Isn’t that magnificent? I wish I could claim credit but I don’t know who the photographer was. I’ve done a reverse image search in Google and nothing comes up.

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The news has just broken a couple of hours ago – the Treasury has said, Oops, we made a miscalculation – the total cost of the Jobkeeper and Jobseeker allowances that the government has been promoting is not $130bn, as we’ve been told for the past two months, it’s only $70bn!

Now, the government have been telling us steadily that they can’t extend these allowances to migrant workers here on work visas, and they won’t allow tertiary education staff to claim them either, although they won’t say why. And the arts. Actors, dancers, anyone on short contracts doesn’t qualify presumably due to cost.

So now there’s no excuse. The government must extend these allowances to the backpackers, migrant workers, arts people and tertiary education staff. After all, if they could spend $130bn, they have $60bn extra they didn’t know about to do it now.

I love Anthony Albanese’s comment today, that the error in the government’s figures about the amount being spent on Jobkeeper/Jobseeker is so big it can be seen from space! Good one.

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My Bali-expat friend sent me this today. It’s a recent shot – either today or yesterday:

Credit: Rio Helmi

It’s Gunung Agung, the volcano in Bali. Ain’t that beautiful? Great shot.

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I reckon this is beautiful too:

What an elegant drawing. I admire it and the draftsman who did it.

It’s the circuit diagram of a Sony portable radio/CD player I used to own. I’d forgotten I had it. I remember I bought it in Singapore in the first few years of the 2000s and it was a beautifully elegant design (I thought). But within a couple of years it developed a fault and after attempting a repair, I realised it used such specialised components that I couldn’t do it. I just had to dump it. That’s the trouble with modern (post 2000) electronics – it’s full of special integrated circuits that you can’t buy except from the maker, and they generally won’t supply.

This is the issue called Right to Repair. It’s been driven by farmers who spend $1m or so on huge harvesters, usually made in USA, then when the software/computer control goes wrong, the country service guys find they can’t get information or replacement software from the manufacturers. Likewise these big LCD and OLED TVs – they’re pretty reliable but they do go wrong and you won’t find any suburban servicemen any more, it has to go back to Sydney or Timbuctoo at your expense. Even if a serviceman tried to offer service for them, they would find they would not be able to get service information or parts from the big makers.

Their reasoning is that a small time service operation would probably bugger things up and that would reflect back on the maker.

But the European Union has said “Not so fast. We’re not going to allow this, it’s restraint of trade” so they’ve brought in legislation (in Europe) called Right to Repair. They mandate that manufacturers will have to keep spares and give out service information, just as car manufacturers do. I don’t know whether this will extend to Australia.

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I’ve had the battery charger connected to the Honda battery for nearly five days now and it still ain’t working. I think I’m out of luck there. I’ll have to spend the money for a new battery.

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I’ve just found out – the new version of Microsoft Flight Simulator is due for release on 28 May, only a week away. It’s supposed to be really something, worth buying just for the pleasure of taking simulated flights all over the world, without needing to do any piloting. All the scenery is from real aerial photos, just like Google Earth. I’ll be buying it.

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Likewise, I’m a user of Trainz Railroad Simulator. It, too, is based on real scenery from rail tracks all over the world. I haven’t used it recently but I intend to.

Kyoto, Sanno-machi area.  © PJ Croft

Oh, the Centrelink insanity continues. This morning I was still curious about the Customer Access Number that I was asked for yesterday, when I didn’t know what it was.

OK, just now I Googled it. One of the results was:

Aha. So I click on this, expecting to get the explanation and I get this:

So in order to get the explanation of what my Customer Access Number is, I have to supply my Customer Access Number. Brilliant.

I’ve never read Franz Kafka, but I believe this is what they call Kafkaesque.

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I’ve also just been reading a long piece by my favourite photography blogger, Mike Johnson, about hi-fi speaker cables and whether they make any difference to the sound of speakers. He’s a believer, that despite cables being quite simple things made of stranded copper wire that has a resistance in ohms and a very small inductance and self capacitance, they can make an audible difference.

My opinion is it’s self delusion. Provided the cable is of a diameter enough to make the cable’s resistance negligible compared to the speaker and amplifier, (which it is), there can not be any serious difference in the sound between a cheap cable and an expensive one. Unless of course, the expensive cables have markedly different resistance, inductance and capacitance to straight wires, in which case they should change the sound! People who think there’s a difference seem to also believe that wire must be expensive to sound better, and the more expensive it is, the better it sounds.

The other point is, although I can’t quote references for this, it’s accepted that when comparing sound sources in a blind test, the louder one will almost always sound better. The matching has to be better than 1dB, a very small difference.

So how do people compare loudspeaker cables? Do they have two identical speakers, matched to very fine tolerances, connected to identical amplifiers again matched to very small tolerances, with a switch which will change between them inaudibly (i.e. with no switch noise, either electrical or mechanical) and hidden behind a curtain so that the listener can’t see which amp is in action?

I very much doubt it. No-one is going to do this at home. They will have to physically stop the sound and turn the amp off, get behind the speaker and unscrew the terminals and swap the wires, then turn the amp back on and resume the music. And at this point, remember exactly what the sound was like before the swap. Bunkum.

Last week I paid $90 for two 10m lengths of figure 8 cable, the thickest I could afford. I don’t know the rating but it’s very low resistance. I’m not going to pay hundreds of dollars for “hi-fi nut case” speaker cables.

By nut case, I tender this as an example:

It’s a Canadian company. They claim that cables have to be “burnt in” before use and will sell you this box – they don’t say a price but offer to burn-in your cables for an average of C$15-25 each, “…translating into more transparency and dimensionality, a deeper/wider soundstage, and deeper/tighter bass information.” Telling someone who is susceptible is as good as making them believe it.

They also say that you need to redo it if your cables aren’t used for a week or more! And that you need to do it for your turntable-to-amp cables because “…phono cables will never completely burn in with the small signal from a phono cartridge. The CABLE COOKER produces a signal approximately 2000 times higher than the average MC cartridge!”

Since the output from a MC cartridge is about 1mV, then 2000 times that is 2V! Wow! That’s really cooking.

I’ve been in electronics for more than 40 years and I have a Diploma in Electronic Engineering. This is pure bulldust, horse shit, designed to transfer dollars from your bank to theirs. It’s laughable but people believe it. They also think donald trump (I don’t capitalise his name any more) is a genius. He says America has a high Covid infection rate because they do more testing. So if they didn’t test, they wouldn’t have a virus problem. Miraculous! He’s an imbecile.

Musee d’Orsay, Paris   © PJ Croft 2020

I wasn’t going to write a post today but I’ve just been provided with some stupid material by our wonderful government.

I’ve just been on the My.Gov website updating some bank details. While I was logged in, I realised that my password is a bit dated and needed changing. OK, I clicked Change Password and was taken to a screen that asked me for my Customer Access Number. Huh?

I have a number that I log in with, given to me a decade ago or whenever My.Gov was set up and it logs me in OK. Try that – no, “The Format of Your Customer Access Number is Incorrect”.  I have a CRN (Customer Reference Number) printed on my pension card – try that. No, same error message.

It’s got spaces in it. I remove the spaces – still no go.

The result is, I give up, I can’t work out what to enter to change my password.

But when I want to go back to the base page, there’s no way back. There’s the Centrelink logo at top left and a Services Australia text at top right, but neither is clickable. I click the back button on my browser and instead of going back to the Centrelink home page, I’m taken to Human Services Australia home page which asks me to Sign In again. I  was never on this page! I just have to go through the sign in again, which involves User Name, Password and an SMS code. Damn.

Second, I decided to add a couple of “Secret questions” as they call them. I clicked on that and was taken to a list of questions about how to do it. OK, I understand, but where do I start? There’s no Go button on that page, it’s purely Help topics. I can’t remember exactly what I did but somehow I had to back out of that page to find the button to add my secret questions.

I did this successfully.

Then I changed my bank account details (very carefully!) It seemed to work, so I clicked an exit button and got this:

This is classic programming bullshit! “Do you want to cancel?” OK / Cancel. Which is correct?  This is still happening in 2020? I clicked OK, which to me meant that I would be cancelling what I’d just done, but it accepted and I was OK. Phew! And people with poor computer skills are supposed to be able to use this web site?

Then there’s this message:

Understand that? It’s like a Monty Python script from Meaning of Life. “The boy on the left of you, unless he’s your brother, in which case you do may defer this message, and last week’s message which may have been in error, unless we say otherwise, may exit by the side door, unless it’s closed for repair…”

It’s gobbledegook. Word salad. Government-speak.

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I said my internet speed has been “shaped” by iiNet because I’ve exceeded the 250GB limit for the month. I’m supposed to be on 250Kb/s but it was so slow this morning that Speedtest wouldn’t even attempt to measure the speed. I’ve had to pay $15 to add a 20GB data pack to get me through until tomorrow night. Grrrr. Not happy.

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There are a few people, prominently Liza Harvey, the leader of the WA Liberal Party and the putative alternative premier of WA, who say we should reopen WA’s borders with the other states. They say it’s bad for business to keep us isolated etc etc.

What they don’t seem to understand or care about is that although the risk is low, people are still being infected by the corona-virus in NSW and Victoria. If they come here and bring the virus here, it’s not just their bad luck that they get sick, it puts at risk the airport staff, the taxi drivers, the ambulance drivers and the doctors and nurses in the hospitals. Yes, the danger seems to be low here, but it’s not a matter of saying “Oh well, it’s only the individual who gets sick.” It’s a whole string of people who can be affected, and doctors and nurses, particularly, die of this infection.

So it is utterly irresponsible for the Liberal Party leader to argue against the WA government to say the borders should be reopened. It’s dangerous until we can be sure there are no more cases in the eastern states. It’s typical of the Liberal Party, both here and federally, to say that business is more important than people. It shows again why the Liberal Party is not fit to govern.

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I’ve said that the Denon Super Audio CD/DVD player I bought about a month ago refuses to play SACDs. Ordinary CDs are OK, but nothing more complicated. I wasn’t too worried because I figured it would be something simple like a dirty laser lens.

No such luck. I’ve had the covers off today and cleaned the lens, but it’s made no difference. Also, whereas the front panel Load/Eject button wasn’t working, now virtually no buttons work on the front panel (but all functions work from the remote, which indicates that the problem is only in the front panel, not the main logic). I’ve also noticed that the tinplate shielding inside is looking rusty and corroded. Urrrgh.

But I’m a tech and I’m used to this. I’m not too worried – I figure if there’s corrosion on the metal, there’s possibly also dirt/gunk in the connectors too, so I’ll just have to remove and replace all the connectors. It only takes a speck of dust or dirt. But:

There’s a lot of them. This is a far more complex unit than a simple CD or DVD player.

There are more outside this picture.

That’s the laser, that blue dot in the middle. Isopropyl alcohol on a cotton bud and wipe carefully, but it didn’t help.

OK, the next step is to dismantle it a fair bit so as to get at the connectors. The front panel seems to only have a couple of ribbon connectors so that will be first.

There are also complete laser assemblies advertised on eBay for about $100, but I’ll do the connectors first before spending that money.

Watch this space.

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Another crazy web page programming error:

Huh? Step 1 of 0?

Social isolation, Bali style.   © PJ Croft 2020

Another lovely day, 19deg but getting cooler. It was actually cold last night wasn’t it? But just think, it’s only 5 weeks until the winter solstice.

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Damn. I found my internet was running very slowly this morning (in fact not running at all until I rebooted the modem). I was going to wait a while before phoning iiNet support. I ran Speedtest a couple of times:

It’s pretty bad when your upload speed is faster than your download speed.

Then I noticed my phone – a message from iiNet: You have exceeded your monthly download limit. Your speed has been shaped to 200Kb/s and will reset to full speed on 22 May at 12.01am.” Damn. It’s the first time this has happened since I’ve had fibre. Oh well, nothing to be done about it, I’ll just have to wait it out.

I’ve been an iiNet customer since April 2013. I think it’s time they started treating me nicer, like unlimited downloads or even a free upgrade to 50Mb/s. I’d threaten to walk, but there are only a few choices in this Hybrid Fibre Coax area. I’ll check it out.

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The Honda battery — while thinking about buying a new one and hesitating before spending $189 or more, I remembered that Silicon Chip featured a design for resurrecting dead lead acid batteries a long time ago, so I looked it up. I found it was first published in 2005 and was called the Battery Zapper. I remembered it because a friend was interested and asked me if I’d build it for him. But the interest waned and it didn’t happen.

I looked it up and found there was a new version in July 2009, so I bought the issue ($9, Paypal, instant access online to a PDF version and a paper copy is in the mail, great).

Unfortunately it uses a few hard to get components and although Jaycar produced a kit, it was $79.50 then and has been discontinued.

However, the article filled me in on how it works and why the battery dies. Sulphation. This Zapper gives brief high current pulses at a rate of about 1/sec to blast the lead sulphate crystals off the plates. I’ve got my Century charger connected and I’ve noticed the LEDs blink at about a 1/sec rate, so maybe that’s what it’s doing, I don’t know.

But the article did say the process can take tens or even hundreds of hours, so that made me think that I’ll just leave the charger to do its thing until either it commences a proper charge or it’s obvious it’s not working. I don’t need to drive the car so I can leave it as long as it takes.

The other point is that spending $80 on a device that may not do anything, on one battery, which may not stay fixed, doesn’t add up. If the charger doesn’t fix it, I’d be better off saving my $80 and just buying a new battery.

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The fuel price for unleaded today – 87.7c per litre! That’s the lowest price in at least 20 years that I remember. I was thinking of filling up but I’m doing so little driving these days that I hardly need any. The Honda needs filling, but with the dead battery I can’t drive it.

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Silicon Chip are selling USB sticks with 60 issues of the magazine (five years’ worth) per stick for $100 each, or $90 for subscribers, which I am now. Scanned copies, that is, in PDF form. Not a bad idea. I’ve got piles and piles of the paper copies, which I never want to be without, but finding any article is a lot of work and they take up a lot of space. I don’t like spending lumps of $100, but I might buy one or two.

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Do you know this woman? You might think you do, but I can post it here without fear of her objections because it’s completely computer generated. Yes, it’s AI at work. There’s a Google web site devoted to artificially generated faces which can be used for any purpose.

Brrrr. Even though it’s another bright sunny day, I’m a little cold. It only takes 1 degree to feel a difference, I find. Still, it’s very nice.

I’ve been taking a nightly low dose anti-histamine, Phenergan 10mg, to help with my sleeping. It seems to be free of side effects, is an over-the-counter medicine and was recommended by my GP to help with my right ear hearing blockage. Apparently it dries out the sinuses. It gets me to sleep easily, at the expense of waking late ~9am and feeling sluggish for the first couple of hours (yes, I know Doris, I should take it earlier, before I go to bed but I forget).

But it’s become a regular pattern – for some reason I wake between 1 and 2am, wide awake. And itching!! Right leg, outside calf, left leg inside knee. Aarrrgh, it’s intense, unrelenting itching and no amount of scratching will relieve it. Worse, scratching risks breaking the skin and when that happens, it bleeds and is hard to stop.

I use a lotion called Pine-tarsil which helps somewhat, but not a lot. I’m even resorting to taking Panadol which also helps a bit, but it takes a long time to work. Night time is not that good these days.

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Early 1972 Blackdown Way, Karrinyup.

Here’s a photo that one or two people might recognise. It’s my parents’ block at 47 Blackdown Way, Karrinyup, in about 1972 as the footings were down for their AV Jennings house being built. You can just see the ocean past the trees.

November 1973 – Dad put in an awful lot of hard yakka building that garage and retaining wall.

Parked in the garage, just visible, is Dad’s Peugeot 404 station wagon. In late 1974 I bought that from him for $400. I drove it for a year or so, then sold it to the parents-in-law of some friends for about the same amount and allowed them to pay me out at $100 per month. A month or two later, it had a major engine failure and like a fool, I said they could forget the rest of the payments. I’ve always been too trusting. It was going fine when I sold it. I didn’t know it was going to break down!

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Call me obsessive, call me a nerd, but it’s a habit I don’t want to break. I keep spiral bound A5 size notebooks and I write down every dollar I spend, every day. I was doing it intermittently during all the years up to 2000, but after I “retired” in October 1999, one of the first things I did was to start this habit of keeping a daily “diary” of my Expenditure. I also write in anything I need to remember and anything worth noting.

But importantly, I weigh myself every morning, in the nuddy just before I step into the shower. Same scales, same time, same conditions. Therefore I have a very long record of my weight and over the years since 2010, I’ve been entering the figures into a spreadsheet and graphing the results. Yes, it’s boring but I only enter the figures every six months or so. I can enter a whole year’s figures in about 2hrs.

Voila: I have graphs for every year, 2010 to now. I’m spurred to write about it because I finally filled in some gaps yesterday and now the records are complete. There are ten graphs but I won’t bore you with all of them:

It started well, but this was the year I started to buy the Bali villa, hence the three Bali visits, and the start of a bad time from the middle of the year on, hence the rise in weight.

By contrast, this was 2013 when I was selling at Trigg, packing and moving and having a bit of trouble as the year went on, hence the weight loss.

2014 was a topsy-turvy year too, with two ship cruises. On the first in March, I gained 2.5Kg in a week with all that lovely food, as much as you can eat, while on the second in October/November, I lost 6Kg in 6 weeks due to illness.

Hmmmm, too much sitting at home since early March. How’s your weight going?

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The developments in America are leading to a new scenario for a novel. How about this:

It’s becoming ever clearer that the president is unhinged. He’s denying facts, making up his own “alternate truths”, displaying paranoia, showing no leadership, peddling false theories, telling even more lies than his usual whoppers, firing anyone who he doesn’t like, agree with or who tries to speak the truth, stacking committees with his own yes men, using his family members as if they were government officials, encouraging far-right activists in violence and intimidation and stacking the supreme court with his own choices who will take the right wing Republican line. And that’s before breakfast.

Very disturbed at the direction this is taking and aghast at the decline in leadership and prestige of the United States, a group of powerful figures start to meet informally to discuss what can be done. The meetings are held at private homes, never more than once in each location and in utmost secrecy.

It started slowly with a chance encounter at a Washington restaurant between a former presidential candidate and a former secretary of state. Tentative at first, the discussion grew intense as each let slip his personal feelings of dismay and sadness at the loss of American power, leadership and prestige. That naturally, led to talk of what could be done and the idea took root: to form a secret group of powerful, connected men and women of integrity and ability, with the aim of working to explore options. They agreed to meet again in a week, using the time to sound out other potential group members.

The next meeting was held at the home of the former secretary of state in upstate New York, a weekend home in a secluded, forested location reached by backwoods roads. Present were five prominent Democrats, both former and present office holders and members of Congress, two retired Supreme Court justices, a top constitutional lawyer and surprisingly, two Republicans, both dismayed at the direction their party had taken.

After a light dinner, discussions commenced with a preamble by the former sec-state outlining what she thought their aims should be and what she thought might be possible. That quickly led to the constitutional lawyer speaking of the law concerning grounds for impeachment and the powers of the congress and supreme court. He also emphasised the dangers of taking this path.

To be continued. 😉

Kyoto  © PJ Croft 2020

Another three day gap. I admit it becomes hard to think of enough new material for a daily post, although you might not think it for the way I prattle on.

Still glorious weather, with no end in sight, no rain on the horizon. I did weaken and had a hot shower this morning. Must put a stop to that.

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Glum – the battery in the Honda MDX has died a stone cold death. I don’t know if there was something draining it but I confess I hadn’t driven it for about six weeks. I’ve got a smart charger made by Century, the battery makers, and it’s been connected for more than 48 hrs so far, but there’s no sign of life. $189 for a new one. Booger, this will  be the second new battery I’ve had to buy recently – the Verada needed a new one about August last year.

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No matter how much you like something, you can make yourself sick of it. About a year ago I discovered cashews with the skin on in Coles. Yum! I took to buying a small bag each week. But I think I’m sick of them. I never would have believed it.

Likewise, I’ve been spending a lot of time getting my music collections in order using MusicBee, as I’ve said, and playing a lot of music in the process. Even that’s becoming boring. I’m valuing silence now.

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I just thought of a couple of words to write about: onto and into. And lead.

Onto does not have the same meaning as on to. Nor does into mean the same as in to.

“If you go down the road a bit, then proceed onto the next town…” is wrong. It should be “proceed on to the next town…”  Onto means to place yourself on top of something. He climbed onto the horse’s back. To go on to means to proceed forward.

Similarly, into and in to. They have different meanings. I groan when I read or hear that a batsman (e.g. in cricket) is “going into bat”. What, inside the bat? I know they can have TV cameras inside the stumps but a batsman going into a bat stretches the imagination too far.

Lead and led: for some reason, a couple of years ago it became the fashion to add an a to led, as in “She lead [led] him to the bedroom.” Lead is the noun for the element, that heavy metal, symbol Pb, pronounced “led”, or a dog’s lead, pronounced “leed”. These are not interchangeable. Why some people want to add unnecessary letters and complications is beyond me.

Likewise, lay and lie. Lay is the past tense of lie. I lay down on the bed. I will lie down for a while. Pleease!  Not, “I am going to lay down.”

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Great Eastern Highway     ABC News photo

My brother’s a mathematician and I asked him the question yesterday, does a log vertical scale (1; 10; 100; 1000; 10000 and so on) imply that all the COVID country lines will roll over eventually like Australia’s has? (Because the effect of plotting on a log vertical scale is that the plot points get closer together.)

The answer is, yes and no, but the point is that the USA’s curve is nowhere near flattening, which means they are nowhere near getting their COVID infections and deaths under control. Their curve is still rising even on the log vertical scale, which is quite a frightening thing.

Here we have the “world’s greatest country”, the “world’s richest country”, the “world’s most powerful country” and they’re losing it. They do not have control. Their death rate is still climbing while most of the rest of the world (except for Brazil, India, Russia and the UK, all ruled by fellow imbeciles) has gained some measure of control. The consequences don’t seem to have penetrated the thick skull of The Dump, the Imbecile in Chief.

This pandemic has a long way to play out yet – years and years. The USA is likely to become crippled for a long time to come. They have ceded leadership before this even started and they’ve become pitiable now. The ingredients are there for political instability. I find it hard to believe that good people in government and power in America would let chaos rule forever, especially when it poses extreme danger to themselves. At present, there is effectively no leadership. “Nature abhors a vacuum.” Sooner or later, someone will try to fill the vacuum.

I don’t believe conspiracy theories about China planning this, but I’ll bet there are plenty of Chinese hawks looking to take advantage of this situation. It’s a worry.

And meanwhile, our attention is diverted from Global Heating.

Queen Victoria Building, Sydney 2000  © PJ Croft 2020

What beautiful weather! It was 28.7deg yesterday and we’re promised 24deg today. I can feel it. There’s no wind but the warm air wafts in through the doors. What lovely weather for a pandemic.  Yes, I had another cold shower this morning, yah.

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From ABC News 14/5/20

Wow, look at that! That’s solar power, big time. It’s a solar “farm” in Queensland and shows it can be done. Here’s a wider view:

That looks like a big power station in the distance, converting the relatively low voltage from the panels into high voltage for transmission on wires to the towns or cities.

This country should be doing renewable energy in a walk-in. We have so much area and so much sun and wind. Plus we’re the world’s largest or second largest repository of lithium. We can do it.

But with a federal Liberal government committed to supporting coal mining and coal fired power generation, it will be up to us to make it happen. No help from the government. This is sheer madness.

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I’ve been told Australia has a shocking record of men’s violence against women and on the evidence of the past few days, I’d have to agree. The trigger was the report of a senior executive of Tourism Australia saying that a female host of a current affairs program on TV should be given a slap in the face or a good uppercut to the jaw for being the presenter of an item critical about some aspect of tourism in this country. The fact that she’s just the presenter who only reads the Autocue didn’t matter.

Then there are the reports of marked increases in police attendances for family violence in WA last month. In fact it was the highest number of complaints on record. I’ll wager 98% of them were men’s violence on women.

There’s also all the comment about the retirement of Alan Jones, that Sydney “shock jock” radio announcer. Shock is right.

• Saying that then Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s father, who had just died, probably died of shame.
• Saying that Ms Gillard herself should be put in a chaff bag, towed out to sea and drowned.
• Saying that someone should “put a sock in the mouth of NZ PM Jacinda Ardern”.
• Suggesting Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore should be lynched.

These are just the standouts that come to mind. There are many more examples of his hatred of women. (Yet when I said on Facebook that it’s good riddance, several people leapt to his defence, saying if he won 260 odd rating weeks, he’s someone to be respected. Whaaat?)

Then in the news today, the former Treasurer in the former WA Liberal Party government, who engaged in atrocious behaviour toward women while in office, is going to trial on charges that he allegedly assaulted his partner on three occasions over three years. He was put forward as a potential candidate to be Premier of Western Australia. This is one example of the standards of the Liberal Party.

So yes, although these are just some examples of men’s violence against women in this country, and I agree these are awful, I don’t agree that this proves that Australia has a problem as a whole. There’s nothing to prove “all” Aussie men have these attitudes. It’s wrong to generalise from some bad examples. You could just as easily say all New Zealanders are bad because there’s a high proportion of Maoris in bikie gangs, or all German are bad because there are lots of neo-Nazi groups in Germany.

So yes, highlight the wrong-doers, but don’t tar all we men as harbouring thoughts of violence toward women. Thank you.

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So, I just twice began sentences with “so”. It’s a plague and I usually pull myself back into line but my loud music at the moment is fuddling my brain.

I’m talking about this because I was listening to a linguist on the radio at 3am last night and someone mentioned “plice” as a word they hate. I agree. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone use the two syllables in police for a very long time, including people who speak very properly (“proply”). They “probly” don’t care.

It’s ironic that people who rattle on about literacy almost always say “litracy”.

People are so quick to adopt cliche words. “Shutter” has now become the substitute for close, but it’s worse because it’s used in past tense, “shuttered” instead of closed, but also as a verb, “the store shuttered in response to the virus”. This started less than six months ago, I think, in the USA with one TV report, and it spread like a bushfire. Even ABC reporters here are using it now. For Dog’s sake, shutter it will you!

Another expression is “I’ve got your back”. Suddenly everyone has our backs. Aussie politicians, particularly, latched onto it and this US expression has stuck like Clag whenever they talk about what they’re doing for us. Please, get off my back!

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At the beginning of this virus scare, around early March, I ordered a few sets of facemasks from the Wish website. Several of my orders were notified as “no stock” and my money was refunded. It wasn’t surprising as that time was peak demand.

However, five masks arrived this morning, just when I read a news article that said no, don’t bother wearing a mask when you go out because if there are any virus particles in the air, they tend to stick to the surface of the mask and get transferred to your hands when you take it off.

The article even advised against wearing gloves for the same reason, that any viruses (virii  🙂 ) collect on the gloves, then get onto your hands and face when you remove them. Hmmm, I guess I’ll stick to my hand sanitiser.

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I got my latest water bill this morning – $655.19. Ouch, ouch. That’s the result of my being complacent. I thought I’d found the source of the leak (my toilets) so I fixed that and stopped looking. Meanwhile the underground leak just got bigger. I’m a fool.

People object to high-rise on the beachfront, but I don’t know why. This is the Gold Coast in Queensland. Looks good to me.  ABC News phto.

Ooops, missed three days. I’m still here, still fine, just getting a bit lax. Helped by this beautiful weather. It’s an autumn like spring, or a spring like autumn. Nice 23deg yesterday and again today. I’m still having cold showers – it’s like an addiction, like sucking ice, I suppose. I have a gas-fired storage hot water system but I wonder if I need it. OK, dishwasher and washing machine. Better leave it on.

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Bryce, the lawnmower guy, came yesterday and fixed the water leak in my retic pipe at the front, the T-junction. Now that it was dry, he got it apart and showed me a small hole in the brass fitting where it screwed onto a plastic fitting. It’s clear that a small leak developed some time ago (months) and gradually enlarged itself. Water can be surprisingly abrasive and this hole had enlarged to about 2-3mm diameter. It was half in the brass fitting and half in the plastic fitting.

He also found that a solenoid was showing signs of bad corrosion and swelling, so he replaced it. Then he remade the complicated plastic pipe junction and glued it all together. He left it overnight to harden, then came back this morning and covered it all again with the soil. Cost was $35 for the solenoid, $25 for the other pipework and 1½hrs labour at $60 an hour = $150. Fair charge.

I’d been offered a possible rebate by Water Corp, but it depended on the work being done by a licenced plumber or a licenced reticulation guy. I think they would have charged me a lot more and because it’s a reticulation fitting, it’s unlikely the Water Corp would have taken any responsibility, so I reckon it’s better this way. No notional rebate, but a much lower cost of repair. Job done.

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I must admit I’m feeling a bit complacent about going out now. The infection rate in WA is so low that the chances of picking it up are infinitesimal so I feel a bit blasé. I wear nitrile rubber gloves and sanitise the shopping trolley handles and stay away from other people (but they don’t stay away from me!). I tend to have the attitude, “Well, I haven’t noticed any infection, any sore throat or cough or fever” but by the time you notice this, it’s too late, and you were probably infected nearly 14 days ago.

No, I have to tell myself not to be stupid, to follow the rules. I’m bloody certain that if I got it, with my age and co-morbidities, I’d be a goner.

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A few days ago I showed the switching desk I used to work on at Channel 7:

I mentioned the paper “log” we used, shown in front of Tom on the desk. Here’s a sample of the actual log from 25 September 1965:

This is a typed log from before they had any computer printers. You can see that the station didn’t go to air until 4pm on a Saturday afternoon!

The second program at 4.28.18pm was Sing, Sing, Sing which I think was a Bobby Limb thing. Then the first commercial break at 4.30.57pm was just Pellews 30secs (remember them?) followed by a 6AM PM (radio station) 30secs commercial. That’s all. The second break at 4.41.09pm was just Mills and Wares 20secs (biscuits), then at 4.49.23pm Kolotex 30secs (hosiery).

If I’d been the tape operator I would have needed to be really quick and skilful to switch to local control, shuttle the heavy one-hour reel forward, listening to the sound track for the countdown pips to know when to stop shuttling then take the tape back a bit to just before the pips started, play it until I saw the start of vision of the next segment, note the time on the real-time mechanical tape counter, then subtract eight seconds from that time and take the tape back, park it there and switch it to remote control for the program controller to roll the tape remotely. We all became expert at subtracting 8 secs from any time.  Another page:

This was before my time, Sept 1965 whereas I didn’t start until April 1966.

I still have these pages right here on my shelf just a few feet away, and more. I wish I’d kept the other physical items I salvaged when I left. Not valuable things, just mementoes that would have gone into a bin if I hadn’t taken them home. But the turmoil when I moved here in 2013 saw me give almost everything away. I had a set of manuals for the Bosch VTRs that I specialised in – they went into the bin! They had no value and I don’t know what I’d do with them now except let them take up shelf space and collect dust. Oh well.

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Sydney 2000 Olympics  © PJ Croft 2020

I found a folder (literal folder, plastic) on my shelf that I’d forgotten I had containing a CD and the actual film of my visit to Sydney for the Olympics in 2000. I have a folder on my hard drive of some images from that trip, but these are ones I’d forgotten about. Bonanza.

Circular Quay “big screen”  ©  PJ Croft 2020

I’d guess Svanen is Danish for Swan.  ©  PJ Croft 2020

It was a fairly big deal to have a cruise ship tied up.  ©  PJ Croft 2020

The entrance to the wrestling at Darling Harbour.  ©  PJ Croft 2020

I’m very annoyed that the Contax G cameras I was using with their Zeiss lenses produced slides and negs that are mostly soft in focus! I have two bodies, a G1 and a G2, and I don’t think I’ve ever had a sharp shot out of them! They’re autofocus but it just doesn’t work. I’ve had to apply heavy sharpening for these images. Two bodies and three lenses, all duds. Very annoyed. Time to sell them.

What a shot! It’s the International Space Station transiting the Sun.  © Mack Murdoc + Petapixel.

Phew, I’ve just had the nearest to a close shave in the car in a long time. I drove slowly up to a T-intersection on my well known path to the supermarkets. I came to an almost-stop, looked right then looked left, and in the time I was looking left, a car came from my right at probably only 30-40Km/h in a 50Km/hr zone, but I didn’t see him, or her, or it. My car was still slowly rolling forward and I had to slam on the brakes. It left me shaken. I’ve never had an accident in 55 years of driving and I don’t want to blemish my record before I go.

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Don’t shop at Woolworths! If you do, check your receipt very carefully. There are so many pricing errors, and they are always in Woolworths favour. Overcharging, in other words.

For more than a decade I’ve been noticing this. It’s usually when items are reduced, on special. You’ll pick up the item, but after you go through the checkout you’ll find the reduction has not been applied. Or an item has a reduction sticker on it, but the barcode scanner scans the original barcode and doesn’t see the reduced price.

I will make the statement: you will not get through a Woolworths grocery shopping trip without there being a pricing error, and in Woolworths favour! I’m sick and tired of it. It’s mainly Woolworths, although my local IGA does it to a lesser extent (maybe because I don’t shop there often because they have this problem, alongside their higher prices).

The latest is that yesterday I bought a bottle of Wolf Blass Chardonnay Pinot Noir Sparkling from the cold cabinet at Butler for $7. Yeah, classy eh?

When I got home, I found I’d been charged $12 which was the price on the edge of the ordinary shelves.

Today I  went back there, armed with a photo of my bottle on my phone to compare, and found I was right, the price was $7. I called a guy over and pointed it out, with my receipt. He didn’t say anything but went back to the counter and talked with another guy there. Then he came back and had a closer look at the $7 yellow price tag, went back to his mate and had another talk, then beckoned me over and just said, “Got your card with you, mate?” No apology, no friendliness, just that.

After I got my refund of $5 (nearly the price of the bottle and possibly the cost of driving there!), the big guy said “Enjoy the rest of your day.” I replied, above the noise of someone being reprimanded for going the wrong way around the counters, “For a long time, I have found I cannot get through a Woolies shop without there being a pricing error. This is the latest one.” The guy still didn’t apologise, he just shrugged.

Dammit, I’m tired of this. I’ve been noticing this since my Trigg/Karrinyup days when Woolies was my only real choice.

In contrast, Coles are exemplary. The difference is really noticeable. I usually check my till receipt when I get home but very rarely do I find an error, so rarely that I don’t need to check until I get home. If I have to shop at Woolies, I always sit down outside and check the receipt before I leave. This is atrocious. Sometimes I wonder if it’s deliberate. It’s a good way to keep the profits up.

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No doubt some people will call me a fool for allowing it, but I have Google Maps Timeline turned on in my phone. It logs where you go each month, or where your phone goes anyway, and you get a monthly report. I assume Google wants this information so it can sell it to marketers. I don’t particularly care, but I don’t go anywhere that I’d be embarrassed about either. If I were visiting brothels I’d be sure to turn it off, or carry a “burn phone” as they call them, a simple cheap pre-paid that you could afford to ditch if you had to. But anyway, I have nothing to hide and I don’t care if Google knows. Besides, I find the reports interesting.

The one today shows where I went each month and I can compare them Here’s March, before COVID became a big thing, fairly wide ranging:

But here’s April, when the COVID “lockdown” was in full swing:

It shows I only went within 5Km of my house in that month.

Here’s something that interested me – all my Bali travels since I installed the app and turned it on, about July 2017 I think:

There are stats on the left which tell me where I was on what dates too.

Here’s one small trip during my stay in Sanur in May last year. It was down to the Beach Shack restaurant at Semawang Beach (great place!) on Monday 27 May:

And a local drive on Wednesday 22 May. I also had lunch at the 104 Bar & Grill, a great Club Sandwich:

By the way, that Club Sandwich, with a lime juice, cost a bit over $12. That’s a Perth price. Bali is not cheap any more, not in Kuta/Sanur, anyway.

As I said, some people will say I’m foolish but I’m interested in this information about myself.

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I also went to Aldi this afternoon, to buy their coffee pods. I like their Expressi coffee enough to make the trip. Ten pods for $6, not too bad.

I also had to return a “bottle bag”, a good idea but it didn’t work. It’s a soft-ish bottle sized bag with sides that freeze in your freezer to keep a wine bottle cold. But the first time I tried to use it, I found the bag was frozen so solid that I could hardly get the bottle in, and when I finally got it in as far as I could, the neck stood out so I couldn’t close the zipped top. Useless. There were no quibbles about the refund, $14.99.

But it’s fatal – I intended just this, and to buy some beer, but fell for a wet-&-dry vacuum powered by a 20V Li-ion battery for $39.99. It’s not a toy, it’s quite substantial enough to do a job, but small enough that I’ll pick it up to do a job, where I wouldn’t get my full sized Miele vacuum out with its cord.

You don’t get a battery with it, of course, but I have three batteries to fit now, having two other tools in that range. Very clever – when battery driven power tools became the thing, then when you choose a tool, you buy into that maker’s battery system and one maker’s battery does not fit another maker’s power tool. So you tend to get locked in. As I said, very clever. Same voltage, but physically different connections.

A guy should make a universal adapter so that any battery can be used with any tool, say Ozito battery on Makita tool, or Bosch battery on Milwaukee tool. No doubt the lawyers would be issuing threats very quickly.

Me in December 1994, at the Xmas lunch in Studio 2. When I had hair on top. Hmmm.

Wow, 51 days, but as I’ve said, this is nothing new for me. All it means is that I can’t (or shouldn’t) jump in the car and go somewhere, or have lunch at the shopping centre or have coffee/brekky with my photo mates. I miss that. But otherwise, I’m just spending more time at this PC – not wasting it but hacking (oops, wrong word) into stuff that I’ve been putting off for a long time.

One thing is that, as I own an ASUS laptop, they sent me an invitation to buy 1TB (yes, Terabyte) of space to back up my files for US$13.94 for one year. Obviously, once they’ve got me one time, then I’m probably going to repeat it next year but the price is low enough that I took the bait.

So for the past few nights I’ve been uploading files. It’s pretty slow as my upload speed is only 5Mb/s (only!). It seems very slow – I started a 58GB folder at around 10am this morning and it’s still uploading now at 5pm. It doesn’t matter, it’s a background process.

I’ve used about 62GB of my 1,024GB allowance. A Terabyte is a lot. I’ll see if this works and if it doesn’t, $21.78 is not a lot to consider wasted.

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I’ve been wasting an awful lot of time getting MusicBee into order and really enjoying it. I’ve found there’s another view that I didn’t show yesterday, Recently Added:

Since this is the first time I’ve built my Library, they’re all recently added. Here’s another view of just one composer/performer:

Yeah, 26 CDs of Mozart. It gives statistics too:

Hmm,  14,946 tracks. J.S. Bach 405 “tracks”; Most Played Quincy Jones; Most Played Genre, Classical; Most Played Album, The Best. The Best who? Maybe Quincy Jones but it could be Mozart The Best, I don’t know. I don’t really care.

This RIFFINFO is strange. It seems to be any track that it can’t find on the internet but I’m not sure. Time will tell. I’m enjoying this.

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I continue to be astounded at the stupidity of the USA. They are showing their absolute worst face to the world, especially personified by the Dump, the worst, most stupid president in the history of their country.

What’s set me off today is the reports of COVID Parties in Washington State. Young people, young but adults, are holding parties where people who have been tested as positive for the virus are encouraged to mix with uninfected people in the belief that these young people will catch the virus, but due to their age will be OK and recover and  become immune.

But what about the people they meet in the weeks after the parties? Can they be sure they won’t pass the virus on to strangers or their families?

It seems to me this may well be a test of natural selection in action. The smart people will survive and the dumb, stupid ones may die. Hooray. I approve. Unfortunately they will probably take the innocent elderly with them.

The US infection rate is essentially out of control and with over 73,000 deaths already and climbing at a rate of near 3,000 a day, they have no control. Yet Republican state governors (equivalent to our state premiers) are relaxing their stay-at-home orders and so people are out mixing, partying, going back to work. As I said, it’s an intelligence test. Let’s hope this sees a rise in the IQ of the country as the dumb ones die.

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Another suggested theme for a novel:

• In the panic of the pandemic, a vaccination success is announced. It’s made by a seemingly reputable lab and in the race to be first, is human tested but to minimum standards. It is widely distributed and injected and looks to be the answer.
  But a few months later, reports start up of side effects which were not found in the trials. In particular, personality changes. No, NOT ZOMBIES, I am not suggesting that, but changes like dementia and aggression. By this time millions of people worldwide have been vaccinated. Now read on …
• While the USA are incapacitated by their mishandling of the virus, a large Asian power decides to take the chance and annex Taiwan by force. Taiwan fights back bravely but are being overwhelmed and call for their treaty partners to come to their aid. This includes the USA but also Australia. The US Navy has been decimated by virus infections on nearly all their ships in the Pacific fleet and struggles to respond. Australia’s navy is largely at full strength and is forced into action against this powerful foe. Now read on … Tom Clancy, are you reading this from your grave? John Birmingham, are you there?

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This is where I used to work, the job I used to do in 1979 when I took this photo. That’s the lovable Scot, Tom Mitchell at the desk.

The main desk in the bottom centre was programmable (in the days before computers) with 12 events, where an event was an action such as rolling a film projector and switching it to the output 5 seconds later. Or playing a videotape and switching it to line 8 seconds later. Going into a program, that was all it had to do until the next break, be it a commercial or a slide and cassette or a change of machine or whatever

On the desk in front of Tom is the “log” a printed set of paper sheets telling us what to program into the desk, i.e. every film, videotape, commercial, promo, whatever, with their durations, key numbers etc. we marked this up with actual times switched to air (a legal requirement as well as for client billing). As the operator, we had to go through this when we started our shift and check everything, so that we knew where things were coming from and that they actually existed, and so on. This marked up log went back to the “Traffic” department for their records next day.

All this switching was supposed to be automatic, based on the times programmed in, but we found this wasn’t satisfactory so we had to do all the switching manually. That way we chose when to switch and I liked to keep things tight, not allowing much time before I hit the Take button for the next item. Otherwise we slipped time and it meant we had to drop something to get to the news on time at 6pm exactly. That was one of the hardest things, keeping to time and working out how late you were  and what you can cut to make up time.

Twelve events sounds a lot but in a busy period between programs it wasn’t enough and we had to program more events in while we were switching the short items. It took intense concentration!

The black monitor on the right showed what was coming out of the desk and being sent to the transmitters. It’s hard to see but there was a colour TV receiver in the gap to the right of it which showed the “off air” signal coming back from an antenna, i.e. just a normal TV receiver, so that we could be sure we were on air and things were OK.

Top left, lotsa buttons above and below the three meters which were the remote controls for the transmitters at Bickley, 13Km away. Microphones for talkback, i.e. talking to the machine operators in the adjacent area or the studio control rooms etc.

Beer o’clock. More another time.