Tan Family Blog

A most excellent visit to Brisbane, striking just the right balance of activity and inactivity.

We chose to visit Australia Zoo on Saturday, ensuring that we get good value from our annual passes. Perhaps because of the spectre of rain – indeed, there was a brief downpour – the crowds were very thin, which made for a much more enjoyable experience. Oscar and Adeline enjoyed feeding the elephants (three times!), riding a pony and watching the tigers. As much as anything else, they enjoyed the jumping castle, clearly a major reason we went to the zoo in the first place.

In the afternoon, Oscar and Adeline went swimming at their grandparents' and then in the evening we celebrated Hau's birthday at New Chinese Garden (our favourite Chinese restaurant, also where our wedding reception was held). 

Sunday was more of a rest day. Adeline was awarded her Dog Paddlers swimming certificate (finally!) and in the afternoon, we played some boardgames. The latest addition to the children's collection is Enuk, a push-your-luck/memory game that I acquired on my recent visit to Canberra.

Over the last 3 months, I have put an increasing amount of material "in the cloud", particularly with Zotero (for citation management), Weave (for browsing history and bookmarks) and Ubuntu One (for file storage). Most recently, though, I have migrated from Ubuntu One to Dropbox, driven chiefly by the need for cross-platform compatibility so that I can sync with Mac computers. With two computers I use regularly in Melbourne and two in Brisbane, I am sure that I represent the bullseye of Dropbox's target market. My increasing immersion within the cloud reflects my high level of satisfaction with these services. Although I have some reservations about the use of proprietary software to provide some of these services, they are just so convenient that I wonder how I managed without them!

Three spam-bots have registered with this website. I have not bothered to deactivate these accounts because they have not posted any comments nor achieved anything else nefarious as far as I can tell, and I am curious to see whether they can do anything. In any case, there's no sensitive or valuable content here, so what do I have to lose?