desthpicable

Shameless self promotion

2011-10-01T21:03:00.000+10:00

Some screen grabs from the Ch7 News last night.

Full story here Here just for a short time, some wilds footage from Ch 10 Here.

Rainbow Beach, Cutting boat, support boat & contractor's boat.

Calf entangled in Shark net, mum & friend

The cavalry

Going in for a cut, your humble correspondent standing around looking busy, but not actually doing much.

Except looking like a finalist in a "Who can dress up most like a lego man" competition.

Helmet cam of cutting net

Last cut & he / she is free.

If you'll forgive a minor geek-gasm, compare the Ch7 footage to the Ch10 shots.

The Ch7 chopper has a double plus sweet U-beaut gyro-stabilised camera.

The Ch10 guy was hanging out the door with a camera on his shoulder. Sux to be him.

Couple of photos

2011-01-17T16:49:00.001+10:00

"Faark, It's like China"

Hundreds of willing hands. at first it felt like we were farting against thunder but we made a major difference. I cant calculate how many tons of crap we shifted, but it must have been in the tens of tons. A complete cross section of the community; from skinhead tattooed Johnnys, International students, pony tailed hotties & octogenarians handing out sausages in bread. Restores one's faith.

Time stamp 15:01 Start with an empty skip. Get 150 - 200 willing workers and mountains of detritus. Two load masters, I dubbed them Loud Mouth & Igor. You can see Igor in his white suit. No disrespect intended, Loud Mouth recognised a need for people to be guided so he climbed into the skip and directed the army of willing hands. "Right I want fridges & washing machines first. Couches, bring me couches. Now I want wheelie bins. Now I want mattresses..." Igor climbed in and said nothing, he left that to Loud Mouth. He just hauled & shoved & grunted & heaved. He worked harder than any man I've ever seen work. I shook his hand afternoon and he just said "It's what needed to be done.
Addendum; I just noticed Loud Mouth in this shot swinging the door open.

By 15:22, she's full as a fat girl's sock. The Bobcat operator said "There's no way I could have filled it that fast." The volunteers loaded all the bulk items, fridges, washing machines etc. The Bobcats topped off with buckets full of broken sheeting & mud.

This is the nice park out at Moggil that I and 300 other volunteers sat around in for 3 hours on Sunday morning.
Apparently BCC was overcome with volunteers and couldn't keep up with a flow of jobs to send us to. Must be hugely frustrating for those whose homes were submerged. Almost as frustrating as for the volunteers who wanted to get busy & get dirty.

Well timewasters that's it for now.

Bobette & Ubiquitis and the Flood

2011-01-14T11:38:00.000+10:00

As this is a public blog and it is entirely possible that Big Brother may peer over my E-shoulder. As a result: I'm not discussing my employer's completely unused State Government resources or skills. <100kms from the unfolding crisis. I'm not discussing EMQ's choice to put recreational & volunteer boat drivers @ risk, while commercially qualified boat drivers sat around preparing memoranda. I'm certainly not going to "play the sob story" of people trying to retrieve wedding and baby photos from the encroaching flood. I won't bring to your attention that we had 2 latest model Hiluxs sitting in the shed when EMQ were pleading for 4x4s for the Lockyer Valley search for survivors & victims. It would not be professional for me to hypothesize that upper management were more concerned for their overtime budget than for the well being of the people who pay them. So I wont.

I will however say how damned proud I am of The Bobette & SWMBO.

And I might mention I'm looking for a new job.

Geek Question

2010-12-22T08:46:00.001+10:00

If I butchered fatted calf on the altar of your geekdom would you shine your luciferous geekness on this poor mortal.

I have an unlisted number, sensible really given what I do for a quid.
Anyway if I dial my mobile (a bog standard Nokia on 3G Telstrarse none of your whizzo IDoovers or Crackberrys for me) from my home number the caller ID shows "Private Number." Right & fine. Also when I call home & the Bobette is on the phone ( a common state of affairs, she is 16) the Telstrarse Home Messages says "You have reached home messages 101 service of a (significant pause) private number blah blah blah." Confirms my perception of the cloaking technology is working fine, although if you have dialled the number, you'd think you might have known it, but that's bye the bye.

I had reason to call my help desk Nuffy last night and did so from the home phone. He answered "Hey Bob." Now don't get me wrong his Kung Fu is mighty, but I don't believe he has telekinesis nor paranormal psych capacities. Plenty of psychotropic capacity, but that's another story.

He runs a naked ADSL and an alcatel VOIP phone.
Apparently his phone book in his VOIP phone recognises my number. But I thought my silent number status meant that it doesn't transmit my number in the caller ID field.

WTF?
How does his VOIP phone recognise a number that I thought wasn't transmitted?

D'ohs

2010-10-30T11:03:00.000+10:00

Righto time wasters.

I'm not clumsy, I have pretty good hand-eye coordination, good manual dexterity and my fine motor skills are (currently) at least at par. My fitness in terms of cardio leaves a lot to be desired because I smoke. I don't use gym weightlifting equipment so I can't specify what I bench press in Kg but I'm a big strong bloke who can carry a bale of hay without much trouble. Offshore boat work is like low speed isometrics for the whole shift. After 10 hours I feel like I've walked 15 miles. I'm a plodder not a sprinter and have, can & will work for 14 or 15 hours without much complaint. In short I reckon in terms of physical capacity I'm on the good end of the bell curve.
Conceited as it may be I also think I'm smarterer than the average bear. Perhaps it's not about capacity but how I think or what I think about. I do believe I live a more examined and deliberate life.

What I lack is long term consistency in attention to detail.

I get bored. I reckon I'd be a very poor assembly line worker.

Eventually I'll miss something, overlook a detail, fail to consider the implications of a decision and it turns to custard. I then have a Situation to attend to. I reckon I could compile a two or three page long list of these Situations in my professional & personal life. The most common cause is the classic "Doing something stupid."

I think an example or 2 is in order.
Working on a jet ski in the river. Outgoing tide. I have to chat some clown so instead of spinning down the creek through traffic I direct him onto a convenient sandbank. In the past I have had to drag the ski off the bank as the tide has left it dry, so I now pick a steeply shelving spot & put it onto the bank so I can still get it off easily. Or I could "Do Something Stupid" and have to swim after it. That's professional.

A monthly production meeting at events centre in Brisbane, Item 135 on the agenda (snore): After unacceptably common incidents of damage to walls, lifts and people the big 14ft ladders are now scheduled as a two man lift. It is expressly forbidden to lift, move or carry them solo. The next day I'm, well, Doing something stupid and carrying a 14ft ladder by myself in one of the 3rd floor meeting rooms.
Do you know those little red glass bulb fire extinguishers recessed in the ceiling? If you are in a multistory commercial office there is probably one above you right now. They are remarkably fragile and surprisingly susceptible to ladder related trauma.
In the roof space the events centre has an earthquake fire-tank about half the capacity of a backyard pool so in the event they lose power and water pressure they can still extinguish a fire. I didn't see it myself, but allegedly there was a waterfall cascading down the still running escalator.

The boys I work with give me good natured sh!t about this pretty regularly and my standard response is "If I compiled a list of my best fifty fck-ups this wouldn't make the list."

This has of course stimulated me to think about such a list.
I decided fck-ups should be scored by:
Stake -What did I endanger through my stupidity.
Predictability - in hindsight is it really really obvious it would go pear shaped.
& Novelty - is it a new & exciting way to be stupid, or have you been stupidly doing this all week. (Each out of ten, sum / three)

It's not at all novel to do a U-turn in long grass in a work car. (1)
The stake is the sump of the work car & the rest of the afternoons work. (6)
It is pretty likely that eventually you'll hit something. (7) =14/30 = 4.6/10

It's pretty novel to skurf (ski on a surf board with foot loops) towed behind a four wheel drive on the beach. (7)
At 40 KPH the stake is broken bones & epic abrasion. (5)
Predictability, approaching certainty (9) = 21/30 = 7/10

Intuitively beach skurfing isn't twice as stupid as a U-turn that surprisingly goes wrong, so I think my model needs work.
It can't have a direct co$t factor as doing something stupid that you get away with can be just as stupid as those occasions when it goes tits up and you find yourself being summonsed for "Fail to drive with due care & attention," winched onto a tilt-tray tow truck or 34 sutures in one's foot. Also there is no accurate butcher's bill for when you get away with it, so it's not equally quantifiable. Unlike the grim reality to two decimal places of stupid tax - insurance excess or whatever.

Any advice?

After Action Report [edit]

2010-09-14T09:05:00.001+10:00

Well that was most excellent.
Lets get it out of the way early - No. A forty year old snowboarding is not some kind of midlife crises or aging denialism. It is just wicked, dare I say fully sick, fun.

So as previously advertised, on Saturday morning at O'Crap O'clock we set out from the Sunny Coast for Brisneyland International Airport. On the way The ABC Radio News informed us that Christchurch NZ had taken a walloping, awesome. I was travelling with 3 friends who were half way across the Pacific Ocean En Route to Chile when the Chilleans had their seismic excitement. Now they were at it again, but this time it was affecting the quality of my holiday! B'stards. I suggested they could set themselves up for life by Not holidaying on The West Coast of the USA.
Once again my genius escapes most mere mortals.

So we rocked up at the airport and was told by the Airline Staff "We have no comms with Christchurch, it could be levelled for all we know." Out fracking standing.
So long story short, by lunchtime Christchurch was open, we flew out at 1830 ish, arrived at midnight in states of extreme dishevelment, serious fatigue & emergency.

Once again the mainstream media gave the impression that Cantabrians where marauding, splitting skulls and supping on the living goo spilt. (Christchurch is in the district/ region of Cantebury thus people who reside there are...) We saw some minor damage; most older buildings had chimneys fallen or removed, there was cracking in the car park @ Mt Hutt but other than than there was no civil unrest, no anarchy, no looting not even any lynched corpses swinging from power poles. I wasn't so much disappointed as, well you know Ready. I did feel some of the aftershocks. Interesting in a shaky kind of way.

Anyhow we made it up to Methven, sorted hotel, hired gear, grocery shopped and did all them good things you do. Sunday Night we went to the Blue Pub for dinner and didn't bother going there again for the entire trip. The wind got up to over 100Kph and we were stressing that the Mt would be closed, but everything came up Millhouse in the end.

5 full days on the snow. The helmet paid for itself a dozen times over with Epic high speed stacks. One observation is that when the vents in the top of the helmet get jammed with snow in a stack, it melts over the next hour or two dribbling icy water down your back. The onboard tunes rocked. Minor tech fail with an inability to recharge the IPod, but good 'ol Nokia saw me through. Also it seems to overheat reasonably quickly thus I was not able to wear bandito mask or balaclava under the helmet as I couldn't shed enough heat & the goggles kept fogging up. Perhaps I was just holding my mouth wrong.

So all things considered it was an excellent trip. Brother Nuffy contacted some Gastro Lurgy which required him to evacuated the contents of his alimentary canal at high speed at inconvenient hours of the evening, thus never actually got up onto the Mountain. I*Don spent 70% of his time instructing Miss K on the finer points of staying vertical and when he left her to master this, she was bifurcated by a L plate loser - instantly demolishing the scrap of confidence she had spent the whole week developing.

I slashed carved, popped and rocked. I did a couple of little baby jumps and carved down through the Exhibition Bowl at Warp Speed 5.2, or so it felt. I stacked it in many interesting a varied ways, mostly on backhand turns, but that's half the fun. After a Kamikaze gentleman who apparently could neither stop nor turn took my legs out from underneath me, I think my coxix may never point the same way again.

Was it great ? Yes.

Would I go again? certainly.

Would I wait a few days until my legs stop wobbling and my bum stops hurting? probably.

Oh and the Kiwis must surely take the award for Best Hedges Ever. The Brits may have 500 year old heritage listed hedgerows, and the septics may carve theirs into variety of topiary goodness, but nothing I've Ever seen is on the same page as the Kiwi Hedges. An easy 30 meters tall, trimmed to geometric precision and utterly impenetrable. F'king amazing!

EDIT.
Just found how to export data from the lift pass. How cool is this?

Holidays

2010-09-03T11:46:00.000+10:00

3 weeks, well 2 and a bit left.
A bit of chilling, a bit of landscaping, some good work out at Mum & Dad's.
And a bit of packing...

Tomorrow [Sat 4th] 05:00 I'm heading to Mt Hutt Snowboarding.
If you cycle through the webcams (like I've been for 3 months now) You may just see a highspeed grinning Bob.
I'm more invested in this holiday than anything for many moons. My emotional barometer has tracked the Snow Base Graph. I've read every tip page I can google
I've researched gear. I bought a helmet from the US.
I've basically used it as a happy place for the last 5 or 6 months.

So If y'all excuse me I'll be Fking off, but before I go.

Apostasy.
This completely boggles me.
Not only do these schmucks believe that they have The Way, Light & Truth, but deviation from the norm is met with an extraordinarily passionate deadly force. It would seem the most torturous and F'kd up ways of killing someone is reserved for apostates. To the extent that if I believe something entirely %100 different then I'm to be pitied as I'm doomed to eternal yadeya, you may even reach out an act of love and attempt to bring me into the ciricle. But if I believe something %5 different, you'll be sharpening your smoting stick?
This impassioned exclusivity freaks me out. How can you be That sure?
I guess it's where 'dogmatic' came from.

And apparently an average Australian annually eats 193 eggs.
I find that a surprising figure, but I'm not sure if I thought it'd be < or >.
What do you reckon?

Furphy tanks

2010-07-07T07:15:00.000+10:00

Ok, you're looking at the wall of my Dad's shed.
And proudly mounted there is a Furphy Tank end.
A convex cast iron disc about 1.2m in diameter and massing about 40kg+/- with a spigot fitting.
As I understand it Furphy cast 2 ends or caps then shipped them to the client.
The client then rolled sheet metal around the ends to make a tank.
The little legs were for mounting on a stand or jinker - a bullock drawn carriage.

Why my Dad has one on his shed is beyond me. That's just the kind of Krazy Kat he is.
So there you go. It's not a Furphy, yet it is.

Making it worse?

2010-06-22T10:15:00.000+10:00

Disclosure - I'm "a lover not a fighter" I haven’t been in a blue for almost 20 years and if possible I'd like to keep that trend. If that makes me chicksh!t, then so be it. I'm also a bit of a Dud when it comes to the protective intimidating father bit. I have a policy of not getting involved in the Bobette's dramas as I'll usually just make a minor thing much worse.

But there is a line over which one crosses at one's own risk.

If you don't know the details, click back to my Fathers Day post, last year my daughter saved my fathers life by giving him CPR until the Ambos got there and much to her distress they made her keep it up until they had lines in and done their basic set up stuff. I have had several Dr's & Nurses not just compliment her tenacity and persistence, but the quality of her CPR as his heart muscle was minimally scarred, so not only did she do it for a long-arsed period of time, on her own, but she did an excellent job. It still chokes me up a bit to think about it.

Last December she started saying "I don't want to talk about it anymore" OK, it's her trauma I'm not going to interfere. Then she said "Some of the people at the Surf Club don't believe I did it." When I asked who? she evaded, again it's her trip I'm not going to stick my big nose into it. Recently, she has decided that "everyone at the club hates me." Now this is a problem and I have tried to get to the bottom of it, but in my ham-fisted and clumsy way I haven’t got very far, but it greatly alarms me that she thinks this.

So on last Wednesday Night SWMBO and I are sitting on the back deck and it comes up again. I express my great concern that The Bobette feels this way. SWMBO then says "Well you know who is behind it don't you?"
"No"
"Mr. X" as if this is old news.
"Please tell me more."
"Apparently one day at training Mr. X said to a bunch of kids he was training that "There is no way The Bobette resuscitated her grandad, the Ambos did it. She is just cashing in on the glory".

Right. OK then. I start having some pretty unpleasant daydreams about how & when Mr X will get his. But I decide that the mature & adult way to approach this is to ask him of his perspective on this. Before I unload some consequences on him.

After the annual dinner on Saturday night I approached him and had only just started to ask him WTF when he gets up in my face and basically threatens me to "Drop it, drop it right Fkn now." I back pedal & disengage, I don't want a blue, particularly not here. So I retreat to "the Naughty Kids corner" for a smoke. I'm halfway through when SWMBO comes steaming out "we are leaving NOW." I am surprised but recognise That Tone, so head for the car. We are almost home when she tells me that Mr X had gone straight to her while I was out having a smoke and had abused her roundly in front of 20 other people.

Apparently I had breached her confidence by approaching him about it. But she appreciated me "sticking up for" The Bobette.

I want to F'k him up for the disrespect he has shown SWMBO & The Bobette. Without making it worse.
Hm.

Cascade of consequence. Have I got this right?

2010-05-19T09:47:00.000+10:00

Once upon a time in lots of far away lands.
Some people who really couldn't afford them were enticed to take out mortages that they (obviously) couldn't afford for up to 100% of the purchase price on "bubbled" or over-priced properties. As was always going to happen they couldn't meet the repayments so the properties were forclosed. Then when the mortagees in posession tried to sell the properties they could not realise the dollars they had lent to the home buyers. This led to the arse falling out of the market for securities that had been crafted to fund these mortages. It was discovered that the finance companies who had crafted these products had been playing fast & hard with these securities and had investors from all sorts of areas of the economy. The Fear contagion spread impacting far and wide from pension funds to local governments. Money had been streaming into these products from anyone looking for a good return on some spare cash they had. Unfortunately for some (See Storm Financial) some people had even borrowed against personal assets to invest in theses instruments.

So now the banks are massively constrained with no more funds coming in the banks had no funds to lend out to new homebuyers. Profits and divedends fall, sparking a migration out of banking & finance stocks. Banks often trade on the capital they have in a porfolio of shares in their own company so as the share price dropped, the value of that protfolio dropped, so they could borrow less against it for lending to all sectors of the economy. This further constrainined the suply of cash into the economy. The banks wobbled & some (none in Australia) but some like Northern Rock got a big chunk of pretty pretty government bail out cash. In Australia we responded with a suite of measures from ca$h handouts to bans on short selling and the government bought up some of these mortages, to inject cash into the system to keep it rolling.

Some of the finance companies that had provided streams of cash into the banks through these securities products saw the banks get some and claimed they were "to big to fail" and got some lolly to. Some of them anyway, others were thrown on the pyre of political expediancy.

Some US car making companies who had been staggering for years put their hand out and got some after a dog and pony show about arriving in Washington on private jets, then hitchiking in sackcloth & ashes.

Now Governments are in difficult straights. Governments funded much of this largess with Bonds issued and sovereign wealth funds. The bonds are sold on a competitive market where they have to in effect out bid other bonds with return over risk. Some governments espescially in Southern Europe have reached a risk level were they have to pay credit card rates of return on bonds to get anyone to buy the things. The Bonds are also fixed period devices so when they are due, the holder expects his cash. Some governments are now having to borrow (issue more bonds) to pay out previous loans (bonds) sort of like paying a Visa card debt (at 15%) off with an American Express card (@25%.) Not good.

So now some supra government bodies like the IMF and the European Central Bank are providing bail outs to back these bonds.

Let's recap.
Joe Sixpack can't pay his mortage on his 3 bedroom brick & tile.
Banks struggle through losses and increased costs of funds.
Finacial institutions who were supplying the banks collapse.
Big corporations like car companies fall over.
Governments step in to supply emergency funding measures.
Some Governments then have problems with their income streams.
So SupraGovernment organisations step up to back the failing Governments.

Who the hell is going to bail out the IMF & ECB?

Horses? pah get with the 21st century.

2010-05-05T17:40:00.001+10:00

Over @ JB's place he's got a shoot 'em up game, looks pretty cool. But why on horseback? I mean really. Shall I fire up my steam launch or bone drilling awl? Get with the technology.
Motorcycles are far, way and hella better than horses.

215kph. English motorway. 04:00 Julyish 1991.

Really pretty simple when you put it like that.
Motorcycles are better. Indisputable fact.

I will grant the following.

Motorcycles can't feed themselves from the surrounding environment. (but really neither can horses)
Motorcycles can't swim.
2 Motorcycles can't make a third one.

But I am convinced that in every other circumstance motorcycles are better than horses.

[edit 18:00 5.5.10]

Dawn Service

2010-04-25T08:47:00.000+10:00

Just home from the ANZAC Day dawn service and the traditional BBQ breakfast at the Surf Club after the service.
As I stood there in the predawn gloom many thoughts rolled around in the ol' brain. I thought I'd get some of them down before the disapear like the morning mist.

Better than 400 punters dragged themselves out of warm & comfy beds to give honour to the fallen in what is a small beachside community. I didn't recognise most of them so I'm guesing many of them are touristanistas. They are very welcome to share the morning with us.
The mob seemed made up of a couple of identifiable groups; the young families with sleepy eyed under fives wondering what the noise was about, the old timers there to remember mates and kin who didn't come home and a single USMC officer in full dress regalia, he's been there for a few years now so I suspect he is a local. I haven't noticed him at the local shopping centre or corner store so I wonder what his story is. But the most touching to me was the grommets. Young men 15-18, in bare feet and board shorts standing stock-still heads bowed listening to the ceremony with more dignity than I thought they could muster. It was only when the ceremony was over and there was more light that I noticed the stack of surfboards stashed beside the public bogs. These lads had got up earlier than they needed to, put aside the first couple of waves of the day to give respect to the diggers. Well done those men. The lives lost that they were commemorating were not much older than they are. Mum and dad were not making them be there. They didn't leave in a mob, so I doubt it was pre-arranged. It was just young men giving respect. Kinda makes me regret some of the Less Than Charitable things I've said about that age group. The Bobette insisted that we go this AM. SWMBO is away and The Bobette was insistent. She said "If you don't go I'm going anyway." How's that for the young people of today!

Recently two lost Diggers from the Malaya campaign were found and returned to their kin, the last 2 Australian MIA in Vietnam were found and brought home and the HMAS Centaur (a WW2 Hospital ship torpedoed by an IJN sub) was finally located off the SE QLD coast. It made me think that war is the second most abhorrent thing I know of and the remarkable bravery of the men and women who take up the challenge and fight on our behalf deserve all the support and honour we can give them. The worst thing I can think of is when we don't fight when we should have. EG Early 1930's China, if the international community had stood up against Imperial Japanese aggression then, could that have changed the next decade?

I won't say that our servicemen were supermen or beyond reproach. As with all human endeavours there are failings, mistakes and terrible accidents. But every last man Jack (or Jill) one of them deserves our thanks and honour.

I did a bit of history at Uni, so have been exposed to the culturally relativistic approach of historiography, placing events in a cultural context. There has been many stories of volunteers in WW1 setting off for a grand adventure, or to see off the hun or whatever. I've heard about a bazillion times about the WW2 recruits stepping up with the ANZAC myth of their fathers their eyes and about the horror that they discovered on the front line. I think this is so much myth making and horesh!t justification. The bottom line is that young Australian men and women for more than a century have stepped up and taken the fight to the enemy not for any geopolitics or foolish imperial ideal, but instead they fought and died for the man standing next to them.

I honour and thank them.

I think I'll leave comment off on this post.

You have got to be sh!tting me

2010-03-22T08:27:00.001+10:00

29 September 2009

19 March 2010

Same roundabout, same direction, even the same damned lane.
At least this time I was in front.
Goes to show what a high set tow hitch can do to an unsuspecting (or inattentive) Nissan.

Judgement

2010-03-16T22:37:00.006+10:00

Working in compliance I am sometimes required to make a judgement & run with it based on little or no information. Vexing. Particularly troublesome when I judge a 'clients' motivation.
Pig ignorance is (usually) met with a brochure and a smack on the wrist. I'll respond differently to knowledgable indifference and differently again to intentional villainy. So if the client is a dumbarse who hasn't endangered anyone they'll probably get a stern warning. If the client knows the rules but didn't care to check, I usualy issue a ticket. If the client has set out to break the rules, like build a poachers hold in a boat or bodge a logbook, I go in hard with court action.

Let me tell you about Tony.
Tony is not the sharpest tool on the rack, nor the brightest bulb on the tree, but he's a nice enough bloke. I don't know it for fact but I suspect there are some literacy issues going on. He's recently married and has two little girls. Tony has been a pretty unsucsessful deckhand in the district for years and finally got 'all his sh!t in one sock' and qualified as a master fisherman. He bought an old but sturdy boat, leased an authority to fish, bought some quota and took up fishing for spanner crab. Good luck to him, I hopes he makes a go of it. One of the good things about the fishing industry is that it provides opportuinties for blokes like Tony and pays in direct proportion to the effort he puts in.

Spanner Crab Fishermen have special and additional reporting obligations on top of the usual commercial fishing documentation which can be pretty over the top. For instance instead of telling us monthly how much of what was caught, they have to tell us every day where and when they will land & ballpark catch Kgs. This is so we can be there and inspect the catch as it comes off the boat. This Prior Notice starts a whole documentation train that traces product from fisherman to retail sale, significantly it also starts the process that deducts his days catch from his remaining quota balance. I am very confident Tony got this information.

One day I'm tootling down the river and I see Tony unloading crab. Hmm, I didn't get his prior notice via SMS like I do for all the other Spanner Crab Fishermen. So we pop over to talk to Tony to see wassup.

2 hours later I'm sitting in Tony's dining room with a drift of reciepts and paperwork spread across the table.
Tony hasn't reported once in the 8 months he's been fishing.
So we havn't been notified by SMS, so we haven't inspected any of his unloads.
No paper trail has been started.
So no trigger for investigation or audit can happen as there is no such catch according to the system.
Most importantly his catch is not deducted from his remaining quota.
So theoretically he could fish forever, never be checked and never run out of quota.
Tony is holding his head in his hand telling me "I've always tried to do the right thing you know? but I didn't know I had to do this Prior Notice stuff, noone told me."
Mrs Tony is circling waiting to unload a metric ton of toe in butt on Tony when I'm done.
.
I have to decide. Is Tony a dumbarse or an evil genius. Has he blundered into this very fortunate situation through ignorance, or has he studied the system, identified a weakness and set out to exploit it?
It matters because it dictates how I respond.
Evil genius or dumbarse? Sh!t. I hate making calls like this.
Then a fat & glossy large white hen, yes female chicken type hen, walks out of the living room, clucks at us and then pops out the back door. I guess it had been catching some TV or something,
If you are too dumb to keep poultry off carpet, you go in the dumbarse box.
Tony got a brochure and a slap on the wrist.
[minor edit & link17/3/10 08:40]

Mr Happy

2010-02-11T23:01:00.000+10:00

The esteemed P.C. gave me a sage piece of advice the other day when I was bemoaning my fate. In between draughts on his golden can he said "So what are you going to do quit ? You can quit your job fair enough, but you can't quit being a son, or a husband, or a father. You can't just say "nuh-uh too hard" & bail. So accept you've got some shit on your plate and harden the fck up sunshine."
I hate it when that smug bastard is right.
I countered that positive thinking was sciematiffically proveerised to be bunk eg cancer survival rates- no statistically significant difference between time diagnosis to death for the happy thoughts brigade VS glum bums across a hundred 'n forty leven different cancers. It also places a burden on the family of those who don't make it, implying that the patient didn't Believe enough or whatever.
He said I was a pratt, was full of crap and should harden the Fk up.
I hate it even more when he gets personal and is right. and from a fourex gold drinker!
So. Positives eh?
Righto.

For the first time in five years since initial boot camp I recieved some training that actually had value to me in doing my job. I've done first aid refreshers, Govvie credit card & moral rectitude sessions (stealing is bad, bribes are bad mmkay!) but this was the first time that an expert turned up and ran through stuff that I will actually need in the performance of my core duties. I'm not going to discuss the hows, why's or effectiveness, just take it as fact we have a new S (for shark) fishery in Qld. This means that instead of every commercial fisher having a go, now only S endorsed fishers will be permitted to fish for the flake market. Fins are still in the too hard box for now & are treated as value adding, despiting being worth up tp 20 X per kilo what the flesh or barrel is worth. So, how does this affect me? well theses S guys have to report in what they have caught and where they are landing it, I'm required at ramdom intervals to inspect their catch to ensure they are reporting correctly. Now I consider myself a pretty smart guy and can count well past 20 without removing my shoes, but I wouldn't know the difference peween a silky or blue shark, a river whaler from a pigs eye shark or whatever. How am I supposed to check for compliance when I don''t know what I'm looking at? Well this super shark guru turned up with a chest freezer on the back of a ute. From it he pulls out a dozen different species of baby shark. Just as a baby human has physiological traits the same as a adult, so the baby sharks have fin placement & profile, nose shape, tooth shape and tail profile identicle to it's mummy, just smaller. So this bloke didn't try to teach us each shark, he just showed us the key features used in identification, but with real sharks as teaching props. Pretty cool. Same went for the new changes in trawl net design, turtle excluders and bycatch reduction devices. Again instead of power point slides delivered by some gormless beige pilock, we got The Man with full sized real examples of the nets. Excellant.

Dad is profoundly unwell. His stroke has seriously degraded his visual processing. As a result he can't drive. Mum's eyes have alwys been weak and the cataract surgery a while back didn't improve that, so now they are down to about 1.5 eyes between them. Not such super happy fun news, but the positive is that the oncology team believe he is strong enough to start a course of radiotherapy. I believe they'd give his appointment to another patient if the 12 Year Old Dr's thought he was on his way out, so take that as a positive. The biggest positive is that this treatment is delivered as outpatient in a hospital local to Mum & Dad's home, so mum can look after him, drive him around and return home to dogs, chooks & Furphy Tank each night. Compared to the Brisney land thing this is a big improvement. They still can't stay in that house long term due to amoung other issues the bushfire risk, but we'll leave that for another day.

This Pollyanna positivity piffle eats ass.
One last try.

The Blue Helmets reported a distinct calming of tensions between the BLA insurrection and the massive crushing power of the state (her parents) over the past few months. It would seem that this was largely as result of the idyllic lifestyle of a teenager on school holidays & when the school load returned (oh the humanity getting up before noon) so did the I'tude, complete with door slamming, driping sarcasm, $140 spike in phone bill in one month, ignoring being asked to do something like feed pets with "I'm just..." [ unsaid; doing something far more important than whatever it is you want me to do], the I'm-so-hardly-done-by muttering and (this sh!ts me the worse) through actions shouting not only are her parents entirely without ideas worth listening too but even feigning polite disinterest is far to bothersome to warant. So I've been taking off the red cross red crescent apolitical 3rd party hat & joining in the iron heeled oppression. Anyway this kind of crap is insufferable and things were boiling up into open insurrection and brutal suppression when she went to yoga with her godmother (leaving the bedroom a tip, her clean laundry not put away & animals hungry.) She came back 90 minutes later a different kid. Like fire is differnt to water type different. Courteous, willing, able to appear at a dinner table when called, taking her plate to the kitchen after dinner without being hounded, self motivated to do her study, pleasant to be within 10 feet of, the list goes on. This difference was unbelievable. I checked to make sure GM brought back the right kid. I suspect I'm going to put on a faceade of "it's all stinkin hippy sh!t" as if I endorse it she'll drop out tomorrow. But that qualifies as a win in any language.

The weekend at Evans Head (not Lennox as previously advertised) was great. Really really fkn wet but great. I realy needed it.

Ok, so my charkras need work and my visualisations may not be what they could, but I'm making an effort to focus on the positives and the things I have agency over.

And if you see a little ginger haired Irishman who answers to PC, punch him in the head for me.

P.S. remember the arseclown who begged & pleaded for me not to give him a ticket for his expired flares? Well he wrote to the minister. Apparantly I bruised his petal like feelings. Just another memo to write on company time,

Ciao, shalom and go the Wallabies.

I

2010-01-20T20:29:00.001+10:00

I'm at a low ebb.

At work the christmas holidays are always the hardest for me. Every day brings a fresh crop of clowns, idiots & agressive halfwits to my little world. I hate putting hurt on nice people who didn't read a speed sign or know what kind of fish that is. The aggressive ones are easier to deal with as there is an element of 'Fck You, cop this'. I also get suprises; I had a guy burst into tears the other day at a speeding ticket and another beg me, in front of 2 mates, actually plead with me not to issue a ticket for flares 3 years expired. That sh!t eats your soul, let me tell you. I'm also acting king. Even without crises there are times when it's Not good to be the king.

Dad's illness has recently been ah complicated with some pretty bad news. Surgery soon kind of bad news.

Because I'm A: preoccupied with the above, B: perhaps just a tiny tad surly and C: there is a chance that I may over-react to otherwise very minor Piss Me Offs things are not so sunshine & buttercups @ home.

FCK.
Haiti.
FCK
Pick 'em up & put them down.
Anyone remember the old horse in Animal Farm?

Compulsory listening

2010-01-13T08:53:00.000+10:00

Launch a new explorer window.
Open this; http://www.abc.net.au/rn/rearvision/stories/2010/2767858.htm
Download & save to your Ipod or whatever.
Go for a half hour walk, clean the windows or whatever.
I don't expect you to sit at the 'puter and listen for half an hour.
You could read the transcript, but I reccomend listening.

After you've listened to it.
Go back to the RN site, and get Lt Gen Peter Cosgroves Boyer lectures.

The discussion starts
3
2
1

Now.

*rant.

2010-01-02T18:11:00.000+10:00

A Tourist.
We've all been one, even when six years old and not legally responsible, we were all at some stage a tourist. Visiting somewhere nice, playing, relaxing, dining & drinking. In the early twenties some of us found enlightenment, VDs and debt backpacking and justified it as a personal growth thing. Honeymooners, dirty weekenders both long married & illicit, from family camping holidays to highway Zed grey nomads people seem to like to get away from home. I heard once that popular (meaning middle class) tourism & holidaying was started by promotion for hotels on the English beachside towns, but thats not important right now.

Let me give you a local or resident perspective. FCK OFF You vulgar, brash, insensitive, ignorant, unpleasant and otherwise inconsiderately occupying my valuable reality, parking, shop & highway bastards.

One bloke (25, sombrero, sunnies, Aussie flag boardies, zinc & a shit eating grin) yesterday was being towed by a boat on a plastic blow-molded kayak while pretending to paddle with an esky between his knees at a remarkably brisk 5 or 6 knots, on a hugely incredibly long rope - seriously it was like 70m long. I was travelling upstream & almost passed his 2 giggling idiot towing mates before I saw him. On a dam somewhere, thats pretty funny. But in an insanely busy waterway with hundreds of halfwits going hell west & croocked? C'mon.

Thanks for the squillions you drop in our local economy.
Now go home it's going to rain all next week.

4 minutes of a disturbed internal monologue

2009-12-21T17:47:00.000+10:00

In a voice like a bison might have.

A young researcher isolates a new enzyme associated with antisocial and socially disruptive behavior. As a result of the very compound he isolates the young scientist officially publishes, describing it's make up and structure and as his is right he calls it Fuckwitylase.

Further study, by other researchers as he was undoubtedly sacked, shows that a: the most basic level of self control can moderate levels in the blood stream and some Buddhist monks can reduce their levels to undetectable & b: develops a reliable field test akin to Blood Alcohol Content devices currently on the market.

At first used in law enforcement. Speeding ticket? "Please just swab your mouth with this sir, hm that is 228 Parts per Million, less than proscribed 400ppm, so off you go sir and please slow down."

Then used in selection of politicians, Exec Office Holders & Officer recruitment in the armed forces.

Would this lead to the beige-ification of the said professions?

Would it result in such reduced risk taking behavior that society would stagnate?

Do men in need periods of insanity, frivolity, stupidity, caprice.

NBobbing in the South Pacific

2009-12-03T10:38:00.000+10:00

Well folks I'm back after a week away on the job.
Was a good trip all up with no significant badness.
Good company, interesting countryside and boy does it make a nice change from the same old same old that I do week in week out. I get to do 2 or 3 of these trips each year where we set out in the good ship Lollipop and head out to sea to chase the poachers, villains & hopeless clowns that justify my meagre pay packet.
Some photos.
This is the good ship Lollipop.

The more observant among you will notice the red stripes. That indicates that she is in fact the QG Lollipop, I need to be vewy vewy careful on what I say in case Big Brother construes it as a criticism.
I believe I have spoken in the past about All boats being compromises. You trade off X for Y. Speed for comfort in this example. Note her beam - or width for you lubbers. She is very narrow in the hips. That makes her go like a cut cat when the big twin cats downstairs roar, but it makes for a very rock 'n rolly ride.

Exhibit B your worship.

You are looking out the back deck, across QG Little toot in her cradle. The alloy pipe structure is a gate that lowers on hydraulics to allow launch & retrieval at sea & at speed. Only sissy boys use cranes & davits (yes I'm looking at you Customs -blouses the lot of them) As you scroll down pay close attention to the horizon relative to the roof, if I could be stuffed I'd assemble it into a little animation, but I cant so just pretend it's one of those old flick books OK? Good.

What was really cool was that we were running with the sea, not into it. So instead of turning green & feeding the fish I was scarfing down left over pasta sauce as we steamed along.

So we steamed up the coast and overnighted at Fitzroy Reef. Google Map it. Seriously, Now. Go do it, there'll be a test after.

Neither words nor photos can begin to describe the brain bending beauty of this place. It is simply stunning.

I could happily spend a month there fishing & diving and napping in the cool bug-free sea breezes.

Here's a dodgy photo of the plotter.

I could stick in a tirade about global warming and the threat to the Great Barrier Reef & yah de yah, but I wont.

I will however digress for just a few moments.

I hope one day to own a substantial vessel. I'm not usually motivated by grand desires, in most things Im pretty humble in my wishes & dreams, but one day I'd like one of these. She is a Cloverlly Class dive tender Ex Royal Navy. Accom for 8 + 3, full compressor & gas mixing facilities. Slow as a fat kid & Ugly like a bucket of smashed crabs, but I like her lots. I really want to cruise the Western Pacific before it's buggered, I recognise that I'll probably never have the ca$h to do it under my own steam, so I need to find some other clown or clowns to ca$h up. I figure high-end live aboard dive charters in the region of $2K US/day would be about the market I'm looking for.

Anyway back to where we were.

We overnighted at Fitzroy after a big night of Trawler boardings. The next day we steamed for 130 odd miles down to behind Fraser Island. Another huge day, that's the run the Rock & Roll photos are from, we had 25+ knots of wind straight up the jaxie and had the Lollipop surfing down waves, at one stage hitting 20.2 Knots, which while not Rocket-car fast is really going in a lump of alloy That big.

We anchored up in the lee of Fraser and hit the bunks. Blessed sleep. Funny, I actually got used to the constant humm of the Gen Set running all night and woke three times with a start last night in the silence of home, my point being it doesn't take long to get used to something

The next day we launched Little Toot again and went for a big blatt around the islands & up & down the Sandy Straights, some lovely countryside through there. And then it rained & rained & Fkn rained. Holy mother of dog it rained, at one stage visability was down to about 5 meters and the wind against tide pushed up a 3/4 m chop; commonly referred to as a kidney killer, because you have to drive standing up, but slightly hunched over the helm and that's where the pounding gets you- in the lower back, about kidney-ville ugh.

So we pounded back to the Lollipop, for a hot shower & a big feed and it was all good.

Back into Hervey Bay to top up with about 3 thousand litres of diesel and 80+ of ULP.

Washed the Lollipop from stem to stern. Secured her alongside and caught the train to home & hearth.

8 huge days and I'm ready for days off.

Hope all are well.

Dad's home & doing ok, which means Mum is over the moon.

And we can all sleep soundly knowing that the Wallabies were able to defeat that mighty powerhouse of Rugby Union, the Welsh.

Generic

2009-11-14T08:56:00.006+10:00

All will remember and probably own VHS cassettes. Most remember Beta cassettes, some Beta Max, a few Betacam & probably only commercial operators would know Betacam Pro and that last great tape gasp Betacam Pro Digital. It was an interesting story of competing manufacturers and their licensing decisions that ended up with VHS ( in many ways the inferior format) taking global predominance. Look it up if you could be arsed. The nub of it was VHS became the Generic standard globally. It was only once this was established that video hire business became viable.

A sound & vision technician works with a fairly limited suite of plugs. 6 or 7 standard connectors can connect pretty much anything to anything across manufacturers. Except for Sony. Sony in many ways set the bar of technical reliability and performance to which other manufacturers struggled to match, but they had this stupid extended jack plug that no other manufacturer used. Same diameter, but with an extra sleeve. It may seem trivial, but believe me it's a grade A Piss me off. Nokia is obviously cleverer than the Rest of the World too and uses a 2.7 mm Headphone socket. Industry standard is a satisfactory 3.5 mm plug. Arse Clowns, the pair of them. Generic is good.

The PC VS Mac competition was good for consumers on a macro level, but gentlemen would have done it without whacky Mac peripheral connectors.

There is much talk & work being conducted on a range of renewable energy sources for industrial, domestic and transport use. Great cool & excellent. Having a crack at a variety of source options is probably smarter than putting all effort into one direction*. Here diversity is good. But I was thinking about the transport element. We need to find a way to transport in bulk and deliver a safe, non polluting, low mass, lots of ergs in a can or a fluid to allow vehicle refueling. It's gotta be the same from Cairns to Carlton. Roll up at a refuelling point and take on power for the next X00 kilometers of the journey It must be Generic. Without this the transition will be strangled - possibly deliberately so by those with interests to maintain the market for fossil fuels and control of the current refuelling marketplace.

I'm proposing that deviations from certain international industrial standards be punishable by 100% import tariffs and perhaps some unpleasantness for convenient board members of the offending company.

*As a side thought - my money is on a GM Algae that can eat coal fired power station exhaust and make natural gas. This is fed back into the system resulting in remarkable efficiency gains & reduction of emissions.
This then escapes from a power plant and goes rogue, over the course of months spreading to infection sites across the globe. A new engingeered form of unicellular biological pollution. It grows fastest in the most polluted areas of the earth - following it's food source. Perhaps it's temperature sensitive, so it affects equatorial areas more. It establishes reserves in deserts so is un-eradicable and spreads covering & discolouring everything but killing trees & shrubs causing mass carbon release and landscape degradation through soil loss. This run off sediment will "fill in" harbours & estuaries exacerbating the effect of sea level rise impact on those cities adjacent to waterways. But that's because I'm an optimist.

The crippled shopping-trolley of crap we call an exsistance

2009-10-13T11:24:00.008+10:00

Ok. This should give you the equivilant of a coupla thousand words to start with.

I was steaming home when a nice man in his 04 Falcon became a new & interesting hood ornament for my Hilux. My insurer who shall remain nameless tried to duck & weave and minimise their "Exposure." A poor strategy on their behalf, met by my war-face led to a "Recalculation." The end result is a $400 excess and a $400 "co-contribution" making it an $800 momentary lapse, but better than the original offer of "Suffer in your jocks."

Dad is mending well. He is weak as a kitten and has no stamina, but is in relatively fine spirits. He's joking with the staff & visitors, but I can tell he wants out. He make frequent references to the "Escape Comittee Meetings" and "Tunnel George is progressing well." OK, so a big zero points for subtlety on his part & sensitivity on mine.
I am still blown away by the events of 5 weeks ago. I really don't know what to add but thank you all for your best wishes, it looks like the crotchety old bugger aint done yet.
Moving on.

On the home front Blue Helmets report no serious skirmishes or breaches of the Norwegian Accord cease fire. Some activity continues in this geopolitical hotspot. The Junta accuse the insurrection forces of the BLA (Bobette Liberation Army) of laundry sabotage. Namely dumping clean clothes back into the dirty laundry hamper as it's easier than putting it away.
In return the Freedom Fighter Forces allege the Junta's Secret Police have been interfering in the legitimate social activities of "Friends dropping around uninvited & unannounced at 8:30 PM on a sunday evening."
Relative to some of the engagements of the past few years this is Very Small Beer indeed.

Sorry folks, that's about it for today.

S'funny that I've been having all these slightly crazed thoughts 3am at frequently culminating in "Hmm, should Blog about that," but when I'm sitting here all good to go I can't think of any of them.

Fathers Day

2009-09-07T09:16:00.006+10:00

This is going to be a very heavy one folks, so by all means bail now & come back when you are in a strong state of mind. Please excuse the venting and if you are concerned by disclosure of personal information - Kindly F*ck off.

I was away for most of last week with work. I returned on Thursday a creased & salt encrusted bundle of sleep deprivation, hungering for my family & my bed. The Bobette had been home sick from school (minor Upper Respiratory Tract infection) and as I had been away & SWMBO had been in Brisneyland doing executive banking things we had parked The Bobette out at my parents. I knocked off on Thurs PM and rang mum to say I was on my way to get The Bobette. 5 minutes later I get a call from mums mobile, I assumed she wants me to pick up milk or papers or something on the way. I answered. All I can hear is mum weeping & The Bobette (with obvious terror in her voice) yelling 4,5,6,7,8,9,10 then I hear a tinny 3rd voice saying "you're doing great honey the ambulance is on it's way."

Ooh F*ck.

Then I hear mum say through sobs "It's your father, come as quick as you can."

My old 94 Hilux aint a high performance vehicle and I think I probably took five years off her life as I hit the afterburners and made the 20K trip to Mum & Dads in what at the same time felt like an hour but was probably record time.

I pulled up at their house & there is an Ambulance in the driveway. I sprint inside. The Bobette is obviously shattered, Mum is going to pieces & 2 Ambulance officers are working on my Dad who is flat on his back on the bedroom floor. They get me on CPR while they get lines in and intubate him. I'm on his chest counting out the compressions and I look down at his face. Big F*cking mistake as he looks completely f*cked. The Great & Powerful Bob Brain kicks in and says "He's not your Dad, he's just some old fat bastard you are helping." Possibly the most cellophane thin & transparent coping mechanism ever, but it kept me going.

We got him started again, the Packer Whacker* gave him 3 shocks and he's arching and twisting, has a bit of a spew, which clogs the intubation tube down his neck, but we've got him going. We load him onto a gurney, get him into the Ambulance and they take him off to hospital.

Was it an hour or was it 5 minutes I have no idea.

But here's what I do know.

My 15 year old daughter gave me back my Dad. She saved his F*cking life.

By the Ambulance logs she did unassisted CPR for at least 12.5 minutes effectively on her own. Mum was there but not helping as she was falling to pieces. Everyone, seriously everyone from triage nurses, cardiologist, to the Ambos - everyone has said that if she hadn't done what she did Dad would be in the morgue today. A Herculean effort. Unbelievable for one so young & so blond.

Now of course apart from her beauty, wit & grace (transparent arse covering) one of the things that most attracted me to SWMBO was her capacity to deal with a situation. She may do the girly tears & hand flapping later but in a jam she is calm together & capable. This is the first time The Bobette has demonstrated this capacity. And then some!

She is a Surf Lifesaver and had done a refresh on her CPR recently so it was all fresh in her mind, but with the Clubbies they are trained to operate as a team. The Bobette was flying solo.

She is quite understandably traumatised by the experience & we are taking advantage of all the school & surf club counselling staff & support.

So now dad is in a induced coma at the Prince Charles Hospital in Brisneyland. He has had 2 stents put in and is a long way from being fine. We may yet lose him & I accept that.

But I wanted to share how proud I am of my kid, and how not to spend fathers day - in an ICU stroking his hand hoping that the crotchety old bugger aint done yet.

Oh and I got a Play Station 3 combined fathers day & Birthday present.

* A Packer Whacker is Australian slang for a defibrillator. After Kerry Packer (Australia's richest man at the time) had a heart attack on the polo field & was restarted by one of the very few Defibs in NSW Ambulances, Big Kezza lashed out & bought one for every Ambulance in NSW - hence the name - a Packer Whacker.

Do you look at the world with an easel or a scanning electron micrograph?

2009-08-16T21:01:00.004+10:00

Well howdy binge thinkers.
It's been a while and as per usual my poor old melon has been racing around with a million imponderables.
Today's topic: What price a rounded education? What is a rounded education?
Parents want the best for their progeny. It's as natural as, well, something really natural. What "The best" is, is about as subjective a concept as I can think of.

Science is important to me. Really important. Without a basic understanding of science an internal combustion engine, or an antibiotic is indistinguishable from magic. Here's a quick example; as part of The Bobette's ongoing treatment for a gastric complaint we have a rather wonderful Paediatric Gastro-enterologist, at the last appointment Dr E wanted to send The Bobette off for another XRay. I asked if an ultrasound would do the same job, Dr E looked at me with that look usually reserved for vegans - a mixture of pity & contempt. I expressed my concern that The Bobette had received many many pelvic Xrays and I want to limit her exposure. Why? because I have an understanding of XRay radiation and the attendant risk of cumulative doses. Remember the old lead aprons we used to get at the dentist? they weren't for fashion, they were to protect your next generation still swimming around in your shorts or loitering in your ovaries if that's how you are plumbed. On this occasion Dr E agreed that the Xray wasn't necessary, so I saved the Bobette another dose. Someone without that understanding would have blithely said yes Dr. - Better living through a scientific understanding.

I also believe there is beauty in some science.

Darwin's (or Walace's) klanger Evolution through Natural Selection changed our understanding of our world. Old sex mad Karl Linnaeus revolutionised our understanding of the flora & fauna we share the world with. The scientific method - observations, repeatable experiments, peer reviewed publications & collaboration may not be the only way to study the world, but it beats the living p!ss out of opinions based on intuition if you are developing a new cancer treatment. Quite apart from the utility of these & other scientific achievements they are (IMHO) beautiful ideas in their own right.

The creative arts are also hugely important to me.
I spent 6 years failing to complete a 3 year Bachelor of Arts. I love some sculpture & painting and I wish I knew more so I could appreciate it more, I love some literature. Dance leaves me cold and I think poets are largely a waste oxygen & real estate but that's just me. I believe there are some questions that are best explored through the arts. A dry statistical report could never deliver the understanding that say "The Killing Fields" or "The year of living dangerously" could. 1984, Animal Farm and Fahrenheit 451 changed my head- radically & permanently.

So how we understand our world is based on our understanding of & appreciation for two quite distinct ways of arranging our thinking.

The Bobette is coming into her last 2 years of secondary education and has to select subjects for these last 2 years. She is wonderfully creative and expressive. She is hugely talented in a performance sphere and can write fit to kill. She wants to pursue a career in journalism. I am passionate about the role of journalism in a democracy. (Ithink it is at least as important as the judiciary.) I am a keen and (I think) discerning consumer of news. I shot news for regional & metro newsrooms for almost five years, so I have an insiders view of the trade. I recognises the shortcomings & pratfalls inherent in the business, yet I still 100% support her decision to undertake an important & (sometimes) honourable trade.

I have been strongly urging her to do at least one science to balance her creative arts subjects.
This has been met with that same high carbon steel will that her mother is known for across several continents.
Now I am under riding instructions to pull my head in.
She is her own person. What is important to me is not necessarily important to her.
The best way to guarantee that she hates school & her parents and drops out to become a Meth Ho is to force her to do subjects she hates.
A B+ in drama will count better to her tertiary entrance score than a C- in Chemistry.
High school is not the end of her learning.
I (apparently) hold unrealistic expectations of what a 17 year old should know.
All reasonable points, so why do I feel she is getting the educational equivalent of fairy floss (cotton candy) & a caramel thick shake for dinner?

I was discussing this with my work partner, he suggested that I was being as narrow minded and closed as the Jesus freaks who want to banish evolution from schools. Just 180 degrees opposed in view. I disagree, I think the comment would be valid if I campaigned for pure maths science. But I'm not, I'm just looking for something anything on the quantifiable side of the ledger.

I seem to have had a minor victory tonight getting Geography onto the list in position 5. At least that's something.

That's it. That's all I've got for you.
Not world shattering or hysterically amusing, but if you wanted that you'd be over @ NatV's or The Good Dr. Yobbo's joints.

Aribear, there you go. You only needed to ask.

Shalom & go the Wallabies.

Busy Bob

2009-06-22T11:01:00.015+10:00

Well friends, It's been 6 weeks since my last drivel. Who'd a thunk it!

I've been a busy little beaver at home & at work.

Where do I start?

The ongoing asymmetric warfare between The Bobette & SWMBO continues. The most recent skirmish was over The Bobettes mobile (cell) phone. As with most gullible parents we were sold on the safety aspect of her carrying a mobile. To date I have called her mobile about 3 times, the rest of the time it's just a social networking device for her. She has (I think) lost 5 of the damned things in about 2 years. So after losing the 5th phone we (meaning SWMBO) decided that enough was enough. The Bobette would learn the value of blah de blah if she was forced to live with the consequences of her yah de yah. You know the story.

So we are apparently cruelly depriving her of an essential human right - namely the capacity to get "wat U doin?" text messages at midnight. Anyhoo, after a couple of months of "clean up your damned room" guess what she finds behind the desk? mobile #5.

So The Bobette-with the memory of a goldfish- says "Mum can you buy me some phone credit?"

SWMBO "No. Get a job, I'm sick of financing your social life."

Kaboom - Up it goes again & I'm back in my foxhole with the top of my blue helmet just visible over the edge. I lack the resources to materially affect the outcome, so I'll just try to stop them killing each other and Bear Witness if they do.

Maintaining a neutral position is damned hard, and doesn't endear me to either of them.

Dog help me.

Work.

What can I say? Work is work.

If they didn't pay me I wouldn't turn up.

Nice days, crap days, idiots, villains, poachers & hopeless clowns. Nothing new there.

I snapped this the other day heading into Tin Can Bay - I just liked the reflections.

Handy Bob. I've been busy with a couple of projects .

Where I live is "Flat as a sh!tcutters hat" I have about 20mm fall from the back yard to the storm water outlet on the footpath. We are about 100m west of the dunes in what was Melaleuca swamp before the developer dumped a couple of meters of crap clay fill & built what was to become Chateau Nowhere II on it. The clay has all the absorbent properties of plastic. So whenever we get more than a light rain I get pools in the backyard. No biggie - Labradors like the water, but when it starts pooling in the shed it is unacceptable. So what to do about it? If I just raise the backyard level all of the water will pool in the shed. I mulled over this issue for weeks before accepting that I would have to do something heavy duty.

The drain across the front of the shed slab is self explanatory but note the cast alloy grate. It covers a 300mm square pit that I have cut the arse out of (black disk on cement) and concreted onto a buried 200 litre drum. In the drum is a mains powered pond pump. See the black hose running in from the left? that's 50m of 80mm slotted drainage hose that drains into the pit, but inside that is a garden hose that runs most of the way out to the storm water outflow on the footpath. So the rainwater now trickles down the slotted pipe into the pit, it collects in the drum & every time it rains heavily while I pump out the pool I also pump out the drum. Inelegant, but it works. Installing it all & digging the 50 m long, 60cm deep 40 cm wide trench, laying in gravel, slotted pipe, refilling et al turned out to be a week of work. Doesn't look like it but there you go. It was actually really good spending a week pottering around in the backyard talking to noone. I've said it before & I'll say it again. People suck.

Shed Works B.

When we moved into Chateau Nowhere II, I knocked together some shelves out of some scavenged rough pine, it has done the job but it was only ever a temporary bodge & I've been looking for an upgrade. Thank you Mr. Supermarket - they recently gutted all their shelving & replaced it. So a couple of midnight dumpster dives & hey presto: serious industrial shelving at the right price.

I'm sure the blokes reading are going "yeah right good one" & the ladies are thinking "who cares?" Vive la difference!

Gate works.

Most recent job was the side gate. This is the only vehicle access to the backyard, and it's already pretty narrow. SWMBO complained "the side gate is sticking." So I go on out to investigate. H'm that's interesting. There is no post on the left hand side, just a scrap of fencing timber nailed to the fence. No wonder it's drooping. So I spent Saturday trying to bodge it, but the weight of the gate is bowing the fence, so I need to put in a gate post. Out comes the tape measure, guess what - I have 30 mm from the butt of the hinge to the fence. 30mm! a touch over an inch. Bastards! This is just another example of how the bastard builders who knocked up Chateau Nowhere II spent time & effort on showy features & completely f*cked the dog on standard tradesman type things like painting the sides & bottom of exterior doors properly & sealing the deck timbers. Anyway after wasting Saturday trying to bodge - I slipped into Bob mode & over engineering the problem. I removed a paling & have concreted in a 40 X 40mm gal steel box-profile pipe & hung the gate off that. I poked concrete & reo up the pipe & that connects to the footing. Droop now you bastard! It's a bit of a pity that it poured down rain 10 minutes after I put in the cement & the hole half filled with water. Nothing I can do about it now.

So, I've been a busy Bob. Sorry I haven't got anything particularly worth pondering.

Be well & happy, go the Wallabies.

Brain Farts

2009-05-09T14:36:00.006+10:00

I don't know about you but if I let my brain coast in neutral it tends to misbehave. 2 Quick examples.

1 Is eggshell the only common English word with four consonants in a row?

2 A bridge is an architectural device that allows traffic to cross from one side of an obstacle to another, avoiding the obstacle. A ford is a shallow part of a river / creek / stream where traffic can safely wade across. Can we use these distinctions to rate or assign value to Oxford and Cambridge?

So I guess that's why I try to keep busy.

What intellectual flatulence do you have to share?

The new & improved Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

2009-04-06T19:27:00.005+10:00

OK, the last two post have been a bit of fun. Time for another serious one.

I'm a fan of Mr John Birmingham's stuff. In his most recent book "Without Warning" a particular paragraph has stuck in my head like a piece of beef gristle between the teeth.
I hope he'll forgive my gross impertinence.
Caitlin:
'Think about what happens when you take the lid off Pandora's box and everything we forgot about in history comes spilling out to bite you on the ass. Do you know how unusual it is in human history, for children to be able to grow up in a place like this?' she waved her hands around to take in the city. 'Never knowing the fear of someone riding over the horizon to steal their family's crops and burn their hut to the ground, and all as a prelude to being snatched up as slaves for the rest of their miserable fucking lives - That's normality, baby. That's life as it has been lived by most human beings through most of our history.

Grim eh?

Can't fault his logic though.

So to today's ponderous ponderings.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Wikipedia describes them as
"The "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" is a term used to describe four horsemen that appear in the Christian Bible in chapter six of the Book of Revelation. The verses traditionally describe the four horsemen as Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death."

I'm not a big one for biblical references, but lets use them as a metaphor. Who is going to bring us to the end of days?

I was idly leafing through a Harvey Norman junk mail catalogue on the back deck this afternoon. Now I'm sure Gerry Harvey is a very nice man who is kind to his mother and gives regularly to charities, but this catalogue was whispering "what you need is a new television / dryer / coffee machine." No Siren ever sung to a sailor so sweetly. I strongly believe that this kind of rabid consumerism is going to send us to hell in a shiatsu massaging all leather fully imported hand basket. So I vote Gerry on the consumerism horse.

Mr Robert Oppenheimer - inventor of the A bomb, or some unknown in a lab currently refining a new & improved airborne pathogen? How about we just use old Mr "I have become the destroyer of worlds" as a symbol on the gathering knowledge faster than wisdom horse.

The Pope with his " breed for Jesus" & "condoms are bad mmkay." One of the American Televangelists gagging for war in the holy lands, or perhaps, A Beardy Wahhabi Nutbar who put the Fun back into Fundamentalism?* on a blinkered dogma horse.

That's three - I'm scratching for a fourth. So many candidates so few horses. Kim Jong Il and Robert Mugabe would have to be in with a shot on a horse called The dear leader is always right.

What I want from you are the 21century horsemen. Four would be good, but what ever you've got for me I'd be pleased to hear.

* I know I stole it, but I cant remember from whom. Birmo?

& Props to Albrecht Durer for the Art. Nice one al!

Rhino Support Vehicle

2009-03-20T18:50:00.004+10:00

Well, I've got to say I was a little surprised when I found this parked outside my office the other morning. I wondered how severe the goring was I was to receive and what heinous sin I had committed to deserve it.

Obviously this one was a high speed walk in humidor, with a samovar serving piping hot Earl Grey and a selection of horn polishing creams.

It got me wondering. If you had a lifestyle support vehicle, what would it contain?

Mine would be a combined book shop and tackle store, with a swing out Jason recliner (Lazy boy for those across the Pacific) a mini fridge containing icy cold ciders and freezer temp Vodka and possibly an Amsterdam Coffee Shops "specials."

Havoc Action figure.

2009-03-08T20:28:00.001+10:00

Strange but true.

In the toy section of the local BiLo Supermarket.

I'm a bit worried about the tights bro, but hey if Batman can pull it off...

Meh with a capital M

2009-03-05T20:57:00.005+10:00

Sorry Folks. A pretty poor effort tonight.

What a week.

Had the Bobette in hospital Thurs, Fri & Sat. A recurring gastric problem brought to a head by a virus that dehydrated her to a pretty chronic state. I stayed with her at the hospital on Friday night. Note I didn't say slept. I struggled - I readily recognise that one of my many character flaws is that my tolerance for fools is linked to my current level of sleep debt. Most of the staff at the hospital were wonderful, fabulous, caring, kind and skilled. One particular bitch of a nurse & a "Look how shit hot I am Dr." will probably never know how close they came to a NB fist enema.

SWMBO & I have been bouncing over another rough patch. When the communication between partners falls in a heap it's hard to get through issues.

& work of course has been, well, just hard frackin work.

I've received some not so thinly veiled comments from friends this may no longer be the anonymous platform I thought it was. It's a bit of a bitch, as I was enjoying being able to vent what was on my mind without filtering for fear of causing offence, or making things at home more difficult than they already are. Perhaps it's time for another blog. I'll keep you informed.

I know that most of the planet have a far harder path to walk than I, but holy mother of Dog it wears on a man you know.

I feel I'm letting the team down.

But that is all I've got today.

I'm sorry. Perhaps I'll be in a better frame of mind tomorrow.

Conservative politics make me a bit sad

2009-02-18T08:09:00.005+10:00

I'm a bearded pinko greenie. A rather colourful description for my political predilection.

I was listening to the radio this afternoon to a commentator who surmised my ilk as not trusting of the common man. According to this numbat we lefties expect the population to do wrong and thus require regulations to prevent society from falling apart. Where as conservatives prefer the open fields of freedom, where good men will do good by their fellows while turning a buck.

Others define us as urban ideologues with no understanding of "how the world really works." Australia is mourning the loss of life & livelihoods in the terrible Victorian bushfires. Conservationists and specifically National Parks & Wildlife Service are whipping boys De Jour for allegedly prioritising trees over safety.

I've heard more than one commentator argue that the current financial downturn was in fact caused by excessive & badly applied regulation of the financial sector. This apparently encouraged poor decisions made on regulation compliance, instead of profit with appropriate probity.

Let me tell you why I think the way I do.

A child born of the poor does not have an equal go in life as a child of the rich.
Pick your measure; life expectancy, education levels, chance of incarceration, or potential future income. All these factors are heavily dependent on or directly associated with your parent’s wealth.
This is injustice personified. Any and all affordable steps should be taken to rectify this.
Most people accept that the colour of or language spoken by your parents is immaterial to the quality of your person. Why do we still allow a kid’s life story to be dictated by the income of the family he happened to be born into?
I recognise that self-interest is the engine of our economic progress, but for a football player to sign a contract worth millions while children die of preventable illnesses is simply obscene.

Through millions of years of evolutionary pressures or by act of God or Gaia, either way, we were blessed with a suite of biodiversity. A deck of flora & Fauna cards if you like. We have recklessly thrown these cards away before realising the value of them. Imagine any card game; now discard 10 percent of cards from the deck at random. What chance is there of a satisfactory outcome? Again I say any and all affordable steps to conserve the remnants of this natural heritage should be taken.

I have written and deleted about a gazillion sub arguments, qualifications, riders, caveats and expansions, but I deleted them. This is as close to a succinct summation as I can come up with. Hopefully it goes some way to explain why the NeoCons, Free Marketeers, Libertarians et al leave me cold and a little sad.

I see a pattern forming

2009-02-05T21:19:00.006+10:00

You may have noticed my photos on every post. If not then you should get a new guide dog. I didn't consciously decide to include one with every post, it just sort have happened like that.
You see, I love my phone. I listen to ABC Radio National on it for up to 10 hours a day, when they have boring poetry crap on or I'm out of range I have about 30 albums on it (from System of a Down to Bluegrass) I use the dictaphone function so I remember shit, I sometimes call or text people on it but most of all I love always having a camera in my pocket. I did photography for a while at High School & Uni - I wanted to be the next Annie Liebowitz. Then I discovered what a crap job it is and importantly how expensive it is. Every frame cost big $. Especially so in the large format pro cameras.
Now with my Nokia in my pocket I can take as many shots as I like and it is %100 free. That is so cool. So having a free camera I feel obliged to take photos with it, no actually, I just like taking photos. So then I think - besides filling up the hard drive what else do I do with them? Share them with my adoring public of course. I hope you like them and I don't care much if you don't.

So to today's topic.

Sorry, it's another work one. I'm back in harness, so what else am I going to talk about?

Today we did Trawler boardings.

In case you don't know trawlers drag (usually) 2 dirty great big nets across the bottom of the ocean catching tasty prawns, squid & bugs for us all. That's shrimp to our American friends. Y'all saw it on Forest Gump. Dunno what you call bugs? Slipper Lobster?

As I discussed in an earlier post these blokes have to make a living while complying with about a meter and a half of legislation [on a book shelf.] It's part of my gig to ensure that they are dotting Is & crossing Ts.

Some of these guys are real cowboys out to rape & pillage (not in a good way) others of them are nice enough blokes who are making a pay in a tough industry. Some are slack arses that need a good jabbing with the jabby stick, others are honestly trying - but just not up to the admin & documentation side of it. It's not exactly a career that attracts a lot of Rhodes Scholars.

I steam up behind them in my little boatyboatboat jump on board and generally make a pain in the freckle of myself.

Here's what I'm on about today.

I board a trawler, it's well kept, the skipper is courteous and has his paperwork in order, do I say thank you & jump off to find another? or do I look more closely, do I start unpacking his hold, do I start unbolting the back of his snap freezer, do I get him to drop / pull up his gear so I can check it?

Unfortunately that is what I have to do. 90%+ of the time it is a gross imposition, I'm just making it hard for the good guys and I feel like I am basically accusing them of doing the wrong thing.

10% of the time I find something wrong.

10% of those occasions I find something seriously wrong.

Like 60kg of Shark Fin.

Like the Turtle excluders laced shut.

Like 50kg of bugs that have been dipped in chlorine solution so they drop their eggs.

I wish they would get together and agree that poaching asssmunchers would fly the Jolly Roger so I could search them properly find the badness & bust them, while leaving the good guys to get on with it. Not gunna happen, but it pisses me off.

So today we did 3 trawlers stem to stern, unpacking holds, under floor boards in the engine room & searching crew cabins. I don't know if they were poaching but I found nothing wrong. I felt like a prick - but that's the gig I guess.

If I wanted everyone to like me I'd be an ice cream van man.

By the power of greyskull.

2009-01-30T09:44:00.006+10:00

Well now.

That was most excellent.

4 days on @ Tangalooma on Moreton Island with the Bobette & SWMBO.

Google Map. Click satellite & check out the wrecks to the north. I love that shit.

Instead of a fortieth birthday party a good mate rented 2 kickarse holiday houses on the hill behind the resort.

For the Oztraya Day long weekend we had 11 in residence. BBQs on the deck. Lots of laughs & beers. We have done similar several times so we do it pretty well.

Very very nice.

To today's business.

As part of our contribution to the gig, as something different for a family holiday, as a bit of a pressie for Comrade birthday boy and just because it was an option we hired a 6m alloy plate boat and steamed over & back instead of taking the barge / ferry options. We went fishing 'n skitubing 'n snorkeling on the wrecks. Double plus good.

I hired the boat, I hold the licence, I was "the man."

Today I'm talking about responsibility.

Pretty much every second day I go to work, I launch a boat and steam off to do my thing. I can't say that I don't think about it - of course I do. I'd be dead by now if I didn't think. I don't however, stress & strain about it. I'm in a boat I know & am comfortable with it's capacity & limitations. More importantly there is another bloke beside me who, at my office, without exception have at least 20 times the boat experience I have so I can defer to / learn from them.

On the holiday I was the holder of knowledge in all things nautical.

I was the one who would make the call, resolve the problem, hold the responsibility.

To add to this I had the 2 most important people in my life on board.

Man did I feel that. It weighed on me like something really really weighty.

I couldn't get to sleep second guessing how / were I'd anchored, would EPIRB/ Flares / radio / fishing gear be stolen off it, would the whole fucking boat be stolen, would it be OK on the trip home - round and fucking round my head. Up 3 or 4 times a night checking it was still there. My old Hilux turned out to tow it OK, but it was another stressor. *

Nothing went wrong.

The trip home was a bit lumpy with 18+/- knots of SouEaster, pushing up about half a meter of chop, across a 3/4 meter of Northerly swell. And one morning the anchor dragged a bit. Other than that it was all good. We are all home in one piece with happy memories.

Have you experienced this? When the buck stops with you, does it weigh like a yolk on your shoulders?

Comrade Moko posted the other day about a friend lost to Motor Vehicle Incident. Why do I not feel the same level of burden when driving with the fambly?

* Havoc I owe you & your caravan towing ilk something of an apology.

The old girl (hilux, not SWMBO) towed the boat up & down the Bruce Highway and maxed out @ 90 KPH. (110 zone) I thought of you & all the grey shuffling undead caravan towers I've cursed in my day. I mentally apologised to you, but not to the rest of them bastards.

Limping towards the finish line

2009-01-14T20:06:00.003+10:00

Have you seen the footage of the ultramarathon Johnnies so exhausted that their body is being propelled through sheer force of will?

My professional sunny disposition is starting to feel a bit that way.

One more day

Then two blessed asshat free weeks.

I didn't post just to bitch about what is really one of the best jobs going 8.5 months per year.

I do have something for you.

Do you ever savour words? Roll them around your tongue like wine?

Today, mine is (drumroll please) Upholstraphile.

Just try it.

Out loud, nice & slow like you've a speach & drama forcing you to elocute every syllable.

Uphosltraphile.

I dont know if it's a real word, I dont care much.

I was rained on, in a small boat, up a shitsville creek for most of the day. I spoke to some 50 boats, had to book Klietus & Billy Bob for an unregistered boat & (more to piss of my boss than anything) I let them off for one little crab. "We was gunna let it go at the ramp, honest!"

If I want to play with a made up word, I reckon thats ok.

People suck

2009-01-02T15:18:00.002+10:00

Behold tranquility.
Beautiful isn't it? Pity that at this time of year it is plagued by thousands of jet skis, hire boats, sailboats from hobie cats to schooners, look-how-rich-I-am power boats, wake-boarders, kids swimming & kite-boarders.
It's that time of the year again when assmunchers from Australia wide migrate to my little patch for summer holidays.

For those who came in late, I am a Fish Pig. A fisheries officer. This means I am responsible for enforcing fisheries and maritime safety legislation on a little patch of the Queensland coast.
I really struggle with it at times.

I recognise that our fisheries resources need to be protected by laws, that those laws need to be backed with penalties, and need to be enforced.

I also understand that we have entirely to many preventable catastrophes on the water, thus there needs to be legislation, penalties for non compliance and enforcement.

The other side of the coin is the buttmunchers in head office have little or no idea how things go down at water level. Recently they re-jigged the penalty regimen, promptly followed by the government upping a penalty unit from $75 to $100. This now means that I am supposed to give you a $300 on the spot fine if your crab pot sports a marker float that is smaller than the required 150mm in diameter. Are they high? I'd no more do that then fly backwards 'round the sun. Also many of the people I deal with are on holidays. If they fail to notice a speed limit sign, I take $200 from their holiday fun budget. They recently changed the Australian Standard on what makes a PFD (Lifejacket to you) up to standard. They told no one about this change. Now I am required, instructed, directed to lighten your wallet by $200 if yours are not fully up to spec. I strongly believe that boating & fishing is the most over-regulated recreations - even the sporting shooters don't have this much crap.

So where is this rant going?
I have to sting nice people who are ignorant with the same stick as the powerassholes. I get abused regularly as part of my job, suck it up Bob. One of the best to date was "I bet you were the kind of kid I put in the bin at high school." How does one respond to this professionally?
Then I get the nice people who say "She's right mate, your just doing your job." Take a guess who is easier to book.
I actually got busted providing particularly deserving people with the "Correct Answers" to get them out of a ticket. The brother I work most often with strongly advised me to stop doing this as I would surely end up on the pointy end of a stick before long.

In short between December 1 & Febuary 10 people suck.