Blog Archives: December, 2009
On the Gold Coast
Surfers' Paradise on the Gold Coast My parents and I spent last weekend on the Gold Coast, southeast of Brisbane. The beach at the Gold Coast is 57km of uninterrupted sand. 
Conrad Jupiters at night We stayed at the Conrad Jupiters casino and hotel in Broadbeach, a few kilometres south of Broadbeach. Sunday was a gloomy, rainy day, and we were limited to taking the monorail from the hotel to the beach (yes, there’s a monorail to the beach), and gambling at the casino, where I discovered that trying to beat a pseudorandom number generator does not particularly amuse me.
Mom and dad on the Gold Coast Monday started off a bit dreary as well, but fortunately it cleared up as we walked the beach. Unfortunately, the sunscreen was back at the hotel where we left it, thinking the day would be cloudy, so we got a bit of a sunburn, but oh well. We walked along the beach the whole morning, making our way 4km to Surfers Paradise for lunch. 
Q1, Surfers' Paradise Surfers Paradise is also home to the world’s tallest residential building, Q1, which you can see in the centre of the picture at right. After lunch we walked back to our hotel (the walk back seemed much shorter than the walk there, a strangely common phenomenon) to catch our train back to Brisbane.
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Merry Christmas
Merry Christmas from the Stebila family in Australia!
The Stebila Family wishing you a Merry Christmas from Australia
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Twelve Days of Christmas
Our Australian Christmas tree Merry Christmas Eve from Brisbane! My parents and I are enjoying the holiday season here in Brisbane. Today we decorated our Christmas tree: a palm tree in my patio garden. Hopefully Santa will be able to find us all the way on the other side of the world!
Wandering around town on Christmas Eve, we came across these sculptures in the square in front of Brisbane City Hall, celebrating the twelve days of Christmas. For the past twelve days, a different artist has been decorating each day. Here are Brisbane’s Twelve Days of Christmas.
1: A partridge in a pear tree 
2: Two turtle doves 
3: Three French hens 
4: Four calling birds 
5: Five golden rings 
6: Six geese a-laying 
7: Seven swans a-swimming 
8: Eight maids a-milking 
9: Nine ladies dancing 
10: Ten lords a-leaping 
11: Eleven pipers piping 
12: Twelve drummers drumming
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Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary
Me holding a koala My parents arrived last weekend to spend some time here in Australia visiting me for Christmas. On Saturday, we went to the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary, a fantastic little zoo just outside of Brisbane. It’s not a huge, fancy, plastic zoo. The parking lot only holds a hundred cars or so, and there were probably only 200 people there the day we were there.
Mom and a kangaroo What’s really great about it is that you can get in close with the animals. They have a big open park area that you can walk through where over 100 kangaroos live. You can just wander around with the kangaroos, walk up to them, feed them, and pet them. At first my mom was a little scared that they would be aggressive when you walked up to them, but they were very calm. Most of the time they wouldn’t pay much attention, but if you had some food in your hand they would sniff it out and start munching away, and then you could pet them. For some reason, however, the kangaroos were scared of my dad.
A sleeping koala The prime attraction of the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary is — you guessed it — koalas. One of the things to do is to (pay extra to) get your picture taken holding a koala. My little koala, which you can see in the picture at the start of this entry, was a female koala named Vinnie. She was very gentle with me, and didn’t dig her claws into me at all. 
Four koalas
She had a very soft coat. Sadly, they wouldn’t let me take her home with me. I don’t think my garden has eucalyptus leaves anyway. My mom visited this exact place when she came to Brisbane in 1971 and had her picture taken with a koala too!
Me and a peacock The zoo also featured a good number of birds. We attended an interesting “birds of prey” show. While we were eating lunch, a peacock just happened to wander up to get his picture taken with me. He was a little shy at first, but once the cameras came out, he was preening like nobody’s business. He knew he was on display, and he was loving it. 
Dog jumping on a sheep We also saw a sheep herding show where two border collies herded sheep around a paddock. Very impressive — they did a much better job of herding the sheep than I would have.
A laughing kookaburra And just before the camera battery died, I got this picture of a laughing kookaburra in its cage. And shortly thereafter, the skies opened up in a torrential downpour, but we had finished seeing all the animals there were to see anyway. You can see some more pictures in my Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary gallery.
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RFC 5656
Today, my first RFC was published: RFC 5656, which describes the use of elliptic curve cryptography in the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol. For those who don’t know, Requests For Comments (RFCs) describe technical standards that are used to specify how computers interact on the Internet. The Secure Shell protocol is used for remote command-line login and is very important for us geeky folks. My standard describes how to use elliptic curve cryptography in SSH. I published the first draft of this standard all the way back in November 2003 while I was working with Sun Labs. After six years, it’s finally made it through the process to become a standard!
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Naples
View of Naples and the Mediterranean Sea from Castel Sant'Elmo While attending the conference in Vico Equense, Italy, I found out – through the cyberstalking magic of Facebook – that my former next door neighbour from residence at St. Jerome’s, Greg, now a grad student in CS in Waterloo, was also in Italy in the Naples area after attending a conference. We arranged to meet up in Naples to do some exploring.
Basilica San Francesco di Paola Greg and his girlfriend Lisa had spent a few days in Naples already, which relieved me, because I was a bit worried about visiting the city. My Italian friends in Windsor had warned me to be careful in Naples – it has a gritty reputation. But I was pleased that I had absolutely no troubles in the city. It felt friendly, more so than Rome, for example. I met up with Greg and Lisa at the train station, and we set off.
Sheer walls of Castel dell'Ovo We decided to check out some of Naples’ castles. Our first stop along the way was the Basilica San Francesco di Paola on the Piazza Plebiscito, which you can see above at right. We continued on to our first castle, the waterfront Castel dell’Ovo – the egg castle. The theme of castles in Naples, as you can see from the picture at left, was tall, sheer, imposing walls. Walls that you would never dream of trying to scale. Whether history found the walls as imposing as I did I cannot say, but I think scaling the walls of this castle ranks up there with trying to invade Russia in December on the list of bad military ideas. The panorama below shows the view of Naples from this waterfront castle.
Archway of the Galleria Umberto We headed back into the city, briefly visiting the Galleria Umberto. We stopped nearby for lunch at a pizzeria. Naples is the home of the pizza, or at least it claims to be, and its speciality – the original pizza – just happens to be my favourite: margherita pizza, just tomato sauce and mozzarella (and basil leaves). Absolutely fantastic. I defy you to make pizza better by adding more ingredients. I don’t believe it can be done, and if you don’t believe me, then you need to eat pizza in Naples.
Imposing walls of Castel Sant'Elmo We continued on to our second castle, Castel Sant’Elmo, high on a hill overlooking the city. If you thought invading the last one was a bad idea, this one was even worse. It was hard to tell where the rock foundation of the hill ended and the castle walls began. Where the castle walls ended, however, was very clear: way up there! 
Top of Castel Sant'Elmo And once you walked up the hill, around the castle, up some pathways, across the drawbridge, and up countless passage ways cut from solid rock, you made it to the top of the castle, where a small village was waiting for you. Best of all, for the tourist at least, it had a spectacular 360º view of the city. Here’s a 270º view looking out over the city of Naples and the Mediterranean sea.
Bell tower over Naples I’ll close off with one more picture from Naples: the bell tower of the church at the top of the hill beside Castel Sant’Elmo. I thought it looked particularly awesome at sunset.
The rest of my pictures from Naples and the conference site are available in my gallery. Coming soon: Pompeii and Mt. Vesuvius!
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Website redesign
Comparing old and new website designs After 7 years of using the same basic layout of my website, and over 2 years of the same exact graphic design, I have done a complete redesign of my blog. While I liked the old design and thought it stood the test of time fairly well, it’s time for a change. With this new design, it will be much easier for me to maintain and improve going forward, and I think it looks much nicer. (If you’re reading this post on Facebook, why not click through to my website to see the real deal?)
Some of the new features include:
- fancy fonts using new @font-face support
- improved slideshows in my picture galleries (i.e., they should actually work now)
- improved panorama displays and links
- all kinds of pretty CSS effects (shadows, rounded corners) in modern browsers (Firefox, Safari, and Chrome)
- better organization of much content, especially including my research papers
Leave me a comment if you have any problems viewing the website. Note that if you’re using a really old browser (like Internet Explorer 6), it’s time to upgrade.
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Handel’s Messiah
This evening I attended a spectacular performance of Handel’s Messiah by The Queensland Orchestra here in Brisbane. I’ve seen Messiah many times and always enjoy it. Why was this performance so spectacular? Three reasons:
- It actually made me feel like Christmas was coming, which is a hard thing to do when the average high is 32ºC.
- The poor trumpet player’s music fell off her stand just as “The Trumpet Shall Sound” started, and she didn’t miss a note.
- Soprano Miriam Allan was amazing, absolutely amazing. She made singing seem as natural as breathing. It was like hearing music for the first time. I hope I get to hear her perform again.
