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John Ross
If you are interested in coming to the second Yandoit history in story event on the theme of Yandoit Hills stone houses and vineyards please keep late afternoon /early evening of Saturday November 23rd free.
This will be a local community event and another edition of the Chronicle, coming soon, will provide details.
The information herein is irrelevant to you if you have a health care card and get your prescriptions for $5.80 anyway.
It had never occurred to me that it might be worth comparing prices for prescription medications, until a friend alerted me to it. And it is not just a matter of specific brand versus generic medication. I am a typical middle-aged male with a tendency to high blood pressure and cholesterol – hence I am prescribed several drugs on an ongoing basis. I do not have a health care card, so I pay the normal PBS price. Naively I assumed that PBS medications would be the same price everywhere. I would go along to the Chemmart pharmacy in Castlemaine and have my prescriptions filled as necessary. Then I discovered that the Chemist Warehouse chain offer the same medications at much reduced prices. Without disclosing the particular medications I am prescribed (but they are very commonly prescribed), here are some comparisons…
Chemmart Castlemaine Prices:
Item 1: $32.95 (specified brand)
Item 2: $20.45 (specified brand)
Item 3: $35.40 (generic, Pfizer)
Total: $88.80
Chemist Warehouse (Ballarat, Bendigo, Maryborough and other locations):
Item 1: $23.99 (same specified brand)
Item 2: $11.99 (same specified brand)
Item 3: $14.99 (generic, Sandoz)
Total: $50.97
This post is not an advertisement for Chemist Warehouse, so I won’t include a link to their website. There may be other chains, unknown to me, that offer a discount. The retail experience is quite different: Chemist Warehouse is to pharmacy what Bunnings is to hardware. I just want people to know that if they have a need to save some money on their regular medication costs, there is an opportunity to do so. Chemist Warehouse also offer a service whereby you can lodge your prescriptions with them and they will mail your medications to you for $8.95, or free if your order is over $99.00. They also publish their prices online.
For Windows users, Google Picasa is the best and easiest to use photo software ever written, and it is free. It organises your photos; it can adjust exposure and colour, straighten a skewed horizon, crop and resize. It can even do retouching and apply special effects. If you do manage to make a mistake with it, you can always ‘Undo’ at the touch of a button – the original files are always preserved. Only a professional photographer would require more. Most people don’t need anything as complicated as Adobe PhotoShop and find it confusing.
Google Picasa is available as a free download here: http://picasa.google.com/. It is a small download (14.6MB) and installs in a couple of minutes.
Picasa is also available for the Mac, but Mac users already have iPhoto, which is very similar.
This information is from ACOFS (Australian Council of Film Societies) Bulletin, July 2012.
“Discussions with some DVD distributors are under way to deliver a DVD rights process that is easier to use and fairer to the film societies and distributors. Feedback from film societies has illustrated that the charges for DVD rights are too high for the smaller society but the larger film societies may not find it difficult or
unreasonable to pay more for the DVD rights.
While distributors would like to see a price increase across the board, they may be willing to balance this by retaining the current prices for the mid range societies or even offering a bargain price for the smaller ones. Recognising that some societies use many more DVDs than others, we are also discussing the possibility of agreeing on a “blanket licence” along the lines of a bulk discount arrangement.
There will be more details to follow in later Bulletins, but for the moment I wish to thank all societies that have submitted DVD usage stats with their annual affiliation applications as these have allowed us to focus on the real needs of the societies and put real figures to the estimates under discussion.”
(for the geekishly inclined!)
yandoit.net uses the shared hosting service justhost.com, which is one of a number of large hosting companies owned by Endurance International Group Inc. based in Boston, Massachusetts. Hosting costs only a few dollars a month.
yandoit.net is built on WordPress 3.4.1 using the Weaver ii theme. WordPress and the Weaver ii theme are free software.
yandoit.net also uses ‘plugins’ for extra functionality. Plugins are extra bits of code, mostly written by enthusiasts in the WordPress community, that add extra features to the basic WordPress platform. yandoit.net uses the following plugins:
- All-in-One Calendar (the calendar page)
- Authors Widget (lists posts by author)
- Browser Blocker (detects old versions of IE. I had to hack it a bit to make it work)
- Cimy User Extra Fields (collects info when you sign up)
- Configure SMTP (handles email responses)
- Dashboard: Pending Review (for moderation of posts)
- Fast Secure Contact Form (to contact me)
- Peter’s Collaboration E-mails (more email functions)
- Post From Site (this is the plugin that provides the Add Post link and form – I had to hack this one too).
- Slimbox2 with Slideshow (the fancy display of posts containing photos)
- Theme My Login (login and sign-up screen)
- User Role Editor (what you can and can’t do)
- Weaver II Theme Extras (save and restore theme settings)
- WP Approve User
- WP Image Size Limit
If you want to play around with WordPress yourself, create a free account on wordpress.com. It is an excellent place to host your own personal blog. You won’t be able to add any plugins, however. If you want to learn more about WordPress than is possible at wordpress.com, or about web development in general, there are plenty of options. Many companies offer free web hosting (do a search). Or you can install a web server on your own computer.
- 000webshost.com: One of many free hosting services. I don’t know anything about them, but they seem to offer all you need.
- XAMPP: easy-setup free web server for Windows, Mac or Linux.
- WordPress: free download.
The Tennis Court opening and barbecue was well attended with the mandatory cutting of a ribbon and many locals, including our Mayor, displaying their prowess upon the pristine tarmac.
The refurbishment of the tennis court was a project of the Jim Crow Planning Group with funding and support from Hepburn Shire Council and the State Government.
The court is always open and available for use. It is marked for Tennis, basketball and netball.
yandoit.net has been redeveloped on the ’WordPress’ platform. I have done this because the old platform ’WebsiteBaker’ has proved difficult to maintain and is not well supported. WordPress is the dominant platform used by many bloggers. It is well supported and still being actively developed. A popular local example of a WordPress site is Geoff Park’s excellent Natural Newstead.
Some features, such as home pages and subscriptions, were broken on the old platform. The move to WordPress should solve these issues. The new platform should prove easier for subscribers to contribute material to yandoit.net.
Windows and Mac are familiar to all, but there is another: Linux. It is completely free, open source software. Linux used to be ‘just for geeks’, but today’s Linux looks and feels much like Windows.
Linux is very stable and reliable, which is why it is so popular for web servers. Yandoit.net is hosted on a Linux server, somewhere in the US.
Various companies and communities create and package their own variety of Linux. These are called ‘distributions’. Most are free to download. The most popular distribution, and the one I use, is Ubuntu. You can download it here and burn it to a CD, which you can then install, or try it out by running it directly from the CD.
Ubuntu includes all the basic software you need, including the OpenOffice suite (word processing, spreadsheet and presentations), Firefox web browser, email/calendar application, graphics, media player, CD/DVD burner and games. There is also a huge online repository of extra software to choose from, all free.
Linux facts…
Linus Torvalds
There are no Linux viruses so you don’t need anti-virus software.
Depending on which survey you read, around 70% of the world’s web servers run Linux.
Of the world’s top 500 supercomputers, 91% run Linux[1]. The fastest supercomputer in the world, IBM’s Sequoia, runs Linux.
Linux is built and maintained by a community of enthusiasts. Its core was written by Linus Torvalds, commencing in 1991. Since then it has developed from a rather plain and technical system mainly of interest to programmers, to a fully-fledged desktop system: a worthy rival to Windows and Mac OSX.
PC repairers (myself included) often use Linux (installed on a USB stick or CD) to kick-start a borked Windows machine and recover its files.
You can try out Linux (without installing it or making any changes to your computer) by running it from a CD or USB stick.
Screenshot of Ubuntu (click to enlarge)
References
1. TOP500.org. “Operating system Family share for 06/2010 | TOP500 Supercomputing Sites”. Top500.org. http://www.top500.org/stats/list/35/osfam. Retrieved 2010-06-01.
The earliest reference to the name ‘Jim Crow’ that I have found was by Edward Stone Parker in his report of September 22nd 18391. In John Tully’s book of the Djadja Wurrung Language2, he states that Jim Crow is a corruption of jumcra, the aboriginal name for the area. I have not discovered an original source for the corruption ‘Jim Crow’. It is unlikely that Parker coined the corruption because he was familiar with aboriginal names and referred to them regularly in his writings.
‘Jim Crow’ would have been a familiar phrase at that time, and least to those who had knowledge of North America or English theatre as explained below…
(Thanks to Bill McClenaghan for his contribution to the following section)
Thomas D. Rice as ‘Jim Crow’, 1832
“Jim Crow” was a stage character created in 1828 by a travelling white minstrel called Thomas “Daddy” Rice, who used to blacken his face (as Al Jolson did a century later). By 1830 the “Jim Crow” character had become his signature act. Rice was very popular and toured extensively in North America. He was known in England too. He was mentioned in the Times in 1833, he toured England in 1836 and married there in 18373.
Why Rice chose that name is the subject of debate and nobody knows for sure; perhaps the name of an old black slave or a ragged black stable boy. In any case, it became synonymous with black Americans and other racial groups considered inferior at the time in American society. Decades later, segregation laws would become known as the “Jim Crow Laws”.
So it is likely that any English settlers in the Colony who had been to the theatre back home would know of the character “Jim Crow” and would associate the phrase with black people. Upon hearing the local Aborigines use the term jumcra, one can speculate how they might easily arrive at the corruption “Jim Crow”.
I have just found some information (from Ballarat Genealogy) that claims two of Alexander Mollison’s shepherds coined the name ‘Jim Crow’ when they established a western extension of Mollison’s run in 1840, further that Mollison wanted to change the name to ‘jumcra’. But then according to Edgar Morrison’s book, Parker referred to the name in 1839. Maybe some of these dates are a bit fuzzy. I will try to verify the original source and date of this information. The Ballarat Genealogy page states as follows:
“Alexander Mollison, in a letter to his sister Jane on April 30th 1840 tells of the naming.
“One of my finest sheep runs is nicknamed ‘Jim Crow’ and a young settler, not very refined in his ideas, and who stutters painfully, amuses me when I chance to meet him, he pertinaciously reporting ‘Ah it was m-m-m-m-me that called it J-J-J-Jim Crow’. I have Australianised it into Jumcra but with little effect.” 4
Update 17th July 2019
There has more recently been controversy as to which name came first: ‘Jim Crow’ or ‘Jumcra’? That is, it could be that ‘Jumcra’ is an aboriginal corruption of ‘Jim Crow’. In John Tully’s 1997 book2, John gives ‘Jumcra’ as the aboriginal name, however, following a recent personal contact with John Tully, he provided the following, indicating his opinion has changed since the 1997 book:
“Since writing the language book in 1997 I learnt more about linguistics and have more references. In my 2016 book I had trouble deciding whether Jim Crow was named after Jumcra or the other way round. I concluded Jumcra is probably not a traditional name. The Mollison reference changes things again. The name early on was recorded by Parker, Hepburn and Mollison in three different places. This leans more to the European origin as Aborigines didn’t usually name creeks but individual names for camping places along a creek. This is not conclusive. Jumcra is not a typical Djadja wurrung word which suggests it to be a corruption of Jim Crow rather than a traditional name. In conclusion it is not certain which name came first. Also I don’t think we can be certain whether the original names Jim Crow or Jumcra referred to the creek or the range.” [John Tully].
References
1. cited on p26 of: Morrison, Edgar & Morrison, Geoff (ed.) 2002 A Successful Failure, a Trilogy : The Aborigines and Early Settlers Graffiti Publications for the publisher Geoff Morrison, Castlemaine, Vic
2. Tully, John 1997 Djadja Wurrung language of Central Victoria : Including Place Names John Tully, Dunolly, Vic.
3. Thomas D. Rice – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_D._Rice [Accessed September 30, 2010].
4. central vic squatters. Available at: http://www.ballaratgenealogy.org.au/art/loddon.htm [Accessed October 12, 2010].
“Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.” Attributed to Pablo Picasso.
“Home computers are being called upon to perform many new functions, including the consumption of homework formerly eaten by the dog.” Doug Larson.
“Spam will be a thing of the past in two years’ time.” Bill Gates, World Economic Forum, 2004.
“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.
“Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.” Popular Mechanics, 1949.
“Almost all of the many predictions now being made about 1996 hinge on the Internet’s continuing exponential growth. But I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.” Robert Metcalfe, founder of 3Com, 1995. (3Com was a manufacturer that specialised in network products, recently taken over by Hewlett Packard).
Interviewer: “Is studying computer science the best way to prepare to be a programmer?”
Bill Gates: “No, the best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating system.” from Programmers at Work (Lammers, S, 1986)
Bill O’Donnell BA LlB Melb GradDipNotPrac FANZNA. The mobile Notary Public: for all your overseas document authentification, call me and we’ll arrange a common stamping ground!
Mediator: why keep on with a dispute when you can talk it out with a little help. Member of the Australian Mediation Association.
Phone: 0439 398 488