Thought you might enjoy it as much as I did

Given that the major federal political parties have clearly explained policies about the NBN heading into the September 2013 election, there’s no real mystery there.

In a likely future Coalition government cycle, what will the landscape look like three years after that? What challenges may an FTTN-based approach have presented by then?

Here is the PDF slide pack for my talk (5MB):

CommsDay-Syd-2013-hackett-problem-with-fttn

Here is a quicktime movie file that ‘plays’ the presentation slides synchronised with the audio recording of the presentation ‘as delivered’ (around 28MB, 20 mins including Q&A):

But I had a real problem with it – sharing a folder with a new work group lately just wouldn’t work. We couldn’t figure out why. Nothing looked wrong, but updates to the original files we’d shared around never appeared.

The back story

I’ve had a folder set shared across all my various Macs and IOS devices for ages, and I’ve had another folder shared with some colleagues for months – all working perfectly, with file updates from any of us turning up for everyone else. Brilliant.

A few months ago, I started using Dropbox with a new group of people I’m working with, and to facilitate that process, we set up a new Dropbox folder and shared it around.

At least, thats what we thought we had done, but it just didn’t work.

We got all the original files shared around, but over the coming weeks the complaints began. Updates weren’t turning up. Key files we needed for meetings didn’t appear for others. We had got this wrong, but it didn’t look wrong.

We’d try sharing the folder again. All the new files then turned up in a fresh copy of the folder with a different version number. However, further updates still just… didn’t appear.

Head scratching ensued. I know this works for my other folders, so why isn’t this new folder, that another member of my team created and shared, working for me (or the rest of our workgroup?)

Fast forward to today, when I was setting up Dropbox on a new computer under a new account here at my office, and I managed to accidentally create the same issue – the new account wasn’t seeing updates to a shared folder that a number of us are otherwise using fine (and have been for months).

I did some experimentation, and I figured it out.

In the hope of saving others the same grief, I’ve written down, here, what I’ve learned today. What I’ve learned is that Dropbox is working fine, but some aspects of the Dropbox user interface, specifically some confusing terminology, makes it easy to think you’re doing it right, when you’re actually just… doing it wrong.

The problem

The interface for Dropbox is confusing. The crux of the confusion is one, little, word:

“Sharing”

The Dropbox user interface uses that one little word to describe two completely different outcomes that it can deliver.

One outcome offers continuous future updates. The other offers a single snapshot copy of the original, with no future updates in either direction.

The distinction is determined by the person who initiates the ‘Sharing’ operation, and if they have chosen the wrong mechanism, the outcome can be different to what you expect.

Your recipient gets your files, and all looks good. But your recipient will never see any future file updates, and nothing they change will be reflected back to you.

If your intention is to collaborate within a workgroup and this happens, it can obviously be a significant source of frustration. If you’re trying to convince a new group of people about how cool Dropbox is, this tends to get in the way of that outcome too!

Time to delve into Dropbox terminology to understand what is happening.

Dropbox has two fundamental ways to provide access to files:

a) Sharing a folder

b) Sharing a link to a folder

The confusion stems from the fact that Dropbox uses the term ‘Sharing’ to describe two entirely different outcomes.

In my view, Dropbox should call the second choice Sending instead of Sharing (as in: “Sending a link to a snapshot copy of a folder”, and then things would be a lot less confusing.

Sharing a folder results in an environment where all future changes in that folder are shared to all participants dynamically.

Sharing a link to a folder results in the recipient obtaining a moment-in-time snapshot of the sender’s folder and contents, an ‘uncontrolled copy’, that is dissociated with the original sender’s folder.

This is why the latter can be used to deliver files to people who aren’t actually Dropbox users – and its a darn useful feature, as an alternative to (say) emailing large attachments around (including to non-Dropbox users), if that is what you actually want to do.

Further confusion is created by the fact that the recipient of a link to a folder has the option (if they are already using Dropbox) to ‘Add’ the link to their Dropbox environment.

Doing this creates the visual impression that full (bilateral) sharing has been engaged – the files appear in your directory structure precisely as if you’d bilaterally shared them.  But you haven’t.

How it happens

It is the originator of the sharing process that controls this, not the recipient of the invitation.

Indeed, if you see a link invitation in email, its already too late – and you need to get the sender to go back and do it ‘the other way’.

One of the reasons its easy for the sender to get this wrong is that if you browse your filesystem via your Dropbox.com home page, there is a ‘link’ option that helpfully appears to the right of each folder you move your mouse over. Thats the wrong choice, right there, just begging you to click on it!

The rule to apply – as a sender

If you want to offer dynamic-update access to a folder and the approach you’re taking to do it uses the word link anywhere, stop… you’re doing it wrong

Instead, go into the ‘Sharing’ menu on the Dropbox.com web page and use the ‘New shared folder’ button to initiate sharing of a new folder, or select your existing (already being shared) folder from the provided list under that ‘Sharing’ menu and invite others to join you via that mechanism.

You can also share a folder from the Mac OS X finder directly:

From the Mac OS X finder, right-click on the folder inside the Dropbox area, select the Dropbox context-sensitive submenu, and you’ll get three choices:

• Browse on Dropbox Website
• Share Link
• Share This Folder…

Again, that wrong choice is hovering there in front of you, namely ‘Share Link’.

The right answer is ‘Share This Folder’… and again, the confusion is caused by both options using the word ‘Share’. They look like sort-of the same thing, but they’re actually quite different.

How to tell the difference – as a recipient

If you get an email invitation to access a Dropbox link, but you really wanted to dynamically share their folder, then your sender has got it wrong – don’t click on the link, all you’ll wind up with is a moment-in-time copy.

Instead, tell the sender to delete that pending link at their end (via the ‘Links’ menu on their Dropbox.com home page) because they are doing it wrong.

Next, ask them to try again to share the folder by using the ‘Sharing’ menu on their Dropbox home page to do it, and by specifically avoiding any approach that uses the word ‘link‘ to do it.

If you do not get an email invitation, but if instead your Dropbox client pops up on screen and tells you someone has shared a folder with you, then – huzzah! – the right thing has happened.

Its the absence of that email invitation that is the success factor here (!)

Now, you can simply accept that invitation via the Dropbox client.

Alternatively, you can log in to your Dropbox.com home page, where you will see the invitation waiting under the ‘Sharing’ menu item (Not under the “Links” menu!)

On that ‘Sharing’ page, just view and accept your ‘New shared folder invitation’.

The folder that turns up is now a properly shared one, with dynamic updates between all participants.

How to unscramble your current eggs

If you’ve already been doing this for a while and you’re not quite sure what files in your local Dropbox folder are links and what are being truly ‘shared’ (in both directions), here’s how to find out:

Start at your dropbox.com home page.

Under the ‘Sharing‘ menu, you can see what folders you are fully sharing (automatic updates).

You can add and remove people from existing shared folders here, and you can create new shared folders from here to invite people into.

Under the ‘Links‘ menu, there are two separate tabs:

• “Your Links”: This lists links you have created and emailed to others to access. If you’re done with some (or all) of them, delete them from here to invalidate the links previously sent out via email
• “From others”: This lists links you have accepted from others, and you can delete them from here to clean up your world a little when you’re done with them.

Note also that you can be (truly) sharing a folder at the same time as you can be the recipient of a link to an older version of the same folder. They will show up with exactly the same name, once under your ‘Sharing’ menu and once under your “Links” menu.

You can delete the ‘link’ entries with impunity as they have no impact on the operation of the (truly) shared folder of the same name.

Conclusion

In the end, this was a lightbulb moment thing for me – I just hope this helps someone else avoid having to find that lightbulb from scratch.

I also hope that Dropbox improve this terminology in their service in the future, reserving the term ‘Sharing’ for one option, perhaps moving to a word like ‘Sending’ in association with their ‘link’ feature.

It might also be nice to add in a few relevant warnings here and there (including in the email invitation for a link) to make it clear that the link approach isn’t actually offering an update service for the files concerned.

This so might other Dropbox users to avoid the head-scratching that I (and surely others) suffer from as a result of all of this.

If you’re interested, you can take a look at that presentation in a couple of ways.

First, a recording of the presentation audio with the slide pack is available here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvOkzfA9joI

(It runs for 30 minutes)

Second, the slide pack alone is also available as a pdf here:

Internode IPv6 Deployment Status 2012

This is a pretty esoteric subject for anyone not working within the Internet industry!

For those who are within that industry, I hope this is a helpful and useful look at how we have succeeded in terms of IPv6 deployment where others are yet to meaningfully commence.

It also explains how starting early and working hard on seamless (automatic and invisible) deployment to all new Internode customers means that we have now passed the 5% takeup level within the customer base (and rising) for IPv6/IPv4 dual-stack Internet service.

We are at the point where a full-fidelity Internet experience is necessarily a dual-stack one – and we’re proud of leading the way in this regard in Australian Internet services deployment.

As part of that process, after taking shots inside and around the aircraft on the ground, John Absolon (who did the flying and the photography) went flying to Kangaroo Island to try the plane out for himself.

It was later flown to Sydney for air to air shots in the vicinity of the appropriate famous landmarks!

Unfortunately access restrictions due to the weather (specifically, strong winds driving limited runway selection at Sydney Airport) was such that it wasn’t possible to get right into the harbour as intended. There were still some great shots taken with the harbour in the background, taken from the vicinity of Chatswood.

You can see a selection of the photos taken on these days at John Absolon’s photoshelter site, here:

http://johnabsolon.photoshelter.com/gallery/Aviation-Magazine-Work/G0000W74PMn0PxC0/20

This is my favourite shot (with thanks to John Absolon for letting me post it here):

VH-TCP flying over Chatswood with Sydney harbour visible in the background

I’m one of those people who likes to keep (or: finds it hard to throw away…) old computers and computer related bits and pieces. Watching ‘Storage Wars’ was the catalyst for me to arrange to empty the contents of my own storage facility in Adelaide, into which I’ve put various old computers and related bits and pieces accumulated over the last two decades of starting and growing Internode.

The contents of that storage facility are now in a larger room, where I can start the process of figuring out what I have, what to keep, and what to throw away. There are a lot of unopened boxes in there!

Most of this stuff has no commercial value – but it is not (and it never was) about that.

People who have the tendency to keep this old stuff from their past (and I know I’m not the only one!) do it for emotional reasons. This stuff contains mental triggers and talismans. Things that we spent countless hours using, in various ways, and that became a huge part of our thoughts and our lives in the process.

In today’s terms, the total computing power in the room would be dwarfed by the iPhone in my pocket. But it all had a purpose, and it all did something good.

Some of these computers held all of our customers’ email and web pages at Internode – in an era when the computers were so expensive that you couldn’t have redundancy in the modern sense (with many low cost nodes). There was generally only one of most things, and those things were cared for very closely, maintained carefully, and spares were held for fast repairs should something fail.

These old computers will mean little or nothing to my kids, for whom computers are merely and unemotionally ‘tools’ to be used, games to be played, communications paths – just ‘things’. Things not really worthy of caring about, in terms of how they work or why they work. Things with a very short life cycle, compared to the old devices in this room.

I found the process of looking over this old stuff has been quite emotional for me. My personal investment in time and effort with these things was just so massive.

My sentimentality for this stuff is a product of the era – the era in which the only way to obtain a useful outcome from computers that operated at these (low) speeds with storage at this sort of (low) density was to truly understand how it worked, and hence to use it so efficiently that sensible outcomes could be obtained.

These didn’t feel like limitations to be overcome – these devices were magical, and the magic is still in there for those (like me) who used and relied upon these devices for so much of what we achieved.

These days, technical efficiency is barely a consideration in the use of most modern computing devices. Massive compute and storage, and incredibly large amounts of working memory in the cheapest of devices mean that software problems are routinely solved with brute force rather than elegance.

Thats not a criticism, even though it probably comes across as one. When you live in a world full of abundance, efficiency for its own sake is often quite literally a waste of time.

But those of us that grew up with this stuff – and that grew with the growth in the computer capacity concerned, gradually and progressively, still retain (I claim) a love of the elegance that remains possible in the solution of computing problems, as and where that opportunity still exists.

Echoes of that past exist today, in the rise of tiny, very low cost computers to solve problems, using software, that used to be the realm of custom solutions using hardware.

This evolution has been very well described and explained by my friend Simon Bisson in his story software with everything.

Reading that story really brought home, for me, the extent to which the world of analog and even discrete digital electronics is over. Now we’re using CPUs and software to replace these physical things with software emulations.

We code up a new version of a sledgehammer into a dedicated micro-controller to crack every new nut, because these virtual constructions are cheaper than buying a ‘real’ sledgehammer!

Its no surprise to anyone, I’m sure, that I’m a big fan (and supporter) of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. This is an absolute Aladdin’s Cave  of the artefacts of the history of the industry that has hugely shaped my own life.

I wonder whether my own kids will ever care about this stuff. Probably not. I guess it doesn’t matter if they don’t – but it definitely still matters to me, and to many people in my generation whose lives were wrapped in and around this stuff.

I feel the same draw that I know some others in ‘my generation’ still have, to get some of this old gear working again, to allow some of this very old software to be cranked up and to briefly be in the world again, running in the aged and dusty shells holding old, low density and often hand built computers.

The thing that is embodied in these old dusty computers is the efforts of the working lives of their creators and users. The echoes of all of that effort remain somewhere inside the boxes, quiescent now, but still capable of brief moments of life when the magical electricity is applied to the circuits concerned.

As my children build their own lives, with none of the huge emotion I feel about the echoes of my working life that is wrapped up in all these old boxes, I wonder what new things they will create, by standing on the shoulders of all of this technical evolution.

My brain is still full of technical details about computers that I no longer need to know…

Locations in the memory map of an Apple II that trigger clicks of the speaker or changes in video graphics modes.

Programming information and file data structures used to drive the operation of the quite superb VMS operating system.

The capacity to flip numbers from decimal to hex to octal to binary in my head – and appreciating the aesthetic beauty embedded in the alternative base representations of various numbers.

The introspective pleasure of single-stepping assembly language code through a debugger to find that elusive memory leak at last.

Having got this stuff ‘out of the vault’, I can now look forward to a day when I try to fire up some of these computers again, just in the hope that one or two of them might still work.

I’d like to boot up my old and much loved Apple II, the computer that was a key to discovering that I had a huge aptitude in this realm. I’d like to see if I can fire up an old game like ‘Choplifter’ again (if the disk drive will still work), and watch the code make pixels dance across the screen again, unaware that it has all been in stasis for around thirty years…

I’d like to boot up one of my old Vax/VMS systems and see if it still works, full of the thoughtful and powerful mechanisms that made it (and still make it) one of the best operating systems I have ever used.

By opening these boxes, I find that I can remember a younger man, working away under a desk trying to get a coaxial cable ethernet link to work, so the handful of people in the back of a sub-let room in 1991 could share a 28k modem link to the Internet. An Internet that then consisted of email and telnet and where it wasn’t yet clear that the World Wide Web would truly change the world. Words like Gopher, Usenet, VT100 and Kermit were in the daily lexicon, and neither Facebook or Twitter yet existed.

Somewhere between then and now, I grew up. My business, against all the odds, succeeded.

It has cost me a great deal of my life and a great deal of stress, but it has also delivered me a massive reward in so many ways (and the financial aspect is only one of many and varied personal rewards).

Much of my adult life experience – both in business and personally – has been interdependent with the evolution of all of this technology.

Could anyone have predicted the outcome, for me, all those years ago, when I was a schoolboy at the Angle Park Computing Centre, marking cards to feed into an IBM 360 … writing code that went in on cardboard and came out on fan-fold paper? Probably not.

In the prophetic and wonderful words of Jonn Lennon – ‘Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans’.

On a related topic,  I just finished reading a work of fiction called ‘Ready Player 1‘, given to me by a friend who thought I’d like it. Its really an exploration of the 1980′s era of video games and old computers, built on the classic science fiction storytelling substrate of a world-spanning metaverse computer system. If you are, like me, a ‘hacker of a certain age’ – I think you’ll enjoy that book as much as I did.

And so … here are some photographs of what I have been looking at today. Only the outer fringes of all the boxes of stuff is currently visible. There is much in there to explore, on another fine day.

The Tesla Motors Model S is the second vehicle model produced by Tesla Motors and the first to be a ground-up, clean-sheet electric car design.

As it happens, I’ve been an owner (and supporter) of Tesla Motors for a fair while – including having undertaken a record breaking 501 km (313 mile) single-charge drive from Alice Springs, south along the road toward Coober Pedy, back in 2009.

My daily driver, a Very Orange Tesla Roadster 2.5 Sport, has the distinction of being the last Right Hand Drive Roadster to be newly delivered to a customer in Australia.

As I have already had a fair bit to do with Tesla Motors, its clear to me that Tesla has a significant level of ‘geek foo’ within it, being very much the Silicon Valley re-invention of a car company.

So I wonder if the quite utilitarian name ‘Model S’ was derived from a little more than just the obvious word (“Sedan”).

‘Model S’ is quite unlike the names that car manufacturers seem to be fond of these days (inventing more and more coined words that are likely the outputs of professional product naming companies).

It seems to me to be an intentional throwback to arguably the first utilitarian vehicle to be mass produced – the Ford ‘Model T’.

Importantly, and unlike ‘Model T’, this is a high technology vehicle. It sports more computers and far more computing power than any manned space flight mission in history.

So perhaps there is another geek culture linkage that just might have been in the thought process (consciously or otherwise) at Tesla:

The use of ‘Model S’, being one letter back from ‘Model T’ in the alphabet, seems like a subtle echo of the cult classic “2001: A Space Odyssey”. The computer in the movie, HAL, is named with the three letters that come sequentially before the letters “I”, “B”, and “M”.

So perhaps ‘Model S’ is both in homage to Henry Ford (and evincing an intention to create a new era of motor vehicle mass production for the new world), as well as being a subtle tip of the hat to Stanley Kuberick as well!

How can this speculation be supported?

Well, we know that Tesla and its CEO are no strangers to having fun with movie references.

There’s the decision to fly a Monty Pythonesque wheel of cheese in the first Dragon capsule to be launched and retrieved successfully.

(I have seen this wheel of cheese at SpaceX. Note to Elon… its really starting to smell a bit )

And there is the whole Tony Stark “Iron Man” / Elon Musk thing. Movie reference, cameo, lifestyle… its all a bit of an overlapping of life and art.

So:  Why not a subtle reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey in the car that seems most likely to bootstrap the true coming of the electric car market in this decade?

The trip has certainly left a strong impression in my heart and mind that is unique in my own life experience.

It has been an exercise in viewing the world at a different scale – an intermediate scale – relative to the interactions I have previously had when travelling internationally.

Like many people whose work has involved travel, I have tended to blast across the world to the USA or Europe and have largely ignored the spaces in between.

Country boundaries drawn on a map, places described in geography lessons back in school, places depicted on the Internet here and there (generally when things go wrong), country names winding past on the entertainment screen of an A380… these are all one dimensional abstract things, or mere statistics, until you’ve actually been there.

The Pilatus PC-12NG sits in the spaces ‘in between’. It flies much higher and faster than the sort of small, ‘light’, aircraft most people fly privately if they fly privately at all. Yet it flies lower and slower than passenger jets, in an airspace that provides a better view of the terrain you are passing above.

Using such an aircraft, and engaging in international hops of the order of around 1800-2400 km’s at a time, we have stepped across Europe, the Middle East, India, Asia, south into Indonesia and then back home to Australia.

We have seen how the habits and patterns and societal rules of people and their governments blend and cross pollinate across country borders, while also evolving progressively at each such transition point.

We have seen and flown above areas that have otherwise been (for me) the abstract realm of geography books… Crete; the Sahara desert; Egyptian Pyramids and the Nile delta; The Taj Mahal; Thai markets; The Ho Chi Minh Reunification Palace, and much more.

In the process, we have ridden camels, and we have (surprisingly) avoided food poisoning… these and so many other life experiences have been packed into a very short period of time.

There is also a sense of mild disconnection with reality – of unreality – that I am experiencing right now. It is like jet lag, but it is perhaps more a form of reality lag.

Each day, my brain has been assimilating some small aspects of a country just departed, while landing in and starting to experience another one. Again and again, day by day, until the details start to blur into each other somewhat.

This has been one motivation for writing these blog posts, each day, as it happened – as a form of modern day diary, and for the same reason diaries have always existed; to capture the moment before it fades. To record a little of our life experiences in a manner more permanent, and less apt to waver, than our own (often fallible) senses and memories.

I’m back home again now, taking kids to school, hanging out with my wonderful family, collecting bills from the letterbox, and enjoying a mild and sunny day here in Adelaide that is a huge contrast to the hot and humid conditions prevalent over much of the journey.

I am a changed person. These life experiences are quietly insinuating themselves into my memories and my ways of seeing the world. The perspectives gained are proving the old adage that ‘travel broadens the mind’. It most certainly has done that for me.

I’ve had the privilege of living a long term dream, in that I’ve been able to do such a trip not only at my own pace, but in my own plane.

I believe I have been able to safely and yet rapidly make the leap to flying quite a large and definitely a very powerful aircraft by building on the seeds of more than three decades of flying gliders.

That pursuit that has ingrained, in my hind-brain, the fundamental sense of how an aircraft works and how to work with it. The principles that keep a little wooden single seat glider flying about between thermals on a summers day are the very same ones that keep an A380 flying between continents.

I began my flying in gliders, and I still fly them today. If you (or your kids) find an interest in flying, I’d strongly recommend going to a gliding field and going on a ‘trial instructional flight‘.

If you happen to be in South Australia, I can recommend the Adelaide University Gliding Club, the club that taught me to fly, but there are many great gliding clubs around the state and around country.

Flying a glider (also known as a sailplane) is a flying experience that involves being absolutely in tune with the atmosphere and with the sights and sounds of the world.

It shows you, in the most direct manner, why and how the wings of aircraft give humans this incredible capacity to ‘slip the surly bonds of earth‘.

There are also times and places when things can be far easier than they can be later on.

In my case, I learned to fly gliders when I was a student – when I had the time and the inclination to spend the (many) hours needed to do that. This made the rest of my flying to this point possible, and able to happen in and around what has since became a very busy life.

Oh, and the chocolate… well, that did great on the trip over, after all. Even the boxes left in the plane have somehow survived in good order. I’m busily handing out boxes of it as visitors turn up

Some statistics from this journey:

• 16 days: 5 days to get there and prepare to depart; 9 flying days; 2 rest days
• 9 flights for a total of 49.1 flying hours to get back, covering well over 10,000 nautical miles
• 2,300 photographs taken to obtain around 300 half decent ones to edit and post into these blog posts
• 35 gigabytes of high definition flight video footage (still awaiting editing into some sample clips)
• Faults or damage over the course of the journey: Zero
• Total bill for Jet-A aircraft fuel: “Significant”
• The life experience: Priceless

Later this week, I’m sure I will be hopping into the plane and going flying… somewhere. That why its here

My thanks to those who have followed along with this journey for your comments and your interest along the way.

I look forward to future adventures, including travelling to many and varied places with my family and friends, in this amazing piece of Swiss engineering, for many years.

We got up on the morning of our last flying day in Cable Beach Resort and slept in until 7am this morning, after a trip spent mostly waking at 5am local time (including losing 1-2 hours in timezone shift) each day. Luxury!

We had breakfast at the resort restaurant overlooking the beach (that was very tough), and then headed to the airport.

Today we also had a tail-wind forecast, for the very first time in the entire journey

At Broome airport, we prepared the aircraft for departure under a clear blue sky with a clear weather forecast all the way home.

I got us up and out of Broome and established on track, and then Pete decided that I needed some more of a challenge, and turned down the main flight management system / GPS display screen, leaving me with paper maps, my flight plan, and a pencil and said ‘take us home’

So I spent most of the flight scratching things on flight plans, measuring things on the map and tuning in and using the (very few!) available radio navigational aids on the way home.

VORs (directional radio navigational aids) are great – and made radio navigation in this ‘conventional’ manner pretty easy on most of this trip across other countries… but far less of them exist in Australia.

Indeed, there was one VOR in Broome and then not another one I could use until Ardrossan, so it became a matter of figuring out and monitoring intercepts onto NDB’s (another, simpler, form of radio navigational beacon) as we passed near enough to one of those, here and there, to do so.

Otherwise the flight was spent “dead-reckoning” a lot of the way over the desert, updating estimates of speed and position whenever a radio aid made it possible to do so.

In a fast plane, driving it with a pencil and paper definitely keeps you busy – even on a clear blue sky day travelling (in principle) mostly in a straight line at constant speed.

Challenges to that ‘straight line’ and ‘constant speed’ included flying into and then out of a 100+ knot jetstream mid flight, which changed our heading and (even more so) our groundspeed to quite impressive extent as time passed, forcing further furious work with the pencil and paper to figure out the changes that had occurred since the last naviational fix, and the consequences for heading, groundspeed and hence waypoint arrival time to report back to air traffic control over the course of the trip.

I really enjoyed doing that, and all in all I had a great flight back, ending in a visual approach back home into Runway 23 at Adelaide International Airport (YPAD), the new home for my plane. I even had a friend who turned up at the airport and took some photos from the ground as we came in to land (thanks Michael!).

When we landed, the guys at the hangar brought out the shiny new toy, an ‘iTowbot’.

This is high tech, electric radio controlled aircraft moving unit. Using its handheld radio control unit, we steering the plane into the hangar to join its stablemate (FMM, the aircraft I did my initial training in).

We then spent a happy period of time pulling 11 days worth of accumulated ‘stuff’ out of the aircraft before my family arrived and started happily crawled all over the plane, figuring out which seats they were going to sit in on our first family trip (which is clearly going to be soon – much enthusiasm for that was displayed ).

Meantime – we made it, and made it in style. Over nine flights for a total of 49.1 hours in the cockpit, we have taken this new Pilatus PC-12NG from its factory in Stans, Switzerland to Adelaide, Australia, a journey of a bit over 10,000 nautical miles.

On the way, I have visited literally a new country every flying day, and flew over many more. These are all places that (except for Switzerland) I had never been before.

I have soaked up these new experiences and hugely enjoyed them, over an intense journey of discovery. Travelling at this smaller geographic scale (relative to a large passenger jet) allowed us to see how the cultures and environments of these countries progressively blend into each other as one travels between them.

Clearly it was, in every sense, a ‘flying visit’, and I will surely be back to explore some of these places in greater depth in the future.

This sophisticated, high performance, brand spanking new aircraft has shown the quality and experience of its builders by performing this initial mission flawlessly.

Oh, and the chocolate made it in good condition too – even the cartons left in the aircraft were pretty good (verified via taste-testing a selected sample). Amazing, but true!

I tried to bring a sense of the journey into these words and with the photos I have taken all day (endlessly snapping hundreds of shots on my iPhone 4S to yield the subset posted each day). This has improved my own focus on really trying to be in every place we visited, albeit briefly, to look into whatever nooks and crannies I could find in each place before we headed away to the next one.

These ferry flights were framed to me as being the trip of a lifetime. They absolutely are. My head is full of the sights, sounds, smells, and senses of many countries. Different temperatures, cultures, languages, food, and experience.

They say that travel broadens the mind, and this has been an example of doing that in spades. My mind has been broadened, and blown, by the diversity experienced in this small window into our huge, complicated, and interesting planet.

In addition I’ve now clocked up a total of nearly 70 hours in PC-12′s already, and I am really, really, really enjoying flying in them. The plane is everything I had hoped and believed it would be.

I have plenty of video footage of departures and landings that I’ll edit into releasable shape in the next little while, for those who (like me!) enjoy that sort of thing (the stills from the cockpit that I’ve posted here and there are taken from that video footage).

Thanks to everyone who has followed along on this journey. My core motivation was to give my own family a linkage to what I was doing, so intensively, from so far away. I’m really happy that so many of my friends have told me that they have enjoyed following along vicariously too. Its been important to document each day while ‘in the moment’, and I hope that has come across in the journey as well.

We arrived at Adelaide airport mid afternoon today, in good order, and having had a great time getting here from so far away. The flight was fun for various reasons – that I’ll explain when I make a proper blog post this last ferry-flight day.

But… its getting late right now, so I’ll make that post tomorrow!

After that, I’ll see if I can get some of the in-flight footage into decent shape to post as well!