willedoo

A good day for Australia in the World Cup. The women beat Fiji 30-14 followed up by the men 44-12 over Samoa. The finals next Sunday at Lang Park, Australia vs New Zealand in both the men's and women's.

If you ignore the covid era hump in the line, it's almost a straight upward trending line from about one year into the first Rudd government to where we are now.

Another issue with roads is whether they are built for the allowable load limits. I can only see two choices - build the roads better to take the weight or change regulations to reduce truck weights. Either way has a big economic impact. The inflationary pressure of having lower payload/higher transport costs would be huge. Probably much cheaper to just keep patching the roads we currently have.

A bit off topic but on the subject of B-Doubles, I saw a really unusual sight recently on the Bruce Highway between the Sunshine Coast and Brisbane. Normally on those roads only B-Doubles are allowed but I went past a conventional double road train tanker (semi trailer pulling a dog trailer via a dolly and drawbar). I don't think I've ever seen one there before and the best guess is they had a special permit for some reason. Normally, conventional roadtrains coming in from the west have to drop their extra trailers on the western edge of Toowoomba and shuttle them down to Brisbane one at a time, so it's a fairly big exclusion area.

Jerry, don't forget to take into account that it doesn't matter how big, long or how much weight a truck carries, it's the axle weights that mainly impact the roads, ie: the ground pressure. A tandem axle grouping on a B-Double carries no more weight than the tandem axle grouping on a heavy rigid class truck like the bogey drive tip trucks we see everywhere.

This post on a forum did a good job of summing up some botched software updates. He's referring to CCleaner 7, but it could equally apply to others: ' If there’s one genuinely good thing about CCleaner 7, it’s that it now serves as a masterclass case study for product professionals everywhere — on how a trusted, legacy product can lose its way through poor change management. Reading through the forums, you’ll find hundreds of frustrated posts — one user summed it up perfectly: “You should have warned me this wasn’t just another update. You should have told me to save my configuration. You should have let me defer this until I was ready. But you didn’t.” That single paragraph captures everything wrong with Version 7. The release dropped with no clear communication, no migration guidance, and no empathy for long-time users who had built custom cleaning rules, cookie whitelists, and workflows over years. The result? Years of personalization wiped out in one “update.” The interface overhaul might have looked modern on a whiteboard, but it ignored how people actually use CCleaner. Merging the Registry Cleaner into Custom Clean broke functional separation and user intent. The new UI stripped out critical control options, like protecting specific cookies — the kind of tiny but meaningful feature that represented loyalty and trust. And then, as if on cue, a new “Ideas Board” appeared — asking users to submit feature suggestions for the “future of CCleaner.” The irony is almost poetic. You don’t need an idea board when your community is already shouting feedback you refuse to acknowledge. From a product-management lens, CCleaner 7 illustrates several timeless lessons: Communicate before you change: Never disguise a fundamental overhaul as a routine update. Respect user configuration: Data, preferences, and habits are part of the product’s emotional value. Don’t break muscle memory for aesthetics: A sleek UI means nothing if it disrupts daily usability. Empathy beats innovation theater: “Listening to users” means fixing what you broke before asking for new ideas. Ironically, this release has made CCleaner more valuable — not as software, but as a cautionary tale. Every product manager, designer, and QA lead should study Version 7 as a reminder that progress without communication is just chaos with better branding. Maybe the next time someone in a sprint review says “Let’s modernize the experience”, someone will pull up CCleaner 7 and reply, “Let’s also make sure we don’t modernize our users right out of the product.” '

Google AI says they're one and the same, generally called split pins in Australia. They use AIMS Industrial Supplies as a reference. The AI also says the Brits call them split pins or split cotter pins, the Americans call them cotter pins, then it goes on to describe a true cotter pin. https://aimsindustrial.com.au/blogs/product-guides/split-pin-cotter-pin-guide

It was the same in Queensland when I was growing up. Even as a young adult everyone was still calling them cotter pins, but you rarely hear it these days. Split pins has been the common term for a long time now

They say VB stands for Very Bad, but I thought it was streets ahead of XXXX.

One thing I've noticed a lot lately while watching YouTube videos is Americans pronouncing solder as 'sodder'. Same for a noun as verb, and it seems to be wide spread across states and not restricted to certain areas. They sodder a leakey pipe so they can water their erb garden.

The way the so called financial experts on the ABC radio explain that is that Australia had a much bigger underlying inflation problem than other countries before the war in the Middle East started. Because we were doing so much worse on inflation than other countries before the war, we started behind the eight ball and have a bigger job than the others to control it.

ome, I'm guessing you mean Jarome Luai and Brian To’o heading to the PNG Chiefs.

The big thing with women's rugby league these days is trying to grow the game, ie: bigger crowds resulting in more sponsorship bringing more money into the game. When that happens, a lot of the players can go fully professional. It's frustrating for them at the moment. Most of them have to have a day job and juggle that with playing while they see their male counterparts on big annual salaries to play football full time.

Yes, Jesse Southwell, our star new recruit for the Brisbane Broncos did all the kicking. She missed number 14 out of the 21 kicks. I'm not sure why she didn't play in the match against England. The girl doing the kicking in that match missed a lot and Jesse rarely misses. She's not only a great kicker but a playmaker as well; she's one of the top women players in the game and only 21 so plenty of career time ahead of her.

Albo stepping back:

The Jillaroos have beaten Wales 124 to 6 in the Women's Rugby League World Cup. It's a world record for total number of points scored in any Rugby League match ever, men's or women's. The Welsh seemed to be a happy lot. They were down 100-0 with ten minutes to go when they scored their only try. The reaction from the crowd of supporters and the players was as if they'd won the world cup. Good training for the Welsh team to be able to play a top tier team like Australia. They'll be reviewing that match many times over in training for sure.

Albo might be able to have a break from stepping on rakes regarding his golf course problems as it's all going to higher levels of scrutiny. He's been referred to the parliamentry privileges committee to investigate whether he's mislead parliament and a Senate inquiry starts in a couple of weeks time. The Australian National Audit Office, the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and Marrickville Golf Club officials will be attending the inquiry.

Two months, that's bizarre for something that size. Like a third world country. What's going on down there, is the council bankrupt or something?

It's interesting how different people view things. A bloke on marketplace not too far from me has two Howard Juniors for sale. They are almost runners, just need a clean out as they've sat for a while, but otherwise complete, near running machines. One is a MK1 and the other is a MK2 which has the reverse gearbox. Also he has a non-running Howard Terrier he's throwing in for free. The Terrier has the 300cc side valve engine the same as the old Kelpie engine I have. I was just a little bit too late messaging the seller. He said he has a prospective buyer coming tomorrow afternoon to look at them and will let me know if he doesn't commit to buying them. So here's the thing. The seller wants $150 for the three hoes, roughly equivalent to half a trolly of groceries if you're just buying cheap food. Forgetting about the rotary hoe part of it and breaking it down into parts, for $150 you get two 670cc single cylinder side valve engines with the motorcycle style round crankcase, one 300cc single side valve engine, heaps of solid steel shafts, bearings, pulleys, gearboxes, clutches, fuel and oil tanks and other various handy components. You could sell the carburettor off one of the Juniors and get your $150 back. So why someone would be a tyre kicker and not seal the deal stright away is beyond me. The only thing I can think of is that the bloke is solely looking for a viable rotary hoe to dig a veggie garden and doesn't see the other value in it. I'll see what eventuates tomorrow regarding whether they get sold or not. The message I got back from the seller gives me the impression I'm second cab off the rank if the other bloke doesn't buy them. Attached is a photo of a Junior engine. It shares the exact same top end as the front cylinder on the 80 cu.inch Howard Eight V-twin in previous posts.

Fairly close, those numbers. If you take a net figure of promises kept (kept minus broken) it's 26 to 21 in Morrison's favour, so not much in it. I can remember John Howard copping flak on a lot of broken promises in his first budget after defeating the Keating government. The term core or non core promises was invented around then if my memory is correct.

Got a better pic of the old Richardson drill today. It's a heavy old thing, a lot of cast iron and heavy steel plate where the mount has been modified. This is the way I'll mount it as a horizontal drive if the gearbox lube works out.

I love old industrial machinery. Today I picked up this old J.S. Richardson drill on marketplace and couldn't resist it for $50. There's way more value than that in the steel, electric motor and other components. Good old drills, made in Sydney in the days when we manufactured stuff and employed Australians. At some stage in it's career it's been converted from a pedestal drill to a wall mount. I already have a big industrial grade pedestal drill, so my first thought with this is to mount it like the second photo I've edited with a flip-around and a cutout. In other words, use the wall mounting plate as a base stand and do a bit of sideways stuff with it. I'll have a good look in the morning and check how that will fit with the gearbox oil level/ fill and drain plugs etc. in that orientation.

That's a tricky one. Often the leader of a party gets the job because he or she is the best performer on the floor of Parliament. That ability can sometimes also make them the best to sell their stuff to the media. Some ministers are ok at their jobs but are prone to embarrassing gaffs in front of the media so they get sidelined/insulated/firewalled, pick whichever term suits. Often the PM is left with the job of dealing with the media. At least they have their mandatory flanking noddies to keep them company. It puts a big workload on a PM, particularly if those under him/her are bigger idiots than he/she is. It's probably a fine line between overworking the PM and delegating too much freedom to ministers. You see the worst effect of the latter in some developing countries with the amount of corruption that free hand can result in.

Times are changing. I was listening to a researcher on the ABC radio and he was talking about the younger generations getting their political information via social media. My brain sieve can't quote the figure he gave regarding those getting info solely from social media, but I was surprised how high it was. That's why Albo and other pollies are doing these social media gigs, to chase the younger vote. We boomers and those a bit younger are used to getting ours from traditional media.

Always pays to dig deep into Google AI references. I've seen a lot over time that just quote what some bloke said on Facebook or some other public forum.