Move.

Yesterday I had a bit of a play putting together the model car I bought a while back. Since I never aim for perfection anyway the loser like job I do doesn't matter, however I'm stalled now until I can find some amber and red colour for the tail lights, even Jimmy isn't happy with the clear look back there.

It's the last day of the year now, we had 3060 mm of rain here this year, 50% more than average but it felt average except for a waterlogged March.
Happy new year all.

It could be worse, somehow.

Someone's luck ran out early Saturday morning when powered by a few drinks he managed to carefully control his car into a collision with the police station.

At least he will have an xmas to remember, even if it's all bad.

Happy xmas all.

For us it's already way better than the last one, unless it starts raining heavily we're not going to be flooded, unlike last year. Here's pics of the rising Log Creek down from our place last year, and one I took this morning that has a dry road.

A car park for whom?

A noisy morning here as the Crushers parking area appears to be getting excavated for a fancy car park.
I doubt whether they use it more than 10 times a year but I suppose they managed to score a taxpayer handout. At least it looks like they plan on using the soil removed again.

Terrible light for a photo, sorry about the gloom.

Grace and I must add our sympathy to our friend John in Newfoundland whose wife Theresa died last Thursday.

A sea of grey and white.

I was surprised by the Coles car park being rather full on Friday, scarily the supermarket was busy too.

The surprise caused me to take a photo (with the new camera), and sadly it demonstrates just how bland we've become with grey replacing white as the dominant shade of car.

Golly it'd be nice to see some colour again.
Because I always park very distant from the entry the extra vehicles had no real effect on parking Artie, a keen eye may see his rear.

SH100 plaything.

Jimmy just wasted a bit more money on a new pocket camera to take with him about town.
I must be becoming a bit of a Samsung fan but bottom line is nearly always price and Samsung do price quite well.
The WB700 on the left fits fairly easily in a pocket but its extra zoom is not needed about town and Jimmy got to thinking something smaller and simpler may be better to carry about town, also the new SH100 on the right was available in a colour.

The WiFi had me a bit curious but in reality for me its use is too limited to be a selling point, for others it may be just the trick.
Delivery was a pain, I tracked it leaving China, then being cleared by customs here quickly, followed by a week of sitting in the Sydney freight depot, then 4 more days to travel here. However for $132 all up, hardly moaning material.
Function wise the SH100 is about what I was looking for, I didn't want fancy controls, I just wanted the auto mode to give a good cheery result, and that's something Samsung do manage very well. Most of my use is in bright sunny days so Samsung's less than stellar high ISO performance isn't much of an issue for me, I trade that off for what I perceive is Samsung having excellent lenses and their programmers favouring a bright punchy look that I prefer.

I've read reviewers criticising the SH100's touch screen's feedback but I'm finding it excellent and sensitive, perhaps the firmware upgrade addressed the moans there.

Bling.

Something pretty for Artie, though Jimmy really did it so he can see where the front of Artie is.

Forrest Beach.

I zipped up here last Sunday hoping to get some cyclone info from a display, at least it was a chance to get out and take some pics. That's a coconut palm, they may soon be treated as a noxious weed if the Greens have their way, personally I find coconut delicious but I have to be wary as too much gives me the spews.

Lower right is a coconut that has fallen.

So would I.

I spotted this custom plate in town the other day, much nicer than the blatantly false "smart state" one.

Sadly for me golf is history as my arms just plain and simply can't swing without tear inducing pain, and if that wasn't enough my fingers hurt just thinking about gripping a golf bat.

Life moves on.

Ruined.

Sorry I've been very slow of late, I had some trouble upgrading my computer's cooler which sadly ended up with Jimmy making a total mess of the motherboard's CPU socket in attempting to clean off some crud that had prevented the pins connecting. Jimmy's eyesight just isn't good enough to play with these fiddly things any more so another same type of board was ordered but seemed to ride upon the slowest courier in the world.

Anyway job done now and the new water cooler is quite quiet, or as the new super educated generation would write, quite quite.

A key, how exciting.

Well not really but the lass who cut it did say there was no way it was going to work unless my lock is seriously borked. It works and Jimmy doesn't care, he just wanted a plain key, plus now has the old one as a spare.

Anyway after that feeble excuse for a post, happy birthday to brother Mega. 7*8 today.

Something happening.

I went into town this morning to get money from the bank and the road was blocked, something must have happened at Lee's Hotel.
Of course Lee's Hotel or the Day Dawn as it was known back then was the place where the bush poem that the iconic song "The Pub with no Beer" was made from was written, due to WW2 beer shortages.

Of course song is the only useful outlet for poetry, bush or any other sort.

Edit: I should have looked a bit closer, It's the Royal Hotel, and the press reports it had a bit of a fire, no reported casualties.
I couldn't smell anything nor see any smoke.

A proper URL again.

Since our new ISP provides fairly generous website space I've moved the webcam to it.
http://home.exetel.com.au/zzzz/

Temporarily at least.

The age old webcam can be found at 58.96.42.106 (type that into your browser's address bar)
I expect to change back to a proper URL soon enough, but this should be OK till then

Parcel a coming.

Caught Sandy the parcel contractor pulling up today, saved her the bother of getting out, pity the delivery was nothing special, a cable that still waits for the thing for it to plug into.
We get a much better delivery service than most Aussies, but I think a smile goes a long way.

Now after that quite useless post I must advise anyone who ever logs into our webcam that the URL shall be changing in about a week, the new address to be advised when Jimmy has a clue to what he's doing.

Different at least.

Spotted yesterday, different but didn't change my pulse rate a bit.

Black helmet, I suppose daring to be different can only go so far.

Charming.

I think this one gives me a friendly welcoming look, I might use it on Facebook.

Now I can ride a pushbike too.

This mask was cheap too and also gives me the chin I never had, good enough chin to let me ride the Tour-de-France if my legs (heart actually) were up to any hill steeper than dead flat.

It also has the toothbrush moustache that I'd grow if I could ever be bothered.

Teeth again.

Since my mouth looks like an old piano these days, some yellow, some black, and some missing, I saw this online and thought it would give me a nice toothy smile again.
It works, cheaply too!

An interesting little issue.

I've changed all of Artie's lamps to LED (except for the headlamps) and an intriguing issue was when applying the brake my parking and instrument lamps lit up. Not a big issue but Jimmy got to thinking and (I think) it was due to the brake/tail light using a clever circuit that just lights all the LEDs in a dimmer fashion for the tail light part, this was feeding voltage back to the park light circuit.
Solved by placing a diode in the tail light wiring, or in this case two of them due to it being easier to access the wires at the lamp. I just used a couple of salvaged old 1 Amp  diodes but they could be marginal if I placed an olde style lamp back into the circuit.

BTW the headlights are not easy to change, I've yet to find LEDs that are anywhere near as good as the halogen ones and also Artie's H/L circuit switches the earth rather than the usual 12V line, this would mean having to wire an adapter anyway. HID are frowned upon as well as being arguably illegal, so I'll just leave them for now.

I must get active again.

My health has returned, possibly better than it's been for a good while too, fingers crossed.

Anyway I saw these in Coles today, would have bought a pack too except they were too expensive, can't see them ever becoming popular in the USA though.

Probably as good as it gets.

Tomorrow if the stars align right then I expect to start eating at least half decently again, but it's nice to see a mid-teenage number again.

I stopped losing weight for a while after the last post despite not eating, strange? but the body must have been a bit full of toxins and my dark pee since then must have flushed them out, my mind wandering while that was happening was a bit of fun though.
Then I felt a bit better and lost a bit more weight.

Maybe my pancreas has given up the ghost, the doc can find out next visit.

Confession: I'm a drug addict.

I've been fearing seeing the doctor as well as the pharmacist of late so I thought I'd see if I could survive albeit painfully without the pills prescribed.
That was a major mistake, after about a week I had the worst angina attack I've ever had, 25 hours of agony. I'm still as weak as a kitten and have learnt my lesson, if it was any worse I would have even risked my life going to hospital, but knowing they don't like me kept me from going there.

Age does weary and what I could and did do 15 years ago is no longer possible, now I have to gather the courage to see the doctor again, as well as hide in the corner of the pharmacy while all of the important people get served.

These are my main pills, I also take a couple more that are more to do with quality of life than required for it.
And no I haven't been on the booze much for a long time.

Doing all right.

These red flowers sprout up about this time every year, maybe they signal spring or something. Anyway it appears a few more of them show up every year so something must be pleasing them

Overpriced but fantastic.

Finally the people near us have safe pedestrian access to town, no need to share a narrow road bridge with trucks any more.

The council milked way too much money from the taxpayer to do it but at least a much needed job is done.

Usual D'OH!

I had no sooner finished Artie's steering rack makeover when I merely tapped my new tool trolley parking Artie and the castor wheel collapsed. You get so used to things like this happening that it's lost all meaning, anyway I was able to while an hour away this morning fixing it, my time isn't worth anything so repair is viable, it'd be junk for anyone else.

Yuck.

I ordered a replacement bearing for Artie's steering rack as soon as I bought it, I had correct info that it took a common 6202 bearing and by the feeling and look of the rack it must have been stuffed.

It took ages for the $3.50 bearing to arrive from China but the rack was a bit of a horror story upon removal, running a muddy rust mixture caused by water ingress, and yes the old bearing was stuffed.

Artie by rights should get a new rack but I think it may be right till I retire him to the graveyard now.

I learned not to take shortcuts here, I only created extra work for myself by trying, It really has to be cleaned up and sorted out properly. Now happily the crunchy steering is gone, replaced by a smooth normal action.

Gloomy Tuesday.

At last another wet day and as per schedule "Ergon" the power people switched us off for nearly six hours while they replaced a few old boards carrying the H/T line past our place.
In an example of productivity it took them about four hours to do the half hour job two poles up from our place, all they replaced was the two top boards. The vehicle on the right was a lollypop car which even had one occasion to put a stop sign out, the rest of the time the pair of them were trying to see how many cigarettes they could devour in a day.
Ergon brought up plenty of staff so while they did a few poles that day had a gang for each one plus a continual stream of supervisors driving around smoking and avoiding rain.

At least the massive power bill increases help to pay for it.

Genuine "Goodride"

First I should say that I have renamed Fritz to Artie, in part due to the numberplate which has "RRT" as the letters.

I got a pair of these fairly cheaply on eBay to replace the 12 year old ones on the rear of Artie, even had fun mounting and balancing them. They raise the rear a bit and may draw the ire of our nanny state which manages to have a law against everything, but finding tyres in the correct size for Artie isn't easy and I'm sure I'd only be met locally with a blank stare and a price tag designed to write him off. I think the pair cost $137 including freight.

Found.

Going on the info in Fritz's owner's manual I found it parked at its old home.
Easy to understand why it is so dusty, being on a dirt road but since the photo is one of the new high res ones Google are rolling out it comes as a surprise to see it parked in the garage.

Should the old owners see this, I'd be more than happy to tell them what's happening with their old toy.

Wow!

Jimmy was a bit slow to find this out but Fritz's seats unfold together to make a fairly comfortable bed.

Cool.

Jimmy's waiting for some LED lamps to arrive before he puts the dash back together, so don't worry about it looking very rough.

Relief.

This is a major reason for changing cars, now I can easily lift the important bits out of floodwater and have some peace of mind.

New belt.

A way easier job than I was expecting, nothing was stuck or stripped or seized or broken.

Another productive day.

The boot was torn on the tie-rod end and although it's otherwise OK without being dustproof it'll be soon buggered, since I'm no longer part of any trade I think I might only embarrass myself trying to find a new boot, so I bought a complete unit, usually you'd go to a lot of trouble to keep the wheel alignment the same when fitting but the previous owner must have taken it to one of the 9 out of 10 shonk shops because the alignment was woeful. I've set it a bit closer now and will probably play a bit more later.

Why can't people leave the alignment as it left the factory, they get it right and then shops proceed to ruin it.

Playing with a Nippon-Denso alternator.

Since Jimmy in his youth seemed to always have alternator trouble with whatever dunger he was using, he's made a habit of inspecting them in his mature years.
First up remove the alternator then spin the pulley if it spins smoothly then merely looking at the brushes should suffice, if not then don't worry about brushes and get an exchange unit.

This is the first ND one I've played with and I like it already. Most of them are probably very similar with the back cover plate needing to come off, use a 7mm spanner on the three green pointered screws, or if you're brave and strong a philips head screwdriver, but be warned the Japanese always do up screws far tighter than mere mortals can cope with. The Yellow nut is a 10mm hex and only has to be undone to the last thread or two and the insulator will pull out of the cover plate and allow its removal.

The new brushholder cost $21 on ebay and judging by the wear on the old one wasn't needed for a long time yet, but peace of mind is a wonderful thing when you're out in the middle of nowhere, so I put it in anyway.

The brushholder on these are simply held in by the green pointered screws, use a good screwdriver for these not granddad's old hand me down, you don't want to burr them. The lower one is longer but the short one won't fit in that hole so you'll know if you get them wrong like I did. Something thin may help to hold the brushes back while fitting them and be careful they line up properly.

Now Jimmy will have peace of mind for a while, say 100,000 km till he bothers looking again.