Speaker size increase...is it worth it??

[J M Fahey]

Sure beats playing same olf boring Nintendo games with:



worst of all is that she always cheats and wins !!!!

[mexicanyella]

I live in rural Missouri and none of the "paddocks" in my neighborhood look like any of those. I wish they did, though. Shapes, colors...

Great thread and great info, guys...thank you for taking the time to write it.

[Roly]

Awww - cute lil HAMP-STA!

{Had to house mind some of these once.  Randy little buggers.  The male would ram the end of his cage to move it closer to the female.}


Don't ya'll got no NasCar in Missouri? 

[J M Fahey]

"Paddock" = the log dump of a shut-down sawmill.
-31.630487, 152.297325

Checked those coordinates and found you live in the middle of a huge forest ... nice place

Not exactly what most people expects to find in Australia.

https://www.google.com.ar/maps/place/31%C2%B037%2749.8%22S+152%C2%B017%2750.4%22E/@-31.630487,152.297325,524m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x0:0x0?hl=en

[Roly]

Was.  This was my "Walden" period.   :loco

Something that is not obvious from the SatView is that it is the edge of an escarpment that drops very rapidly to Dingo Creek and the Manning River to the South, so you can see hundreds of km from the edge.  On foot this country is very hard going.  Most of the farmers work it on horses 'coz aggie and quad bikes won't do.

One thing about living in the middle of a native forest, it's the critters turf, so you just have to be accommodating when they decide to pass through ... or move in; more species of moth than you can count, half a dozen different frogs, lizards and skinks taking up residence, firefly's and glow worms, fungi that glow in the dark, birds ranging from tiny Blue Wrens, Wagtails, Flycatchers, a riot of parrots, Hawks and Eagles, every day, micro-bats to flying foxes, Boobook and Powerful owls.  Sundry snakes; even had a resident Python for quite a while, resident skinks, Horseshoe-nosed bat, bush spiders as big as your hand.  The rule is pretty simple - don't try to pick me up and I won't bite you.


http://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/canberra-life/gang-gang-powerful-owl-visits-20141203-11z2wx.html
(on one of my farm minds I would see one of these fellas almost every evening and fully grown they are BIG, ~2m wingspan.)


This is now;
-37.430748, 143.900123

It's a tiny block with a cozy little 1 bedroom house, but it adjoins the Creswick creek breast and redundant soccer oval, both flood prone, so I'll never be built out, and the Council kindly mows my "front lawns" for me.    Oh yeah, and lots more forest ('tho this is mostly plantation).

There's a guy just across the road that builds stock car racers and there is the occasional engine revving, so I think I might just get away with a speaker white or pink noise test out in Northcott Park provided I didn't over-do it (not that I'm into that much these days).


From SatView it looks like Missouri is a pretty quiet place too, rural, farming and forestry and not a lot else.  Everything I know about Missouri comes from the Brando film The Missouri Breaks (1976).

Interesting landforms;


Similarities to Northern New South Wales Gorge Country.  This is the Ellenborough Falls and gorge which was just down the road;

At 600-odd feet it is supposed to be the longest single drop waterfall in the Southern Hemisphere.

The general nature of the country, plateaus divided by steep gorges, Oxley Wild Rivers National Park;


The RAAF play cat-and-mouse up these gorges at close to the speed of sound, F111-E's trying to outfox a pair of FA-18's.  One time doing a farm-mind in the far back blocks of Doyles River I had a pair of FA-18's fly through the veggie patch at Mach 0.9.  You think I'm kidding?  I happened to be looking in the right direction to get a 100mS snapshot through the trees of the pilot in the cockpit going past not a hundred meters away.

But mostly it's just munching Kangas and galloping Wombats.  And Cicadas.  Lots of Cicadas in the summer.

This was my service patch, often literally "in the field".  Many service calls included home-grown dinner, music jamming (pack guitar) and stay overnight (pack O/N bag).  It could get cold enough to snow (yes, even at that latitude, because altitude), and at times people had been stranded in the Bush for up to three days (water, food, paper, lighters, big tarp).  All your tools of course, but also boxes with every spare and fitting you are even remotely likely to need.  Fuel up, and anything up to a 50-mile dirt road drive, avoiding kangas, cows, and the occasional log truck.

Always an eye on the weather; windstorms can bring trees down over back roads (pack chainsaw, "turfer" tree winch, and chains); the Wet can deliver a deluge of an inch and hour or better for hours, rapidly bringing up creeks and rivers and making roads too slippery to be passable.

As a mechanic friend put it when I asked about getting a four-wheel drive, "The difference between 2-WD  passable, 4-WD passable, and totally impassable, is five minutes around here - not worth it."  And vehicle traction is always a concern.

[J M Fahey]

Wow !!!!
BEAUTIFUL place !!!!!!

[Roly]

Oh yeah, great place, great wildlife, great climate ... shame about the people.   xP

Much happier where I am now.   :dbtu:

[mexicanyella]

Awesome photos, Roly...a 2m wingspan on that owl must be a real sight when you flush it out of a nearby tree: "WHAT THE F--?!?!"

I'm in east central Missouri, just north enough to be in the southern reaches of the glaciation-formed prairie terrain. Go about 15-20 miles south of me and the terrain gives way to the Ozark hills, with larger trees, denser woods, more rocks and less horizon. It's a pretty dramatic terrain change in a fairly short distance.

What's the terrain like in your neck of the woods, JM?

(Should we have a forum category for this?)

[Roly]

Owls, even big ones, like to stay off the radar which is why the one on the Canberra park, particularly being active during daylight, is such a curiosity it is bringing birdwatchers from all over.

We also have a much smaller fella called a Tawny Frogmouth which is seen more often because it's a late afternoon/early evening hunter and it hangs out in the lower branches pretending it's a branch.  It's possible to get within arm's length for a really good look while it repeats to itself "I'm a branch ... you can't see me ... I'm a branch".


Like I giveadamn?

Spot the bird.

Owls generally like to sit on a roadside marking post on a bend above a straight so they have a clear view of anything crossing the road and can just glide silently down ... and wallop!  Dinner.

One time I was doing a farm mind, driving out each evening, and night after night for about two weeks I'd come around this corner and there would be a Powerful Owl sitting on a side marker post (and taller than, ~4ft head to tip), and some nights it would take off and fly just above the front of my car in the spill of the headlights giving me a great view, and the wingspan was significantly wider than my car (Toyota Corolla).  Bloody awesome!

If you live in the Bush, or more specifically the forest, you have daily critter encounters.

[phatt]

Hey Roly,, Yah shoulda caught one and trained it to read surface mount part codes as their eyes are way better than ours. Though the mouse might be a big distraction while in training.
Phil.

[Enzo]

Until about four months ago I lived on a rural farm and it was a hoot (pun intended) to listen to the owls at night,  The hoot owls are scattered around the country side.  One near the house, another a quartet mile down the road, etc.  One would hoot, another would answer, and the owl conversation would hop around the area all night.

I have lots of wildlife, and in the snow would be all manner of animal tracks.  One winter day I went out and there was a rabbit track across the yard, and out in the middle the rabbit track stopped, and there was some impressions of wing tips and a little blood.

[J M Fahey]

Sometimes I envy you guys, but I'm a 150% brick and mortar, big city guy.

Need lots of people, public transportation, a Metro system rates highly, some Broadway type street if possible, some concentrated shopping area (HATE Malls and Shopping Centers as well as having to drive to get even the most basic, such as cigarettes or a paper)

Here's a Buenos Aires sample, just by chance my very street block in the old river Port appears a couple times at: 00:03 , 00:10 , 00:13 , 00:51 , 06:33 and our local Football Stadium (2 blocks away) at 07:09

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Opelw_NHwcw

for a foreign view of Buenos Aires:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7N4t3kEm3qg

again including my neighbourhood at 05:08 to 05:38  .

To show something else besides the city itself, a visit to a cattle ranch (some 50 miles from the city)  from 08:00 to 10:10

EDIT: FWIW the latest immigration type is a lot of "expats", US and UK people running away from economic crisis and plain rat race.

US dollar buys a lot in many places around the World, but most are not attractive to live in (to say it politely) or real isolated, like a Pacific island; nice ones are usually expensive; Buenos Aires is both affordable, safe, and with lots of action.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=expats+in+buenos+aires

[Roly]

Born in Melbourne, I've lived in London and rural England where I first got interested in critters and what they got up to, but basically an inner-city boy until mid-life, electronics study, career, and bands/theater teching, I also liked to get out in the bush for long walks, but getting ill turned out to be an opportunity to take a more rural direction and actually live in various places in "The Bush".  Visited Lake Eyre several times for long stays - simply mind-blowing wild life and isolation.

The inner city suburbs of Carlton and Fitzroy are where I lived for many years and I think that Porteños would find them quite tolerable with a huge range of eating places, pubs with live music, many small theaters, art galleries and such.  We have people from around 120 different countries and walking down Brunswick St (which I used to live just off) you can sample the cuisine of most of them.

Sydney has the wonderful harbour setting, "the (surprise) view to water" and fantastic surf beaches, but even Sydney-siders agree that Melbourne is great coffee and great food.

It also once had a good manufacturing base until the country put all our chips on "mining boom" which went well for a while, but has now gone bust, meaning that in future we will all be living off servicing each other in service industries - everyone will be waiting on everyone else's table.  Or something.  Never understood the "Science" of Economics - can't predict and can't explain what happened.  The kids that took Eco's as school were all a bit odd.  :duh   Not at all like us fact-based science geeks.  8|


{but somehow we now have a buffoon for a Prime Minister, and a government hijacked by a bunch of Tea Party neo-con ideologues that nobody expected - but mercifully it's "fascism moderated by incompetence"   :grr   I guess we'll get over it - eventually.}

[J M Fahey]

The inner city suburbs of Carlton and Fitzroy are where I lived for many years and I think that Porteños would find them quite tolerable with a huge range of eating places, pubs with live music, many small theaters, art galleries and such.  We have people from around 120 different countries and walking down Brunswick St (which I used to live just off) you can sample the cuisine of most of them.

You bet.
Sounds REAL good 

It also once had a good manufacturing base until the country put all our chips on "mining boom" which went well for a while, but has now gone bust, meaning that in future we will all be living off servicing each other in service industries - everyone will be waiting on everyone else's table.

Here they bet everything into soybeans.
Not only killing Industry but even meat!!!! , our pride and joy.

Or something.  Never understood the "Science" of Economics - can't predict and can't explain what happened.  The kids that took Eco's as school were all a bit odd.  :duh   Not at all like us fact-based science geeks.

Oh, the top level Economics guys know very well what they are doing: stealing, and I'm not talking a marxism/socialism "good" vs. capitalism "bad" approach or some other "cafe analysis" , but plain old stealing, as in putting a .45 against your head and robbing you blind.

They know that ripping car making machines from Flint and reinstalling in Korea or whatever will kill jobs, so directly lost some customers (jobs declined from 280000 before the 90's to some 14000 today, with next month loss of another 2800) , but a car which would have cost (I'm making out these numbers) U$35000 to make and would have sold for U$40000 , or 14% gross profit if made and sold in USA now can be made for U$8000 in Asia and sold for U$16000 in USA ... a 100% markup .

As I said, made up numbers, but trying to explain that Industry/Finance decision makers are not fools or don't know how to handle their Excel sheets, they are simply ruthless immoral, and that's not an economic problem .

That said, if only one Industry did that, it would have been a very wise decision (economically) , the point is that everybody is doing the same, so ... who are they going to sell those cars/clothes/appliances/toys/whatever to when NOBODY (or almost)  in USA has a manufacturing job? (the ones which can pay good salaries to millions of people).
Service jobs, as Roly said, means one day everybody will be waiting at everybody elses's tables ... not even so because a Guatemalan or Salvadorenian will do that for 1/3 the wage.

[Roly]

...and to illustrate the point, just had a lovely 3 hour Greek lunch for the step-grandson's 21st at an inner-city taverna.  I've loved Greek food ever since I went there, and this was a real treat.    <3)



I think that in their hearts people like Exxon and the Koch Bros know that climate change is going to be a kind of end game for them because things are going to change so radically they are effectively being knocked out of the game entirely, so there is a mad scrabble to accumulate the biggest pile of gold before the $&!% hits the fan.

I'm reminded of a Russian saying; "I know there is starvation in the world, but this bread if for my child."

It's a raw survival rather than winning strategy.  There was a time in the 70's when it looked like companies such as BP were reinventing themselves into renewables, solar (and nuclear), but a widespread political polarisation has become a sort of deathlock on looking for new directions - renewables and conservation to the left, and laissez faire oil and coal to the right.

Two tribes with different world views, and different totems.

:duh


A couple of million households, including mine, have voted with their feet/wallets;

2009, output was just 18 gigawatt-hours.
2011; which was 225 gigawatt-hours
2012 – Solar energy supplied 550 gigawatt-hours to Victoria

:dbtu:

Which makes me optimistic that while the politicians serve their coal fired masters the population is going a different way.  Then we have the current government - a dysfunctional neo-feudal theocracy straight out of 1850, and I despair.   


um ... that's a raw, unpeeled onion Our Glorious Leader is munching into...   
Being somewhat less popular than a dose of the clap, it's apparently some sort of "I'm so tough..." statement.  Nobody doubts he's tough, it's that he is also a totally loose cannon that has done more damage to his own side than anything else.  Think Yes, Minister meets Gilbert & Sullivan.