I renewed my domain names for two years today. I started to renew online until I saw the price which was more than double the cost two years ago. So I phoned Melbourne IT and renewed at the old price which is probably extortionate.

The official receipt from the NFSA for the 215 species videos arrived today. A week ago I received a scary email from the curator who thought we had only sent 146 movies until she double-checked the USBs and confirmed that there were 73 movies on one  USB and 142 movies on the other.

Steve received a quote from the camera repair man he contacted who had indicated that we would need a new lens assembly which would cost a little less than $1400, an amount well on the way towards the cost of a new camera. I will soldier on with the Sony and use my remaining four tapes. The filmic blemishes are more evident than I would like, but the new frames and species videos are more or less up to the job.

Today I posted 2 USB sticks containing 215 HD Species Videos plus an excel folder with taxonomic and descriptive information plus the year each video was uploaded to Vimeo, to the National Film and Sound Archive in Sydney. The videos had to be retitled to include species and family names. a process we began in May 2015.

Today I handed over the latest instalment of the image library to Michelle Ryan of the Queensland Museum. She is drafting a new agreement based on the one I entered into with the State Library. There are 367 new video frames and 131 new photos. For the statiscally-minded, this is my 400th post.

Today Steve and I uploaded six new videos, after we had to abandon work because of the major systems failure which came to light on March 1. The videos are based on recent tapes, whereas the inaccessible data includes older tapes and whatever comes to light as we start from scratch, retitling the SD videos for the NFSA.

Collected the camera from Dev’s office. He thought he needed some software to make the required adjustments to the back focus, but Steve found out from Sony in New Zealand that the software is not applicable for the model and will now contact a local camera repairer to see if he can solve the problem and at what cost. Meanwhile, the raided system’s register cannot identify the data contained on the hard drives because, unlike the drives, it was not part of the mirror image backup. Steve is trying to find software to overcome the impediment, but if not, we will have to load up the data anew to progressively carry out our scheduled work.

A week ago my fortnightly evening with Steve had to be curtailed because two of the hard drives crashed, preventing us from accessing the files we needed for the work we were scheduled to do. Steve set about rebuilding the drives, which takes 30 hours or more. After the first rebuild the computer shut down and the process had to begin anew. Meanwhile Steve has acquired two replacement drives, only one of which he was able to install. I was supposed to be with him this evening, but this had to be postponed until Thursday (March 10). Meanwhile, last Thursday I took my camera to Steve’s office and met with Dev, one of his technicians, who is attempting to fix the problem which causes the right side of the frame to be out of focus on wide shots, the result of the camera falling onto an earth bank one night, a year ago. Fingers crossed for hard drives  and camera fixes.

Showrunner Productions are a no show for my possum clips. Perhaps my refusal to provide uncompressed material for free cooled their ardour. The good thing to emerge from their initial interest is that I was reminded about my Ringtail Possum footage which I had not made into a video, but have now.

A few days ago I told Jaap that he could photograph a cycad (an ancient and slow-growing palm or fern-like form of plant life) across the road from the Eagle Heights Post Office. I thought no more about it until I opened my eyes and saw, to my horror, that in the intervening sixteen years since I filmed its companion next to the footpath, a White Cedar tree had all but smothered this cycad. I had simply walked by day after day, year after year without registering the unwanted intrusion of a non-native on one of Australia’s glorious endemic flora species, Lepidozamia peroffskyana. It has the largest (reproductive) cones, about 1 metre long, of all the earth’s cycads.