Rhonda Bracey: At Random

Well, not exactly stars, but ‘planet light, planet bright’ just doesn’t sound right!

The past few mornings have been stunning. When I’ve gone out to get the newspaper just before dawn, low in the eastern sky has been a fingernail sliver of the moon, with two bright planets close to it.

One I knew was Venus, but I wasn’t sure what the other was until I checked out the weekly astronomy column in the paper earlier this week and found out it was Jupiter! So bright for reflected light from such a long way away.

Update (26 Feb 2008): At 5.45am this morning, when dawn was just a very faint light in the sky, the early morning ‘stars’ where shining very brightly in the east near the horizon. Venus was the brightest, and close to it was Mercury. Higher up was Jupiter, and Saturn (I think) was high in the north. There was about a half moon as well. Amazing. All those people who sleep through until the sun is well up miss out on a sense of their place in the universe… (Oh, and thanks to The West Australian‘s “Night Sky” column on Monday for alerting me to these—and telling me which planet was which!)

Not long after we moved into our house almost 12 months ago, I walked from the bedroom across the passage to the bathroom—and saw a tiny scorpion! In the house. Near the bedroom. Freaked me out.

It was really quite small, so my first reaction (after the shock and horror) was to pick it up in a paper towel and dispose of it. I told my husband when he woke up—and told some other people over the next few months—but he and the rest of them didn’t believe me. They thought I must’ve seen an earwig or something like that. I know what an earwig looks like, and yes, we have quite a few of them here. But this was a scorpion. No-one believed me, so eventually I shut up about it. But I knew what I saw!

Well, tonight after watching some TV, my husband went to the fridge and told me there was a scorpion!! On the floor of the kitchen. This time I wanted proof so that all those nay-sayers would now believe me. Here are the photos. The vinyl tile shapes are 9 inch (22.5 cm) square, so you can see how small this thing is.

Maybe it’s an inch long. But hell, it’s a SCORPION not some damned earwig!!! And now I have the pictures to prove it. I don’t know how well I’ll sleep tonight…

I’m not sure if it’s the education system, or the specific customer service training that people get, but this YouTube video highlights how ANY information you receive from a customer service representative over the phone is suspect.

The issue is not that the customer service people didn’t have the information to hand (some obviously didn’t), but that even with the correct information, they didn’t know how to communicate it correctly to the customer.

I’ve been a bit lax in posting recently… There’s a few reasons for that:

• I’ve set up a blog for my company newsletter and have been working through all those hints and tips I’ve accumulated over the years. I’ve been putting one into each post, and have been working through my old newsletters checking the currency of the information and making posts of each article if it’s still relevant. There’s still a long way to go… The neat thing about WordPress is that I can post-date articles, which means I’ve got one article a day ready to go for all of February, much of March, etc. So if I get caught up with other commitments, the posts will keep on coming.
• I’ve been doing quite a bit of editing for my friend Char’s training materials, and updating my own Author-it instructional material to suit v5 (this has been much more time consuming than I first thought…)
• Work has been pretty full on. I’m still only trying to do three days a week, but they’ve been very busy days (some 10 hours), and by the end of each I’m happy just to loll in front of the TV with my husband. Besides, it’s the height of summer here, and doing anything more energetic is too taxing (well, that’s my excuse anyway!).

I haven’t done anything on the quilt for more than a week—I packed up my sewing machine a week ago expecting to swap it with my Mum’s slightly newer model last week, but we didn’t get to see them in Bunbury as we had planned. We’re going over there on Saturday to see their new house (they moved in on Monday just gone), so I’ll pick up her sewing machine then and give her mine. Maybe I’ll get some more sewing done this (long) weekend…

The lawnmower guys came a few weeks ago, before Christmas. We’ve had a LOT of hot weather since then and the lawn out the front of the house is as dry as. It’s not dead, but we’re not watering it, so if we get a really long hot spell, it will die off. But the back lawn is a different story!

Again, we don’t water it, and until the lawnmower guys came two days ago, it was growing like a weed! Why? Because I think we have our own little mini-ecosystem happening out there. Here’s a pic of the fairly steep back lawn and fruit trees (with a back shed we don’t use hidden in the background):

So, what’s happening here? Why is this area so lush and green and rampant and the front so dry and brown?

I put it down to gravity combined with a septic and leach drain system! Our house is on a hill (as all houses in Bridgetown are), and we’re near the top of one hill. Our backyard slopes down quite steeply—it’s steep enough that we have three levels out the back separated by retaining walls. The final section has no retaining walls, but that’s because it just has some fruit trees and no buildings except two sheds. The main house is one level down from the road, and the three levels at the back step down from there.

With no sewerage system, the grey and black water waste from the house ends up in the septic tank, and then leaches in to the soil. If you look at that photo, you can probably guess that the septic tank is on the level immediately below the house! We’ve never found it, but we figure that’s where it is…

No wonder the lemon tree (closest in the picture and situated on the second level) is so prolific! It just LOVES the food and water it’s getting, and rewards us handsomely with more lemons than we know what to do with. I can’t deal with all the lemons—I freeze some, give some to friends, but now give the bulk of them to the local hotel which uses them for in the bar (that slice of lemon has to come from somewhere…) and in the restaurant’s kitchen.

The cycle of life at work.

This picture is doing the rounds of the internet—I received it today. I have no idea where it’s come from, where the picture was taken etc., but you have to think hope that the process of natural selection might just prevent these idiots guys from breeding!

The caption with the photo is:

• Home-made flotation device: $3.50
• Hosting death BBQ in your pool: Priceless!

If it’s not clear from the size of this photo, there’s an electric BBQ grill on the centre table (with the beers—a telling sign!), hooked in to a power board that’s floating on some plastic/rubber beach scuffs, and hooked in to an extension lead.

I guess these guys never came to grips with basic science, huh?

Early this morning, while I’m reading the Sunday papers in bed, my husband called out that there were seven twenty-eights on the back lawn. “Nothing unusual about that”, thought I, “we often have native birds out the back.” (BTW, twenty-eights, also known as ring-necked parrots, are bright green with a flash of blue tail feathers, a black head, and a yellow neck band—pretty birds.)

So I got up and wandered out to find that this family of twenty-eights were happily ‘bathing’ in our back lawn! Despite the recent hot summer weather, part of our back lawn grows prolifically—I think it’s over the septic tank/leach drain!

These birds were turning themselves over and over in the long dew-covered grass, obviously having a bath… In the lawn!

They emerged looking pretty scraggly as they were quite wet and had fluffed out their feathers. They must’ve had a good old wash for at least 10 minutes before they flew away. I could only get a couple of photos as they were mostly hidden in the long wet grass.

… you just can’t open it!

Why did a miniscule proportion of world’s population do such stupid acts as tamper with products that they’ve made it difficult for the rest of us? And why are companies so fearful of tampering and law suits that they make products that are almost impossible to open—by anyone?

I’m not arthritic and I can use my hands as well as I could when I was in my 20s, but in the past few days I’ve had two instances where getting a top off a product was more than difficult. It was frustrating, annoying, and in one case put my teeth at risk!

One instance was one of those ‘push down and turn to open’ lids that’s meant to keep children from consuming the contents. Well, I pushed down and turned about six times before I got the darned thing to open. And I swore a bit too.

The other was a plastic jar of what used to be called stewed fruit. It seems the two main producers of these ‘jars’ are using a seal that can only be opened by brute force. Here’s a picture of this ‘seal from hell’:

So, what makes it nasty? See those two little bits that stick out? Well, there’s four of them, evenly placed around the seal.  But they are almost impossible to lift using my adult fingers, small though they are. Fingernails get broken in the process, and once I resorted to using a kitchen knife (NOT a sharp one), but that only put my eyes, face, arms, and hands under serious threat of mutilation. Only once have I been able to lift these tabs enough to pull them back to break the incredibly strong seal. And then the seal itself is a sod of a thing to remove without spilling the contents.

The only thing that works for me on this seal is my bottom front teeth! Yes, teeth. I’d like to see the manufacturers’ reactions if I sent them a bill for missing or broken teeth as a result of trying to consume their product!

I wonder how those with even slightly limited motor impairment get on. The elderly spring to mind, anyone with arthritis or lessened strength in their arms and hands, multiple sclerosis sufferers, and the like.

Design for usability and accessibility is not just for software—it’s for every product we use. This seal meets neither requirement—it’s not usable, and it definitely prevents the product from being accessible!

Just a little rant to finish off the year…

David Pogue, the technology writer for The NewYork Times whose blog posts I read each week, had an interesting tale he posted on Dec 20, 2007 about the ethics of downloading and copying music etc., and the generational differences between his audience responses.

It’s already generated more than 250 interesting comments! I especially liked Bill Shepherd’s comment (#4).

Enjoy your Christmas however and wherever you spend it!

And enjoy this Christmas ‘mashup’ song: