Aaaah, cool. I get tired of the heat after a while, so I’m very happy to have a grey humid cool day for a change. I like change.

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I look at Facebook Marketplace a lot and occasionally I buy something. Looking at cars, I do not believe I have ever seen a car’s air conditioning described as anything other than “icy cold” or “ice cold”.

Listing batteries: I’ve seen battry, bettery, bettry, battrie, battrys, bettries, betry, batry… the low level of spelling!

Teachers, you have failed. Two generations, at least, have passed through the school systems without learning to spell. The standard of spelling is just disgraceful. Even when the word is written on the maker’s label, they still can’t get it right.

And apostrophes? Anything ending in s seem’s to get an apostrophe, whether it needs’ it or not. sic. I roll my eye’s. Potato’s. Tomatos’. Chilli’s. Pizza’s. Kapow, take that.

This takes the cake, though. Talk about confused.

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How about this?

Facebook applies iron fisted censorship of any image posted that contains even a hint of a woman’s nipple or exposed breast. I found this out on the Lost Bali group when they banned me for 48hrs.

Yet the picture above is allowed. It was posted by my female cousin in the US as a bit of titillation for the girls. I don’t care about the picture, it’s just Facebook’s hypocrisy I object to. Talk about double standards!

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I think it’s time I bought and built up a NAS, Network Attached Storage. I have so much on my hard drives that it’s not feasible to back it up to DVDs as I used to do, 20 years ago and if I lost it, it would be disastrous. I’m still lamenting the loss of a pair of RAID disks when I moved from the old house to here. They had to stay as a pair, but one hard disk looks much like another and somehow I got them separated. They contained all my images to that point in 2013. Luckily I had nearly all of them backed up to CDs, but to this day, I still get flashbacks of images that I used to have but are lost forever.

A NAS box contains a motherboard and power supply and can take two, four or more hard drives and connects to your home network. Unfortunately, they’re expensive – they start at around $250 and go to $1,500 or more for the big ones. For what I need, to take four drives, will be about $650. Ouch. That’s just for the case, not including drives. I have about eight on my shelves which I want to reuse, so that’s OK.

The benefits are: 1. RAID configuration, which can mean one drive failure won’t bring the lot down; 2. possible hot-swapping, changing a drive without powering down; 3. networking, meaning more than one PC can access the drives over a network; 4. reliability; 5. ability to access the drives remotely by a client over the internet – access my files in Perth from Bali, for example. And so on. The benefits are clear. It’s just the cost. Hmmm.

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A couple of weeks ago I saw a posting on NextDoor, a web group which tries to link people in neighbourhoods and local suburbs. The post said, “Hi, my name is Amir [or some such name], I’m a boy looking to make some money. Does anyone have any jobs for me to do?”

I didn’t immediately reply but last week I did, saying, “Hi, I want some things done. How are you at washing and polishing cars? How old are you?”

Answer? Nothing. No reply. So much for youth. So much for enterprise.

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I’m looking at NextDoor now. Oooohhh! The spelling, the grammar, the punctuation! It’s almost unreadable. No-one cares, no-one reads their own writing back before posting. I feel as if I’m contaminating myself by continuing. The education system has failed.