© PJ Croft 2016

That f…’in’ idiot Lord Rabbott VD VHS UHF CD and 6 bars has said that “the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States was encouraging because the Republican – who has said that he believes global warming is a scam – would put climate change in better perspective.”

So the fact, repeat fact, that each year is hotter than the last and the Earth’s atmosphere has warmed by more than 1degC on its way to the catastrophic 2degC of the Paris Climate Change Accords is just “moral panic”, is nothing to worry about.

“He said Turnbull was finally growing into the role of prime minister, and Turnbull’s complaint about the “elite” media this week was a sign of that.”

““He appreciates that it’s one thing to appeal to a certain constituency when you are the would-be, but when you are the Man your constituency is first and foremost the party room, and secondly the people who are going to vote for the Coalition, or who you want to vote for the Coalition at the next election,” Abbott said.””

Get that? When you are PM, the most important things are first and foremost your party room, then the people who voted for you, or who you want to vote for you.

What about the whole of the Australian people, mate? You bastard.

And it’s goodnight from us.  © PJ Croft 2016

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Ha! I’m just ripping the final CDs in my collection, and the current one is Bach’s Cello Suites 1 – 3 performed by Lynn Harrell. For all of the last 30 years that I’ve owned this pair of discs, I’ve assumed, and had a mental image of, Lynn Harrell as a woman. Uh uh, it’s a bloke! Sorry Lynn. Mate.

Four discs to go to the end of this massive album, making 374 classical discs, and 426 non-classical (everything else, including comedy, of which there are 9 discs). Phew! Ph-eee-ew! Most of them have small images of the cover, so I’ve just got to find a program that will present me with a display of all the cover images so that I can browse and click. I have a few contenders suggested by a friend, but they’re not exactly what I had in mind so far.

This is a serious asset. A 2TB drive with about 850 CDs, instantly browseable, all at original CD quality. I’d better guard this.  Now, what do I do with all the physical discs?

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I’ve been having terrible trouble sleeping recently, as I’ve said, and even though I slept during the day yesterday, it caught up with me last night. I felt my eyelids drooping about 8pm and thought, dammit, go to bed. So I did, and lay there on top of the covers until 3am or so, it was so warm. Up for a pee, back to bed, out again, up again maybe 5am, out again, awake at 6am, radio on, and out again until 9am. That’s 13 hours!

What woke me was what I thought was the hissing of the fan in the corner. No, it was rain on the roof, heavy, steady rain. Cold 21C today after 36.4C yesterday. Crazy. Good for the garden!

I went down to the Dome Cafe and had dinner while sitting out on their verandah, overlooking the lakes. Here’s the “Super Moon”, the closest approach since 1948:

6:44PM

6:45PM

6:49PM

6:57PM

These were shot using the Panasonic FZ70 with its 20 – 1200mm lens. This is a small sensor camera to get such a huge zoom range and the quality is not up with larger sensors, but for this kind of thing, 1200mm is very useful. The 20mm ultra wide angle is also great for interiors. This range is why I bought it. In good light, the quality is very acceptable.

The next Super Moon to come this close to Earth will be in 2034. That would make me 88, roughly. Will I make it? Will I want to make it?

It was hot yesterday! And last night. I threw the doona off and ran the fan on me for the first time of the season. I hope to start my annual cold shower routine soon, maybe 1st December. Why? I love cold showers, that’s all, and it saves me hot water bills. Although, since my HWS is a gas storage, which is heating all the time whether I use the hot water or not, I wouldn’t be saving much. I wish I knew how to turn the heating off in the summer. I don’t need it.

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Does the full moon affect crime rates? Most people think it does, including cops, “just because”. Everyone knows it, right?

Well, a retired Queensland detective went through 980,000 crime records recently (ABC Radio yesterday) and found NO correlation between the moon and crime rates. In fact, if you think about it, criminals would not want to commit crimes when the moon is full. They want darkness. So no, the moon does not make people commit crimes.

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Great video clip from Q&A last night. Joe Siracusa, a US security expert, said Donald Trump is “an appalling human being”, and he’s “as dumb as Ronald Reagan and as mean as Richard Nixon.” He’s so dumb he wouldn’t get employment in K-Mart. He gives him a year before he’s either impeached, or forced to resign. Hear hear. Can’t come soon enough.

But that would mean the Vice President, Mike Pence would take over. He’s a hard line, ultra right, anti-abortion Fundamentalist Christian. He’s probably smarter than Trump (crumbs, anyone is), but would we want him? Ugh!

Scotland, near the Isle of Skye   © PJ Croft 2016

I bought a couple of walking sticks last week. They came with instruction manuals. No kidding 🙂

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This time I really must put my name and phone number on them. I lose them sometimes by leaving them in shopping trolleys, I think.

I bought an umbrella in San Fransisco in 1988, just a cheapie. I had it about 20 minutes, I think, before I left it in a store and lost it.

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I bought a couple of packets of croutons a few weeks ago. I used the first one, then got the second packet out of the cupboard. The package felt a little odd, it’s metallised plastic and it felt a lot softer than the first packet.

After I used some croutons (in my soup), I looked for the Use By date. How about 17 01 13!

The croutons seem OK and it’s no use taking them back, I have no proof of purchase. How could they have been on the shelf so long like that? Unless … unless – it’s [20]17-01-13? Must be. They smell and taste fine.

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Scotland a few hours later.   © PJ Croft 2016

What crazy weather. After a week of low 20s, today is suddenly shooting up to 37degC. But tomorrow is forecast to be 20degC, with showers on Wednesday. Crazy. Must be the Trump Effect.

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Aaaah. At 7.30am I’ve just done 10 full minutes on the treadmill at 3.0km/h, on the flat, admittedly, but I’ve got to start carefully. I haven’t been exercising enough, and I can feel it. I hope (not ‘hopefully’) I’ll do much better now with this treadmill. I’ll try for at least 5 minutes every hour or so. The aim is to be able to do a full 30 mins at a good speed and a moderate slope, enough that I’m sweating. I was doing this in 2008.

Strangely, my pulse went up to 110bpm at the start, then fell back to 72-80bpm after a few minutes. I think that’s good, isn’t it?

I was watching SBS and wouldn’t you know it, after the Al Jazeera tail end, the Italian News hadn’t arrived, so I had to watch 7 minutes of weather patterns. Duh.

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Speaking of the Trump Effect, a lot of Americans are thinking of migrating to New Zealand. So New Zealand has a major earthquake. Message? Don’t come?

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Trump is changing his mind already about promises he made during the campaign. He’s not going to build a wall on the US-Mexican border, only a fence. He lied every time he opened his mouth. How could anyone believe him? Yet they did. Why? Wishful thinking? Deranged minds, more like it.

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Interesting article yesterday in a webmag called Quartz (thanks my dear), about the South African experience. After Mandela stepped down as President, they elected Thabo Mbeki as his successor. He was well qualified and quite a good man, but dull and not well connected to the electorate.

So in 2008 they replaced him as President with a popular good time guy who appealed to the electorate, Jacob Zuma. They ignored his terrible past, and now it’s come back to bite them. Zuma is incompetent, corrupt as hell and is trashing the reputation of South African black rule. There’s a lesson there for the USA, you’d think. Unfortunately, the Chump is going to cause immense damage in the next four years. It’s damage that will not be limited to the USA alone. It will affect all of us. Dog help us.

The magazine calls him “bigoted, lying, self-contradicting, autocratic, anti-science, tantrum-throwing man-child”. How nice. He doesn’t read anything, relying on his staff to summarise documents and contracts for him. He doesn’t sleep. He usually acts on the advice of the last manager he talks to, so his managers compete to be the last in line to see him. He hates meetings and can’t stick to agendas. He has difficulty understanding big ideas and almost always acts on his gut instincts. How the hell is he going to cope with all the detail of the presidency?

From The Guardian today: “The former MI6 chief Sir John Sawers struck a cautionary tone in an interview with the BBC’s World At One. “We’re getting back into a world which is quite dangerous,” he said, raising the prospect of the US going to war with Russia or China.”

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There was a comment by a US woman who had voted for Trump. She said she hoped Trump would make the world more aware of America’s nuclear missiles, and that they are ready to use them, so that we’d show more respect.

Lady, wake up, if you use nuclear missiles, you lose. It doesn’t matter whether you’re right or wrong, in a nuclear war, no-one wins, everyone loses. If brains were dynamite …

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I’m sorry to be going on about Trump so much at the moment. It’s been a shock, but I’ll quieten down soon and get back to more mundane things.

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The Guardian: “Trump has consistently denied 40 years of climate science – and he claims that man-made global warming is a Chinese hoax. Ditching the Paris treaty, he has said, is his number one environmental priority.”

“Withdrawal from the treaty, which was crafted over years by US diplomats, often against developing countries’ wills, would take four years to complete and would outrage world opinion. Many delegates in Marrakech privately think it more likely that a new US administration would choose to ignore it. Because the Paris treaty is voluntary, the US would face global opprobrium, but no sanctions or fines.”

“Instead of reducing US emissions by a quarter to 28% below 2005 levels by 2025, as the US has pledged, Trump would support US coal, gas and fracking and halt payments aimed to help developing countries adapt to rising sea levels and temperatures. The result would be to increase US emissions, set back attempts to hold temperatures to a 2°C rise by years and, say businesses and activists, put a brake on the world’s renewable energy industries and consign poor countries to deeper poverty.”

“Should the US leave the treaty, Solheim says that some of the biggest losers would be America’s working people. “They would lose out on all the new green jobs. It would be a huge lost opportunity for the US people. The thinking that climate is a cost is wrong. It is a business opportunity,” he said.”

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Ian MacEwan, The Guardian:  “… this unique tragedy of national self-harm whereby a suspected con-man (the Trump University case, one of many, comes to trial on 28 November), this narcissistic and cynical vulgarian of limited attention span becomes the most powerful man on earth, ready by his own account to begin his assault on liberal democracy, rational discourse, civil liberties, and all manner of civil decencies, which are known to him as political correctness.”

“Trump’s poetry was misogyny, race hatred, xenophobia, petty vengefulness and reckless ignorance. On the stump there was hardly a dark human impulse that he failed to display or exploit.”

“If, by chance, Trump meant what he said (his supporters will be watching), it will be government by bonfire. He has said he will:

• repudiate the Paris accords on climate change;
• scrap the hard-won nuclear deal with Iran;
• scrap various trade agreements, e.g. the Trans Pacific Partnership TPP;
• pressure Saudi Arabia and Japan to acquire nuclear weapons;
• undermine the mutual aid aspect of “obsolete” NATO, and so risk a Russian incursion into the Baltic states;
• annihilate the families of terrorists;
• begin a trade war with China by means of a discredited protectionism;
• reinstate torture as an arm of foreign policy;
• build a 2,000-mile wall along the Mexican border;
• block Muslims from entering the US;
• vastly increase military spending;
• “lock up” his opponent, as promised at a thousand rallies;
• go after hostile newspapers;
• go after the women who claimed he sexually assaulted them;
• slash taxes, especially for the super rich;
• abolish Obama’s healthcare programme and leave 24 million people without medical cover;
• slash government programmes for the poor and unemployed;
• “create” 25m jobs in 10 years;
• scrap environmental regulation;
• re-ignite the coal industry;
• deport illegal immigrants by the million;
• borrow billions, and murmur about defaulting on US debt;
• pack the supreme court with ideological conservatives as vacancies arise.

“The hope is that Trump was lying to supporters at his rallies, but if by wretched fortune he actually manages to govern as he campaigned, when he projected himself as an autocrat and misogynist, intolerant of dissent, dismissive of the limits on presidential power, keen to sanction torture, racially hostile, paranoid in his nationalism, bloated with simple answers to complex problems, then we would have to concede that the US has elevated to its highest office a fascist by any other name. At present it looks improbable. But it’s going to be terrifying.”

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James Packer, billionaire Scientologist and gambling casino tycoon, was hooked up with Mariah Carey recently, until they had a big bust up (surprise, surprise).

It’s reported that she is allegedly demanding that Packer stump up $50m as an “inconvenience fee”. Hooray, I say. Good for her.

“As anyone in their life who has ever moved  knows, $50m is small potatoes for the inconvenience involved.”

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I’ve nearly finished ripping all my CDs! There’s one more album to go. It’s a big one, classical CDs, 32 pages with 4 CDs per page equals 128 discs – there are a few empty slots, so, say 120.

There are 420 non-classical folders, and 257 classical so far. This last lot will bring the classicals up to 382. Total 677. That’s not as many as I thought I had – I thought 1,000, but even so …

The non-classicals use 231GB, and the classicals use 166GB. How do I know this? Tree Size Pro, a fantastically useful little program that I’ve been using for more than 20 years (I paid for it), which very quickly indexes a disc, counts all the files and folders and shows their sizes, and much more information besides.

Then there’s Print Folder Pro (also paid for), a similar program I’ve been using for many years, which formats the directory tree structure so that you can print it out. Windows has never allowed this.

These total sizes are for .wav files, by the way, uncompressed audio straight off the CDs, original quality. To play in the car, they have to be mp3s, which brings them down to about 10% of their size. That means I could fit my entire CD collection on two USB thumb drives!

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Minnie  13 Sept 2007. I miss her so much.

Perth drivers continue to astound me. I was waiting at the lights to turn right near here yesterday. There were three cars in the right turn lane opposite, facing me, waiting to turn to their right. The traffic coming toward me cleared and I moved to make my right turn just as the lights turned amber.

But one of the right turners facing me changed his mind and pulled out of the queue to power his way through on the amber! I was caught half way through my turn with this lunatic speeding toward me. Stop or keep going? I elected to keep going, but it was a near miss. I was shocked.

I’ve been thinking – I reckon 10% of Perth drivers are determined to disobey the law, thinking it doesn’t apply to them, refusing to abide by the rules, doing whatever they like, too bad about anyone else. Deliberately driving through red lights. Knocking down speed signs with their 4WDs.

Another 25% are just ignorant and lazy, weaving across lanes, not using indicators, going through amber lights, driving 10-15km/h above the speed limits. With faulty headlights, tail lights and brake lights – they obviously never check them.

Another 25% don’t know the rules or how to drive. They use their phone while driving, don’t pay attention and often don’t wear seat belts. These are the ones who die in crashes on country roads. They’re also the ones who beckon me to break the law by “giving way” to me when I can’t legally take their offer. They just don’t know the rules.

That leaves only 40% of Perth drivers who try to do the right thing. My opinion, of course. I thank them, but it remains that Perth roads are more dangerous than Bali, because the speeds are so much higher that there’s little room for error and the consequences are so much worse. I’m astounded by the number of drivers who simply barge their way through, completely careless of anyone else. Scary.

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Trigg Island, 10 October 2007. It’s that rocky bit to the right of the surf club building. Some island, eh?   © PJ Croft 2016

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

This article by Bob Carr in The Guardian is very good:  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/12/australia-china-and-the-lunacy-of-trumps-talk-of-a-trade-war

Please think about subscribing to this on-line newspaper by looking here:

https://membership.theguardian.com/au/supporter?INTCMP=epic_thankyou_3

It’s only $10 per month or $100 per year for high quality journalism, great special interest stories, terrific picture collections of the best of each day’s news, reviews of books, restaurants and movies, cooking and so on. It also has Australian, UK, USA and International editions that you have full access to. Want to know what America thinks about their new village idiot president? Just click on the menu.

Think about it: $10 per month for 30 issues (it comes out fresh every day) is only 33c per issue. That’s 1/5 of the cost of the West or 11% of the cost of the Australian. If you buy the annual subscription for $100, that’s 365 issues for 27 cents a day. Cheap! And no newsprint to send to landfill.

As you can tell I highly recommend The Guardian. Quality news journalism. One of the very best. Please support them.

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I bought a treadmill this morning. I can’t make myself go outside walking. It’s either too cold, or too hot, too windy, too wet, or there’s no time, or I don’t have the right footwear on, or it’s just too hard.

I’ve had a treadmill before and I know I can use it. It’s set up in the lounge area, against the windows, facing the TV, with a pedestal fan ready. I turn the TV on, tuned to SBS foreign news with the subtitles, but foreign language  sound turned down, and ABC local radio on, and I’m in the zone, absorbed listening to the radio but distracted by the foreign news pictures. Therefore I don’t tend to notice the effort of the treadmill.

If I can do 5 minutes, or 10 minutes every hour or so, it will make a big difference. I’m likely to use this, much, much more than actually going out the door and walking.

My good mate Keith came and helped me set it up and bring it inside into the lounge. I thought I could do it myself, but I never could have. It’s an Orbit SS248, 1.5HP with motorised incline and all the other fruit like multi-programs, pulse rate measurements and so on. I used to have a very similar one at the Trigg house but sold it for $250 when I moved. Bad move.

The Barbarians are not just at the gate, they’ve broken through it.

Even though Hillary Clinton, by far the best qualified to be president, gained more than 50% of the vote, the village idiot Trump, one of the least qualified in history, was elected.

The US election system, already one of the world’s democracies’ most corrupt, is utterly broken. Corrupt? In some states, it is legal for political party workers to use intimidation to prevent “undesirable” people from voting. In some states, if you vote early, you can change your mind and go back and change your vote. The Republicans were deploying muscle gangs to intimidate voters in lines at polling places.

I don’t think people realise just how scary this result is yet.

• Both Trump and the vice president Pence are anti-abortion. Pence is a fundamentalist Christian who is virulently anti-abortion. It is very likely that abortion will soon be made illegal in the USA. This must horrify many women. Abortion will be illegal even in the case of rape. We’ve hardly heard about this.
• Republican policy, and Trump’s, is to abolish Obama Care, properly known as the Affordable Care Act. This will take health care away from mostly poor people. Can you imagine that? The world’s richest country, yet they will deny health care to the poor.
• Trump is going to reduce taxes, mainly benefitting the richest, yet plans to massively increase spending on the military and infrastructure. It’s economically impossible without printing money. It is going to produce financial and economic chaos.
• Trump’s fan base is white, gun totin’ lower educated males. The kind who carry gun racks in their pickups and wear guns on their hips in states that allow it such as Texas. These guys are not exactly tolerant and open minded. They will now feel licensed to be bigoted.
• Trump and his inner coterie believe global warming and climate change is a “Chinese hoax”. They are committed to pulling out of the Paris climate accords painfully negotiated last year. This will give other countries an open ticket to ignore the agreement too. As a climate change expert said on the BBC Business Report this morning, this is disaster. This point took years to reach, and the USA is now walking away. There will be nothing to stop the horrendous effects of global warming. We will feel the effects even more than we are already.

And so on – I could go on and on. And despite Trump’s syrupy words about bringing the country together, protests and divisions have arisen already where there were none visible before. America is now an even more divided country: between the very wealthy and the rest; between the comfortably off and the huge poor population of the world’s richest country; between white poorly educated gun lovers and university educated technocrats who voted for Hillary; between the religious Right and all other religions in the USA, especially Muslims, much more of a factor than in this country; between white Americans and Latino Americans … and so on and so on. It’s started already – protests have broken out on the west and east coasts.

As one of my friends says, it is even conceivable that there could be a new American civil war. It would be between the heavily armed, bigoted, racist, anti-government militias (of which there are many) and perhaps the real military, deployed to protect the neutral population. Between the coastal technocrats and the poorly educated but heavily armed centre of the country.  This is pretty far fetched, of course, but we thought Trump being elected was far fetched too.

In summary, America is now a severely divided country and the poor and the sick and the lower skilled are going to suffer even more than they do now. Sheee-it!

Ho…lee…shit!  President Trump. I never believed it possible.

This will be a disaster. There will be war. There will be a world recession. There will be a breakup of alliances. Many hundreds or thousands of US troops are going to die in conflicts with Russia and China. China will become even more assertive in building its South China Sea military bases. That will involve the RAN making Freedom of Navigation patrols to try to assert our rights. The USA will demand our contributions. This is going to affect all of us, not just America.

Coming on top of Brexit, that other disaster in the UK, the world is breaking apart. Putin will be rubbing his hands with glee. NATO is now well and truly destabilised. Just what he wants.

I was amazed today, not just at the news – I was having lunch at the shopping centre with the newspaper on the table. One of the cleaning ladies leaned over and with a very concerned, even frightened, face said to me, “Trump has won. It’s President Trump.” You know things are serious when that happens.

Combined with another terrible blow for me, today has been one of the worst days of my life.

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One bit of bright news was that I paid for my copy of dBpoweramp ripping software, and it turned out to cost US$39 or about A$52, less than I thought. It’s great value.

The benefit of the full copy, as distinct from the trial copy I’ve been using, is that after you put the CD in the drive, if you just wait, it automatically reads all the track names and finds the appropriate CD cover image from the web for you. No need to search for it yourself. So all you need to do is create and name a folder for the files and click Go. It speeds the process even more. Excellent software.

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I don’t feel like writing any more. This is awful.

Lake Eyre from the air.  © The Light Collective

Ha! I’m writing this at 4.30am after waking at 3am and being unable to get back to sleep. I’m “ripping” CDs, and the title of the first track of the first CD, a Handel disc is “Oh sleep, why dost thou leave me?”  Oh, ya gotta larf.

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I’m addicted to this CD ripping. I’m not sure why; it seems to be the pleasure at discovering CDs that I’d forgotten I have, and seeing the massive list of folders growing on the hard drive. In the classical category, I’m up to 169, and non-classical (everything else) is 294. So far. I’m less than half way to finishing.

Funnily, I’m finding I have multiple copies of a few CDs. I have two copies of the one I’m doing at this moment, and I have three copies of another! I forget what I’ve got when I’m out shopping and browsing.

I sing the praises of this ripping software, dbPoweramp. It extracts all the track names, saving me a massive amount of time and effort, and also finds images of the covers, so that you can recognise a CD at a glance. Sometimes it can’t find a suitable image (it searches the web) and I’ll have to go back and maybe digitally change what it finds to read correctly. For example, I just ripped a Mahler Symphony no. 7 disc, but the best image I could see was for no. 6. I’ll go back later and change that number by pasting over it.

Some discs don’t have a suitable cover image at all, and I may start taking photos or scans of my actual covers. That would be quite a lot of work, so only maybe.

Another point is that I’m storing all the digital copies on an external 2TB drive. That’s Terabyte. So far, the drive is 50.566% full. As it represents a massive investment of time and effort, I want a backup. The only way to backup such a big drive is to copy to another big drive. I’ll have to buy another one. Ho hum. Who would have believed 20 years ago that we would be wrangling such huge amounts of data? It’s amazing. I can remember around 1993 when I wanted to buy a 1GB drive. It was going to cost about $200 but it seemed as if that would hold my entire digital image collection with space to spare. Hah! Not even close. Now even a 1 Terabyte drive seems small. But so relatively cheap. I’ve seen a 5TB drive for $170. Affordable, do-able.

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My next big job? Above is the stack of my diaries dating from 1993. I didn’t write in detail, just brief entries listing important events that I needed to remember and receipts. They are not my life story and there’s no scandal, sorry. I got very enthusiastic in about 2001 and stuck all my supermarket till slips for the whole year in there for future price reference. Unfortunately most of the ink has faded.

I don’t want to keep them, but I can’t bear to throw them out. So I’ve decided I want to scan all the pages with important entries on them, and make PDF files of each year. Then I can throw the physical books out. Not a hard job, but it’ll take a few weeks’ work.

I don’t bother keeping a diary any more, by the way. I do write down every cent I spend in a notebook and write in needed reminders about when I went to the doctor or specialist, etc. And the entries for items are their own record, e.g. car tyres or whatever.

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In the laughing category again, I heard a cricketer on the news last night say that the WACA ground is “one of the world’s unique grounds.” Think about that. Unique means one of a kind, one only. So how can something be “one of a collection of unique things”?

I should be grateful he didn’t say it’s iconic.

Another good one is “pre-prepared”. Think about that. Prepared means made beforehand. So how can you pre-prepare something? How can you do or make something before you make it? It’s impossible.

I continue to be driven mad by “y’know”. Listen to the radio or TV. People use y’know every few words, even people who should be good speakers, even BBC announcers. It’s a plague!

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Another funny incident. I was supposed to have received a parcel delivery of some books yesterday, from Australia Post. They emailed me that the delivery had been made, but I haven’t seen it.

At 5pm I heard some thumps outside and looked out to see a white truck with red lettering parked on my verge lawn. Aha, I thought, and went out to speak to the driver. I said I was expecting this delivery but it hadn’t come. He said he was trying to find number 10, but looked through his order book. While he was doing that, I looked more closely at the truck. Duh!! It was a Coles delivery truck, not Australia Post. White truck, red lettering – I didn’t read it closely. No wonder the driver was confused. We had a good laugh.

But I still haven’t got my books, $47 worth. That’s not funny.

STOP PRESS: I had a look at 9am and my parcel was there. But it was torn open and on the ground next to my letterbox. Strange, was it delivered to another address, and they had a look and decided it wasn’t worth keeping? Did someone steal it yesterday and reject it too. But why bring it back? Oh well, it’s a mystery and I’ve got my books, so it’s OK. Uh oh, what if they’ve been read!

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Ain’t that nice?  © ABC News

I predicted that our cold spring would change suddenly and it nearly happened on Saturday, with 37degC., but we’re back to the low 20s again. Very strange weather. It was the coldest September on record, I believe, and the coldest October for 11 years. Odd.

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I’ve finished the book, The Man Who Saw Infinity by Robert Kanigel, the biography of Srinivasa Ramanujan 1888-1920, the maths prodigy who produced a massive amount of new work around the start of the 20th century. It’s an amazing book, with incredible detail of his early life and where he lived in south India and Madras. It also told me a lot more than I knew about Cambridge University in England. What a fabulous place.

By the way, just think about the consequences of an all-out nuclear war. Places like this, and in Rome and Greece, which date from the medieval times or earlier, would be erased from the face of the Earth. All civilisation’s magnificent history, art and culture. I think about this more these days because if that madman Trump were elected POTUS, we would be in grave danger from him and the Russians. There are nuclear missiles aimed here, you know, at the RAN submarine base at Garden Island. We, in little old Perth, would be erased too. Gee, what was that flash? I’m more frightened now than I was in the Cold War.

Anyway, back to the book. It’s a bit hard going but I’m very glad I’ve read it. I know now what the TRIPOS exam is at Cambridge, and what the Senior Wrangler is. What a strange name to give the first place-getter in the maths exams at Cambridge. There are second, third, fourth wranglers and so on, of course, but to be Senior Wrangler is to be the pre-eminent mathematician in Britain and is hugely prestigious. Ramanujan’s sponsor when he came to England in 1916 was G.H. Hardy, who held this Senior Wrangler position. Yet he, Hardy, stood in awe of Ramanujan, calling him “the most intuitive and original mathematician” he had ever known. The man was a freak of nature. Original mathematics formulas, equations, and concepts came to him as if by magic. He was a genius.

Unfortunately, he was felled by TB and died at the age of 32. Even right up to the last weeks of his life, he was still producing original, inspired maths. We’ll never know what he could have done had he lived to a normal old age.

So on Sunday night I watched the DVD movie starring the Indian actor Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons. It was good, if you hadn’t read the book, but it was so abbreviated to fit into a 100 minute time limit that huge sections of Ramanujan’s life are missing or brushed over. His arranged marriage to a 13 year old bride when he was 18 is not mentioned, and although she stars in the movie, they don’t even say her name, Janaki, until right near the end. The importance of his mother is also glossed over. Steven Fry is listed as one of the big stars of the movie, but his part is quite minor, no more than about two minutes on screen.

I recommend the movie, but please read the book. It’s hard going, but I’m hugely glad I read it.

That makes a trio of books I’ve read recently that have been very satisfying: the biographies of Alan Turing, the maths and computer genius in the 1940s and 50s, and the biography of our current cosmology genius, Stephen Hawking. The Turing book is another that goes into very great detail and is a bit hard going, but very rewarding. The Hawking book is written by his wife Jane and is also very insightful and warm. She is an academic herself, in both music and early Spanish literature, but had to go through an awful life with Hawking, both from his disability and as he fell under the spell of his nurse, forcing his wife to leave. She found love with another guy, but feels very hurt by her treatment.

By the way, why hasn’t Stephen Hawking won a Nobel prize? He deserves it, surely? The reason is that prize winners’ research has to be verifiable and reproducible by other scientists. But cosmology by its nature can not be proven. It’s nearly all conjecture. Maybe he will be awarded a Nobel one day, but nothing so far.

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My saga with the Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro S tablet/laptop, where a BIOS change automatically applied by Samsung made it go wrong, and it was away for six weeks with no fix, has been resolved.

When I finally got it back, there was no change. It still couldn’t be made to sleep by pushing the power button was unchanged. Then it developed another problem, where I couldn’t even power it off! Pressing the power button brought up the wallpaper screen and a message to “Swipe down to Power Off.” But doing that just made it stay on. Crazy. I had to repeatedly press and hold the power button to turn it off. There’s no other way, by the way.

Then last Friday night an update for “Samsung Update” arrived (yeah, an update for an update). The next day, a Saturday, another BIOS update arrived. This time it fixed the problems and it all works properly now (except the volume buttons are still reversed). This update also coincided with a massive Windows 10 update from Microsoft, so it was a very busy machine for a few hours. Many reboots.

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I’m annoyed by another problem with it, though. The tablet only has one USB-C port for everything, charging included. So I bought a Targus “Powered 4-Port USB Hub with Fast Charging” so that I could charge and use external USB devices at the same time. The device name sounds as if it will do that, right? It cost $79. It has a plug pack for power, a USB-C cable to connect to the tablet, and three other USB ports.

But I found that none of the USB ports are recognised by the tablet via the USB-C cable. Huh? So I got onto Targus in Sydney and described the problem.

It turns out that what I want is simply not possible. You can’t send power through the USB-C port and send/receive data at the same time. The only way to use this hub is to connect one of the USB-A ports via an adapter cable to the USB-C port for data, but that means the power is not supplied. And the adapter cable is only USB 2.0, not USB 3.0. Therefore this hub is simply not suitable. It won’t work in the way I expected it to from the description.

I told this to Targus and they agreed. I said I wanted to return it for a refund and they agreed, but I have to go back to JB HiFi where I bought it and explain it all to them. Targus said I can show JB the emails. Of course, the packaging was one of those sealed plastic packs that you have to destroy to open, so I’ll be taking the bits back in a plastic bag. I can’t find the receipt at the moment either. Grrr.

Lake Eyre.  © Adam Williams/The Light Collective

The photo above, yes, it is a photograph, not a painting, is one of a set of 18 published in the Guardian yesterday, and I highly recommend a look: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2016/nov/03/lake-eyre-from-the-air-in-pictures

One of my Mr Negative friends immediately branded them as having “magic” applied, i.e. they’ve been digitally enhanced. So bloody what?! They are stunning and beautiful, and give me great pleasure. I don’t care if they’ve been punched up. They are great images.

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I’m more nervous now than I was during the Cold War. The possibility of that idiot Trump becoming president of the USA is truly frightening. Putin would lead him like a monkey on a leash. I reckon there would be a strong possibility of a small nuclear conflict in the Middle East, as a proxy for an all out war between Russia and the US. Trump is mad enough to try it, I reckon, and Putin would goad him.

Hillary must win, but the problem is that Trump and his band of Republican idiot chumps will immediately set out to destabilise her with law suits and court challenges. This will make it almost impossible for her to govern properly. This is a horrible prospect.

The USA has gone mad. And they’ve got guns and nuclear weapons. It’s scary.

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I’m often on about coincidences. Yesterday I was so surprised by one that I gasped and sat back in my chair.

The news radio was talking about a TV program called something like “Program for a murder”.  At the very moment I heard that, the title of one of the tracks on a CD I’m ripping popped up – “Anatomy of a murder” by Duke Ellington. I was so surprised that I made a noise and just about fell off my chair. Coincidences, they keep a’coming.

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I’m quite addicted to this CD ripping process. So far, 294 non-classical CDs done, and 104 classical. Plus six comedy discs and a big collection of 60s hits that I made in 2007 for a reunion. I reckon I’m about a third of the way through my CD stock, and I’m finding discs that I’d completely forgotten I had.

Such as an ABC disc of 65 tracks of historic ABC radio sounds, including all the variations of the classic news theme. It used to be quite slow and very classical/orchestral back in the 30s, 40, through to the 70s. Then it was speeded up and made to sound more modern, the theme we hear today. Interesting. I haven’t listened to all the tracks yet.

(Notice how I avoided using the word iconic? I hate that cliche word. It seems to be impossible for any journalist to leave it out of any piece. Sometimes it will be used twice or three times in the one article. Lazy writing.)

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I’ve been making name cards for a mate’s reunion of all his Viet Nam war buddies to be held soon in Busselton.

Those are the Viet Nam war campaign medals. Mick has a sticker on the back of his car, and I photographed it a couple of years ago. Lucky I’ve still got it. He’s pretty pleased with the result. There are 78 names and they’re all done. I’ve just got to print them (12 per A4 page) and cut them up. Easy. I like doing this sort of thing.

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Lake Eyre from the air. © The Light Collective.

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I’m nearly finished reading the biography of Srinivasa Ramanujan, an amazing Indian mathematician born 1887, died 1920 of TB. The book is called The Man Who Saw Infinity, and I highly recommend it. That’s if you like maths, of course, as the author doesn’t hold back. It’s a masterful explanation of some of the maths concepts, with many equations in the book.

Ramanujan was an absolute prodigy. He was self taught and never got full recognition in India because he couldn’t get a uni degree. Why? Because he was so fixated on the maths pouring out of his brain that he totally lacked interest in any of the other subjects required for a uni degree course.

He was finally noticed and was sent to Cambridge University, where he was so brilliant that they gave him a BA degree without requiring other studies. In 1918 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society, F.R.S. This is about the highest honour any academic can get. (I must admit, if there’s one thing I would love to have, it’s F.R.S. after my name. Impossible, of course, but I’d walk over hot coals.)

Anyway, he got TB in England and became very sick, and had to return to India where he died a couple of years later at age 35. He was a prodigy in the same way Bach, Mozart and Beethoven were, just geniuses, work so perfect that it only happens once per century, almost.

But get this: he was a Brahmin caste, the highest in India. But the Hindu religion forbids Brahmins to travel overseas. Why? Just because, that’s why. So by going to England, he broke that rule and when he died, he was refused a full Brahmin funeral. All the big Brahmin dignitaries in India stayed away from his funeral. Bloody religion. It’s a curse on humanity.

The book has been made into a movie of the same name, and I’ve got it. I won’t watch it until I finish the book (about 50 pages to go), but I bet I’ll be disappointed. The book is so detailed that the movie will have to brush over it all. Oh well.

Donald Trump’s mind

This is astounding. This is frightening. This can’t be happening.

The Director of the FBI appears to have either gone mad, or shown his political bias, or been got at, bribed or pressured. I suspect the latter. There’s no other way to explain his amazing action in making these unfounded accusations about Hillary Clinton with eight days to go to the election. This has given huge ammunition to that madman Trump and his lunatic supporters.

Trump is simply incompetent to be president of the USA. He is ignorant of politics and especially foreign affairs. He lies so often and so stupidly that no other head of state or government leader would ever be able to take him seriously. How could anyone take his word on anything when he is just as likely to change his story a week later? He knows nothing about other countries, nothing about international law, nothing about ethics and integrity. Not to mention his misogyny.

Worst of all, Vladimir Putin will twist him around his little finger. He will be so weak compared to Putin that Putin will trick him into some disastrous actions. I think there is a serious risk of nuclear weapons being used if Trump becomes president.

I never expected to say this, but I think an assassination is needed. Let some gun-nut with a licence-to-carry take a shot at him. He must not be elected president. This is scary!

Women of America, you MUST vote! Even if you don’t like Hillary, she is the only competent candidate. Do you really want a bumbling, dishonest, lying woman-hater as your president? You MUST vote for Hillary.

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Hillary’s mind

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I’ve been to Thailand, to Bangkok, once (and Phuket briefly, for less than a day) and the Thai people are very nice. But what a fucked up country. I don’t see myself ever going there again.

A country that has military coups about every seven years is no place to be. Even as a tourist, you could be in danger. To me, it’s not worth the risk. Even in the holiday resorts the stories of drugs and crime put me off.

But they’ve excelled themselves now. The Thai military government is asking other countries, Australia included, to arrest and return people to Thailand who have been accused of insulting the monarchy. Uh, no, guys. This is paranoid crap. This shows what fools you are.

This lese majeste law is a serious danger, even for a tourist. A couple of Facebook bloggers were handed jail sentences of 28 years and 30 years recently, simply for writing something interpreted as insulting to the Thai monarchy. Thirty years in a Thai prison! That would be worse than a death sentence.

I’ll never take the risk of going to Thailand again, so they miss out on my tourist dollars. And the monarchy? Ponced up medal wearing loonies. They’re all corrupt. So come and arrest me, you Thai military fools.

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I’m still on the job of ripping all my CDs to hard drive. It’s a mammoth job and even though it’s slightly boring, I actually enjoy it.

For some reason, I’ve always liked doing repetitive work, even when I was working at Channel 7. Quite often we had to make many copies of some circuit board, or wire up many complex connectors. I used to volunteer. For some reason, I enjoyed it, I think because I can put my mind into reverie mode and feel a sense of achievement as the results pile up. Once, I had to wire up 12 custom back plates for rack mounted PCs, each back plate with about five multi pin D-connectors and others. It took me about a fortnight and I was proud to say that there were no mistakes. All worked perfectly. Unfortunately the PCs were only in service for about three years before the whole system was scrapped. It was an enormous waste of money and time. Sydney thinking.

Anyway, back to the subject of ripping. I’ve been using software called Cyberlink Power-to-Go, a very versatile bit of software that does everything. Easy to use.

But it doesn’t read the track names (except for a few discs – don’t know why they worked). For ordinary “pop” CDs, I usually don’t worry about naming tracks, I just name them “01 Rolling Stones Forty Licks d1” for example, and so on 02, 03 etc. Another program, ACDSee gives me batch renaming, so that only takes about 30 seconds per disc. (And if I want mp3 conversions, that’s a batch process too. I can convert a whole folder of .wav files to .mp3 in about three minutes in one operation.)

But for classical music, I want to know the actual music titles. I’m thinking where I’m  listening in the car while driving, where I want to know what the composer and piece is. These require me to go through and name each track from the CD sleeve booklet. Ugh. That takes a lot of time and effort.

This afternoon I’ve tried a new piece of software called dbPowerAmp CD Ripper. I’ve known about it for years but now I’ve downloaded a trial version and installed it.

Bazinga! Somehow it knows the names of all the tracks and makes these the file names. It also allows me to select an image of the CD cover from the web. I suspect it might be finding the track titles on the web from the disc key number  – not sure.

Anyway, although it’s taken me a bit of practice to get the rhythm, working up to speed, the time saved in not having to name the tracks is fantastic. I can rip a CD, complete with track names, in about 3 minutes. I’m doing “pop” CDs (anything that’s not classical music) where I don’t really need the track names, but to get them is a bonus.

But this means I’ve ripped hundreds of discs so far with no track names before I found this program. Am I going to go back and rip ’em again? No way.

I haven’t done many classical CDs so far (about 50?), and I’ve got hundreds to go, but having automatic track naming for these will be fantastic. dbPowerAmp. It costs about $65 I think. I’ll be paying for my copy.

The next stage is to find software that will display screens of CD covers and allow me to select and play on my hi-fi system, from a hard drive. I’ve ripped them all to .wav format, same as the original on the CDs, so same quality. It’s all good fun.

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I got my Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro-S back last week, and as I said, the battery was completely drained, 0%. Thanks Samsung. Anyway, it’s up and running.

But the fault isn’t fixed. It still won’t go to sleep by pressing the power button briefly, as it used to before their BIOS update. It’s either full on, or full off.

However, yesterday another BIOS update came through. I don’t control this – it just appears and installs itself, then restarts. Did it fix the problem? Nope. No changes as far as I can see.

So the device is not actually faulty – it’s working as Samsung intends it to, apparently. I’m not happy, but there’s not much I can do except complain.

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In addition, I emailed Targus in Sydney to say that the 4-Prt USB 3.0 Hub with Fast Charging I bought at a cost of about $79 will not recognise any USB device plugged into any USB port on the hub.

Their reply is:

As I understand your situation, you seem to be using a USB-C (male) to USB-A (male) cable to connect from the Tab Pro-S to the Hub high power port – which will deliver power at 5V 2.1Amps but will not deliver communication support. The reason for this is that the Hub needs to be connected to a supported Operating System via the Hub’s upstream USB 3.0 Micro (male)  to a USB  3.0 Type-A host port (female) cable (as included in the pack), OR.. if an adapter to Type-C is used it will need to be a USB 3.0 (female) to USB-C (male) adaptor cable (which will make the Tab Pro-S the ‘host’ device) and will allow the applicable drivers to be loaded by the host system (Tab Pro-S) in order for the hub to work – However, please note that USB 3.0 hubs do not support power delivery via the supplied upstream cable.

If you require both USB-C power & data then you will need to look for a dedicated USB-C hub ‘with’ power pass-through support… which will then allow you to use the USB 3.0 ports on the hub, while charging your Tab Pro-S at the same time.

I hope this makes sense.

You must be joking, mate. It’s gobbledegook. To me, this says the device will never do what I want. Therefore it’s not fit for the purpose I bought it. Therefore I should be entitled to return it for a refund. This will be interesting. Sigh.