Wisemans Ferry Run

I've been want to write about this for a while now, but haven't had the time to sit down and get it done. Just before Christmas, the guys from mx5cartalk.com organised to do a drive through Wisemans Ferry. It was on the weekend before Christmas, and we had about 15 cars show up (including a Nissan Skyline).

The route was as follows:

1. Start at Rofe Park in Hornsby Heights
2. Turn right out of the Rofe Park car park onto Galston Rd and head towards Galston Gorge
3. Proceed through the Gorge, veer left at the top as you come out of the Gorge
4. Drive through Galston, past the shops
5. Turn right at the roundabout after the shops on to Mid-Dural Rd and follow to the end
6. Turn right onto Old Northern Road and head north towards Wisemans Ferry
7. Drive right to the end of Old Northern Rd going past the shops and pub in Wisemans
8. Cross the car ferry at the end of Old Northern Rd
9. Turn right onto Wisemans Ferry Rd as you drive of the ferry
10. Follow Wisemans Ferry Rd all the way to Central Mangrove (it is a fair distance)
11. At Central Mangrove (the next big crossroads after the ferry) turn right onto George Downes Drive
12. Turn right onto Peats Ridge Rd
13. Follow this under the F3 Freeway and turn right onto the Pacific Hwy, then turn left onto the Pacific Hwy (otherwise you end up on the freeway)
14. Follow this until you reach Pie in the Sky at Cowan (at the top of the hill after you come up from Brooklyn)

Click here for the map of this route on Google Maps.

The drive is a good one. It isn't too long, only a couple of hundred kms round trip, and it only takes about 3 hours to complete. There are good winding, twisting driving roads and some nice scenery. The most picturesque part of the drive is along Wisemans Ferry Rd, from Wisemans through Spencer and up towards Mangrove Mountain. The road here runs alongside the Hawkesbury River for a while and makes its way through some small country towns. The problem here is that the road in this stretch (Wisemans - Central Mangrove) is not all that great. The surface is bumpy, uneven and has many small potholes that upset the car. The road is also very narrow in some sections, but there are very few cars that use it most of the time.... until you run 15 odd MX5's along there :-P

Of course, there is the run along the Old Pac to finish up the run. Ahhhh.... the Old Pac is a great piece of road. Lots of twists and turns and undulating ups and downs. It is a nice drive, but with a speed limit of 60km/h for the vast majority of the way, it is a little slow. You can always stop for a pie at Pie in the Sky too :-)

I have done this run on a number of occasions in both the MX5 and my previous car in both directions. It is always a nice drive and usually free from traffic for the most part.

HDR Photography

The other week a friend and I went out to take a few photos and create a HDR (High Dynamic Range) photo. My friend is a photographer with W&B Automotive Photography. This outing was inspired by this thread over at mx5cartalk.com that was talking about HDR photography.

So Andrew and I headed out on a Wednesday night a couple of weeks ago and found an empty car park where we could take some photos. Basically the idea with shooting for a HDR photo is to take a photo at the correct exposure and then bracket that with a couple of photos that are over exposed and a couple that are under exposed, generally changing the exposure by 1 stop at a time.

Once you have your photos with multiple different exposures, you can then use software to blend the photos and create the final product. A common piece of software used for HDR is Photomatix. Below is the final result. Thanks Andrew!

Windows 7

Recently Microsoft released the Beta version of Windows 7, the next Windows operating system. I got my hands on a copy of said operating system and last night installed it on one of my machines. The PC in question is one that I have recently built up to use for "playing" and studying for Microsoft certifications. It has 4GB RAM, 1TB HDD, Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 and GeForce 9500GT. I plan to run up numerous virtual machines on this PC as I study for the above mentions Microsoft certifications.

So, I installed Windows 7. The install was very smooth, there were no problems at all. It looks pretty much the same as the install process for Windows Vista. Afterwards, I was left with some unknown devices, but I was able to quickly and easily install the drivers for these devices from the disk that came with my motherboard. Boot time is very quick.... a lot quicker that Vista on the same PC.

I have only used it briefly as yet, but I must say that it ran flawlessly (this may have to do with the amount of RAM and the speed of my CPU). I had a bit of a look around and the interface and all the settings are very similar to what was in Windows Vista. The taskbar is different and there are icons for Internet Explorer, Windows Explorer and Media Player that are like the "Quick Launch" toolbar in previous versions of Windows. However, when you open one of these programs, the icon also doubles as the taskbar button for that application, so when you click on it again you get your already opened window. Other applications that are opened get similar looking icons in the taskbar, which then makes it look like there are more icons in your quick launch. If you have an application open, the icon in the taskbar gets a box outlines around it that seems to indicate that the program is running, and when you hover the mouse over the icon, a preview window pops up with an image of what is in the application currently. It is a bit hard to explain, but I will post up some screen shots for those who are interested sometime in the next week when I get more time to explore.

Another thing I have noticed is the absence of the Windows Sidebar that was introduced in Vista. Instead, you can still have your "gadgets", like the clock, CPU meter, Slide show etc, straight on the desktop, and not in the Sidebar.

Internet Explorer 8 is also included in Windows 7. I used it a bit last night and it has some new "interesting" features that I have yet to completely use and understand. Being a Firefox user, I'm sure that it will take a lot of convincing for me to go back to using IE. Also included is Media Player 12. This look rather different, and I don't really like the new look/design of it, so I hope it is a work in progress that will be changed shortly.

Now I know that this is beta software, and there is likely to be bit and pieces that don't function or are missing all together, but still I'm impressed with what I see. I will continue to use Windows 7 and see what I think as I get used to it more. So far I'm liking what I see. I just hope that Microsoft don't screw it up between now and the release to market which is supposedly sometime next year.

Stolen number plates??

I was in Wentworthville (Western Sydney, NSW) this evening when I saw a police car drive past in the opposite direction. I didn't think anything of it until I pulled into a shopping centre car park, put the roof up, and got out of the car to head into the centre. As I was walking away from the car, the same police car stopped behind my car. The officer behind the wheel of the car pointed to me as if to say "Don't go anywhere". I was thinking "Oh crap, what is going on here?!?!"

The police officers got out of the car and started asking questions about me and my car like, "Is this your car?", "Where do you live?", "How long have you had the car?", "Where did you buy it from?" and so on. They said that my rego had come up as being stolen! I'm thinking, I know it is my car, because I bought it about 3 years ago.

Anyway, after about 10 minutes of chatting to them while they checked stuff on the computer in the police car and talked on the radio they told me that my number plates (or at least my rego number) had been on a Toyota in 1990 that had been stolen, and that when the recovery was done on the car, something was missed that meant that my number plates were still marked as stolen. I got the number plates not long after I bought my first car in June 2000.... so it has only taken them 8.5 years to catch up with me!

The officers told me that they would try to fix up the problem on the system for me, but also advised that I should call the RTA to sort it all out. They said that the plates had been re-issued because they had been missing for so long and that my car and rego are all OK, so I have nothing to worry about. Obviously, because I haven't been pulled over for anything apart from the odd random breath test, the Police have never had reason to look up my plates. These guys just drove past me and ran a check on my rego, because they said that they do that randomly, and it has come up on the system as stolen, so they chased me down.

Weird ehh??

Welcome to 2009

Hi all,

I'm still here. It has been a while since my last post, but don't worry, I have some more stuff that I will blog about, all in good time :-)