ajft

Why did I wake up so early again? The last three days I've slept really well, but this morning it was 03:35 again, wide awake and listening to a loud annoying blackbird that decided to warble away until daylight. Five o'clock and the trains start, six o'clock and you can just start to hear the traffic on Warrigal road. Six thirty and I gave up and got up and had breakfast. Maybe its the contrast to the quiet at mum and dad's place, maybe I'm just all slept out and don't need any more sleep. I sure hope so.

“Post 9/11” I have flown within Australia several times and internationally three times. Internationally, I've been to airports in the UK, Switzerland, Italy, China and Vietnam and have had various levels of security checks at variou airports. Within Australia I've flown through Melbourne, Adelaide, Alice Springs and Canberra. At only one place have I ever had any hassles, that is Canberra airport. It doesn't seem to be a one-off either, it seems that every time I fly through Canberra airport the security staff are the rudest, most obnoxious, most determined to puff up their chests and egos and find some trivial item that must be confiscated because it's in the rules. When questioned, we get the stock answer: “We're just following orders...”

Today was no exception; Canberra airport checkin, for the first time in five years I've had to take off my belt — the same belt I've worn every time at every airport. Yet again I was chosen for a random explosives test — three trips out of Canberra airport, three selections for the bomb-wipe. This time they decided to confiscate Jo's nail-file! The damn thing was 8cm long and she's had it for twenty years, its been in her toiletry bag for twenty years, it's been through the metal detectors any number of times. It was allowed through onto the aircraft leaving New York a week after September 11! But no, mister puffed-up shirt Canberra airport security thug must confiscate this deadly implement.

Perhaps these idiots should walk ten metres past their all-powerful metal detectors and have a look in the airport bar — the airport bar that sells glass bottles of beer that you can take onto the aircraft. Perhaps the security thugs should check up on how many people in the world have been assaulted, threatened and injured with broken bottles versus how many are attacked with nail files. If the nail file is a weapon then so is the headphone cable for an iPod, the nice pointy steel pen and pencil that everyone carries, or the battery in everything from phones to MP3 players to laptop computers....

Perhaps the idiots need to step down their attitude and ridiculous theatrics.

Coffee, stress, strange noises in the night? I'm not sure which is the primary causes, but last night I woke up at 03:45 and couldn't get back to sleep, and the night before it was around 04:15. Its having a lousy affect on my grumpiness factor during the day. At least this morning I could blame the howling wind — tree branches scraping along the house, bits of building site crashing and flapping, strange creaks from the roofing... the night before I had the joy of listening to the world come awake, starting with the local garbage trucks starting their rounds almost an hour before they're allowed to.

Maybe tonight I'll get a good night's sleep. I hope so.

Late afternoon founding me sitting in the sun at the corner of Poath road and Rosella streets in Murrumbeena, just up the road from where I first lived in Melbourne ten years ago. I should have bought a house here then, or even a flat, its become all trendy and gentrified now.

Two cafés with tables out on the footpath, the old video-game parlour closed and mysterious purple curtains over the windows. The TAB and post office gone now, a new suite of offices with apartments above just opened. The secondhand whitegoods shop is now a gourmet pizza place, the home-brew supplies a café. Only the big ugly blue-green warehouse still sitting alongside the railway, half-abandoned looking, at least it hides the ugly 1950's toilet-block architecture of Hughesdale station.

I wonder how the expansion of the railway to include a third line to Dandenong will fit? Which buildings will be bought and bulldozed? How will they squeeze it all through?

Another whirl of the software upgrade merry-go-round on the Windows laptop today: Firefox quietly downloaded and installed 1.5.0.7, but after restarting, the Google Browser Sync. plugin didn't reload all my tabs so I lost something I was reading. iTunes asked and I consented, and so version six point something was replaced by 7.0.0.70, but then all my music started sounding all w-w-w-warbly and g-g-g-garbled. Plugins it is, the Last.fm/audioscrobbler plugin was at fault, so out it went and in came the newer Last.fm for Microsoft Windows. At least the latest revision of the Garmin Web Updater seems to have gone in without a problem....

Revisited 2006-09-18: Seems that my iTunes problem doesn't go away by disabling the plugin. The latest version is a major step backwards for me and the slightest bit of activity by any other application and it warbles and stutters. Followed all the recommendations on configuring Quicktime to no avail. I guess I just wait for iTunes version 7.0.1....

According to the proverb; good fences make good neighbours, apparently. Seems we don't have good neighbours though! Latest on the development front; as Jo was walking out the door she saw that the builders are taking down the fence between our block and theirs! First we have heard of it was when the builder came over and asked whether or not we had a dog! No idea what the answer would have been if she said yes, since they had already removed all the poles and were starting on the sections of the fence palings.

A telephone query to the council for rubber-stamping building permits reveals that we should have inferred that the fence would be removed from the placement of the proposed development's walls, and the developer should have have received verbal approval before starting work on the fence this morning. Apparently the fact that Jo didn't tell them to stop and put it back classifies as verbal approval!

The whole planning and objection process appears heavily weighted in favour of the developers. On their side they have the developer, builder and surveyor creating the plans and knowing all the ins and outs of the rules, on the other side are the neighbouring residents who are presented with a fully developed plan and meant to infer everything from that with the help of the council. Apparently all we had to do was ask the right questions of the council at the time! I pointed out that we didn't even know the right questions since we aren't developers or builders.

We really couldn't care about that section of the fence anyway, it is hidden flush up against the house. What we do care about is the complete lack of notification and communication that appears to be displayed at every step of the way.

Fotothing,outage

  Fotothing.com is currently offline.
  Appologies for the inconvenience.

Come on guys, get your act into gear! In the last week since I've been back from holiday the Fotothing site has been off the air more often than on it. No explanations, just that little place-holder page in place of the entire site. It's a great way to lose customers.... Don't just appologise, fix it!

I guess I'll be putting my photos from the China trip onto Fotonomy then, at least until I manage to get my local photo management stuff all working as well as I want.

No, not the famous ranting video clip of Microsoft's Steve Balmer.

Saturday morning disturbed by chainsaws again. The one big eucalypt tree that we can see from our back window, the one big tree for a couple of streets around, the one big tree that always has magpies warbling and lorikeets shrieking from the branches — well the tree's gone now, cut down and pulped up. The old house and garden will go soon, to be replaced by yet another pair of big-as-you-can-build two-storey boxes, the rest of the block covered in concrete carparking, white pebbles and tidy-little evergreen shrubs in pots.

It was meant to be our shopping day, a last chance to look around the markets, visit the Silk market, and gather up some presents for neices and nephews — unfortunately Jo was still very sick this morning so we spent almost our entire time hunting up the English-speaking SOS clinic.

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The weather in Beijng is officially “cloudy” — there is no smog. In preparation for the 2008 Olympic games, large numbers of new parks and trees are being planted all over the city, and a huge steelworks has been closed and moved to another city to clean up the air — Beijing's air anyway, the unvisited industrial recipient city gets all the pollution now. Car numbers are supposedly to be capped at three million to limit congestion and pollution, but nobody is quite sure whether this will happen, or whether money and privilege will just make for a black market in unofficial cars.

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Where?

Beijing

A traveling day; bus from Xiahe to Lanzhou, lunch, back in the bus for the trip to the airport then fly to Beijing. Eight in the morning to ten at night.

Once again our bus driver proved his worth; there was another huge thunderstorm last night — a thunderstorm that I slept through — and the river was even more swollen and flooded and brown than the last two days, the roads were covered in rock-falls and the road-works detours turned into churned up bogs. A fairly routine six hour drive had a number of very boggy crossings and much slaloming around everything from handfuls of gravel to fallen boulders a metre in diameter.

Lunch at a café in Lanzhou, a beef noodle dish that is one of the three things this area is famous for — the other two being labour camps and the Chinese space industry. Good news was that Dan assured us that we'd only get to experience one of the three! Bad news was that Jo started feeling sick shortly after lunch, maybe the lunch, more likely last night's Chicken Biryani in Xiahe.

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Checking in at the airport it was interesting to see that although Beijing, like Ho Chi Minh City, has changed in spelling or name from its original westernised version, the airport code that is stuck on all the luggage is still the original, PEK for Beijing (Peking), SAI for Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon)!

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