“For reasons that still remain obscure, Abbott got it into his head that wind and solar power were the enemy and had to be crushed, while the fossil fuel incumbents, particularly coal exporters, had to be glorified.

“Never mind that around the world, renewable energy industries are emerging as real industries of the future, while coal seems to be in terminal decline. Facts like these had no impact on Abbott’s apparent loathing of renewables.” [The Conversation https://theconversation.com/with-a-single-sentence-malcolm-turnbull-can-end-tony-abbotts-war-on-renewable-energy-47694 ]

This was bizarre. How could such an idiot ever have been thought suitable to be the Prime Minister of Australia? He did serious damage to the renewable energy industry, including stifling investment, job creation and employment, for no good reason whatever. This was just madness. This man was a Rhodes Scholar, but to me he just wasn’t intelligent. He was a slow thinker, said the wrong things and made utterly weird decisions. I listed some of them a couple of days ago but the list of his stupid, silly things is huge.

We can only hope that the new PM will end the madness, but I’m not counting on it. Already Turnbull is showing that he is ready to repudiate his own previously held positions. He’s a coward. He knows that evil is being done on Manus Island and Nauru, but he won’t speak out against it.

Different leopard, same spots. He’s changed his views to appease the dinosaurs of the Liberals and the Nationals. He’s a coward.

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I’m writing this on the new Acer CB280HK 28″ 4K monitor. Wow. It’s beautiful. Absolutely smooth edges – the pixels are completely invisible. No more squinting to read the 10pt type in my Photobooks. I can easily read the text and it shows up my typing errors straight away. Too many times I was only discovering the errors after the book had been printed and delivered. It was very frustrating.

But there are some bizarre effects. I’ve discovered that my password storage program won’t show the password data! The headings are there, but the data spaces are blank. This is crazy. Why would changing the display cause this? It’s not fatal – I can double click on a record to put it into editing mode and the data shows up then. I dunno, Windows is utterly mad at times.

I upgraded to Windows 10 on my laptop last week and I’m not sure about it so far. The upgrade went OK, taking about an hour, but when it finally booted up, the screen res came up at 1600×1200 (native for the LCD screen is 1920×1080) and the text size came up as 125%, so it looked awful. It took a lot of fiddling to get it right.

I can do the upgrade on this desktop PC whenever I want to, but I’m holding off until I’m sure everything is ready. I’m making sure all Win updates and fixes are installed, then doing a full backup so that I can go back if I have to. Won’t be too much longer.

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I had a hypo (hypoglycaemic, low blood sugar) attack yesterday morning while I was out, in a cafe (oh, OK, it was a McDonalds for breakfast). I can easily recognise it and I had my jelly beans in my bag so I got through it, but urrrgh, it’s not a nice feeling. It’s just a matter of drinking an OJ and eating the sweets and waiting, but I was perspiring and woozy and feeling shaky and sick. Not good. But the funny thing is that my BS on rising was 8.2, and when I measured again when I got home, it was still 8.2, even after eating all that sugary stuff. Odd.

I felt pretty tired after it so I went back to bed and slept for another three hours. Doesn’t happen very often.

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I’ve been urged to do more travelling and a flyer has turned up advertising a cruise from the UK to Sydney via Fremantle. It’s in September next year, so plenty of time to think about it.

The thing is, it’s 46 days, nearly 7 weeks, and goes from London, through the Mediterranean with a couple of stops (Italy, Greece), then through the Suez Canal, round to Dubai, then to Cochin in India, Phuket, Malaysia (Penang, KL), Bali, Fremantle, Margaret River then on to Sydney. Many other stops on the way. $6,999.

It attracts me, but I immediately remember the crowds and the awful queueing, plus the very expensive costs in getting off the ship and onto the bus tours in each port. These would add another $2,000 – $3,000 at least.

Nah. A business class round world air ticket would be about the same price, I think, and much more flexible. Something to think about.

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Still no action on the car idea. I’ve asked Barry to see about getting a test drive on the John Hughes CLK500, as I’ve never even seen one of these, let alone touched one or sat in it. I might not like it.

One thing that puts me off is that it’s so black. Black exterior, black interior. It’s very boring. All these Mercs are either black or silver. It’s rare to find any other colours, except grey. Boring.