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Must be international idiot on the roads day, or maybe just Melbourne Motorised Morons.... A few drops of rain on the way home and two idiots try to hit me, one successfully.

Major idiot number one was the one that missed; traffic was banked up all the way back from the roundabout to North road in the right lane so what does our hero do? He plants his foot and sends his rice-boy car fish-tailing down the left lane and around the corner, then pulled over and stopped in the bus-stop. I caught up as he drove into the bus-only lane. Stupidly I presumed he was simply illegally stopping to pick someone up, but no, he revs the car, glances right and starts to do a u-turn as I'm about half-way past his car! A loud "HEY!" from me is greeted with a shouted "Fuck off dickhead" as he slides the car around and screeches through the roundabout ahead of the ten or so cars he's managed to overtake through this manoeuvre.

Idiot number two was the far more prosaic daily illegally parked car in the street outside the house — as I overtook and turned into our driveway he pulled out without looking and ever so gently ran into my left foot. Didn't even knock me off, a brief surge of adrenaline and I'd got up the gutter and out of his way.

Bah, neither of them left me bleeding in the gutter, and with no bus-load of lawyers as witnesses there's stuff-all that our police will do if I tried to report it, so all I get to do is add them to the list of idiots who try to kill me.

OK, so there was a bad collision in the Burnley tunnel last Friday. Yes, there are no emergency lanes or emergency bays in the tunnel, and yes, the speed limit is 80km/hr — except for the majority of the time when I seem to go through and its been reduced to 60 or even 40.

But come on people, the amount of crap we've seen in the papers for the last few days about "a disaster waiting to happen" is complete bollocks. Every bloody motorist in Melbourne is a disaster waiting to happen, they don't need a special tunnel for them to be stupid and drive too close together too quickly!

Amazingly, on Saturday as we drove in stop-start traffic to get off the freeway before the closed tunnel. There was a semi-trailer in front inching its way along, us, also stationary, then a largish gap and another semi-trailer with the driver slowing as he approached. So what happens? Typical idiot comes flying up the closed-off lane to overtake as many people as possible and swerves into the gap between the bumper of the truck and the back of our car! Semi-trailer driver had to brake hard to avoid flattening Mr Important in his 4WD. Um, wasn't it idiot antics like that that caused the crash in the first place?

Wake up, pack up... Bacon & eggs for breakfast, finish off the bread. Clean up, wash up... Bicycle cleaned and ready, bags all packed. Put the bike in the car — no mean feat when one is a tandem and the other a Holden Astra. All ready to go. One last look around, "Have you got your shoes?" "Oh hell, no!" Pick up the offending pair of cycling shoes and have one more last look around.

Out of the house at 10:15 and only 40 minutes to drive around the CBD and out to the Hume highway — a vast improvement from last Friday.

Three hours of freeway with far more sensible drivers than Monday, bypass most of Albury then detour in for lunch at the Mermaid café, an old favourite hamburger joint.

Back onto the highway and north up to Holbrook, refuel, turn off and head east to Tumbarumba. One bad moment as we were run off the road by one terrifying gravel truck, head-on straddling the centre-line and thundering past downhill, then an uneventful drive the rest of the way though rolling hills and late afternoon sun.

The Red Café in Tumba runs a 'B&B' — more of a relabelled motel I think, but they like the name. We got the last available room, unpacked and settled in, then wandered around the town. Up the main street, down along the creek to the parklands, then back around to the Union hotel for a few beers. Sadly, no bistro, so at eight we left and walked two doors along the street to the other pub for an enormous steak dinner amidst TAB screens, pokies and seemingly hundreds of mandatory government signs warning of the dangers of problem gambling.

Stuffed full, we staggered out the door and back to the hotel to bed.

Since I've changed roles at work it has been deemed that I no longer warrant the use of a laptop, something I'd found to be useful enough that the lack was a slight annoyance. Happy enough with the ASUS model from work, we looked around and decided to buy one ourselves... the F3JV seems to be fit the specifications and price.

Only one small problem though. I've been trying to buy one since mid-January. Despite it appearing every week in five different companies' advertisements in the IT section of the paper, when you phone up these companies and try to buy one they don't actually have them, nor can they get them, nor do they know when they will get them!

Today we are quoted:

Centrecom

“Be in in two weeks, nobody has them”

CPL

“Next week sometime”

Computerworld

“No, we don't have them in stock”

Nextstep

“We don't have them in stock, we'd have to order one in for you”

At least Landmark have given up pretending that they have them, and have removed the model from their ad. — even though the guy in the shop never did ring me back.

Today's purchases

• CD Hashish and Liquor by Dave Graney and Clare Moore
• CD el momento siguiente by The Church
• a small gift for a nephew's christening present
• 1:250,000 map (SI55-15) of the Wagga Wagga area for cycling holiday
• an historic map of Melbourne's railways 1854-2004

Today's accomplishments

• hung the ceramic frog tile that was a Christmas present from Kathy on the kitchen wall.
• collected the case of Xanadu Chardonnay that has been sitting under my desk at work.
• found homes for most of the Christmas presents that have been sitting in a pile on the lounge-room floor for two months.
• tried to buy, or even order, the ASUS F3JV laptop but was foiled by the lack of stock or expected delivery times.

Maybe that last one doesn't count as an accomplishment yet...

Soft reset: Press mode and lap/reset at the same time.

Hard reset: While the unit is off, press mode while pressing the power button. You should be asked if you want to erase all user data. Select Yes.

2006-Apr-03: Telephoned GME and they didn't sound at all helpful, "Its a new device and we've only had them for a while, send it in and we'll have a look at it"

A few minutes later I found out that a newer release of the software is available, so I've updated it from version 2.30 to 2.40.

2007-Jan-05: Oh yay, went over a speed-hump coming into Monash and the Edge popped out of the bracket, hit the road and cracked the display in half diagonally. Seems that the handlebar bracket is broken and won't grip the unit properly.

Called up GME (Australian support staff for Garmin) and I have to post the unit off to Sydney to be repaired.

2007-Jan-23: Rang up the Melbourne office of GME to get the phone number for the Sydney office of GME to find out what has happened to my Edge. "It couldn't be repaired so we're waiting for a replacement unit". Nice of them to call me and tell me, but that would be customer service and apparently that just isn't done!

2007-Feb-12: Posted off the broken mounting bracket to GME in Dandenong South to be replaced, and asked whether I can get a third bracket for the third bike. Australia Post charged $3.85 for the tiny little plastic bracket since it is too thick to fit through the letter sorter!

2007-Apr-16: Called up GME to politely enquire what has happened to the bracket. Seems that it had been buried somewhere with their returns. New brackets can be bought as "MKT64" for $20 from any seller of the Edge 305, the replacement broken one will be posted to me today.

GPSbabel

Seem to need to remove the module garmin_gps, with /sbin/rmmod.

Example commands to read the data from the Edge:

sudo gpsbabel -t -r -w -i garmin -f usb: -o kml -F 20070305.kml
sudo gpsbabel -t -r -w -i garmin -f usb: -o gpx -F 20070305.gpx