Out of the chaos and tragedy of the Gallipoli campaign emerged the
legend of the Anzacs: a story of steadfast courage under impossible
odds and the forging of the spirit of mateship that somehow saw triumph
in disastrous defeat.
Turkish tribute
In 1934, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who led the fighting Turks at
Gallipoli and became founder of the Turkish Republic in 1923, paid
tribute to the Anzacs:
Those heroes that shed their blood And lost their lives…
You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country.
Therefore, rest in peace.
There is no difference between the Johnnies
And the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side,
Here in this country of ours.
You, the mothers, who sent their sons from far away countries…
Wipe away your tears.
Your sons are now lying in our bosom
And are in peace.
After having lost their lives on this land, they have
Become our sons as well.
Anzac Day
Today, the "great defeat" at Gallipoli is commemorated in Australia
and New Zealand on Anzac Day, April 25 each year, anniversary of the
landing on that Turkish shore, as the Anzacs are remembered.
The world now is so different now. A few months ago we all thought we were safe. The markets were good and we invested into all those wonderful high return funds. Well I know for myself they have all gone crap. I haven’t yet had the check on all the money I invested as I’m way to scared to check. My 22% returnds at the beginning of the year are now probably showing I’ve lost money.
About a year ago I was investing in a number of funds in NZ and then decided that I had put enough into them so just started putting the money into the Bank of New Zealand on the best fixed term rates available (about 8%). I had no idea that this was going to turn out to be the best place to put the money. Two years later I’m actually getting a better return on my money from the funds. After all the admin and investment feeds they are no worth less than I put in. I’m not pullling out as the market will turn around and will (hopefully) make me money somewhere along the line.
I did pick top notch funds with good companies and so far so good, (well down now, but its a long term thing, so it should go up). Whom I feel for now is those who need to start pulling out there money based on investments they have made. We are looking at the baby boomer generation who have lost huge amounts of capital.
One thing I have found of interest in the US electorial campagne is the Redneck vs urbain culture. To me its a total non starter. Why, well where was I raised part of our food came directly from raising animals that would either be destined for your plastic wrapped supermarket food, or in our own freezers.
This means that the beef, lamb and occasionally chicken or turkey was raised on our own land and was turned into Sunday night (and every other nights) dinner. The process of turning a cow into steak is not actually a pleasant process. Your pork tenderloin doesn’t just turn up in a sterile plastic wrapped package we all know from the supermarket
It was actually a pig or a cow that used to live on a farm. I know as I lived, and sorta still do live on one. I’ll put the rest below the fold so you can surf away happy with your supermarket package meat.
Wow, I just realised how long it has been since I wrote something on the blog. The last few entries have been about the american elections which I must admit are huge entertainment value (all be it a little scary). Actually most of the last few weeks have been about following whats going on. I’m rather addicted to the ‘Daily Show’ and the ‘Colbert Report’. If you have a good internet connection you can watch directly from the site.
I do find it interesting that most of the fun is poked at the republican party and there are no shows which can poke fun at the Democrates. I guess its because McRage and Caribou Barbie are giving so much material for entertainment!
I have been spending the last few hours trying to figure out how I can take a single report, then update the header information (and the underlying query) as I have a number of reports that have the same layout and information, but just need to have a different heading, and query.
I could have just created a duplicate report with different heading and query, but as I’m still working out the layout of the report I don’t want to have to redo each report.
You think this would have been easy, but nope. I spent hours looking over material from the internet and just couldn’t figure it out. I tried global variables, but that didn’t work. A function to update the titles was a way around it, but also not nice. There had to be a better way.
I ran into problems because you by default you cannot access a reports object unless is been opened. Then you can access the controls on the report and update them, but you I couldn’t figure out how to refresh the print preview.
Then I stumbled onto something that works perfectly (well at least in the test model I did in 2003 and it will hopefull work in 2007).
What you need to do is open the report in designer. The look at the report properties and goto the ‘Build Event’ option. This will transfer the report into an class and let you edit in VBA various values of it. You don’t actually have add any code!
Many years ago I used to work for a very small company in New Zealand in the freight industry. (fond memories).
During this time we had installed a software package that could deal with transtasman shipments and a multi currecny general ledger. I know this quite well as I was the programmer who did most of the work on the GL. Our head of the company was in charge but after I proved I could do it and with an accounting background I was left to it.
We had this international client that took on the package in another part of the country and it did all the freight stuff no problem, but for some reason the accounting side never quite worked correctly. This really got to me as I knew it should work with all the information it was getting and I also used to do the air freight side of the system so it was a complete mystery.
Well this went mystery went on for a while then they pulled in the head office chiefs to go and figure out what was going on. I had spent alot of time working out the currency conversion between the ledgers and was certain it was right. (Back then it took about 3 hours to run the GL listing). And in that industry they don’t think of money they know they owe now, they think of money they expect to owe (accural accounting its call). Well after me being flown down on site to try and figure out what was going on. The investigator told me, it doesn’t mater how you try and reprogram the system, all you are doing is rearanging the deck chairs on the titanic!
He never told me exactly why but I found out later, that the office administrator was fiddling the system to steal from the company and so was the branch manager. Ironically neither knew the other was also stealing. I don’t think they ever figured it all out. But it wasn’t my GL at fault, it was just major theft!! (the office administrator had back door access to ‘fix’ transactions’, we just never realised she was fixing them cos they were actually right!!!!).
Oh how that all changed now as proper change control would never allow this!
1. Learn about al-Qaida. 2. Learn about Washington, D.C. 3. Order Bristol’s dress (Elastic waist!!! Is white inappropriate after six months?) 4. Fire brother-in-law. 5. Learn about Russia/Georgia/S. Ossetia (Locate Abkhazia???) 6. Nurse Baby Trig. 7. Order flowers for wedding. 8. Fire people who haven’t fired brother-in-law. 9. Learn about ethics rules. 10. Fire at brother-in-law? (Option: aerial shooting?) 11. Nurse Baby Trig. 12. Learn about Iran. 13. Learn about U.S. Senate. 14. Learn about contraception. (Too late???) 15. Investigate homes for foundlings? 16. Govern Alaska. 17. Life insurance on J.M.?
