Airline timetables_0761

Originally uploaded by gtveloce

Would you believe I have stashed away these 1970s-vintage airline timetables for posterity?

Weird, I know. But printed material of this nature – anything at all, really – is fast disappearing. You may not recognise it yourself but paper as an office “staple” has been on the slide for at least 30 years. With every passing year more paper invoices, receipts, tickets, timetables, instructions, labels and “forms” are replaced by an online equivalent. Once gone they won’t return. Not that I’m a Luddite, far from it. I just like to document some of the simplest, perhaps least important details of our human civilised history as it passes….

Wet day, a camera, some fruit and flowers. You are warned.

Originally uploaded by gtveloce

Another shot on this perfectly-lit day.

Wet day, a camera, some fruit and flowers. You are warned.

Originally uploaded by gtveloce

Some light rain and even light under a cloudy sky – perfect!

Wet day, a camera, some fruit and flowers. You are warned.

Originally uploaded by gtveloce

Some light rain and even light under a cloudy sky – perfect!

Posted via email from gtveloce’s posterous

Posted via email from gtveloce’s posterous

USB Guitar snake_0259

Originally uploaded by gtveloce

This USB ‘light snake’ is an alternative (and possibly cheaper) way to get your guitar signal into your PC.

M-Audio K61es MIDI controller_0258

Originally uploaded by gtveloce

An alternative to software keyboards is this MIDI controller that recently landed in my collection of gadgets. MIDI-out via USB to PC where I use Reaper or Mixcraft (amongst others) to play with the sound. It’s powered by the 5V USB output, so it’s very easy to connect. Just select ‘USB device’ in your software preferences and away you go.

USB Guitar Link_0260a

Originally uploaded by gtveloce

For those who are interested in such things, I use a Behringer GuitarLink USB cable to link my Strat with my PC, using various software ‘amplifiers’ to get the right sound. On the PC I record to a WAV file and mix it in Mixcraft or Reaper. Quick and simple.

Mod Luna Park Invasion_062

Originally uploaded by gtveloce

Tribal Sydney in the late ’70s, early ’80s. Mods roamed the streets on Vespas and Lambrettas from the 1960s onward, especially enjoying a re-birth with the 1979 release of the Who’s film ‘Quadrophenia’ (which also helped rebirth the British film industry).

This is a scan of a cheap and cheerful Mod ‘zine from circa 1980.

a017

Originally uploaded by gtveloce

Love the shadow of the photographer… probably my father. Don’t know who was driving. The car is (I think) an Austin 7. Circa 1950.

Free airshow up the Tamar valley_0243

Originally uploaded by gtveloce

These are RAAF Pilatus PC9/As in a tight aerobatic formation (called the Roulettes). It was an unexpected show, 6 of these aircraft suddenly arrived in the Tamar valley (Launceston) and went into what was either a warmup, practice or a holding pattern. I think they were waiting for their slot for a display over the local Symmonds Plains race track but that’s just a guess.

Short Sandringham Rose Bay_006

Originally uploaded by gtveloce

Some nostalgia… Sydney during the early to mid 1970s.

This is one of 2 ex-Ansett Sandringham flying boats prior to handover to Antilles Airboats in late 1974.

There were 2 of these ‘boats used on the run to Lord Howe Island:
(1) ‘BRC had the rounded nose of a more ‘pure’ Sandringham (even though it was a converted Sunderland) and was called ‘Beachcomber’, becoming N158C with Antilles Airboats in 1974. ‘BRC is now landlocked, at Southampton, UK.

(2) ‘BRF, named ‘Islander’, was a ‘near-converted’ Sunderland with a blunter nose. It’s now landlocked at Miami, Florida.

I may not have taken this shot – I took a lot, but so did my late friend James Davidson, who had access to the Rose Bay base via his flight engineer father. James got me hooked onto black and white photography in the first place.

Very old cockatoo_0801

Originally uploaded by gtveloce

Once a wild parrot gets this old – maybe 60 or so, possibly older – it finds it harder to eat, let alone get around easily to find food. We just experienced a long period of hot, dry days which would have stretched this guy’s resources to the limit. He’s now perched under the roof of our back deck, keeping out of an otherwise welcome blast of cooler, wetter weather.

Channel Billed Cuckoos_0771a

Originally uploaded by gtveloce

Just for a change of pace… here are some juvenile Channel Billed Cuckoos – world’s largest cuckoo, btw – calling to their surrogate “mum” (a Pied Currawong) for more food… like many cuckoos they are parasitic, in that they lay their eggs in other birds’ nests, the expectation being that the “foster” family will raise the young for them, unknowingly. Generally that’s exactly what happens, with the cuckoos outgrowing the other chicks and starving them. Not exactly charming behaviour but very effective!

Huntsman_0649b

Originally uploaded by gtveloce

I can’t help it, this is one cool spider…!

An open case_0784

Originally uploaded by gtveloce

Amazingly, there’s little left at all. 4 combs of uncertain providence – and I don’t think I even used a comb back then – I certainly haven’t touched one in the past 12 years! And some Internet connection software on a 3.5inch floppy disk – something I couldn’t use today without booting up an old 486 machine (also in the garage).

Today of course I work from home, but when I do venture out I carry my laptop in its bag, so these handy cases are simply NLR. Hence they are confined to the dustbin – or the dusty garage.

A shut case_0780

Originally uploaded by gtveloce

Whilst cleaning out the garage I found my old work bag, or case, circa 1996 or what I’d call my ‘Internet Account Manager’ days. How much – and what – would be left inside?

Super snail_0622e

Originally uploaded by gtveloce

Well it may not be that super, but it’s a big snail, anyway. I though I’d take a few quick (errrr, maybe slow…) shots up close for posterity. Oh well, it was something to do on a slow day…

drawing_King parrot_0357a

Originally uploaded by gtveloce

A digital-pen-and-mouse image drawn from a photograph, then Photoshopped until it looks how I want it to look… I think.

Interesting drink_0430

Originally uploaded by gtveloce

My 7th all-time most popular Flickr image… and it’s pretty ordinary, really. So why would people look at it? I reckon because (a) it tells a story and (b) it includes 2 things that activate human interest: kids and animals.

We have in one shot my daughter with her broken wrist (there’s a monkey-bar story to be told there), a fairly yucky cockroach drowned in a wine glass (another story, one of curiosity, success and despair) and the cat checking it all out, as cats do.

Somehow that all works to make people ‘click’.

Oscar and Lucinda_0492

Originally uploaded by gtveloce

No, nothing to do with the book. They are just local larrikins who seem to stay in a pair, year in, year out. Mind you, they could have done a switcheroo and I wouldn’t have noticed, except that Oscar is so brazen he climbs the back door and squawks for seed.

Personally I think speed limiters on private cars are inevitable. It won’t be as simple as a governor or throttle restrictor, it will instead be a logical device that takes note of conditions (eg road type and weather) and location (eg GPS or RFID coordinates) to reasonably balance traffic flow and safety. You don’t, after all, save any time by speeding except on a clear road. And speeding – ie exceeding the speed limit – adds risk. The risk goes up because you are generating an unpredictable range of speeds for other drivers to contend with, everyone has decreased time to react, and energy levels in an accident are raised. There’s nothing bright or clever about it. Speeding is either by choice or by neglect.

But that’s not all. Speeding and the political games played by politicians, journalists and car makers ultimately encourages civil disobedience. We are told by some that speeding is not as dangerous as lawmakers think, and that fines are “revenue raising” only. Whilst that is obvious hokum (the revenue is actually tiny, laws are costly to police and enforce so the “profit” is even smaller, and general taxation revenue in fact pays for our roads), worse is that the whole law-breaker-law-maker vortex criminalises otherwise decent people, sometimes robbing them of their livelihoods and community respect.  We shouldn’t be doing this!

But wait, it gets worse. On most roads you have mixed traffic, intersections, potholes, pedestrians, accidents – you name it. So mixing into that some speeding is not a good idea. And there’s no point to speeding if all you do is catch up to the traffic ahead of you. And in so doing create a traffic jam to curse at. The irony of the speeding motorist is that in their haste to get somewhere quicker they cause the traffic jam that slows them down.

No matter how you cut it, we don’t need it – get on a racetrack if you want to speed. So it’s interesting to read this: “He said the rate of crashes per kilometre for 16-year-old drivers was almost 10 times that for drivers aged 30 to 59, while excessive speed was the biggest killer on Australian roads.” Which makes perfect sense. But less compelling to read this: “Speed-limiting is valuable but … occasionally to get out of trouble it is useful not to be limited by speed. You might need that extreme speed to avoid a collision,” he said. Occasionally? Exactly when does it happen that exceeding 130kmh (the governed speed mentioned in the article) saves lives? The contention would be when you are already doing 110kmh and someone crosses your path, or is about to – and that doing 130 will “get you out of trouble”; but dropping to 80 may equally get you out of danger. And 130 may simply get you out of one mess and into another, bigger one. Especially for an inexperienced driver.

Let’s face it – we demand absolute standards of safety of our public transport systems, including a disciplined approach to speed. For too long we have erred in the car maker’s favour, allowing “anyone” to drive by simplifying the controls and compromising safety in favour of “accessibility for all”. Whilst a case can be put to do this, to facilitate independent private travel as a “freedom”, car makers have a vested interest in making it as easy as possible to buy a car, get a licence and drive. And vested interests are prone to misjudgement of what is right and good for everyone else. Just look at the car mags and their constant bleating about speed laws. They, like the manufacturers they serve, are blighted by the corruption of self-interest. IMHO, of course

abstract_s2157b

Originally uploaded by gtveloce

Part of me wants to take photos, paint, draw and play with Photoshop all day long. This is one resultant image. If you can’t tell me what is is (and I really want to know, too) then most likely it is truly abstract.

ASU on WA toady

Originally uploaded by gtveloce

But it lends a special flavour, don’t you think?

It’s just such a good typo – “toady” for “today”. By: the Australian Services Union’s web team, hot off the virtual presses today. Proofreading is obviously not a service provided!

Steam_0024

Originally uploaded by gtveloce

Yes, I went away for a week or so, to show the kids how 19th Century engineers solved puzzles such as ‘how do we climb this damned mountain?’.

It’s a bit out of Sydney but hey, this is part of Sydney’s history too. There was a zig-zag rail section on both sides of the Blue Mountains in the 19th Century. Whilst this was slow – it required engines to stop, decouple and ‘run around’ to drive the train up or down the next section, it was cheaper and easier to build at the time.

This preserved section is very impressive. Luckily there’s a coal mine next door…

Well things are coming together as people realize just what can be done with inbuilt accelerometers. Apart from protecting hard drives from major injury (the original purpose), and gaming (which one supposes is a purpose the iPhone accelerometer could be used for), it could be wired into the Grid using the UD or BOINC software ‘clients’ that are used now to farm out data for various medical or extra-terrestrial data crunching. These Gridded accelerometers can then send back reports on any movement, including earthquake tremors: (via PCWorld) Elizabeth Cochran sensed an opportunity to save lives when she realized laptops can be used as seismometers to detect earthquakes. Many laptops have an accelerometer, a sensor that detects motion and free fall, and that can be used to detect the intensity of earthquakes when a laptop shakes, said Cochran, a seismologist and assistant professor at the department of earth sciences at the University of California, Irvine.

Now if these devices also had a GPS unit onboard then we could pinpoint exactly where the quake is, although simply keeping “proximity” software updated with location would do the trick (with more error).

I previously mentioned the possibilities here and here. In brief, an accelerometer senses movement, so if you know where you start then it can track your movement through space in 3 dimensions, which is useful for gaming (as a controller), training (for example as a tool for induction, as in ‘walk ten steps, turn right, that’s the cafeteria’), measuring (calories, Watts, whatever), virtualization (mapping an area for later use in virtualizing a task or a building) – you name it. OTOH privacy-minded people may think this is all too much like Big Brother watching me, although with cell phone triangulation and mobile GPS already well embedded in society I think we can let this one through to the keeper as well. You can always disable it, or join a Luddite sect.

Do you ever suddenly stop, slightly dazed, look around you, and wonder ‘how did I get here?’  I like to think that the whole of humanity occasionally does it, or at least that a significant number of us do. And I don’t just mean those of us who are ‘getting on a bit’. I mean everyone.

After all it’s both a reality check and a way to re-gain perspective on what we are achieving, and setting out to achieve. Think about this: here in Australia (and the US is pretty similar but with a few French and Spanish invaders to add to the story) the Anglo-Australians have managed in a bit over 200 years to subdue, subjugate and divide a native race; release non-native animals that have subsequently reached plague proportions; sent a multitude of unique and unusual species to extinction and cleared huge tracts of land for settlement, food production and mining. And populated the land with peoples from all over the planet to boot. Not bad for about 220 years work. But is that what they actually intended?

When the English settlers set out to invade Australia, or Terra Incognito, they just had a few plans in mind. Firstly, grab the land and keep it, just in case there’s something useful there, and before the French do it. Secondly, use it as penal colony to replace the colony they had just lost (read the US of A). Thirdly re-make it in as good a likeness of England as they could, given it was rather different in landform and native occupation.

So they certainly achieved those objectives. But did they mean to wipe out so many of the native animals or to all but destroy the native human culture? There’s evidence either way, and some degree of ignorance and fear explains how it all happened. But what’s our excuse? We are still clearing land, and still replacing native plants and animals with houses, factories, roads and English country gardens. We love our cities so much we have managed to sprawl them over the land like a disease, wiping out whole communities of plants and animals so that we can live cheek-by-jowl with ourselves. We are actively reducing diversity in order to meet our economic wants and displacing – probably forever – the natural world. And this cycle of destruction by consumption is being repeated on different timelines all over the world.

Now is this all part of a plan or just an accident? Let me think about it.

In an effort to improve cellular (ie mobile) phone reception indoors there is a new technology brewing to provide femto-cells… yes, not pico, not nano, these are itty-bitty base stations for your cell phone. Why bother? Because mobile Internet users need good bandwidth and you don’t always get that through walls…

Now these are itty-bitty signals and in a world of low-power, non-ionizing radiation it’s just another wireless connection; but I do wonder how the local anti-mobile-phone-tower brigade will take to the thought of having base stations inside the home? Maybe the name will be enough to throw the anti-RFers off the scent…

OK, OK, so the Star Trek franchise is bigger than just the original cast and crew, the 80-odd eps and scripts, the 10 or so movies, the spin-off generational series… but another movie? That takes us back to the beginning? I guess there are always new fans to be harvested.