careful i'm hot...
After suffering a horrible cold last week I've learned a valuable lesson: phenylephrine makes me extremely dizzy. Due to pseudoephedrine being used to manufacture illicit drugs, many pharmaceutical companies have recently started introducing "new formula" cold and flu products which switch pseudoephedrine for phenylephrine. This allows them to avoid restrictions on the sale of such products and probably stops chemists being broken into in the middle of the night. Unfortunately for some people phenylephrine causes nasty side effects; my conscious existence was starting to resemble some kind of whacked-out roller coaster ride.
Meanwhile, South East Queensland has been hit by some massive storms in the past week causing significant damage to parts of Brisbane. The storms have avoided us, we just got the rain, and now everything is green again. A benefit for Brisbane is the increase in dam levels which will hopefully prevent the misguided introduction of an energy-hungry water recycling system.
The Australian Securities Exchange, impacted by the "global credit crises", has now halved in value since last year. I was saddened to see BP Solar announcing the closure of their Australian manufacturing plant, not due to a lack of demand or problems sourcing raw materials, but simply because of cheaper labour costs and larger production volumes overseas.