ajft

Its a toss-up really, of the businesses in Haughton road who back onto our street — Mill road — who dumps the most crap in the street? They all seem to consider the public street to be their private property, according to the council residents have to keep their bins off the street but apparently the businesses on the other side of the road are above all that, they can just dump crap where ever they want with impunity and leave their bins out all year long.

Is it Jaanz School of Singing, who for five years have left their bins blocking half the footpath and every couple of months just dump all their crap on the road and path somewhere near the bins?

Next one along is the empty building where a great deal of work is going on trying to create a new business — The Sweet Greek — you have to feel a little sorry for them, trying to drum up customers with a street frontage looking like the local landfill.

Then we get to Scott's Old Auto Rubber, less frequent offenders, but usually a bigger mass of timber crates or oily old packing boxes? Maybe its the owner of the building and not the occupants, maybe its fairies from under the cabbages, but the current crop of crates, old furniture and decomposing garden fence has been blocking half the path since sometime back in November — funnily enough, the contractors who empty the wheely bins won't touch it since — IT ISN'T IN THE BIN.

I'm not sure who the winner is. Even when this lot all do use their bins we end up with a street full of garbage because they've ripped the lids off all the business wheely bins — presumably to balance more garbage in them — so the rats, possums, crows and passing drunks all manage to throw garbage out on the street. I do know who the losers are, the residents, their rates sucked into a black-hole.

Of course Monash City Council turn a blind eye — letters go unanswered, phone calls elicit an offer “to look into it”. Dumping your crap on the street, in the park, on the nature-strip or along the railway line seems to be a way of life in Oakleigh.

Back in June 2001 I cycled through an odd part of Dorset in England, the deserted fields and villages of the army range between East Lulworth and Swanage. Very peaceful and post-appocalyptic and a place I'd love to revisit with a camera to take more photos! Since then I've read more about the area and wish I'd taken the time to detour to Tyneham. Why the post? Well this evening an article in the news caught my eye and had me looking back through my journal and the scruffy old A-Z map of the UK that I used when touring. Courtesy of The Independent:

Lingering ghosts of a long-dead England

Tyneham in Dorset was already a museum piece when it was shut down during the Second World War. It never reopened

By David Randall

There'll be another burial in the village next week. Arthur Grant's ashes will be interred in the churchyard at Tyneham in Dorset. He left more than 60 years ago, but now the last of him will return to the village that laid down its life for the Second World War.

...

After failing to go for my ceremonial last ride of the year yesterday — something I've managed to do when I can on December 31 each year — I took myself out on the bike today.

First bike ride of the year; an easy 38km ride from Lorne out along the Great Ocean Road to Wye river, on for a couple more headlands, stop and look at the ocean for a while, then turn around and make my way home. An inauspicious start as I was knocked over by a woman in a station waggon in bumper-to-bumper 5km/hr traffic in Lorne — she turned left into a parking spot as I was alongside her without looking or indicating — she stopped pretty quick from my yelling and hammering on the door. Once I extricated myself and the bike from between her and the car next to it the rest of the ride was almost event-free.

The Great Ocean Road was its usual mix of spectacular views and mind-bogglingly stupid motorists; highlights being a mix of foreign tourists in unfamiliar tiny hire-cars who don't believe they can squeeze past a bicycle, Aussie holiday-makers in 4WDs who don't care and go roaring past an inch from my elbow, retirees towing caravans and forgetting that the van is wider than the car trying to remove my elbow — they are a minority, but its the oddities that get remembered. Thankfully, at least 99% of the drivers either ignore — or are ignorant of — the law about crossing the centre lines, and pull onto the opposite side of the road to pass, so that magnificent piece of new road rules that makes Victoria's roads more dangerous for cyclists doesn't come into play¹.

Nothing too strenuous, nothing too complicated, but more riding than I've done for some time, what with only commuting to work two days a week and having the rest of my time fully occupied with toddler-wrangling. Not that I'm making any new-year resolutions or anything, but I'm certainly planning on spending a little more time on my bike — or bikes — during 2010 than I did during 2009!

Here, according to my nearly-always-present Garmin Edge 705, is a summary of 2009's not so impressive cycling:

Count	383 Activities
Distance	2,342.48 km
Time	127:46:21 h:m:s
Elevation Gain	20,820 m
Avg Speed	18.3 km/h
Avg HR	145 bpm
Avg Run Cadence	—
Avg Bike Cadence	—
Calories2	87,086 C

Footnote:

1. As of 2009-Nov-09 it is now illegal for a motorist to cross a single or double line to pass another vehicle. There is still an overriding requirement to "overtake safely", but given the “overtake the damn cyclist at all cost” attitudes of most of Victoria's road users I suspect motorists are now more inclined to overtake dangerously, paying more attention to not crossing a painted white-line than they do to not running cyclists off the road!

2. Meaningless, since I think they're calculated in some way based on the weight of the bike, but I manage to move my GPS between my road bike, mountain bike and the tandem, and either of the latter two could be towing 16kg of trailer and 12kg of toddler!

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.

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