Common wisdom has it that what we call fog in Australia is called mist elsewhere. In
Germany, fog starts with visibilities of 150 m and less. But today we had something that
almost came close:
The dogs were very interested in something up on the fence on the east side of the property
(towards the road) today. When Leonid barked,
I went out in hope of finding the cat that had been reported missing in Westons Road a
couple of weeks ago. But no such luck:
A young Eastern grey
kangaroo, with both legs broken. How did that happen? Yvonne called up Vince at the Wala animal sanctuary. He sent out Gary, who was with
him four years ago.
In the meantime, the dogs came and took a (very cautious) look:
He then checked its sex? Why? It's obvious: a female could have had one or
more joeys in her pouch. It
seems that if their eyes are open, they have some hope of survival. But in this case it was
a male.
And what was the cause? It was up against the sheep mesh fence, and I wondered if it might
have got caught in the fence like so many other cases that we have seen round here. But no,
Gary thought that it had been run over. For a while I was left feeling malice towards the
driver, but of course there's little you can do to avoid this kind of accident, and most of
us have had it, myself three years
ago. But he could at least have called the wildlife people.
For years I've complained about poor exposure with flash. But my recent attempts, with the
Olympus STF-8 and the mecablitz 58 AF-2, seem to have been relatively well exposed. For the first shots of
the kangaroo, I had set the camera to add +1 EV to the flash exposure, but that caused the
images to be overexposed by about 1 EV, maybe only ⅔ EV. Why have things changed? Maybe
the subject?
Restless night. Leonid barked for some reason
round 3:45, and I couldn't get back to sleep. Round 5:46 I heard a “beep” from somewhere,
and off to the office to find the UPS grumbling to
itself, apparently being fed voltages that were all over the place.
The oven and adjacent microwave oven had reset their clocks, so clearly we had some kind of
power failure. The microwave
oven in the pantry showed 7:02. What does that mean? That it didn't fail? It resets to
(paradoxically) 1:00 on a power failure and carries on running, so it could indicate a
failure at 23:44. On the other hand, I can't set the clock manually: I've lost the
instruction manual, and if clock setting still works, it's well hidden. The time displayed
doesn't match the time of the previous outage (2:06).
Strangely, I was woken by a “beep” at 5:46 the following day, though there were no
problems. Did the sound come from somewhere else?
In the early afternoon we disappeared from the net. I had just got round to grumbling when
it came back again—for all of 7 minutes. Took a look at the NTD, which showed:
That orange LED is labeled “ODU fail”, implying (incorrectly) a defect in the “outdoor
unit”, which other people call an antenna. Again, the connection came back pretty quickly.
But it continued like that, and after 15 minutes starting at 14:50, I headed off to the
Radiation Tower to see if anything was going on. Sure enough:
He was quite informative. Yes, this was a scheduled outage, and he was replacing an
amplifier module which they thought could be defective. We'd be up again quite soon (which
he later clarified as “an hour or two”). The whole thing relates to the modifications they
performed to support 3.4 GHz connections. The modifications themselves are complete, and we
now have an uplink bandwidth of a whopping 394 Mb/s, almost enough to sustain 16 parallel
downloads at 25 Mb/s. He couldn't tell me what the bandwidth had been before, but no wonder
we run into congestion at peak usage periods.
3.4 GHz? I had been told 3.5 GHz, and OzTowers agrees with me. Was the technician mistaken, or is the truth somewhere in
between?
Was the maintenance really scheduled? We still have the prospect of another 4 hour outage
some time in early next month, and we were informed of that. Given the nature of the work,
I think this was unplanned, but of course he got a job order.
The cabinet was open, showing a surprising amount of equipment, most of which was difficult
to identify, though there were a large number of (probably redundant) power supplies.
I was quite impressed by the appearance of the installation, and he told me that it was much
more modern than the Telstra tower 100 m away.
He was from Decon, who do work for
Telstra as well.
True to his word, the connection bounced several times (probably for testing), and finally
came back up at 16:50. 9 outages today (102 minutes), a total of 28 (1,107 minutes, 18.4
hours) in the past 40 days, an availability of only 98.1%. Will they finally get their act
together?
Date
Outages
Duration
Availability
Date
(seconds)
1521032400
1
26968
68.79%
# 15 March 2018
1522069200
2
27326
68.37%
# 27 March 2018
1522764000
1
1225
98.58%
# 4 April 2018
1523196000
6
3935
95.45%
# 9 April 2018
1523541600
5
850
99.02%
# 13 April 2018
1524405600
9
6098
92.94%
# 23 April 2018
I get the impression that they don't have much in the way of diagnostics, and today's effort
involved a lot of “suck it and see”.
Our daughter Yana is back in town, for the first time in
two years. Another dinner
(Chris Bahlo came along for the fun of it), but not much else, not even photos.
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