Fortress Australia  ©  PJ Croft 2014

I got an email from a friend this morning that, at first, I thought was a good joke. It shows a boatload of grey haired Seniors rowing on the ocean (supposedly).  I thought the joke was that Seniors are leaving Australia for a better life in Indonesia after Abbott and Hockey’s horror budget.

Then I read further down and realised it’s yet another attack on so called “illegal immigrants”, saying the Seniors were going to row back to Australia, be taken ashore and given via Social Security “far more benefits than they were entitled to as Australian pensioners.”  I’ve replied to all the recipients of this email in the following terms:

It is NOT illegal to seek asylum from persecution in another country.  The constant lie by Abbott and Co. that they are illegals is utterly reprehensible. When assessed by immigration, 97% are found to be genuine refugees. 97% !  And they do NOT get far more social security benefits than Australians.

As you can tell, I am very angry at the racist attitudes in this country.  It is based simply on fear of foreigners.  There is NO orderly queue at embassies for visas for these people.  They would be killed and their families targeted if they stood outside Australian embassies wanting visas to escape their countries.  Read up on the Hazaras.

As you can tell, I’m rather passionate about this. Call me a do-gooder (as one of my former racist friends did – stand up, Pete), but I am sickened by the cold, racist, xenophobic cruelty coming from this country.  Jailing people who have committed no crime, with no hope of release.  Jailing pregnant women and their children, with no schools and no hope.  I am sickened.  Not in my name!  I didn’t vote for this.

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I was going to post a picture above from the March P&O cruise, but I’ve just realised all my pictures from the cruise are gone! Bloody hell.  I immediately thought, backups, but there are none.  There may be copies on the laptop that I used on the trip. I hope so.

UPDATE 1pm:  Yes, thank goodness, all my pictures are still on the laptop. Phew! Now to burn a DVD for further backup. (A DVD? How about 5 DVDs so far and I haven’t finished the transfer,)

This move to a new computer has cost me dearly. I lost my entire Images drive.  I had a backup, but it was from December last, so all my recent stuff may have been lost.

And despite all my efforts to fix it, I’ve lost my Video drive too. About 1GB (Ooops! 1TB) of video.  I have all my Europe 2008 material on DVDs somewhere, if only I could find them.  They must still be in an unopened box in the garage.  I hope.  Trouble is, I can’t remember what I had, except vaguely.  The lesson is, BACKUP!  I’ve bought two new 2TB drives for that purpose and will make copies of all my stuff for storage on the shelf as soon as I’ve got organised.  At a price of $105 for 2TB, it’s not too expensive these days.

UPDATE 2:  All my Europe 2008 video was on a spare hard drive, so I’ve copied it all over to the new Video drive (3 Terabytes in size!) and it’s not lost.  Even many of the image stabilised copies of the clips, which involved many hours to do, were there too.  Thank goodness.

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It’s also made me dig out all my CD-RWs that I built up since 2000, and the great news is that they are all fine.  There were only two files that couldn’t be read.  So provided they are kept in good conditions, I see no problems with using optical media for storage. Most of these discs dated from 2000 to 2005, and many of them were BigW cheapies, yet they’re still OK.

One interesting thing is that one CD-RW seemed to be empty, even though I’d labelled it with its contents. I think it hadn’t been finalised.  But I put it through software called Recuva and bingo! It retrieved all the files, about 40 of them, all fine.  Recuva is free (shareware) software – I think I’ll have to make a donation.

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Well, my landscapers haven’t come back. That’s about two weeks so far since they left with the job unfinished.  They started to accuse me of not paying their bill, but I paid the first two 25% installments on the day I got the bills.  I’ve now paid another 25%, but that hasn’t brought them back.  I’m not paying any more, that’s for sure.

I had no dispute with them.  We got along fine, I thought. But I’ve ended up with a part finished job and the wrong type of lawn laid.  I never even once mentioned Sir Walter, asking for Buffalo Palmetto twice and even pointing to a picture in a Stratco flyer.  But I got Sir Walter.  It’s supposed to be good lawn, but it’s not what I asked for.  Quite coarse.

Oh well, I’ll get the paving slabs myself (they’re only 20mm thick so not too heavy) and get someone in to lay them.  I’m buying compressed coir soil blocks from Bunnings to lay on the ground, then I’ll get someone in to bring trailer loads of potting mix for the top.  The retic pipe is there, it just needs the risers fitted.  Not much to do.  And I’ve got a healthy West Indian Lime tree ready to plant. Yum.

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I just tried to make a coffee but my BigW Caff Italy machine has failed again, in the same way the first one did back in January.  It just stops dead and beeps.  Nothing I do will get ti to work.  Oh well, take it back.  That’s what you get for buying cheap ($50).

But my BluRay player wasn’t cheap.  My full sized, full price ($129) Pioneer BluRay player has failed again – dead, won’t turn on. This is the second time it’s failed.  I took it back about a month ago but it worked in the shop.  Couldn’t make it go wrong.  But it’s failed again now in the same way.  I’m going to ask for a brand new one, and even try for another brand if I can get it.

The Rank Cintel Mk 5 film scanner of the 1980s. We had one.

Back when I was a big dog at Channel 7 🙂 , flying spot telecine machines were huge, seriously expensive, needed constant adjustment and broke down all the time. A flying spot telecine (above) is a film transport (16mm and 35mm) where a very bright spot of light is produced by a very expensive CRT, passes through the film and is picked up by camera tubes, three for R, G and B.  The spot of light is swept back and forth across the tube face, hence scanning the film frame as if it were a TV in reverse.

If working well and well adjusted, the results could be superb, well, for an SD analogue output anyway.

Then digital came along and the film frame was projected onto three CCD sensor chips by a conventional light source (lamp). Each chip (R, G and B again) output stayed digital as it was processed in the machine, then was output to an analogue TV signal in the normal way. This should have been a huge improvement. If only the damn machine worked!

They were made by a long standing, very well known and prestigious British company called Rank Cintel, who were the premier makers and had most of the market. The machines cost around $250,000 in the 1990s. As I say, when they worked, the result was superb but we quickly learned that you couldn’t put it direct to air because it would stop working on air.  We always had to record the output to videotape so that we could stop and fix the failures as we went. It was hugely time consuming because someone had to attend the machines to make sure it went through OK.

My jaw dropped this morning when I read that a fairly small Melbourne (Australian) company called Black Magic Design has bought Cintel and has produced a film scanner that outputs 4K Ultra HD (3840 x 2160 pixels) and are selling it for US$29,995!  We Aussies have taken over this British company and are topping them at their own game. You’ll forgive a bit of chest beating after all the hassles we went through in the 1980s and 90s.

Knowing this little Aussie company, I have no doubt it will work and be reliable.  This Black Magic company is amazing. They are turning the video and camera world upside down.  They have produced three small HD digital video camcorders that take interchangeable lenses (I have some that will fit) for a price that starts at $995 and up to $2,995 for more features.

This is a High Def video camcorder that takes my lenses, for $995!

Then in April they introduced a full sized studio camera (actually a shoulder mount camera) for $5,995.  This is 1/10th what this type of camera used to cost, and no tape to worry about. Not even special cards, just ones you can buy in any good photo retailer.  The broadcast world is buzzing.  These things are actually available to anyone at these prices. This is 1/10th what things used to cost, with fabulous output quality.

This is every news cameraman’s or independent video cameraman’s dream.

A portable, almost pocket sized HD video recorder!

This is another of their products. Just slide a SATA SSD drive in (available over the counter at any computer shop for not many $$s) and you have a battery powered portable, pocket sized Hi Def video recorder, connected to your camera by HDMI.  $345!  There was nothing like this when I was working, only 14 years ago.  All video recorders used tape and cost upwards of $50,000.

And now the film scanner above.

The old film scanners used to be the size of one or two fridges and weigh about the same. This seems to be small and light enough to mount on a wall.  I’ll bet it’s reliable too.  This is not all –  http://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products  Great stuff from this Australian company.

Oh yes, why do we need it? The new TV/video standard is called 4K or Ultra Hi Def, but there’s almost no material to broadcast or stream. There is a huge amount of 35mm film though, of superb quality.  This machine will be used to convert old 35mm movies and docos to 4K UHD for distribution. It would repay its cost very quickly, I would think.

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I saw something I’ve never seen before on Monday. At Whitfords shops there were two armoured truck guys loading money into the back of the truck. The money was in clear plastic bags and there were masses of them, all obviously heavy with coins.  I saw at least one full of $20 (red) notes too, great bundles of them.  I stood and watched out of sheer fascination, but I didn’t go too close though.  I just grinned and said, “I’ve never seen anything like this before”, and moved on.

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Listening to the radio this morning about rules for kids’ play at schools these days, one woman said she’d been counselled by the school about what her son could and couldn’t do. She said, “I felt quite emasculated.”  Ha ha.  You were emasculated before you were born, lady. You obviously don’t know what the word means.

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I got my latest blood test results yesterday and even though I’m on insulin now, with very fluctuating blood sugar levels, my HbA1c was only 7.1, and well down from the level 3 months ago. Whacko. All other tests were good, except for one, and it explains why I’ve been feeling so low for months. Luckily it’s easily treatable and not damaging, so I start treatment tomorrow (topical cream).  I’m hopeful of a big boost.  I hope.

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Addition:  What a beautiful graphic — http://www.5wgraphics.com/img/newsletter/50-years-of-exploration.jpg

Tough but fair?

“Many [medical research scientists] have said they are torn by a budget that provides the new pot of money, in part by charging people to visit the doctor, but also cuts $80m from co-operative research centres, $111m from the CSIRO and $75m from the Australian Research Council.” [ABC News]

“Low-income couples with children and single parents will bear the brunt of the Abbott Government’s first budget, losing up to 15 per cent of their disposable income when the measures hit in full, according to independent modelling.

The findings from the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling (NATSEM) at Canberra University stand in contrast to the Government’s insistence that the budget is “fair” and “shares the burden”.” [ABC News]

“We’d estimate around 1.2 million families that would be on average around $3,000 a year worse off by 2017-18, whereas the top income groups – so the top 20 per cent of households – would have either no impact or a very small positive impact,” [NATSEM via ABC News]

Liberals lie to you, without compunction.  Liberals look after their rich mates.  Don’t blame me.  I voted Labor.

Try some of this Tony.

“The National Commission of Audit chairman says people are visiting the doctor more than 11 times a year and he doesn’t believe Australians are “that crook”.

“Tony Shepherd’s audit report recommends the Government introduce a $15 co-payment for people to visit their GP, which he says “will give people cause for thought over whether they really need to go”.” [ABC News]

This disgusts me. The Commission of Audit chairman makes a wide generalisation about people’s health, an area where he has no qualifications or expertise. He decides people need to be discouraged from visiting their doctor!

The ABC’s Fact Check proves that his statement is wrong. The average number of doctor visits is around five per year, not 11.  It says that if you count small procedures such as skin cancer removals, the average is nearer seven visits per person, but he’s still wildly wrong.

People need to be discouraged??! Who is this guy?  I’m having trouble with blood glucose control at the moment and I’m making a lot of visits to try to fix it. Perhaps I shouldn’t bother going, then see all the complications that can develop and cost Medicare even more for major treatments?

This is the rubbish a businessman/accountant speaks.  If he’s wrong about this, what’s the rest of his report worth?

“The Business Council of Australia today announced the election of Tony Shepherd as its new president for a term of two years effective Friday 11 November 2011.

Mr Shepherd B.Comm. is one of Australia’s most highly respected and passionate business leaders”  [The Business Council of Australia web site]. 

As I said … This $15 co-payment is a regressive tax. It will hit the poorest people the hardest, while for high income and wealthy people, who generally have better health, it will be no more than a loose change pin prick.

Speaking of pricks …

The hip is much better today. Thanks for asking. 😦  I don’t know why it was bad yesterday but nearly OK today.

I’ve got a GP appointment this afternoon but I’ve had to book it a week ahead.  This is wrong.  I’m still having trouble with blood sugar control and a week is doing me damage.  I need an appointment next day if not sooner.

I had to switch to another GP at the Medical Centre nearly a year ago because I couldn’t get in to see him unless I booked about 7-10 days ahead. Now the same thing is happening with this GP.  I think they’ve taken on too many new patients, or have too few doctors.  I’d go elsewhere, but I doubt it would be any different in this area and I’ve established a relationship with my present GP.  I don’t want to break that.  Problem.

© P J Croft 1989, 2014

If it’s not one thing, it’s the next. My right hip is on fire. I can get around the house with some difficulty but it’s a bit inhibiting. Of all the times to happen! I’m a bit booked up, surgically speaking, at the moment.

Speaking of bookings, I’ll be having an overnight stay in the Mount Hospital on Wed 28th, so I’ve booked into the hotel next door for the night before, and the Thursday night. That way I can catch bus and train in and out of the city.

That’s if this hip will let me.

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The Booo! is for Western Power. The power was off for four hours last night. Four hours! From 6.45pm until 10.45pm, then on for about 15 mins, then off again for another 15 mins, then finally on again at about 11.15pm.

I have candles and I was able to use the laptop to watch about 70% of a DVD (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), but then the battery died. It’s too hard to read by candle light, so I listened to a CD on headphones for a while. I would have gone to bed, but I can’t because I need my CPAP to sleep. So I just sat in the dark with my thoughts for a long while until the power came back on. Grrrr.

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I’m still setting up this new computer. Kerrumbs, it takes a long time. So many programs, so many web downloads, so many passwords, so many serial numbers. I’m only about 2/3 of the way.

No, I haven’t got my Video drives back yet. I have a feeling I’ve got the striped drives mixed up. If I can figure out which two drives go together, I might get them back. What’s that? They weren’t marked? Er, no. Nor backed up. I was too complacent. I’ll be extra careful from now on …

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I’m typing this on the new PC with an ASUS 19″ LCD monitor I bought a few years ago for this very purpose, as a second monitor. But this is a LED backlit LCD monitor, and wow, it looks good. Better than my 10 year old 24″ Dell LCD with its old style fluorescent tube backlighting. That’s taking 10 minutes of warm up time these days.

Which is a long way of saying there’s a new Samsung 28″ 4K computer monitor out now – 4K means a resolution of 3880 x 2140 pixels, four times the HD spec. The pixels are so fine they are invisible. Price – $748. I think the Dell will have to retire (to a good home) soon.

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Great rain! I was driving home along Marmion Avenue yesterday morning and the rain was so heavy for about 5 mins that I was considering pulling off the road as I could hardly see. I was down to 60Km/h in the 80Km/h zone.

But that didn’t stop the lunatics passing me at the full 80Km/h or more in this heavy rain, with no lights on. To me, this is criminal negligence.

Which reminds me of the ABC local radio announcer who was freely, laughingly, admitting a couple of years ago that she didn’t know what half the switches on her car dashboard do, including functions of the light switch.

Criminal negligence, lady. If you’re driving without knowing what you’re doing, you are negligent. Never overestimate the intelligence …

Holy crap. I’m in a state of shock. Not for any health reasons – it’s these damned computers. I’ve not only lost my Images drive, I’ve lost my Video drive as well. This is gut twisting. I need some of the above.

I had a backup of the Images drive, so I haven’t lost everything, but the last backup was December last year, so I’ve lost any changes since then. I’ve paid $82 on-line for data recovery software and after more than 6 hours of crunching, it appeared to have recovered everything. I even get thumbnails of the images when I look in the folders it’s recovered, which made me think it had worked. But when I try to open the file, it’s corrupted. Damn, damn, damn.

But the Images drive is a different matter. This is (or was) a pair of striped drives, with data shared across them. You can’t have one without the other.

This one I don’t have backed up. It was always more than 1TB, which a couple of years ago was too big to back up. Now that we have 2TB drives, I could have backed up, but I hadn’t.

The amount of work I’ve lost is huge. I have most of the original video files on DVDs, but it’s the data files produced by my editing and slide show software that can’t be recreated.

I’ve got the new computer up and seemingly stable now (but only after it had a corrupted BIOS!) so that’s one consolation.

What a disaster this has been. It’s taken a week so far of failed Windows installations and damaged drives. I wish I’d never started this. I’ve still got days or weeks of work ahead to try to get back to where I was. At least I don’t get bored.

I must also say, I am sick of seeing the Windows circling “Please wait” symbol! So often, something I do seems to take minutes of waiting, if it works at all. I just tried to record a DVD on my old (stable) PC and nothing would proceed. I gave up after minutes of seeing that damned circle, got the stupid error messages, managed to get out of it, but now the DVD drive has gone missing from the list of drives and the tray won’t open! It’ll be OK after a reboot, but bloody hell …. !! Windows is so fragile. It’s almost enough to consider ditching the lot for a Mac. I am so sick of Windows!

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If it’s not one thing, it’s the next. My right hip has been very slowly developing twinges for the past few years, but since last weekend, it’s suddenly got quite painful. I’m limping at times. I assume this is future hip-replacement territory. Ugh. Yet another reminder that age is creeping up.

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The side as of yesterday when they left.

The side after all the quartz chips had been removed.

My landscapers seem to think they’ve finished my job. I’m not dissatisfied, but there’s still work to be done as far as I’m concerned. The RH image is as it was left yesterday.  Yet they’ve given me their final bill. I haven’t paid it, yet.  I wanted pavers laid, but I couldn’t get them to understand what type I wanted. In the end I said Stop – I’ll choose them myself.

This was just green weeds when I bought the house.

I’m not sure why I’m doing this! This is not an area I’ll use. It’s just for the appearance really, and resale value of course.

That’s better! The reticulation works too.

Rail Master control panel. $349

Phew! Had the colonoscopy this morning and “all OK”. Only one polyp, which was removed, otherwise no problems. I am very relieved. I lost 3.5Kg in the pre-op diet regime and I feel another 5Kg lighter with all the relief from tension. So what did I do when I got home? I walked over the road and had a Hungry Jack’s Whopper and chips for lunch. Yeah, I know, but this was a comfort reward, and I had Diet Coke with it. That makes it OK. Back to the high fibre foods from now on. They really are beneficial.

It’s weird. You have no warning at all – one second you’re looking at the wall in the operating theatre, the next you’re waking up in the ward. There is no sensation at all of going to sleep and no sensation of time passing. Thank goodness we have the ways to do this.

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The photo above is a replica locomotive control panel, a physical embodiment of my train simulator control on the computer. I’m using software called Trainz which simulates, um, trains, on dozens of different routes in a score of countries, including Australia. You can either be in the driver’s seat looking forward, or outside the train watching it from some distance away. It has full sound effects and all the lineside scenery and stations and towns are as realistic as the computer allows.

With this new controller, arriving any day on my doorstep, I can actually push and pull the levers and push the buttons to make things happen. I don’t usually play games, but I do like this one.

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One problem is that my “old” computer, this one dating from 2009, is a bit slow for this simulator game and the scenery is very jerky. I’ve built up my new machine with a much better graphics card, so I’m hoping for a better result.

BUT! I’ve been building and fixing computers since the late 1980s and I have never had as much trouble as this one. It seems to be corrupting hard drives. I seem to have irretrievably lost my Images drive, with over 30,000 images on it. I knew there were a few bad sectors, but the whole thing is gone now. Attempts to revive it have failed.

It’s also lost my striped pair of Video drives. It showed them working for a day or so, but they won’t show now. I’ve had to disconnect them because if I lost them, I don’t have a backup – they were too big to back up.

OK, so I decide to start again and reinstall Windows for the third time. But I can’t get past the Setup stage, either from the actual Windows 7 DVD or from a Win7 Boot and Repair disk I have. It just spins its wheels in the Setup phase, never going any further. What the hell is going on?

Neither will the motherboard retain its BIOS settings. I have to go into the BIOS setup each time to make it boot from the DVD drive.  This is crazy. I’m beginning to wonder about crying “Faulty” on the motherboard (Gigabyte). So I’ll just plug on and see.

The wrecking crew, Channel 7 1994. We were dismantling our old friend, the Ampex ACR25 cart machine. We were sad about that, hence the black armbands (made from 2″ wide videotape).

Hmmm, colonoscopy on Monday. Bit apprehensive.

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Schadenfreude. Taking pleasure in someone else’s discomfort. The NSW Liberal government sets up an inquiry hoping to dig dirt and nail Labor, and ends up having dirt smeared all over themselves. The hypocrisy!

The Rabbott and his henchmen bray and crow about Craig Thompson and union corruption, but are being shown to be just the same. Let’s not forget that Peter Slipper was a Liberal member of parliament.  Yet his Liberal cronies absolutely trashed him when he moved to the cross benches and supported Labor. Hypocrites.

And the Rabbott made a huge show last year about Labor’s “Big fat new tax” (the so-called carbon tax). But despite his solemn promises, what have we got? A big fat new tax. Hypocrites.

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Habeas Corpus. “… requires a person under arrest to be brought before a judge or into court. The principle of habeas corpus ensures that a prisoner can be released from unlawful detention—that is, detention lacking sufficient cause or evidence.” (Wikipedia)

Asylum seekers have not committed any crime. It is NOT illegal to seek asylum in another country. Yet they are being unlawfully detained in Australian prison camps without evidence and without being brought before any judge. They are being kept in unlawful detention.

What does it take to get the Australian government, consisting largely of lawyers, to obey the law? They are in violation of the principle of habeas corpus.

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The hum goes on. I mentioned it in the last post. It’s driving me nuts. I’m going to have to complain to the Council.

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I was almost finished building up the new computer yesterday, and disconnected and removed two hard drives prior to installing different ones. I didn’t touch the C: boot drive.

But it would no longer boot up. I disconnected the new drives, removed and reconnected the cables for the C: drive, tried all the BIOS settings – no go. It seems the partition table had been lost or corrupted. I haven’t had this happen before.

There was nothing for it but to reinstall Windows. Easily done, but a waste of time. Luckily at this early stage there wasn’t anything much on the C: drive that was lost. I just have to reinstall a dozen programs. It’ll take a few more hours.

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As part of this new computer, I bought two external USB3.0 dual hard drive docks. They were listed at Altronics as reduced from $59.95 to $49.95. Fair price, I thought. I took two, as I said.

Then I had a browse in the shop and took two long USB cables and a 1m network cable at an average of about $11 each. Total of about $133 I thought.

I had to wait a couple of minutes at the counter for the guy to come from the back office. He was hugely apologetic at keeping me waiting, then told me he’d give me a discount for the wait. I said, no, it’s OK, don’t worry about it.

But the final bill came to $99.50. In effect the cables were free. I was amazed. And he threw in a magnetic desk toy to play around with.

Altronics, Balcatta. I’m impressed.

I need the caddies because although my new computer case has room for ten drives (eight hard drives and two optical drives, all of which I want to use), there are only six SATA ports on the motherboard. I hadn’t thought of that when I chose the motherboard. The external USB 3.0 caddies solve the problem, though, by adding four more. Just external, that’s all.