perfectshops wrote: What happened? How did this emergency surgery come up?

valerie's medical history is no-one's business but valerie's. She is entitled to keep some things private.

And to valerie, I hope the surgery was fully successful and you will have a quick & pain-free recovery. Emergency surgery is a scary thing - no time to really prepare yourself for it.

Send some of your snow down to Sydney please. We are going through our hottest Summer since records began over 150 years ago. Today is the 10th or 11th day over 35C (95F). And we still have a month of Summer to go.

For the first time in my life I am considering buying a portable air-conditioner for my flat, even though I hate the damn things because of their environmental impact.

Beware of misery-guts people who predict the imminent End Of The World/Armageddon/The Rapture (and all the other variations). They have illness in their minds. Those people are here on this Earth just to make you sad & miserable.

valerie wrote: I would say to all young folks, beware of a one world ruler that is kind and peaceful.
It is most certainly then you will know the end is arriving.

I would say the complete opposite to young folks. Nothing wrong with wanting to give peace a chance.

A triple-play for Australia Day:

Sherbet - Summer Love - YouTube

Little River Band - Cool Change - YouTube

Richard Clapton - Deep Water - YouTube

I don't spend a huge amount of time here - mainly keep an eye on the ClixAddon for ads & surveys, and play the ClixGrid while watching the evening news. But I still make between $40 & $50 most months, and that easily covers my phone & internet bill (plus a six-pack or two), and that is all I am really after.

I never want ClixSense to become a full-time job where I fear going out for the day in case I miss an offer.

Treat it as a hobby that rewards you, and you will be a lot happier than if you treat it as your main income stream with an expectation of earning X amount of dollars every day.

The previous posters who say that ClixSense has gotten much better over the years are correct. I actually stopped using the site a few years ago, because the only opportunities I could expect to get were PTC ads. I was earning less than 10 cents on most days. When I came back, it was full of surveys & offers & my earnings skyrocketed, and I do regret the time I spent away as I may have missed out on making several hundred dollars.

A vinyl album contains about 22 minutes of music on each side. When bands recorded an album, they would arrange the song order so that side one had that full 22 minutes of sound, but often side two would finish up a minute or two short. So the band would add a "filler" to the end of the album, and some of those fillers are great (and often a little odd). Here's my favorite by the band that is usually considered to be rock's first super-group:

Mother's Lament - Cream - YouTube

You can send me your barn owl & I'll send you my noisy miners. They don't make any noise at night, but from dawn to dusk they let out a very loud "peep" every half second. They are like a metronome & have the timing of an atomic clock.

All day long peep peep peep peep peep peep peep peep peep peep peep peep peep peep. If there are 3,600 seconds in an hour, and a bird chirps every half second, then that is 7,200 times an hour. Multiply that by the 15 hours of daylight in Summer, and that means each bird chirps about 108,000 times a day. And there are dozens of these birds in the neighbourhood, all chirping loudly all day long to mark out their territory. They love urban & suburban gardens, so they are hard to get away from.

Seriously though valerie, if the owl is keeping you awake, have you tried sleeping with earplugs in? I started doing that about 6 years ago just so I could sleep past the break of dawn when the birds all start, and it has made a difference. I can still hear my clock alarm when it goes off, but the noise from outside the window is reduced markedly with the earplugs in.

Back at the end of the 1980s we had a work function at a Spanish restaurant (Capitan Torres) on the edge of Sydney's Chinatown. The dining areas occupied several floors upstairs, and the stairs from the footpath/sidewalk were quite steep & very narrow. At the end of the night, and after a few beers (probably 10 to 15 if I count pre-dinner drinks), I joked to a workmate that I could sprint down the 60+ stairs without falling.

And I did! I was on auto-pilot! You remember the scene from Aliens where Lance Henrikson's character (the android "Bishop") does the knife trick where he machine-gun rapidly taps a sharp knife between the 5 fingers of a colleague's hand without drawing blood? Well, my feet were moving like that for the full 3 floors! I sprinted down the stairs, and then I shot like a cannon right across the 4 lanes of Friday night traffic on Liverpool St, and somehow I avoided being hit by a car.

The next day I was really amazed that I:

1) did not fall & break my neck &
2) did not end up as road fatality

I still remember those drunken hi-jinks 30 years later.

So I am just wondering, has anyone else done a really silly dare & ended up genuinely amazed that they somehow survived the experience?

The most important thing (in the days of 30" monitors & 4" phones) is that the logo must be scale-able. So, if the world at the left is too big, will reducing to 1/4 size make the "lixsense" part illegible?

valerie wrote: If I could, I would create a plan in the country in which I live, that people must drive electric
cars or at the very least hybrid's with the EXCEPTION of other vehicles that do not use oil....
corn fuel for example. ALSO the exception would be the gas guzzlers such as shipping vehicles...
in other words, tractor trailers.

A very good modern solution is car sharing (where you book the time you will using a shared car) & ride sharing (taxis, Uber etc). Better 20 people sharing 1 car than 20 people owning 10 or more, unused 90% of the time, cars between them.

I am still doubtful about electric cars due to the amount of resources required to produce them, and the energy that must still be burnt to generate the electricity to recharge the battery (although, as we move towards renewables, that will become less of an issue). At the moment I think hybrids which use braking energy to recharge to be a better solution than all-out electric vehicles which use power-stations to "fill up". But that will change within the next decade.

Who knows? Roads might even be obsolete by 2030 if flying cars take off (pardon the pun). But then again, those flying cars might be banned if governments cannot work out a way to charge tolls & road taxes on vehicles that do not need roads to go to their destinations.

Will cars even be necessary when you can do everything via virtual reality?

TasMail wrote:

tasman1 wrote: Robot Vacuum Cleaners
Perfect sh.t for folks who like to live in sh.t

Those robot cleaners are costly and I just think they are so dumb!
Sorry not for me..lol

I bought a robot vacuum cleaner about 6 months ago

Though I did also buy a proper 2800W vacuum & a rechargeable stick/dustbuster at the same time. I just use the robot for the kitchen floor when I don't feel like mopping & the rest of the house in-between proper cleans or when the weather is too hot & I feel a little lazy (like now here in Sydney - gonna hit 38C (100F) in a few hours time).

Just a reminder that members should not use abbreviations in posts as not everyone will understand what those terms mean, and we don't all have the time to go Googling to decipher posts. For example, what does "N u" stand for? I can have a few guesses, but I really can't be bothered looking it up.

Communication is the key here. If you write abbreviated posts with single-letters to replace words, others will misunderstand you, or ignore you, or think you are poorly educated, or think that you aren't worth the effort of a reply, and you won't get the assistance or response you are hoping for.

Cold Chisel - Khe Sanh - YouTube

Favorite line:
"It's really got me worried - I'm going nowhere and I'm in a hurry"

If people do good because they crave recognition, I really don't have a problem with it. After all, if no-one ever admitted doing any good, then there would be nobody for others to look up to & aspire to be like. We would not have the large private foundations pumping billions of dollars into research or providing services to the impoverished.

Regarding the lost glory of the Earth & things being better thousands of years ago, that is a common misconception usually attributed to those who believe that the ancient biblical times were when the Earth was at its most perfect (apart from the leper colonies, frequent diseases, plagues, droughts, floods, famines, earthquakes, wars, lack of democracy, extreme poverty for most, high infant mortality, low life expectancy, lack of education, no medical services, no anaesthetics, no antibiotics etc etc etc).

Maybe what is happening now is just next stage of the continuous evolution of life on Earth? After all, I am sure that a few hundred million years ago there were a bunch of large amphibians complaining about these newcomer reptiles taking over all the good places and making life hard for those with porous skins.

Yes - we may be damaging the planet, but that is nothing new. Most of the vast forests of trees in the Middle East had disappeared by the time Jesus arrived, as they had all been cut down for building ships, houses & other things. Europe lost most of its trees during Roman times, which was one of the reasons the Roman Empire had to keep expanding - the need for wood.

The difference is that now we are informed and capable enough to know how to fix or remedy things. It is not the knowledge that is lacking, but rather the desire to do something. We should be proud that we have reached the stage where we can actually reduce (or even reverse) the damage that has been happening for thousands of years.

Craft beer. Sometimes it is good, sometimes it is bad, most often it is ordinary, and always it is overpriced.

tasman1 wrote: I have never seen people like Bill Gates come here and ask how to earn a dollar here

Could you imagine his survey profile?

What is your annual household income before taxes?

$1,000,000,000 and above

Didn't Dire Straits sing about this in the 1980s? Get your money for nothing & your chicks for free?

We all wish we could become wealthy with as little effort as possible, but unless you are born into money or extremely lucky (win the lottery), it ain't gonna happen.

Anyway, why would someone who works 50 to 60 hours a week then want to spend their free hours clicking ads & doing offers for a few cents? When I was able to work full-time, my free time outside work was spent living, not clicking. Even now, as a pensioner with loads of spare time, I only spend an hour or two online earning each day.

Just 1.