and it's raining

i hate it when it's so hot that even the coolest part of the night is hot - last night was one of those nights - i slept with my balcony door open and still spent the night tossing and turning because of the heat ...

today hasn't been much better but it's just started pouring with rain so hopefully that will mean a cool down not a steam bath

we're experiencing the humid temperatures we normally get at the end of january/beginning of february (when we start back at school) at the moment and everyone is cranky

Sunday Afternoon

After spending most of today working on end-of-year-files etc i decided that perhaps i should eat - first i walked down to the local fish'n'chips shop


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then wandered to the beach to eat my chips


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(if you can't see anything above then the embedded street view thingy isn't working!)

Here are my shots:



there were families out enjoying the sun



and a couple of hopefuls hoping for some food

and i even streamed a video via qik

new battery

so i have now calibrated my new iBook battery - the iBook is my personal machine and the one i'm taking with me on holiday

although i'm usually a documentation reader type person the mac proved to be so easy to use that i didn't read all the documentation and so didn't see the info about batteries - as in - calibration and normal running of the lappie - and so, since it was originally a work machine, i ran it most days plugged into power - which degraded the battery life significantly

this time i'm doing things the right way (i hope!)

1. Calibrate - this means fully charge then fully run down till it turns itself off - done

2. Restart - ok - i don't know if this is actually exactly what you do but i found i needed to do this to get an accurate-ish battery reading

3. Turn off stuff not needed - i sync my phone via bluetooth at the end of the day but don't need it on apart from that so have turned it off; internet is via wireless so have that turned ON but will turn off before leaving home when i go away

4. Keep an interested eye on the system profiler information about the battery



as you can see there's been ONE full charge cycle ...

5. Set the battery for better battery life as the norm





and this is what my menu bar looks like now - actually as i'm typing it's adjusted and now shows longer time left - my old battery on full charge gave me 30 seconds of life before turning off!!

I'm now officially a happy camper

and what this means for me travelling is another device to help pass the time - between my iTouch, my iPod Mini & my iBook i could theoretically stay awake for the entire 14 hour flight (MEL-LAX) playing on or listening to stuff!