Weekend trip to Deua NP; Ubuntu

This weekend, as always this time of the year, our suburb was full of inebriated, heavily tattooed man-children who believe that loud noises and inhaling toxic fumes are the most sublime forms of entertainment ever invented, and so we fled the city and went camping in Deua National Park. I have already written about one of its main attractions (the Big Hole), and we went back to the same place, so I do not have much to add.

The Shoalhaven River is perfect for a four year old as it is slow moving and not too deep. We had a great time there both Saturday and Sunday afternoon.

The heath on the way to the Big Hole. As my wife commented, "in Germany you would see two towns and three villages in that direction." One of the main attractions of this country is its relative emptiness due to low population and a high degree of urbanization.

Persoonia (Proteaceae). This genus is a bit different from most other Australian Proteaceae in that it has fleshy fruits - at least some are edible - and apparently lacks the cluster roots that enable other members of the family to survive on very poor soils.

And a Fabaceae whose name I should know because I already saw it in 2010, but it escapes me at the moment. Whatever its name, its combination of Holly leaves and typical pea flower are extremely odd from a Central European perspective...

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Our adventures with Ubuntu continue:

• The GUI does not allow us to change access rights to files. Yes, we could perhaps do that in the terminal but the point is, it should.
• The Privacy tool does not allow us to delete the history. Yes, we could perhaps do that in the terminal but the point is, it should.
• Skype crashes whenever one of our contacts goes online, whenever one of our contacts goes offline, and whenever we answer a call. We can call others though.
• TreeView X, one of the most widely used phylogenetic tree viewers, crashes whenever I try to open a tree. FigTree, an alternative tool for the same purpose, does everything it should except, strangely, converting a tree into a graphic. On the plus side, I found an absolutely awesome freeware program that I may blog about in a few days.
• The virus scanner is very paranoid and considers many harmless files to be threats, including even a few short executables that I programmed myself for a work project in 2012, and they do nothing but write large amounts of randomized data into a text file.

Because several of these issues do not appear to present themselves to colleagues who are using Ubuntu, they might be due to some problems between the OS and our specific computer. Whatever the reason, this needs work.