Either we start treating this like the common cold, an endemic – accept that everyone will get it and just go about our lives like normal, or we treat it like a pandemic and still have people isolating.
Fortnight ending | AUS | NSW | VIC |
Jan 8 2022 | 559,058 | 301,901 | 143,518 |
Dec 25 2021 | 65,194 | 39,002 | 20,626 |
Dec 11 2021 | 20,619 | 4,276 | 16,071 |
That means that in the last fortnight we have had 65% of our total case count of 850,349 nationally.
Looking at those numbers, it would mean we have at least 1 million people in their own lockdowns; 559,058 due to being positive and at least that number again in close contacts. Thankfully the number of people in hospital is less than 3000 but of those in lockdown, only the positive people that don’t have sick leave or annual leave are entitled to the government support (which is taxable) of $750. The close contacts don’t get any support now unless they can’t work because they are caring for a positive case.
]]>I mean, you can’t get any more positive for corona right? As the cases rise we’ll soon teach a point where more people have it than don’t and at that point couldn’t we, as the majority, demand that our uninfected comrades stay home so that we can get on with our lives instead of hiding out in unairconditioned rooms suffering in silence.
I’m calling it now, it’ll be less than a month till there’s something in the news about the “outrageousness of some positive people having a party” some where.
]]>I had a gathering coming up at my house, I had been at a few places that the Checkin app alerted me on so I went and got a PCR test done.
Test result came back negative, friends came over, fun was had by all. Till that night when the friends advised that they had been in contact with a positive case on the 21st however one family member had been tested on the 22nd.
Friends family member’s PCR test came back as negative, with that and the timeline we opted to head to the farm. Just to be doubly sure I even called NSW Health to see if we were close or casual contacts, they said we were neither.
We stopped at a petrol station to wee in the outdoor toilet block.
We returned from the farm, we stopped at a country shopping centre to get some medicine for the eldest, and to wee, everyone masked up. I also paid for fuel. Other than that, we avoided everyone and came straight back to Sydney.
Up at 0545 to queue up for a PCR test, we were heading to Queensland for our LOOOOOOONG overdue holiday. As we were queueing up the announcement came out that Queensland only needed RATs at the border was made so I went out and bought some.
In a very unexpected twist, we had received our results. Suspicious given that most people were taking up to 6 days but we were happy about that. The missus and the boys were sent to her phone, all lovely negatives. I received my result to my phone, they had a weird way of spelling negative. It came through as positive.
Well there goes our trip to Queensland…
The rest of the family were up at 0530 to queue up for another PCR test whilst I hid in my room away from everyone else.
The littlest kid had had a bit of a cough since about Christmas day and by New Years Day it was bad enough that he threw up from coughing so he and mummy went to the ED. At the ED they had to do a RAT to get in, both negative. They then got put in a room on their own as the covid positive area was full, they then were forgotten about. Eventually they got seen to and part of that seeing included a Rapid PCR test which also returned negative. So it looked like it was just his regular asthma/bronchilitis stuff that he’s had before.
More results have been SMS’d through. His Rapid PCR from the night before came through as negative. Mummy’s PCR from the 31st came through negative. Little man’s PCR from the 31st came through positive. No result for Big Man’s PCR from the 31st.
Now the question becomes, which result is correct? It has taken 12 calls to the NSW Coronavirus Community Support line, the National Coronavirus Info line, and Services NSW and so far we’ve had a few transfer attempts and one successful call that suggested that isolating from each other in the house is now pointless, if Little Man has been positive from the 31st it is likely that everyone else already has it.
We’re now at the point where we are all just living normally in our house, I’m not isolating with Little Man, we’re just assuming that everyone has it and hoping to get out around the 7th January 2022.
No one has any idea what is going on, they’re all just making it up as they go, and I miss Gladys. Domicron “Let ‘er Rip” Pairoftits really dropped the ball on this one, no restrictions should have been eased until AFTER Christmas and New Years, yeah it would have sucked wearing masks for longer but the super spreader event that is Christmas might have been a little less magnified if we had of kept our masks on and our testing and tracing system going.
]]>There are no words to explain how it feels to have had a website going for this long, I mean the World Wide Web got started around Christmas 1990 and Lankyland kicked off in August 2001. Yes, I know that the internet has been around for a lot longer but websites didn’t start popping up till 1990.
As of today’s post Lankyland has been online for almost 65% of the World Wide Web’s life. And I have no plans to stop.
]]>The nature of user-generated content hosting services is that eventually they will get abused. And 4cache got abused. Big time.
So now it is gone.
]]>The stability of the the railway is dependent on the rocks and dirt underneath the steel and sleepers. There are three layers to the rail, a stabiliser mix (basically rocks with a bit of concrete), a capping layer, then the ballast. The ballast is usually 40-70mm rocks that are shaped perfectly to fit together when weight is applied to it. The more weight, the tighter it grips to itself.
Occasionally parts of the rail line get filled with mud and water and that causes the whole section to sink and slide about which makes the track bumpy and dangerous. When that happens, it is time for a track recon.
The first step is fairly easy, at either end of the section that needs to be fixed up the rail is physically cut and then dragged back up the track and out of the way. Then a bobcat with forks on comes along and scoops out all the sleepers to be stacked up neatly. Once the sleepers are out of the way the fun really begins.
Excavators start to dig out all the old ballast into Hydremas which tip it onto a spoil pile for recycling later on. Once the ballast is out they then keep digging down, usually at least another metre or so getting rid of the mud and water and unclean dirt (I know right). Once they are done a bulldozer and a roller will come in and even out the surface and make it hard and flat.
They will then roll out some geofab, this offers a layer of separation between the regular dirt and the stabiliser.
As it is brought in by the Hydremas it is leveled out, rolled, compacted, and generally winds up looking like a hardened dirt footpath. As the go along the length of the job the geotechs will measure it all with a nuclear density gauge to make sure it is capable of handling the weight of the trains and will also not absorb to much water.
Once completed a layer of capping is then laid out in the same process. The capping has a different amount of concrete mixed in to offer further protection from water and weight compaction.
At this point we start bringing in the base layer of ballast, this is set to a particular depth and covers the stabiliser and capping layers. It is leveled by a bulldozer and compacted with a roller to “lock” the stones into place.
Once that is completed the sleepers are then put back into place, usually with The Octopus. This is an attachment that goes on an excavator that can pick up 6 sleepers at a time from the neat stacks they were put into earlier, it will then spread them out to a predetermined spacing and drops them down onto the ballast base layer. When they are in place a loader will then drag the rail back down and fit it into place.
After the rail is put back into place it is time to clip it up. A crew of labourers will reconnect the rail with the clips, biscuits, pads, and often a small excavator is used to lift up the sleepers hard against the rail to assist with this process. Generally whilst clipping up the Hydrema drivers get to have a bit of a break.
When the rail is clipped into place it is time to flood the track with ballast. If you are lucky there will be a circuit you can do, you get on track at one end and drive towards the other, tipping off your load as you go along.
Between loads a bobcat will run along with a spreader bar to ensure an even layering of the ballast. Eventually the rail will wind up looking a lot like this.
As soon as the track is completely flooded it is time for the tamper and shaper crew to come through. These are specialised trains, one will move the excess ballast from the track and get it all to a uniform shape, then the tamper will come through and it picks up the rail, punches some prongs into the ballast, vibrates strongly, and locks the ballast and the sleepers into place.
]]>DNS is how your computer translates a domain name into the IP address of the server hosting the requested content. It was first developed decades ago and started off as a manually maintained text file. Back then, there weren’t that many computers on the “internet” such as it was. Whenever a new machine was added to the network a new entry was added to the text file, then that file was sent around to all the computers. Obviously not a scalable solution.
Eventually it became obvious that a different solution would be required so certain servers were set up as Domain Name Servers, basically they were a giant text file full of Domain Name to IP Address records and any computer on the network could question them and they would answer. As the number of machines connected to the internet grew the number of requests to these Root DNS machines increased. A combination of this increase in traffic and geographic distances between client machines and servers, the lag in getting answers was noticeably slowing down internet access.
To account for this slowdown ISPs started deploying their own DNS machines on their network. As users went to various domain names the ISPs would cache their results so that future DNS lookup requests wouldn’t have to go all the way to the Root DNS machines.
These secondary DNS machines saved a lot of time and traffic but led to a problem. ISPs would have a record of every domain you were accessing. They could also alter the IP address that a domain was related to. This is the process that Australian internet services providers have implemented for this block. If you are using the default internet settings provided by a company like Telstra or Optus, when you enter a domain name into your browser your computer first checks your local hosts file, then asks your router, which then asks your ISP, which then asks the Root DNS machines. By setting up a read-only field for the blocked domain name in the ISP level DNS machines you can effectively block any requests.
So given how the blocks are being implemented all we need to do is tell our computers to ask another DNS Machine that isn’t controlled by our ISP. And given that most ISPs have slow and poorly implemented DNS machines there are a few companies out there that offer their own services.
I use CloudFlare’s 1.1.1.1 service. It is free, fast, and secure. Google has their own at 8.8.8.8 and then there is OpenDNS. By telling your network to consult them instead of the ISP you can bypass the court mandated blocking.
]]>No one is trying to diminish anyone’s rights to live a safe and secure life, what they are trying to do is ensure that everyone is living to the same standards, to lift up people of colour so that they may experience the same level that White people do.
Should you hear anyone loudly declaring that AllLivesMatter tell them you agree but right now we need to prioritise the Lives that are most in peril. Or just show them the comic below, it points out just how stupid AllLivesMatter is right now.
]]>It’s the most dangerous time to be a white person
And it made me realise that they are completely wrong. What they probably meant to say is, “It’s the most dangerous time to keep using my White Privilege to keep oppressing those people I consider inferior”.
I’m fairly removed from the racial divides of America but even a blind man could see this coming. It has been boiling ever since the Emancipation Proclamation. Powerful white people didn’t want to give up their privileges they had during slavery and twisted and turned the laws of the land to keep their former slaves enslaved.
Here in Australia White Privilege is rampant, no one discusses it much until a particularly bad incident makes it to the news but then it all dies down again as the media moves on to other, friendlier topics.
No country in the world is without a history of White Privilege and slavery. It may not have been formal slavery everywhere but Aboriginal people were subjugated, torn from their lands, forced to work for the White people, and treated like cattle. Like with the American racial issues, I’ve led a pretty sheltered life from Australia’s history of oppression. It’s not something that was covered in school history class.
I’ve traveled through rural and regional Australia and have seen the run down conditions of those remote settlements. It’s disheartening to know that us city folk live so well compared to them.
I think it was highly likely that the oppression in America and here would have continued unabated for decades to come were it not for the corona virus. Months of anguish, isolation, and anger at how it was being handled by the government brewed a violent concoction of fear and outrage. The spark that set this ablaze was the murder of a black man by a white cop in a painful and humiliating way, all over a counterfeit $20 note that the victim may not have even realised that he had.
In recent days the charges or Murder 3 have been upgraded to Murder 2 and the other police officers that were involved have also been arrested and charged with accessory to murder. It is a bit late to save the innocent man who had his life choked out of him but the sheer volume from the protestors have finally forced the justice system into action. This could be the start of the revolution, there is a monumental amount of work to be done to change the inherent systemic bias against people of colour both in America and here in our backyard.
We can’t stop now, the momentum is here, it needs to keep going. There is going to be violence, there are always groups of people that like to take advantage of turbulent times to their own gain but if everyone keeps pushing for justice for all victims of police brutality we can help those few good cops that are left to speak out without fear of reprisal, to then clean up the police system into a force that will protect people equally, regardless of the colour of their skin.
And yes, I realise that I am using a lot of White Privilege as I sit here in my comfortable house blogging about how people should keep getting out there protesting the injustices of racism.
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