A Year in Papua New Guinea

We’ve had a busy two weeks. At work I ran a training program over two days for staff on Spreadsheet Basics. I ended up with 11 participants and will probably run it again soon as there were others who expressed interest. It went really well.  The trouble with designing a training program is that until you have delivered it once you don’t know how long it will take or whether you have the content right. I asked Chat GPT to design me a 10 lesson basics course and it did a great job. I modified it a bit but probably 70% of the content and exercises were designed by AI. Jenny and I worked through the course several times to fine-tune it. The end result worked well. I had allocated two 3-hour sessions and the course fitted this well with a few exercises now moved to homework. The participants were at different levels so when some had finished a lesson they helped others. Jenny was my excellent assistant. I actually learned a few spreadsheet things in developing the training. So far I’v...

Dec 21st saw us jetting off to the big island to our south. We arrived at Brisbane Airport, picked up a rental BYD Atto 3 EV and took the M1 up to Wurtulla on the Sunshine Coast. We had rented a nice house for the next two weeks in a quiet street adjacent to Currimundi Lake. After a couple of days on our own we were joined by Liz and Sophie, David and Toby on Christmas Day. The boys stayed a few days and the girls a week. We didn't do a lot as we were all tired at the end of the year but it was great to be together for the first time in quite a while.  Jenny, David and Liz chilling. Osprey Mistletoebird Red-backed Fairywren Little Corella The lack of daylight saving in Qld meant that the sun was up just before 0500 every morning and I took my coffee out the front to watch a great variety of birds along the lakeside park. A short walk towards the coast took us to Currimundi Lake Conservation Park - a small reserve of mostly coastal heathland. I popped in there most days and always a...