Oh, hello there! It seems I shelved this entire website and YouTube while studying for university. Was it all for nothing? My GPA of 6.5 says it was worth it. Can I keep it up? Probably not!

The video above is something a little different from my usual collection of electronic failures. Cicadas! Big, noisy, magnificent little creatures. I’ve always had a soft spot for them, probably because they remind me of the summers I spent growing up around Sydney.

In the footage, I’d been out at seven in the morning looking for spice and Vegemite when I found several cicadas sitting on the footpath along the main street. Quite an interesting place for them to be, especially given how vulnerable they were to people walking past. One was already dead, unfortunately, but the others were very much alive. I gathered them up so I could release them somewhere safer.

At first I thought they might be Black Princes, but after looking more closely I suspected they were Red Eyes. You can probably guess what made me think that. Those lovely red eyes! I remember the big green Grocers from my childhood as well, and I even used to give the ones I found names like Croaky the First, Second and Third. Very imaginative.

These cicadas were surprisingly docile, although every so often one would decide to climb up my hand or suddenly take flight. I had a temporary container with some leaves while I got things organised, and planned to release them around dusk. I’d rather they were back among the trees than sitting on a footpath waiting to get stepped on.

I also had a little look at the differences between the males and females. The males make that unmistakable summer noise using their tymbals, while the females have a different arrangement for laying their eggs. Fascinating things, really. They spend so much of their lives out of sight that it’s rather special to see them up close.

Now I’ve complained about the lack of internet speed here on a few occasions. We were supposed to get true high speed internet over a year ago. It’s since been delayed indefinitely thanks to politics. I hate politics so much.

Anyway, while waiting for a lab at uni, I tried splicing together the above video on an iPad and happened upon my university wifi. The video uploaded in less than a minute. A short speed test later and… 229 Mbps down, 452 Mbps up. That’s a theoretical 56.5 megabytes per second uplink, before overhead, rather than a measurement of the video’s sustained upload speed.

To put things into perspective, my home internet connection could manage a massive 80 kilobytes a second. Comparing those figures gives roughly 700 times the rate. I couldn’t believe that a 2 GB upload could finish in under a minute instead of taking hours. Suddenly the footage backlog felt a lot less impossible!

So the future is looking bright, maybe I will end up getting the 250-odd gigabytes of footage uploaded yet! Stay tuned! :-)