I've been working on a fair bit of marketing-related stuff over the last few years, and we've been spending pretty big on online campaigns. Much of this money has gone on display advertising, the kind of stuff you'll see on Fairfax and News Corp sites. We've had a whole range of problems with this stuff, and I've come to the conclusion it's more trouble than it's worth. Certainly if you want to measure response based on sales, the rate is pitiful. Here's why it's broken.

When you buy a search ad, you can be pretty certain the person is actually interested in the topic represented by the keyword you're buying. So when someone types "wireless keyboard", it's a good bet they're probably interested in buying a "wireless keyboard" of some sort.

When you buy a display ad, you get pretty loose categorisation. Perhaps your technology product might end up in the technology section of the site, so at least you're being exposed to people with an interest. Or you might be in the "general interest" pool, in which case you're getting exposed to the people who clicked on "celebrity shows boobies" links. Just the people you want. But regardless of the type of category you end up in, you're getting people who are expressly there for something other than finding something about a very specific topic.

So really, you can't measure the results of display advertising by expecting people to buy immediately after clicking, it's more for branding. Or so the salesmen for these mass media properties will tell you. So really you're getting your brand exposed to roughly categorised people.

Except it's completely unmeasurable, and the mass media sites have only themselves to blame for this. You see, if I want to have my brand exposed randomly to roughly categorised people, I need to have some pretty solid statistics on how many have seen it. I'm an Internet advertiser, so I'm used to pretty solid stats, not based on diary entries like TV or circulation surveys like newspapers (yeah, like most copies of the newspaper get read by more than one person, every day).

The problem is the major media in Australia specifically make any "impression" numbers meaningless, by adding a little line of code like this to every page on their site, this from news.com.au:
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0300" />

This line of code means the page gets reloaded every 300 seconds, or 5 minutes. Fairfax have recently started doing this in a slightly different way (checking if a video is playing first) but they do the same thing.

By reloading the page every five minutes, they've made their impression numbers completely meaningless. People regularly leave their browsers open with a page: the news, the weather, whatever they were just reading. So they go off for a half hour lunch and three "impressions" tick over, except there's nobody home to be impressed. There's no way to quantify how often this happens, so the impression number isn't just inaccurate, it's some unknowable amount completely wrong.

So you see, measured by the only accurate measurement, click throughs and subsequent sales, display doesn't make sense. And as a branding exercise it's not worth playing around with because the publishers have specifically taken steps to make the numbers meaningless.

And they wonder why newspapers are dying, when they go out of their way to devalue the one thing of value they do produce?

For the last five years I've run a virtual server from the excellent Linode which has hosted a number of services including this web site, a Jabber server, some other web sites, and my email. Initially I did spam filtering myself, but between the load this placed on the server and the constant tweaking required, it annoyed the hell out of me, so I outsourced that to JunkEmailFilter.com, which while imperfect was passable.

I've used mutt as my email client since some time in the later 90s, after upgrading from pine. The advantages of a text-mode mail client were speed, accessibility from nearly anywhere, integrated tools (gpg, lbbdb) and the fact that a clueless boss looking over your shoulder will think "techie stuff, must be work" and hence not require me to justify my work throughput.

More recently I've noticed myself regularly bouncing messages to my secret gmail account. Partly this is because Google Reader produces broken text attachments, and a few of my correspondents insist on using that, but mainly it's because more and more emails included stuff I couldn't use in a text-mode client, like links to complicated web site, pictures, or links to videos.

So I thought I'd try out moving all my email to Google excellent web client. The process of moving the whole domain was surprisingly easy. Just point the MX at Google's servers, set up the appropriate accounts and define the pass-through mail server for anything that doesn't have an account on the Google servers. This means the mailing lists and weird aliases I have on my server continue working as before.

The hardest part was uploading all my old mail. I've been saving mails into their own Maildirs based on the big before the @ in the email address, so john@smith.com ends up saved as john/ and if there's any doubling up of "john" it's still all in there. Gmail has a pretty good (and very fast) search, so filing becomes much less important.

There's a bunch of tools you can find that claim to be able to upload Maildirs to Gmail. I couldn't get any of them to reliably work. Eventually I downloaded the corpus of my Maildirs to a desktop and used Thunderbird to upload them all to the new location. It took ages, but it worked.

So far I'm pretty damn happy with this. I haven't had a single spam get through, and even the ones that make it to the Spam directory are pretty minimal. The add-on Postini spam filtering service has done two false positives on spam so far, which I consider pretty good and I presume it'll learn.

Now that I'm paying US$50/year for each email account (one for me, one for Holly) it's costing about the same as my former JunkEmailFilter.com and rsync.net accounts. I'm also going to downsize my Linode which will also save me some money. More importantly, I'm doing even less maintenance, and the search engine on my email is vastly superior to mutt. It's also a graphical email client, which is nice, and the mobile clients are really quite good.

Quite happy with it.

I've been learning to drive in Sydney for the last few months with an excellent instructor who's been patient, thorough and reassuring. Tashman driving school has seen me through a bunch of lessons at varying times of day and traffic conditions, including a really severe hail storm in peak hour, night time traffic on Parramatta Road and the Hume Highway. I've really appreciated his excellent guidance.

As well as excellent guidance, Tashman is quite an accomplished self-promoter on his web site. He asked me to blog about his service, and I'm happy to recommend him.

After about twelve hours of lessons, I finally graduated to driving with Holly in our own car yesterday. It went fine, apart from one stupid near miss in a car park where I nearly hit a stationary object. I'm learning!

Below is the eulogy I gave for Anthony at his funeral yesterday. It outlines his life, and his achievments. I have had many comments from my family that they didn't know he had achieved so much, and that many of these things they were hearing for the first time.

I have placed the slideshow that also played at the funeral online. You can view just the images (use the "Slideshow" button in the top-right ot view full-screen) or view it with the accompanying music (click "Full" to go full screen).

Before I begin I'd like to thank all those who have provided help and support to our family at this difficult time. The friends and family have been out in force with emotional and material support that is quite humbling and demonstrates the love there is for Anthony and his family. We thank you for all the kind words, flowers, support, meals and other help we've been given.

Anthony was born on 16th April 1972 to Chris and Ray Rumble in Port Macquarie hospital after a 49 1/2 hour marathon labour. He was a good baby and would sleep until he was due for his feed, which was handy as both his parents worked long hours, often tag-teaming child minding duties.

Early on Anthony showed many of the traits he displayed throughout his life. His knowledge ranged far and wide, and he didn't mind telling you what he knew. As fact. He was easy prey for the ribbing and stirring of his uncles and aunts, taking their gags hook, line and sinker. During his childhood he was very fond of animals: our pet dogs Buttons and Scamper, his aviary full of budgies and quails, and the Robinson family duck.

Anthony took an early interest in technology. Our first computer, a Dick Smith Wizzard, was purchased in 1982 and Anthony was immediately hooked. When we purchased the BASIC programming cartridge, he went to town writing software. Our games of "shop" with Kristy, Janelle, Susan and Kathryn had Anthony holding our money in computerised accounts at his bank, using software he'd written himself. Later on he wrote a database programme, modestly using his initials in the name: AERBase. Bear in mind, this was a ten year old who had taught himself programming and seen the necessity of a generic data storage mechanism. Anthony continued with newer computers, inheriting the computers that had outrgrown their usefulness in the family businesses.

When it came time to go to high school, Anthony went off to St Patricks College boarding school in Goulburn. I won't say he loved his time in Goulburn, not being the archetypal sporty type the school usually required, but he did well academically, studying four unit maths and getting time on any of the computers he could find around the place. At one point he was effectively administering the school library's multi-user computer network, saving the school thousands in expensive consulting fees.

After school Anthony went to Newcastle University to study Computer Science, briefly. He quickly got frustrated with ivory tower academics lecturing without recourse to the real world. In those days computer science courses taught lots of theory, with little reference to what was actually happening outside academia. He scored a couple of jobs for small engineering firms in Sydney, before landing a job he could really sink his teeth into at Netcomm, a manufacturer of modems.

It was around the end of Anthony's time at school that we bought our first modem. A modem allows you to connect computers to other computers through a phone line, but this primitive model worked at the blistering speed of 300 bits per second, about 40,000 times slower than the Internet connection in my home today. We started calling bulletin boards, which were computer meeting places that you could use to exchange messages and, in some cases, talk in real time to other people. Eventually discovered one of the more popular boards in Sydney, Active Fun Entertainment, which at the time sported five lines allowing five different people to talk to each other in real time. Quite a revelation. The main difference with this board was its social aspect, and it is here that Anthony met some of his closest friends.

One of the groups who frequented Active, and its many social events, ran another bulletin board called Arcadia. This group shared a quirky sense of humour and a plethora of obscure in jokes. Anthony was rapidly accepted into the group, and made lifelong friendships. I see a bunch of Arcadians present today, and I know a few couldn't make it today. Thank you for the kindness and companionship you showed to Anthony.

Soon after discovering Active, Anthony installed some software into the core of the bulletin board to allow people to play a real-time, multiplayer game. It was while installing and integrating this system that Anthony wowed Grant Parnell with his technical skills. Grant and Anthony became close friends, and eventually business partners. We're extremely fortunate to have Grant with us today, as he was scheduled for major surgery last Friday, but it has been rescheduled.

The Linux community has much to remember of Anthony. He was one of the early users of Linux in Australia, with his interest in Minix coinciding with that of a certain Finnish programmer. I remember him rushing in to tell me about a new operating system he'd found, which promised to be more useful than Minix. I was a bit bewildered, wondering how something that took so long to boot and seemed to crash constantly could be of any use. While going through his things, I stumbled on ancient floppy disks for Linux v0.12, the second ever release of the Linux operating system.

Anthony spent much of the early years of Linux distributing the software to others in Australia. He had an Internet account, a rare thing at the time, and so was able to keep up-to-date with the latest developments. People would post or hand-deliver floppies for him to copy, and eventually he set up a bulletin board to allow people to download it. Soon enough he helped found the Sydney chapter of the Australian Public Access Network Association (APANA), which was at the time one of the only ways ordinary Australians could get Internet access outside universities and a few big companies. His APANA node, lsupoz, was one of the first in Sydney and at one point was the hub for the Sydney network, running from the front room of our parents' house.

Later on, Anthony set up a business distributing Linux software and merchandise around Australia with his wife Laura. They got Linux into thousands of sites, distributing CDs and propaganda by mail order and at conferences.

With the dawning of the Internet explosion in public consciousness, Anthony scored a job with one of the early Internet Service Providers in Australia, Microplex. Here he learned many key skills in networking and business, and was fortunate to meet another close friend, Matt Perkins, who would later be Anthony's best man.

Anthony was next headhunted to work on an ambitious project by a large multinational stationery supplier with ambitions to control the entire market in Australia. Corporate Express wanted to move most of their transactions onto the Internet, which at the time was a radical idea. Anthony rose to the challenge, building an innovative online ordering system with a front-end simple enough to be used by the secretaries and admin staff ordering stationery in Australian businesses, government and academia. Soon enough, it was Australia's most successful e-commerce site, turning over many millions of dollars in orders every month. The technology Anthony developed handled the massive load with ease, and the project won a special commendation by the Australian Information Industry Association.

While still working at Corporate Express, Anthony met a young university student named Laura, and shortly afterwards they married in a big ceremony and party. While the marriage ended some years later, there were very happy times as Anthony and Laura built up a business and a family in their home in Croydon. Anthony and Laura set up a business distributing Linux software and merchandise, Everything Linux. This developed a sophisticated stock-management and online ordering system to handle mail orders.

Abigail Rumble was born late in 2000. Anthony doted on Abi, his beautiful daughter, and loved her dearly. After Anthony and Laura separated, they shared custody and he continued Abigail's involvement with cub scouts, which she loves. Under his parents' rearing, Abigail has developed into a beautiful, intelligent and loving young girl, who was the centre of Anthony's life.

The last few years of Anthony's life have not been perfect. He struggled with epilepsy, which was diagnosed about six years ago. The drugs used to control it have many negative side effects including mood disorders, memory loss and aphasia, and the doctors attempted to adjust the dosage to minimise these effects while keeping him safe from the dangers of epilepsy. During this time, his friend, business partner and flatmate Grant was an enormous support to Anthony. More recently things appeared to be looking up for Anthony, with his drug regime seeming to stabilize and cause fewer of the bad side effects. His epilespy seemed well controlled and his mood was good.

Anthony joined a support group after his divorce, Parents Without Partners and soon became heavily involved with the organisation. They gave him excellent support and improved his outlook enormously. He also took up Ceroc, a modern jive partner dance style, and was incredibly proud of his dancing ability. At one of the PWP functions, he met and gradually wooed his partner Rosetta. Rosetta and her family welcomed him into their lives and made him very happy, enjoying dancing and tons of blended family activities.

A few weeks ago Anthony took possession of his new flat in Belmore, and had just finished unpacking his posessions. It was a lovely place and I hadn't even had a chance to visit it myself when I got the phone call last Saturday and rushed over. Anthony's elderly Greek neighbours have told us about the impression he had already made, helping them with odd jobs around the place and always being friendly and polite.

Looking around here today, I see that Anthony was loved far beyond his own immediate family. He'll be missed by all his friends and relatives, but especially by his mother Chris, father Ray, brothers Charlie and Simon, partner Rosetta and her children Jeffrey, Matthew and Catherine, and by his daughter Abigail. We'll miss you Anthony.

My beloved brother Anthony died unexpectedly last Friday in his flat in Belmore, Sydney. He will be remembered as a devoted father to his eight year old daughter, as a loving brother and son, and as a loving partner.

The Linux community has much to remember of Anthony. He was one of the early users of Linux in Australia, with his interest in Minix seeming to coincide with a certain Finnish programmer. I remember him rushing in to tell me about a new operating system he'd found, which promised to be more useful than Minix. I was a bit bewildered, wondering how something that took so long to boot and seemed to crash constantly could be of any use. While going through his things, I stumbled on these ancient Linux v0.12 floppies. Quite impressive historical artifacts.

Anthony spent much of the early years of Linux distributing the software to others in Australia. He had an (at the time rare) Internet account, and so was able to keep up-to-date with the latest developments. People would post or hand-deliver floppies for him to copy, and eventually he set up a bulletin board to allow people to download it. Soon enough he helped found the Sydney chapter of APANA, which was at the time one of the only ways ordinary Australians could get Internet access outside universities and a few big companies. His APANA node, lsupoz, was one of the first nodes in Sydney and at one point was the hub for the Sydney network, running from the front room of our parents' house.

Later on, Anthony set up a business distributing Linux software and merchandise around Australia with his wife Laura. They got Linux into thousands of sites, distributing CDs and propaganda by mail order and at conferences.

Outside the Linux world, Anthony had an active social and family life, especially his beautiful eight year old daughter Abigail, who he adored. He will be dearly missed by family, friends and his partner Rosetta.

I'll post some more about Anthony later.

Thanks for your kind words. Also thanks for the very kind emails and messages I've been receiving. They really are much appreciated.

• Anthony Rumble by Grant Parnell to SLUG
• Sad News: Vale Anthony Rumble by Donna Benjamin to LUV
• Anthony Rumble - Linux pioneer and enthusiast by conz
• Farewell to EverythingLinux founder by Suzanne Tindal
• Linux pioneer dies in tragic circumstances by David M Williams
• R.I.P Anthony Rumble by Roland Turner

The funeral for Anthony Rumble will be held 11:30 next Monday, 18th May 2009 in the Camellia Chapel at the Macquarie Park Crematorium.

No flowers please. There will be envelopes for donations to Epilepsy Action Australia at the funeral.

DebConf9 is getting closer so I was browsing the Internet and the DebConf9 wiki for information. When I'm travelling I enjoy having maps to be able to get around and not get lost. For DebConf8 I relied on TangogGPS with OpenStreetMap on my OpenMoko Freerunner since my laptop is fairly cumbersome and has relatively little battery life these days. For DebConf9 I'll probably do the same since navit doesn't seem too reliable for me yet. During my information gathering for DebConf9 I came across the DebConf9 map overlay and the Madrid free Wi-Fi map. I wanted to have these available in TangoGPS so I wrote a short python script to import them into the TangoGPS POI (points of interest) database. It requires the feedparser and beautifulsoup python modules. First download the GeoRSS feeds you are interested in and then run the script on the machines where you want to use TangoGPS with the filenames as arguments. It only handles points, not lines or polygons since TangoGPS doesn't allow that. Hopefully it will be included in TangoGPS upstream or the Debian TangoGPS package soon. If you want to update the feed you'll need to manually delete the relevant points from the database or remove and recreate the database and then import the feed(s) again.

I caught the end of a sale for international flights :D

Perth -> Dubai -> London Gatwick -> Madrid -> Cáceres.

Might be stopping in to see family in the UK and or other folks in Germany.

If any folks in London near Gatwick feel like lending a couch to a Debian developer on July 13th, please contact me.

Definitely looking forward to the debexpo hacking and deployment session, having fun with Debian games folks and seeing Debian folks again.

Finally got my shit together and got a flight to Argentina for DebConf!

Perth -> Sydney -> Auckland -> Buenos Aires -> Mar del Plata.

That is quite a bit of flying and a long bus trip ending quite early on the 4th. It will definitely be worth it if DebConf7 was anything to go on.

Hopefully by DebConf I can get my hands on an OpenMoko FreeRunner to do some Debian porting work during DebCamp and possibly mapping out the streets of Mar del Plata for OpenStreetMap. Of course I need to work on completing analysis of the results of the Debian user and new contributor surveys and figure out what to say about synfig if I get the chance to do a lightning talk about it.

/me now officially excited

As a Debian developer I have on occasion felt a bit out of touch with doing things with Debian and out of touch with other users. I mentioned to some folks at DebConf7 that I felt I focused too much on working on Debian and not actually connected to what the benefit of working on Debian is.

Partially as a result of those feelings and partially because I thought it would be an interesting thing to do, I started to prepare a couple of simple surveys early this year. The first one went out earlier last month and I posted the second one a few days ago after far too much procrastination and running the wording by a few people - thanks to Micah for the drug boats question :)

So, if you are a Debian user or are a new contributor (or DM/NM/AM or new DD), I would greatly appreciate hearing from you. Please respond to the survey addresses rather than my personal ones.

So far I have 15 or so responses to the new contributor survey, but ideally I would have many more, so please send something in if you are getting involved in Debian development or helping others get involved.

I've had about 24 responses to the user survey so far. Many of you will have heard about Debian success stories like Extremadura, Bhutan, HP, Skolelinux, Sanger and other high-profile Debian users. I'm hoping to hear about as many different uses of Debian as possible, so please keep the responses coming in.

The primary audience for these surveys is the Debian development community. The results will go to the debian-devel-announce and debian-private, I also hope to have a discussion or two about them at DebConf8 in Argentina. There is no time-frame for closing the survey or releasing the results, like the Debian distribution, I release when ready :)

PS: Please install the popularity-contest package on your machines if possible and subscribe to the packages.qa.debian.org pages for packages that you particularly care about.

PPS: Please feel free to ask me questions in your responses and I will attempt to reply as time allows.

So today is the last day of the 2008 Synfig January Challenge. It is hopefully the first of many synfig challenges, I hope that the February one will be for a new splash screen for Synfig.

My entry is fairly simple and boring compared to the other entries, but it represents one thing about Synfig that I think about a lot: we need more developers! Anyway, here it is:

There is nothing special in it, but I put up the source code too.

Also, I've been informed that there will be an Open Video Developer meeting on Friday February 1st 2008 at 21:00 UTC on irc.freenode.net in #openvideo. Should be an interesting meeting, sounds like at least Synfig, Blender and Cinelerra people will be there, hopefully many more.

Dear Lazyweb

KL airport has free wifi, it works fine on Windows, but my Linux install relies on DHCP to get an IP address, gateway and DNS servers. I tried capturing some wifi traffic with wireshark, but had no luck. I remember in Thailand having to write down network settings from Windows computers in netcafes, then manually apply the settings after booting the copy of Debian on my external hard-drive. I'm currently using NetworkManager. On the way home from DebConf I'd like to be able to use the net in KL. What nasty Windows protocol am I missing support for?

On the way home from Thailand, I saw Linux booting and X starting up on the in-seat screens on our Malaysia Airlines flight.

Also got a funny cartoon for my birthday called "The adventures of debianman".

So, back to geekery after too many months away. While we were in Thailand, I met Theppitak Karoonboonyanan and his friend Neutron Soutmun and a couple of others from the Thai Linux community. Thep is in the NM process for Debian, he maintains Thai support packages in Debian and Neutron is a Debian user. Neutron writes firmware for GPS receivers (IIRC) and other GIS stuff, I'm hoping he will get involved in the debian-gis subproject. I think I convinced Neutron to at least think about applying to NM :D. We talked about a lot of things, mainly about Thai localisation and the challenges involved. He mentioned that the language barrier is a big problem for Thai people, so their main focus has been firstly infrastructure (text rendering, layout and wrapping, fonts, input methods, locale, etc) and now translation (and the associated, laborious localisation efforts). He told me a bit about the writing system and how it is related to other systems in the area. Thep also mentioned the possibility of debconf9 being in Thailand, I recon it would be bloody awesome to have debconf in Asia. At least one other Debian Developer is interested in this, madduck is the initial instigator. I hope we both make it to debconf in the UK this year. I also visited the open source lab at NECTEC (the Thai National Electronics and Computer Technology Center), which is government funded. There, they develop LinuxTLE (an Ubuntu based desktop distro), LinuxSIS (a simple internet server for schools and businesses) and do lots of translation and advocacy work within NECTEC and with businesses and other organisations within Thailand. One thing about LinuxPLE which I noted was that during the post-install GUI configuration step, there is an option to setup the system to use fonts from a mounted Windows partition. IIRC, they explained that they found this was important because of a reliance on Microsoft fonts in Thailand. While I was there, I went to a couple of other labs and saw a demo of a cool Thai OCR and car registration plate recognition system, English to Thai machine translation (text) and direct English speech to Thai speech conversion. They were also working on some medical imaging and speech recognition stuff that I didn't get to see. I also met the founder of linux.thai.net, whose company develops this online map for Bangkok..

Also posted some photos from our trip through Thailand.

[RV Heraclitus SE Asia voyage: blog photos]

Arrived at Ko Phuket a few days ago, I'm off the ship and at a hotel. In Bintan, we saw an interesting looking resort with plenty of coconut trees, logs and other stuff floating in the harbour, a snake oil merchant (with a live cobra), barges and transformer ferries, pouring rain and bad drainage. We left Bintan, went south for Selat Durian, then north past Singapore Straits, into the infamous Straits of Malacca and north past Malaysia and to the tourist island of Phuket. Along the way, we saw the coals of sunset, massive jellyfish in the dark green water, huge queues of massive ships covering the horizon as we passed the entrance to the Straits of Singapore, lights from Singapore in the distance, the pirate-free Straits of Malacca, where many large cargo and other ships passed us, the fleet of lights/boats that sprung up as if from nowhere some 50 miles off Phuket, the last sunrise on the ship (in a bay near Phuket) and an awesome NYE party on the ship.

Leaving the Heraclitus has been hard, I'm gonna miss that black and red ship and the awesome crew who got us the 3000 or so nautical miles from Cairns to Phuket. Now it is time to visit some Thai Linux developers and return to Australia.

[RV Heraclitus SE Asia voyage: blog photos]

The past few weeks, we changed our route to visit an uninhabited island (aka Ko Pulau Island) said to be "National Geographic, man" by some Americans we met in Kupang. On the way to Ko Pulau Island we saw a large school of pilot whales and dolphins, a humpback or other whale close to shore, a blue starfish and hot water vents nearby on the same mostly dead reef, a flock of birds feasting on a dense school of fish, a manta ray, a bonfire on the beach shared with the kids of Rote (who we swapped roast banannas and coconuts with), a clean hull and renewed sea-sickness. At Ko Pulau Island, we saw a long white beach made of small bead things instead of sand, with surf at either end and reef in between, a green lagoon with islands being eaten away at the base, a monkey-head rock, pink coral, reef fish, sea urchins, various pieces of flotsam washed up on the beach (flip-flops, a light-bulb, bottles, wood, burnie-beans, nautilus shells, a seabird egg, a dead seabird and other crap), sunset over the ocean with golden cirrus in the sky, turtle nests, tracks and hatchlings scurrying off into the water, Indonesian fishermen in need of water and turtle eggs, tidal pools with the occasional crab, ghost crabs darting towards the water, a pandanus stand, a small cave surrounded by discarded turtle eggshells, spinifex, hermit crabs, scrambling lizards, sunburn and other things. Later in our voyage, we saw a big lone flying fish, land looming mountainous on starboard, TNI, gratis reef fish, water buffalo and threatening rain clouds. The next major stop was a bay on the south side of Sumba, black cliffs to port and an eroded hillside to starboard. There, we enjoyed the excellent snorkeling against the cliffs and off the beach, birds calling from the forest, wasps - shiny blue and otherwise, meeting roaming cows in the forest, forest fungi and other sights. We met some fishermen and drove through the forested slopes toward a nearby city. On the way, we visited an Indonesian village and saw their traditional animist temple, ample baby pigs & dogs, tons of kids trying to get in photos, satellite dishes and graves in front of houses. Unfortunately, I crashed once we reached the hotel, missing eating and night life, but I did enjoy the sights from the windows of the cramped 4WD we were in. We headed for the 9.8 knot passage of Selat Sape, complete with eddies, currents, a barracuda and the steep slopes of a silent volcano. Since there, we saw an increasing number of interesting and curious Indonesian vessels, fish traps, the grey shapes of dolphins swimming in the aqua water under the bow, a floating sandal, a school of mahi-mahi jumping out of the water, a misty night, numerous schools of feeding fish, entangled luminescent trails left by dolphins swimming in the phosphorescent water beneath the bow, flashes of lightning in the distance, our first rain since Cairns, the associated storm, Jack the fisherman (a mast hallucination) and other things. Our next stop was Kalimunjava (north of Java, Indonesia), more than half way to Phuket. We spent a week there, watched lightning, collected rain, visited the local school, dived and snorkelled on the magnificant reef with some really nice university students (hi Lely, Dudu, Jaos and others) from Java who were doing a study on the corals and hiked up the steep slopes of the island. From there we ambled past Borneo, towards Bintan, near Singapore, experiencing the first non-calm seas in ages, dolphins in the storm, floating lines of debris, big barges, container ships and megatankers, a fancy, shiny yacht, fishing vessels with 50,000 lights, Rain Drop and it's egg (child of Rain the gecko), amazing cloudscapes at sunrise, throughout the day and at sunset on the way. Amazingly, we met the ∞ (Infinity, the new PCRF vessel) one find day in the South China Sea on their way to Bali. Eddie saw them from 5 miles away and knew almost straight away it was them. Michelle came on board and a lone daytime cumi (squid) swam between us as we parted. Before we arrived at Pulau Bintan (near Singapore), we saw seasnakes and a palm tree floating and lots of wind and rain.

We will probably arrive in Thailand by January and I'm thinking of passing thru Sydney on the way home, so let so please mail me if you want to meet up.