The Royal National Park - And Beyond!

October 18th was another exploration of the near-Sydney landscape. First stop: Jibbon Beach at Bundeena.

Looking ENE from the western end of Jibbon Beach.

Jibbon Beach basically marks the northeastern corner of the Royal National Park. Depending on to whom you are talking, the Royal National Park is either the oldest (Aussie speaking) or second oldest (Yank speaking) national park in the world, the rival being Yellowstone. The scale and variety don't rival that of Yellowstone, but the beauty does. It it certainly much more convenient and accessible, being on the southern outskirts of Sydney. It is minutes from our base in Kogarah.

Next stop: Wattamolla Beach. But first, at the parking lot I snapped a (poor) photo of a few birds that I've been seeing around since I arrived in country but had never really got a good look up to this point. Here's a cropped and lightened version:

A crested pigeon.

The first time I noticed this species was on our first incursion into the RNP, when I photographed Claude trying to get buddy-buddy with a cockatoo. I was intrigued, but never got close enough to attempt identification until now. With a little help, the species has been positively identified as crested pigeon, by no means rare but a little exotic-looking nonetheless.

Getting back to the original mission, we headed down to the lagoon. From this vantage point, it appears to be a river.

Looking "up-river".

This body of placid water is cut off from the open ocean by a sandbar most of the time.

That sandbar is the beach. Apparently at very high tides it is submerged.

Wattamolla is an idyllic spot, fairly unusual in its combination of attributes. The lagoon is a nice calm place to swim, and the water is crystal clear both in the lagoon and of course in the ocean, as it has been all along the coastline that I have so far observed.

Lagoon in the foreground, ocean in the right background.

The sandbar/beach is much broader than it appears at first sight. It's still a couple of hundred meters from the beach to the mouth of the little harbour.

Looking out to sea at Wattamolla.

Wattamolla is almost halfway down the park, and there are several beaches and areas of coastline that are accessible between there and Jibbon, but none of those are accessible by car. Most of them require a significant hike to see them.

Leaving Wattamolla and heading south(ish), the road winds and climbs through dense forest to over 700 feet (215 meters) of elevation at Otford Lookout. Although as usual, photos can't possibly do it justice, but I'll let you make up your own mind as to the quality of the view:

From the Otford Lookout looking south toward Wollongong

There is another lookout at Stanwell Tops Park, but it was quite busy and not that different from Otford, so we kept on truckin' to Sublime Point Lookout, which is over 1200 feet (365 meters) elevation. Another of the local residents that seems out of place in significant numbers in total freedom:

Lorikeets at the Sublime Point car park.

Sublime Point was the literal climax of today's excursion, with fantastic views overlooking Wollongong and its adjacent suburbs along the coast. It's unfortunate that the day was hazy.

The view to Wollongong and beyond from Sublime Point Lookout. It was all downhill from here.

We intended to take the most direct route home though the park, but immediately took a wrong turn and ended up making a grand loop to the west. As is often the case, that turned out to be a pleasant, although completely different, jaunt through a rural countryside, with a bonus crossing of the Georges River National Park (official link) near the end.

Olympic Dreams

On the 15th of October, Claude had a volunteer job on the grounds of the Sydney Olympic Park, built for the 2000 Summer Olympics. While he enjoyed his menial tasks, I wandered around and took in the sights, imagining what it must have been like during the Games. The park is still used extensively, and is notably the new home of the Sydney Royal Easter Show. The Aquatic Centre is now a fitness center, and while it isn't exactly cheap, I was surprised at the relative affordability of membership, especially considering how the facilities stack up against the average rec center or gym. I was a little surprised that they charged me $3.50 just to go in and take photos, but I suppose that's a fairly common occurrence and it didn't deter me.

The Sydney Games by all accounts stands out as yardstick against which all other games are now measured. I wouldn't really know, having never personally attended any of them and only watching some of the events on television. Anyway, more than a decade after the games, the grounds are well kept and well used. The "Homebush" auto race circuit actually snakes through and around the Olympic Park, and the facilities are ideal for the booths and various displays and shows. But that's another post...

The main stadium

These poles have plaques with the names of all the volunteers who worked the 2000 Olympics

Claude's pole (he often goes by "Rob") - Christmas-y, no? Ho/Ho...
(Don't get up, I'll show myself out...)

Entrance to the Aquatic Center.

The kiddie pool and play area.

The play pool, spa and relaxation pool. Another lap pool is out of frame to the right.

The diving pool, with water polo practice in the near end.

The main lap pool. The diving pool is to the right of frame, the kids' area is beyond the wavy arch and to the left.

The Cauldron, with the ANZ Stadium in the background. The Cauldron was moved here from its original location, and is now an "interactive fountain", where the kids play and cool off in the summer. Water streams from all around the edges as well as myriad perforations in the bottom surface.

The Dome Hall, where scores of classic and custom vehicles were on display during the Sydney Telstra 500 V8 Supercars race. The more conventional attached rectangular Ross Pavillion Hall (behind and at an angle to the left) was the "paddock" where the V8 Supercars were stored and maintained. Race attendees with the proper tickets could wander around in the Ross Pavilion and watch all the goings-on.

Another view of ANZ Stadium.

Those towering latticework light posts all represent the various cities that have hosted the games, and there are benches dedicated to them as well, with their corresponding logos set into the sidewalks. There are many blank benches waiting for future events, and the London bench and logo were ready before the event began. It's not in-your-face obvious, but if you look closely the place is peppered with solar panels as well. As with the Jenolan Caves, it's really not practical for me to show, discuss or even mention but a tiny fraction of all there is to see here. If this kind of thing is interesting to you, I suggest you browse the links I've provided and even do your own Web searches. The details are amazing.

Sunsets

This Post will be updated from time to time with various sunsets. The house at Lake Munmorah is particularly suited for sunset photos because it overlooks the lake to the west and there are no tall buildings in the area to detract from the view.

Live Tracking

This post is just a heads-up to any who have been following my adventures via the live-tracking service. They are closing up shop as of December 13th. I am trying to work out a replacement, but so far haven't come up with anything workable. If and when I do find something, I will pass on the info as soon as feasible. If you are curious as to why InstaMapper is going away, below is a forum post by their Admin. Stay tuned for more developments.

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Hi all,

Thank you for the (mostly) supportive comments. I will try to answer some of the questions asked here and via email.

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Why is the service closing down?
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There are really a lot of reasons, many of which are show stoppers. In no particular order:

1) We have been losing money for the past 5 years. The model that we had, free service for donations, simply didn't work. If anyone is curious, we averaged about $1 per 1000 active users per month in donations. In other words, the average user actively using the service donated 1/10th of a cent per month. We are still very thankful for the donations that we received. Knowing that someone out there appreciated the service enough to send us money was important, and helped us to keep the service available to this day.

2) Software patents. This is really a topic for a separate discussion. We got accused of patent infringement in 2009. Even though there was no lawsuit, the matter was never fully resolved, and we were reluctant to invest additional resources into InstaMapper going forward.

3) Lack of time. All of us have busy lives, both at work and at home. Closing down the site will free up valuable time.

4) Finally, the service just wasn't growing very much in the past few years.

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Can you offer a paid service?
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This is actually hard. As an example, the minute we start charging for the service, we are no longer allowed to use Google Maps for free. Instead, we would need to buy a business license, which is surprisingly expensive (tens of thousand of dollars per year). There are other choices, such as Bing Maps and OpenStreetMap, but they are not as good, and switching over would require a rewrite of our frontend.

With a paid service, we would also need to hire some full-time employees, to improve service availability and to provide customer service to our users. With these additional expenses, and with our estimates on how much people would be willing to pay for the service and how many users we would have, it is not clear that we would be making any money.

That said, we will continue to consider our options. There is a chance that we will regroup and relaunch the service in one form or another in 2013.

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Will you open source the code?
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I am afraid the answer is likely not. The code is fairly complex -- we ended up writing a custom database for location data, for example. It would take a lot of time to clean everything up and package it into something usable by outsiders. Additionally, the code is valuable to us, and we might still find a use for it later on.

If you need a simple tracking app, writing one from scratch is probably a better option than trying to recycle our code. It should be possible to write a simple Android tracking app in a couple of hundred lines of code. The simplest backend / frontend solution is probably the Google App Engine. github is a good place to host the code, in case some of you decide to collaborate.

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"It's a free country"

<soapbox>
I'm getting more and more fed up with the idea that freedom exists in a vacuum and that everybody should be able to say anything they want any time they want. While I believe in freedom of expression, I also believe that in several ways the pen really is mightier than the sword, and verbal comments can be as well. And in a very bad way. physical scars can heal and be forgotten, but emotional ones can fester and grow and last a lifetime, and there's no ointment or pill that can help.

The thing about freedom is that if there were only one being in the universe, that being would be truly free to do whatever they wanted. But as soon as even one other being enters the picture, one being's rights end where the other's begin. Having honest discourse directly with another human is one thing, but deliberately and publicly causing pain of any kind to another human is ethically and morally wrong, and should not be allowed, much less encouraged. That goes for everything, not just words.

That flippant comment "you can choose how you respond to other people's words" is utter hogwash. It's the worst kind of lie. If everybody had exactly the same constitution, and that included being able to totally ignore other people's harsh words, there might be something in it, but in the real world, it is simply a tool to further victimize and abuse people who are already victims of abuse. It is evil, unethical and immoral. There is no justification whatsoever for abuse, verbal or otherwise.

On the same note, it distresses me that society not only condones, but encourages ridicule of others as "humor". "Self-deprecating" humor is fine and can even be healthy, but deprecation of others is never funny, it's just sad. There is a whole universe of stuff out there that is side-splittingly hilarious without resorting to the abuse of others (or reveling in the misfortune of others) in the name of "fun". Just as you should never trust a statement that comes after the phrase "trust me", anything that is the subject of "it's all in good fun" is neither good nor fun. Truly, farts, belches and other natural functions are far funnier than cutting others down to size. An intelligent comic can find silliness and merriment in day-to-day life rather than resorting to what really amounts to bullying.

If you're wondering, this post was brought on by the recent withdrawal of Chris Brown, who was "cyber-bullied" by Jenny Johnson for over a year before finally snapping and responding. Also on my mind are recent comments about Jose Conseco, Lance Armstrong and others. I can't defend any of their actions, but as my mother always said, "two wrongs don't make a right." Singling certain people out for constant public humiliation (while dozens of others guilty of the exact same things go totally unscathed) is never a good thing. Give it a rest, people!

tl;dr:
Another of my mother's sayings that I strongly believe is this: "If you can't say anything good, say nothing at all."
</soapbox>