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Year View| Summary| Highlights| Month View| Monday 5 January 2004 (Day View)

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05.01.2004 – Monday 5 January – Second-hand Fire

Morning

• Mum and I drove to town, where we picked up Sarah, and did some shopping. The second hand shop burnt down last night. It was the first thing we noticed upon arriving in town – it is totally burnt down, just a blackened pile of tin and old chairs. Two fire engines and a pile of fire fighters, including Matthew, were sitting outside along with some police. It’s all taped off with police tape and looks a bit sad. Apparently, the butcher next door has suffered some damage too, and people were complaining that it took half an hour for any fire engines to arrive. I’m surprised Cooktown has two fire engines, unless one was sent up from somewhere else, which seems doubtful, the nearest place being four hours or so away.

Evening

• I walked up to Shan’s, where Jade and Ella were copying some CD’s, and talked for a while, before heading down to Nui and Koi’s to have a look at their computer, or computers, as it turned out. After a quick trip back here to get a dialup phone number to authenticate their satellite, I installed their various bits of software they wanted installed, and set up the satellite stuff. There’s only a very small window of time to get a transmitter lock, before the auto-phase protection stuff shuts you down, and we couldn’t get a lock on any valid transmitter rate. Because they’re so paranoid about VSAT’s (you need to be a registered transmitter site to actually use one, which are they’re location-sensitive, and they’ve got to have safeguards built in so you can’t do anything bad, fry people, or interfere with anyone else’s services), any transmit error shuts down the entire system – so shut down it is. Telstra is going to send someone around to have a look tomorrow morning apparently.

Night

• I had planned to chat online, as per usual, however I kept getting disconnected, which was rather annoying – not to mention expensive. After being disconnected for the umpteenth time, I decided I’d have an early night instead, and went to bed.