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Cairns

We had intended to go to Cairns sometime just before Christmas, but Karen had to present a paper in Cairns on Tuesday so we decided to take our leave a bit early. We headed up to Port Douglas last Friday night straight after work and stayed there for three nights before returning to Cairns for another two nights.

While we were at Port Douglas we took a boat ride out to Low Isles. Absolutely beautiful. Saw heaps of green turtles while we were there. The tour operators, Quicksilver, were first class, and genuinely friendly. They had to deal with a whole bunch of people throwing up on the way out and on the way back. The seas were very choppy and we were in a largish sailing boat. The crew suggested that anyone who tends to get sea sick should take some preventative tablets (which they made freely available). I guess it didn’t work for some people. I don’t imagine that sea-sickness turned many people off their lunch, which was included, because it was mouthwateringly brilliant: prawns, chicken and a variety of salads.

On Sunday we saw the Daintree, Daintree River and Cape Tribulation with Billy Tea Bush Safaris. Again, it was wonderful. We spent a good part of the day cruising around in a big Landcruiser with ten others plus the driver. We saw some smallish saltwater crocodiles on our Daintree River cruise. The smallest was about 20cm long! Our boat driver, Bill Smith, was a real funny bloke, and he had eyes like a hawk. Unfortunately we didn’t spot any cassowaries in the Daintree Rainforest. I went for a swim in Emmagen Creek with some of the other people on our tour. Cape Tribulation was a very idyllic looking place, with its secluded beach and gentle waves.

Monday was spent walking around the town of Port Douglas. We walked up to the lookout for a nice view of the beach. Wouldn’t mind buying one of the houses up there on that hill! On Monday afternoon we caught the bus back to Cairns.

On Tuesday I walked Karen to the Cairns City Council building where she had to give a presentation to various government types. Then I headed off to Kuranda on the Skyrail cableway. The Skyrail was impressive in that it was a fairly long ride with two changeovers in the middle. At each changeover, you can do a five minute bushwalk through the Barron River Gorge rainforest. I had a cable car all to myself for the entire journey. Kuranda itself was pleasant, but extremely touristy. I checked out the markets and went for a couple of bushwalks through the rainforest. The train ride back to Cairns on the Kuranda Scenic Rail afforded some nice views of Barron River Gorge. Karen and I had dinner on the Esplanade.

We spent Wednesday wandering around Cairns. We checked out the main shopping centre. We got back home at around 8pm on Wednesday night. A nice holiday, and Karen’s presentation was very successful.

Categories
Random observations

Call me slow…

… but I just noticed that Google Scholar has added citation exporting (which, for some reason, it calls importing; guess it depends which way you look at it) to a number of bibliography formats including Bibtex. To enable this feature, go to Google Scholar, then click the Scholar Preferences link next to the search bar. Scroll down to the bottom of the preferences page and you should see the relevant setting that you need to change.

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Random observations

From Zero to 1.65 billion in less than two years

Speaking of Google acquisitions, YouTube has been snapped up by the Web search giant for the not insignificant sum of US$1.65 billion. YouTube was founded in February 2005. Not a bad pay-off for twenty months’ work! Okay, so a lot of the work was probably done before the company was founded, but still…

Anyway, this acquisition comes less than two weeks after Mark Cuban suggested that you’d have to be a moron to buy YouTube because of the litany of lawsuits that are, apparently, just waiting to happen. Material is often posted to YouTube by users who are not the copyright owners.

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Random observations

More Writely

As I pointed out in my previous post, I have just discovered Writely. Writely also allows you to upload documents in Word, OpenOffice, RTF and other formats, and to export to a variety of formats including Word, OpenOffice and PDF.

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Random observations

Writely

This post was written using Writely, a web-based word-processing application. As far as web-based WYSIWYG word-processors go, I must say I quite like it. It even supports the direct posting of documents to your blog, as long as your blog software supports an XML-RPC based API (which WordPress and many others do). But blogging is just one use of Writely. You can use it in place of your regular word processor if you so wish. Furthermore, it allows you to collaborate on a document with other Writely users. Writely is free to use. You just need a Google account (Upstartle, the company that developed Writely, was acquired by Google in March this year). I’m sure everybody must already know about Writely and that I’m just very slow. I came across a reference to Writely while reading about Web 2.0 (don’t you just love buzzwords) in case it was relevant to a project proposal I’m helping to put together.