I'd like to respond to a few of the points people made in the last few
Digests.
First, a bit of background ...
I'll be 72 this year. I married when I was 42, and for a few years we had
a happy
life, but from the age of about 3 of my youngest, things started to turn
to custard; I
would have been about 48. At the same time the then Labour government of
NZ, to pay
back environmentalists for support during the parliamentary election,
totally
disestablished the NZ Forest Service, so that along with all the rest of
the staff
(3,000) I lost my job. This was the first of what was to become known
internationally
as "the New Zealand madness". 3,000 doesn't sound like many, in the
context of much
larger countries, but in NZ, this was huge.
I managed to find another job to use my skills (Fisheries, this time), at
half the
salary, but in 1995 after 9 years there, along with 60 others, I was laid
off. This
was Nov. 1995. Unemployment was running at 15+%, and nobody wanted an
overskilled 57
year old. I tried all sorts of things but could not find work.
Fortunately, I had invested from the first day of my employment in the
Forest Service,
in an inflation-proofed superanuation scheme, and by 1995 I had been
paying in for 42
years. This kept the bread on the table, and both our kids got a good
education. I
note however, that I enjoyed my professional work in the Forest Service so
much that I
wanted to keep working in it until I was 70. It was a very productive and
fulfilling
career, and I know of very few to rival it.
I stayed in the marriage so that I could be with my kids, fortunately the
house was
big enough that I could live in a part of it quite separate from my
estranged spouse.
It was a very lonely existence however, and I have to say that joining
this group of
Zuikoholics - and access to general e-mail as well, kept me company and
sane, more
than you can imagine. And not to overlook all I learned about OM cameras
and Zuiko
lenses.
During this period I did several things that the computer enabled me to
do. One, a
world first, was to list in easy computer-accessible form, all 12,800 or
so of the
fern species of the world. I was assisted by a German man I met on the
internet.
See http://homepages.caverock.net.nz/~bj/fern/
I also wrote a couple of books, one self-published, on NZ forestry topics.
http://homepages.caverock.net.nz/~bj/book/
I also chaired a committee which ran a major family reunion in 2006.
See http://homepages.caverock.net.nz/~bj/SFR/SFR4.htm
for pictures.
>From early in 2006 an unexpected series of events made me think that my
kids were
pretty-much able to look after themselves, and that I should get out of
the current
sham of a marriage and find a new partner. A series of events led me to
the site
http://www.findsomeone.co.nz) which at that time had 55,000 New
Zealanders ( in
addition to others in the UK, Canada and Australia sites)
That has led me to my new partner, Maggie (Margaret), who lived(s) in
Central Otago.
So this has resulted in us buying a house together. We have each put in
about $200,000
NZ; me as cash ( all my savings) and her half of what she will get when
she sells a
house she owns locally. At $400,000NZ this house is about at the national
median price
over the last year. Not an expensive house by some standards, and I have
just a half
share.
$400,000 is equivalent to $285,364.15 USD, 224,112.07 EUR, 192,733.24
GBP, 297,602.12
CAD (Canadian), 321,351.39 AUD (Australian), 316,378.63 CHF (Swiss
francs),
2,198,698.81 ZAR (South Africa Rand), and 5,738,319.65 UYU (Uruguay peso).
Having bought this house, I'm living off my income. I do not have buckets
of cash.
While the house has 5 'bedrooms', since there are 4 of us living in it
(Maggie, me,
Chris her 40-year-old son on a medical disability pension, and his 7
year-old daughter
(Chris's wife died of cancer on daughter's 2nd birthday), the house is
full; one is my
study and one is the TV room to take the TV and its nonsense programs out
of 'in our
face' especially at mealtimes. 3 bedrooms used as such.
At age nearly 72, there is an element of "live life while you can" in what
I do; who
knows if I'll live another 5 minutes, 5 years, 10 years, or even 20?
One of the devices I used as a carrot to hold in front of myself, as
encouragement to
succeed with separation, was my boat which I had put into storage. I used
to do a lot
of fishing using that boat, but after the powerful van I once towed it
with was stolen
and trashed (burned) along with $6,000 worth of "stuff" I could not use
the boat again
as I had nothing to tow it with. Raising two teenagers made it impossible.
Now I do have a towing vehicle; but it turns out I have bought a real
'white elephant'
in the form of the Range Rover. It looks great, the body is fine, and it
is great to
drive; but it is very unreliable, and parts are very expensive. I was
looking to buy a
Nissan Terrano G3R or a Toyota Surf 3L turbo 1997, both of which are
reliable and
powerful enough. And tripped over the RR on the Trademe site. Some time I
will be
quit of it but not until I have finished moving and given the boat a few
runs with it.
The reasons I bought a 4x4 include; towing boat, access to mountain areas
over rough
tracks and access to snow-covered landscapes for photography, and with
climate control
for the summertime benefit of my partner who is unable to cope with high
summer
temperatures when travelling - due to a severe head injury some 6 years
ago.
Getting my boat recommissioned (including the trailer road-certified)
after 20 years
storage is a top priority. So also is lifting the roof of our garage by
about 30cm,
and substantially lengthening it so it will take the boat and some
vehicles. The
target time for this is about 2 years away. Some time I will post pictures
of the back
of our house, and also my two biggest bookcases which I hauled up into the
study. I
had intended to use facebook, but I don't trust facebook's intentions with
the
uploading add-on they now insist that I install on whatever computer I
happen to be
using. And I'm away from my base in Christchurch with my own computer
which has the
programs to upload to my photography site.
Thanks to Chuck's guidance, I can now add terabytes of storage to my
computer. All the
advice I got told me that the motherboard would not recognise more than
about 132
gigabytes. In a simple hook-up test my computer man demonstrated it would
recognise at
least 500 GB. He also did a massive defragmentation using a program be
bought; this
has speeded up my machine hugely, but I'm not sure about it being fast
enough to deal
with RAW files.
I have this idea in my head that a technology ( digital imaging - digital
cameras )
is/are a somewhat deficient process that just HAS to improve over time if
it can't
cope with highlights such as those generated from back-lit or strongly
front-lit
autumn leaves, and relies instead on third party inventions. But I also
suspect that
not enough digital photographers care enough to cause the camera companies
to make
that sort of improvement.
Anyway, this is a long way of saying that there are other items in the
spending queue
ahead of a new computer. What I have, will have to do, for a while yet.
Doing RAW
files will probably have to wait a bit. And the labs that do the best
printing here
insist on TIFF files.
Brian Swale
--
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