Cairns and reconcile cost/benefit

15/9/2016 Qld Cairns. (Landed 6.30am 11/9/2016) Flight was uneventful with the standard level of economy class discomfort. It was a no-frills Jetstar flight that was cost-effective and on time. I medicated my cold and slept for the next 24 hours.

By the 14/9/2016 I had sorted the images I had collected and reconciled the bills accrued, so I could evaluate my expenses. At $167 per day for the 14 days travelling, including airfares and coach/scenic-flight,boat trips,  my costs were what I anticipated. Interestingly this was about the same as the daily costs for my 2015 European Study tour.

15/9/2016 Sent off the "Dissertation" chapters that I had been working on. Double-checked/edited the blog and did some serious library work re 3D printing. I may have to go to Townsville campus of JCU for practical advice.

Back-story of the Dissertation chapters was that the external hard-drive I took with me as a back-up, would not read (it had died) when I got home but I assumed the computer copy was OK. However, I found that Word defaulted to the last version saved, which was the back-up version. For the whole trip I had actually been working on the external hard-drive not the computer. I "begged" the IT techs at JCU to try to salvage my files from the dead hard-drive and got most of the data back. They found it was a software "re-write" glitch rather than hardware malfunction. I had to reformat the text and re-write whole "missing" sections of the first two chapters but at least the gist of my manuscript was still there. A case of two steps forward and one back.

At the same time as I discovered the corrupted hard-drive I found that my smart-phone had reprogrammed itself while rolling around in my day-pack. At one stage I thought that it too had died but patient "maze-running"got me through the menu system and the phone functional again. The final blow was as I was rewriting my document, the wide-screen, graphics-enabled HD monitor "blew" with a loud pop and the classic disappearing screen image down to a central dot. Dell explained that monitors are "throw-away" (they prefer the term "uneconomic to repair"), mine was no longer in warranty, and advised that I should buy an up-to-date replacement. I used my smaller, older, non-graphics monitor instead.