The Unix Heritage Society is an interesting
organization. We're registered as a charity in Victoria, but nearly all our
expenditure is in the USA. We
clearly need a bank account, and as an Australian organization, it should be in Australia.
But transferring money to the USA costs money just for the transfer. Who charges the least?
I went through this exercise five years ago. The cheapest was “Wise”,
formerly (and more understandably) “Transferwise”, and the most expensive was the Commonwealth Bank of
Australia, who would have charged fully 5.4% more than “Wise”.
What's the situation today? After considerable research, I still don't know. Five years
ago I was able to establish the exchange rates on which the banks based their charges, but I
can't find that any more. All I was able to establish was that most banks charge 3% fees
over and above an unspecified exchange rate; only CBA charges 3.5%. But are they all based
on the same base exchange rate? One thing is sure: despite advertising to the contrary,
“Wise” will not accept us as a customer, so it looks like we're going to have to bite the
higher fees.
Checking the weather this afternoon, discovered that the weather station had stopped
logging. What a pain this device is. Into the lounge room, where it's located,
planning to hard reset the device. But that wasn't necessary:
I never cease to be amazed how late our tomatoes ripen. I'm told that they should start
yielding in early summer (December, say), but in practice we don't get much before the
beginning of autumn (March). But today was the first time that I picked some after the
beginning of spring:
It's been 2½ months since we gave Bruno to the Sayers.
That didn't work out, and they returned him 2 weeks ago. Now that the dog run
is cat proof, I had hoped that we could keep him, but somehow he has changed. In any case,
I grudgingly accepted Yvonne's desire to rehome him again,
even though he was just making friends with Mona again:
We changed our Saturday night dinner at relatively short notice. What did we have?
Asparagus and “Peking flavoured duck breasts”. Neither very difficult to make. I have
developed a relatively simple recipe for asparagus and prawns over the years, and we've already eaten the duck, which just requires heating, and found it good.
But it's so much! Admittedly, only 100 g of asparagus after trimming, but the same amount
of prawns. What do you eat with the duck? In the end I tried “roti” “wraps” with the duck, and sure enough,
we only ate (most of) one of the two breasts. But I must have spent more time thinking
about it than preparing it.
This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have
a horror of reverse chronological documents, so
all my diary entries are chronological. This page normally contains the last two days,
but if I fall behind it may contain more. You can find older entries in
the archive. Note that I often update a diary entry
a day or two after I write it.
Do you have a comment about something I have written? This is a diary, not a
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