ajft

After last Friday's massive media beat up regarding the Critical Mass ride through the Burnley tunnel, there's a few rants on how cyclists were abused more than usual over the weekend and in the days since as a direct result. I'm curious; does it happen? Is it just cyclists being more than usually paranoid and expecting it? Limited data from my riding, Friday evening was well away from the whole area, but seemed to have just the usual mix of abuse and stupidity on the part of the motorists, Saturday was just an ordinary 30km ride, today's commute was no different to normal....

MLP

[http://www.ultreya.net/]

a site about el Camino de Santiago. An exceptional path to ride or walk, but the website is a bit sparse.

Let the ranting commence! I wouldn't normally get to see it, but during a visit I glanced through the Herald Sun and found their usual anti-bike rantings. One report quoting that traffic was banked up “for several blocks” — indistinguishable from any other Friday night as far as I can tell, and then a venomous editorial that included this gem:

But there are plenty of parks, bike tracks and city public spaces where protesters can do it without disrupting a vast number of citizens. Less busy times, too.

It seems that they're all for democratic rights and protests... so long as they're carried out somewhere where nobody will notice and nobody will be inconvenienced.

Oh well, contrary to various fears expressed in cycling groups during the week, when I went out on a ride today I was not confronted by a baying mass of blood-thirsty motorists, anxious to run me down as direct payback for the actions of the 450 riders yesterday. Just a pleasant 30km out to Mount Waverley and back, the only excitement being a group of golfers who refused to share the shared path. They forced me to go around them through the mud, they got splashed with mud — c'est la vie.

Tonight was the much-anticipated 70's 70th party. Nettie and Chris' combined 30th and 40th birthdays... With a vague “hair” theme, it was amazing the lengths that some people went to. Prize comment of the night was Sean's sudden realisation and “Oh! That's your hair.”

Honorable mentions must go to the number of black afros, and Marko's blonde mullet and matching pro-wrestler moustache.

You have to watch out for those idiots in tin boxes, a girl tried to run me over last night... backwards. She couldn't fit in a parking space and reversed out, then stopped. I was stopped a metre behind her, lights on, bright yellow jacket on, trackstanding and trying to work out whether to go around her on the left, the right, or just wait for her to drive off. Surprise! She decided to drive backwards down the cul-de-sac and shot straight at me. Somehow I managed to leap to the side, belting the side of the car as it passed.

Then this morning, you wouldn't believe it — some idiot tried to reverse into me at high speed! He came backwards down the service lane of Dandenong road, then reversed around the corner, backwards through the stop sign I was sitting at! If it hadn't been for the stupid girl last night, I wouldn't have been paying as much attention and he'd of hit me.

The media have latched onto the Critical Mass ride through the Burnley tunnel and rants are growing louder and louder, for and against... It'd be fun to ride through there, but leaving work at 6:30, it isn't possible. Instead I had my own little cruisy ride, deciding to take an extra few kilometres in the cool of the evening. Along the way the usual number of idiots abounded. I was:

• Spat at and screamed at by bogans in a Barina. Maybe the spitting was accidental and they were just frothing at the mouth...
• Squeeezed off the road by someone who resented me passing them three times, so they passed me and then ran their wheels into the kerb in front of me. Hated being shown that MTB was as a fast a car — so much that he ruined his wheel alignment to show me...
• Narrowly missed by a falcodore that shot through a giveway sign in my path, motorist with phone against the ear. What's $A165 and a three point penalty anyway...
• Terrorised by an RACV truck driver zig-zagging his way up Chapel St, I thought at first he was deliberately trying to ram me into parked cars ... no, he was reading the melways on the seat next to him.
• Blockaded by cars driving up the bike lane on Church street.
• Blocked out by cars parked in the forward bike box at traffic lights.

Yep, just an ordinary Friday evening, the motorists were as well behaved as normal. There didn't seem to be any exceptional malice or abuse, just the everyday accepted malice and abuse...

After all that, I met up with the Critical Mass on Swan Street, they were heading back towards the city as I was riding home. Had to laugh as I pulled up alongside the woman in the Barina — must be a night for Barinas — parked in the forward bike box at the lights. She was staring open-mouthed at the bikes on the other side of the road and blissfully ignorant of the green turn-arrow for her. The taxi behind was beeping its horn, she was ignoring this too! I waved to attract her attention, gave a polite “'scuse me lady, you've got a green light,” and she crunched the car into gear and drove off.

Must be a bicycle kinda day. At lunch time I sent off my bike speedo to the Australian importer. My call lodged at Sigma's website resulted in an email asking for me to return the unit to Norco Australia — the local agents.

More fun and games with the Monash City Council. They responded to my email, claimed that they were collecting the rubbish, that the trolley contracters are the ones dumping things. They even helpfully gave me a couple of phone numbers to report future litter. I tried one this morning, since in the last 24 hours someone has dumped a trailer load of household garbage, a TV, a chair, garden cuttings, etc., on the same section of bike path between Cole street and Warrigal road. Bad luck, the number they gave me is for reporting litter seen from specific vehicles, and without a report of the vehicle, the EPA won't take a report.

I did use the other number though, its not quite 1-800-TROLLEY, but it should be. At 1800.245.022 I give you The Shopping Trolley Hotline. Dobbed in the four or five that are out on the path and parks today. No idea how quickly they respond though...

Damn it was cold this morning! I must be getting soft in my old age. Radio reported that it was 3°C while I was listening in bed, coldest I can remember hearing while I've lived in Melbourne, but I don't think I've ever seen a decent frost here!

Riding to work was a numbing experience for the fingers though, foolishly I left the warm winter gloves at home and opted for the ordinary ones. Frost on the grass and a strange lack of people walking their dogs...

Riding home was much warmer... but there was this one BMW — a blue one, 3 series — being driven by a lady who I could have sworn was drunk.

First she stopped at the Dandenong road/Orrong road corner with half her car in the right turn lane and half in the through lane, but a car and a half length back from the car in front.

I caught her again at Orrong road/High st corner, she looked like she was going to turn left, the car was angled about 30° in the lane, the front bumper overhanging the curb. The lights went green and she wound the wheel around, bumped the kerb, and went on straight.

I caught her again at Malvern road lights and stayed well back, she stopped, opened the drivers door at the lights, half got out of the car, then sat back down and drove off, then closed the door.

A very, very scary person to be sharing the road with.

I thought it was never going to happen, but we finally got to use the free Gold-Class tickets to see a movie at the Village cinema in the Casino. The tickets have been sitting on the kitchen bench for over a year, expiry date, a couple of days ago! Very civilised though, sitting in very comfortable armchairs in a cinema of only thirty seats. Oh yeah, the movie... Matrix Reloaded. Lots of fun, parts of the dialog were almost hysterical. All the expected action and intrigue, plus enough new characters and ideas to make it seem more than “just a sequel.” I did find the ending very abrupt, and reminiscent of the 1940's serials with their “stay tuned for next week...”

From The Age:

Man jailed for car-door attack on cyclists

A car passenger who attacked a group of cyclists for fun was yesterday sentenced to 15 months' jail. The Tasmanian Supreme Court was told Stephen Leonard Campbell, 43, was travelling in a car driven by his learner-driver son when they approached five professional cyclists on Hobart's East Derwent Highway in March last year. “As the car overtook the cyclists, the passenger opened his door, deliberately striking the third cyclist with it,” Justice Alan Blow said. “The second cyclist lost his balance but was able to stop.”

The third cyclist fell, causing the fourth and fifth riders to tumble. All suffered injuries. Campbell, who was seen laughing, was disqualified for driving from five years.

Hardly puts a dent in the number of bogans who think its a funny thing to try and “door” someone, but I guess its a start. I wonder if like all the other driving suspensions it'll be overturned on appeal because he “needs” to drive to get to work?

Too much red wine last night and not enough sleep. I'm getting too old to go out two nights in a row!

A lazy day, some slow-motion shopping to refill the kitchen, a pause for lunch and to rehydrate at E-Lounge on Victoria street. Four young asian girls sat at the table next to me and chain-smoked for an entire hour.

No, I was not named after Mr Castro, or any of the other famous Fidel's throughout history! School friends found it hilarious — it was the cause of many instances of verbal abuse as a child. I spent years convincing bureacracies that I have two middle names, nowadays, I still have trouble with institutions and (mostly American) software that insist that everyone has a Christian name (whether they are Christian or not), a surname, and a single middle initial.

Fidel was the first name of one of my ancestors, a watchmaker who was born near Frieburg in Germany in 1834. His father was also named Fidel, but we don't know much about him. He ran away from home and followed the Rhine down to the sea, then across the English Channel to England. Through family practice, the first-born son in each generation has been given the middle name.

There must be some kind of record for slow bicycle riding — today Jo and I managed to cover almost 40km in five hours! I guess spending an hour in Christie's viewing the sad remnants of their stock didn't help. The MT800 Cannondale tandem looked mighty tempting; but even discounted, its still a lot of money at $3750... not to mention being a rather bileous shade of toothpaste green. I guess the KHS Alite really is looking attractive — especially at almost half the price. I consoled myself by buying a Vistalight “Code 15 Nightstick” headlight.

Spent the rest of the afternoon exploring the backstreets of Fairfield, Thornbury and Northcote, including such wonderfully named sub-suburbs as Dennis and Merri. We're vaguely thinking that if we bought a house, that would be the area we would be heading...

This evening was Alistair's annual solstice party. A Sumerian theme was felt to be topical this year, my knowledge of Sumer comes from a reading of Snowcrash, Jo's from first-form high-school history!! Lots of fun as usual. Lots of wine as usual... Evan surpassed us all with his choice of costume. Ancient Sumeria or 1950's B-grade SciFi movie... we weren't quite sure.

Alistair got out of his usual solstice speech by hiring a belly dancer. He claimed that Turkish belly dancers were fairly close to the Tigris/Euphrates delta, and that anyway, he'd been very busy and only organised it all at the last moment. He then attempted to entertain us all by joining in the dancing.

Well here goes Sigmasport, an email is on your way. Is 16 months and 10,0000km an unacceptable life for your products, or do you believe that I should be buying a new bike computer almost every year?

The site keeps evolving... In keeping with the current interest on RSS and RDF, I've added an RSS feed of my latest ten photo albums. Its all done with an evilly mangled perl script — one that I'm too ashamed of to reveal in public.

Time for a cultural experience this evening — off to the Melbourne concert hall to see Paco Peña, a Spanish Flamenco impressario and supporting troup. We'd left it a little late buying the tickets, so we sat in row “W” and wished we had thought to bring binoculars like the family in front of us. It seemed that half of Melbourne's Spanish community was there! Very impressive, made me want to go back to Spain... Such a brilliant contrast between the control of the performers and the flamboyance of the material...

More FOAF stuff. Playing about with the FOAF explorer when I should have been working...

You can check me out in the explorer , or view the raw XML+RDF /foaf.rdf.

Stupido! Riding home in the rain, I calculated that the bike speedo would read 9,997km when I got home... I was already wet, an extra three kilometres wasn't going to be too much further....

So on I rode up Yarra boulevard, around into Bridge road, then up Burnley street to the concrete monstrosity — Riverside Gardens — then over the river, up the bike track in the dark and then a kilometre or two along Kew boulevard. Turned around at 9,997km and started heading home — pausing in Hawthorn in the rain to take a photo of the magic “9999.”

Big joke — I got home and tried to see how far I'd ridden today. The buttons have broken and the bike computer is now falling apart! Sixteen months since I was given it, exactly 10,0001km on the clock — not exactly good advertising for Sigma!. 625km per week average.

More pollution; today it was petrol flowing down Gardiners creek, it all seemed to be coming out of a drain in the golf course, maybe they overfilled a lawnmower.... It was enough to annoy me about yesterday though, and send off an email to the City of Monash asking them to clean up the crap.

Gotta love it: An extract from “High and Mighty” by Kevin Bradsher, a book about 4WDs (SUVs) in America.

Who's been buying SUVs since auto makers turned them into family vehicles? They tend to be people who are insecure and vain, they're frequently nervous about their marriages, and uncomfortable about parenthood. They often lack confidence in their driving skills. Above all, they're apt to be self-centred and self-absorbed, with little interest in their neighbours or communities. No, that's not a cynic talking, that's the auto industry's own market researchers and executives.

Ooh look! Nearly 10,000km — and back to zero — since I fitted the Sigma bike computer to Norky bike.

Damn. Spent way too long trying to get cwm running on the WinXP laptop only to get bitten by Windows. The authors have two files URI.py and uri.py in the same directory, Windoze still only allows the one.

Monash city council seem to be doing their bit to increase the amount of litter in the City of Monash. Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to gather up the abandoned shopping trolleys that were lying in Gardiners creek and drag them to the side of the path. They'd picked up an impressive amount of garbage; old cardboard, bottles, etc, and filled the trolleys with this. Presumably they'd then called the council to let them know....

As I was riding up the path, a council truck drove past me, then parked next to the trolleys. I didn't see how this happened, but when I came past in the evening, the trolleys were gone, but all the garbage has been emptied on the ground!

That's the second time in a couple of months this has happened. I guess some genius believes that his job is only to collect the trolleys....

[http://rdfweb.org/foaf/]

Friend of a Friend

[http://norman.walsh.name/]

Norman Walsh's private page. RDF and XML.

[http://relaxng.org/]

Relax NG

Rain, cold, wind, winter.

Coffee, soup, read the paper, listen to the radio.

...do last year's income tax.

Here's a challenge for our American friends: How many of the Australian states can you name? This morning Jo mentioned that Australia's states had such boring names, while American ones were at least interesting. As a result of that we started naming them — eventually managing to remember 49 of the 50... I think we forgot Delaware.

Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Connecticut Delaware District Of Columbia Florida Georgia Hawaii Idaho Illinois Indiana Iowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York North Carolina North Dakota Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas Utah Vermont Virginia Washington West Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming

I'm not sure what it shows, maybe just the pervasiveness of Americanism. Maybe the breadth of Australian education....

Winter is here though, a cold biting wind howling along Bridge road, the warmth of the coffee shop after the markets this morning very welcome.

An afternoon bike ride — warmly dressed! Out along Gardiners creek to Carnegie, a visit to Fitzroy Cycles for Jo to trial a few more bike seats, finally selecting one, after months of searching... Now there's no more excuses, we will be riding enough to go on the Geneva to Verona tour in September!

Man jailed for car-door attack on cyclists

A car passenger who attacked a group of cyclists for fun was yesterday sentenced to 15 months' jail. The Tasmanian Supreme Court was told Stephen Leonard Campbell, 43, was travelling a car driven by his learner-driver son when they approached five professional cyclists on Hobart's East Derwent Highway in March last year. “As the car overtook the cyclists, the passenger opened his door, deliberately striking the third cyclist with it,” Justice Alan Blow said. “The second cyclist lost his balance but was able to stop.”

The third cyclist fell, causing the fourth and fifth riders to tumble. ALl suffered injuries. Campbell, who was seen laughing, was disqualified from driving for five years.

Interestingly, the Mercury (Hobart newspaper) reports that he had been drinking, but makes no mention of the driver being his son on L-plates.

Sufficiently weird quote in [9fans], I just had to preserve it for posterity — I hope it makes it to the fortunes file.

No, I won't be bringing either the Harley or any guns, since apparently, I can get a pass without them.

Coincidence. Last night we were discussing strange kids names that parents choose — we've recently heard of Atticus. To me it was a reminder of Roman generals, to Jo, of Atticus Finch — Gregory Peck) — in To Kill a Mockingbird. Today we wake up to hear that Gregory Peck has died.

Bike riding — it sure does provide rich and varied experiences... this morning's priceless moment started with me watching the small truck drive out of the discount tyre place, slowing as it turned to drive off in front of me, then me hitting the brakes and swerving wildly as it launched a brand new truck tyre out through the open rear doors. Tyres are round, they roll really well!

Google is a wondrous thing indeed. If something's been bugging you all week, thirty seconds of typing and you can find the answer. So just what were the Seven Wonders of the World?

Hmm, the copyright notice on the page makes this a bit tricky, but they are (or were)

1. The Great Pyramid of Giza
2. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon
3. The Statue of Zeus at Olympia
4. The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus
5. The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus
6. The Colossus of Rhodes
7. The Lighthouse of Alexandria

The perfect end to the day... There I was, minding my own business, riding home along the bike track under the Citylink tollway when all of a sudden a girl heading the other way yells out “Slow Down!” I rounded the curve to find a Volkswagen Golf stuck at the bottom of the track, nose up to the bollards that are designed to prevent motorists from driving in to the bike track. I guess there is nothing at the other end to stop them coming in, half a kilometre back! I would have thought that driving for that distance along a 2m wide red track, with hand rails either side would be enough to make the driver stop and think.... I just managed to squeeze past, shaking my head in bemusement at the befuddled looking old man in the driver seat.

Unfortunately my camera didn't want to focus on the car at night, or maybe I was laughing so hard that my hands shook too much, anyway, I couldn't capture a picture to add to my collection of “Things I Have Met on the Bike Path.”

The vending machine up the hall decided today not to give me any change. Nothing special there, but just this once I had my phone in my hand and decided to call the 1-800 number to report it faulty.... Deadly seriously, all my details were taken, details of the fault with the machine, then a promise to have it seen to, then a promise to send me my change in the mail! I wonder how much it costs XYZ vending company to process a single payout of $A1?

The laughter abounds. It seems that recently, every time I try to look at an Australian product website, I find that they've been written by a demented 10 year-old who would fail basic English.

Q. Can I divide partition the Anypak Drive?

A. Of course you can, just like any other drive. However due to a bug in Windows, it is recommended that for stable use, you do not partition the drive.

Q. Can I boot my computer from the Anypak?

A. Unfortunately, you can not boot from the Anypak. Booting sequences are decided by CMOS BIOS and CMOS BIOS does not support booting by USB. USB is recognised only once CMOS BIOS has booted.

Wording? Facts? who needs 'em. Will I buy the product... Not bloody likely! (Shame about the machines that boot from USB, they've just been told they don't exist)

With a minimum of effort, XF86Config now appears to be managed by debconf. Magic command to reconfigure everything is:

dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86

Key points to remember are that the RivaTNT video card has a driver type of "nv".

Give a man an Imprezza WRX and he thinks he's a world rally champion... until he slides it backwards off the Great Ocean Road and leaves it hanging over a cliff. One of two great Kodak Moments™ that I should have taken a photo of today — the other being the road sign: “In Australia, DRIVE ON THE LEFT” — I guess a few too many international tourists stop at the lookouts and then drive off on the wrong side.

Magnificent timing in our ride to Wye River though — the ominous gray cloud turning to rain just as we pulled in to the shop for a coffee, pouring down for the half hour that we sat there, then stopping in time for the ride back to Lorne!

Where?

Wye River, Lorne.

Fourth day of riding in to South Melbourne for a course at Excom — learning all about Windows XP (or at least enough to be dangerous). I could get to enjoy this — out the door, down to the end of the street, right turn onto Swan street, ride to the end, right turn onto Alexandra parade, through the tunnel and onwards along City road, then, right turn onto Montague street, stop. Seven kilometres, fifteen minutes. Shame about the traffic jam in Swan Street though — cars are packed so solidly they're slowing down the bicycles. A bulldozer to clear the parked cars out of the clearway would come in handy too; there's been at least three cars a day so far.

MLP

[http://haystack.lcs.mit.edu/index.html]

Haystack, “the Universal Information Client” Yeesh! 48M of java application to download — maybe later!

[http://rantelope.com/]

Rantelope. Yet another blogging system. This one has a cool name, maybe I should investigate...

Bah! Debian unstable is living up to its name for me. Following whatever my most recent updates are, Evolution is refusing to run, just crashes on startup, and after downloading the tonne of debs that is KDE, it generates a crash when starting, then gives me a neato blank screen with a pointer. Maybe having Gnome and KDE on the one machine is a bad idea — certainly for anyone not owning a 100G hard disk.

With Evolution refusing to play, and me using Firebird as a browser, maybe it's time to download thunderbird as well, and try using that for a mailer. It's just that I'm getting really fed up with the “training period” required by each new mailer. I want my programs to all share a common set of configuration options, and I want them all to use ACAP (rfc2244)!

Shocking news! I found out that random people actually read some of the pages in here. One of Jo's colleagues complained that I'm out of date — as a married man I shouldn't have a link to my girlfriend.

Three dud floppy disks and one good one, a quick download of the Debian rescue image — mine seems to have vanished — and finally wyvern is back on the air. In the future I must remember to get these sorted out before fiddling around with partitioning!

Boot off the rescue floppy, rescue root=/dev/hdc1, login and run lilo, logout and restart. Back to where I was on Saturday morning...

I've been getting grief from circle on the debian unstable system. It complains that python-gtk isn't present, even though dpkg -l shows that its there. A bit of digging shows that they seem to have hardcoded python2.1 into a few places. Changed the python2.1 to python in /usr/bin/circle, and made a symbolic link from /usr/lib/python2.1/site-packages/circlelib to /usr/lib/python2.2/site-packages/circlelib and miraculously, it works.