I recently spent many hours talking about many topics of somewhat controversial natures.
I’ve been away on a yacht for several weeks. Resources are finite. We expect the items to last, we are frugal with food, fuel and water. Yet generally, humans are making things to last such a short time. Or after a certain time span the systems, parts start to become redundant or break.
The fittings on a yacht have to be the strongest most durable and long life materials on this planet. So, every year we start a program of maintenance aimed at repairing or renewing component’s as they break down. Case in point. Ropes we recycle to lesser roles after many years of hard labour with the sails and rigging. stainless steel or bronze are inspected serviced, cleaned up and reused over and over.
Jam cleats are devices that just can’t fail so we employ the best then replace as the signs show extreme degradation or fine cracks in the metals and carbon fibre fittings. I could go on forever naming every part and countless procedures we partake to keep the yacht always at its best. For safety and secondly aesthetic reasons. I won’t bore you with all the details. As there are many procedures which we follow and check off as they are completed,
To my shock and horror earlier today. I turned on a really good quality acer laptop computer. Stored in special bags to keep it safe from the harsh elements.
The operating system is windows 7. The manufacturing age is June 2012′. The process is intel Pentium 2 ghz processor. 4gigs ram and 500gb hard drive.
There’s not a mark on this device. Its fast for its age and responsive. I turned it on, needing to do some work on excel spread sheets for the guys at home to update some data. The product loaded fine. It came up as unlicenced as did the rest of the office 365 suite. I loaded the sign in for the MS account. It wouldn’t accept the Firefox default browser. It stalled on chrome and edge was so slow i just gave up. Full functionality was there for null, by current license denial on this device. which is a global shared license paid annually by our company.
So i checked with a couple of companies to upgrade the laptop. Low and behold both declined advising me to ditch the device even though the intel processor and graphics display is fine for that operating system.
I’ve just spent 4 days sitting in the middle of a cyclone in a safe harbour.
This cyclone is part of the climate change phenomena which we are all been told to save the planet. But im faced with throwing a perfectly good appliance away because of redundancy probably driven by greed. How many others out there can relate to this tale.
We continue to focus on the big picture without changing the small things which will impact greatly on the end result. I’m sure more carbon and pollution were released in the manufacture and upgrading process for my device, than all the methane from a few cows in a paddock. As methane is a natural substance. 8 billion humans can attest to that plus all the other animals.
Here are some photos after the storms and had passed. Thanks for your patience reading this 
Canon and bay at Russell Bay of islands.
entrance to BOI cape Wiwiwiki
