(me & My Laptop)
The Sunday Age
Sunday January 26, 1997
LES HIDDINS.
The Bush Tucker man.
Laptop: TOSHIBA 410CDT.
90Mhz Pentium, 8Mb RAM, 810Mb hard drive, CD-ROM, 11.3in active color display.
"THE Bush Tucker Man knows more about the bush than banging his head against gum trees," says Les Hiddins.
One of the projects Hiddins is working on involves tracking down a mystery ship that sailed north of Australia in the 1830s. Finding the ship and tracing its route has involved friends in Britain photocopying Dutch and British shipping records from the newspapers of the day and sending them to Hiddins, who enters the details into a database. The software for the job is Microsoft Access. "I started using Access when they first invented it," says Hiddins.
It is a big project. For a single year the database traces the movements of just on 1100 ships. "I've been tapping away for months," says Hiddins, who is keeping his cards close to his chest as to which vessel is the object of his hunt (it will feature in a new television series to be shot in the middle of the year).
When the research has been done and the story completed, Hiddins will contribute the valuable historical resource of his database to the public domain.
Another of Hiddins' databases is made with Asymmetrix Toolbook. "Fancy the Bush Tucker Man doing computer programming," he says. But Hiddins' interest in Toolbook was sparked when a run-time version of the program was included with every copy of Windows version 3.
You can tell that Hiddons is a computer veteran; no one much remembers Windows 3 and most of us would like to be able to forget it. Hiddins started out with DOS but "I felt that as soon as Windows came along, that was the way to go".
Hiddins was an enthusiastic user of Ami Pro but that program has had a chequered history. A sleek and easy-to-like word processor, it has been through a succession of owners and fared poorly. For word processing he now uses Word 7, largely because it meshes well with Access.
For the past three years, Hiddins has carried a Westinghouse satellite phone in his vehicle. Satellite phones work anywhere - including places way out of range of the mobile phone system - and anytime, avoiding the problems of high frequency radios which, after sunset, have limited range and are prone to interference.
The satellite phone has "done to the HF radio what E-mail has done to the fax," he says.
Hiddins uses E-mail a lot. He is looking forward in the next few weeks to getting a device that will complete the loop between his Toshiba laptop and his satellite phone. A fax modem card will allow him to send and receive E-mail anywhere in the country. The bush telegraph has come a long way.
© 1997 The Sunday Age