Respect.

While I checked on Grace today I couldn't help but see all the graves of the returned soldiers sported Aussie flags today ANZAC Day, It was a lovely thing to do.

You only really notice the damage on Daisy's guard if you look at it. It was a truly woeful repair by me but it didn't need to be any better. This was from that Xmas incident with Skippy.

I must blame myself.

I was sitting peacefully watching a replay of football from yesterday and the screen went dark, and quiet abounded. That's odd thought Jimby we must have a blackout, yet we almost never get blackouts (unlike Olivia's old home where she could bank on 100 blackouts a year), check the light switch Jimby, it still works hmmm, ask Olivia what she was doing, she had plugged in this power adapter which upon checking rattled, villain found.
Somehow a screw had found itself inside this seemingly sealed unit but I sense it would be because of being forced over this oversized holding screw, the black one in this photo. About the only two contacts it could reach simultaneously were between active and earth which would logically explain why the earth leakage circuit breaker tripped.

 The eight screws holding the unit together were never designed to be unscrewed but the clever Chinese company that built it used just enough torque on them to hold them in place, allowing me to undo them. I'm far more used to things being assembled by gorillas so it came as a pleasant surprise after the misery of seeing their tamperproofness.

Butterfly.

Olivia snapped this while we were playing with the step, pretty good job too.

That step is now done.

We can relax for a little while now, we've finished the job replacing the worst of the steps.

Today's effort was pretty simple after buying the rather expensive step tread on Friday. It's just a matter of marking the holes, which isn't as simple as it would seem due to the marking pen having to attack at an angle for the rear ones.

Then try to drill the holes straight, very handy to be able to ask Olivia how I'm lined up here, I also had to take a guess at how far my mark was offset to where it should be.

End result was only one hole needed a slight bit of work to fit.
Next we have to replace the bottom step and very soon but first I need another pay day, this step exhausted our last pay.

Made me smile.

Olivia grabbed these the other day, it's lovely having a wife I can trust to find stuff that's well priced.

Ready for a new tread.

I think it's ready enough now for a new step tread.

The welding today went better than yesterday, instead of using my rusty old rods that have been through a flood, I used some newer ones I have that have had a gentler life. Now I have to think of a use for some old ruined rods.

I'm measuring up here, note the hole to the left of my hand, that's going to need some work.

A bit of old steel should cover the hole.

If I made the work too neat then it wouldn't look like my work.

I should wear shoes, I always get hot chunks falling on my feet.

A splash of paint and I think I'm ready to spend money on some overpriced wood now.

Our stairs need repair.

This is about the worst of them, the wood is rotten and the steel has corroded away.

I found a bit of steel that was a close enough fit and welded it into place, a job that went very poorly until I eventually saw after wiping the old flood mud off the indicator on the welder that my current was set way to low. American's call them stick welders for a very good reason.

Quite a useful tool is a hacksaw. Out comes the old bolt.

I was drilling here for a reason.

This pipe had filled with water from a hole further up that had rusted away, fixing that will be my next stage after I recover energy.

A splash of paint and the old step is temporarily back in place, because the weld embarrassed me so much I made this shot extra small.

The paperwork is in the mail.

Finally after discovering Olivia had to do a whole fresh batch of paperwork to continue her visa, paperwork that should have been sent to us about a year ago but wasn't, we received the police report today that enabled us to mail it away.
I have to moan about having to pay $42 for a federal police report that then gets snail mailed to us, why can't they in this day and age just email the report to immigration? astounding but a really good little money spinner for the department.
Hopefully Olivia will be granted permanent residency after this but we're painfully delayed at this point with Olivia still unable to claim benefits that she's entitled to, as well as having her medicare card expire for no valid reason.

Apolopise

I never have to look hard to find whoopsies like this, what hurts a bit is signs in the Philippines which I've been spending a heap of time lately viewing on Google Street view rarely have errors yet English is only a second (or later) language for them.
Maybe we should employ more Philippine (and other Asian folk) as their school system seems to work a bit better than ours.
I might check this window again to see if it's a permanent sign, which I have a suspicion it may be.

I think it looked better before.

I wandered while Olivia was buying some plants and noticed the bridge in our old botanic gardens had vanished.

This is a photo I took of the same place in 2010, back then it led to a nice but mosquito ridden shady area, now it has no appeal to anyone. I imagine they destroyed the area to remove a favourite haunt of the millions of bats we have in town, of course they just moved a short distance to another batch of trees.
The bridge seemed to be in good nick back then, so that's a bit of a mystery.

Unwrapped.

I noticed upon reading the minutes of our last council meeting that a good deal of money was set aside for these trees to be wrapped during the current Easter school holidays, I've seen no evidence of it.

This is the section of the minutes.
I get depressed about this sort of thing, I wish I was immune to the pain of money getting wasted but I suppose I'd be just as humourless if they'd actually wrapped the trees.

The day starts with the usual disaster.

Today started badly with my new computer not booting, poor old Jimmy feared a real headache job to fix but by progressively eliminating the suspects I found this burnt connector to the Blu-ray drive.
Somehow I suspect it may be only a connector short circuit and a bit of cleaning and soldering may bring it back to life, but that's for another day, I've done enough today.

Asrock bios/uefi blues, and a fix.

I finally bought some stuff to upgrade my aging and somewhat slow computer but naturally that only created a decent headache. I bought an Asrock H-170M Pro4 motherboard and an i5-6500 CPU which had a combo offer of discounted memory, when the bits eventually arrived the setup was most unreliable, either not booting or dropping out after a short time. Bugger but I had noted that Asrock mention memory timing issues addressed on their bios updates so I tried their magical LAN update in the bios menu, well that was the end of things and the motherboard became as dead as Julius Caesar, bugger.
So onto eBay went Jimmy and ordered an honestly priced programmed bios chip replacement, then thinking of further issues ordered this cheap little programmer shown here, CH341A or whatever they call it, I'm glad I did.
The bios chip arrived without much delay except for the usual Australia Post way of doing it after a weekend, this brought the dead board back to life but with a MAC address problem for the ethernet that Asrock's Mac Tool program won't fix, possibly due to the board's newness, oh well at least I could set things up using wi-fi.
Today this little programmer arrived so Jimmy set to playing and had the usual trail of woe, if a person buys one of these then the artwork on it showing the chip mounting is correct, don't take any notice of the pretty artwork on the software that is downloaded, which I did and caused a deal of overheating and angst.
What you need to do is grab the 6 byte MAC address which is on a white patch on the edge of the motherboard, naturally it was way too small for me to read so I took a photo and printed the result in a size I could read.
Edit hex address of  #1000 and the next 5 with the proper MAC code and perhaps change the next 00 to 01 (not sure about that as my original dead chip had a 01 and I thought it may pay to copy it, which worked) and hopefully you board will no longer boot with an cmos error mismatch message, made me smile.
A downside for me is I only rarely get involved with problems like this rarely and have to relearn things as I go, I imagine the next time I need program something my hardware will be obsolete yet again.

Congratulations to Irish

Our niece Irish (on the left) whom Olivia has raised as the daughter she never had, graduated from the University of Bicol last night, we're both hoping the future is bright for her.
I really like the way the white chevron on her outfit makes it look like a Rugby League jumper, also the sky blue is much nicer than the usual black.
We're looking forward to Irish posting some stuff on Facebook about the night but things have been hectic there, including a power blackout,