Hi everyone,
About time for an update! We had another meeting with the architect on December 22nd. Over the last few months he has been working with the engineer, drawing up structural, plumbing and electrical plans, and made a few minor changes to the floor plan to account for these. We also went through the glazing schedule, confirming the sizes and types of all the windows. We also met the builder for the first time!

Latest plan revisions:

There were another 20 or so diagrams/plans with these ones but I won't upload them all - things like updated elevation diagrams, subfloor plan, roof plan, and so on, I won't scan them all :)

Major changes:

- A niche running all the way around the top cornice area of 3 sides of the house - this was because the roof support structure needed a bit more space than what was available (and raising the roof level would have required going back to planning approval) so to keep window sizes the standard height they added a gap. This works out well because it provides a spot where blinds etc. can be installed and then be hidden when they are open - and also allows some niches to be built into some walls.

- Laundry chute location confirmed, after about 4 different options were attempted!

- AV/network cabinet location changed - made it bigger and placed it between the theatre and the garage. Discussions with many AV enthusiasts have let me to believe that cat5/6 will be used for AV in the future (there are adaptors to do so now) so as a result it made sense to consolidate the network and AV runs.

- A step before entering the garage - because the garage is 300mm higher than the rest of the lower floor. I think the step may get in the way a bit, so will raise some alternatives with the architect!
We've also confirmed some floor surfaces:

- Polished concrete in the downstairs hallway (as well as hopefully a polished concrete benchtop)

- Modwood for the decks - modwood is made of sawdust and recycled plastic milk bottles, doesn't require oiling every year or other maintenace, and doesn't splinter!
I've also done some sketchup mockups of some areas to give the architect and builder an idea of what we are after.
Kitchen:





(Appliances are Electrolux oven & induction cooktop, F&P fridge, Robinhood rangehood and Asko dishwasher)

Laundry:




And my work of art, the AV unit!


Construction is now expected to start in March 2011.. which means we may not be in there before Christmas 2011 as we had hoped, but that's ok, we'd rather it be done well than done quick!
 
That'll do for now, electrical and plumbing to come in a future update!

A year ago, Australia was the favoured nation to win the right to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup.  Two weeks ago, FIFA's technical reports said England, United States and Australia were the three bids best prepared and capable of hosting a World Cup - Russia and Qatar, the most high risk.  Yet, on Friday morning, Russia and Qatar were declared the winners, while England and Australia were eliminated in the first round of their respective votes.  What went wrong?

Frank Lowy stated that before the vote, they were confident that they had at least four votes in the first round - maybe as many as six - meaning at least three ExCo members had looked him in the eye and lied.  Even afterwards, two members have claimed responsibility for the single vote.  Who can he trust?

Clearly politics and backdoor deals played a role, but it isn't as simple as "whoever donates the most money gets my vote".  The voting pattern is a curious one:

The number of votes for Qatar and Japan actually decreased after the first round - leading to suggestions that some blocs of members planned to vote in pre-arranged ways in particular rounds, targetting individual nations one by one.  USA, Qatar and Australia were the only nations seen as the likely hosts of the event (not to say the other bids weren't good - but too soon after their 2002 hosting).  Australia was probably identified as the easiest of the three to "get rid of" early.

Now for a game of "what-if" ... notice how Japan had an extra vote in their first round as opposed to the second?  What if that vote was originally going to Australia but was "switched" to Japan just to knock Australia out, as it was deemed a bigger threat?  Japan and Australia would be locked 2-2 for last place, leading to a "knock-out" voting round between the two.

A poster on the FourFourTwo Australia forums, girtXc, appears to have some sort of insight into the workings of the FIFA ExCo and has posted an interesting theory.  Apparently when the Tahitian delegate Temurii (I'm going to assume people know all about that!) got suspended it had bigger ramifications than just losing a single vote.  His theory about the Japan vote is that powerful Qatari ExCo delegate (and Asian Football Confederation chief) Mohammad bin Hammam arranged it so that Japan wouldn't go out in the first round, therefore keeping Japan ExCo delegate Oguru's honour (very important in Japanese culture) and thus ensuring Japan's vote went to Qatar after Japan was knocked out.  Talk about swings and roundabouts!

The theories about how it happened can go on forever, and we may not ever know... but what happens from here, for Australia?

The sad thing about losing is that, as well as not hosting, it makes the moronic anti-sockah brigade in this nation think they have the right to spout rubbish about the sport.  Rebecca Wilson is already at it.  I won't go into detail about this one, if you read it, you know about it, and if you don't believe it happens I'm not going to change your mind.

The corruption has hit several major nations hard - the USA and England are even discussing a breakaway governing body to FIFA.  Australia could potentially be a part of this but we don't have the standing to do so - any form of dissent and the AFC - headed by bin Hammam (conflict of interest much?) - will send us back off to Oceania.

When will Australia get another chance?  The disappointing thing is that these opportunities come up so rarely for Australia.  FIFA has had vague continental rotation policies in the past - usually the rules are changed before a full cycle occurs.  With the 2018 and 2022 bid process, the rule was that once a continent hosted, they were not able to bid for the next two.  Although it is possible that this will change in the future, if it continues, then 2026 would likely go to the USA, and 2030 to Europe.  That puts Australia's next chance at 2034 at the earliest.

I will be 56 by then.  Frank Lowy would have well and truly fallen off his perch - he will be 104 if he makes it that far!

... and the big question is - will the government at the time support it?  We were lucky in that we had bipartisan support from Kevin Rudd (a "foreign affairs nerd prime minister") and Malcolm Turnbull.  It may not be that easy for a government to fork out $45m again, depending on the political landscape at the time.

But then again, in 1986, Melbourne unsuccessfully bid for the 1992 Olympics.  11 votes out of 85 in the first round.  Brisbane bid for the 1996 Olympics, 12 out of 86.  Imagine if those two experiences were derided as being "wastes of money" - it may have stopped the AOC supporting Sydney's bid for the 2000 Olympics - 30 votes out of 88 in the first round, defeating Beijing 45-43 in the final round, and going on to host the "Best Olympic Games ever!"

In the meantime, lets support the Socceroos at the 2011 AFC Asian Cup - strangely enough, hosted in Qatar in January - after all, it is the game on the pitch that matters!

This is a meme going around Facebook at the moment and, I haven't written a blog post for a while so this is as good as place as any!

For a geek I've done a rather poor job! (I've tagged both mine and Emma's in the one list!)


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (Emma)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (Emma)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (Emma)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - read first 3 (Emma)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (Chuq)
6 The Bible - read parts (Emma)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (Emma)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (Emma)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - read 7 or 8, seen more on stage. (Emma)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (Emma)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (Chuq)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (Emma)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald  (Chuq)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (Chuq)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (Emma)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (Emma)
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (Emma)
34 Emma - Jane Austen (Emma)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (Emma)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (Chuq) (Emma)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (Emma)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (Emma)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy.
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (Chuq)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (Emma)
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth.
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (Emma)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (Chuq)
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (Emma)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (Emma)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (Emma)
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt.
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White (Chuq) (Emma)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton (Emma)
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (Emma)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (Chuq) (Emma)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo


9 out of 100.  How embarrassing!  If you don't count the ones which are (a) children's books or (b) books that were a compulsory part of our high school english curriculum, then the ONLY book on the list would be Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.


What is even worse is that a significant number of the books on the last are sitting right on our bookshelf and have done so for the past 9 years.  Most of them were inherited, not purchased ... I know many of them are classics which is why they are still there!


Some titles on the list do stand out as standard geek fare.. Nineteen Eighty Four, Animal Farm, Brave New World, Catch 22 and The Time Traveller's Wife are titles that I should really familiarise myself with more!


If I scrape the bottom of the barrel ... I've read the book of Contact, and it WAS better than the movie, does that give me cred?  Also there were episodes of Lost named 'The Little Prince' and 'A Tale Of Two Cities' .. there was a lot of CS Lewis references in the show as well.  That has to count for something?


Emma scored 27 on this list, quite a few of which she attributes to owning the complete works of Jane Austen, the whole Harry Potter series, and all of The Lord of the Rings books!  


Quick plug: If you are a bibliophile - check out http://www.librarything.com - fellow geek John Dalton helps to run this one!

• Three months after activation, the number of homes connected in Tasmania is 262. Including homes that have requested a service but connecting is pending, it is 436.
• The number of households passed with the fibre is reported between 3000 and 4000 in difference sources. (Note: The source that said "4000" was from The Australian)

• Dial-up internet had been around since 1994;
• In November 1998 (four years later), 13% of households in regional Australia had internet access.

• FTTH over NBN has been around since July 2010;
• In October 2010 (three months later), 10-14% of households in regional Australia had signed up for a service.

Enough about our house.. here are some of the other fantastic houses (and houses-in-progress) that I've found on the HomeOne forum. It’s a great resource if you are building a new house, with dedicated sections for everything to do with building a house - kitchens, bathrooms, heating and cooling, lighting, AV, automation, security, flooring, landscaping ... it’s not even restricted to the work itself, with sections on investment, real estate, being an owner/builder and so on.

People in Glass Houses is Michelle and Tom’s blog. They are nearing the final stages of completion of their architecturally designed 5 bedroom house in a bushland area only 5 mins from Hobart’s CBD! It is a very modern design with lots of angles and designed for a big family similar to ours.

Chris and Kelly’s blog is called Housearama. They have just finished building a passive solar designed 4 bedroom house in Adelaide, roughly based on a Longridge Madison 255. It features a separate home office, a great kitchen (including a professional wok burner – which is a story of its own!) and lots of “cat features”. This is of course on top of all the smart environmental features like retractable shades, opening skylights and power monitoring features.

Building Our 9 Star Home is the blog of Rodney and Elizabeth in Melbourne. Hopefully the key feature of this house is obvious. Their house will actually be ranked as 9.1 star! Not only do they use passive solar design, but they are going to great lengths to ensure the house is as friendly to the environment as possible through choices such as materials used in their kitchen and type of paint used. One of their friends owns the block next door and they will be sharing a backyard for their vege garden and chickens. Construction hasn't started (last I checked), but I think this is going to be a great one to follow!

Big Red's Castle is worth the link just for the amusement of this post!

And last but not least... they don't have a blog that I can link to but sis & bro-in-law Ben and Laura are also planning to build soon, and drawing on Ben's experience in AV & automation they are planning some pretty smart things for their house!  As an example .. they will have an automated watering system for their garden - not that unusual - but the system will take into account time of day, current temperature, recent rainfall, water tank level and weather forecast for the next few days!  So long as it isn't called Skynet ...

As I alluded to in a previous house update, here are some "before and after" plans of some parts of our new house, compared to similar areas in our current place.

Well, it has been quite an eventful few days in the world of Australian politics. Noone really knows who our Prime Minister will be. All the analysts are currently saying that the coalition will have 73 seats to Labor's 72. On first glance this points to a coalition victory, but it isn't as simple as that!

Enter the independents - or more technically correct, the crossbenchers! Three of them - Bob Katter, Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott - are sitting independent MPs from regional seats in Queensland and New South Wales who have be re-elected by their elecorate. They are all from rather conservative National Party backgrounds. The other two (Adam Bandt and Andrew Wilkie - noting Wilkie's position is not confirmed) - are from a different background - both representing urban seats in Melbourne and Hobart, and both from the left side of politics - Bandt being the first Greens representative in the lower house, and Wilkie being a former Green member.

On face value it could be assumed the first three would side with the coalition and the last two with Labor. It is never that simple! After all you would assume that the four independents are no longer members of their party for a reason.

Which brings me to what I personally believe was the only policy in the election that clearly separated the two major parties - telecommunications.

While watching the television coverage over the weekend, as expected there were live crosses all over the nation including the three conservative members. And a picture spoke a thousand words - or rather, no picture. The live crosses were just a still image with audio provided by a grainy mobile phone call. Even though the members pointed out that telecommunications was a big issue in their electorate, the fact that the current situation was being clearly demonstrated only served to reinforce this!

The Greens and Wilkie also ran on a platform of supporting the National Broadband Network so it could be assumed they would side with Labor in this regard - not to mention the fact that the Greens and Liberals are polar opposite ends of the spectrum.

The other factor that gives hope to Labor is that the crossbenchers have indicated that they want to support a stable government. It is not in their interest to see the country go to another election in six months time. These comments have made specific reference to the Senate. After the massive surge to the Greens - their number of Senators will increase from 4 to 9 - perhaps the independents think that a conservative government would not work with a left leaning upper house? It is worth mentioning that the Senate does not change until 1 July 2011. Until then, a Labor Government will need the approval of either the Coalition, or all Greens senators, Family First senator Steve Fielding, and Independent Nick Xenaphon, to pass legislation. After the new senate term starts, only the Greens will need to be appeased. Probably not an issue for a Labor government but it could be a challenge should the Liberals form government.

(As I write this, news has come to light that Wilkie may be not as likely to win Denison as first thought. If it did go Labors way, it may put it at 73-73 for the major parties. That's probably a sign that I should stop writing this, every few hours there is something new!)