ajft

An interesting year at work; I can hardly remember any of January to May — the normal, five day a week part of the year. Instead its been Monday to Wednesday at home looking after Cam, then Thursday and Friday in the office. Wednesday was my nominal "work-at-home" day to bring my hours up to three days a week, but in reality it was two whole days on site and the remaining seven and half hours of work spread out between Friday evening and Thursday morning, as and when a small boy and life allowed. I wouldn't have missed it for the world and would qite happily become a stay-at-home dad if finances allowed!

How much was accomplished? I'm really not sure. With no real deadlines, targets or goals there are no real measurements. Slower than I hoped, harder than I expected. Some things are much easier at home uninterrupted, some things harder on the end of the not-always-useful remote-access to the office. Depressing to go in on a Thursday and find that because I had been away, work I'd expected to occur had not happened.

Oh well, 2009 is over now, I'm on leave for a month. An entire month!

Next year could be interesting, it'll be a nasty shock to the system to go back to five days a week at work — I think I could be quite happy with four, or even three, days working. Sadly, management and finances disagree, so five days a week it'll be.

The best part of it all? For FOUR WHOLE WEEKS I DO NOT have to touch Lotus Notes — at all — in any way, shape or form!

Here's hoping that 2009 is better than 2008 for movies! Seem to be more DVDs and fewer trips to the cinema ... much like the rest of the Australian public I guess.

2009-Jan-12 Quantum of Solace — loud and boring
2009-Jan-13 El Mariachi (DVD)
2009-Jan-30 Desperado (DVD)
2009-Feb-03 Once Upon a Time in Mexico (DVD)
2009-Feb-29 WALL-E (DVD)
2009-Mar-04 Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (DVD)
2009-Mar-13 Willow (DVD)
2009-Mar-19 The Last King of Scotland (DVD)
2009-Apr-26 Seven Samurai (DVD)
2009-Aug-08 Jean de Florette (DVD)
2009-Nov-23 Transformers (DVD)
2009-Nov-25 La Petite Lili
2009-Dec-11 Mary and Max

“Assemble at 11:50 for the noon bus” we were exhorted, “Be on time!” I had my reservations about catching the bus to the function, being reliant on the corporate transport meant being held hostage if it rained or turned out to be a dud or I simply got bored and wanted to escape….

Will I or won't I? Around in my head all morning, but finally I decided that yes I'd be the good corporate boy and catch the corporate transport to the corporate Christmas function.

So out we all trooped and then stood around and waited from 11:55 to 12:15 for the supposed 12:00 bus, more and more people passing in their cars, managers' cars, on-call cars. Finally at quarter past I gave up, went back to the office, got my bike shoes and helmet, went and unlocked the bike and rode the eight and a half kilometres to Jells park. I'd managed to lock the bike up and got half way through my first beer at around 12:35 before the bus finally turned up!

The function itself? Who are all these people? We're spread out over three buildings and I've no idea what entire sections do, let alone who individual staff are.

Catered barbecue and drinks in a marquee, good food — they learnt their lesson from a few years' back — Alan's farewell speeches and presentation, lucky door prizes, and so it went.

Left around 15:50 and was back at my desk by 16:25, the only hassles on the way back being riding up Ferntree Gully road after a large lunch, and the four or five carloads of ITS staff who thought they were being friendly by tooting on the horn — deafening loud blasts indistinguishable from the bogans' prelude to a screamed “GERROFFDAFUGGINROAD!”

Thank you for holding

Your call is very important to us. So important, in fact, we'll continue to keep you on hold so that by the time you reach a real person your mood will have become as foul and black as satan's stool sample.

Cribbed from http://theoatmeal.com/comics/customer_service

Continued from part #2.

Back from the dead — it lives!

After a long, leisurely, walk over to Carnegie this morning with the pram and Jo's bike we picked up a newly revitalised Norky bike. Dropped her Norco Magnum off for a service and to sort out the gears and picked up the grandfather's axe that is my Java¹.

A bit of a comedown in the world, the only replacement 8-speed Shimano shifters left are Altus; LX, XT and XTR are all 9- or 10-speed nowadays. The thirteen year-old XT shifters had performed wonderfully, well past their expected life, so anything now is a blessing! According to the mechanic “The XT and XTR shifters that year — 1996 — were a real problem, very fragile, amazing they lasted this long at all” I seem to always hear this, or something similar, about my gears, or my wheels, or my forks, or something. I'm never sure whether its true or whether its just the mechanic genes at work — always wanting to sound knowledgable about — and slightly disparaging about — the equipment that I have got.

Yada yada, Norky bike needs new chain, new cassette, new sprockets... a set of new sprockets costs as much as a new crankset so they'd probably advise that instead... only the frame remains.

Surprisingly cheap for the work, and what a pleasure to have gears again! Single-speeds may be all the rage, but only on bikes designed for it please.

Coffee and cake and then some lunch at Rita's to celebrate the reanimation, then back home for another thirteen years' life in the second set of shifters... I hope.

---

1. I'm fairly confidant that the only original parts now are the frame, XTR brakes, headstem, handlebars and bar-ends. All else has been repaired, replaced or swapped over the years.

Disk space, ugh. The desktop is full, the laptop is full, the desk is covered in a pile of old hard-disks of various sizes in various states of repair.

• Two 200G 3.5” IDE drives in fafnir in a RAID mirror
• A 1T 3.5” SATA drive in the DViCO media box
• A 100G 2½” SATA drive in the laptop¹
• 40G 1.8” drive in the iPod
• 20G 2½” IDE drive in the X-Drive II card reader
• 20G 2½” IDE drive in the old X-Box
• 8G USB stick

Then piled up on my desk, a collection of 3.5” drives; 400G SATA, 2.5G PATA, 200G PATA, 80G PATA, 40G PATA. All up, I think that's not quite a terabyte, none of it really usable, and all of it a PITA².

The DViCO media box has the most storage; but it isn't on the network. Must get around to it….

The laptop was about the last of the systems using IDE drives rather than SATA, annoyingly, the drives are far more expensive and much harder to find — $140 for 250G IDE vs $70 for 500G SATA! Except that it isn't! See ¹ below. Last time I believe what the vendor tells me or what diagnostic software says, next time I'll simply unscrew the cover in the first place and check it myself.

The desktop PC is a small form-factor Shuttle X51, there's only room inside for a single 3.5” drive so I squeezed in a second one in behind the floppy drive blanking plate to let me have a RAID1 mirror. Sadly this system is definitely parallel IDE, so there'll be no easy upgrade to a pair of 1TB SATA drives.

So what is it to be? Do I buy an external drive and hang it off the desktop, or do I go for a smallish domestic NAS? Do I bite the bullet and buy a new PC with room for SATA drives? Build or buy? Too many options, and never enough money….

Footnote:

1. Aargh! For a month or more I'd laboured under the misapprehension that it was a PATA drive, even to the point of ordering in a new — and expensive — 250G replacement. Only when I got around to unscrewing the cover and taking the old drive out did I discover that it really was a SATA drive!

2. Pain in the Ass: An American term, something to do with causing discomfit to donkeys.

http://statuscloud.icodeforlove.com/ajft/13195

Tweet cloud for ajft

After a little more than a decade, the time has come to finally part with Mr Damage — for the last four years, maybe even five, I've done little more each year than just pay the registration and then get it running for a couple of days in the last weeks each January.

The bike owes me nothing, the costs in time and money of cleaning it up and advertising to sell it probably wouldn't be worth anything like what the recompense would be. Instead I offered it up on the mailing list of http://www.teamRC17.net — swap for a case of beer! One of the semi-local members jumped at the chance and all that remained was to find a mutally agreeable time to come and pick it up.

In all these years I've never had to put the bike on a trailer so it was a little amusing to finally learn how (backwards) one and a half fit and healthy gents can hoik a CBX into a trailer — my left shoulder still refuses to have anything to do with lifting heavy weights:

Of course Melbourne's weather chose to make life a trifle more interesting by raining lightly on us the entire time, but we refused to either drop the bike or slip over. Paul tied it all down to his satisfaction and after more thanks on both sides, headed off for the long drive back home. I'm really glad the bike is going to someone who'll use it, rather than have it sitting and gradually falling apart in our driveway — Farewell Mr Damage.

Finally, the all-important beer:

Continued from part #1.

After a little searching online I decided to have another look at the internals of my rear shifter — albeit a 1996 Shimano XT unit, so I've had a decent thirteen year's use out of it! Undid the three chassis screws, disconnected it from the cable, and brought it inside where I can safely drop tiny pieces on the kitchen table and not lose them in the shed or the garden.

First major annoyance, the tiny little phillips head dust-cover screw that yesterday I removed then replaced, neither time with any problems, has mysteriously jammed and is almost stripped. Needed to be almost butchered out since the cross-slot has nearly gone.

Surprisingly clean considering the thirteen years of use so far — a wipe with a clean cloth and a toothpick to remove some of the dirt, then the discovery that the main ratchet is broken. I doubt if these are sold as servicable parts by Shimano, and if they are, how many other small parts are worn out or nearly so? Cleaned up and regreased lightly it all seemed to be miraculously operational again — I doubt it'll last another thirteen years, but I may get a few more out of it!

Second, or third, major annoyance came during the reassembly — the 7mm nut that holds the thumb levers on managed to twist around inside my socket-spanner and refuse to go on the bolt, jamming up so badly that I couldn't extract it without hooking a piece of wire into it. Then I found that it had stripped the thread of the bolt, so both the bolt and the nut seem unusable, a new nut may exist somewhere in my toolboxes, but a special custom-made Shimano bolt — no way. Looks as though new shifters are on the shopping list.

Nine-speed Shimano Deore XT brake/shifter levers seem to be $299 a pair — now can I use the nine-speed levers with the eight-speed cassette? Some people seem to say yes, some to say no...

Either way, a working repair seems better left to my LBS — providing I can find an LBS I'm happy with. I bit the bullet and rode up to Carnegie and dropped it off at Fitzroy Cycles, apparently the nine-speed shifters cannot be used with the eight-speed cassette so they'll have to order in an eight-speed shifter, but it should all be fixed and running and frighteningly clean and adjusted by Thursday.

... part #3.

Over the last few months my rear derailleur — 1996 eight-speed Shimano XT — has been harder and harder to change; I can change up to a bigger ring, but down is a problem, and I need to change two or three cogs and then back up. Jo has also pointed out that her changer is sticking and she was just about stuck in one gear almost all the way to and from work — not much of a problem around either of our commutes, which is why we haven't done anything about it.

This morning I took a look at Jo's rear shifter; the cables look corroded and stick, so I suspect there's no point in trying to adjust anything until they're replaced.

Starting to have a quick look at Norky bike, I found that the shifter had jammed completely and I couldn't move the thumb-lever at all! A little fiddling and it released, shifted up and down a few times, then jammed again. Undoing the tiny dust-cover screw and then the three chassis screws meant I could remove the shifter body — not sure if the cable was still in the guide where it's meant to go. A little bit of fiddling up and down and I convinced myself there's nothing I could do, better off to check it in for a service — but where, we're not entirely happy with the last few services from the last place we've been, I get the feeling that things were done "on the cheap" or with odds and ends parts because they classify me as a cheapskate and a friend. Local bike shop has butchered things twice when I tried to get a quick repair, then stuffed me about when I tried to get a wheel trued so I'm not inclined to go there for service, although they're fine for bits and pieces. Next nearest is Fitzroy Cycles, up in Carnegie on Dandenong road.

I put it all back together and started contemplating my options; repair or replace, adjustments or new shifters, proper service, its all just money...

...part #2

Ho-hum, a letter from the bank...

We understand just how tight the finances can get some months. You never know when you might need some additional funds to tide you over.

Um, yeah, I guess so... that'd be why there's never more than about $1000 on my $5000 credit card, but you're the financial experts so carry on...

We'd like to invite you to apply for a credit limit increase on your Starts Low Stays Low credit card, from $5,000 to up to $7,500. A little something extra you can use for any unexpected bills or to pay for those everyday expenses like groceries and petrol.

WHAT THE HELL YOU ON ABOUT Mr BANK? $7,500 for groceries and petrol? I'm sure you'd like me to apply, and you'd just love it if I went bankrupt maxing it out and paying your extortionate interest rates and charges, vultures.

Wouldn't possibly be trying to get people into financial difficulty just coming up to Christmas now would you?

Dear bank, get stuffed.

I took advantage of Microsoft's It's Not Cheating offer last Friday and bought myself a $50 Windows 7 upgrade online, paid an extra $14¹ to get a DVD rather than battle Telstra BigPond and download it all myself. The DVD arrived yesterday, here we go. So it begins...

Of course like 99.9% of the people out there with Windows Vista on their laptops we've got Windows Vista home premium, and the Windows 7 Upgrade that Microsoft will happily sell us is for Windows 7 Professional, which cannot be used to "upgrade" the system, only to perform a clean install over the top of it! If there's an easy path and a hard path you know which one they'll choose for you...

Backed up both our accounts from Vista with Windows Easy Transfer; 7.6G for Jo, 39G for me. Then did a very simplistic xcopy of everything onto the external drive, its not as if I don't trust the Windows tool and its unknown format, giant blob archive, its just experience at work here...

Meanwhile poking around on the Windows 7 upgrade DVD reading the help.

Wow that took a long time, my goodness Vista is slow copying files. The xcopy process took almost 14 hours!

This morning I logged back in and tried to start the setup program. Surprise, surprise, Vista can no longer read the DVD and shows a single README file telling me that I need to use a drive with UDFS capability! Hey guys, I was reading it yesterday and every day prior to today. Standard Windows fix for this one, shutdown, restart, TADA, a readable DVD drive. Pathetic.

Started the setup program and I'm drastically short of disk space; first I need to clear out about 1G to allow setup to download updates and start, then its 6.8G to let the upgrade commence, finally I need to clear out 11G for “recommended” operation.

Ugh, 800x600x16 colours, I sure hope we can find a better resolution than that once we're finished, of course the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor was useless, offering the advice that:

Check Windows Update after installing Windows 7 to make sure you have the latest driver for this device, otherwise it may not work.

Yes, I knew that already. That's not bloody advice, that's just "suck it and see, and if it doesn't work then too bad because you've already upgraded, sucker."

First half of the install takes about half an hour, only a little fun and games as Cam tries to help by tapping maniacally on the keys. The last step of six then takes about half an hour; no appreciable activity, just the words "Configuring."

Reboot; enter my account name and choose a name for the computer. Then try and remember the key for my wireless network. Um, err, its written down somewhere and I've lost the somewhere... Oh well, "Skip" and on to the next step.

Reboot; login. Ugh. 800x600 pixels bog-standard ancient VESA resolution at 4x3 aspect-ratio on a 16x9 aspect-ratio laptop; "Ugly fat-bastard mode". Try to change it and all I've got available is an option of 1024x768 — I guess that's an improvement.

Plug in to the wired network, connect to the Internet and hit Windows Update — 8 security updates and 7 optional, and the optional ones all look to be drivers for my hardware. 59.2M downloading, slowly, ever so slowly.

Waiting, waiting, waiting. Oh, failed. "Windows cannot install updates because Windows Update is installing updates". Ah. Obvious. "Try again later." So I did, and it installed seven updates, then rebooted.

Login and start Windows Update again. Hmm, "Most recent check for updates: Never." I do not think that is correct, I distinctly remember checking for updates five minutes ago! Five important updates and four optional ones this time.

A few more reboots — yes I've got my 1280x800 resolution back — start reinstalling the applications, start rummaging around through C:\Windows.old\ and purging as we reinstall so that there's a usable amount of disk space.

Connect up to the SpeedStream router via the wired interface to find out the WEP key, then reconfigure the wireless network. Easy enough, but I really should find where I wrote it down — inside the cover, in the manual, but where is the manual?

After a fruitless search for the destination end of the Windows 7 transfer tool I re-attach the external USB drive and double-click on one of the two archives, perhaps I should have read the instructions and saved myself some fruitlessness — twenty minutes and eight gigabytes later and I've restored all of Jo's photos. Now to repeat with the 40G of data for my account, after first clearing yet more space on the disk.

Tada! We're up, we're running, we're 95% full on the disk and sometime soon I think I'll have to find out what hideous hoops I have to jump through to replace the 100G disk in the laptop with a 300G or 500G one, whatever the largest laptop non-SATA IDE drive is.

Oh, big surprise and THANK YOU VERY MUCH to Microsoft. The Windows Easy Transfer archive of my files includes everything... everything EXCEPT 17G of my photos! Restored a nice empty Pictures folder just ready for me to curse and swear and copy back all my photos from my other backup because... wait for it... I DON'T TRUST THE MICROSOFT TOOLS BECAUSE THEY DON'T WORK!

Then endless hours of reinstalling applications from my great archive of application installers, followed by watching as they download complete upgrades of themselves because my installers are out of date! The endless treadmill of patches and application upgrades.

---

1. Doesn't look as though they can get that right, according to the receipt email on the 11th:

  $63.95AUD The charge(s) will appear on your credit card as
  "DRI*StudentOfficeAU". Microsoft Windows 7 Professional Upgrade - 32
  bit

Checking my credit card account today, the last three transactions are:

12/11/2009	Dri*Studentofficeau Orderfind.Com	$49.95
13/11/2009	Acp Publishing P/L Sydney	$49.95
16/11/2009	Dri*Studentofficeau Orderfind.Com	$14.00

Why on earth does it take them a second transaction and an extra four days to include the DVD? I haven't bought anything from ACP Publishing that I know of, so is that a double charge, or just a coincidental random wrong charge from ACP?

2. Revisited 2009-Nov-27: Pure coincidence, the ACP purchase for the identical amount was a magazine renewal I made weeks ago that has taken until now to appear in my statement. I wish ACP could print the name of the subscription, especially as it seems to take them at least ten days to process an online purchase!

http://store.digitalriver.com/store/msshau/ContentTheme/pbPage.Windows_7_FAQs

FAQ for Windows 7 "Its not cheating" offer

A couple of months ago — January 22, wow I hadn't realised it was that long ago — I was knocked off the road bike on the ride home by a guy on a MTB who suddenly braked and turned right without looking back or indicating. Big solid guy on a MTB, he took the front wheel clean out from under me. “Sorry mate, I was only listening for cars,” he said as he looked at the damage before riding off on his way. More damage to me than to the bike I thought at the time.

What with the fun and games I've been having with rear wheels its taken me quite some time to spot the real damage. It started when I found the split in the old one a year ago, then the replacement "new wheel" that collapsed as I went around the u-turn on the Dandenong road overpass, then a couple of months of a temporary replacement by the 8-speed wheels Marko had found and lent me, then the bike sitting in the shed for a couple of months with its "new new wheel" attached, but no tyre or tube while I rode Norky bike instead.

While the temporary wheel was on I thought the bike was handling funny and didn't ride quite straight, but thought it was due to having an 8-speed wheel in a 7-speed frame, my reading on whether this was possible just seemed to get me more and more confused.

Last weekend I finally put tyre and tube on the new wheel #2 and the old kiddie seat that I'd been given at work, then yesterday tried it out taking Cam to playgroup — with mixed results.

The seat seems to fit mostly ok, although designed for a slightly more relaxed seat tube angle, so it is perhaps more upright than the occupant would like.

A bit of a wibbly-wobbly ride with 10kg of passenger, but sadly I think the bike may have suffered more than I noticed in the prang. Rear wheel is not tracking behind the front, looking down the handlebars and top-tube are not at right angles. The rear-triangle is bent and the bike doesn't track straight any more.

To top it all off, my courier bag full of nappy and playgroup essentials ends up jammed in little sir's face, so there doesn't seem any easy way of carrying it and him, I waddled through the suburb the two km or so to playgroup and may consider it all a failed experiment.

Giving the frame a good once-over I realised that its bent at both top and bottom of the rear triangle, probably easier to spot after a few months when the paint starts to peel and the bare metal to rust.

Bent just below the braze...

...and where the cut-out is to accommodate the wheel.

Not yet sure if it is possible to repair the frame, or economic to repair it. It may be time to consider end of life for the old Peugeot Aspin, not bad for an 18 year old bike I guess!

All from Living by Design, Sunday supplement to The Age:

http://bachkit.com.au

bachkit, 1300.288.223

http://ecovilla.com.au

Eco-Villa 0401.448.443

http://modscape.com.au/

Modscape 03.9314.7769

Cam doesn't talk yet, not in any recognisable way. Instead we get long involved fragments of fascinating jibber-jabber, it sounds as though it should make sense if only we knew the translation:

  ma ma ma Ooo ya
  owa owa owa

Eating out with a toddler is an interesting experience. Even with Cam, who eats nearly everything and seems well behaved compared to some, it can be a trying time. Finding places that open early enough that Cam can eat at a reasonable hour for him, finding dishes suitable to feed to a toddler — at least for us that's an easy one, trying to ensure that a minimum of food is flung, squooged, smeared or anything other than eaten, trying not to be too self-conscious of any looks given by spoil-sports at other tables, all while trying to enjoy your own meal and eating it before it gets cold.

My birthday treat? A romantic candle-lit meal for two it was not; but an enjoyable and tasty meal for the three of us with an early night out at the Red Mango five minutes' walk up the street

BV's annual Ride to Work day met work from home day today; together with cold and flu day and drizzly grey rainy day.

With the best intentions in the world I'd signed up saying I'd ride in, thinking I could pop Cam in the trailer, trundle over to Clayton for a breakfast and a chat then head home. Reality dawned dreary and coughing and wet and so we stayed home with a large mug of tea watching the rain run down the windows.

I wonder how many others decided the weather gods were against them and opted for the car or the train? BV don't seem to mind, I've already had my email thanking me for participating and reminding me I can get more people to register and say they rode if they have forgotten to register.

Its five years this week that we've been living in the 'burbs. Its seventeen months since a little boy appeared and any form of nightlife vanished. Its a long time since I've been to a gig!

Johnette Napolitano at the Corner hotel. Dinner at Sylvios' — a large Sylvios' special, garlic bread and a carafe of wine — quick, hot, tasty. Then back down to Swan street to the Corner Hotel. A good night. I thought it better than last time Jo and I went to see her back in 2002, Jo thought that the last time was the better of the two. Singing Midnight Oil's Beds are Burning as the final song of the set — to me oddly reminiscent of Davros singing at one point. Scary voice lady. Other highlights were Ghost Riders in the Sky, and an acoustic/audience participation rendition of Tomorrow Wendy as her encore.

Fiddling with the site.

I came across my account registration on disqus while searching for account details on another site — please, please, please can we have a few more decent implementations of OpenID so I can cut down on all these lost and forgotten passwords! Reminder to self, here is the code to paste on the end of my templates.

<script type="text/javascript"
  src="http://disqus.com/forums/ajft-org/combination_widget.js \
  ?num_items=5 \
  &color=blue \
  &default_tab=people">
</script>

Its bad enough this ridiculous business of door-to-door sales-scammers, sorry, salesmen, coming around for whichever company wants to annoy you the most, insisting on seeing your bills for product X and trying to sign you up for some competitors' offer, presumably one that gives them a commission on every customer converted.

More annoying, if anything, is when they are from a company that I already do business with, wanting to see my bills, which is information they already have. Today it was AGL, insistent and annoying enough that I sent the following to the AGL customer enquiries:

I am currently an AGL customer for both gas and electricity, yet today was visited by a door-to-door salesman purporting to be from AGL who demanded to see my bills as I qualified for some "special offer". I tried to explain to him that if AGL was offering AGL customers special offers, then AGL already had access to my bills, but he was adamant that he was told to do this, albeit in almost unrecognisable English. I do not show my bills to anyone calling door to door. If I am eligible for his incomprehensible special offer, can you please provide details of what it was, and why you persist in harassing people at their door asking for information that you already have access to.

thank you,

I shall await their response with interest….

The worst culprits in my area seem to be AGL and Optus, but maybe I'm just not home when the other offenders get sent away.

Who knows what happens when at the households nearby where the occupants are either elderly Greek or young Chinese, the intersection of English language skills between them and the sales people must make for some interesting conversation.

There's a national “Do Not Call” register for telemarketers, there are “No Advertising Material” stickers for mailboxes, both of these have some legislation backing them, time for the same thing for door-to-door canvassers, sales-bodies, charity collectors and assorted other annoyances.

Revisited: 2009-Aug-05

Thank you for using the AGL website to pass on your feedback to us regarding door knockers.

We value your suggestions and appreciate the time you have taken to raise this concern with us.

AGL can confirm we are able to offer you a 7% discount off your usage for both gas and electricity.

But of course no details on how they offer the discount, other than to "see our website" and a link to the root of the company site, not to any specific page or offer. Much hunting around the website and reading, adding up a years' worth of bills — only the consumtion mind you, all "service charges" excluded and I find I can save about $49 a year if we sign up with them for two years, and footnotes to say they can change the rates at any time so our discount could change. Hardly worth the bother is, it?

Yet another aggregator, yet another site that's tickled my fancy and convinced me to create a login:

When not snowed under by the sheer weight of spam and rubbish mail, its important to take time out to find those little amusements in the day to day junkmail. Here's one that came in today, personally addressed to a one-off email address that was on my site for a while, asking for a link exchange because clearly I have something to do with shonky weight-loss products.

  Please use the following details for my link:

  Title : weight loss for women
  Please link The Title to this URL :
  http://www.######.com/

  Descripcion:
  It takes more than just losing a few pounds to truly live a happier,
  healthier and more fulfilled lifestyle. That's why the Slim Girl's Box
  of Secrets comes with a unique set of benefits that you just won't find
  elsewhere.

Oh dear, a bit Too Much Capitalisation, and can you at least spell check your Descripcion.

Perhaps look at the format of your text and where you line-wrap.

I'm not sure I can get past the Slim Girl's Box, and for some reason I keep reading it as Slime Girl, not Slim Girl, so maybe the entire product line needs revision.

  I hope you have a nice day and thank you for your time.

No problem, my bills in the mail.

  Best regards;

  Sharon Rottino
  Web Marketing Consultant
  sharon.rottino@##########

...and I refuse to make a cheap joke about a spammer with a surname that sounds like Rot In O.

Who views my photos, why, how often, what brings them here?

Every day or so I check with Flickr to see what is being viewed the most, and what has been viewed the most overall.

Oddly, my most viewed image has more than ten times the views of the next most viewed, and to me is a fairly boring bland photo. Linking to it here would only drive the view count up higher, so I won't!

  New office desk, just like the old office desk
  1760 views / Nobody counts New office desk, just like the old
  office desk as a favorite / 0 comments

It hasn't been there a great deal of time more than other photos, it's only posted to one group, nobody posts comments on it and I have no idea why it gets viewed so often. Any ideas?

Next on the list

  10/365 - Dad, are you sure this is an approved baby carrier?
  116 views / 1 person counts this as a favorite / 1 comment

Now I can see why number two is popular, but not number one. Very puzzling.

Generally the most recently posted photos get a few views, I guess from my friends and contacts as they popup in feed-readers and various "what's new" lists, but oddities stand out and I'd love to know what causes them. Surges of interest seem to come and go; one day it'll be tandem bicycles, the next Milford sound, the day after that any parrots. Topical subjects in the news, both very local and world-wide, act as triggers, the PBS/RRR Community Cup and Melburn-Roobaix both kicked off an interest as their times of year came arond. Of course this posting itself will have an effect, you can't measure something without affecting whatever it is you're measuring….

Tinkering about I add tags here and there and have found that the more, and better, tags that photos have then the more likely it will to be viewed — hardly surprising, it means people can find it. They're tagged, and where appropriate I try and find machine tags to add, and nearly all have latitude and longitude information in the EXIF data and in the geo-tags and can be found on the Flickr map.

Photos of the two weeks in China seem to attract a continual low-level interest, but nobody ever leaves comments on them so I have no idea who is looking at them.

All in all its a fascinating insight into what appeals to others, from a set of photos that vary wildly in quality and interest.

I guess being a Tritschler I tend to overlook the other half of my family tree, I know a little about mum's family, but not a lot of detail. Wonderful to read a little about Grandad Barker from Gina then:

...My father died in 1987, my mother in 1980. So long ago. They were 'older' parents and I am the youngest and I envy people who still have their parents - take care of them, one day you will miss them as much as I miss mine. My Father was a wonderful man, Reginald Barker was his name and he started his working life as an engineer in a factory but played in his own band at weekends. Eventually the music took over and through huge talent and a series of leaps, he ended up a professional musician playing at The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden for 25 years. I wish I'd asked him more about his early life, do it now everyone, before it's too late.

He was born and lived in Leytonstone, East London and his father was an entertainer too. It was in the blood. Daddy also had a great bass singing voice and could play most instruments he picked up. He originally played the trumpet in his own band but mostly played timpani and percussion. We had a whole room at our house filled with his instruments. Huge kettle drums, tubular bells, a xylophone and glockenspiel, cymbals, all sorts. He had a wonderful bird whistle that you filled with water. You had to blow down it and it made a marvellous sounds. I loved it.

His nickname for me was Whizzer. Sadly he developed Parkinson's Disease in his later life and it robbed him of a happy retirement and the medication made him miserable and depressed. So unfair for a man who had so much talent. I could write much more about him, maybe another time. I still miss his raucous laughter and his deep resonant speaking voice.

Being part of a household that watches approximately an hour of television a week, at most, I've mostly ignored all the shiny new Australian digital TV channels showing the same old crud with the same overbearing ads and deliberate schedule slippage to render any recordings unusable. In the words of the TV executive, “We're not in the business of letting people not watch ads.”

All of a sudden a deadline emerged, mid-July, the Tour de France, this year SBS will be broadcasting their coverage on SBS2 — their digital channel. Much head-scratching occurred, reviews were perused, some catalogues were read. What do we want? We've got a wide-screen TV, albeit CRT, but the venerable TEAC still does the job. A digital receiver, yes. A hard-disk recorder, yes. Access on the home network? Backup copies of our other data? Photo store?

The LaCie cinema looked attractive, certainly physically attractive, but very expensive and reviews tend to indicate that they've got noisy fans. Back to the studying of the literature….

DViCO TVIX HD M-6500A, what a mouthful of letters and numbers, but the specs looked OK, the reviews sound good, the price seemed reasonable. Thank you Mr Rudd, I'll be spending that stimulus of yours, yet more money flowing from Australia to Asia, Korea this time, http://www.tvix.co.kr/ to be exact. EYO technologies in Sydney helped lighten my wallet, no less than three progress emails to tell me the steps my order was taking along the way and then 24 hours later the box is at the door.

First impressions? as always; the good, the bad and the ugly.

Neither good, bad nor ugly, but to quote the immortal words — as the actress said to the bishop — “Its a lot smaller than I expected.” It looked physically bigger in the images and I lazily didn't measure out the dimensions that it said on the brochure.

Neither the hard disk nor the HD tuner was installed in the main unit, but installation is dead simple and they slot together without screws or any other fasteners. So far so good….

The HDTV receiver was trivially easy to setup, the display rock-solid and far better than our analogue TV reception — and the antenna cable it is plugged into simply vanishes into the wall and I've no idea what on the roof it is attached to, or where the antenna points.

Manuals? As with most consumer electronics now you don't get one, just a CD and you're on your own to go and print the 68 pages yourself.

Now for the ugly, the on-screen display is woeful on our TV screen. I almost gave myself a headache navigating through the menus and setting the system up. Not sure if it just simply isn't designed to work with an analogue TV — but if that's the case then don't sell it as something that is! The on-screen display of the TV itself is fine, as is the menus from the DVD/VCR and the old X-box, but with the 6500A you'd better have the manual in front of you to help guess what the words and numbers are.

The bad? Wifi support only with a third-party USB dongle plugged in the back — a dongle I haven't got yet — and I couldn't get the wired network to work. Connects easily enough as an external USB drive which let me transfer all this year's photos, all my old scanned APS photos, and a handful of DivX videos for testing. The JPEG software simply cannot handle two-thirds of my photos, I've no idea if they're too big, or if the EXIF and/or IPTC headers confuse it, but the majority of my photos simply display a black screen, timeout and move on to the next photo that simply displays a black screen. No problems viewing them on websites or under Windows, Mac OS or Linux, just on a media player that can't display media….

To finish, I suspect that the user interface to setting up scheduled daily recordings is going to be difficult. Appears to be more of a media player with TV and recorder functionality tacked on over the top, and I'm starting to have my doubts….

Revisited:

2009-Jul-05: Watching the first recording of the prologue of Le Tour, all is well until we get to the first ad break. Press the fast-forward, 2x — then again — 4x, 8x... wait for the ad to pass, press Pause/Play and it jumps back to before the ad-break we've just fast-forwarded through! What the? Try again, this time the pause button won't work until we're well into the next part of the coverage, but once again play sends us back to before the ad-break!

Trying other button combinations, the "Up" and "Down" arrows are meant to jump 15 seconds forwards and backwards, they show a graphic on the screen saying that this is what they're doing, but they both jump about 5 minutes backwards through the coverage!

The manual(s) are of absolutely no help, pathetic Engrish, and the only mention of the functions of the remote is "navigation buttons" with no indication of how to use them or what each button does.

Come on, this software isn't even beta-test software, it DOES NOT WORK, this is not a commercially viable product!

Summary: As a consumer product the DViCO TVIX HD M-6500A is unusable crap.

2009-Jul-06: Ok, I've updated the firmware to 1.3.137 and things are a little bit better — but only a little. Instead of being totally unusable it is now only mostly irritating. Fast-forward now seems to go 2x, 8x, 32x and exiting from fast-forward to play usually goes to where it should — although it still sometimes leaps backwards five, ten or fifteen minutes! The up and down arrows still show the jump forwards/jump backwards graphics and this time they sometimes do what they say, although most of the time the forward button does nothing and the backwards one goes back more than the ten or fifteen seconds it says.

Summary: As a consumer product the DViCO TVIX HD M-6500A is half-usable crap.

Oh dear, oh dear. Can't tell their h1n1 from their hini. Can someone please get them a clue, or maybe even fix their spell checker.

Update on HINI 09 influenza

Following a significant increase in the number of confirmed cases of HINI 09 in Victoria

:

It is important that staff and students act responsibly in the interests of their own and their colleague’s health. If you are unwell and think that you may have flu-like symptoms, it is important you consult your own local doctor immediately and do not come to University until your doctor advises it is appropriate to do so.

That last paragraph really bugs me. The vast majority of people simply do not have a "local doctor" and cannot see "their doctor". Due to the way the health system works they go to multi-doctor health clinics where you're lucky to see the same doctor twice in any two visits, forced to sit in a waiting room with up to twenty other sick people for an hour or so, and if you don't have something contagious when you walk in, you're pretty much guaranteed of it by the time you leave.

It then goes on with an injunction to wash our hands a billion times per day, and for me to wash it every time after touching my face — surely in order to not bring the virus into contact with me I need to wash my hands before touching my face — it would do wonders for the water bill and lead to a truly stupendous amount of virus transmission as everyone rushes to the taps and the door handles; over and over and over again.

Remind me again, just how many people in Australia have died of this? Oh, that's right, none. Meanwhile 20,000 people in this country die each year of ordinary household non-catchy-named flu.

Yes, no, maybe? All the little 10" netbooks are attractive, but it seems that the more I look into it the more my options diverge, rather than converge to a model that I'm happy with. US prices on assorted models seem to be:

Model	$US
Samsung NC10	$399
Dell Mini 10	$349
Asus 1000HE	$385
Acer Aspire one	$349
MSI Wind	$329

Australian prices range from $550 to $800 as far as I can tell, with a lot more variation.

It passed like a blur at times, like a glacier at others. From zero to one in twelve months. From a baby to a toddler, albeit a toddler who doesn't quite toddle… yet.

Two more weeks before I manage to make time to myself to even write this up, two weeks since one year since 2008-May-08.

New beginnings, a change in work arrangements with both of us working three days a week and me working one of those three at home. Split child minding with me on duty Monday to Wednesday and somewhere shoe-horning a day's work into the hours between leaving work on Friday evening and getting back there the following Thursday. So far, so good….

So many beautiful lonely Russian ladies writing to me. I'm so sorry girls, I just can't seem to find the time to get back to you all individually. As a homage, here's a photomontage of all those pretty pictures you keep sending:

Having rebuilt my home PC and started the laborious job of reinstallation and reconfiguration, I thought I'd better check with BigPond to see how many megabytes the patches and updates had cost me. A simple task? Of course not. Nothing is ever simple or easy with BigPond, nothing other than being billed that is. Splat across the homepage of http://my.bigpond.com is the following, in place of the dialog boxes that are supposed to let me login:

  Member Login
  Trouble with Login?

Active Server Pages error 'ASP 0113'

Script timed out

/homepage/default.asp

The maximum amount of time for a script to execute was exceeded. You can change this limit by specifying a new value for the property Server.ScriptTimeout or by changing the value in the IIS administration tools.

It went clack, clack, clack, clack, CLACK. Then it stopped.

Part way through a very ordinary ubuntu package upgrade the hard disk in fafnir made an horrendous sound and the PC froze. It wouldn't respond to a soft restart, it wouldn't respond to a hard reset, it wouldn't even come back up after powering off and on. The hard disk has had it. A single consumer-grade IDE disk running almost continually in a desktop machine since about June 2004, what can I say, it was bound to fail eventually.

Now about those backups and my personal disaster recovery plans….

I'm helping to clean up, fix up and conserve the environment. Come along to the 'Operation Oakleigh' Clean Up Day and help us to make Oakleigh shine. There will be a free BBQ for volunteers and prizes to be won.

So says the effusive little introduction from the co-ordinator of the “Cleanup Oakleigh” group of “Cleanup Australia Day.” What, you didn't know that it was “Cleanup Australia Day” today? That's funny, neither did I. No advertising, no signs, no mention anywhere. Pure luck that I heard a mention of the Surf-riders' association doing a cleanup on a beach today as part of it all and a suggestion to lookup your local area on the website — http://www.cleanup.org.au/ — if you were interested in helping.

The entire railway reserve from one end of the suburb to the other is ankle deep in rubbish, every road and footpath in the suburb is full of crap, every time I walk to the shops I seem to end up picking up bottles or newspapers and putting them in the bins; but today for a special event they've nominated a nice clean and tidy park — with playground for the children and easily accessible barbecues for afterwards — as the big site to “clean up.” Forgive my cynicism, but the three blokes I watched standing about drinking take-away coffees for half an hour then getting a rubbish bag out and directing the two kids from the local Air League squadron to pick up a few cans and plastic cups all seemed a bit of a joke.

Cameron and I had headed over to the park for a play on the swings and maybe to join in the cleanup, but as it was we just spent our three-quarters of an hour watching nothing happen, then went home for a nap and a coffee respectively.

Maybe next year I can direct them to the piles of paint cans, mangled pieces of furniture, builders' rubble and destroyed shopping trolleys that have been sitting along Haughton road for the last four years. On the other hand the locations that do need cleaning up aren't so good for photo opportunities and barbecues afterwards….

Yay, finally! After four months of battling “Ubuntu who knows best,” I've finally managed to convince it to reinstall a current NVidia driver that works on my PC and gives me back the 1280x1024 resolution that I'd been using for four or five years! For some reason the 8.10 upgrade had removed all traces of the NVidia packages and refused to recognise that I had hardware that could use them.

Now if only I can get it to fix my local cyrus IMAP installation that also went belly-up with the Ubuntu 8.10 “upgrade.”

Only two more months until the Ubuntu 9.04 “upgrade” happens and I find out what wonders it manages to break….

http://www.9gridchan.org

Building a decentralized grid with Plan 9 and Inferno

http://j.9souldier.org/

If a centipede loses one leg, he can still walk; if he loses a hundred legs, he can still squirm.

http://graverobbers.blogspot.com/

This site contains a collection of articles about Plan 9, Inferno and the technology transfer of their technologies to other platforms such as Linux. It will include articles about ongoing development, novel applications, and step-by-step tutorials on using the various technologies.

No thank you Senator Conroy, I do not want mandatory internet filtering of all Internet content in Australia, slowing everything, especially when the blacklist that is filtered is a secret from the very people it is "protecting". Communist China filters the internet to "protect its people," lets not have that sort of protection from our government.

Around and around we go; Connex and Monash City Council, Monash City Council and Connex....

Every couple of weeks someone decides to ignore the no parking signs, to ignore the huge white markings on the ground, to ignore the fact that they're blocking the footpath and bike path, and decides to park illegally at the end of the Oakleigh station car-park. Anyone on foot who is skinny enough can squeeze past, anyone on a bike, with a pram or shopping trolley or who is fatter than average either cannot get past at all, or has to scrape along the side of the idiot's car. The council — Monash City Council — seem to ignore this and rarely police the car-park and even more rarely book the cars. Understandably, a number of people on foot or on bikes get annoyed, but unfortunately a lot of them take it out by ripping the mirrors and wipers off the offending car, an act that is hardly likely to give the driver charitable thoughts towards the next cyclist they meet.

One too many cars parked here, this morning I rang up Monash City Council and spoke to their “local laws” officer and asked to have the offending cars ticketed. As usual, whenever I speak with the council a Kafkaesque miasma descends. The staff member I spoke with insisted that the car-park is a railway car-park and is the operated and policed by Connex, and that the council is not allowed to enter it and issue any tickets. OK I thought, I'll just ring Connex… ha ha, not so easy. After the usual voice mail menus and irritations I got to a human and they insisted most strenuously that Connex is only responsible for the car-park and surrounds — an area that I have never seen them clean or maintain, but that's another problem — and that only the local councils are legally allowed to issue parking tickets and that I will have to speak with the council. Pointing out to Connex that this was the opposite of what the council said I was politely told “Not our responsibility.” So thank you everyone, thank you for buck passing.

At least I know that at some stage in the past the council has got off their lazy arse and booked at least one car that parked there, I've got a photo of it from back in September 2007!

Oh well, here's hoping that either the council starts to book them or a few cars get torched, maybe then people might stop parking there!

I don't know what I want to say, how I'm feeling, its all just a bit numbing.

Bushfires are a normally just a part of the Australian summer, eucalypts and the bush burn. On this scale though, and with all this warning so many deaths?

Two weeks ago Melbourne's weather set a record for three days in a row over 43°C, then on Saturday another record with the hottest day ever at 46.4°C — and with howling hot winds, fires broke out all over the state and continued through the night. Sunday in Melbourne was grey and cool and drizzled with rain, but just out of the city to the north the fires raged on and now 108 are confirmed dead.

Places I'm familiar with have been devastated, a map in the paper shows one of our cycling routes; Wittlesea, Humevale, Kinglake and St Andrews, only in this case each town is accompanied by a number, the number of people confirmed dead.

• http://www.abc.net.au/news/events/bushfires/

http://abandonedshoe.blogspot.com/

“Haven't you ever spotted them and thought; where are the owners? Do they not know or notice that they lost a shoe? Did the parent of that baby shoe feel sad at the loss? I recently began taking photographs of the phenomenon. So please do take that photograph next time you spot an abandoned shoe, then email to abandonedshoe@googlemail.com with the date, time and place you found it - and any theory or words you'd like to share with the readers of this blog!”

http://abandonedshoe.blogspot.com/

“Mysterious doorways, curious windows, fascinating glimpses and interesting signs... all those moments that make 'enchanted glimpses' when out in the world.”

Given the enormous number of toys that young Cam has to play with, what do you think would be his favourite things? Is it the stacking cups, the boxes, the wobbly inflatable thing, the mirror or the rings?

Of course not. Like kids everywhere he has more fun with the cardboard box than with the toy that it contained. Having stocked the house with far too many baby toys he finds the most fascinating things are; the track pump, a length of aluminium tubing, the cast-iron door-stopper, the door itself and the rattly handles on the coffee-table drawers.

Three days of ridiculously hot weather have ended, three days in a row with a maximum temperature over 43°C; 43°C on Wednesday, 44°C on Thursday, then 45.1°C on Friday. Records have been broken, together with some of Melbourne's infrastructure, tempers and a few too many lives.

Walking around Oakleigh and Murrumbeena this afternoon the grass is brown and crisp and covered in leaves, every second tree has shed its leaves to conserve water — some of the eucalypts have shed branches too. Half a dozen dead ringtail possums were lying on the ground through the park, a dead Tawny frogmouths (Podargus strigoides) on the ground under its nest, parent bird a stock-still silhouette against the sky above. If it hadn't been for the dead fledgling we'd have walked past and never spotted it.

Back home the lemon tree has dropped all its lemons and strange burning smells came from my ADSL modem, the BigPond SpeedStream has always been a lousy performer in the heat, this week the wireless simply shutdown — amazingly it recovered after being switched off and allowed to cool down. Hopefully the scorched leaves and wilted plants will recover after they've been allowed to cool and rehydrate….

Following on from yesterday it was uncredibly hot overnight, I slept with the windows open but as it only dropped to an overnight low of 28.7°C it was just as hot inside as out, a little less stuffy but more light and noise from the street.

Third hottest Melbourne night on record with an overnight low of 28.7°C; 1902-Feb-01 was hottest at 30.5°C followed by 1997-Jan-21 with 28.8°C. I wonder how hot it really was in our house? The old OneWire weather station seems to think it dropped to around 21°C, lying on its side on the tiles in the kitchen — maybe that's where I should have slept!

As the day wore on our office stayed cool, although the air-conditioning in various other places broke down and staff were sent home. Power consumption throughout Victoria hit new records as every man and his dog cranked their air-conditioners up… endless suburbs of big brick boxes of houses with poor design, no shade, little insulation and the assumption that heating and cooling can all be done as an after thought with power-hungry equipment.

From http://business.theage.com.au/business/power-hits-dangerous-low-20090129-7scr.html

Victorian power demand has hit a new record today, depleting electricity reserves to critical lows, as the state sweats through a summer heatwave.

Demand on the state's electrical grid exceeded 10,000 megawatts for the second consecutive daily cycle, dropping the excess power on the grid to zero before hovering around the 1% mark, according to power-monitoring service Global Roam.

Odd that I clearly recall a statement on Monday by the premier that there would be at least 10% capacity available on top of any anticipated maximum peak demand this week….

I wonder if the power will be on when I get home?

Oh look, and the train system is melting:

…198 trains cancelled by 4pm and services suspended on three lines.

Between an asset-stripping kind of privatisation to Connex, decades of government neglect and go-slow unionism the whole debacle grinds to a halt. Connex blames the government and the rail unions, the unions blame the government and Connex, and the government blame previous governments. Tracks buckle, trains have air-conditioners that only work up to 35°C, and unionised train drivers pull trains from service for a range of faults, too technical to be explained to the lay person but sufficient to make the operators and the government look bad. Public transport to be free for the next two days, not that it'll help everyday commuters who have weekly or monthly tickets, if there is no public transport available due to breakdowns in the heat!

Second day of cycling home in 43 degrees, I really wouldn't want to make a habit of it. A couple of cars broken down in the heat, a V/Line train crawling along at dead-slow, a few motorists in their air-conditioned boxes either dazed and confused or just plain 'ol grumpy. Home at last, a trifle cooler inside than out, some clouds on the horizon starting to promise a possible change later….

Stupidly hot today, the rest of the family escaped to the coast leaving me to get hot and grumpy by myself, rather than hot and grumpy in the company of others — something that is never pleasant for the others.

I'd gone in to work earlier than normal as the temperature was already climbing towards, or maybe even past, 30°C but its still simpler and quicker to ride in slowly for fifteen minutes than to take walk to the station, catch a train, wait at the station, catch a bus, then walk ten minutes to get to work.

During the day people seemed to spend half their time watching the temperature climb inexorably upwards — apparently if we have three days in a row of 43°C or more it'll set a record for Melbourne.

Hanging around after work wasn't making it cool down, turns out the highest temperature of the day was at 18:15! I think it was around 42°C when I rode home, slowly, carefully, and frequently squirting myself with the drink bottle.

+1 : Successfully avoided all unthinking drivers on the way home

-1: Assumed cyclist in front of me was going straight ahead on "preferred cycle route"

-2: Assumed cyclist in front of me would indicate if about to turn right,

-3: Assumed cyclist in front of me would do head check before turning right just in case there was any traffic behind him.

-4: Assumed cyclist in front of me heard me call out “g'day” as I started to come up behind him.

BANG, cyclist in front of me brakes suddenly and does hard right “flick left, turn right, looks cool on the off-road videos,” kind of turn from the left-hand car wheel track on the road while I'm in the right-hand car wheel track.

THUMP. I'm lying on the road, bloody knees and elbows, cricked neck, sprained wrists, and a large solid mountain biker is saying “Sorry mate, I was listening for cars.”

Ouch. Damn. Damn. Damn.

Insufficient care was taken.

Monash City Council rang up today to verify that the rubbish dumping report that I made to the EPA that the EPA then gave to the council was a report that I wished the council to hand to their local laws officers to actually do something about.

I have no idea why they make this so hard. The Red-Cross donation bins have a sign on them, the sign says to only place items in the bins and that anything outside the bins is dumped and should be reported to the EPA. I watched someone dump a boot-load of crap next to the bin. Ring the EPA to report it and they say it should go to the council!. The EPA then "help" by handing the report to the council. Then the council ring and see if you want the report acted on.

As an aside I also pointed out to Monash council that the signs that they put up all along the railway telling people to report dumped rubbish to the EPA all have the wrong phone number on them — a number that doesn't exist! Apparently this will be reported to the supervisor.

2009-Jan-29: I've now had a phone call from the local laws officer and have to make an appointment with him to make a statement so that they can take it to court! It just goes on getting harder and harder….

Thought for the day: If you ride a tandem bicycle with only one person on it you will be subject to endless strange looks and wise-cracking comments from passers-by about the empty seat. Meanwhile, you'll be surrounded by cars all with four or more seats, mostly empty and containing just one driver….

Prompted by: http://www.melbournecyclist.com/profiles/blogs/double-tandem-standards

Back in October I upgraded my Ubuntu system from 8.04 to 8.10 and as seems to happen far too often, once again something went wrong. This time it removed the nvidia support that has been running for years and all of a sudden I can only run X at a resolution of 1152x864 instead of 1280x1024.

Far more important though, the LVM system that, once-again, I have been successfully using for a couple of years and a couple of upgrades has now been rendered unbootable. For some reason the new kernels that are installed keep on generating initrd images that will not support a root filesystem in LVM.

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-2.6.28-4-generic
Running depmod.
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-4-generic
W:copy_exec: Not copying /sbin/lvm to $DESTDIR/sbin/lvm, which is already a copy of /lib/lvm-200/lvm
Not updating initrd symbolic links since we are being updated/reinstalled
(2.6.28-4.9 was configured last, according to dpkg)
Not updating image symbolic links since we are being updated/reinstalled
(2.6.28-4.9 was configured last, according to dpkg)
Running postinst hook script /sbin/update-grub.
Searching for GRUB installation directory ... found: /boot/grub
/usr/sbin/update-grub: line 297: /sbin/vol_id: No such file or directory
Searching for default file ... found: /boot/grub/default
Testing for an existing GRUB menu.lst file ... found: /boot/grub/menu.lst
Searching for splash image ... found: (hd0,0)/grub/splashimages/debsplash.xpm.gz

Found kernel: /vmlinuz-2.6.28-4-generic
Found kernel: /vmlinuz-2.6.27-7-generic
Found kernel: /memtest86+.bin
Updating /boot/grub/menu.lst ... done

Examining /etc/kernel/postinst.d.
run-parts: executing /etc/kernel/postinst.d/dkms
run-parts: executing /etc/kernel/postinst.d/nvidia-common

I finally worked around it by moving the root partition back out of LVM and onto /dev/sda2, which was still unused since my migration off physical partitions and into LVM back in May 2006!

Revisited 2009-Feb-24: Finally fixed the NVidia display after four months!

First post of the year…
First work day of the year…
First bicycle commute of the year…
First puncture of the year.
Bugger.