ajft

Will I or won't I? The registration papers for Mr Damage arrived in the mail a week or two ago and I realised that I haven't ridden it at all this year. So its either get rid of it in an unregistered and poor-running state, or make it go again and make myself ride. First step is a new battery, the slow death of the old one being one of the leading causes of me stopping riding. A trip to Bikes 'n Bits and $75 later and I have a brand new battery, complete with a plastic squeezy bottle of "Battery containing acid" and a set of gibberish-like instructions.

FILLING METHOD

READ ALL INSTRUCTIONS BEFORE FILLING (CHECK MANUAL)

OK, that's printed on the sheet of paper that comes with the battery and bottle of acid — there is no manual. Unless the sheet of paper is intended to be the manual?

Preparation for filling

Take off the sealing tape and remove the vent plugs ONLY right before filling the electrolyte.

What flipping sealing tape? The little red rubber bung that covers the end of the overflow pipe? Its a plastic plug, nothing made of tape...

Filling electrolyte

Fill the battery with electrolyte (dilute sulphuric acid) with a density of 1.280. Fill to the "UPPER LEVEL" as indicated on the battery. The electrolyte temperature should not be over 30°C/86°F when filling.

The big question is HOW? Little squeezy bottle has a nipple-like nozzle that needs to be pierced. No mention of piercing it, and the nozzle isn't long enough to reach into the vent holes, how the hell am I meant to do this? OK, call me an idiot, but the last time I got a new battery for the bike it came ready filled.

The plastic piece of tubing fits over the nozzle, and I manage to fill each cell one-by-one through the vent holes from the squeezy bottle — all up to the last one, where I ran out of acid when it's only half full. Bummer. This cannot be the right way to do this! Fiddle about for ages, take long exploratory pokes at the old battery for inspiration, no idea. End up pipetting half a teaspoon at a time out of five of the cells to top up under-fed number six. I guess one day someone will show me what the opaque instructions gloss past and it'll dawn with a great Aha!

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  odo: 20507km
  dst: 77.5km
  max: 65km/hr
  avg: 26.92km/hr
  time: 2hr 52’ 59"

Down to Shoreham for the day to visit Kath and John and Jack and Will in the caravan park.

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Don't know why I bothered. Two years ago I went to the work Christmas function in the University Staff Club and got some pink, raw, half-cooked rissoles that made me sick for the rest of the evening. Last year I didn't go. This year we were assured that “concerns regarding the food had been addressed”.

On my plate I received:

• a tasty piece of steak
• some nice salad
• a rissole that turned out to be pink and raw inside
• chicken kebabs that were pink and bleeding when I bit into them
• a baked potato better described as half-baked that could have killed a man if thrown

I should have gone to Cinque Lira and had a bowl of pasta!

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Courtesy of The Age:

A woman was bitten by a lion at Melbourne Zoo after slipping her hand inside the enclosure to get a flower, the zoo confirmed today.

It is the second time in the past month that an animal has injured a visitor at the zoo.

The incident has prompted a review of perimeter security around the lion enclosure, with electric fencing to be installed to prevent lions getting close to the barrier.

Um, how about putting up an electric fence on the outside to prevent the idiots putting their hands INTO THE LION CAGE? Sheesh!

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Good news or the bad news? Good news is that I've got my photos back from Kodak, although the prints don't seem to be the same quality as I'd expect, and the CD seems to come from a third party... Are they subcontracting out their work? Is digital photography biting them that hard? Bad news seems to be that all the time and date information that the APS camera records on each frame has been omitted from the prints and the scans. I've got a helpful "24.03.2005 — 04.12.2005" printed on the index print, and that's all.

It'll be another case of a few hours of leafing through old journals and comparing notes to find when they were taken. At least most of them seem to be grouped on a few major days; Uluru, Adelaide, and the Wilson's Prom. weekend.

One other good thing may have come of it though. The CD of images seems to have been created by QFL Photos, and has their website printed on the disk. My curiosity took me there and I found that they'll scan exposed APS films to CD for around $10 a roll. Maybe I'll finally get all those old films scanned!

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...and I use bike lanes just like cars do: When its convenient.

Driving home last night it was amazing to see some of the Christmas lights that people have put up, it seems to have all turned into a great testosterone dick-waving thing: “I've got bigger and brighter lights and reindeers and santas on my roof than you have.” None of the trees in peoples' houses seem to be set up so that they can see them, they're all placed in windows so that other people can see them.

Not for us! Out came the dusty box of decorations on the weekend, a handful of ornaments, a few lengths of tinsel, and a great tangle of fairy lights. A moment of panic when I thought we'd lost the power-pack for the lights, since we hadn't used them since before moving house, then I realised that it was the mysterious extra transformer that's been sitting on the bedroom floor for months.

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Finally; the last frame has been shot on my last roll of APS film, roll #866-142. I'm still not sure whether it was a good purchase or not, the camera was pricey, the APS film and developing doubly so! Fast talking by the salesmen in the shop convinced me to go with the APS rather than an only marginaly larger 35mm camera.... Twenty-one rolls of film in seven years, and I only worked out late in the process to pay extra and get the photos on CD at development time — I still haven't got around to getting the rest of the rolls scanned from the negatives, mañana mañana....

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Ah I love it. A company has a website that won't work. I send them an email.

The error has been fixed and you should have no problems going forward.

Regards, @@@@@@.com.au team.

Did I have a problem going forward? Did I, like a Rolls Royce, “fail to procede?” How about plain english guys? How about “you should have no problems submitting entries.”

Aha! He says, having just read the manual and realised that although his last camera defaulted to having the power-saving turned on, the IXUS 700 seems to have been delivered helpfully configured so that if — say — you are stupid enough to leave it on in your bag after fully charging it on Thursday night, it will quite happily stay on all night and all the next day so that it has gone flat by the time you want to use it on the weekend.

The camera is now configured so it turns itself off, thus hopefully avoiding future tantrums by its owner.

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This morning we woke from a lousy night's sleep to find that the tent was still standing, although still billowing in around us like a spinaker in a gale. The neighbours had finally shut up after midnight, but commenced laughing, shrieking and giggling the minute they woke up, despite the odd pointed comments from other neighbours within earshot.

Breakfast and pack up, then over to the information centre centre to check in. There's a free shuttle bus we can catch up to the Mt Oberon carpark, but stupidly it doesn't stop at the information centre — it leaves from the beach, the furthest possible point from here that's still within the Tidal River campground! Shoulder the bags and drop in at the shop for a ceremonial last cup of coffee, then make our way down to the carpark to wait for the bus. Another oddity, there's nowhere to sit at the bus stop, and the nearest garbage bins are as far as you can get from the stop as possible!

The bus dropped us off at the carpark and we started on our way, off on the walk to the lighthouse, with perhaps just a little less training than we really should have had.... All the good intentions over the last few weeks seem to have come to naught, I think we'll be relying on general fitness, brute force and ignorance!

The park rangers had told us that the grass trees were all in flower, although the flowers were starting to fade this week, and the flag irises were coming out everywhere. It was stunning though, flower spikes from the grass trees up to 3m tall, and great swathes of white irises in the undergrowth. The April bushfire is still highly visible, but most of the ash has washed away, its all just sprouting black trees and bright green underbrush. Very photogenic, but...

I'd put my camera batter on charge on Thursday evening, knowing that we were going away, knowing how much I wanted to take some follow-up photos to compare to the visit in June. Unfortunately I must have turned my camera on and left it on in my bag, it had just enough juice to tell me to change the battery pack — very helpful — before turning itself off. The charger is helpfully at home too, so even if there is a power-point at the cabins this evening, I won't be able to charge it up for tomorrow! Luckily I've brought my APS film camera, as I'm still trying to finish off the last nine frames — when I get it developed there'll be one or two shots of today...

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?huh?

I wouldn't have believed it! Three days in a row all I have to do is the fairly simple task of getting up a little bit earlier than usual, then riding in to South Melbourne to a training course.... OK, so I was a little bit late leaving this morning, but now that I know the way, and know where the building is, that shouldn't have been a problem, and a new tyre should mean that all the glass in the bike lanes is not a problem either — and they weren't. I arrived at EXCOM in plenty of time, then went off to get changed — damn, damn, damn! Left my pants at home, so although I had a clean shirt, I only had my bike nicks to cover the bottom half for the day! Nobody said anything, but I stood out like a sore thumb all day! Maybe tomorrow I can finally get it right!

Then this evening there was more bike-oriented weirdness. Last night in a fit of enthusiasm I attacked the gorgon-like knot of inner-tubes in the basket in the kitchen and sorted them out into 26" mountain bike and 700C road bike versions, and pumped them all up, throwing out the obvious complete duds. Today the good ones were rolled up neatly, tied up in little bundles, and placed into labelled boxes, so hopefully we can use them, rather than going out and buying more and more new tubes!

Fetching the front wheel from Norky bike inside to fix the flat noticed last Sunday, I quickly discovered that it wasn't a piece of glass causing a slow leak after my last long ride — somehow the sidewall of the tyre has split and the tube has exploded, much like what happened to the front tyre of my road bike yesterday! I wouldn't have thought it would be too hot in the shed, and I'm surprised that it blew sitting there rather than when I was riding! Regardless, after more than two years of service, the second of the very nice Hutchinson 1.2" slicks went into the bin, along with the little metal adapter that let the Presta valves fit through Schraeder-sized valve holes in the rim. The adapter had corroded solidly onto the valve stem, not even the vice-grips coupled with several of the more powerful of the nine million names of God could shift it.

Time to fit the spare tyre then, the pair of GEAX Street Runners have been sitting in the shed since the Easter Deadly Treadly ride. I can't remember the convoluted chain of events that lead to them being in the shed — something to do with a German backpacker convinced to come on the ride at the last minute, a mountain bike borrowed from Netty, a new pair of tyres that I bought on spec. a week earlier, some new tubes bought on the day and a whole lot of other begged, borrowed or acquired equipment... First success of the whole operation I guess, the tyre fits the rim, one of the tubes from the neatly-labelled 26" box fit the tyre, and the whole works holds air!

After yesterday's fiasco, getting to South Melbourne today should be easy... I know where to turn into Inkerman street & I know where the building is!

Somewhere down towards St Kilda the bike didn't feel quite right, then I realised that the front tyre was going soft — all that bloody glass I swore at yesterday. I made it through St Kilda to Milddle Park, then stopped at Penny Farthing cycles to buy a new inner tube — I suspect that the spare I'm carrying has a slow leak.

Helpfully, the guy in the shop offers to pump it up for me, saving me from having to do it with the mini-pump I'm carrying. “There you go,” he says, handing it back. “Nice and hard.” Too right it was hard, I wondered what pressure he put in, but they were busy with the five other customers who all came in for inner tubes or puncture repairs, so I put the wheel back on the bike and continued on my way.

Half a kilometre up the road I glimpsed a flicker on the tyre, looked down thinking that I'd picked up something stuck to the tyre and was reaching down to flick it away when a sound like a rifle shot when off — the tube blowing out through a huge tear in the sidewall of the tyre!

Damn, damn, damn! Just how high did he pump that tyre up?

Walked the bike around the corner to the next bike shop, fuming gently to myself, and ask for a new tube and (now) a new tyre. As I'm standing there muttering about shops that over-inflate tyres, the owner from Penny Farthing walked in! I hadn't realised that he runs both shops. He takes a quick glance at the tyre and tells me it's buggered, all my fault, I should have bought a new tyre months ago....

Finally on my way again, $44 poorer, filthy dirty from two tyre changes and the road grime on the wheel and once again ten minutes late — just like yesterday.

Just get out of bed a little early, get on the bike, ride into South Melbourne and get to a training course. Not too hard, is it?

I intended to leave at 7:30, since I was fairly sure that the advertised 8:30 start was really "08:30 for 9:00". Didn't manage to leave the house until 07:40, off through Murrumbeena and along Dandenong road. Somewhere along Normanby road in Caulfield there's a tram turning left and I can't quite see the roadsign through the windows — it must be Inkerman street so I turn too. Play tag with the tram all the way down to St Kilda where I realised that I was on the wrong road! Not too wrong, just one road south of where I wanted to be. Around the Esplanade, then back up Johnson street and left into Canterbury road.

Lots of glass in the bike lane, a bike lane less than the width of road bike's handlebars in places, and lined with parked cars the entire way! Definitely a dangerous place to be, but I'm pretty much the only traffic moving past the bumper-to-bumper cars all the way to South Melbourne.

Not quite sure of where to turn, guessed correctly, then turned left instead of straight ahead into Montague street — no problem, simply do a u-turn through six lanes of rush hour traffic. Off up a block or so, cross at the pedestrian lights to where EXCOM is...

Damn! Seems that EXCOM have moved out of that building and there's no sign of where too! Stupidly, I didn't check my confirmation notes about the booking since I knew where they were located!

A quick look around, then duck in to ask at the printing shop next door. They've never heard of EXCOM! But by coincidence one of them is doing a print job for the company, grabs the folder and reads me the address — luckily its just around the corner so I make it round there only ten minutes or so late!

Two options for this morning; I can stay in bed, get up at a reasonable hour and then have a leisurely bacon and eggs, or I can get up far too early, fumble my way into my bike gear and go out to join some friends for a ride up to Kinglake and back. Sure enough, I've picked the riding option — about time I got my lazy self out and rode up a few hills...

First surprise, sometime between getting home last Sunday and this morning Norky bike's front tyre has gone flat — I guess I picked up some glass. Quick change of plan and the road bike — desperately in need of a clean and some lubrication — goes into the back of the car and I head off to meet the others in Alfington.

Eight o'clock rolls around, as can be expected the three of us turned up in the opposite order to our distance from the start. I arrived first, Evan ten minutes later then Kelvin, who only had to ride a block or two from home, was quarter of an hour late. Then off for a tour of the suburbs on a twisty route that they seem to use on a Thursday evening, before we were out of the suburbs and heading towards the hills.

It is definitely a long time since I last went on this sort of ride! Heading up the lst long climb towards Kinglake I was left well behind, dropping down through my gears and winding up through the forest trying to simply get there in one piece!

Another side escapade with a third-party blogging service. Google support led me a three week long merry dance in refusing to reset the password on my blogger account unless I could provide them with the email address. Not knowing the email address was the only thing stopping me from resetting it myself! Leaping from link to link, I found myself looking at someone's photos in an MSN spaces account. Just for fun I tried the login button and was most surprised to find I could get in, and that a bare-bones space already existed for me! Fleshed it out a bit, despite annoyances with it being — surprise surprise — quite Windows-specific and not working well with either Mozilla or assorted proxies. Will I be bothered to update my MSN space though, that's the question...

Browsing through the recent photos on Fotothing and I came across some pictures of tropical aquarium fish. Beautiful as always, but annoyingly unlabelled, so the curious viewer is left not knowing what they are. Reminded me of fish I used to keep, then of other pets I've had over the years.

The loach, sold to me as a Javanese Weather Loach, it always sounded so exotic in there with the goldfish. I think it escaped from the tank over a dozen times, only to found curled up in a ball of carpet fuzz somewhere in the corner of the room — inert but still living, dropped back in the tank to resume life. I see now that they are listed as an exotic pest in Australia. Assorted goldfish over the years. An axolotl for a while. Tropical fish at various times, swordtails and gouramis and angel fish and the odd cichlid — I can remember all the names. Hairy pets were limited to Cindy the male cat and a very long-lived but exceptional wild and shy guinea pig that never had a name. An escaped budgie that flew into the garden when I was about 12 started an aviary of budgies and finches for a while, zebras and double-barred and chestnut-breasted finches, and a small group of king quail scurrying around on the ground.

Birds, fish, mammals, only the reptiles and marsupials are missing! I think a blue-tongue lizard and a long-neck tortoise fell under my care at times, the closest I came to marsupials were the kangaroos in the bush over the back fence and the possums in the fruit trees in the garden.

There, a trip down memory lane. I wonder if I've missed anything?

Sunny day, no wind, definitely time to get out on the bike. Jo and I did our usual ride down North road to the bay, then down Beach road to Mordialloc. Interesting mix of barricades around Mentone since there was a triathlon running and the road had been closed, but only closed to motorised traffic! Apparently other cyclists are allowed to mix with the competing triathletes, which sounds like a recipe for disaster to me.

Fun and games started on the way back up the bay. Somewhere around Brighton we were riding with about four others, single file on a four lane road. Screaming, shouting, abuse and roaring of engine, the usual suspects go flying past. Four young guys, P-plates on the car, exhaust pipe the size of a coffee-tin. The most impressive part was the front passenger half out of the window, screaming at us to get off the f#$%ing road, while swinging his fist and trying to punch us as he passed! Not sure of the plate, SJB-305, a red car, probably a Nissan Bluebird, but with all the badges and chrome removed. Didn't get enough of a description to bother with going to the police, as they'll only give me the usual run-around of requiring a full identikit of the driver plus a bus-load of witnesses — merely describing the car is never enough.

When will someone do something about these dickheads?

Onwards back around to Port Melbourne where Jo dropped her new bike off for its service and went off to catch public transport while I rode home. For some reason I decided to clock up a few extra kilometres and ended up riding back down to Mentone, then came home up Warrigal road — never an interesting ride, with neanderthal motorists and narrow lanes, but it certainly helped clock up the distance! First ride of over 100km in a very long time.

Sometime back near the start of this year, Jo and I decided that when we went to eat out we'd grab the book of discount vouchers, pick a random, but not too inaccessible location, and try somewhere new.... All good intentions, but it didn't last very long. Favourite places are just too convenient, too dependable. Silvio's for pizza, Groove Train for whatever it is they label their style of food. Tonight was another Groove Train night. Calzone, Prawn risotto, good coffee. What is important in life?

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The blackbirds (Turdus merula) seem to have settled on the nest in our fence. I was starting to think that after building it all weekend they'd realised it was right next to the path on Monday and moved out. This one seems to be stuck there with glue, I could creep right up to it and take a photo. Ambivalent feelings about having a feral pest nesting outside my bedroom window!

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Hot, dry, dusty and the air is full of pollen. Sneezes galore.

Discovered that there's a blackbird building a nest in the jasmine vines on the fence outside our bedroom window. In a way this is kind of cool, wild-life in the suburbs, etc. Just such a pity it has to be feral blackbirds, rather than the vanishingly small number of native birds we see around the area. It might explain all the blackbird noises we keep hearing around dawn though!

I was so tempted to do nothing all day, Jo decided we should go for some kind of a bike ride in the afternoon. It ended up being a gentle meander in along the Gardiners creek trail to Richmond, up around the river to Abbotsford, then back down into Richmond for a beer and then a pizza.

So hot and dry, on the way in it felt like mid-summer, not at all like early November! Silvio's pizza was as good as always, a garlic bread, a Silvio's special, a carafe of red wine, all delivered blindingly fast, all simple, good, tasty food. The menus have been reprinted, but nothing much has changed, they look the same as the last lot, but the prices have gone up a tiny amount and the amusing spelling “Sylvos” has been corrected to “Silvios”.

Riding home as dusk was falling, the bugs were out in force along the creeks. We rode with eyes half shut, each swarm of midges causing much blinking, cursing and spitting. Temperatures were high enough that the cicadas were singing in the trees, again it felt like late summer.

Chris and Annette's wedding in the afternoon and evening down at Brighton. Strange to see all those people, people I've probably met at some time or another, but never all together, and definitely never all in their best clothes!

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Back at work for real this time! Two weeks' holiday, a day at work with the plague (™), a day home in bed, a weekend at Lorne convalescing by the sea-side — time to face reality and get back to work....

You could be forgiven for thinking that the Monday before the Melbourne Cup is a public holiday, the number of people who take the day off or just plain don't show up for work must be phenomenal! The carparks along Haughton road were almost completely empty, the roads a windy wasteland.

A day catching up on work, closing off jobs that seem to have accumulated while I've been away, jobs that other people should probably be able to do, but just haven't done anything about....

An evening putting the house back in order too. Climb up the neighbour's orange tree and liberate enough oranges for juice for the next fortnight, they don't mind, they don't pick them or use them at all! I've been missing this orange juice in the weeks we were away.

Walking back through the council camp-ground looking at all the tents, all the people, all the cars... it doesn't look like much of a camp-site, with the number of cars and the size of the sites its more like camping in a car-park!

Still no activity out on Lorne pier, now that the last fishing boat has gone its looking completely dead, and the revuilding that was due to start last winter still isn't approved. First plans were for demolition to commence in May — six months ago — then rebuilding to commence before plans were finalised, some kind of fast-tracked idealistic market-driven twaddle that never even got off the ground. There's now a tatty photocopy of the proposed plans for the new pier taped up in Christo's window, no idea of when construction is due to start, or how long it'll take to complete...

A wonderfully archaic sounding word — convalesce — what people in the 19th century retired to the sea-side to do. Well today I joined them, spending most of the day lying on the couch or dozing in bed, trying to get over the bronchitis. It must have worked to some degree, late in the afternoon I started to feel cabin-fever and headed out for a walk. Down to the swing-bridge and around on the beach for a while, the tide is out a long way and there's hardly any water left in the Erskine estuary.

?huh?

Fourteen days, two hundred and eighty seven photographs, a couple of thousand kilometres and several inches of rain! Home again. The lawn is nearly knee-high and full off weeds, the snails have eaten half of the vegetable garden, and after a week of seeing Callistemon (bottle-brush) flowers everywhere we've been, the bush in the front garden is covered as well!

Where?

Horsham, Melbourne.

Where?

Adelaide, Bordertown, Horsham.

Cleland Conservation Park

Cleland Conservation Park and Wildlife Park

Where?

Adelaide.

Around and around we walked this morning, back down to the street with all the cafés from last night, then back up the side streets, then up the main road through the centre of town — not a single place seemed to be open, not a chance of getting breakfast. It seemed to be some sort of joke: “Sunday morning, Adelaide is closed.” Around the block again, we were just about to give up when we found a poky little place on the ground floor of some serviced apartments. Bacon and eggs and a coffee; nothing special, but by the time we located it we were ravenous!

Then up to the north end of town and almost immediately we seemed to come across streets full of shops, café's with tables out on the streets, people everywhere having late breakfasts! The fun of being in a new place!

Tried to visit the migration museum, but it wouldn't open until 1pm, so onwards over the river to walk on up to North Adelaide. All the while we were holding our hats on in the wind, and keeping a careful eye on the weather.

North Adelaide seemed very reminiscent of Carlton in Melbourne, lots of shops, cafés, restaurants and people. Stopped in for a good coffee in Café Paesano, being packed with people was the best advertisement of all.

Back down towards the city along side-streets towards the river, admiring the architecture, the stonework of all the old houses. Unlike Melbourne it seems that timber was in short supply, so nearly every old house is made of stone and looks set to last another few hundred years.

Rain and icy winds hit as we were just north of the zoo, we sheltered for a while under a tree, then half-walked, half-ran over the river to hide in a fortuitous doorway.

This latest bit of rain blew away, so we decide d to have a quick look around the Botanic gardens — a quick look that ended up taking four hours or so!

Annoyingly, my digital camera went suddenly flat as soon as I pulled it out of my pocket — seems to be a feature of the IXUS 700, very little warning, just a flash of a red battery logo and it turns itself off. I was still carting around the old APS camera so I took quite a few photos with that.

Fascinating herb gardens, and the “economic garden”. I'm not sure why its called that, something to do with all the plants being of some value perhaps? Many herbs and plants that I've seen before, all labelled, half of them caused me to have an “Aha! So that's what that is called. Unfortunately I didn't write these down, so I've promptly forgotten the lot!

The cycad collection, with weird enormous and oddly coloured seed pods, then run to the shelter from the next shower in the palm greenhouse — now given over to a spiky collection of plants from Madagascar.

Back outside and stumbled upon a group of five greenhouses; cacti, bromeliads, ferns, magnificent giant water-lillies and a collection of various other hothouse plants.

Jo in the Adelaide Rose Garden

A brief visit to the gift shop to shelter from another shower turned into a half-hour stay. Browsing through the books and gifts, doing a little pre-emptive Christmas shopping. Outside and through the “classground,” a working part of the gardens where new plants are experimented upon — to see whether or not they are suitable for South Australia's climate — then on to the rose garden. Wow! What a surprise. In the dull light under the cloud-grey sky the roses looked brilliant — and so many of them!

Also surprising was the “Bicentennial Conservatory,” rising like a weird spaceship in the middle of the garden. I'd seen it marked on the map, but hadn't realised its size or uniqueness! The door charge was a little steep, so we contented ourselves with the view from outside, and an hour or two in the roses.

Three o'clock and we finally decided that we'd had enough and were in need of lunch! Left the gardens and found a café on East terrace and had a very enjoyable — if slightly late — lunch while watching and faintly hearing the jazz in the park over the road.

Back on foot via Rundle street, ducking here and there into all the outdoors shops to look at boots and clothes and things that we'd realised last week that we needed — no success, so back to the backpackers' for a short nap to recover our energy!

We'd arranged to go out this evening to a bar at Henley beach, Sandy had told us all that Bacchus bar was a great place on a Sunday evening with a great rock'n'roll band, good crowd, and magnificent views out over the sunset and the water. The howling wind and stormy seas greeted us when Jo and I arrive in the car, but the pier was there so we had to walk out along it — it seems to be a universal law of piers! Hands firmly holding hats on heads, we made it to the end and back, then hurried into the bar for a drink!

Dave, Cornelia and Monika, all turned up, but Sandy never showed. I think she probably took one look at the weather and sensibly stayed inside! I'm sure it's what I would have done if I hadn't been visiting Adelaide today!

A couple of hours and a couple of drinks, the wind howled and beat on the awnings and tarpaulins, driving rain in through the gaps and up under the tables from ground level! We sat around talking and catching up and listening to the band, then in a lull in the weather sprinted back to the car and drove back to the city and to bed!

Where?

Adelaide.

Taylors winery has what I believe to be one of the ugliest brick facades that I've ever seen on a winery — spectacularly fake castle-like crenellations. Luckily you can't seen any of this from the inside, where the wines are very good. I think we left with a couple of bottles of 2005 White Cabernet, 2003 Shiraz/Cabernet, 2004 Clare Valley Riesling and the 2001 White Burgundy (Crouchen/Chardonnay).

Where?

Wilpena Pound, Quorn, Adelaide.

Where?

Angorichina, Blinman, Wilpena Pound

Where?

Quorn, Parachilna, Angorichina.

Where?

Coober Pedy, Marla, Quorn.

Where?

Yulara village, Coober Pedy.

Around the rock to the sunrise carpark and join the throng, once again surprised at the number of people here. One busload asked Sandy quite sternly to move the bus out of their line of sight — it didn't occur to them to walk 5m further along the road!

Like last night, once again there was a lot of standing around and waiting, but unlike last night the results weren't really worth it. The sun gradually came up through the clouds and the rock gradually got lighter — no amazing colour changes, no "Oohs" and "Aahs". The only point of interest being the fog and low clouds over the top of Uluru and Kata Tjuta looking impressive shrouded in thick fog, but too far away to photograph.

Back in the bus, back to Yulara for breakfast, then back again to Uluru for the walks. We arrived at the start of the Mala walk just in time to join one of the rangers for a free tour, as Sandy freely admitted, he knew far more than she did, and she was coming along to learn too. He started off a little self-conscious, speaking a little too soft and a little too quickly, but soon got over it and was a wealth of information. One major problem was hearing him over the noise from all the frogs in the waterholes! Very loud, and sounding quite like the bleating of sheep or goats.

We learned a little of the Anungu and Mala people, and the stories that go with Uluru, but as was pointed out a few times, without being a member of those families, the only stories that can be told are the equivalent of nursery rhymes — very basic childrens' stories giving only the outlines of the significance of the sites. This goes for all the dreaming stories Australia-wide, so there's a whole lot here that I'll never know. The stories explain partly why the Anungu strongly request that visitors not climb the rock; but in a trade-off with the tourism operators, its not forbidden. The tourism operators claim that if visitors couldn't climb, nobody would come here, and both they and the Anungu would have no income. We asked how many people respect the Anungu's wishes and were quite surprised — 80-85% of visitors still climb, although in certain demographics it is much higher. According to the ranger almost 100% of visiting American and Japanese ignore the native requests and climb.... At the conclusion of the guided walk, Jo and I headed off anti-clockwise around Uluru while the rest of the group detoured back to the bus to top up drinks, then set off clockwise. A long walk. A very long walk! The most fascinating parts of Uluru are all the places that are of special cultural significance, there are signs forbidding entry and photography, and $5000 fines for breaking these rules. It's all a little confusing though; from a kilometre or two away all the photos show all of the rock, but up close one whole end is off-limits. Should all of the thousands of tourists be fined for taking their photographs from the sunset viewing area? Should NASA be fined for their satellite photos of the top of the rock? Would the Anungu prefer that nobody too any photographs at all? I'm really not sure.

Finally back at the carpark around noon, stupidly neither of us had taken much in the way of food! Must be turning into a stupid tourist — the bus driver didn't tell me to think of taking food on a 10km hike, so I didn't think of it myself! I think we met most of the others almost exactly half way around. There was five or ten minutes of sitting around waiting for the last few to get back, nobody asked who had climbed the rock — the two Japanese guys did, not sure who else did or didn't. Then it was back to camp for some much needed lunch! After lunch it was time to visit Kata Tjuta, and walk through the valley of the winds. A large thunderstorm was moving in from the west, and everything was still damp from the morning's rain, so there was little chance of the walk being closed — something that happens when the temperature exceeds 35°C! Sandy looked knowledgably at the clouds and claimed that we'd be all right, that we'd be sheltered by the “domes from the rain if it did arrive, so we headed off up the track...

The wind increased as the storm drew closer, and was further intensified as it funnelled in through the gap between the domes. Heading down from the “1st Lookout” — the point where the walk is closed in hot weather — one of the party was spooked by the thunder and started to head back. Sandy talked him out of it, convincing him that it was only noise and lightning, that there probably wouldn't be any rain, that we should head on... Looking back up the hill from the bottom I was watching as the clouds reached the domes we'd just passed. Boiling in over the hill, the wall of rain came sweeping towards us! Some people struggled into their spray jackets, some (like me) had left theirs in the bus or the camp, Ken decided that the best option was to take off his t-shirt, roll it up and keep it dry in a bag.

The pelting rain only lasted a few minutes, together with wild winds that thrashed the trees around and had us all wondering where we could get shelter, then it had all passed and we were left soaked, but gently steaming! It was an amazing walk from there on, as we watched, the rain started running off the domes in streams and small waterfalls, some only lasted a couple of minutes, some seemed to be draining larger areas and kept going the whole time. Sandy was very excited, it was her sixth visit to Kata-Tjuta and the first time she'd ever seen rain out here, “Look at the waterfalls!” she kept on exclaiming. At the next major intersection in the track Sandy and some of the group turned around, while the rest of us decided to walk around the longer loop and do the full walk. Annoyingly, half-way around we were interrupted by a member of another party who was chatting incessantly on his mobile phone — amazing that it has coverage out here, 20 or more kilometres from Yulara, but incredibly annoying to the rest of us!

It had been bliss the last few days being away from any kind of phone coverage, even Yulara had none until late yesterday evening as they'd been hit by lightning. All of a sudden phones had started bleeting and beeping and then three or four of the group had spent the next hour or so texting or talking to friends and family in Australia and England — so much for backpacking in the 21st century, seems some people are never more than 12 hours from an SMS from mummy and daddy!

Wind, rain, lightning, thunder, rainbows, red rocks, blue sky — an event-filled two hours around Kata-Tjuta... and we'll never know the significance of it all, since the whole area is still part of “men's business” for the Anungu, and not a word of that is told to anyone outside. On the bus trip back to Yulara Sandy suddenly came to a halt for no apparent reason and half-leapt out of the bus “Quick, quick! she cried. We all followed, and amazingly, she'd spotted a Thorny Devil (Moloch horridus) as it was walking across the road. Amazing because we were travelling at about 100km/hr, and it is only about 20cm long! Together with the Frill-necked dragon it's probably Australia's most well known lizard, appearing on postcards and picture books around the world. Quite amazing to see in real life, so much smaller than everyone imagines! Another Uluru sunset tonight, but much more low-key than yesterday's. Jo and I grabbed a couple of beers and walked from the campsite to the nearby lookout, then stood around with half a dozen others and watched quitely as the sky faded to orange and purple. Uluru was nowhere nearly as exciting as yesterday, but the colours on Kata-Tjuta summed up the desert evenings.

Where?

Yulara village.

There's a steep climb up from the carpark at Kings Canyon, then most of the walk is around the canyon rim admiring the rock formations. Apart from a large busload of students from a Melbourne girls' school it was fairly peaceful, the girls shrieked and squealed and could be heard half-way around the canyon, the rest of the time we met small groups like ourselves. At one point a Euro dashed out from behind some rocks and bounded away over the broken ground — astounding that they never misjudge and plummet into the canyon — or maybe they do!

Stairs and a boardwalk lead down into the canyon, the recent rains meaning that the waterholes and creek are flowing at the moment. A pair of black ducks and their ducklings were swimming about, according to the guides the pair are resident here. One or two members of our group decided to go swimming, the steep sided canyon and little sunlight in here make for very cold water! They were also joined by a dozen or so of the school-girls, with ear-piercing shrieks as they jumped in. Back up to the rim of the canyon and continuing on around, we came to an immense smooth-sided rock-face. According to geologists this huge slab fell away only some 70 years ago — we joked about whether anyone was here at the time, and whether they are now spread very thinly under the rock! The freshly split rock is an almost whitish sandstone, the iron in it oxidises to give the browns and reds when it is exposed to the air.

At one point Sandy stopped and beckoned us over to a gum-tree growing out of the rocks. Kneeling down low, if you press your ear against the trunk you can hear water trickling around down in the rocks — an amazing trick of acoustics considering how dry it is up at the top!

Continuing on around the canyon we eventually came back to the carpark, then back in the bus for another long drive to take us all the way down the Lasseter highway to Yulara. After an hour or so of cruising along the flat roads a bump appeared on the horizon, gradually increasing in size. “Is that Uluru?” came into my head, “Can't possibly be, we're still two or three hours away, and it's completely the wrong shape...” A few more minutes, Sandy quietly grinning to herself in the drivers seat as more and more people murmured and pointed, before she had to give the game away. “Over there on the left is Mount Conner, we'll be stopping at a roadside lookout for lunch and to take photos.”

Several hundred kilometres from anywhere else, Mount Conner and Lake Amadeus rest-stop contained two buses and the two touring cyclists we'd seen yesterday. Still on their way towards Uluru, the distance we cover in an hour, they cover in a day. They didn't look too impressed to be sharing the tables with us. From my memories of cycle touring I think I can understand why; every day the same questions, all the same noisy inquisitiveness, when all you want to do is sit down off the bike and have a relaxing meal. Drive into Yulara and then around and around the campsite. It hadn't struck me until we got here just how many people visit Uluru. Five campgrounds, two dedicated solely to bus tour groups, with permanent parking lots and shelters for each tour company. Drop off the bags, then into Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park for a visit to the information centre and a drive around the rock itself. Wet and glistening after the rain, it is an amazing sight rising up out of the flat landscape.

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Arriving at the “Sunset viewing carpark” I had no idea it was all so organised! I guess I should have realised from the numbers, there can be up to sixty full-size coachloads of people here at peak times. Everything from minibusses of backpackers with an esky of beer, to busses from the resort with their trestle table of champagne and suit-jacketed waiters! Once you've walked around the viewing area a few times, then up the track along the dunes to get a slightly different angle, and taken a few photographs, there really isn't much to do but stand around and chat and wait for the sun to go down — hoping that the clouds will part and that we'll get to see some of the famous colour changes. I was standing with my back to the rock sipping a beer when all of a sudden the crowd let out a uniform "OOooo!", almost comical in effect. I turned around to see that the setting sun had shone in under the clouds and lit up the rock as though from footlights. Everyone started running around taking photographs, even the park ranger was standing on the back of his truck taking photos, so I guess it must have been a good night!

Where?

Kings Creek station, Kings Canyon, Yulara village.

A six o'clock wake-up call, breakfast and packed and waiting for the bus we discovered that the other two girls in the room were also on our tour. Right on time the bus showed at five to seven, then several minutes of confusion because there were meant to be five of us and there were only four — the girls had been travelling with a friend, and all three were booked on the tour, but one had cancelled and gone home to the UK. They'd called the Wayward office and let them know, but obviously the information hadn't made it back to Sandy, the bus driver.

Back around town to Toddies Place so we could all register for the tour, confusion once again over the missing girl. The whole story was explained again as the two remaining English girls registered. Jo and I were next, then followed them outside where one of their mobile phones immediately rang — it was the Wayward head office, trying to locate the missing girl! The staff inside were calling the head office, who were then calling back to her friends standing 3m away to check the story! A bizarre situation as once again the story was repeated, with the Wayward head office having no recollection of the cancellation yesterday! Eventually it was sorted out and all sixteen people got on the bus and ready to go.

A quick stop at the side of the road to pick up the National Parks entry tickets from someone who had raced off to collect these when the office opened — these were meant to be available at Toddies Place, but somebody had forgotten to arrange for them yesterday. Out through Heavitree Gap and south down the Stuart highway, we were meant to visit Rainbow Canyon, but the last few nights' rain had flooded the road — yesterday one of the buses was stuck for three hours. Instead the first stop was at Stuart's Well, approximately 90km from Alice. Here we met Jim Cotterill, a member of the family that first recognised Kings Canyon as a potential tourist destination and started developing it in 1960. We also met Stuart's Wells most famous resident — Dinky the singing dingo.

Since all the other members of the party except Jo had brought their cameras inside, she was “volunteered” to play the piano while Dinky sang. You don't even have to play well, as soon as the keys are pressed, the dingo howls. Play a high note, and the dingo howls high, play a low note and the dingo howls slightly lower. An odd display!

Time to wander around the roadhouse after the show and read the history from the walls' full of brochures and magazine articles, cut out and pasted up over the years. Outside in the campground were camels and kangaroos, and an entreprenurial wildlife rescue service charging five dollars to step into the enclosure and hear about the joeys raised after their mothers became road-kill. Then it was time to get back on the bus for more travelling. The lunch stop was at Mt Ebeneezer roadhouse, a combination roadhoue and aboriginal gallery, painting and souvenirs on display, including wood-carvings in a style that has been “invented in the last twenty years, and didgeridoos that aren't made within a thousand kilometres of the inland area — but they are what the tourists expect! While we were eating two long-distance touring cyclists arrived, tired and dusty and looking for a break. I'm not sure where they were from or where they were going, I've been at the other end of this, and I didn't want to interrupt their break with a lot of pointless sounding questions from “a lazy tourist in a bus.” Hats off to them, but I don't think I could do a self-contained tour here myself — the distances are just too intimidating, a week between Alice and Uluru, over a hundred kilomtres between road-houses, definitely a test of moral and physical stamina. Later in the afternoon we stopped in the bush to walk around in the red earth and to hunt for witchety grubs. Not interested, so Jo and I wandered around in the quiet and looked at the rubbish — here a rusting tin that could be two years old, or it could be fifty, I couldn't tell! The ubiquitous supermarket plastic bag can be seen caught around tree branches near the road, along with blown out tyres and broken glass, ten metres off into the mulga and it could be any decade, only a few rusting pieces of metal giving any hint that people have been here previously.

A second stop later disturbed a little. I'm sure that there are endless mulga trees around, but our instructions to bash down dead trees and gather up wood for the fire tonight seemed vandalistic. It happened a few times during the week, a tension between the promotion of the outback and the unspoilt nature, and an injunction to “rip that down”, “burn this”, probably the quintessential Australian approach — admiring the landscape while digging up and chopping down as much of it as possible. Regardless, we drove off with the roof of the trailer piled high with dead stumps, no more a shelter for lizards, snakes, birds or possums, fuel for the evening's fire. Perhaps the ratio of trees to people out here is enough to support the behaviour, perhaps in a few years there'll be dustbowl for a few hundred metres either side of the road...

Later in the afternoon we arrived at Kings Creek station, a combination working cattle station, campground, roadhouse and tourist park. A surprisingly noisy place, the electricity is supplied by a large diesel generator, and major attractions are the helicopter rides and quad-biking around in the desert! Jo and I opted for a quarter of an hour camel ride, led by Gwen the camel lady — someone I'm sure I've seen at country shows in NSW or Victoria! Only a few hundred metres off into the scrub and it became almost silent, just the creak of the leather harness, the rumbling in the camels' stomachs,and the swish as they rubbed themselves against the vegetation — a rather disconcerting practice! For some reason I like camels, its almost got to be a joke at home with me suggesting we get one for the garden, but I could find the lazy swaying walk quite relaxing. Too soon we were turning around and heading back, back to the noise and the people.

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After dinner we mostly congregated around the fire where Sandy had us all play a silly — but fairly effective — name game to try and learn each others names. “Hi I'm Sandy and I like sausages...”, “Hi Sandy who likes sausages, I'm Ken and I like koalas....” “Hi Sandy who likes sausages and Ken who likes koalas, I'm Kota who likes kangaroos....” By the time it gets to the sixteenth person naming the preceding fifteen, everyone should have the general idea!

Although we were camping well out in the bush away from city lights, the clouds covered too much of the sky — none of those spectacular desert skies for us tonight! Dave and a couple of the English girls wanted to see the Southern Cross, amusingly it was low on the horizon and hidden below the trees, we had to point in the rough direction and say “It'd be there if the trees weren't there!” Finally to bed, no tents, wrapped only in our swags, and hoping for fine weather!

Where?

Alice Springs, Stuarts Well, Kings Creek station.

Where?

Adelaide, Alice Springs.

Where?

Horsham, Nhill, Bordertown, Adelaide.

Nearly holiday time! Nearly every time it seems to happen, a sudden pile of things to do, a feeling of unreality that I'll actually be able to get away — then finally it arrives with a rush and it is definitely happening now.

Where?

Melbourne, Ballarat, Horsham

This site is getting unwieldy, I'm wondering about a restructure, a rewrite, or a change to one of the myriad of blogging services or CMS systems.... Tried to login to my account on blogger, only to find that I can't remember the password. I know that I have used it in the past, because http://ajft.blogspot.com/ exists, and I updated it on the 23rd of April, 2003. I can't login because I can't remember my password, I can't reset my password because it won't send an email to my existing accounts, I can't write to their support because they seem to insist that I login in order to contact them!

Late update: I think I found a way to break out of the circle and ask them to reset my password.

Every year Bicycle Victoria promotes a “Ride to Work Day” in October, and exhorts everyone to ride their bicycles to work, just this once! There's free breakfast in the city, the odd speech, promotional material, police present to engrave your drivers' license number in your bike if you like — to aid recovery in the event of theft.... The last couple of years I've decided to ride in to the city to have a look around, then back out again to go to work. Silly enough when I lived in Richmond and had to then head out to Clayton, downright foolish now that I live in Oakleigh — 15km into the city then 20km back out again!

No photos though, sometime in the past couple of days I've left the camera switched on and flattened the battery, but lots to see, lots of people to talk to. The ride up St Kilda road is an eye-opener, bumper-to-bumper motorists crawling along at 5km/hr, all quite happy to drive in the bike lane, but all equally prepared to lean on the horn when a cyclist pulls out to go around an illegally parked car!

I saw both the Spiegeltent and the box that it comes in! Time for its annual pilgrimage to Melbourne, it appears tardis-like in the forecourt of the Arts centre for a month or so, then silently vanishes overnight.... There's nothing silent about the hammering, clanging and shouting the accompanies the unpacking and setting up though! I'm looking forward to seeing a band or two in there this year.

A warm spring day, a good night's sleep and today its time to go for a ride — but which bike do we use? Jo wanted to get out on her new roadie, I joked about the spider webs on the tandem, yes, no, maybe... The tandem it was.

Beach road was amazing. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of cyclists in groups all up and down the bay. The good weather and the approach of the Around the Bay in a Day ride has driven them all out for their training. Police were out too, whether patrolling for motorists or cyclists breaking the law I don't know, a siren went off directly behind us as they pulled over a speeding motorist and it half deafend us, half frightened us off the bike!

Lunch at Portobella, on the beach in Port Melbourne, just past the end of Kerford road. Not quite sure what to make of it, the food is ok, the service kind of laughable. A well meaning owner running around and handing out menus, but forgetting to tell his waitresses about the new customers, waitresses who all seem to be visiting British backpackers — young, invariably cute, and totally unskilled at waiting. Eventually manage to catch the eye of the waitress, only to find that we'd been given the breakfast menu, and breakfast wasn't being served anymore.... Despite it all we managed to get lunch ordered and delivered and eaten.

First weekend of October means that we've now been in the house for a whole year.... I'm sure there was a list of things that we thought we'd change and fix and do, and I'm equally sure that very few of them have been done! Today's contributions were a visit to the shops for a new outdoor light to replace the decomposing one that finally failed a month ago, and a pile of things for the garden — mulch and potting mix and spring-time plantings of tomatoes and snow peas. This then resulted in lots of fun playing in the dirt.

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Photos

Bikes, bikes and more bikes! A leisurely ride into Richmond so Jo could sneak in a few hours at work, then I headed up Burnley street for a lap of the Boulevarde. One lap turned into two, then very optimistically I turned back for the third. More hill climbs than I've ridden in months — almost more riding than I've ridden in months!

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I've succumbed. Here's my pig. Ooo-errr; its got a long tail.

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Greyness, wind, drizzle, and bad coffee. The variability of spring covers some of them, but the bad coffee is inexcusable. The Hargraves café — sorry, HG Café, as it is now trendily known — has gone all American and is trying to imitate all the big franchises. All the coffees come in disposable paper cups, unless you insist on a real cup. “Small, medium or large,” is the next question. You half expect: “Do you want fries with that?” For some reason I went in at lunch time, a momentary escape from building 28. What I got was not a cup of coffee, it was a glass of warm milk.

At least the music keeps me sane. Last Thursday as we drove home I caught the tail end of the Australian Mood on RRR, the end of a brief piece on a band I hadn't heard for more than two decades! The Thought Criminals now have a web site! Not only that, but they've released a double CD and all the songs can be freely downloaded from the site. I started to download them, then decided why bother, ordered the CD. Today it arrived in the mail and as a result I've been reliving my youth, with vague memories from the early 1980s and bands and Canberra's old Civic hotel and the ANU bar....

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Ow ow ow! Another day, another motorised moron.

Rush hour traffic in Haughton road? A fifty kilometre speed limit and traffic in both directions. A road specifically narrowed by the council to stop everyone using it as a short cut. A road narrowed so that motorists have to actually think and pull out to overtake cyclists safely. Not a problem for our local inhabitants. Speed up and go head-on towards oncoming cars, then swerve back in and slam on the brakes to avoid hitting the next car up ahead. Only problem was the little lady driving the big bronze Lexus 4WD, she pulled this idiot stunt just as I was approaching one of the little roundabouts, swerved back in to avoid the traffic island and slammed the side of the 4WD straight into my shoulder, arm and hand! “But mister, why you hit me? I turning left! What you doing, why you run into me mister?”

Bruised knuckles and a hand that hurt to type with for the whole day.

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Cryptic numbers? No, its the price of petrol a year, a month, a day ago, and then today. You'd almost think that petrol rationing was about to start.

Riding to work this morning there's chaos at the first petrol station — still $1.25/litre — and motorists queueing at all the pumps and out onto the road. Then ride up to the corner of North and Clayton roads where, bizarrely, the two outlet that face each other often have wildly different prices. Sure enough, its $1.25 at one of them and $1.39 at the other! Even more bizarrely, there are motorists filling their tanks at both... I wonder what the price will be in a week, a month, a year?

The old apricot tree in the neighbour's garden still manages to sprout some blossom, it'll be a shame when it finally dies, but its probably got quite a few years left in it. I think there were two apricots on the tree last summer!

Time to make the most of the day, since this week I only got a one-day weekend. Clear skies, not a breath of wind all day, near perfect spring weather.

A bit of gardening, all enthused because we have a garden: first beans planted for the year, some wysteria seeds I took from mum and dad's old vine, ripped out the broccoli plants from the winter. Jo and I even managed to catch the eye of the old Greek lady who lives over the back fence as she was in her garden and said hello — that's two out of three neighbours we've spoken to, the third is unlikely — the gent in number ten seems too reclusive! We talked about the fruit and veges in her garden, she wanted to know where we're from. Admired her olive tree and she immediately offered us some fruit next season — I might have to help picking the higher ones!

Out for another orientation walk around the streets, and to be nosy and look at the enormous piles of rubbish that have been put out for tomorrow's hard-rubbish collection. Absolutely astounding, rolls of old carpet, mattresses, fridges, TVs, rotting fences, garden trimmings, but also dozens of old bicycles, bags of old clothes, jars, bottles, plant pots — half of it perfectly usable, but all going to be crushed and off to land-fill — and a stern warning on the council brochure that anyone seen scavenging would be prosecuted!

The house now smells of Jasmine and Fresias; the smell of jasmine always reminds me of living in Cameron street in Richmond — I think it was the only thing that grew above the concrete there — the second are one of the few things I can't kill off in the garden!

Photos

I was “volunteered.” Management can't seem to work out whether we're supposed to work between 8am and 6pm or 24 hours a day. They certainly won't pay for anyone to be there out of the ordinary hours — but all hell breaks loose when you want to upgrade anything or install anything — “You can't do that in production hours!” Bah! Who wants to volunteer for the evening? Who wants to volunteer for the weekend work? On-call as well, a phone call last night then four SMS alerts ten minutes before the shift ended — I got in early expecting the worst, only to find that a router update had clobbered the whole network for three-quarters of an hour and last night's alarms were spurious. Double-bah!

Awake at four-thirty a.m., quiet, then birds, trains, traffic. A clear sunny morning — perfect for not having to go to work! I headed off on my bike in one direction while Jo headed off in the other, me to Monash, her for an hour or so down along the bay and back!

The only good point to the whole exercise was that it happened very smoothly, we were scheduled to take all day to 5:30pm, Paul and I were finished four hours early — I wonder how the other half of the work tomorrow will go?

Afternoon exploration, South into unexplored territory. Over North road and down along the fortified boundary of the golf course, a quick detour in along the driveway to see if we could see the clubhouse — supposedly a wonderful example of a pre-suburbia building preserved in the club — all we could see was the carpark and the watchful eye of the security cameras watching us...

Keep going south along the fence, Magnolias and fruit blossom everywhere, finally the golf course ended and we could turn left, but twists and turns of the roads conspired to send us still further south. Where are we going to end up we wondered? Somewhere in South Oakleigh, nearly at Centre road, derelict site of an old school, only the basketball courts and concrete cricket pitch remain, poking through the grass on the vacant block. Around a corner and a fascinating house confronted us, such a suprise after the uniform suburbia and endless 1960s brick housing, striking panels of colour, and odd angles sticking out — something interesting!

One or two more streets and we found ourselves at the bottom of Huntingdale road, finally at least we knew where we were! Simply head North — a very long way — and we would be home. Still a few surprises, a huge pit beside the road that seems to be an abandoned quarry in the middle of the suburb, then a well kept park and athletics track, nameless, but with signs warning you to control your dog.

Spring weather again; albeit with a strong northerly wind. Off for a lazy ride around and around, exploring a few places I haven't visited for a while. Up along the bike trail to Carnegie, lost through the back streets to Caulfield, head north up Glennferrie road, zig-zag through Toorak, down to Richmond, nosiness sends me up the street where I lived for five years. Westwards into the city, sit at Federation Square for a while and watch the world go past, then off down St Kilda road to St Kilda and Elwood, before turning left back towards Oakleigh.

Glen Huntly road heading home, an idiot in a bright yellow Porsche decides to throw the car door fully open in front of me. I see it in time and merely yell “DOOR!” he screams abuse back and threatens "I bloody run-a you down". Shake my head as I continue on, its amazing the beliefs held by some of the people on our roads.... A suburb or so later I'm passing a stationary line of cars, queued up all the way back from the rail crossing at Ormond, as I draw level with one car the driver pulls out of the traffic, turning left straight across my path into the carpark. The indicator has just been flicked on but there's no hope of me stopping in time, he hasn't looked before he turned. I yell, brake, and crunch hard into the side of the car. The windows are open and the driver almost has a heart attack. Luckily the only damage to me is a friction burn on my elbow where I slid along the car. Seems that dozens of passers by want to know if I'm alright — I'm just annoyed. Annoyed that I didn't see him in time, annoyed that I didn't guess that he would turn straight across me without looking. The driver is very shaken and apologetic, he claims he saw me, claims he indicated, just claims he didn't realise I was so close. Maybe he'll check a little more carefully next time. “Cyclists in mirror are closer than they appear.”

RRR is nearly at the end of their annual radiothon, three days left to go and I've been meaning to get around to resubsribing, but was leaving it until the weekend.... This morning the Breakfasters had a guest from the long past — James Young — half of the old Fast Fictions team. I couldn't resist, I had to give it a try. Rang up, re-subscribed, made a donation, then offered to double the donation if Hound Dog can find me a replacement Fast Fictions CD to replace the one that I took to South Africa and left there sometime back in 2001! Ok, waiting on you, Mr Young....

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Fairly typical mix of old weatherboad houses, some well kept, some run down, some with magnificent well-established gardens, some with bare expanses of weeds, mud and student cars — typical for any suburb right next door to a university! Magnolias, wattles and fruit trees are all in blossom at the moment, with the sun out I managed to get one good photo to brighten up the day.

With much fanfare Jo declared it is time. Time to take her new bicycle out for a ride — one week old and it hasn't been ridden yet! The weather doesn't look promising and we decide we're both getting old and lazy — its far too easy to just sit at home and wait for a perfect day... Off down Warrigal road, a brief stop in a carpark to adjust the seat, then head for the bay along North road. Down towards Mordialloc and we're thinking that the new bike is magic — the two of us are sitting there, cruising along at 35km/hr, chatting away and barely pedaling.... Ah, the faces of the riders heading in the other direction reveals the awful truth — there's quite a northerly blowing, and its square at out backs! Once we'd turned around it became one long slog home into the face of the wind, approaching South road we were struggling to maintain 14km/hr!

As I grabbed my slices of toast and put them on the bench, Jo burst out laughing, pointing out that they looked like the silhouette of a basset hound. Far more interesting then the assorted images of Jesus and Mary that are seen in donuts or tree stumps, in our bread slices we have seen completely non-denominational penguins, octopus and the odd basset!

Dentist appointment at 9 o'clock this morning, just up the road from where — err, from where I lived until last October. Forty-five minute bike ride from home to Richmond now, so I had to get up early — or what passes for early for me! I could have got it down to thirty-five minutes by taking the car and being stuck in the crawling hordes on the freeway, by bike in the sunshine was far more appealing. Pink and white blossom is out on all the trees along the way, as are all the wattles in various shades of yellow — I do miss that ride to work!

Somehow I managed to find every piece of roadworks between Oakleigh and Richmond; a council digging up Poath road, contractors repairing the bike track where it is splitting and sliding into Gardiners creek (finally, its only taken then five years to start that!), other road-works mysteries on Yarra boulevard and in Malvern. The leaking sewer and assorted lumps and bumps are all still where I remember them on the track, some houses have gone, bulldozed in the night, building sites have finally been finished. Its amazing how quickly some parts of the route change.

Anyone care to confirm the following bizarre question and answer that appeared in a discussion on Daleks?

  Q: Whats the Welsh for EXTERMINATE?
  A: since you asked, it's DIFODIWCH

I really ought to write something here, it was a very busy day! Food, friends, freezing wind, three hours walking around the NGV. Exhausting!

Dutch Masters from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. an impressive collection of paintings, and a few miscellaneous pieces of silverware and pottery. One of the glasses had me thinking, the sign on it said it was one of under five left in the world... I could swear I'd seen another! Oh yeah, in the glass museum in Venice! A magnificent painting of a 17th century warship reminded me of what might happen today if the artist tried the same thing “I'm sorry sir, you can't paint that ship — security — I'm afraid we'll have to confiscate your studio...”

“No photography” and “Please turn off your mobile phones” say the signs at the entrance announces. Bleep, bloop, ring-ring. The attitude of the public replies straight back — every couple of minutes a different ring tone blares out “Uh yeah, Hi! Um, I'm in the gallery...” Guess what — we all know you're in the gallery.

Interesting subjects, fascinating techniques. Some incredibly lifelike hair and cloth and lights playing on metallic jewelry. I hadn't realised until now that Harlem in the US was named after Haarlem in Holland. One painting caught my eye because the subjects looked to be slightly squashed, something we see on TV often enough when normal 4x3 pictures are shown on widescreen TV with the wrong picture setting — no TV then, so the artist must have intended it... was Adriaen van Ostade's Peasants intended to be seen slightly from the side, as you were walking along a hallway towards it?

Mark had suggested that there would be time to visit the National Museum in Carlton after we'd finished with the paintings — not a chance, after three hours of Dutch masters we were exausted and desperate for lunch! Big bowls of soup in Degraves street, perfect for the cold weather and the icy wind.

Four degrees overnight and we've learnt that the walls of the old weatherboard house has a lot less insulation than the bricks and concrete of Richmond! The only heating in the house is the wood fire, light it at 6:30pm and by 10:00pm the place is just starting to feel warm — just in time to go to bed.

Bund is back, amusingly, a heat-related problem. One of its fans had expired and the machine overheated. My suggestion that they move the machine outside and let ambient air cool it was received — coolly.

One big win this evening — I discovered that my X-Drive external hard-disk/memory-card-reader thing can handle the SD cards from the IXUS700. I was worried that it could only handle the cards from the other camera. I then ran around the freezing cold house cooking dinner, reading the newspaper, trying to light the fire, listening to early '80s punk on RRR and taking photos of things all at the same time! Somehow I managed to not drop the camera in the bolognaise, and got the house warm!

Bah! One of my colleagues from work spent the night in hospital and will spend the rest of the week off work. Motorist “failed to give way” and ran into him. I've seen him riding — lit up like a christmas tree, lights, reflectors, shiny vest, and always on the lookout for the idiot in the tin box. It only takes one lapse in concentration and the idiot will get you...

Uh oh... I'm off the air. So of course, nobody can read this. Something bad has happened and my friends at bund.com.au have been down since Sunday. Best wishes in exorcising the devils within the machinery guys....

?huh?

The civil liberties of some Australians will have to be curtailed in the fight against terrorism, Treasurer Peter Costello says.

Thanks Mr Costello. More and more it seems that the terrorists win. Security becomes the justification for anything and everything.

Our Man of Steel, the Honorable John W. Howards wants thousands more cameras to monitor us every step of the way, meanwhile it seems that carrying a camera is now a suspicious activity. More and more ordinary photographers and tourists seem to be finding themselves harassed or forbidden from taking photos of sights that tens of thousands of people before them have! Shopping centres, cinemas, airports, government offices, train stations — the famous clocks of Flinders street station could now be out of bounds — Of course, any attempt to photograph a camera that's photographing you is automatically a subversive act.

Of course you aren't automatically a terrorist if you're carrying a camera — be so foolish as to take a photo in a public place that shows anyone under the age of 18 and the other option is that you're a pedophile!

An interesting thought that occurred to me yesterday though, along with all these places banning cameras as well as banning photography. Approximately 35% of the mobile phones on the market contain a digital camera, and Australia has an 85% penetration rate of mobile phones — so presumably 35% of 85% — eg 29.7% — of the Australian public is forbidden from taking their mobile phones into many of these places...

More monitoring

Italian river 'full of cocaine'

The results suggested cocaine was in regular use in the areas tested Scientists have found large quantities of cocaine residue in a river in northern Italy - suggesting consumption is much higher than previously thought.

They've analysed the river and found that people upstream metabolise cocaine. How long until they start moving upstream to individual drains, streets, or house sewer outlets to track it down and use it as evidence in prosecuting people for consumption?

2005-Feb-18 2005 RTA NSW Big Ride: Charlotte Pass — Kiama
2005-Mar-25 Easter Deadly Treadly Tour: Avoca — Melbourne

Just about to leave this morning to ride to work when the rain started hammering down on the tin roof, definitely time to sit for a quarter of an hour and tidy the kitchen!

Oddest motorist this morning — the lady stopped at the lights on North road. She drove up, stopped, her hands and eyes dropped into her lap and she started fiddling about. “Another idiot on the phone,” I thought. Wrong! She had picked up her knitting! The lights went green and she drove off, still looking in her lap, still doing her knitting!

Strangely, at the Clayton road lights I pulled up alongside the same garbage truck that yesterday tried to run me off the road, not sure if it has a different driver today or whether they're just in a better mood, there was no abuse, no laughter, nothing.

Once at Monash I detoured around to the semi-regular monthly cyclist breakfast, a chance to stand around and chat and discuss what routes people use to get to and from the campus. My hat goes off to the girl from Upwey who rides in most days — riding home up Mount Dandenong each evening must be hard work!

This morning I'm on my way to work when I meet, SKM-659, the garbage truck driven by idiots. First they're stopped at the corner hanging out the window and yelling sexist abuse at a female pedestrian, then they came up behind me on North road, pulled into the bike lane as they passed, then just ahead of me kept on coming left until the truck almost met the railing, pulling back out the two passengers were leaning out the window looking back at me and laughing.

Mere coincidence that the newspapers and commercial TV news are doing a big beat-up on anti-cyclist sentiment and what a "threat" unregulated cyclists pose to "normal law-abiding folk"? I'm sure that those three in their ten ton garbage truck felt completely threatened....

  Odometer: 19884km
  Distance: 68.53km
  Average speed: 18.93km/hr
  Time: 3:37:14

The weather is starting to resemble spring time, the excuses for being lazy and not going out on the bike are getting harder to come by — even with the inflammatory anti-cycling attitudes being drummed up in the media — so Jo and I took off for a ride this morning. Just the normal ride, along North road to the beach, turn left and head down to Mordialloc. One... two... three... four... five... I gave up counting, motorists on the mobile phone — but I've got to remember, it's the cyclists along here that are the menace. Once at Mordialloc we stopped for a coffee, palm trees in the sunshine, is it still Melbourne in winter time?

On south down Station street, a fascinating mix of houses, everything from tiny old weatherboard shacks to the latest stylish bay-side life-style apartments, and every vehicle type to match.

The south-westerly breeze was increasing and starting to cool us down, so it was pleasant to head inland and onto the track alongside the Patterson river. A strange site really, a waterfront development that looks like it would be more at home on the Queensland Gold Coast than here in Melbourne — I wonder what all these pristine water-ways and private boat docks will look like after a few years of neglect, silting, and cold, wet winters? For some reason whoever built the cycle-track has decided that each bridge should be under a metre wide, and with heavy metal gates at either end, so it was slow going until we got away from the development and were heading inland alongside the creek. Bird-life all around us, ducks, cormorants and a few pelicans, the snake-like neck of one bird convincing me that it was a thing called a darter — a cormorant-like bird I can't recall having seen previously. Of course I was too busy having fun just cruising along in the sunshine to take any photos!

Under a few very low road bridges, through some sections of track in desperate need of maintenance, flood damage has half-washed away the safety railing in places, left mud and silt in others. Finally there appears above the trees in front of us a few of the larger buildings of Dandenong. I was starting to get confused, since I thought that we ought to be heading more westerly, and that we'd missed a turn somewhere, but the track just continued on with no turn offs right into the heart of Dandenong. Here we decided to leave the track and try to head back towards Oakleigh — we knew that the railway went there, we hoped that we could follow it without being forced onto major roads!

Some fascinating little shops in Dandenong, spice smells and unusual goods spilling on the footpaths, an impressive new train station — all glass and light, such a surprise compared to the other stations I'm familiar with in Melbourne, maybe Richmond will one day look like this... Amazingly, we then found ourselves on a little-trafficked side-road that paralleled the train, and were able to follow a series of similar roads all the way back home! Dandenong, Noble Park, Springvale and Clayton all thronging with life, shops and restaurants from most parts of South-East Asia. The food smells and the voices reminding me of some of the streets in Vietnam!

Amazingly, the only place where we had difficulty in staying alongside the train-line was near Westall road, heading North-West along Queens Avenue it seems to finish at a tight corner heading South, so there was a delay while we indulged in a little exploration; first on the north side of the tracks where the road also ended and a spur line blocked any progress, then back on the South side we followed a foot-track between the back of the factories and the tracks, and that track joined back onto the official bike track at Westall road.

What appeared to be a footpath onto Westall station then turned out to be a bike track on through to the next road along the line, then only a few hundred metres more and we were at the very end of Haughton road — the road that continues in a piecemeal fashion alongside the lines all the way to Oakleigh station!

It took nearly four hours all up, and only covered a touch under 70km, but it was a fascinating bit of exploration through some very different parts of Melbourne. We enjoyed the last of the afternoon sun in Oakleigh with a beer and a plate of snacks from one of the cafés in the mall — we need to go on more of these rides to places we don't normally visit!

I was tempted to put a note out asking if he could just leave a little more room — but a friend of ours did that and ended up in court because it was deemed to be against the law for him to have touched the car! I think half the problem is that we haven't got a ramp up from the kerb, must get around to asking Monash city council about that...

Aha! Finally found the bit of Victoria's Road Rules that I've been after for months. Paragraph 2, Rule 134, Part 11:

1. Exceptions to keeping to the left of a dividing line

   (2) If the dividing line is a single broken or a continuous line, or a broken divided line to the left of a single continuous dividing line, the driver may drive to the right of the dividing line to overtake another driver.

So those obnoxious drivers in Haughton road who squeeze past me nearly every day when there's no oncoming traffic should be perfectly capable of pulling out and overtaking me legally.

Every time we come here there are water birds galore, today was no exception. Ducks, coots, grebes and moorhens everywhere, then surprisingly, two adult black swans accompanied by their four cygnets appeared through the reeds heading straight towards us. I thought they were being inquisitive, or about to beg for food. We quickly discovered that they were being highly territorial! I was in the middle of kneeling down to take a photo when the two adults half-spread their wings and started hissing and charging at me! Jo and I hastily beat a retreat!

Its also a popular spot with people; walking, running, dog-walking, bike riding. A few too many ignoring the “dogs on leads” signs, but that seems to be mandatory for dog owners, everyone knows that those signs all apply to other people's dogs....

Its been a while since I've met quite such an aggressive motorist, one who's prepared not only to scream abuse but to try and hit me with their car — unfortunately tonight was such a night.

I pulled up at the lights to turn right from Clayton road into North road, drawing alongside a dark blue/green Ford station wagon stopped in the through lane. As I got level with the driver's window she flicked half a cigarette's worth of glowing ash straight out, half in my face, half down my leg. Surprised — and stung where it burned — I yelled out “Yeow!”. She looked out the half-open window and “Sorry, didn't see you”. All I said was “Use your ashtray” and she launched into a tirade of abuse, “don't have a f'ing ashtray”, “you shouldn't be riding at night”, “I'll f'ing ash where I f'ing want, you f'ing c***”, etc etc, meanwhile shaking the cigarette furiously out the window at me and trying to flick more ash onto me. “Just use your ashtray!” I shouted as the lights went green, starting to pedal forwards to get away, she planted her foot and swerved in to my lane, throwing my arm out for the impact I smacked down with my hand on the bonnet and took off around the corner as fast as I could into North road, she tore off forwards down Clayton road, still screaming abuse at me out the window!

Unfortunately I didn't see the registration, the plates were dark and the light above them wasn't working, so it was pointless to visit the police and go through the rigmarole and get nothing done.

Only good point of it was that there don't appear to be any burn holes in my clothes — only in my face!

The days are getting longer, the sky is sometimes still light when I ride home in the evenings, warm and sunny at lunch time I escaped from the windowloess brick box and went for a walk. Around the shiny new multi-story concrete carpark and over to the lake. As soon as I sat down the pigeons started waddling over to beg for food.

It seemed to be a day ideally suited to sitting inside and eating. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, chocolate biscuits, walnuts, apple strudel.... Cold and windy outside, swirls of rain and the threat of hail.

Warm and tasty scrambled eggs for breakfast, accompanied by the second half of our weekend tasty fresh loaf from one of the Oakleigh bakeries.

A brisk walk in the wind took us over to Hughesdale, or maybe Murrumbeena, I'm not sure exactly where one suburb ends and the other begins. When I moved to Melbourne in 1996 I lived in Rosella street just around the corner from here. There are now two cafés on the stretch of Poath road that used to hold only a greasy fish and chips shop and a video games parlour. The Homebrew beer shop has closed and become a café called “Brew”, the old fish 'n chip shop is now the “Turtle Bean café”. A toss of the mental coin and it was the Turtle Bean for lunch; hot soup, red wine, toast slabs an inch thick and a bruschetta piled high. Yum!

The creep of the cafés... Murrumbeena, Hughesdale, Oakleigh, all still within “a reasonable distance” of the city and becoming increasingly desired as real-estate. Maybe we bought a house in the right place! Now if only there was a decent pub within easy walking distance — from being spoilt with riches in Richmond there's only “the Junction Hotel” in Oakleigh — an uninspiring place offering pokies and sport bar.

“Going Forward on a Day By Day Basis” — Uggh! Congratulations NASA, that would have to be the bureacratic double-speak quote of the day! No wonder the space shuttle has problems when the people in charge choose to speak such gibberish.

Gaslight music has closed for the last time! Heard it on the radio and read it in the news — it must be true. Seems to be ages since I last visited, its been years since I spent a lot of time and money buying CDs, and I never spent much time in the CBD anyway. Good memories of the shop and the people though, there always seemed to be something of interest when I did get in there...

Where's the BikeCam™ when you need it? Not once, but twice this evening on the way home I came within inches of being flattened by morons who decided not to bother giving way to traffic on the roundabouts. First one was just out of Monash on Woodside avenue, moron in a red station-wagon, Subaru I think, rego. TBX-197, flying up Koonawarra street, doesn't bother to slow, straight out in front as I'm halfway around. There's that sickening feeling in my throat, in my stomach — I can't stop in time, I can't get my foot out in time — I screech to a stop, jack-knife the front wheel turning to avoid hitting the car door, I nearly fall off. The jack-knife saves me! The front wheel twists out of the way as the idiot shoots past and on his way, somehow I twist back the other way and stay upright, then manage to force down on the pedal, keep riding and not fall off.

Nearly home, most of the way up Haughton road and there's a Ford sedan waiting at the roundabout in front of me, the two cars in front of me go through, then as I'm part way round, the driver waiting floors it and shoots out in front of me! Not so close this time, I merely brake and swerve and shout and shake my head in disgust.

  Odometer: 19810km
  Distance: 79.05km
  Maximum speed: 65km/hr
  Time: 3:25:37

?huh?

Are the neighbours moving out? Has the old lady died? I wonder if I'll ever know, in nine months we've never been able to speak to them, the guy seems to avoid eye contact the few times that he is out in the front garden.

My camera behaved oddly with that second photo too. It claims that the data is corrupt, yet downloaded it and other programs can view it. Is it the camera? Is it confused? Most likely, has CPL sold me a dodgy, borderline memory card....

I thought that it was about time I entered Bike Vic's ATBIAD ride. Hang on — $110 for a soggy salad roll and a ferry ticket? No thanks. Jo and I may well ride down to Sorrento and back, but I don't think Bicycle Victoria will be getting over $100 for the privilege! With over 5,000 entries, what do they do with the more than half a million dollars from the entries? I know it doesn't go to the volunteers who man the route, and none of it goes to the charity du jour — I've sent them an email asking why the big increase from previous years.

Jo is beset by end-of-financial-year woes and had to go in to work today for a few hours, I spent the time constructively poking around at the local markets — unsuccessfully looking for a nutcracker to deal with yesterday's fresh walnuts — then went on another exploratory walk along the railway and down into Huntingdale. The amount of dumped rubbish is amazing — and depressing. Seems that the industrial residents of Monash have little, if any, respect for the littering laws.

The dead-end street where the shop fittings from the newsagency were dumped has been cleaned up by the council — but then promptly refilled with a trailer-load of mattress-sized pieces of foam and drums of chemicals from a local upholsterer. Further down in Huntingdale a mechanic was at work — busy changing the oil in a van, then hosing down the concrete and washing a sump's worth of old engine oil down into the gutter and on into the storm-water drains.

A fascinating walk, but definitely depressing in the amount of litter out there.

Go the giant catfish! So this is what was lurking around in the Mekong while I was boating around above!

646-Pound Catfish Netted in Thailand

Fishermen in northern Thailand have netted a fish as big as a grizzly bear, a 646-pound Mekong giant catfish, the heaviest recorded since Thai officials started keeping records in 1981. The behemoth was caught in the Mekong River and may be the largest freshwater fish ever found....

After a slight hiatus of a month or so, Jo decided it was time to resume her search for a shiny new road bike, so off we went to see what is on offer now, with the end of financial year possibly inducing sales in the stores... Fitzroy Cycles were covered in signs loudly proclaiming 20%-50% off everything — the only problem seemed to be that the bikes we'd seen for $1500 six weeks ago had been marked back up to the RRP of $1899 and then “discounted back down to $1499! Three test rides on three different bikes, two from Avanti and one womens' specific Specialised, then off to Ashburton Cycles to see what was to offer in another store...

Not much it turns out! Ashburton had not a single road bike in stock, but referred us off to the sister shop — the boss had apparently taken the last road bike and transferred it to the other shop. The boss turned out to be someone we knew from the Deadly Treadly tours, slightly short on stock but long on advice and knowledge. Still no new bike, but we're getting closer...

I did pick up a spare tyre for my road bike and a new D-lock, the old one is starting to rust inside and is getting difficult to open. I think it must be at least ten years old though, and considering what it's been through — including a twist in the arm courtesy of riding off on the Katana with the lock through the wheel — I think it gave good value for money. After a recent furor where it was shown that half the round-keyed locks on the market can be opened with a Biro, I was keen to get a lock with a flat key. The five spare keys seems a bit excessive, but the Bulldog DT #5012 from OnGuard looks like it'll fit the bill. The additional four foot of braided steel cable will come in handy for locking other bits up too!

Also cycling related, the Tour de France starts tonight, three weeks of sleep deprivation because SBS will be broadcasting every stage live, and owing to timezones they all start at around 11:30 at night! I decided not to stay up and watch, tomorrow's half-hour hi-lights of the prologue should suffice — choosing instead to browse around on Google maps and look at various points of interest. My house, of course, then that of my parents', a few spots in London where Jo used to live, and then to round out the cycling for the day, l'Alpe d'Huez in the French Alps. Broadband access a must! I could spend hours viewing places this way!

A bit of fun and games and I've managed to configure privoxy to automatically add in the headers to work with the authenticating proxy here at Monash. No more 407 errors for me!

HTTP's Basic Authentication is quite basic. With a username of username and a password of password, a single header is added to every HTTP request, of the form:

Proxy-Authorization: Basic dXNlcm5hbWU6cGFzc3dvcmQ=\r\n

The username and password are base64 encoded, to find your string, something along the lines of:

echo -n username:password | mencode

Should do the trick. I've used that before, but couldn't locate mencode so the following perl snippet works.

use MIME::Base64;

print MIME::Base64::encode_base64($ARGV[1]);

Locate your privoxy config files, I'm not really sure where in them to put it, but you'll need to add the following config line:

{+add-header{Proxy-Authorization: Basic dXNlcm5hbWU6cGFzc3dvcmQ=\r\n}}

As a result of this I've now got tla working, after setting http_proxy=http://localhost:8118/. Presumably other programs that are proxy aware, but can't handle proxy authentication, can be made to work in a similar fashion.

Yeesh, I rang Canon to say I didn't want to go ahead with the repair, since $164.13 is more than a second-hand IXUS300 can be had for, and to ask when can I pick up the camera...

Surprise... there's a $44 fee for rejecting the quote. Feels to me almost like blackmail the way that one is worded!

Did anyone tell me this when I brought the camera in? No, of course not.

On the back of the receipt I got is a wonderfully vague statement in amongst all the other terms and conditions:

Additional charges, including quote rejection fees and freight costs, may also be payable by the Customer.

No indication of what these charges are, when they apply or anything else! As far as I can tell, they can decide to airfreight it to Canon Japan and I have to foot the bill!

I got grumpy.

I got put on hold.

I got told “As a gesture of goodwill, the quote rejection fee will not be charged. You will be contacted when your camera is ready.”

The whole thing has left a sour taste in my mouth. I've had nothing but good things to say about the three Canon cameras I've bought, but this whole rigmarole is very depressing.

A grey morning, poor visibility, wet roads. Just what I need, first moron of the month — the lady in the blue falcon wagon (OCR-023), she sits beside me at the lights SMSing on her phone, then when the lights go green drives off, eyes still firmly on the phone in her lap as she veers into my lane towards me. I point at her and shout out, “Put the phone down!” She looks shocked, she points at herself and shrugs “What have I done?” her expression seems to ask as she drives off...

It must have been something about the weather though; nearly home this evening, riding along in the cold and dark and rain, if anyone should be in a bad mood I'd think it would be the cyclist and not the motorist ensconced in their heated 4WD. With no traffic heading in the opposite direction the driver of the black 4WD, RGO-346, couldn't possibly pull out to overtake me, choosing instead to skim past inches from my shoulder and blasting on the horn as they did so.

?huh?

A “Children, Dog and Goat friendly event.” So goes the advertising for the Community Cup, a friendly footy match between the Megahertz from Melbourne community radio stations PBS and RRR, and the Espy Rockdogs, various band members from the Melbourne music scene.

Early start for me this morning, I managed to leave the house by 8:30! I truly am not one of the world's early risers at the moment. Saw my first Melbourne frost for the year along the railway reservation, 7°C as a I arrived at Monash with blue and stiff fingers. Then I found the 75 Degrees South blog. Currently -28.5°C down at Halley base in the Antarctic!

Evening ride in to the city, something I probably haven't done since last October when we moved to Oakleigh! The idea was to meet Jo at Pivotal Galleries in Richmond at 5:30, the scary thing was that for a block or two on the way in I found I was completely blank and couldn't remember which roads and bike tracks I used! Equally astounding was how quickly things change when you don't visit an area, the constant flux of buildings being built, changing hands, changing business, being bulldozed, see it everyday and it stays familiar, ignore it for a month or two and it is suddenly all very new and different.

The purpose of the trip was to visit the Richmond 3121 exhibition, works by Anthony Figallo and Daniel Moynihan, and an exhibition that we'd read about in the newspaper. I think I was expecting more of a photography exhibition, less of the drawings inspired by Richmond, but the whole thing was fascinating — the use of the Thylacine (Tasmanian Tiger) as an emblem for the Richmond (Tigers) I thought whimsical and entertaining. Naggingly, many of the places I could half-remember, or thought I'd seen, but none seemed to be fully described, leaving me wondering if I really had, or if I'd just been past so many places so very similar...

Stopping in for a drink turned into an hour or two and dinner in front of the fire, me in bike riding gear, Jo in her work clothes, the other patrons dressed up in their Friday-night finest. Both of us a little nostalgic and homesick to live in Richmond — maybe one day we'll move back here. Gropius serves good food, but I still miss Ian and Via Ponté — it was only on this spot for around a year, but they quickly became a firm favourite.

The ride home was thoroughly enjoyable, a cruise along the bike tracks in the cold foggy night air, only faintly lit by the nearly full moon's light — something I haven't done for a long time, and vastly different to riding around during the day. Everything looks very different with the mist rising off the river and the sports grounds, feeling the temperature difference in the dips and rises of the track.

“Where's my camera? Is it repaired? How much will it cost?” I asked yesterday. Today I receive a voice mail message stating that they will endeavour to repair it next week. That is all. I call back to ask how much and get told that the help line can't help me, the help line has to email the technical support line who might be able to help me. She did tell me that I would be quoted the price of the repair prior to the repair being performed.

Weee, Canon called me back. Apparently the camera has been booked in to be repaired, there was no requirement for them to call me with a quote first — somehow that got lost in the twenty-minute form-filling exercise when I brought it in and asked how much it would cost a month ago When I asked, I was given a verbal quote of approximately $150-$155 — pretty much what a whole second-hand IXUS 300 costs! They have now put a hold on the repair pending a written quote being prepared and sent to me.

Four weeks and no word from Canon. Where's my camera? Is it repaired? How much will it cost? I rang the help line, the help line can't help, the help line has to email the technical support who might be able to help. Sounds familiar...

So the 69th Tour de Suisse has just finished, and on their last stage they had to ride up the Gotthardpass. Two years ago, Jo and I got to ride down that side of the pass!

Chopping firewood yesterday. Aching body today. Cause. Effect. It must be good for me — it certainly is satisfying to belt enormous chunks of tree trunk with a block-splitter and reduce them to handy, bite-sized pieces. There are so many other problems where the block-splitter could be applied too....

Grey and windy today. Winter in Melbourne. Bus driver tries to frighten the crap out of me driving through the red light at Dandenong road. Second time in a week that the bus driver decides he doesn't want to wait for the green but preempts it by two or three seconds. Could get interesting with the one or two motorists who decide to not stop for the red turning arrow the other way...

[revisited] I discovered about a month later that a new law has been passed that allows for a pre-emptive bus light to let them enter the intersection three seconds before the rest of the traffic — no idea where it was publicised but I sure didn't see it in the paper!

A late afternoon walk along the rail line in Oakleigh, off to investigate the gleaming colours coming from the coathanger's graveyard. The new colourful pile is an equally huge mass of plastic car body panels, we don't know whether they are being stockpiled for recycling, or whether its just easier to rent an old warehouse and dump them on the ground for storage! Also dumped in the vacant land at the end of Downing street was a mass of shopfittings, newspaper racks and shelving — then I realised, the newsagent in Portman street closed a week or so ago — guess they thought it was too expensive to dispose of their crap legally.

Then two movies in one weekend, amazing, seems to be ages since I've seen even one. Jo and I decided that it was time to finally go and see Star Wars III. Ho hum. 28 years after Star Wars was made, lots of special effects, lots of tacky looking fades between scenes — very reminiscent of a bad day-time soap opera. The battle scenes just look so over-crowded they're laughable.

Maybe I'm just too old to enjoy Star Wars. Maybe the movie just wasn't very interesting. Making it less interesting was the three individuals who insisted on answering their phones during the movie, and the one in front of me who sat there the entire time texting on his phone!

“Hey, what's that?” was the cry at breakfast. A pair of Black-faced cuckoo-shrikes (Coracina novaehollandiae) were flying about the garden, from the washing line to the gum tree to the apricot and back. Ok, it must be about time that I wrote down all the birds we've seen in — or above — our garden. The following table is from the Monash city council, I've added in a column for our house!

Bird species. An asterisk (*) denotes an exotic species.

Seems that we've seen birds here that the Monash City Council doesn't list, below are the rest of the ones we've seen either in the garden or flying overhead:

?huh?

?huh?

A grey and dreary-looking morning, everyone sat around inside for far too long eating far too much breakfast.

In the afternoon the weather cleared so Jo and I headed out for a walk to Norman point — anywhere to get out of the cabin! Down Tidal river as the tide was at its lowest and just starting to come back in, amazing how quickly it covers the sandbanks once the incoming tide overcomes the outgoing current! Along the beach past dozens of cuttlefish shells, shells of crabs, weed and the thigh-bone of a large sea-bird — all the flotsam and jetsam of a less-frequented beach, not yet stripped bare by humanity.

The sun came out as we reached the southern end of the beach and started up the burnt-out area at the base of Mount Oberon. Black timber and grey ash, with only bracken and some grasses starting to sprout, and the grass trees showing a fan of green under their brown scorched tips.

Many birds earlier in the day, nearer the campsite, but only a few up in the blackend areas — a yellow robin, crows and a few wrens. Three sooty oystercatchers strutted around on the beach, their bright red beaks standing out against the gloss black.

With all the undergrowth cleared away, also standing out were the gleaming bottles and cans that have been hurled off into the bush. Most of the cans burnt away, but the shattered glass of the bottles twinkled in the sun. Before the fire you probably wouldn't have been able to see two metres into the scrub, now, the whole hillside is bare, revealing all the hidden treasures and rubbish. It would be fascinating to see a series of photos of the area taken at monthly intervals over a year or two as it grows back.

Home from work and packed and gone by 6:30pm, out into Friday night long-weekend traffic on the freeway. Bumper to bumper to Cranbourne, 40km/hr or so, always wary of the one in a hundred idiot determined to do something stupid in the heavy traffic in the rain.

Somewhere around Lang Lang we started getting hungry, will it be Korrumburra or Leongatha for dinner? Joked about stopping in at the Loch pub, which we'd done two years ago when heading out this way, then realised that it wasn't such a joke — we were just about to drive past Loch!

Off the highway and down the main street, not a car to be seen. The pub looked shut, but half a dozen cars were parked outside. Dead quiet as we walked up to the door and stepped inside — all voices stopped and ten heads turned to see who had arrived. A dozen people were lined up at the bar, sitting and singing and talking and laughing, one guy at the end playing along on a ukelele.

Ten to eight was just in time, the kitchen closes in ten minutes, we can have dinner if we order right now. Two big plates of slow-cooked beef casserole are ordered, and just as promptly arrive, then sitting in front of the fire they were just as tasty and filling as the last time we had a meal here. It was getting tempting to just stay, have a beer or two and stay overnight in the pub, but people were expecting us down at Tidal River, so we dragged ourselves away!

Australia Post actually called me back! I was starting to wonder if it was going to happen; I'd even jotted down a note to call them up and find out what was happening about my call on the 23rd.... The call lasted under a minute, “We've spoken to the delivery contractor and been assured that future deliveries will not be left unattended, you will recieve a card and need to pick parcels up from your local post office. Thank you, goodbye.”

I blame my uncle! Last weekend when we visited and got to see Graeme on his flying visit to Australia he had a shiny new camera. Not just any shiny new camera either — the same model IXUS 700 I've been debating with myself.... The last fortnight has been extra difficult too, with the old camera in for repair at Canon, and me with no camera. Prices seem to range from a RRP of $885 down to $660, with half a dozen businesses selling them for around $570 via eBay in Australia as “Pay in Australia, shipped from Hong Kong to you and identified as 'gift' for customs to avoid GST. Too dodgy, instead I bought it from a local dodgy-looking computer parts supplier.

I don't know why, they may well be perfectly legal, above board and everything, but their appearance always strikes me as shonky. Receipts on scraps of paper, an enormous staff of family members and friends, no service, no advice, no support, just low price. I wonder how often the tax office drops in for an audit?

Open the box, charge the battery, insert the memory card — oh yeah, the 32M card supplied is a joke, if not an insult Mr Canon. Fiddle about and take a photo. Yep, ok it works. Now what?

Just testing, having a bit of a poke around at audioscrobbler and displaying my most recent listenings:

I guess this is how all the non-English-speaking inhabitants of the planet feel when inundated with English language emails and surveys. Last week I bid on a very dodgy looking item that appeared in ebay, the next day it had vanished. The next day an identical dodgy-looking item reappeared, but from a different seller. I bid on it...

Yesterday I received a great long email from ebay.de, I have no idea why, either they guessed from my surname that I'm German (which I'm not) or they saw Australia and mis-read it as Austria, or some other reason. Any way, I passed it through a translator, laughed at the output, guessed it was something about a dodgy transaction, and wrote back to ebay.de to let them know that I can't read or speak German. They then wrote back telling me that the auction had been fraudulent and they'd suspended the seller. Today I receive a second German email from ebay.de, this one pointing me off to a survey — customer satisfaction I guess — I've ticked a whole range of boxes, then finally at the end there's a space for comments, so I told them yet again that I can't speak or read German!

Two years roll around, Henry Rollins rolls in with it! Two and a half hours of full-on intense monologue, no half-measures, no let-up. I'm convinced the guy will explode one day. 21st April 2001, 07th May 2003, then the 27th of May 2005. I guess he'll be back sometime mid 2007...

Rugby, Chapelle Corby, Kylie's tit, the Trans-Siberian express, inane modern communication via smilies, texting and email, George W. Bush and the Christian Taliban of America, the oration doesn't ramble, its more like a bulldozer on amphetamines. Somewhat repetitive, and if it wasn't Henry saying it, probably half the audience would be booing, but somehow he makes it entertaining.

I'm not sure how I'll survive but I'm now camera-less for four to five weeks, maybe less if Canon can fix my camera sooner. This morning I made my way up and down the hills of Blackburn road into the wilds of Burwood and visited the Canon service centre — expecting a short visit and maybe even for it to be fixed on the spot. Merely filling out the online form to book it in for a repair took at least half an hour, then only after I parted company with it did they tell me that they typically quote four to five weeks, because all parts have to be ordered in! Friday's phone call certainly didn't give the same impression.

Found out why Australia Post never called me back from when I last contacted them about parcels being dumped in the garden back in April. Seems that they verbally assured me that they would call me back, but noted down in the job entry that “the customer requires no response.”

After Friday's parcel in the garden, I put in a second query. I've been again verbally assured that someone will contact me after the delivery contractor has been contacted. Anyone care to place bets on when or if I'll hear from them?

Ground Effect, 1;
Australia Post, nil.

Following up on my missing parcel from Monday, Ground Effect sent me a replacement, after asking for a different address. With some trepidation I gave them the home address, since every parcel that we've had delivered here since last October has been left lying on either the footpath or the front doorstep, not once, but every single time!

Sure enough, I got home this evening and there it was, sitting on the footpath just inside the front fence! Time for another enquiry to Australia Post, but I don't hold much hope, after the last one I lodged they assured me that they took it seriously and would phone me back that afternoon... no surprise when they didn't phone that afternoon or any time afterwards.

The day's other customer service three ring circus was when I decided to give Canon a call. Some time after my camera zoom buttons broke over a year ago I'd asked a couple of camera shops if they could be repaired, they'd generally just shaken their heads and told me I'd need to get a new camera. Last week a cow-orker pointed out that the major Canon service centre is only a suburb or two away. Thinking I'd call first and find out if they can fix it, I look them up in the phone book, get the address, and call up to ask... dial 13 13 83, play voicemail games, wait for a minute or two, get hung up on. Call again, this time the voicemail is incredibly distorted and unintelligible, hang up. Call a third time, listen to the prompts, push the buttons, wait for five and a half minutes being told how important I am, and finally get to speak to a person. “Bring it in so they can look at it and tell you whether or not they can fix it.” Thanks, I guess. Next week I find out whether they can fix it — thus removing any excuse for me needing a new camera!

'twas a beautiful sunny morning as I was heading off to work, so I decided to take some photos along the way. Not as interesting as my previous commute from Richmond, but it has its advantages — the shortness being the main one!

Ground Effect make some nice bike gear, I've never had a problem with them before, but I was extremely nervous the first time I ordered anything from overseas. Never had a problem with the items being delivered, but two weeks ago I lodged an order, they claim it was shipped on the 2nd, but the parcel has vanished. Damn! $90 out of pocket unless someone can find the item. Of course they only ship it normal mail, so there's no receipts or consignment numbers. The mail room at work can't help and have referred me to Australia Post, Australia Post can't help and have referred me back to the sender, I now have to wait and see whether Ground Effect can get anywhere with the New Zealand post office...

Update: Ground Effect shipped me a replacement, and despite Australia Post dumping it on the footpath, I received it at home on the 20th.

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?huh?

People in cars do the darndest things. Today's idiot du jour was the passenger in the silver Barina, P-plates, Vic. rego. PZD-984. There it was stopped at the traffic lights about five cars from the front, he decided to throw the passenger door fully open in order to spit on the ground. Somehow I managed to just stop before ramming his head into the open car door. Maybe I shouldn't have braked so hard, maybe having his head rammed into the door might have helped him think in future....

Next set of traffic lights I was keeping an eye out backwards — just in case the driver decided to try something even more idiotic to endanger my life — luckily not, but I did get to watch her drive through the Dandenong road intersection after the lights were red. Oh yeah, and two of their three brake lights are defective.

Hmmm, an easy to use camera. An EASYSHARE™ camera. A camera purchased partly on the premise that it can be plugged straight into its printer and needs no computer. The new owner opens the box, there is no manual, three CDs and a single sheet of paper fall out. The manual is on a CD in an Adobe PDF file, the sheet of paper states in big letters that he must install the software before using the camera. The by now slightly annoyed new owner decides to install the software — in order to see what he needs to do to use his camera and printer that need no computer. The software won't install, it complains that Windows XP is a version of Windows that is not supported by that software, spits out a Kodak error code and tells him to contact Kodak technical support.

Ten out of ten Mr Kodak!

Out the door a bit after eight thirty, a quick ride into the city, arrived in plenty of time to join the rally. I guessed somewhere between 100-200 cyclists turned up to support the Wheels of Justice rally in Adelaide, complaining about the total inadequacy of a $3,100 sentence for a driver who killed a cyclist in a hit and run collision.

On a much happier note, GPS tags in EXIF headers of images, flickr tags and googlemaps appear to be all coming together. Geobloggers can display images on maps based on either the tags added to a Flickr image, or (supposedly) pulled straight out of the EXIF headers. I say supposedly, because after tagging five images manually I can find them all ¹, but attempting to use the EXIF data failed ². As a further test ³, I dredged up and tagged an old photo from August 2003 that I'd taken in the UK, since googlemaps can only display maps of the USA and UK.

1. In Australia, works, but no map: tags are "geo:lat=-37.900", "geo:lon=145.106" and "geotagged". [37.900°S 145.1106°E]

2. In Australia, doesn't work: tags are "geocoded", the latitude and longitude are in the EXIF headers. [38.749°S 143.670°W]

3. In the UK, works: tags are "geo:lat=51.337", "geo:lon=-0.904" and "geotagged". [51.537°N -0.904°W]

OK, time for stage one. What do you do with all your favourite old t-shirts? Are they destined to be completely ephemeral, worn for a few years while fashionable (or unfashionable), then to be lobbed into the void or the rag-bag for all eternity? Or do we seek to preserve them in some unnatural way, a practical garment rendered impractical by being treated as something more than mere clothing?

So what prompted it? Comments a few weeks ago that my shirt of the day was past its prime, but was probably an old favourite, and what would I do when it finally became unwearable. Attempts to cram the washing away showed just how many t-shirts there are in my life... bands, a myriad of bike-ride shirts, artistic and just plain utilitarian.

So here we go, stage one. Five at almost random, photographed to see how it works. The T-Shirt Preservation Society convenes its' inaugural meeting. The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Daleks, more Daleks, the Ramones and Sid.

Two court results of the week:

  WA: man vandalises a speed camera — $109,000 fine
  SA: man kills cyclist in hit and run — $3,100 fine

Sheesh!

At least the South Australian government has just announced a Royal Commission will be enquiring into the handling of the hit and run.

There's a rally being held to protest against a recent decision in an Adelaide court, which saw lawyer Eugene McGee handed down a $3100 fine and 12 months loss of licence for hitting and killing cyclist Ian Humphreys whilst drink driving in his four wheel drive.

Afraid that he might "damage his career" he didn't stick around at the scene of the accident. When he was later apprehended by police, McGee was not breath tested or blood tested, even though he admitted to having had 4 or 5 glasses of wine and police admitted to having smelt alcohol on his breath.

Two brothers who stopped to see if they could help at the accident scene claim that their statements to police have been changed, and are baffled as to why they were not called to give evidence in court despite claiming to have witnessed McGee driving erratically at speeds of up to 160kph, then speeding off after hitting the cyclist.

A group called "Wheels of Justice" has formed in SA — they think it's pretty lousy that it only costs $3000 to kill a cyclist and are holding a rally in Adelaide on the weekend; there is a concurrent action being held at Fed Square from 9:30am on Saturday 7th May. People who cycle and feel that their lives should be protected by the law are encouraged to bring their bikes and join the rally, which will travel to the steps of Parliament House — pedestrians also welcome.

Best present of all — a Saints footy jumper. Best for him and his dad, not best for the non-Saints fans in the family! Lego, radio-controlled car, bug-catcher, bell and helmet for the bicycle — all the essentials that small boys need in the 21st Century!

An interesting obvservation of Jack's bicycle though — as I lifted it to move it around and install the bell I nearly pulled a muscle! Then I just had to carry it into the bathroom to weigh — 13 kilograms including trainer wheels! That's heavier than either of my or Jo's bikes! Remember that all you cyclists next time you see a five year old struggling to ride alongside mum and dad!

?huh?

Off to the wilds of Northcote, up over the river, into the wilderness to the norht of the Eastern freeway. Searching... searching... for 250 High Street and the Wild Yak café.

A banquet for 10, good food, good company, good conversation.

The Age newspaper has excelled themselves. In an article about Apple opening an iTunes store in Australia, they've gone and stated that:

iTunes is the only site where iPod users can legally download songs.

I guess they haven't noticed the thousands of songs that are legally available at thousands of legitimate websites because the legal copyright holders has put them there. Just because I can't pay Apple for music, doesn't mean that it's illegal to pick up Teenage Fanclub's eight songs, for example!

...But still they won't touch the thorny issue that in Australia I can't copy music that I bought on CD, LP or Cassette Tape music onto my iPod for my listening. OK, so that is illegal, but that isn't the topic that they're addressing!

Not sure what I think of tags. I think they're a poor mans meta-data, for those people to lazy to properly annotate things, or those developers too lazy to develop decent interfaces to allow proper annotation. I've already had a run-in with the multiple possibilities of Victoria, for example. Today I tagged a fotothing foto that had contained a lion, then looked for other lions. I got told that similar tags included dandelion, sealion, and pavilion. Ok, I'll accept the first two, but the third made me nearly splutter my coffee out my nose.

How many interesting numbers are there out there that people know and remember? Doing my lunch-time CD importing, and listening to a bit of music, there in the background of Killing Joke's Mathematics of Chaos is a female voice repeating over and over, “875 020 079”.... What does it mean? As always, google is your friend. A nerdly star-trek reference. Oh well.

And a strange coincidence. Ministry's Psalm 69 was the last CD I read in to be imported into my iPod. Then I plugged in the iPod and found there were 69 songs to be imported.

Why can I remember numbers and not names?

This morning Jo and I took mum and dad on an orientation tour of Oakleigh, around through the shops again and over to Brickmakers park. All the water features have been dry and rusted for months now, I bet they will need replacing when they're turned back on — if indeed they'll ever be turned back on. The Indian Mynahs and Noisy Miners seemed even noiser than normal around one tree, we finally realised it was because they were harassing a Tawny Frogmouth (Podargus strigoides) that was trying to be invisible against the tree trunk. Strangely, it was on either Saturday or Sunday that we'd all been saying how rarely we'd seen the frogmouths.

Lunch at Bada, a mix of nachos and tapas, slightly delayed as the waiter lost our order, but more then made up for by the quantity of food and the quality of it all!

After lunch I proposed going down to Half Moon bay. Not too hard to get too, reasonably interesting, not too strenuous! I said Half Moon bay but it isn't where I had meant to go. I think I'd meant Holloway Bend, which is another small, sheltered bay just off Beach road. The bays and inlets around Port Phillip Bay all seem so different when we're driving along Beach road compared with cycling along there! Even so, it was sheltered, warm in the sun, and interesting to walk along the art trail — even if vandals have stolen three or so of the signs!

An enterprising sculptor had built a whimsical mermaid in the sand, the rising tide was removing her left arm as we approached. A few hardy kids splashed around in the bay, their parents sitting in warm clothes on the sand! More dogs on the beach — dogs can't read the “no dogs” signs — sometimes I think that councils put up the signs to appease one set of people, then refuse to enforce them to appease the dog owners.

After breakfast it was decided to go for a walk down to the beach, around past the Erskine river and maybe along to the Lorne pier. All quite simple, until you try to take two young nephews and all the required support infrastructure along! I think it was at least an hour from decision to leave until we actually walked out the door.

Back at the house, examine the maps to see what would be the easiest way to get from Lorne to the Otway Fly — once again we seem to have left it too late, so it seems Jo and I are doomed to never visit! We decided to drive further along the coast, then turn at Apollo Bay and go home along the inland route. Jo drove, avoiding the more maniacal motorcyclists who cut corners and used both sides of the road — fine racetrack form, but not ideally suited to a two-way public road! The first one or two lookouts had so many cars stopped that we wouldn't fit, when we got to Cape Patton the lookout was empty so we pulled in to take in the view.

Four motorcyclists on three bikes soon joined us, delighting in the good weather and the twisty road. After climbing over the safety wall to peer down the crumbling cliff face and each bragging on how he'd been taking it easy to let the others keep up, they hopped back on and continued on towards Lorne. To the last of the four I would have recommended gloves, but I guess its his fingers on the road, so its his problem. On to Apollo Bay and we arrived as the music festival was in its final hours, people and cars everywhere, but many in the midst of packing up and leaving. We skirted the tents and walked out along the beach, dodging dogs and rubbish to watch the fishermen on the breakwater around the boat harbour. Good luck had me glance into the water just as a huge stingray drifted past through the shallows. It must be over a metre across, and according to one of the fishermen, it just cruises up and down sucking in all the bait and bits of fish that fall in. Anyone hooking it would be in quite a task to lift it out of the water!

There was also a squid boat tied up at the docks, showing up close all the lamps and wiring that they carry — I've seen them out to sea at night, lighting up the ocean, but have never seen one up close. A frightening tangle of wiring on a wet, salty, metal boat!

The afternoon wore on, it started to cool down so we started to head back. The carnival tents were still finishing up, I picked up an Ash Grunwald CD that was lying on the ground. A quick icecream as the shops were clearing up and then back in the car for the twisty drive up through the forest then over the flat plains back to Geelong.

Geelong to Melbourne, boredom on the expressway as three lanes of cars sit nose to tail at 100km/hr, the odd idiot tailgating even closer, then weaving and dodging through the traffic. Victoria's motorists just don't seem competent.

Pizza at Silvio's; a magnificent way to end the weekend! Hot, tasty, and very, very fast. Sometimes I can't work out how they can serve us so quickly. Sunday evenings are always a blur of activity in the shop, the tables full, people calling in for takeaway, and the oven radiating across the room.

The intention was to leave in the morning and drive west to visit the Otway Fly treetop walk, then head back along the coast to stay the night at Lorne. A long breakfast, too much sitting around chatting, and a stroll around the local shops meant that we didn't leave Oakleigh until noon! A quick change of plans and we headed straight to Geelong and spent the afternoon wandering around the waterfront in strangely summer-esque weather. I guess Jo and I will have to visit the Otway Fly some other time!

On the waterfront the hire businesses were all in full swing; we could have hired a tinny (an aluminium dinghy), gone for a ride in a jetboat, a cruise boat, or even a helicopter! One enterprising operator has brought his helicopter down from Darwin and was taking joy flights around from the wharfs for $33 a head. We resisted them all and settled for a long, leisurely, if somewhat late, lunch overlooking the bay. From Geelong we headed off to visit Bells Beach, a place I've somehow managed to go past a hundred times, but never actually visit. The beach is just far enough off the Great Ocean Road to make it too much of a detour when I've been riding past, and when we're driving we've either been wanting to get to Lorne, or to get home. For all its reputation, the beach looks remarkably unspoilt. Many cars in the carpark at the top of the cliffs, and many surfers out sitting on their boards, but due to the length of the walk down the stairs, there were no other people on the beach itself.

Evening was closing in as we left Bells and headed west, smoke from fires and the dusk making it harder to see the view. We arrived at Lorne in time to reintroduce the two sets of parent's in law to each other, then all sit down to eat and drink our way through the evening.

A fascinating invitation arrived in my inbox today from a restaurant. I think I put my email address down once long ago when we went there for a nice dinner, as a result, I periodically get offers for events that are completely out of my budget. The food and service were fantastic, but they need to work a little more on their email:

Wok Tossed Queensland Bug Meat¹, Green Papaya, Macadamias, Spanish Onion, Chilli Salad, Passionfruit Mirin Dressing

OR

Lightly Battered Yarra Valley Zucchini Flowers, Leaves², Asian Pesto Dressing OR Crispy Fried Milawa Chicken & Country Tender Eye Fillet Salad, Mint, Peanuts, Shallots, Creamy Coconut Dressing

1. Mmm, Queensland Bug Meat, is there a word missing here, or am I alone in somehow finding this one unappetising?

2. Leaves. Leaves of what? Anything in particular, or is it just leaves from the garden, from the tree, from the pot-plant in the corner?

OK, I'm guilty. I took a camera into the local shopping centre! A bizarre rule I know, but nearly every single shopping mall in the country seems to have sprouted signs in the last few years banning cameras. (I'm not sure what you are meant to do if you buy one inside). In some fit of wisdom, the management of the Oakleigh Centro have decided that keeping the doors open at night is a security hazard, and since everyone knows that the entire population of Australia drives everywhere in their cars, they lock all the doors except the one into the carpark. Of course you can't legally get into the carpark unless you drive, so all the people on foot who come from the bus and train station find themselves walking down the edge of the road, then through the carpark and finally up the stairs to get in!

All this brought on by seeing another reference to the maybecamera and http://wearcam.org/.

Adelaide this time, another dead cyclist, another drunk motorist gets off with a slap on the wrist. Five glasses of wine, then run into someone in your four-wheel drive and kill them — NO PROBLEM — the court will acquit you. What the hell does it take to convict people in this country? Oddly enough, the police found that they had time and resources to take a blood alcohol reading from the victim, but had insufficient resources to take a reading from the lawyer who had hit him!

McGee was convicted of driving without due care but can be fined no more than $1250 — about a day's pay for him based on the average $250 an hour rate for Supreme Court barristers.

Well done Eugene McGee, drinking, getting in your 4WD, running over people — you're damn near getting away with murder.

Annual grape harvest.

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Two years, so quick! I organised a surprise for the evening, timing, funding and lack of planning quickly reduced it to one of the simplest I could come up with — out to dinner somewhere reasonably nice, but a little quirky. The Colonial Tramcar Restaurant fulfills both criteria, rattling around Melbourne in a dignified manner, the inside reminding me of the ornate 19th century railway carriages of royalty!

Silver service, or as close as you can get while inside a w-class tram, paté, a choice of two entrées, main courses a cheese plate and desserts, and a never-ending stream of wine with the food and a liqueur with coffee and dessert. Watching the chef operate inside a cupboard-sized kitchen was quite an eye-opener! Strangely enough, the four people celebrating at the table beside us were from the north-east of the UK, very near to where I was born — I think it was Barnard Castle, in County Durham.

In a humorous salute to our previous home, we stayed the night at the Rydges Riverside hotel, converted from the old tramways depot at the end of Bridge road in Richmond, it's been a hotel for the last 14 years, and we walked past it any number of times while living nearby. The view outside was good, but the rooms look a little seedy and rundown, and definitely in need of some revitalisation!

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More links and accounts. Added myself into Audioscrobbler so that my potentially dubious taste in music can be revealed to the world [RSS], and to Feedburner to amalgamate my Flickr and Fotothing pictures, and my del.icio.us bookmarks [RSS].

The new Canon IXUS 700 looks very attractive. Can I justify it? Do I need to justify it? Has my IXUS 300 really reached the end of its useful life?

Jo is in the middle of reading a biography of Natalie Wood, so last night we watched Rebel without a Cause, a movie I'd never seen before. Talk about being type-cast though, one of the police characters made both Jo and I almost collapse in giggles each time he appeared on screen. Edward Platt, imortalised as The Chief in TV's Get Smart.

Eek! I can't control myself. Into the bookshop and out I come with

Quicksilver, byNeal Stephenson ASIN: 0099410680 Buy at Amazon

[http://www.43things.com/]

yet another lists 'n communities kind of thing.

Rainfall for 2005

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Blah blah blah ... “experienced an issue” blah blah; “printing is experiencing intermittent issues” blah blah “an intermittent printing issue has been identified.”

WHAT THE HECK? If it's a PROBLEM, say that its a bloody PROBLEM! Maybe they're too frightened to say the word PROBLEM in case they just might be expected to fix the bloody problem! Somebody please belt these people over the head with a thesaurus.

Oops. End of rant.

Arrg, the one day I leave my camera at home is the one day that I get a perfect opportunity for a photo. There I was, stopped at the red light when a “cyclist” appeared, riding illegally along the footpath and across the pedestrian crossing. Dead flat tyres, knees almost hitting his chin on a way-too-small bike, the bag and clothes and appearance indicating he's one of the myriad of overseas students here at Monash University. Priceless finalé — the helmet is on backwards with the straps almost covering his eyes. I caught his eye and quite reasonably say “YOUR HELMET IS ON BACKWARDS. He smiles, looks back, nods and replies “Hello, Hello!” I guess I shouldn't be surprised, the residents around here drive like they have no idea of Australian laws, why should they be any different on a bike?

It must have been the day of the bike idiot though, later in the evening I drove into Richmond at 7:30pm, while turning right I nearly collected a stupid girl in black clothes who was riding along Swan street with no lights (just saw her silhouette as she rode past the stationary tram through the exiting passengers). I then sat waiting for ten minutes to pick up Jo, three cyclists pass in the narrow street:

• First one is girl in helmet, dark clothes, no lights, takes off the wrong way down the middle a one-way street.
• Second one is guy with no helmet, no lights, meandering down the centre of the road.
• Third one had a nice shiny bright white headlight, then he went past and I saw that he had a nice bright shiny white light on the rear too!

I've seen plenty of idiots with a flashing red on the front, this is the first idiot I've seen with a white light on the rear.

Following on from yesterday... plus one to Unisuper, after I telephoned them they changed my address — to the same, new address I changed it to in January — and they changed my login password so I can login again. Minus about five for the 24 hour delay in answering an email enquiry, an answer that told me to telephone them, and for not being able to tell me why an address change via their web site had reverted back to the old one.

Moving house, then finding, then changing, the myriad of address records is hard enough — it doesn't help when the address reverts back to the old one! Tomorrow our mail redirection runs out, yesterday I received a six-monthly statement from Unisuper that had been redirected from old to new address by the post office. Today, I checked back through my emails and there's the one from mid-January when I changed my address! Sure enough, I can't login to their web-site either. I've lodged two queries through the web-site asking for my account back and to know why my address change failed — I wonder when, or if, they'll respond...

  Today: 76.0 km
  Trip: 293km

The ride from Bacchus Marsh to Melbourne is always a bit of a slog — first there's the seemingly endless plains of red dirt and rocks, broken only by the great swooping descent into the gorge over the Werribee river, then there's the interminably mindless eight kilometres along the Western Highway with the mind-numbing roar of the traffic and the ever present danger of the idiot's towing their caravans and not realising how much wider than the car the 'van is.

Today was no different. Medium headwinds to make the flat portion even less fun, the bridge over the river had been severly damaged in the floods a few months ago so there was no screaming descent to be had — we had to brake at the bottom and walk across through the road works. The ride along the highway was no different to usual, ending in Deer Park, a place that seems to contain neither deer nor any kind of park except a car park. From there Noel seemed to have picked a new route, a mystery tour of the western suburbs through Sunshine and Footscray, a distinct improvement on the rest of the day! Jo and I had been intending to ride straight home then drive back, hunger got the better of us — just after passing all the smells and sites of Footscray and its bakeries — so we headed down to South Melbourne to the pub and hopefully for food. Unfortunately we were early, and had to fill in the time with a beer or three, then some food, then a ride home. That last twenty kilometres out to Oakleigh is quite a way at the end of a day after the beers!

Home, changed, then back in the car to pick up the bags, say our goodbyes and head home to rest! Another Easter over, another Deadly Treadly ended.

  Today: 91.2km
  Trip: 217km

There are some magnificent swooping descents in the last few kilometres to Bacchus Marsh, ending in a hill into town with a 60km/hr speed limit, a hill where a bicycle can quite easily reach that speed limit! Unfortunately there seems to be some local law in effect in Bacchus Marsh that insists that the local motorists must be abusive, ignorant and stupid, I don't think I've ever ridden into town without someone being yelled at, swerved at, or had something thrown at them — today was no different, halfway down the hill at 62km/hr on the tandem, some ignorant petrol-head pulled out of a side-street straight in front of us and nearly got 150kg of tandem and riders right up his boot.

  Today: 80.3km
  Trip: 125km

Out of Beaufort and south to Snake Valley, lunch at the Snake Valley pub. I had no idea there were places with names like that in Victoria — it sounds like something out of a bad western! From Snake Valley we took the long route to Linton, with a magnificent descent through the forest into the town, then an equally long, but much slower, continuous climb back up along the highway.

Brief stops at Smythesdale and ???, then a longer-than-expected final few kilometres to Buninyong. Every time we thought we were approaching the town, the road seemed to take a meandering turn and head off in another direction. We did finally arrive, stopped a the pub and celebrated our arrival before heading up to the campsite for a promised sausage sizzle and barbecue. Unfortunately whoever had promised the barbecue had failed to show up, no food on offer, nothing to drink, and the Buninyong footy club's change rooms are distinctly third-world in appearance and cleanliness. Not the worst I've ever come across on the rides, but far from the best!

Back down the street into town for dinner at the pub, they seemed quite eager to have everyone fed at six o'clock, which seemed a little early! More than made up for it in the size and the quality of the meals though — a delicious looking plate of whiting went past while I was making up my mind, so that was my choice. Others chose steaks which turned up large, or chicken parmagianas which appeared to have come from something the size of a goose!

  Today: 45km
  Trip: 45km

Another Good Friday morning, another Deadly Treadly Tour commences! A little too far from Oakleigh to the city to do the car and bike shuffle, so Jo and I hopped on the first train of the day, loaded down with bags and helmets and the tandem. Arrived at Flinders Street station to discover that we had to carry the beast up the stairs, no easy task while wearing a large backpack! Ran into another four riders and all made our way over to the start for the hellos, the packing and the getting into the busses. Two busses today, around a hundred cyclists, seemingly equally split between newcomers to the rides and those who had been there for eternity!

Avoca to Beaufort is almost straight south, with only 45km to ride we were expecting a nice, easy afternoon's riding. Unfortunately we weren't expecting the icy cold southerly that blew solidly all afternoon, turning the ride into one long cold slog! Avoca to Amphitheatre, then on to Chute and Beaufort to flop down in the caravan park beside the lake.

A sign at the outskirts of the township of Chute caused an immediate stop and photo opportunity. Chute seems to consist of a t-intersection of two country roads and a grand total of four houses, but it is apparently the birth-place of Cyril Callister, the inventor of Vegemite, that great Australian icon.

?huh?

Poking around on Flickr, there seems to be some consensus on tagging images with the Australian postcode in the form pcNNNNN, I guess it'll have to do until there are tools around that can put the location information into the EXIF headers in a defined way, read it back out, and pass the results around. Plain tags just don't have enough context — is Victoria a girl's name, a state in Australia, or a city in British Columbia in Canada? Here are Flickr's photos tagged for my workplace — Monash University, homes; new — Oakleigh and old — Richmond and Melbourne CBD.

My iPod got sick... but it seemed to get better. I'm not sure what is happening, but sometimes it won't power off, ever since I got it, it doesn't seem to like powering off when in the photo menus. Today it got very confused, started displaying screen images over the top of other screen images. After about half an hour I could finally power it off, then when it came back on again it was behaving normally.

First evidence of the so-called “Free Trade” agreement between Australia and the United States of America — a multi-national corporation (Sony) in America attempting to get the Australian government to overrule a court ruling allowing mod-chips. Free-trade my ass! More like “Enterprise Bargaining” that seems to go on in many work places: “We're the Enterprise, you, you can start bargaining.”

Aha! In a blinding flash, Inspector Clouseau spots the difference between clear and cleared and all of a sudden half my style sheet problems go away. I'd managed to misspell it in dozens of places, and it was bugging me why pages weren't breaking where I thought they should..

More grumblings at work. Gee, I can't understand why people are upset at the blanket notice forbidding any leave in January or February 2006.

Riding to work on a quiet Monday morning, it's a public holiday, there's hardly anyone on the roads. Riding to work should be easy today.... Then as I approached one of the mini-roundabouts in Haughton road there were not one, but two motorists driving around it towards me!

One driving in the convential manner, clockwise when seen from above, at about 40-50km/hr.

The other one was driving in a rather unconventional manner, he'd decided to be a dickhead and go screaming the wrong way around the roundabout to overtake.

End result, two motorists coming off the roundabout, side by side, one on either side of the road and both heading straight for me. Mr idiot in the black Alfa, in his nice suit and sunglasses, swerved with a great screech of tyres back onto his own side of the road and tore off past me. Mr ordinary in the car behind just shook his head and kept on going.

A deft bit of handiwork and I captured the cat and managed to hold the squirmy beast still enough to put his collar back on. I wonder what the owners will think? I wonder where the council pet registration tag has gone?

As to why I was lying on the grass sipping a beer and reading a book — well for some reason I woke up around 4am and couldn't get back to sleep. Over the next three and a half hours I lay in bed and listened to the continuous car alarm in the next street, the early-morning trains starting up, the traffic, birds waking and the sounds of Joey sleeping, but I couldn't get back to sleep. As a result, by around lunch time I was dead tired and got nothing useful accomplished, at four thirty I gave up and came home early, to lie on the grass and sip beer and read a book.

It went WHOOSH! But thankfully, there was no THWACK to follow. Idiot in a red VW Golf, (NSW rego. AB-58-YO), driving along with the phone pressed hard against the ear, half in one lane, half in the other, missed my elbow by inches as he decided at the last minute to not exit from North road.

Another day and another handful of my old CDs make their way onto my iPod. Something has got to give soon with the Australian copyright law and fair use of personal copies... Along the way I've corrected the typos that I notice, like the Violent Femmes. Quality control on the song dates is pretty haphazard too. Then I got to wondering, should I relabel individual artists from Nick Barker to Barker, Nick? It would keep them all nicely sorted in alphabetic order, but it'd be a lot of work. Then all the odd edge cases pop up — is Dave Graney and the Coral Snakes a band to file under D or G? What about collaborative works like Rob Snarski and Dan Luscombe, is it S or L? Maybe they need a sort key as well as a display name? I think the alphabetic sorting leads to bands at the start being played more than bands at the end anyway — all that effort of twiddling the little whirly-wheel thing....

A bit of fiddling and a bit of XSLT, a few borrowed scripts and a little digging — Tada! — my iTunes recently played list. Now to ensure that it's kept up-to-date where I keep my iTunes, and also where I keep my website....

The temporary solution was to cut off all the branches on the downwind side, and hope that the rest of the tree would not lean any further

Other than that, the weather made stepping out the house unpleasant and unlikely, so we stayed indoors and tried to put some order to the mayhem that is the front room — too much stuff and too little space is the fundamental problem! All those pieces of computers and electronics; they might come in handy some day...

Yow! After some contradictory reports of the Bicycle Victoria ride in Tasmania I finally got to chat with two cow-orkers who had been on the ride. Both had a good time, despite hills and rainy weather — both things that they had been expecting. What they hadn't expected was the motorist who lost his temper, blasted on the horn and drove through a pack of riders while towing a caravan! Knocked eight people off their bikes and one had to be taken by helicopter to hospital.

A leisurely trip back down the Hume highway today, with a few more stops than normal. It seemed to be a national day of roadworks too, with long delays in Albury and between Euroa and Seymour for road rebuilding.

An hour-long break at Holbrook, our favourite submarine town, where the stern of HMAS Otway has appeared in the park and seems to be part of a new exhibit to accompany the rest of the boat.

I wonder where the rest of the Oberon-class submarines are? Will have to find out what they all were, and where they've all ended up — there's at least one in Fremantle, one in Hastings, one in Holbrook...

Another hour for lunch in Albury, a magnificent hamburger from one of my favourite cafés, the Mermaid — stuck in the traffic in North Albury I was almost tempted to get out of the car and walk on ahead to order the food!

From 20°C in Yass and sunny at 9:30, the temperature gradually climbed to just under 30 at the NSW-Victoria border, then up to 36°C by the time we reached Melbourne. A big change from the last time we drove home this way! We finally got home around 6pm to discover that the tomato plants had all gone kind of crisp around the edges, but are still covered in green tomatoes.

Update

Here they are then, the Orion-class submarines HMAS OXLEY, OTWAY, OVENS, ONSLOW, ORION and OTAMA. HMAS Oxley was scrapped, but the bow remains at the maritime museum in Fremantle (Western Australia), HMAS Otway is in Holbrook (NSW) in the park, HMAS Ovens is in Fremantle in the maritime museum, HMAS Onslow is in Sydney (NSW) at the national maritime museum. HMAS Orion is tied up alongside the naval base HMAS Stirling, in Western Australia. Finally, HMAS Otama sits off Hastings (Victoria), waiting to be made part of a proposed Naval Memorial park. So I've seen three of the six in person!

  Today: 38.4km
  Trip: 598km
  Max: 63km/hr
  Time: 1:50:27
  Avg: 20.9km/hr

  Today: 84.1km
  Trip: 559km

  Today: 113km
  Trip: 475km

  Today: 82km
  Trip: 362km

  Today: 0km
  Trip: 280km

  Today: 75.5km
  Trip: 280km

  Today: 85km
  Trip: 205km

  Today: 74.6km
  Trip: 120km

There was a thunderstorm early last night and some heavy rain, but it all stopped later on. One obnoxious local appeared at the show ground sometime after the pub had closed and seemed to spend half the night walking around the campsite and screaming abuse. On and on he went to the tune of “You can ride a f'ing pushbike but you can't ride a f'ing horse....” The main topic at breakfast being where the drunk local had been standing, nearly everyone in the camp thought he was directly outside their tent.

Drizzly rain started around four a.m., then continued in a stop-start fashion throughout the day, settling in quite steadily at around two in the afternoon — just after Jo and I arrive in Dalgety and settled ourselves on the pub balcony, almost the only shelter in town.

There's not a lot to the town of Dalgety, one pub, one café, a famous brdige and the showground. It was apparently one of the preferred sites for the Australian national capital, but lost out due to its remoteness — so for those people who think that Canberra is cold, just imagine what it could have been like!

  Today: 44.75km
  Trip: 45km

A 7:30am arrival in Jindabyne, out of the bus and into endless queues to register, weigh bags, meet friends, find coffee then get back on the bus to head up to Charlotte Pass.

I'm not sure where Bicycle NSW got the coaches and drivers from, in the light of day the rust holes added nothing to last night's impressions of lurching driving and grinding gearbox. At least ours didn't sound as bad as the description we got from one bus full from Sydney — then they pointed out that we now had that driver and coach to head up the mountain! He was everything they warned us about, I think I'd rather have ridden the 40km uphill myself.

  Today: ??km
  Trip: ??km

?huh?

Late in the afternoon I had a spur-of-the-moment idea and hopped on the train into the city. After a few weeks of knowing that a cousin is somewhere in Melbourne, but probably busy being an English backpacker and doing whatever English backpackers do, I decide to go and find him rather than wait for him to find me. Almost didn't get there, the ticket machine on the platform decided to reject my $5 note a few times before finally spitting out a ticket, I grabbed it and dived onboard as the doors were closing, forgetting — of course — to validate the ticket.

Change at Flinders Street station, then around to Spencer street, an unholy nightmare of a construction site — the whole place is boarded up and barricaded off, misleading scraps of paper thumb-tacked to hoardings redirect passengers around in all directions. My ticket won't let me out the gates because I haven't validated it getting in, so I have to get it validated on the spot, a minor hassle.

Off down the street to the backpackers' on the corner to see if I can find Ben. First attempt is unsuccessful, I try the wrong surname — that side of my family tree is convoluted at best, and I have trouble remembering who has what name. I retire to the bar next door and order a beer — cheap, cool and flat — just how the English travellers like it. Inspiration strikes and I had back to the reception and try again with the right surname... success! A big catch up in the bar over a few drinks, Ben and I haven't seen each other since he was about ten, so many things have changed! Finally we decide to head over to Richmond and meet Jo for dinner. Ben goes to get changed, I ring Jo, we finish our drinks and off down the road to jump on a tram....

Of course I didnt bother validating my ticket, nobody does, I knew it was still valid from the train ride in.... As we were getting off at Richmond Town Hall, we were suddenly surrounded by four inspektors, insisting on seeing our tickets — of course mine had expired as a result beer, laziness and carelessness. The inspektors make us stay on the tram and miss our stop, but let us off a block later. Names and details are exchanged, we are seperated and quizzed individually, finally allowed to leave and told that in the next two weeks we may or may not receive a $150 fine each.

Finally we get to to catch up with Jo, who is starting to wonder where we'd got to. Dinner was fun, but it was an expensive evening!

Perusing the local freeby newspaper at lunch time, out jumps the following little article that may explain the absence of dodgy DVDs from the market this week as compared with last weekend. I wonder how long it'll be before the next one appears?

Pirated DVDs

Oakleigh detectives seized a large quantity of pirated DVDs at the Oakleigh Sunday Markey in Hanover Street on Sunday, February 6.

A 37-year-old Dandenong man will appear later in Dandenong Magistrates Court.

Lunch was a lamb souvlaki in one of the Oakleigh cafés that I hadn't managed to get to previously. Award winning, I think it said in some of the papers. The food was good, but certainly not earth shattering, I think my memories of the souvlakis in Toorak road are better — maybe it was just eating them at two in the morning that makes them taste better.

The weather keeps up its strange business of making Melbourne in summer time unpredictable. After yesterday's heat, it was drizzly and grey again, there were probably things I should have done at home, but it was easier to escape into a book — first a novell, then my last paper notebook as I finished writing about the trip to Vietnam.

With my on-call roster finished, the holiday really has started. I meandered down along the Station Trail to Clayton to see where it went, to see what it's like. Amazing how different to my preconceptions of Clayton, once past the factories of Oakleigh and Huntingdale, the path travels along a quiet park beside the line, only re-entering noise and bustle as it gets to Clayton road. A quick poke around the shops then it was up to the Uni. to drop off the phone — Clayton road is abysmal to cycle up, masses of traffic, and a huge number of drivers don't seem to be all that well acquainted with the Victorian road rules — sharing the road with them seems to indicate that it is too easy to get a license if you already hold an overseas one.

From Clayton back to Chadstone — a visit I've been dreading, I hate the place — changing a duplicate Christmas present book. Acres and acres of carparks, mums and cars and stress and screaming children. Me seemingly the only male over the age of five in the entire shopping centre! Leaving, back on the bike, a whim takes me, I swerve to the right and head west to Prahran. I spend the rest of the sunny afternoon with a pint or two reading The Island of the Day Before, sitting in the beer garden at Bridie O'Reilly's and watching the world go by. I'm definitely on holiday now.

A quick morning trip across the road to the markets. Curiosity had got the better of me, after last week I was wondering how many dodgy DVDs there'd be. Strangely enough, not one at any of the stalls! I did find myself a cheap pair of shoes for work — cheaper to buy them than to get my other ones repaired!

We missed the big noon start to the Chinese New Year festivities, but made it in by train for a couple of hours of lion dances, crowds and thunderous firecrackers. There seemed to be at least half a dozen of the lions, swirling and stomping and moving, never stopping, in and out of all the restaurants around Little Bourke street, chomping lettuce and spraying the crowds. So many short people in the crowds seemed to rely on cameras held above their heads, take a few photos in the right direction, pull the camera or phone down and see what they'd just photographed!

That's two weeks in a row I've had lunch at Cinque Lira. Two weeks in a row I've tried to have minestrone for lunch. Two weeks in a row that it isn't available! Gnocci and wine instead. I'm starting to obsess about a good bowl of soup!

Another day, another near miss.... A couple of times a week I meet them, dickheads in two much of a hurry who decide to drive the wrong way up the ring-road at Monash then cut through to the other side. The layout of the carpark seems to encourage them, the entrance is only a little bit past the through road — but far enough that they have to plant the foot and come roaring the wrong way head-on at any cyclist foolish enough to believe that the one-way road will have traffic only heading in one way. The driver of this one either didn't see me or didn't care, I slide to a stop in the gravel as he headed straight at me then tore left around the corner, spraying me with more gravel.

There's an interesting market held every Sunday in a carpark at the Oakleigh shops; this morning Jo and I wandered over after breakfast for a poke about. Second-hand books, masses of old electrical junk, pot plants and clothes... and a couple of dodgy young Asian guys selling pirate DVDs. I joked about the $20,000 fine for selling them with another guy near me, he laughed and pushed past to get his hands on the latest releases... Five minutes later at the other end of he markets there were two police officers interviewing another DVD seller, and packing up their boxes of disks. Glanced over my shoulder and the first guys had vanished, only an empty table showing where they'd been. The Oakleigh Rotary don't seem to care, so long as they get their $10 a stall they don't care what you sell... they certainly don't do anything about stopping it!

Home for lunch, and round two of attacking the garden. I'm sure glad we didn't buy a bigger garden! Go away for two weekends and it goes feral, knee high grass and a potato vine threatening to climb from the fence in through the front door.

Late in the afternoon it was tandem time again — a leisurely ride along bike tracks in the general direction of Jells Park. We should have known better, bike tracks are hard enough to navigate on a normal bicycle, on the tandem they are well-nigh impassable. Merely finding and staying on the track is a task in itself. When off-road the path vanishes under mud, gravel, into trees and leaves, back onto the roads and it suddenly dissappears in the middle of Mount Waverley. Several U-turns, numerous curses, some half-remembered previous attempts and inspired guesswork eventually found our way to the park. Along the way we met another bunch of riders, equally lost and confused. It doesn't help when you reach a T-intersection to find arrows pointing clearly both left and right, each labelled “bike route.” No indication of which bike route, or where it is going! Then there is the nightmare of the tiny little chicanes, presumably because the council doesn't want cyclists to ride out onto the road — hard enough to navigate on an ordinary bike, they become major obstacles for a tandem, for anyone with panniers, for a tricycle, a recumbant or anyone towing children in a trailer.

The last twenty four hours have thoroughly tested the new rain gauge! 17mm of rain on Tuesday, 35mm in the twelve hours to eight o'clock last night, then a further 55mm overnight. 104mm in just over a day, some kind of a record for Melbourne, especially in the middle of summer!

One big old tree down along Haughton road, two smaller scrubby things knocked the fence over at the corner of Monash University, the only other thing I noticed was how marvellously clean all the roads were today — the broken glass, bits of car, and assorted crap is all gone.

The BBC and the estate of Terry Nation have reached an agreement, Daleks will be returning in the new series of Doctor Who. Even more fun, the company that makes the Robosapien robot will be making radio-controlled daleks. I want one!

There's nothing quite like an audience to make you nervous for a first attempt at anything — both of Jo's parents came outside to watch us take off down the very steep driveway! We departed without ignominy, and took off down the hill with frightening acceleration. I'm still not entirely used to guiding 140kg of bicycle and riders!

Out to North Lorne and back for a warm up, another very wide u-turn to turn around, then right across the traffic to commence the ten kilometre climb up to Benwerrin on the Dean's Marsh road. Much the same as last Sunday, we just picked a low gear and trundled away up the hill — unlike last week it was pleasantly cool in the forest, with no other riders or traffic.

Three quarters of an hour later we stopped at the top, hoping to relax in the shade and rest. The local march fly population made it difficult to relax for too long — 2cm long evil black things buzzing around like demented wasps, threatening to bite holes through half-inch steel plate... Any attempt to stand still for very long would quickly degenerate into a mad hop-on-one-leg dance with hands flailing in the air to drive the flies away. For some reason they seemed attracted to the suede toes of my shoes, I think I killed around ten in five minutes!

Off along the dirt road through the forest, paying careful attention to the inside of the corners and the gravel patches — I had no wish to unceremoniously dump the two of us onto the ground! In some ways the road was in better condition than the sealed road, fewer potholes and far less traffic — until the local 4WD enthusiasts drove past in a cloud of dust.

Rejoining the sealed road on the Erskine falls road we could either head straight back to Lorne or detour down to the falls. The last few times we've headed straight back, this time we turned left towards the falls — and down the precipitous hill through the forest. Too steep to be enjoyable, I was riding hard on the brakes most of the way down, knowing full well that where the road ends, you head straight into the carpark! I know now why so many tandems have drag-brakes, those slopes are scary with that weight.

There are two choices at the car-park; a two minute walk to a lookout to view the falls at eye-level, or a staircase of over 250 steps down into the forest to the pool at the base of the falls — we chose the quick walk around to the lookout! The rain earlier in the week meant there was plenty of water going down the falls.

Now for the hard part! I did a quick lap of the carpark to try and get the bike down into a low enough gear, then Jo hopped on for the assault on the hill up and out — crunch, crunch, crunch — the front derailleur refused to drop the chain onto the granny ring and we quickly ground to a halt. A quick flick of the fingers and we had the chain onto the ring, but now to try and get back on and start, heading up the steep slope. With a mighty wobble we mananaged, on the second attempt, and puffing and blowing succeeded in making it up the first of the two steep sections before having to halt in the shade under a tree. Then back on for the second section, the top coming much quicker than either of us expected. From there it was a wonderful down-hill run into Lorne, sweeping through the forest at around 50 km/hr and barely needing to touch the pedals at all.

There are two options from the outskirts of Lorne; either down the precipitous slope to the sea-front, around and back up the hill to the house, or up and down the nearly as steep undulations of Polwarth road, and not quite as far to climb back to the house. The first option would give us the grin-factor of riding through the middle of town, the second is a slightly easier ride — we chose the second.

A loud pop from under the back tyre as we descended Polwarth road, neither of us had any idea what I'd run over — hard on the brakes to avoid running up the back of the 4WD on the steep hill. Through the stop sign and into Richardson boulevarde, both wondering how far we'd manage to get up the hill, and whether we'd be able to change onto the granny-ring in time. It didn't matter, the back end went all soft and at first I thought Jo was wriggling around, then realised that we had a flat tyre. Off the bike and walk it up the hill to the house, possibly the best possible place to have a puncture! Whatever it was that I'd run over had put a snakebite into the rear.

About forty kilometres around through the forest, it felt almost as much hard work as last week's ascent of Mount Buffalo!

So there we were hoping for a weekend of sunshine and sitting on the beach! Woke this morning to the sound of rain trickling through the trees outside the window and no sign of it clearing all day. I headed out around noon to walk through the drizzle to the shops, the beach and out to the pier, the sea was the flattest I've seen for ages — a lazy swell that wasn't even breaking on the beach.

Something dodgy is happening here with the beer in Victoria. More and more pubs seem to be serving “schooners,” 425ml glasses previously unknown south of the Murray. It seems to have happened just this summer, Oakleigh, Bright, now here at Lorne. Suspiciously, they also seem to be taking it as an opportunity to whack up the price. An ordinary glass (285ml) costs anywhere up to about $2.90, $5 for a Schooner is somewhere around 20% more per litre!

Saturday on the beach, grey and cool and still. The sea is flat, no waves, no people. Trudged my way around to the pier past rockpools and crabs, flotsam and jetsam at the high-tide line. An interesting pair of words that; “flotsam” and “jetsam”. Do they signify different things, are they ever used seperately, or like “goods and chattels” and “kith and kin” do they always occur together?

Phone message: “action this as it has issues” GAAKKK!! Please speak english. I must get down through my reading pile to Don Watson's Death Sentence. Then I must club some of my cow-orkers to death with a copy.

Yeow! Our friends at Garry and Warren Smith Holden have now fixed the problem with the cooling system idiot light in Jo's car. As suspected, the light was coming on because there was something wrong when the car was started and the engine was hot — not because the sensor needed recalibrating like they did last time! $580 to get the fan replaced, thanks Holden, that's one bloody expensive fan on a four year old car! This evening the cupboard was bare so we walked across the road to the shops for dinner at the local Japanese/Thai restaurant. The wasabi managed to make itself felt through my cold-dulled sense of taste!

Walking through the underpass at the Oakleigh station we saw a groovy old tandem that looked as though it was an ex-hire bike that had seen some hard life. On the way home we stopped to take a look at it, just as its owner arrived to ride off and catch the train. A very friendly and talkative Mexicali, he claimed his bike was over 80 years old — hard to believe, but its certainly seen some hard work and bush-mechanic repairs!

Sitting out in the garden as the house cooled down afterwards we could hear a possum in the old apricot tree, unconcerned with us watching, it forraged around before heading off into the orange tree to hollow out a few more ripe fruit. I managed a photo, even though it was so dark that it was pure guesswork to point the camera in the right direction.

A wonderful sign that I walk past nearly everyday, the juxtaposition of the “welcome” with the barbed wire all strikes me as funny. There's hardly ever anyone in the R.A.O.B., but occasional we see a car drive in. See [R.A.O.B.] for more details I guess!

Another scene that sums up Australia; we'd just finished the grocery shopping and stopped in at the Vietnamese bakery in the mall for some fresh bread for lunch. What should we choose? Would it be the French stick or the Turkish bread? Turkish bread from a Vietnamese bakery in a Greek suburb for Australia day lunch!

[http://philwilson.org/blog/2005/01/how-to-export-firefoxs-history-to-text.html]

How to export Firefox's history to a text file.

Riding home along North road, a car passes too closely. Lady driver in the Audi (vic SVC-222) has the mobile phone in her hand and is busy staring at the display as she taps in a phone number. As I went past her to the front of the lights I gave her an evil glare, but she didn't notice, too intent on her phone... The lights changed to green, I took off, three cars passed and then came the Audi, this time the phone firmly clamped to the ear, busy chatting away. The major annoyance was that right next to her in the right lane was a police car, the two officers completely oblivious to all of this, or at least not bothering to do anything about it. Gee, thanks guys.

Ok, so we chose the 85km option — the soft option, the easy option...

Starting at 07:40 from the car-park down by the Ovens river in Bright, the first challenge was taking off up the steep road in a great bunch of other cyclists. Chatting with the older couple on the KHS tandem beside us showed that despite far more experience on the bike they weren't all that happy with a crowded hill start either.

Off in the cool of the morning eastwards to Wandiligong, a little way past that village, over a pick-a-plank bridge then a u-turn at the first checkpoint. No easy task performing a u-turn on a narrow country road on a tandem! We ended up getting three-quarters of the way around and having to hop off and skip around the rest of the way — very undignified.

Back to Bright, then on down through Porepunkah to the turn off for the national park. Mount Buffalo looms ominously larger as we approach through the forest. The rocky slopes are facing north, getting the full benefit of the sun, and only marginally shielded by the trees that were burnt away in the bush-fires of 2003. Onwards and upwards, pick a low gear and just pedal, pedal, pedal up the mountain. Somewhere between eight and eleven kilometers per hour, partly depending on the slope, partly depending on how accurate the speedometer was, since I hadn't recalibrated it after swapping it over from my other bike!

Two thirds of the way up Mount Buffalo was a much-needed water stop, half a dozen other riders rested in the shade or tried to stretch their calves. Time for a rest, a muesli bar, a quick photo of Jo and the bike, and to top up the bottles with metallic-tasting bore water, before getting back on the bike for the last third of the climb.

Finally the top of the climb, then just a few kilometres of undulations across the plateau before reaching the Dingo Dell checkpoint. It was tempting to laugh as the organisers shouted out “85km riders stop here, 100km riders another three kilometres to go....” Both the 85km and 100km rides started at the same place, both went to Wandiligong and back, both climbed the same route to here. It seems that according to Audax Australia the difference between 100 and 85 is six! Later calculations showed that, as we suspected, the 85km ride was a shade over 90km, and the 100km ride was just under.

Half an hour or so of resting and eating. Jo was so hungry that she managed to get half way through a muffin before she realised that it was fruit-cake and not chocolate.

We took it easy going back down the mountain, every time I let off the brakes I could just feel the tandem leap ahead and want to keep on accelerating. No way, not with this amount of experience on the bike, was I going to try and set a descent record! Several times I was glad to have the bike travelling quite slowly, as one after the other, idiot motorists pulled out to overtake cyclists heading up the mountain and drove straight at me, expecting me to instantly swerve 150kg of tandem out of their way.

Despite the stupidities of Victoria's motorists we made it safely back to the valley floor, then all that remained is the ten kilometres or so back through Porepunkah and to Bright. The excitement was over, we knew we could ride the tandem up the mountain, our bums were sore and we were tired. Two kilometres to go and both of us wanted nothing more than to get off the seat and sit on something — anything — other than a bicycle saddle.

Completed! Three quarters of an hour to spare as we pulled into Bright to drop off the cards, then sit in the shade and watch as the first of the 200km riders came in! Total distance 87.87km, an average speed of 18.5km/hr, both meaningless with the calibration not set, four hours forty-six minutes riding time. Now it was beer time.