I played this course in August 2011. Surely it must be one of the world’s most spectacular golf courses. You access the course by a 10 minute ferry ride from Hamilton Island and the club house sits atop a hill which gives great views out over the Whitsunday Passage.

There are some tricky holes made even tougher by a stiff breeze which waits to push your ball off the fairway and into the coarse rough just off the fairway. I paid several penalties for lost balls, when tee shots hit the fairway and then rolled off the fairway into the rough.

The most memorable holes are definitely on the back nine. The par 3 14th, with fierce winds and a long carry over native bushland is as tricky an iron shot as you’ll find. The 15th is a great par four which runs downhill & into a stiff breeze, you’ll be best hitting something which keeps low here. Another distraction, when I played this hole, was the pod of humpback whales passing through the passage. The par 4 18th, hitting down the hill & with views forever is a great closing hole.

I thoroughly enjoyed the course, though it was one of the more challenging I have played.

To see my scorecard for the round: http://golfshot.com/Rounds/Detail/218-6406508-6406739

I am shocking with change…. I hate carrying around any change in my pocket and that normally means I dump all the change, at the end of everyday on the counter in the kitchen. From there it gets transferred to the piggy bank and then from there to the secret hiding spot and never seen again. Poor plan huh!

Andrew Sinclair introduced me to this beautiful machine. It’s a coin counter! You take all your loose change in, tip it into a tray and the machine starts sorting the change and counts it for you. After counting the change, you’re issued with a receipt that you take to the teller. The teller then can deposit the funds into your NAB account, or, cash you out and provide you with the funds in notes

OK, that’s the cool part. The not-so-cool part is that if you are not an NAB customer, the service charge to use this service is 10% of the value of the transaction.

I’m not aware of it in any other banks, but would be great to know if they’re out there.

Love the machine NAB, I’ll be using it a lot.

Surely, in this day and age we can have electronic voting! Swipe our licences, passports or some sort of ID to then use a touchscreen system and lodge our votes…. We could then be seeing results come in through the day and by 630pm or so the result could be known. It would also cut down on the high number of informal votes. There were hundreds of thousands of informal votes were lodged and technology could be used to stop this. On the other hand, we only vote every three years or so and maybe the investment in technology, which is likely to be usurped quickly mean this is not a wise investment…. I’d think we could make the investment in a sensible way and someone should be looking at this.

Congrats to the 20 year old from Brisbane, Wyatt Roy, who looks to be off to Canberra to represent his electorate. This is a wonderful thing and great to see youth coming into our parliamentary system. To those saying he’s too young, too bad to you! He’s been elected by his electorate and he’s off to Canberra! Think about this. If we can send 20 year olds off to Afghanistan to fight, they can be part of our parliamentary system.

The big winners out of the election are the Greens and good for them! They ran a good campaign and gave the folks of Australia an option other than the Coalition & Labour. Great to see them in the lower house and capturing a big share of the vote.

Where does all this leave the NBN?! I want my fast broadband dang it!

I no longer believe in this two party preferred system and in particular it worries me that a party who gets the share of vote the Greens got and yet they still only have 1 seat in the lower house. Obviously, the Australian people feel uncomfortable in either the coalition or the Labour party being our government and it’s so close that neither of them will have a majority of any kind. I dont know the answer to this, but I don’t see the current system represents the desires of the Australian people.

I thought I heard last night that we’ve got our first indigenous member of the House of Representatives. Is that true? I would have thought surely there had been an indigenous person elected previously.

Great to see Steven Fielding gone. Tootle-loo! Shame Conroy made it through…. Shame.

The Labour party must be ruing the decision to dump Rudd. They should be anyway! Instead of blaming him for leaks and the result, how’s about acknowledging that the dumping of him is one reason for the result. Good to see KRudd get back in.

Hopefully, whatever the outcome, our politicians can put aside all the BS and sort out this mess soon and they can get on with running the country.

The Long Road

Originally uploaded by ckjchambers

Photo Taken: 13th September 2009
Photo Location: Outback Northern Territory somewhere…

In September 2009 I went to Darwin & then toured out to Arnhem Land. This photo, with the road stretching off into the distance and seemingly never, never ending was taken somewhere on that tour…