ajft

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.