ajft

Friday; work goes crazy, petrol prices go up. The latter happens every Friday, the former, only on the Fridays near to the start of semester.

Well pleased with myself — my mum gave us a calendar this year that has a different pasta recipe for each month of the year. Jo and I joked that we had to make each month's recipe before the end of that month... we've made it so far! Today was ???, made with only a few minor alterations to things that I couldn't locate in the kitchen. It tasted great, and preparing it was a wonderful way to unwind from the hassles of the day.

Sat around this evening listening to one of my favourite shows on RRR — I'm completely in awe of Neil Rogers, the man's depth of knowledge of Australian music is amazing. Today he's celebrating 20 years of the show he's been presenting, and playing an amazing selection of music from bands I'ld almost forgotten about. Songs from the Thought Criminals and Do-Re-Mi, I could recognize them, and had the names of the tip of my tongue, but couldn't quite name any of them... Jo was chuckling at my reminisces.

Another hot day — 37°C late this afternoon, but luckily it cooled down a lot by the time I rode home. It was even trying to rain... A good thing too, since Jo had called me to come home and let her in the door — her keys had dissappeared and she had gone to wait in the pub.

Luckily her keys were inside, sitting on the kitchen bench where we'd left them, so it wasn't necessary to commence the long and involved “replacement of the keys process...”

I have to shake my head at the amount of “usable junk” that is thrown away every day. Its too hard or too time-consuming to sort, or to give it to someone who can make use of it, so it all just gets dumped in a hopper and crushed as rubbish. Stepping out of our building at lunch time I was confronted by a hopper half-full of old monitors, PC cases and miscellaneous computer junk...

An amusing problem with my bicycle computer surfaced this afternoon — yesterday as I carried it up the stairs, the display started flashing as though I'd hit the “set” button. I hit set again and thought no more of it.... Today, it reported that I was riding along at 58km/hr with brief bursts up to 87! I found out later that somehow my wheel diameter had changed from 1975mm to 2975mm!

I did manage to purchase some new brake shoes this evening though — no more riding along and gingerly using the rear brakes, waiting for the grating screech from the worn out front ones! A small detour after work, down Warrigal road to Mentone, then up around the bay to Pegasus for a chat and a cup of tea with William and Peter. It sounds as though they had a good time on last week's ride in Tasmania; fixed lots of bikes, met lots of people, made lots of money....

<literal><p> <a href="/2003/01/27/104-0402_img"><img class="left-floating" width="256" height="192" src="/2003/01/27/m_104-0402_img.jpg" alt="[*]"></a>

This afternoon we decided that it was time to get out of the house and complete the Lilydale to Warbutton rail trail — lazy pair that we are!

We parked at Woori-Yallock and lunched on pies from their award-winning bakery, then down to the trail to ride off along the valley — periodically checking the horizon for any signs of smoke! There are no bushfires around this part of the state, but I didn't really want to be around if one started from a cigarette out of a car window.

The trail was busy with riders of all ages and abilities, some of them not quite up to the task of riding in a straight line and keeping to the left. Families out walking as well as unrestrained dogs added to the mix.

After a cool drink in Warbutton we decided to head up the road towards Mt Donna Buang to the forest gallery lookout — from memory I thought that it was about two-thirds of the way up the mountain, and the total distance up the mountain was about 12km. I tried asking the woman in the shop who had served us, she obviously didn't know, but tried to make something up. When I asked about the forest lookout as well as the top of the mountain, she thought I must be local to the area. It turned out to be only half way, but still about eight kilometres, which was good, because by the time we got there Jo was getting grumpy at riding up the hill! Its a fantastic climb though, not particularly steep, just a never ending climb up through the mountain ash forests.

Up at the forest gallery there's a walkway from the carpark out about 40m into the tree tops 15 metres above the ground — well, the tree tops of the Beech forest anyway, the tops of the Mountan ash are well above us. The temperature drops once you walk away from the road and into the trees, it was almost uncomfortably cool standing out at the end!

Back on the bikes for the trip back down into Warbutton, the eight kilometres pass in a bit of a blur. I was well aware that my front brakes are in desperate need of new pads and was taking it easy, even so, we were just rolling down the hill at 55km/hr where on the way up, it was a steady 8km/hr!

Stupidly hot day today — a maximum of 44.1°C, extreme measures were called for in order to cope. Even early in the morning it was too hot to stay in bed so we ended up getting up earlier than during the week! We found out later that it was 30°C at 6AM!

Jo and I headed into the city and spent most of the afternoon inside Myer, looking around at wedding registry goods. I was half expecting the stores to be packed, but apparently nobody wanted to go out shopping because the outside was too hot — they were all either in their pools or inside the airconditioned malls...

There must be an enormous amount of hot air being dumped in the city — somewhere all those air-conditioners must have their outlets!

The shopping was a success, the beers afterwards a blessed relief. We dropped in to the Mountain View on Bridge road on the way home — not having been there since their renovations almost a year ago. A large selection of beers on tap, and the only place I know of that still has the James Squire ale on tap. Not much view of a mountain from their roof anymore though, the pub could probably be renamed the “Epworth Hospital View.”

[http://williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/blog.asp]

William Gibson's blog

No sign of the 37°C maximum yet, but its still early in the day...

Good news on my latest toy — an email from aagelectronica to say they've shipped my weather station. Now to wait for it to be delivered....

This must take the cake in the “nearly hitting a celebrity” stakes. I thought I had a close call a couple of years ago with Mark Seymour of Hunters and Collectors when he wobbled down the middle of the bike track, but this... (from uk.rec.cycling)

Many years ago while I was an undergraduate I was "allowed" to have a car (normally they were rightly frowned upon). I was carefully backing it out of a parking place in Harvey court in Cambridge one rainy November night, when I felt some slightly unusual resistance. I checked both mirrors, wound down the window and checked again, but seeing and hearing nothing, I assumed the brakes must have jammed , so revved up a bit, and let the clutch bite a bit deeper. Still some resistance, so I thought I'd better check again. I clambered out to find Prof Steven Hawking in his electric wheelchair, firmly attached to my rear bumper, canted over at a perilous angle, and mouthing something inaudible but nevertheless perfectly intelligible.

Lets see if we can open our email inbox without a Nigerian Business Proposal falling out... just once this week — Yay! There isn't one today.

Oh boy, all of a sudden people realised that we're getting behind schedule to deploy the new student system. Mass panic at lunch time and a call for volunteers over the long weekend so that we have a demonstrable system by Tuesday...

I've deployed the four new servers that we needed — I can't see much point in people beating their breasts and coming in martyr-like over the weekend if we don't have a definite plan of the work that needs doing.

Trials Riding

Just in case I get inspired to try a few stunts, something a little more inspiring than “stop and fall-off:”

[www.trials-online.com]

Trials learning site

[www.austrials.com]

local trials info.

Ho-hum, it must be Nigerian Business Proposal week — yet another one today...

Damn, and another single-hulled oil tanker has just sunk off the coast of Spain. Another thousand tonnes of oil to leak out and pollute the coast.

CodeCon 2003 is on soon. Looks to have the usual very interesting mix of presentations and papers.

Interesting bits of network traffic occur all the time, probes, weird requests, attempted logins, etc. Occasionally one of them manages to do something just that little bit out of the ordinary. Congratulations to whoever is — or was — at 64.86.155.118, that must have been something like 70 different probes you executed against our machines last night. Well, I'm not running IIS, so none of them worked...

MLP

[http://plone.org/]

yet another content-management system. This one is based on Zope.

Further to yesterday's rant — another day, another two Nigerian Business Proposals!

More banking stupidities. I paid the rent, easy enough, just transfer money from my account to the real-estate agent. Then tried to pay the phone and electricity bills — both have “B-PAY” facilities on their bills, but neither accepts credit cards, on the other hand, both of them also have a phone number so that you can pay by credit card!

One thing I did find today was a

photo

that Jamie took when we were in South Africa in November 2000. I've kept a copy to replace the one I lost sometime in the intervening years...

From the department of redundancies department of The Age newspaper...

A planned $100 million expansion of Chadstone shopping centre has given rise to fears of chaos on major roads surrounding the complex.

There is already chaos on major roads surrounding the complex, hasn't anyone been paying attention? It's a bloody great ugly shopping centre, set up with bugger-all access except by private car. Making it bigger will make it worse.

'Orrible Links

For those of you who might be in a similar position to Jo and I, and who have to draft up your own wedding vows, here's a whole bunch of references that we've been given, most of which are at http://www.weddingguide.co.uk/:

[http://www.weddingguide.co.uk/LovePoems1a.html]

[http://www.weddingguide.co.uk/LovePoems1b.html]

[http://www.weddingguide.co.uk/articles/ceremonies/vows/WritingYourOwnVows.html

Musings...

With the Canberra bushfires in the news so much over the last few days, and all the stories of people losing everything, I'm even more conscious of my digital photos and these pages being replicated in multiple sites — something that my photo albums and physical treasures aren't... I've always been a bit of a pack-rat, and the amount of junk I've collected over the years is astounding considering the size of the places I've lived in. I just can't comprehend losing it all and starting again.

Latest news this evening was that Downer is being braced to evacuate — there's nothing I can do about my flat next door in Hackett except think fire-retardant thoughts....

Five Nigerian Business Offers in my inbox this morning — this is getting ridiculous! There was a four-page article on the scam in Saturday's Age, and I've now got 40 copies of them in my spam collection!

Is there anybody out there who lives in Nigeria who isn't involved in scamming money off people?

Weather...

A colleague sent me a few data sheets regarding the Dallas semiconductor 1-Wire data transmission system, and the 1-Wire Weather Station that utilises it. Hunting around a little further I found a few more references for future use:

[http://www.wunderground.com/weatherstation/]

the “Weather Underground”

[http://www.aagelectronica.com/]

a firm that seems to be the only supplier of the 1-Wire Weather Stations. $80US for the basic system...

Useless observation: Tiny Teddees are too small.

[http://www.chapmancentral.com/Web/public.nsf/Documents/Safer_Roads_Manifesto]]

Guy's traffic manifest.

An amusing little venture this afternoon — Jo and I cycled up to a town-house development in Abbotsford to look at the display homes. It caught our eye in yesterday's paper, so we thought it would be fun to have a look!

Very impressive loft-style “apartments,” hugely spacious, masses of storage space, two or three bedrooms... and only three-quarters of a million dollars a piece! After admiring all the centrally controlled lights and entertainment equipment, poking our noses into all the cupboards, and leafing through the company documents that the developers have left lying around, we quietly left before the agent could embarrass us by asking how many of them we wanted to buy! I'm not sure what the privacy policy is of the developers, but all those folders marked “correspondence” and “invoices” probably shouldn't have been left for visitors to leaf through — and they were definitely tempting fate by leaving the cupboards full of beer in the display unit!

Canberra's Burning...

Yeow! Jo's mum wasn't kidding when she said last night that she thought we should watch the news. The bushfires there yesterday look like the worst on record — worse than anything I can remember in the 25 years I lived there. Four people dead, four hundred houses destroyed, who knows what else badly damaged....

All my family are north of the worst of it, all rather busy, but not in the direct line of any of the current fires. It does sound like the people in the country areas are more aware of the fire danger than those in the city, even though it is surrounded by bush.

An irritating bit of shopping today in a bike shop — I ducked in to take a quick look at helmets, since mine is starting to fall apart and I'll probably have to replace it soon. The 20-ish guy in the shop was far too over-eager to sell me something, anything, now but also seemed to be of the mindset that anyone venturing out on a bicycle without a helmet was guaranteed of dieing of head injuries in only days. I tried asking him what he thought of the tens of millions of cyclists in Europe who somehow manage to defy his “odds,” but he just wasn't interested.

Totally useless statistics for today. The distribution of student account names, sorted by first letter! Very few Umbertos...

6087 a
2406 b
5241 c
3481 d
2179 e
1180 f
1777 g
2554 h
 798 i
6157 j
4847 k
4239 l
6528 m
2637 n
 373 o
2994 p
 200 q
3293 r
7779 s
3111 t
 113 u
1102 v
2012 w
 530 x
2427 y
 485 z

This evening Jo and I caught the train to Eltham and joined a few friends for their monthly full-moon ride back to the city. I'd been meaning to go on these a few times, but have either forgotten, had other things to do, or just plain gone to the wrong place...

Catching the seven-forty train from West Richmond we were reassured to see faces we recognised in the carriage ahead, then not so comfortable a few stops later when four ticket inspectors boarded the train — the general reaction was that of stirring a bees nest with a stick....

At Eltham there were around ten people all together, apparently double the normal number! We stopped into a café for a bite to eat and to wait for the moon to rise, then headed off down the bike track back towards the city. The moon was bright enough that although we all had tail lights, most people were content to ride with no headlight and just follow the bike in front. Getting used to riding in the cool and dark took a little while, there were a few interesting moments at the sharper corners, or when the those leading stopped to wait for the rest!

Strange goings on at one of the sports ovals in Eltham, with what appeared to be several hundred teenagers all milling around in the dark, smoking and drinking and sometimes sitting on the bike path. Things got a little tense as some of them started to bluster and swear and shove at us, and for a moment Jo thought we were going to be pushed off the bikes! I've no idea what it was all about though.

Down into Westerfolds park near the Yarra river and we were well away from people, houses and traffic. It was near here that Helen nearly ran into a wombat last month — then almost on cue, there was a wombat wandering along besides the path. We all stopped to watch as it shuffled off through the long grass, not really afraid, just keen to get away from all the people.

The wombat was the most striking of the wildlife, apart from that, we saw many rabbits disappearing off into the grass, as well as ring-tailed and brush-tailed possums, fruit-bats and an owl. The surprise wildlife find was the spiders — it's possible to see the eyes shining at you from the little wolf-spiders as they hunt in the grass — Geoff was almost besides himself every time he spied one, leaping off his bike to find it and point it out to the rest of us.

Even when we weren't spotting wildlife, just riding along in the dark with our moon shadows ahead of us was exhilarating. It's completely different to other riding that I've done, even normal night riding is usually just coming home from work, or a trip to the shops, rather than riding for the sake of riding. The serenity was further enhanced by the shock of coming up from the river where the track rides alongside the Eastern Freeway — all of a sudden there were four lanes of traffic heading straight at us, separated only by a chain-mesh fence!

At various intersections on the Yarra trail people turned off to go home, Jo and I left up on Yarra Boulevard for a shorter ride home, rather than detour down to Fairfield boathouse and then ride back along the river. The only drawback of Yarra Boulevard at night is the number of would-be race-car drivers, determined to demonstrate their prowess to their mates — not much different from Yarra Boulevard during the day really. Luckily most of them seemed to be more interested in parking in dark spots overlooking the river than in racing....

Home just after midnight, the two hour ride wasn't especially fast — quite slow and cruisy actually — but it certainly seemed to be draining! Definitely happy to hop in the shower and get to bed!

Riding home, listening to the magpies in the trees — memories of riding on frosty mornings in Canberra. Melbourne's weather is a little too mild in the winter, sometimes I miss the really cold, clear, mornings!

—>

Inspired by some photos that someone (Daniel Colyer) took of their winter cycle commute in the UK, I've stopped on the path here and there to take some of my own commute. The countryside isn't as striking, but some may be interested. I decided not to include photos of the growing list of dead things that I've seen in the last week, but will list them here:

• a large dog at the side of Ferntree Gully road
• a flying fox in the park in Chadstone
• a water rat on the Boulevard
• 1m long eel beside the Gardiners creek path

There's not many interesting live animals to be seen, apart from a myriad of birds and dogs, all I see are European Carp in the creek, and — just once — an Eastern Long-necked tortoise.

On the way home I had to detour via Mount Waverley, so yet again I attempted to follow the cycle path that runs alongside the rail line. Just like the last time, I lost it somewhere near Holmesglen station and ended up detouring through their maze of one-way car-parks and private roads, before escaping back into known territory at the golf course.

There was another car on the bike path this evening, it had a little more class than those I usually meet, but I can't imagine that the owners will be bothered to clean up the dribbled trail of oil that it left from the carpark down to the picnic ground.

I read this afternoon that the City of Booroondara has created a “rapid response unit to attend to, and repair, all potholes within 24-hours of being reported.” I wonder if I should put them to the test and see whether it applies to potholes in the cycle track that they're responsibe for....

The Councile is encouraging residents and members of the public to contact it to report any urgent defects on Booroondara's roads.

Residents can report potholes during business hours by phoning 9278 4576 or after hours on 9278 4444.

Nearly lost my coffee this morning — in a messy sprayed guffaw at reading the latest obesity-related message in uk.rec.cycling. There was mention of someone suffering from HFBV... it looked reasonable enough, until I read the footnote explaining the acronym at the bottom of the page.

A forecast high of 37° today, and bush fires all over the state. There is a smoky brown haze covering the city, everything is smelling of smoke, and there's a strange orangy-red tinge to everything as I rode to work.

Lunchtime, hot, still and smoky. Walking across the campus felt like walking in the bush in summer. Cicadas calling, the smell of eucalyptus, dust and smoke.

Demos

[http://www.mindcandydvd.com/] — a DVD of Demos. They're all PC demos, but it does say that future discs may be of Amiga demos, or from other platforms.... Unfortunately, its produced in NTSC, and one of the three platforms that they say it plays badly on is the PAL Xbox. I never really could get many of the demos to work on my Amiga, so many of them were produced for the A500 or A1200, and didn't run properly on an A1000.

I just tried to run two demos — downloaded at random — on my T21 laptop under Windows XP. Kasparov crashes with a Windows protection error, Wonder first brings up a dialog box asking how to run it, then crashes saying “update your drivers or something Maybe a high-end Windows 98 machine with gamer-type 3D cards would work, but they're kind of scarce around the office!

Gnod?

[http://www.gnod.net/] — an interesting concept. I stumbled across Gnod while looking up Laurence Durrell, it had nothing of interest on the author, but it could. When I wandered into its' website recommendations I was told to go to a porn site, a political rant/soapbox, and to buy myself a copy of G&ouml;del, Escher, Bach. Amusingly, I misread the page as saying “Based on your rantings so far...” rather than ratings. It's almost unnerving, I wish they said where they've got their information from. The web is very big. I like the idea of computers intelligently suggesting to me things I might like, I don't like the idea of relying on this and not finding things myself....

Oh hell, I've done it now. I've submitted last week's comment on obesity in Australia and the US to Gnod — I wonder what sort of politically correct abuse I'll receive as a result...

Another lazy day on the beach, but a far more careful Jo and Adrian today! My feet were painful everytime the sun shone on them, so I spent nearly the entire day lying under the sun-shelter, only coming out when young Jack demanded some entertainment in the surf.

The trip to the Lorne book exchange is becoming almost a ritual, its one of the better second-hand book shops that I know of, with an amazing range of old hardcover titles by authors nobody has ever heard of. I picked up a wonderfully worn, old paperback copy of Laurence Durrell's Reflection of a Marine Venus and then lay on the beach reading it. With the sound of the waves, the colour of the sky, and the murmur of greek conversation coming from nearby, we could have been lying in the Mediterranean. Time will tell whether, in the words of one reviewer, “you either love Durrell's writing, or you loathe it.”

Apart from a minor excursion to Kafe Kaos to stuff ourselves on their magnificent Thai Tofu burgers, most of today was spent lounging on the beach. Unfortunately, neither Jo nor I applyed enough sun-screen, so by the end of the day we both had sunburn in various places — me on the tops of my feet and ankles, Jo on her knees! The Pier to Pub swim was the major attraction, several thousand people on the beach, assorted swimmers and surf-life-saving boat races. The seas were flat, with the easterly wind trying to push boats and swimmers towards the rocks. Later in the afternoon the swell picked up, it would have made for far more interesting boat races. Twenty or so logging trucks cruised through town blockading the Great Ocean Road and protesting about the Government end to the logging of native forests — after years of pressure, logging is to end in some forests, and the loggers seem to want to be paid to not log anymore. A couple of light aircraft and police and news helicopters added to the noise and general mayhem, definitely not a day to lie quietly on the beach and read a book!

—> Yesterday evening we finally got to try out the barbecue in the park — after nearly getting killed buying sausages! A strange coin-operated device, I don't know why they bother with the overhead of maintaining them and collecting the coins, when a single 20c coin lasted long enough to cook our entire meal! Apart from having to chase away someone's dog while we cooked, it all made a pleasant change from dinner at home. The dog either couldn't read the sign telling it to be on a leash, or the nearby owner was one of the vast majority who believe that these signs apply to other peoples' dogs and never their own.

The lesson I learnt while collecting the sausages is this: If you are riding a bike and some idiot throws the door of their car wide open straight in front of you, when you scream at them as you swerve around it, don't turn your head and look at them, or the idiot in the next car, who then throws their door open is even more likely to hit you! Amazingly, neither of them managed to hit me, but the second one was remarkably close. He even had the stupidity to swear at me and tell me to watch where I was going!

Bugger! It's Friday, we're going away for the weekend, we forgot to fill up Joey's car yesterday, and as per usual, the price of petrol rose by 8c today.

Ah well, at least I managed to order the cake. Unlike Wednesday at least today I was only kept waiting for half an hour after my appointed time of noon!

Trying to check the GeoURL server in order to see who else read the slashdot story yesterday, and whether I have any new neighbours. It would appear that a lot of people did. GeoURL is out of action for the rest of the week! Note to the public — Before attracting the attention of Slashdot, make sure that the full attention of Slashdot is what you are after...

—>

A whole mish-mash of thing today, here they all are, jumbled one after the next.

Ah the wonders of slashdot... One of today's stories touched an interest of mine — Geographic information in the Internet. There are already a couple of RFC's [1712, 1876] on how to add Latitude and Longitude to the DNS, this story was on GeoURL's method of including the information into webpages, blogs, etc. I've added the requisite headers¹, follow the pretty green button to find out who my neighbours are: GeoURL

Without borrowing a GPS unit from anyone, Burnley, Victoria is at 37.82° South, 145.01° East. So, in goes the information:

<meta name="ICBM" content="-37.82,145.01">

Others in the bund community appear to have read the same slashdot article... all of a sudden beebo.org has appeared as a neighbour.

An email this morning from Thorsten Tritschler [www.thotri.de] prompted me to update what little I know regarding my surname. It's an unusual enough name, we're probably related if we look back far enough...

I laughed at the following, so lets see how many emails I receive in response (although judging by recent newspaper articles, you could substitute Australia for the USA):

Are you overweight? Take this simple medical test to find out:

Stand with your arms hanging by your sides and your feet slightly apart. Now look out the window. If you see the United States of America, then you are overweight, because everybody here is. That's why your arms are hanging by your sides at a 45-degree angle.

A couple of Plan9 snippets... the Venti-based file server (Fossil) is on its way. One step closer to me really thinking about building a Plan9 system. Notes from the wiki:

Setting up venti
Setting up Fossil

I should have stayed in bed...

Got up, stumbled into the kitchen as usual, stood around while the coffee created itself, then poured coffee into two cups. Went to fridge, took out orange juice and milk, unscrewed cap of orange juice, poured orange juice into coffee. Damn. Poured corrupted coffee down the sink and split the remaining coffee into two much smaller cups.

Now to ride to work... 4km down the track and there's a loud PING — the sound of a bolt snapping — as one of the bolts holding my seat on snaps and the seat falls off. That's the second time this has happened in six months. Maybe I over-tightened it when I put the last one in, maybe I'm just a big fat bastard who's too rough on the bike.

I stood up for the 8km ride to Chadstone, not realising how often I must brace my leg against the seat while standing — the bike is very twitchy with no seat! Asked a security guard how to get to the bike shop, and showed him the seat. He laughed and took pity on me, leading me down through one of the delivery bays under the shopping mall, in through an unmarked door, to pop out rabbit-style in the middle of the mall. The guys in Graecross cycles then had a little laugh, before finding me a seat bolt. $2.95 and a bit of fiddling and I was back on my way, heading to Oakleigh to try to order a cake...

9:15 and I arrived at the cake shop, ordered a coffee and asked to see someone about placing an order. “I'll get one of the girls to see you shortly”... 9:30 and I'm told “It'll be better if you talk to Tass, she'll be here soon”... 9:40 and an apologetic “She's just called up, she'll be here in 20 to 30 minutes”... 10:15 and one of the other girls came out, asking if we'd already arranged anything, then decided that I really did have to wait for Tass. 10:50 and I gave up waiting and headed off to work. I tried telephoning this afternoon and was told that Tass only comes in on Friday and Saturdays, I made an appointment for noon Friday. I guess we'll order the cake one day...

Time for a little site maintenance — I've split up some of my bookmarks, so that the cycling and electronics ones appear seperately under their respective pages. Finally commissioned the hardware pages too, although sometimes I refer to them as hardware, and sometimes as electronics... ought to make up my mind one day. Still need to rework my cycle tours/rides pages, and finish going through all the old paper journals to write up the missing tours!

Off to the movies this evening. About time we saw Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, or Chamber Pot of Secrets, or whatever its called.... Entertaining, but definitely not for arachnaphobes! There are some very large and very hairy spiders in the movie. A long movie too, I'm glad there weren't too many kids in with us! Irritatingly foppish Kenneth Branagh, and a number of other wonderously pantomime-esque characters. We didn't stay for the entire ten minutes of credits, so we missed the “easter-egg” scene at the end... oh well.

An interesting event on the morning ride to work today.... I rounded a corner, passed the two women walking along waving empty dog leads in the air, rounded the next corner and slid to a halt to avoid the dog that ran out of the bushes into my front wheel. “Move, you stupid dog,” says I, not really expecting a reply. Then from across the river came the following — from a man with two dogs of his own, an anger problem, and probably a guilty conscience — “Get F$$$#@$#%ed you F##$$%Ging prick, go and F&*$##$ off!” What's his problem? I yelled back, “Put 'em on a lead, like their supposed to be,” and promptly received more of the same in return... Wow, not even his dogs and he busts a blood vessel screaming at me. I know that the dog owners along there ignore the On-Lead and Off-Lead areas, but that's getting ridiculous!

Jo decided that she really did need to get on her bicycle a bit more often than once a month, so this afternoon we drove out to Lilydale to ride along the rail-trail. As usual, the Lilydale end is totally un-signed, so we gave up trying to find the trail end and rode straight up the Maroondah highway until we found where it crossed. Once on the trail its a pleasant ride through the forests, lots of other people, but they're all better behaved than the ones I meet on the tracks in town — everyone keeps left, for example. We stopped at Woori-Yallock to visit their award winning bakery — enticed off the path by the sign — and had a pie for lunch, then headed back up the track to Lilydale. If I'm heading out that way again, I think we'll forgo the Lilydale end of the trail and go straight to one of the picnic grounds, it'll avoid leaving the car in a carpark that seems to be full of glass from smashed car windows...

Couch-potato time this evening though — I was left at home while Joey went out to a movie. My mind-expanding viewing was a slightly surreal BBC documentary on lions, presented in US Desert-storm style, with all kinds of weird video overlays and effects, and the first episode of Hornblower, the series from the good 'ol C.S.Forester novells.

A bit slow to get started this morning... last night's two bottles of wine and the odd beer had added a certain lethargy to our rising. Bacon and eggs kick-started mind and soul, then off to the markets to restock the fridge — pity that we'd forgotten that the markets were closed this weekend! A simple trip to one market turned into an hour and a half tram trip into the Queen Vic markets and then home.

Jo's friend Phil visited this evening, the three of us headed off to Groove Train for dinner — accompanied by two bottles of wine and a couple of beers...

First day back at work — quiet as a grave. Closing off old logs and trying to remember what I need to do at the start of each year — it doesn't happen often enough, so nothing tends to get automated...

Andy and Suzie are still emailing me with tempting invitations for the bike ride from Geneva to Verona. I want to go, Joey is in two minds. Lots of money, three weeks off work — I think by the time we've decided, all the places will be full.

There was an ugly start to the new year — waking around 9AM as a hairy arm appeared around the bedroom door and Marko lobbed a small — but exceptionally noisy — alarm clock onto our bed. It was a Christmas present desk calendar/alarm clock that I'd put the batteries into yesterday then left on my desk in the spare room — not realising that it had pre-armed itself with a 7AM alarm. Mark had belted it into submission, then decided on revenge by resetting it and lobbing it in to visit us. We managed to placate him with strong coffee, scrambled eggs, and the assurance that the initial alarm had been accidental, and not part of some fiendish plot to destroy his sleep.

The first housework of the year consumed the rest of the morning, then due to the total absence of edible material in the flat, Jo and I headed up the street for groceries and lunch — foolishly assuming that there would be cafés open. It was like another end-of-the-world movie scene, a few people wandering up and down the street, hunting in vain for somewhere to eat. All the pubs were shut, and only two other shops seemed open. It was either Silvio's or Spargos for lunch — cheap good pizza with table service, or pretentious bad food in a noisy, self-service style... No contest really, Silvio's pizza it was.

While we were cleaning up, Jo found a newspaper cutting that she'd kept for me. Apparently there's been some big storms in the south of England and half the derelict pier at Brighton has fallen down. From the photos in the paper, it looks like the outermost half of the pier has collapsed completely. There was money earmarked for its rejuvenation, but the summary is that its too badly damaged and might have to be completely demolished...