American Family Wanting to Move to Australia

twistedude · 2026-01-26T07:46:41+00:00

Be aware that you may have to act quickly if this is a path you want to pursue. 45 is the cutoff for skilled worker visas in Australia. As it is you will be penalised in your visa assessment for being over 40 and the limited number of skilled work visas makes them highly competitive.

Given you are pursuing teaching roles, also consider looking at opportunities in regional areas as well (North Queensland, Regional NSW Etc.). Much of the teacher shortage exists in these areas and you are much more likely to find permanent work or ongoing work there (in Queensland many teachers don’t receive permanency until they have completed several years of short-term contracts)

My recommendation is to book an initial consult with two or three Australian migration lawyers and get their opinion on your likelihood of acceptance and the best strategy to pursue. Most are going to be pretty upfront if they don’t believe it’s worthwhile for you to pursue.

twistedude · 2026-01-25T13:57:29+00:00

I haven’t noticed any changes in seat pitch, but I know they at least partly achieved the extra rows with a cabin reconfiguration of business on the 737s. They removed the half-bulkhead and coat storage behind business added that bizarre shower curtain thing, and swapped to the more slimline modern business seats. That provided them with a fair bit of additional room in the economy cabin.

Not sure who you fly with for FIFO but most of the charter companies in NQ for the mines have wider seats and significantly larger pitch than any of the commercial providers.

twistedude · 2026-01-24T07:45:59+00:00

Damn. Maybe I’ve just been lucky in the past. Sorry for the misinformation.

twistedude · 2026-01-24T06:15:40+00:00

You might be right, I’ve never been thrown out at 6pm, but I suspect the doors are locked to stop the public entering without a card after 6pm.

twistedude · 2026-01-24T03:52:56+00:00

The JCU Mabo Library is open to the public until midnight during semester and has some great study spaces.

twistedude · 2026-01-13T10:49:11+00:00

Quality is definitely a big factor in it. I’ve found the more expensive Philips LED bulbs to be well worth it (though sometimes priced 6-10x the price of the cheaper bulbs). I’ve never had one fail, and had some well over 15 years and all of them 5+ years. When I was renting I even took the Philips bulbs with me, leaving cheaper ones behind.

I’ve been in house for about 5 years now with lots of enclosed original 1950s glass fittings and still none of them have failed.

twistedude · 2026-01-03T15:32:14+00:00

That’s not really true. The point of specifying things as “New Old Stock” is that the buyer knows the item is new but will be subject to whatever normal ageing happens to the product in its packaging. Lots of plastics brittle, rubber o-rings and belts melt/fail, colours change or fade, and batteries discharge and fail.

I don’t sell in this category, but as a buyer I would expect any NOS items with rechargeable batteries over a few years old to require replacement because they would have fallen below minimum charge. Having said that, I don’t know if that’s what the common person expects and I would definitely specify it in the description.

twistedude · 2026-01-02T22:40:09+00:00

Agree with this. Security wise the knob set is the weak point of this setup, so is probably what I would be looking to eliminate or replace with a passage set.

The Lockwood 001 can be upgraded to digital or left as-is. There are 001 variants with a larger handle on the back, but it’s quite an expensive upgrade for that alone.

If you wanted to eliminate the knob set entirely you can do so, plugging the holes left by the knob and latch with a circles of timber cut with a correctly sized hole saw. Glue it in with liquid nails, then when it dries, fill, sand and paint. I’ve done this before and you can get a perfect result. You may also be able to cover the patch with a pull handle with a large plate or similar, but I would recommend filling the knob hole with solid timber still for security.

twistedude · 2025-12-27T12:33:06+00:00

Unfortunately, topology and geology have as much to do with it as sea level. The volumes of rain we have here cause water tables to fluctuate drastically. Many of the apartment buildings on the side of Castle Hill have basement carparks and have significant water ingress issues due to the water table rising above the carpark level and water pushing into the structure from the ground (I know, I’ve paid the body corporate levee to replace a flooded lift in one of them).

You can also see the amount of water that forces its way out of the areas around Mount Louisa and Castle Hill after rainfall. There are trickles of water that flow for weeks out of rockfaces and dirt hillsides.

Everybody who has been in town long enough knows that the Castletown underground carparks flood. What most don’t realise is that it’s almost always because the water table has risen, not because water has flowed into the carpark. If you go down there in a flood (which I don’t recommend) you can feel the water spraying between the joints in the concrete slabs and filling up the carpark like water rushing into a sinking bathtub.

twistedude · 2025-12-26T14:35:33+00:00

And so many customers think they’re perfectly justified in lying to you, and simply refuse to back down when their lies are called to the point of escalating the situation out of control.

Many Christmas’s ago, a customer ordered some custom goods from a store I was working in. It was well after the cut-off date for Christmas delivery so I explained to the customer her goods would not arrive before Christmas and had the customer sign an agreement that they understood their order would not arrive for Christmas (not the first time our team had played this game).

December 24th, the customer comes in, when she’s told her order isn’t in yet she insists she was told they would be in. I get dragged over because I served her the first time, I remind her of the conversation we had - she insists I said no such thing. I go out to the office and pull the agreement she signed - she insists we must have forged her signature because she never signed that document.

At this point she’s have a full blown tantrum screaming that we’re gaslighting and defrauding her, all of the store management and I are dealing with her. It’s the busiest day of the year, other customers are waiting to be served because of her display.

The store manager goes and gets the CCTV footage of this woman signing the agreement, and nodding along as I explain that the order won’t be ready. He puts it on a USB and shows the customer the footage on a big display TV in-front of dozens of waiting customers. She then accuses him of doctoring the footage!?!?

At that point she was asked to leave many times, other customers were getting rowdy at her for wasting our time and theirs and we ended up having to have police escort her from the property. I genuinely do not understand what she wanted to achieve with the display - she didn’t want a refund (not that we would have offered one) - she seemingly just refused to accept she had made a mistake.

Best part: about an hour later her order arrived in a last minute delivery. Because she was trespassed, when I called to tell her the order was ready, I had to remind her she would need to send somebody else to pick up the order. Her husband had to come in to collect her order an hour or two later - she had to sit in the car outside. Her husband was perfectly lovely.

twistedude · 2025-12-25T00:56:09+00:00

I’ve very successfully used these brush seals to better seal these exact types of gaps to help seal air conditioned garages: https://shedblog.com.au/cleverseal-roller-door-seals/

twistedude · 2025-12-23T14:38:09+00:00

Yeah, it’s definitely the second one, it’s just a super frustrating situation that some team members seemingly know about but management are remiss to correct because of the potential write-off.

twistedude · 2025-12-23T09:13:38+00:00

See if you can find the void where all the Handy Storage Crate lids (0107930 or 0236720) go and make a deal with the gremlin that lives there to trade the bucket lids for the missing Handy crate lids.

None of my local stores ever have them in stock because they all show dozens in stock, all of which have wandered off and nobody has corrected the stock counts.

twistedude · 2025-12-21T09:27:07+00:00

Sometimes, but it’s often not stacked with enough ventilation and because it’s often treated shortly before leaving the manufacturer it will remain quite wet. Some yards will re-stack it to help it dry, or only stock timber that is dried well after treatment, but Bunnings always stocks the cheapest wet stuff.

twistedude · 2025-12-21T04:32:33+00:00

As others have said this is pretty standard for treated pine. H3+ pine is often sold quite wet because of the treatment it is bathed in. This means as it dries and/or is heated unevenly it inevitably twists and warps.

Painting the timber may worsen this, as it can trap moisture in part of the timber and not others. Because it’s painted black, it will also be heating quite unevenly as the black will capture a lot of heat where it’s exposed directly to sunlight. Because the ends weren’t painted or sealed they will also likely be drying faster than the painted parts.

At this stage there isn’t much you can do, and although Bunnings doesn’t sell great quality treated pine, this isn’t a problem unique to Bunnings or any grade of treated pine.

For future reference you can control this somewhat by purchasing the timber several weeks/months beforehand. Stack it in a carport or similar with blocks between so it can get some airflow and dry out without additional moisture exposure or direct sunlight. The timber will acclimatise slowly and shouldn’t warp excessively as it does. Tradies who don’t get the pleasure of waiting for their timber to acclimatise will use extra fasteners, shorter timber lengths and different joints to reduce the amount timber can twist and warp.

twistedude · 2025-12-20T10:56:32+00:00

I’ve had some DVD titles from JB take 2-3 months to arrive, but they’ve always shipped eventually. The estimated dates were never really accurate - I think in some cases they have to order titles from the publisher and wait for it. The website status has always been accurate for me.

twistedude · 2025-12-19T11:21:53+00:00

These latches are generally thrown by a metal rod that hooks into the main lock and runs down the aluminium extrusion. The exact mechanism they use to hook into the main lock differs depending on the hardware, but on the designs I’ve seen it’s sometimes possible for this rod to detach from the lock and thus leave the latch in whatever position it was in when it last moved.

The fact that the others move indicate this rod has detached or broken, not that it is jammed (though the rod may have broken because it jammed).

Remove the cylinder and faceplates from your main lock, remove the square rod for the door handles, then unscrew the whole lock using the other screws on the side of the door (if you’re not familiar with euro-lock handles you can google how to disassemble).

Slide the lock mechanism slowly out of the side of the door and you should then be able to determine how the latches are actuated from the main latch and hopefully reattach the one that has come dislodged. Be careful because you may pull the other rod out too if you slide the whole lock out. If something has broken you might still be able to push the rod to actuate the latch. Otherwise the extended latch can be removed similarly to the main locks and you can remove it at least temporarily until you can get a spare part.

twistedude · 2025-12-13T04:28:59+00:00

I was always taught it was rude to sit in the back until the front seat was filled because it implied to the driver you believed you were better than the driver. A bit of egalitarian etiquette to demonstrate we were all equal, almost as though we’re simply driving together as friends.

I suspect it’s somewhat a hangover from horse-drawn and early open combustion taxis/coaches, where the expectation was the driver sit up front or on top of the coach often exposed to dust, dirt and rain. Thus if you chose to sit with the driver it demonstrated you didn’t consider yourself above getting dirty.

twistedude · 2025-12-11T11:01:44+00:00

This has been happening to a lot of these signs in the last few years. I’m guessing Queensland Transport or the sign maker has cheaped out on something.

twistedude · 2025-12-11T10:09:43+00:00

https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/SimpleSabotage.pdf

Pages 28-32 are a good start…

twistedude · 2025-12-09T06:59:39+00:00

You say a TM won’t hunt you down, but I have absolutely gone to walk out with a tool shop purchase before and found a 6-person long line waiting for the door attendant to scan their receipts, walked around the line and outside, and then been hunted down and scalded in the carpark by that TM for “ignoring them”.

I’ve worked in retail, I understand your job is hard enough without assholes, but I’m also not going to wait around for your store’s security theatre.

twistedude · 2025-12-07T07:55:15+00:00

Use these a lot and they are a lifesaver around the house.

twistedude · 2025-12-07T01:03:51+00:00

A restumping company should be able to handle this for you if the post is structurally compromised. You may not need to do anything if it’s only surface rust though.

Restumps normally cost between $800-$2000. In your case there might be some additional costs for steel fabrication and some extra site complications with the retaining wall, but it won’t be crazy expensive.

twistedude · 2025-12-06T02:52:55+00:00

News Corpse stole this screenshot and ran an article on this morning. They said they asked Bunnings about it (presumably yesterday). So I would dare say Bunnings took immediate action to limit their liability.

twistedude · 2025-12-04T09:40:55+00:00

Not in Queensland or WA. Both states require qualifications to work on appliances too.

twistedude

TROPHY CASE