Bustopher Said...

Twitter

2011-06-03T00:38:00.000+10:00

Okay guys, I've just signed up for a Twitter account. The ID is "Peter_Deane" - not bad that it was available, eh? Might be a good sign.

Problem is, what the HELL does one do with a twitter account. I'm following a few political tweeters such as Malcolm Turnbull, Kevin Rudd, Latika Burke and so on. I went to follow the ABC's QandA, or course. I'm still not real familiar with how it all works, and the 140 character limit is (as you'd be aware, dear readers) not something I'm going to be enamoured with. Let's see what goes on, however.

What we really can't afford

2011-05-26T03:54:00.000+10:00

Again we hear the empty rhetoric. Barnaby Joyce on the carbon tax: "we can't afford this toxic tax". "Australia cannot afford this tax right now".

Here's what we cannot afford, people:

We can't afford extra energy in weather events leading to the largest cyclone to ever hit Queensland

We can't afford an increase in temperature leading to more frequent bushfires

We can't afford extreme weather events leading to 150mm of rain in an hour (unprecedented in Australia)

We can't afford more frequent wild weather events such as the tornadoes in Joplin, Missouri

We can't afford to have the sea levels rise - just ask anyone in Kiribati!

This is the gravity of the situation. Do nothing now, and in fifty years it will cost so much more to act urgently. We are merely complaining about a tax we don't like. Consider the alternatives above. THAT is the real cost.

Carbon lies - this is getting sickening

2011-05-26T00:30:00.001+10:00

I've really started to get fed up on the misinformation spewing forth from the Coalition on the Carbon Tax. Greg Hunt went on 7.30 on Tuesday (24 April) with news about the "Direct Action" plan.

This is fair enough. It seems the coalition have been quite keen to step forward and label the government's plan as a "Toxic Tax" that will cause the end of the world and businesses to go broke.  Have you noticed that this is Tony Abbott's strategy - "The Unnecessary Carbon Tax". "This Toxic Tax". "This will impose more strains on everyone's cost of living". At least he keeps it simple...

It's high time some of the alternative plans were looked at. "Direct Action" is nothing more than subsidising certain companies to do very little. As Greg Hunt contends, a reduction by 5% of 2000 CO2 emission levels (our completely arbitrary target set a few years ago after Kyoto) could be achieved by "... storing carbon, it could be [by] capturing waste coalmine gas, it could be [by] cleaning up landfills. Whatever is lowest cost, we'll do that".

Nice to see such a simple solution. Pity the Grattan Institue have completely debunked these so-called solutions as being totally innefectual. What it means is that there are vested interests who will be the beneficiaries of these subsidies who are keen to see the Abbott side of politics instilled in power!   If that happens they will benefit from billions of dollars in free money handed out by the government, and WILL KEEP POLLUTING with very little change to our total CO2 emissions.

Greg Hunt then went on to say "we will, over four years, for example, spend $3.2 billion on our approach. That's offset by $50 billion of savings." This is the cost of "Direct Action" over the forward estimates (budget preditions for the next four complete financial years) as stated by Greg Hunt. However less than a minute later, he is asked by Chris Uhlmann: "and $3.2 billion you are saying now will cover the cost of that increased gas price - for how long?" (I yell at the screen - "he's already answered that, four years") but Greg Hunt has the audacity to answer thus: "We were looking at a period out to 2020..."

Greg, I make that nine years, and about sixty seconds earlier, mate, you were saying four years.

The Carbon Tax is a response to a problem. Okay, governments can do nothing, bury their heads in the sand and pretend everything is okay. The UK government has not decided on this course of action. Germany plans to be the biggest renewable energy user in the world by the end of the decade. What are we going to do in Australia? If we follow the ALP's stance we will have a tax on pollution shifting the cost on to the polluters themselves, and this will then transition to a cap-and-trade system in three to five years. If we follow the coalition's stance then very little will happen, except that quite a few very large polluters will be subsidised by the government to keep polluting, and the tab to clean up that mess will be picked up by the government from a revenue stream that doesn't exist.

(If you listen to Greg Hunt (see his 7.30 interview) the funding will come from budget savings (savings=cuts) so what that means is you'll get less services from the government, and in return, the savings (cuts) will be transferred to the polluters, instead of the people that probably needed the government services in the first place).

Again, Liberal policy is to give government assistance to people who do not need government assitance. As if big power generators, steel-makers and aluminium smelters cannot pay their own way.   They will close down and sack staff based on purely financial grounds, the impost of a carbon tax isn't going to make one iota of difference because of the materiality of the changes.

Speaking of materiality, on Monday, Tony Abbott went to a welding company in Queanbeyan. Here he was describing the impact of the "Toxic Tax" as "the firm will pay an extra $4,000 in power [bills per year] ... ". (It is clear he's using the annual figure because he also mentions "$1,000 a quarter" in the press conference).

Let's do the maths. The owner of the welding firm also spoke and said they employ forty people. Let's do some approximations here and estimate the annual wages bill at say $1,000 a week for 40 employees for 50 weeks a year and you're looking at $2,000,000 a year in wages alone. Plus naturally there are other expenses. This company must be paying out close to $10 million a year in total expenses, and a $4,000 increase in electricity prices is going to send them to the wall or at least put jobs at risk??   This is what Tony Abbott is seriously contending!

To look at it another way, if this business decided to give a $10 a week pay rise to TEN of its employees (cost: $5,200 annually) this would send them to the wall or they'd have to sack other staff. This is greater than the $4,000 increase in electricity costs. These contentions are just scare tactics, and if you are being suckered in by them it's only because Tony can keep a straight face as he contends absolute baloney so well.

No mention is made of the fact that with the Australian dollar sitting up at $US1.05, the cost of fuel for this company is about 30% cheaper than it otherwise would have been six months ago.   Nah, you can't mention that, because that might just indicate that the government is managing the country well enough that other people are now prepared to pay a premium for the Aussie dollar.

And yes, a high Aussie dollar means our exports are less competitive, 'tis true. However since Australia has always had a balance of payments deficit (throughout our entire history) this means we import more than we export, so overall a higher Aussie dollar is better for the country than a lower Aussie dollar, plain and simple.

Nah, this incompetent government is bringing in an unnecessary toxic tax that will put jobs at risk and impose costs on us all that we can't afford.

The cost of climate change is borne by our children and grand-children. They will view us with absolute contempt and disdain if we can't solve the problem now and leave it all up to them. But perhaps maybe they'll be a less selfish generation - they'll HAVE to be in order to survive.

Numeracy

2011-05-22T04:05:00.033+10:00

I just remind all readers to be aware of the numbers game and how easily it is to lose track of the real issues when people are quoting figures at you.

Remember back in 2000 when the GST was introduced? The pollies were going out and buying baskets of groceries and comparing prices before and after the GST. Yes, at that time some things were taxed at the 22-1/2% wholesale sales tax, 12-1/2% and 32-1/2%.

Go buy a basket of dog food, and lo and behold, under a GST that 32-1/2% wholesale sales tax rate gives you an actual saving! Go buy fruit and vegetables and you're paying 10% more. (Well Meg Lees got her way and the GST stayed off Fruit and Veg - so what I ask).

All these comparisons were done and a whole lot made of the findings. But people were not really taking the right information into account. Okay, you can muck around by comparing taxes at different rates and on wholesale and retail prices and you get different numerical outcomes.

The one thing that wasn't being discussed at the time was the most important thing, and the NAME of the tax gave it away. "Goods and SERVICES tax". Okay, there'd be a change to the tax rates on goods, but on SERVICES, the current rate was zero, and ten per sent of the retail was going to be added to all services.

Now you'd be taxed on getting your hair cut, buying movie tickets, getting the car serviced, paying for the services of a professional person (lawyer, accountant, etc), taxi fares, plumbing services, electricity supplies, petrol (in addition to all other taxes), and so on and so on ad infinitum.

Never mind the goods side of things - mathematically they will vary a little. Worry about the services side of things, where everyone is worse off. And all income the tax cuts promised simply never eventuated. Bracket creep was given back, but essentially income tax revenue remained almost the same!

This is just a reminder to worry about materiality. You may hear incredible stories about how power bills will increase under a carbon tax, and this is usually because they will include an actual quantum (eg electricity bills will increase by $50,000 a year for this particular business). Ask instead what PERCENTAGE increase is this going to be (and according to Treasury it's around 15% for electricity. For food it's estimated at a 1.2% increase).

The figures are then easy to work out. Say your business currently spends $80,000 a year on electricity. This means it will cost an extra $12,000 a year for power. Don't mention the existing $80,000 and a $12,000 increase sounds massive, doesn't it? Honest reporting would say the bills will rise from $80,000 to $92,000 per year. (Power is probably the highest increase of all commodities, because it emits a massive amount of carbon in its production).

This is, of course, assuming you still use coal to make the electricity... Generate your electricity from gas, and already the carbon cost is halved. Generate it using hydro, wind or solar and you pay virtually NO carbon tax at all (which is the whole point of the exercise)!

Long Term Unemployed

2011-05-11T21:20:00.001+10:00

After the budget last night you can definitely see none of the pollies have been unemployed for any great length of time.

I want to impress on them the depression involved in long term unemployment. It's not as simple as "get a job" in many cases. I've been looking for work in the past and applying for jobs willy nilly. Over a six month period in 2001, I applied for about 140 jobs. I got about 35 no-thank-you replies from the employers, and the rest were just ignored. I'm not sure what's worst. An employer taking out a classified ad in the employment columns is sometimes subjected to over a hundred applications, and some small employers simply don't have the resources to reply. But then again, each of those applications has been the result of an investment of maybe a couple of hours time from the applicants, so they probably do at least deserve acknowledgement.

What IS bad, however is the arrival of a no-thank-you letter, as it's a constant reminder that you are not wanted by that particular employer. A few letters are fair enough, but when they keep going for month after month, it certainly leads to depression. All you can do is pick yourself up off the ground and keep applying for more jobs, but that's something that's often easier said than done.

Worse, I suppose is when you happen to actually land an interview. The hopes rise, and you get yourself in to the employer on time and with a shiny face. This often involves quite a few hours of your time, plus the cost of travel to and from the workplace. In many cases, unfortunately, the employers didn't even have the manners to call back and say I was unsuccesful after an interview. I can live with ignoring an unsuccesful written application, but after an unsuccesful interview, where you've gotten yourself along to the employer's place of business at your expense and on your own time, a reply is definitely warranted. How many people are they interviewing, for goodness sake?

To impose on the long term unemployed the requirement to apply for ten jobs a fortnight is crazy. For a start, I'd doubt there'd be ten jobs a fortnight I'd have any prospect of applying for in the first place. This means you'd have to be applying for jobs that you've got no hope of getting. Crazy for the employer who has to deal with the applications (shred them?) and crazy for the applicant who is going to be constantly reminded of his or her unemployability.

As I mentioned, each no-thank-you letter can be taken as a personal slight. That's yet another employer who doesn't want to employ me. Assuming about a 30% reply rate, that's three letters a fortnight arriving in the mailbox reminding you of yet another employer who doesn't want to give you a job. That might be all right for a month or two, but it'd be downright demoralising after a year.

What would the pollies know about this, however? Well, they could ask us.

The future

2011-04-01T11:34:00.001+11:00

Again I keep hearing all the "problems" of imposing a carbon tax: jobs will be lost, our exports will be less competitive, electricity prices will rise, etc, etc.

How short sighted these are!

All these criticisms fail to look much further than a few years into the future. These criticisms are probably true within the short-ish term However look a bit further ahead and what have you got?

Firstly, carbon-intensive industries will become more expensive. What does that mean? Well non-carbon-intensive industries will become far more competitive! Whilst solar panels are not the cheapest things around now, if they are competing with free carbon emissions, they'll stay that way. But if carbon emissions have a price, they will be comparatively cheaper, there'll be greater production of them, and eventually due to economies of scale they'll get a lot cheaper. Look at the price of DVD players when first released - somewhere around $500. Now they're $39.95 for quite a decent unit. Look at the price of cars when the Model T came out - a car today is cheaper in real dollar terms than back in the days of Henry Ford.

Eventually industries will adapt to the new paradigm, and it'll become second nature to look at how to produce things without spewing carbon into the atmosphere. The earth's atmosphere is comparatively small. In fact it is an interesting phenomenon that the oceans are far bigger than the atmosphere, and if you're really going to pollute something there's much less effect by dumping stuff in the sea than in the air! Not that I'm advocating either - just presenting the comparison.

The one thing we do know, however, is if we look further into the future, if we continue to pollute the air for free, we'll have a much hotter world (I hate the heat!) lose species, have more intense weather systems, lose Pacific islands, lose coastal land, and a myriad of other undesirable effects. Where's the economics in that?

It's time to bite the bullet and do what's right for the world. Yes, it will have short-term economic effects. But the longer term results will be a cleaner atmosphere, and saving us from inevitable destruction. The cost of cyclones and severe weather storms is never brought up, but only in January we saw a taste of the consequences. The residents of Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley must surely be able to attest to this!

Cost Shifting

2011-03-30T12:32:00.000+11:00

Some classic examples of cost-shifting occur in some of the so-called "sin-stocks". Probably the best example is that of the cigarette companies. Their product, which costs about 50-60 cents to produce retails at around $15; so no doubt there's a strong desire to produce it - there's a lot of profit there. Naturally the government is keen to also put their hands in the pot and adds excise and tax along the way. But is it enough? Clearly not.

The costs that are shifted include the littering problem, the smoke that is annoying for non-smokers, plus of course, the health issue. Here's where the cigarette companies cost-shift. They sell their product with the full knowledge of these other social costs, but don't contribute to them at all. It all goes to their bottom line, and the health system and other government agencies are reduced to paying for these external costs.

The alcohol industry also does similar things. The consequences of alcohol consumption are immense. We have assaults, vandalism, broken marriages, massive car accidents, health issues, not to mention the simple task of cleaning up vomit! All these are costs of consuming alcohol that the alcohol industry does NOT pay for. Someone else picks up the tab for these "incidental" expenses, and the alcohol industry does not include them within their accounting bottom line. It all stays there in the alcohol industry's books as profit, and is a massive expense for the governments who have to provide police, paramedics, counsellors, doctors, nurses and the like to clean up the mess.

With these issues, it's not difficult to get support from people about the cost-shifting. People tend to agree that the industries need to fully pay for their impact on society. For example, we now pay a levy to dump used car tyres when we buy new ones. We pay an environmental levy when we get our oil changed in the car. TV manufacturers are finally being forced to provide mechanisms for taking back their TV sets when they are no longer in use.

It's the same situation with carbon disposal. Up until now it has been completely free to discharge Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere. This massive cost shifting has meant industries have been able to shift the cost of disposal of their pollutants on to other areas of the economy, and have the resultant profits in their own P&L statements. The carbon tax is a fantastic way of pulling the costs into the existing accounting system without too much reliance on regulation or other cumbersome methods. If it costs money to pollute, then it is in the interests of the company to reduce that cost, pure and simple. Any reduction in costs in the accounts will result in an increase in profit. And maximising profit is one of the most important aims of being in business. It's listed right up there at the top of any company's aims!

These arguments need to be made and explained to the Australian people. It's a pity the Federal Government is failing in its attempts to do so!

Why Tax Carbon

2011-03-22T13:39:00.000+11:00

I am constantly dismayed at this common argument about the carbon tax: we impose a tax, then we just go and compensate people for the tax, what's the point of imposing the tax in the first place?

The ALP has a lot to answer for for allowing this argument to run. It's been used by a number of Liberal politicians lately, Christopher Pyne used it on Q&A last night, and it was never answered correctly.

The reason for the carbon tax is where it's applied and where it is felt. The tax is going to be imposed on industries for emitting CO2. They will then pass it on to customers by increasing their prices. So as a Labor government, the policy is that the people being ultimately affected by the tax are going to be compensated.

Now, what this means is that an industry can either pay the tax for emitting CO2 and pass it on, OR they can find ways of not emitting the CO2 (by using green technology) and then their products become comparatively cheaper as their carbon tax outlay will be less. They get a leg-up on reducing their expenses. If their competitors increase their prices because of the tax, then the non-emitters can either keep their prices low and thus become far more competitive, or not increase their prices as much and improve their profitability.

What this does is assist low-emitting industries, and penalise high emitters. After a while, industries will be encouraged to find ways of reducing their carbon emissions. Either that, or they'll find their prices are not as competitive because they'll now be having to pay extra carbon tax.

It was said that to reduce smoking, tax on cigarettes is increased. You don't then go and compensate smokers for the increase in cigarette prices. But this ignores a very important economic concept: substitution. A smoker really can't substitute other products - you either smoke tobacco or give up. (There are probably a few substitutes, but not of high importance in our condierations here).

Whereas with energy there ARE many substitutions. Already we can buy Green Power generated from wind turbines, hydro-electric schemes and the like. It's more expensive than coal generated power, and therefore it's not really all that popular. But if you tax carbon emissions, you make Green Power relatively cheaper, and thus increase demand for it. People will be queueing up to tick the box on the Green Power option if it's not as expensive as coal-generated power; just as most people now take the cheapest power option on their bills (which just happens to be coal-fired stuff).

So the reason why the compensation IS different and the reason why we need to tax the emitters is simply to differentiate the products. Don't forget if you don't generate CO2, you won't pay any carbon tax. And if you do (which is regarded as the undesirable outcome) your emissions will make your products more expensive.

For too long industries have had a free run. They have been allowed to emit CO2 into the atmosphere for free. It's called cost-shifting. You do something that costs someone something, but if you're not paying for it, then that cost is not in your accounts, it's in someone elses, therefore the profit is yours. And some other poor guy (usually the government) has to pay to fix things up. The government gets its funding from taxpayers, so that cost avoided is paid for by all of us.

I can't see why a government needs to pay for the expenses racked up by companies. Consider a petrol station now being closed down. The land needs to be remediated from the chemicals. No-one would argue that the petrol station itself needs to pay for that remediation work. But let's say they get away with it by becoming bankrupt. The land still needs remediation, and now the government (ie us taxpayers) has to pay for it. That cost has been shifted on to someone else. And the saving in cost goes straight to the bottom line of the company avoiding it. In other words taxpayers are subsidising the industries.

This is what has been happening for too long with carbon dioxide. Emitters have been emitting it for free until now, whereas it's long been regarded as a cost. Not a financial cost, but an environmental cost. With a carbon tax, you immediately transfer that environmental cost into a financial cost. It will appear on the business's bottom line, and they'll be doing something about it - mark my words. With carbon emissions free there is simply no incentive at all to do anything about it. Why bother?

We need a carbon tax, plain and simple. Carbon emissions are NOT free to the world, why should they be free to businesses who actually emit them? Cost-shifting is so frequently used by big business, and I'll blog more about it later this month as it's a fascinating concept that is, fortunately, being phased out gradually. One of the biggest cost-shifting phenomena is that of free carbon emissions.

The things they say

2011-02-10T04:21:00.000+11:00

Hi guys, I'm back again. I'm participating in an interesting project at the moment, and that is campaigning on behalf of the ALP candidate for the state seat of The Entrance, David Mehan.

What I'm doing is "doorknocking by telephone". Our current state member, Grant McBride (ALP), is retiring at this election, and David is the replacement candidate.

My telephone campaign has started very interestingly. Most people are quite happy to talk about the upcoming election. I have spoken to a number of traditional ALP supporters, many of whom ARE intending to vote Labor on March 26. However there are also a number of traditional ALP supporters who are either still undecided, or are not going to be voting Labor on 26 March. There are also a number of Liberal voters who are not going to be voting Labor, however there are NO Liberal supporters who are thinking of voting for the ALP!

It is interesting how a few of the people I'm calling have (how shall I put this) very little interest in politics. I have even spoken to people who are not aware that an election is being held in this state on March 26. I suppose not everyone watches the news.

I keep wondering what the situation would be if we had voluntary voting in this country. After all, at the moment, many people vote who have no idea of the issues involved, and simply regardit as a burden imposed on them by the faceless ones. If the decision was left to people who WANT to vote then perhaps a more informed decision could be made on who gets in, and those who don't care can just accept what those who bothered to show up and vote decided. This is why I was heartened when Tony Windsor, Bob Katter, Rob Oakeshot and Andrew Wilkie were the ones deciding who would be the next Federal government back in September last year. After all, THEY were interested, informed and had a stake in the issue, unlike so many of the electors out there who couldn't really care less.

Incidentally, one question I ask many people when on the phones is just out of interest, are they able to name the Liberal candidate for The Entrance. Not a single person has been able to answer this as yet. (To save you from the suspense, his name is Chris Spence.

Victorian TAC Christmas Ad revisited

2010-12-11T01:34:00.001+11:00

We ran this last year. Are you going to be driving again this Christmas?

You NEED to watch this. Confronting I know, but if this gets the message home to one person I'll be glad.

Click Here to go to YouTube. Need I say any more?

Wulfe HWS

2010-12-10T13:03:00.007+11:00

It was uncanny that a few days ago I wrote "things happen in threes". I really didn't mean it and have no time for superstitions generally. Well, it sort of didn't happen in threes, but as I type, Michael from Mizu Plumbing is currently installing a new Vulcan hot water service in the cupboard under the stairs.

It's actually been leaking for years, but it has come to a head and we've been investigating where this mystical water leak is coming from. It has destroyed the walls around it, the bottom plate and the skirting board. But it hasn't been real clear exactly where the water has been coming from.

Well, it's been the hot water service and the reason why we haven't been able to identify it is that it only leaks when the electricity to it is turned on and the element is heating. And because that's on Off Peak Tariff 2, that's only really between 11pm and 6am of a night.

Night before last after I had removed all the damaged gyprock and skirting board to try to get to see where the leak was I went out and the channel I had cleared was full of water. Given that it had been almost dry an hour before I reckoned I was in a prime spot to see the leak and I was right. Yep. The hot water service, which was thirteen years old and not a very good brand according to our plumber who has had to replace quite a few of them. There was a sure and steady drip of water coming out from the base of it, and falling exactly where the water had been accumulating. It had been running around the channels where the bottom plate had gone and wicking up the studs and into the gyprock.

So the third thing has been fixed within the last couple of weeks: the water tank pump, the personal video recorder and now the hot water service. That'll do us for a while thanks. Which is just as well, as I now have a lot of carpentry and gyprocking to do. Here's the extent of the water damage:

Bianco Pump Back

2010-12-06T23:06:00.000+11:00

Wow, things are happening in quick succession now - today a BRAND NEW Bianco Pump finally came into stock which the wife brought home after work, and not only that, I reinstalled it today as well.

We now have the toilet and washing machine connected to that completely full 5,000 litre rainwater tank in the back yard, and to celebrate, I flushed the toilet FULL FLUSH three times! (Okay, I was clearing the air out of the lines, but it was slightly celebratory).

The new pump is quieter, and has a longer mains lead on it, which is great as the previous one only just reached the power point before.

Our next in-home repair is going to be a water pipe in the laundry which is looking like having tiny pin-prick corrosion holes in it, which is causing water to slowly drip into the laundry wall and rot the bottom plate out. It is going to be interesting to see what happens. If all goes well with our plumber, he's going to be here after lunch time when I get back from having an Xray done.

Homecast comes home

2010-12-05T02:37:00.000+11:00

On Thursday the Homecast PVR returned home in working condition! The electronics technician I dropped it into was fairly busy. I dropped it in Monday, and then rang on Tuesday afternoon. "Have you had a chance to look at it?" I eagerly asked. Alas, no. "Just so you know: we're missing it" and I left it at that.

On Wednesday I thought I'd leave him to his own devices and not bother a very busy man who has a phone glued permanently to his ear. Well, every time I dropped in he was on the phone talking through procedures!

On Thursday morning he rang me. Early. "It was a couple of capacitors and a resistor, and it's all fine now - $99. And I'm leaving early this afternoon at 3:30, so you can pick it up Friday if you want".

I interjected that I'd be there within an hour, and he said that'd be fine. I'll say that'd be fine. The thing came back home, I checked it out and re-installed it in its pride of place.

It had recorded a show at 8:30pm on the Saturday night, but it hadn't recorded "Insiders" which is on ABC1 at 9am on Sunday mornings. So it failed between then and then. Was there a power surge, Saturday night at all? A couple of caps, a resistor and a pair of diodes in the power supply chain sounds suspiciously like a bit of a power surge to me. Anyway, we'll never know, and the Homecast is back in heavy service as usual. Didn't even get the VHS machine out while it was absent, although it was starting to look like it was going to be fired up again. Sheesh, I wonder if it actually still works?

Bianco Pumpz

2010-11-30T00:01:00.029+11:00

Things happen in threes, eh? Well you know all about the Homecast PVR breaking down; yesterday it went in for repairs. Yesterday I dropped off our rainwater tank pump in for repairs as well!

We got rainwater tanks installed about three years ago - we have a 5,000 round tank which is connected to a tap, the washing machine and the upstairs toilet cistern. We also have a 2,000 tank for only watering the garden.

We use water from the big tank a lot more than from the small one, but due to the locations on the block, we can gravity feed from the 2,000 litre tank into the big one almost all of the small tank's capacity. Well it will leave about 500 litres there.

We only have one pump - on the big tank, of course, so if we want to use water in the front yard, or at high pressure, we can hook up to the big tank and use the hose off the pump, and it comes out at a great rate of knots! We can sort of pay it back, as technically the big tank is on Stage 2 restrictions, by "borrowing" water from it and the replacing it from the 2,000 litre tank which is completely unrestricted. In any case, we've never had empty tanks since they were installed - there's always been SOME water in them from rainfall. We did get low once, but again I topped up the big tank from the small one and we made it through all right.

That is until a few weeks ago, when the pump completely karked it. They have electronic controllers which sense the back pressure, and turn the pump on or off depending on whether it needs to be on or not. EG flush the toilet, and the back pressure drops, the pump senses it, and then operates the pump for a minute or so while the cistern refills. It then turns off.

Sometimes, at random and for no apparent reason, the pump comes on. This is because the pressure in the lines has dropped and the pump senses it has to recharge them. It's certainly uncanny when you're out in the backyard when it happens! Also, when we get visitors staying in the downstairs spare room, we'll often switch the pump off and use Town Water again for the toilet, as the pump is right outside the window and at 3am it can be a bit of a shock when I go to the loo as I am wont to do.

So the pump is in for repairs. We have a dilemma. The repair will cost $177; or we can buy a new pump with a fresh two year warranty (mind you, this one has died after 2-1/2 years) for $250. I still haven't decided: there are pros and cons that are almost even. The pump has been dead for a few weeks now (no chance of repairing it while the show was in production!) so another day or two deciding is not going to make much difference in the scheme of things.

If you, dear reader, are out there and pondering this, please suggest what we are to do. Initially I thought repair, however more recently I have been coming down on the side of replace...

Not the Homecast again

2010-11-29T12:27:00.000+11:00

We came home yesterday from an overnight stay in the Hunter Valley (doesn't that sound nice - in reality we stayed overnight at my in-laws') and lo and behold, what was to greet us on our arrival was a dead Homecast Personal Video Recorder.

This machine has been not totally reliable, although it is a very handy piece of technology and means we haven't used a video cassette for a number of years now. But it simply wouldn't boot up. It's not completely dead - it passes through the RF signal to the TV, and the hard drive spins up all right, but as for it proceeding beyond these rudimentary features, forget it.

It's been the subject of a few blog entries in the past, actually, if you want to go searching. It cooked out its hard drive last year and that had to be replaced, which turned out to be quite a simple repair that I did. (And the 320 gig drive was replaced with a 500 gig drive as it was cheaper to buy a 500 gig drive at the time). For now, however, it's a little bit too technical and it's going over to meet an electronics technician at West Gosford in about ten minutes. Fingers are crossed, as I'm all set up to use it now re software and cables and everything else. The lovely thing about it is you can get digital broadcasts off the machine, on to a computer, edit them (top & tail and if on non-ABC cut the ads out) and burn them to DVD. Download a DVD cover for a movie and with a digital input, your DVD is almost as good as a commercial number, minus the special features, of course.

I wish it well. It's in the front seat of the car at the moment in its original box for transport.

Caught in the Net for the last time

2010-11-27T03:28:00.000+11:00

Well, well, well.

On Saturday 20 November, Caught in the Net came to an end at Wyong Drama Group. This was a project that had occupied virtually my every waking moment for the last month, and a substantial amount of time for the two months prior to that. That's why there have been no blog posts for ages.

The show was, without doubt, the best thing I've ever directed, and it was the funniest thing on stage I have ever seen. It's a real testament to both the cast, and my crew (Sharon, Scott, Josh and the rest).

To see more specific info, including a hundred and fifty photos, podcasts and videos, see the Drama Group web pages at www.wyongdramagroup.com.au/caught_in_net.htm and you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Sounds good, doesn't it? Well, there is a nasty taste in my mouth from certain drama group members who seem to be a little upset that the show was as succesful as it was. I normally DON'T produce farces, but this one was a real tour-de-force. My respect for Ray Cooney jumped umpteen-fold after getting to know this play pretty well from a three month rehearsal period. Whereas before I was dismissive of farces in general, I can see just how much detail Cooney has put into the play. There are a number of setups where the payoff doesn't take place for ages. For instance a snorkel and mask is dropped as a setup on page 27 when the wearer has to answer a phone. This action is quite insignificant at the time.

Yet on page 43 the payoff comes when another character unseen to the audience, puts on the snorkel and mask and uses it to hide his identity in one of the (many) funniest moments of the show. Sheer comic genius from Cooney, and the play was full of so many details that you can see it must have taken him over a year to write the thing.

With all these positives, why the negatives? I can only put it down to jealousy. You could see during the leadup to the show that the group wanted it to be a success, but just not TOO MUCH of a success. The laughter emanating from the audience during the second act, and that final incredibly appreciative applause at the end for the Curtain Calls was an absolute joy to behold. It made it all worthwhile.

But alas, not all is quiet on the Western Front. At a committee meeting, four days after the play was over (I am Treasurer) several members of the committee saw fit to really put the boot in over absolutely petty issues that weren't even my fault. I copped a grilling for an hour and ten minutes. Whilst I did get support from a couple of committee members, the other four went out of their way to make things hard on me. And they didn't really have to - they chose to do so.

Given the success of the show and all the positives that came about, it's a real pity that our Drama Group mission statement went completely out the window: Wyong Drama Group Inc. strives to provide a variety of quality theatre for the community, and to support, nurture and showcase the diverse talents of its members in an atmosphere of fun, friendship and enthusiasm. What a joke.

Maximum TWO visitors

2010-09-15T03:55:00.001+10:00

When I was in intensive care at Royal North Shore there was a strict rule applied to all patients. That was a maximum of two visitors per patient at any one time. This was STRICTLY enforced, and for obvious reasons. When Aunty Val and Uncle George came down from Brisbane, and were visiting with Mum & Dad and Sharon, they'd do things via tag team, with three waiting outside and two inside at any one time. I must admit at very brief periods we would have had three people at the bedside, but this did not last for long and we complied with the spirit of the law at all times while in the ICU.

One unfortunate patient who was in a nearby bed had mesothelioma. This form of cancer is one of the most vicious and horrible diseases you will ever get. No-one ever survives it (compare testicular cancer which has a survival rate of over 95%) and it kills within a relatively short period after diagnosis.

It is also a horrible way to go. Your lungs cannot absorb oxygen properly and it feels like you are always short of breath. As Bernie Banton described it, it feels like your lungs are encased in a concrete silo. You cannot take in a deep breath as there are restrictions on the outside.

This unfortunate chap happened to know about his diagnosis, and knew then end would be soon. So he was tidying up loose ends and ensuring all was taken care of when he was no longer around to do it. So one afternoon he had a visit from a couple of guys in suits and his wife was also at his bedside. They were working out his will. There was a solicitor and his assistant acting as a stenographer, the guy's wife, and the guy himself and they were in quite deep discussion as to what was going to happen.

A nurse walked in, noticed there were THREE visitors at the bedside and asked one of them to leave. She had no idea exactly what they were doing, but she knew the two visitor rule was being infringed. I think if she had asked exactly what was happening (his will was being prepared) she probably wouldn't have brought this up. I'm sure her embarrassment was greater than the nasty taste it left in the mouths of those preparing the will.

Speaking on behalf of?

2010-09-14T02:38:00.000+10:00

I recently posted an email containing comments about the proposed Wyong Shire Cultural Centre, and have published the spruced-up text of that email here on the blog.

Strange thing has happened. It has been contended that my comments were purporting to be that of Wyong Drama Group. How the hell this can be inferred is a little beyond me. I reckon it's pretty obvious from reading the comments that the opinions are mine and mine only.

Granted, I am a member of Wyong Drama Group (I have been since 1987 and was made a Life Member back in 2002). So I am sort of stuck with the brand. In fact, I am probably never going to be able to cease being a member of Wyong Drama Group. However, the way it's going, if I go down to the shops and buy a couple of litres of milk, I'd be not surprised to hear that I was speaking on behalf of the group - and I know at this point in time with about 4 litres of UHT milk in the Green Room fridge, Wyong Drama Group does not actually require 2 litres of milk!!! Therefore I speak with forked tongue!!! Okay, ridiculous, but exactly the point, it IS ridiculous to assume I speak on behalf of Wyong Drama Group when I simply mention that I am a member.

If I was not a member of the Drama Group then I'd say my association with Wyong Memorial Hall would not have been as initimate or as long, and I'd not know about the sort of audiences we get to WDG shows. However guys, let's amke a deal. Unless I specifically say "I AM SPEAKING ON BEHALF OF WYONG DRAMA GROUP" (and hell, to do so I will get a motion from a meeting to do so) then please assume that I am actually expressing my own opinion. I mean, really. Some of the words like "I reckon" and "personally" must surely indicate that the comments are opinions of the author of the opinion and no-one else.

Why have a government?

2010-09-11T14:59:00.000+10:00

Why indeed. This is a question a lot of people are now asking given we have a hung parliament. There is a lot more interest in what a government does and why we have one. Here is a very short answer, which is by no means complete.

A government is basically a mechanism where market failures are addressed. Generally, open markets can supply the needs and wants of a society. However, in many cases, certain goods and services would not be supplied or may be supplied at economically inefficient levels. Such services might include the extremely socially desirable areas such as health, education, roads, police and legal services and so on ad infinitum. Although some services previously provided by governments are now undertaken profitably by private enterprises (such as our national airline, the Commonwealth Bank and the like), there are large numbers of services that a government must still provide, such as health, social order and social welfare. These services are never provided by private enterprise.

Governments also go into the business of providing services that could be supplied by a private enterprise. There are two main reasons for this. One reason is to achieve economies of scale in an operation. Consider the Post Office, which is able to maintain an excellent distribution network because it is the only body performing this service. Private letter delivery companies do operate, but at far lesser efficiencies than the Post Office.

Another important reason is to avoid, or at least control, the development of a monopoly in a market. An instance of this is where a distribution network, such as a pipeline or an electrical transmission grid is required. This is funded and setup by a government organisation, which can then regulate who gets use of the network, whilst still achieving economies of the scale for the network. The rollout of the Foxtel and Optus cable television cable networks about ten years ago is a classic example of the inefficiencies of having two distribution networks for the one product, and corrective steps have recently been taken by Optus and Foxtel to solve the problem.

Another example is the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) owned formerly by Telecom Australia. While the telecommunications industry was developing, the government was able to supply the services as a monopoly and fund the provision of the network. Now, external competitors to Telstra have access to the PSTN, and legislation determines its use. This would not be possible if the PSTN was owned by a private enterprise. After all, a business is hardly likely to give competitors free and full access to one of its privately owned income-generating assets.

Another major function of government is to stabilise economic fluctuations. Throughout the economy various measurements of the economic activities being carried out (such as the All Ordinaries Index) are subject to constant flux. In general, indices increase, but sometimes the movement is in spectacular gains, followed by equally spectacular falls. A government works to try evening out the peaks and troughs in various indices.

A government has a vast array of mechanisms it can use in order to achieve this. It can spend to stimulate demand, and bring an economy out of recession. It can increase interest rates and invoke a credit squeeze in order to slow demand, and bring an economy out of an overheated situation. It can also channel resources into sectors that may be deserving of them, such as into Health, Social Security, Defence and the Arts, areas private enterprise may be neglecting. It can perform these latter actions maybe in sympathy with the business cycle, or maybe to simply re-direct resources within the economy to more “deserving” areas.

In order to fund these operations, a government is entitled to raise taxes. Indeed, the raising of taxes is yet another way the government can influence the economic cycle, by controlling the incidence and amount of tax an economy pays. It can also direct taxation to various sectors of the economy, favouring one section at the expense of another. It can help to increase Research and Development spending, for example, by allowing favourable tax deductions for R&D spending. This encourages certain economic activities that are otherwise being neglected by private enterprise.

In all, the government is an important stabiliser of the economy, and ensures that society still receives the services it needs when there is a failure of the open market to provide them.

The Greens have been criticised lately due to their policies to introduce new taxes. They certainly do have a number of new taxes they'd like to introduce, but their implementation simply serves as a mechanism for evening out the imbalances in society. As a government, taxation is one of the most important tools at your disposal.

Wyong Shire Cultural Centre

2010-09-08T12:27:00.000+10:00

I’d like to make a few comments about the proposed cultural centre for Wyong Shire and as a current user of Wyong Memorial Hall can speak specifically as to the needs and requirements it will need to address.

Wyong Memorial Hall was built in 1964 to be a major venue for events in the Wyong Shire. It was built at Wyong for a reason: it is the administrative hub of the Tuggerah Lakes area. After all, Wyong Council itself is firmly entrenched in Wyong township and has resisted the many temptations to move over the years.

The hall has reached the end of its useful life and needs replacing. It needs replacing IN WYONG. The same reasons for its initial construction still apply today.

The history of various theatrical groups on the coast needing a cultural centre venue is chequered. There have been quite a few other theatre groups over the years, but only three major ones REMAIN: Wyong Drama Group, Woy Woy Little Theatre and Gosford Musical Society. There are quite a few other groups around, but most cannot point to a history greater than ten years, and many have simply fallen by the wayside. Wyong Drama Group was founded in 1952. Woy Woy was the mid 1960s and Gosford Musical Society also from the mid 1950s.

The main factor contributing to these groups' longevity has been the existence of a venue (now provided by the local councils), for the groups. Woy Woy has the Peninsula Theate, Goford Musical Society has Laycock Street, and Wyong Drama Group has the Wyong Memorial Hall. When compared to the other two, it is immediately apparent that we are the poor cousins of the other two groups. The other theatres are worlds away from what we've been provided for some time in regard to standards and facilities offered.

The contention that a theatre should be provided closer to the southern boundaries of the shire would be okay if there were only one major venue on the Central Coast. Unfortunately that is NOT the case. Along with the Peninsula Theatre at Woy Woy, and Laycock Street Theatre at Wyoming, Gosford City also has a couple of other major venues, such as the Conservatorium in Georgiana Terrace Gosford, and Gosford High School Auditorium (GMS's former venue before Laycock). In addition, a 1,000-seat theatre is being planned on premises now occupied by the Central Coast Leagues Club.

It means that Gosford City has a preponderance of concert venues already, with an additional major one on the way. Wyong Shire, which has a population almost as large as Gosford City, has but one - the (decaying) Wyong Memorial Hall. This hall is the focus for people from as far away as Summerland Point, Wyee, The Entrance and Ourimbah. They centre on Wyong. To build a Wyong Shire cultural centre in the shire’s south at (say) Ourimbah or Tumbi Umbi means it actually competes with and does not complement the facilities in Gosford City. It also makes it harder for people living around the upper Tuggerah Lakes to get to the venue.

One element the new cultural centre is aiming to attract is touring shows and theatre companies. This is well and good, however if you are wanting to attract touring shows to a venue, you really need to have it FURTHER away from Laycock Street otherwise you'll find that a touring group will simply play at Laycock Street and then book their next show in Newcastle. To think they will play at both Laycock Street and then 15 kilometres to the north at Ourimbah on adjacent days is hopelessly optimistic.

A new cultural centre for Wyong Shire needs to be in Wyong, or indeed, thinking it through, even further north, (maybe the new Warnervale Town Centre). This is where the hub of the people will gravitate towards. Wyong itself is very much a transport hub of the coast, with a number of Bus Routes and the Railways Station all centring on Wyong itself.

It's quite simple - the Wyong Memorial Hall basically needs replacing. If you understand the audiences we get, where they live and how they are frequently restricted in their travel, you'd immediately recognise that Wyong is the ideal location.

I do have self-interest in mind, as a member of Wyong Drama Group, but I also can relate to the history of events. Obviously the question of where to site the venue arises validly, but note that our group has been doing shows in the hall at Wyong for 45 years. No other group on the coast has such a long association with a venue. And the reason for the long history is that Wyong is an ideal location to have a group based.

Personally, I live at Wyoming (and for ten years prior to that at Narara), and if I only had to commute as far as Ourimbah to a venue, it'd be a lot more convenient for ME. But for Wyong Shire Residents in general, I can instantly see the benefits of siting a new venue at Wyong itself. (Not to mention the need to breathe a bit of life back into Wyong post-Westfield days). Wyong Drama Group itself does not necessarily need to be favoured in the provision of a hall. It's just that if you site a hall where a group with a 50-odd year history is located, then SOMETHING must be right, and other groups will benefit from what's provided to us. IE what's good for a group with a 50-year history is going to be good for other users of the hall and other residents of the shire.

Incidentally, don't be too optimistic about touring groups hiring COUNCIL venues. A lot of touring groups will hire venues already existing in local clubs, and thus not provide much business for a council venue anyway. The council venue should be concentrating on servicing local non-profit groups in preference to touring professional companies from Sydney and Melbourne. Otherwise the council will be competing with existing local clubs raising their ire as well as forgetting the community it needs to serve.

Hopefully we can see reasoned sense and ensure the new Cultural Centre is located at Wyong. It would no doubt be beneficial to ask a few of our audience members with limited resources and travel options. Wyong Drama Group plays to well over 3,000 people per year, so we do have a bit of an affinity with the people using our venue. When we hear misguided conclusions about who will use the venue and where it should be it really gets us upset.

We can give good advice if people want to listen to it. Other conclusions may not be based on putting on shows (in my case since 1987) for local audiences, rather an optimistic prediction of what you'd like to happen rather than what will or indeed does happen.

Thanks for your time.

Vision for the country

2010-09-07T00:40:00.000+10:00

The independents have all had their call for measures to improve the country. I agree with most of them. However they've missed a couple of very important measures which I think is a wasted opportunity.

These measures would be extremely popular amongst the community, yet constantly are put in the too-hard basket every time they come up.

I've already blogged about making voting not compulsory (see below). This is one I reckon MOST people in the electorate would be in favour of, yet we hear nothing about it from the pollies, even the independents. Let's put that to one side, however.

The other one is something everyone seems to agree upon and yet nothing is done. It's something Bob Hawke and John Howard share a consensus with, and that is, if we were putting the country together again now, then we'd probably do it without having state governments. Bob wants us to keep the state boundaries for the purposes of Sheffield Shield cricket and State of Origin football, but otherwise let's get rid of them. It was Don Chipp who said they were "useless appendages that hang on to body politics - they should be cut off" (ref) (mind you, in that same interview he reckoned Mark Latham was a shoe-in to be Prime Minister).

So yeah, how about it Rob & Tony? We're already going to have a referendum on recognising native Australians in the constitution next election thanks to the Greens. How about we add in a "let's abolish State Government" clause as well?

And Steve: yes I still maintain Labor lost the election. Julia is going to remain as Prime Minister, but no longer with a majority in parliament, which is what she did lose. Note my prophecies from August 24, however. IE a Labor/Green/Independent coalition with Bob Katter being the loose canon. Got that one right, I wonder now about the next bit how we're going to be back at the polls within a year thanks to an external event. Nostradamus eat your heart out.

Stop the Waste

2010-08-26T03:59:00.002+10:00

In a recent report it has been revealed that the cost to Australia of alcohol misuse is $36 BILLION per year. This includes a lot of indirect costs, obviously, but is said to be a realistic figure.

So the Liberal Party wants us to "stop the waste"! I say let's start looking at this problem of alcohol misuse. It's sobering to think that if we all stopped misusing alcohol for just a year and a half, we could actually pay for the National Broadband Network, INCLUDING budget over-runs!

This puts a lot of things into perspective. The coalition has long claimed that the NBN is a waste. On this basis, it is, in reality, excellent value for money. Why don't we see people appealing for the reduction in alcohol abuse with the same sort of vehemence they are opposing the NBN?

Barnaby

2010-08-25T23:59:00.002+10:00

Who's that jolly dumb-fuck you've got in your cabinet?

Thanks to Andrew Hansen for absolutely cracking me up tonight on "Yes, we Canberra" !!

Why Labor didn't win

2010-08-25T00:01:00.052+10:00

I can tell you why Labor didn't win if you'd like to know. The answer is easy. Labor gave up on itself, and therefore the electorate gave up on Labor. Consider these points:

(a) Climate change was the greatest moral challenge of all time up until early 2010. Labor gave up on its policy despite a clear mandate to do something about it at the 2007 election.

(b) The Home Insulation Scheme had problems. Hell yeah, but most government schemes do have problems. What happens? The problems are identified and steps are taken to fix them. Instead Labor gave up on the insulation scheme.

(c) The Henry Report, which was the most important review of the taxation system was written and released to the government and it was given up on. It wasn't published for over six months, and when it was partially released the government gave up completely on explaining it. We still haven't had the figures and statistics underlying the conclusions released to this day. The government implemented about 8 of the 138 recommendations. So can I say that the government 94% gave up on it. And the bit that it did decide to go with (Mining Tax) was unpopular and pilloried by the miners and their mates in the Liberal party.

(d) The promise of fixing the health system by midway through 2009 was given up on. Okay Kruddy got around to doing something about it, but they certainly gave up on the deadline.

(e) after a cumulative effect, of the above bad policies, the government did the ultimate capitulation, and gave up on its leader, resulting in Julia Gillard coming to power.

(f) In the campaign, the government gave up on announcing significant policies, gave up promoting itself, gave up countering ludicrous arguments from the other side, gave up pointing to its fine record in the GFC, and simply reverted to the line that Tony Abbot was a real risk and you should not vote for him.

After all this (and a lot more besides) the electorate gave up on the government. And fair enough too.

Granted, the opposition gave us a bland and negative campaign consisting of the line that the government was incompetent and we should not vote for them (if there were any other policies used I must have missed them). Their "action contract" said they'd repay the debt (what debt? I know the dollar amounts sound impressive, but borrowing 6% of GDP is not a significant level of debt); stop waste (a party wanting to give $75,000 to a couple earning $450,000 a year for paid parental leave cannot lecture us about waste); stop new taxes (see the previous point resulting in a 1.5% tax levy on all big companies that sell us groceries, banking services and petrol and filtering through the economy); bring the budget back to surplus by 2013 (weren't we all going to do that anyway) stop the mining tax (might be a problem with the former unless huge cuts to government services are going to result) and stop the boats (thus ending a whopping 3.4% of the asylum seeker problem).

And yet, with this campaign, Tony Abbott emasculated the ALP, made them lose 15 seats and their majority on the floor of the parliament.

It's no coincidence that most seat losses for the ALP occurred in Queensland. Kevin Rudd is a Queenslander.

How the ALP can say Gillard ran a great campaign and that if Kruddy was still PM they would have lost another ten seats is beyond me. It is a case of believing your own spin. It was Shakespeare that said "and this above all, to thine own self be true". The ALP needs to take a page out of the folio, learn from the debacle and move forward in the real sense of the term, not the spinning sense.

Election Fever!

2010-08-24T00:24:00.000+10:00

The federal election has brought me out of hibernation. Firstly I must state that at the moment I am an ALP member, and have been for about fifteen years now. Back in the mid 1980s I was in fact a Liberal party member, God knows what possesed me to do that. (Actually it was Mum & Dad, but let's not go into that now).

I need to make quite a few comments on the election. Firstly re the political process itself. I absolutely hate it when people say they can't be bothered with politics, you can't trust politicians and they couldn't care less who gets in. Probably the middle point is true, but we get the politicians we deserve. They come from us. They come from people who care enough to care. If no-one cares any more, then obviously the standard of political candidate decreases and any old so and so can get in. But whose fault is that, really? All politics is local, and if you care enough about it, then there IS something you can do (ask me how - I won't go on about it here).

Secondly, consider the electoral process of "compulsory" voting. As Mark Latham pointedly reminded us, we don't HAVE to make a mark on the ballot paper, we only have to turn up and get our names crossed off the roll. However I think if you've bothered to turn up, get a paper issued to you and are in a polling place anyway, it'd be crazy not to vote.

That's not the crazy point. The thing that drives me mad is that half the nation simply couldn't care less about politics. They don't understand the processes, they aren't interested in the game at all, and they regard voting as an inconvenience. In some countries, people have died (literally died) over the right to vote, yet half of us couldn't give a toss. Just do a quick street poll and see if you can find out what proportion of people can actually name their local member. I reckon you may be in for a big disappointment. When Kruddy was toppled that fateful day a couple of months ago and Gillard was made Prime Minister, I actually spoke to people who had never even heard of Julia Gillard. It says it all, really.

But in Australia we force them to vote and influence the outcome of the elections, yet their decisions as to who to vote for might be based solely on such factors as the colour of the candidate's hair, or the fact that their second cousin has the same surname as their local candidate. These criteria, for some people, are the main basis of their decision. More fool us for forcing them to vote.

Accordingly, the election campaign has to be pitched at a level that the dumbest Australian can understand. Don't worry about giving them facts about economics, don't worry about giving them aspirations, don't worry about giving them foreign affairs and defence policies, it's a waste of time. What you do instead is give them a sound bite with a juicy quote, or a picture, such as buying a pie from a shop, or chucking around a football. This is what Australian politics has been reduced to, and it's not something that gives us a good government. The sad thing is that instead of basing a political choice on the outcome of a debate, a lot of Australians might prefer to base their decision on the result of a bare-knuckle fight between a couple of political leaders.

So I say this: make it optional. If you don't care, don't vote. If you don't understand, don't vote. If you hate having to interrupt your Saturday footy or fishing trip, or visit to the pub, don't bother, we're all right without you. This way those who care enough to vote will be the ones making the decisions and the rest of the nation can just acept what those who did vote actually said. This is the way it works in most countries in the world. According to Wikiedia, only 32 countries have compulsory voting. Notably USA, UK, New Zealand, etc, etc do not, yet people do not tend to argue these nations are undemocratic.

Thirdly, and I need to probably end this post on a positive note, isn't the outcome of this election great on the same basis as the second point? To form a government, the independents and Green will need to be courted by someone aiming to form a government. On this basis they need to convince not a dumb electorate, but some of the most wily and canny political thinkers in Australa. I've been listening closely to what the non-aligned members have been saying (okay, ONE of them is a little disappointing with his parochialism - sorry Bob) and I am encouraged. They WILL be making a government based on policies, aspirations and abilities, and not the colour of the hair, or the relative's names. Won't this be a welcome breath of fresh air into the mix.

As a prediction, I cannot see either Tony Windsor or Rob Oakeshott coalescing with the Liberals. Adam Bandt has actually come out and stated that he wouldn't. I have no idea how Bob Katter will go (nor does anyone else, I'd say - even including Bob Katter, I'd reckon).

But the upshot of all this is I can't see Tony Abbott as Prime Minister this parliamentary term. The numbers are so close, however, that I also don't think the parliament is going to be workable. If a minister needs to go overseas, if an opposition member gets sick, if someone dies, or (more likely) someone has to resign due to either retirement or corruption, the parliamentary dynamic can change. The fact that the governing side would probably need to give up a speaker who doesn't have a normal vote also makes it difficult. So my prediction is a Labor/Green/Independent coalition for now, but it'll become unworkable due to an external factor and we'll be out at the polling booths again within a year.

Try to Remember (that kind of September)

2010-08-22T03:02:00.000+10:00

The singer is Tamara Abbott, as part of Wyong Drama Group's show "Harp on the Willow" on Saturday 21 August 2010 at Wyong Memorial Hall. The video speaks completely for itself. One of the nicest renditions of the song you'll ever hear.

Vive le Tour

2010-07-02T02:34:00.000+10:00

At last, tomorrow, the road warriors depart for three weeks of self-imposed torture. And I'll be watching as much of it as I can. Cadel Evans has a new team, hopefully he can get the support of it more than the old Lotto squad he has left behind - but is it really Cadel's lack of support, or Cadel's lack of just that little bit of extra true grit?

I find that when he's required to pull out all stops and push just that inhuman amount more than possible, it seems he leaves a stop in place, and just can't quite make it.

Anyway, this year, I'm going for Mick Rogers. If anyone deserves a win it's ol' Michael - it may be the last chance he gets before he reaches the age of impossibility.

In all reality, however, I can't see anyone beating Alberto Contador this year. Not even Lance. My fingers are crossed for Mick, however, hopefully he can at least get a top ten in the GC.

Regards also to Stewart and Robbie. Don't forget the website is probably one of the best sporting results sites around http://www.letour.fr/us/homepage_courseTDF.html

#@&%! Facebook

2010-06-10T03:53:00.000+10:00

Hmm, I just have had the distinction of being blocked from sending further messages on Facebook because it detected my activities were abusive to others.

Sheesh! All I was doing was trying to re-connect with a few friends from the 1990s Newcastle BBS world. Okay, well, QUITE a few friends from the BBS world. Still, the activity I was doing certainly WAS legitimate, private use of Facebook, for EXACTLY what the intended use was. IE "Facebook helps you connect with your friends".

Well, I guess I'll just have to stop posting messages on FB for at least a few days. I really have no choice! If you reply to me on FB, please forgive the lateness of reply, as I'm blocked. The block will last "from a few hours to a few days", whatever that means. I'll try to use normal email for now anyway.

It's amazing how connection with ONE old acquaintance can lead to connections to a dozen old acquaintances. But that's how it goes, I suppose. We are all connected somehow.

Slow Progress

2010-06-09T09:18:00.000+10:00

It was late last year when I started looking for old schoolfriends in various ways, and at the start there were precious few I could track down. It is amazing how far and wide we have spread. Some are not even still in the country.

Anyway, at the start I had managed to contact eight or nine of you, and it stayed reasonably static for a few months. In the last few months, however, the contacts list has steadily grown, and now I have email addresses for 23 of you. It seems to be snowballing.

One of the best tools for doing this is, of course, Facebook. I didn't quit on "World Quit Facebook Day" on 31 May past. Why would I want to do that, just as the quest for former schoolfriends is getting interesting. Anyway, things don't happen overnight, I have planted some more seeds, and they will probably germinate over the next week or so.

Incidentally, I have been given about eight class photos in the last DAY to add to the Gorokan High Website. I'm pleased to say they are all online now as we speak. See http://my.integritynet.com.au/wdgi/class_photos.htm

Newcastle BBS History

2010-06-08T03:37:00.000+10:00

Just came across an old notebook I kept when first using Bulletin Boards in Newcastle. It contains some historical records I want to put down for later use and to get on to a Google Search for other people's reference in the future.

In January 1990 I noted these Bulletin Board Systems in the Newcastle region:

Communication 2000 run by Ian Mason. Based in Toronto, this was probably my favourite system. Ian started off using QuickBBS, then went to Remote Access. He got sick of running a BBS for nearly a year, then returned with a vengeance with software called BBS-PC, which he paid big bikkies for and renamed the BBS to \/ector X BBS. Unfortunately the user-friendliness of this system was not up to scratch, although it had a lot of power. The problem was many commands required several letters to execute (almost a command line interface at times) and while I found this a brilliant facility, not many other users were into it, who preferred the usual one-key commands. After suffering from diminishing call rates, Ian pulled down BBS-PC and returned to Remote Access.

Ian was a consummate sysop who setup his system with the users in mind, and was very attentive to detail. His day job was as a school teacher.

Cybertron was run by Brett McKenzie on QuickBBS, then made the transition to Remote Access, like probably everyone else at the time. Brett was located at Georgetown. Brett, like me, had several problems paying his phone bill and was off the air for some months at a time. The BBS disappeared after a few years of sporadic operation.

Mega Technology TBBS was the biggest and oldest system in Newcastle. It was a three-line system, with the biggest hard drives, and offered that incredible facility of the day of multiline chat! It used TBBS (or The Bread Board System) which didn't allow the operation of standard Remote Access BBS doors, and the ones available for the TBBS software were pretty lame, in my opinion, although they all had multiline capability.

The sysop was Stan White and the system operated out of Boolaroo. Stan used to also run a computer shop at Boolaroo. The system was probably the first to offer online CD rom access, which meant there ended up being a massive lot of files online. I remember Stan saying at one point he could no longer add any more devices as he'd used up all the letters of the alphabet in drive names!

Bill's BBS was an interesting system at Broadmeadow, and run by Bill Mastrippolito (AKA Mastro). This system ran on an Apple //e system on a 5 megabyte hard drive, and was quite basic, although it was normally up most of the time. Naturally it didn't offer network messaging or all that much in the way of file downloads, but Bill persisted with running it for quite a few years mainly to prove a point that an Apple //e COULD actually run a Bulletin Board.

The Local BBS was located at Tighes Hill, sysop was Tony Dodds and ran Quick BBS (later Remote Access). I didn't use this system very much and have precious little in the way of notes on it.

Small Business BBS must have been near Lambton somewhere (from the phone number I have) and I don't have any notes on it at all. If I can recall correctly the sysop was Geoff Bilborough and the system was aimed at providing a network for small business owners in the local area. It didn't get much action, and was frequently offline. I think Geoff had a lot more to do than ensure his BBS hobby was well-maintained.

Newcastle Microcomputer Club (which was founded in October 1976) met twice a month (2nd & 4th Monday of each month in 1990) at the University. NMC BBS was run by the clubp and the long-suffering Sysop was Tony Nicholson. The system was on a phone line at the uni, and so used to operate outside business hours - ie 5pm to 9am Monday to Friday and 24hrs on Saturdays and Sundays. I have an extract from Tony's section of the NMC newsletter (Jul/Aug 1990 issue):

"A hard disk failure put the system off the air from about 19:00 Friday 1st June until 17:00 on Tuesday 5th June. Some files and messages entered in the system on 1 June have been lost. "

"We've had two hard disk drive problems lately. Firstly, the old 20 Mb Miniscribe (which used to be in the old CP/M BBS System) started giving lots of errors and making a whining noise. It has been retired. Then (just after doing a lot of work getting the network software going) the newer 32 Mb drive stopped with a "general failure on drive C:" message. I could not do anything on the weekend (it happened on Friday night) so the system was down for four days while I did a low level format and ran drive diagnostics. Luckily I had made a full backup only hours before the failure so only a few messages were lost".

Other Systems existant in Newcastle included the Hunter Schools BBS, Sysop name was Troy Harper which was a small system based in Newcastle West, operated by some local education establishment and run by students. Also there was a BBS called the Novocastrian Computer Link (sysop was Matt).

On the Central Coast there were a couple of systems. Coastal Opus at Kariong was run by Kevin Mann, which used the Opus-CBC BBS program, which wasn't really good for games and downloads, but Kevin was a dedicated mail mover who was later to become both network and region co-ordinator in Fidonet.

Another very interesting system was The Round Table BBS which was run on an Amiga out of Koolewong and used a Skypix system. This wass software ahead of its time. As well as being able to use ANSI graphics, both monochrome and colour (like almost all other systems at the time), Skypix also allowed users to download a set of what we would now call avatars - full graphical pictures that were displayed instead of ASCII characters. This was well before the invention of HTML (hypertext markup language) and the invention of the world wide web, of course, but the system was before its time. For a start, you needed an Amiga computer to be able to use it, so the 5% of computer users at the time with an Amiga would have been happy. Unfortunately this BBS was at STD rates for me, and I didn't login all that often.

I suppose I need to add that Inquestor BBS started at some point in 1991, and operated for many years. The sysop was Peter Deane, operated on an Amiga and concentrated on mail distribution. We always had troubles paying the phone bill and finding hard drive space, but the hobby was extremely rewarding and introduced me to computers in no uncertain terms. I used a number of software programs to get the system running (rather than an integrated package our IBM friends would have used) and ended up modifying the existing BBS code of Metro BBS (which I called OzMetro) and wrote an entire message section called Plutonic which was a powerful *.msg message editor with a number of utilities.

Three things killed Inquestor. My move to Toukley from Newcastle, which meant my regular callers all became STD calls to the system; the rise and rise of the internet and world wide web; and (of course) the bankruptcy of Commodore Business Machines and the failure of the Amiga computer to remain with a viable user base. As I have mentioned before, Inquestor still exists. I will drag out the old A2000 it lives on in the next few days, and dump all the files from the hard drive via a serial cable to this machine. With the Amiga Emulator, it might even be possible to get it running on the IBM PC, but at least if that is not possible, the message bases and text files will provide interesting memorabilia.

Old Friends Reunited!

2010-06-07T02:29:00.000+10:00

Well, despite the best intentions, time has been the killer in posting to the blog. Did I not promise to try posting every second day at least? One post in the last two months has not been a good record!

One thing that has become apparent, however, is my quest to track down prior friends, acquaintances and relatives. I have setup a website of school memorabilia at http://my.integritynet.com.au/wdgi but the problem with that is it is not interactive. People can reference the material there, but cannot interact.

What better mechanism for providing output and a forum for input than this very blog we are looking at now? In the next few weeks I will be publicising the existence of this site and hoping to get not only a few responses from users to me, but possibly some interaction between old acquaintences.

I'll also not stop at former schoolfriends. In a former life, back in the late 1980s I used to run a Bulletin Board System called Inquestor BBS on an Amiga computer in Newcastle. At one point it held a record for being the longest continually-running bulletin board in the Newcastle region. Note how many qualifications were needed in order to assert that record! In the early 1990s, however, two things happened. Firstly I moved to Toukley from Newcastle meaning the number of people in the local calling area diminished substantially, and secondly technology overtook bulletin boards, and this thing called the internet seemed to become a lot more significant than the esoteric academic/military plaything it had originated from. Our worldwide Fidonet Nodelist went from a size of well over 2 megabytes to what is now about 150k.

Hopefully we can catch up with a few Inquestor users over here as well. If you'd like to add your comment, PLEASE DO SO. You know how.

Incidentally, Inquestor still exists - last time I booted up the amiga last year it did, anyway. I might see what I can lift off the hard drive that might still be useful. In the meantime, another really useful website is http://fidonet.ozzmosis.com/ which contains a few posts even YOU may have typed!

Return of the Prodigal

2010-05-10T23:07:00.001+10:00

I can't believe I haven't blogged since day 7 of the New Zealand Trip! This was nearly two months ago. For the first couple of weeks after coming back I was rather crook and didn't even turn the computer on; I started to get a little better later, but have just had so much else to do. Looking back at the New Zealand posts everything looks really nice - some of the best looking blog entries posted here. I can't believe they were made under such adverse conditions in hostel internet cafes! (Mind you the Wellington one was typed up on the laptop and then cut and pasted into the blog, rather than created online at exorbitant internet access rates. Amazingly, Wellington was the only hostel we stayed in that had WiFi internet access).

In the last couple of weeks I have been creating a commercial website, and so typing for pleasure is not what I've been looking forward to. However that site is now getting to a decent level of completeness (finally) so I have a bit more time to myself. I'll try to do a blog post at least every second day from here on.

I suppose I should plug the website I've created if you'd like to see what I've been doing instead of blogging. The URL is http://www.optimumair.com.au/ and it's for Optimum Air Conditioning on the NSW Central Coast. I'll add it to the list of my websites over on the right hand side for future reference.

Oh, by they way, I'm after any commissions for websites. As you can see from my sites they are done in Frontpage and aren't full of magical graphical whizz-bangery. However I do try to provide USEFUL CONTENT in a very personalised and customisable form. I aim for a website that users will keep coming back to in order to learn from, rather than one that looks flashy but once you've seen it once or twice it serves no more purpose.

I'm cheap, too! So if you reckon it's just about time to get your business a web presence, just drop me an email via the blog link at the top of the page, or add a comment here.

Wellington, not the Duke

2010-03-15T20:51:00.000+11:00

Well, it’s day eight of the trip, and we are in Wellington. We have visited a LOT of the countryside so far. I think we left the blog on Day 6 at Taupo. Day 7 was at New Plymouth and now, as we said, Wellington.

On Day 6 we saw the Orakei Korako thermal pits, which were intriguing. According to the Lonely Planet, after the destruction of the Pink & White Terraces, this is the most interesting thermal field in New Zealand, and possibly the world. We saw all of it, and for $38 (each) we were ferried over across a lake via boat, dropped off and given a map. After an hour and a half walk I’d taken quite a few photos of the thermal fields, and saw a small geyser going off. This was a relief as on the day before at Te Aroha the geyser wasn’t co-operating. There is a spa operated below it which taps into the waters and seems to have zapped the life of the geyser. At least at Orakei the geyser went off, albeit only tamely.

Night 6 saw us staying at Taupo on the northern shores of a massive lake, which was the result of one of the world’s biggest seismic events. The lake just blew up, al la Krakatoa, leaving behind a massive crater which is now filled with water. Taupo is a very commercial area with vast numbers of accommodation facilities and tour operators, such as helicopter rides, para-sailing, bungee jumping and the like. However it is a remarkably beautiful area.

Day 7 saw us do the mountains of Ruapehu. This is the first active volcano I’ve ever seen. It last erupted in September 1995, and the local guides were saying it was probably due to go off again, as it had erupted in 1969, 1975 and 1988. He did resist the urge to look at his watch, but I was almost expecting him to. Apparently in a 1953 eruption, 153 people were killed. We forked out $23 each to go up a long way on two of the chair lifts, which took us a long way up the hill. It was a magic experience, and from the top we could see Mt Taranaki (Mt Egmont) which was 230km away, and where we would be staying that night. A lot of driving saw us land in New Plymouth at the Egmont Eco Lodge, which was fully booked due to the Womad festival being held there for the last three days. Apparently this is a youth Arts festival, but from the looks of those staying in the hostel, the minimum age was 55!

Today we’ve done a lot more driving, all the way around Mt Egmont via the coast and down to Wellington, which is probably about as far south as we’re going to get. We are here for at least two days.

More later. We are not finding it easy to get internet access all the time. New Plymouth’s terminals were down last night. Today, here at Wellington, which is a massive hostel, I actually have the laptop going and have wi-fi access which is pure luxury. We're more than halfway through the holiday now, and am getting used to the hostelling to a certain extent. The worse thing is the packing up and repacking every day. Now we get two days in the one spot! Luxury!!!

Foreigners, not

2010-03-13T16:27:00.000+11:00

Well, we've been in New Zealand now for five days, and it's been heaven. For a start everyone over here seems to pronounce "kilometre" correctly (ie killer meter) and the street signs, notices on walls and articles in papers all seem to be spelt correctly and the apostrophes are even in the correct places!

We were told New Zealand was like Australia, but just twenty years ago, and they are right. Although today we drove through a few towns that were probably Australia FIFTY years ago! The place we have seen so far is very rural. However we have seen a few pockets of native bush. Crikey, when NZ was settled there must have been a rampant effort all up to clear the land. Of what we've seen so far, there are mainly cleared areas used for agriculture or forestry, with occasional bits of bush. Nothing like the East Coast of Australia anyway where there are huge expanses of native uncleared vegetation.

The places we have stayed in so far are day 1, Auckland, where we landed and had the afternoon/evening. We went up to SkyTower, which is shown here from the YHA room itself. Not a bad view (click on the pic for a bigger image). We acclimatised ourselves on Day 1 and got slightly used ti thi uccunt. Random vowels abound.

On Day Toe (that's how they pronounce it) we headed north and stopped at Paihia. We saw some magnificent bits of coastline on the way. The shot on the right here is where we had lunch. It is an absolutely magic location, but is also home to New Zealand's sole oil refinery. Over to the right you can see the storage tanks and the incoming ships, and in the background the unspoiled bits!!!! They need petrol, I suppose, but maybe the refinery could have been better placed. Speaking of petrol, it's quite different. The oil companies set a price and it seems all the servo's stick to it. When we arrived it was $NZD1.77.9 everywhere. But two days later Shell and Mobil put it up to $1.80.9 and BP and Caltex to $1.82.9 so we bombed out there. Also, it's weird. You pull up in a servo and start putting petrol into the car, and they come out and grab the hose off you and finish it off. We've only been to ONE self-serve station so far, and I'm not used to it (as I was saying, Australia, but twenty years ago).

Day Three saw us at Paihia in the morning where we went on a Bay of Islands cruise all day. The cruise was called the "Cream Trip" and goes around visiting all the islands making a few deliveries and allowing us all to swim with the dolphins if we want to.

The pic on the left is the "Hole in the Rock", which we actually did sail through in our reasonably large twin hulled cruiser. You can't go through on all days when the swll is big, but we were lucky. The boat ONLY JUST fitted. The captain, who was Dutch but with a combo Dutch/Kiwi accent was quite a talented seaman, and he slipped through without a problem at all.

In the evening we travelled further North to Ahipara which is the most northerly YHA hostel in NZ. Next day (Day 5) we started by travelling North to Cape Reinga, which is as far as you can drive in NZ (not exactly the most northerly point, but close. It's also the most westerly point, so I suppose it's as close to Australia as we're going to get for another week and a half.

Here's the view north from the northern tip of NZ:

The maoris reckon that all the souls travel north upon dieing right up the northern tip of the country and beyond. After all, they originally came from islands around Hawaii, so it is only natural for them to return. Sheesh, we got bored on the three hour plane trip over from Sydney - imagine canoeing here from Hawaii...

Day 5 saw us drive for a huge distance, as once we had hit Cape Reinga we came down the highway, back through Auckland and actually made it to Hamilton. The YHA at Hamilton was full, and we didn't think we'd make it as far south as we did so we hadn't booked. But we did, so we stayed in a cheap motel on the north side of Hamilton. Day Six wasn't quite as exciting, as we toured around Hamilton and it was not as interesting as the North. However along the way we did see this interesting animal constructed from corrugated iron! The things they do. So many drivers were stopping for photos, the shops were doing a roaring trade.

Day 6 we've seen the largest tree of some species I can't remember (walked for miles to get there and back) and walked around a thermal springs field. We are now at the YHA in Taupo, almost at the geographic centre of New Zealand. Haven't got photos for today as they are on the camera still up in the room.

We took 40-odd photos on Day one. On Day 2, 130, Day 3, 180 Day 4 only 110, Day 5 a mere 67 and today I haven't looked but it's possibly going to be three hundred.

Anyway, I have eight minutes of internet access left. It's been a good catch up, we are nearly halfway there already. Bye for now

Bay of Islands

2010-03-09T19:21:00.000+11:00

Day two sees us at Paihia, a little town in the Bay of Islands. We have decided to head north from Auckland, and tomorrow we are off on a cruise around Bay of Islands, which will take up the entire day.

We wanted to stay a second night here at Paihia, but they are full tomorrow, so we are off to (err) Ahip Ara, which is further north. The day after tomorrow we are hitting Cape Reinga, so we will be at the most northerly point of New Zealand, and also the most westerly point of the North Island.

We DO plan to do the geographical extremes OF THE NORTH ISLAND, but who knows how far we will get.

The main thing about New Zealand is it does NOT feel like you're in a foreign country. Everything is soooo like Australia. The currency is different, there is a difference in opinion on how vowels are pronounced, but the terrain, the roads and everything else looks all too familiar. Auckland doesn't half remind me of Brisbane. And the areas we drove through today look so much like northern NSW it's not funny.

Anyway, we aren't getting much down time, so these blog entries are on stolen time. I will see what we can post tomorrow - we have taken a hell of a lot of pictures at least, I'd like to get some online eventually. Please be patient. We are all well. We are flipping exhausted after today's efforts, but we are safe and well.

Arrivee Auckland!

2010-03-09T05:38:00.000+11:00

So we survived a three and a bit hour flight from Sydney to Auckland. Across the dutch as they said when we landed. We hope the dutch weren't too put off by that.

So we are safe and well in Auckland. We have gone up to the Sky Tower already, which is higher than Sydney Tower at Centrepoint. Today we are heading North and will stay at Paihia tonight.

This is a QUICk blog entry as we have to check out in 15 minutes. Parking at Auckland has been pretty hard to come by, and we have to move the car. Apparently, the enforcement of traffic rules is pretty strict over here. Today we are going to find out as we have to drive about 4 hours worth.

Ao Tea Roa Bound!

2010-03-07T00:02:00.025+11:00

Well, the time has finally come and we are off to New Zealand for a fortnight. We fly out of Kingsford-Smith airport at Sydney on Monday morning at some ungodly hour. (8am). We need to be ready to check in from 6:30am. What a drag. We are staying at a hostel the night before so we only have a twenty minute journey to the airport rather than a plus-2-hour one from here.

We are driving around the North Island for two weeks in a hire car, staying at YHA hostels. There hasn't been much planning done, the itinerary will be devised on the go. We are told there's plenty of stuff to do and we'll not get a chance to see the South Island if we want to properly explore the North.

Hopefully, I can manage to get access to the net sufficiently to blog most of the journey. In any case, just about every YHA hostel has a few internet terminals in the front foyer. We are going to take LOTS of pictures and we have the laptop with us, so blog posts can be typed up and then just cut and pasted online while at the internet cafes. Hopefully I can manage to get some pics up as well, as that sort of thing will look interesting.

I have a gmail address where you can contact me if need be. It is:

bustopher.deane@gmail.com (God help me re spam posting that here. Ah well.)

I cannot guarantee the regularity of posts for the next couple of weeks, but I can probably guarantee an increase in the interestingness! This is my first real overseas trip (my parents & I did a cruise to Fiji, the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) and Noumea, New Caledonia back in 1979. For that trip we didn't even need passports then. Since I lost the opportunity for the Europe trip last year due to the ruptured oesophagus this sort of thing is well overdue and at last I can use the passport!

Tenzing fostered out

2010-03-06T23:31:00.001+11:00

We took Tenzing up to the mother and father -in law's today. Tenzing, of course, is our small mainly white himalayan rabbit. We have only taken him out in the car once before, and that was only to the vet's in the same suburb. He travels quite well, as he's quite an intelligent rabbit (as rabbits go, of course).

Tenzing is to be baby-sat for the next two weeks as guess what? We're off on holidays to New Zealand, leaving tomorrow! Sharon drove up and back, while I nursed Tenzing in the front seat.

Today he went very well while we were on the smooth roads. He's a bit "clingy" generally, and likes to hug you high up on the chest. Unfortunately it's an effort to hold him there for a great length of time, and eventually I managed to get him to sit in my lap. One thing's for sure, he hates roundabouts. Fair enough, too. The drive is about an hour and a half, and he'd done very well up the freeway and the main roads, but as you get through Seaham and on to Clarence Town Road the surface quality deteriorates noticeably, and the poor thing was NOT impressed.

When we got up to the folks' place I stayed in the car with him for at least ten minutes, and he was still shaking. I took him inside, and sat down on the lounge and eventually he stopped shaking. Poor soul. Perhaps we worry too much about him. Not much we can do I suppose now until we get back.

Our thoughts are with you, Tenzing.

A Blast with Microwave

2010-03-05T00:02:00.001+11:00

I heat up my hot water in my mug for coffee in the microwave. I've been doing that for years. Last year we finally got a microwave with a digital timer, rather than a knob you turn with minutes marked on it - it's far more accurate. Gee, the old one it replaced could go either 90 seconds or 150 seconds if you'd set it for two minutes. It was always a bit of a lottery.

Anyway, my mug takes 2:20 to heat up to the ultimate temperature. So for ease of use, I enter 2:22 and press go. The number of times I've keybounced on the "2" and gone to put the coffee on for 22 hrs and 22 mins is amazing.

I'm wondering why the microwave doesn't have a failsafe check in there. After all, what on earth would you ever want to microwave for nearly an entire day and night? What would be left of it after being subject to such a treatment? We're talking a microwave oven here - the capacity of which would be limited to something about the size of a shoebox. Even if it was that big I shudder to think what would become of it should it be subjected to a microwave bombardment for that long.

I've always managed to catch the error and re-enter the time so far. Ever may that be the case, as even leaving it on for half an hour would have dire consequences. Although mind you I'd probably be wanting my coffee before then!

Caught in the Net

2010-03-04T02:29:00.000+11:00

Wyong Drama Group had a play reading of a Ray Cooney play "Caught in the Net" last night, and it worked out well, with ten women, four men and myself attending. There are seven roles in the play, so we were able to pull off the show with enough bodies for the roles.

Overall, the play was well received. It's amazing how many lies you can tell in order to cover an existing deception. One lies to another and the grave being dug gets deeper and deeper until the final conclusion which had an interesting twist.

In all, I think it'll be a very appropriate play for the Drama Group and it is proposed as the November production. We need to ratify it at a meeting first, so let's wait for then with fingers crossed.

Even Steven!

2010-03-03T01:03:00.000+11:00

Last night was the AGM of Wyong Drama Group, and yes! I was elected unopposed as Treasurer. I've done it before a few years ago so I know the work I'm letting myself in for.

Most of the other positions were filled by the incumbents. However we had to have a vote for the two vice-presidential positions (three people were nominated), and for Committee members we had to select three out of six nominees.

What we did was distribute ballot papers with all six candidates and ask people to circle three. After this process the ballots were tallied, and there were two winners, but there was a three way tie for the final position!

Okay, we thought, we need ONE person out of this three, so we distributed bits of paper asking members to write down one candidate on them.

We tallied the votes again, and you wouldn't read about it! Another three way tie!!!

At this point we decided to put the three names into a hat and draw out one. What else can we do to separate them! What an incredibly even split of opinion that was.

Tolerance and Love?

2010-03-02T00:02:00.001+11:00

On Sunday Night, Compass on the ABC showed a riveting show called "For the Bible Tells Me So" which concerns the attitude of the Christian Church (actually quite a few Christian Churches) to homosexuality. Obviously they know the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras was on the night before!

The show is highly critical of literalist biblical interpretations. After all in Leviticus it quite clearly states homosexuality is an "abomination" and anyone participating in it should be treated quite mercilessly indeed. Mind you the bible also says anyone working on a Sunday should be stoned to death and a father can sell his eldest-born daughter into slavery, no worries.

As is quite clearly pointed out, the bible contains details of customs and practices WE NO LONGER ADHERE TO. The Old Testament is OVER two thousand years old, and things change a bit due to the change in societal norms. I would have thought this was blindingly obvious.

However, in the USA (and no doubt in all ostensibly Christian societies) there are vast numbers of people who persecute homosexuals, and one of the worst things they do is to contend that homosexuality is a lifestyle CHOICE that can be suppressed by the "victim" and you can convert people from being homosexual into heterosexual.

If homosexuality was a choice - why would anyone choose to be a member of a minority that's being persecuted, hassled, bashed and otherwise discriminated aginst in often violent and distasteful ways? Why would anyone choose to put themselves through this willingly?

And conversions! Huh. There are cases of people being in heterosexual relationships for twenty years or more, and they'll give the appearance of being straight to all outsiders. But really, they are supressing deep inner feelings which is not good for their psychological well-being at all.

Why are people frightened of homosexuals? Might I say from the outset that I am not, but I don't feel threatened at all by them, nor do I consider that society is doomed by their existence. What does worry me is the outward display of hatred to other Christians by Christians, in blatant defiance of Christian principles. Universal love is one of the fundamentals espoused by Christ. He did NOT say love everyone except homosexuals, he said love everyone. Or have I got the whole thing wrong?

Lots of people certainly have, anyway. There are vast numbers of extreme right-wing moralists who bay for the blood of homosexuals and would deny them all societal rights if given the chance. Doing so seems to be quite a profitable operation. The show quoted figures of several churches turning over half a billion (US) dollars annually, based on preaching a non-tolerance of homosexuals.

And worst of all was the story of a mother, caught up in the hype of denying homosexuality, who refused to accept her daughter's position and basically disowned her, only to have her commit suicide feeling that the major cause was her mother's lack of ability to accept her. This woman has since realised that what the church taught her was plain wrong, and had she not been so dogmatic, her daughter would now still be alive. Problem is, it's a bit late now. If there is an afterlife, she can apologise to her daughter.

Prejudice and discrimination is such an evil human trait. It leads to death, war, genocide, etc, and is such a negative use of human endeavour. I wonder why it is so innate in many members of the human race? And why so-called preachers can use it to summon up these hostile feelings in members of their congregation. They probably think they are doing the right thing. If only someone with some clout could come down and explain it to them...

ACMA giveth and ACMA take away

2010-03-01T00:42:00.000+11:00

A few months ago I had work done on our television antenna so we could get better reception on the digital set-top box (actually a PVR but the same concept applies). It worked so well, that about a month ago I re-tuned the PVR and picked up ten new channels from Sydney! They are 4 (a programme guide) 40 (national indigenous television), 41 (ABC News text service), 42 (announcements page), 44 (TVS Sydney Community TV), 45 (Teachers TV), 46 (Christian Channel), 47 (House of Reps), 48 (Senate) and 49 (Expo - flogging stuff).

These are currently transmitted as a trial service from a transmitter at Gore Hill in Sydney's North Shore on the above digital frequencies. We do well to get them from Gosford, but is exactly what digital TV is about: despite a 2% signal strength, which is pretty lousy, we get an almost perfect image on the screen. (Mind you in a storm, they drop out, but we are well out of the intended service area anyway).

I've really enjoyed seeing parliamentary transmissions other than question time, the Christian Channel sometimes has reasonable stuff, and the NITV channel is absolutely briliant. TVS is also finally on the digital spectrum after transmitting on analogue for many years. TVS is a community television channel run by a non-profit collective rather than a media mogul. And there is plenty of room for these broadcasters on the ariwaves! After all, in 1956 when television was introduced, up until only a few years ago, there were stiull exactly the same number of channels, despite a massive population increase. In reality, there is more than enough room for a new full-blown commercial television network, but try telling that to the powers that be and the existing operators! In the meantime I'll settle for the extra community channels. Anything to give us more choice...

The horrible thing, though, is apart from TVS on Channel 44, all the other channels are slated to be discontinued from April 30!!!

I've only just started to enjoy the stations, and they are only going to be with us for another couple of months! It is hard to believe! I reckon a lot of people won't even know these services exists as they (a) won't have digital television or (b) won't have them tuned in on their set top boxes.

To register your protest (like I have) you can see the website of the Minister, Stephen Conroy or the Australian Communications and Media Authority. As always, a WRITTEN or FAXED protest carries more weight than an email one, however feel free to email one as well, it's better than nothing.

If you want to save some typing, here's the text of the letter I sent to the Minister for you to cut and paste:

Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy
Level 4, 4 Treasury Place
Melbourne Vic 3002

Fax: 03 9650 3251

Dear Senator Conroy,

I wish to protest strongly about the planned discontinuation on April 30of the digital fortyfour services on digital television in the Sydney area.

I have just found the digital fortyfour services on the digital tuner after getting an antenna upgrade and re-tuning the set-top box. I live near Gosford on the NSW Central Coast and prior to the antenna upgrade we just didn't have enough signal to receive these new channels.

In the last couple of weeks I've really come to enjoy the services of parliamentary telecasts, the Christian channel offerings and especially the nitv services. (I am not a christian or indigenous person, but some of the programming on those channels has been exceptional).

Yesterday I was absolutely thrilled to see TVS added to the services.

But I was also horrified by the announcement of the suspension of the trial services on 30 April. Why on earth is this necessary?

Despite their existence for years, I have just started to get to like the new channels, and they are now going to be removed... At least I've been lucky. Many many people are not going to have even SEEN these services before they are discontinued. Digital TV uptake in this country is slow, and I know many non-technical people won't be re-tuning in their equipment to take advantage of the new broadcasts. They will not be protesting about the dropping of the services, because they won't even have known they existed.

Please record my strong protest about dropping digital fortyfour services, and my plea to have the services retained.

Yours sincerely,

etc, etc.

All these years

2010-02-28T00:24:00.000+11:00

I was just browsing around on wikipedia the other day and finally found out what a song means that I was completely oblivious to for a very long time. We even used to play the song back in my high school band, and I certainly had no idea what the title really meant.

Anyway the song is "Turning Japanese" by the Vapours, which came out in 1980. Lyrics include gems like "everyone avoids me like a psyched lone ranger" and "I want a doctor to take a picture so I can look at you from inside as well". Who'd have ever thought it refers to what it is alleged to refer to!?? Wanna guess? Maybe in certain regions this expression is common, but I sure hadn't heard of it until a few days ago.

If you can't guess what it means, and want to be put out of your misery, here's the link.

MP3 Player

2010-02-27T00:07:00.000+11:00

Struth, am I behind the times! This year sees me finally getting a mobile phone, and thanks to an Aldi special I just got an mp3 player. It's quite strange how people jump to conclusions about me, as I've had a computer since age 15 (now 30 years ago), so they expect me to adopt technology quickly. I took ages before getting a CD player and DVD player. I was a lot quicker getting a video recorder as at the time I was living in Newcastle and working shiftwork. Both NBN and the ABC used to close transmissions at about 1am, so I'd come home from work at maybe 3-4am and not have a thing to watch. A lot of people in Newcastle used to put up 100 foot TV masts to get the prized Sydney TV reception, and I know exactly why they did so!

The not having a mobile concept has been interesting. Everyone asks me for the mobile number and I used to simply reply "I haven't got one" and watch the jaws drop in disbelief! Now I have to answer that question. Fortunately my mobile number is pretty easy to remember.

And thanks to an Aldi special a couple of weeks ago, I picked up an mp3 player for $19.95. What's more I've actually been using it and it has chewed up 2 AAA batteries already (although they were cheap ones that had been on top of the fridge for a fair few months). Yesterday we bought a couple of rechargeables, as it appears this thing is a reasonably heavy load on the batteries. I can at least have one in the charger, and one on the go.

Is my experience correct? Are mp3 players really a battery hog?

Paracentesis again

2010-02-26T02:54:00.001+11:00

Sheesh, I've had another injection straight into my left eye again (called paracentesis) so I'm all sore and re-eyed at the moment. The process involves dilation of the eye, then application of a lot of lignocaine drops. The next step is for a disposable plastic sterile adhesive fenestrated drape to be stuck over the eye, and along comes the ophthalmologist with the syringe of avastin.

It's weird getting injected, as you can see the syringe actually going in, and when the liquid is injected, you can actually see it wash over the front of the eye. A bit like a wave hitting a porthole and looking out. At this point it hurts so much the assistant says "All Done" and you instinctively shut the eye anyway. An eyepad is stuck on with micropore and then you get up and fork over $750 for the privelege, of which Medicare will generously refund about $280.

What generally happens then is after about four or five days the vision in my eye improves noticeably, but after about 3 weeks it's back to how it was before (worse luck). We have been trying, I must say, to get vision back, but I'm not real sure it's working.

What happens later is you get an OCT (occular coherent tomography) which is a special computer-enhanced photo of the rear of the eye (for which you pay $100 and Medicare doesn't give you back a cent) and this is used to check the state of the retina. My last one I had about two weeks after the avastin injection. This one showed a massive improvement, and yes, at the time, I was seeing a lot better from the eye. However after another couple of weeks the vision got noticeably worse.

This time we're going to wait two months before doing the OCT, so we can check what happens after a fair bit of time has elapsed. I think it may perhaps be time to give up on these treatments, as they're very expensive and don't seem to be doing all that much for my vision.

Cocos to Go

2010-02-25T02:22:00.009+11:00

We finally bit the bullet and got the dreaded Cocos Palms removed. They've been here at the house for probably 25 years or more - they are really big - but they have reached a height where we cannot reach them with the extendable pruning pole any more!

They were a habitat for flying foxes, and the wild bees used to love the nectar pods when they sprouted, plus they did provide some shade from the western sun. But on the other hand, they dropped a hell of a lot of rubbish, and you could definitely see the distortion of the rear concrete barbecue area. Our next door neighbour said the ones he had removed a year or so ago destroyed an entire retaining wall.

Anyway, it's too late now, they've been hacked off to almost ground level and have been taken away in a rather large truck!

Nokia Mobile Phone

2010-02-24T00:02:00.003+11:00

I need to get a few photos off my new Nokia mobile phone that Mum and Dad bought me for Christmas. They were shot on our trip to Sydney on Sunday. Taking pictures and recording of the Cliff Richard Concert was strictly forbidden but it's not something that is enforced too well.

Gee, people need to figure out how to turn the flashes off on their cameras. There were photo flashes going off all the time in the Entertainment Centre, and unless you're within three metres of the subject a flash does you no good at all! All it does is freak out the artists on stage, although I think they were fairly impervious to it in this case. I hate it when people do it at our drama group plays, however - as it's very distracting for an actor. You certainly don't need to use flashes in theatres - there is more than enough light already provided!

Worse, I suppose, is when you see people taking photos of FIREWORKS using flashes... Apart from the three metre concept, so the flash has no effect at all, you're taking a photo of a light source, so if the flash did actually work, it'd reduce the light image you're trying to record... Ah well, I digress.

It's just that you'd think that if taking photographs was strictly prohibited (as is written on the tickets and on signs up all over the place) you'd want to do it clandestinely and not announce your presence to all and sundry by setting off a whopping great flash of light each time you take a photo! After all, if push came to shove, you'll be infringing your ticket conditions by doing so and giving the organisers a perfect right to eject you from the concert with no comeback possible at all on your part.

What (also) cheeses me off, however, is the Nokia USB port, and the main reason for this post. The Nokia has a standard USB symbol over the connector cover, and I had just had a cursory glance at it before. I have three sizes of USB cables down here with the computer - USB B, USB Mini and USB Micro A and I reckoned the small one was going to be fine.

Well ... none of them work - Nokia have used a USB Micro B connector, which I haven't got, and they didn't provide it with the phone, unfortunately. It's actually slightly larger than a USB Micro A connector, but flatter.

Anyway, I've ordered one online and it should arrive in the next few days. I got one for $14.95 plus $9.95 postage and handling from a phone accessory place in Brisbane. Nokia sell them for $39.95 plus postage and handling which I didn't bother looking up. You know why they do this sort of thing, don't you? I'll now have a range of four USB cables, let's hope I don't have to buy yet another one in the future sometime!

Cliff and the Shadows 50th Anniversary

2010-02-23T23:07:00.024+11:00

On Sunday, Sharon dragged me along to the 50th Anniversary Tour of Cliff and the Shadows at the Sydney Entertainment Centre. We saw a three hour show which included mainly OLD songs from before Cliff broke up with the Shadows and they went their own ways. As a result, I wasn't familiar with many of the songs (after all it's not me who is the die-hard fan, it's Sharon), and I was disappointed he didn't do some of my favourites like "Wired for Sound" and "Devil Woman". I'm even a sucker for the Eurovison entry "Congratulations" and other songs from "I'm No Hero". But alas, it was mainly older stuff.

A couple of strange things happened. Firstly, he sold out the 12,000 seats at the Entertainment Centre within about an hour and a half of going on sale, with virtually no publicity. Cliff has an incredible fan base (don't ask me why) and they are loyal and plentiful! I was on the Ticketmaster site within five minutes of sales opening, and as the first tickets offered were right up the front, behind the line of the front of the stage, I rejected them. The next ones allocated were miles back, so I rejected them. The third time I was offered seats a little closer, but right on the side and right in the back row. You could see the centre booking out in front of you, so these ones I didn't reject at all!

After a few hours I went back on the Ticketmaster site to see what positions were being offered and they were completely sold out. Not bad for a septuagenarian, eh? There were, of course, pre-sales, but they were far more pricey than the standard $139 each we paid, and we didn't want to go that far. He would have made a lot of money from this latest tour, which at his age may well be his last, of course. (Although knowing Cliff and his penchant for being in front of an audience, that's probably not going to be the case).

Another strange thing was the reaction of three ladies sitting next to us. We were at the back right hand side of the audience, and as a result of the speaker stack, you could only see the left hand third of the large screen behind the stage. If you'd been a lot lower, or more square on it wouldn't have been a problem, but a large number of people would have had the big screen obscured for them.

At the brief interval at half-time, two of the ladies went off to complain about the lack of vision in the large screen. I wasn't sure what could be done about it. No, I was sure what could be done about it - nothing. The way things were setup there was no way anything could be done save lowering the speaker stacks to the floor, which may have had an adverse effect on quite a few things. Well one of these ladies got a bee in her bonnet, and went off to complain to someone down near the mixing desk. After ten minutes had elapsed she came back to the seats, and announced "They're not going to do anything about it, we're going home". Her other companions then begrudgingly left with her! Earlier on they were saying it was the first time they'd been to a Cliff concert and what with the guy's age, there's no guarantee they're ever going to see him again!

As a result they missed about ninety minutes of the concert that they had paid about $139 each to see, merely because a large part of the big-screen was obscured. You could still see them on the stage, and you could still hear everything fine, but as a protest, the three of them left. I'm damn sure that according to the conditions of sale of the tickets they would not be given a refund. And in the 12,000 attendees we really didn't notice their form of protest due to their absence!

Anyway, we moved along three seats after they left to stretch out a bit and got talking to another guy who said he was from Maitland. We asked why he hadn't seen the show in the Hunter Valley vineyards the day before and he said he was appearing in a play for Maitland Repertory Society, and only had this Sunday off. Turns out he is in "Breath of Spring" currently running at the Maitland Playhouse and we had seen him last year in the "Maria Martin Murder Mystery". He was the father who got killed. Interesting coincidence that of the 12,000 people in the Entertainment Centre at the time, we had already met the guy (within a theatre) sitting next to us!

Cliff is a consumate performer and always puts on a good show. Hell, Sharon has been to six of his concerts, and the amazing thing is that I've been with her for three of them! I could think of better artists to see than Cliff, but then again I could think of a lot worse.

Knockin' back the pie?

2010-02-21T01:17:00.000+11:00

As a taxi driver you have the option to flick a switch in your cab, turn the radio to silent, and transmit everything from the car to the base. It's called the M13 alert and is compulsory in every taxi in NSW. Usually, however, the transmissions are false alarms, and you can simply hear what's going on in the cab, which can be quite interesting.

One night a driver flicked his switch accidentally, and I could hear very clearly everything going on in the cab. He picked up a couple of passengers, asked them where they were going (which is very useful info should the driver actually be in trouble), and set off. You could hear the blinking lights operating, acceleration away from lights and so on.

The driver went up Darby Street Cooks Hill, and there is a famous late-night pie shop halfway along. The passengers hurriedly told the driver to stop, while they dashed into the shop to get pies. "You want one yourself driver?" "Nah, I've just had tea" "Go on, it's our shout, mate!" "Nah, sorry, couldn't fit it in".

At the time, the driver was completely tieing up one of the three transmission channels completely, so we switched off Channel 2 and were issuing jobs on Channels 1 and 3 instead. Things went on for about a quarter of an hour and we'd listen to the driver with the M13 on every few minutes to make sure it really was a false alarm.

Eventually the driver twigged something was wrong. It was quite a busy time, and no radio transmissions would have been received by the car for a while. He should have at least heard a few jobs being called and a few cars calling in. He flicked the switch off and came through.

"Yes, car 57, you've had channel two tied up for the last twenty minutes"

"Sorry control, everything's okay"

"Yeah, we got a bit worried about you when you knocked back the pie, but we assumed as much"

"Oh... Sorry"

It was okay, he hadn't said anything stupid or emabrrassing. This was not the case all the time!

"Cars go back to normal transmission on Channels 1 and 2"

Breaking Bad

2010-02-20T00:33:00.002+11:00

How many of you are watching the series on ABC2 called "Breaking Bad"? I've managed to catch every episode so far, and have been amply rewarded.

It is the story of Walt White who is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and has been a high school chemistry teacher. It seems he has missed the boat and wound up in this not so glamorous job, whereas some of his colleagues have done a bit better.

Seeing his brother-in-law, who is a DEA (drug enforcement agency) operative at work, Walt begs him to ride-along on a raid to see the guys cooking meth-amphetamine. With Walt's chemistry background he is interested in cooking crystal meth as by doing so he can raise a lot of money in a short time and leave a lasting legacy for his family. After he dies, Walt knows they will be lumbered with debt and have a really hard time of it. His wife is newly pregnant, and his older teenage son has cerebral palsy, and thus needs constant care. He teams up with a former student, Jesse Pinkman who has been cooking meth before, but nowhere near as good as the stuff Walt can produce. (By conicidence, Jesse was actually at the place raided by Walt's brother-in-law in the ride-along, but manages to slip away unnoticed by everyone except Walt who is under strict instructions to wait in the car).

You've read the above paragraph and if you haven't seen the show you're reckoning it's pretty heavy going. Well, I forgot to mention. It is a comedy. The second episode was an absolute hilarity where they tried to dissolve a body of a rival crystal-meth dealer who tried to kill them (it was self defence) in a bath of hydrofluoric acid. Walt had told Jesse to get a polyethylene container at the hardware store, but Jesse couldn't find one big enough and reckoned the bath would be good enough... Hydrofluoric acid eats through just about everything, including enamel-steel baths and wooden floors. With the bath on the upper storey and Jesee and Walt below in the sitting room, a very interesting entrance is made by a partially dissolved body! What a mess, and what a laugh-out-loud situation!

The ludicrousness of the situation is amply shown, in a very black and laid-back manner. I've been having a look at the US website (see link up the top) and have had to stop reading. We are up to Season 1 Show 5 in Australia. There are 2 more episodes in Season 1, plus another 13 made in Season 2, and they've just proudly announced the starting of the making of Season 3. Great to hear, but a lot of spoilers on that website, no doubt!

Anyway, it's on ABC2 on Friday Nights at 9:30pm for at least another 2 shows. Let's hope Season 2 shows have been bought and can be played straight onwards.

Council's Liability

2010-02-19T00:02:00.009+11:00

I visited my podiatrist today and got chatting. He mentioned that there was an incident a few weeks back where one of his clients came into the surgery all battered and bloody. Apparently there was a tree growing close to the concrete footpath just up the street from the surgery and the roots had pushed up through the path causing a trip hazard which the poor old dear had fallen foul of.

He then mentioned that the VERY NEXT DAY there were workers with jackhammers digging up the footpath and effecting a repair. He was impressed as to the immediacy of the action.

The reason, of course, for the council's action is due to the way the liability laws for these things are framed. As long as a council has a reasonable maintenance programme in place (eg they inspect the area maybe four times a year) and effect repairs as they become necessary, then a problem with the footpath is not their responsibility. They are not expected to know about every nook and cranny of their local government area.

However, if they are made aware of a potential problem, and do nothing about it, then they ARE liable for problems arising as a result.

In this case, the poor old dear who fell over probably won't have gotten any relief from council for her fall, but no doubt she will have told council about the problem. Hence, from that point onward, the council is liable for future slips and falls. This explains the fast action.

The moral of the story is, if you do notice dangerous things developing such as distortions in footpaths from tree roots, and any other potentially dangerous situations, let your council know about it, preferably in writing or by fax (although a phone call or email is possible). Once they have been informed of the problem, they are then liable for any eventualities caused by the problem. This'll get em going and you'll get stuff fixed!

And then there was one...

2010-02-18T02:11:00.000+11:00

On 15 July 2008 (I remember the date well, as it's my father's birthday) I had a testicle removed due to a seminoma, and it was quite a straightforward procedure. I was in and out of hospital in one day. Here's the message I typed up at the time describing the incident.

I went in to the new section at the back of Wyong Hospital at about 7:20am yesterday. I played in the band at the official opening of Wyong Hospital in about 1979 or 1980. At this point it consisted of two main wards and a small casualty section, with a few smaller ancillary buildings scattered around. There has been an incredible amount of building going on there in the last thirty years and the facilities now are enormous. The latest extensions at the back are very new and modern, and very easy to get lost in!

I was second on the operating list for the day, and got into the theatre at roughly 8:20am. I had a general anaesthetic and woke up at 11:30am in recovery minus the right testicle.

The surgery involved cutting through the lower abdomen and removing the testicle and other associated connections, so there's been quite an invasion of the body. It's REALLY sore at the moment.

I didn't require too much analgaesia after the operation - just one pethidine shot at 11:30am and two panadeine forte about 4 hours later. Mind you I'm on doloxene as required spaced at least four hourly for the arthritis anyway, and this also works to avert the surgical pain.

I had a catheter inserted, a drain sutured into the wound, and naturally a cannula for a saline drip (seems to be de rigueur for most hospital admissions this day and age anyway).

At about 12:30pm, they finally managed to scrounge up a room for me. It was a massive single bed private unit, normally used for maternity patients. It even had a baby bath in the corner, which I didn't actually use. Occasionally some of the ancillary staff delivering meals or cleaning the place would ask me how my baby was going!

The operation was a definite success. (They didn't leave it in accidentally or remove the wrong one for instance!) I still have the marks made by some sort of felt tip pen by the surgeon consisting of his intitials and a rather large arrow pointing to the offending piece of tissue. This will take weeks to wear off, they tell me!

I had lunch at about 1pm after the operation - no restrictions. I was fairly well starving by then, and the lunch was great despite minor congealing of the mashed potatoes. I suppose the hospital food does suffer from having to be transported in racks over what must be an enormous distance from the kitchen.

The flowers arrived shortly after lunch (thanks again) and I chatted away with Sharon and my Mum and Dad for quite a few hours. 15 July was, in fact, my father's 78th birthday, so we had a bit of a celebration for him. It was a fairly quiet affair, though, given the circumstances. Mum and Dad live at Kanwal, so it was quite handy for them to get to the hospital. Sharon stayed with them overnight as well to save the drive back to Wyoming and return early the next morning.

Tea arrived at about 6:30pm, a cuppa at 8pm and then no more catering until breakfast at about 7am next day. Problem with me is my arthritis frequently keeps me awake for all hours at night, and it was no exception that night. With the Tour de France at a rest day, I was lost for viewing (I have been avidly following every stage this year), but I got myself a card to operate the TV set and saw a selection of Foxtel channels. Mum and Dad went home at about 6:30pm, and Sharon and I watched an old episode of "The Last Detective" on UK-TV before she was kicked out at the end of visiting hours.

I managed to get a couple of two hour sleeps overnight, which is possibly more than I am getting at home these days. Problem in the hospital was going without coffee and snacks for an extended period. In 2006 when I spent 2 weeks in Gosford hospital I could at least patrol the corridors at 3am and use the food and beverage machines liberally sprinkled throughout the building. Mum and Dad had brought me in some supplies of fruitcake, cheese and biscuits and a couple of bananas. They were very welcome to get me through the night.

I wasn't so mobile last night, however, what with tubes hanging out of me everywhere, and also being connected to inflatable cuffs around the calves which would inflate and deflate alternately every fifteen seconds or so to avert cases of deep vein thrombosis. Left leg goes up, left leg goes down. Right leg goes up, right leg goes down. Homer Simpson would have been enthralled!

I am convinced that hospitals do not exist as a place to sleep, because in addition to this, the intravenous pump beeps like crazy every two hours until the nurse either punches in some more numbers, or replaces the saline bag. They also do observations every hour for four hours then every four hours post operatively. This means you get your pulse, blood pressure and temperature taken at 8pm, midnight, 4am and 8am (plus or minus half an hour) all through the night. The nurse on night duty kept being disappointed by me being awake when she came in to do the observations, but I don't know what they expect.

Come morning, however, when I had dozed off, I was awoken by my surgeon doing his rounds at about 7:45am. All was fine, cannula, catheter and drain can all be removed and I can go home provided I passed urine and an ultrasound confirmed my bladder had been emptied completely. Breakfast then arrived at 8am, and then my nurse started disconnecting me from things for the next half an hour. The requisite urine being passed, and proof the bladder was empty meant she removed the drain from the wound at about 9:30am, and I was discharged at 10am.

I then had to wait nearly an hour for the hospital pharmacy to fill my post-operative antibiotic prescription, given as a precaution to avert possible infection, but this was a minor hiccup.

I arrived back at Mum and Dad's at 11am, stayed there for lunch, and got back home to Wyoming at about 2pm.

Since then I've fielded quite a few phone calls - thanks everyone for ringing - it is very reassuring. The star caller was Bonnie, of course. We had quite a long chat about lots of things.

Anyway, we await pathology for any further news. I will visit my GP in a few days' time, and a community nurse will visit me to remove the staples on 25 July, but I'm not really going to hear much more significant info until I can visit my urologist (Dr Finlay McNeil) which is on 31 July. He specifically wanted to wait until 2 weeks after the operation before seeing me. It will be at that point when I hear if I should need chemotherapy, radiotherapy or nothing further. Anyway, nothing along those lines has been indicated so far - although it is very early days yet.

99% of testicular tumours ARE malignant, incidentally, but if there has been no spreading of it into the abdominal cavity the removal of the testicle generally cures testicular cancer. The disease has a 99% cure rate. Lance Armstong seemed to have no problem winning seven Tours de France after suffering from the same affliction. Mark Latham (remember him?), and TV presenter Chris Reason both seem to have gotten over it fine.

I intend to join them.

Anyway, with tonight's coverage of Le Tour just starting on SBS, I'll leave you all with it, and type to you later!

Storm boy

2010-02-14T01:16:00.000+11:00

We got back from staying at Clarence Town at my parents-in-laws' place yesterday to find an inch of water through the garage. We had a drainage channel installed across the driveway a few years ago to avoid problems, and it works on all but incredible rainstorms. Since the drain has been in, it has come into the garage only twice; once last night. In looking further it seems Sydney had its biggest storms in ages which prevented a result in the third One Day International between Australia and the West Indies.

Kangy Angy topped the rainfall to 9am on 13-Feb-2010 with 122mm, and Gosford came in fourth with 75mm. The evidence was here, although we missed the storm itself. At Clarence Town itself, however, there was no rain: in fact it was one of the hottest nights I've experienced for a long while. Some rain would have been welcomed to bring down the stifling temperatures, but it obviously pulled up just a little bit to the south of us.

Difference of Opinion

2010-02-11T02:28:00.001+11:00

A while back when I was driving cabs on a Saturday Night I took a couple of twenty-something guys out to Valentine from Newcastle. This was about a $20 fare at the time - nothing to be sneezed at, really, as you'd be taking about $250 in total for a good Saturday night, so it was 8% of the nightly takings - some nights the proportion would be higher.

Of course you'd get the occasional "bolt" - where your passengers would get close to their destination, and simply bolt. And in every case where I've been the victim of a bolt, I'd never seen the passengers again. Hell, one night I went from Wyong Golf Club up to Morisset with a group of three passengers, and I'm pretty sure I saw the house where they ran into - but of course when I knocked on the door, the guy answering it played dumb and said he had no idea what I was referring to.

Naturally for a police charge to be lain you'd have to be able to identify the passengers (huh!) and be able to find them again later so the police would actually be able to lay charges. Not much chance of that, really.

So when I dropped these two off down at Valentine, my heart sank as one of them threw open the door and was off like a shot into the dark.

The other guy was still in the back seat. I remember him saying "It looks like I'm a bit more honest than my mate - he's done the bolt but I can't bring myself to join him - What's on the meter?" He then paid me the fare and walked off, leaving me collecting my jaw from the floor!

Palliative Care

2010-02-10T03:13:00.000+11:00

I just watched a recording of the Four Corners programme on palliative care by Deb Masters (A Good Death) and, as I so often do, sat there nodding frequently in agreement with the views expressed.

Since my hospitalisations I am now always fascinated by decent medical stories, and this one was a great start for Four Corners for 2010. In it we were shown, first-hand, the stories behind four people's final days on this earth. All of them had cancer (two of them bowel cancer, one pancreatic and one breast). In all cases the cancer had metastisised (spread) to many other organs. They were fortunate in one regard in that they knew death was approaching.

The show posed more questions than it answered, of course. There are not many places in the country setup for dieing. Accute care and intensive care beds is where it probably happens the most, however they are not ideal places in which to die. I can assure you of that from experience. The palliative care ward at St Vincent's hospital in Sydney tries to provide such a place. It makes sense spiritually and economically as well - it costs $3,000 - $4,000 per day for an ICU bed, whereas a palliative care bed is from $600 - $1600 daily.

I nodded emphatically with Darryl Calver's comment "...I don't care what it is I have to take, legal or otherwise, [to] stop the pains so that I can go out and enjoy my last 18 months". It might seem strange, but I know exactly what he means.

I nodded again at Sandy Riches's comment "It's mental anguish, you wake up every morning and you think 'I'm still here you beaut' ". I can remember poor old Bev in the bed opposite me at Royal North Shore for nearly 7 weeks saying exactly the same thing.

And I nodded probably most emphatically at a comment from one of John Peart's relatives: "Dad saw his dad go through it and Dad was always strong about euthanasia but obviously it's illegal but his theory was that if you're in that much pain then you shouldn't be sitting there suffering"

It is pathetic that in this country and most others, you'd be prosecuted for being cruel to a pet if it was in constant pain and not euthanised, but as soon as the victim is human, the option is simply not available. In fact we frequently see people assisting others in suicide charged with murder in this country. There is a BIG difference between assisting suicide and murdering someone. A murder victim generally does NOT want to die. Someone wanting to commit suicide generally does. However our legal system doesn't make any distinction.

When I was in RNS last year a woman in a bed diagonally opposite me was diagnosed with terminal gastrointestinal cancer. The curtains were drawn to give her a semblance of privacy, but I could hear what the doctors were saying quite well through the thin drapes. They were suggesting she needed operations and chemotherapy and so on, but she simply said to them that she wanted NO treatment. She was even refusing regular medications as the nurses came around, and to the nurses' credit, they were complying with her requests, not trying to force her to take medications she didn't want.

She justified it to her sons (one of whom had flown over, taking time off from his relatively important job in the USA, the other was an Associate Professor of Marketing at a local uni) that she'd had a good life already and given that death was inevitable anyway, she didn't want to die with tubes stuck in her and weak from the chemotherapy. I know that this choice is not what the sons wanted, but it was what this brave woman was insisting on, and I hope she got it. It wouldn't have been my choice, I can assure you, but given that it was what she wanted with no doubt about it, I felt strongly about her right to make that choice and have her wishes fulfilled.

I never saw the conclusion to this, as they insisted she was transferred to RNS Private Hospital instead of the public one. Mind you the nurse to patient ratio in a private hospital is generally WORSE than in a public hospital anyway, so it may not have been the best move. A transfer to the St Vincent's palliative ward might have been in her best interest, having seen this Four Corners programme.

I just hope that when I am facing death I can be as courageous as this grand lady. I think the victim is better off to deal with it than the relatives anyway. When I was told I had a 20% chance of dieing last year I was grateful for the honest appraisal, and accepting of the fate. After all, there was nothing I could do about it. However I saw the effect it had on my wife and parents and it was not a pretty sight. It's harder on the carers than the victims. Perhaps that's a topic for a future programme - support not only for the afflicted, but also the relatives.

Pakis sent Packing

2010-02-06T03:48:00.000+11:00

After the T20 match last night, where Pakistan fell three runs short of victory, Australia completes a clean sweep of their visit, winning ALL the tests, ALL the 50-over matches and the one T20 match.

It must be so disappointing for the Pakistanis in that not one victory was possible for them. I suppose it really points to the fact that they really haven't been playing enough cricket lately, given all the security scares in Pakistan, and the fact that opposing teams just don't want to tour their country.

As if that wasn't enough Shahid Afridi's weird nibbling of the ball in Melbourne last week and consequent two-match suspension casts another gloom over proceedings.

And what with the West Indies dispute between the Cricket Administration and the Players' Association reducing the strength of this nation, it is looking to be a pretty one-sided summer for cricket in Australia this year.

Let's hope the Aussie DO get beaten once or twice by the Windies in the One Day series starting on Sunday. These one-sided matches are no good at all for the spectators. When we went to the SCG for the One-Day match a few weeks ago, the game was fairly obviously going to be won by Australia, the crownd got bored, and there was a hell of a lot of anti-social behaviour going on as a result. At least last night's T20 match did keep the interest up until the last over.

We can also hope that things improve in future series. One-sided matches are boring, and that's not what we want.

Reacquaintance

2010-02-05T03:23:00.000+11:00

I can't believe how long it has been since I've made a post, so apologies to all. The computer has hardly been turned on in the last fortnight for two reasons: 1) I've had other things to do and 2) I've not been all that well.

On 29 January I re-entered the operating theatre at Royal North Shore hospital. Fortunately this time it was actually a scheduled event and it was only for a gastroscopy. I've been having increased chest pain recently, and what with my costo-chondritis it is very difficult to tell where it's coming from. Last year I was convinced it was the costo-chondritis, and was horribly wrong with dire potentially fatal consequences. This year I reckoned it may have been the oesophagus again, and as soon as I saw a gastro-enterologist he immediately agreed that I needed a gastroscopy. He also said that it needed to be done in a major public hospital (not a clinic as was being mooted by my GP). The reason being is that 25% of oesophageal ruptures are actually caused by gastroscopes themselves! And given that I'd already had one of them the odds for me were a lot higher than the person-in-the-street!

He also said if I wanted the gastroscopy at Gosford Hospital I could well be waiting three months. So I was referred back to Dr Steve Leibman at St Leonards (who saved my life last year) to arrange it all at Royal North Shore. It took just fifteen days under the public system, and it didn't cost me a cent.

The good news was, as Steve said visiting me after the procedure, it was all good - there wasn't even any inflammation at all. It was great to meet Steve again - we do get on quite well. He looks so at home dressed in scrubs inhabiting an operating theatre. When they wheeled me in, he was playing with a power cable over in one corner of the room looking like he really belonged there! All in a day's work, I suppose. I certainly challenged him a lot less this time than on 7 Feb 2009!!!

You hear so many complaints about the public health system not working and how things go wrong. I have nothing but praise for it, and can speak with some authority, having been an avid consumer of medical services for over three years now. Nurses DO make minor errors, doctors DO occasionally misdiagnose things, but I can't speak more highly of a health system which is going to be without doubt one of the best in the world. It is something we can really be proud of as Australians.

I woke up after the gastroscopy (they pump you full of valium) in the recovery ward at RNS (I've been there a few times before!) I was ushered out to the discharge ante-room, sat in a lounge chair, given a cup of coffee and a delicious ham sandwich (I had to fast for the procedure so I was quite peckish at the time) and I was like a pig in mud. Steve came in to let me know the good news and about half an hour later I went home. It was quite a good day. I slept a lot the next couple of days (the valium at work) but the recovery was complete and overall it was a very pleasant experience.

Now if only I could shake off this morbid head cold! The first cold I've had for probably four or five years....

A Healthy State

2010-01-22T02:27:00.002+11:00

I saw Michael Moore's "Sicko" documentary last night. You might think the Australian health system is in a sorry state, but all I can say is thank goodness I wasn't living in the USA this time last year. Thanks to our Australian health system I was operated on from an affliction that I would have died from had I not had the operation. It would have cost at least $60,000 to have the operation in this country, so in USA, it would be probably twice as much. And I have no health insurance, so to have this life-saving operation, I would have been given a debt of over $100,000, which I'd be paying off for many years to come.

Here, in NSW, I left hospital requiring a few drug purchases (about $90 - heavily subsidised, too mind you) and no bill at all.

In "Sicko" you hear the story of an employee of a health insurance company (known in USA as an HMO - health maintenance organisation) whose principal task is to find non-disclosures by applicants in policy applications in order to deny claims.

You hear the story of a young mother taking her three-year-old into a hospital with a temperature of 104 degrees farenheit (40 degrees celsius - normal is 36.8). They start to treat the girl realising the situation is urgent then realise she's insured with a particular HMO which doesn't cover this hospital's services. So they tell her to take the girl to a hospital subsidised by this HMO by private car. The girl gets to the "proper" hospital, but dies within half an hour of arrival.

(We have mixups in this state and take people to the wrong hospital occasionally, but you don't hear of a small child with a temp of 40 degrees being turfed out on the street do you?)

You hear the story of the unlucky guy who sawed off two fingers with a circular saw told it'd cost $60,000 to re-attach his middle finger but only $12,000 for the ring finger (much less damage), so opted to say goodbye to his middle finger entirely as there was no way he could afford it to be re-attached.

(I once dropped an (operating) angle grinder into my left hand - I'd have been ropable had I been given a quote to clean up and stitch my wounds).

You hear the story of how Guantanamo Bay inmates have access to far better healthcare than 9/11 volunteers (so many of them have respiratory problems due to the toxic gases given off by the burning computers).

You hear the story of a 79-year old guy who cannot retire, because to do so would mean the end of his (employer-provided) medical insurance. Unfortunately for him, he is dependant on various expensive drugs he will need for the rest of his life. So when he stops working, he probably won't have long to live...

Then you hear about how many Republicans are opposed to Barack Obama's healthcare reform proposals. There are some guys in USA so vehemently opposed to it that they are angrily marching in the streets and abusing supporters of the reforms. And there are heaps of them. In fact they might almost be a majority: they are certainly a substantial proportion of the US populace...

It is so disappointing that a vast proportion of a nation can be so misguided over a universal healthcare system based on the ability to pay and the need for treatement.

However, I am reminded that in 1976, as soon as Malcolm Fraser came to power in Australia that he dismantled Gough Whitlam's Medibank system - and was allowed to get away with it. After Hawke re-introduced it in 1983 and we got used to it until 1996 John Howard didn't dare dismantle it as Fraser had done, and we thankfully still have a universal health care system in this country. My only question is why it doesn't include dental services. I have had to have a decayed tooth removed at 2am one morning, and I can assure you the need was essential. Fortunately Mum and Dad paid the dentist for me.

I cannot understand the problem people have with the introduction of a universal health system, yet a large number do seem to have a problem. I think once they see what happens without such a system when their own need for services arise they will change their minds. After all, such a system demonstrably works in the UK, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, Italy, France, Sweden, etc, etc, etc, and these places have not become communist outposts, which seems to be the main argument against it.

Abba Fans Unite!

2010-01-19T01:23:00.001+11:00

Well, after enjoying a full two and a half hours of Abba music at "Mamma Mia" it has confirmed what I probably already knew. That is, I am a died-in-the-wool Abba fan. I have "Abba Gold" and "More Abba Gold" at home (naturally), and immediately put on the "More Abba Gold" CD upon returning from the musical on Saturday night. I have since listened to "Abba Gold" itself on the computer.

The plot for the show was nothing to write home about, really. It is the story of a daughter who lives in "Melbourne" (for the Australian version) who has booked her wedding at the mother's taverna which just happens to be built on a Greek Island. Twenty-one years ago Mum had a series of dalliances with blokes, and as a result the daughter has no idea who her father is. She sneaks a glimpse of Mum's diary from the period, and concludes there are three candidates for father, and invites them all to the wedding using her mother's name. They all turn up.

During the course of a few days we hear their own stories, have a buck's night and hen's night and have a wedding. I really loved the way the show would segue into an Abba song. It was a little corny sometimes, but I really loved the use of the details of the song "Our Last Summer", which has the verse "And now you’re working in a bank / The family man, the football fan / And your name is Harry" which was used well into the second act. Of course, these details had been setup right from the start of the show. Sharon asked me on the train on the way back whether these were the original lyrics, and I confidently replied that they certainly were.

But the plot was not the main feature of the show, the star of the show were the great Abba songs.

Since the show, I've spent a few hours downloading as many Abba tracks as possible; there are quite a few available out there, I must say. Almost all of the songs used in "Mamma Mia" are on the two "Abba Gold" compilation CDs, but not all of them. There's a very interesting one from Bjorn entitled "Slipping Through My Fingers" which starts off "Schoolbag in hand, she leaves home in the early morning / Waving goodbye with an absent-minded smile" which is a nice little parable about his seven-year-old daughter, which was used in the second act and in the show, is sung by the mother on the eve of her daughter's wedding. This was one of the last Abba songs ever recorded in 1982, although it was included on "The Visitors", their final album (track 8).

I know all the lyrics to the early Abba songs, however I'm nowhere near as familiar with the later stuff. I did actually have the album of "Super Trouper" (second last album), but I never had their third last "Voulez-Vous" and last "The Visitors".

After the tour of Australia in 1977, Abba's popularity in the country plummeted. It was simply because the Sydney concerts were a very wet affair at the Showgound. We couldn't see a thing from where we were, 3/4 of the way back, and we were shrouded in garbage bags trying to keep dry. There were many stackable metal chairs in the grounds, and a popular practice was to stack them up ten or fifteen high and climb up on them. Doing this meant you could see the stage, at least, but did rather block the view of people behind, and was probably quite a dangerous thing.

After this concert, you were considered a pariah if you admitted to being an Abba fan. It had a deleterious effect on their popularity in Australia, and was the catalyst for the construction of the Sydney Entertainment Centre (which finally opened in 1983). At last, Sydney had a venue seating 12,000 people out of the rain, which would make enough money for the promoters, but allow protection from the rain for the patrons. Incidentally, Acer Arena at Homebush Bay is now the largest indoor venue in Australia and seats 21,000 - completely eclipsing the Entertainment Centre.

I have borrowed the DVD of the movie of "Mamma-Mia" from Mum, and will certainly be watching it again shortly. I've had Abba songs playing whilst typing this, of course!

Mamma Mia

2010-01-15T21:22:00.000+11:00

We're off to see Mamma Mia at Star City Casino in Sydney tomorrow. It's in the Lyric Theatre, which is the huge three-level theatre in Star City (probably a better venue than the Ball Room).

We last saw Mamma Mia probably four years ago, again at Star City, and it is a musical you would want to see again. I was a diehard Abba fan, even braving the weather at the Sydney Showground back in 1979, and just managed to catch a glimpse of them in the distance. Mind you, we had no problems hearing them.

I've always been impressed by Benny and Bjorn's compositions. They are usually quite difficult to play - a sign of true musicians. Some songs like "Achy Breaky Heart" for instance, while selling zillions of copies, are only a few chords (in Achy's case only two) and dreadfully easy to play. This is not a sign of good musicology, for sure :-)

The litmus test of a good musical is that you'll come away humming the songs. "The Sound of Music", "Oklahoma", "Cats", "The Rocky Horror Show", "Grease" and "Guys 'n' Dolls" all spring to mind. There are, of course, a lot more. I reckon "Wicked" failed dismally in this department. However, with so many number one Abba hits to choose from, the writers of Mamma Mia cannot fail to impress.

I'll let you know how it went shortly.

Ultrasound and Prevention

2010-01-14T00:02:00.035+11:00

I went in for an abdominal ultrasound yesterday. I am starting to experience increased oesophageal pain, but with my costo-chondritis, it's really hard to pick the cause, and indeed this can easily be mistaken for oesophagitis in itself.

When I went into hospital in September 2006 I was showing gastro-intestinal symptoms. My costo-chondritis (a rheumatic affliction) was actually diagnosed by a gastro-enterologist. In February 2009 when I went into hospital and had a ruptured oesophagus, I actually thought the problem was a flare-up of the costo-chondritis. (Fortunately this latter admission was diagnosed almost immediately and I was flown down to RNS hospital for emergency surgery within 8 hours - in 2006 it took twelve days to get a diagnosis, if it had've been a ruptured oesophagus then I would have been long dead).

Later today (9:30am) I am off to see Dr John Dowsett, who is a gastro-enterologist who will hopefully refer me for a gastroscopy. An interesting piece of trivia is that back in 2006, it was Dr Dowsett himself who visited me in Gosford Hospital and diagnosed the costo-chondritis!

If I had had a gastroscopy in early 2009 I would have saved myself a hell of a lot of grief. The rupture in the oesophagus was caused by an ulceration about 4cm long, which would have been festering for many months before it finally gave way and perforated the oesophagus. It would have been picked up on a gastroscope quite easily and I could have started treatment BEFORE it ruptured. So today we start using preventative techniques rather than reactive methods.

Mind you, the way Medicare works is strange. Last year I spent 78 days in hospital, nearly four weeks of which in intensive care. It would have cost tens of thousands of dollars for my treatment. All of it was covered by Medicare.

What I'm trying to do now is prevent a similar occurence. However I will have a bill for the gastroscopy and apart from the fact that Dr Dowsett is going to be generous and bulk bill my visits, I'd also have a bill for the specialist visit. Medicare will cover part of these expenses, but nowhere near all of it.

It's not as hard as it seems

2010-01-13T22:20:00.001+11:00

I want to complain. It's a bit of a pet peeve of mine, but why can't people get apostrophes in the right places?

I have been watching the incredible rise in the number of apostrophes used for plurals lately. Or as they'd erroneously put it, "the number of apostrophe's used for plural's" and even "why ca'nt they get apostrophe's in the right place's". (sigh)

Apostrophes are used in English when letters are missed out. They are used for possesive forms of nouns because back in Middle English you used to simply add "es" most of the time. For example "the Kinges horses". For some reason this got "shortened" to "King's" hence the apostrophe. The "e" has been omitted.

They are NOT used in possesive pronouns, however, probably because they never had the "es" ending, but simply always ended in a plain old "s". The prime examples are "his" and "hers". You will frequently see "her's" wrongly used (shudder), but rarely do you see "hi's" (thank heavens for that). But how many times do you see "it's" written in the wrong form? I suppose the problem with "it's" is that the spell-checker won't catch it, as it IS a correctly spelled word, as the contraction for "it is". However as a possesive pronoun ("the cat sat on it's mat") it has no legitimate place.

Apostrophes also used in contractions where letters certainly are missed out. Isn't that right? Where "isn't" is actually short for "is not", and so where the "o" comes out, the apostrophe goes in. Please get that right, too, people: the apostrophe goes in where the letters are left out. So it's NOT "ca'nt" or "should'nt", it's "can't" and "shouldn't".

Apostrophes are NEVER used for plurals. It is quite simple. It seems people like to use them especially when a word ends in a vowel. Their "quota's" are used up. The "apostrophe's" are in the wrong "place's". Of course many people use them to form "plural's" outright, unfortunately. What really peeves me is when you see the inconsistent use of them such as in a menu. You can have "tomatoe's egg's and chips" for instance. (Yuck, I say, not because of the flavour combination, but because of the apostrophe misplacement. Surely if you have "tomatoe's" and egg's" you need "chip's" (better still, since you have "chips" why not "eggs" and "tomatoes". Hell, with the latter you're already adding an "es" rather than an "s", why chuck in an apostrophe as well? Oh, I see it's a word that ends in a vowel. Or indeed two vowels...)

We are fighting a losing battle with the apostrophe, as society becomes more illiterate every day? Or am I wrong? We are probably more literate (back in the 1600s only a small percentage actually could read) but since there is much more use of the written form of language, the total number of errors is increasing. I wonder what the error RATE actually is? Apparently back in the 1600s there were spelling variants abounding, and people just made things up. I see nothing has changed.

The KFC Straw Man

2010-01-12T00:58:00.000+11:00

The "Straw Man Principle" is an argumentative technique whereby a person's contention is misrepresented as a different contention and then that misrepresentation is argued down. It is, of course, invalid as arguments go. When you do a logic or critical reasoning course it will be one of the first invalid arguments pointed out to you (there are many others).

It's quite a cowardly technique as it enables the arguer to substitute any old contention for what the proposer is saying, then argue that down. This is usually twenty times easier than a proper argument because you can substitute anything you want for what was actually being said. Rather than doing your job and actually attacking your opponent's contentions, you can substitute anything you like and then have a go at that instead.

The KFC Windies Ad being racist is a prime example. It was actually withdrawn from use on 7 January 2010 after some culturally unaware Americans came in hard, claiming it was offensive to African Americans, portraying the stereotype that to shut them up all you need do is give them fried chicken.

This is the classic Staw Man argument, completely misrepresenting the intention of the ad. Firstly the black guys were actually West Indian cricket fans, not African Americans. The claims were that they were behaving in a rowdy manner which is a stereotype offensive to African Americans (they are actually behaving as typical West Indian cricket fans do behave), and that the white guy is calm, again an offensive stereotype of white people (more like trying to keep his head down while being outnumbered by a bunch of supporters of the other team). He then calms them down by giving them fried chicken just like the Yankees in the South used to do to their slaves (he really gives them some tasty distraction, a product supplied by their team's sponsor - KFC).

Sigh.

There have been quite a few claims by Americans that Aussies are fooling themselves that they cannot see the racism in the ad. If the ad had in fact represented what they claim is being presented then they would have a case. However they have setup a classic Straw Man and proceded to attack that instead.

There's no way the ad is racist and for KFC to pull it from transmission is to simply give these people more credence than they deserve. I am calling for its return to the airwaves for when the West Indies return for the limited overs matches in February. Allowing them to use the Straw Man technique to get the ad pulled is rewarding their use of an invalid argument, and that is just so unfair.

I suppose the benefit to KFC is that the ad has gone viral and the coverage achieved is probably well beyond their wildest dreams. Artistically the ad is not particularly brilliant, but it has achieved the recognition of millions more people than KFC would have originally anticipated.

A La Carte

2010-01-11T00:02:00.032+11:00

One thing Sharon and I have been doing recently is cooking. It's a hobby that adds kilograms to your mass and centimetres to your waistline, however.

Since Christmas we have made Honey Jumbles, Fruit Mince Pies and Bread (damper) which are over and above the usual fare, and it has been showing, unfortunately!!

We've been doing a lot of main courses, too, and the technique is to cook something nice that we can store in the fridge, and heat up in the microwave as required. There are only two of us in the household, and so cooking nightly is not only an arduous chore, but also an inefficient way of doing things. By doing it this way, we have meals for the next three or four nights from one lot of cooking which must save on energy and ingredients, and most certainly saves on time.

Probably our major source of recipes is the monthly magazine called Super Food Ideas. We like it as it's a realistic publication that doesn't use ingredients that can only be obtained from a merchant with a yak who visits the mountains. The things called for are obtainable at the local supermarket and fruit shop.

We have been getting more adventurous lately, however, and have ingredients such as burghul (cracked wheat) and caradamon pods. Our spice rack, which is a three level job, and has had plenty of room in the past is now completely full. We sort the spices alphabetically (I think this is quite anal really), and apart from Basil, the top shelf has only spices that begin with "C". We have cinammon quills and ground; cloves, whole and ground; the aforementioned cardamon pods, cumin, curry powder, chilli powder and coriander!

We got a Kenwood Prospero mixer for Christmas and it will be used frequently with appreciation. It came in handy today with its dough hook for making bread. The old mixer I used to have is quite small and getting old. It's an old Waltons Celestial rebadged Sunbeam model and would be well over forty years old. It's enjoying its retirement.

Lovely Bones

2010-01-10T23:01:00.000+11:00

We went to see "The Lovely Bones" a couple of days ago. It's been a while since we've seen a big box-office drawcard, and I suppose this was one of them. It certainly would have cost a pretty penny to make. As is usual we watched until the end of the credits and were naturally the only two audience members in the cinema. There was a staff member still there packing up rubbish left behind by the patrons too lazy to take the stuff to the bin themselves. Quite a few of them, I note.

The movie was, basically, nothing to write home about. It was ostensibly about what happens after death, but the post-death episodes were so stylised that nothing could really be concluded from them. I'm not sure why I expected a movie to have inside knowledge about post-death experiences anyway! There was a fantastic opportunity to present some pretty weird special effects in these scenes, and Peter Jackson definitely took advantage of this.

There was a suspenseful story of a murder presented, but it wasn't actually solved by the police! It took someone else to do that, someone who you'd least expect to, really. And there was a final retribution and resolution so the movie did at least leave us with a sense of closure. However if you're looking for it as an answer to "what happens after death?" I think you'll be sadly disappointed.

USB Key Dodgy

2010-01-08T00:02:00.032+11:00

Why is it USB keys seem to be an unreliable piece of equipment? We have four in the house at the moment, one of which has decided to kark it. In fact it probably never was a goer.

This is the third one I've had that's rubbish. It's uncanny that they all have a common characteristic in that they were all bought for someone else!

The first one that died was bought for my wife for Christmas a long time ago. She had bought me one for my birthday I think, from Dick Smith and it is still going strong, however time has crept up on it and it's only 1 gigabyte... However I mainly use it to keep a backup of the drama group website, among general file transfers. The one I bought her was a 2 gig unit, obtained from Big W. Alas, it never worked from the start, however Big W were quite okay when I brought it back for an exchange. At the time, these things were quite expensive. The replacement is still going strong and copping a lot of use. It travels with my wife to and from work every day.

The second one to die was one bought from Joyce Mayne for my Dad. It was 1 gigabyte and I think it was $4.95 (oh how they have come down in price). Dad was doing a course in basic emailing so we could send him stuff on an overseas trip rudely aborted by my oesophageal rupture. It was working fine and had been used to get a few test pictures emailed to his Yahoo address. Then we went and plugged it into his $39 DVD player and it simply ceased functioning. We're convinced the DVD player was the culprit, however the USB key itself WAS only $4.95 so we're really not sure. This one was thrown out after I fished out the receipt and original packaging and had it sitting on the kitchen bench for about 6 months. I think the cost of the petrol to get me over to Joyce Mayne would have exceeded the benefit from an exchange.

The third one was one bought from (hmmmmmm) Joyce Mayne as one of nine raffle prizes for the last play at Wyong Drama Group. It was won by my father-in-law's brother who gave it to my father-in-law who then used it to transfer genealogy data down here so Sharon could do some more work on it. It worked fine for that, and fine in her laptop. It was then used downstairs here on our desktop and it wouldn't have a bar of it. Sharon then took it to work the next day and again, not recognised by any work machine.

It still works in the laptop, however, so I went and formatted it, and discovered it only works on the laptop if plugged into the USB ports on the left hand side: not the ones on the right! Also I gave it a better test by copying a 1.5 gigabyte file to it (it's a 2 Gig stick) and it failed, even plugged into the left hand side USB ports.

I'm of a definite mind to take this one back to Joyce Mayne. I can put up with one dieing (and it may have been killed rather than actually dieing of its own volition) but a second one is inexcusable.

The Big C

2010-01-07T00:02:00.024+11:00

We were hit with some pathetic news today. That is, a relative has had a resurgence of cancer which has been supposedly succesfully treated in the past.

It makes you feel so incredibly useless. I feel like I want to be able to do something about it, but in all reality I can do diddly squat to help.

Given that I've had my own brush with cancer I do know full well that cure can be achieved. Lance Armstrong is the real testament to this: in 1996 he had an aggressive form of testicular cancer, but he came back and won seven Tours de France from 1999 to 2005. The most influential book I read during my three months in hospital was "It's Not About the Bike: My journey back to life" which describes his illness and recovery. It took me all of about three days to read the thing (I wasn't well at all at the time: even watching TV was proving a biut much at the time) but as things went I could hardly put it down.

So there are plenty of success stories. However, the day before yesterday at the cricket it was Jane McGrath Day. She was taken from us all too early.

It really gets you thinking about the existence of a god. If there is a god, why is such pain and suffering foisted upon people. If there isn't, then what's the point of it all, particularly when you are taken so early?

Alas, I feel almost as useless at coming to a conclusion on that as about being able to do anything about the affliction with the Big C itself.

I'm back for 2010

2010-01-06T03:14:00.000+11:00

It seems it's commonplace for bloggers to take a few days off over the festive season, and I'm no exception. Its good to be back, as I actually have missed the therapeutic nature of a daily rant.

For the first time in many years, Sharon and I actaully went to a New Year's Eve party at a drama group member's house. Normally our NYEs have been rather sedate, this year it was sedate, I suppose, but it was shared with about 50 other people!

Talk about fireworks! Our location was Caves Beach, and there were displays at the Mawson Hotel at 9pm, also we could see ones at the Newcastle foreshore albeit hazily in the distance. At midnight we could see the Newcastle ones, and ones at Swansea RSL club. We also had the Sydney fireworks on TV playing, and the interesting thing was that the Swansea display, although nowhere near as ex(t/p)ensive as the Sydney ones, went on a whole lot longer! The credits were rolling on the TV show and the Swansea display was still going strong.

Some of the many coal carriers anchored off Newcastle which we could see from Caves Beach chipped in by letting off a few flares, plus there were a few "independent" probably illegal displays from a few homes in the area.

It's often the case that we're in bed even before midnight on NYEs, but this year we didn't hit the sack until after 3am!

I haven't made any NY resolutions this year - in fact I generally don't anyway. I can only hope for better health. Fingers are crossed.

Magic Bullet

2009-12-30T22:16:00.000+11:00

I want to suggest a Road Toll magic bullet to follow on from Seatbelts and Random Breath Testing, which have both proven to be substantial decrements to the road toll. I have alluded to this in recent posts, but want to go into a bit more detail today.

As you're probably aware the technique is regular driving tests for all motorists. However if this is going to be too hard to administer, what I suggest is a series of tests that work a little bit like the defective vehicle notices already in place.

If police see a vehicle in their travels that is unsafe or dangerous due to mechanical problems, or indeed at the annual inspections for registration renewal, the vehicle can have a "defective vehicle" sticker applied. These come in various degrees: the vehicle might be so defective it is dangerous to drive, and therefore a tow-truck is needed immediately, or alternatively the defect might not be so bad, and you're allowed to drive the vehicle for a couple of days in connection with its repair (the one I got a few years ago gave me four hours to drive the vehicle connected with its repair, which meant I could drive it from the RTA depot to the mechanic's workshop (about 750m away), but couldn't really make it home and back in time given that I would have taken quite a few hours to effect repairs).

Once you have a defect notice applied to your windscreen, it is necessary to have repairs effected, and the vehicle is then taken to an authorised inspector who can examine the vehicle and clear the defect notice.

I reckon a smilar process should be applied to drivers. They don't necessarily have to be booked with traffic offences, but I reckon if a police officer (or other appropriately authorised official) sees a driver driving in a manner that is dangerous to the public, or simply indicates the driver's grasp of the road rules is astray, they should be issued with a "defect notice" which requires them to pass a driving test.

The test need not necessarily be immediate: it might be in the next (say) three months. You don't impose any monetary fine on the driver, and you allow them to drive in the meantime. You just require them to pass a driving test within a certain timeframe. Of course this could be graded so that very dangerous drivers have to sit their test within a fortnight (say), while a driver whose ability is a little bit suspect might be given three months.

There would be no appeal from the requirement to sit the driving test: you'd simply have to be spotted doing something stupid that didn't necessarily amount to a traffic infringement. (If you commit enough traffic infringements you'll be sitting a driving test anyway when you re-apply for a cancelled or suspended licence). The reason for no appeal is that the test imposes nothing more on a driver than is required now: you know the road rules, can drive a vehicle safely and have all the necessary skills with which to carry out this task. Every time you hop into a vehicle and drive, this is the implication of you having a licence. It's just that you'll need to prove this ability to someone else.

Quite possibly the testing could be contracted out to suitable testers, given that the RTA might not employ enough testing officers already (eg Driving School Instructers themselves). It will probably lead to increased employment in the driver training and testing industry, and it will no doubt save lives, as it'll force people to think about their driving actions, something that is just not happening enough these days.

I write this after hearing on the news tonight of an horrific accident on the Princes Highway (South Coast) where a vehicle slowed down substantially, was about to be overtaken, and actually did a U-turn fair in front of the vehicle overtaking it. Why it is necessary to do a U-turn from the middle of the Princes Highway is completely beyond me. I'd suggest pulling to the left, waiting for clearance and then doing a hook turn might be a more appropriate choice, or better still, pulling into a side-street and doing the U-turn there instead.

I heard Barry O'Farrell calling for more funding for the Princes Highway today, but really! If a moron is going to chuck a u-bolt in the middle of a major highway, then why is the accident the government's fault? This is the sort of driver who would be my candidate for the driving test within three months. Justify your licence mate, and stop killing the rest of us.

Drive While Using a Mobile

2009-12-29T15:45:00.002+11:00

Another thing I forgot to mention in yesterday's post was one of my pet hates. People using mobile phones while driving. I am reminded of this by our trip northbound where just near the Toronto exit, we came across a young green P-plate driver in the left lane obeying his speed limit. Ah, very good, we thought. Until we finally pulled alongside, and from my side (passenger) I could clearly see his mobile phone in his right hand, and he's watching the screen thumbing a text message into the phone. He did occasionally look up at the road ahead, but he was travelling at least 95 km/h in moderately heavy traffic. Need I point out the obvious danger of his practice?

A really crazy thing people do is to commence a phone call whilst on foot, then hop into the car, continue the conversation while driving off. I saw a woman do this at the local shopping centre the other day. This just compounds the error. Fair enough, sit in the car, put the keys in the ingition and continue the call. But you are ALREADY PARKED. Why drive off before you've finished your conversation??

People really need to get things into perspective, don't they? No phone call is that important is it necessary to take it whilst driving. Surely the caller can be called back, or will call back if it's urgent. Surely you can pull up? And of course, surely you don't have to drive off if you are already parked! I suppose some people actually INITIATE calls while driving too... Sheesh!

The offence in NSW carries a $253 fine and 3 demerit points. If you do it in a school zone, it's $338 and 4 demerit points. But the enforcement of this one is rather hit and miss.

Mythbusters did a test of driving while using a mobile compared to driving whilst drunk and concluded that it was actually worse (safety wise) than driving while slightly over the limit. It wasn't so bad if you were just chatting away meaninglessly, but once they started asking questions that required some thought (for instance mental arithmetical calculations) it got pretty hairy in the car, and a lot of witch's hats were knocked over in the process.
Again, it comes down to attitude. I wouldn't dream of doing it. Nor would I dream of drink driving. I do care about my fellow road users out there, not to mention my own vehicle and safety. However, a lot of us don't. I think I've mentioned it before, but I am really quite surprised our road toll is actually not a lot higher than what it is. We get there more by good fortune than anything.

Where are they all?

2009-12-28T02:44:00.000+11:00

On Christmas Day, Sharon and I travelled about 250km visiting both parents' houses for Christmas Lunch (her parents at Clarence Town) and Christmas Tea (my parents at Kanwal). I have referred to the Victorian Transport Accident Commision's Ad already in a post before Christmas Eve, and have also seen NSW's offerings of warnings about police everywhere and double demerit points.

But on this trip which included quite a long way on the F3 between Ourimbah and Black Hill in both directions, WE DID NOT SEE A SINGLE POLICE CAR!!!!! We saw a lot of traffic, and despite it being Christmas Day, the incredible selfishness of drivers was so prevalent. People tend to not drive courteously these days. The attitude is "I'm all right Jack, Bugger you, mate". The main problems we saw were:

* People not anticipating the road ahead sufficiently.
* The frequency of tailgating
* Inapproporiate lane choices
* Pointless speeding in traffic areas (we catch up at the next traffic light anyway, guys)
* Travelling far too closely on the freeway (both fore and aft and left and right). Why travel in a bunch???
* Speeding up after being passed on multi lane roads

We didn't see any accidents, nor did we come close to any collisions, so I can be thankful for that. There is an incredibly low standard of driving out there, however. People need to be tested more than once in their lives, and I reckon that'll be the next magic bullet to reduce the road toll. The first was seatbelts, the second Random Breath Testing. The third will be Regular Driver Testing. Let's see how long it takes for it to be introduced. Maybe every ten years at the start, but preferably increasing to every five.

Season's Greetings

2009-12-25T00:05:00.002+11:00

Greetings everyone. Here's my christmas message to you all, hopefully it might influence at least one person. We are all on this planet together. It really helps if you consider everyone else's feelings in everything you do. Having gone out to the shopping mall these last couple of days, it is all dog-eat-dog (mind you, that's a strange expression as I've never ever seen a dog eat another dog). There's fighting on the roads getting there, fighting over parking spots, fighting over products in stores. Fortunately I live in Gosford, and it's just fighting.

In other countries this same attitude is taken further. We have the example of a gun being drawn at a snowball fight in USA two days ago; and of course in Afghanistan they use car bombs instead, so the fighting has more dire consequences.

If we can only get rid of the upmanship that goes on in the world, it's going to be so much better. It appears to be a deep seated human trait, however, so I'm not really sure how far we're going to get. It seems to me that two thousand years ago a bloke whose names are both swear-words today had the same sort of idea. I wouldn't call myself a Christian by any means, but I tend to agree with a lot of what he was saying.

So may I just leave you today with the cliched expression: Peace on Earth and Goodwill to all Men (and Women). Have a good one.

Retailers come to the party

2009-12-24T00:02:00.004+11:00

Well it must be the festive season because the two retailers mentioned in the previous entry have both come to the party (at least figuratively).

Firstly, the simple problem of a calculator not working was easily fixed: I swapped it for one that did, and the girl at the counter was extremely cheerful about it. I had the receipt and original packaging, and there is a sign up at the checkout saying refunds and exchanges are only given for goods with a manufacturer's defect (ie not if you change your mind for some reason). This is strictly not true, as under the Trade Practices Act you are entitled to a refund in four cases: (1) if the product is defective (2) is not fit for the purpose it was sold (3) was incorrectly described or (4) does not match a sample showed to you. These rights cannot be abrogated by anything the retailer does or says.

The second problem was a measuring spoon set bought from a kitchen accessories retailer setup in the walkway in very temporary premises. Firstly they were still there and as a bonus, the same sales representative was on duty. When I bought the measuring spoon set I specifically asked for one which contained a tablespoon that was as per Australian Standards and therefore 20 mL.

Have a look at the measuring tablespoon(s) in your kitchen drawer. In almost all cases it will be 15 mL, as this is the English, American and even New Zealand standard for a tablespoon. We have two sets of measuring spoons both with 15 mL tablespoons, so to correctly comply with Australian standards you need to use a (15 mL) tablespoon and a teaspoon (5 mL all around the world, thank goodness) to make up the extra 5 mL.

I'm not really sure if any countries other than Australia actually use a 20 mL tablespoon. A quick internet search reveals we are indeed the ONLY country using a 20 mL tablespoon, so no wonder they are so hard to get, as all the units made in China are catering to the UK/US market.

Anyway when I was wrapping up the presents last night I had a look at the tablespoon I had been supplied and worse luck, it was 15 mL. I didn't actually look at the spoons when I bought them. The sales lady simply said it was 20 mL and I relied on this to purchase them. Again the Trade Practices Act comes in and the goods are not as described.

When explaining the situation, the lady remembered me and immediately offered a refund. I still had a look around hoping to get a 20 mL tablespoon, but alas, no such thing was possible. I took the refund as I certainly don't want a third set of US measuring spoons. She said I'd have trouble getting such a spoon and I agreed with her, although I had seen one in the past somewhere.

However, I did manage to find two spoons in the entire Erina Fair (both in the same shop). Not only that, they were stainless steel, not plastic, and were $1 cheaper! We now at last have a 20 mL tablespoon! There is now only ONE 20mL tablespoon in the entire shopping mall. I know where it is if you're looking for it and it hasn't already been snaffled up!

Victorian TAC Christmas Ad

2009-12-23T23:35:00.000+11:00

I think everyone needs to watch this before setting out in the car this Christmas. Click Here to go to YouTube. Need I say any more?

Christmas Shopping

2009-12-23T04:22:00.004+11:00

Today I hit the local shopping mall (Erina Fair) and was there from about 3:30pm until 7:15pm shopping. I can't really recall ever spending that long engaged in retail therapy in the past, and it was quite an exhausting process. My legs are going to be killing me today - they are already aching severely even as I type.

I did not completely finish my Christmas shopping, but came very close. I'm also going to have to go back as two products I bought are not right. One, a calculator, simply does not work and another was not as described. The sales representative either fully misled me, or at least was horribly mistaken. Anyway, I have the receipts and original packaging, and the Trade Practices Act is with me on both counts. I'll let you know how it goes, dear readers.

Yesterday, I head from Margy Osmond , spokesperson for the Retailer Traders' Association that there was a quick poll taken of consumers. They were asked "have you completed your Christmas shopping yet?" and 70% replied they hadn't. Of those 70%, a whopping 30% stated that they HADN'T EVEN STARTED!

I commenced my shopping a few weeks ago, and judging by how taxing a pastime it is, I'd hate to be in that situation only four days before Christmas. I guess a lot of people like to literally leave things to the last minute. I am one to always sail close to the wind with regard to deadlines, but even I wouldn't like to be THAT close! As I mentioned, I have two purchases to rectify. If I'd left it until the last day, there'd be no chance of rectification at all...

No Matter How Simple You Make the Lesson

2009-12-22T00:11:00.000+11:00

... some people never learn.

A six year old boy, Bangoang Tut has been killed yesterday thanks to the actions of a moronic low-life scumbag.

A driver, coming home from a Christmas party, allegedly over twice the legal limit, and doing burnouts in a residential street, has claimed the ultimate victim of innocence: a six year old child playing in his front yard. Superintendent Neville Taylor said of the accident, that it should never had happened. And isn't he right on that score?

Alcohol is a sedative. It slows down the reflex actions of the body. This is what it is "designed" to do. If you happen to be driving a motor vehicle at the time of being influenced by alcohol, you are just plain dumb. If there is one thing you do NOT want to happen whilst in charge of a tonne or more of metal moving at a lethal speed it's to have your reaction times slowed.

Hey, most of the time you'll make it okay: you won't be required to react quickly. But just occasionally something unexpected will occur - maybe a cat will dash out in front of you, or a driver in front will brake sharply because he's missed his turnoff, (note that neither of these examples is of your own doing) and you are then called to quickly respond. It helps if you CAN quickly respond, and your action is appropriate and timely. If you're drunk, this ability is substantially impaired.

To make yesterday's situation worse, the driver in question was not only well above the legal limit (no questions of slight miscounting of drinks, etc) he was actually doing burnouts in a relatively quiet residential street - whilst drunk. Okay, he's twice the legal limit and attempting to drive home. Dumb and stupid. But now he's also doing burnouts in the street. My thesaurus isn't sufficient to deal with this one... Can you actually get any more stupid, I wonder?

Now a completely innocent six year old is dead. Will people learn from this incident? I doubt it. It has happened before and will happen again. What does it take for people to realise that there are other forms of transport than driving themselves in their own vehicles? There ARE buses, taxis, hire cars, walking, lifts, and probably a few more ways of getting home when you are drunk. Please consider...

Global War

2009-12-21T04:30:00.001+11:00

An old game I used to play when I frequented Bulletin Boards was called Global War. It is based on the commercial board game, Risk, and the object of the game is to dominate the world by conquering every country.

It is certainly my favourite online game even now, despite it using what current users would call very primitive graphics, and a very simple display. However the strategy is what I'm interested in, and it's certainly got that.

I've been managing to play the odd game or two of late, thanks to the fact that there are a number of sysops STILL OUT THERE who allow access to their BBSs via the telnet function. I would have loved this years ago. Instead of having to pay for a phone call to call each BBS, you can now contact telnetable BBSs with just one internet session. In fact, most systems have other BBSs available as a function on their own BBS!

To do this you need a Telnet program, such as PuTTY or even HyperTerm which comes standard with Windows. You'll also need an ibm-type font which displays drawing characters using the hi-ascii set (essential for such BBS games as Global War).

I suppose the main reasons sysops have their systems online is nostalgia; because what's available through the internet using html is far superior to what you can display on an ANSI-ibm terminal (essentially a colour VT-100 implementation). But some of the functionality from a BBS is fantastic, and the screen displays are orders of magnitude faster than anything you can see on the net! There are a lot of old BBS users re-discovering their hobby, so if you want to join in, feel free. I'm happy to answer any questions you might have - simply drop me an email.

Peacock Pets

2009-12-19T05:15:00.000+11:00

After our house fire the tenants left behind virtually all of their possessions. We bent over backwards to give them the opportunity to come and collect the stuff, constantly asking them when they'd pick it up. We gave them about a month, I suppose before finally wading in and throwing everything they left here out. Mind you, they did come back several times to collect some things, and in reality there was not one thing left that anyone would have wanted to keep.

The strangest thing they left behind was their peacocks. Yep, abandoned in the back yard, were three birds, two female and a male. Apparently they make excellent pets, and they're certainly a talking point! They had been left here for a week or more before we realised they were there. After all, at this stage we were only dropping over to the house occasionally, as there wasn't much here to come over for.

The peacocks were roaming the neighbourhood. Early in our visits they weren't in the backyard, but after a few trips over we noticed them in the backyard. A visit later they had gone, so we though they'd been picked up, but on the next visit two of them were in the backyard. Eventually we realised there were three of them using the backyard as a base, but not always here. They can actually fly, so had no trouble clearing the six-foot fence both inwards and outwards.

We ended up having to provide food and water for them, as they were not being tended to at all, and after several weeks we contacted WIRES who were told the birds had been abandoned and to come around and pick them up. A couple of volunteers dropped out to pick them up, but were told by the tenant not to get them. By a strange quirk of fate, the tenant was working as a builder's labourer, and at this time he was actually working on a house directly opposite our house that had burnt!

WIRES volunteers made several visits, apparently, because we'd see that the peacocks were still there, ring them up and ask them to pickup the birds again, and they'd come out to the house only to be told by the tenant not to pick them up again! This must have happened three or four times.

Eventually the tenants made arrangements for them to be re-homed and finally one afternoon we came around to the house and the birds were no longer there. We've had a few strange pets over the years (eg rabbits and rats) but never peacocks. It seems we have a lot to learn about looking after peacocks. What they eat, for a start!

TV Antenna Problem Solved

2009-12-18T00:52:00.000+11:00

Well, we fixed the TV antenna problem a couple of days ago, and by gee, the signal I am now getting at the TV set is degrees of magnitude better than before.

I can state that I'm in a really good signal area. Rabbit ears would actually work rather than an external antenna, as we're up on a hill, direct line of sight to the transmitter and about 2km away from it.

It was the coaxial cable run, which was done by an electrician. I can only speculate and say the electrician has let his apprentice have a go at it. Why not? He was busy wiring up the rest of the house, it's good experience for a young lad, and he's not going to kill himself with 240volt whilst hooking up a TV antenna!

Already I had mentioned in a previous post, the connection at the wall plate was a dog's breakfast. The Antenna Man finally got up on the roof today and re-connected to the antenna. Another big problem. Also, the coax came into the roof cavity and was connected to a splitter (with only one output connected to it) and the job there was also pathetic. In fact the cable fell straight out of one end of the splitter as soon as he picked it up! So the splitter has been replaced with a joiner, and the coax re-connected properly.

The digital picture is now perfect. The ANALOGUE picture which was previously snowy and really horrible is now rock-steady. It can even be mistaken for digital quality!!!

And the real clincher is that from Wyoming, I can get quite a viewable picture on the analogue TVS (UHF CH-31) community television station from Sydney! It's a bit snowy, but it's in colour and all there. Previously it was usually not present, and a ghostly image when it was coming through.

So the problem has been the coax connections all along. Four of them simply done by an incompetent operator, and losing so much signal between the antenna and TV set. And out of this, in practice, I get an extra TV station.

The Central Coast is probably the best area for TV stations in the country, as not only do we get Sydney stations, but also Newcastle Regional Transmissions (which are almost identical to Sydney, but not quite. They still break out for local content occasionally, particularly NBN). It is quite an interesting area indeed.

Memories of another era

2009-12-17T23:14:00.000+11:00

Yesterday I had a visit from an old school friend who I last saw in late 1982 when we graduated Year 12.

Yep, it had been 27 years since I had seen Steve, and really, he hasn't changed a bit. He's a mining engineer now living in central Queensland and operating his own company. Certainly a lot more succesful than myself financially, and working long hours to keep up.

I suppose when you do own your own company it is very tricky to get someone to fill in for you if you are indisposed or simply want a break. They won't have the same dedication that you have, and might be able to keep things running briefly, but since their efforts will be rewarding the owner of the business rather than themselves, you really can't expect them to work as hard as what probably needs to be done.

But Steve was down for a few days and I feel honoured he decided to catch up with me. Of course there weren't enough hours to catch up with everything, but we did venture out for lunch, and I reckoned it'd be nice to go to our local Gosford City Art Gallery and Japanese Gardens. It just so happened (I had read about it in the local paper but it wasn't on top of my consciousness) that a selection of paintings from the Archibald Prize competition was on display at the time. The paintings included not only the winner, but the People's Choice award winner.

Steve had his nine-year-old son with him, and it was a bit of a cultural dawning for him, and certainly worth the look. We had a very nice lunch, and had to part company as he had to get back for a family do that evening. He flew out of Newcastle this morning back to central Queensland, and back to the grind.

The object is to not leave it another 27 years until we catch up again, I suppose!

Wreck of the Hesperus

2009-12-15T04:19:00.000+11:00

When I was driving cabs in Newcastle in the 80s and 90s a lot of the fleet was (how shall I put it) rather old. Car 7 was a 1972 HQ Kingswood; 23 and 33 were XC Falcons (of a similar age to Car 7). Some of these vehicles had, in fact, travelled well over three quarters of a million kilometres and were quite tired indeed.

It is a tribute to their manufacturers at how cars can get such a flogging, and yet still remain roadworthy and operational. One of the contributing factors is that a taxi engine very rarely gets cold, and so all the wear and tear from cold starts you get in a normal car doesn't happen in a vehicle operated for such long periods.

However, as one of my passengers informed me, "I'm not too keen on paying 70c a kilometre to get carted around in a twenty year old clapped out Kingswood". At the time I think he was getting carted around in a fifteen year old Kingswood, and I could easily see his point.

I was glad when in the early 1990s, the RTA brought in a new rule that any vehicle to be operated as a taxi had to be less than six years old. This meant far greater safety for passengers, probably lower maintenance costs for the owners, but a much greater capitalisation on their part. Nearly every taxi in Newcastle needed to be replaced.

There was a transition period in place for existing vehicles: I think everyone got two years to comply. The base owned a number of Special Purpose Vehicles, which were modified to carry wheelchairs. There was a four-year phase-in period for these cars, as they represented a substantial inverstment on the part of the base, and the RTA didn't want to inconvenience the wheelchair bound users of these vehicles.

But it was a BIG change to the system, and certainly one I welcomed. It is a lot nicer not only being a passenger in a newish vehicle, but also DRIVING the things.

Smoking is bad for you

2009-12-14T00:02:00.060+11:00

The picture is the scene from the master bedroom of our home in October 2006. At that stage it was a rental property and we had a family of 6 staying here. Their 15 year old son had taken up smoking, apparently, but didn't want his family to know about it.

This was his bedroom where the fire started. Apparently he set fire to his mattress earlier in the evening and thought he'd put it out. Naturally he didn't share this info with anyone else as they'd know he'd been smoking. Alas, he was wrong about the extinguishment of the butt.

A few hours later he was woken up by a mattress fire and it was too late to do anything much about it. The fire had taken hold, it had gotten into the roof cavity and it was well alight. Naturally the neighbours were alerted, the family cleared off out of the house, and while waiting for the fire brigade to arrive, started working with garden hoses from the outside.

I remember my next door neighbour, whose house was perilously close to the seat of the fire, saying he spent the longest hour of his life using the hose on the bedroom, waiting for the fire brigade to turn up trying to protect his own home. It apparently took them ages to get here, which is interesting given that the fire station is actually in the same suburb as us!

At the time, Sharon was staying up at her parents' house in the country, and I was on my own at home at Narara. At about 3:45am the phone rang. It was the police. They asked me "are you the owner of {address}?" I replied yes. They then told me they had some bad news. There had been a fire and there was extensive damage and I should get around to inspect the place as soon as possible.

The first thing I did was fish out the insurance policy from the lever arch file. It was landlord's insurance with NRMA Insurance, and it was most definitely current. So I drove over to the house, and you could see the pall of smoke clinging to the valley which got worse as I approached. I parked somewhere nearby as there were fire appliances, police vehicles and an Energy Australia truck all over the place. There wasn't much I could do, and in fact the firies simply told me to stay out as it was dark and rather unsafe in the house. I spoke to the tenants briefly who said their dog had gone missing, presumed dead. Fortunately he turned up a day or two later. He had obviously run a mile, petrified of the events.

After about ten minutes, in which I gave permission for fire investigators to take samples later on, I went back home. In reality the visit to the property was a waste of time.

The funny thing was, despite receiving such horrible news, I was not in the least bit surprised. The tenants were five weeks behind in the rent, and we were thinking very seriously of evicting them anyway. This at least gave us a perfect excuse for us to get them out of the house! And everything was insured anyway. So it wasn't too much of a catastrophe, although it was quite a large inconvenience.

A funny thing was that the tenants were quite religious people in spirit. (They drank to excess, gambled, took illicit drugs and weren't remiss about not paying their rent, but they were devout Christians). There were Christian icons all throughout the house. We have a lot of pictures of the fire damage to the house, but the adjacent one shows the protection offered by his lord Jesus Christ:

I suppose the punch-line to all this was a few days later when I was asking them about arrangements for their possessions still in the house and arrangements for their future accommodation. After being five weeks behind in the rent, and causing over $100,000 in damage to the house I was asked, if a little sheepishly, "When, do you think, can we get our bond back?"

I'll blog further on the house fire, as it wasn't all cut and dried.

Xmas Party

2009-12-13T02:01:00.000+11:00

I've just returned tonight from the Wyong Drama Group Christmas party at the house of a couple of our members. We arrived at 3:30pm, aware the start time was 3pm, but knowing full well we'd have quite a few hours to go.

We were actually the FIRST to arrive, and we got a bit worried that we might have had the info wrong. Originally the party was planned to be at 6pm in the Green Room at the hall, but this venue is not really suitable for a party of the sort we are into (goodness knows we hang out there quite a bit anyway before, during and after shows). Fortunately our members kindly volunteered their place for the venue. We've had drama group functions there before: indeed it is a fantastic venue, right on the edge of Wyong River, and overlooking Tuggerah Lake. A magic site indeed.

As is always the case with these things people come and go: Gosford Musical Society was also having its Christmas Party the same day, along with Wyong Musical Theatre Company, so the three major groups on the Coast clashed (what's unusual about that, you may cynically ask?) Some people wanted to actually get to at least two of these functions, so we said goodbye to them early on. Others had started at the other locations (and one or two had also been to work parties) and ended up finishing with us. I suppose that is the best compliment.

We all had a lovely tea, made up of meat supplied by the group; salads brought by people from A-L and desserts from people M-Z. It was quite a generous affair and we all probably over-ate. We had some interesting discussions, and suddenly one guest, whose 9-year-old girl came up and sounded quite groggy explained "No wonder she's feeling so tired, it's a quarter past ten!"

Time had just flown, and in the next half an hour, most of us left. An uneventful, but rather enjoyable day catching up with lots of friends. Isn't that what Christmas is all about?

I feel for the couple who provided their venue, there'd be quite a bit of putting stuff away and cleaning up, although we weren't too grotty this year. But R & L: it was greatly appreciated. A real pity our house wasn't quite as large and accommodating, as we'd seriously think about hosting it here if it were practical.

Playing God?

2009-12-12T01:03:00.000+11:00

One of the most memorable events of my stay in intensive care was the "treatment" of an old guy who had respiratory problems in the bed next to me. He was definitely of the "old school" and was brought up in an era gone by (probably just as well). He was most definitely a racist bigot, and he had something against Asians which may have been developed during the war. This was unfortunate however, as this was St Leonards in 2009, and quite a few of the nurses were of a cosmopolitan background, and yes, a fair number looked Asian.

A lot of them had been to school in Sydney. Someone may have an Asian appearance - that's difficult to hide - but often they'll open their mouth and sound like Kylie Mole, indicating they are, if not actually born here, certainly bred here.

The old gentleman in the bed next to me was quite troublesome. They had him hooked up to a respirator which required him to keep pressure on his mouth and not to speak in order for it to work properly. He was resisting the thing, and would often throw it off. In Intensive Care you have a number of monitors hooked up to you giving instant readings. One of them attached to your finger will be a blood oxygenation probe indicating the percentage of oxygen in your blood. They aim to get the reading at around 94% or higher - any less and they will put you on oxygen to get the levels up as high as possible (I am accutely aware of this as I was on oxygen in various forms for over a month).

Apparently he had been a smoker and his lungs were in a bad way - he was managing to get readings around 80% or so, indicating quite a dire need for a respirator. But he hated it, and kept throwing it off, much to the chagrin of the nurses. There was a constant running argument. He'd say he's better off without it, and at one stage the nurse was pointing out to him that his oxygenation levels were much higher with the respirator on than without it. It seemed to no avail, as the machine WAS quite uncomfortable, and he kept throwing it off.

I remember at one stage, one nurse made him a promise. She said if he'd wear the respirator for an hour, she'd make him a cup of tea. To someone on nil by mouth promised a cup of tea that would be a strong incentive. I would have done anything for a cuppa at this stage, wearing a respirator for an hour would be most definitely worth it (mind you MY problems were a bit different and consuming anything via the oesophagus at this stage would not have been wise). Despite him being nil by mouth the nurse was still prepared to make the offer - she may have gotten in trouble for it later on, but she figured it was a calculated risk, and if it got him to use the respirator the benefits outweighed the problems.

One night, a young nurse came in to do the dogwatch shift. In Intensive Care there is a high ratio of nurses per patient. For the first week or two, I actually had ONE nurse for only myself, and at most a nurse looks after two patients. Our gentleman friend was also allocated one nurse (indicated by a special sticker they'd put on your shoulder) for that night. The young nurse was definitely Australian (very likely schooled on the North Shore), but of Asian appearance. The old guy didn't get off on the right foot making a tasteless racist remark to greet the poor girl. Let's get this clear, he was most definitely a racist bigot.

For the first hour there was a hate-hate relationship between the two, and he threw his respirator off at least eight or nine times, meaning the nurse had to re-fit it under very trying circumstances, handling not only physical resistance, but also hatred racist remarks from the old guy.

The poor girl wasn't handling him well at all. Some of the nurses dealt with it through a carrot (such as the one who promised him a cup of tea, which he DID get incidentally), others would use a stick, and simply yell at him to put the respirator back on, and not taking any crap from him. This method seemed to work the best: I think this was the sort of discipline he would have been brought up with.

But this night, she was trying to use reason and appeal to his good side (which was, if not non-existant, quite miniscule). And it wasn't working at all. Finally after another rejection of the respirator she simply walked out. Some of the other nurses tried to reason with her, but her clinching comment was "why should we bother to save him? It takes a lot of time and effort to treat these very sick people and it takes a lot of resources to do so. If he's going to be like that, why should I have to put up with it? He can just lie there without a respirator and if he dies, so be it". She walked out, went home and I never saw her again.

The nurses didn't quite know what to do in this situation. By this time it was well after midnight, and management were quite absent at these hours. Fortunately the old guy mostly slept that night, and didn't require much help. The nurse allocated solely to me, who was sitting at the foot of my bed during all of this, did spend a bit of time looking after the old guy when required. Her caring mode kicked in and despite it not being her job, she went over to fix up a few things that went wrong as the night went on.

We got through the night and the Nursing Unit Manager was prowling around next morning asking questions and trying to get to the bottom of the issue. As I said, I never saw that nurse again. I was in ICU for probably another three or four weeks after that, and would often see the same nurses again on different shifts.

So for the actions of one old beligerent man on one fateful night I am wondering whether a fine nursing career has been ended? You don't get to be a nurse unless you are caring and dedicated. It most certainly is a well-paid profession, but it involves work that is quite difficult physically and emotionally, plus it's hard on the stomach. I had to be cleaned up of faeces, urine, vomit and blood quite a number of times during my ICU stay, and my hat is off to the wonderful souls who did this for me. Plus there were a few deaths, which to a nurse must be the ultimate occupational reinforcement that something has gone wrong. I reckon you'd constantly be thinking if only you'd done something differently perhaps the outcome would not have been the same. You'd always be blaming yourself for the result.

I hope she has managed to return to the profession, although I don't think it'd look good on your resume. Fortunately nurses are in high demand so if she takes a few months off, she might be able to continue her careeer given her qualifications. I certainly hope so.

The old guy was discharged from the ICU well before I got out, so I'm not sure of his ultimate outcome. The prognosis was not good - smoking causes so much damage to your lungs their chances of oxygenating the bloodstream decreases sharply as age increases.

Freedb.org

2009-12-11T05:52:00.000+11:00

I decided a couple of days ago to rip all the CDs in the collection to the hard drive. Perhaps I'll get an mp3 player for Christmas, or maybe another 1 terabyte hard drive, so having all the CDs in mp3 format is going to be very handy indeed.

It's a gradual process, but I'm a long way towards completion tonight. I have ripped 253 CDs so far, which is totalling 4,460 individual files on the disc; and roughly 9 gigabytes. About 20% of them had already been ripped, but needed consistently renaming. I also have put both ID3 version 1 AND 2 metadata into the mp3s. This will come in handy when I finally get a programme to run over them and create a database of them for searching (I'll probably use Windows Media Player for compatibility I'd say).

During all this I have been accessing the freedb database to get filenames for the mp3 files and it has saved an inordinate amount of typing. I am absoloutely stunned at the comprehensiveness of the database. It has contained listings for every CD so far except for four. They are:

Col Joye - Most Requested
Shakin' Stevens - This Ole House
Barry O'Dowd - Best Loved Christmas Songs and
The Ventures - The Very Best of the Ventures Disc 1

Mind you, the Ventures' Disc 2 was actually listed, surprisingly enough. Funny that someone has typed up the second disc, but not the first. And I can't believe the ole Shakin' Stevens CD isn't in there! Poor ole Shakin' Stevens - has no-one typed up "This Ole House" for us? The other two are reasonably obscure I suppose and no-one's gotten around to typing up track listings for them yet.

I am going to find out what's required to send away submissions, as I've typed up the titles and info for these four CDs and for the sake of completeness, would really like to send the listings up to freedb.

I have probably another forty or fifty CDs to go before the project is over, so I'll wait to see what else might be missing and chip in my 2c worth for possible use of others out there.

The surprises never cease in that despite Barry O'Dowd's Christmas CD not being listed on freedb, when I went and played a song or two from the album, Windows Media Player was able to access the album art and download an image of the album cover for it! So someone out there knows about it.

The Antenna, Tenzing and A or An Historic

2009-12-10T05:02:00.003+11:00

Well, just a couple of quick updates to post, and then a question inviting comments.

The antenna man was held up at work and hasn't returned yet! We had a few dropouts watching the T20 cricket on "One" last night, but it wasn't terminal and we got to see all of the match. For those unaware, Wednesday Nights are One's T20 cricket nights, and they will be replaying some earlier T20 games each Wednesday night during summer. As a diehard fan in the non-ratings period, this seems like a great service to us viewers.

The Wife LOVES the name Tenzing. The rabbit even LOOKS like Tenzing:

So I think we've struck a win there, thank you Balmain Boy!

Finally, I've been having an extended conversation on Facebook (me and quite a few others) re the usage of A or An as an article in front of a soft h. A user pointed out that Channel 10 News used the expression "An Historic Occasion..." and that was a grammatical error. I went into bat for Channel 10 and said with a soft "h" at the start, the article "an" was correct. Naturally we have gotten nowhere, although research has shown Stephen Murray-Smith is on my side, and in any case my contention is "an historic" is not wrong, NOT "a historic" is not right. Doing a Google Search universally gives 32% to "An" and 68% to "A". But if you choose the domain .au, there were 139,000 hits for "An Historic" just shading "A Historic" which came in at 138,000. So in this country we're dead on 50/50 (Well, almost. Probably by the same margin Federal Elections are decided!)

Anyone want to add their 2c worth? I've read MOST of the Google results on this, so I'm really interested in what you guys have to say rather than technical grammatical analyses.

Antenna Woes

2009-12-09T05:39:00.000+11:00

Digital television is something we've had for quite a while now, and finally today I have gotten around to doing something about the antenna deficiencies we've had.

We got a digital Personal Video Recorder in April 2008. It's a nice unit although it has broken down once. Last night we were watching "Red Dwarf - Back to Earth" on ABC2 and ten minutes into the show the transmission dropped out, and the screen stayed black for about ten minutes. We DID get to see the end, and had seen the start, it was just the middle bit we missed. Such is life.

With Digital TV, you either get the signal or you don't. Back on analogue you get varying degrees of picture quality from "rock-steady" to "quite snowy", etc, etc. But with digital it's basically all or nothing. So when you do get a dodgy signal, often the last picture you've received will freeze on the screen, and then it picks up when there's next a signal.

We had a lousy signal ever since the repairs to the antenna were done after the house fire (more on that later); but with the coming of the digital TV, it improved enormously and I haven't really done anything about it, despite knowing the quality was not 100%. Occasionally we'd miss programmes due to dropouts, but it's just one of those things you mean to do something about but never get around to.

Anyway, I had a visit from an antenna installer yesterday who has measured the signal strength, informed me that it is quite good, so there's definitely a problem with either the antenna or the connection. We may need a new antenna, the existing antenna properly connected, or re-wired.

Anyway, he's coming back this afternoon as he didn't have a long enough ladder with him. The price you pay for living in a two-storey house!

Turn of phrase, no?

2009-12-08T01:51:00.000+11:00

I recently left a comment on Adrian Neylan's blog where he had an 87 year old woman in the taxi who was a real inspiration. I typed "Adrian, she's 87, no?" quite unwittingly.

Another reader has taken offence at the expression "... , no?" and this is naturally his right. But it has gotten me thinking what the alternatives are. Quite clearly the construction is designed to be egging you on to agree with me, no? The same can also be indicated by the opposite term, yes? It is one of several cases in the English language where "yes" actually means the same as "no", no? Yeah, no, yeah, no... (Forgive me for answering my rhetorical questions)

Years ago we would have simply said, "eh?". Sounds like what my Uncle Dudley would have said, eh? Modern expression has turned this more colloquial linguistic form into a more formal form, and instead of using the slang form "eh?" we've converted to using the actual words "no" or "yes" instead. It is a phenomenon not only in Australian usage, but quite definitely English as well. I'm not too sure how common it is in American...

Like it or not, it seems to be quite a prevalent occurence in modern parlance, and is here to stay, no? I'm sorry, I should stop using it, yes? I'm glad you all agree with me on that one, eh?

Enough! While on the subject, however, I am reminded of an old TV commercial for NRMA Finance with Doug Scroope in it. (This is pre-de-mutualisation of course). NRMA Finance had been awarded a triple-A credit rating. The last line of the ad from Doug was "NRMA, AAA?, Eh?"

It's a boy!

2009-12-07T23:36:00.011+11:00

We took the rabbit down to the vet today. We haven't really ever been a user of the services of a veterinarian before, so we simply went to the closest one. The experience was quite painless, I rang up and asked whether they had dealt with rabbits a lot, whereupon they said yes, and I asked what sort of vaccinations are recommended.

Apparently you cannot get vaccination against myxomatosis in Australia, and it's quite a rare event anyway. However you certainly can get vaccination against rabbit calicivirus, which our bunny has now udergone. We also got the vet to give it a once-over and checkup.

Firstly, we must report it's a boy. Fairly obvious when you know where to look, in fact. It's probably a year or two old judging by his teeth, and almost certainly full-grown. He was very brave when injected with the vaccine, and seemed quite unperturbed by what would have hurt a bit. In fact he's a very active and curious rabbit in general, always investigating and looking out for things.

The cost for the visit to the vet and vaccination was $49.60, which as a prolific consumer of medical services, seems to be quite reasonable. We had a large budgie cage to transport him down to the vet and back, which we formerly used as a holiday cage for the rats. The unsuitability of it came to the fore as we were leaving the vets, and the bottom fell out of the cage completely. Fortunately he was well-behaved and I was able to pick him up before he went gallavanting around the floor in the waiting room of the vets. When we exited the front door, a family had a nice-looking dog waiting for attention, who proceeded to growl at the rabbit. Probably just as well there were no greyhounds in at the time!

He is still un-named. Given that he's a male himalayan rabbit, are there any suggestions from you, dear readers? We were thinking perhaps something geographical from the region. We were thinking of "Katie" after the mountain K2, but this was, of course, before we found out she was a he. Thinking caps on, please!

Murphy's Helicopter

2009-12-06T02:18:00.001+11:00

My transport to RNS on that fateful day involved a NSW ambulance helicopter. Or should I really say TWO NSW ambulance helicopters. I actually remember the pilot turning up at Gosford, and saying "We've got an hydraulic leak in the chopper we just arrived in, so we can't take you in that, we'll get another one".

This statement may, in fact, have been the last thing I ever heard, given the seriousness of my problem, and the prognosis. Fortunately it wasn't, but I can't remember much after that. They went ahead and sedated me, as the replacement helicopter wasn't going to be long.

What ended up happening was fascinating. Since the first chopper had landed on the helipad at Gosford Hospital and couldn't be moved, the helipad was therefore out of service! The second chopper had to land down the road at the oval in Showground Road, and I had to be carted down there in a road ambulance to be loaded on to the chopper.

Sharon says she can recall me being taken down on a stretcher and driven off in an ambulance. She didn't actually come down - earlier on I had told her to ring my parents and get them to come down to Gosford, pick her up and carry on to Royal North Shore Hospital.

Apparently it took almost as long to get me from Gosford Hospital to the oval in Showground Road than it did to actually take me from there to Royal North Shore!

It just goes to show, though, if you are going to get sick, NSW is probably one of the best places in the world for it to happen to you (especially if you are close to Sydney). The speed and scope of everything they did for me was absolutely brilliant. I really cannot praise them enough. When I was triaged at Gosford Hospital Casualty I must have been assessed at an incredibly high rating, as they basically dropped everything and took me in. I jumped the queue in front of quite a few other patients, and at this stage I hadn't actually been diagnosed. However severe chest pain coming from the left hand side (which is exactly what I had) does rate up there with the most serious of concerns.

Reading about oesophageal ruptures on the net lately, the speed of treatment is a big factor in the success rate. If you let it go more than 24 hours, the result is almost always fatal: get treatment in less than an hour and the fatality rate drops to a mere 10%.

I have really no idea how long I had let the rupture go before I got Sharon to take me into hospital, but we figure the oesophagus probably ruptured at about 8-9pm at night, and I arrived down at Royal North Shore at about 7am next morning...

Cost is relative

2009-12-04T01:09:00.000+11:00

Back in 1988 when I used to run my Bulletin Board System I was unfortunate in that the host system was located in the United States, and the maximum speed of the modem was 2400 bits per second. As a result I had to make fifteen or twenty minute calls to the USA to get software, such as new doors for the board or indeed new revisions to the BBS software itself.

At this point in time (pre-Optus in fact) the cost to call USA was $1.79 a minute peak, $1.19 a minute off-peak (after about 10pm to about 7am, Australian time). I ended up becoming the Australian distributor of the BBS software (fat lot of good that actually did me, in reality) so was the main gateway of stuff from the USA into Australia.

So after a few months of doing this, it arrived. That is: the phone bill. At this point in time they were sent every three months to private subscribers.

Opening it up I knew it would be large. A twenty minute call would cost maybe $25 or even $35 if I hadn't waited to off-peak hours. And I'd made quite a few of them.

I couldn't believe it when I opened the bill and it was a whopping $750!!! Since most of the calls were international, even then they were itemised, so I went through it with a calculator and added them all up. And despite it not looking anything like $750 when you looked at the individual calls, it sure enough added to the given total. (Gee these computers are good at arithmetic).

As a full-time university student on TEAS (Tertiary Education Assistance Scheme - the forerunner to Austudy) which was at the time, even less than the dole, there was going to be a little bit of trouble paying the bill.

The time for paying the bill came and went, and the inevitable happened, of course, Telecom cut the phone off, putting the BBS off the air. Eventually thanks to cries out to my users, some of whom generously chipped in with small contributions, a loan from my girlfriend and a loan (which ended up becoming a grant) from my Mum, I managed to pay the bill.

So I applied to get the phone re-connected. All was fine until after a few days there was still no dial tone on the line, so I rang up and made enquiries. It seems that since my account had been delinquent, Telecom required a $250 security deposit before they'd re-connect the phone. The hadn't told me about this at all when I applied for reconnection after paying the bill. And if they had, I'd say the full cost of reconnection would have been apparent, ie $1,000, not $750! So in order to recommence, I had to fork out another $250 after I'd had so much trouble scraping together $750...

After another couple of weeks I managd to pay the security deposit and the BBS was back on the air, finally!

Now I look at call costs to the USA, and if you shop around it's possible to get these same calls for 6c a minute! Plus the modems we are using now are twenty or thirty times faster; although I'd in reality be using ADSL to do the file transfers at probably sixty or seventy times faster at no actual call cost above the monthly subscription fee!!! I was using telecommunications far too early, it seems!

Wascally Wabbit

2009-12-03T03:19:00.001+11:00

A couple of days ago, my wife Sharon (who goes for an early morning walk with more regularity than my blog posts) came back asking me "are you awake?"

It turns out she'd found a stray RABBIT hopping around outside the house. My wife has been a small mammal enthusiast since her high school days, having a succession of rabbits, guinea pigs, rats, mice and other similar things. She's often alluded to getting a ferret, but hasn't made good on her threats.

Anyway, since the rats have died (this time last year) we've had a large empty cage in the living room. That cage now has an occupant (although only on a temporary basis as it's quite inappropriate for a mammal the size of a rabbit given that it was custom made for rats).

The thing is SOOOOO CUTE!!!! It is very tame, and we have made some efforts to contact the original owner, however this hasn't worked so far. At this stage its probably not what we want, anyway :-) The rabbit will sit in your lap and just take pats en masse. It is very docile, and loves being loved.

So naturally we are trying to come up with a name for it. For a start we don't know whether it's a boy or a girl. I have tried to determine it (rats are VERY easy to tell) but to no avail yet (I suppose that's what the internet is for).

I suggested the name, "Tony Rabbit" after our newly appointed Federal Liberal Leader. Then if we get the sex wrong the name won't have to be changed. However my wife cannot abide calling a pet after a politician, and I tend to agree after a few moments' thought. So good readers, are there any suggestions from you??

Enough, already!

2009-12-02T01:34:00.003+11:00

See all those brochures on the right? That's what arrived in the mailbox yesterday. 22 individual flyers!

I'm all for freedom of the press, and I don't have a "No Junk Mail" sticker on the letterbox. Hell, a number of years ago, I actually used to deliver the things, and I also have a good mate who used to be an area supervisor for one of the main printing and distribution companies.

How I can even get through this much information in a day or two I do not know. And in the last few months it has been very similar, at least fifteen, maybe twenty brochures on some days.

I am simply going to have to resort to chucking the lot in the recycling bin. It is a simple case of overwhelming me with information I can no longer possibly keep up with. And don't the advertisers know it? Their advertising dollar is simply going to waste, because unless you are retired and/or have absolutely nothing else to do with your life, it'd take a couple of days to carefully consider all the offers provided in this little lot. And if you did have the time to peruse the offers comprehensively, your economic situation wouldn't make you a member of those able to afford the offers anyway, if you get my drift!

I used to browse the brochures. In fact I even need to get a Christmas present for my mother who is the most difficult person on earth to buy presents for, and there might be something appropriate here. But due to the sheer volume I don't find this useful at all.

When I used to deliver this stuff (when I was fresh out of High School, before I started driving cabs) we rarely used to get to deliver more than one brochure at a time. When my mate was an area supervisor, I actually went out on a few delivery runs with him to give him a hand when his regular deliverers had let him down or he needed an area covered urgently. At this time we'd sometimes get to do four or five brochures at a time. But the time when you'd be doing twenty-odd brouchures simultaneously is mind-boggling. The logistics are crazy - you'd be battling to physically carry more than about 50 sets of brochures in a backpack, so you'd need to be constantly returning to the car for refills. And you'd need to spend hours collating all the brochures into sets of twenty-odd.

I did see one brochure deliverer using a newspaper rolling machine at one stage, given the number we got yesterday, it would have come in very handy.

The whole concept must be an incredible use of resources and environmentally damaging. I hope the number of brochures returns to a manageable level, otherwise I am going to have to resort to the sign! Maybe as Christmas comes and goes it'll be all right again.

Finally, may I apologise for missing the blog these last couple of days, when you have a bad few days, even blogging becomes out of the question!

Location, Location?

2009-11-29T02:09:00.000+11:00

As I mentioned a few posts ago, I went to drive cabs in Newcastle after an abortive start at Toukley, and so had to pass a locality test, sit a safety lecture, and attend a training session run by Newcastle Taxis. I did this in early 1983. It was a good system, well thought out and organised. The locality test was conducted at the Newcastle West branch of the RTA, and involved learning about 12 foolscap pages of locations, landmarks and shortest routes to and from about a dozen sample landmarks.

At the time I did the test, I had never lived in Newcastle, and had absolutely no idea where anything was.

I wasn't letting that stop me from getting my licence, however, so I memorised the sheets completely parrot-fashion, and could reel them off verbatim. Except the churches... I simply didn't bother to learn them at all (I was an atheist in those days, things have changed now, but that's yet another story).

When I went into the RTA, there was a young lady administering the test. I had done the safety lecture and training session at the Co-op, and that part had been signed off on. I had to demonstrate suitable command of the English language, which wasn't really a problem, had to pass an eyesight test (gee I wish my vision was that good now), and then do the locality test. Since I already had a Class 2A licence, I didn't have to do another driving test.

I started well, naming most of the locations I was asked for. I stumbled over the "Civic Hotel" which I had learnt was in Hunter Street, Newcastle. "Ah, but Hunter Street is a long street, where is it near?" "I don't know, I've only learnt Hunter Street" (The answer is between Burwood Street and Auckland Street, I know that NOW, of course, but not then). Anyway, she let me off on that one. She then asked me where one of the churches was. "I don't know, I haven't learnt any of the churches". I was then asked for ANOTHER church, which confirmed her suspicions, and used up my two incorrect answers I was allowed. "Better not ask me any more churches". Fortunately she took the hint.

I got all the rest of the locations right, was able to list the shortest routes between A & B by reciting the street names in between, and about fifteen minutes later I had a nice blue taxi book in my name.

I still had no idea where anything in Newcastle was, of course.

But hell, you soon learn. After three or four years I remember I had a shift where I didn't have to use the street directory at all for the entire shift. I remember this shift well, because it only ever happened once! I suppose the GPS is going to be well-used by taxi drivers nowadays? I'm happy to say I still don't have one to this day. Mind you if I were still driving cabs, I'd say I'd have bitten the bullet long ago. I'd probably have a mobile phone, too!

Self destruction of a party

2009-11-28T03:26:00.000+11:00

Well if I were in the ALP caucus in federal parliament, I'd be buying a number of lottery tickets at the moment. With very little effort on their part, it seems their opposite number has inflicted untold damage on themselves, and in all reality have made themselves unelectable for another two terms.

"If you can't govern yourselves, how can you govern the country" is a question on everyone's lips. Turnbull has come out, espoused logic, reasonableness and correctness. Yet half his party want him out. That's politics, I suppose. Despite him being right, he's going to find himself out on Tuesday morning.

Why so? It can't really be that most liberals DO deny climate change do they? With a 38 degree day expected today in Sydney they are pushing it uphill to contend otherwise. Maybe it's because it's just so inconvenient that for centuries, polluters have been able to cost-shift the real costs of their activities to anyone else but them, and now we finally want to price it into the economy.

To clarify what I'm saying for example if you are generating electricty and charging a pretty penny for it, it's really nice if a major cost of your activity: carbon emissions, is picked up by someone or something else. Your Profit & Loss statements deduct most of the expenses involved except for cleaning up your mess. Someone else can do that, and your profits don't reflect that REAL cost. This is great for the shareholders or owners.

Now the government wants you to include the cost of carbon pollution into your accounting system. Time to cry foul and insist the cost is passed on to anyone else but you like it has been for the last four hundred years. Get real.

The accounting system is only a model of your business, and if it excludes ALL costs, and here we are talking environmental costs, then ipso facto, as a model it is a failure. The liberals seem to want this status to be maintained: ie the accounting system simply omits a vast area of costs because it will reduce profits of industries that have been for years getting away with murder. An analogy would be to eliminate some other valid cost from the accounting system: let's say as a company you'd like to exclude wages from your expenses! It'd make a fantastic improvement to the bottom line, wouldn't it? (Mind you I reckon some companies probably have tried this, too!)

I'll be sad to see Turnbull go, really, as he's one of the smartest Liberal leaders we've ever had. But it just goes to show there's more to it than that. You have to keep your troops in line and on side as well. That's probably more important than being right in politics. Doesn't politics suck?

The Hidden Unemployed

2009-11-27T00:45:00.000+11:00

I've been signing into a few internet forums lately, and they often ask for your "occupation". Well, I'm not too proud to admit it, currently I am unemployed. I do no paid work for anyone. I'd certainly LIKE to, but I'm not too sure I'd be able to, nor whether I could find anyone who'd actually employ me. Mind you, I certainly am able to do productive work, it's just that my health precludes me from doing it at scheduled times, day in, day out.

My wife, bless her, works full time, in a reasonably good job for a government based organisation.

According to the federal government, then, I am actually NOT unemployed. I do not appear in the statistics you hear on the news and in the papers. Despite the fact that I am looking for work, would like a job and am not currently working in a job, by their definition, I am NOT unemployed.

I figure there are quite a few others like me in the same boat. If your spouse works, and earns even minimum wages, you are not eligible for a vast array of assistance measures given to other unemployed people. I am registered with several employment agencies, and I have a jobseeker ID. However every time I apply for a job which has an employment agency screening applications, I do not get a look-in. (I have applied directly for jobs and even gotten to interviews as a result, but if I apply via an agency I have never been so much as contacted by that agency about my application). The reason for this is if the agency does find me a job, they will not get a cent from the government for doing so. Naturally, if they are referring people to a job they will send someone on benefit so they get a subsidy for the job placement. And if they send someone whose employment prospects are impaired (eg disabled, long term unemployed, ex-criminal) the subsidy is even higher.

As an employer, you are encouraged to use an agency to find you staff. I can state to you that if you do, you are more likely to be sent a candidate who is difficult to find employment for. IE the one with the highest subsidy. This may NOT be your first choice, and you may simply be better taking an ad in the paper and screening the applicants yourself: you will at least get candidates who are keen to find work.

Even if I were eligible for unemployment assistance, the tendency is for the agencies to send candidates who have been out of work longer, and offer assistance programmes to longer-term unemployed. Those of us who have been out of work for only a few months - the ones who are probably most employable and productive - do not qualify for any assistance at all at this early stage of our unemployment.

Crazy but true. And take heed of the record low unemployment figures being quoted these days. There is so much hidden unemployment (and indeed under-employment) I reckon the true figure is probably closer to double the headline figures.

Armed Robbery!

2009-11-26T00:59:00.000+11:00

It was my second day ever driving cabs, and the most exciting thing that ever happened in a seven year career as a driver.

I started driving at Toukley, with restricted plates and a roster system whereby at most times only three of the four cabs were on the road, and at other times, only two. This was done with a rolling four-week roster and gave the owners a great chance to get the cars maintained and repaired. And if there were mechanical failures, the cab rostered off could easily swap the off day for an on day, etc.

It was a Sunday, and my cab was on standby. This meant there were two working cars, and if needed the third car could come on to the road to assist a busy period. As it was my second day ever driving a cab, I spent a lot of time sitting at home in the driveway listening to the two-way radio.

Well, about half an hour later a call came in from a very distressed driver driving a Wyong car. Judy got on the two-way and said "base, I've just been at the BP at Tuggerah, and a couple of guys in balaclavas have left driving a red falcon, and the attendant has come out saying he's just been robbed at knifepoint. The red falcon is heading north along the Tuggerah straight and I'm now following it as best as I can".

Eventually the pursuit progressed through Wyong, Wyong North and up to Kanwal, which is where I was. So I started up the car and headed out to the Pacific Highway. At this point in time (1983) there were two options for a car going along this road - either to continue north towards Doyalson, or turn right and head towards Toukley. So I said to Judy on the two-way "I'll head north, you turn right and we'll be able to keep track of them". Of course in the meantime the operator had called the police and they were out "in force".

Merely by keeping their location observed and transmitted over the two-way we were doing our stuff and making it easier for the police.

Eventually they turned right towards Toukley (not the way I had gone), and coming the other way from Toukley Police Station, of course, were several patrol vehicles who stopped the red falcon and arrested the culprits. We made the local paper the next day or so (which referred to us as "taxi-men" which was a bit of an insult to Judy, I suppose, but typical of our local paper). The money was recovered, and the crime had been solved within half an hour of its commission!

I got the sack. I never drove a Toukley car ever again, and in fact made the move to Newcastle to continue my driving career, which involved sitting a locations test as well (country drivers do not need to pass a locality test, whereas Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong drivers do). But that's a story for another day.

My eyes are dim, I cannot see

2009-11-25T00:02:00.053+11:00

... I have no specs to bring with me.

{ To those unfamiliar with the song, those are lyrics from a song (almost). }

One of the catastrophes that befell me during my hospital stay was damage to the retina in my left eye. There are several techniques they use to inject liquids into your blood stream or to take blood for testing and I've had them all. There is an arterial line (or art-line) which is mainly for diagnostic purposes (arterial blood can easily be taken for testing, and arterial blood probably tells a lot more about you than venous blood). There is a central line (usually inserted into a vein in the neck), a PICC line (peripherally inserted central catheter) which normally goes into the arm and a simple cannula (which is a flexible plastic tube normally inserted into the wrist).

The differences are many, but the main thing to remember is that the cannula needs to be changed every three or four days, whereas a PICC line or Central Line can last even months. Mind you, none of my central lines lasted more than a fortnight, and the PICC line, well, that's today's story.

My fourth central line was coming to the end of its useful life, and so I was taken to the procedure rooms to get a PICC line inserted into my left arm. The process is reasonably painful, but nowhere near as bad as getting a central line put in which involves an incision into the neck while you are well and truly awake. Lignocaine is used, but it only numbs the surface skin. Anyway the PICC line was inserted in about 40 minutes and I was taken back to the ward.

Next day my left arm swelled up like a balloon. The hand became so fat I had to get the identity bracelet replaced as it would no longer fit. I had developed a blood clot in the left arm, almost certainly due to the PICC line insertion. These things happen, so I was treated with Clexane (which is a blod thinning drug) which later was replaced with Warfarin.

A couple of days later I noticed a haziness in my left eye. I would often get cloudiness in the eyes due to my eye drops for glaucoma, and I really didn't think much about it, as it generally clears up and I can see well in a day or so. However this was still cloudy after four or five days, so an ophthalmologist was sent up to see me. It turned out I could hardly see a thing with the left eye, with the doctor holding up fingers about three metres away from me, I couldn't make out how many at all. I could see them moving, however.

A lot of consultations with the hospital ophthalmologist later, I was diagnosed with severe retinal damage due to the blockage from the blood clot. The retina uses a lot of blood and it flows in and out very quickly. With a blockage, the drainage stops, and damage happens very soon. As he put it it was like getting "instant glaucoma". And unfortunately, he said there was nothing he could do.

I have seen my local ophthalmologist since, and we have started a course of intra-occular injections of (at first) lumix and now avastin (which is an anti-cancer drug primarily used for colon cancer). This multi-use of drugs intrigues me - for instance I am on methotrexate which is another anti-cancer drug, but I use it to treat my arthritis!

These injections into the eye are something yet again. My eye is dilated with drops, lignocaine is applied in copious quantities, a sterile disposable fenestrated drape is applied over the eye, then in comes the ophthalmologist, normally tells me a good joke, and then whacko! Into the middle of the eye with a needle. It's quite merciless.

These injection treatments are quite expensive and they are not covered much by medicare. However I am informed if I don't have them, I'll definitely lose what little sight I have left in the eye. They do offer a glimmer of hope, and I have shown slight improvement after them for a week or two - but the vision reverts to its old ways. It is slightly better now (I was injected on Tuesday last week) so I hope it will remain this way for once this time.

Strangeness on a train

2009-11-24T03:24:00.001+11:00

Hell, I'm not a commuter, so if you are, you can probably skip this blog entry calling me a n00by big time.

Yesterday I got a train down to my rheumatologist at Chatswood. The trains from Gosford heading up the line are not all too frequent in the middle of the day (maximum two an hour) but from Hornsby they are much more prevalent. So we had the chance to take a train a lot earlier than necessary from Hornsby. So we checked out the new Macquarie Park detour when changing from Hornsby rather than straight down the North Shore Line.

I wasn't aware that for the entire journey from Epping to Chatswood we would not see the light of day! And it seems the three stations on the way (Macquarie Uni, Macquarie park and North Ryde) were all bought from the same shop. Architecturally, looking from the train, they are almost identical. I reckon so many people are going to get off at Macquarie Uni saying "Damn, I've done it again, I meant to go to Macquarie Park" as the stations look the same and the first word IS exactly the same.

But what really amazed me was coming home. We entered a crowded carriage, and I observed almost half of the passengers were mucking around with their i-phones, calling up various apps, and I even saw a few of them googling various things. My mind boggles as to why it is necessary to google things while sitting on a train? Surely the cost of wireless internet access makes it far too expensive a prospect?? It cannot be so important that it justifies using Google RIGHT NOW??? Obviously, to some people, it is that important.

I would call myself a computer geek, having had one since the age of fifteen, but I draw the line at googling a word whilst travelling on a train. I would wait until I got home (or better yet, back to work the next day so work would be paying for the internet access!)

Then again, you are also reading a blog from someone who does not own a mobile phone... Am I a weirdo or are there any others out there like me who do not have a mobile (cell) phone as of yet????