Monday.  21st.  Did I mention I'm doing low carb again for another few weeks? Except the day got off to a rocky start because I'd forgotten about an apple that needed eating. There goes my carb limit for the day.. whoops. The sweetie prepped a cauliflower bake and brussels sprouts for dinner and I chucked a chunk of beef in to go with it. I got my blogging done quite early. Funny how writing up notes properly during the week makes blogging a lot quicker on a Sunday.. or Monday in this case. DS9 2.24.

Roast beef and veggies

Tuesday.  Awake from Dentist Time for hours and only broken sleep after that. Sigh. NEIL at work, as well as trying to figure out the API of our IP management system to help someone with something. Leftovers for dinner, DS9 2.25. After dinner started going through Dad's photos (from when he switched from slides to prints and onwards) to get photos of Mum. Annoyingly Dad had a really bad habit of over-enhancing his photos. At least with the prints I can go back and rescan them, but for digital photos once they're enhanced at all they're destroyed because he didn't keep the originals. Which is odd in itself because he used to make backups upon backups upon backups, just not of the original unaltered files. #grunt.

Wednesday.  Slept mostly ok. Really wanted to get through some decom prep but the interruptions Would. Not. Stop. All. Day. So damned hard to concentrate with Teams and Outlook popping up every five seconds. Seriously considering turning all notifications off. The sweetie cooked creamy mushroom chicken for dinner which was very nice.

Creamy mushroom chicken

DS9 2.26. Then more photo picking. From 2010 and some of 2011 Dad saved the raw camera photos off separately to the enhanced photos. That was nice of him. Maybe there were other copies of the rest of his digital camera photos elsewhere that either he or I lost. More likely him. I spent an entire week one Christmas trying to sort it all out, and would definitely have kept any raw photos if I'd found them. Knowing him he probably made several backups, thought he had a backup, didn't in fact have a backup, and deleted the original. Or maybe he just never thought he'd need his originals. Silly Dad.

Thursday.  Slept okish until about 5:00. Mostly decom work at work. Bar 59 for drinks which was quite pleasant, although a lot more expensive than work drinks! Made pizzas then DS9 3.1.

Friday.  Anzac Day.  Lest we forget.  Awake from 1:45 for hours sigh.

Mt Rogers

House stuff mostly in the morning. Happy that Stumpy is basking more and is more enthusiastic about food.  Did some camera testing in the afternoon. Only to realise later I had it on the wrong mode. Sigh.

I need to find a spot to plant out these chrysanthemums.  I accidentally uprooted one of the ones out the front the other month and chucked it in a pot out the back.  They're now happily flowering while the ones out the front are barely hanging on to life.  These things like a lot of sun but our garden is completely hopeless so not sure where I can put them.  

Chrysanthemums

Kievs for dinner.  With half a cauliflower and most of a capsicum.

Kievs and veggies

DS9 3.2. Then watched Blackberry which made us both a little nostalgic. Also, it's Anzac Day but I've only worn a jumper like twice all year. Usually by now there would have been days where we'd be wanting to put the heater on in advance of the Anzac Day allowed starting date. Instead I had a window open in my room to cool it down so I could sleep.  hrmmm.

Saturday.  Slept mostly okish.

Sunrise

Mt Rogers trig station

Two balloons over Belconnen

Cooked cheese kranskis and miso scrambled eggs for breakfast.  Although Stu just had eggs because he needed to only eat soft food to not break his temporary tooth crown again.

Cheese kransky and miso scrambled eggs

Started a jigsaw. Went for a several hour drive with the sweetie, checking out previous houses, family houses, the church we got married in etc. Was a lovely way to spend a few hours with the sweetie (and we drove like 70km!). 

Made a small share platter for lunch (although I did get hungry later)

Anniversary lunch platter

Finished the jigsaw. Got Chong Co delivered for dinner (after the MenuLog driver finally turned up) and watched DS9 3.3, then The Princess Bride :)

Candle and bubbles

Chong Co anniversary dinner

Sunday.  Awake from ~3:30 and never got back to sleep. Sigh.  They promised many millimetres of rain.  We got about three drops.

Black cockatoo mural

Went and saw Constellations at the NFSA with Tony which was a bit of fun. House stuff mostly for the rest of the day, and some food shopping.

When you realise you have 15 different cheeses in the fridge.. whoops...
15 cheeses

Filled with rage in the afternoon at Optus who FORCE you to use international roaming because there's no way to disable it. Their only workaround is leave the phone on flight mode and use wifi. WTF??? I think I did read somewhere that if you have a second sim you can disable the Optus one. Which would work unless I needed to receive an SMS for two factor for anything. But there's a heap of horror stories out there from people getting charged the $5/day even when the sim wasn't even in the phone!!!

Hi.

Edit: all of the R6 photos were on "Fine Detail" instead of "Automatic" which I swear I'd set it to.  So I'll probably have to redo this entire comparison at some point.  Sigh.

Took out another couple of cameras for more side-by-side testing.

First up is wide angle.  The 600D would have to be my favourite in this lineup.  The G5X is quite dark, and the iPhone is a little over saturated.  R6 is dull and lifeless.

Camera and lens testing

Next we have zoom.  For the iPhone, G5X and R6 this is full zoom.  For the 600D its about half way.  The 600D is also duller than its wide angle, and actually probably too bright..  The G5X is dark.  I like the iPhone shot.  The R6 is dull and lifeless.

Camera and lens testing

Finally a comparison with the 600D at full zoom (at bottom).  None of my other cameras even come close to the zoom on the old camera.

Camera and lens testing

Let's have a look now at raw pixels for zoom shots (fully zoomed for everything except the 600D which is half zoom).  In order, it's iPhone, G5X, 600D, R6.  Honestly I could get just as good a photo on my little G5X as the R6 (and it even has a better zoom!!).  Sorry about my head not being on straight!

Camera and lens testing Camera and lens testing Camera and lens testing Camera and lens testing

And for a bonus, here's raw pixels on the 600D fully zoomed.  Winner by far.

Camera and lens testing

And here's some of UC.  The R6 is actually probably the winner here in terms of picture clarity, but that's only comparing the 600D at half zoom.  At full zoom the 600D wins.

iPhone
Camera and lens testing

G5X
Camera and lens testing

600D (half way)
Camera and lens testing

R6
Camera and lens testing

600D (full zoom, had to crop it quite a bit)
Camera and lens testing

In conclusion?  I shoulda just stuck with my old camera.  I'm half tempted to take the 600D on my next trip.  It's lighter and has a much better zoom and the picture quality is arguably better.  The only advantage of the R6 is its low light capability and utter silence.  

Sigh.

Sunday.  13th.  Apple cider pulled pork and lots of veggies for dinner. I didn't measure out the apple cider vinegar this time so it was a little tangier than last time, and I also added less water in the gravy which made it a lot quicker to cook. Yum yum yum. DS9 2.18. Then watched the start of a new season (for me) of Air Crash Investigations. First time I'd watched any since 2021!!

All the veggies

Monday.  Slept mostly ok. Busy morning before work, busy day at work. The new version of Outlook sux donkeyballs. They shrunk down the ribbon so my quicksteps are now hidden behind a drop down menu. So now my quicksteps take twice as long because I have to click the drop down then click my action. And no way to customise it. They broke the categories/colours on our shared calendar so everything is grey and I can't create a new category to match the common ones. And every time I move a mail to a folder it pops up a stoopidly annoying "You've moved a mail, Undo" message RIGHT OVER THE NEXT MAIL I WANT TO READ. Microsoft is so trash. Ok got my ribbon and action buttons back by choosing Classic Ribbon. Leftovers for dinner, DS9 2.19. OMFG this is the funniest thing I've seen in a long time!!!! Don't even know what I did with my evening. I know there was some looking at optional tours for the Greece cruise. The extra tours practically double the day cost of the cruise. hrmmm.

The second half of the ramen pack, with leftover pulled pork
Ramen with leftover pulled pork

Tuesday.  Took *ages* to get to sleep :( The Old Reader's CDNs are working again today hurray (they'd been broken for a few days). Found another bug in new Outlook. I only have one mail rule. It wasn't working. When I went to look at it I got the error "This rule can't be edited or viewed in Outlook for Windows". Found this page which said it was to do with the "mark as read" rule. So I turned that off in Classic, sure enough it can now be edited in 365.  Nearly had a meltdown over how much time I've wasted on Microsoft TRASH. Another "feature" is they've turned off the nice little count down the bottom which shows you how many messages you have in a folder. Ok at least you can see, but you have to hover over the folder to see it. Meeting notifications are dumb. Old version you could just hit snooze and it would automatically popup again at the five minute mark, hit snooze again and it would pop up at meeting start time. New version you have to hover, then click on snooze, then click a time to snooze. And even then it doesn't work properly, repeating notifications. Also whenever I even look away from Outlook, it navigates me to the top of my inbox, which are my oldest messages. So I'm constantly having to scroll all the way down to the bottom to see my newest messages. Went to get a Covid vaccine at lunch (been like eighteen months since I got my last one). Also spent a 50th birthday gift card. I probably should have looked around more for some cool games or something, but ended up just buying a couple of jigsaws. The sweetie cooked cabbage and bacon for dinner. DS9 2.20.

Ribbon grass flowers

Cabbage and bacon

50th birthday present jigsaws

Wednesday.  Took quite a while to get to sleep and still woke up before 6. First meltdown of the day - the barrel fell out of my locker again at work, but no Connor around today to help me fix it. Took like ten minutes to get it back in. Second meltdown of the day - losing my mind over some proxy configs - turned out Wardie did a sneaky add and remove of a policy which confused me no end. All the middle of a MICROSOFT problem on the proxies that we spent literally all day on, and still haven't resolved. Microsoft is utter TRASH. Third meltdown of the day - YELLOW LIGHTS. I did have a nice birthday lunch with DC though. DS9 2.21.

Thursday.  Slept mostly okish. More trash today. Gave up and went back to Outlook Classic, which made me feel a whole lot better. Microsoft is almost entirely responsible for my very strong desire to retire early.  Super quiet drinks, just our group. Pizzas, DS9 2.22.

Good Friday.  Not so great for Jesus back in the day.  Slept mostly okish. Went for a walk then mostly holiday planning. Tuna bake and veggies for dinner. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

Chrysanthemums

Good Friday feast

Saturday.  Slept mostly okish. Went for a walk then mostly holiday planning. Finished my galah Diamond Dotz and did one of my birthday jigsaws. Steak and salad for dinner. DS9 2.23, then Death in Paradise 14.6.

Belconnen from Mt Rogers

Ribbon grass flowers

Easter Sunday.  Christ has risen.  So did the sun in a nice way.

Sunrise

Slept mostly okish. Went for a walk. On the way back a group of kids (and parents) were out in their pyjamas doing an Easter egg hunt around one of the playgrounds. Funny.  Mostly house stuff in the morning. Mostly holiday stuff in the afternoon. Leftovers for dinner then Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

Monday.  Somewhat restless sleep and thermoregulation issues. Another quiet day - bit of house stuff, bit of holiday stuff, food shopping (which was super quiet which was nice).

I really could get used to four day weekends....

The other day I took the new camera out to try out different picture mode settings to see if any of them give good results.  The options it has are "Auto, Standard, Portrait, Landscape, Fine Detail, Neutral, Faithful, Monochrome"

Here's them all on 24mm.  Auto is probably the best, although the greenery is not very green.

Camera and lens testing

And here's them all at 105mm.  Everything is dark and dull.  Not happy. 

Camera and lens testing

Here's them compared with the iPhone

First at wide.  The phone is greener.  When compared to my old 600D I did generally prefer landscape photos off the Canon rather than the phone because sometimes the phone overdid the blues.  Here I'm almost preferring the phone.

Camera and lens testing

Then at full zoom (3x for the phone, 105mm for the Canon).  The iphone is so much BRIGHTER than the Canon.

Camera and lens testing

Here's some side-by-side of the iPhone vs the Canon using "Auto" mode, cropped to be about the same dimensions.

At wide angle things aren't too bad

iPhone

Camera and lens testing

Canon

Camera and lens testing

And here's them at zoom.

iPhone 3x - nice and bright

Camera and lens testing

Canon.  It's so DULL

Camera and lens testing

I have to say I'm pretty disappointed.  In bright sunlight these photos should POP.  But instead they're just dark and dull.

Given 105mm is hardly much more than the 3x on the phone it makes me wonder what I'm paying for.  I'm not getting the zoom like I used to have, and what I do have is no better than I could get on my G5X.  I should probably take the G5X and the 600D for the next round of testing.

Sunday.  6th. 

Ribbon grass flower

Had some leftover lamb which I dug out of the freezer for dinner.  DS9 2.13.  20:00 is bed time right?  Well that's 21:00 in old time so I guess that counts.

Monday.  Slept mostly ok.  Got like 9 hours sleep or something. Hurray. Still woke up early though. Went to take out the recycling this morning and saw all the neighbours' cars were gone and everything looked neat and tidy. Yup, they'd moved out. They're off to New Zealand. Maybe for just a year. Unless they love it and stay haha. Spent half the day (it felt like) on the phone today blerf. Cooked sausages and two big zucchinis I got at Chris' yesterday for dinner, then watched DS9 2.14. Interesting episode, but it's never answered how they know right from the beginning.

Tuesday.  Slept mostly okish, but still woke up before 5:30 (at one point I guessed 5:30 - it was 5:26!). Busy day evaluating doco and rules for a big change. Neighbours' friends came over to put the bins out. I'll still take the rubbish that's in their recycling bin and put it in our rubbish bin haha.  Went with T/J to the Shine Dome for the AI Science talk which was quite interesting.  What we heard of it.  For the start of the second speaker (which was recorded) they couldn't figure out the audio so it was super quiet, and they couldn't figure out how to take it back to the beginning.  So missed like a quarter of the second talk.  

Shine Dome noms

Wednesday. Slept mostly ok I think. 

Almost there!

Mini capsicums

Busy day, including being NEIL for some of it.  Late home, DS9 2.15, backing up the NAS to one of my lesser used drives - backed up more stuff from Mum's computer from the last time I was there.  Also started backing up David's America masters again.  I have them on my little holiday drive but that's raw, not rotated or renamed, and I might need space on that drive for the next trip.  Only got up to about day 9.

Thursday.  Restless sleep.

Super excited to pick the first two of the mini capsicums!!

Mini capsicums

Pretty busy day I think.  Super quiet drinks sadly - just our group and two others.  Pizzas for dinner.  DS9 2.16.  You'd think they would have learnt from literally the last episode not to both beam down to a planet by yourselves.  Odo said noone was interested in him, clearly he forgot about Lwaxana Troi just a few episodes ago.  And I was thinking the little kid looked familiar - she played Dylan's little sister in 90210.. haven't seen her in thirty years but still recognised her!!!  Early night.

Friday.  Slept mostly ok.

RGB

Got pissed at the ANIMAL that ripped off the third mini capsicum which was not quite ripe.  Didn't even eat it, just put claw/teeth marks on it and left it on the ground.  #grunt.

Capsicum mauled

Day of all the crap and all the interruptions.  Did get some documentation done though.  Leftovers for dinner - finished up the leftovers in the fridge.  DS9 2.17 and Death in Paradise 14.5.  Why didn't they just test them all for GSR?  Would have saved them all a heap of time.  Sheesh.

Saturday.  Woke up at Dentist Time, only got maybe 3/4 hour more sleep.  Sigh.  Climbed Mt Rogers.  In a vain attempt to be healthier.  Sigh.

Black and white on blue

Black and white on blue

Brown

Belconnen from Mt Rogers

Didn't end up going to Cypher at lunch, which was a bit of a relief, on account if it would have taken up much of the day, plus trying to be healthier and all that crap.  Instead I spent much of the day doing holiday planning.  Also food shopping. 

We won't mention the "breakfast raclette" I had for lunch - leftover roast potato with raclette that I bought like two months ago and really needed to be used!

Breakfast raclette

Concentration

Steak and salad for dinner.  Pretty much one of my favourite easy meals - just make a salad and fry some meat.  I might even convince the sweetie that steak is good m'kay? ;)

I would like to point out that I only ate half of this rather huge steak - the rest I sliced up for cold meat snackages.

Steak and salad

Then watched Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

Sunday.  Slept fairly well.  Climbed Mt Rogers again.

Dewy spider web

Dewy spider web

Grey

Belconnen from Mt Rogers.  In fog.

Spent the rest of the day on holiday planning.  Up to Slano.  Did put on some pork at lunch and a heap of veggies for dinner...  while the sweetie is on holidays.. hrmmm... 

Last year or whenever it was, when they cancelled the work ball a few days before the event, we all agreed that we should go out somewhere anyway.  We never managed to arrange it and then it became Too Hard so that was that.  In January we again brought up doing it due to Bar 59 being the perfect place for it.  So last Saturday night we did it.

We got there at 18:00 to get a view during the day as well as at night.

Me and the sweetie

LAKESIDE SPLASH - Vodka, Rum, Tequila, Gin, Blue Curacao & Lemon-lime Soda

Lakeside splash

Lakeside splash cocktail at Bar 59

Parmesan & Truffle Chips - Served with Aioli Sauce

Parmesan and truffle chips

Sunset over Belconnen

Sunset over Belconnen

Margherita Pizza - Fresh Tomatoes, Mozzarella & Fragrant Basil. Drizzled with Olive Oil

Margherita Pizza

Mixed Charcuterie & Cheese Plate - Combination of Cheese & Charcuterie Plates

Mixed Charcuterie & Cheese Plate

The gang

The gang

COSMOPOLITAN - Vodka, Triple Sec (Cointreau), Cranberry Juice & Fresh Lime Juice

Cosmopolitan

The gang

Some of the gang

MARGARITA - Tequila, Cointreau & Fresh Lime Juice

Margarita

Belconnen by night

Belconnen by night

Confit Garlic & Rosemary Pizza - Slow-Cooked Confit Garlic & Rosemary, Mozzarella. Drizzled With Olive Oil

Garlic & Rosemary Pizza

So it was a perfectly pleasant night out.  But given that people forgot about it, double booked, or just didn't turn up, we only had seven people in the end.  If someone else organised another one I might go, but I dunno that I could be bothered organising it again myself.  Organising people is worse than herding cats.  And I'm allergic.

Thought I'd get this little guy to hang out at work.  $3.30 from Daiso!

Petit Block Fox

Petit Block is another in the line of nanoblocks and miniblocks (I've never actually tried to see if the pieces are interchangeable, but they look like they could be).

Petit Block Fox

His head and tail are articulated on a ball and socket joint so they move.  Except, being Not Lego, it'll disintegrate if you don't hold it together because it's so flimsy.

Petit Block Fox

But he's pretty cute :)

Petit Block Fox

These were the leftover pieces.  Maybe I could use some of them in the nanoblocks church heh.

Petit Block Fox

Sunday.  30th.  Had Jenn over for dinner, wherein we cooked up a huge vegetarian feast.  Stu cooked his miso mushrooms.  I did a potato bake, a blue cheese broccoli/cauliflower/onion bake and brussels sprouts with hazelnuts.

Vegetarian feast

Vegetarian feast

We debated how long it had been since we saw Jenn last.  I looked up my blog and said April 2023, which seemed way too long, but I do remember taking a photo of her hair, and the date on that was April 2023, which pretty much confirms it.  We're such slackers at keeping up with people.  Watched DS9 2.7 after Jenn left.

Monday.  Slept mostly ok I think.  Got to hand back over the NEIL job back to Neil hurray!!!  Leftovers for dinner then DS9 2.8.

Tuesday.  Took ages to get to sleep #grunt.  Did a bunch of analysis of some catchall rules so I can put in some more specific ones so we can get rid of the catchall.  

I tried feeding Stumpy today.  He's still being lethargic and not basking, but he did eat a blueberry and some food which was good.

Stumpy slurp

I'm always suprised how quickly the COLD hits in Canberra.  It'll be 30C for days on end, and suddenly it's 5C overnight and leaving the windows open makes for a very cold house.  Decided April 1 should be close up all the windows day (several are left permanently locked open over summer).  In the afternoon I was cold and hungry so had a cup of tea in our fancy Cunard tea cups.

Tea and candle

Luv-a-duck for dinner which was very nice.  All. The. Garlic.  !!

Luv-a-duck

DS9 2.9.  After dinner was watching a video Dave2 linked to on living without a smartphone.  Yeah I literally can't even remember how friends and I would meet up without being able to text each other updates or issues.  Like what if a train was late, how would you tell who you were meeting?  Navigation is another big thing.  Nowadays I can turn up anywhere and use GPS on my phone to navigate (except that one time in Switzerland when I had to pay more for a car with satnav because the esim I got didn't work in Switzerland).  I can't even imagine the paperwork you'd need to cart around to try and do the same thing with maps.  Don't get me wrong, I love maps, and I like navigating, but they're damned heavy and more often than not I'm doing the driving not the navigating, and I can't imagine Mum would have much luck navigating me around European cities.  Having said that, we did manage to navigate our way around the USA and Canada in 1983 and 2004 before phones.  But for the most part we stayed out of big cities.  And the USA is literally designed for road tripping.  Signage is way way better there than in Australia or Europe.

Wednesday.  Second night in a row dreaming about toilets.  I have this bizarre thing where I stress about finding a clean/usable toilet.  And not even when I need to actually pee in the middle of the night, it's just this weird obsession I have.  Bizarre.  

Poppy display in the mall

Somewhat busy day.  Late home.  Stu had had a day so we got KFC hmmm.  DS9 2.10.  

OneNote is trying to force me to upgrade to Office 365.  It's already upgraded itself from the old Technet version I've been using for years AGAINST MY WILL I might add (apparently there's a way to turn off automatic updates so I might try reinstalling it and do that).  So now it says I have 90 days of free usage.  Well I can tell you that there is no way in HELL I'm going to pay to use it.  I will NEVER get an Office 365 subscription.  I'll rip everything out of it and use LibreOffice and Notepad if it comes down to it.  Which is a shame, because OneNote is actually quite a good product.  I like how it keeps different groupings of notes together and you can easily password protect sections.

Thursday.  Late getting to sleep, then awake from 5:30 sigh.  Went out to put a few things in the recycling bin before it got collected, only to find two big bags of RUBBISH in it!?!  WTF!?!  I pulled them out and raged for a while.  Messaged the neighbours but didn't get a response.  In the end put out our bin (which only had one bag of rubbish in it so wasn't worth putting out) and put their rubbish in it.  As we were leaving for work neighbour's Dad was out there and I asked him and he said he did it.  Sigh.  Simon was sick at drinks so if I get sick early next week we'll know why.  Pizzas for dinner then DS9 2.11.

Friday.  Slept mostly ok.  Busy day - put in a heap of those firewall rules which took me all afternoon to do.  Kievs and veggies for dinner then DS9 2.12.

Kievs and veggies

Saturday.  Awake from like maybe 1 til 4.  Sigh.  Zombie day.  Spent a chunk of the day photo picking from "other peoples photos" and trying to sort out what backups I have of Mum's computer. I'm definitely missing a few years worth from 2015-2017 where I just haven't had the time during visits to get it all copied. Debating a trip to Sydney to do that, as well as sort out the mess they made when they built her a new computer and didn't transfer all the files. Luckily she has all the photos (I hope!) on an external hard drive that has a snapshot backup I made her do some years back. In the evening we went to Bar 59 for an "antiball" but it was a bit of a fizzer really. People forgot or double booked or just didn't turn up, so there was only seven of us there in the end. I tried a few cocktails just for a bit of fun. So it was nice enough night, but dunno if I could be bothered trying to organise another one. Neil very kindly gave us a lift home.

Sunday.  Awake for maybe an hour or so in the middle of the night - from 2:27, but the new 2:27, so didn't get to watch the clock go from 2:59 to 2:00. Still pretty tired though. Finally managed to setup SMTP on my iPhone using CloudLoop. Optus is flaky as hell for sending SMTP mail through, plus I get SPF softfails with them because I don't have their mail servers in my SPF records. Did a bit of house stuff, and started thinking about some holiday stuff. Tried again to add my Qantas frequent flier number to my Emirates flights, but I kept getting the error:

Warning:
Sorry, we`re unable to save the changes. Please check all the information and try again.

So I tried their online chat. It was quick and they just did it for me. Unexpectedly quick and painless! Not that I know why I bother really - Qantas expire all my points before I can use them. Then did some other holiday planning.

Bottlebrush

The Windows 11 Explorer trash is really pissing me off.  I have an in tray where I have all the photos that I post to this blog.  I update it every week when I'm processing my photos, and when I've posted them they get moved to Done.  I sort this folder by date (in reverse to what windows likes to set it to) so that when I'm blogging them I can see and post the photos in order.  Every time my computer reboots this setting is lost.  I have to go Sort By -> Date (twice to get it in the right order) not just in Explorer, but in Chrome as well.  Every damned time.  But lately it's gotten worse.   Tonight I did an experiment.  I had the folder set the way I wanted it, and copied the path to clipboard.  I closed explorer on this desktop.  Opened up again and pasted the path.  Folder view was reset to default.  So did it again, this time by navigating manually to the folder.  In this method the folder view is retained.  And it's repeatable. 

I also epic hate how Explorer collapses all explorer folders that you've had expanded whenever you insert or eject removable media.  Like WHYYYYYYYY????

I hate Windoze SO MUCH!!

And suddenly the weekend is over. hrmmm.

Millers

Capitalism at its finest.  A store is puttering along.  Gets bought out.  Parent company goes bust.  Takes a whole bunch of brands with it.  

And so ends Millers.  And Katies and a heap of others.

Not that I shopped at Millers much.  I don't shop anywhere much for clothes.  I HATE having to buy clothes.  It's a painful process, sometimes ends in tears, and almost never leaves me with clothes I actually like or look good in.

Twenty five years ago, Millers used to sell plain-dyed tshirts.  They had them in a big variety of colours and I had a lot of them.  

I still have them.  All of them.  They're practically threadbare now - really thin fabric, and some of the seams have gone but they're still hanging in there.  I wear them as my "winter" tshirts - under jumpers - because after twenty five years deodorant stains are a thing.

I took this photo in 2018 and resized it for my blog back then, when I was still only doing 400 pixel photos

Millers tshirts

Millers stopped selling those thsirts years and years ago.  I was super annoyed that I couldn't get them anymore.  They were made in Australia, only like $13 at the time.

And did I mention how well they've lasted?

My theory is they stopped selling them because noone was buying them.  Because people didn't need to buy any more of them once they had them because they lasted so well.

But here's the thing.

After twenty five years, the collars on them are still intact (ok this photo was taken in 2022 but nothing's changed)

Millers collars

Nowadays if you buy a tshirt you'll be lucky to get a couple of wears out of it before the collars go crinkly.  The one I got at Target last year - maybe six washes.  The one I got at Target last week - literally one wear/wash.  WTF??  Target used to be good.  Now it's utter TRASH.

The whole world has been enshittified.

Sigh.

All the Millers tshirts

I think Duncan might have brought this one in, can't remember.  Wasgij so you don't get the picture to work with.

Wasgij 1

This one Duncan definitely did, picked up at a garage sale or similar

Wacky World jigsaw

This is one Duncan brought in ages ago (his brother had given it to him years ago) but at 1000 pieces and a lot of black I didn't think we'd ever do it. But Sachin decided we should, so we did.  It was quite decent quality and a lot of piece variety, so it was tricky, but not evil.

Mona Lisa jigsaw

I got this recently at the Green Shed sorry Vinnies sorry Goodies Junction for like a dollar or two.  Complete too which is impressive.  I sat down one Saturday afternoon a couple of weeks ago and did the thing in an hour and a quarter flat!

Venice jigsaw

This was another one I got the same day for a dollar or two, again it was finished which was impressive.  And a bit of fun, done quite quickly.

Wacky World jigsaw