willedoo

I bought this pedestal drill on marketplace today. It's a bit of a monster, two of us loaded it into the back of the ute, but it must weigh at least 100kg or more. The head is solid cast steel which contributes a lot to the weight, although it's built like a tank from top to bottom. One thing about it though, the on/off switch on the left hand side reminds me of the safety aspect of modern drills with front facing switches. I've got an old bench drill with that same side mount setup and it's not ideal.

Don't worry Brendan, it's not your chain I'm jerking. I was expecting a bite from someone else.

One Nation seems to be getting a lot of free publicity, some good some bad depending on the media outlets, but the media is certainly giving them some oxygen. It took a shark attack in Sydney to finally bump ON off the top of Google's news feed. It's been saturation level lately.

In case anyone is wondering why I clicked the informative button on Brendan's post - I saw the post and he had a string of icons there starting to resemble a poker machine. There was left to right, 1 Like, 1 Haha, 1 Winner and 1 Sad. So I thought why not give him a crack at getting the full jackpot - one of every type, the full string. So come on blokes, don't be mean, all it needs now is 1 Confused, 1 Thanks and 1 Agree. I'm not sure if anyone's ever hit the jackpot on this forum before.

I think a lot of the issue nowdays is that almost everything relies on computers. There's humans there but they have to work within their company's systems. Computers don't have common sense and because the human staff have to work within their computer systems, common sense is long gone from corporate customer service. A big portion of the work force these days have never known a day of their life when computers weren't a big part of it, so they don't know any better. To them, ineffective, unproductive computer bureaucracy is the norm.

Bumper season that should read.

It always amazes me what they can do in that light soil. A cousin of mine farms around 11,000 hectares in the Tammin area and they get into a fair bit of high tech stuff. At that scale a lot of it is about minimising costs so a lot of their decision making is data based. It's another world from where he grew up with black soil metres deep.

The main rock around my area is rhyolite. A lot of years ago I had a bloke with a dozer do a slight contour modification, basically pushing off the topsoil, doing a cut and fill then replacing the topsoil. Before he replaced the topsoil, he pointed out some patches of a purple coloured, soft chalky rock that had been exposed. He told me it was rich in minerals and that bananas did really well with it. Turned out he was right. I planted Lady Fingers on that area and they did really well considering the shallow topsoil depth. I fed a lot of flying foxes and bush turkeys on those bananas. The flying foxes weren't too bad; they wouldn't rip the bags apart and would just eat the end bananas on the bunch that they could reach at the bag openings. The turkeys would fly up onto the bags, rip the bags open and peck bits out of every banana on the bunch. They wouldn't eat complete bananas, just destroy the whole bunch by partially eating every single banana.

I always thought there was just bunya nuts, but have since found out there's bunya nuts and there's bunya nuts. This year was a bumber season for the nuts in S.E. Queensland with trees bearing well above average crops. A mate of mine lives up on the Darling Downs and recently bought some nuts down from his area that he'd collected. They were noticeably much sweeter than the nuts from my area, and you would think they'd had sugar added to the water, but they hadn't, only salt added. There's a difference in climate that might be part of the equation, but we also have much more acidic soil down here. Where he comes from a lot of the soil is naturally alkaline. I'm wondering whether that's a factor in the taste difference.

It would be good if some websites could make the chatbot less intrusive. I guess it depends on your particular device or OS, but on mine the chatbot pop-ups tends to cover content. A bit similar to those retail sites that have continual annoying pop-ups covering content and being an eye distraction just to tell you someone else has just bought something. The problem with it is that if you turn javascript off, the rest of the site loses function.

I've only ever known one bloke in that category. He never knew what party was in power state or federally, and could never once in his life name who the PM was. He used to go along every election and vote Labor. He was a funny character, he had cut a couple of holes in his beanie to use it as a teapot warmer. When he'd finished the pot of tea, he'd take it off the teapot and have a nice warm beanie to put on his head.

Marty, you do know that I was joking, don't you?

I still think our system here takes a lot of beating. A constitutional monachy with the best of both worlds. No el presidente, all government members are elected, not mates appointed by a president, and we have an elected senate, no unelected house of lords. Having an admittedly quirky, but harmless wingnut in pommieland as our theoretical head of state is a small price to pay for it.

I got an email from my power retailer today outlining the new pricing. The daily supply charge has increased to the tune of an extra $180 per year. The tariff rate for useage has decreased by 7.27 cents per kWh. At my average useage, that will be about $167 less per year, so the net result is $13 p.a. worse off, no big deal. My useage is about half that of an average household, so an average household would be better off under the new price structure by at least $150 per year.

It could very well represent TonyAbbott Derangement Syndrome. I know someone who's got a severe case of that.

That last sentence should read rational. not rationl. That sticky 'a' key has been bugging me for a while now.

Thanks octave, and yes, you are a rational person. Your views are always balanced and thoughtful and appreciated. No TDS, just rationl analysis.

Time will tell with Tony Abbott. I'm not about to underestimate him. He was an unsuccessful prime minister but a very successful opposition leader. He saw off the Rudd/Gillard show with a handful of three word slogans and it took Labor three terms to get back in the hot seat. His record as opposition leader is of pulling Labor down to a hung parliament in one election and leading the Coalition to a landslide defeat of Labor in the following election. This time around his job is to rebuild the party. Good luck to him with that one, I don't like his chances there, but you never know until it happens one way or the other.

It's a fairly simple equation - the easier it is for criminals to get away with it or get off lightly if they're caught, then the more prolific crime will be.

On the other side of the coin, if it's a simple straightforward question you want answered, the Google AI overview is a quick handy way to do it. I'm referring there to questions of the type that could probably only have a correct answer.

That's odd, it's working now. Good trick. I use Floorp which is Firefox based.

I tried it Marty but unfortunately it doesn't work. Maybe that trick only works with certain browsers.

The other issue I wonder about with Google AI is the revenue effect it will have on website operators. Most websites are funded by click per view payments from the advertising (sponsers) on their website. Google AI is harvesting information from their sites to use as a response to Google search questions. But if people don't go past the top of the page where the AI answer is, all those websites are missing out on site traffic which equals income. I wonder if Google pays them a royalty for using their information.

That's a new one, two bills. The only issues I've had with Origin is not entirely due to them as they are only the retailers. Energex is the provider who owns the power and lines and it was all good and simple when their staff drove around and did the meter reading. Then they farmed it out to a contracting company and their people don't like to drive off the bitumen. That means they won't come on the place and most bills are estimates. The estimates used to be based on your past useage but now are based on average household useage. I don't use much power, so I'll get an estimated bill based on the useage of a large family household. That means I have to do a self meter read so Origin can reissue a corrected bill and this happens every three months. I've got 3 phase power (three meters) but only two have ever been wired in. The third meter permanently reads a string of zeros, and when you input your numbers into their websites self read option, the software won't accept the one with the zeros because it's the same as the previous reading. Even though I've explained all this to them, after swapping emails, they get me to take a photo of the inactive meter and send it to them. After that I get an email thanking me and letting me know it's been raised with their working group team and they will keep me posted. And so it goes on and on like this every bill. Previously, it all worked seamlessly for decades until common sense vacated the corporate sector.

It's always the price they pay for being in the hot seat. When things aren't good, they're the ones caught in the headlights.