at least in Sydney, I don't know how much the rave culture spread to the suburbs, as it is historically an urban phenomenon).  It's interesting what you can find out about a culture by knowing what they request on the radio. 

Workers tunnel to find missing coal miners. (Doesn't look good.)

The shuttle has a 3 inch gash. (Doesn't look good either.)

Afghanistan prepares for a 'Tet' style offensive. (Ditto.)

Another school shooter named. (Psychos, cont.)

Missing girl in Portugal believed dead. (Psychos, cont.)

Big Ben goes silent. (This doesn't happen very often.)

Dads design bulletproof back pack. (Good onya' mate.)

Pakistan government claims to have full control over their nukes (at least for now).

So what's happening around here? Not much. The cows are grazing. Downtown they'll be chopping up the trees that fell over yesterday. Free firewood I reckon.

Once more became gainfully employed. Started this morning at a large nearby University managing computer systems for the Electrical Engineering Labs.

Lasers, robots, tesla coils. The morning drive is over the edge of the escarpment, through the rain forest and along the coast. And the real kicker is that they're gonna' pay me for working here.

It's difficult to appreciate what I mean by Robertson being a bit 'wet' without some measure of comparison to put it in perspective. Let's try this...

England (universally accepted as a soggy place) just recorded their wettest summer since records began in 1766 - with about 387.6 mm of rain falling in the 3 month period from May to July. 

Robertson's last summer recorded 605.4mm over the three summer months. We won't have an accurate reading for the winter months this year because the local rain gauge only holds 500mm and it spilled over recently before the end of the monthly measuring period. 

I used to think that I had a built-in compass - that you could put me anywhere on earth and I'd be able to find north. Usually this is the case, but I have found that my sense of direction gets tripped up when you drop me into a place where the ocean is on the 'wrong side'. I'm used to having the (nearest) ocean towards the west. If that isn't the case, it takes me a bit of orientation to 'find the ocean'.

But the curious thing is that once I've found the ocean, I seem to be able to keep its location oriented in my brain, and I don't lose it again, no matter how I get twisted around - as long as I stay on the ground and as long as the ocean stays in the same direction.

It was interesting that when living in Colorado years ago that I still maintained my direction by the orientation of the Pacific Ocean, a thousand miles away. Western Mexico, no problem. As a teenager I was at ease finding north in York, England, though this defies my logic completely. Although I do recall flying towards the coastline an hour before landing. But having flown to New York and the Yucatan and most recently to Eastern Australia, my sense of direction was completely destroyed for about 48 hours. The common denominator in these cases is that the location of the sea was apparently on the 'wrong side'. 

Very curious.