TET.Life (The Extraordinary Tourist Life)

Semaphore Beach main foreshore. Semaphore Beach is a favorite haunt of my partner and I. Oscar also loves it too. He's not a big fan of the water but he's not really scared of it either. With a bit of encouragement you can even get him to swim. He likes all the people and seeing other dogs. I've written about Semaphore Beach before. It's a great family beach with plenty to do even for non swimmers like myself. You can see the main part of the foreshore in the image above. This area has playgrounds, a skate park, cafe, fairground, waterslides and even a miniature train that runs at least half the length of the foreshore. The Frog Van at Semaphore. Semaphore is about 45 minutes to an hour away from where we live in Gawler. Part of the reason for going was to give my Frog Van its first long distance run since getting it up and running and back on the road.  On the highway. Obviously we made it there and back with no issues and not a single backfi...

Tech blog, Mashable, recently posted an article titled How Kids’ Pics Are Going From Social Networks to Porn Sites  which describes how child porn sites are getting as much as 88% of their suggestive or sexual images of children or young people from social websites, having been uploaded by the kids themselves. From Mashable's article: The Internet Watch Foundation spent 47 hours (over four weeks) monitoring sexually explicit images and videos uploaded to the Internet by children and young adults. During the period, the Internet safety organization logged 12,224 images on 68 various “social network sites.”   Before long, almost 11,000 of those photos had been mined by pornographic “parasite websites” — sites created with the sole purpose of exploiting sexual images of underage males and females.  It's a worrying study for anyone who has kids and perhaps doesn't monitor their internet activity as closely as they'd like to. Mashable's article might just be usef...

As mentioned in the title of the post this will be my final update on the Frog Van project. Happily the van is back on the road and running well. Therefore the aims of my GoFundMe.com project have been achieved and, with this post, the spending of the generous donations people gave me have been accounted for far beyond the $500.00 I asked for and beyond the $520.00 that was actually donated. There is a complete tally of money spent at the end of this post. In my previous Frog Van Post I gave you a full run down of what work had been done on the van just prior to me booking it in for a major tune up, service and safety check. In the video below I also give a run down of things that have been done since my last video update plus you get to see my dog Oscar as well as go for a bit of a drive in the van. After the full tune up, service and safety check I was very pleased that this did not reveal any major problems with the van's engine other than the points being comp...

For the most part I'm a strong supporter of the Australian Labor Party (for my US readers that kind of equates to a Democratic Party supporter) however I can be swayed to vote for the opposition if they have strong leadership or a great, hard working local candidate. One election I voted for my local Liberal candidate (read 'Republican' if you're a US reader) because he seemed to be everywhere. Visiting every community organisation, no matter how small. Where as his Labor counter part I never caught a glimpse of outside his campaign posters the entire election. For anyone not familiar with Australian Government, we don't get to vote directly for our Prime Minister. We vote for local candidates and, at the end of the day, whichever party has the most candidates voted in determines which party leader will become PM. Last week in Parliament our PM made a speech that got the country and, seemingly, even the world talking. It's essentially a 15 minute a...

The Frog Van is a little closer to being 100% drive-able as I continue to work on getting it back on the road. Since my last update I took the van into a local mechanic  not too far from me where it was discovered that the van's timing was way out of whack. Not too surprising to me since the van hasn't really been tuned properly in several years and has only really been worked on by backyard mechanics (such as myself) since it was first returned to the road. The mechanic adjusted the timing and cleaned out the carburetor with some cleaning spray which seemed to get the job done. Stopped most of the back firing issue and made the van a little easier to start. At the very least, this last couple of weeks, I've been able to drive the van around on very short journey's locally with few issues. Total cost of the repair: $49.50 It hasn't fixed the van completely though, as I've noticed through driving it, that it eventually starts to develop back firing issue...

I didn't know much about Mental , the new Australian movie by writer/director P. J. Hogan and staring Toni Collette (reunited for the first time since Toni starred in Muriel's Wedding ). All it took to get me interested was that it was Toni Collette playing a borderline, obnoxious but somehow still like-able Aussie and Rebecca Gibney (who could pretty much be in anything and I'd watch). Rather than re-write the plot outline, here's what the movie's website has to say: The film follows the story of the Moochmore girls who are certain they all suffer from some kind of undiagnosed mental illness - because if they're not crazy then they're just unpopular. Their mother Shirley (Gibney), unable to cope with her demanding teenage daughters and philandering politician husband, Barry (LaPaglia), suffers a nervous breakdown. After Barry commits his wife to a mental hospital (telling his constituents that she's "on holiday") he finds himself alone ...