Life's Been Interesting: Ray Beaumont 1912-2010

"Poppa! I can count to twenty!"

One of my earliest memories of my grandfather was me proudly showing I could count. He used to offer a little monetary incentive, 50 cents, when I could count higher.

My grandfather, Ray Beaumont, was the person I admired most in this world. A person of such generosity we will probably never know because he didn't flash his money about. Others less generous would have had buildings named after him but he was a true philanthropist, one who kept his generosity almost exclusively private.

Working full time at 80 years old

His work ethic was impeccable and showed itself in his sons and grandchildren including my father and myself. He worked full time until he was 80, then cut back to 3 days a week. He started his last business when he was 50, when many his age were looking at retirement, which now is a national company in Australia turning over more than $100mil per year.

A modest man who could work 120 hours

When his wife was in her last days in Ashford hospital, my father was concerned as he had been there, awake for almost 2 days. My grandfather dismissed the concern with a story about how when he had been working at McLaren Flat, he worked 5 days with no sleep because it had to be done. An impressive feat, which he hadn't bragged about to anyone we know of for more than 50 years.

He was a loving and caring person who would always listen and give wise council to those who asked for it. He didn't play favourites with his children or grandchildren and was universally proud of all of us no matter what we did with our lives.

Generocity for others

Some of my fondest memories are of staying with my "Nana & Poppa" at their house in Novar Gardens, playing in their garden, and nana's tuna morney. They also had built, as one of the many investments my grandfather made, a series of units at Victor Harbour. The project netted them enough to pay for the project and still keep 2. One unit was their holiday home the other was given to almost anyone who wanted to use it. Family, friends, even friends of friends.

My grandfather has had many careers over his life. He has delivered telegrams by bicycle, worked for the YMCA, been a wool-classer, planted and worked in vinyards, been a costing clerk, realestate developer, importer and business owner.

My grandfather, the hoon

Yes, he was a hoon. He owned motorcycles and later moved on to Jaguars. Some classics he has owned include an Ariel 500 and several Jaguar XJS.

I owe much to my grandfather, whether it be directly or as a result of how he brought up my father: Generosity, my love of cars, my business & sales skills, my caring nature, my sense of humour and my caring nature.

I love my grandfather and will miss him deeply.

The Unions Right To Tresspass

Picture this:

I walk into a business, into the staff only areas, into secure areas, into areas which may be dangerous or contain proprietary, confidential or private information and nobody has any legal right to stop me.

I demand to speak to the CEO, and they have no right to refuse a near immediate appointment.

I walk into the payroll office and begin going thought all employee records, taking copies where ever I want, making notes of who gets paid what.

In almost any western country, I would be thrown out on my ass if I wasn't a member of the police or other authority.

In Australia I could do it if I was a union representative.

Recently I was talking with someone about the Rudd Government's "Fair Work" (their answer to the former Howard Government's Work Choices) and was astounded to find out the above facts.

I was informed that shortly after the legislation was passed, all the warehouses this company ran were forcibly visited by union representatives who:

• Forced a stop work
• Assembled all staff for a "lecture" on why they should join the union
• Talked aggressively to at least one female warehouse worker who in turn lodged an official complaint with the business. (Which can do nothing about it, but is still legally liable)
• Forced an immediate meeting with the manager with no appointment

Now, all these workers are paid above award and almost all of them are paid generous performance bonuses which they almost always achieve. They are not mistreated, they are valued and treated more as family than as employees.

To this point, not a single employee of this business has joined the union in response to this gross violation of a business' privacy.

It is implied by the promotional material that a union must give at least 24 hours notice to enter a premises, but this isn't actually the case as Fair Work Australia pretty much exempts all union officials from the requirement.

Another thing that is implied, again by the glossy slick Rudd-esque spin-doctored material, is that the union can only access employee records of union members. No, they can access any and all employee records, YOUR records including pay rates, sick leave, everything.

Now how would you feel if your pay rates were made known to other employees by a union rep? Well, they're allowed to and you have no legal right to stop them.

As bad as Work Choices was made out to be, Fair Work is worse. You now have no privacy from the unions and they can not be held accountable.

Save the planet: Drive a manual!

For a while now, there has been something bothering me. People are very big on fuel economy and save the planet and global warming climate change.... and yet more and more people are driving cars with Automatic transmission.

Almost without exception, a manual transmission will use between 5% and 25% less fuel than an automatic. "But I can't drive a manual..." Then learn! (except for those who are physically unable to drive a manual)

I spend over an hour driving every workday and in that time I'm confounded by those who drive automatics. Every time you use your brakes, you are wasting the fuel you have used to establish that inertia. Those who drive automatics seem to near-continuously ride their brakes to maintain a constant speed.

In addition, the purpose of brake lights is to indicate a vehicle is slowing to others around them. If you've got these people who drive automatics near continuously riding their brakes, the result is more rear-end accidents because we don't know if they're just maintaining a constant speed or if they are actually slowing down.

And my final point. The Prius. Some of you would know this car is my pet peeve. It claims a milage of 4.4 L/100km but in real world city driving its close to 5.5 L/100km. Lets compare this to a Corolla. Your standard 1.8L manual corolla achieves about 7.5 L/100km and costs AUD$17,000 less than a prius with a similar feature set. Thats a 36% saving in fuel for an 85% additional purchase cost.

As a comparison, my car (1998 Lotus Elise) cost less than a Prius and uses, in real world figures about 9 L/100km. In addition, I don't have the environmental footprint of all the fossil-fuel based plastics used in the Prius' construction, nor the environmental hazard of the Nickle Metal Hydride batteries or the cost of replacing those batteries every 5 years. (with a bonus that it does 0-100km/h in about 5 seconds, handles better than 99.9% of the cars on the road and sounds brilliant)

So instead of a Prius, buy a Corolla, use the $17,000 different to convert your house to be more environmentally friendly and then take a holiday with the change.

Here are some figures.

Assume you drive 20,000km per year in your Corolla or Prius

Car	L/100km	L per year	Fuel $ per year
Prius	5.5	1,100	$ 1,375
Corolla	7.5	1,500	$ 1,875

So, with your $17,000 additional spend, you save $500 per year in fuel costs. Does this make sense to ANYONE?

Oh, and for $3000 more than a Corolla, you can get a VW Golf Turbo Diesel which achieves 5.5 L/100km... hang on... that's not a hybrid... oh, and you can use Biodiesel with the Golf. The VW Polo is even lower, at 5 L/100km.

Vacancy at The LAN House

My house has a vacancy as of the 12th of October. My good friend Brock has decided to move closer to the city leaving a room available.

House details:

• 4 bedroom
• 2 bathroom
• Located in Sturt, less than 10 min walk from Westfield marion
• Air Conditioning
• $150 per week board (plus 1/4 of Power and Gas)
  
• Includes:
• ADSL2+ internet (80GB/month with Adam)
  
• Shared central server
• 3 meals provided per week
• Use of the espresso machine
• Area in "The LAN Room" for a desk/pc/etc
• Use of washer/dryer including washing powder etc
• Dishwasher
  

Let me know if you are interested either via email, phone, SMS, MSN, Facebook or IRC.

19 great years and now she's gone

My cat Fushia has been a wonderful companion since 1989. I still remember the day we got her. Because of our family's love of cars, Dad, my sister and I were voting for the name Porsche but when it came to the official papers, mum thought we'd decided on a different name.

~ Fushia ~

The sun was warm and we were all excited. At the breeders house, we had a marvelous time playing with the dozen kittens. However, we had already discussed how we would choose. Our order of preference was Lilac, Tortie, Cream, Blue and then Chocolate. The main deciding factor was the kittens behavior. Our little kitten chose us. Fushia was one of the only ones to come to us and play.

Fushia was our first 100% inside cat. Our two previous cats would be inside and outside. We decided for both her safety and that of native wildlife, that she would be restricted inside.

One of the most distinct memories I had was when we were moving house from Eve Road to Federation Court. We were about to put her in her cat carrier but she had escaped and climbed half way up a huge tree in the neighbor's front yard. I rigged up the cat carrier to a rope, climbed the tree, put her in the carrier, and lowered her to the ground. What a sneaky cat!

Our next cat was a tortie Burmese girl named Sheeba. She was wonderful and my parents decided to breed her for a litter so we could witness the cycle of life. Her litter of kittens I think was 4 boys and 3 girls.

The interesting thing we did with our pets was we got both Sheeba and our dog Orson at the same time so they wouldn't fight. Orson knew who was boss... the cat was boss! They got along very well together and that carried over to our next cat, Fushia, and to our next dog, Sebastian.

Fushia was a terribly interesting cat with a unique personality. Early on, she developed this habit of letting out a distinct mew whenever someone sneezed. She even learnt when we were faking to get her to do it.

During my marriage breakdown 2 years ago, she was particularly comforting. For the first few months, she would rarely leave my bed except for the necessities of life. I always found that she knew when I was upset or unhappy and she would come and cheer me up.

The transition from family cat to her being officially my cat came when mum was receiving allergy treatment to desensitise her to certain pollens. We discovered that although the treatment was working, it had the unfortunately side-effect of causing her to become allergic to Fushia.

This was enough to motivate me to do what I could to get my own house as she could no longer be around my mum without making her sick.

18 months ago I bought a house. Due to her insistence that closed doors are a personal insult, I installed a cat door into my bedroom to save my housemates the pain of hours of MEOW MEOW MEOW MEOOOWW.

Since moving to my own house, she has discovered the joys of laptops and the heat they produce through the keyboard.

She also discovered the nice warm UPS that keeps my server running in case of blackouts...

When you have had a constant companion for 19 years, it hurts deeply to lose them. As a memorial to how much joy she has brought me, I have asked my brother in law to bury her in the back yard and plant a fruit tree on top.

Fushia Beaumont
1989 - 2008

I want a smaller monitor...

For years, I've always been a fan of monitors with a great Dot Pitch. Back when Sony Trinitron screens were "the best" you could get, you'd always find the pictures sharper than on just about any other brand. This was because they had a finer dot pitch.

(Another way of describing dot pitch is how many pixels (dots in groups of red, green and blue) are packed in per centimetre)

I love the resolution of my laptop screen. It is 1920 pixels wide by 1200 pixels high while still only being 17 inches diagonally.

The best dot pitch I've found in a mainstream computer monitor is in a 19 inch screen with a resolution of 1680 by 1050. However, that is still 27% larger dots than my laptop screen. Here is a comparison of my laptop screen to all the common "wide screen" (16:10 ratio) monitors available:

Panel size				Width		Height		Dot Pitch	% bigger dots than laptop
				cm	pixels	cm	pixels
17	"	43.18	cm	36.6	1920	22.9	1200	0.0191	0%
19	"	48.26	cm	40.9	1680	25.6	1050	0.0244	22%
15.6	"	39.624	cm	33.6	1366	21	768	0.0246	22%
30	"	76.2	cm	64.6	2560	40.4	1600	0.0252	24%
20.1	"	51.054	cm	43.3	1680	27.1	1050	0.0258	26%
23	"	58.42	cm	49.5	1920	31	1200	0.0258	26%
24	"	60.96	cm	51.7	1920	32.3	1200	0.0269	29%
22	"	55.88	cm	47.4	1680	29.6	1050	0.0282	32%
19	"	48.26	cm	40.9	1440	25.6	900	0.0284	33%
25.5	"	64.77	cm	54.9	1920	34.3	1200	0.0286	33%
28	"	71.12	cm	60.3	1920	37.7	1200	0.0314	39%

I would very much like to be able to get a desktop version (or 3) of my laptop's display, however, I fear the market for such a screen would be far too "nitch" to be populated.

Can One Blog From Bed?

As the darkness of evening grows colder, I find myself pondering why my cat is just sitting there purring for no apparent reason.

The darkness does not bother me. It is comforting in a way, but I still yearn for sunlight. Why does it seem to be such a paradox to love both opposites of the same world?

Tonight, as many of you would have realized, I am feeling philosophical as I contemplate sleep. I have finished watching "Generation Kill", a mini-series based on a true story of the second war in Iraq.

Much of the series was spent highlighting both the good and bad aspects of the American soldiers. However, in the end, it really highlighted the human cost. Was it the lesser of two evils? Do two wrongs make a right?

I do not know. I do not know.

Posted with LifeCast