On Driving

It's been a week since I got back from holidays. Sorry to those people who were anticipating another holiday post.My holiday was not one of those that was filled with action and excitement and really wild things. I did some stuff - I got back. That's about it, really.

One thing that I will mention - I do rather like driving long distances. I think it's fun. And since I'm always listening to either music or podcasts, I don't get bored. So I've decided to look into becoming an Uber driver.

Except... I have a bit of a problem with that. To drive for Uber, you need to own a car that is less than 9 years old. I don't. I signed up by providing my email address and mobile phone number, and then I was asked to choose - from a list - the make and model of my car. The list did not include any models older than 9 years. So there was no way I could proceed from there. Now I'm getting emails from Uber reminding me to complete my background check so I can start driving as soon as possible.

I had heard that Uber provides finance for those who need a new car. I even found a page, thanks to a friend in a chatroom, which details the terms of the finance available. The instruction to apply said "just sign up, and tell us you need a new car!" There was no such option on the signup page. I looked at the finance page very carefully, and the very last sentence of the fine print at the very bottom of the page said "Finance not available in all locations".

I emailed them, asking whether finance was available. They replied within 24 hours, which was nice, telling me that no finance is available, but if I had a car that was less than 9 years old, I could start driving immediately!

So I think my plan to become an Uber driver has pretty much been scuppered. I would have to self-finance a new car, which at this point is probably not possible. I'd have to apply for a loan, and when they asked me how much I earn, I'd have to say "I don't know yet, but as soon as I get this loan I'll be able to tell you." And that's not really how it works.

Meanwhile, I guess I keep studying and keep applying for jobs. There aren't that many places looking for new hires over the Christmas period, but I'm sure there are some.

Sharks! Rays!

I just got back from visiting the Irukandji Shark and Ray Encounters. It was definitely a highlight of the trip.

The place is basically a big barn in the middle of nowhere. Inside the barn there are a number of pools that house sharks and rays. You pay your money, you get led inside where you're given a wetsuit and crocs, and you get into the pools with the sharks and rays.

There is of course a guide. The place has a number of different species - mostly Port Jackson sharks, common stingrays, fiddler rays, eagle rays and a few other species, including a pair of tawny nurse sharks that were up to 3 metres long.

You do get to feed the animals - using sticks with clips on the end to hold bits of prawn and squid. The rays were  very friendly - I'd say extremely friendly. They came right up and gave us hugs.

It's well-known that sharks have rough skins due to the shape of their scales. Smaller sharks are less rough, because their scales are smaller. Stingrays, however, have what appears to be an anti-bacterial mucus coating which makes them somewhat slimy to the touch. It was a little unnerving at first.

And yes, the common stingray is the species that killed Steve Irwin. Our guide had an informed opinion on that, which can be summed up as "not only was Irwin an idiot, but the guy who was with him was also an idiot".

First, Irwin approached the stingray from behind - both in its blind spot and where its defence mechanism is. When it was startled, it did the same thing it would do if it were ambushed by a shark - it struck up with its sting. It was a dumb thing to do. Second, the guy who was with him pulled the sting out. Stingray stings are barbed - like a broadhead arrow. Pulling the sting out ripped Irwin's flesh open and caused him to bleed out. It was another dumb thing to do.

The correct response when someone is stung by a stingray is to get them into very hot water if you can, and absolutely get them to a hospital so that the sting can be surgically removed.

I got no photos. Because, well, wet. We were literally in the water for most of the time we were there. I did get a keyring though.

Dolphins!

Today has been a good day.

Since it seemed a shame to come to the coast and not get on a boat, Terri and I booked ourselves on a 90 minute dolphin-watching cruise in the bay. It was to leave at 1:30pm, so we had most of the morning to wander around the shopping district of Nelson Bay. Spoiler: there wasn't a lot. We had a look in a couple of shops that I've come to refer to as "everything shops", and I picked up a key ring. Which reminds me, I haven't told you about my key rings yet. That'll be for another post.

After stopping to have a smoothie at a juice bar, we made our way to the marina. We stood in a queue on the dock for quite a while before embarking, and the ship was about 5 minutes late departing.

For a while there we didn't think we'd actually see any dolphins when suddenly, there they were.

Now, I did have my good camera with me - I figured that having the zoom lens would be worth carrying it about, and I was right. There were a lot of people on the boat, and most of them were trying to get photos with their camera phones. Don't get me wrong - a camera phone is extremely useful, and sufficient for most purposes. But for this particular purpose, nope.

Turns out it's pretty hard to take photos of wild dolphins anyway, even with a zoom lens. I think you'd need to be underwater or something to get good shots. I took something like a hundred photos of the dolphins, and these five are the only ones in which you can really see all that much. Dolphins like to be under the water, you see. They only surface in order to breathe. That makes it hard to zoom, focus and compose a shot.

I got to the point where I was doing something that I've been meaning to teach myself to do anyway, which is to keep both eyes open when taking the shots. One eye looks through the viewfinder, while the other is free to take in the whole scene. With practice, I found that I could overlap the view from one eye with the view from the other, and choose which eye my brain paid attention to at any given moment. That made it quite a lot easier to catch those elusive shots where the dolphin only surfaced for a fraction of a second.

Of course, I had to keep the camera focused on the surface of the water, but I was able to do that because of the flashing red lights in the viewfinder. Anyone who's used the viewfinder on a DSLR (rather than composing shots on the external screen) should know what I'm talking about here. You can half-press the shutter button and the lights will flash if you're focused on what you're pointing at.

It was a pretty pleasant ride. It wasn't rough or particularly windy, and the rain that has been hanging around since we arrived in the area had pretty much gone completely away by the time we got onto the water.

After we had returned to shore we went back to our room for a couple of hours before going to dinner, which we had in a pub on the bay shore called Mavericks. We chose this particular place because Terri wanted a seafood grill and they seemed to have the best value. The meal was... good. It wasn't great, but it was good. The salt and pepper squid in particular was excellent. The dessert menu only had a couple of things on it, but I think that was because there was an ice creamery just across the square. So that's where we had our dessert. The banana split may just have been the best thing in the world at that moment.

More Songs About Showers

I've already told you how much I hate shower curtains. This post is about the idea that is sometimes found in hotels known as the "wet room". It sounds filthy, but it isn't.

The Wet Room is where the floor of the shower is contiguous with the floor of the rest of the bathroom, and there is no distinction between the shower stall and everything else. The resort I'm staying in at the moment has some dividers up, but there is no door to the shower cubicle.

Also, the water pressure here is of the "I fear for the safety of my nipples" level. While this is quite nice to shower in - as long as I don't turn the showerhead to needles - it does mean that the water splashes all the way out of the shower cubicle.

This means that when I've finished my shower, the floor of the bathroom is awash. Unfortunately, it doesn't drain very well, which pretty much means that the floor is constantly wet. When I sit on toilet, I need to be very careful that my pants don't touch the floor, or they will be sitting in water. And sure, my pants are still slightly damp from not having had long enough in the dryer, but that's not the same thing.

Also, the sink is perfectly designed to splash me in the crotch when I turn the tap on.

Not a short walk

Today we were pretty much taking it easy. Terri swam a kilometre in the hotel pool, and I took a walk to Nelson Bay to find an ATM. It was a nice walk, though longer than I'm used to. I thought it was going to be fairly quick, but it was 40min in each direction.

I found the tourist trap. It was full of tourists. I didn't expect this area to have a large tourist population, but there they were.

I took a few iPhone photos on the way - you can see these on my Facebook if you're interested. It seems that Facebook will now collect photos off your photo stream and compile them automagically into a collage. That was nice.

After that I had a bit of an adventure trying to get my clothes washed. See, it's been raining at home, and since we have to dry clothes on an actual clothesline because we don't have a dryer, we haven't been able to do any washing for a while, and I'd run out of t-shirts and pants. Well... mostly run out.

The resort where we're staying has laundry facilities, but they're coin-operated. This was the reason I needed to find an ATM this afternoon. But it turns out that the laundry is in a different building, and our door card doesn't work in the other building. Got that sorted out - they had to issue me a temporary card at Reception to allow me into the laundry. And it turned out that the laundry had the world's slowest dryer so I had to get my clothes out while they were still slightly damp and hang them on a rack in our room.

Dinner was at a little place called Marco's. It was slow, but it was a Saturday night and they were quite busy, so I forgive them for that. The awesome waitress gave us complementary olives while we were waiting, which was nice because neither of us had eaten since breakfast and we were both very hungry. I had pasta shells stuffed with spinach and ricotta in a tomato sauce, and it was really nice. It wasn't spectacular, or innovative, but it was hearty and well-made. I figured that it wouldn't be at all difficult to do at home, especially if I made the pasta myself - which is something that I've been totally planning on doing for a while now.

Dessert was gelati from a literal guy-in-a-booth. Good gelati too. We'll probably go back to him a couple of times before the week is over.

Road Trip!

There's Sydney traffic, then there's Sydney Peak Hour Traffic. Then there's Sydney Peak Hour Traffic in a Torrential Rainstorm, and that's a whole different kind of traffic.

The road trip only took about an hour and a half longer than originally anticipated. And at many points during the trip I thought of things to put in this blot post, only to have them all vanish from my brain the moment I started typing. Typical.

I'm in Shoal Bay. I assume it's nice, but I can't tell because it's nighttime and it's raining heavily.

There are a number of things that Terri has put on the list for doing, including a Shark and Ray Centre, which sounds exciting. I only know about this because I saw the sign as we were approaching. The rest of the week is going to be a bit of a surprise.

I've brought my good camera. It's been a while since I've used it - I think it was getting lonely. My iPhone camera is good for a lot of things, but for really good photos you can't go past a DSLR. I spent quite a bit of time a few years ago learning how shutter speed and aperture work and how to set them quickly. I also taught myself how to tweak photos in Aperture to make them look good. It'd be a shame for all that knowledge to go to waste. So expect some photos here over the next week.

New blog

I'm moving all of my Oto Nightwood posts onto another blog. This blog will be reserved for personal observations and updates.

Tonight's culinary experiment

Aloo paratha.

It's only when I looked at Wikipedia that I found out that this is supposed to be a breakfast dish. Never mind, we had it for dinner.

I'd describe it as a qualified success. It tasted pretty good. I assume that there's a knack for rolling out the dough so that the filling doesn't leak out. Perhaps I just needed to use more dough for each one. But like most recipes I've used, the quantities seemed wrong. I ran out of paratha long before I ran out of aloo.

If I was going to do this again, I'd probably make the potatoes a bit more curryish. Using a recipe from How To Cook Everything Vegetarian, the potato is boiled and mashed with coriander, chilli, salt, pepper and lemon juice. I added a touch of turmeric, but it still didn't really have a strong flavour.

Before I found out that it is intended for breakfast, I figured that if I did it again I'd probably do it as a side dish with a good hearty vegetable curry. It might also work quite well with curried cube potato, wrapped like a dumpling rather than rolled like a pancake.

There's also a fair bit of cleaning up to do. But that's normal when you're working with flour and dough.