Resuming transmission

Cheers and welcome back!

A perfect storm of issues has effectively kept me away from this blog for most of the last 18 months.
I moved to a region called Hervey Bay in Queensland, where the weather was brilliant and the oceanfront lifestyle even better. "Get a beach house." I took it to heart.

Unfortunately, the internet in said beach house was complete shite – 1.5Mbps down on a good day. My dreams of living next to the ocean and running a consulting business from my home office evaporated as I spent more hours on the phone trying to get a workable connection than actually on the web.

This is where I insert insults about Malcolm Turnbull's 'Fraudband' unravelling of the National Broadband Network, once a truly inspired national infrastructure project for the new(ish) millennium.

Get a beach house—preferably with decent internet!

I gave up on Hervey Bay's dire employment environment, said sad farewells to the beach and shifted to Brisbane. Cable internet running at a quite serviceable 36Mbps down but only 1Mbps up - hardly viable for videoconferencing... So the consultancy concept remained on ice.

Then an incredible opportunity popped up out of the blue. Three months working as the Resident Astronomer at a prestige resort deep in the Namibrand Desert of Namibia, right on the edge of the stunning Sossusvlei Dunes—hundreds of kilometres of rich red sand dunes up to 360 metres high, fringed by imposing limestone and granite mountain ranges.



But, as could be expected, the internet there was crook, with what bandwidth there was sucked up by guests except at the oddest hours—hours when I as an astronomer was working.
Most of my sharing of interesting things online was in the form of social media. Mostly Google+ where support has been kind of crazy. More than 90,000 followers for my Space and Astronomy Collection, and growing by hundreds every day. Thanks, Google!

There will be plenty of broken links both internally and externally on the site as I rebuild things. I'd previously transferred all the blog content to a Wordpress site on a custom domain. But reconstructing all the trashed links and layouts of 800 posts was such a big task that it never happened. If you find links needing repairs, please let me know and I'll do what I can to restore them. Thank you!

So…back at the beginning. Which is a very poignant and fitting place for me to be right now. Cheers, and welcome back!