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Suzy McHale’s Journal: 2014

January

Wednesday 1/1: Quiet NYE; Aussie aggression

New Year’s Eve was quiet for me as usual (just went to bed). A lot of stupid behaviour during the various celebrations, as was to be expected. Someone posted a pertinent comment in r/japan:

The biggest one: no aggro. Coming back to Australia it is clear to me that there is a lot of aggro (aggressive vibes) especially among young men. However, it's just not limited to them. There also seems to be a growing national pride in being loud and stupid, often accompanied with overt racism. I could see myself going back to Japan to work and live again after my most recent time there, something I hadn't considered after the first time I lived and worked there 10 years ago.

Australian culture is embarrassingly uncivilized in many respects, and I cringe at what the rest of the world might think of us. Society here currently does a poor job of civilizing its young people (most Western countries have the same problem). I am so fed up with what seems to be a plague of aggressive young men (and have occasionally been threatened by them), particularly those driving modified cars like they are wielding a weapon. I am inclined to agree with what an MP here said in 2011!

I found a solution for the GIMP 2.8 64-bit no pressure sensitivity issue (see 28/12/2013 entry) – force it to install as 32-bit, as described in the linked forum thread.

Saturday 4/1: Space cadets

Parts of Australia are enduring an unpleasant heatwave – temperatures over 40°C in South Australia (almost 50°C!) and Queensland. Melbourne has been spared this time at least.

My 1 TB backup hard drive has nearly 500 GB of files on it! This is several years’ worth of various things, but only a relatively small proportion (currently around 15 GB) of which are personal files (photos, creative work, documents, etc.) – these are the most important files. Everything else is stuff from the internet and various accumulated programs.

Regarding my comments in my previous entry, there was a Reddit thread yesterday on Australian male violence; there are a few good comments in it.

I have remarked before (15/8/2010 entry); that I am generally disillusioned with aspects of the spaceflight community; I came across this blog (linked from the NASASpaceflight.com forum) which pretty much demonstrates why. The author is a typical Libertarian or Republican with a scathing dislike for President Obama and Democrats, and all associated programs with them, such as access to affordable health care (which is socialist, and “Socialism is just Communism with better manners”!). So he apparently prefers a polarized society with a vast gap between rich and poor, and where the “survival of the fittest” mentality dominates; with no social programs and the less-well-off are left to fend for themselves. (That was the type of society depicted in the movie Elysium.) A very unpleasant place to live for those who are not amongst the privileged, but this seems to be what Conservatives everywhere are aiming toward (the current Australian Liberal government included).

His type also regard environmentalism with scorn (it gets in the way of technological progress), so that is another reason for my disillusionment with them. To their way of thinking, Earth is effectively a disposable planet, as colonizing space will supposedly solve all humanity’s problems with overpopulation, pollution, and so on. It is a dysfunctional and disrespectful way of thinking; of dominating and destroying the environment rather than living in harmony with it (a theme in the movie Avatar).

Saturday 11/1: Reddit annoyances

Hot weather – above 30°C – is forecast for at least 5 days next week, which will be very unpleasant. Summer has been relatively mild so far, but now the heat seems to be arriving with a vengeance.

I spend a lot of time on Reddit now – there is always something new to look at – but it can be a dismal experience. The major demographic seems to be teenage/20-something, urban, technically-adept males, and I am obviously outside of that generation (though I am not technologically-illiterate!). As an online group they can be rather off-putting, and women users in particular can be a target for harassment and obscene comments. There are various sub-reddits which are generally friendly places – I avoid the major ones, and certainly avoid the dubious ones – but on the whole I am not entirely comfortable there. (r/Australia and r/Melbourne can be particularly irksome at times, but they are the only ones relevant to where I live.) The subreddits do have moderators, unlike the more anarchic 4Chan (which I don’t frequent).

One perhaps generational feature I have noticed is the casual use of the f-swearword everywhere, even in what are otherwise compliments. (I can certainly swear myself, but usually only when angry, and not as a frequent part of conversation.) Another more disturbing trend is the apparent wide acceptance and normalization of the use of “recreational” drugs such as marijuana and amphetamines – and they get extremely defensive if anyone suggests that using such drugs regularly is not healthy.

Wednesday 15/1: Hellish heat

Melbourne and Victoria are currently enduring the Week From Hell, with temperatures into the 40s from yesterday to Friday (44°C predicted for tomorrow – map). Making things worse is that there could be power cuts for thousands of homes as electricity generation is struggling to keep up with demand (no thanks to continuing population growth!). The heatwave has previously affected Perth then South Australia (fronts usually move from west to east across the continent). What is annoying is that people were previously whinging about the unseasonally cool summer we were having a couple of weeks ago (I really want to punch anyone on the nose who complains about that). Bring that back, please!

Saturday 18/1: Sick from summer

Back to normal temperatures at last, after four days of hell (the longest heatwave in 100 years). I was feeling nauseous and headachey yesterday morning due to sleeping in an overheated bedroom – the house is old, not well-insulated and gets very warm in summer or cold in winter. I measured 34°C in my bedroom by the afternoon, so I shut my computer off. A cool change finally came from around 6 p.m. I can’t function in such hot weather; my brain just shuts down (humidity is even worse).

February

Monday 3/2: Heat misery; making planets

Had another sequence of hot weather up to today, including a 40°C day last Tuesday – Wednesday was the only sub-30° day last week. There is more coming this week. I just want summer to be over! Vegetation is suffering too – a lot of street tree saplings planted by the local council are heat-stressed and dying. I take a water bottle with me to pour a little water on three or four on my morning walks (no one waters them), but there are just too many for me to do.

I had a go at generating some more alien exoplanets in GIMP last weekend, based on some tutorials at Cartographers’ Guild. I am still muddling through the process, but am getting better at it. The appearance is more of a stylized satellite image rather than 3D photorealistic; I don’t know how to get the latter effect. The top left planet is the original one I mentioned in my 23/11/2013 entry.

Friday 21/2: City from Hell

Where has the month gone?? The weather has been a bit cooler in the last 2 weeks, with even some rain this week. I will be glad to see the back of summer!

I have been fussing and rearranging my website, hence my seeming lack of activity.

“Mumbai: Bright lights, tight city,” The Age, 21/2: article on the extreme overcrowding in an Indian city. The situation is quite horrifying, and the people questioned are obviously unhappy about their situation – “We have already reached saturation point. We’ve got skin-to-skin contact on the trains. How much closer together can we live without going mad? There is nowhere to walk, nowhere to throw a ball or have a picnic.” It is obviously extremely unhealthy both mentally and physically. The proponents of high-density living in other countries (including those in Australia) should read this as a cautionary tale: an ultimate outcome of uncontrolled population growth and urbanization.

Monday 24/2: Dokuwiki installed

I spent the weekend trying to install Dokuwiki, and have managed to get it up and running after some false starts last week. The host server initially kept giving an INTERNAL ERROR 500 message, and I eventually figured out I had to set file and folder permissions correctly before I could do anything, so I am rather pleased I sorted it all by myself! (I used Filezilla to recursively set files and folders via FTP.) I tried it last year but gave up on it (2/1/2013 entry); now I feel better prepared. Dokuwiki stores files as .txt rather than use an external database, so it is self-contained, and there is also a portable version that can be used on a USB stick. I was considering installing Mediawiki, but it is a much larger and complicated set-up and uses a MySQL database, so it is excessive for my purpose. I still have 100+ pages to create and images to upload though!

Thursday 27/2: Fusion, fires, Reddit

This week’s New Yorker has a lengthy article on the ITER program and the current state of nuclear fusion generally. Compared to fission, it seems frustratingly hard to achieve sustained fusion – hopefully it will happen in my lifetime (along with molecular nanotechnology and discovering an Earth-like exoplanet)!

A coal mine in the Victorian town of Morwell has been burning for a couple of weeks. The first thought that came to my mind when looking at some photos is that it should be renamed to Mordor! The night photos look spectacular, but the toxic fumes have been polluting the nearby town.

Someone on r/Australia posted this comment (reproduced below); it explains why I find Reddit exasperating at times. I can’t relate much to that demographic at all (namely points 1 & 3).

Considering that statistically speaking the average redditor will be;

You shouldn’t exactly be surprised. Reddit itself is/was a tech-head/geek website, you’re going to see similar thinking people congregate in the subreddit communities (…).

March

Sunday 2/3: Mars delayed; war on the environment

Rather disappointingly – though perhaps not surprisingly – the Mars Inspiration mission has been rescheduled to 2021. Looks like government/NASA involvement may stall it or delay it indefinitely.

Someone at r/Australia linked to a video (18 minute documentary) about the social disaster that privatization in Victoria has been – electricity in this case. It only confirms the opinion I have long held that privatization is a crime against a country’s citizens. Essential services should not be sold off to the private sector – they are called essential for a reason! It is a national security issue. (Previous 5/4/2008 entry).

“World’s most anti-green PM?” Tony Abbott seems to be doing everything in his power to revert any gains made in protecting Australia’s much-damaged environment. I can’t adequately express my loathing for this Liberal government, and there is another 3 years of them – how much more damage will they do?

Wednesday 5/3: Online ordering frustration

I decided to open a second bank account so I could use EFTPOS if needed and do online ordering – my current one does not allow this. I opted for the basic form of the account (no fees), then once my debit card was activated I tried to order an ebook online from Amazon.com – but it was not accepted. After going to the bank to enquire, I find that I can’t do online ordering with that type of account! Which was not made very clear on the webpage describing it (“Select a Debit MasterCard if you want to pay with your own money online …”). I ended up borrowing a relative’s card to pay (only around $6 for 2 ebooks). I am rather annoyed as online ordering was a main reason for getting the card. If I want to do that I would have to change to the normal fee-paying account, which I can’t afford in my current situation. I guess there is always a “catch” to any account.

Thursday 13/3: MH370 mystery

Big mystery of the week is what happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which vanished off radar enroute to China and has yet to be found; thought most likely crashed somewhere over the ocean in the region. There was no distress signal or calls from the crew, and the aircraft itself (Boeing 777) is considered fairly reliable. There has been a massive search effort from various countries, and a lot of false leads and contradictory information. The unfortunate people on board are most likely dead; surely if any were alive they might have managed to get through on mobile or satellite phones.

I put up some screenshots of earlier versions of my website. I have little for the earliest years; I did not think to take images then, and only did so sporadically later on. Looking back, I don’t think I did too badly for an amateur web designer!

Tuesday 25/3: Dentist visit

Had a dental checkup and clean today. Thankfully there were no more cavities this time, but the bitewing x-ray shows my left jaw joint is misaligned and so is my bite, which is the likely reason for the pains I have been having. Suggested treatments such as braces are expensive, though, and I do not have the financial means for them.

My renewed Health Care Card has not yet arrived; my old one expired last Saturday. I went to Centrelink last Friday to inquire about it, and it had not even been mailed out yet! Very frustrating (I need it for concessions on things such as medicines and public transport). Ringing up Centrelink is a hopeless endeavour now as a lot of staff have been made redundant and phone waiting times on hold are an hour at least. The situation is disgraceful and the blame is squarely on the current Liberal Federal Government, who seem bent on punishing the less well-off in society. A government is here to serve its citizens and look after them, not make life harder. I do support a Welfare State as the alternative is extremely unpleasant.

Got a fundraising begging letter in the mail from my old school for some new $2.2 million building they want to construct (if a donor gives $750,000 the building would be named after them). I wouldn’t give them money even if I had any to spare!

MAF370 has not yet been found despite an intense multinational search effort, but is thought to have gone down somewhere in the Indian Ocean for as-yet unknown reasons.

April

Wednesday 16/4: Eclipse; no MH370 yet; ominous Budget

There was a total lunar eclipse yesterday evening; it was visible when rising from the east. I could not get a good in-focus photo; I think I need a tripod! The Moon was very red. It is the first of a group of four; the next is on 8 October, and there are two next year. Mars was also visible to the left of the Moon; it was at opposition last week and has been bright in the sky. On my early morning walk yesterday I also had a nice view of Mars and the Moon in the west, and a bright Venus in the east.

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has still not been found, though the search area has been focused in the south Indian Ocean for the last 3 weeks. Four pings that were possibly from its flight data recorder were heard a week-and-a-half ago, but nothing since; if these were it, the battery life had expired.

The current Liberal government is giving dire warnings of massive spending cuts in the May Federal Budget, a lot to essential services such as health. I do not believe the cuts are necessary as governments are supposed to spend tax money to benefit their citizens, not hoard it like a miser. Never have I hated a government as much as the current one. I don’t think even the Howard Government was so bad. The former PM Kevin Rudd was warning of the-then Opposition’s plans for cuts before the last election, and how right he has been.

May

Saturday 3/5: Government from Hell

There was a partial solar eclipse visible from Melbourne last Tuesday afternoon, but due to overcast weather and rain, no-one here saw it, disappointingly!

I had to go to the GP to get my ears syringed out yet again last Thursday, as the right one became blocked – there has been wax build-up for some months. That is my 6th time since 1997 (see 30/12/2011 entry).

Australia now officially has the Government From Hell. A National Commission of Audit report was released this week, suggesting brutal cuts to many Government services, including health and welfare, that will hit the less-well-off the hardest. (Those compiling the report were business types.) Not all suggestions will be implemented; the cynical view (as suggested in this Reddit thread) is that it is a version of the “Door in the Face” technique – introduce a bad offer first, then implement a more moderate version (that will eventually creep up to match the first offer). It is also an implementation of Shock Doctrine. Medicare as Australians now know it will be drastically changed (a lot more “user-pays” up front – never mind that it is already funded via taxes) – devolving towards a U.S.-style system. I cannot afford private health insurance and am fearful of what might happen if the condition for which I was operated on in 2008 and 2009 returns.

The prescriptions advocated by the Audit are stock-standard 1980s-era neoliberalism. Privatise government assets. Cut red tape. Abolish or amalgamate government agencies. Charge citizens more for government services, like visits to the doctor. Slash government benefits, especially for the most vulnerable. Make students pay more for their education. Reduce foreign aid. Abolish national protections, like a national minimum wage. Halt Commonwealth support for the homeless.

This is a recipe for a poorer, nastier and more brutish Australia. If implemented, it would mark the beginning of the end of the Australian fair go. […]

We don’t need to ask ourselves what Australia would look like if this radical plan were implemented. Just look across the Pacific. The United States has a small federal government as a share of GDP, and devolves many public services to its states. It has a vestigial or non-existent social safety net. It has low taxes and many social services are privatised. In other words, it is exactly the sort of country the Commission of Audit would like to see Australia become.

– “Commission of Audit: a recipe for a poorer, nastier and more brutish Australia”

One possible hope to end this government is for a Double Dissolution to stop the Budget being implemented, but that is dependent upon the other political parties to act – and hopefully voters would not be so foolish as to vote in this evil government again.

Thursday 8/5: Autumn bliss; website deletions

Today is perfect Autumn weather – a chilly morning followed by a clear sunny day that I can go out in without melting or burning. My favorite time of year! Especially after the brutal summer earlier this year.

I deleted my RuSpace (Russian spaceflight) site as I have lost interest in it and no longer wish to maintain it. My interest is now focused on science fiction and worldbuilding.

Compared to what I might have been 8 years ago, I feel no interest in current events in Ukraine, and disinterest in human world events in general. Little of it is relevant to my own life. The only thing I care about regarding the rest of the world is environmental issues.

Tuesday 13/5: Cinema movie Transcendence

I saw my first cinema movie for this year, which was Transcendence. I enjoyed it, and don’t understand why it got bad reviews! The visuals were awesome and there were lots of interesting ideas (which is what I want in a sci-fi movie). I was siding with the uploaded Will/the AI – hoping they would change the world – and felt annoyed at their silly irrational human opponents; unfortunately things did not go his way.

If I were in his place I’d be doing much the same things – unfortunately I am nowhere near smart enough!

Watching that only makes me feel more frustrated at Australia’s shitty backwards-looking government and the shitty Budget due tonight. There are to be drastic funding cuts to many services and Government programs (including scientific research), but they are at the same time prepared to spend $40 billion on building roads – unbelievable! Imagine if those billions instead went into developing innovative technologies such as renewable energy and artificial intelligence.

Wednesday 14/5: Budget horror

The Federal Budget was released last night and it is truly horrific for the less well-off. The Age have overviews. I am in anger and despair, as are a lot of other people. There are massive cuts to public health and Medicare which are going to turn these into a US-style health system if these are implemented. The only hope now is for the Budget, or parts of it, to be blocked in the Senate.

There was a post on Reddit about New Zealand’s policies also following this path, and it has been socially destructive.

Saturday 24/5: Disturbing dream

I had one of my now-recurring dreams about going under general anasthesia last night: I was slowly fading out but felt very uncomfortable or distressed, and one of the shadowy figures around me was pushing an IV tube into my upper left thigh, and pressing hard on the area. Having an uncomfortable crushing pressure on my thighs – always that area, never anywhere else – seems to also be a recurring part of some dreams. I wonder if it could be a form of sleep paralysis.

The weather has been unseasonably warm; over 10 days of low-20°Cs in Melbourne, a new record. I am wanting to rug up in my winter clothes, but have still been wearing summer-weight clothing on some days, annoyingly.

Wednesday 28/5: Journal to Dokuwiki

I am considering changing this journal to a Dokuwiki format, but that entails copying 100+ pages – 1 month to a page – converting them to Dokuwiki syntax and creating a new page for each month, so this will probably take a few weeks! The result won’t be too much different to the current format, but does have search and tag options.

Going through my oldest entries is tedious – why did I have to write so damn much about Russian spaceflight and quote a lot of news items – and I cringe a bit at some of my opinions then.

June

Thursday 5/6: Dokuwiki conversion

I am still plodding through my journal, converting it to Dokuwiki formatting; I am only up to 2006. I seemed much more animated and interested in various topics back then (and somewhat embarrassingly opinionated); now I am disengaged from almost everything. Looking at the file sizes for each month, the length of my entries dropped off notably from 2008, where I learned I needed surgery (two as it turned out) – from around 40-70 KB to below 20 KB per month – so I obviously lost energy and motivation after that, and still haven’t regained it. The prospect of my condition returning is a nagging worry (namely, that my body will fail me again), and the vicious cuts by the current evil Federal government to public hospitals and health mean I could be in for a very long wait on a list if it does.

My parents are away in Kyneton for a week; they return tomorrow (hopefully safely). I have had an isolated week as I have no real-world friends and can’t drive. Without going into details, my situation is fragile and I have no career or finances to speak of.

Sunday 8/6: Journal review

My parents returned home OK.

I thought I felt a minor earth tremor on Friday evening (6/6) at around 6:44 p.m. – just for 3 or 4 seconds while I was standing at my desk – but no one else apparently felt it and there is no record on the Geosciences website.

Still trudging through the Dokuwiki format converting for this journal and I will be for a while yet (and I may yet decide to stay with plain HTML). One obscure formatting annoyance is that I can’t use block elements (headers, paragraphs, etc.) within blockquotes for Dokuwiki as it will not display them correctly, so I have to enclose the blockquotes within <HTML> tags for it to be parsed correctly (as described in the Syntax). As I have hundreds of quoted items though my journal, this is yet another chore.

Some comparisons between early entries (2004-2006) and my feelings now:

One disturbing phenomenon I have come across recently is the so-called “Fat Acceptance Movement”. This is where obese people try to justify their condition by denying it is unhealthy and that fat can be attractive too. No – it’s unhealthy and certainly not attractive, and these people are seriously deluding themselves if they think otherwise! There was a short documentary about it on SBS TV (and a related article), which garnered quite a lot of acerbic comments on Reddit (where I came across it). Australia has an increasing problem of obesity, not far behind the USA, and it incurs a huge cost on the health care system.

Saturday 14/6: Gum worry; elephant atrocity

A red sore has appeared on the gumline below one of my lower incisors; it bleeds from underneath if brushed. There has been a bit of soreness there when brushing for a week or so but I didn’t really notice it until today. I will wait until week’s end; if it is no better I will have to go to the dentist (yet again) :-(. I hope it is nothing serious as I can not afford expensive procedures if it is an abscess. My gums are otherwise not inflamed and I floss and brush 2-3 times a day, so I don’t know how I could get gum disease.

“Kenya’s biggest elephant killed by poachers,” Guardian, 14/6/2014. Reading this only makes me feel disgust at humanity as a species, and anger at countries (namely China) whose insatiable demand is leading to these atrocities. I am inclined to think that if humans ever became an endangered species, that would not be a bad thing for the rest of the animal kingdom. But it is more likely that there will be a lot of extinctions and biosphere loss by mid-century as the human population expands inexorably.

Monday 16/6: Journal to Dokuwiki

It is done, finally! All 112 pages of my journal converted by hand to Dokuwiki markup, so I am now writing in real time for this entry. An unbelievably tedious and mentally tiring chore. There are still some bugs to work out and I will have to see how things go with this format (main disadvantage is I need online hosting to use it – there are no free Dokuwiki hosts to my knowledge, so if my hosting here is ended I’ll be stuck).

I don’t think Dokuwiki is quite intended to be used like this (i.e. as semi-static webpages), but it’s convenient for me at the moment. I can also edit pages live online, which I can’t do with static HTML pages that I have to edit locally then upload.

I suppose that now the difficult part of converting is done, I could go back and make each entry a separate file, but this would entail more manual work and the files would number in the hundreds!

Regarding tagging/labeling, it’s hard to know how much detail to go into, so there are some inconsistencies in what I might tag.

I also have an incipient cold, with the usual irritating sore throat :-(.

Tuesday 17/6: Cold misery

I have literally not slept for 24 hours due to extreme discomfort from my head cold and feel like a zombie :-(. The throat soreness seemed to induce excessive saliva production, so I spent last night either spitting or swallowing (I won’t go into gross details!). That has eased off but I now have the usual stuffy nose.

Tuesday 24/6: Winter havoc; new Halo novel

My cold is much better – just a lingering cough – but now my parents have it! :-(

Melbourne is getting a wintry blast of Antarctica weather (well, feels like it!), so there is snow in the mountains surrounding the city. It has also wreaked havoc across Melbourne, with public transport disrupted and flooding, though so far I have been relatively unaffected where I live.

A new Halo novel is to be released in November, Halo: Broken Circle. I have almost lost interest in the Halo universe as I do not like the direction in which it is going (I don’t play the games but have a lot of other books and merchandise), but this might pique my interest enough to buy it as it features my favorite aliens in it, the Sangheili, and – hopefully! – no human characters. I am uncertain of the author as he seems to get mixed reviews for his other novels.

Thursday 26/6: Zoo madness; shut-ins

“Zoos Drive Animals Crazy,” Slate.com. Many zoo animals have to be given antipsychotic drugs to moderate abnormal behaviors brought on by confinement. A dismaying but not surprising revelation. I would like to see zoos and other forms of confinement ultimately outlawed for non-domestic animals; captivity cannot really be justified because it pleases humans. The Metafilter post from which I found this had a few pertinent comments:

Meaningless lives in an unstimulating artificial environment with the ensuing mental breakdown duct taped over with Prozac, Valium and antipsychotics. And then we go visit the zoo to see wild beasts we’ve made kindred souls.

– crayz

Would any of these justifications be acceptable for keeping humans in zoos? I mean, we’ve had human zoos, and you could trot out the same rationales - conservation dollars, city dwellers seeing “nature,” the thrill experienced by children when they see “real” people of [X group]. Now, I’m not saying that an otter is the same as a person (although I don’t want to keep the otters either) but dolphins and elephants and gorillas (and probably parrots and others) have real, complicated, tool-using, self-aware experience of the world even as we do. A smart social animal is tormented by boredom, loneliness, stress and fear even as we’d be tormented.

– Frowner

I honestly, honestly believe that the vast majority of mental illness is caused by the fucked up environment we’ve created for ourselves. The reason that so many of these are hard to pin on specific physical causes and hard to treat is that there is nothing wrong with the people suffering from them. They’re perfectly healthy. It’s society that’s fucked up.

– empath

One commenter had issue with that last observation, but I don’t see it as unreasonable; I know at least some of my own mental health issues can be attributed to the society in which I live (worries about my future in it, no certainty of stability and security).

“All About Hikikomori: Japan’s Missing Million,” Tofugu.com. A recent article about “shut-ins,” a social phenomenon not restricted to Japan; I am one in part. It is not a happy way to be, but I can’t see a way out; I am certainly not employable in my current mental state. An interesting idea I have seen is a universal Basic Income; a basic wage paid to all citizens. It would replace a lot of welfare without the stigma attached to the latter, and enable citizens a basic level of survival and access to services. I certainly can’t envision the current punitive and heartless government to even consider the idea, though.

July

Tuesday 1/7: Dumb ways to die

I have had an aching in my upper right jaw and cheek (the hollow bit below the cheekbone and nose) since last week – it started a week after my cold, the latter which has mostly gone, aside from a residual cough. My upper pre-molars have been aching a bit – I have not had trouble with them before, so I wonder if it could be a mild sinus infection or something (hopefully that). I will give it another week or so – I really don’t want to visit the dentist if I can help it :-(.

A young man died in a most stupid, embarrassing and pointless way earlier this week – he took his clothes off while on a train then climbed onto the roof and was subsequently electrocuted. It was intended as some sort of stunt as he was being filmed by some friends, but ended fatally. He was apparently a “street artist” – in other words a graffiti vandal. I can’t feel much sympathy for someone who kills themselves by their own stupidity, though I do for the family left behind (how will his death be explained to his daughter?). There was a lengthy and vitriolic Reddit thread on the incident.

Thursday 3/7: Toothache

Tooth is still hurting, extending into my jaw and neck. I have included a detail from my OPG from 11/3/2014 of the affected area (4 months ago); I can’t see anything obviously wrong but I am not an expert and the image is not high-resolution (I laid it on my iPad screen set to white and took a photo!). The premolars were asymptomatic before my cold, so I don’t know what is going on – I hope it is not another cavity or abscess :-(. I am really tired of having pain in my mouth for one reason or another; it has become almost daily since 2007.

Friday 4/7: Right to die

Gave in and made an appointment with the dentist for tomorrow :-(.

Via my Facebook newsfeed, “Euthanasia advocate Philip Nitschke criticised over support for 45-year-old who committed suicide,” ABC News, 3/7. The man in question was not elderly or terminally ill but was mentally distressed due to personal circumstances. I feel it is ultimately his right to decide. It is certainly preferable to jumping in front of a train or other gruesome and sometimes ineffective methods.

Saturday 5/7: Mars mission madness

Saw the dentist (Dr Smitha Gaikwad), she did a thorough examination and took an x-ray, but couldn’t find anything obviously wrong, so she suggested it might be sinus-related, seeing as it began immediately after my cold. So, another reprieve thankfully. I am so paranoid about my teeth now, though – 10 years ago I had no problems with them.

“Life on Mars: Meet the Australians preparing for the mission of a lifetime,” The Age, 5/7. This is another somewhat mad proposal by a company called Mars One to privately fund a Mars mission, sending a small group of civilians on a one-way trip to live there in the early 2020s – an unmanned mission is currently set to be launched in 2018. It will certainly be interesting to see if such a mission eventuates! I wonder if the volunteers have really thought things through – the professional astronauts quoted in the article generally seem to be skeptical of the participants’ survival chances. The Inspiration Mars that was publicized last year has already been delayed to 2021 from 2018 for a Mars flyby.

Sunday 6/7: RuSpace back

I put my RuSpace site online again, after being offline since May (8/5 entry); I think I will leave it up for personal history reasons even if I don’t update it much. Quite a lot of pages need updating and rewriting, though, which is a daunting task.

I was looking through the NASASpaceflight.com forum that they are apparently not releasing the Press Kits from ISS Crew 36/36 onwards. Disappointing as these were quite detailed. Seems to be a result of cost-cutting.

Do not know if this is a good place to post this. I just got done talking to NASA headquarters media representative on the phone. I asked when will Expedition 37/38 press kit be released. SAD NEWS … NASA is NO LONGER DOING PRESS KITS ON ISS EXPEDITIONS. Quote un quote!! I was informed they may do a press kit on the one year mission. But no longer on ISS Expeditions will Press Kits be done or released. The representative doubled checked for me and said this is the case.

The Human Spaceflight Gallery has also been discontinued and photos are now uploaded to a Flickr account, which is rather annoying to use.

Friday 11/7: Rocket fireball

A fireball was seen over Melbourne last night at 9:44 p.m., and much of SE Australia. It turned out to be the third stage (Fregat stage) from a Russian Soyuz rocket launch (a Soyuz-2-1B with various satellites onboard). I was inside, in bed, and missed the excitement, sadly :-(.

Sunday 13/7: Corrupted files

Had some computer drama today when a folder on my C: drive – a personal one containing all my digital art! – became corrupted. My PC has been acting a bit odd all week, freezing randomly and a copying program noting there were a few corrupted files when doing a backup. I put it through a chkdsk to try to repair it, but this didn’t work – it kept restarting and getting stuck at an Automatic Repair screen; none of the presented options helped. I eventually tried to restore it with a system image I made back in January (I usually do manual backups of my personal files instead), and this seemed to fix things – for now at least. I then had to update system and other files, which took up the afternoon. The Windows 8.1 on my hard drive is one Dad downloaded when it was free to try last year, so I don’t have an official disk for it. So I will do more regular images from now on! (The System Image Backup in Windows 8.1 is accessed via searching for File History, or Control Panel → System and Security → File History.) I also lost artwork I had done yesterday, as I had backed up the night before, so I will have to redo it (just a side view of a spacecraft).

Friday 18/7: Ukraine shootdown

The Ukraine conflict is back in the headlines for very tragic reasons as an airliner, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, was shot down by a surface-to-air missile while flying over a separatist-held area. All 295 onboard were killed. Rebels there reportedly mistook the passenger jet for a military one and targeted it – it seems doubtful that a civilian foreign aircraft would have been deliberately targeted as the rebels would have nothing to gain from shooting it down. As the Buk missile is Russian-made, and may have been supplied to the rebels, Russia is something of a pariah at the moment with other countries.

My computer seems to be behaving itself again so far (fingers crossed!).

Tuesday 22/7: Red scare

The MH17 fiasco continues, with much confusion and blaming. Russia is certainly not very popular at the moment, including in Australia, where inflammatory anti-Putin headlines have dominated the newspapers since the disaster – I screencapped some examples from the Herald-Sun, a Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid. I am not a particular fan of President Putin – I am ambivalent about him at best – but the vilification from the Australian media is getting ridiculous. I certainly don’t “hate” Russia, never have, even during the Cold War.

What really made me gag is today’s fawning editorial in the Herald-Sun, promoting Prime Minister Tony Abbott as some sort of crusading hero against the forces of evil (i.e. Putin). “Compassionate” – he certainly did not show any toward disadvantaged Australians in the recent Federal Budget! I suspect Rupert Murdoch – who is something of a force of evil himself – had a say in the editorial.

Astonishingly, there are those who suggest Mr Abbott is somehow exploiting what has happened for his own political ends.

Probably because there is some truth in this?

Sunday 27/7: Hard drive troubles

My main hard disk drive is still skipping and freezing occasionally – it makes a scratching sound – but a disk check tells me it is “healthy”. All I can do is keep making backups.

There was a power failure yesterday evening for just over 2 hours (7:20-9:25 p.m.); just on my side of the street. Don’t know what the reason was and there is nothing on the news about it.

Tuesday 29/7: Moving drives

I decided to try to move onto another hard disk drive today but this time Windows System Image refused to work, giving the message: The system image restore failed. Windows cannot restore a system image to a computer that has different firmware. The system image was created on a computer using BIOS and the computer is using EFI. I did not have that issue with the system image I restored on Sunday 13, though that was on the same HDD. I don’t know what had changed since then. After much exasperated Googling I came across this Macrium Reflect free version) and cloning the drive onto another HDD that Dad grumpily dug out of his shed. So far it seems to be working OK.

My computer gets a lot of use, and is turned on and off everyday, so I guess that increases wear and tear on the HDDs. Leaving it on all the time is apparently less demanding of these, but that just is not practical due to power usage and outages.

I don’t have a Windows 8.1 installation disk as Dad upgraded from Windows 7 to 8 when the latter was free, then to 8.1. I tried creating one today, but the program wouldn’t accept the serial number.

Thursday 31/7: Wind; hard drive OK; removing predators

Melbourne had some gale-force winds overnight and through today, and unusually mild weather for this time of year (nearly 20°C earlier) before a violent cold front swept through from the south and the temperature dropped to 9° along with the usual destruction (trees downed, etc.). I saw the ominous dark clouds coming up around 3:00 p.m. and on a radar map they appeared as a strikingly straight line.

Dad ran my computer’s apparently-troublesome 1TB drive in his computer and it displayed no problems, oddly. I formatted it in my computer today and scanned it for errors, but Windows found none. I may try to install Windows 8 on it again (Dad found the original disk, though he is not sure if the serial number will be accepted).

The next movie I might make an effort to see in cinema this year is Interstellar; the trailer just came out today.

“The Radical Plan To Eliminate Earth’s Predatory Species,” io9: this has to be one of the dumbest and morally dubious proposals I have seen yet (I have encountered mention of this sort of thing on certain transhumanist-type blogs). Quite a lot of commentators are scathing in their replies:

Humans do not have that right. We’re part of the world, not above it. We live in the ecosystem, not apart from it. We’re far to fallible and ignorant to ever make these kinds of decisions. CRISPR is cool, sure. But we barely know what most of the genetic sequence does. Changing whole species is way beyond our capability to do responsibly because it’s very likely there would be unforeseen side effects. If we try this we’ll most likely kill most of the biosphere. And even if we didn’t we would make it into a bonsai version of itself. A pruned thing completely dependent on humans for maintenance. Honestly, I have more sympathy for the people who believe humans should be wiped out for the good of the Earth. Actually, since he doubts the need for predators to survive at all I wonder why he wants humans around.

– KatjaKat

Humanity is apart of Nature and we can not control it. We are born and evolved from the ecosystem and linked to Nature as well. Humanity has grown, in some aspects, away from Nature, which is self-destructive.

– partylikeits1771

For myself, I like predators – they are fierce and wild and awesome – and would hate to see them dumbed-down and effectively emasculated (if such a genetic project were possible). Humans have already bred certain predators – the ancestors of cats and dogs – to be more compliant to humans (domestic animals are less intelligent than their wild ancestors), so that is a limited form of engineering.

August

Saturday 2/8: Hailstorm

There was more dramatic winter weather yesterday, and the coldest day this winter. There was also snowfall down to lower altitudes; towns outside Melbourne such as Ballarat got covered with snow. In the evening at 7:15 p.m. was a brief but violent storm cell that moved quickly across the south-eastern suburbs, with some thunder and a heavy hailstorm. The ground was covered almost ankle-deep with hail! It came from the south and my bedroom window was noisily battered for a few minutes, which was rather alarming! The weather is fining up again, though the nights will be very cold (close to 0°C).

I scanned the drives on my computer with Acronis Drive Monitor and the program could find nothing wrong with the 1TB one. My older 500GB one did have bad sectors on it – which I have been getting warnings about since last year – so I removed it and will now use the 1TB drive as my second internal drive, and see how things go. The odd scratching sound continues, though, at regular intervals.

Thursday 14/8: No Reddit

I have been unable to access Reddit at intervals since yesterday; apparently this is an Whirlpool forum thread.

Thursday 21/8: Megabra

The world news has been particularly depressing lately, one of the worst incidents being the Yazidi, who have a rather unique-sounding religion (at least they don’t try to go around forcing it on everyone else). All that can ultimately be done with the barbarian fanatics is wipe them off the face of the Earth; they cannot be reasoned with and they want to fight.

There is also an ongoing Ebola outbreak in West Africa which has killed over 1000 and is still spreading.

On a much more localized scale, the Australian Liberal Government is still trying to push through its socially-destructive Budget in the Senate and there is no certainty that this will be blocked. My Facebook news feed is full of posts from various anti-Tony Abbott and related groups as I have joined a lot of these! I feel so helpless and frustrated though as there seems to be nothing I can do to stop the unwanted changes.

On a somewhat lighter note, I was looking at bras in a department store and came across one of the most disturbingly massive ones I’ve yet seen – a size 22J! As can be seen from my changing room photos, one cup just about covers my whole chest, not to mention my head! Thankfully I am much smaller – if I were that size I could not get a reduction fast enough! There seem to be a lot more larger sizes of those and clothes generally now, due to increasing obesity, which is not a good thing.

September

Wednesday 3/9: Fat burden

Spring is here – though the flowers on deciduous cherry blossom street trees are finishing already – and soon Daylight Savings :-(. There were two very cold 0°C mornings on 3 and 4 August, but that was the coldest it has got here.

“Canberra hospital bariatric unveils room to cater for half-tonne patients, new orthopaedic wards,” ABC News, 25/8. An alarming indication of the obesity epidemic in Australia, and an indictment upon our society generally – and food manufacturers in particular, who deliberately create addictive foods. I am stunned that humans can reach such a weight! Such patients in hospitals make life very unpleasant for already overburdened nurses. The Victorian Government also began showing anti-obesity ads starting from two weeks ago.

This letter was published to the Herald-Sun on 11 August: “JACK Lyons says everyone is on social media. I am 44 and have never owned a smartphone nor a PC. I live in the real world, not on a device. This is my monthly visit to a library to email the HS.” – Andy, Brunswick. I don’t think boasting of not using technology is anything to be proud of! Admittedly I don’t own a smartphone, but that is because it is unaffordable for me.

Monday 8/9: Aches and pains

I had some abdominal pain on Saturday night, similar to but not as severe as that in May 2011, and also strained a ligament or something in my left jaw joint when half-asleep (the one that has TMD), so it was a bit sore yesterday but seems better today.

Wednesday 10/9: Storage dithering

I have been procrastinating a bit by my periodical dithering over what file format to use for my various projects (my story and journal, and so on). I came across this article at Wikibooks, “Choosing the Right File Format,” on “future-proofing” your work so that it can be read decades from now on whatever technology exists then. The consensus for documents includes simple plain text (.txt) files, or basic Rich Text Format (.rtf) if visual formatting is wanted, and PDFs. For web pages, HTML is recommended, and for images, .jpg and .png among others. The main important feature is that the formats be open-source, not proprietary, so document editors such as Microsoft Word are not recommended for the long term. As a last resort, if I am unable to use or afford programs such as Microsoft Office in the future (the one I have installed was bought by Dad), there are open-source alternatives (sites such as PortableApps.com have an extensive collection).

Related to this, I am not sure whether I want to keep using the wikis I have installed or not – there are advantages and disadvantages to them vs. static HTML files:

I was looking at TiddlyWiki as an alternative – it operates through a browser and stores everything in one HTML file, though it needs some exterior software to function. I spent most of yesterday fiddling around with it, and found it a bit exasperating to figure out at times. It uses some different Wiki markup to Dokuwiki – this is a major irritation between different wiki formats, as there is sometimes no easy way to convert one type of markup to another. As I have a lot of wiki files now, it would take me weeks to copy and convert them to TiddlyWiki format. It is also difficult to incorporate images – these are generally expected to be hosted elsewhere, though images can be embedded into the document, but this greatly increases its size. It can be password-protected, but the only options are to set a password and only let those who know it view and edit it, or set no password and then anyone can edit it – there doesn’t seem to be an option for letting others view but only the owner edit.

So I have yet to find the ideal solution (namely, one program to rule them all), and waste a lot of time and mental energy dithering about it! Ultimately, I basically prefer HTML as I am familiar with it and, as a minimum, only need a text editor and a browser to write and display pages. If no browser is available, I can still read the .html files as text.

Thursday 11/9: Static again

I decided to go back to my static HTML blog after all (though I could change my mind again!). The Dokuwiki version takes up over 40 MB, while this one is just under 8 MB. I just wish I could edit it online, but there seems to be no way to.

Monday 15/9: Migraine; Samurai; golden girl

I had a migraine last night to early this morning, my first since May 2009, according to my records. It followed the usual path of nagging headache → nausea → vomiting → gradually feel better. I don’t know what is the trigger for it, and they seem to come randomly and (fortunately) rarely – my first episode was on 2/8/2002.

I went to see an exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, “Bushido – Way of the Samurai,” today (my second attempt since the last time I went was on the day it closed!). It was small – in one room – but the exhibits of swords, armor and accessories were exquisitely-made. I took some photos but they are rather murky as I couldn’t use the flash. An irritation were the hordes of noisy schoolchildren wandering around – if I go to another exhibit in future I will have to go on weekends or during school holidays! (See my gallery)

Samurai armor - the epitome of cool! Samurai swords

Samurai are one of my long-term interests and I kind of wish we had similar today – when it comes to armor and weapons, modern warfare in comparison is rather mundane in appearance as it is mass-produced and mechanized. I find the earlier history more interesting – things get less so for me from the Tokugawa shogunate onwards, when meeting the West and modernization happened and they became like everyone else. I have a similar attitude towards European knights – as soon as guns come into use, I lose interest!

I was impressed by this 108-year-old lady featured in last week’s Herald-Sun – she is still living independently and is mentally alert at her great age! I wonder how much of it is good genes, and how much of it lifestyle – her tips are quite simple (including: eat good food and exercise; don’t drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes).

Our golden girl

Esther Penn starts each day with a few laps around the lounge room, singing her favourite tunes.

The morning ritual has kept the Forest Hill woman fighting fit – fit enough to notch up her 108th birthday milestone last week.

Believed to be the oldest Australian still living independently, she still cooks, cleans and keeps great-nephew Jason Stewart “out of trouble.”

But the confessed “antique” laughed off suggestions she is special.

“I don’t take any medicine, I don’t take any pills, I don’t take anything – only a cup of tea,” Ms Penn said.

The retired dressmaker was born in Blackburn in 1906 when it was mostly orchards.

She remembers travelling in a horse-drawn jinker, the outbreak of World War I and the day when a light bulb first lit up her home. “I said, ‘Ah, now we can see all the dust in the corners’,” she remembered.

Mr Stewart, who has lived with Ms Penn most of his life, said his great aunt had a unique outlook.

“You can learn a lot from someone who has lived for more than 100 years,” he said.

“She has taught me how to live a nice, basic life without worrying about everything,” Mr Stewart said.

If her good health continues, doctors believe Ms Penn could reach supercentenarian status at 110.

And she plans on doing it in the home where she has lived for almost 20 years.

“I don’t want to live anywhere else,” she said.

“I can do whatever I want here.”

Friday 26/9: Envoy movie

Today I came across this awesome short movie, Envoy, via io9. It’s a concept piece rather than a finished film, but I would love to see it in cinema one day. My only minor wish is that one of the main human characters were female – some of us like robots, too! (YouTube link)

Saturday 27/9: Website search

My site now has a rudimentary search ability (on the main Home page), as I found a CGI script in a zipped archived version of my site I had kept. It only shows pages, not the actual words searched for, but it is something!

I just realized that my website had its 11th birthday on 21 September! I first uploaded my “Kosmonavtka” Russian spaceflight website to Yahoo! Geocities in 2003 (as described on my About my website page). I still miss Geocities; 5 years will have passed on 27 October since Yahoo discontinued it (“Internet Atrocity! GeoCities' Demise Erases Web History,” TIME magazine, 9/11/2009). A lot of people sneered at the amateurish websites hosted, but as Jason Scott said, “GeoCities was the largest self-created folk-art collection in the history of the world.”

The weather is warming up and Daylight Savings begins next Sunday :-(. Winter passed too quickly!

Elena Serova is now in orbit, the 4th Russian woman cosmonaut to launch overall (a tiny fraction of the women astronauts to date) and the first to visit the ISS.

I also reinstated my Sergei Krikalyov Russian cosmonaut site (accessed via RuSpace → Cosmonauts), though it is mostly archival now since he retired in 2009 and I don’t have much interest in updating it.

October

Saturday 4/10: A bit of me gone

Daylight Savings begins tomorrow for the next 6 months :-(. The warm weather is also beginning, so not my favorite time of year.

I seem to have lost a kilo or two; I am under 60 kg. I have not been consciously dieting, but have cut out some things. Even that small loss makes some difference. I have been stuck at much the same weight for years.

I bought a $15 pair of jeans at Kmart that, in a minor miracle, actually fit me reasonably well – most other jeans that I try on are ill-fitting around the waist and are just uncomfortable generally. They are not real good-quality (their “denim” being cotton-polyester-elastane mix) but will do for the present.

There was yet another suicide on the Frankston train line on Thursday; this seems to be becoming a frequent occurrence, like in Japan.

Sunday 5/10: England home

I was looking for what had been my paternal grandmother’s house in England on Google Maps – the Corner Cottage in Spridlington – to see if it was still there. After some searching and looking through Dad’s old photos from the 1970s I found it. I don’t know if the house is the original one or if it has been rebuilt, but it looks similar, with whitewashed exterior walls. If I find a photo of it taken by Dad I will add it later.

The first photo, taken by Dad, is from 1978 and shows myself (taller with brown hair, aged 7 years) and my sister standing in the front garden; the view is southward. The second photo is a little further along the street, but the tall brown stone house in the background is still the same one. The second photo is a Google Streetview screenshot of the cottage (or its replacement) in September 2009, looking northward. The street itself still looks much the same, lined with a green canopy of trees – the same trees can be seen in the photos, 35 years apart – and seems a pleasant place. The Cottage was opposite an old church (St Hilary’s) and graveyard.

My family visited Dad’s relatives in England twice, in 1975 and 1978. As I was 4 and 7 years old respectively, my memories of those visits are hazy and fragmented. I wish we could have gone when I was older, but my parents could not afford it again, and certainly not now, unfortunately.

Wednesday 8/10: Loathsome Libertarians

A Leslie Hughes, Liberal Democratic Party Candidate for the Victorian Elections, just did an AMA at Reddit on the Melbourne and Australian subreddits. The LDP are essentially Libertarians – an ideology that is socially odious if you believe in government-provided welfare, socialized health care and so on. It seeks to remove as much government regulation and “interference” (so-called “red tape”) as possible, leaving citizens at the dubious mercy of private corporations to provide such services – if citizens have the means to afford these. Because the LDP are ostensibly liberal about some issues (e.g. decriminalizing marijuana), a lot of the younger people on the forum seemed impressed with the party, enough to award its spokesman Reddit gold (he comes across as young and hip, so has made a generally favorable impression with them). A careful read of the party’s website, however, reveals some alarming ideologies.

Deregulate and privatise – that has been a social disaster for the Australian states (such as mine, Victoria) who have done this to some essential services, such as gas, water and electricity. Prices have gone up tremendously, and the various companies’ priority is to make a profit. Competition has not made services cheaper or more efficient.

In countries with freer markets, people generally show greater levels of private charity and stronger civil society. While America is often criticised for having low levels of government aid and welfare, the level of voluntary help from American individuals and private charities (civil society) is one of the highest in the world. The government approach (where decisions are politically motivated) has done more to erode civil society, encourage corruption and create a materialistic contest between political players.

The main motivation for government-provided welfare is to ensure a steady and reliable safety net – not one dependent upon the whim of philanthropists and charities, which may or may not be around for the long term.

Health: “Abolish Medicare, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and funding for public hospitals, which will be transferred to non-government ownership.” Effectively turning a good socialized system into the worst aspects of the U.S. system – no insurance? No treatment.

Most people can look after their own health, including through private insurance and membership of friendly societies. Family, community and charity can assist the least well off.

That’s a poor and inefficient way to administer public health – rather than having a regulated and centralized system of care. The point of socialized health care is to enable a basic standard of care for everyone in a society, regardless of status or income, and thus to improve a country’s health as a whole.

And their welfare policy is little better than that of the current Liberal government – again, privatizing services and leaving charities and philanthropists to pick up the slack is an inefficient and fragmented way of caring for the less-well-off (or, in this case, grudgingly providing for them).

My own belief is that a government’s primary role is to provide security and stability for its citizens, such as through welfare (or a Basic Guaranteed Income), socialized health care and so on. The current system is certainly not without flaws, but the alternative as presented by the LDP would be many times worse.

I posted a quick comment there, but it will doubtless get downvoted.

Mark Rosenfelder: What’s wrong with libertarianism.

Monday 13/10: Shirtfronting

PM Tony Abbott today again embarrassed himself when he said he would “shirtfront” President Putin on the latter’s visit here for the G20 (metaphorically chest-bump him). As Putin has black belts in various martial arts, including judo and karate, such a real life move would see his opponent flipped over his head very quickly! I cringe every time our Dear Leader opens his mouth.

Wednesday 15/10: Australia vs Russia

Just when relations between Russia and Australia couldn’t get any worse, the Herald-Sun reaches a new low! “Bugger off” – really? I would think the Kremlin got a good laugh at the impundence of a no-name parochial newspaper. If there is one person I would like to see kidnapped by ISIS it is Rupert Murdoch; an evil manipulative old man. Prime Minister Tony Abbott continues to blunder along – he has certainly given satirists endless material if nothing else.

Mum has had a cold with a bad cough; now my throat feels ominously scratchy :-(.

Thursday 16/10: Alien flower

This peculiar-looking flower emerged over the backyard fence this week. It looks like a bird-of-paradise flower but the color is different, and the plant is a tropical one with large leaves. My best guess, going by some Googling, is a variety of Heliconia – the only similar image I could find is this Flickr photo. The spiky part is black (hard enough to stab someone with!), with a crest of blue, pink and white petals, and is quite large; as long as my forearm. It is rather alien and exotic, and I like it!

Addendum, 16/11/2014: According to this Reddit post, it’s a Giant White Bird of Paradise (Strelitzia nicolai).

Thursday 23/10: Blood test; overcrowded Bentleigh

The warm-to-hot weather has started; yesterday got to 31°C :-(.

I had a cold over the weekend and to Monday, when I felt very off-color, but it had begun to clear up from Tuesday.

I went to a different medical clinic today just for a check-up and enquiry; the previous local clinic to which I have gone all my life has just got too expensive – its gap fee even with a concession payment is nearly $30 now (goes up every year), and it does not bulk bill. The new clinic – not far away, still in my suburb – bulk-bills for Health Care Card holders. The GP took some routine measurements:

So my weight is a little less than I thought (a pleasant surprise!) and I am generally in good health, my past two surgeries in 2008-2009 notwithstanding.

“Unrest over living space the key in battle for Bentleigh,” The Age, 19/10. This article focuses on my home suburb for the upcoming State Election. Demolitions and new developments are continuing relentlessly here and they are not improving the area as it, like most other suburbs, becomes ever more overcrowded and overdeveloped. I hate to think how it will look in another decade if such change keeps up – I feverently hope for a housing market collapse. Population growth can only be addressed on the Federal Government level, though, and there is no one in the current Government who opposes such growth (parties such as the Stable Population Party being an exception, but they are minority parties).

A good letter from today’s The Age:

We’re becoming just like the neighbours

How a town at the far end of the antipodes rose to become the world’s most liveable city has come about purely by our geographic aspect compared to the heightened populations of all other continents (“How to save the world’s most liveable city,” Comment, 20/10). The greatest resource that Australia is now cashing in on is not coal or gas, but our low population.

Having lived in Asia (Hong Kong, Bangkok and others) for more than a decade, I can easily see why so many people want to emigrate here: to escape the waiting, the endless queuing, the living on top of each other, the horrendous pollution, the brazen crime and quite simply the stifling of what we in Australia call quality of life.

You can wax lyrically about the politics and the infrastructure and how to cope with how much busier it is going to get for everyone here. The truth is that when Melbourne has cashed in its namesake and has become just like all of these other capitals, we will all be looking for somewhere else to live than our soon-to-be unliveable city.

– Craig Kennedy, Ashburton

I haven’t written in my Populate and Perish blog for a few months, though I have a big backlog of collected articles (including the horrifying recent prediction that the world’s population could climb to 11 billion by 2100 – not long after, another report was released about Earth losing 40% of its wildlife in the last 40 years), as I get frustrated at repeating the same thing over and over again.

(… I ended up posting an entry after all.)

Former Australian Labor Party Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, died yesterday aged 98. He is the one to thank for such reforms as bringing in Medicare (then called Medibank) and free university education, though this has almost vanished now.

Thursday 30/10: Go away Halloween

My throat is feeling dry and scratchy, so I think I have another cold developing – only just over a week since my last one finished! :-(

Tomorrow is Halloween, which I have no interest in, but – annoyingly – it is increasingly being promoted by retailers who want to sell yet more rubbish, as evidenced by the orange-and-black disposable products apparent in stores, which will only add to landfill. It is a big event in the USA, but has no real relevance or tradition in Australia. I am already fed up with seeing endless posts about Halloween costumes and pumpkins on various forums!

November

Sunday 2/11: An archaic sport; Minister for Destruction

With the Melbourne Cup to run next week, the media is again full of tedious propaganda for horseracing. There was an ad in the Herald-Sun last week featuring the industry in a very positive light:

It’s not the money; there are easier ways to earn a living. It’s not the up-at-the-crack-of-dawn starts. I love horses. It’s as simple as that. And when you truly believe in something, you do what you’ve got to, no matter how much manure you have to shovel. That’s why I picked the best place on Earth to do it. Here in Victoria, we’ve got over 9,000 active thoroughbred racehorses and in my opinion, they’re the most cared for horses in the land. From private vets, farriers and dentists to chiropractors and nutritionists, I work hard to give my horses nothing but the best. And I’m not alone. I’m just one of more than 70,000 passionate people who care the way I do. So it wouldn’t surprise you to know that on average we spend upwards of $35,000 per horse per year to make sure they’re well looked after. But it’s not just the individuals. The industry as a whole goes above and beyond to make sure they’re taken care of. On race days there’s about 60 vets on duty across the state whose primary focus is to ensure the health, wellbeing and safety of horses remains paramount. And when the day finally comes for them to retire, we go to great lengths to re-home them to equestrian riders, where they’ll continue to make people happy … like my wife and daughters, who are equestrian riders and love horses too. I’m proud they’ve grown up riding thoroughbreds that were once racehorses. At the end of the day, I’m the first to let others entering the sport, both new and old, know – don’t underestimate the horse. Understand it’s their life that is supporting your own. And always make sure they come first.

A response to a billboard ad from some weeks ago depicting a slain racehorse, which the industry complained was “distasteful” – but the brutal reality of it can’t be disguised. They don’t convince me, or the author of this opinion piece from today’s The Age. Racing is an archaic sport which I would one day like to see abolished.

“Guy’s legacy: A Melbourne beyond recognition for the worse,” The Age, 2/11. Victorian Planning Minister Matthew Guy is probably the worst nightmare for Melbourne’s residents; even worse than the previous Minister, Justin Madden. Guy is the very definition of a meglomaniac, seemingly on a frantic quest to approve as many apartment towers as possible in order to leave his mark on the city – and an ugly one it is too. My nickname for him is “Minister for Erections.” (Comments at Reddit; predictably some of the younger ones don’t care that much, seeing as they tend to be pro-high density.)

Wednesday 5/11: Cup slaughter

Not one but two horses were euthanized during yesterday’s Melbourne Cup race. Admire Rakti was carrying something like 53 kg of extra weight – effectively the equivalent of two people – because of the ridiculous handicapping system, which is one thing that should be abolished (do human runners have to carry weights?).

Saturday 8/11: Wiki dithering

My last day of being 43. Hot today (34°C) though a cool change has arrived in time for tomorrow.

I am still dithering (and procrastinating!) about what to use as a reference guide for my story (see 10/9 entry). There are many elements of TiddlyWiki that I like (it is more “interactive” than plain HTML pages), but how to deal with images is a sticking point. With TW5 I can at least use HTML code for a lot of markup, so that saves much rewriting. There is a plugin to hide various editing tools from other viewers, making it sort-of read-only, but editing online is awkward anyway as it is programmed to download everytime it is saved. There is storage space at Tiddlyspot.com, but external image folders can’t be uploaded, and I would prefer to host it on my site anyway.

Dokuwiki is still an option, but it has a lot of files (the bare installation has 919 files, 90 folders, and once various plugins are installed, it is 3181 files, 201 folders with the ones I have chosen). Dokuwiki also needs a server to function, which is an irritation – the portable version has a mini-server called MicroApache which has to be launched everytime I want to use it. I have looked at other wiki programs, but these are even less suited for what I want – they all have various elements I don’t like.

Wednesday 12/11: New glasses

My main birthday present was a new pair of glasses – my previous pair had been bought in 2009 and there were some scratches on the lenses, so I was in need of a new pair (the pair before those lasted for 10 years!). I am not sure how I feel about the frames – I had difficulty deciding between two styles – and will probably feel some “buyer’s regret” no matter what I chose. Problem is I don’t know how the frames will feel until I have worn them for some time, and there is no money-back guarantee if they are not comfortable. My eyesight at least has not changed (see my Profile page for details). I wish I had had good eyesight; it would have been one less impediment (and expense). I don’t know if nearsightedness is counted as a disability, but I cannot see any distance without glasses – everything is blurry.

The latest Halo novel, Halo: Broken Circle, was released last week; I received a copy as a birthday present. The book was of particular interest for me as my favorite Halo species the Sangheili featured prominently, with no humans at all (I care nothing for the human characters). Its reception has been generally favorable, in contrast to the novel trilogy written by Karen Traviss, who seems to be rather controversial.

Friday 14/11: Scary Russians; glasses not right

The Herald-Sun was scaremongering again yesterday with a ridiculous tabloid headline (“The Reds are coming”) – more Russophobic nonsense! The ships were still in international waters, so it’s not like they turned up in Sydney Harbor.

Afte a couple of days of wear, the lenses of my glasses are a little too narrow, as are the frames – but I can’t return them for another pair :-(. It’s something I didn’t realize when trying them on – very frustrating. It’s why I have put off getting another pair for so long – choosing is an ordeal, and I can still make the wrong choice.

One way I test my website is to view it through a text-only browser, such as Lynx (portable version). This is a useful way of seeing how accessible a site is. Mine is reasonably straightforward to navigate (as much as I can ascertain; I don’t know of any blind people who might use it). I also got my website to validate at the W3C validator.

Sunday 16/11: Jemjabella

One online “personality” I have been aware of for quite a few years is Jemjabella (Jem Turner) (mentioned in 22/11/2006 entry). My impression now, as it was back then, is not too favorable: she seems to be the kind of person who is quick to dish out criticism but can’t take it – in other words, a hypocrite with an abrasive personality. She did a lot of site reviews back then, some “unrequested,” and anyone who responded to her negatively would be met with hostility (supported by her sycophantic followers). Since then she has had two children, and has turned into one of the dreaded “Mommy bloggers” (and become the “leading expert” on parenting – in that anyone who disagrees with her is wrong – NSFW language in that link). She split up with her partner of 12 years and now – the reason why I am writing on this subject – wants donations to help raise £20,000 to buy out of her joint mortgage. Seriously! (Screenshot in case the page goes offline.) Update 29/7/2015: a page criticizing Internet beggars is in the Archive.org record of her site … Well, as the saying goes, she made her bed and can lie in it – I would not be inclined to feel much sympathy for her. Considering she has effectively been an Internet bully over the years, perhaps it is a bit of negative karma come back to her.

While my own life has been a dismal failure, I am thankful that I never wanted children – at least I don’t have to worry about providing for them also.

Wednesday 19/11: New glasses redux

I went back to the local optometrist regarding my glasses (lenses too narrow in depth) and, after yet more dithering and agonizing, I decided to change them for the other pair I initially chose (within budget limits). Unfortunately it is going to cost a bit more as the lenses have to be remade. Next time I need a new pair I might try one of the glasses chain stores; at least they have a money-back or exchange policy if not satisfied with the glasses chosen. A damned frustrating experience, but my fault – I find it very hard to choose frames though.

Thursday 20/11: Concatenation

One useful task I learned today is how to combine all files of a type in a directory into one file (to “concatenate”). From this Stackoverflow question, in Windows, open the command prompt and type >copy "[path to files]\*.html" "[path to files]\merged.html" (replace [path to files] to wherever the relevant directory is between the first quotes, and the path to where you want the merged file to be located between the second quotes). This is for a webpage .html file, but it can also be done for text (.txt) files. The only drawback with merging .html files is there will be a lot of redundant code – multiple <head>…</head> and so on – that needs to be removed for the page to be valid in a browser.

Saturday 22/11: Pointless arguing

I made another comment this week (screenshot) at r/Melbourne on Reddit that predictably got downvoted, given the youthful demographics of that subreddit. The comment in question from the original Herald-Sun comments screenshot:

Population growth – I’ve got an idea, how about we REDUCE the immigration intake into Victoria? – what exactly is so hard about that, is it compulsory, written in law, non-flexible or whatever to have Victoria’s population over swamped via immigration??

I thought that a reasonable comment and wrote:

The population one has a point – bringing in huge numbers of people certainly isn’t helping :-/

It is not an issue they seem to want to acknowledge; instead they advocate high-density living, as if that will solve all the problems Victoria, and Melbourne in particular, is facing from relentless population growth (through both immigration and birthrate). It would be better instead at the Federal Government level to reduce population growth and take the pressure off infrastructure here, instead of futilely trying to keep up with demand. That won’t be forthcoming, though, from either major political party (Liberal or Labor) who are fixated on growth. In the meantime, once-livable suburbs like mine, where I have lived all my life so far, continue to be blighted with excessive and inappropriate housing developments. The ongoing destruction is extremely upsetting, and my feeling can be described as solastalgia – “a form of psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change … exacerbated by a sense of powerlessness or lack of control over the unfolding change process.”

One thing that makes me angry is deriding people who oppose inappropriate housing developments as “NIMBYs” – this insult is deployed often on the Australian subreddits. It is perfectly reasonable for residents to want to preserve a pleasant neighborhood, and there is also the solastalgia factor.

“Schoolies Week” is about to hit the Gold Coast, where thousands of school students who have finished Year 12 exams travel up there for a week of getting drunk and assorted debauchery. It is a sorry excuse for a rite of passage; in most traditional cultures, these were proper ceremonies supervised by adults so their children could formerly transition into adulthood. In the individualistic modern society I live in, though, such rites are almost non-existent, and teens thus invent their own sometimes hazardous substitutes. There is a need in the human psyche for these rites, but society at the moment is too disordered.

A further note on the file concatenate process I mentioned in my last entry: I could not get the merge selected files command to work (>copy file1.txt+file2.txt+file3.txt destination.txt – substituting my own file names for these) – I kept getting the error “The system cannot find the file specified.” I did find a small program to combine files, and a Notepad++ plugin – the pages for this need to be opened in tabs in the desired merging order.

Sunday 23/11: Dam hubris

“River of the Dammed,” New Scientist, 22/11. Problems such as silt build-up and earthquakes are appearing around China’s Three Gorges Dam – they can’t say they were not warned. The project would seem to be an example of the Law of Unintended Consequences, and yet another warning against hubris. The government’s only response seems to be building more dams upstream, which will only exacerbate the environmental effects, and they are unlikely to admit they were wrong. Dams should be banned worldwide as the effects are catastrophic to the local ecosystems.

Monday 24/11: Progressive Japan

There was a report last night on ABC News about Japan’s development of robots, particularly in manufacturing and assisting the elderly. Aside from the inherent coolness, this is a stark contrast to Australia and its retrograde government, which has cut a lot of funding to research institutes such as the CSIRO and is fixated on exporting coal and other resources. My own vision for Australia is to be “small, smart, sustainable” – to remain small in population but smart in research and use of technology and renewable resources, and protecting the natural environment here.

“Can immigration save a struggling, disappearing Japan?” – yet another doom and gloom article about a declining population supposedly being a disaster. Increasing immigration can cause social disruption and more competition for resources, so they are right in not wanting this. The article is pro-population growth – “a growing population is an essential ingredient for a growing economy” – but in the long term the extra people will grow old also, and yet more people be required to support them, ultimately an untenable solution as resources and space will run out. The idea of endless economic growth has to be abandoned for a sustainable society to last into the future.

Friday 28/11: More aching

Got another vaguely achy tooth, this in my lower 2nd right molar; it was where my first filling was placed back in January 2007 (25/1/2007 entry – 5 years since I had last visited a dentist then! A big mistake; but I had got complacent). So back to the dentist yet again next Friday :-(.

Victorian State Elections are held tomorrow. I will likely put the Australian Greens first (left-wing), followed by Labor, and put the Liberals (right-wing) last (I am voting below the line). I will put the Liberal Democratic Party (which has a Libertarian philosophy) second-last as Leslie Hughes was spamming the Australian subReddits again (see 8/10). There were some good criticisms in this thread.

A major reason I am voting for the Greens is that they are the only ones with a Denticare policy. I don’t agree with all their views, but they are strong on social justice, an issue which many of the other parties do not care about (i.e. Liberals).

I also found out how to get the selected file concatenate command to work (22/11 entry): change the command prompt path to point to the directory the files are in (from the main C: drive to my secondary D: drive here): chdir /D D:\[path-to-new-directory], then copy file1.txt+file2.txt+file3.txt destination.txt (replace the example with one’s own selected files).

December

Monday 1/12: Phantom pain again; Labor back in

I managed to get a dentist appointment this morning as the aching had got rather severe (in lower right jaw). But, after a thorough visual exam and x-ray, he could find nothing specific – no abscess or decay under the fillings there (one in each molar). He looked at my bite and determined the top teeth were not meeting evenly with the lower molars, putting pressure on the latter. The only solutions are orthodontic braces (unaffordable, and an ordeal in themselves) or to grind my upper teeth down a little. I already wear a nightguard, so this prevents me clenching. I decided to leave things be for now, but am frustrated at this awful pain (dull aching and the unpleasant sensation of an exposed nerve) that keeps recurring – it is what ruined Christmas last year (28/12/2013 entry) – but I can’t distinguish between that and an actual cavity toothache. At least no more fillings yet.

To my relief, Labor won the Victorian State election, though vote counting has not yet finished; the Liberals conceded defeat. I voted 1. Greens, 2. Labor [insert a whole lot of other parties], and Liberals last. If only the Federal elections were sooner!

Saturday 13/12: Hateful Liberals; going grey

Less than two weeks until Christmas. Hopefully it will be better than last year.

I would seriously like to see the ministers in the current Liberal Australian Government put up before a firing squad. In their mania to find budget cuts, they are totally gutting areas such as scientific research and health care. “If we're seen as a kind of dumb place, the – Lee Kuan Yew put it as the ‘poor, white trash of south-east Asia’, I don't think we're going to get a lot of respect in the region. And my concern is that Australia will end up as some sort of primary-producing vassal state, which I think is a pretty drab prospect for the nation,” said the CSIRO Chairman in an interview last night. So much potential going to waste because of the backwards-thinking traitors now in charge. A government’s first and main priority should be the welfare of its citizens, and this one has well and truly betrayed that trust.

I just came across this news article from 2002 that people are more likely to commit suicide under a Tory (conservative) government in the UK. Not surprising, given that ideology’s mean-spirited attitude towards the less-well-off in society. If legal euthanasia were available now, I’d be considering availing myself of it.

Something else to make me unhappy is that I apparently have grey hairs, mainly on the top of my head (confirmed by a hairdresser when I asked). Looks like I will be noticeably more grey by the time I am 50, unlike Dad, who still has mostly-brown hair in his 80s.

Wednesday 17/12: TiddlyWiki triumph

I managed to achieve a command-line procedure in TiddlyWiki and Node.js, after two weeks or so of confused frustration – namely, generate a static site (multiple .html pages) from a single-page TiddlyWiki document of mine (a wiki reference for my story). I made a plaintive plea in the forum and apparently I was missing a command. The instructions at the TW site are not detailed enough for beginners!

  1. For full (not portable) installation of node.js (install node.js first):
  2. tiddlywiki starwarrior --init server
  3. Go to http://127.0.0.1:8080/ in browser (or whatever address the server gives)
  4. Import twstarwarrior.html via import function/button in control panel (need to do this whenever I add new items)
  5. tiddlywiki ./starwarrior --server to start in browser
  6. Have to Ctrl + C to stop server so I can type in following commands
  7. To render static site, change directory in the command prompt to \starwarrior\ TW folder (chdir /D C:\Users\Ron\starwarrior), then:
  8. tiddlywiki --rendertiddler $:/core/templates/static.template.html static.html text/plain
    tiddlywiki --rendertiddler $:/core/templates/static.template.css static/static.css text/plain
    tiddlywiki --rendertiddlers [!is[system]] $:/core/templates/static.tiddler.html static text/plain

Thursday 25/12: Kurosawa Christmas

Christmas Day was better than last year’s, at least! I had the usual quiet day at home with my parents, and am quite stuffed after a roast lunch. I rather miss the occasion when I was younger as various relatives came to visit during the day. Now they are either dead or live far away and just don’t visit anymore.

TV programming is dismal – no cheerful movies on – so I watched Throne of Blood for the afternoon. That and Ran are two of my favorite Kurosawa movies, and serve as occasional “comfort viewing,” despite being somewhat grim! Both are based on Shakespeare plays (Macbeth was my favorite one when studying them at school). I just wish I could find good DVD or Bluray transfers.

The main aspect of Christmas that I now find annoying is the obsessive focus on consumerism and all the money that shoppers will spend.

Saturday 27/12: Boxing Day madness

I decided to go to Chadstone Shopping Centre yesterday, by bus – not going there on Boxing Day ever again! The traffic and crowds were horrendously huge and the bus I was on let off passengers before the Princes Highway intersection as it was stuck in a traffic jam. I could literally barely move through the swarms of people as there were so many. I intensely dislike being in crowds, so I was verging on panic and fury at times. I ended up leaving a half-hour later – got the next bus home – with nothing to show for it as I couldn’t tolerate the extremely dense crowds for very long.

The jeans I bought a couple of months ago (4/10 entry) no longer fit as the material has stretched a bit, so they are sliding down me! Finding a pair of jeans that fit perfectly is an ongoing and rather frustrating quest.

Wednesday 31/12: Deluded dancers and Bronies; sad anniversaries

Another year gone too quickly. My only achievement this year was losing some weight, after being “stuck” at the same weight for years (now around 55 kg), and I feel much better for that – it was a simple matter of eating a bit less, though I still have to resist against comfort eating. The only problem with that loss is that many of my pants and trousers are now too big! Hopefully I can maintain the loss, but I will have to be vigilant. My life is still stalled otherwise, though.

An ABC News program called 7:30 Report had a segment featuring overweight “dancers” who aim “to challenge the perception of what a dancer's body should look like with a cast of people happy to be fat.” More fat-acceptance nonsense, in other words. There are reasons dancers are thin; it is easier to move and is aesthetically appealing.

Back in October they had a report on so-called “Bronies,” the bizarre fanbase for a TV series called My Little Pony (last mentioned in 13/10 2013 entry). This nonsense is surely indicative of how infantilised segments of the society I live in has become. MLP is fine for children, who were the intended audience, but seeing so-called adults playing dress-ups is disturbing and deserving of scorn. (Adult dress-ups, otherwise known as cosplay – costume playing – is another form of stupidity that gets a lot of defensive fans if it is criticized.) There was another article on a Brony convention posted earlier this year at Jezebel.com, which pretty much validates my opinion of the fandom (and fandoms in general) – they look like stupidly immature twats. No I will not respect them.

A great descriptive phrase I came across recently, used by a letter writer in the The Age TV Green Guide, is “sentimentalized histrionics” – referring to the excessive public grief displayed when a celebrity or other identity dies, or when there is a headline-making tragedy; there were two such examples in Australia in the last month or so. The first such display began with the death of Princess Diana back in 1997 and it has become a fashion to show such grieving since then. The media are also complicit, showing 24-hour coverage of whatever story has incited the latest display. It is symbolic of a lack of emotional restraint and stoicism, and I find the trend annoying.

I have not progressed much in my digital art, though I did receive a better tablet for Christmas :-). Freehand drawing is still difficult as my lines are wobbly, as is shading. GIMP is my main graphics program, but the current version is lacking in a useful feature for drawing: canvas rotation – necessary for drawing at otherwise-awkward angles. The next version is supposed to include it, but there is no set release date as of yet (hopefully some time in 2015?). I have to open the image in another program that has that feature. Photoshop CS6 has it (earlier versions don’t), but the program is over $1000 in Australia – unaffordable for me – so other means are needed to acquire it (ahem). I would prefer to use GIMP as I have become used to it.

The year was rather sad also as the elderly family friend mentioned in that 13/10 2013 entry died in October, a year after I last saw her. As she was in another state I had no chance of seeing her again.

This December also marked two years since Sasha the dog was put to sleep (3/12/2012 entry). Parents do not seem to be inclined to get another pet, and I am also ambivalent – it would be nice to have something to hug (I otherwise do not have physical contact), but they are expensive and are very dependent upon their owners – so I do not want that responsibility again.

The weather has been relatively mild for summer so far, but sadly that is due to change soon (into high 30s from this weekend).