Did you think I was finished? I hope I’m not boring you but there is much, much more to come.

When I left off in the last post, I was into Olympus OM and wow! The OM system in the 1980s and 90s was incredibly well designed, extensive and desirable. And through scouring the second hand shops in Perth, I built up a big collection.

I only ever had the OM2 Spot/Program body, just the one, but as I said, I had 18mm, 21mm, 28mm, 50mm and 135mm Zuikos, which were renowned for their smallness and sharpness, and I can vouch for that. I’ve still got the 28mm but lost the rest to a burglary in 1990. More on that later.

Olympus’s flash and macro system was the best on the planet and I lusted after all of it. I never bought their actual macro lenses, but by using highly corrected dioptre lenses (ie +1, +2 and +3 close-up lenses, as they were called), with the Olympus flashes I bought, I was able to get excellent results.

I have, or had, nearly all these things. Wow, I loved the thrill of the chase. It wasn’t just Perth, I was hunting in the shops in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur as well.

One thing I did, after I got into Nikon (which see), was to use a T-adapter to adapt a Micro Nikkor 200mm macro lens to the Olympus OM2 SP body. Why? To be able to use the Olympus’s flash system with the 200mm reach of the Micro Nikkor. It was unweildy, but it worked. Sure, you couldn’t focus to infinity, but you didn’t need to – this was close-up work.

Here’s a shot I took with this setup, i.e. the 200mm Micro Nikkor mounted on the OM2 SP body with an Olympus T32 flash held out to the side on a coiled cord. All the while trying to keep my feet in a muddy jungle grove near Fraser’s Hill in Malaysia.

© PJ Croft 2024

As I say, I still have the OM2 SP body, with a roll of Fuji Provia slide film still in it, waiting to be finished!

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Nikon time …

It had to come. I had talked about my gear with other guys at work who were also into cameras, although no-one was as obsessed as me, and people repeatedly asked me why I didn’t use Nikon, one of the top two brands at the time. I said it was because:

• I didn’t have any Nikon lenses at the time, except the 200mm Micro Nikkor

• I had never liked the way the lenses worked in reverse, i.e. anticlockwise twist to mount, and anticlockwise turn to focus. The opposite of all the cameras I’d had up to then.

• It was an expensive system, although very high quality.

Eventually, I bought a 55mm Micro Nikkor from a pawn shop in Perth. Scatched front element, but for $75 I took a chance (and it was good). Well, that made two Nikon lenses, so I had to have a body, and in about 1986 I bought an FE2.

Auto exposure (aperture priority) but AF wasn’t a thing then. Lovely camera, wonderful shutter sound. I loved it.

Then around 1989, this was released. Wow, I had to have it.

I bought it in 1989 for a trip that Geoff Williams and I did. This was still film days, remember. This was my first autofocus camera, although I only had one AF lens, if I remember correctly, the 50mm AF that came with it. But I still had the 200mm Micro and I also bought a Nikon Series E 70-150 which became almost my favourite lens. The Series E lenses were Nikon’s cheaper lenses to go with their Nikon EM (“economy model”?). But they were extremely high quality lenses, especially the 28mm which I sold to a friend. She loved it.

I also had my 55mm Micro Nikkor (Micro was Nikon’s way of saying macro). It was in a pawn shop in Hay St for $75 and had seen better days. In particular, it had a few small scratches on the front element (how they could do this is beyond me, considering how deeply recessed the front element is). Anyway, in view of the legendary status of this lens, I decided to take the risk, and I’m glad I did. Here’s an example shot with it:

From then on, I used both systems, the Olympus and the Nikon. I also bought a beautiful 300mm f4 IF ED Nikon lens, below. (IF stood for Internal Focusing, meaning the glass elements moved within the lens, so the length didn’t change as you focused. ED stood for Extra Dispersion, i.e. special glass to minimise aberrations.)

This lens cost about $2,000 I think, but to me, it made me feel professional. I was heavily into bird photography and landscapes.

I think the F-801 was the best handling camera I had ever used. The buttons just fell under my fiingertips, I didn’t have to think about what I was doing, it came naturally. I got some of my best shots ever on that trip to Java using this camera.

Disaster!

Then in 1989, I arrived home from work one night at about 11.30pm to find a front window jemmied open and a big lot of my possessions missing. In the lounge room, my Technics SL-P1 CD player and my Nakamichi cassette deck. Also my entire collection of around 100 CDs were taken.

In the bedroom, all three camera bags with all my equipment were gone. A wooden vintage camera was smashed. I was very upset, as you can imagine. All those items above – gone! All the small adapters, rings, filters lost. Years of collecting.

Obviously I called the police the next morning. They came and sniffed around, writing a report, but I didn’t expect any return of my things and I wasn’t wrong. I said something to the effect of “I’d better take precautions in case they come back.” No, they won’t come back, said one of the coppers.

Well guess what – they did, about three months later (see below).

Luckily, I was properly insured and I got a full payout, but it depended on me recalling all the things that had been taken. I did have serial numbers of a lot of the gear, but not all, and for months and years afterwards, I was recalling items that were missing but I’d forgotten about. Not too many, luckily.

However, the insurance company insisted that to maintain my insurance, I had to have a burglar alarm fitted. So I did. It was a full professional job, about $1,000 worth, I think, and it was very effective. More than once, I accidentally triggered it and lived to regret it. It was LOUD!

The Rebuild

From then on, having the insurance money, I set about rebuilding, buying second hand. One thing was – all my CDs, I recalled from my memory. Yes, it took me a few days, but I was able to build the list in my mind and write it all down. CDs had value then – no-one wants them now.

The Return of the Burglars

Despite the policeman’s reassurance that “They won’t come back”, I got home from work one evening to find the sliding glass door to my bedroom smashed to smithereens. Luckily it was afety glass and just smasshed into small pieces, but it meant my house was open to the world. They’d used a jemmy on the lock and it was torn out of the brickwork, but I was able to fix that.

But nothing was taken. I think the alarm must have done its job and scared them out immediately. Good work. I didn’t have dogs then either.

So from then on, I slowly rebuilt a system, not exactly the same, no Nikon bodies, no 300mm, but I did find an Olympus OM2 SP second hand in a camera shop in London Court and bought that. Then, on a holiday in Sydney in the ’90s, I found another 200mm Micro Nikkor in a Sydney camera shop and couldn’t resist it. It cost $800. I know, because it cleaned me out of the money I’d allocated to rent a car and do some touring. Oh well, at least I had a solid asset in my hand instead of money “wasted” on car rental and hotels.

To be continued – the digital age!

It rained yesterday! To my eastern states or overseas readers, that might sound silly, but it’s the first serious rain (more than just a ten second sprinkle) in three months. This has been a record hot dry summer in Western Australia. This is global heating at work, folks.

It’s particularly serious here in WA as we’ve lost around 20% of our annual rainfall on a permanenet basis, since 1977. I can remember noticing that year and how dry the summer was. We used to have adequate dams, which filled reliably every winter, for our water needs. No more. Most of our dams are only 30-50% full and have no hope of suppllying the needs of a city of 2 million people who need to pour water on lawns and gardens.

Our main water supply comes from underground now, but even that’s becoming depleted as it’s not being replenished by the low rainfall. It’s very much supplemented by hugely expensive seawater desalination plants. We have two already and a third is being built now, just up the highway from me, actually.

Anyway, back to more interesting stuff. Cameras!

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After the Pentax departed, I thought I’d found my forever camera, the Minolta XD7.

Wow, I thought I’d hit the jackpot. I loved the looks, I loved the feel, I loved the multi-mode operation. It was an aperture priority/shutter priority/program/manual camera, all the things I liked. I can’t remember how I got it – I think I bought it new on one of my many trips to Singapore in the late ’70s.

I started a small collection of lenses, the 50mm standard lens, a Rokkor (Minolta’s brand) 35mm which I still have, a Rokkor 100mm (which I didn’t like and sold to a guy at work). And most especially, the beautiful Minolta RF Rokkor 250mm f5.6 mirror lens, which I still have right here.

The thing about this lens is that it was so small and light that I thought I could hand-hold it without camera shake. But I couldn’t. It was deceptive. I don’t think I ever got a sharp image hand holding it. Even so, I loved using it. Mirror lenses were a big thing in the ”80s and I also owned a Tokina 500mm f8 mirror lens. That was a heavy lens and the weight actually assisted hand-holding. More on that later.

I hold onto the Rokkor 250mm lens these days because things have changed. You can get lens mount adapters now and I’ve got an adapter from Minolta to my Olympus OM-D E-M1 Digital Micro-4/3 camera. This doubles the focal length to 500mm, but crucially, gives me excellent, amazingly good image stabilisation, meaning I can hand hold to my heart’s conntent. And it’s digital!

I also bought a second hand Minolta XE-1:

And I also bought my heart’s desire, a Minolta XM. This was Minolta’s attempt to get the professionals to buy into the Minolta system, (but it was never successful). It’s built as if you could use it to hammer nails.

I still have it! It’s big, it’s heavy but it’s beautiful. Titanium shutter curtains. Interchangeable (removable) prisms. Interchangeable focusing screens. I’ve still got this camera. When I initially bought it, mine had a plain prism, i.e. no light metering. No problem, I used a hand held meter. But I spent literally years looking for a full metering prism as shown above, and finally I found one, second hand, of course, in the camera shop in Forest Place in Perth (before Myer was built, demolishing that whole block of shops). It cost me $150 for the prism but I was rapt! I’ve still got it, and I thought this camera would appreciate in price, as it was always a prestigious camera. Unfortunately, it’s depreciated badly and is only worth about $100 now, the whole thing! However, I still have the 35mm and the 250mm lenses, so I can still play around with it. But film has become so expensive and so inconvenient that I would never bother with it now. Pride of ownership only.

So I had quite a big Minolta system in about 1978 or so. Why did I switch away? Shutter shock in the XD7. That’s when the action of the shutter mechanism in the camera induces camera shake, and that’s what I was discovering. My images weren’t sharp. I can’t exactly remember what I did with the whole system – probably sold it to a guy at work.

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I left off at the Pentax Super A. I was very fond of that camera, so why did I go away from it? Two reasons, (a) a friend wanted to buy it; and (b) I lusted after an Olympus OM camera. It was mainly for the Olympus OM system of macro and flash stuff. It was by far the best in those days, the 1980s. So I sold the Pentax and Minolta and bought an Olympus OM2 Spot Program (OM2 SP), which I still have, although it’s not the same one. More on that later. It’s still got a film in it, too, awaiting me finishing the roll and taking it for processing!

I should add that this was a time when duty free (tax free for overseas travellers) cameras were quite low priced in Australia for some reason (strong Australian dollar, tax 33.3% I suppose) and I only paid about $145 for this camera, brand new. I was rapt!

I quite soon started to build a system and I was finding used Olympus equipment in the thriving second hand windows of shops in Perth. I soon found 18mm, 21mm, 28mm, the 50mm that came with the body, and 135mm genuine Zuiko lenses. In addition, I bought a Sigma 50 – 200mm APO zoom in Singapore. (APO means apochromatic – corrected for all colours to produce fringing-free, sharper images).

Then it was into the macro and flash system, and boy, Olympus had the best system of any maker then. I found most of this stuff second hand:

I owned all these and more. In fact, I still have a lot of this flash equipment stored away in a box that I haven’t opened in over a decade. And more:

I had all this! I bought most, if not all of it, second hand as there was a lot of it available. I had to get rid of the big flash grip at left because it overheated every time I tried to use it. No matter, I had an equivalent Metz unit and flash. As you may gather, flash was very big back then. It’s not so important now due to the incredible sensitivity of digital sensors. You can shoot at ISO3200 or more now, so you don’t need flash, although it still helps sometimes.

More to come, much more!

My post today is a result of my favourite blogger, Mike Johnston, of The On-line Photographer ( T.O.P. ) suggesting that he is going to compose a list of ten favourite cameras, compiled from reader suggestions.

But it will probably be restricted to digital cameras, since film is too, er, retro?

That set me thinking that I would like to do a kind of biography of all the cameras I’ve owned and used since I started in about 1969. That’s 54 years; this will be a long post!

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My first camera (apart from borrowing Dad’s Voigtlander twin lens) was the Praktica Nova 1B.

I remember I bought it from a camera shop (remember those?) in William St, Perth. From memory, with Tessar 50mm lens, it cost about $120 I think, a lot of money then. These cameras were made in what was East Germany, Dresden I think.

It sticks in my memory because when I received my first roll of film back from processing (you had to send Kodachrome off to Melbourne for processing, taking about a week!), it was totally blank. Kodak included a note saying very politely, we think the film has not gone through the camera, due to not being attached to the takeup spool. I was extremely disappointed, as you can imagine. I never did that again. I developed the habit of using my left thumb to turn the takeup knob to check for resistance, signifying that there was film on the spool. It served me well.

Being a Zeiss Tessar lens, the quality of the images was very good, although I seem to remember flare was a bit of a problem. I kept it until about 1972, then donated it to the son of one of my cousins.

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My second camera was a source of great excitement, because I bought it in Singapore on my first trip overseas, to the UK, with my good friend from high-school days, Geoff Williams.

On the right, my travel notebook from 1974. I can still remember buying this camera, at a shop called Evergreen Electrical on the north side of People’s Park shopping centre, New Bridge Road, Singapore. I think I chose it on the basis of good reviews in Modern Photography magazine. Plus it was shutter priority auto exposure – you set a shutter speed and as long as the meter needle was in the zone, i.e. between f1.4 and f22 approx, then the camera set the aperture on the lens. I was a shutter priority believer. This was called “trap needle” automation in Konica-speak. Would you believe, a metal bar inside the camera lightly clamped down on the meter needle, and depending where on the bar, therefore that set the exposure.

It cost me S$468, and since the ratio of dollars then (1974) was A$1 = S$3.70, that made it A$126.49 – a bargain! I bought it with the Konica Hexanon 50mm f1.7 lens and of course in those days it came with the “never-ready” leather case. Geoff bought a Minolta SRT101 with Rokkor 50mm lens, and I remember having a slightly animated discussion about whether he should spend the extra money to get an f1.4 lens. He did. I thought it was a waste and he should have saved money with the cheaper f1.7.

I also bought a Vivitar 28mm lens, and a day later a Vivitar 135mm lens in Change Alley. Wow, what a great time I had. I loved that camera and kept it until 1980 when I sold it to a work mate. *Story to come.

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My next purchase, while I still had the Konica, that is, was a second hand Mamiya C330 twin lens reflex with standard 80mm lens.

This camera was unique for a twin lens, in that you could change lenses. The lenses were mounted on a metal “board” that was clamped to the main body by a wire lever. Crude, but it worked. I also bought a used second lens panel, a 28mm equivalent, although I had a lot of trouble with it, due to the aperture blades sticking. I think a previous owner had tried to lubricate them and used the wrong lubricant.

I owned this for quite a few years and it made a trip to Bali with me, on my first visit in 1980. It was an unwieldy camera to use, having to look down on the viewfinder from the top, on a laterally reversed image. It used 120 size film with 12 shots per roll. There was no snapshooting – each image had to be composed with the camera held at waist level. But the quality of the images was superb. I had a few stored away but they seem to have got lost. I donated it to my neice-in-law, who has repaid me by cutting me off, not speaking to me for more than 11 years.

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In about 1982 one of my workmates asked if he could buy the Konica setup from me. Sure, I said, as I was always looking to change cameras in those days.*

My choice for my next camera was one of my favourites of all my “career”, the Pentax Super A with 50mm lens as shown.

I think this was a great design. It gave Program exposure, Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority and Manual exposure, simply by setting the lens aperture ring to A, or the shutter knob to A as desired, or leaving them independent for Manual. There was a small LCD window on the top plate to show shutter speed.

One small problem was the perspex window in the front of the pentaprism (shown above). This gave light into the viewfinder display, but when blocked off, the viewfinder went dark. This was never a problem for me because I didn’t wear hats, but when I sold it later to a mate, he complained bitterly because he wore baseball caps where the visor covered this window. He implied that the camera was faulty and that I hadn’t told him about this. Hmm.

Anyway, I never invested in Pentax lenses except for a couple of Tamron Adaptall 2 (changeable mount) lenses. I liked this camera because it had a very nice feel to it and I could adjust things by touch, without looking. This was my introduction to the Pentax family and I became a Pentaxian. I still am! I still have a comprehensive digital Pentax system (the K-5) and five or six lenses.

One drawback to it was the self timer switch (with the small arrowhead below the Super A logo in the top picture). This fell under my middle finger when holding the camera, and I grew frustrated at the number of times I pressed the shutter release, only for nothing to happen and to have the self timer start counting down because I’d accidentally moved this switch to on.

I sold it around 1986(?) because the Olympus Spot/Program became available at a very attractive price and I badly wanted to get into the Olympus system for their flash gear. So the Pentax was sold to my baseball-cap wearing friend. Who never read the manual that came with it and constantly whinged to me that it was “no good”, because he didn’t know how to use it. In the end he dropped it and it never worked properly again.

• In about 1984, my workmate asked me at work if I had the serial numbers of the camera, because he’d been burgled and the camera and lens was stolen. “Sure”, I said, and on the spot I said, “The camera body is 586755 and the lens is 7627303.” Seriously. I had memorised them when I went to the UK in 1974 and once in my brain, they stay there. I’ve just recalled them right now to write this. He was a bit gobsmacked. But it did no good, the camera was never recovered.

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To be continued! MUCH more to come.

This post was written last week, when it was incredibly hot. It was too hot to continue writing so I delayed it.

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Pheeee-ew! It is hot! It’s 43ºC today, after 39º yesterday. And tomorrow it is forecast to be 42º, and 41º on Saturday, and another forty degree-er on Sunday, and another on Monday. We’ve already exceeded the record for the number of forty degree days this summer. And we’ve had above 30deg temps for more than ten days in a row, I think.

Luckily, as I’ve said before, this house is well insulated and with ducted air con, I’m hardly noticing the heat. I don’t need to turn it on until around midday, and it goes off at about 5pm because it gets too cold in my TV watching position. I don’t need it on overnight, either.

So with solar power, and the $400 grant from the state government, I don’t need to worry about the cost of running the air con either. Not much, anyway. This is all good.

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I’ve delayed continuing this post for a few days and wowee! The heat goes on. This is the hottest February I have ever known in my 77 years. We had three days of 43degC in one burst last weekend and we’ve had about eight days over 40deg in the 20 days of the month so far. It’s a cool change today, only 37deg! And there’s more to come – the highs will continue on Thurs, Friday and the weekend.

The question is, is this global heating? Is this climate change? If, by some miracle, we reversed the increase in CO₂ in the atmosphere, would the temperatures go back to the mid to high thirties?

I think the answer is, probably yes, but it would take up to a century for any change to take effect, because that’s how long the increase in CO₂ and hence the heating has been going on.

So the answer is, better get used to it. I absolutely do not think we will stop the increase in atmospheric CO₂ (erroneously called “carbon” – carbon is black soot, CO₂ is a gas!)

My house is very well insulated (sheets of fibre in the roof space) and I have ducted airconditioning. I haven’t even turned it on yet today, at 10am.

My cars are airconditioned, and the premises I visit are also airconditioned, so I’m not exposed to the heat much.

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The announcement of all those new Navy vessels today is great, but for cryin’ out loud, where are we going to get all the highly skilled construction workers to build the ships, and all the thousands of new crew members to operate them? Isn’t it clear, skills and experience are becoming so much in demand. But the company I worked for all my working life placed a low value on training.

I worked with a guy, 10 years younger than me but extremely bright, a software programmer who had the ability to easily pick up new software languages.

He wanted to do a degree at Curtin University and all he wanted from the company was to be able to arrange his shifts so that he could attend lectures at the uni during the day, that is, in work hours. He wasn’t asking for time off, just to be able to arrange his shifts to give him time to attend lectures.

The company’s answer was no, we need you here, sorry. It was unbelievable and has not been forgotten.

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_{Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. Ozemandias. Shelley. I don’t think I could live in that building. I’d be too afraid it would topple.}

Aaah, I feel better today. I was able to get quite a few hours of continuous sleep last night and awoke reasonably refreshed. And I’m pretty sure I know why I slept properly – no alcohol after about 7pm. Especially no mixed drinks, i.e. beer plus red wine. That’s a pity. Maybe I’ll try white wine to see if it has the same detrimental effect. Or prosecco – I do like that. Poor man’s champagne.

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Strange, I’m still using Ozempic (semaglutide) the “fullness”” drug, and although I was having excellent success last year, losing 6kg, since Xmas it doesn’t seem to be working. That is, I still feel hungry. And paradoxically, I even feel food cravings. My weight has risen by a couple of kilos and is not going down. Bugger.

I guess the answer is that you have to use a bit of will power (or ‘won’t’ power) as well as the drug. That’s not easy, whereas the weight loss before Xmas seemed effortless. Oh well, shoulder to the wheel.

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My partner bought me a book for my upcoming birthday (bless her) called Interstellar Travel. She heard me thinking aloud about it, something I’ve been thinking about for years. I have ideas about it:

• I believe we’re kind of quarantined in the Universe, by some kind of natural design. A bit like a beetle placed in a deep bowl. No matter how much it tries, it can’t climb the walls of its container. There’s a whole world outside, as we know, but the beetle will never be able to see it or visit it.

• I think there’s a reason behind this: it’s so that each civilisation in the Universe (and I belive there are many, many, in fact countless civilisations), can’t “contaminate” other cultures. We are not meant to visit other civilisations. We are in a gravity “bowl” and are never going to be able, like the beetle, to climb out.

• The speed of light is unbreakable, an absolute limit. Nothing, not even light, can travel faster than 3.0 x 10⁸ metres/second. That also means information. Since we can never even approach that speed (our mass increases according to m = F/a (F=ma) then the faster we accelerate (a), the bigger our mass (m) increases and therefore the force (F) required, so as to limit our velocity. The idea of a spaceship approaching or exceeding the speed of light is ridiculous, according to our present knowledge, anyway. It’s possible there may in the future be some breakthrough in the laws of physics, but it’s very doubtful.

• Even if we did decide to travel to our nearest star, and could build a spaceship capable of such a trip, it would take at least 200 – 300 years even if we could travel at a fraction (maybe 10%) of the speed of light. That means the crew and travellers in that ship would have to live and die on the ship, and breed at least one new generation in the ship. Yes, have sex and give birth to a new crew, at least once. Just think of the sociological and psychological implications. The parents would know that they would never see Earth again, nor would their children, but they would need to be educated with all the human social knowledge required to live lives in the service of the Goal, to reach the new star.

• But what if the children and young adults rebelled? What if they didn’t care about the Goal? What about the potential for serious rebellion, even warfare between the true believers and the rebels? The ship would need to be vast, so could there be a form of segregation?
  
• While the spacecraft is on it’s century or more long voyage, research and development on Earth will not stand still and there is every possibilty that when the present day craft finally arrives, there may be a welcoming committee on the new planet to greet them, having arrived decades before. This would be extremely upsetting for the slow voyagers, having thought they would be the first.
  
• Relativistic effects would mean that time would pass much more slowly for the voyagers compared to Earth time, meaning that the people on Earth would age much faster. Therefore the voyagers would have to accept that their parents and loved ones left on Earth would age and die during the voyage. So they would need to accept that they would not see or be able to talk to their families again.
  
• Even communicating with Earth would become almost impossible as the voyage went on. At present, signals from the farthest man-made objects, Voyager 1 and 2, tiny spacecraft launched in the 1970s and presently past Pluto, outside the Soar system, take more than three hours to reach Earth. It would take days, weeks or months for signals from an interstellar spacecraft to reach Earth, meaning the voyagers would be “on their own”, with virtually no news or hope of messages from Earth. This would be an enormous psychological hurdle.
  
• Huge strides have been made in electronic and mechanical reliability in the past few decades, but reliability measured in centuries? It’s not feasible at the moment. At present, electronics will last decades, but no-one can predict what will happen over century time scales.
  
  In other words, I don’t believe we are at the required level of reliability, and won’t be for a long time.
  Huges strides have been made in electronic and mechanical reliability in the past few decades, but reliability measured in centuries? It’s not feasible at the moment. At present, electronics will last decades, but no-one can predict what will happen over century time scales.
  
• So what happens when (not if) components break down and go faulty? How many spares can the spaceship carry? What would happen if spares ran out? Who would do the diagnosis and repairs? Would the training facilities on the spaceship be able to train the next generation of technicians, and the next? Would there be a new generation willing to take on the training and responsibilities? Probably yes, but probably is not enough, we would need certainty.
  
  In other words, I don’t believe we’re at the required level of reliability, and won’t be for a long time.
  
• What about food? Providing for a crew of probably at least 100 people for up to two centuries will require innovative ideas. Obviously, crops requiring large areas of soil will be difficult. It will be possible to use vast areas of hydroponic crops – we already know how to do this. Animals? Unlikely. The requirements for grazing areas, waste disposal, slaughtering areas, animal husbandry would likely be too onerous. Better to use artificial growth for meat, as we can do already. However, this is another area where reliability will be critical.
  
  It’s one thing to manufacture the required food on board the ship, but variety and innovation will be critical. Imagine needing to eat the same diet, even if rotating on a weekly basis, for 100 years.
  
  I could go on, but the last point I want to raise is motivation. The first crew and passengers will know that theirs is a one way trip and they will never see the destination. They will die on board, hopefully of natural causes.
  
  But this would be a daunting prospect. It would require a high degree of altruism to know that you are sacrificing your life and that of your family without ever seeing the fruits of your sacrifice.
  So a new generation would need to be born on the ship and be taught the objective of the voyage. Popular fiction always shows the crew being in a state of suspended animation, frozen in a deep sleep, but the fact is that we don’t know how to do this. Maybe it will become routine in 50 years or so, but there’s no guarantee of this. And reliability must be factored in again. The cryogenics would need to be 100% reliable. We can never guarantee this.

So I reiterate, I can’t see this human race venturing out of the Solar System to other planets around distant stars in our lifetimes. I’m always open to the thought that some astounding breakthroughs will be made in the next 50 – 100 years which will negate my objections, but I’d be very surprised.

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The other day I found a query on the web: if we set out to travel in a straight line into interstellar space, would we go on forever, or loop around and return to our starting point (even if it took a very, very long time)? This was what a very knowledgable person wrote in answer:

Despite all the possibilities that account for the shape, curvature, and topology of the Universe, traveling in a straight line, even forever, can never return you to your starting point. The combined facts that:

• the Universe is expanding,
• dark energy is causing the expansion to accelerate,
• it’s already 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang,
• and the Universe does not repeat and is not finite on scales smaller than ~46 billion light-years,

ensure that we’ll never be able to circumnavigate the Universe the way we can circumnavigate the Earth. The Universe may, on some very grand cosmic scale, truly be finite in nature. But even if it is, we’ll never be able to know. While we can travel through space as far as we like, as fast as we can, for as long as we can imagine without end, most of what’s in the Universe is already forever beyond our reach. There is a cosmic horizon that limits how far we can travel through the expanding Universe, and for objects more than ~18 billion light-years away at present, they’re already effectively gone.

So there you go. Or there you went. Whatever.

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Finally:

What is it? It’s a printed circuit board made by Tektronix, a USA company that makes ultra high end electronic test equipment. I used to use a lot of their gear in my days at Channel 7.

I believe this is the base PCB for a large test array. You can see the sockets for extra assemblies in the corners. I think it looks fantastic. This is 1960s technology, by the way, long outdated and obsolete.

Aaarrrgh, I can’t sleep. I don’t remember dropping off at all last night and I was feeling so tired this morning that I had to cancel two appointments. The first was for the nurse at the medical centre who was going to change the dressing on me “botty”. I’ve got a boil, y’see. On me botty. It was incredibly painful at the start and was bleeding quite badly. It’s had three changes of dressing so far and two courses of an antibiotic. It’s much better, but not completely cleared yet.

The other appointment was at Joondalup Hospital, the Day Care Unit, for an aged person’s guide to physio, to coin a phrase. I couldn’t have coped with it today.

So after a very light breakfast, I went back to bed and tried to get some more sleep. But as usual, I could only manage an hour. That’s all I can ever manage. Not good. I’m building a very large sleep deficit.

That hour, plus another hour of resting made me feel much better, anyway. * see below

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I think I mentioned that I have a new phone, or if I didn’t mention it, I have. I had to buy it because of the shut down of the 3G network. Although my previous phone was a 4G model, it didn’t have the voLTE protocol. It meant I could send and receive SMS messages, but no voice calls in or out.

The previous phone was a OnePlus 3T and I’d had it since 2017. Not a bad run, and if it hadn’t been for this voLTE bizzo, I would have kept it forever. It was good.

So I chose another OnePlus, Nord something, with, not only 4G, but 5G as well. In theory I can use it as an internet hotspot at speeds of 3Gb/s or something like that. But at a big data cost.

However! I hate it! The software is bloody awful. It’s Android, of course, but it will not leave me alone, constantly trying to force me to install bloody Tik Tok and other stupid applications that I don’t want. Plus trying to force advertisements on me, so badly, so infuriatingly that I’ve had to install Ad Blocker. But even that constantly shows an ad!! Bloody hell! It’s bad enough that if I could figure out how to do it, I would return it. If it’s not too late. I bought it through Amazon.

I’ve realised that I think I can upgrade my old phone to give me voLTE. That would put me in a quandary. I think I should do it anyway, even though I only have one SIM card. I could get another one, of course. Hmmm.

This new phone has a twin lens camera, and the main sensor is 104Mpixels! That makes file sizes of around 38,000 x 28,000 pixels or 100MByte files. That’s far bigger than any of my stills cameras.

Of course, it assumes I have the energy and strength to go out photographing.

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I’m watching Foyle’s War on TV. What an absolutely superb program this is. The star is Michael Kitchen. I’ve never seen him in any other production, yet he’s magnificent in this role. There are quite a few episodes in this series. I’ve seen most of them before but I don’t remember tonight’s. Highly, highly recommended.

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Speaking of TV, I’m almost embarrassed to say that I’m addicted to two other programs on Seven, Million Dollar Sales New York (and the same program set in LA), and Shark Tank which follows it.

The first is all about real estate sales in New York (and LA) and holy smoke, there’s nothing under $2m, going up above $15 million for apartments and town houses. One NY town house this week was four stories and had an indoor salt water pool. Virtually all the properties have pools and the locations with views are all important, naturally.

Nearly all are already furnished and if not, the agent has to arrange to have furniture brought in for the prospective clients, a process called staging.

Today’s program in LA showed a mansion, there’s no other word for it, at $60 million! And the client didn’t bat an eyelid at the price. She didn’t choose that one, but another one at $16.5 million with a decision almost on the spot after a five minute phone conversation with her husband in London.

The other program, Shark Tank, is based on the UK program called Dragons’ Den, where people with inventions or ideas for enterprises pitch their product to people with money seeking investments. The inventors make a short five minute presentation asking for money at a certain percentage of their company. Whether their pitch is attractive or not is the interesting part.

What’s also interesting is the difference between the UK production and the USA version. The UK “dragons” are cold, almost malevolent, very unfriendly. I assume it’s by design. And each entrepreneur is required to walk up a steep staircase before reaching the main floor, meaning they’re somewhat out of breath and uncomfortable as they have to face the dragons.

By contrast, the US “Sharks” are good natured, natural, friendly and jokey, putting the entrepreneurs at ease from the start. Except for one “shark” all the others seem like very nice people. The one exception is abrasive, self opinionated, egotistical (he calls himself Mr Wonderful!) and hard to deal with.

Anyway, the show is entertaining and addictive. I enjoy it very much.

Hoo boy, I am not feeling so great. So weak I can hardly lift myself out of my chair. I’m wondering if this is the chronic lymphocytic leukemia. I’ve made an appointment with the GP for a referral to the haematologist.

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Meanwhile, I’ve got a young guy coming tomorrow to do a string of jobs for me, around 17 of them that I’ve been delaying for far too long. He seems to be a hard worker, saying he thinks he can knock them all off in a day. Nothing difficult, just things that are increasingly difficult for me.

Jeez, he’s a good looking guy. He’s basically English with Scottish and German ancestry. That explains it. He’s 23 years old. We’ll see how it goes tomorrow.

PS: it’s Saturday now and he was here yesterday to do the work. He brought two younger people with him to help, siblings I would guess. He did introduce them but I didn’t catch the names.

One of the jobs was to swap over a radio in the Honda, from an AM/FM standard Pioneer to an almost identical unit with DAB+. It involved sticking an antenna to the inside of the windscreen and running the cable down to the radio – behind the dash.

But I neglected to supervise him and he put the antenna on the driver’s side – not where I wanted it. And he didn’t run the cable behind the dash as I wanted. I’ll have to pull it out and do it again. Serves me right!

But more worrying is that it doesn’t work – no stations. I wonder if it’s even plugged into the back of the radio? As I said, I’ll have to pull it out and look, which means I could have done it myself in the first place. Duh!

I also got him to look at my water feature- a long trough next to my patio which is supposed to be full of water and has a waterfall on it. It’s been leaking ever since I’ve been in the house, so much that I don’t bother to fill it. The young guy reckons it’s a leaking plastic pipe in there. Huh? He said he can’t fix it. I suspect he doesn’t know how, but too bad. It can wait.

At least I’ve had a start made in revamping my hi-fi setup, with the speaker and HDMI cables run. I hope I can get it going soon. I’m looking forward to it.

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A few weeks ago I posted on Facebook that I recognise Israel’s right to defend itself from Hamas, and to take reasonable revenge for the evil attack on 7 October.

But they are going too far! This is not revenge, this is horrible vengeance. This is a new Holocaust being visited on the civilian population of Gaza. This unreasonable, indiscriminate killing of women and children, along with bombing of hospitals, ambulances, schools, refugee camps, food and medicine convoys, anything that moves in Gaza. This is, if not genocide, the nearest thing to it. They have killed 25,000 Gazan Palestinians, most of them civilians. Israel, you are war criminals!

Israel, STOP THIS!! You are as bad as the Nazis who wreaked revenge on innocent civilians during WW2. Stop!!!

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I’m not embarrassed to say that even though I’m an avowed left wing voter and proud member of the Labor Party, I listen every chance I get to two radio programs: Between the Lines, hosted by Tom Switzer, and Counterpoint, hosted by Amanda Vanstone, on RN (Radio National).

Tom Switzer is well known to be of the conservative right, and Amanda Vanstone is a former minister in a Liberal government and was the Australian ambassador to the Vatican, appointed by Tony Abbott, I think. But definitely with right wing views.

These programs are on the ABC and are meant to balance any left wing leanings by ABC journalists and staffers. But regardless of that, I listen avidly and find their interviews to be full of interest. They manage to interview leading figures in both US and UK establishmentds, universities and think tanks, as well as leading Australian intellectuals. I say openly, I listen closely and agree with much, if not most of what’s said. There’s not much difference between right and left in Australian politics I feel. Except when they talk about labour relations and unions. There, I draw a line, as you know.

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One of the topics today was the legacy of Britain, whether it did wrong things in “invading” many countries to make what was the British Empire, and the legacy of colonialism. It can easily be said that the British were arrogant, brutal and savage in the way they took over many territories, Australia in particular. They assumed ownership of all the land which was rightfully owned by the indigenous people, driving them away and actually killing, murdering tens of thousands of Aborigines.

By the way, Aborigine is made up of two words, Ab which is a linguistic term for extra or definite (e.g. ab-normal), and origin, which speaks for itself as original inhabitants.

There is no question that the indigenous people of Australia, the Aborigines, were treated abominably, cruelly, harshly, brutally and are still being treated so to this day! There have been more than 400 Aboriginal deaths in custody, deaths in jail cells at police hands, and not one prosecution has resulted. This is an outrage. Yet nothing is done. The deaths continue. I’m not talking about the past; I’m talking about as recently as last week.

We’re celebrating Australia Day in a week, on the 26th, and I’m not saying we should do away with it or move it to another date, but what I do say is that we should think closely on what it means to the indigenous people and bear witness, keep kindness in our hearts for them. This is their land!

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That leads me to another topic that I think about often, the quality of the colonising people.

I think most people woud agree, that Americans are exceptional people. They are so talented in so many fields that it’s no wonder to me that they are world leaders. Rightfully so in my opinion.

Why is it so? Because from the very beginning, the Plymouth colonisers, who were a group of British people with high ideals who were incredibly courageous in the 15th century to set out across unknown seas to establish a new colony, based on high moral standards. Note: I do not deny that this is similar to invasion, that they assumed ownership of land from the American original inhabitants, the so-called Indians. I know that battles with the indigenes resulted. However, the quality of the Plymouth settlers was exceptionally high in morals and ethics.

They were followed by British people attracted by the similarity to England (hence New Hamphire, Boston, New York and all those “olde English” names which engendered a spirit of ‘home” in the early settlers.

But just as importantly, the early British settlers were followed by Dutch, French, German and Scandinavian people, people of high ideals. People who just wanted to establish a new life for themselves. Not convicts. Not soldiers. People of high morals and above average intellects. Hence Harvard, hence Princeton Universities and so on.

This contrasts with Australia. Our early settlers were convicts and soldiers, not noted for high morals or intellects. I’m afraid this is reflected in our population today. The average IQ is not very high and although there are many fine people here of high morals, we are dragged down by the hoi polloi, the racists, the dumb idiots. As shown by the result of the Voice referendum. So many people were too dumb to understand what “If you don’t know, vote No” meant. I am extremely disappointed in a couple of people I know. I thought better of them.

I’ve just decided to post these proof pages of my book, OK So Far. No special reason.

It’s post Xmas for another year. As usual, it was a lonely time for me. I usually have a couple of mates out for Xmas dinner and drinks, but the “mate” who borrowed my car and wouldn’t return it bowed out this year, (he won’t talk to me any more). That meant the other friend didn’t have a non-drinking driver to bring him and take him home.

Therefore I elected to drive to his place to pick him up. But when I got there, he was waiting outside and said his son has contracted COVID and he didn’t recommend me getting too close. So, no guest for me, cancelled visit. Best idea, but that meant a lonely night. But I’m used to it, eh?

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I’m not without family. I have a sister and two brothers, but despite me sending my usual Xmas/New Year Greetings card, as I do every year, not one of them has bothered to respond in any way. And Xmas Day? You might think I might have got a phone call or two. Nothing. Complete silence.

Therefore I am ANGRY! And so I get labelled as the angry man, too hard to get along with. It’s all my fault of course, isn’t it?

Well, fuck you!! Fuck you!!! I’m in the process of redoing my will and they are going to get an unpleasant surprise when I check out. I’m leaving all my assets to more worthy causes and close friends who have actually helped me in the past 20 years, instead of hindering me. You have no idea of the dirty deeds that have been done to me by family members. I’m writing detailed notes about it all. Chickens will come home.

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I got home and turned in to the laneway where my “spare” car, the Verada is parked. It immediately hit my eye, the rear number plate is missing! I can’t imagine it’s fallen off, some thief must have taken it. The front plate is still there, which says something about the level of intelligence of the thief.

When was it taken? I have no idea, but it was so obvious when I saw it on Sunday evening that it must have been recent. I would have seen it before.

I’ve reported it to the police and they’ve given me an incident number – 15 digits long, would you believe? They’ll keep an eye out for it.

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I’m depressed about this car. When I lent it to KG in February 2022, it was going well, a daily driver. But since he returned it in July this year, 16 months later!, I couldn’t drive it. The rear tyres were completely illegal (since replaced), and the power steering fluid leak is so bad that you almost can’t drive it. And now it’s stalling all the time. I suspect this will be the MAF (mass air flow) sensor needing cleaning, so I hope it will be a quick and easy fix.

But the power steering problem is a $1,000 fix. About $500 for a replacement rack (reconditioned, not available new) and another $500 labour to replace it. I’m depressed. I love the car, but I can’t drive it.

I think I may have to just advertise it at a really cheap price and be honest with the buyer – it needs work. I’ll be losing a lot of money, but it’s costing me a lot of money with every month. Grrrrrr!

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Similarly, I think I’m just going to have to dump the mattress I bought last year. It’s so uncomfortable that I don’t look forward to going to bed. It’s advertised as firm, but it’s too soft! It hasn’t got support at the edges, so I constantly feel as if it’s trying to roll me out. I hate it! That will be $857 down the drain, although it will go to a good cause, the Salvos.

Luckily CHOICE, the consumer web site, has a top mattress recommendation that only costs $479 (full retail price, probably able to be haggled lower). I’ve asked the Salvos if they’ll take the existing one away – yes please!, so it should be easy. (Huh, I’ve said that before and lived to regret it.)

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I’ve bought myself a Christmas present. I’ve finally succumbed to the persistent advertising of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and bought a 12 month subscription for their on-line streaming service. it means I can watch and listen to it on this PC, or on my TV with hi-fi sound.

The offer also comes with a three disc BluRay set of lovely music. Looking forward to it.

I’ve got the hots to change my main speakers. Haha, more money spending. I’ve had a pair of KEF Q7s for twenty years now and they are good, but so neutral that they have no warmth or character. Speakers shouldn’t have a “sound” of their own, but I admit I would like more bass and a bit of warmth.

So I’ve got the hots to buy a pair of Dali (Danish Audio Loudspeaker Industries) Oberon 9s.

Those are a 5″ midrange driver at the top, a 1″ tweeter, and two 9″ bass drivers below. Each 9″ is in its own partitioned and ported section of the cabinet, so they should give adequate bass. They weigh 37kg each!

I haven’t heard them yet, but they’re stocked by a firm in Joondalup, so I plan to ask for an audition. All I’m going on is reviews and they get good ones, as they should. Price? $3400 – $3500. My KEFs cost about $2400 in 2003.

But I don’t need these! I get the urge to buy something at times and have to resist. We’ll see.

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Much more to write, but I have a Silver Chain assessor coming. Gotta close off.