Friday 23 July

Was having major and frustrating technical difficulties with modern technology yesterday and today. I could receive emails, but not send them, getting the unhelpful message that they were being rejected by the server. Eventually I was able to resolve this finding on the Bigpond website that I needed to have SMTP authentication turned on. Unfortunately they offered no advice on how to do this so I had to guess and make some assumptions, which amazingly worked.

Today was scheduled as a recovery day with nothing too critical to do. However this morning I did have some time-critical shopping which I wanted to accomplish, then needed to find a post office to send the items back to Australia.

This afternoon I spent a couple of hours wandering around the city taking photographs of interesting, and mainly nineteenth-century buildings, mostly using the remarkable but challenging Pentax 10-17mm fish-eye zoom lens. When de-fished using appropriate software this can produce very interesting results, but more often than not produces awful results. So the solution is to take lots of pictures, and hope you get some good ones! One of the many advantages of digital photography is that that approach costs nothing. Another is that lenses of that type are practical. They would be too big and costly for 35mm film cameras.