ajft

Last night as we drove home from the semi-ritual of “Thursday night dinner out somewhere in Richmond”, the Saints, an old favourite band, were playing on the radio. RRR's "The Australian Mood" always seems to be music I like — two weeks ago it took me back to my almost-underage ventures into the Civic hotel and bands like Tactics and others whose names I've forgotton. Enough rambling, the Saints' Walk Away was playing, for once it wasn't just the opening few bars being used as an introduction or station promo. This afternoon I decided to listen to the song again while flicking (flickring?) through the Melbourne photo pool on Flickr. There in front of me is a photo titled Down The Drain — another Saints song from the same album.

I don't normally get that far through the newspaper in the mornings; front page up to the end of the world news, then in the evenings start from the back and read the comics and the quizzes. This morning the obituary caught my eye — Eric Newby. 1919 — 2006, from steam trains and tall ships to the twenty-first century, and authored some fascinating books of his times and travels.

It's that time of year again — TARDIS-like, the Spiegeltent appears in the Arts Centre forecourt and brings joy and good things to Melbourne for a month or two. Tonight was the first of hopefully many gigs I'll be seeing there, “My Friend the Chocolate Cake” were playing. Highly accomplished musicians and a packed crowd, the one drawback was having to sit at an odd angle and crane my neck around to see them!

It took almost three years, but finally the trip that Jo and Lesley have been talking about came about, find a suitable date that includes the third Sunday of the month, then a weekend away, stay in a B&B in Ballarat, then drive over to see Mooramong — a National Trust owned homestead out near Skipton or Beaufort.

Where?

Mooramong 37° 39' 16.8876"S 143° 15' 3.4092"E

Why is it always so windy in Ballarat?

Whoa, we're definitely getting hot around here. The temperature is 35°C and still only in October, we're in for a very hot summer.

Hot, damn hot... as it says in the classics. Not just hot either, gusty, blustery dry and dusty northerly winds as well, the kind of winds that blast a cyclist back and forth across there-quarters of a lane while filling his eyes with grit. The kind of wind that for the second day in a row rips a great branch off the Callistemon in the front garden. I guess it solves the dilemma of how we prune it, and how much we remove!

Lunch spent under the trees in one of the university courtyards, the almost summer heat and blustery wind makes everything smell of dust and eucalyptus — the Australian bush in suburbia.

Global warming or just an unusually hot spring? Who knows, the aussie government is stuck somewhere in the 1950s, so they should be able to analyse the historical data! As for the rest of us, we just have to live here. Damn.

Shut out the world and sit in the shade, I started reading Burton's The Arabian Nights, the short stories fit nicely into workday lunch breaks, unlike the 800+ pages of Quicksilver that was the last book I read at work.

Please stand by...

I broke it, I'll fix it....

Copies of photos I've taken, mostly just snap-shot quality, but some are worse! Here they are organised by which roll of film or date-based upload they are on, elsewhere they are used on other pages. The folder titles are loosely related to the contents, I had a habit of taking photos so infrequently that film-based rolls lasted for ages, so the title of a roll of film might apply to some or all of the contents.

Its all undergoing a bit of a restructure. Initially I had folders of all the photos from a roll of film, then when I started using a digital camera I was loading photos in here in folders that corresponded to the date I emptied the camera. Completely arbitrary, so as of about December 2004 I started splitting the photos up by the day that I took them, and linking them into each day in the journal. So I haven't stopped taking photos — I'm just putting them somewhere else. They're all tagged to varying degrees of accuracy; time, date, location, contents — I'll add in some searching here one day... and along the way I promise not to break any existing links.

June 2006 and it was still all a mess. It wasn't just me that noticed the mess, I was asked whether I still put my photos here, and why were they so hard to find. That's it then! Definitely time for a rethink.

While I fiddle about here, I also keep some of my photos on Flickr — because everyone has photos on Flickr, some on Fotothing — because I fell in touch with Fotothing's developer while finding out about annotating photos, and some on Fotonomy.

When I get it all written and working, you'll be able to look at photos individually — but that's easy — or by album or collection, and hopefully by who or what is in them, or when or where they were taken.

Ok, it does sound very nerdish! Today was the 100th anniversary of the first electric tram becoming operational in Melbourne — there'd been cable-trams running before 1906.

Thoughts on riding the tandem in to Docklands evaporated in the rain and howling wind, so public transport was used to go and see the public transport — a train in to the city, then nearly blown backwards as we struggled our way from Spencer Street station (that I refuse to call Southern Cross station) down to Docklands for a bit of tram-spotting.

There was a band and a marquee, and a dozen trams or so. Nothing too spectacular really, over half the trams on display are ones that you can see on the road any day of the week, only the oldest models seemed interesting — except to the enthusiast I guess.

Out of work and onto the bike to ride home, run inside and grab a pair of jeans and other essentials, then back out to ride in to Richmond for a beer.

Sunset commute ride, sun in the eyes, bugs along Gardiners creek, manic motorists all around. The majority of other cyclists are heading out from the city, here I am again riding against the flow.

Past the DHR and a surprise to see it all closed up, tape across the door and builders' ladders and stuff filling the bar. Up the road to the Spready and in for a pint. Damn, I managed to leave my lock at home, so its the Belgian bike lock¹ on the front wheel and a seat by the window where I can keep an eye on it....

People watching.

People listening.

Snatches of conversation float past; a strong London accent at the end of the bar, "Me arm 'urts when I lean on it like dis", an indepth discussion on lightning strikes on trucks and truck drivers, two girls complain about their boss...

A blind man and his guide dog arrive in a taxi, so relaxed as they negotiate the croweded bar, amazing.

People watching, second pint of Goat.

A Dover regular, a local character, walks in and meets his friends,not really surprising with the Dover closed. I wonder why, it was renovated only a couple of years ago?

Feeling quietly melancholy and a little homesick for Richmond, so many faces I recognise, quite a few who nod and recognise me back.

A chance meeting in the gents' with a garrulous local and I learn all about the Dover, there's been a buyout and the new owner has big plans. The old back bar has moved into the front bar, the unused upstairs is becoming a function room, it's all changing... so long as it doesn't change like the Bridge Hotel did — comfortable local pub to brighly lit soulless trendy bar.

1. Put the bike helmet strap through the front wheel and cross your fingers. Stops, or at least slows down, any casual theft.

Woohoo, ride to work day! Um, I guess that'll be just like any other day, except with Bicycle Victoria pumping wildly in the background.

As they asked, and as I replied, in their questionaire: How will you celebrate Ride To Work Day?

The same way I celebrate every day, happy to be alive after the idiots in the tin boxes yabbering on their phones haven't killed me.

You Are Here...

The two contenders that I can seem to find for tools to help me write and publish my website are pyblosxom and muse. If I was going to use pyblosxom it would be to publish static pages, which doesn't seem to work 100% and isn't really what it's intended for. My main requirements are:

• consistency of appearance
• no change to existing URLs

OTOH, it seems I can use muse to publish to blosxom source files, then use pyblosxom to publish these to html. A long and convoluted path, but maybe it'll get me to where I want to be.

birthday,railway

Are we ready? Picnic blanket — check, lunch stuff — check, camera — check, non-open-toed shoes to appease the lawyers — check, sunglasses, sunscreen, hat — check, off we go then! Half-way up Warrigal road.... Aarrgh! The birthday present! It is not advisable to go to a four-year-old's birthday without the present! Back home we go, race inside, then off again, quarter of an hour late.

A fun afternoon celebrating, all the family headed out to Eltham for a trip on the Diamond Valley Railway, followed by a picnic lunch and chocolate cake. It would be a close run thing whether the first or the last of those three was the most important for the guest of honour. Hilight for me was definitely the ride on the train, these guys have one serious model trainset! Oops, apparently it is a miniature railway not a model train. Four dollars a ride, twice around on what must be a fairly sizeable figure-eight folded over on itself, I hate to think how much money and how many hours have gone into building and maintaining it all.