Antenna Woes

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?

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!

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

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

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

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!

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!