ajft

Ouch, ow, oh! Creaking old bones and bruises this morning, I'm definitely not accustomed to physical work like yesterday's housemoving extravaganza.

There are bruises in the weirdest places, and my hands feel like I've completely lost all fine-motor coordination, picking up boxes is about all they can do. A perfect day to do nothing, laze on the couch and read the paper...

If only! A slight sleep-in then its preparation for Jack's seventh birthday party, a cavalcade of cousins and a horde of aunts and uncles. Completely exausting, I'm going to need a weekend to recover from the weekend.

Take three abodes; in order these are a one-bedroom flat, a two-storey two-bedroom townhouse and a two-bedroom house. Starting conditions are one person lives in the first, two people live in the second and both the first and third are full of furniture — in the case of the town-house heavy, obscure, antique wooden furniture. Our mission, which we did in fact volunteer for, was to assist in moving half the furniture from the flat to the new house, half the furniture from the flat to the town house, and half the furniture from the town house to the new house. Two people move from the townhouse to the house, and one from the flat to the townhouse... simple really.

To add to the complexity, the townhouse was full, years of skilled packing had left not an inch of storage space unused, so nothing could get in without something coming out first!

Seven adults and one half-adult assistant, one truck, nine hours and it was mostly done. A great deal of good natured cursing, many bruises, and the skin off quite a few knuckles, but it was done.

The electricity company had stuffed up, the power that was meant to be connected on Friday hadn't been, so the last load of furniture and a monstrous man-eating wardrobe were delivered by candle-light, but it all added to the atmosphere of the post-house-moving bottle of red wine.

Such a good day, and such a bad taste left from three bad experiences with Connex in under 24 hours! Last night's train into the city — the trains that run every 15 minutes — was 19 minutes late to arrive, the only reason the 17:48 didn't run into the 17:54 was because Connex cancelled the 17:54! Today's train home was running on time, I guess, but the whole trip the pleasant recorded announcements were one station wrong, so were told that "The next station is Richmond" as the train left Richmond — it's only ANZAC day, there's only hundreds of visitors probably trying to use the trains and get useful information from the announcements!

Piece d' resistance was at Flinders street station and the queue for tickets — more of those hundreds of visitors all unfamiliar with the ticket machines. It seems that probably half of them didn't need a ticket anyway, since anyone in the Anzac day march was entitled to free public transport, but nowhere was this advertised! Large queue of elderly people peered at the machine and tried to puzzle out the tickets while three Connex "Customer service" staff leaned on their elbows on the turnstiles. Once I finally got in I asked if there was any chance they could help the people outside "Wot people?" was the aggressive reply.

Trying to keep calm, "The ones queuing up who don't know how to use the ticket machine". Him, "I can't make the queue go faster, and anyway, most of 'em don't need a ticket".

"Yes, I know that, but they don't because nobody has told them!". "Not my job mate" I did ask "Well what is your job" but he wouldn't respond.

His final words when Jo said "You're meant to be customer service staff" was "Ah, go on, just go and get on your train"

I wonder how much of today's ticket take was from people who didn't need to pay, and how much Connex will be donating to Legacy?

It must be a day for computer upgrades to try their best to frustrate me... Ubuntu Feisty has had its try, now the new Vista laptop has a go as Jo tries to download photos from the old Canon Digital IXUS 300 — surprise, it seems that no matter what we do we simply cannot convince the laptop to read the photos from the camera. It can see the camera, but it can't read anything off them.

The ubuntu upgrade I started yesterday morning has completed on fafnir, or at least initially completed. Now all I have to do is find all the software that broke and fix it... Minor problems during the upgrade itself:

• gettext-el failed to install
• sawfish failed to install
• upgrade-manager failed to install

The first two seemed to be because they were looking for /usr/lib/X11/locale, and there isn't one anymore, things are in /usr/share/X11/locale. Created a symbolic link from the real one to where it was looking and re-ran apt-get -u dist-upgrade and it fixed those up.

After the install and reboot I've found:

• Beryl/Emerald won't work anymore, no window decorations unless I disable the "window effects"
• imgstamp now produces an error at commented out lines in ~/.imgstamprc

I can fix imgstamp by removing the commented out lines, although it looks to be a step backwards, since nearly everything else can handle a configuration file with lines that start with '#' being ignored.

Dear selfish bastards... PUT THE PHONE DOWN BEFORE YOU KILL SOMONE!

You'd think that with all the recent media focus on idiots who insist on breaking the law, that maybe, just maybe some drivers would actually STOP USING THEIR BLOODY PHONES. Obviously not, they just can't resist their mobile phone addiction. I'm not really looking for them and in my fifteen minute ride to work I'm still seeing four or five a day, every single day.

Today's Mr Important was sitting there at the Dandenong road, North road lights in his shiny green BMW, Victorian registration RWC-726, chatting away. I sat across from him in the next lane staring, pointing at him so all could see — he got a little embarrassed and tried to hide the phone below the door, then behind his head, but no way was he going to put it down. Eventually the lights went green and off he drove, phone still clamped to his head, still chatting away.

When will the police start to enforce the law?

When will someone start to confiscate the bastards' phones?

After many months of building it seems that we've finally got people moving in to one of the two units next door — the rear one, since the front one isn't finished yet. There's been a "for lease" sign up for a few weeks, sometime last week a couple of cars started appearing in the drive.

Saturday afternoon they took all their boxes and rubbish from moving in, neatly bundled it up and dumped it on the street out the front of the house! I've no idea why people do that, rather than wait for the garbage collection and put it in the bin, for a start the stuff sitting on the street won't get picked up if it isn't in a bin!

Of course it sat there for the weekend, then this morning when the gardeners turned up to work on the front unit the rubbish was in their way so they moved it half-way along the front of the house... then surprise, surprise, when I got home from work they had carefully bundled it all up and piled it up on the footpath outside our house!

A couple of minutes work and I carried it all back next door, lifting it over their front fence and neatly bundling it back up on their garden.

[2007-Apr-17] Looks like the boxes of rubbish were in the way of the gardeners when they turned up, at least this time they've picked it up and moved the boxes into the doorway of the unfinished house.

[2007-Apr-19] Garbage night last night, the new neighbours put out all three bins, garbage, recycling and green-waste — all full of garbage — and next to them, two big bags of rubbish on the footpath. Not surprisingly, when I came home in the afternoon the bins had been emptied and put away and the bags of rubbish are still sitting out on the street.

OK, we'll start with the nice approach. A note in the letterbox with:

Please don't leave garbage on the footpath.

It has to be in your bin or it won't be collected.

thanks,

Adrian (x Mill rd)

[2007-Apr-21] Surprise, surprise. Today the builder/owner turned up to look at the week's work — as he does every Saturday. I guess he didn't like the bags of garbage piled near the letter box and the three boxes of stuff in the doorway of the unfinished house. He's moved all the garbage off his land and it is now piled up on the footpath at the edge of the road.

Required a full reset while the Bigpond staff were helping me get the Vista laptop to use the Wifi, so had to reconfigure all my settings.

Dynamic DNS support

From the main screen: Gateway, ISP Connection, Advanced settings, Set up Dynamic DNS, then:

• enable
• Service username: ajft
• Service password:
• Host name 1: millpond.dyndns.org

and then Apply

Port exceptions

From the main screen: Gateway, Security, Address Translation, Port By-pass configuration, then:

• TCP, Port 15998, fafnir's internal IP

Firewall

Security, Firewall Level Configuration

• Low

Aarg! On Tuesday I rang Bigpond up and was promised a return phone call within an hour or two, on Wednesday I lodged the same enquiry via email and was promised a response within 24 hours, then today, 48hours later I get an email telling me stuff all, and that I should call them on the phone!

Four paragraphs of advertising for their incredibly expensive 3G wireless network service and then:

Due to the complexities of ADSL with Home WiFi and the limitations of email, it is best for you to call our help desk on 133 933 option 1 option 1 option 2 and talk to one of our support staff for further assistance.

Emailed them back giving the details again and explaining the hassles I have with trying to ring them.

Later in the evening I managed to ring them, then get through to the right people, then, miraculously, I even managed to find out how to get Vista to talk to a Bigpond-configured ADSL router. Yay.

One small drawback — the WEP key and admin. password that were written into the front of the notes wouldn't work, so along the way I had to perform a complete hard reset of the Speedstream 6520 and re-enter all my details manually, losing the port-exceptions and all the security settings that were in their previously. I guess I can recreate the port exceptions from the software I use, but since the security settings were all made intially by the Bigpond setup CD I'll have to make them up!

Its amazing the amount of absolute crap you see on the roads when you slow down to cycling speeds... glass, metal, bits of builders' rubble, bits of garden rubbish. Cycle lanes end up full of the stuff and then people on bikes riding legally "as far to the left as practicable" end up completely outside the bike lane and must endure the ire of ignorant people in cars.

Unfortunately all the well-meaning bleeding hearts with "cyclists' best interests at heart" seem to want to build more special purpose bike lanes, forgetting that what keeps all the crap out of the roadway is the traffic running over it and flicking it off to the the left and right — you build a chunk of road that cars can't drive on and that's the bit of the road that ends up with all the crap in it!

One of the worst sections I see every day is the bridge over the railway on North road at Huntingdale — in either direction the bike lane is full of glass, wire, rocks, nails and bolts... and the odd washing machine part, metre-high weed and chunk of wall board.

Last night an ominous ka-pow from under the back tyre soon proved correct as yet another piece of crap ripped through the tyre on much the same piece of road that delivered my last puncture. This morning I found that a cycling cow-orker has three stitches in his leg, a tetanus injection and a course of anti-biotics as a result of gash from a piece of metal that flew up and hit him.

At least I finally managed to find the contact details for VicRoads to report hazards and glass on the roads; Bicycle Victoria has the phone number and a dud URL, so I'll try 13 11 74, then option 4, then lots more voice mail options, then hopefully a person. Five minutes on hold and still no person, so hang up and look around the VicRoads site and finally find http://www.vicroads.vic.gov.au/Home/AboutVicRoads/ContactUs/FeedbackAndEnquiries.htm, then submit one hazard report to VicRoads and one webpage update to Bike Vic.

Another Thursday, only nine hours in and it feels like death.

Something woke me around 3:30 this morning, then tossing and turning and Jo's cold kept me awake. At 05:20 the garbage trucks came and commenced their not-allowed crashing and banging, at six o'clock I gave up and got out of bed.

Sat down at the desk to grind through some more of the woefully slow sluglike behaviour of Vista and file-synching from my main linux PC and pop, there goes another light bulb. We seem to replace one or two of the three in the kitchen at almost monthly intervals.

To add to yesterday's woes and frustrations about the new ASUS F3JR laptop, today I find that they've mysteriously dropped $150- $200 in price! Brand new, the model's only been out a fortnight, what can you do? Oh well, grin and bear it.

One shining point rising above all of the crap; today is our fourth wedding anniversary! Flowers and fruit for the traditionalists, or the very boring "appliances" from some modern list. Oh wow honey, give me a new appliance...

I'm starting to think that getting Microsoft Vista on the new laptop was a mistake... It seems so slow! I know darned well it isn't the hardware...

Oh, and then there's the "service" from Telstra Bigpond... It seems that despite Vista having been available in development for almost two years and publically available for two months, they don't support it yet, or not in any information on their websites!

After half an hour yesterday of poking around with various wireless connection panels on Vista I gave up and plugged a piece of UTP in and set up a wired connection, then tried calling the technical support to ask how to get the wireless laptop to talk to the wireless router across less than a metre of desk space. Twenty minutes on hold and a very brief conversation, it seems that the special "Vista team" will have to call me back with this information. In response to my "When can I expect their call?" it was a "Oh quite quickly, should be as soon as they receive this email".

Well, its nearly 24 hours later and there's been no call so I've lodged the enquiry via their webform, ah, but there's problems with that since it appears that bigpond.com will only work with IE — something in there just won't work with Firefox on either Linux or Windows.

At least I've received a response, albeit just the automated one giving me a reference number [Reference Number:070411-004681] ...

I do not want to plug the special Bigpond USB wifi key into the laptop, I do not want to plug the lumping great Bigpond wifi PC-card into the laptop, I simply want to connect the wireless laptop to the wireless router, is that too much to ask?

Up nice and early — no chance of a sleep-in with two small boys in the house and an enormous flock of cockatoos in the trees outside; screeching from one lot and elephantine stomping from the others...

Breakfast and pack and out and onto the bike; the simple plan was to ride to Queenscliff and catch the ferry to Sorrento, then ride up the bay to Frankston and catch the train the rest of the way — I don't think I'm quite up to the 200km or so of riding the whole way!

The morning ride from Lorne to Airey's Inlet and Anglesea was one of those magic country rides that sticks in your mind, no wind, cool weather, little or no traffic, just the sun on the sea and pleasant thoughts in your head. Unfortunately it went downhill from Anglesea and just kept on descending... Traffic between Anglesea and Torquay was a constant annoyance, endless 4WDs charging home to Melbourne along the GOR all packed to the hilt with screaming kids and aggressive mums and dads.

The road from Queenscliff to Barwon Heads to Torquay continues to mystify me — yet again I managed to get lost. This time trying to ride through Torquay; the last time I rode this way I missed the end of the road out near Queenscliff, today I couldn't find the other end of if where it leaves the town for Barwon Heads — instead I must have spent half an hour riding around and around endless ugly new developments of monstrous beach McMansions crammed cheek-by-jowl through the golf-course as part of the latest mega-dollar development. One lot of advice sent me into a windy-spiral of interconnected enclave roads that lead nowhere, then a "nah mate, the road out is back that way". Finally some advice to "right at the roundabout then up that hill and turn right at the lights". I back-tracked to the roundabout, headed up that hill and lo, found myself all the way back on the bloody highway facing back to Geelong!

Grumpy, I gave up with the idea of Queenscliff and the ferry and rode the last 20km to Geelong in the hot sun in a bad mood with even more roaring traffic peppering me with gravel as they passed.

Half an hour wait for the train then my first chance to ride on one of our much vaunted shiny new purple "high-speed" Bombardiers... This would have been much more enjoyable if the idiots running the train system had realised that a two-carriage train with near zero luggage space is going to be completely overwhelmed during the school holidays! The train was packed, there were people sitting on the floor the entire length of the aisle and a dozen people crammed standing in the doorways, I could just squeeze my bike into the "oversized luggage compartment", the three guys with surf-boards had no such luck and had to stand holding them the entire way. It seems the trains are designed for commuters or travellers with no luggage at all.

Then we swayed and rocked as it crashed and banged its way for an hour from Geelong to Melbourne, stopping at assorted stations to refuse entry to passengers with tickets because there was no room! "Next train guys" called the conductor, to be greeted by screamed abuse since the five kids had received the same reception an hour ago at the last train! At least a few got off, although one luckless passenger didn't get out because he simply could not get to the doors in time!

Finally we arrived at Spencer Street and I could untangle myself from my yoga-like position wrapped around the luggage rack, wheel the bike outside and ride the rest of the 20km home. My first, and hopefully last, time putting the bike on one the V/Line Geelong to Melbourne train I reckon!

I saw one of my all time favourite books converted to television this evening. An English tele-movie version of Gerald Durrell's "My Family and Other Animals", of course I stayed up to watch it... found it quite annoying.

None of the characters seemed as I had pictured in my mind from so many years of reading and re-reading the book, it all seemed to light-hearted and silly and pointless, there was none of the feeling of wonder and eye-opening experience I had always envisaged from my reading of his years on Corfu.

I'd only just re-read the book a few weeks ago, its one of my "comfort" books to recapture a happy mood, now I feel I need to read it again to wash a bad taste away. I wonder how old I was when I first read his books? I seem to remember reading "Rosy is my Relative" back in 1976 when I was in the UK, or is that just my imagination?

The tide seemed a long way out again today, so our meandering walk was around where the mouth of the Erskine river should be and then off up the beach to North Lorne.

The Erskine if closed off by about ten metres of sand at the beach, I guess the water seeps through gradually, probably in both directions, although the estuary is at the highest I've ever seen it. The river is the colour of old tea and swarming with small bream — and some larger ones that John has brought home for dinner from fishing. Every day there are people lining the boardwalk hopefully dangling a line baited with bread, hauling up endless undersized fish and hoping for a bigger one....

The rock-pools were all completely exposed and accessible, but all seem much more empty than the ones I remember as a child, maybe I'm just not looking hard enough or long enough, but other than the weeds and the limpets and snails, there's not a lot there. Where are all the crabs and small fish that I remember? Is it just a different beach and rock-pools to the ones I used to visit, or has 30 more years of thousands more people really had this much effect?

Today's purchases

• CD Flat Pack Philosophy by The Buzzcocks

All my computers are coming undone — several months of work on and off to try and get myself some consistent files and decent backups and redundancy seem to be coming unstuck from entropy.

The desktop PC at work has the beta software blues, patches, updates, reboots and intermittent behaviour, I got it onto the roundabout and I can't seem to get it off. The desktop PC at home thrashes like crazy and desperately needs a memory upgrade. The Plan9 box was 90% of the way through being resurrected after I managed to fill, crash, expand and rebuild the venti file system when poof it turned off and won't even power on anymore.

Bah!