The Perth Royal Show has always been a favourite destination for Holly and I, where we get to act like kids again and run rampant around the show eating lollies, and patting the farm animals. So when the Royal Melbourne Show arrived (20-30th September), we couldn’t resist and had to attend.

So I took the Friday off as annual leave (under the assumption that the show would be quiet as the school holidays hadn’t started yet), and hopped onto the train heading over to the show grounds.

The highlight of the show would have to be the pig racing. Pig racing you say? Don’t worry, I have never heard of it before but I have been told that it’s a common event at the show. We headed over to the pig stadium to check things out and the result? The most hilarious thing I have seen in my life! Check out the action shots below:

Next onto the farm animal shed. First stop was the ewe birthing station. We waiting around for about 30 minutes for the birth, however the lamb was a no show. I wasn’t too fussed about this because I’m sure the birthing of a lamb wouldn’t be the most attractive thing, so we decided to move on to the baby animal playpen. We followed some kids in pretending we were their parents, but once in, we ditched the charade and ran havoc. How can anyone resist patting a goat or a lamb? After checking out all the baby animals, we scraped the manure off the bottom of our shoes, and went to look at the dog display.

Now Holly and I aren’t doggy people, but we fell in love with the Short Hair German Pointers. We stood at the sideline and got to pat them all as they left the arena. Below is a picture of the Schnauzers.

Other than that, the day was spent filling up on samples of chips, cheese, chocolate, ice cream, jam, fudge, candy and nuts. So which is better, the Perth or the Melbourne Royal Show? Well I personally like Perth better. It’s just more chaotic and less refined than the Melbourne show, and to top it off, Perth has the Hot Fresh Crispy Donuts ™ which were surprisingly absent from Melbourne! Overall, a most enjoyable day out.

ANZAC day public holiday was seen as the perfect opportunity to take an extra few days annual leave, and make a road trip out to the famous Great Ocean Road. After perusing the available accommodation in the area, we finally decided somewhere that was central to the main attractions we wanted to see, and ended up in a isolated cabin, with a great view over a valley and then over the sea. And no we didnt smuggle our cats along, the place was pet friendly!

Our first stop was the Otway Treetop Walk, which according to the brochure was the longest and highest treetop walk in the world. Well for 20 bucks each, it’s gonna have to something pretty special. In the end it was great fun, except the swaying at the top of the tower gave me an overwhelming feeling of wanting to yak, so we didn’t stay up there very long (just enough to get a quick panoramic).

Our next stop was just down the road at the famous triplet falls. We were hesitant to make the walk to the falls (about 1 hour round trip), because of the lack of rainfall in the area meaning everything was quite dry, but we thought it was worth a chance. So after negotiating ourselves down about 300 slippery moss covered steps, we arrived at the bottom of the valley to see the following:

Next onto the 12 (8?) apostles. The pile of rubble in the foreground is the latest casualty where the apostle collapsed in 2005. The day was a little smoky so all the photos were washed out in colour, although nothing photoshop can’t fix! Along the way, we checked out all the standard attractions including the Grotto, London Bridge and the Arch all of which are more of the same really.

So that’s it, another famouse Australian tourist destination checked off the list. Now we have to fullfill Holly’s childhood dream, and go skiing in the mountains

Earlier this month, the Australian goverment launched the National Do Not Call Registry. Based on the Do Not Call Register Act 2006, telemarketers are required to check all numbers against the list before they make a call. If they fail to do so, then they could be in breach of the act and face penalities.

Even though this register doesn’t go anywhere near far enough as charities, educational institutions, the government and politians can still call, at least it’s a start (just watch out for those polititians raising money for some fundamentalist cult).

Everyone head over and sign up and if you get anymore telemarketing calls, don’t just yell abuse and slam the phone down, well still do that but make sure to interogate them first and then file a complaint.

Bogan 1: I hear the Maccas down here is real shit.

Bogan 2: Smells good!

Fractanoid is an experiment in multithreaded programming to allow the processing load to be split across multiple cores in a computer. The image area is first split into 200×200 pixel blocks, each of these blocks is stashed into a list which is being monitored by a series of threads within a threadpool. The blocks are processed and the results signalled back to be displayed.

The image area also always full panning support with new blocks calculated continously as they appear on the screen. Zooming in and out results in clearing of display and recalculation based on the new zoom level.

Through the preferences dialog, the number of threads can be modified to take advantage of extra CPU’s available in the system. This results in extra threads being added to the thread pool.

Download the source tarball: fractanoid 0.1.tar.bz2