Yes I know it's a little "over the top". But you can kill the music by clicking the STOP button on your browser!
Another
really busy year - this retirement business is becoming altogether too frantic.......
The major
event of the year for me
was organising the Apollo-11 35th reunion with a couple of others - one here in
Canberra and the other in Sydney. In Canberra, Mike Dinn (my old boss from
Honeysuckle & later Tidbinbilla) did a great job with a lot of printing and
multimedia items. I ended up with a lot of the organisation, lists, 1100 plus
emails, collecting monies, etc. See
http://www.pcug.org.au/~jsaxon/space/hsk/35th/a1135th.htm or
http://tinyurl.com/3ojyp for short for
more details. In Sydney, Colin Mackellar has created the great Web site at
www.honeysucklecreek.net in time
for the launch at the 35th - like all web sites it is a work in progress, but
there is a huge amount of stuff there already. With some help
from us in
Canberra, Colin also created the 'piece de resistance' - a special DVD which we
played in synchronism with the date and time the events happened 35 years
earlier. Take a look at the web site and you can also read all about the DVD.
Colin was not directly involved with Apollo (not old enough :-) but is a huge
enthusiast and has put in more time on creating the web site and DVD than we
probably did supporting all those missions! I also had the great privilege of
launching (picture right) a book by a good friend from those days - Bryan Sullivan and his wife
Jackie French. The book is called "To the moon and back" - see
http://tinyurl.com/25mxz (The other
address is way too long), and is aimed at 10 -14 year olds to encourage them
into careers in science. Jackie is a
very well known Author and broadcaster here
with around 100 plus books to her credit - her web site is at
http://www.harpercollins.com.au/jackiefrench/ Aparently the book was sold
out before the launch - so a second printing was organised just in time!
About 170 people came to the main reunion function from all over Australia, from NZ, and our friends Bill and Frances Wood from Barstow California. Bill
was one of the main players for Apollo and later, at the Goldstone tracking
complex in the Mohave Desert.
Here we are (on the right) looking cold in the snow at Honeysuckle on the 22nd
July.
A lot of people stayed on for the second day when we had a good time visiting
the old Honeysuckle
creek site and the Tidbinbilla Deep Space Communications complex.
There are over 200 pictures from the reunion at our webspace at http://community.webshots.com/album/166303670BYzjJJ While you are there - take a look at some of the other albums - specially Betty's bird pictures - mostly in our backyard.
The other major thing for me was getting elected as the President of the
Canberra PC User's group - see www.pcug.org.au
We started a campaign for a new Committee in July/August and were eventually
elected unopposed. The big mistake on my part was agreeing to be President! The
group has been going since the early 80's and currently has around 1,500
members. We run our own Internet services (one of the first ISPs in Canberra)
and we have around 1,000 of our members on the net through our services. We
turnover about $250,000 per year.
At our peak we had over 3,000 members with
more than 1,500 using our Internet service. Changed member demographics and
heavy competition with large national ISPs has caused a lot of the steady
decline. Our committee was elected to try to change all that and we have been
making quite a few rapid changes to try to improve both member and internet
services benefits - without spending too much money! But it's turning out to be
a very heavy workload at the moment, and I'm putting in many more hours per week
than I did most of the time when I was officially working......
For our net enabled friends who might be interested - Betty's letter has much
more family oriented news - you can find it at
http://tinyurl.com/5823s or navigate from
the menus on this page. For the non-net enabled who are receiving this by snail
mail, you are missing out on a colour infested multi-media extravaganza! So pop
along to your local library or Internet cafe and start browsing {:-))
We are both well and Betty is her usual efficient self. She is rapidly adding
DVD creation skills to her already long list of 'crafty' things.
Have a great
Christmas and a simply superb 2005.
Love and best wishes from John, Betty and all downunder.
P.S. Click any photos for a larger version...