All posts by George

Holidays, Life, Work

Welcome to 2022

Well, its been a nice break over christmas. I can’t complain really.

I’ve managed to get a few bike rides in, which is nice. And really its been pretty good over the christmas and new year period.

I’m getting ready for the onslaught of 2022 – its hard to know what to expect. But an overloaded health care system is pretty likely once we open the borders. I think the next few weeks will be a revelation for how the health care systems will cope (or perhaps won’t cope) and a marker for things to come.

So the work side of things will be fairly interesting over the next few weeks. We shall see.

Life

Christmas in busselton

It’s been a great time away. Yes, the neighbours have a helicopter. They take it for a daily flight.

Harder to spot is the drone hovering lower down.

Drone is at about 8 o’clock on the photo
Life, Work

The Covid Bubble Bursts

February 5 2022 – The bubble bursts.

Although – with Omicron variant doubling in numbers every 2-3 days, its going to be an interesting race to see what the rest of the country is like by then. Or possibly it will have breached the state borders anyway by then.

I guess we will see.

Either way, its the last normal Christmas for a little while

Life

Restricting the unvaccinated

I just saw this:

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews has confirmed unvaccinated shoppers will be locked out of attending non-essential retail premises from November 24, the date the state is expected to reach its 90 per cent double dose vaccination milestone for people aged 12 and up (not 16 and up). This policy had been flagged last month and it marks a change to the existing, more permissive rules. Since October 29, unvaccinated and vaccinated shoppers alike have been able to visit non-essential retail stores.

I think this is what we need to look at doing more generally.

Life, Work

COVID data from NSW

I think this real world data from NSW Health says it all about vaccines:

Essentially, you are far, far less likely to get covid if you are vaccinated – about 1/12 the rate of getting COVID.

Similarly your risk of ending up in ICU or dying is amazingly low with vaccinations. Its about 1.6% of vaccinated people who get COVID. In comparison, its 2.8% of unvaccinated people who end up in ICU or die.

Overall, that is a 17x reduction of serious illness or death with vaccination.

Energy, Life

Solar Hot Water

I think we have been late to the party, but this is the start of moving to renewable energy.

Solar hot water going in today.

Now I just need to look at solar electricity. I’m more interested in battery systems than feeding back into the grid which is getting overwhelmed anyway at peak solar times.

Life

Amazon Music

Much to my surprise, I’ve put the amazon music into my sonos controller. I’ve been paying for amazon prime anyway, and just been ignoring the music that came with it.

I know its not as good as apple music or especially spotify, but its good.

The amazon music chillout station is really good.

So whilst this isn’t the right thing for selecting specific songs (you really need to pay extra for that), the basic amazon music that comes with prime subscriptions is fantastic for playing in the background.

Life, Technology

Spreadsheets

Just looking for the best WordPress spreadsheet plugin

Probably WPDataTables looks best. Had to increase the maximum upload size of a file by editing the .htaccess file in the www directory. It was still set at a 2MB maximum.

I’m surprised that this is still the case, it must have been higher in the past. Presumably before I migrated to this server.

Continue reading Spreadsheets →
Life

NSW just getting worse

Its pretty sad to look at, but the figures are not good for NSW.

Today from the NSW health website. NSW health has around 500 ICU beds, from what I can determine. So about a quarter of them now are used for COVID.

This will be worse within a couple of weeks.