Monthly Archives: June 2012

New morning, new energy

Just on the item about being unable to get up the ladder yesterday, when I arose this morning, I felt more energy as I usually do, so I had another go before my shower. No problem. After a night’s sleep, I had enough muscle strength to get up the ladder.  Battery replaced, sensor tested and working. Hmmm. Just shows how important sleep is.
I should add that “before my shower” is true. The power was off when I awoke at 7:20am, so no radio and no CPAP machine, so no breathing, and no shower either, because the gas hot water heater needs AC mains to run. No hot water.
The power’s back on now at 09:45am, so I can have a shower.

Bip, Bip, Hooray

It’s been golden light this afternoon.
This shot was taken early in the sun setting process.
Notice how it’s burnt out in the whites.
It’s the JPG file from the camera, and is not what I was seeing.
This shot is no masterpiece but notice how the whites are all there? This isn’t exactly what I was seeing either, but now I have the choice to adjust it as I want.
That’s because it’s the RAW file, recorded alongside the above image in the camera at exactly the same time (simultaneously), but not processed (turned into a JPG file) by the camera for me.
That allows me to make the decisions about exposure adjustments later, saving the highlights and lightening the dark areas as I choose.
Provided I set the menu, I get a RAW file for every shot, alongside the JPG file. Double indemnity. A bet each way. The RAW file adds 15MB or more for every shot, but with SD card prices so low, … ?
So endeth the lesson. I’m a bit peeved because I set the camera up on the tripod and set the intervalometer to take a shot every two minutes to capture the changing light. When it got dark I went out to look, and found it hadn’t even started the sequence! I hadn’t realised you have to confirm the menu setting and press OK before the sequence will start. Duh. I’ll try again tomorrow night.
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I’m being driven mad at the moment (well, I was mad already, really) by a BIP! every 10 seconds from a smoke alarm in my spare bedroom. It means “replace the battery”. It started a couple of nights ago but stopped after about an hour. Just reminding me.
But this time it isn’t stopping, so a few hours ago I got the ladder and set about changing the battery.   (7:30pm Ah! It’s stopped. Battery’s flat. Good. I’ll sleep tonight.)
Gloom. I can get up the first step of the ladder, but my just legs will not lift me to the next step. I tried every way to get up high enough, but it was getting dangerous, so I’ve had to close all the doors between the alarm and me and put up with it so far. The battery will conk out eventually, but if it continues to bed time, I may have to get a rake and just pull it down off the ceiling! It’s only a $15 double-sided tape stick-on, so it’s no loss, and I have a proper mains powered unit in the passage nearby so it doesn’t matter. But … sign of the times. I’ll have a couple of young guys here next week and they’ll do the job (battery or new one) in 2 minutes.
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I read last night (Sunday) that it was Bloomsday, the anniversary of James Joyce yesterday. I haven’t read any of his works, but I’m aware of them (Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake etc.) Notoriously difficult to read, but if people still worship them a century later, he must have got something right!) What I wasn’t aware of is that copyright on his works finally expired on that day, yesterday, 108 years after his death in 1904.
Aha, good news, it seemed. What I didn’t know is that his grandson, Stephen Joyce, living in America, is the world’s worst copyright enforcer and rights litigator. see http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/01/james-joyce-public-domain.html  Even now, more than 100 years after his grandfather’s death, he stomps on anyone, even academics, who tries to quote from his grandfather’s works.
It even extends to denying James Joyce admirers permission to read from his books at celebrations in Dublin, at the shops and pubs Joyce wrote about. It even extended to a man who had memorised whole sections of the books so that he could recite them at meetings from memory. This grandson got a court order and the Dublin organisers had to cancel the celebration events! Obviously, the guy is a nutter.
Even so, it’s not over. Even though the copyright has expired, courts routinely grant extensions and may well do so again in this case. Pshaw!
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Phew! Greece pulls back from the edge of the cliff. They have a long way to go, but at least the hatred party, the neo-nazis, the anti-immigrant party, have failed in their quest to gain power.
Note I said anti-immigrants? Hatred of “illegals”, immigrants, people they think have no right to be there. Hatred of foreigners. Queue jumpers. Boat people. Why don’t they join the queue, go through the proper processes, stand in line outside the embassies where the Taliban can pick them off.
I’ve been told, seriously, by someone I once respected, that Northam army camp has been turned into a luxury hotel for illegals while our army soldiers have to live in sub-standard accommodation. No need to check his facts; a mate told him this and he believes it. Sick.

Losing the business

Storm clouds gather  © PJ Croft 2012
ABC radio 720 is talking at this moment about about all the businesses that are disappearing from the suburbs. They are talking mainly about the western suburbs and saying that the last independent hardware shop is closing down today. Not quite true, because someone phoned in and said there’s still one in Subi or somewhere, and I know the Scarborough Hardware shop is still open, but when I go there, I’m usually the only customer!
I wrote four years ago (2009) about all the businesses around here that have gone, vanished, since I moved into the area. I’ve lived at my address in Trigg for nearly 26 years now and I’ve seen a lot of changes. When I think about it, they’re virtually all for the worse.

I needed to buy some light globes today, 60W reflector types or similar, nothing special. In 1986, when I arrived here, I would have had the choice of a walk to a supermarket and a hardware store just 500m up the street from my place, a supermarket at North Beach 1.2Km away, or a choice of two other supermarkets, a hardware store and two department stores at Karrinyup Shopping Centre 1.6Km away.

Today, I would have to go to Karrinyup for a choice of one supermarket (Woolies) and one department store (BigW), stocking hardware items, and that’s it.

Today’s radio talk set me thinking about what we’ve lost around here (within 2Km radius) in the last 25 years or so. These are the things we’ve lost:

Three service stations, Caltex Trigg, Ampol North Beach and Mobil Karrinyup;
Two taverns (Karrinyup Tavern and the Flora Terrace hotel);
Two supermarkets – Macs at Karrinyup and Macs/Foodland in Trigg (independently owned);
A doctor’s surgery (North Beach);
Two delicatessens (Trigg and North Beach)
Two video libraries (North Beach and Karrinyup)
One bank (Westpac North Beach);
One newsagent (Trigg);
Two greengrocers (Trigg and Karrinyup);
One bookshop (Karrinyup);
One CD/DVD shop (Karrinyup);
Three hardware shops (Trigg, + two at Karrinyup);

They’re all gone. All that’s left is Karrinyup Shopping Ctr with one supermarket and one greengrocer and North Beach Plaza with the same, except that the supermarket at N. Beach is so hopeless that we have to drive elsewhere to do our grocery shopping.

What have we gained?

An expanded and much improved post office (North Beach, franchised);
An ATM, but it’s a Redicard type which attracts charges;
Two nice, but expensive, beachfront cafes;
An improved walkway along West Coast Drive.

I can’t think of anything else. I’ll be happy to be corrected.

This is very disheartening. There is no hotel or tavern anywhere on the coast between Scarborough and Sorrento Quays, 8Km apart. No full service hardware stores apart from the all-pervasive Bunnings are left except one in Scarborough Beach Road, which I deliberately patronise whenever possible, but it’s a 5Km drive. I have to drive everywhere now.

Until three years ago, there was a small shopping centre 500m up the road with a service station, supermarket, good deli, greengrocer, fish & chip shop, hairdresser, chemist, hardware shop, newsagent, dress shop and St Vinnies. It was bulldozed and turned into a mass of identical townhouses. The fish & chips, chemist and hairdresser are housed in the complex, but that’s it.

This is a clear trend. The Coles/Woolworths duopoly is now dominant except for IGA. Twenty years ago there were at least four other grocery chains; full service petrol stations; full service delis; hotels where you could have a quiet drink and a reasonable meal; local banks; local video libraries…

This is a beachside suburb with a median price of around $1m, but we have to drive to other suburbs to get anything. What’s going on? It seems to be a chicken and egg situation – people go elsewhere because there’s nothing here, so no-one can afford to risk setting up here because people shop elsewhere. Is that it? I’m not sure.

Comments, please. PC 

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The above was written four years ago, 2009. Now in 2012 it’s still true and NO-ONE had any comment.

Haters

I am well known among my few friends for being sympathetic to refugees.

To my ‘friends’, they are illegals. I get comments such as “Where do they get the money for their fares?”, “Why don’t they join the queue?”, “Why can’t they go through the proper channels like other [implying white European] immigrants?” Don’t I, Normie and Garry and Pete?

Those who defend them are “blood sucking lawyers” who are paid from the taxpayer.  Aren’t they, Norm?

Northam is to become a luxury hotel for refugees while our army troops have to put up with sub-standard accommodation. Isn’t it, Pete?

“Will we be allowed to shoot ’em if they come over the fence?” was one Northam resident’s question.

I am sickened by the xenophobia, the racism, the hatred, the “boongs and abos and coons”, aren’t I Garry?

Just now, I’ve been re-reading the story of Kim Phuc, the 9yo girl who was napalmed during the Vietnam war and was caught in abject fear and pain and terror in that famous photo by Nick Ut.

Thanks to some good people (non-haters) she got medical treatment and married a Vietnamese guy. For complicated reasons they went to Moscow and:

On the return trip to Havana the plane made a fuel stop in Gander, Newfoundland. On the spur of the moment they found a Customs officer and decided to defect. They managed to resettle in Canada, near Toronto. 

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And she recovered her life and is still around and beautiful.

The point is, she defected on the spur of the moment to a sympathetic country. There is no difference between Afghan and Iraqi refugees needing to defect and this woman’s case.

Stop your racism!

Apologies for all the italics below the line – Blogger will not let me go back to normal case after I pasted the quote.

Getting on

Jimbaran   © PJ Croft 2012
The other day I came across a web item which listed the things you might be noticing that mark you as ‘grown up’. Going by my memory, they were things like:
  • having a mortgage
  • owning your car
  • having a kid or kids
  • washing the dishes straight after dinner
  • mowing the lawn when it needs it
  • having a good credit rating
  • being in your job more than three years
  • cleaning your own gutters
  • planning your next overseas trip
and so on and on, more than 50 items. From this distance, yawn, bit juvenile, forgotten most of those.
Today I was thinking about what it means to be our age – um, greying, shall we say?
  • seeing a scene like the pic above and remembering it before it got ‘developed’
  • having a reverse mortgage – getting some of your investment back
  • SKI-ing (Spending the Kids’ Inheritance)
  • having a station wagon and a sports car
  • restoring a Harley Davidson or MGB
  • going to Paris for the girlfriends’ birthday party
  • knowing, without saying, ‘been there, done that’
  • having a store of stories and experiences for every occasion
  • paying a younger guy to mow your lawn
  • living in an apartment which doesn’t have gutters
  • feeling the satisfaction of knowing you screwed your company when they retired you
  • playing with your grandkids but not having to look after them
  • getting up in the morning when you feel like it
  • getting your taxes back from the government in welfare
  • flashing your Seniors’ card and getting free transport
  • seeing a Google reference to somewhere like Kitsap and thinking, Yeah, I’ve been there
  • being referred to as Sir or Ma’m
  • not caring if your clothes are out of date
  • flashing your Gold card for road service or discounts
  • having a young woman offer to carry your bag up the steps of the aircraft
  • having your suitcase carried down the big stairs by a young guy (both these have happened for me)
  • knowing you don’t need to save for a rainy day, you’ve already done it, this is the rainy day
  • building, or even completing, your collection of whatever it is
  • getting around to reading the great books or seeing the great films
  • understanding what classical music or jazz is really about
  • making that trip to a historic site
  • being able to afford to stay in a decent hotel
  • being out of the office politics
  • lashing out on a nice souvenir or just something nice for yourself
  • seeing a picture of some exotic place and knowing, yeah, I know that street or view
  • having a feeling of self confidence when ordering in a restaurant, having dined in Paris or London
  • not having to be somewhere, at some meeting, having worried all night about it.
This list can go on and on too. I’m just getting started.
In other words, getting older has its compensations, quite a lot.

Slip sliding away

Bet those lake flats are slippery. © PJ Croft 2011
I’ve never slipped over in the shower, but in recent weeks I’ve felt increasingly as if I will, and I didn’t know why. I wondered if the floor had become soap scummed, so I got out the brush and scrubbed it clean, but it didn’t help. Just standing there, I could feel my feet very slowly sliding down the slight slope toward the drain.
I bought a plastic shower mat but that didn’t seem to help much and was uncomfortable, so out it went.
This morning it dawned on me what’s happening. As my legs are becoming dryer and itchier, I’ve been using creams and lotions before bed to try to ease the pain. During the night the itching continues and I use the soles of my feet to scratch my legs.
Therefore when I get up in the morning, without realising it, my feet are a bit greasy with the creams and lotions. I get into the shower and slip, slide, I nearly go over!
The answer is to scrub my feet on the floor to get the creams off in the shower. Note to self: do it.
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Well, well, if you’ll pardon the pun on oil wells.
I was going to mention a story I heard on ABC radio yesterday about a very large British petroleum company and its successful attempt to subpoena scientists’ emails about the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster. It was a very significant story about the way big companies can stifle scientific research if it suits them.
But I thought I’d better check my facts first, so I went to the ABC’s site and did a search for the item I heard.
Nothing. Not a single reference can I find in yesterday’s news to Big – Petro or Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute or subpoena or emails related, nor on RN’s web page either.
This is weird. I’m sure I didn’t imagine it because I half heard it in the afternoon edition of PM, then heard it again, in full, on the 6pm edition. What is going on? Can it have been removed? Is this a conspiracy? Hmmm.

By the way, I read a great item about how important it is for journalists to check facts before publishing. No matter how plausible something seems, check and get another source.

The New York Times mantra is, Even if your mother rings to tell you she loves you, get another source!

Look, up in the sky, …

Atmospheric hole near Tassie. Credit NASA Aqua satellite
How’s this for a couple of really interesting pics to come up within a few days of each other? The one above shows a clear hole in the clouds near King Island at the NW corner of Tassie – you can just see the island in the top right corner.

The hole is hundreds of kilometres in diameter. It’s the result of an intense high pressure cell, that is, an almost circular mass of cold air pressing down and forcing the clouds away. You can see the anticlockwise pattern to the clouds. Anticlockwise = anticyclone = high pressure cell in the southern hemisphere.

Lightning over Africa. Credit ESA
This is circular too, but this time it’s lightning! It was shot over West Africa by an ESA astronaut. Wow, that’s some flash.
They are from http://www.universetoday.com  Good site. I check it every day.

Fast moving

It’s a nice time of the year at the moment, apart from the big storms. Do you realise we’re only six days away from the winter solstice? Yes, after next Thursday, the days start lengthening again. Amazing. I seem to be feeling the cold more than previous years (says he, while sitting with the back door open and no heating in use!)
 The light changes quickly at this time and here are three shots taken only minutes apart — the time it took me to grab the camera, change lenses and decide where to shoot. I had to move quickly because the light faded in a few minutes.
As I said yesterday, that shot of the shed was taken in near darkness. I had to bump the camera up to ISO800 to be able to hand hold. The fantastic thing is, I could! And I could post these photos within 10 mins of taking them.
Photography has changed beyond recognition. In the 80s and 90s, shooting film involved big expense (each shot of slide film cost about $2 with processing taken into account) and took at least 24hrs, or a week for Kodachrome, to be able to see what you’d shot, even if you finished the roll and got it processed immediately. Then I had to scan the slides or negs, which took hours and the use of a $2,400 scanner. It’s a new world now. People who didn’t do photography back then won’t understand what I mean.
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I mentioned yesterday or the day before that I’d weakened and ordered a 120-400mm zoom lens for my Pentax. I was a bit nervous about it. I’ve been holding off for nearly two years but saw a bargain price (about $560) and decided to leap.
Gloom – fate stepped in and slapped my hand. They emailed me back and said, “Sorry, can’t supply, no stock after all, we’ve refunded your money”.
Well, maybe I wasn’t supposed to have it. At least it gives me a chance to reconsider my priorities. I went to Centrelink yesterday to check on the effect of reverse mortgage on my pension, and Bingo. No problem.
They recognise the need of us pensioners and as long as I take a certain maximum amount and spend it on fixing my house within 90 days, it isn’t counted as an asset. That’s exactly what I wanted.
I can also take the remainder as a fortnightly pension supplement with a minimal effect ($3 per fortnight reduction), and that’s also exactly my plan. So at last, after a year of scrimping and watching every dollar, I can ease up and relax a bit. Buy some new sheets, towels, get the floor strippers in and get new tiles and carpets laid, etc etc.
I do need some lounge furniture but I’m not going to buy new. Crazy expensive prices! Second hand shops, here I come.
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Minnie insists on being outside in the cold all the time. She just won’t sleep inside. Yet she still comes to the door at 5pm for her big meaty bone and does her little head shake and dance of pleasure when I deliver it. I just don’t know – I don’t see distress. Not yet.

ABC, stop it, for Dog’s Sake

I’ve always been an ABC person, but I am so fed up with the amateur idiots running it at the moment that I will have to make yet another complaint.

If I’m watching ABC News24 I must know what I’m watching and why. You don’t watch a channel like this just for fun. I wouldn’t be just casually channel flicking. So why do I have to be endlessly, constantly told what I’m watching and who it is speaking?
It appears we are never to be allowed to see the lower 20% of the screen and must constantly be told what we’re watching. Plus suffer the endlessly flickering state temperatures, and endless repeats of headlines, and endless summaries of what was said 10 minutes ago.
I am sick of it. ABC complaint number 437 coming up.