stuff 'n other stuff

This week’s hot weather and bushfire alerts have not done us any favours in the fruit and veg department with the hot dry winds scorching off the raspberries and the zuchinis not to mention that possums stripped the fig tree bare and managed to get under the net on the apricot tree and have a go at these.

So today we mounted a rescue effort harvesting any of the apricots that looked more than half ripe and stripping off the ones the possums had taken a bite out of. Fortunately my being slack about staking the tomatoes has saved them from the wind meaning we should get a few kilos in a week or two.

So what to do with a sudden influx of not quite ripe fruit – the best of the apricots went to jam and he rest to an asian style fruit and chili pickle – and is the result:

not bad for an afternoon’s work …

Yesterday we had a serious bushfire alert, but despite a searingly hot day  with winds between 50 and 70km/h  and the smell of smoke in the air from grass fires to the west of the city, we’re still here.

Yesterday morning it was already 25C when I left for work and in the afternoon it was unpleasantly hot and windy, something round about 36 or 37C, but as I was going up the on ramp to the Commonwealth Bridge, the sky turned black and there was a squall of rain like gravel hitting the car and the temperature dropped a welcome six degrees in as many minutes. Driving back was fun with lots of bits of tree flying about but everybody seemed to be being careful.

All the national parks and bush reserves, including the one on the hill above our house were closed yesterday, and are staying closed today, but by about nine o’clock yesterday evening it had dropped to under 30C. As the sun went down we could see (and smell) smoke in the distance and this morning when I went for walk there was an orange glow to the south from smoke caught by the first rays of the sun.

However today it’s cooler, and while there’s still a breeze, the worst has passed for the moment …

Everyone makes them, everyone fails at them.

Mine this year is to get fitter and lose some weight. This isn’t really a new resolution, I tried starting running again back in 2009 and found that really didn’t work for me – basically my ankles and knees wouldn’t take it anymore.

Since then I’ve been pretty full on with work and house renovations and while I’ve been able to reduce my weight a little, the idea of regular exercise has been honoured more in the breach than the fact.

Diet, apart from a fondness for a decent glass of wine, isn’t really an issue I’m a muesli/yoghurt/wholemeal bread/fruit/salad/pasta type of guy, with a couple of veggie only days most weeks and I eat a lot more fish and chicken than I do red meat.

It’s purely lack of exercise. Working in IT you spend a lot of time on your bum and the trick is to get off it on a regular basis. Social media doesn’t help, as these days work and life blends a bit with me finding myself answering emails at weekends, not to mention checking twitter a couple of times a day – some of it’s recreational stuff to do with my interests, some of it’s work, and some of it’s in between.

Up till now everything’s been more or less ok. I might not be the fittest, but I thought I was ok for a man in his late fifties.

And then last Friday we got up at five o’clock and drove down to Pebbly Beach for a swim and a gentle bushwalk to mark the end of the end of year break. I swam, I enjoyed myself but I found it a lot harder than I expected – sometime between climbing Ohlsen Bagge in South Australia this winter past and now I’ve reached some tipping point.

Taking it as a wakeup call I was up at 5.15 this morning for a twenty minute powerwalk – just me and the kangaroos – amazing how many there are in the suburbs in the early morning – and ten minutes cardio on the exercise machine we bought some years ago for cross country ski training and never used seriously.

I plan to repeat this three days a week and get some other exercise in at weekends – be it a bushwalk or a bikeride. I might never be able to run 10km again but I can still keep fit …

Piqued by our upcoming transiberian trip I’ve been doing a lot of reading around the subject, and about Kolchak, the civil war, the allied intervention and more. Even Chekhov.

And in the course of this, purely by happenstance, I happened across Tent Life in Siberia by George Kennan.

The story is simply told.  In 1864, roundabout the time of the end of the American civil war, before there was a railroad across America, before Alaska was part of the USA, some investors decided to build a telegraph line between Russia and America.

Their reasoning was simple – undersea cables were unreliable and difficult to maintain, as had been shown by the first trans Atlantic cable, so building an overland cable would result is a link that was easier to maintain and one that would allow a direct connection to Europe via Russia. Telegraph lines were very much the internet of the nineteenth century, and like the railways there were always investors and speculators wanting to get on board with the latest technology. Much like the venture capitalists of today.

Kennan was one of the survey team on the Kamchatka part of the route.

While there was a Russian presence in Kamchatka it was little known or explored, the Russian settlements hugging the coast, just as the early west coast settlements in the US hugged the coast as sea was the most viable mode of travel between them.

Tent Life is rich in ethnographic detail, well written, and recounts his adventures surveying the line. And there are odd little facts – like the fact that Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, the administrative centre of the Primorye (Vladivostok did not yet exist) was attacked by a combined British and French squadron during the Crimean war – that make the book truly engaging as well as a description of Kamchatka in the mid to late nineteenth century.

Like Beth Ellis’s An English Girl’s First Impressions of Burmah truly a gem of nineteenth century travel writing, and like Ellis’s book, one that deserves to be better known.

It’s available as an epub through Project Gutenberg, or as a free download for the Kindle through the Amazon store. There’s also a number of print editions available.

Mary Beard recently had a piece on her blog complaining about the rise of the e-christmas card.

And it’s undoubtedly true that as the postal service declines more and more people are turning to sending seasonal greetings by email. I don’t have a problem with this – an annual newsy email from friends and families overseas is always welcome. What’s less welcome is the email of someone’s dog in a santa hat which has been sent out as part of a distribution list.

Somehow it just doesn’t have the sense of anticipation you get by opening an envelope. Partly of course this is pure nostalgia for a simpler world when a card from overseas or the other side of the country was something special.

And the same can be said for the commercial season’s greetings emails from people you’ve done business with. Once it used to be a christmas card sent out as bulk mail, but at least you could put them on your office wall for a bit of seasonal colour.

No one is going to do that with an email – basically they go straight to delete.

So, we need to re think this Christmas card thing. It started on the back of the penny post when, witha  universal postal service, people could send cards as greetings – and to be cynical it did involve some slick marketing by the greeting cards people. Before then the post had been for letters, and handwriting a lot of  greeting letters at christmas was a chore. Christmas cards allowed you to take a prepackaged item, add some personalised words of greeting and send it to someone, and you could include a letter or a note if you felt like it.

Over the years it turned into a mass exercise sending cards to everyone you knew – christmas card lists turned out to be like facebook friends lists – some you know, some you don’t, and who the hell is she ?

And as sending cards became more expensive the habit moved online and became this bulk anonymized exercise we see today.

Let’s reclaim the card – something special sent to those few people who are someway special in your life.  And yes, if that mean’s using the postal service, let’s use it like it was 1891.

For the rest let’s use the technology –  there’s always facebook and twitter – but let’s not pretend it’s really personal …

Yesterday I received a letter, yes, a genuine letter printed on nice paper from a local hospital inviting me to apply for an eHealth record. (eHealth is an Australian government initiative to link up individual medical practice records and aggregate data so that eventually your doctor, your optometerist, your dentist, and the random doctor you went to in Darwin when you unexpectedly came down with a chest infection can all see your past history).

As I’m interested in identity management I thought I’d go and step through the registration to see how they’d done it rather than procrastinate which is my usual response to filling in health forms – I’m the guy who didn’t have a preferred GP for five years after my previous one upped and left for the north coast. Medical registration is of course an interesting problem. People are naturally concerned to keep personal matters personal, and the medical profession have at times an exaggerated view of patient confidentiality and data security.

So, the registration process. First of all you need your medicare number (actually you need it twice) and your date of birth. Fair enough.

Then the fun begins. Then they need an address – which one, Medicare has two addresses for me, my street address, and my post office box which is where my bills end up. As the letter had come to the house mail box, the one we don’t use, I guessed it would be the street address. I guessed right.

Then they asked me when I last went to the doctor, how much it cost, how I paid, and who did I see. This is a problem. I’m pretty healthy and hardly ever go to the doctor. This is how I survived for five years without a GP by using either the campus staff and student drop in centre, or a practice with a drop in service.

Most times I wouldn’t have had a clue. This time I did, only because some fool ran into the back of my car a couple of months ago and I had myself checked out for whiplash did I have a recent date. Didn’t know the date, but trawling back through my online banking records I found the record, how much I paid and how I paid. Only problem was that I didn’t see my usual doctor, but his partner, who is a nice Indian lady from London with a seriously polysyllabic surname.

The only way I got that last bit of information was because she’s suggested I should have some routine blood tests, and being the arch procrastinator I am, I still had the referral form as I hadn’t had them done.

Now I am someone skilled in identity and data management. This whole exercise took me about forty five minutes, not least because when I entered the fee last paid it complained that the data was in an invalid format – I’d typed 75 not 75.00 despite the lack of any instructions as to how to complete the field.

I now have an eHealth record. But I do wonder how the less organised and less skilled will manage – the whole system showed a lack of user acceptance testing. Surely it would be better to prepopulate all the records, have a ‘claim your record campaign’ and base identity on what people know, their medicare number, their phone number and perhaps their Driver’s licence number – that way we might actually get some people registered …

Well the answer’s no.

Readers of one of my other blogs will recall that I experimented on myself with Amazon’s self publishing suite back in January.

No surprisingly I’m not amazingly rich as a consequence, sales have been trickling along at about a couple of copies a month in both the US and the UK although there was that strange unexplained burst of 9 sales in the UK in November.

What it does show is how simple it is to put something out there. And while Amazon does take a fairly hefty cut what it does mean that it would be relatively easy to publish scholarly material such as conference papers, monographs and the like via Amazon with no upfront cost …

Last Friday, I watched a documentary on Semphill and Rutland, two British airforce officers who, at the end of the first world war went to Japan to render the Japanese military and technical assistance.

That they became spies for the Japanese is without doubt. What interests me however is the genesis of their involvement.

During the first world war Britain and Japan were allies, and both participated in the allied intervention in Russia after the Bolshevik revolution. Britain’s alliance with Japan was terminated in 1920, largely due to American presssure.

Churchill was of course a member of the post first world war coalition government and the main mover and shaker behind Britain’s participation in the allied intervention. Churchill was also utterly paranoid about the Bolshevik revolution.

So the question has to be asked – did Semphill and Rutland begin their involvement with tacit but deniable official British approval in order to ensure that Japan remained a credible geopolitical blocker to any Bolshevik plans to expand and consolidate in the east and perhaps occupy Manchuria?

So was it simply a case of  Semphill and Rutland going feral?

The interesting thing is that despite their behaviour neither Semphill or Rutland were arrested and tried for treason. Rutland, not being an aristocrat was interned and later quietly released, Semphill, an aristocrat, agreed to withdraw from public life.

For a whole set of obvious reasons, we will probably never know the whole story.  Just too political, too cynical, and realistically not worth the risk of making the facts public. If true the records may have been shredded later to protect Churchill’s reputation.