Re: Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and a pleasant Australia Day

"Howard J. Rogers" <hjr_at_dizwell.com> wrote in message news:<3fdfd59a$0$18385$afc38c87_at_news.optusnet.com.au>...
> About a year late, it is true. But this evening I finally get to move to the
> house I've built on a 10-acre property deep in Sydney's South West. Peace
> and quiet at last.
>
> There's just one slight problem. Australia's premier telecommunications
> company (Telstra, if anyone wants to send some brickbats on my behalf)
> doesn't have any telephone lines in the vicinity, and won't have until at
> least January 23rd. Which means I'm offline for slightly over a month (this,
> by the way, is an urgent and prioritised installation!).
>
> Time to do lots of writing, I suppose. But no chance of newsgroup
> participation until then (almost certainly). A friendly local Internet cafe
> means I will occasionally read emails, but it will be about twice a week,
> and replies will accordingly be rather slow coming.

You shoulda got a satellite link like my neighbor! :-)

>
> I wanted to live in the countryside. I hadn't realised I was going to have
> to time-travel back to somewhere before the 1940's for the privilege!!

Yeah, that's what I thought in the mid-80's. Then the city came to me. The electricity/telecom situation has deteriorated, as every time there is new construction or destruction (ie, huge firestorms), brownouts wreak havoc on electronic devices and digital cable devices get noisy. Note that surge supressors don't protect against brownouts! Just had to replace dishwasher because it has a computer, too. Three-year-old oven controls went a few months ago. So did fax machine (seems to have confused the tone generator, printer/copier part still works ok, cheaper to buy another one than fix). Neighbor has gone through several business phone systems, I've gone through numerous solid-state answering machines (and can't find any dang tape based machines anymore). And [leased] cable modems. Strangely enough, my Frankenstein box has been unaffected, I guess that is what happens when you buy cheap crap and keep upgrading it with more cheap crap for ten years. But I still wish Redhat 9.2 would have told me _before_ it reformatted that it couldn't install on unsupported hardware, even though the chipset is listed as supported, RH 5&6 (and several others) installed just fine (7 didn't, support was no help), and windows has no problems (well, you know what I mean). Open Source, or Open Soused? Anaconda ate my disks!

Then there is a utilities undergrounding initiative, which has created its own set of problems. For years my phone lines would have problems, which eventually turned out to be because the underground wires were continuously soaked by leaky water pipes. The lines then go up the pole to overhead wires to my house. The developer of the empty lots next door is being required to pay tens of thousands of dollars to underground the utilities. Since no one wants to accept the liability or cost of undergrounding just my house utilities ($20,000US!), he has to put in a _new_ pole, and run the lines up it and over to my house. I still have to pay $3500 for new water service, as it turns out the guy who built my house just had a temporary service (one of those wonderful items buried deep in the pile of documents one signs to buy a house in CA). At least I have a basement so the cat-5 was easy.

So where are those refrigerator-sized household fuel cells that run on natural gas? http://www.dtetech.com/energynow/portfolio/2_1_1.asp

>
> Happy holidays, nontheless.
> HJR
jg

--
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