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Books I've read, books I like, books I should read....

Wanted List

Step one: identify the books I think I'd like. Not that this helps much, since most of the books I read or buy are “books of opportunity.” I guess I could try using Amazon's wish list. Maybe some rich benefactor will surprise me!

A New Kind of Science ASIN: ?? Buy at Amazon

Art of Deception ASIN: ?? Buy at Amazon

Recent Purchase

Step 2: The growing pile of new books next to the bed, waiting to be read:

Currently Reading

Step 3: Far too many books being read at once! Does http://allconsuming.net/ work, or should I stick to maintaining my own list here with the booklist plugin? [ RDF ]

Recent Readings

...and the books that I've actually got around to reading in 2008, 2007, 2006, then older still...

The Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton ASIN: 0241142482 Buy at Amazon

Slowly Down the Ganges, Eric Newby ASIN: 0330280236 Buy at Amazon

Who Goes Here?, Bob Shaw ASIN: 0441885756 Buy at Amazon

Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, Mark Kurlansky ASIN: 0140275010 Buy at Amazon

Secrets and Lies, Bruce Schneier ASIN: 0471253111 Buy at Amazon

The Transparent Society, David Brin ASIN: ?? Buy at Amazon

The New Nature, Tim Low ASIN: ?? Buy at Amazon

Baudolino, Umberto Eco ASIN: ?? Buy at Amazon

Reflections of a Marine Venus, Laurence Durrell ASIN: ?? Buy at Amazon

On the Shores of the Mediterranean, Eric Newby ASIN: ?? Buy at Amazon

Love and War in the Apennines, Eric Newby ASIN: ?? Buy at Amazon

Accidental Empires, Robert X. Cringely ASIN: ?? Buy at Amazon

Whirlwind, James Clavell ASIN: ?? Buy at Amazon

The Emperor's Codes, Michael Smith ASIN: ?? Buy at Amazon

A Parrot in the Pepper Tree, Chris Stewart ASIN: ?? Buy at Amazon

Warrior Class, Dale Brown ASIN: 0007109857 Buy at Amazon

Zodiac, Neal Stephenson ASIN: ?? Buy at Amazon

The Hope, Herman Wouk ASIN: ?? Buy at Amazon

Patriot Games, Tom Clancy ASIN: 0006474558 Buy at Amazon

Tour de France: The History, the Legend, the Riders, Graeme Fife ASIN: ?? Buy at Amazon

French Revolutions: Cycling the Tour De France, Tim Moore ASIN: ?? Buy at Amazon

Foucault's Pendulum, Umberto Eco ASIN: ?? Buy at Amazon

Gerald Durrell — The Authorised Biography, Douglas Botting ASIN: ?? Buy at Amazon

Neuromancer, William Gibson ASIN: 0586066454 Buy at Amazon

The View From Docker's Hill, J. M. McMillan ASIN: 0867863366 Buy at Amazon

Struggletown, Janet McCalman ASIN: 0522843034 Buy at Amazon

The Gobbler, Adrian Edmondson ASIN: 043400362X Buy at Amazon

The Beach, Alex Garland ASIN: 0140258418 Buy at Amazon

High Fidelity, Nick Hornby ASIN: 0140293469 Buy at Amazon

Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson ASIN: 0380973464 Buy at Amazon

Forever Free, Joe Haldeman ASIN: 1857989317 Buy at Amazon

It's Not About the Bike, Lance Armstrong ASIN: 0224060872 Buy at Amazon

Oof! Exausted. Nine o'clock dentist appointment just around the corner... just around the corner from where I used to live in Richmond! Hop on the bike and head into town, arrived five minutes early then had to wait half an hour for the dentist to get to work — he needs to ditch the car and get a bike!

After the dentist I thought “I'll just nip over to the Crumpler shop in Fitzroy, maybe see about a replacement for my aging item, especially with the material falling apart and the seams coming undone....” They don't open until 10:30, so there's coffee to be had to make the time pass, then a lap of Collingwood and Fitzroy, then finally back and into the shop.

The five minute visit turned into half an hour when they offered to stitch up the seams where it's all falling apart “it'll only take ten minutes.” Can't really complain though, no more holes to lose pens and coins through, and a big new buckle into the bargain. Almost new again, it might last another eight years!

Now it really was time to get to work, so I thought I'd take the quickest route — straight through the middle of the CBD, St Kilda road and then Dandenong road.... Oops, seems that there are 100,000 protesters in the city today, the whole of Swanston street was choked. Back out, around, zig-zag and get confused, then all the way back out to Clayton, finally starting work around lunchtime!

Oh yeah, and after too many months of only riding five kilometres to and from work, my legs are feeling stuffed. I am becoming the proverbial fat and lazy bastard....

We had a ball last year, so once again we'd crossed our fingers for good weather and headed off to the Junction oval to see the might of the 3RRR/3PBS megahertz face the Espy rock-dogs for the Sacred-Heart mission community cup.

Beer, music, dogs and kids everywhere, exuberant and wildly inacurate football, inaudible sirens, highly suspect umpiring, variable-length quarters — everything the community cup is meant to be. Jo and I even managed to get on the wrong tram on the way there and take a scenic tour down through Caulfield and St Kilda instead of heading straight along Dandenong road.

It was with great ceremony, and a deal of uncertainty, that I walked around and around the 2006 Mill road pumpkin crop (all one pumpkin of it), large knife in hand and contemplative expression on my face....

Self-sown from seeds we must have thrown into the compost bin, I think its the most successful piece of home-grown produce we've had out of the garden in almost two years. It was certainly the most entertaining!

Musing on the methods of software updates under Windows. Seems that the assorted linuxes are well ahead here; Debian's apt-get upgrade, SuSE's rug update, not just the operating system but application packages too.

Windows has Windows Update, but every other application has its own mechanism — perhaps. Monitor the mailing lists, read the web page, click “check for update” in the application....

Today's updates were for the Edge 305, GPS firmware update to 2.60, Motionbased agent updated to 2.3.0.0, Garmin Training Centre updated to 3.1.4. All performed differently, all initiated manually.

I think Windows needs an API where applications can register an update URL, a time frequency (eg monthly, weekly, daily, manually), and an update behaviour. A single "check for updates" tool could then find everything that you have installed.

Back to the Garmin Edge. Hopefully the Edge 305 2.60 firmware will be better than the bad 2.40 and the appalling 2.20, there are shocking bugs in all of them — this is not a product that's is ready for release! Twice this week I've gone to turn the unit on in the morning only to be told that it has a flat battery, and I know that I turned it off the night before.... Plug it into the charger and the damn thing turns itself on after a while, then complains that it can't see the satellites. Turn it off and a while later it does it again! Firmware version 2.60 can't possibly be any worse....

Thread: last next

Ok, now that we've actually got the ladder into the attic we can start to use it! I'm not sure what I expected, maybe thought the installation would all be over by lunchtime yesterday and we would simply put all the stuff from the front room up into the roof space....

Looking around inside the roof of the 106 year-old half of the house revealed some interesting features. The ceiling of the front room — the room we never use — was covered by very thin insulation bats, but the bedroom and lounge — the two rooms that we do use — had no insulation! Unfortunately the carpenter hadn't told us this yesterday before he nailed boards down over some of the empty space or we would have put more insulation in ahead of him. As it was, today I spent most of the afternoon crawling around from rafter to rafter like a deranged monkey, dragging itchy yellow insulation bats into place and sweeping out piles of leaves, scrap timber, 50 year-old wiring, and all the other crap that the previous renovation had simply left inside the ceiling.

We've finally got the attic ladder in place, but not without its fair share of trauma, worry, and general tradesman-inspired angst. The carpenter was initially to come on Thursday, a destroyed wheel-bearing put paid to that appointment. Early Saturday morning, nine to nine-thirty, was the new time. Only a five minutes late, Mat turned up as we finished breakfast, verified that we really did want the ladder where we'd said we wanted it — apparently he'd once installed one where the customer had said, only to be told later by the customer's wife that that was not where it was wanted, and it should be in another room — then got to work.

Banging, crashing, sawing and hammering; after ensuring that there was a dust cloth over everything still in the front room we retired to the other end of the house and did our best to ignore the destruction/construction.

The electrician turned up around noon, all set to install the light once he had access, then discovered problems with the existing lights.... As with everything else in this house, as soon as we look at something, anything, that the previous owners did when they renovated, we discover corners that were cut, dodgy practices exposed. In this case it was the lights from the hallway and front room, both of them had their earth wire cut off and tucked away, and both of them had their wire joins exposed and floating around in the ceiling, and not (legally and safely) inside the light body.

“Can you connect the earth to them for us?” It seemed the obvious question, especially when we found that it was only a very minor extra cost! “Sure, there's a main earth running along the beam right next to the light”. Bizarre, why the hell didn't they connect them to the earth the first time? I guess the same mentality that had them paint the bathroom and not bother to unclip the plastic light fitting or cisterm lid.

I'm not sure how long I'd expected the whole installation to take, maybe half a day, it was almost five o'clock by the time the electrician was finished, and he very nearly finished himself off in the process! Sitting across the open hatch and resting his foot on a piece of timber that he thought the carpenter had nailed down, the timber slipped, his feet shot forward and he fell backwards and headfirst down the ladder, one big graze from elbow to shoulder, a second from ankle to knee. He finished packing up and hobbled off home, promising to get us the compliance certificate — and the bill — some time in the next week!

Phew, done. At last....

Last night an hour or two spent clearing enough space in the front room for the ladder to be installed, today I'd arranged to work from home for a few hours, from 9 o'clock until whenever the installation was completed.

Good news or bad news? Good news is that the front room is now as clean as it was last night when we finished tidying up. Second bit of good news is that I got in to work well before lunchtime.... The bad news, of course, is that the tradesman didn't actually turn up — a phone call ten minutes before he was due to arrive explaining that he had destroyed a wheel-bearing in his car and was being towed to the garage, he might make it in the afternoon, it might be Saturday.... Nothing is ever easy.

Its amazing how much wildlife there is around the suburbs, hidden away in the trees and bushes — wildlife that only comes out at night, or when everything is quiet and all the people have gone away. This is the second time in a fortnight that I've seen an owl, or as I discovered once I uploaded the photo from my camera, two owls!

At first I thought these were boobook owls, an identification that one semi-knowledgeable person confirmed. I was later told by another much more knowledgeable person that its a pair of Tawny frogmouths (Podargus strigoides). Either way, they're both types of owls!

Only a brief respite, winter only took the day off yesterday. Last night the wind howled through the trees and the rain pelted on the roof. The neighbour's half-built second unit flapped and creaked in the wind. This morning the sun is back out, but so different to yesterday, there's no warmth in it, just a brittle glare to add to the biting southerly blowing in across the bay.

A day for winter coats, scarves and woolly hats — and dogs, lots of dogs. Maybe the wind makes them all get excited, maybe only the dog owners have to go out in this weather; either way there just seem to be more dogs about; racing and snapping at the wind, tearing around in circles on the beach.

Escape from the house and two slightly stir-crazy nephews for a walk. Off up the track along the Erskine river to The Sanctuary, the rock amphitheatre where the Little Erskine joins the Erskine. Moss and black mould as slippery as ice on the rocks. Back down along the river to the mouth of the river, the plaques commemorating all the 19th century shipwrecks seem poignant, so believable in this weather.

A surprisingly warm and sunny day — the fog and cold last night had me prepared for a weekend of sitting by the fire reading a few books! Warm and sunny and incredibly still. There were people out walking all over town, all over the beach, enjoying the sunshine while they could.

Looking back, it seems to be remarkably similar to a weekend down here four years ago — I even found another dead shark on the beach.

The Erskine river was the clearest I've ever seen, the bottom clearly visible at a depth of 1 metre, normally the water is stained a dark leaf-tanin brown. Almost edible-sized fish flicking about on the bottom, and sea-birds and herons all around. Two gannets circled around the bay as we walked out to the pier, it must be ages since I was last here, construction is well underway on the new pier, it hadn't even started the last time I was here, back in February.

In the afternoon I'd intended to go for a bike ride; the weather was perfect, I'd brought my bicycle, I'd brought my cycling clothes, I'd brought my helmet and my gloves — but I'd left my cycling shoes at home!

Friday night, race home from work, get changed, pack the bags, jump in the car and go.

Cold, dark, and Friday. What more do you need to create mayhem in the traffic? Sure enough, one or two people had driven into each other somewhere along the tollway, traffic was at a crawl from Toorak road all the way to the tunnel, through the tunnel and most of the way to the Westgate bridge. One lane of the tunnel closed — as usual. Ten percent of the motorists ignoring the lane closure — as usual.

Off down the Geelong road in thick fog. Everyone slowing to 75-80km/hr — everyone except the semi-trailer drivers that is, thundering past in near-zero visibility at 100km/hr. That'd be how a friend of mine nearly lost his life — hit from behind in the fog by a semi-trailer whose driver “knew the road.”

The temperature hovered around 5°C most of the way from Melbourne to Lorne, dropping to 2.5°C as we neared Torquay, I was amazed that it could be this cold so early in the evening, this near the coast, this early in the winter.

As promised, the gas man came. Surprise, surprise, its never as easy in practise as it looks on paper. We'd been verbally assured that no site inspection would be required and no extra costs would be incurred, there was no conceivable reason why the job wouldn't cost what we'd been quoted.... Oh look, the standard installation includes 6m of gas pipe, we need an extra metre or so. The standard installation includes a flue that will reach from the heater into a 9’ ceiling and we've got a 12’ ceiling so we need an extra flue piece. All standard costs, all set by AGL so we don't get upset with Michael the gas man. Makes me wonder just what percentage of these so-called “standard installations” ever end up costing what is quoted.

Then of course there are the difficulties with installation. We have no access to the underneath of the house, and there's only about 20cm between floor and dirt anyway so it would be nearly impossible to move even if you could get in there. The tin roof means you can't lift tiles, the small eaves make something else difficult.... All part of the joys of a two-part house; part A being 106 years old and part B being 6. I think the politest comment that was made about the existing hot water heater was that if it was installed today it would be unlikely to get approval.

The pipe was slid under the house from outside. The timber studs in the wall meant a slight relocation of the heater from our preferred location. Large holes were cut in the plasterboard and much muttering could be heard in strange technical tradesman-speak.

Three times with AGL, Godwin had assured us that there would be no extra costs, and that the site inspection was not necessary. AGL and the gas fitters seem to play it off against each other. At the AGL shop its all “these are standard charges that the plumbers require, blah-blah.” When it came to signing the paperwork in the house with the plumber it was “that's a standard install from AGL for 6m and a normal flue, the extra flue and per-metre pipe are all standard charges from AGL.”

Then the plumbers drove off taking the instruction book and all the paperwork and I had to phone them to bring it back... and of course I had to clean the house where they'd spread plaster everywhere.

An ugly left-over kind of a page, the only reason it's still here is so that old URLs don't break. Just look for anything scattered through the site tagged plan9, but don't expect too much, just me tinkering at times.

References

[<a href="plan9.xml">xml</a>] — Bookmarks in XBEL format, last modified: <?php $dd = date("Y/m/d H:M:s",filemtime("plan9.xml")); print("$dd GMT"); ?>

For what is a day without spam?

I just had to include this. After years of waiting, I finally recieved the famous Nigerian Business Proposal scam in my email inbox.

Here, for you education and amusement, I've included the text in full.

  **Engr. WILSON OSARO**

  Treasury Department
  Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation
  Tel: +234 80 231 22537.

  PERSONAL


  Dear sir,


  I am WILSON OSARO a Treasury Officer in the Nigerian National
  Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and a close associate of the immediate
  past Minister of Petroleum Resources.

  The Minister has mandated me to transfer the sum of US$88 millions
  recovered from an over-invoiced contracts involving the Nigerian
  National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) into several private accounts
  in Europe and United States. A total sum of US$73,700,000.00 has
  been transferred before the emergence of this present Civilian
  Administration, leaving the balance of US$14,300,000.00.

  I have made proper arrangement/documentation to transfer the balance
  which is retained in a coded account of the NNPC with the Central
  Bank of Nigeria. We are soliciting that you help us to receive the
  fund in trust. We cannot complete this transaction smoothly without
  the participation of a foreign partner who would provide an account
  where the funds could be lodged. Since it is a contract payment, the
  funds must be remitted to a foreign account. The remittance of the
  funds requires little documentation that would be completed as soon
  as you provide us with a secured bank account where you may wish to
  receive the money.

  There is no risk involved on your part in this transaction since the
  former Minister and I have covered this transaction with adequate
  contract and external credit documents from the beginning.

  What we require from you by telephone or fax are viz:

  (i) Acceptance letter of this offer

  (ii) Your company name and your confidential telephone and fax
  numbers

  (iii) Convincing Honesty, Trustworthiness and Willingness to abide
  by the requirements of this proposal paramount of which is
  CONFIDENTIALITY

  We have agreed that you will retain 20% of the entire
  US$14,300,000.00 for your effort in this transaction, 70% for us
  partners here in Nigeria and the remaining 10% will be used for
  defrayal of incidental cost in the course of this transfer.

  Please reply urgently by email,fax or telephone as above,we expect
  that the transaction will not take more than ten working days. And
  please note that this transaction must be top secret.

  Best Regards


  WILSON OSARO
  Treasury Dept.
  NNPC

The following are some notes I cribbed from the Audio/Visual forum of arstechnica.net's openforums. My apologies to the original author, but the links on Arstechnica don't exactly prompt you to link to original articles. I've got a stack of VHS tapes at home, no video player, and a vague wish to transfer them onto CD or a suitably large part of my harddisk....

1. Get at least a GOOD VCR, as that helps immensely with captures... SVHS ones are rather nice. Esp. if the tape is old. You want the cleanest captures you can get.
2. Get a Hauppage WinTV GO. $40 USD. Cheap, cheap, cheap. Better have a fre PCI slot.
3. depending on how long the clip is, you'll want, say at least 4 Gigs free for every 30 minutes of capture.
4. Make sure your HD can do at least 6MB/sec. or so to be safe. Sure helps. Any new HD can do that easily. Also you'll want at least a PII 300-400.
5. Using the free PIC Video codec from www.jpg.com you should be able to capture 640x480 at high quality. Also if your computer is fast enough, try capturing straight to HuffYUV lossless (this will take over 10MB/sec. HDs)
6. Use Virtualdub and everyone's favourite filters, 2D Cleaner, SmartSmoother, et al. to clip, clean up and de-interlace, and perhaps resize the capture.

• Poppy recommends resizing to 480x360 and rendering ot MS MPEG-4 v2 codec (install Windows Media tools to get it) at Sharpness 83 and bitrate 3000 or 6000. You ca fit about 45 min on a data CDR this way. Audio to Microsoft ADPCM.
• It's possible to make a SuperVCD out of it too, using Tsunami MPEG encoder http://www.jamsoft.com/tmpgenc/ and NERO http://www.ahead.de/ to burn it. SVCDs should play in any DVD player that supports them and can read burned CDRs. In this case you would resize to 480x480 and render to HuffYUV lossless then run Tsunami SVCD on it. I don't know too much of the details now, you could try here for more:
  • http://forums.delphi.com/tmpgenc/start/
  • http://network54.com/Hide/Forum/70438

Places to eat, places to drink, places to just sit and watch the world go by. Just my thoughts on a bunch of places I visit. The good, the bad, and the ugly...

Santucci's

Rita's happy smiling face, an eclectic mix of decorations and tasty food. It had the added advantage that it was just around the corner from where I first lived after moving to Melbourne.

Blue Heaven

A favourite Saturday-morning very-large-breakfast kind of place. The Blue Heaven Special is a delicious bagel too. I'm not sure what happened to Rayner (sp?) who I thought used to own the place.

Groove Train

... for when I want dinner and don't want to think of where to go. Comfortable, reliable and enjoyable! Seemed to go downhill gradually once the boss became an absent boss and an endless churn of staff came through.

Silvio's Pizza

No nonsense, nothing fancy. Just tasty pizza, piping hot, straight from the oven. That and a glass of the house's red wine.

Via Ponte

An Italian restaurant that opened and seemed to suddenly have been around for years. Ian did a fantastic job of making everyone feel welcome, and the food is excellent. The mix of a Spanish proprietor, Scottish chef and English waiters running an Italian restaurant just added to the enjoyment.

Sadly, I think Via Ponte has succumbed to the common blight affecting small business in Australia — failure to survive its first year. They closed for Christmas 2002 and in mid-February 2003 still hadn't opened... Latest news I've heard is that its been sold and should open “soon.” Well surprise surprise, it re-opened as a dull and boring place that didn't last long.

Da Joint

Another local. They can't seem to make up their mind whether they're a bar or a a café. The foods pretty good, but I'm put off by the distraction of two TVs, each on different channels, and a blaring commerical radio as well. The totally disinterested staff don't help either.

Rickett's Point

I don't know why I bother. Too many times I've stopped in here while riding along Beach Road. The service is usually slow, the coffee never seems to be as good as I expect, and the staff all seem to be minimal-wage casuals who don't care. I guess its a convenient location and has a good view — that's about all its got going for it.

One of my heroes.

A pioneer animal consevationist and much-loved author, Gerald Durrell has always been a character I have admired. The following letter was penned by him and embedded in a time capsule at Jersey Zoo in 1987.

To Whom It May Concern

Many of us, though not all, recognise the following things:

1. All political and religious differences that at present slow down, entangle and strangle progress in the world will have to be solved in a civilised manner
2. All other life forms have as much right to exist as we have and that indeed without the bulk o fthem we would perish
3. Overpopulation is a menace that must be addressed by all countries; if allowed to continue it is a Gadarene syndrome which will cause nothing but doom
4. Ecosystems are intriccate and vulnerable; once misused, disfigured or greedily exploited they will vanish to our detriment. Used wisely they provide boundless treasure. Used unwisely they create misery, starvation and death to the human race and to a myriad of other lifeforms
5. It is stupid to destroy things such as rainforests, especially because in these great webs of life may be embedded secrets of incalculable value to the human race
6. The world is to us what the Garden of Eden was supposed to be to Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve were banished, but we are banishing ourselves from Eden. The difference is that Adam and Eve had somewhere else to go. We have nowhere else to go

We hope that by the time you read this you will have at least partially curtailed our reckless greed and stupidity. If we have not, at least some of us have tried...

We hope that you will be grateful for having been born into such a magical world.

Gerald Durrell

External Links

• http://www.durrell.org/

Retreating back further and further into the mists of time, the bikes I have owned are:

• Trek T50
• Norky Bike
• Spotty Bike — destroyed
• Peugeot Aspin
• Apollo III — stolen.
• Apollo II — stolen.
• 26" Oxford 3spd — sold.
• Cyclops Dragster — stolen.

One of my many bicycles.

A 27" road bike purchased second hand out of the newspaper and used for many years for touring and getting around town. Eventually it was stolen in Maffra, Victoria, during the 1990 Great Victorian Bike Ride. I was not impressed with Bicycle Victoria's response to this news, their words were that since I had no bike I had to leave the ride and go home, and the general feeling was that they didn't want to know about thefts or other unsavoury activities on their big fund raiser bike rides.

One of my many bicycles.

1976-1982. Over my high school years this gradually decomposed into what now would be called a mountain bike. Flat handlebars, 1.5" tyres, 3-speed Sturmey-Archer hub gears, it started life a shiny blue colour, but at some stage was resprayed a virulent orange by myself and a friend.

One of my many bicycles.

1979-1983. A 27" ten-speed road bike. My first "decent" bike, used to and from school and university, for a brief introduction to road racing while in high school, and for several tours of the surrounding countryside. Stolen from UNSW while I was a student there, along with about twenty other bikes by some thieves who cut the lock off the "secure" bike store and loaded every bike into a truck.

On reporting to the local police station and telling them that my bike was stolen the response was “So what do you want us to do about it?” After insisting that something was written down, the police wrote out the details on the back of a brown-paper bag, I have no idea whether this was later filed, or tossed into the garbage the instant I walked out the door.

One of my many bicycles.

What Was It?

More than a mountain bike, Spotty was a legend.

Fundamentally a Technicomps Bigfoot, it's birth was a long and laborious process starting with the purchase of a fluorescent orange Bigfoot frame at a bike show and a verbal promise to transfer all the components from a 17" model to the 20" frame. During the following two months, the person it was purchased from left the shop and the two new lads wanted nothing to do with it, consequently a lot of the components mysteriously changed down in spec.

It was a 20" Technicomps Bigfoot (Aluminium) mountain bike, setup more for touring than competition or offroad use. Technicomps were an Australian company based on the Gold Coast in Queensland, and produced both frames and entire bikes. A company called Genesis now operates from this premises, also producing aluminium bike frames, a dealer in Sydney has the rights to the Technicomp name.

Where did it Go?

To many places... maybe too many places! To work, out for the afternoon, day rides, week long tours alone, week long tours with hundreds or thousands of others. See rides for additional details.

First ever ride

Home from the bike shop, then an attempt on a single track up Mt Majura (Canberra), the front deraileur hadn't been adjusted, and I hadn't checked it, one of the stop screws was tightened all the way to the limit, so the first time I changed onto the granny ring the chain came off and wedged between the cogs and chainstay. I had to take the cogs off to get it out!

Last ever ride

24-Aug-1996, Melbourne, up the old coach road from "The Basin" to Olinda near Mt. Dandenong, then, in the words of the Butthole Surfers, "Roaring like an avalanche, coming down the mountain". Down Mt Dandenong to Ferntree Gully (Melbourne). On the way home I thought that it was handling exceptionally badly. When I got home I discovered that the downtube has cracked around 50% of its circumference, just behind the weld to the headstem! And so commenced an

interesting tale

of warranties, consumer rights and long distance phone calls...

As you can see it's a very sociable bicycle and loves to meet new people, it can often be seen hanging around outside pubs while on tour, waiting to meet new and interesting bicycles.

Possibly the world's shortest bicycle commute.

Oakleigh to Monash University, and home again. Here are some of the hi-lights and low-lights of my daily ride to and from work. The trip only takes about twelve minutes, no where near as interesting as my previous trip to Monash from Richmond!

A quick count and I've calculated that I ride along five roads getting there and an extra two coming home.

Down the side of the house, battle with the padlock on the gate, a glance back at the neighbour's orange tree silhouetted against the sky, then squeeze between the car and the fence to get to the street. Depending on skill and luck, there may be a big gap or they may be a small one! Out onto the street — usually stepping around the people who park half-blocking our drive-way — and hop on the bike.

Mill road is usually quiet, then right-turn into Haughton road at the end. Visibility not so bad, but watch out for the motorists travelling at 80km/hr in the 50 zone, they appear awful quick. Haughton road used to be a major shortcut through the suburb so Monash city council tried to traffic-calm it into unusability. I'm not sure if its had any effect on the number of motorists cutting through, but it seems to have increased their irritation.

A series of little roundabouts at every side street, together with a narrowed road and huge rough blue-stone kerbs mean that if you're riding along here, motorists can't fit past without crossing half across to the other side of the road. That's fine if they do it legally, but half the time they're in too much of a hurry and try to squeeze through when there's oncoming traffic. They simply don't fit, and there's no room to swerve out of the way of the idiots.

Yet more proof that most people have no idea how to behave on the roads is the right turn into Moroney street, forever referred to as Moron-ey street as motorists either stop dead in the road to let me turn across in front of them, or tear across the traffic island and nearly knock me off. The first lot risk being run into from behind by other motorists who foolishly expect them to be obeying the law, the second lot just can't be bothered to turn the steering wheel a little bit to the left and a little bit to the right to follow the lane markings. Every two weeks or so I come along here and the “Keep Left” sign has been flattened, with tyre tracks over the traffic island.

Left into North road, mind the traffic, two lanes heading east as fast as they can get away with. Around the corner and up to the bridge, watch out for anyone turning down the sliplane without indicating, then up and over the railway lines and a great view of the industrial end of Huntingdale and Oakleigh. Look left and you can see straight up the rail lines all the way to the CBD, ahead the sunlight reflects off a hundred factory roofs. Down and off the bridge and once again watch out for motorists who come flying up the sliplane, oblivious to both signs, “Give Way” and “Watch for Cycles”¹.

Then its just a straight run along North road, watch for the odd motorist who decides to turn left without indicating, or opens the door to let a passenger off at the lights! There's a proposal to run a cycle path along here down the middle of North road, all the way from Huntingdale station to Monash University. Various cycle groups seem obsessed about it, and in pressuring the City of Monash to build it, nobody seems to have given any thought to how cyclists would get into the middle of the road to get to the path, or in how it would be treated at each of the five or so road crossings!

Hazards

Roundabouts. Roundabouts, roundabouts, roundabouts and more flippen' roundabouts. Monash city council seems to be obsessed with putting baby roundabouts along the streets as a “traffic calming” measure. Only problem is, half half the drivers in the area seem to treat the roundabouts as speed-humps, half of them stop and treat them like t-intersections, and half of them try and either overtake me while going round, or pull out in front of me because they're bigger.

Wildlife

A world of difference to the commute along the creek and through the parks; a squashed fox in the middle of North road.

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1. In late December 2007 VicRoads made some major changes to North road, removing the give-way sign and painting a cycle-lane diagonally across the slip-lane; thus requiring cyclists to cross across the front of motorists who drive up the slip-lane at 70km/hr without having to give-way!

The first of my many bicycles!

1974-1976. My first bicycle! A present for my tenth birthday, it was stolen when I was 12 from my primary school, eventually the police recovered the bare frame in the garage of some local high-school students.

Memory is hazy, but it was yellow, had a sparkly-yellow banana seat, and a three-speed hub and dragster shift on the top tube.

One of my many bicycles.

14spd 700c road bike, Reynolds 501 frame, Shimano 105 equipment. 1990-present. A road bike that got very little use for many years, since 6 months after buying it I bought a mountain bike and spent all my time on that.

Three in the afternoon and the SMS comes in: “Large orange bulldoser (sic.) has just arrived on the back of truck!” Two and a half hours of crashing and grinding noises and now there is no house.

No chance now of rescuing even a cutting from their enormous Blue Moon rose — now buried underneath several tonnes of bricks and rubble.

After a few years of procrastinating I've finally gone and changed the look of this site. At least, some of the pages have changed, due the incomprehensibly ad-hoc way in which it is all generated and hangs together, some have the new look and some have the old.

It's a mess. There's no escaping it. I hate to think how many hundred pages exist in here, and they're nearly all hand-crafted (or maybe hand-crufted) in some way. I don't want to use a CMS, I'd much prefer a structure full of documents and Makefiles and then automate the whole. On the other hand, I've never actually managed to get it to work, always too easy to just keep doing one manual bodge after another.

Two commments last night at dinner really brought it home though, one person asked me whether I still put the photos that I took here in my own photo album, since they found it so hard to find them. The other one asked what on earth FOAF was, since when they'd done a google search on their own name, the top entry was something part-way through my FoaF file. It is time to perform some tidy-up work. Time to write out a list of requirements and fix those things that always seem to wait for la mañana.

OK, I want:

• a lot more commonality in my code!
• no broken links
• validated XHTML markup
• photo searches by when or where they were taken, by collection, by who or what is depicted

So far I've used the following cameras (reverse chronological order):

Canon Digital IXUS 700

A combination of the slow speed of the IXUS 300, and the loss of its zoom buttons due to a bicycle crash had me thinking of a new camera. This was compounded by a severe case of camera envy when my uncle visited with a 700. Smaller, much faster, lighter and probably a bit more expensive. Again I've enjoyed the latest IXUS, but unfortunately a jammed lens mechanism and the service I've got from Canon Australia have left a bad taste and I'll be wary of the brand from now on.

Canon Digital IXUS 300

A combination of the cost of running the Elph, but the love of its size, resulted in me purchasing this digital camera. The IXUS 300 is a few millimetres thicker than the Elph, but just manages to squeeze into the carry case and will fit inside a pocket. Now I've got no excuse for the quality of the photo scans, its all up to the skill of the photographer.

Canon Elph

I love it, at last a camera that's small enough that I actually carry it around! Despite the lies of the salesman, the APS film is expensive (about $10 a roll of 25), as is the processing (about 50c per print). If I can get access to an APS film scanner I could get much better quality scans, until then I'm relying on the photo scanner at work.

Assorted Disposable 35mm

For the use I make of them, these are nearly ideal. They're cheap, take reasonable photos, and I don't have to worry about accidently destroying the camera by taking it swimming or camping.

35mm Compact

Not small enough, so it spent most of it's life sitting at home on the bookshelf. Eventually I had it with me when I crashed my mountain bike into a river, it wasn't waterproof and so it died.

Fujica SLR

Probably a cheap SLR, I can't remember. I bought it when I was 16 and going overseas. It lasted about 10 years and then stopped cocking the shutter. When I tried to get it fixed I was quoted more money to just examine it than I'd paid to buy it!

So many things can dissappear without notice; the classic old fish'n'chips shop on the corner that for decades had its great old style advertising sign-writing painted over a drab, uniform cream; the classic old warehouse bulldozed for more concrete slab apartments. This afternoon I went out for a walk to try to capture some of the ordinary things around Oakleigh. The house next door before its demolition, the pioneer cemetary, the cobbled-together fences in the alleys, even the old electricty meter.

The house next door is finally going, the inexorable pressure of the developers. Executive summary is to bulldoze the old house and build two, two-storey town houses on the block. Flatten the garden and cover what's left with concrete carparking. Our objections to council of a two-storey townhouse looking straight down into our garden overruled, not even acknowledged in the planning approval that we received once the ruling was made. Last night we came home to realise that pieces of the house are starting to go; a hole where the airconditioner was, boards missing near the roof, what'll happen over the weekend?

How will the building affect us? How will the building affect us?

Both noun and verb, I'm not looking forward to three months' worth of being woken up at 6am by builders crashing about, not sure what the final appearance of the two houses will be, just how intrusive they'll appear from our garden....

With appologies to Flanders and Swan, and fingers crossed that the whole process doesn't turn into a repeat of their classic. The papers have been signed, the quote accepted, we've been assured that a site inspection is not necessary and no further costs will be incurred. Sometime next week we get a real heater with a thermostat and a timer, so no more sitting around for an hour or so waiting for the wood fire to heat the room up.