octave

Nah, I like to take photos. I may use a waterproof bag for getting in and out of, at other times, there is little chance of it ending up in the water. Anyway, as it turns out, my phone has an IP68 rating The '6' in IP68 means the Pixel 6's body is designed to prevent dust, dirt, and sand from getting inside of it. The '8' represents the Pixel 6's water resistance, allowing it to be submerged in up to 1.5 meters of water for up to 30 minutes at a time.

Mrs Octave and I had an enjoyable paddle on our local river, however it was not all smooth sailing. While getting out of the kayak, I stepped on the concrete ramp which had a green, slippery plant life covering. For a moment I was in that position of one leg in the boat and one leg on the ramp. The kayak started to move away so I had to commit. With both feet on the ramp, I started to slide towards the water in the manner of a ship being launched. The ramp was quite steep so I could not stop myself. This was not such a problem until I realized that I had my phone in my pocket. Despite being completely submerged, my phone still works. PXL_20250309_225720168.mp4

Why not vote by mail? I haven't voted in person for many years.

Well, that is purely your incorrect interpretation of the word.

Is being forced to drive on the left a dictatorship? I really think you don't understand the definition of a dictatorship. Here let me help you. What is a dictatorship in simple terms? A dictatorship is a government or a social situation where one person makes all the rules and decisions without input from anyone else. Dictatorship implies absolute power — one person who takes control — of a political situation, a family, a classroom or even a camping expedition.

When I first saw the Enola Gay story, I thought it must be satire, but no.

Just to be clear, Trump was not referring to conscripts, but he was referring to soldiers in a war cemetery near Paris. He also did not want to be seen publicly with injured veterans at a proposed military parade. https://www.axios.com/2023/10/02/trump-troops-fallen-soldiers-john-kelly Former President Trump didn't want to visit a cemetery near Paris for Americans who fought and died in World War I because it was filled with "suckers" and "losers," John Kelly, his longest-serving chief of staff, said in a statement to CNN on Monday. Trump saying at a 2017 Memorial Day event in Arlington National Cemetery: "I don't get it. What was in it for them?" Kelly said Trump did not want to include military amputees at a White House military event in 2018 because it would make spectator's uncomfortable, and added that Trump had said their presence "doesn't look good for me." Kelly also noted that Trump in 2016 publicly belittled the parents of Humayun Khan, an Army captain and Gold Star recipient who was killed in Iraq in 2004, after they criticized him for his anti-Muslim rhetoric.

Holy sh1t $500 a month. I know what I would do. I would forgo the money put into this policy over the years and think about the $6000 a year I was forking out. I would redirect that $6k into an account and then after a year I would go on a nice holiday.

His sycophantic fans will ignore anything in order not to criticise the dear leader. Trump knows this.

For many people, work brings dignity. Alina Habba said “We have a fiscal responsibility to use taxpayer dollars to pay people that actually work. That doesn’t mean that we forget our veterans by any means. We are going to care for them in the right way, but perhaps they’re not fit to have a job at this moment, or not willing to come to work.” I think many veterans would find the asserion that they are "not fit to work" offensive. If people need to be sacked, why do it in such a brutal manner? I watched a series of interviews with veterans who had been sacked, and they claimed that the reason they were given was "poor performance" even though most of them had had positive assessments. This would make it difficult for them to get a new job. Why so cruel? There is an assertion in Habba's quote that those workers sacked "don't actually work" You must surely agree that the Trump administration has made some embarrassing and dangerous errors such as sacking workers involved in nuclear safety and bird flu prevention only to scramble to rehire them. There seems to be a mentality of acting in haste. Musk actually waving around a chainsaw is the perfect metaphor for what is happening. If he could just put down the chainsaw and use a scalpel and intelligence, it would not be so problematic. VA Crisis Line Employees Among Those Fired Amid Federal Workforce Purge

Trump adviser insults veterans as not 'fit to have a job.' It's disgraceful.

Any cemetery has the remains of someone's loved ones. Does this mean when driving through a small town you can't refer to the cemetery as "the dead centre of town"? Merely referring to a cemetery is not an attack on anyone buried in it.

In what way is this "blaspheming"?

GON can you find other supporting sources? My understanding is this is an allegation by Tim Burchill and Marjorie Taylor Green. I have no idea who the authors of this website are. If I post a link I will nearly always post links from other sites across the political spectrum. The article offers no hard evidence. I would have thought this would be plastered across the media, especially traditionally right wing media organisations. DOGE has made many claims that have been disproved i.e., gazillions of dollars worth of condoms to Gaza. Sure it could be true, but the evidence at the moment is flimsy. Certainly an organisation with such a large budget is going to have things that are not right, however, the wholesale cutting off of life-saving food and medical aid to the poorest in the world for billionaires to get a tax cut is repulsive.

I am better looking than OneTrack😃

Are you referring to me? I am on the east coast 🙂

I am unsure why my input is more interesting than anyone else's. Seems like a storm in a teacup. It would not be my style. I would say, though, that people will often complain or cancel a comedian for joking about a person or group of people, and right will rant about free speech and talk about "cancel culture"

The hypocrisy is mind blowing. Musk never wears a suit in the Oval Office.

It is no secret that Putin would like to restore the borders of the old Soviet Union. The problem with doing a deal to end the war tinvolving Putin keeping the 20% of Ukraine that Russia occupies is that once Russia rebuilds its forces, Putin will surely have another go. Do we then make a new deal and let Russia keep another 20%. How about after Russia occupies all of Ukraine and rolls into Poland? Do we make another deal? Whilst appeasement might stop the war now, you have to consider what this means for the future. We do not say to a thief "You can keep what you have already stolen as long as you don't steal anything else"

We went up to some of the icebergs (the more stable ones) but there is a 150 metre exclusion zone from the face of the glacier. The icebergs are relatively safe, they just watch out for the ones where melting could change the centre of gravity, and they can roll over. This is quite easy to predict.

Indeed. We went on a boat tour on a glacial lake last time we were there. The glacier remained at a constant 28 km (17 mi) in length for all of its recorded history in the 20th century before starting its current period of rapid melting in the 1990s.[1] Between 2000 and 2008 alone, the glacier terminus receded 3.7 km.[10] Since the 1990s the terminus has retreated about 180 metres (590 ft) a year on average. The glacier is now in a period of faster retreat where the rate of retreat is calculated to be between 477 to 822 metres (1,565 to 2,697 ft) each year.[ It is estimated that the Tasman Glacier will eventually disappear and the terminal Tasman Lake will reach a maximum size in 10 to 19 years time. In 1973 Tasman Glacier had no terminal lake and by 2008 Tasman Lake was 7 kilometres (4.3 mi) long, 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) wide, and 245 metres (804 ft) deep.[11]

FDA cancels expert meeting on flu vaccines The US Food and Drug Administration has unexpectedly canceled a meeting with experts to discuss the development of next year's flu vaccines, media reported late Wednesday. It comes after the Republican-controlled Senate approved Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary this month, disregarding widespread alarm from the medical community over his long history of promoting vaccine misinformation and denying scientific facts. Laboratories that produce flu vaccines have traditionally relied on the FDA to annually select which strains should be chosen based on the variants of the virus expected to circulate in the United States the following winter. A selection is usually made by an expert committee convened by the FDA in March based on data from the World Health Organization. "We're all left trying to understand what is going on. Why was this meeting canceled? It's an important meeting. What's the plan for flu vaccines this year," Paul Offit, a member of the FDA advisory committee and director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, told CBS News. Offit confirmed the cancellation of the meeting and warned that it could interfere with or delay production of flu vaccines. He added that given the vaccines have a six-month production cycle, he assumes the committee is not picking strains this year.

We are mainly hiking in the South Island

Mrs Octave and I went on an enjoyable hike this morning. We are getting fit for our upcoming NZ trip. Day-to-day life is pretty good, isn't it?