Sydney

We arrived in Sydney at 0630, were checked in by 8:30, and back on the train to Sydney by 10:00. We found out that North Ryde is WAY north, on a new subway line. Someone had fun with the interior design: Image5865. (Note - with the connection speed I have here, I'm not going to worry about embedding the images in the text in the proper order - I'm lucky to get them up at all. Please use the file names for reference)





















Shortly after starting our city wandering IMG5775, we made a new friend who was in town from China, Shimmer Liu. We'll leave it to him to post his Chinese name .













We found a place to eat at the GlenmoreRooftop Beer Garden. IMG 5784

Nice view of the entire bay, if you don't mind the industrial look. IMG5779. Not sure if "Bangers & Mash" is an Aussie dish, or British - only though to take a picture after it was half eaten :-). The Glenmore is just above Argyle, a pub where Dan Meador recommended a drink...more on that later if we make it there.




















Later, on the other side of Circular Quay, we had a Porland-like fall day to view the OperaHouse up close. That is - grey skies with a good chance of showers. The clouds gave soft light, but nothing interesting. Had to use some imagination to find a neat shot. Let us know what you think of these. IMG5804. IMG5813, IMG5807.















I'm not sure how this picture of the inside of the main performance stage ended up on my camera, but it is a breathtaking concert hall. IMG5838













Yesterday, we had a nice ride aboard a coach (aka bus) to the Blue Mountains. Beautiful, Foggy, Rainy Day. Hope to get some of that posted tonight. Kathy found a Koala and we did have fun - albeit without seeing most of the sights!



Technical Stuff:
Oh - I'm using JoboGPS for GeoTagging. Pretty slick design concept - A GPS receiver that fits on the camera hotshoe, but it has a few flaws, one of which is it won't it won't insert the GPS data unless it can make a connection to a JoboGPS server to also install local Points of interest. Sheesh! So, for now, there are no embedded GPS coordinates as I've already down-sized the images for posting. Anyway, I would NOT buy this thing again until the application software can embed the GPS coordinates in the EXIF header without need for an Internet connection. Here are Scott Kelby's comments

We found out that virtually no image editing SW runs on a netbook. Hello Canon,Photoshop, Nikon, etc. Netbooks are NOT 1024 x 768. Please provide a SW upgrade that works on 1024 x 600 resolution displays! For a comparison, on CPU speed, my5 y.o. desktop at home (then a top of the line- 3.2 GHz Dual Core Pentium) can convert from AVI to AVI (just a baseline test)at about 140 fps, the NB 205 does the conversion at about 80 fps. SO, it's not a screaming fastPC, but that's a fine trade-off for a travel-sized PC.



We're using a Toshiba Netbook 205. A reported 9-hour battery life. The touch pad seemsunresponsive for a few seconds every once in a while, but other than that, having a 3 lblaptop is pretty nice. We ripped several of our DVDs using cucusoft - GREAT stuff. You can get the package for about $US 29 to convert anything to anything. http://www.cucusoft.com/ is the retail site, but we purchased it here: http://www.regnow.com/

Oh, and the reason for no update until now on the blog...Internet Access in Sydney is miserable. During our first 2 days of city wandering, we looked for hotspots. Starbuck (sigh) was the only coffee shop we found with a hotspot, but the captive portal screen wouldn't open after 10 minutes. Here at the hotel, they charge $AU 20/day for "high speed" internet. From here to Seattle, WA (http://www.speakeasy.net/) we have a blazing upload speed ot 60 kbps! I can type faster than my gmail account (in TEXT mode) can accept characters.

Tuesday we leave at 10:45 AM (subtract a day and add 6 hours for PDT - so 4:45 pm on Monday for the USA west coast) to the Whitsunday's where there should be sun!