Memory’s a funny thing. I woke up one morning recently and told Marianne I’d just remembered the punch line of an old joke; “It’s a knick knack Patty Wack, give the frog a loan”. She smiled and said “But there’s more to it than that” and added “he’s old man is a Rolling Stone”. Of course I had to see if I could find the original on the internet and called up the faithful Google search engine which Google assures me heavily uses AI.
Just entering “Patty Wack” came up with one suggested search for the correct joke even correcting for my alternative spelling of “Wack”. Quite impressive, there aren’t too many patty wacks out there.
Not bad for a start but on reading the original joke I discovered that a knick knack is a critical part. So I thought I’d include it in the search. Just by itself and Google didn’t come up with any alternative searches that would have led me to the joke.
Searching on “knick knack patty” was surprisingly successful with an accurate search term as the third item. Not too many other suggestions though it seemed to suggest that I might have meant Paddy not Patty.
The most successful search term was “knick knack patty wack frog” which brought the joke up to the top of the list for suggested searches but I thought that I was giving rather a lot of information out to start with so decided to up the task difficulty a bit.
The punch line of the joke, you can look up the whole thing here, is: “It’s a knick knack Patty Whack give the frog a loan, his old man is a Rolling Stone” where the Rolling Stone is referencing Mick Jagger. I decided to see if the AI would associate Mick Jagger with a frog joke and entered “Mick Jagger frog loan joke”. Nope, not a single other search was suggested – clearly I was being very specific. Curiously “Mick Jagger frog” did suggest another more specific search as the first item. Can’t think why Angie got in there. Yes, I can remember the song! We all used to crowd into a prep room in the school hostel on Saturday night and watch Top of the Pops on a black and white television. Mick doing his best emotional bit in a big floppy hat. “Angie. A-aaaaaangie. Can’t say we never tried”.
Perhaps a case of less is more?
There are of course many variants of AI to be found all over the internet. Perhaps one of the best known is ChatGPT. I have used it a bit when stuck on my programming projects and it’s been useful in suggesting solutions. I did get to use it today on another project and was really impressed.
My business is in trouble. Two weeks ago I was within a few days of running my bank account dry. It was time to see where the problem was. It didn’t take a lot of doing. I am selling my seedlings for less than they cost me to produce. My bookkeeper commented that my salaries and wages were too high a proportion of my overall costs but there is little that I can do about it now – nobody is going to accept a wage cut. I wondered if I could put the business into administration (yes, I Googled what that entails) and be closed down. I didn’t see how I could sell a business that is not a going concern.
There are at least five other commercial nurseries in Harare that I know of. My foreman on occasion phones them to see what they are charging. The biggest is charging substantially less than I am and I have no idea how they do it. I also know what they are growing as we use the same seed supplier and I am friendly with one of the staff there. It’s mainly tomatoes and lots of them. This makes me think they are supplying the farmers who grow for a well-known fast food company. It was time to see if I could get in on the action.
Zimbabwe being what it is, it was not difficult to find out who the procurement officer of the above-mentioned fast food chain is. Marianne, being more adept at marketing than me (not difficult – there are disadvantages of a science degree), helped me put together the approach email. The reply was non-committal. A different approach was needed but at least we had not been rebuffed.
Given our lack of marketing skills we decided to ask Maria. She’s a formidable communicator and the driving force behind HIFA (Harare International Festival of the Arts) that ran for several years and was the arts and entertainment highlight of the year. She agreed to draft something.
While I was mulling over what Maria had put together Marianne was chatting to her sister in Cape Town who has a tour company for older women . Mandy suggested we get ChatGPT to draft something as she uses it quite a lot and was impressed. She did mention that it was a good idea to be polite when asking it for assistance! So I logged in and made my request. The response is too long to reproduce here but I was very impressed. It was just what I was looking for with all the right marketing language. So tomorrow I will send off another email to see if I can get access to the produce suppliers. Nothing ventured. There will be a few adjustments to the original text – “Warm regards” will be replaced with “Regards” which I consider a bit less familiar.
I can of course remember back in the 1980s when AI stood for artificial insemination. One of my housemates at university was doing an animal science degree and they had been harvesting semen from a bull. He wondered aloud if an orgasm for a bull was as much fun as it was for a human. Someone else chipped in that it was physiologically identical, the difference being that the bull could not remember what was so pleasant.
Looking up artificial insemination on the internet (yes Google AI) I saw that it is widely practiced for women who cannot get pregnant the natural way. While there doesn’t appear to be human AI on offer in Zimbabwe (but plenty of livestock options) there are a couple of sites advertising IVF (in vitro fertilization). Most of us older folk can remember that Louise Brown was the first example of this “test tube baby” process. As one fellow student commented all those years ago: “The worst thing about being a test-tube baby is you know for sure that your old man’s a wanker”. If you don’t know what that means try a Google AI search!
Zimbabwe Absurdity 
Taming the voltage
1 05 2026It became evident soon after we installed the solar panels and inverter that we were going to have to do something about the terrible power quality. Most of Zimbabwe has erratic power supplies. Called “load shedding” it’s really just a statement about the government’s ineptitude in supplying power to the nation. The national supplier, ZETDC (Zimbabwe Electricity Transmission and Distribution Company) is a subsidiary of Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (ZESA) and is the sole distributor of power. Other subsidiaries, also government companies, are responsible for sourcing power. It’s a mess and a major driver of the private sector embracing solar power. We have a friend who works for a company that installs industrial sized solar systems and she tells us that they cannot keep up.
Our problem is not power supply per se, but a wildly fluctuating voltage. We have been told that we are on the same part of the power grid as a “person of influence”, i.e. a political fat cat, so we don’t often get intentional power cuts though faults are not uncommon especially during the rainy season.
We installed the voltage protection unit (VPU) pictured above to protect the solar inverter from the voltage which we have seen anywhere from 280 volts down to 160 volts. It simply disconnects the supply outside of the safe range of 190 volts to 240 volts. During the day the supply is often above this range and at night it falls below. We can hear the VPU switching on and off in the evening and the lights flicking as the inverter takes over. Most of the time it is merely tedious but on occasion the voltage goes low for so long that the solar battery goes flat and the lights go off. Especially in cloudy weather when the solar battery never fully charges.
Over the years I have acquired a reasonable collection of woodworking and other power tools. These are in the spare garage next to the cottage in the garden and most can run off the cottage solar system. The planer/thicknesser and it’s accompanying dust collector cannot as they draw too much power so must run off the mains supply and the voltage fluctuations would destroy the motors very quickly. The planer is a very useful machine and because I am so dependent on it very little happens in the woodworking sphere these days.
Whilst I knew that voltage regulation units (VRUs) that supply a constant voltage existed, I had researched them on the internet and found that they tended to be large and very expensive. I asked my friend Barry, who is a professional carpenter, what his solution would be. He has liquidated his company he has no large machines but I thought he might know someone who did. It turned out that he and his partner had just installed a relatively small VRU in a flat that they’d bought and were available locally for less than US$1,000. So I got hold of the company and started asking questions, lots of them.
Having ascertained that I would need a 15kVA regulator and that the warranty would be valid for a year they couldn’t give me a clear answer as to whether it would be valid, or what would happen to the unit, if the voltage went outside the maximum rated supply of 250 volts. Asking around led me to another hardware outlet but they were only interested in selling the VRU and had little backup and simply wouldn’t answer the voltage range issue. A chance conversation with one of my cousins and with an electrician that he knows led me to call Richard of ElectroTronics and he answered all my questions.
ElectroTronics is based in the Southerton industrial area of Harare. Once a bustling hub of industry it’s a lot quieter than I remembered (I had no reason to go there for quite a few years) but was surprisingly clean. The roads were mostly good though the one past ElectroTronics was in very poor shape.
Richard is a very trim man, not looking at all like his 70 years and he assured us that he’d been in the business nearly 50 years. His small warehouse was impressively well stocked, indicating an active business, and he happily gave of his time explaining the principles of VRUs. The one we’d opted for was essentially a variable transformer. “Of course they are made in China” he responded to my inevitable question. “I could sell you that Italian-made one for 18 times the price but these work just fine” he added (we paid $900). He has sold VRUs to all manner of customers including hospitals, laboratories and factories. The biggest was 1,000 kVA. “I back up and repair everything I sell and if it’s a genuine part failure I will honour it outside the warranty”.
Having got the AVR home my brother Duncan noticed some cosmetic damage to the case. I sent in pictures to Richard and asked if it would jeopardize the warranty. He apologized, said no, and the machine was replaced that afternoon. I was VERY impressed!
The AVR is installed in our kitchen (the only place where it can be easily placed to supply regulated/stabilized power to the whole property) and my woodworking machines work just fine! However, a VRU can obviously only work when there’s power and the next day there was none. Fortunately a WhatsApp message to the local faults department led to a prompt replacement of the problem fuse in the nearby sub-station. We’re back in business!
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Tags: ElectroTronics, renewable-energy, solar, solar power, Technology, travel, Volatage Stabilizer, voltage, Voltage Regulator Unit, ZESA, ZETDC
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