Peter’s Blog

I need to place on record my feeling that overwhelmingly throughout my life, my contact with my fellow men, women and children has been a total delight.
It is a recurring pleasure which I experience each day and is among the precious things which makes my life rewarding and worth living, not least because moments of the keenest enjoyment can as readily occur with a complete stranger as with family and friends.

 


 

The Film Diary entries are selected items from the diary I keep whenever I film. To check location references, click on ‘Tamborine Mountain’ on the top information bar then hit the ‘Tamborine Mountain’ button on the map.

The Brisbane Line was the e-bulletin of the now defunct Brisbane Institute, to which I contributed the articles featured, between 2006 and 2012.

Not The Brisbane Line contains my other essays from 2005 to the present.

 



A cherished dream, my book   One small place on earth …  discovering biodiversity where you are,   self-published in August 2019, has been long in the making. Jan Watson created its design template nine years ago. The idea of doing a book seems to have occurred during my stay with Clive Tempest, the website’s first architect, when I was visiting the UK in 2006. By the time Steve Guttormsen and I began sustained work on the book in 2017, much of which I had already written, the imperative was to create a hard copy version of a project whose content is otherwise entirely digital.

 

People may wonder why there is little mention of climate change – global warming on my website. There are two related reasons. Firstly, if former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s 2007 remark that climate change is the “great moral, environmental and economic challenge of our age” is true, we have not acted accordingly before or since. Rudd’s statement is only true if we collectively live as if it is true, Rudd included. Instead, our politics has wasted decades favouring business as usual, and a global economy excessively dependent on fossil fuels – in the wilful absence of a politics intent on achieving a low carbon economy. Secondly, although it is open to individuals to strive to live the truth of Rudd’s remarks, the vast majority of people, myself included, do not. I salute those who do. The precautionary principle alone makes me regard climate change as a current planetary crisis, but because I have only marginally changed the way I live, and still wish to fly, I am not inclined to pontificate on the subject.

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Other / 28.09.2024

Today, Steve copied the correct content onto the hard drive, and gave it to me. I actually discovered the error on the time-coded version which he copied onto the hard drive I use for selecting video frames for my albums, and footage for my species videos. I wasn’t able to check the memory card before I gave it to him to copy.

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Other / 16.09.2024

I contacted Steve to tell him that the hard drive he gave me with the data files of the remaining unedited footage for the State Library, included a duplicate of Card 11. It was on Card 13, the final memory card I gave him to copy. I had already packed the hard drive and was ready to post it.

 

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Other / 22.08.2024

One of the things I decided to do having returned from my overseas trip, was to ask Steve to create data files of the last video footage for the State Library of Queensland (SLQ), for which I had to give him the memory card. I also thought I should find out if the Library would consider accepting my Image Library as a donation. Steve and I had been editing the video frames for the past year or two and they needed to be put onto a USB. I met Steve for lunch at Bond University and gave him the memory card.

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My Travels / 08.08.2024

LONDON

I was away from Sunday July 7 until Friday August 2. I flew premium economy on Singapore Airlines, enjoying the extra room and better meals on offer. Cousin Sue again met me at Heathrow and I bought a sim card for my smart phone at a shop almost adjacent to where I emerged into the arrivals hall. I was fearful of checking in at my hotel in Belsize Park because of the fifty per cent increase in cost to stay for a day less, at a very run-down property. I was relieved and delighted to discover that I was in fact paying for a complete refurbishment as well as for booking in the peak Summer holiday period. The for me hard to use bath in the bathroom, had been replaced by a spacious shower. The bedrooms benefited from new furniture and décor. The old warn carpeting had been replaced throughout. The public areas were smart and tastefully styled. The one redeeming feature about my last stay was the breakfast, which was good and reasonably priced. It was still good and marginally more expensive than two years ago.

The focus of my time in London was… Read Complete Text

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Website / 05.08.2024

I lost no time in accessing my website, seeking to rectify what had been denied to me and today emailed Jackie that I succeeded thanks to her and Melbourne IT resolving the problem. No more forbidden sort order or save changes. One thing that could not be corrected were my historic errors, such as using a capital letter in a species name.

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Website / 06.07.2024

On June 17, Jackie suggested that I pay to use the NextGen Gallery programme so that she can ask them for help in resolving the problem, which I promptly did. Her email on the 21st shows the exchange with NextGen, who now think that we have a hosting issue which needs to be resolved by Melbourne IT. Both Jackie and I have spoken with them and Jackie has exchanged emails. They have issued a ticket to undertake the work suggested by NextGen. I’m about to head overseas. I wonder what I will find on my return.