GING GANG GOOLIE

 

I'm spending some time in the study this morning (The Old Girl is at work - at her office in town) making arrangements for our trip to Australia in August.

We were planning to go to Italy on an opera themed package tour, see: PRONTO but have decided against this and will do the GHAN train trip instead.

This is a 3 night, 4 day train trip from Darwin to Adelaide.

We like train trips and I might have mentioned this fact before 🙄.

At my age it's a nightmare making on-line bookings. In the past I've done stupid things like booked my trips back to front and cocked up the dates and times for rental cars etc. This time I'm taking a lot more care so the exercise is laborious (why should I be the only one to suffer - that's why I'm sharing this with you).

The first thing to do was lock in the train booking as this is a very popular attraction. I've managed to make a booking and have paid a deposit for the 'Ghan Expedition' starting on 8 August this year which is my birthday. Yay!

I can now work backwards and forwards to make airline, accommodation and rental car bookings to work around this.

We will fly direct to Darwin from Wellington. 'Direct' is a bit of a misnomer as it will likely mean 3 different fights on two different airlines and take about 12 hours but hey! Have a look at the map above to see where Darwin is. It is remote. The plan is to spend a couple of days in Darwin, probably the 6th and 7th August which means I can now look at ex NZ flights on 5th August. In Darwin I'd like to see where the pesky Japanese bombed Australia in February 1942 but doubt that The Old Girl will be interested so, as a counterbalance we will no doubt visit some galleries and museums and try to spot a crocodile or two. We aren't 'beachy' people so have no intention of sitting on sand for hours on end. Maybe two days will be too long.

On the journey we elected the 'Ghan Expedition' option which will include some side trips:

The Ghan Expedition

Darwin to Adelaide (March to November inclusive in 2026) - Coast to coast, through the fiery Red Centre, experience Australia at its dramatic best. Your four day, three night (2,979km) journey includes all meals and beverages on board plus your off train experiences at Katherine, Alice Springs and Coober Pedy (with optional scenic flight/tour of Uluru also available - additional fee).

Our arrival date and time in Adelaide is now set. We plan to spend a week travelling to and staying in Barossa Valley, Clare Valley, McLaren Vale and a couple of other scenic wine areas before heading home. 

I'll update you on the itinerary as soon as I can but Richard has put in a special request for a post on my laundry.

"Toodle-oo" as the Aussis say.

A COUPLE OF THINGS ...

The cupboard person called in this morning to measure for the garage cupboards installation scheduled for the end of March. We're making best use of the garage space by having fitted cupboards built in.

These will be used for:

• Kitchen pantry additional items.
• Rarely used appliances, pots and pans etc.
• Tools
• Electronic items, cords, plugs etc.
• Study 'overflow'
• All of the essential clutter that a household needs.

The clutter on the garage floor can be tidied up and, once installed I can have some garage carpet laid down and move the third exercise machine, the bike in.

The more observant of you will have noticed the small TV I bought, snuggled in on top of the existing built in cupboards. I'm quite pleased with this purchase of the 32 inch Samsung Smart TV. I saw them advertised in both Noel Leeming and Harvey Norman for $350 last week but when I called in they were sold out. I searched around and found that PB Tech also had them at this price and were selling out fast (nearly $200 off normal retail). I'd been searching for a while for a good quality TV that would fit the small space in the garage. The Samsung satisfies both requirements. We find that exercise time (up to an hour for me and longer for The Old Girl) goes quicker when watching TV. 

So now you know.

"I'LL HUFF AND I'LL PUFF AND I'LL BLOW YOUR HOUSE DOWN"

 

Welcome to Wellington!

We thought that we'd left storm problems back in Whangarei - how naive was that? 

Last night, close to record breaking winds 'huffed and puffed' and nearly blew our house down ... or so it seemed. Being in a 'new' house we don't know how stable it is yet. Thankfully it stood up to everything that mean old Wellington the wolf threw at us. We could hear the wind screaming around the neighbourhood and the sounds of tree branches, rubbish bins, cats and dogs and sundry rubbish being blown about. I couldn't sleep very well and, at 3AM when I heard a continuous banging from downstairs I got up and investigated. It turned out that the wind had ripped open the electricity meter box and was hell-bent on smashing the thing by banging the cover door against the side of the house. The hinges and locking catch are now munted. In the rain and howling wind I managed to tape up the box with some masking tape - lots of it - which thankfully stayed in place. I went and bought some strong and waterproof tape this morning to do repairs when the rain stops. This will have to suffice until I can get the meter box replaced.

An hour later an almighty noise sent me downstairs again to discover this time that the wind had torn off the gas meter cover and was trying to send it over the fence and on to the road. For Robert's god's sake! I retrieved the cover and put it in the garage. I'll see about refitting it today when the wind drops.

Next an almighty crash and scraping sounds indicated that the storm hadn't finished with us. A very large and heavy real estate sign had been ripped off a fence and deposited on the road. Downstairs I went again and, lifting up the heavy and nail studded sign I demonstrated windsurfing as I laboriously manoeuvred the sign to a safer place than the road. Sheesh! Sheesh! Sheesh!

I did mention some of this in a comment on Richard's blog but as hardly anyone reads that I thought that I'd share the experience here. No need to thank me.

A NEW 'SHEESH!'

You might have noticed on reading earlier posts that I hate the overuse of e-scooters in our cities.

Look, to save you trying to remember, here's one of them: HERE

It would be fine if the riders were considerate but too many weave in and out of pedestrian traffic at dangerous speeds thinking that they have a god-given right to do so. Maybe they're Christians. Robert will know.

It's not only the riding that gets up my nose - it's the parking of the damned things as well.

Do you know what this is?

No? Well neither do the svcooter riders it seems. The council or the scooter company have these scooter parking banks set about the city but I only ever see them empty with - you guessed it, scooters lying higgeldy-pihheldy on the footpaths nearby.

Sheesh!

CONPUTER COMFUSION

I've decided to clear space on the computer desk as the bench arrangement isn't as wide as the one we had up north.

Old set-up, up North

Current

The Apple iMac that I only occasionally use takes up a lot of space so will have to go. It's a good machine but I'm using the laptop more nowadays. I'm going to hook the laptop up to a monitor that's larger than the laptop screen but smaller than the iMac screen.

I generally use the iMac when sourcing old files, information and photos that we have stored on it. Before taking it off the desk though I decided to move all of those files from the iMac to the laptop and used 'Migration Assistance' which is a programme on both of the machines to do this.

The process took ages - a couple of hours but eventually both machines displayed a message that the files had successfully migrated and that they would restart but ... the laptop got stuck in a reboot loop, trying to start but kept crashing. I tried all sorts of options as suggested on the internet but could not get the machine to start up. Bummer!

I looked further into the internet for help and discovered a site named Just Answer which offers IT assistance. I accessed it and signed up for the princely sum of $2 and was connected to a random IT specialist named AmitJ who I guess resides in Eketahuna. Good old Amit guided me through a lot of options - a lot of options - to reboot the laptop. This took ages but eventually we got it going. The machine had to reload Apple Sequoia OS and now seems to be going OK although I have to do a lot of re-setups for things I use. It looks like the iMac files have come across so I can now pack up the larger machine*.

When I met The Old Girl after work I told her of the trials I had and the outcome. She expressed surprise that all that service support only cost $2 which set off warning bells in me (not the kind that are set off inside Richard but they did kind of give me the shits). When we got home I accessed our BNZ Visa account and saw a payment being processed for $2 but immediately after that a change of $70! Now I'm happy with the service and using it saved me a lot of time and I managed to get the damned thing rebooted. I was planning to take it into a specialist in town next week and I'm sure that would have cost me more than $70 but ... I was miffed that the $70 charge wasn't highlighted before I set things rolling. This morning I did a Google search on Just Answer. My query showed that while the site is legitimate they have been under investigation in the USA for unfair billing practices not unlike what happened to me. There was also a warning that they take out unsolicited monthly subscriptions from lodged credit cards of up to $125 a month and advised cancelling membership and removing credit card details. I did both those things straight away. Buyer beware - caveat emptor (or, for the 3G guys "What the fuck bro?").

* Note to Richard or Robert: Do either of you want an Apple Mac iMac desktop machine? Free.

"WHITE WITH KNOBBLY BITS" ...

... that's what The Old Girl said yesterday and I had to double check that she wasn't talking about me!

She was of course referring to my new chair that I'm going to use in my study her office.

This chair I like and it's a hell of a lot better than the one that I'm taking to the tip shop soon.

I think she's a bit jealous because I went to the furniture shop on my own and made the selection without her input.

Admittedly I could have done with her input when I went on my own to PB Tech and bought the chair mats. Camouflage isn't the best pattern. I should have just bought a clear plastic one.

The chair, I'm sure you want to know is very comfortable and the hydraulics work even though I assembled it myself (the old one gradually sank down when sat on). I'm confident that it will contribute to some (more) excellent posts.

"HELLO IT'S ME ..."

We don't have a landline anymore having entered into new broadband and cellphone contracts when moving into the new house. Up north the contract we had included a landline which didn't work very well and it seems that the only people who called us on it were scammers and Spark themselves. We decided to abandon this option.

We still have phones on the walls here though.

There are three of them - one for each level. It turns out that they are an integrated intercom system whereby visitors ringing the doorbell can ask to be let in (or otherwise) and contact can be made internally from one level to another. Neat eh?

I experimented with it yesterday, calling The Old Girl from the garage level to the top bedroom level and asking for a cup of tea. This would have necessitated her going down one floor to the kitchen, making a cuppa and carrying it down another level to me. You can imagine her reply!

"At least I can say that I tried".

WINDFALL?

 

I received an email from an auction house yesterday telling me that our item had sold and that, after costs, $4000 would be deposited in my bank account. Suspecting a scam of some sort I accessed our bank account and, sure enough, $4,023 had been deposited.

I didn't reply to the email but instead, looked up the phone number of the auction house in Auckland and rang them asking if a (name of person who sent the email) worked for them. After a delay I was told that no such person worked there. I forwarded the email to a company email address the spokesperson gave me and then contacted my banks fraud department.

The bank confirmed that a payment had been made but that there did not appear to be sufficient information as to where the money came from. I sought, and was given, assurances that our money in various accounts was safe. They advised to do nothing further and wait until after the long weekend when the bank would contact me.

After this call I received another email from the auction house, this time from the financial controller (the previous person identified as an assistant financial controller) assuring me that there was no scam and that it was human error. He asked if we could return the money to them.

Shortly afterwards I received another email from the auction house, this time from a third person identifying as another assistant financial controller, providing their bank account details and asking me to process a payment back to them.

I did a Google search on the people involved and their connection to the auction house. The second and third people came up as being employees but the first one who initiated the correspondence did not. There is no record of any such person - not via Google searches anyway. I find this strange and will wait it out. I also added an extra level of security to our bank access.

Money scams, and I'm not saying that this is one, operate by dropping money into a person's account 'by accident' and then asking for the money back via a bank to bank transfer. How they make money is that they, as soon as the transfer is complete, somehow have the original deposit ($4000) cancelled so that the dupe - me in this case - would be out by that amount. They often do this during night hours or on national holidays. The email and bank deposit in this case happened just before 5pm (closing time) yesterday just before the Waitangi long weekend. As such there were enough warning bells for me to have responded the way I did. It might be seen to be overreacting but hey! Better to be safe than sorry.

OK, LET'S GO

We've had guests staying the last couple of days who have, along with The Old Girl been using my study which she claims is her office! This meant that blogging has been 'out of bounds'.

Well that's over now and the guests have gone, The Old Girl has gone to work and I'm in the office study. Let's go!

...... Um, what to write about? The other blogs don't provide inspiration. Richard has gone back to fingering and Robert is waiting for the call to go to Feilding or not - hardly the stuff of ripostes, rejoinders and retorts.

I know - I'll tell you about the computer chair mats I bought. That'll cheer you up.

No prizes for guessing that The Old Girl's chair and mat are on the right. "I'm not having that old camouflage one Matey" she said when I came home with them and nabbed the colourful one.

Well, that's it for the mats I'm afraid. My computer chair is stuffed however and I've bought a new one that will be delivered early next week. I'll be able to write a post about that when it arrives.

Go out and enjoy the sunshine in the meantime. That's what I'm about to do.

THEY'RE HERE!

    

Well, maybe more like this:

I've complained about the dangerous rise of AI over the last couple of years and that if the growth goes unchecked there will be serious consequences for us all.

I'm already pissed off at AI generated news reports and documentaries where the lazy reporter or film maker uses AI text and worse, gets AI to search for images in support. When it comes to historical documentaries the AI generated photographs and film clips usually bear little relation to the narrative. It's annoying but increasingly more prevalent.

We already know of AI putting people out of work in journalism, PR, marketing and IT services but increasingly there are encroachments into all clerical positions, legal institutions and even medicine.

 This is in the 'white collar' areas. In the 'blue collar' areas AI inspired robotics are increasingly putting manual labourers out of work and anything involving physical work is being replaced. Robotics have been around for decades in manufacturing (look at the car assembly business) but now smarter robotics drive cars, trains, planes and ships. In another decade or two there will be massive worldwide unemployment.

You'd think that we are ready for it but sadly, no, we are not. Supporting out of job workers isn't the norm except for the best socialist countries but even these will be swamped. Anti-socialist countries like USA will get a massive wake-up call soon and it will be their own own fault. For too long they have equated social support programmes with communism and haven't put in proper unemployment programmes, public housing initiatives and medicare assistance.

I read yesterday an interesting article in The Hill which raises red fags about the rise of AI.

It's well worth reading but here are some useful outtakes: (American spelling and unusual grammar left in for your annoyance).

•  "The AI revolution is here, and it’s gutting entire sectors with hurricane force. This isn’t an industrial transition, nor a replay of mechanization or globalization. It is a technological rupture of a different magnitude. Machines replacing not only muscle but cognition itself: judgment, pattern recognition, reasoning. And it’s advancing at a pace that outstrips legislation, labor markets, and political capacity, moving faster than most in government are willing to admit.

• Change doesn’t arrive gradually but in overwhelming waves. First, it replaces what we dismiss as “menial” cognitive work — call centers, customer service, scheduling, transcription. That phase is already underway. Then it moves into clerical roles, basic accounting, paralegal research, routine journalism, marketing copy, and compliance work. Those jobs are next. After that, no profession is spared, not even software engineering itself.

• Within a few years, AI systems will complete monthlong programming projects in hours. When that happens, junior developers will be removed rather than retrained. Teams will shrink. Entire layers will vanish. If the people who build the systems can be replaced by the systems, then no white-collar profession should feel insulated.

• Lay out the timeline honestly, and it becomes terrifying. In 2026, AI replaces support roles. In 2027, it consumes administrative and clerical work. By 2028, it’s performing serious professional tasks at scale. By the early 2030s, much of white-collar America may no longer be necessary to the current economic structure.

• The United States has no plan. None. No labor transition strategy. No reskilling conveyor belt capable of operating at this speed. No serious public conversation about income decoupled from employment. Just vague chatter about “innovation,” paired with the familiar promise that new jobs will somehow appear, as they always have.

• A society where tens of millions are unemployable is not a sign of free-market success but a powder keg. You can’t preach personal responsibility to a population for whom responsibility has been rendered economically irrelevant. You can’t defend social order while ignoring the conditions that make order possible.

•  The social consequences of mass displacement — crime, despair, radicalization, resentment — spread. They destabilize everything conservatives claim to want to conserve.

• We are approaching a moment where the question is no longer whether AI will replace jobs, but how a democratic society survives when it does. That conversation needs to begin now, while there is still time to shape policy deliberately rather than in panic. The country is already near a breaking point, marked by diminishing trust in institutions, the presidency and even one another. Some will argue that things could improve. They might, but it’s increasingly unlikely. For that reason, waiting is a luxury the country no longer has."