Good pool advice all round, thanks all!!
Think we’ll start conservatively and patiently and see how we go from there.
This one time, someone told me to shock treat my pool, but whilst clearing the algae it created a nice bronze finish to the pool lining.
As it turns out, if you’ve used floaters/blue52/many algaecides/etc. the pool water becomes saturated with copper over time, and all it needs to deposit said copper onto your lining is a good thorough shock treatment. And I don’t mean “loose deposits you can vacuum up”, I mean it PLATES your pool with copper.
The pool place then recommended I pay “somebody” wink wink to come and scrub the stuff off the lining with steel brushes. A hugely expensive exercise, and I’m sure extremely detrimental to the lining itself. I refused, and headed home in a huff.
Then I decided to google the chemistry of what’s going on here, and learnt something I found a bit surprising. Some (not all) pool places sell something they like to label “ascorbic acid”, which is technically called L-ascorbic acid, but the rest of us would call it Vitamin C. You dump enough Vitamin C in your pool and it binds with said copper and then gets “dissolved” into the water. I found a place that sells a small bottle of concentrate (labeled “ascorbic acid” of course, can’t tell the customers what it actually is…) at like, R200? Added to pool water, and 24h later my pool was un-brown again!
Basically, getting rid of said copper (and many other metals that build up over time) from the pool basically requires draining it and replacing the water. (or doing it little by little over time etc). There’s no “add this additive” to get rid of such metals, and as such I now always advise people to STAY AWAY from any pool treatment that contains any metal.
ps. If you already knew all this I apologise, I know way too little about pool maintenance.
I shock treat my pool by skinny dipping. And yes, if you try it at public baths, you may certainly run into trouble with some copper.
Well, you’ll just have to steel yourself against such base metal confrontations with a DC source (5V or higher) and a pair of graphite electrodes. Just make sure they don’t zinc right to the bottom of the pool, which could leaden you into a bit of a nickel.
'Luthon64
Ja-nee. Dan’s jy diep in die strontium.
Yes. Get a microscope. A green pool is far more interesting than a spotless blue one. 
Who will be joining the e-toll wheel-a-thon tomorrow? I’ll most likely be late for work as all the routes leads to my workplace.
Johannesburg - Cosatu will take to the highways in cars on Thursday to protest against e-tolling in Gauteng, it said on Wednesday.“We won’t be marching and demonstrating with our feet this time; we will be demonstrating with our wheels,” Congress of SA Trade Unions (Cosatu) Gauteng chairperson Phutas Tseki told reporters in Johannesburg.
“We will be driving slowly.”
Tseki said this was not a strike and that workers would be at their posts on Thursday.
Cosatu leaders, full-time shop stewards, and leaders of Cosatu affiliates were expected to participate.
“We will do this for almost seven hours,” Tseki said.
There would be two campaigns - one in Ekurhuleni and one in Johannesburg.
Considering they’re going to meet at 6am already, its going to be interesting to listen to the morning traffic reports.
Oh Shit and I’m on my way to the Taste of Xmas with LOTS of cherry beer!
Uhm, so, anyone see/hear anything bad about this? I drove in this morning pretty uneventfully. I don’t take the highway but I cross it and expected mayhem. But none.
Apparently only starts at nine. My route was busier than usual but not gridlocked, I suspect that many people will simply avoid the highways and take alternate routes. We’ll have to see if this exercise will be a success or not. I’m just wondering how many Cosato members (not leaders) actually owns a car…
I started a Facebook page about two years ago about the stars. This is for Middelburg and surrounding towns. On it I tell them whats up and a few interesting astronomical happenings. Most of the people that joined are ultra bible under the arm Christians. So whenever I say something like “nothing will last forever” I get quite a few answers. But what piss me off is that a few just copy and paste pages and pages of “jesus/god is great” stuff. Don’t they get bored of saying the same thing over and over again? The one lady does at least 20 of these posts per day - will 10 not get her into heaven but 20 will and is god on Facebook?
She’s a housewife doing the womanly thing by having supper on the table the moment her hubby sets his weary feet in the door, making supper on an average evening takes about an hour. She’s got at least 7 - 8 hours every day to fill. Its the only distraction she’s got since she’s been indoctrinated from birth not to think for herself and discouraged to apply her mind to more… shall we say - intellectual topics.
I sometimes suspect it is a habitual thing, like brushing your teeth in the mornings. They just do it without thinking.
God is everywhere. 
Again from my astronomy Facebook thing
“Moenie wag tot jy die merke aan Jesus se hande sien voordat jy in Hom sal glo nie, dit gaan te laat wees.” and “The joy of the Lord is my strength.” There a hundreds of these posts. (wtf!!)
I always find it peculiar that the God of Infinite Mercy plays this cruel game with humanity. During your life here on earth, there is no compelling evidence available for the existence of God. But you have to believe, because once you get into a position where the evidence does become available, namely the afterlife, then it is too late. Even if you then start fervently believing.
So belief alone is not enough: you have to believe blindly. And what you DO in life matters little: you could spend your entire life being kind to others, but you’ll still go to hell if you believed the wrong thing, whereas you could spend your life doing the Stalin thing and you will still go to heaven if you repent five minutes before your death. Rather weirdly, repentance five minutes AFTER you die is no good. It has to be while you are still in this life.
I’m preaching to the choir here. But the more I think about this, the more astonished I am that anyone can consider such a deity to be a merciful one. What these folks worship is a psychopathic monster of absolutely breathtaking capricious cruelty. I always wonder if there isn’t perhaps some way, some sort of psychological trick, to make them see this, after which they’ll convert to more reasonable ways. The thing is, the cruelty of their god is so obvious they cannot possibly fail to see it. There is nothing to make them see; I’m pretty sure they all already see it. I must assume then that it is fear that keeps them in the fold.
Or what?
It’s sometimes heartening to keep in mind that intense skepticism and distrust of God and his quirks is not a new phenomenon at all: it has at least as much of a heritage (and much more of a pedigree :D) as religion itself! Here the French author Stendhal (1783-1842) felt almost exactly the same way:
If I meet the Christian Deity, I am lost: He is a tyrant and as such, is full of ideas of vengeance; His Bible speaks of nothing but fearful punishments. I never loved Him! I could never even believe that anyone did love Him sincerely. He is devoid of pity.... He will punish me in some abominable manner.
and famously:
The only excuse for God is that he doesn't exist.
The thing is, the cruelty of their god is so obvious they cannot possibly fail to see it.Maybe that is why they drown their senses by doing it over and over. They know their god is bad but by repeatedly saying he is good maybe they can convince themselves.
Rigil: Stendhal makes another good point. With a tyrant it doesn’t even help if you worship him. He’s like a kid incinerating ants with a magnifying glass: he’s going to do it anyway, whether the ants attack him or run from him or fall on the anty equivalent of knees before him.
Douglas Adams said something similar in one of the “Hitch-hiker’s Guide” books, about the story of the forbidden fruit in Genesis. God creates intelligent, curious people. Then he puts a delicious-looking fruit in front of them, tells them not to eat it and then goes away for a while. Said a character in the book (it was Ford Prefect, if memory serves): with a God like that you cannot win. He’s going to get you in the end.
The New Testament edition of this god adds the charge of “callous psychological terrorist and mercilessly zealous persecutor, hell-bent on tormenting his children for trifling ‘crimes’ of the imagination even beyond the grave unto all eternity.”
'Luthon64
In geen ander sfeer van enige samelewing so vêr ek weet, is hierdie goeie raad nie… Wa de fok!? :-[
Mense wat hierdie onnosle raad volg in finansiële sake byvoorbeeld, ly moerse verliese en ander lag vir hulle!
I drive long distances (I’ve done a 23.5 hour one last year) and I know one is not at your highest alert status after a few hours but where do you draw the line? Well rested I still feel OK after 8 hours but sometimes I feel it within 1 hour. How can you (or as in the above story, a cop) measure your state of fatigue or alertness? I am also a strong believer in Red Bull for these journeys. Don’t like it but it keeps you awake.