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On the 17th February 2020 Wendy and I set sail on Queen Elizabeth on a two week cruise up to Papua New Guinea, returning to Sydney on 2nd March.
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After a stop in Brisbane on the way the ship headed north to Rabaul, returning by:
Kiriwina Island; Milne Bay (Alotau); the Conflict Islands; and Cairns in far north Queensland
Sydney to Rabaul is around four thousand kilometres
I hadn't written up our trip to South Korea (in March 2016) but Google Pictures gratuitously put an album together from my Cloud library so I was motivated to add a few words and put it up on my Website. Normally I would use selected images to illustrate observations about a place visited. This is the other way about, with a lot of images that I may not have otherwise chosen. It requires you to go to the link below if you want to see pictures. You may find some of the images interesting and want to by-pass others quickly. Your choice. In addition to the album, Google generated a short movie in an 8mm style - complete with dust flecks. You can see this by clicking the last frame, at the bottom of the album.
A few days in Seoul were followed by travels around the country, helpfully illustrated in the album by Google generated maps: a picture is worth a thousand words; ending back in Seoul before spending a few days in China on the way home to OZ.
At 12.56 pm on 21 July 1969 Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST) Neil Armstrong became the first man to step down onto the Moon. I was at work that day but it was lunchtime. Workplaces did not generally run to television sets and I initially saw it in 'real time' in a shop window in the city.
Later that evening I would watch a full replay at my parents' home. They had a 'big' 26" TV - black and white of course. I had a new job in Sydney having just abandoned Canberra to get married later that year. My future in-laws, being of a more academic bent, did not have TV that was still regarded by many as mindless.
Given the early failures, and a few deaths, the decision to televise the event in 'real time' to the international public was taking a risk. But the whole space program was controversial in the US and sceptics needed to be persuaded.
New South Wales electricity users are to suffer another round of hefty price increases; with more to come.
The Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal (IPART) has announced that electricity prices for the average New South Wales resident will increase by 17.6 per cent from July. Sydney customers will pay on average about $230 more each year, while rural customers will face an extra $316 in charges. IPART says it is recommending the increases because of costs associated with energy firms complying with the federal government's Renewable Energy Target (RET). The RET requires energy firms to source power from renewable sources such as solar or wind.
What is this about and how does it relate to the planned carbon tax?