ajft

Why did I wake up so early again? The last three days I've slept really well, but this morning it was 03:35 again, wide awake and listening to a loud annoying blackbird that decided to warble away until daylight. Five o'clock and the trains start, six o'clock and you can just start to hear the traffic on Warrigal road. Six thirty and I gave up and got up and had breakfast. Maybe its the contrast to the quiet at mum and dad's place, maybe I'm just all slept out and don't need any more sleep. I sure hope so.

“Post 9/11” I have flown within Australia several times and internationally three times. Internationally, I've been to airports in the UK, Switzerland, Italy, China and Vietnam and have had various levels of security checks at variou airports. Within Australia I've flown through Melbourne, Adelaide, Alice Springs and Canberra. At only one place have I ever had any hassles, that is Canberra airport. It doesn't seem to be a one-off either, it seems that every time I fly through Canberra airport the security staff are the rudest, most obnoxious, most determined to puff up their chests and egos and find some trivial item that must be confiscated because it's in the rules. When questioned, we get the stock answer: “We're just following orders...”

Today was no exception; Canberra airport checkin, for the first time in five years I've had to take off my belt — the same belt I've worn every time at every airport. Yet again I was chosen for a random explosives test — three trips out of Canberra airport, three selections for the bomb-wipe. This time they decided to confiscate Jo's nail-file! The damn thing was 8cm long and she's had it for twenty years, its been in her toiletry bag for twenty years, it's been through the metal detectors any number of times. It was allowed through onto the aircraft leaving New York a week after September 11! But no, mister puffed-up shirt Canberra airport security thug must confiscate this deadly implement.

Perhaps these idiots should walk ten metres past their all-powerful metal detectors and have a look in the airport bar — the airport bar that sells glass bottles of beer that you can take onto the aircraft. Perhaps the security thugs should check up on how many people in the world have been assaulted, threatened and injured with broken bottles versus how many are attacked with nail files. If the nail file is a weapon then so is the headphone cable for an iPod, the nice pointy steel pen and pencil that everyone carries, or the battery in everything from phones to MP3 players to laptop computers....

Perhaps the idiots need to step down their attitude and ridiculous theatrics.

Coffee, stress, strange noises in the night? I'm not sure which is the primary causes, but last night I woke up at 03:45 and couldn't get back to sleep, and the night before it was around 04:15. Its having a lousy affect on my grumpiness factor during the day. At least this morning I could blame the howling wind — tree branches scraping along the house, bits of building site crashing and flapping, strange creaks from the roofing... the night before I had the joy of listening to the world come awake, starting with the local garbage trucks starting their rounds almost an hour before they're allowed to.

Maybe tonight I'll get a good night's sleep. I hope so.

Late afternoon founding me sitting in the sun at the corner of Poath road and Rosella streets in Murrumbeena, just up the road from where I first lived in Melbourne ten years ago. I should have bought a house here then, or even a flat, its become all trendy and gentrified now.

Two cafés with tables out on the footpath, the old video-game parlour closed and mysterious purple curtains over the windows. The TAB and post office gone now, a new suite of offices with apartments above just opened. The secondhand whitegoods shop is now a gourmet pizza place, the home-brew supplies a café. Only the big ugly blue-green warehouse still sitting alongside the railway, half-abandoned looking, at least it hides the ugly 1950's toilet-block architecture of Hughesdale station.

I wonder how the expansion of the railway to include a third line to Dandenong will fit? Which buildings will be bought and bulldozed? How will they squeeze it all through?

Another whirl of the software upgrade merry-go-round on the Windows laptop today: Firefox quietly downloaded and installed 1.5.0.7, but after restarting, the Google Browser Sync. plugin didn't reload all my tabs so I lost something I was reading. iTunes asked and I consented, and so version six point something was replaced by 7.0.0.70, but then all my music started sounding all w-w-w-warbly and g-g-g-garbled. Plugins it is, the Last.fm/audioscrobbler plugin was at fault, so out it went and in came the newer Last.fm for Microsoft Windows. At least the latest revision of the Garmin Web Updater seems to have gone in without a problem....

Revisited 2006-09-18: Seems that my iTunes problem doesn't go away by disabling the plugin. The latest version is a major step backwards for me and the slightest bit of activity by any other application and it warbles and stutters. Followed all the recommendations on configuring Quicktime to no avail. I guess I just wait for iTunes version 7.0.1....

According to the proverb; good fences make good neighbours, apparently. Seems we don't have good neighbours though! Latest on the development front; as Jo was walking out the door she saw that the builders are taking down the fence between our block and theirs! First we have heard of it was when the builder came over and asked whether or not we had a dog! No idea what the answer would have been if she said yes, since they had already removed all the poles and were starting on the sections of the fence palings.

A telephone query to the council for rubber-stamping building permits reveals that we should have inferred that the fence would be removed from the placement of the proposed development's walls, and the developer should have have received verbal approval before starting work on the fence this morning. Apparently the fact that Jo didn't tell them to stop and put it back classifies as verbal approval!

The whole planning and objection process appears heavily weighted in favour of the developers. On their side they have the developer, builder and surveyor creating the plans and knowing all the ins and outs of the rules, on the other side are the neighbouring residents who are presented with a fully developed plan and meant to infer everything from that with the help of the council. Apparently all we had to do was ask the right questions of the council at the time! I pointed out that we didn't even know the right questions since we aren't developers or builders.

We really couldn't care about that section of the fence anyway, it is hidden flush up against the house. What we do care about is the complete lack of notification and communication that appears to be displayed at every step of the way.

Fotothing,outage

  Fotothing.com is currently offline.
  Appologies for the inconvenience.

Come on guys, get your act into gear! In the last week since I've been back from holiday the Fotothing site has been off the air more often than on it. No explanations, just that little place-holder page in place of the entire site. It's a great way to lose customers.... Don't just appologise, fix it!

I guess I'll be putting my photos from the China trip onto Fotonomy then, at least until I manage to get my local photo management stuff all working as well as I want.

No, not the famous ranting video clip of Microsoft's Steve Balmer.

Saturday morning disturbed by chainsaws again. The one big eucalypt tree that we can see from our back window, the one big tree for a couple of streets around, the one big tree that always has magpies warbling and lorikeets shrieking from the branches — well the tree's gone now, cut down and pulped up. The old house and garden will go soon, to be replaced by yet another pair of big-as-you-can-build two-storey boxes, the rest of the block covered in concrete carparking, white pebbles and tidy-little evergreen shrubs in pots.

It was meant to be our shopping day, a last chance to look around the markets, visit the Silk market, and gather up some presents for neices and nephews — unfortunately Jo was still very sick this morning so we spent almost our entire time hunting up the English-speaking SOS clinic.

....

....

The weather in Beijing is officially “cloudy” — there is no smog. In preparation for the 2008 Olympic games, large numbers of new parks and trees are being planted all over the city, and a huge steelworks has been closed and moved to another city to clean up the air — Beijing's air anyway, the unvisited industrial recipient city gets all the pollution now. Car numbers are supposedly to be capped at three million to limit congestion and pollution, but nobody is quite sure whether this will happen, or whether money and privilege will just make for a black market in unofficial cars.

....

Where?

Beijing (北京)

A traveling day; bus from Xiahe (夏河) to Lanzhou (兰州), lunch, back in the bus for the trip to the airport then fly to Beijing (北京). Eight in the morning to ten at night.

Once again our bus driver proved his worth; there was another huge thunderstorm last night — a thunderstorm that I slept through — and the river was even more swollen and flooded and brown than the last two days, the roads were covered in rock-falls and the road-works detours turned into churned up bogs. A fairly routine six hour drive had a number of very boggy crossings and much slaloming around everything from handfuls of gravel to fallen boulders a metre in diameter.

Lunch at a café in Lanzhou, a beef noodle dish that is one of the three things this area is famous for — the other two being labour camps and the Chinese space industry. Good news was that Dan assured us that we'd only get to experience one of the three! Bad news was that Jo started feeling sick shortly after lunch, maybe the lunch, more likely last night's Chicken Biryani in Xiahe(夏河).

....

Checking in at the airport it was interesting to see that although Beijing (北京), like Ho Chi Minh City, has changed in spelling or name from its original westernised version, the airport code that is stuck on all the luggage is still the original, PEK for Beijing (北京) (Peking), SAI for Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon)!

....

I think Jo and I were the only two in our room who slept well last night; Damian and Amy were both feeling sick, Dan snored a bit and claims that he never sleeps well when he stays here, Julie says she spent the night rolling back and forth between Damian and Dan — not used to sleeping between two others!

After the tremendous thunderstorm last night it was clear and sunny again this morning, I ducked out for a short walk around the place, then Jo and I took off for a longer walk before breakfast, happy to get out and see some of the place without the local children hanging off our arms.

Out the western gate and around the outside of the “city walls” around to the east. Dozens of little frogs were out and about on the paths and the walls themselves, so dense in places that you couldn't avoid stepping on them. There were more smiles and curious looks from the local inhabitants starting their day, fetching water from the bore and putting the animals out into the fields, and watching tourists wander about.

...

Afternoon bus trip off into the Tibetan grasslands, up from Xiahe (夏河) at 2900m altitude to around 3300m crossing the rolling green hills, then back down onto the plains to visit Tsewey Monastery and on to Karnang — also Kharnang or the Chinese Ganjia Baijiao City — to spend the night, Karnang hardly classifies as a city, a population of maybe 500, unpaved roads, no shops and a mass of single storey mud houses inside 1000 year-old city walls. There is a primary school here that Intrepid used to support, but we've learnt that the teachers were stealing the donations and none were getting to the school, so the school visit is off the agenda!

The road out from Xiahe to Kharnang is in fairly good condition, except every single bridge is simultaneously being replaced! This has resulted in detours down off the roadway at every culvert and bridge off to one side or the other, across the hopefully dry watercourse, then back up onto the road.

    I met a hairy black yak,
    In appearance, a shaggy old sack.
    I approached the wrong end,
    In an attempt to befriend...
    and ended up flat on my back.

City walls, drum and bell towers and the Little Goose Pagoda.

I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it was not what I was expecting!

A long time in the bus....

Grey, grey skies....

As it says on the ticket:

As the famous touristy attraction in the world and 4A level scenic spot firstly announced by State Tourism Board, Shaolin scenic spot enjoys rich humanities sight, antique natural sight, massive Shaolin Buddhist and Wushu Culture and elegant & rare geological wonder. Centralizing within 2.1Kmof coral area of coral area of scenic spot, the humanities sight mainly includes Shaolin Temple, tower forest, Damo Hole, First Ancestor Hut, Second Ancestor Hut, etc. Centralizing in Sanhuangzhai of Shaosi mountain, the natural sight integrates three biggest orogenies of Songyang, Zhongyue and Shaolin and land making activeties, which were famous during the precambrian period and are the optimum sight spot of Songshan World Geology Park. The natural sight mainly contains over 40 spots such as monkey watching sky cloud apices and howling tiger setting sun in Yusai, autumn scenery of Shaoshi, Waterfall, Atalagamite Hole, Daxian Gorge, Lingxiao Gorge, Nappe Hole, Camel Stone, Elephant Stone, Dragon Head and Tail, etc.

A day to ourselves today, just be back in time to get to the train! At 08:30 or so we'd packed our things and checked the bags into storage at the hotel, then walked off towards the old town. A long way to walk, but neither of us had much of an idea how to go about finding the right bus, or how to flag them down and pay. Breakfast again of mysterious tasty bread-things from a stall, then roughly south and east zig-zagging along the streets and trying to stay in the shade — it was already hot in the direct sun.

Past the “Bund Centre” and a mandatory photograph for the folks at bund.com.au — its a tall building with what appears to be a concrete crown, I may have taken a photograph of it yesterday.

Around the corner and suddenly we found ourselves in blocks of traditional-style buildings, some still under construction. In fact everything in China appears to be still under construction. One huge marketplace of little shops selling to tourists, endless streams of touts on the footpaths wanting me to buy “Watch, Prada bag, lady watch, shoe,” all rattled off as one long meaningless sentence. Crowds of people around the — bright green — ornamental lake, including a TV crew filming an interview with someone, I've no idea what its about but I'm in the background!

Then RMB30 to enter the Yu Yuan gardens where it was far more peaceful, although we still had to dodge 50-person Spanish and American bus-tour groups as we walked around in the maze of rooms and gardens and pavilions. A real shame there was no map as it seemed a lot larger inside than expected, all the small spaces making it easy to miss parts of the whole.

Finally we made our way back to the entrance, then back up to the Bund to start on the day's chores — money and food for the train. A green-bean icecream as we crossed another new park and back in the direction of the river, confusion set in and we headed the wrong way along Ren Min Lu and found ourselves walking three-quarters of the way around an enormous building site then along a main road in blistering sun and finally to a corner of the park where we were within sight of where we'd sat to eat the ice-creams! Took the correct turn this time, then alongside the river on the Bund walk, again really hot as there's hardly any shade up on the embankment.

The first bank we stepped into while hunting about to change money was enormous, one of the traditional old-fashioned style banks, all timber panelling and 19th century attitude. Completely overwhelming and no signs anywhere in either English or Chinese of where to do anything. The second was much easier, the guard took one look as we walked in the door and guided us upstairs to the foreign currency office.

Financial transactions completed, back across (under) the river via the “Pedestrian tunnel,” a bizarrely misnamed piece of tourist tat which is a very expensive little train that holds eight or so people, costs RMB30 one way (as against RMB1 for a return ticket on the ferry) and has a very tacky and very loud laser and light show its entire length. We had been warned by Julie, but we just had to see it for ourselves!

One good point is that the tunnel exit is right next to the Pearl tower and across the road from the enormous gold coloured supermarket-mall-department store that Dan had suggested was a good spot for provisions. Once inside it was a bit tricky finding the supermarket, luckily Jo remembered that it was in the basement!

It felt strange to be walking around in an enormous supermarket, everything marked in Chinese, but little different to any supermarket anywhere else in the world. All the same bright fluorescent lights, bright colours, endless brands and packaging. A reminder of how different the culture is came in the form of a company rep. standing behind a display rack of cartoons and a tray with tiny sample cups full of a mysterious drink... “Sir, madam, try this, its milk” Indeed it was, simple, ordinary, plain cold milk, but a product that necessitates a special advertising campaign in a country that doesn't consume much in the way of dairy products.

We made our way back towards our hotel by the metro, then sheltered for half an hour or so in an air-conditioned foreign-language (ie English) bookshop. The thermometer outside happily telling us it was currently 35°C.

Regrouped at the hotel then all piled into taxis for the trip to the station. An amazingly noisy and slow trip, I'm sure we could have walked it quicker, then down into the largest underground taxi rank I have ever seen.

Show our tickets at the turn-styles with guards outside the building — with so many people in China you can't even get into the train station without a ticket, but even so it was packed once we got in. The waiting halls are amazing, enormous cavernous rooms just full of people.

A deafening and distorted PA system blasting out announcements, then down onto the platform for the long walk to carriage 17 of 20 or more — sorry Marko, no chance of taking any pictures of the engine for you!

We made ourselves at home in our compartment, six beds in two stacks of three, then spent the rest of the afternoon and evening sitting around chatting and eating our way through assorted snacks, watching as the world went by. Noodles for dinner, the same as most of the other passengers, RMB5 from the lady with the food cart then fill them up with hot water from the urn at the end of the carriage.

Lights out and into bed at 10; I slept fitfully through the night, waking up occasionally as the train lurched and banged or stopped in odd locations.

After a day of travelling, last night I slept like a log, but surprisingly still managed to wake up around 7:30 this morning. Off to find something for breakfast out on a street stall before our first group event — subway and walk to the Shanghai museum. Temperature already up around 30°C as Jo and I headed off at semi-random around a few corners and bought a pastry-thing and a bun-thing from a street vendor.

The group met up around 9:30 for the walk over to the museum, I think I was still confused about west and east and thought we were heading in the opposite direction — towards the river rather than away from it! The museum was far more interesting than most of us expected — we didn't think we'd be there long but found we spent almost an hour on the fourth floor just looking around at the exhibits and costumes (we'd decided to start at the top of the building and work our way down). Some fascinating calligraphy and scrolls — but of course neither of us can read any of it. Nearly everything was labelled quite well in English.

Ming and Qing furniture, a huge room full of bronzes, we skipped the exhibit of five thousand years of pottery and finally made it out around 12:30 to find that it was still hot, but had just finished raining.

With the afternoon free we took off on foot to the French quarter and found ourselves surrounded by construction work everywhere we went. Buildings listed in our maps simply did not exist anymore. A new park with a sign proudly proclaiming “4,936 families successfully removed to create this park” — we wonder where the families are now.

The old flower market is gone, one huge building site of rubble in its place. Slight mis-reading of a map on the way back had us walk the long two sides around a triangle, then successfully made it back to Middle Hennan road on the metro — including a change of trains and puzzling out the automated ticket machine. Simple things that become suddenly complex in a new place and a foreign language. Dinner by ourselves of “three mixed meats” and eggplant and Chinese vegetables, then regroup at the hotel for a visit to the acrobats. Wow! These are absolutely amazing people. Traditional pole and rope climbing, running up poles as though they were stairs. An incredibly flexible girl performing some sort of yoga/ballet will holding five sets of lit candles, tying herself in knots and not setting anything on fire. Hoop diving, plate spinning, a tacky silk-rope show set to an over-the-top backdrop projection of music and film from Titanic. Cyclists on eight bikes in formation, then eight cyclists in formation on one bike! The climax of the show was the motor cycles in “the wheel of death”. Completely crazy to watch with one guy spinning around inside the ball, when the second bike entered it was amazing, then it was three... four... five motorbikes whirling around in a blur of two-stroke and noise.

Successful negotiation of the metro back to the hotel and then some very expensive beers outside on Funan road — the Chinese equivalent of Eiffel tower beer, RMB25 a bottle, 20 of which was for the seat and the view! Then back to the hotel, exhausted.

An hour and a half this morning in Changi airporty in Singapore, time enough to walk around and look at the pools of Koi and orchid gardens, then back on the plane for the flight to Shanghai (上海).

Long queues at Chinese immigration, video cameras everwhere filming the arrivals in the hall, then quickly through a very prefunctory customs check and out of the aiport. Do we change money insider or outside the immigration? The rates inside didn't look so good so we waited until outside — should have known, the rates outside were exactly the same. Luggage and money, now time for transport — woohoo, the maglev train! Only one small problem, we couldn't find it!

The sign that we thought pointed outside to the Maglev train actually meant go upstairs to the second floor! Luckily a woman for one of the hotels tried to get us a taxi, then told us how to find the train station once we explained our predicament.

RMB40 and an aircraft boarding-pass stub and we were onto the train. Very ordinary looking on the inside, apart from the groovy illuminated signs that tells you how fast you're travelling; 100, 200, 300, 400 — ticking away up to 432km/hr! Only a little bit of noise and shaking, it was all quite amazing really. Eight minutes later and we were in the station in the centre of the city, this is definitely how it should be to get from an airport to the city!

Struggled across to the metro station and puzzled our way through tickets; machine or person? The machine has English text, but is slightly confusing, as every ticket machine in every city always seems to the visitor. We made it though, two RMB4 tickets and onto the train, then across Pudong, under the river and off at the correct station of Middle Hunan road — Yay!

I'll blame the northern hemisphere! Subconsciously navigating by the sun we came up blinking into daylight from the metro station, confidently turned left and strode off in precisely the opposite direction to where the hotel was! Luckily it was only half a block before the rational part kicked in and had us make an about-face, then down the side street to the Nanjing hotel and inside to checkin and get a well-earned shower!

After getting established in the Nanjing hotel we headed back out for an exploratory walk, once again I got confused about north and south, that subconscious is a dangerous thing! Nanjing Lu is one big pedestrian mall, the crowds and shops and stonework making it all look vaguely reminiscent of Bourke street mall in Melbourne — but maybe that's just because I don't spend much time in Bourke street mall! Maybe not so similar after all, the architecture and neon signs all straight from the 21st century.

Early in the evening we met the rest of the Intrepid group for the first time, handed over our wads of cash for the “local contribution” then headed out dinner. Damian and Amy from down near Geelong, Peter and Rachel from Ballarat, Steven and Kristine from Toronto in Canada, and Julie from Adelaide, to be led around the country by Dan.

Dan quickly proved his leadership abilities by taking us around a few blocks to a favourite restaurant where he ordered the first of what turned out to be many fantastic meals in China! Of course no meal and no holiday is complete without beer, so there was a highly symbolic “first beer of the trip” in the restaurant, followed by a couple of very expensive — for Shanghai (上海) and China — beers at an outdoor café on Nanjing Lu. At RMB25 per bottle, we were definitely paying for the pleasure of sitting around outdoors in the warm evening air and watching the world go by.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single zone one Met. train.

Oh well, it sounds good, sufficiently Confucian for the start of a fifteen day trip through China. The 9:30pm to Spencer Street station — errr, make that Southern Cross station. The station looks almost complete now, totally empty and desolate at ten o'clock on a Sunday night. Foolishly, Jo thought we'd be able to buy a coffee while we waited for the bus to the airport... not a chance! Just sit in the cold grey echo-ey concrete carpark that is the brand new bus station. I wonder if there is a bus station anywhere in the world that looks attractive?

A small mercy on the bus to the airport, for once we were not subjected to the appalling “Come and spend all your money at Chadstone mega-mall” video. Maybe it only shows to arrivals, maybe the driver hates it as much as the passengers do.

Checkin as much fun as it always is, this time we got to queue up behind an entire teenage German orchestra and most of their instruments. All kinds of oddly-shaped luggage requiring all kinds of different handling.

Eight hours to Singapore and I tried to sleep, dozing badly while being leant on by a man we nicknamed “Mr Stinky” — the owner of one of the worst cases of halitosis I've ever had the misfortune to experience. When his fat arms and broad shoulders weren't leaning on me, he was subjecting me to a form of chemical warfare that must surely be illegal on a civilian aircraft.

Yahoo, last day of work! Two weeks of holiday. A blur of preparation. Am I ready? Have I got everything sorted?

AAaaarrrg! Every day I ride to work. It's only five kilometres and it only takes fifteen minutes. Every day I see a couple of idiots on the roads on their phones in the morning, and another couple in the evening. Every week once or twice I have to take some evasive action from the antics of one of these idiots.

The local papers state that the police had “a massive crackdown”on motorists on the Monash freeway with “round the clock staffing” for an entire month. A whole 72 motorists were booked for using their mobile phones — illegally — while driving. Um, forgive my mathematics but 72 in a month is about 2 and a half a day, or a mighty one every ten hours!

How the hell can the police see one motorist every ten hours on an eight lane freeway using their phone when the rest of us have to put up with seeing 2 or 3 every fifteen minutes? Maybe the police should get out of their shiny protective police cars and see what its like being a pedestrian or cyclist on our roads!

Prompt for the rant? Today's dickhead du jour in his red Nissan Skyline, RGK 034, pulled out to pass me in Haughton road, then swerved back in when only half-past since he was about to ram into the traffic island and keep-left sign. I ran up the gutter to avoid being hit while he blithely roared off, the steering wheel in his right hand, the phone in his left as he SMSed away.

The latest plot uncovered in the UK and the (over?) reaction of the airlines has me thinking that maybe the terrorists are winning. Is the desired outcome death, or is just total disruption? Restrictions down to no hand luggage of any kind, no food, no drink, nothing except travel documents.... Oh yay, I'm flying internationally in a couple of weeks too.

Seems to be getting close to a point where the airlines are going to hand out a plastic bag as you step through the security checkpoint and ask you to strip and hand everything over, you'll then be led naked into the aircraft and handcuffed into your seat for the duration of the flight.

I think my favourite quote would be in Bruce Schneier's New Airline Security Rules:

Yet another opportunity for a movie-plot: Evil terrorist drinks a large bottle of liquid explosive, then detonates himself by swallowing a small pill hidden inside his watch (or chewing on a detonator hidden in a false tooth...).

Yet more magnificent reporting, courtesy of The Age this time: “plotters had begun investigating non-stop flights from the UK to the USA.” Non-stop flights over the Atlantic? Can someone tell me what other kind there are? Do some of them set down on icebergs or something?

Courtesy of The Register:

Welshman in 12 pint cider binge goat death ride

...

Myles' defence asked: "Did you know you had a goat with you and did you have any intention of driving the vehicle on the road?" Myles replied: "No."

...

Another bloody motorist who can't be bloody bothered to watch where they're bloody going and obey the bloody give-way signs. Idiot old builder in crappy old white Ford station wagon, tears up the merge lane of North road from Huntingdale and goes straight through the give-way sign, straight past the “watch for bicycles” and would have hit me square on if I hadn't swerved out of the way. Glancing blow on the knee and hand, looks round in amazement at the loud bang as the bike hits the door and slows for a moment, then roars off up the road. Registration Vic. DPC-215, oh yeah, only one working brake light too....

Assorted mucking about with inferno, getting it all working on the Windows XP laptop. Hassles since home area is in both a file path with spaces in it and not the C: drive! (D:\Documents and Settings\ajft\pkg\inferno).

Inferno just wouldn't install to a path with a space in it, so I installed to C:\infern then copied all the files to ~/pkg/inferno=, ran regedit and changed the root path. Then updated the Start menu icon to launch the correct executable with the correct parameters.

Could not get ~/namespace to handle paths with spaces in them either, so I've ended up with a convoluted path to get Inferno launched and running:

1. %HOME%\pkg\inferno\inferno.cmd that contains:

     "%HOME%\pkg\inferno\Nt\386\bin\emu.exe" -g1280x1024 \
       "-r%HOME%\pkg\inferno" sh.dis /%COMPUTERNAME%.sh



2. %HOME%\pkg\inferno\%COMPUTERNAME%.sh that contains:

     bind -bc '#UD:/Documents and Settings/ajft' /usr/ajft
     svc/net
     wm/wm wm/logon -u ajft



3. %HOME%\pkg\inferno\usr\ajft\namespace that contains:

     bind -ia #C /
     bind -a #UC:/ /n/c
     bind -c /usr/ajft/tmp /tmp
     bind -a /usr/ajft/dis /dis
     bind -a /usr/ajft/module /module

A kind of awful loop-back mounting of package within the home directory has a home directory that mounts the real home directory over the top of itself.

Mounting external resources:

The following works, showing me I've got the network configuration setup correctly and can access sources.

 mount -A tcp!sources.cs.bell-labs.com!9fs /n/remote

I can mount caerwyn's wiki, but /acme/wiki doesn't (yet) exist in this installation so I can only see the raw files.

Local mount -A tcp!canto.hopto.org!wiki /mnt/wiki
/acme/wiki/Wiki

Tried to follow some of caerwyn's Getting Started, but the first steps are to create an account, and the first step of that is an anonymous mount that won't work for me.

An interesting conversation with the local council's planning office today; I decided to call them up and query our neighbour's actions on Saturday of cutting down the tree that was expressly retained on their planning permit. Half way through explaining the permit's application, objection, granting history the women interrupted with “...and let me guess, they've cut down the tree.”. When I replied yes, it was met with “Why does that not surprise me in the least — oh, I shouldn't say things like that, um hang on, I'll put you onto the planner officer responsible for that case.”

Explained the story again, and once again was met by an unsurprised audience. It sounds a little too common to leave the trees in the plan to make it all look green and friendly and environmentally responsible, then once the permission arrives, to bulldoze the lot and concrete it for ease of development. The Senior Statutory Planner will investigate further and call me back....

The planning permit went up; bulldoze the single-storey house and build two, two-storey houses on the block. We objected. We were over-ruled and the plan accepted, the plan that included “retaining established shade tree”. The bulldozer came and the old house departed — but the tree remained! The tree was carefully protected by plastic “do not bulldoze me” tape, protected from the bulldozer driver, but not from the owner!

Ten o'clock this morning and the chain-saw started up, the owner and the developer drove in and cut the tree down. Didn't even bother to take the mess away, just left it lying there against our fence. If that's their attitude to the planning permit and conditions, what will they do with the rest of the development?

Too much talk in the newspapers over the last few weeks — yet again — about Melbourne needing an icon. Something big, we've got to have some enormous building sticking out like dog's balls or we're not a real city — or something like that....

Grow up.

Much is iconic about Melbourne; the people, the bars and cafés, the trams. Tonight was an iconic Melbourne evening; meet after work for a couple of beers in the Goat brewery — hidden away on a Richmond backstreet, walk up the road for delicious pizza and staff who remember us at E-lounge, shoe-horned into a tiny table beside the fridge, then catch a rattly old drafty W-class tram back down Church street and the train home. Human-sized iconic.

I'm tempted to try again and see if I can beat PyBlosxom into producing the kind of site I'm after.

This will be my first posting if that system works, then I have to see about back-filling with all the old posts.

I've written off to the managers of the Arintji café and Federation Square to ask them what the hell they are on about, the following made bugger all sense at the time — just another example of the mindless rules that seem to be increasing all the time, generally waved off with the all-powerful word “security” wafted over them to ward off evil spirits. I wonder what bizarre explanation they'll be able to offer.

Jo and I sat down for a late lunch and a beer at one of the cafés in Federation Square. We heard that Mountain Goat Hightail Ale was available, so ordered two and a few snacks.

The beers duly arrived, two bottles, and since its such a flavoursome beer we asked for glasses, the better to savour the smells and tastes. The conversation became somewat Dada-esque:

“Can we have glasses for the beers please?”

“We can't bring glasses outside”

“What about those glasses of wine, that glass of water, and these beers in glass bottles?”

“Sorry, but we're not allowed to give you glasses outside.”

“That is ridiculous, you've already given us glass bottles, and you've given those people glass glasses. What do you do with wine?”

“Those are the rules, they have told us we can't bring glasses outside.”

“Look, the beer tastes much better from a glass, surely we can drink it from glasses.”

“Ok, but security will tell us off if they see them!”

So there you have it, straight from the Stalinist Russia school of rules and security. No rationale, no explanation. These are the rules and they are policing them.

We did get our glasses, and the Goat tasted much better for it; we also received forks in a glass with the snacks! At eight bucks a bottle, I'm sure Arintji can afford to pay for the extra washing up, and I shall wait with bated breath for their responses to my letter of enquiry....

From now on I think I'll stick to drinking goat from the tap, somewhere pleasant like at the brewery or the GB in Richmond where it costs half as much!

Oh my god, Australian state secrets of critical importance are being published in the local newspaper — or at least in the monthly glossy insert of the local newspaper!

The world's entire supply of Vegemite™ is produced in one single factory in Fishermans Bend by only twenty six staff! Just imagine the devastating blow to the Australian economy and morale if a hijacked tram were to run into the building and destroy it all!

Surely there should be immediate high-level talks to cross-train staff at secret remote locations and bring a backup Vegemite facility online in case of national emergency...

CNA and CNE: Certainly No Experience and Can't Network Anything.

CNA and CNE: Certainly No Experience and Can't Network Anything.

I've a soft spot for the 500s, between about 1986 and 1990 I was half-owner of one, gloss-black with metal flakes. We had a ball in it for a couple of years until the other half drove it over a speed-hump too fast, an engine mount snapped and it went no more. For several years it sat in Richard's garden with the intention that we'd get it back on the road again — it never happened. He moved house and either sold it or sent it to the wreckers. I still get a wistful expression when I see them putter past on the streets.

Today I saw that the Fiat 500 has been named the number one sexiest car in the world! I'm sure it'll do wonderful things for their resale value, not so good things for my thoughts on one day getting one....

Sure wish I had a copy of the photo we took all those years ago of it sitting beside the Lambourghini Countach in the carpark of the Lakeside hotel...

I'd finally got around to taking the mountain bike in to the shop last week to see about the leaking oil seals, thinking of course that only the seals needed replacing. Got the phone call, the annodizing has been all worn off the fork legs and Rockshox don't make or don't stock spares for 2000-2001 SIDs anymore, or if they do they're several hundred dollars just for the legs.

I was offered a second-hand but unused pair of "seven or eight hundred dollar Springer" forks for $500 fitted, should probably have done a little more checking around first because I said yes. First time I looked once I really new the model name — but after I'd paid — had the forks for around $430! Another learning experience, even friends in bike shops are in business first. On the other hand, the amount of servicing and adjustment that was done for "no charge" probably more than makes up the difference!

Along the way the headset was replaced as well, this was definitely needed, the old bearing races were very pitted and worn — loose balls now, I'm sure it'll feel so much better when I ride.

Not as good as new, maybe better, definitely different — Norky bike just keeps on changing and mutating over the years.

*******************************************************
Sat 22 July - Melbourne-Roubaiz "Hell of the Northcote"
*******************************************************
12PM - Starting from Fed. Square.  Fun for all! - course will be run over
melbourne's brutal pave,railway crossings, dirt tracks and finishing with
a lap at the brunswick velodrome.  All finishers go into a draw for major
prizes.  This is NOT a race!
FREE but bring $10 to purchase items along the way and a panier or backpack.
organiser: Simon of Darebin BUG

BREAK

It should take us about an hour to get to the start, so 11 o'clock and out the door — first time on the tandem for quite a few months! Oakleigh, Hughesdale, Murrumbeena, Malvern and onto the Gardiners creek trail. Major detours around Hawthorn where the path is being repaved, restored or maybe just re-layed. Follow the trail to Richmond and the city and join the crowd clustering around in Federation square, awaiting the signal, all the while under the watchful eye of two of Fed Square's burly security men. Maps are distributed, bicycles are examined.

“Alright everybody, this is Ugly. Remember Ugly. You will need to find Ugly.” Easy to hear when the megaphone points at you, very hard to hear when it points elsewhere. We get the rough idea, a few minutes more and finally we're told to head off — first stop is to get to Rod Laver arena where Ugly will hand us our cards and our instructions. That's not so hard, we just came from there, so along with however many others we all headed off along the river in the direction of Richmond.

Arriving at Rod Laver arena, I held the bike while Jo vanished into the throng, returning with our card. Then off to squat on the road and peruse the map, where are these twelve points, what is the optimal route between them?

We figured out a rough plan of attack — the first two not just closest but also in familiar territory — then headed off in the direction of Fitzroy. Short cut past the MCG along one of the newer footbridges and off through East Melbourne, Victoria parade the first challenge as major roadworks made crossing a hassle. Something resembling a hook-u-turn got us around and back down the direction we wanted, then off up Rokeby street searching for the building site with the Austral sign — Q.6. What is the block number of the building site with the Austral sign.

Rokeby street seemed to finish, a narrow bluestone lane matching up on the opposite side of Gipps street — Aha, our first section of the dreaded Melbourne pavé — brace the shoulders and power the tandem off down the lane, gradually narrowing to impassable where a builder's truck blocked all progress. Squeezing past, Jo helpfully pointed out that this was the Austral bricks sign we should be looking for! One question down, eleven more to go...

Number two — or five on the card — was easy. Cut across to Richmond and count the pink gates in an alleyway. Saturday Victoria street and the tandem don't seem to agree, it just doesn't have the acceleration for right-turns through the traffic! More pavé in the lane and one pink gate, two more cyclists enter the alley as we're leaving. Down through Richmond using all of Jo's sneaky local knowlege culled from years of walking to work, then Church street and Toorak road for checkpoint four at the far end of Rokeby — amazing, no pavé! A handy park, empty the bladder and fill the bidon.

Another right turn, across packed Toorak road, half a dozen others speed past in the direction we just came, I think they're taking this much more seriously than we are, or maybe just much more quickly! Off along Toorak road, damn, should have stopped at the bakery and grabbed a bite to eat. Randall place is checkpoint three and the first place where we met other riders at a checkpoint. There's a lot of discussion of the question, “the last three digits on the lamp-post”. The bloody lamp post seems to be covered in numbers, 703 on one tag, a five digit number on one sticker, K285 hammered in down low seems last to me!

Back to Toorak road, right turn a piece of cake across a bizarrely empty road, Albert road to south melbourne then stop at the lights for the first occurrence of map-reading failure. “Go right here”, so we're in the right lane — “um no, straight ahead I think”. The lights went green and there's no option, right we went, then up the kerb and cut into Dundas place. “Oh yes, this is where I meant, the map was upside down”. Okay, it seemed to work!

Pavé and slimy mud, a wonderful combination. We came through unscathed and found checkpoint two, then an easy run back up Ferars street to Soutbank to find Railway place. Left or right at the end here? Mental coin toss and the wrong choice, back the other way onto the worse looking cobbles (that should have clued me in) and count the gas bottles three. Checkpoint one complete. Tandem u-turn in the alley, through the chicanes across the light rail and back past Jeff's shed and north over the river.

North wharf road through docklands seemed to be hiding from us, we had a vague idea of where it should be but couldn't seem to find it. At last I spotted two riders on fixies off to my left so we picked a path and found our way over there, sure enough, North wharf road! It seemed to go on for ever, ending almost under the Bolte bridge. Q12, How many “Allez” are painted on the rusty steel pipes? See for yourself, there are five.

Now back to the city for checkpoint eleven and our first major navigational stuff up. Docklands to the city seems to contain a few walls of concrete and roads that will exist — in the future. We followed a sign that helpfully said “City,” but a left instead of a right had me in a concrete canyon and heading for Footscray road. Oh well, back into the CBD from the North-West and down to Lonsdale street.

We found Niagara lane easily enough — more pavé of course — but couldn't find the clue. The first run through the alley was riding with a 4WD on our tail, the second pass on foot heading back. Finally Jo spotted the answer, hidden behind two cars parked in a sub-alley off the main alley! Can't remember the last time I entered the CBD, let alone rode up an alley here....

Carlton next, first to spot #7, just off Canning street, then off to in Taplin place. Major overshoot by a couple of blocks, it seems that a street we were looking for had different names either side of a main road. Madame navigator was looking for one name while we rode purposefully past the other one! How come those three girls behind us aren't there anymore? Oh, that'd be because they turned off where we should have! U-turn in Canning street and back down to Macpherson street. Mud and slime on top of the pavé this time, an extra degree of difficulty. I think this is where I nearly lost it and bashed my shoulder against the fence to keep the Trek upright.

North and east from Carlton to Northcote, Nicholson and Holden streets rather than St Georges road — no obvious reason, they just seemed right at the time. Checkpoint #9 was in a tiny street with no signpost, pavé of course. Then simply go around the block and up the alley to #10. There was a lot of up in the alley, it had been named Col d'Ugly on the notes and at the top were a couple alternating between photographing the arrivals and screaming "Don't you dare get off!", "Allez, allez!" and other words of encouragement and derision. Brute force and stupidity triumphed as we powered the tandem over the jack-hammer bluestones, a near-crash with the alley wall resulting in Jo unclipping both feet in preparation for an emergency dismount, then flailing around madly as she realised we were still underway! We made it to the top, our polaroid photo taken to be used as a ticket in the raffle.

A pause to regain our breath, then over to the Northcote plaza for our contribution to the barbecue — $10 worth of orange juice, 3 two litre bottles — a challenge to carry! We ended up with one stuffed down my shirt and the other two in bags, one on each side of the rear handlebars, then rode across to Brunswick taking care not to set up too much of a swaying motion.

Finally into the velodrome to thunderous applause — yeah right, maybe in my head. In true Roubaix/Roobaix fashion it isn't over without the lap of the velodrome — this could be interesting, a lap of a steep concrete velodrome on the tandem and avoiding the massed bodies scoffing sausages and beer! Hardest part was getting started, I'd rolled forwards past the crowd but that left us in a steeper spot and I couldn't get my leg over.... A bit of a push, much ribald encouragement and we were off, must have been the slowest lap of the day, but it'll do for a first attempt!

Food, drink, talk, look at bikes. This all could have gone on far longer, and for many it probably did, but for us we realised that although the inaugural Melburn-Roobaix was now over, we were still twenty-five kilometres from home and only one hour to sundown! Easy for some, not at the end of this day for us, the last suburb or so was pretty dark, luckily the yellow jacket and reflectors stood out like the proverbial, and no grumpy policemen were encountered.

A bit of magic with the one-wire weather station and RRDtool.

July 2006 and I still have not mounted the weather station outside, so the information recorded is from it resting on the table near my PC. Despite the gaps under the door, there's only temperature information, no wind speed or direction!

Today's data

This week's data

This Month's data

  One of my many bicycles.
A tandem at last — No collection of bicycles is complete without at

least one tandem.

After several years of thought, and several months of searching, Jo and I finally bought ourselves a tandem. Second-hand, a trifle scratched and worn, but mechanically magnificent.

• 40 hole Shimano XT hubs
• Velocity Dyad rims
• Shimano Ultegra shifters
• Shimano Deore DX 9-speed rear derailleur
• Shimano 105 triple front derailleur

1750mm long, with the wheels removed, a trifle cumbersome to carry up and down the stairs or to put in the car! So far, so good, and it is lots of fun.

I'm sure it doesn't get used as much as it should, mostly due to the pain of taking it anywhere; major expeditions so far have been a nine-day Bicycle NSW tour and the minimal 80km version of the Audax Alpine classic.

Richmond to Monash University, and home again. Here are some of the hi-lights and low-lights of my daily ride to and from work.

Despite a personal dislike for “cycle paths” and most other cycle-specific infrastructure, most of my commute does use one of Melbourne's bike paths... except that they aren't really bike paths.

Every off-road bicycle path in Melbourne is really a shared-use pedestrian footway, where pedestrians have right of way over cyclists, and there is no legal enforcement of the keep left requirement, or any of the other rules and regulations, which appear to be little more than local council suggestions.

So why do I use the Gardiners creek path? Mostly because it is the quickest and most direct route. It would be even quicker if the designers of the path hadn't been besotted with bridges, and made the path cross back and forth over the creek at every opportunity. On the plus side, there's a wealth of wildlife to be seen — mostly birds — and its generally much quieter than the road.

The majority of commuters are those that live in the suburbs and work in the city, so each day I pass a fairly constant group of riders heading in the opposite direction. Sometimes we nod to each other, but I've no idea who any of them are. Every couple of weeks a friend of mine hurtles past in a blur heading home — we've never quite collided head on, but there's been a few close calls!

Leaving home, an illegal short-cut across 50m of footpath between Park street and Yarra Boulevard, then right along Yarra Boulevard, ignoring the narrow, winding, bumpy and unmaintained Yarra bike path. Minor hazards to avoid here are the speeding motorists, and the rapidly opening doors from those who use the road as their daily car-park.

After following Yarra Boulevard to where the Gardiners creek path joins the Yarra path, there's a tight left-hand turn and climb up onto the cycle-path bridge, then along one of Melbourne's cycle path engineering marvels — the suspended cycle path. Rather than build the track alongside the creek, millions of dollars were spent on constructing a suspended track that hangs down underneath the Monash freeway. Why do this rather than along the public land next to the creek? There is a private school bordering the public land, I've been told that they pressured the government into disallowing the cycle track next to their property...

Under Glennferrie road, a commonly flooded underpass, then up and around the badly-cambered spiral ramp, over the creek and a right turn to follow the cycle track across the sports oval. This section of the track is used by a large number of students from Melbourne University's Hawthorn campus, and from their behaviour, the majority of them are incapable of reading the English-language signs stating “Keep Left”

Leaving the students, I continue on around past the velodrome, then follow the track along the creek, under Toorak road, the most common site of flooding, then follow the path all the way to East Malvern train station, first through the wasteland near the Coles Myer head office, then the parks and reserves of Glen Iris. Two major and one minor roads to go under, Burke road, High street, and Great Valley parade, the latter two both having steep windy ramps to get down to creek level and under the roadway.

The last kilometre or so of this is around the public golf course, thankfully separated by a 3m high chain-mesh fence, designed to protect the general public from random golf-balls. Unfortunately, the users of the golf course have chosen to cut large holes in the fence to expedite crossing from one green to another, and the occasional stray ball hurtles through, along with golfers who step out in front of cyclists.

Across the foot-bridge over the Monash freeway, glancing down to read the amusing “Slow Down” painted on the way up the steepest part of the bridge, then follow the track around to the left. I try to remember to hold my breath while crossing the first park, since there's been a sewage leak there for as long as I can remember. Then continue along behind the houses to the crossing over Waverley road.

The pedestrian crossing at Waverley road is a good place to catch my breath, since there's usually a delay of almost a minute between pushing the button and the lights starting to change... then there's the 15 seconds while I watch for motorists driving through the orange and then red lights, before finally I can continue on my way!

The path continues through the narrow park between the freeway sound-abatement fence and the back of the houses towards Warrigal road, here I'm within half a suburb of the Chadstone shopping centre, so the likelihood of meeting abandoned shopping trolleys is high. It also seems to be some sort of epicentre for migratory plastic bags — every bush is festooned with them.

Up and over Warrigal road, then along back streets to the crossing with Atkinson street in Oakleigh — why bother going up and down kerbs onto the bike track when there's perfectly good quiet streets to use? Back onto the track for the block or so to the Oakleigh Recreation Centre, then back onto the roads to wend my way around the car yards and tyre vendors' premises to get to Ferntree Gully road. Anything and everything goes here, there are cars facing both ways parked on both sides of the street and I might meet anything from a fork-lift to a semi-trailer, but it still seems easier than attempting to use the track that crosses all their driveways!

Now for my daily hill-climb training. Ferntree Gully road heads straight up to a crossing with Huntingdale road, a pause at the lights, then coast down and a second climb up to Clayton road. There's usually no problems with traffic, other than the noise, the only excitement comes at the right-hand turn into Clayton road. Depending on the phase of the lights, traffic, and personal whim, I'll either cross the three lanes to the right-turn lane, or perform a hook turn from the left.

Clayton road can be a intimidating. A widely ignored 60km/hr speed limit, two narrow lanes in each direction, and a lot of passing traffic doesn't particularly recommend it, the alternative is to continue along to the lightly-trafficed Gardiners road, which has a 50km/hr speed limit, one wide lane, and use the cycle lane along the left. Unfortunately, or typically, the cycle lane ends half a block from the intersection with Bayview avenue, and traffic turning into the University squeezes cyclists off the road well before the corner. Riding down Clayton road to turn left into Bayview gives a clear run straight to the University gate.

Last noteworthy obstacle of the day is the large roundabout inside the gate. A right-hand turn around this can be accomplished with varying degrees of ease depending on the number, and skill-level, of the students and staff attempting to overtake me, and on the one or two each year who manage to drive the wrong way up the one way roads.

Returning home is almost the reverse of the morning ride, with a few exceptions. Leaving the University I head up the cycle lane in Gardiner road to turn left into Ferntree Gully road. I usually cut the left turn out by detouring through the Bunnings car-park, since there's a squeeze point at the traffic lights, where naturally the cycle lane disappears. The cycle lane is also a clearway, so there shouldn't be anyone parked in it, but it also goes past a pub, so there usually are cars parked in it.

Along Ferntree Gully road almost to the junction with Dandenong road, this is the fastest section of the day's riding, I think I've hit around 65km/hr down one section. A right turn into a side road, then an illegal shortcut along the paths through Brickmaker's park — at least I think its illegal, there are so many bits of path and track around there that I'm not sure what is bike path and what is footpath. The two hi-lights of the park are the old brick-making equipment, and the stream through the centre — it's been turned into a kids' activity centre with water-wheels and movable gates, definitely worth investigating!

From the western end of the park, its back along the Gardiners creek track as far as the crossing of Waverley road, then I usually turn left and use the road as far as High street. It seems to take the same amount of time whether I use the bike track and have to ride slowly and zig-zag over the creek, or use Waverley, and then Malvern, roads at a faster pace, but stopping for the traffic lights. Where these roads are wide there's a bicycle lane, naturally this disappears at every intersection or where the road becomes congested — I really don't know why they bother!

The turn from Malvern road into High street is always exciting, with motorists following each other lemming-like through orange and red lights, then invariably being stopped at the traffic light combination of pedestrian crossing, railway crossing, and freeway crossing. Once I've made it through this, a quick left turn into Hope's Rise and I rejoin the Gardiners creek bike track for the remainder of the way home.

Cruising around Yarra Boulevard in the evenings is generally pleasant, its a common trainng ride for some, a recreational ride for others. At the Swan street bridge I often find rock-climbers practicing on the blue-stone boulders that make up the wall — inching their way the length of the underpass, 30cm off the ground.

The last detour that I sometimes make on the way home is to continue for the length of Yarra Boulevard, turning left into Bridge road to stop for an hour at the first corner. Why? The Bridge Hotel is at the end of my street, its a fine place for a beer on a sunny evening!

Hazards

Of course no ride is perfect, mine includes a number of hazards. The most prevalent are pedestrians, with or without dogs, walking, jogging or running, on the left, on the right, or along the centre... The jogger pictured is one of about 40% who keep left, as is legally required, I'm usually too busy swearing, cursing, and swerving to get a photo of the rest of them.

I'm always wary of the requirement to “audibly warn pedestrians of my approach” — too many times I've found that people behave in a completely random manner, and are just as likely to leap from the left of the path across to the right-hand side as they are to keep left. There's also a percentage who just don't care and ignore cyclists anyway, and a smaller percentage who go out of their way to force riders off the path!

Dog owners seem especially self-righteous, it is far more common to see dogs roaming around while the owner casually waves an unused lead, than to see the dogs on the lead — regardless of whether the council signs say its an Off-lead area or not. And the “Clean Up After Your Dog” signs seem to always apply to other people's dogs — yet another unsavoury hazard on the paths.

Less frequent than the pedestrians are the vehicles, council workers who think nothing of driving trucks at 30km/hr along narrow cycle tracks, or parking to completely block the path, motorists who use the bike tracks to park broken-down vehicles, the odd abandoned car, and the occasional motor-cyclist using the bike track as a short-cut between roads.

On the roads there's always the motorists with the mobile phone, or the ones that must overtake and then turn sharply left. Other cyclists are hazardous at times, the main problems I find are at night in the winter on the unlit paths, some have lights so badly adjusted that they dazzle, some have no lights at all, and some have a red-flashing light on the front of their bike! This last lot are scary, with no other light around I think that they are heading in the same direction I am, only slower. Trying to “overtake” results in a near miss and much swearing!

Environmental hazards come last, the design decision to stick a bike track along what is basically a storm-water drain means that parts of the track become impassable after the slightest rain. Lack of drainage and lack of maintenance add to the excitement of using the track — there's always an overhanging branch or encroaching bush to duck around, or cracks, potholes and large pools of standing water to avoid.

Wildlife

One advantage of a ride along the creek and through parkland is seeing the multitude of wildlife, even in the city and suburbs. I'm sure if I stopped for a while I'd see even more. Without including the pet dogs and cats, I think I can remember seeing:

Fish: European Carp, Eel

Reptile: Eastern Long-necked tortoise (Chelodina longicollis), skinks, Red-bellied Black snake (Pseudechis porphyriacus)

Bird: Crested Pigeon (Ocyphaps lophotes), Common Bronzewing (Phaps chalcoptera), Spotted Turtle-Dove (Streptopelia chinensis), Red-rump Grass Parrot, King Parrot (Alisterus scapularis), Eastern Rosella, Rainbow Lorikeet (Trichoglossus haematodus), Sulfer-crested Cockatoo (Cacatua galerita), Galah (Cacatua rosiecapilla), Yello-Tailed Black Cockatoo, Gang-Gang Cockatoo (Callocephalon fimbriatum), Cockatiel (Nymphicus hollandicus) — probably an aviary escapee, Pied Mudlark (Grallina cyanoleuca), Magpie (Gymnorhina tibicen), Australian Raven (Corvus coronoides), Laughing Kookaburra (Dacelo novaeguineae), Superb Blue Wren, Pacific Black Duck (Anas superciliosa), Australian Wood Duck (Chenonetta jubata), Australian Shelduck (Tadorna tadornoides), White-faced heron (Egretta novaehollandiae), Nankeen Night heron (Nycticorax caledonicus), Australian White Ibis (Threskiornis molucca), Great Egret (Ardea alba), Little Cormorant, Eurasian Coot (Fulica atra), Dusky Moorhen (Gallinula tenebrosa), Masked Lapwing (Vanellus miles), Willy Wagtail (Rhipidura leucophrys), Noisy Miner, Bell Miner, Silver Gull (Larus novaehollandiae), Australasian Grebe, Little Pied Cormorant (Phalacrocorax melanoleucos), Welcome Swallow (Hirundo neoxena), Pied Currawang (Stepera graculina)

Mammal: Water rat, mice, Brush-tail possum, Ring-tailed possum

Pest: Sparrow, Blackbird, Indian Mynah, Mallard, Pigeon, Geese, Goldfinch

Experiences with Bicycles and Airlines

As they say in the classics, Your mileage may vary. Here is a summary of my experiences with taking bicycles on airlines, both within and outside Australia.

In general I've found that officially, all the airlines will insist that a bike is boxed. Bikes also count as oversize and fragile items, so if they choose, they can decide not to carry it, and if they damage it, in theory its your fault not theirs.

In practice the staff seem to make the rules up on the spot, and anything you are told will apply only to the person who tells it to you. Rules change arbitrarily with the airlines "code-sharing" routes, you can be quoted one set of rules by one airline, then turn up to find that you're flying on a different one... I generally box my bike, arrive in plenty of time, and smile a lot... it generally works.

Air New Zealand

January 2002; Probably the friendliest airline I've ever flown with respect to carrying a bike. A phone enquiry when I booked the ticket told me that bikes must be boxed, so I did. No charges.

Ansett

In Theory...

The following was quoted over the phone to me from a document that they would not name and could not provide me with a copy of!:

• Handlebars and pedals must be turned inwards, or removed.
• Front wheel must be removed and strapped to the bike.
• Tyres do not have to be let down.
• Bikes count as two pieces of excess luggage, and if you are charged will cost $AU20 per flight. However, you may not be charged if you have only one other piece of luggage (at the airlines discretion).

...In Practice

Various times that I've flown with my bike on Ansett:

• Launceston-Melbourne: no charge, bike in box, not required to sign disclaimer.
• Melbourne-Hobart: no charge, bike in box, required to sign the disclaimer saying it was insufficiently protected.
• Canberra: Since I had only one other bag, no $AU20 charge, required to remove pedals and front wheel, wrap the chain, turn the handlebars.
• Melbourne: Bicycle was not loaded at airport due to mistake by baggage crew, Ansett brought it up and delivered it via taxi to my work within 2hrs.
• Melbourne: Both my girlfriend and myself were required to let the tyres down.
• Sydney: Both my girlfriend and myself were required to sign a declaration that the bikes were "insufficiently protected" and thus the airline took no responsibility for damage.

Qantas

Insisted that the bike be in a box. If you don't have a bike box, Qantas will sell you one for $AU20, or $AU10 (they never seem to know which). A warning though, different airports stock varying numbers of boxes, it's probably advisable to call ahead to find if one is available.

Travelling internationally I found I had to walk from the international to the domestic terminal to pick up the box, and due to their confusion was not charged for it.

March 2002; for the first time ever I was charged $AU11 to take my bike from Melbourne to Sydney. This was quoted as a Mandatory Charge, however it was not repeated when we flew back a week later.

Lufthansa

November 1998:

When I came to fly from Heathrow to Sydney I was told that on the leg from Frankfurt to Singapore there would be a $AU70 charge! This was despite there being no mention of charges when I had booked the ticket and asked specifically, nor was there any charge eight weeks earlier when I flew the same leg in the opposite direction. After a bit of discussion this was waived as "I had not previously been informed".

At Frankfurt airport I got to watch through the window as a member of the ground crew picked up my bike box, threw it onto the luggage trolley, then kick it back when it fell off towards him! Arriving home I found that the front brakes required complete dissasembly to realign and reattach them.

Phillipine Airlines

Sometime circa 1994

I never took my bike with Phillipine Airlines. When I initially purchased a ticket for travel from Australia to the UK I asked and was told that it was ok and the bike would count as one of two allowable pieces of luggage. A day or so before I travelled I called the airline directly and was told that it might be a normal piece of luggage, or they might decide to charge it entirely as excess luggage, at a $AU60 per kilogram charge — approximately $AU600 — $AU900 each direction!

After my general experiences with that airline I would probably never choose to travel with them again, they no longer service the Australian market and may be out of business entirely.

The Atomic

A magnificent find! Jo and I were rummaging through a second-hand book and Brik-a-brack store in Inverell when we spotted it.

The Bialetti

The Vesuviana

It isn't mine, some friends resurrected it from a bedraggled state after discovering it in the back of a cupboard.

External Links

• www.espresso.com
• www.bialetti.it

What did you expect to see in here? I'm married now, not allowed to have a girlfriend!

This is Jo, she's still my girlfriend, even though we were married in April 2003.

Birrarung Marr is a new park on the banks of the Yarra, “Melbourne's first new park in 100 years.” Opened officially on Australia day 2002. Nobody seems to know about it yet, maybe next summer when Federation Square is open people will come through there and down to the river.

After months of talking about it, one Saturday, Jo and I walked along the river from Richmond and explored what there was to see. Most striking is the Federation Bells, but they're only played at 8am and 5pm, so we couldn't hear what they sound like.

One final look at the city skyline from the park.

Last night stage 15 of le Tour de France finished up on l'Alpe d'Huez, fantastic racing and amazing scenery as always. I did think that with the camera cutting back and forth you just couldn't get much of an idea of how steep that mountain really is.

From the www.cyclingnews.com special page on l'Alpe d'Huez: Unofficially, the top twelve times are as follows:

1. Marco Pantani (1995) 36’ 50
2. Marco Pantani (1997) 36’ 55
3. Marco Pantani (1994) 37’ 15
4. Lance Armstrong (2004) 37’ 36
5. Jan Ullrich (1997) 37’ 40
6. Lance Armstrong (2001) 38’ 05
7. Miguel Indurain (1995) 38’ 10
8. Alex Zülle (1995) 38’ 10
9. Bjarne Riis (1995) 38’ 15
10. Richard Virenque (1997) 38’ 20
11. Iban Mayo (2003) 39’ 06
12. Giuseppe Guerini (1999) 41’ 52

... and from Friday the 13th, July 2001, the very non-competitive time:

13. Adrian Tritschler (2001) 74'

Ok, ok, so there's probably a lot of other times between numbers 12 and 13! Oh, and I hadn't ridden 150km at a race pace before hand, nor was I two weeks into a three week race, and I stopped at the main square in l'Alpe!

Why shiny white paint is a cop out.

I'm of the firm opinion that the provision of segregated bicycle lanes and seperate facilities is not achieving much for me as a cyclist.

Bicycle Victoria, and many other formal and informal groups seem to believe that since cycling on a public road is percieved as a dangerous activity, since cyclists are a vulnerable group, that a whole range of segregated facilities should be built for them — whether these be on-road bicycle lanes, or nice safe off-road paths.

To me, this sounds tantamount to admitting that the cause of the threat is untreatable; that Australia's motorists are so ignorant, untrained and il-behaved, that it is not possible for a motorist to share a public road with a cyclist without them gravely endangering the cyclist. That the only possible course of action is to remove pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists from the roads, and to surround the motorists with air-bags and bullbars, so that when they run into each other, they won't suffer too badly.

Additionally, I find that the provision of cycle lanes:

• only occurs where the road is wide enough, or where they won't inconvenience motorised traffic; so narrow roads where the problem of motorist encroachment is worst, are by definition omitted.
• Provoke a fair proportion of motorists to believe that cyclists must use the cycle lane, which is then a short mental leap to...
• Enforce the belief that cyclists must not ride where there are no explicit provisions for them

After several weeks riding in France, Spain and Portugal I found that despite these places having fewer specific cycle lanes or facilities, they have a much higher proportion of cyclists on the roads. The attitude of the motorists is different, and sharing with other tranports is accepted.

Damn, I wish I'd written down the rest of the beautifully printed, but appallingly worded notice from the café window.

  Wanted experienced Café's staff.
  Please summit your resume.

Every year the radio station RRR and Intrepid travel get together and have a trip somewhere in the world that's a Triple-R trip — every year until now that is. For eight years enough people have signed up for it to be held, this year the time was right for Jo and I and the place looked right for Jo and I. We signed up, we paid our deposit, then yesterday we were told that the trip's been cancelled. Damn!

I was really starting to look forward to two weeks in China in September. Where to now for our annual holiday?

There's one less website in the world for the search engines to worry about indexing. I've been happily using planner-mode inside XEmacs at work to keep track of what needs to be done and what I do get done, and publishing the result as HTML to my personal pages. Today I was directed to remove some as they identified specific people, products and practices. Thinking about it a little showed that I really couldn't publish any of them without massive sanitising at ever step, so rather than worry about what I could and couldn't say, I've removed the lot.

If anyone wants to see what happens at Monash University or in the ITS division, they'll just have to read the official documentation from the Marketing and Public Affairs people.

I've been importing my photos into Adobe Photoshop Album over the last few years, entering titles and tagging the images. The titles go into the images in the EXIF header, but the tags and other information is held in Adobe's proprietary database. I can extract the EXIF:ImageDescription with python or perl, and some of the other image viewers will display it... some, but not all. My latest experiments have been with Google's picasa, or more specifically, the beta version from picasaweb.google.com, which allows geocoding and has various tie-ins with GoogleEarth. Unfortunately it seems that Picasa uses the IPTC:Caption-Abstract as the source of its title, so all the information I've entered via Photoshop Album is ignored.

A few quick searches and then, Phil Harvey's came exiftool to the rescue! Read and write every single possible type of metadata, at least every possible type I'm interested in at the moment.

exiftool -IPTC:Country-PrimaryLocationCode=AUS *JPG
exiftool -IPTC:Country-PrimaryLocationName=Australia *JPG

I'm not really sure what to do with the postcodes (zipcodes), I think I'll put them into IPTC:Sub-Location, at least until someone sends me a nasty-gram telling me the correct field to use.

PSAtools was next (the author no longer maintains it, but I found a copy archived elsewhere. Dump out the Photoshop Album catalogue into CSV and XML text files so I can play with it to my heart's content.

After only a week, another update from Garmin for the Edge305, Software Version: 2.70 and GPS: 2.60, up from 2.60 and 2.40 respectively. Fingers crossed, but I haven't had the device hang or flatten the battery overnight since the last upgrade....

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Seven days a week we get the Age delivered in the mornings; for the first year or so that we lived here, whoever was delivering it managed to sling it up alongside or underneath the car — no problem, other than having to grovel around on our knees some mornings to get it out. About a year ago they changed their approach, it gets lobbed over the fence and lands bomb-like in the courtyard-sized front garden. Over the months we've been getting more and more branches broken off plants, and repeated phone calls and visits to the local newsagency result in bugger-all being done. Three out of four times the guy in the shop has denied that they deliver to our street at all!

Sent off an official complaint to the subscriptions department on Friday, then today the paper has broken off one of the four main branches of one plant! Maybe when we pay the next bill we should attach damages claims for each destroyed plant....

Books I've read, books I like, books I should read....

Wanted List

Step one: identify the books I think I'd like. Not that this helps much, since most of the books I read or buy are “books of opportunity.” I guess I could try using Amazon's wish list. Maybe some rich benefactor will surprise me!

A New Kind of Science ASIN: ?? Buy at Amazon

Art of Deception ASIN: ?? Buy at Amazon

Recent Purchase

Step 2: The growing pile of new books next to the bed, waiting to be read:

Currently Reading

Step 3: Far too many books being read at once! Does http://allconsuming.net/ work, or should I stick to maintaining my own list here with the booklist plugin? [ RDF ]

Recent Readings

...and the books that I've actually got around to reading in 2008, 2007, 2006, then older still...

The Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton ASIN: 0241142482 Buy at Amazon

Slowly Down the Ganges, Eric Newby ASIN: 0330280236 Buy at Amazon

Who Goes Here?, Bob Shaw ASIN: 0441885756 Buy at Amazon

Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, Mark Kurlansky ASIN: 0140275010 Buy at Amazon

Secrets and Lies, Bruce Schneier ASIN: 0471253111 Buy at Amazon

The Transparent Society, David Brin ASIN: ?? Buy at Amazon

The New Nature, Tim Low ASIN: ?? Buy at Amazon

Baudolino, Umberto Eco ASIN: ?? Buy at Amazon

Reflections of a Marine Venus, Laurence Durrell ASIN: ?? Buy at Amazon

On the Shores of the Mediterranean, Eric Newby ASIN: ?? Buy at Amazon

Love and War in the Apennines, Eric Newby ASIN: ?? Buy at Amazon

Accidental Empires, Robert X. Cringely ASIN: ?? Buy at Amazon

Whirlwind, James Clavell ASIN: ?? Buy at Amazon

The Emperor's Codes, Michael Smith ASIN: ?? Buy at Amazon

A Parrot in the Pepper Tree, Chris Stewart ASIN: ?? Buy at Amazon

Warrior Class, Dale Brown ASIN: 0007109857 Buy at Amazon

Zodiac, Neal Stephenson ASIN: ?? Buy at Amazon

The Hope, Herman Wouk ASIN: ?? Buy at Amazon

Patriot Games, Tom Clancy ASIN: 0006474558 Buy at Amazon

Tour de France: The History, the Legend, the Riders, Graeme Fife ASIN: ?? Buy at Amazon

French Revolutions: Cycling the Tour De France, Tim Moore ASIN: ?? Buy at Amazon

Foucault's Pendulum, Umberto Eco ASIN: ?? Buy at Amazon

Gerald Durrell — The Authorised Biography, Douglas Botting ASIN: ?? Buy at Amazon

Neuromancer, William Gibson ASIN: 0586066454 Buy at Amazon

The View From Docker's Hill, J. M. McMillan ASIN: 0867863366 Buy at Amazon

Struggletown, Janet McCalman ASIN: 0522843034 Buy at Amazon

The Gobbler, Adrian Edmondson ASIN: 043400362X Buy at Amazon

The Beach, Alex Garland ASIN: 0140258418 Buy at Amazon

High Fidelity, Nick Hornby ASIN: 0140293469 Buy at Amazon

Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson ASIN: 0380973464 Buy at Amazon

Forever Free, Joe Haldeman ASIN: 1857989317 Buy at Amazon

It's Not About the Bike, Lance Armstrong ASIN: 0224060872 Buy at Amazon

Oof! Exausted. Nine o'clock dentist appointment just around the corner... just around the corner from where I used to live in Richmond! Hop on the bike and head into town, arrived five minutes early then had to wait half an hour for the dentist to get to work — he needs to ditch the car and get a bike!

After the dentist I thought “I'll just nip over to the Crumpler shop in Fitzroy, maybe see about a replacement for my aging item, especially with the material falling apart and the seams coming undone....” They don't open until 10:30, so there's coffee to be had to make the time pass, then a lap of Collingwood and Fitzroy, then finally back and into the shop.

The five minute visit turned into half an hour when they offered to stitch up the seams where it's all falling apart “it'll only take ten minutes.” Can't really complain though, no more holes to lose pens and coins through, and a big new buckle into the bargain. Almost new again, it might last another eight years!

Now it really was time to get to work, so I thought I'd take the quickest route — straight through the middle of the CBD, St Kilda road and then Dandenong road.... Oops, seems that there are 100,000 protesters in the city today, the whole of Swanston street was choked. Back out, around, zig-zag and get confused, then all the way back out to Clayton, finally starting work around lunchtime!

Oh yeah, and after too many months of only riding five kilometres to and from work, my legs are feeling stuffed. I am becoming the proverbial fat and lazy bastard....

We had a ball last year, so once again we'd crossed our fingers for good weather and headed off to the Junction oval to see the might of the 3RRR/3PBS megahertz face the Espy rock-dogs for the Sacred-Heart mission community cup.

Beer, music, dogs and kids everywhere, exuberant and wildly inacurate football, inaudible sirens, highly suspect umpiring, variable-length quarters — everything the community cup is meant to be. Jo and I even managed to get on the wrong tram on the way there and take a scenic tour down through Caulfield and St Kilda instead of heading straight along Dandenong road.

It was with great ceremony, and a deal of uncertainty, that I walked around and around the 2006 Mill road pumpkin crop (all one pumpkin of it), large knife in hand and contemplative expression on my face....

Self-sown from seeds we must have thrown into the compost bin, I think its the most successful piece of home-grown produce we've had out of the garden in almost two years. It was certainly the most entertaining!

Musing on the methods of software updates under Windows. Seems that the assorted linuxes are well ahead here; Debian's apt-get upgrade, SuSE's rug update, not just the operating system but application packages too.

Windows has Windows Update, but every other application has its own mechanism — perhaps. Monitor the mailing lists, read the web page, click “check for update” in the application....

Today's updates were for the Edge 305, GPS firmware update to 2.60, Motionbased agent updated to 2.3.0.0, Garmin Training Centre updated to 3.1.4. All performed differently, all initiated manually.

I think Windows needs an API where applications can register an update URL, a time frequency (eg monthly, weekly, daily, manually), and an update behaviour. A single "check for updates" tool could then find everything that you have installed.

Back to the Garmin Edge. Hopefully the Edge 305 2.60 firmware will be better than the bad 2.40 and the appalling 2.20, there are shocking bugs in all of them — this is not a product that's is ready for release! Twice this week I've gone to turn the unit on in the morning only to be told that it has a flat battery, and I know that I turned it off the night before.... Plug it into the charger and the damn thing turns itself on after a while, then complains that it can't see the satellites. Turn it off and a while later it does it again! Firmware version 2.60 can't possibly be any worse....

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Ok, now that we've actually got the ladder into the attic we can start to use it! I'm not sure what I expected, maybe thought the installation would all be over by lunchtime yesterday and we would simply put all the stuff from the front room up into the roof space....

Looking around inside the roof of the 106 year-old half of the house revealed some interesting features. The ceiling of the front room — the room we never use — was covered by very thin insulation bats, but the bedroom and lounge — the two rooms that we do use — had no insulation! Unfortunately the carpenter hadn't told us this yesterday before he nailed boards down over some of the empty space or we would have put more insulation in ahead of him. As it was, today I spent most of the afternoon crawling around from rafter to rafter like a deranged monkey, dragging itchy yellow insulation bats into place and sweeping out piles of leaves, scrap timber, 50 year-old wiring, and all the other crap that the previous renovation had simply left inside the ceiling.

We've finally got the attic ladder in place, but not without its fair share of trauma, worry, and general tradesman-inspired angst. The carpenter was initially to come on Thursday, a destroyed wheel-bearing put paid to that appointment. Early Saturday morning, nine to nine-thirty, was the new time. Only a five minutes late, Mat turned up as we finished breakfast, verified that we really did want the ladder where we'd said we wanted it — apparently he'd once installed one where the customer had said, only to be told later by the customer's wife that that was not where it was wanted, and it should be in another room — then got to work.

Banging, crashing, sawing and hammering; after ensuring that there was a dust cloth over everything still in the front room we retired to the other end of the house and did our best to ignore the destruction/construction.

The electrician turned up around noon, all set to install the light once he had access, then discovered problems with the existing lights.... As with everything else in this house, as soon as we look at something, anything, that the previous owners did when they renovated, we discover corners that were cut, dodgy practices exposed. In this case it was the lights from the hallway and front room, both of them had their earth wire cut off and tucked away, and both of them had their wire joins exposed and floating around in the ceiling, and not (legally and safely) inside the light body.

“Can you connect the earth to them for us?” It seemed the obvious question, especially when we found that it was only a very minor extra cost! “Sure, there's a main earth running along the beam right next to the light”. Bizarre, why the hell didn't they connect them to the earth the first time? I guess the same mentality that had them paint the bathroom and not bother to unclip the plastic light fitting or cisterm lid.

I'm not sure how long I'd expected the whole installation to take, maybe half a day, it was almost five o'clock by the time the electrician was finished, and he very nearly finished himself off in the process! Sitting across the open hatch and resting his foot on a piece of timber that he thought the carpenter had nailed down, the timber slipped, his feet shot forward and he fell backwards and headfirst down the ladder, one big graze from elbow to shoulder, a second from ankle to knee. He finished packing up and hobbled off home, promising to get us the compliance certificate — and the bill — some time in the next week!

Phew, done. At last....

Last night an hour or two spent clearing enough space in the front room for the ladder to be installed, today I'd arranged to work from home for a few hours, from 9 o'clock until whenever the installation was completed.

Good news or bad news? Good news is that the front room is now as clean as it was last night when we finished tidying up. Second bit of good news is that I got in to work well before lunchtime.... The bad news, of course, is that the tradesman didn't actually turn up — a phone call ten minutes before he was due to arrive explaining that he had destroyed a wheel-bearing in his car and was being towed to the garage, he might make it in the afternoon, it might be Saturday.... Nothing is ever easy.

Its amazing how much wildlife there is around the suburbs, hidden away in the trees and bushes — wildlife that only comes out at night, or when everything is quiet and all the people have gone away. This is the second time in a fortnight that I've seen an owl, or as I discovered once I uploaded the photo from my camera, two owls!

At first I thought these were boobook owls, an identification that one semi-knowledgeable person confirmed. I was later told by another much more knowledgeable person that its a pair of Tawny frogmouths (Podargus strigoides). Either way, they're both types of owls!

Only a brief respite, winter only took the day off yesterday. Last night the wind howled through the trees and the rain pelted on the roof. The neighbour's half-built second unit flapped and creaked in the wind. This morning the sun is back out, but so different to yesterday, there's no warmth in it, just a brittle glare to add to the biting southerly blowing in across the bay.

A day for winter coats, scarves and woolly hats — and dogs, lots of dogs. Maybe the wind makes them all get excited, maybe only the dog owners have to go out in this weather; either way there just seem to be more dogs about; racing and snapping at the wind, tearing around in circles on the beach.

Escape from the house and two slightly stir-crazy nephews for a walk. Off up the track along the Erskine river to The Sanctuary, the rock amphitheatre where the Little Erskine joins the Erskine. Moss and black mould as slippery as ice on the rocks. Back down along the river to the mouth of the river, the plaques commemorating all the 19th century shipwrecks seem poignant, so believable in this weather.

A surprisingly warm and sunny day — the fog and cold last night had me prepared for a weekend of sitting by the fire reading a few books! Warm and sunny and incredibly still. There were people out walking all over town, all over the beach, enjoying the sunshine while they could.

Looking back, it seems to be remarkably similar to a weekend down here four years ago — I even found another dead shark on the beach.

The Erskine river was the clearest I've ever seen, the bottom clearly visible at a depth of 1 metre, normally the water is stained a dark leaf-tanin brown. Almost edible-sized fish flicking about on the bottom, and sea-birds and herons all around. Two gannets circled around the bay as we walked out to the pier, it must be ages since I was last here, construction is well underway on the new pier, it hadn't even started the last time I was here, back in February.

In the afternoon I'd intended to go for a bike ride; the weather was perfect, I'd brought my bicycle, I'd brought my cycling clothes, I'd brought my helmet and my gloves — but I'd left my cycling shoes at home!

Friday night, race home from work, get changed, pack the bags, jump in the car and go.

Cold, dark, and Friday. What more do you need to create mayhem in the traffic? Sure enough, one or two people had driven into each other somewhere along the tollway, traffic was at a crawl from Toorak road all the way to the tunnel, through the tunnel and most of the way to the Westgate bridge. One lane of the tunnel closed — as usual. Ten percent of the motorists ignoring the lane closure — as usual.

Off down the Geelong road in thick fog. Everyone slowing to 75-80km/hr — everyone except the semi-trailer drivers that is, thundering past in near-zero visibility at 100km/hr. That'd be how a friend of mine nearly lost his life — hit from behind in the fog by a semi-trailer whose driver “knew the road.”

The temperature hovered around 5°C most of the way from Melbourne to Lorne, dropping to 2.5°C as we neared Torquay, I was amazed that it could be this cold so early in the evening, this near the coast, this early in the winter.

As promised, the gas man came. Surprise, surprise, its never as easy in practise as it looks on paper. We'd been verbally assured that no site inspection would be required and no extra costs would be incurred, there was no conceivable reason why the job wouldn't cost what we'd been quoted.... Oh look, the standard installation includes 6m of gas pipe, we need an extra metre or so. The standard installation includes a flue that will reach from the heater into a 9’ ceiling and we've got a 12’ ceiling so we need an extra flue piece. All standard costs, all set by AGL so we don't get upset with Michael the gas man. Makes me wonder just what percentage of these so-called “standard installations” ever end up costing what is quoted.

Then of course there are the difficulties with installation. We have no access to the underneath of the house, and there's only about 20cm between floor and dirt anyway so it would be nearly impossible to move even if you could get in there. The tin roof means you can't lift tiles, the small eaves make something else difficult.... All part of the joys of a two-part house; part A being 106 years old and part B being 6. I think the politest comment that was made about the existing hot water heater was that if it was installed today it would be unlikely to get approval.

The pipe was slid under the house from outside. The timber studs in the wall meant a slight relocation of the heater from our preferred location. Large holes were cut in the plasterboard and much muttering could be heard in strange technical tradesman-speak.

Three times with AGL, Godwin had assured us that there would be no extra costs, and that the site inspection was not necessary. AGL and the gas fitters seem to play it off against each other. At the AGL shop its all “these are standard charges that the plumbers require, blah-blah.” When it came to signing the paperwork in the house with the plumber it was “that's a standard install from AGL for 6m and a normal flue, the extra flue and per-metre pipe are all standard charges from AGL.”

Then the plumbers drove off taking the instruction book and all the paperwork and I had to phone them to bring it back... and of course I had to clean the house where they'd spread plaster everywhere.

Retreating back further and further into the mists of time, the bikes I have owned are:

• Trek T50
• Norky Bike
• Spotty Bike — destroyed
• Peugeot Aspin
• Apollo III — stolen.
• Apollo II — stolen.
• 26" Oxford 3spd — sold.
• Cyclops Dragster — stolen.

One of my many bicycles.

A 27" road bike purchased second hand out of the newspaper and used for many years for touring and getting around town. Eventually it was stolen in Maffra, Victoria, during the 1990 Great Victorian Bike Ride. I was not impressed with Bicycle Victoria's response to this news, their words were that since I had no bike I had to leave the ride and go home, and the general feeling was that they didn't want to know about thefts or other unsavoury activities on their big fund raiser bike rides.

One of my many bicycles.

1976-1982. Over my high school years this gradually decomposed into what now would be called a mountain bike. Flat handlebars, 1.5" tyres, 3-speed Sturmey-Archer hub gears, it started life a shiny blue colour, but at some stage was resprayed a virulent orange by myself and a friend.

One of my many bicycles.

1979-1983. A 27" ten-speed road bike. My first "decent" bike, used to and from school and university, for a brief introduction to road racing while in high school, and for several tours of the surrounding countryside. Stolen from UNSW while I was a student there, along with about twenty other bikes by some thieves who cut the lock off the "secure" bike store and loaded every bike into a truck.

On reporting to the local police station and telling them that my bike was stolen the response was “So what do you want us to do about it?” After insisting that something was written down, the police wrote out the details on the back of a brown-paper bag, I have no idea whether this was later filed, or tossed into the garbage the instant I walked out the door.

One of my many bicycles.

What Was It?

More than a mountain bike, Spotty was a legend.

Fundamentally a Technicomps Bigfoot, it's birth was a long and laborious process starting with the purchase of a fluorescent orange Bigfoot frame at a bike show and a verbal promise to transfer all the components from a 17" model to the 20" frame. During the following two months, the person it was purchased from left the shop and the two new lads wanted nothing to do with it, consequently a lot of the components mysteriously changed down in spec.

It was a 20" Technicomps Bigfoot (Aluminium) mountain bike, setup more for touring than competition or offroad use. Technicomps were an Australian company based on the Gold Coast in Queensland, and produced both frames and entire bikes. A company called Genesis now operates from this premises, also producing aluminium bike frames, a dealer in Sydney has the rights to the Technicomp name.

Where did it Go?

To many places... maybe too many places! To work, out for the afternoon, day rides, week long tours alone, week long tours with hundreds or thousands of others. See rides for additional details.

First ever ride

Home from the bike shop, then an attempt on a single track up Mt Majura (Canberra), the front deraileur hadn't been adjusted, and I hadn't checked it, one of the stop screws was tightened all the way to the limit, so the first time I changed onto the granny ring the chain came off and wedged between the cogs and chainstay. I had to take the cogs off to get it out!

Last ever ride

interesting tale

of warranties, consumer rights and long distance phone calls...

As you can see it's a very sociable bicycle and loves to meet new people, it can often be seen hanging around outside pubs while on tour, waiting to meet new and interesting bicycles.

For what is a day without spam?

I just had to include this. After years of waiting, I finally recieved the famous Nigerian Business Proposal scam in my email inbox.

Here, for you education and amusement, I've included the text in full.

  **Engr. WILSON OSARO**

  Treasury Department
  Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation
  Tel: +234 80 231 22537.

  PERSONAL


  Dear sir,


  I am WILSON OSARO a Treasury Officer in the Nigerian National
  Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and a close associate of the immediate
  past Minister of Petroleum Resources.

  The Minister has mandated me to transfer the sum of US$88 millions
  recovered from an over-invoiced contracts involving the Nigerian
  National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) into several private accounts
  in Europe and United States. A total sum of US$73,700,000.00 has
  been transferred before the emergence of this present Civilian
  Administration, leaving the balance of US$14,300,000.00.

  I have made proper arrangement/documentation to transfer the balance
  which is retained in a coded account of the NNPC with the Central
  Bank of Nigeria. We are soliciting that you help us to receive the
  fund in trust. We cannot complete this transaction smoothly without
  the participation of a foreign partner who would provide an account
  where the funds could be lodged. Since it is a contract payment, the
  funds must be remitted to a foreign account. The remittance of the
  funds requires little documentation that would be completed as soon
  as you provide us with a secured bank account where you may wish to
  receive the money.

  There is no risk involved on your part in this transaction since the
  former Minister and I have covered this transaction with adequate
  contract and external credit documents from the beginning.

  What we require from you by telephone or fax are viz:

  (i) Acceptance letter of this offer

  (ii) Your company name and your confidential telephone and fax
  numbers

  (iii) Convincing Honesty, Trustworthiness and Willingness to abide
  by the requirements of this proposal paramount of which is
  CONFIDENTIALITY

  We have agreed that you will retain 20% of the entire
  US$14,300,000.00 for your effort in this transaction, 70% for us
  partners here in Nigeria and the remaining 10% will be used for
  defrayal of incidental cost in the course of this transfer.

  Please reply urgently by email,fax or telephone as above,we expect
  that the transaction will not take more than ten working days. And
  please note that this transaction must be top secret.

  Best Regards


  WILSON OSARO
  Treasury Dept.
  NNPC

Places to eat, places to drink, places to just sit and watch the world go by. Just my thoughts on a bunch of places I visit. The good, the bad, and the ugly...

Santucci's

Rita's happy smiling face, an eclectic mix of decorations and tasty food. It had the added advantage that it was just around the corner from where I first lived after moving to Melbourne.

Blue Heaven

A favourite Saturday-morning very-large-breakfast kind of place. The Blue Heaven Special is a delicious bagel too. I'm not sure what happened to Rayner (sp?) who I thought used to own the place.

Groove Train

... for when I want dinner and don't want to think of where to go. Comfortable, reliable and enjoyable! Seemed to go downhill gradually once the boss became an absent boss and an endless churn of staff came through.

Silvio's Pizza

No nonsense, nothing fancy. Just tasty pizza, piping hot, straight from the oven. That and a glass of the house's red wine.

Via Ponte

An Italian restaurant that opened and seemed to suddenly have been around for years. Ian did a fantastic job of making everyone feel welcome, and the food is excellent. The mix of a Spanish proprietor, Scottish chef and English waiters running an Italian restaurant just added to the enjoyment.

Sadly, I think Via Ponte has succumbed to the common blight affecting small business in Australia — failure to survive its first year. They closed for Christmas 2002 and in mid-February 2003 still hadn't opened... Latest news I've heard is that its been sold and should open “soon.” Well surprise surprise, it re-opened as a dull and boring place that didn't last long.

Da Joint

Another local. They can't seem to make up their mind whether they're a bar or a a café. The foods pretty good, but I'm put off by the distraction of two TVs, each on different channels, and a blaring commerical radio as well. The totally disinterested staff don't help either.

Rickett's Point

I don't know why I bother. Too many times I've stopped in here while riding along Beach Road. The service is usually slow, the coffee never seems to be as good as I expect, and the staff all seem to be minimal-wage casuals who don't care. I guess its a convenient location and has a good view — that's about all its got going for it.

An ugly left-over kind of a page, the only reason it's still here is so that old URLs don't break. Just look for anything scattered through the site tagged plan9, but don't expect too much, just me tinkering at times.

References

[<a href="plan9.xml">xml</a>] — Bookmarks in XBEL format, last modified: <?php $dd = date("Y/m/d H:M:s",filemtime("plan9.xml")); print("$dd GMT"); ?>

The following are some notes I cribbed from the Audio/Visual forum of arstechnica.net's openforums. My apologies to the original author, but the links on Arstechnica don't exactly prompt you to link to original articles. I've got a stack of VHS tapes at home, no video player, and a vague wish to transfer them onto CD or a suitably large part of my harddisk....

1. Get at least a GOOD VCR, as that helps immensely with captures... SVHS ones are rather nice. Esp. if the tape is old. You want the cleanest captures you can get.
2. Get a Hauppage WinTV GO. $40 USD. Cheap, cheap, cheap. Better have a fre PCI slot.
3. depending on how long the clip is, you'll want, say at least 4 Gigs free for every 30 minutes of capture.
4. Make sure your HD can do at least 6MB/sec. or so to be safe. Sure helps. Any new HD can do that easily. Also you'll want at least a PII 300-400.
5. Using the free PIC Video codec from www.jpg.com you should be able to capture 640x480 at high quality. Also if your computer is fast enough, try capturing straight to HuffYUV lossless (this will take over 10MB/sec. HDs)
6. Use Virtualdub and everyone's favourite filters, 2D Cleaner, SmartSmoother, et al. to clip, clean up and de-interlace, and perhaps resize the capture.

• Poppy recommends resizing to 480x360 and rendering ot MS MPEG-4 v2 codec (install Windows Media tools to get it) at Sharpness 83 and bitrate 3000 or 6000. You ca fit about 45 min on a data CDR this way. Audio to Microsoft ADPCM.
• It's possible to make a SuperVCD out of it too, using Tsunami MPEG encoder http://www.jamsoft.com/tmpgenc/ and NERO http://www.ahead.de/ to burn it. SVCDs should play in any DVD player that supports them and can read burned CDRs. In this case you would resize to 480x480 and render to HuffYUV lossless then run Tsunami SVCD on it. I don't know too much of the details now, you could try here for more:
  • http://forums.delphi.com/tmpgenc/start/
  • http://network54.com/Hide/Forum/70438

One of my heroes.

A pioneer animal consevationist and much-loved author, Gerald Durrell has always been a character I have admired. The following letter was penned by him and embedded in a time capsule at Jersey Zoo in 1987.

To Whom It May Concern

Many of us, though not all, recognise the following things:

1. All political and religious differences that at present slow down, entangle and strangle progress in the world will have to be solved in a civilised manner
2. All other life forms have as much right to exist as we have and that indeed without the bulk o fthem we would perish
3. Overpopulation is a menace that must be addressed by all countries; if allowed to continue it is a Gadarene syndrome which will cause nothing but doom
4. Ecosystems are intriccate and vulnerable; once misused, disfigured or greedily exploited they will vanish to our detriment. Used wisely they provide boundless treasure. Used unwisely they create misery, starvation and death to the human race and to a myriad of other lifeforms
5. It is stupid to destroy things such as rainforests, especially because in these great webs of life may be embedded secrets of incalculable value to the human race
6. The world is to us what the Garden of Eden was supposed to be to Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve were banished, but we are banishing ourselves from Eden. The difference is that Adam and Eve had somewhere else to go. We have nowhere else to go

We hope that by the time you read this you will have at least partially curtailed our reckless greed and stupidity. If we have not, at least some of us have tried...

We hope that you will be grateful for having been born into such a magical world.

External Links

• http://www.durrell.org/

Possibly the world's shortest bicycle commute.

Oakleigh to Monash University, and home again. Here are some of the hi-lights and low-lights of my daily ride to and from work. The trip only takes about twelve minutes, no where near as interesting as my previous trip to Monash from Richmond!

A quick count and I've calculated that I ride along five roads getting there and an extra two coming home.

Down the side of the house, battle with the padlock on the gate, a glance back at the neighbour's orange tree silhouetted against the sky, then squeeze between the car and the fence to get to the street. Depending on skill and luck, there may be a big gap or they may be a small one! Out onto the street — usually stepping around the people who park half-blocking our drive-way — and hop on the bike.

Mill road is usually quiet, then right-turn into Haughton road at the end. Visibility not so bad, but watch out for the motorists travelling at 80km/hr in the 50 zone, they appear awful quick. Haughton road used to be a major shortcut through the suburb so Monash city council tried to traffic-calm it into unusability. I'm not sure if its had any effect on the number of motorists cutting through, but it seems to have increased their irritation.

A series of little roundabouts at every side street, together with a narrowed road and huge rough blue-stone kerbs mean that if you're riding along here, motorists can't fit past without crossing half across to the other side of the road. That's fine if they do it legally, but half the time they're in too much of a hurry and try to squeeze through when there's oncoming traffic. They simply don't fit, and there's no room to swerve out of the way of the idiots.

Yet more proof that most people have no idea how to behave on the roads is the right turn into Moroney street, forever referred to as Moron-ey street as motorists either stop dead in the road to let me turn across in front of them, or tear across the traffic island and nearly knock me off. The first lot risk being run into from behind by other motorists who foolishly expect them to be obeying the law, the second lot just can't be bothered to turn the steering wheel a little bit to the left and a little bit to the right to follow the lane markings. Every two weeks or so I come along here and the “Keep Left” sign has been flattened, with tyre tracks over the traffic island.

Left into North road, mind the traffic, two lanes heading east as fast as they can get away with. Around the corner and up to the bridge, watch out for anyone turning down the sliplane without indicating, then up and over the railway lines and a great view of the industrial end of Huntingdale and Oakleigh. Look left and you can see straight up the rail lines all the way to the CBD, ahead the sunlight reflects off a hundred factory roofs. Down and off the bridge and once again watch out for motorists who come flying up the sliplane, oblivious to both signs, “Give Way” and “Watch for Cycles”¹.

Then its just a straight run along North road, watch for the odd motorist who decides to turn left without indicating, or opens the door to let a passenger off at the lights! There's a proposal to run a cycle path along here down the middle of North road, all the way from Huntingdale station to Monash University. Various cycle groups seem obsessed about it, and in pressuring the City of Monash to build it, nobody seems to have given any thought to how cyclists would get into the middle of the road to get to the path, or in how it would be treated at each of the five or so road crossings!

Hazards

Roundabouts. Roundabouts, roundabouts, roundabouts and more flippen' roundabouts. Monash city council seems to be obsessed with putting baby roundabouts along the streets as a “traffic calming” measure. Only problem is, half half the drivers in the area seem to treat the roundabouts as speed-humps, half of them stop and treat them like t-intersections, and half of them try and either overtake me while going round, or pull out in front of me because they're bigger.

Wildlife

A world of difference to the commute along the creek and through the parks; a squashed fox in the middle of North road.

1. In late December 2007 VicRoads made some major changes to North road, removing the give-way sign and painting a cycle-lane diagonally across the slip-lane; thus requiring cyclists to cross across the front of motorists who drive up the slip-lane at 70km/hr without having to give-way!

The first of my many bicycles!

1974-1976. My first bicycle! A present for my tenth birthday, it was stolen when I was 12 from my primary school, eventually the police recovered the bare frame in the garage of some local high-school students.

Memory is hazy, but it was yellow, had a sparkly-yellow banana seat, and a three-speed hub and dragster shift on the top tube.

One of my many bicycles.

14spd 700c road bike, Reynolds 501 frame, Shimano 105 equipment. 1990-present. A road bike that got very little use for many years, since 6 months after buying it I bought a mountain bike and spent all my time on that.

No chance now of rescuing even a cutting from their enormous Blue Moon rose — now buried underneath several tonnes of bricks and rubble.

After a few years of procrastinating I've finally gone and changed the look of this site. At least, some of the pages have changed, due the incomprehensibly ad-hoc way in which it is all generated and hangs together, some have the new look and some have the old.

It's a mess. There's no escaping it. I hate to think how many hundred pages exist in here, and they're nearly all hand-crafted (or maybe hand-crufted) in some way. I don't want to use a CMS, I'd much prefer a structure full of documents and Makefiles and then automate the whole. On the other hand, I've never actually managed to get it to work, always too easy to just keep doing one manual bodge after another.

Two commments last night at dinner really brought it home though, one person asked me whether I still put the photos that I took here in my own photo album, since they found it so hard to find them. The other one asked what on earth FOAF was, since when they'd done a google search on their own name, the top entry was something part-way through my FoaF file. It is time to perform some tidy-up work. Time to write out a list of requirements and fix those things that always seem to wait for la mañana.

OK, I want:

• a lot more commonality in my code!
• no broken links
• validated XHTML markup
• photo searches by when or where they were taken, by collection, by who or what is depicted

So far I've used the following cameras (reverse chronological order):

Canon Digital IXUS 700

A combination of the slow speed of the IXUS 300, and the loss of its zoom buttons due to a bicycle crash had me thinking of a new camera. This was compounded by a severe case of camera envy when my uncle visited with a 700. Smaller, much faster, lighter and probably a bit more expensive. Again I've enjoyed the latest IXUS, but unfortunately a jammed lens mechanism and the service I've got from Canon Australia have left a bad taste and I'll be wary of the brand from now on.

Canon Digital IXUS 300

A combination of the cost of running the Elph, but the love of its size, resulted in me purchasing this digital camera. The IXUS 300 is a few millimetres thicker than the Elph, but just manages to squeeze into the carry case and will fit inside a pocket. Now I've got no excuse for the quality of the photo scans, its all up to the skill of the photographer.

Canon Elph

I love it, at last a camera that's small enough that I actually carry it around! Despite the lies of the salesman, the APS film is expensive (about $10 a roll of 25), as is the processing (about 50c per print). If I can get access to an APS film scanner I could get much better quality scans, until then I'm relying on the photo scanner at work.

Assorted Disposable 35mm

For the use I make of them, these are nearly ideal. They're cheap, take reasonable photos, and I don't have to worry about accidently destroying the camera by taking it swimming or camping.

35mm Compact

Not small enough, so it spent most of it's life sitting at home on the bookshelf. Eventually I had it with me when I crashed my mountain bike into a river, it wasn't waterproof and so it died.

Fujica SLR

Probably a cheap SLR, I can't remember. I bought it when I was 16 and going overseas. It lasted about 10 years and then stopped cocking the shutter. When I tried to get it fixed I was quoted more money to just examine it than I'd paid to buy it!

So many things can dissappear without notice; the classic old fish'n'chips shop on the corner that for decades had its great old style advertising sign-writing painted over a drab, uniform cream; the classic old warehouse bulldozed for more concrete slab apartments. This afternoon I went out for a walk to try to capture some of the ordinary things around Oakleigh. The house next door before its demolition, the pioneer cemetary, the cobbled-together fences in the alleys, even the old electricty meter.

The house next door is finally going, the inexorable pressure of the developers. Executive summary is to bulldoze the old house and build two, two-storey town houses on the block. Flatten the garden and cover what's left with concrete carparking. Our objections to council of a two-storey townhouse looking straight down into our garden overruled, not even acknowledged in the planning approval that we received once the ruling was made. Last night we came home to realise that pieces of the house are starting to go; a hole where the airconditioner was, boards missing near the roof, what'll happen over the weekend?

How will the building affect us? How will the building affect us?

Both noun and verb, I'm not looking forward to three months' worth of being woken up at 6am by builders crashing about, not sure what the final appearance of the two houses will be, just how intrusive they'll appear from our garden....

With appologies to Flanders and Swan, and fingers crossed that the whole process doesn't turn into a repeat of their classic. The papers have been signed, the quote accepted, we've been assured that a site inspection is not necessary and no further costs will be incurred. Sometime next week we get a real heater with a thermostat and a timer, so no more sitting around for an hour or so waiting for the wood fire to heat the room up.

Definitely not a bad thing, seeing two movies starring Juliette Binoche in the one weekend. Last night Jet Lag was on TV, tonight went off to Brighton to see Caché (Hidden).

Photos

Photos

Photos

Photos

Almost half an hour on the phone to Bigpond/Telstra trying (unsuccessfully) to change the billing address for my broadband connection to go to Monash.

The online form has a number of small, fixed-length fields and no conceivable abbreviation of Rm 232, Bldg 28, ITS Division, Monash University, Wellington Rd, Clayton 3800, Vic. can be made to fit in the small, fixed length fields.

The Bigpond telephone staff tried, but finally admitted that they too were confronted by "the new billing system" with its small, fixed-length, fields and could not change the address. They transferred me to Telstra, who they explained could enable "single billing" of broadband and phone service, but then split this and send the broadband to a different address!

Telstra staff reviewed "the notes attached to the account" and stated that while they could change the billing address for the phone account, they couldn't do anything about the broadband. They transferred me back to a Bigpond billing consultant.

The Bigpond billing consultant stated that I'd initially ended up with sales staff, but promised to work it out. He tried several ways, but eventually admitted that he was confronted by the same small fixed-length fields and could not make the supplied address or any variation fit.

The only other option I was presented with was to receive email bills, but these cannot be sent to any address other than my bigpond one "for security reasons". So I now have to receive my bills at my Bigpond email address, automatically forward these to my Monash email address, then manually forward them each month to the administration staff to be paid!

Determined to keep Mr Damage running by riding it at least once a fortnight, and hopefully once a week, I rode to work yesterday. Tried to leave only to discover that the ignition switch had no effect. No amount of swearing or checking fuses would get power to the bike. Today I brought in the multimeter, spanners and screwdrivers and an optimistic attitude. Viking provided a few handy pointers on where RC17 electricals are likely to go wrong. My lunch break involved the followng:

Remove fairing, swear, curse, confront row of connectors. Unplug, plug, unplug, plug, unplug, plug... unplug, aha! Scrub scrub scrub, plug. click lights, etc.

One very crusty burnt multi-way connector appears to be the culprit. Cause or effect of the high voltage that the bike seems to be plagued by. I cleaned it up as best as I could and plugged it all back together.

The latest water bill turned up and we seem to have stopped using water! I could have sworn that we're both still washing, but for the May quarter only 3kl have passed our meter. Sounds bizarre to me, a mere 32 litres per day. Time to start checking the meter every day again — something I did when we first moved in since I was curious as to what we would use in a new house.

In an odd coincidence, its exactly a year since I last took a reading from the meter, so I can see what a year's consumption works out as:

At South East Water's current rate — an enormous 77.71c per kilo-litre, or 0.07771c/l — the usage cost of the last year's 49058l of water is $38.12! Makes a bit of a joke of the exhortations to install a rainwater tank and "save up to 26% of your water usage"; we'd be saving $9 a year at most, and having to spend around $1000 to purchase a water tank and get it installed!

Water bills:

The day didn't start out well; woke in the dark to hear the wind howling around in the branches of the orange tree, rain pelting against the roof, dreading having to get up and ride over to South Melbourne for the training course — then I woke a little more and realised that it was still only Sunday and I didn't have to go anywhere today!

For around five years I've been aware of the Kellybrook Cider Festival, but I've never managed to get there. Three years ago Jo and I got married at Kellybrook winery, but we've never been back there to visit the winery, or the restaurant, or the cidery! Today, despite the freezing wind and icy rain and hail, we finally managed to drag ourselves off into the wilds of Wonga Park and find out what happens at the cider festival....

Cider; cider and apples, apples and cider, ... and morris dancers. Seems you can't have cider and a harvest festival without morris dancers, prancing rather ineptly around with bells on their ankles and clouting each other with dirty great lumps of wood.

The garden looks much the same as when we were here and got married. Perhaps more overgrown, the enormous oak tree is still an enormous oak tree, and still has all its leaves. The vines look cold and desolate, leafless in the wind. The crowd of visitors all look bearded and “organic” and many speak with English accents.

We got to watch the apples being dropped through the disintegrator — a marvellously titled piece of machinery — and the fresh juice being pressed out and taken away. On tasting were the fresh juice, fresh scrumpy cider, clarified still and sparkling cider, a thoroughly appropriate warm spicy mulled cider, and then the triple-distilled apple brandy. Very potent that last one, definitely a drop to sniff and savour in small quantities! A bottle of it accompanied me on the way home, it'll probably last a very long time.

Photos

Definitely well into autumn now, nearly winter. Saturday was cold and damp and misty, Sunday it rained all day. Today is just damp and overcast. A lunchtime walk showed that it is peak time for mushrooms though, they were everywhere! Big juicy tasty ones, and a variety of scary looking red monsters with white spots.

Photos

The Telstra bigpond package turned up at home this morning, it contains one "insert and run" Microsoft Windows CD and one PCMCIA wireless card as well as the ADSL modem and ethernet cable.

I had carefully told the nice man with the almost unintelligible Indian accent that I needed the wireless card for a DESKTOP PC and that both PCs ran Linux and not Windows. So I've been given a CD I can't run and a wireless card I can't plug in! Absolutely zero instructions on installing any of it in the box.

Surprise, surprise, the account name and password I setup when I booked the service won't let me login to the bigpond website. Just spent three minutes in voicemail menus entering my phone number etc, only to be told “technical assistance is currently unavailable, please call again.”

Two hours later... second call, four minutes on hold listening to mindless music then I can get my password changed. No idea what the original one is, they can't tell. Tried to login with that password and it won't work, but the support person tells me it can take up to quarter of an hour to go through — i.e., if I still can't login call back and it'll be someone else's problem....

Another two hours then what a surprise, the new password still won't let me in. Three tries and the account is locked, time to ring technical assistance again.... Now I've been told that the account isn't active until after I've plugged in and connected the ADSL modem from home, so I have to wait until I get home and go through the whole rigmarole again.

Long delay, go home, unpack boxes, play with wires, put shiny CD into Windows laptop and follow the bouncing ball... Oo-err, now we're connected to the internet. Assorted bits of web browsing and software updates to check that all is working. Ten o'clock at night and I try to login to the Bigpond website — still no luck! Yet another call to that 13xxxx number, more voicemail prompts and a different story from a different helpdesk person: “there's a problem with the servers since about six o'clock and hardly anybody can login, try again tomorrow morning.”

My name is Mohammed a merchant in Dubai, have been diagnosed with Esophageal cancer It has defiled all forms of medical treatment, and right now I have only about a few months to live, according to medical experts.

Well, Mohammed, a merchant in Dubai, I can recommend grammar lessons. Defiling medical treatment is probably not what you intend.

A slow start, and a cold morning. After breakfast it took forever to get coordinated and underway — last night's red wine taking its toll. The coffee shops of Yarra Junction beckoned, we'd only just started riding by the time we got there and settled inside to thaw out and apply coffee to aching heads.

Leaving Yarra Junction the local traffic was a bit too obnoxious — as the drivers along here often seem to be. We retired to the Lillydale-Warbutton bike trail to see whether this improved our outlook on life; far quieter and better for the aching heads, but now very much in need of regrading, repair, and resurfacing, and packed with recreational cyclists of wildly varying skill levels — definitely a track to ride along at a very sedate pace, and paying extreme attention at all times! Somewhere around one of the smaller towns we even came upon a car driving up the bike trail; apparently it is part of their driveway, but nobody has thought to put a warning sign on the track telling cyclists that they may come head on around a corner and meet cars!

At Mt Evelyn we left the trail and returned to the road, and one of the most fantastic road surfaces I can remember riding on for some time. A magnificent swooping curvy run down the hill, effortlessly reaching the 70km/hr speed limit on the way down!

The rest of the way home was the usual ride from the outskirts of Melbourne back to home, unlike a lot of easter holiday rides we were thankfully free of the dangers posed by caravan-towing motorists — motorists who forget that the 'van is half a metre wider than their car as they pass. Into Melbourne along the highway, stop for lunch at a suburban bakery in Heathmont, back along the highway then head south when we got to Warrigal road. Warrigal road is known territory, up and down, crossing the lines of the hills till we're back in Oakleigh, home for a shower and a change of clothes!

As usual, the official meeting place and luggage drop off was at the Wayfarer Inn in South Melbourne; I've no idea why, the place isn't a pub anymore and seems to only barely tolerate having a bunch of a hundred cyclists turn up. A hundred hungry cyclists; but they close the kitchen while people are still trying to order food. A hundred thirsty cyclists, but they haven't turned the beer taps on, only bottles are available. They really don't seem to care, but I guess this is the last time. Lack of food meant that Jo and I only stayed a while, one drink and a few goodbyes, then off to get some food in more pleasant surroundings — Silvio's pizza, piping hot and on the table in under ten minutes with a smile and a beer and a wave from the staff.

The Easter Deadly Treadly is over. The last ever Easter Deadly Treadly is over. What will we do next easter...

Where?

Wesburn.

From Neerim South to Noojee the road climbs steadily up for at least ten kilometres, then climbs more steeply up for another few before swooping down through the forest in wet twisty curves. Magnificent riding, but a little unnerving with the wet leaves and the narrowness of the roads. Inflight discussions between tandem pilot and stoker resulted in the decree that the tandem would travel at a reasonable speed downwards through the forest....

Noojee pub is a magnificent building, and has a wonderful open fire. The only problem is that when you arrive at quarter past eleven you find that the pub doesn't open until noon, and even the presence of fifty thirsty cyclists can't convince the publican to vary those hours. Some people decided to stop for coffee at one of the two cafés in town, the rest continued on along the river valley towards Powelltown and then on to Yarra Junction and Wesburn.

A second and completely unexpected long climb before we reached Powelltown, seemed to plod endlessly up through the forest, I'm sure the road is meant to be running along the valley. The Powelltown shop and pub has been renovated and is no longer the pokey old country store I remember; now a warm and inviting bar, restaurant, café, shop and agency for the local bank, it is all the facilities in Powelltown other than the sawmill!

After lunch it was a cruisy ride along mostly flat roads to Yarra Junction, then turn off and a only a few more minutes before we were at Wesburn and time to set up the tents for the last time this ride, and the last time ever on a Deadly Treadly tour! Plenty of time in the magnificent autumn afternoon to sit around in the sun and drink a few beers and reminisce and relax.

Where?

Wesburn.

Photos

Korumburra to Poowong, where we would have stayed last night if the pub — the only food source in town — had been open on Good Friday. The last five minutes into Poowong an exercise in vector analysis as we plotted speed and direction of the tandem versus the speed and direction of the next big black rainfront. Jo and I stood around dry and sipping coffee while Evan and Andrew rolled in ten minutes later having sheltered under trees and in a muddy ditch.

Photos

Where?

Korumburra Poowong Drouin Neerim South

Where?

Kilcunda Dalyston Loch Korumburra

A what! Yes, I spent half the morning at an open-garden out near Noojee. An obvious sign of senility, but a site for some very autumnal photographs. “Tall Timbers” had opened their garden to the public, and what a garden it was! I think its taken them about thirty years to get to the stage it is currently at, and probably takes up most of their time to keep it that way.

Cool and misty weather when we got there, the rain held off for the two hours or so that it took to fully explore the gardens, then started just as we decided we'd seen it all and it was time to leave. Kind of scary with the four of us being the only people there who didn't have senior's cards....

Photos

Something seems to have gone someway awry with the configuration of a supposed announce-only mailing list from Novell! Cutting out the names and headers, the following three messages came through in response to a routine announcement:

devnet-announce@forge.novell.com wrote:

> I am out of office until the 10th of April. Your mails will not be
> read or forwarded. Best regards: Rxxx Sxxxxxxxxxxxxx

>> no problem. if you want, you can stay out of office till 11th or
>> 12th.

>>> Better yet take the whole month off - relax and enjoy

There's a cycling film festival on at RMIT for the next four days called Celluloid Cycles, we didn't think we'd need to pre-purchase tickets to the first night's session. We were wrong! After racing home from work, leaping on the train and getting into the city for 6:30 we found that it was completely sold out.

A beer for consolation at Transport while we plotted our next move.... Yeow! A $6 beer for consolation, that'll probably be the first and last from there! Back up to RMIT to purchase tickets for Sunday night — at least we'll get to see the other movies we want to see — then an evening walk around the CBD. I just never go into the city, I've no idea where anything is. There seem to be even more small asian cafés and bars than ever before, or maybe its just the turnover in streets where there didn't use to be bars.

The other movie? That was a DVD purchase of The Triplettes of Belleville, an odd mix of an NTSC region 4 DVD, hopefully it will play at home! Also accompanied by CD boxed sets of both the Laughing Clowns and Johhny Cash at Folsom Prison and San Quentin.

Photos

A placeholder of sorts, of a bunch of AJAX-ish portals. All the rage, latest buzzword compliance and all that. Annoyingly, and as always, there's arguments for and against each one so I can't make up my mind if I'll use any of them.

• http://www.google.com/ig/
• http://www.netvibes.com/
• http://www.pageflakes.com/
• http://start.com/
• http://live.com/

Interesting changes to the wording from the first report which appeared on the Age website credited to AAP, and the second one, printed in today's paper.

The website version:

Webber urges drivers: watch for bicycles

April 3, 2006 - 6:24AM

Formula One star Mark Webber has urged Australian motorists to take a leaf out of the European book and pay more attention to cyclists on the road.

Webber, who admits to being a huge cycling fan, said while motorists in Victoria had improved in their attitude towards cyclists in the last five years, the rest of the country was not so patient.

Sometimes road users may not have an idea how much room a cyclist needs," said Webber, who is a patron of the Amy Gillett Foundation, launched in Melbourne.

"I've ridden my bike in many different parts of the world, the culture is different in Spain, in Italy and in the UK, and in Victoria the culture is very, very good.

"But there's probably other parts of Australia where (cyclists) are not as well accepted."

The foundation has been set up in memory of the Australian cyclist who was killed by a motorist while training with five teammates in Germany in July 2005.

It aims to promote a safe relationship between cyclists and motorists, provide an annual scholarship for emerging female cyclists and help the five women injured in the crash.

Up and coming cyclist Jessie Maclean, from Canberra, is the first recipient of the scholarship.

The printed version — can't say anything bad about Australia's drivers now can we!:

Webber promotes safety

Mark Webber, Australia's F1 hopeful, has lent his name to a foundation urging motorists to look out for cyclists, following the death of rider Amy Gillett in Germany last year.

Webber, who yesterday flew out of Melbourne, was in Germany last July less than 200 kilometres from the accident where Gillett and five teammates were struck by a car.

He has now accepted the position as patron of the Amy Gillett Foundation. The foundation was formed to promote a “safe and harmonious relationship between cyclists and motorists and assist Gillett's five injured teammates.”

Each year Jo and I head down to Red Hill to help with the harvest at the Duke Vineyard, owned by her uncle and aunt. This year was no different, just a little later than other years due to vaguaries of grape varieties and ripening.

Number one problem was getting out of bed; even harder than usual for a Saturday morning, last night we'd been out to the Goat brewery, dinner in Victoria street, coffee in Brunswick street, then off to see Mick Thomas and Nick Barker at the Rainbow hotel. The end result of all that was not getting to bed until 2am and a very rude awakening in the dark by the alarm clock. Somehow we did manage to get up and get going though!

We made it down to the vineyard by half-past nine, probably the earliest we've ever arrived! Unlike previous years, today was almost the last of the harvest, three rows of incredibly dense Pinot, thick with leaves, and with leaves and grapes the same colour!

Half a day's solid work, some of the patches of vines so dense that we filled entire bins with grapes without moving from one spot. Spiders, leaves, stems and the odd mouldy grape all hopefully discarded, the rest dropped in the tub for Geoff to collect on the near-antique of a tractor that somehow my father-in-law keeps running with judicious applications of engineering and inventiveness.

Following the picking is the main event of the day — lunch. Each year Sue outdoes herself to produce magnificent bowls of thick tomato soup and seemingly endless supplies of salads and other foods. Of course these are always accompanied by a glass or two of the previous years' vintages, otherwise why else would we keep turning up....

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It hung again today. Once is annoying, twice a coincidence, three times... four times — a product released before it is ready!

2006-03-24 13:00-16:00 on charger until it reported "fully charged"
2006-03-24 17:30-17:45 cycled home with it.

2006-03-25 10:00 plugged into the PC, downloaded data and restarted PC. Edge goes off and will no longer power on. Windows now reports "Replace device."
2006-03-25 18:3 Edge finally turns on, but the battery is now flat and it turns itself off in under a second.

2006-03-27 09:00-12:00 on charger until it reports "fully charged". Edge was completely flat and took 3 hours after fifteen minutes use last Friday!
2006-03-27 00:30 use at lunch time (00:30 total)
2006-03-27 00:15 use riding home (00:45 total)
2006-03-28 00:15 use riding to work (01:00 total)
2006-03-28 10:00 succesful upload
2006-03-28 00:15 use riding home (01:15 total)
2006-03-29 00:15 use riding to work (01:30 total)
2006-03-29 10:00 succesful upload
2006-03-29 00:15 use riding home (01:15 total)
2006-03-30 00:15 use riding to work (01:30 total)
2006-03-30 10:00 succesful upload. I believe the PC was then restarted with the Edge connected to the USB cable.
2006-03-30 18:00 Edge no longer powers on, no "charging" message or other display when plugged into the charger. Pressing "mode" and "reset" brings it back to life.
2006-03-31 00:15 use riding to work (01:45 total)
2006-03-31 10:00 succesful upload, power now down to 3 bars.
2006-03-31 14:00 sent off support email to Garmin in the US.
2006-03-31 18:00 Edge won't power on. Reset via "mode" and "reset" buttons, only one bar of power left and device cannot lock onto satellites.
2006-04-01 approx. two hours on the charger to recover from a supposed 1hr 45 minutes use (from a quoted 12hour battery life).

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Being a married man as of almost three years ago there are some questions that come up occasionally:

1st	Cotton
2nd	Paper
3rd	Leather
...

Ooo-errr, its coming up on our leather wedding aniversary.

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Purchased Thursday, arrived Friday, broken Saturday! Saturday morning I plugged the Edge into the laptop and turned it on, it fired up the Garmin software, declared that there was no data to download (so I guess I didn't record anything on the ride home yesterday) and then powered it off.

After that I found I couldn't switch it on at all, and plugging it in to the laptop results in a Windows message telling me that the device is faulty and needs to be either unplugged and plugged back in, or replaced.

Later in the evening I could switch it on, but it promptly turned itself off again. Dead flat battery? I fully charged it Friday afternoon and it was only on for twenty minutes or so! Annoyingly, I'd left the charger at work so I couldn't investigate further.

Today I plugged the Edge into the charger at 9am and left it on until it said fully charged, noon, three hours later! No idea how it can have completely flattened the battery on Saturday, although I have my suspicions that a software bug killed it when it was disconnected from the USB cable.

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The Commonwealth Games cycling time trials are on today; first the women's in the morning, then the men's in the early afternoon. I half thought about taking off from work at lunchtime, racing down North road to Brighton to see what I could see. Turns out that firstly I wouldn't have been able to see anything since one event had finished and the other not yet started, and I'd probably only have about five minutes down there before having to turn around and head back to Monash!

There's a TV upstairs in the staff room, but more importantly I found that one of my esteemed cow-orkers has setup a thoroughly experimental stream from a TV card that's accessible from my desk. I got it successfully set up with mplayer with minutes to spare from the end. Just in time to see Kathy Watts race home to take second place, between two other Australians.

Wee! A winning time of 37’ 40.87s, an average speed of 46.195km/hr over 29km! Fairly standard back of the envelope guesswork, and I think I could manage just on double that time.

The men's race is meant to start at 1 o'clock, I guess it has, channel 9 advertised it as one of the highlights of their coverage but by half past still haven't mentioned it. Their coverage is execrable, the one saving grace is in the cycling where Phil Liggett covers the event rather than just the Australians in the event!

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It was lots of fun with no traffic on the roads. Jo and I took the tandem out for a ride in the afternoon and rode up Beach road from Elwood to Port Melbourne. We didn't see any of the marathon, just millions and millions of bollards, railings and miles of flapping plastic tape. Such a huge road when there's no other traffic on it though!

Funniest part of it all was at one set of traffic lights. Not one but two police motorcyclists sitting at the side of the road 3m back from the lights, a pedestrian pushed the button and made the lights go red, we stopped, another three cyclists come up from behind, pulled out, overtook us and the motorbikes, then two of them rode up the footpath to avoid stopping and around behind the lights while the third rode through the red light, half-way through the intersection, up the footpath and then continued around the other light before all three dropped back onto the road to continue!

We sat at the lights laughing while wondering whether they get booked for running a red light or riding on the footpath or both. Police guys were shaking their heads and said they couldn't believe it, but it was not the worst they'd seen during the day.

Lights went green, we rode off, police #1 pulled over the couple riding together who'd shot up the footpath while police #2 pulled over mr red light runner. We passed as he was busy arguing "I didn't ride through a red light."

Probably evolution in action, but if you must ride straight through a red light I'd suggest not doing it straight in front of two uniform traffic police!

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Billions and billions of dollars spent on a spectacular display of something on Wednesday night that left millions of people around the world collectively holding their breath and going “Huh?” Ducks and trams and what appeared to be the Crusty Demons of Dirt chromed up, polished and sedated while they popped itty-bitty wheelies around ballerinas. The flying tram spewed forth a horde of tram conductors in a scene reminiscent of the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind — maybe that's where they all disappeared to when they were sacked and vanished from the tram network years ago. Footballers and more footballers, oh, you'd almost be forgiven for thinking that the major sponsor also has the rights to the AFL football! Its one saving grace was watching the sickly-sweet TV coverage with the sound turned off, and listening to the hilarious commentary from Leaping Larry L and assorted others on RRR.

Australia's first medal is won in an event that the commentators carefully work around the name of — an event called the 48kg women's snatch. The idiot commentators congratulate a swimmer on winning Australia's all-important first gold medal, quarter of an hour after Anna Meares won one on the velodrome. When not doing that they manage to sound like yokel red-necks massacring any non-Anglo-saxon name and making patronising comments about any country who spends less than Australia does on its national sports teams.

Meanwhile the cycling teams from a number of African countries have arrived without bikes and are borrowing equipment from big-hearted locals!

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First time in a week or so that I've managed to have a real lunch break and get away from cow-orkers and computers for a while. Today I took off for half an hour to sit under my favourite tree and read some more of my sadly-neglected copy of Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver. Back at my desk at 1pm, made myself comfortable and was just starting back into the next lot of impossible tasks when YEOOWW!!! — a needle-like pain in my back. Was wondering what the hell it was when YEOOWW!!! it happened again. I shuffled about and stuck my hand up my shirt, thinking I'd got a splinter in there... hmmm, nothing. "What was it that — YEOOWWW!!!!".

There was a three centimetre long bull-ant sitting on my shirt busily biting me every time I leant back and squashed it between me and my chair. It must have come down from my favourite tree.... Damn it hurts!

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