Here is a picture of a nice garden I noticed the other day whilst Nattie and myself were going for a walk. The garden itself is segmented into a few sections with some lawn, rows of flowers along the path and another section of lawn which is bordered by plants. The picture here is of the flowers along the path.
The thing that makes this garden especially special is that only a couple years ago it was really just a big hedge that some idiot decided would look better if it was on fire. The burnt hedge has since been removed and the front bit of the garden is where the hedge once was. The way the owners have recovered from the tradgedy of the firebug is truly sensational.
This morning I had the great pleasure of talking with the king of Radio, Mr. John Laws, the conversation was to do with Nguyen Tuong Van who is due to be hanged in Singapore in a couple weeks.
I must say I was very impressed with the short amount of time it took to get through to Lawsie. When I started ringing at about 10:50 the open line number, 13 13 32, was engaged, so I kept trying. It was about 10:55 when I did get through, and I ended up speaking with Lawsie at about 11:07 after the news and Lawsie reading some emails.
I had the radio setup to record the event, but in my haste (and I can’t really check these things when I’m on hold) the volume of the radio was a bit too loud, resulting in some clipping of the digital recording. It is still perfectly legible, just not perfect.
I have been informed that somebody is claiming I have deleted their account on this blog, I don’t know how they came to this conclusion as accounts have not been deleted. Perhaps they forgot their password in which case they can order a new one with a couple clicks, or maybe they stumbled across a post where comments are closed, that happens after a post has existed for 60 days, and may also happen at the discretion of the site owner when comments spiral out of control.
If whoever it is happens to be confused by it all, they can easily contact me via the contact form and I will try and help them out.
Another week and another huge slip, I wouldn’t be surprised if Schnappi is out of the charts completely in a few weeks. Schnappi is down to 36, although I have noticed another related song called “Ein Lama In Yokohama” has made it onto the charts, however I will not be following the progress of that one.
This weeks award goes to Merle Haggard and the feature song for the week is “The Fighting Side Of Me”
I hear people talkin’ bad
About the way they have to live here, in this country
Harpin’ on the wars we fight
An’ gripin’ ’bout the way things oughta be
An’ I don’t mind ’em switchin’ sides an’
Standin’ up for things they believe in
But when they’re runnin’ down our country, man
They’re walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me
They’re, walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me
Runnin’ down the our of life
Our fightin’ men have fought and died to keep
If you don’t love it, leave it
Let this song that I’m singin’ be a warnin’
When you’re runnin’ down our country horse
You’re walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me
I read about some squirrely guy
Who claims, that he just don’t believe in fightin’
And I wonder just how long
The rest of us can count on bein’ free
They love our milk an’ honey
But they preach about some other way, of livin’
And when they’re runnin’ down our country, man
They’re walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me
They’re, walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me
Runnin’ down our way of life
Our fightin’ men have fought and died to keep
If you don’t love it, leave it
Let this song that I’m singin’ be a warnin’
When you’re runnin’ our my country, man
You’re walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me
You’re, walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me
Runnin’ down our way of life
Our fightin’ men have fought and died to keep
If you don’t love it, leave it
Let this song that I’m singin’ be a warnin’
When you’re runnin’ down our country horse
You’re walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me
This one was from a public servant trying to intimidate a lawyer on the television show “Judge John Deed“, the quote isn’t exact, but it is close enough:
Public Servant: “I’m a public servant, we don’t learn from our mistakes, we live in the present!”
Another quote, which was the “Quote Of The Day” on Google’s Personalised Homepage (sourced from http://www.quotationspage.com/qotd.html) was by Hesketh Pearson who said “Misquotation is, in fact, the pride and privilege of the learned. A widely- read man never quotes accurately, for the rather obvious reason that he has read too widely.”
And to all the people declaring that I am not “normal”, Ellen Goodman has some words of wisdom for you:
“Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.”
For the first time ever the popular Retirement And Lifestyle Expo, as seen in Sydney and Melbourne, is coming to Canberra.
Denise Drysdale will be making an appearance, and more importantly in my view, 2CC will be there with some outside broadcasts.
Regular 2CC and 2UE listeners will know that 2UE broadcast from their own fully fledged studio at the Sydney Retirement And Lifestyle Expo, and for them it is a very large and exciting event, I wouldn’t be surprised if 2CC treat it the same way.
2CC will be broadcasting the Drive Show on Friday November 25 from 3pm-6pm and Weekend Magazine & The Trading Post from 9am-2pm on Saturday November 26 (according to the information I heard Mike Frame distributing today). I personally plan on making my way down to the expo on the Friday and (hopefully) taking some photos of the 2CC outside broadcast. I can’t make it down there on the Saturday but if I could I’m sure I would be making the journey on that day as well.
The expo is taking place at Exhibition Park In Canberra from Friday November 25 to Sunday November 27 between 10am & 4:30pm
Entry is $8 for adults and $6 for Seniors Card holders and Pensioners. Accompanied children get in free.
You may recall that in September I started talking about my “new” radio which is actually older than myself. In this I said that I would take a photo of my radio, which I finally remembered to do today. The radio is a Sony Walkman WM-F57, built in 1986, a year before I was born. The radio features an inbuilt multidirectional auto-reverse cassette deck and a speaker, with the use of the speaker on/off switch it is possible to have headphones and the speaker in use at the same time, but this would probably drain the batteries quicker. The radio runs on two AA size batteries.
Here is the front:
As is shown under the tape deck window, the tape deck features Dolby Noise Reduction.
This picture is of the top of the radio:
The switches at the top, from left to right are as follows:
Input: Tape, Radio
Tape Select: Normal, CrO2 (Metal)
Battery Condition Indicator Light (not a switch)
Dolby/FM Mode: Off/Mono, On/Stereo
Speaker: On, Off
The headphone socket can be seen on the next row, to the right of that is the tape direction mode switch, which changes the auto reverse mode from “A->B->Stop” to “A->B->Restart”, to the right of that is the direction change button, followed by the fast forward button, the rewind button, the play button and the stop button.
The next row contains a socket for a 3V DC external power source.
The back of the radio (slightly out of focus):
At top right you can see the volume control dial, which works on a scale of 0-10. The visible label provides some information such as model number (WM-F57), frequency range (AM: 530-1605 kHz and FM: 87.6-108MHz), the number and type of batteries it uses and in small print a series of numbers which appear to be a serial number (3-335-824-01). The unreadable label in the photo is a notice about Dolby trademarks, and the section labeled “Open” with an arrow is the battery compartment.
On the opposite side to the volume control is a switch for band selection (AM and FM) and a tuning dial.
In the entire time I have had this radio the dial has ventured off 2CC (1206 AM) a couple times to briefly check other stations, and has only ventured off the AM band once to see what stations I could recieve (I seem to recall stopping on News Radio for about 30 seconds).
On some of Nattie’s longer walks, the radio has accompanied us, this morning would be a good example as we enjoyed David Young’s Garden on our 40 minute walk.
For those that aren’t aware, the Postmaster General’s Department (or PMG) was a government department responsible for the postal service, the telephone service, and apparently the ABC broadcasts among other things. The PMG was broken up into the companies now known as Telstra and Australia Post in 1975. A company called “Broadcast Australia” is now responsible for the operation of Canberra’s ABC radio transmitters, and pretty much the entire ABC and SBS networks, among others.
Anyway, the matchbox cars that I was thinking of are some I bought from the post office a while back, the first one is a 1927 Model T Ford PMG van.
The large P.M.G is a shiny gold colour, but the flash of the camera made it show up as a brownish colour. You can also see on the “door” of the vehicle “PMG 282”
Next up is a postie bike showing the letters “PMG” and the numbers “692”.
And finally, the last vehicle in the collection doesn’t bear the PMG mark, but it is an interesting vehicle none the less. It is an Australia Post bright yellow Express Post van, which in this case is in the form of a Ford Transit from year unknown.
These vehicles show an evolution of postal transport and the postal system in Australia, which in itself is rather fascinating.
Thank you to everyone who sent in entries for our Golden Bull awards this year. We have spent many hours laughing at the best and worst of English gobbledygook, and have managed to compile a list of winners, which will be announced in the next few weeks. However, if you missed the deadline, do not fear as we are now accepting entries for next year’s awards. The winners of the ‘serious’ prizes including the Inside Write award, will be announced at the beginning of December.
Looks like it’ll be a busy time here on Samuel’s Blog at the start of December, we’ve got the large photographic journey to Sydney and back for the New Day Australia Christmas Function (people keep asking me about tickets, unfortunately they are all sold out), the usual monthly site stats, a summary of the Plain English Awards, and to top all that off, the Samuel Awards 2005 are also coming in December.
They are pictures of a Wheel Of Fortune set where the contestants are trying to solve a puzzle, the first picture was drawn on paper and was designed as a planning picture.
In the picture you can see the puzzle board at the top showing a partially completed puzzle, underneath that you can see the “puzzle genre” graphic and co-host Sophie Faulkner, further down you can see the wheel and host of the time Rob Elliot announcing that there are three “O”s in the puzzle.
The picture was destined to become the cover for my art folder for the art class I was in at the time, and was promptly drawn on there.
There are a few changes in this picture, firstly the picture has colour and the newly revealed letters have a highlighting. The genre graphic has been coloured green to match the TV show’s graphic, and a speaker emitting the sound effects heard on the show has been placed to the left of that. Sophie Faulkner’s dress in now striped. On the far left you can spot two camera operators, one with the camera pointing at the puzzle board and the other pointing at the contestants, who actually appear in this version of the picture. Apart from that, the contestant’s wheel pointers have been coloured to match the TV show. The yellow contestant is requesting “an O for orange” and Rob Elliot is announcing in sentence form “There are three O’s”
In this picture you can see that “Top Dollar” on the wheel is $2000, which means that this was prior to the “inflation” of the money as Rob Elliot called it. This was also at the time when Daewoo were the motor vehicle sponsor of Wheel Of Fortune.
The point of the cover artwork was to identify the owner of the folder, despite the missing letters in the puzzle, it would be fairly easy to identify that I am the owner of the folder.
Alrighty then, Nielsen have put their report up on the web here and I’ve summarised it all below. Unfortunately Nielsen don’t release detailed reports to the public for regional areas (Yep, Canberra is regional in radio), so we will just have to make do with overall results.
The general trend is for losses by the AM stations and gains by the FM stations. Interestingly, FM 104.7 managed to take over the top spot from Mix 106.3, the survey was undertaken from October 9 to November 5.
Survey 2 for Canberra Radio has been released, with FM 104.7 taking top spot from Mix 106.3, both 666 ABC Canberra and 2CC recorded losses, as did 2CA and radio national. The general trend was a loss across the AM band and gains on the FM band, which isn’t exactly what I wanted to see, but it is interesting none the less.
I’ll wait for Nielsen to release the full details before running a more comprehensive story on the issue.
Well, after recieving a response of “We’ll employ Samuel as and when needed” and that time being somewhere at the other end of next month, and probably only for a few days, I am seeking a new job. On top of the strange mistreatment, I was also sent a job advert by my current employer for a job elsewhere…needless to say, I get the hint, and I’m moving on. Unfortunately for them the people who are now left to run the network are seriously understaffed and probably don’t know half of what I know about it, but I’ve done my level best to impart my knowledge on the incumbant employees, if they don’t remember it is not my problem.
After spotting a few good jobs which I feel like applying for and tracking down some former colleagues for advice, I am quietly confident that I have everything in order.
There isn’t much more I can say without breaking confidentiality agreements (something I have no intention of doing) so I will leave it at that.
For the record, I am intending on continuing study in the middle of next year, although that is variable depending on my employment situation.
One thing I’ve noticed is that, when you’re half asleep, just about everything makes perfect sense. Last night, whilst half asleep I was thinking about this, and trying to think of one of the many examples of such mind behaviour, however I failed, a decided to make up an example of something that woul makes sense when you’re half asleep, I came up with a scenario where someone might need more floor space in their bedroom, so the obvious and logical thing to do would be to move the bed onto the ceiling.
From this point I started thinking about how one would go about doing that, and coming to the conclusion that my bed is tucked in best at the foot of the bed, I would possibly end up hanging upside down from feet, then I woke up a bit and realised that this simply wouldn’t happen because the mattress is not fixed to the bed, so I started thinking about strapping the matress and associated sheets and blankets to the bed, which would also sove the falling out of the bed problem. This morning when I reflected on this I realised that, rather than attaching the bed to the ceiling upside down, it would make more sense to attach it the right way up, which would mean that nobody would fall out, although you would want to have a strong ceiling.
