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Everyone loves a baby... including the government so it would seem. The government in all its myriad forms; Federal, State and Local, they all want in on the act, they're all here to help...

An inundation of glossy brochures and photocopied fact sheets, two DVDs, registering with local health care, state records, national medical insurance.

This morning the regional maternal health nurse came to visit, to record, to instruct and book us in for further visits at our "local" maternal health centre. Except it isn't our local centre, the local one is easy to get to and about four minutes walk — we've been allocated to one that's three times as far away, and on the far side of a six-lane main road. At least we managed to get reallocated, then had to sit and listen to about half an hour of an interesting mix of useful advice, the bleeding obvious, and what I think are personal opinions, all mixed in as one. She handed over a great sheaf of photocopies of local guvment advice, then carefully took her pen and crossed some bits out and made her own annotations. I guess that like all free advice, its worth what we pay for it.

Paperwork step one, register the baby with the Victorian Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages. You have two months, and if you do not all sorts of dire things will happen. Hating to be caught with an unlicensed baby, we leap at the chance to placate the government.

This one's not so bad, just four pages of questions that must be filled in, then signatures from both parents, both witnessed. One of the nurses from the hospital had told us we're allowed to witness each other's signatures, so we did. On the back of the form we then found a footnote saying that we're not allowed to witness each other's signatures. Oh well, we'll send it off and see what happens. Now on to the next one...

Half-way through filling out the four pager paper form to register the new baby with Medicare we find that you get to a certain point and then have to do part of it either online or via the phone, then transcribe some receipt number onto the paper form in order to continue. Typically convoluted. I started by going to the website, http://familyassist.gov.au/, but of course there is absolutely no indication of what you have to do! Fumbling around found a page that looked promising, but surprise surprise, you can't go any further without "registering" and creating yet another bloody account on yet another bloody website. I started filling this out, meanwhile Jo simply picked up the phone and started to call. She'd was in touch with a person and starting the process before I'd even got the rest of the way through creating the account on the website.

Hey, dearest government, if the only websites you can make are this bloody convoluted and hard to use, PLEASE DITCH THE WEBSITES and stop pretending you have an online presence!

Second surprise; despite us having sent any number of Medicare claims in to them in the past nine months, indeed quite a few over the past three years, they claim that there's no record of us at this address! This is despite them somehow managing to send us refunds TO THIS ADDRESS for the past three years!

Anyway, after giving out a whole lot of details over the phone, we are now in possession of a magic registering number which we can enter on the paper form, together with re-entering half the details already given out over the phone! We can then send off the form where all the details will be transcribed from paper back into someone's database — hopefully without too many transcription errors.

OK, we now think the paperwork has been dealt with. What's the next surprise in store?

At 18:07 Cameron was born after a very full day. I'm now a father, I'm now very tired, I'm now over the moon, I'm now having trouble expressing myself. I'm now very busy.

Hello world, Cameron Fidel Tritschler.

We seem to see fewer and fewer movies as the years go by, after starting 2007 with the best of intentions I think seeing a couple of movies at Chadstone sitting ankle-deep in rubbish while obnoxious people talked through movies, answered their phones through movies, or played with lasers through movies, put us off for the rest of the year. Maybe 2008 will be better...

2008-Apr-23 The Painted Veil

I defy anybody to make sense of the following gibberish:

Today's enterprise network landscape incorporates numerous discrete but interrelated infrastructure elements - applications, databases, services, and hardware - and encompasses a variety of management disciplines, interfaces, tools, and dashboards. Typically, these elements are lashed together with chewing gum and baling wire. Nevertheless, the expectation is that such a patchwork assemblage will work cohesively, even though in practice the cohesion among such diverse sets of components is seldom transparent and never seamless. Run Book Automation (RBA) represents an emerging technology space architected around various sets of standards. Early adopters turn to RBA to address basic enterprise needs for coherent, end-to-end task automation across the IT landscape. These early adopters also typically seek to fill the gaps using turnkey solutions instead of patching site- or system-specific solutions together.

...with apologies to the vendor who sent it to me.

Weddings, Parties, Anything know their audience well; they're all getting older, they're all getting fatter, many of them have kids... so for the last show in the series of the ten-year reformation Christmas in April it was a matinee show. Quite odd to walk in from the bright autumn sunlight to a dark pub bandroom and see not only a room full of punters but young kids darting about here and there, dancing on whichever of the two stages wasn't currently in use, and generally putting everyone in a good mood and making them laugh.

Even the merchandising was in tune with the audience, amongst the t-shirts, Hawaian shirts, CDs, DVDs and footy scarves there were bibs for babies! Your choice, either "Weddings, Parties, Anything.. 10 year reunion", or the magnificently tongue-in-cheek titled "Spawn of the Women."

I'm no good at writing gig reviews so I'll give it a miss, they opened with Wide Open Road, I think everyone had a good time, I ran into an old friend from years back and we all left contented.

If they all jumped off a cliff would you follow? From tbray.org:

nidhogg:~$ history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s \n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head
   42	cd
   34	ls
   10	grep
    8	make
    5	svn
    5	./ftqviz.py
    4	p9
    4	./ldapstaff
    4	export
    4	du

Hmm, cd, ls, grep, make, then yesterday I was fiddling with svn for a while, trying to get hold of the source for something interesting. The pything was analysing some numbers from a system performance utility, p9 invokes the rc shell of plan9ports. Then right down at number 8 we get to an LDAP wrapper script I use for work-related porpoises!

During some browsing around this partially migrated mess that is my website I've discovered that entries from June and July 2007 seem to have vanished. Did I do that? If so, how did I do that and when did I do that?

Where did they go, and can I get them back?

There must be something about their "professional training", I really can't think of anything else to explain it.

Every day I ride up North road, usually with no problems

Every day I am passed by several hundred cars, usually with no problems.

Every day I am passed by one or two buses from other bus lines, usually with no problems.

About once a month some maniac in a Grendas bus seems to want to kill me.

January, run off the road, then told to G* F*d by Grendas management when I wrote to them.

February, abuse screamed at me by a Grenda driver for being in the adjacent lane 3m from the bus wanting to do a hook turn!

Today, 6115-A0 passed at I guess 70-80km/hr with about 10cm clearance, blew my bag off my back and helmet half off my head. Any chance of pulling out a bit into the (vacant) adjacent lane next time? At the Clayton rd/north rd set of lights I pulled up alongside the bus in the middle lane, 'cos I thought he would be pulling into the bus stop after the lights, but instead WHILE CHATTING ON THE PHONE, he swerved out half a metre into my lane while pulling away from the lights then tore off up North road and through the Dandenong road lights as they went orange to red.

[2008-Apr-08] Revisited: Hmm, maybe someone at Grenda's is getting the general idea. Maybe I just met the other 29/30 day's bus drivers who don't have a problem. This morning Mr Bus driver of 6116-A0 was quite happy to go past with over a metre clearance, even though he had to almost change lanes to do so.

Before

After

We're getting there! Slowly, every so scarily slowly, the front room is progressing from a disaster zone to a bedroom.

The floor is in, the skirting boards replaced or reattached, the timberwork has all been primed, now the walls have been painted. Carpets and curtains and painting the trim remain... and the deadline gets closer.

Now that definitely leaves a bad taste in the mouth Mr Garmin.

You purchase a GPS in good faith, one that comes with a 12 month warranty and so when it breaks you send it back to be repaired. You can't send it to Garmin since they don't have a presence in Australia, instead you have to send it to GME, who are the “sole repair and distribution centre.”

When it comes back you assume that the replacement one has a warranty, then nine or ten months later that one breaks too... that's when you discover that according to GME “they're not real reliable,” but since its a repair unit it only has a 3 month warranty and it'll cost you $AU209 to have your unrepairable GPS replaced! Staff at GME claim to be "only a repair shop" and that I have to discuss it with "Garmin Australia" if I'm not happy with the warranty, or that fact that two out of two Garmin devices have failed in under a year.

Searching about shows that there is no such entity as "Garmin Australia", all references to a Garmin presence in Australia are directed straight back to GME! Garmin's "international office" in the US won't help, since I'm not in the US, and helpfully directed me to contact Garmin South-East Asia, which have a website in Taiwan that is solely in Chinese characters.

So two years of endless firmware hangs and two broken Edge 305 GPSs can be summarised as: nice concept, crap product, crap firmware, crap warranty and crap support.

Thanks Garmin.

There I was, riding up Beddoe avenue to Monash uni. on my way to work, slowing for the roundabout, looking left, right and straight ahead for motorists, checking for ijuts riding on the footpath who shoot across in front of you, watching for some of our less knowledgeable overseas students who drive, ride or walk unpredictably or on the wrong side of the road, indicating right an' all — employing all the usual safeguards at this tiny little roundabout... then out of the blue whump

The attack of the jaywalking uni-student, he launched himself out from behind the power-pole, eyes on the ground, not looking left, not looking right. Straight into the front wheel, stopped me dead as I flipped up and over and down ontop of the bike. He apologised profusely, claimed he only looked for cars, left me a scrawled name and phone number and continued on his way.

The road bike is now unridable until I get new handlebars, and since the forecast is for 39°C it'll be a hot walk home.

Miscellaneous small bruises, and aching shoulders and wrists from the hand-stand in the middle of the road, but thankfully no major damage.

Yet another in the endless daily stream of people not watching where they're going, and finally the odds caught up with me and I failed to avoid him.

Playing around with google Docs. I can't seem to find a way to make an X-Y chart that has a date along the bottom. That graph should be from September 2002 to March 2008, but I can't figure out how to make the dates appear.

What's in a name? An awful lot it appears... especially if you're seven months pregnant, don't know the sex of the baby and have no real idea of what to call it.

Canvassing some outside assistance we appealed to the nieces on the weekend; according to one set of twins our options now seem to include Charlotte and Prancer — from Saddle Club I believe — try explaining that one to the kid when they're at school “Mummy, why am I called a reindeer name?” The other twins are quite firm in their belief that only babies have names, “It can't have a name while its still a lump inside, silly!” The silly aunt and uncle retired, suitably chastised.

Nephews had previously proposed Ann and Zac for a girl or a boy respectively, an impressive pun on the due date of April 25 (ANZAC day).

Driving home we thought that Reality was a good option, similar in style to a lot of translated African and Asian names that seem to sound slightly odd in English, but open to any number of puns like “You can't handle Reality...” and “There's no escape from Reality.”

Boy, Girl, Giraffe? Who knows. Currently known by the temporary name of Marty monster and apparently trying out for early admission to the Socceroos as striker.

Ugh, why did I volunteer for this? I admit it, I was hoping that BV's offer would put me on North road so I could see first hand just how few people really use the useless "bicycle lane". “Volunteer to take part in a bicycle commuter survey, tell us where you live and work and we'll place you somewhere nearby”. I volunteered, I specified Oakleigh and Clayton — 5km apart — they put me down on the Nepean highway 10km away in Moorabbin in the opposite direction!

So, a free orange tee-shirt in size extra-bed-sheet large and a $50 donation to the bicycle user group of my choice. That's what I get for standing on the corner of Nepean highway and South road for two hours being deafened by truckages. Below follows a very unscientific summary of two hours of my life from 7:00 to 9:00a.m. this morning:

One cyclist said hello, but she's a friend and she recognised me.

One commodore, 6:55am, P-plates, three lads, front passenger screamed C*#NT! while rear passenger spat out the window — I retired to higher ground in case they returned.

There is no coffee, bakery or toilets nearby.

Bicycle Victoria supplies nice neat sheets showing four roads and Left/right/straight for each of those four roads — 12 combinations to tick for each rider.

Melbourne supplies cyclists who ride up the footpath, the wrong way up feeder lanes, or diagonally across arbitrary combinations of pedestrian crossing and road — this makes ticking the tick boxes more interesting and open to interpretation.

In every given 15 minute period I saw more motorists illegally on the phone than I saw in cyclists.

128 cyclists in 2 hours, 1 recumbent, no penny farthings, 1 cyclist ran a red light, 7 had no helmets, 31 either arrived or left the intersection riding on the footpath.

...and surprise surprise, the most popular direction was the 41 people going straight north heading for the city.

Ah, yet again the wonders of the two newspapers. Same story, reporting the same court result, just look at the slant each gives:

Slow service killer gets 7 years

A restaurateur has been jailed for seven years for the manslaughter of a patron who complained about slow service.

...more

'Slow service' killer may be out quickly

A RESTAURATEUR who stabbed a patron to death after he complained about slow service could be free in little more than two years.

...more

So do you know what is going on in the world, or is your News Limited?

On it goes...

  Drivers find cyclists a road hazard
  from Herald Sun; State News

MORE than 60 per cent of Victorian motorists find cyclists are a road hazard, according to research carried out by insurer AAMI.

...

Anything to sell more newspapers, split the population into "us vs them", pick a minority and stir, this is the way of the little paper.

It contains such gems as "47 per cent of Victorian car drivers have had a close call with a cyclist", but somehow seems to neglect to ask what percentage of motorists have had a close call with another motorist.

Amazingly, in amongst all the diatribe and hate-mail posted in the feedback and followups, a few voices of reason have been allowed to be printed, and not (yet) removed by the editors.

Still the aggro continues.

Seems some bright spark decided a little vigilante action was called for on the weekend and spread tacks on Beach road, in amongst the reports from the police calling it callous, stupid and dangerous, and yet more diatribe offering to simply kill people on bikes, someone came up with this gem:

We may have finally found a use for all those new terrorism laws the Howard government was so keen on.

Provided we use the basic definition of a terrorist act as violence against civilians used in the persuit(sic) of a political aim (in this case getting bikes of Beach rd), then this should fit the bill.

So it goes on....

Meanwhile, outside it is magnficent late summer weather just perfect for cycling, the sun is out, its not too hot or too cold and there's not much wind, but inside, malignant spirits attack their keyboards and vent their spleens.

For the first day of semester it was amazingly uneventful; the mass of bods queued up for the bus at Huntingdale station delayed the bus for so long that I'd made it the entire way to Monash uni without being caught and buzzed by a number 900 "smart bus"

One brief hair-raising moment came in the carparks of the uni; the self-important security staff standing in the middle of the roads "guiding" traffic, telling people who wanted to turn left to turn left, telling people who wanted to go straight ahead to... um, go straight ahead. Unfortunately one of these geniuses told someone driving towards me to turn right straight across my path, then spun around and laughed as I slid to a stop to avoid going over the bonnet. A little traffic management training would be helpful guys...

Looking forward to my first encounter with "new student in shiny car going wrong way round ring road", it happens each year, somewhere before week 3...

Worst part of the day was the coffee machine — nearly three months old and its out of action again. Couldn't possibly be due to the rather haphazard weekly cleaning its been subjected to, could it?

I'd love to believe that Garmin's Edge 305 is a great piece of equipment, but unfortunately my experiences with the device — two so far — have left me unconvinced.

From day one it has been subject to battery draining hangs if you don't switch it off and disconnect it from the PC in precisely the right order, and even then sometimes it'll just hang. You get into the habit of switching off, unplugging, then switching it back on briefly just to check. A number of firmware updates haven't cured the problem, perhaps lessening the frequency though. Its the only USB device I've ever heard of that has this problem.

Another design flaw seems to be a loose mounting bracket and a mount almost at one end — it always seemed wobbly and eventually my first one fell out when I hit a bump and smashed the display. Just under ten months life for that one.

Four weeks later I received a replacement, still subject to the software hangs.

Nearly ten months into the life of the second unit, in early December 2007, and I noticed that one of the buttons didn't work anymore, but I don't tend to use the up/down arrows so I've no idea how long that was the case, then a few weeks later it started to randomly turn itself off if I hit a bump in the road. I resisted sending it back to GME until after the Alpine Classic in late January, then today posted it off for repair or replacement.

Now the wait, hopefully not another four weeks, until I get it back. A dodgy product or just bad luck and two bad items?

Updated: Ah damn, I guess I should have read all the data off it before I shipped it off, I think it unlikely that they'll send it back with the memory still full, especially if it gets replaced. Oh no, I've lost all records of my commutes since Feb. 8!