Blue Mountains Photos and Trip Report

Well, that was a bit of a long hiatus! Things got busy at work and home after my trip to Australia and I never found time to post an update. Time to rectify that now!

The flight to Australia was pretty uneventful. Flew from Victoria to Vancouver, Vancouver to San Francisco, San Francisco to Sydney. The flight was about 13 hours long and I managed to catch a few hours sleep thanks to the Sony NC22B noise canceling headphones I picked up before leaving.

Arrived in Sydney at about 6am and got through customs in about an hour. Picked up the car and set out to the office that I was going to using the Garmin 60CSx GPS that I had loaded with the Australia maps. Managed to get where I needed to go without too many problems. One thing I hate about driving in a new city using the GPS is that you become totally reliant on it. I could not tell you how I got from the airport to North Sydney, I just followed the prompts on the screen. I read somewhere once that the current generation of kids will never know what it is like to be lost as everything will have a GPS and location awareness built in to it. All I can say is, I hope they have plenty of batteries, as once you become dependent on a device to tell you where you are and where to go, I think that spatial processing part of your brain starts to atrophy.

Be aware when driving in Sydney that lots of stretches of the motorways and some tunnels and bridges are toll roads that use an electronic payment system. If you don't have an epass then you have to pay cash if you can. Some toll roads have no toll booths and if you don't have an epass then you have 3 days to go to a website and pay the fee. I wasn't sure if the rental car had one or not (it didn't) and just drove on. If there is a toll booth it may only be in one lane or you may have to come off at a junction, pay at the booth and then get back on the motorway. If you don't pay on the website, the rental car agency will charge you about $30 AUSD for each toll.

The drive out to the Blue Mountains was pretty uninteresting. It takes about 2 hours from Sydney to Katoomba but I stopped at the Featherdale Wildlife Park along the way to see some kangaroos, wallabies, kookaburras and other Australian animals. The Mountains aren't really mountains as we know them in Western Canada. They are more of a gradual increase in elevation until you get to a plateau and then come to these amazing sheer-sided cliff mega valleys. I stopped at Wentworth Falls and did a geocache on the path to the Empress Falls viewpoint. I continued on to Katoomba, got some lunch and then checked in at the Red Leaf Resort in Blackheath.

After dropping my bags off in the hotel room, I drove back in to Katoomba and followed a gravel road to the top of the Golden Stairs. This is a path that follows the cliff face a couple of hundred meters down in to the valley. I was hoping to follow the trail out to Mt. Solitary but I only had about 2.5 hours of daylight left at this point so I only got about 1KM past Ruined Castle. Camping is allowed in the valley and I went past some nice camping spots as well as lots of trees that would be good for hanging a camping hammock. Despite having my headlight and rain gear with me, I turned around after about 1.5 hours and got back to the car after a 20 minute climb back up the Golden Stairs.

The next morning I did a short drive out to the start of the Grand Canyon loop at Evan's Lookout. This was a fantastic hike down the canyon along the narrow canyon bottom following a stream.It was very cool seeing the plants change from the dry top of the canyon to the much cooler and wetter bottom. It took just over 2 hours to do the 11KM loop.

After checking out of the hotel, I spent the rest of the day geocaching in the area and then drove back to Sydney along the Bells Line of Road. This was a great drive with lots of twisties and fantastic scenery.

Unfortunately, the rest of the drip was spent working so I was stuck in Sydney for most of the time other than a day trip to the Royal National Park but this was a little disappointing in the Winter. I'm sure it would much more interesting during the summer when there should be lots of animals around.

The rest of the trip photos are here.

Heading Down Under Tomorrow

A sister company based out of Sydney is having some issues with a new installation of Citrix and the parent company that owns us both wants me to go down and see what can be done. Apparently, there is a shortage of IT people with Citrix skills in Australia. Should be fun!

I've managed to bookend the week with both weekends, so on the 19th and 20th I am going to go drive out to the Blue Mountains and stay in Blackheath near Katoomba. On Saturday I'm going to walk the Golden Stairs and hike out to Ruined Castle and maybe Mt. Solitary. On Sunday I'm doing the Grand Canyon walk and then driving back to Sydney on Bells Line of Roads. Saturday the 26th I'll go down to the Royal National Park and see what I can see there.

Its wintertime in Australia so Sydney is about the same temperature as Victoria during the spring (19°C during the day, 10°C at night). Katoomba is currently about 10°C during the day and 3°C at night). So I'm having to dig out my thermals and my Thermawrap to make sure I don't freeze out my walks.

I'll put up a Flickr photostream when I get back.

Building a starter PC for under $300

My oldest son, Adan, has wanted to upgrade his computer for a long time. To be honest, I can't blame him. He has been using a P3-600MHz beast that I built back in 1998! I told him that if he saved up his money he could buy the pieces to make his own computer that would be be a good starting point for future upgrades for about $300 CDN. After about 6 months of saving he finally had enough and I started looking to see what I could get.

He isn't a big gamer so the only thing it had to run was Runescape and Flight Sim X. I did some research and it looked like a motherboard using the AMD 780G chipset would be a good starting point. This would support AMD processors all the way up to the new Phenoms but we could start with a dual core 4400+ for $72. The motherboard also has an integrated ATI HD3200 video card that is capable of decoding a Bluray stream even using a cheap Sempron CPU. The HD3200 can also use Hybrid Crossfire to connect to a HD3450 or a HD3470 if you want better gaming performance. This would still be nowhere as good as a dedicated 8800GT or other midrange gaming GPU but it would only cost an additional $75 vs $200.

So, in the end we got:

Biostar TForce TA780G M2+ AMD 780G mATX AM2 1PCI-E 2PCI SATA W/RAID Video Sound GBLAN Motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ Dual Core Processor Socket AM2 Brisbane 2.3GHZ 2X512KB 65NM 65W Retail Box
Apex PC-373 ATX Mid Tower Case Black 4X5.25 1X3.5 4X3.5INT 400W W/ Front USB & Audio
Corsair Value Select PC2-5300 1X1GB DDR2-667 240PIN DIMM

I dug up an unused 250GB SATA HD and an unused copy of Vista Ultimate and in the end including shipping, taxes and insurance it cost $271. Not bad for a machine with a fair amount of upgrade potential and that also does everything that Adan wants to do right now.

Some tips for the West Coast Trail

Here are some quick tips if you are thinking of doing the West Coast Trail with Lightweight gear and/or a hammock in no particular order.

• I had Telus phone coverage for the entire length of the WCT. A PLB or a SPOT Personal Messanger is probably not necessary unless it makes you or your partner feel better.


• Even early in the season you can do the WCT with a lightweight gear. My suggestion would be to go from Bamfield to Port Renfrew as the trail is pretty good all the way up to KM51. I'm not a fast hiker and I don't get out and do much hiking but I still managed to do this stage in three days.


• Take a pair of lightweight shoes that you can use for wading through Michigan, Darling and Crib Creek. I left my New Balance 908s and socks on and my socks never really dried out completely even after leaving them out in the sun for an hour.


• I made the mistake of washing two pairs of my socks on day 2 which left me with only one pair of dry socks for the remainder of the trip. Merino socks are still warm and wearable when damp but it can cause blistering.


• You can easily hang a hammock at Michigan and Darling Creek. If you got creative you could probably hang off of the driftwood at TSusiat Falls. I carried on to KM29 on the beach and hung off some driftwood there. Make sure you have plenty of water as even in May there was nowhere to fill up until I got to Cribs.


• Bonilla Point has a couple of good spots for hanging a hammock and plenty of water.


• Make sure you bring a variety of food, including some fresh stuff. The highlight of my days foodwise were stopping for lunch and having some fresh hungarian salami, cheese and dried apple rings.


• Don't wash your base layer unless you are sure you can dry it completely before you need to wear it again. I made the mistake of doing this at Bonilla Point and then the fog rolled in. This meant I had to hike in my other baselayer shirt all day to Camper and then sleep in it while it was still damp. I'm sure this contributed to my cold night there.


• I only found one good spot to hang at Camper. Firewood is nonexistant here as well unless you are prepared to wade across the creek.


• If you are going to try and go around Owen point don't underestimate how long it will take you to get to the Beach Access points on the trail. On the map it looked like it was right at Camper but it took about 90 minutes to get to the first BA and onther 30 to get to the second. Make sure you factor this into your timings for the low tide.


• KM51 to KM75 are very challenging if you are wearing lightweight nonwaterproof shoes and spats. I found that I could pick my way around all of the mud holes and stay dry. However, on day 5 it rained the whole day and my feet were soaked for the whole time even without going in any of the mud. This was the worst day for my feet and it was the only time I got any significant blisters. KM70 to KM75 the trail was particularly bad. The trail has its largest elevation change and then the last 2 KM was in very bad repair. By the time I got to the end I was wiped out.

I will add more as I think of them. Good Luck!

Possible fix found MSA1500sc halting problem

Thanks to Eric at Genesis Hosting for finding a possible fix for our MSA1500sc and VMWare problem. He has had the same thing happen to him and has gotten further with HP and VMWare then I did for finding a fix.

His server hardware is a bit different than mine but the SAN and FC components are almost the same. Here are the various things that need doing to fix the problem:

• Make sure the FC HBA have the latest firmware installed


• We are both using Brocade switches, so the firmware needs to be v5.31 or higher


• Even if you only have a single controller in the MSA1500sc, upgrade to v7.00 of the firmware


• Most importantly, set the FC switch ports that your HBAs and MSA1500 are connected to to 2Gbps and unselect any unused port types. In my case I set the two MSA1500 connections to F-Type. I was unable to modify the type setting for the HP BL480p FC ports for some reason.

Eric's testing seems to indicate that the problem occurs if the SCSI Queue depth gets to high. You can view this by using the MSA1500 CLI and entering SHOW TASKSTATS.

You can change the FC port speed and type will VMs are running but you probably want to do it when there is no disk load on the SAN.

Eric also pointed out that instead of having to shut down all of the VMs and reboot the MSA1500 when the problem does occur you can go on to the CLI and enter DISABLE THIS_CONTROLLER REBOOT. If you have two controllers you would also have to do DISABLE OTHER_CONTROLLER REBOOT. This may hang or cause problems with the VMs but you should be able to reboot them without having to reboot the ESX hosts.

I have made all of the changes already except for the firmware on the Brocade switches. I have scheduled some downtime this weekend and will do the upgrade then as well as a reboot of everything and then I will leave it and see what happens.

West Coast Trail Photos Posted on Flickr

The photos from my West Coast Trail Trip are now up at Flickr. I'm still working on adding comments to them. I'll post a day by day point form log of the trip in the next couple of days.

West Coast Trail Trip 2008 - Day 5

• Wake up at 6am after a cold and uncomfortable night. Not sure if it is because my base layer was damp or underpad wasn't positioned correctly or what but I was pretty chilly during the night.
• Had to get up at one point to tighten the ropes as the hammock had sunk down far enough that I was bumping the log that was under me.
• Everyone else in camp is up at 6 as well so maybe it wasn't just me!
• Have a breakfast of oatmeal, pack up and am on the trail by 7:15am
• Trail is more of the same as yesterday: mud, roots and now rain!
• Feeling very tired and sore today and can't get up to speed. I have to be very deliberate going around each mud pit today to make sure I don't miss my footing.
• Glad I didn't try and go to Owen Point. It takes about an hour to get to Beach Access A and another 30 minutes to get to Beach Access B.
• Even on the boardwalks I can't seem to maintain any speed.
• Finally get to junction with Trashers Cove at around 11. Immediately the trail starts climbing up a hill.
• Start running into hikers coming the other way at about KM71. They all look happy and clean even with their gigantic packs on. Must go past about 20 people over the next 2KM.
• Phone wife to tell her I will be early and to get her to bring a change of socks, shoes and clothes as everything I'm wearing is damp or wet. Feet and socks are especially wet and soles of feet are starting to get sore.
• The last 2 KM seems to go on and on. It must take me over 90 minutes to finish. Lots of storm damage here and lots of mud. Knees are really hurting but don't want to stop to take anything.
• Finally reach the beach at KM75 at 2pm, exactly 5 days after I set out! Too tired and sore to feel anything except relief.
• Rise the buoy to signal the ferry and keep moving to stop right knee from siezing up.
• Ferry arrives after about 10 minutes and then head over to cabin to sign off the trail.