My wife and I have been customers of the nab for the past 27 years. But no longer. Over the past couple of weeks we have opened a new account with a bank that is not one of the ‘big four’.
There were a number of direct debit arrangements to change; screenshots of the details of commonly-used payees to grab, and ensuring we had csv downloads of our recent transactions.
After 11 years, 435 books read and 418 reviews I have deleted my goodreads account.
I loved it when I first began using it (before Amazon owned it), and it is still useful to obtain some information about a book or author; but my screen seems to be increasingly consumed by advertisements and banners; and I seem to get logged out about once a week for no apparent reason.
I wanted to keep a record of what I have read, what I thought about it at the time, and what I may want to read in future. Goodreads met that need for quite a while, but for the time being I’ll keep those records in a spreadsheet instead.
Something Bill Muehlenberg quoted on his site yesterday from CH Spurgeon has got me thinking.
Bill quotes Spurgeon as follows:
Master those books you have. Read them thoroughly. Bathe in them until they saturate you. Read and reread them, masticate and digest them. Let them go into your very self. Peruse a good book several times and make notes and analysis of it. A student will find that his mental constitution is more affected by one book thoroughly mastered than by twenty books he has merely skimmed. Little learning and much pride come of hasty reading. Some men are disabled from thinking by their putting meditation away for the sake of much reading. In reading let your motto be, ‘much not many’.
I most recently wrote about my Linux distro of choice and window managers a little over a year ago.
At that time I was running the i3 window manager on an Arch distro. That is still my setup of choice, but in the interim I did use both dwm and Qtile for quite a while (probably 9 months in dwm and two months using Qtile). dwm did take some fiddling with patches to install a systray, but it eventually came together.
For much of my adult life I would have described myself as centre-left on the political spectrum and with some concern for environmental issues (amongst a range of other issues).
When I was growing up the left-oriented party, the Labor (sic) party would stand up for workers rights and social justice whereas the right (the Liberals) were more interested in big business and sound economic management. It was said that one voted Labor to fix the country then voted Liberal to fix the economy.
In this last batch of holiday photographs we undertook the “Gould’s Circuit” walk in the Warrumbungle National Park. The walk is a 7 km circuit from Pincham carpark heading south to Febar Tor and Macha Tor. Both tors offer magnificent views into and across the valley containing the Breadknife, Belougery Spire and several other bluffs.
The views are fine from Febar Tor, but even better a bit further south from Macha Tor. You could just visit Macha Tor. Be prepared for a reasonable workout to ascend (and descend) both Tors!
Heading further north we spent a morning walking the Sandstone Caves track in the Pilliga Forest, and the afternoon between Coonabarabran and Barradine.
Signs of regrowth
The way in
Some bizarre patterns
A mighty big lump of sandstone
Holes within holes
The way out
Grasstrees
Siding Spring Observatory from the Barradine Road
An abandonded farm?
Continuing the holiday trip we spent some time in the botanical gardens in Dubbo. The gardens are divided into a number of areas incuding Japanese, Indigenous, and an Adventure playground area.
On our recent holiday we visited the Japanese Gardens in Cowra. There is something of a link between the Japanese and the people of Cowra as a result of the breakout from the Cowra POW camp in 1944. Here is a selection of photos from the gardens. Sunshine appeared about half way through!
Crepe Myrtle
Weak sunshine
From the teahouse
A place to pond-er
Spring and autumn probably look the best
This is a copy of the first sermon I preached. The year was around 1992. I have done some very light editing. Reading back over this sermon thirty years after its appearing, I would be happy to preach it today. That can’t be said for all of my sermons!
Read through the newspaper…
Watch the television…
Listen to the radio…
Within a short time you’ll discover (if you haven’t already) that Australia is in a recession1 – the world is in a recession.