ajft

Twice in two days, given a mouthful of abuse while riding to work ... for not breaking the law! This morning the driver of Subaru (Forester probably) Vic. rego. UCA-754 felt he couldn't overtake me legally and safely in my lane or the lane to my right, so he swerved into the bus-lane to overtake on the left, meanwhile blasting on the horn and screaming at me to “Bloody move over”, then swerved into my lane when he was only half-way past. I braked and swerved and thankfully there was nobody behind to avoid as well and he was off in a great screaming rush to stop at the red-lights a couple hundred metres up the road.

Yesterday it was a woman in a Mitsubishi Magna blasting on the horn and frantically waving her hand in a “get out of here, go and ride through the McDonalds building site or the bus-lane or something” kind of motion.

Ride in the bus-lane, break the law and get abused verbally and physically by the bus-drivers.

Ride in the left-most legal non-bus lane, get abused by the motorists.

Thank you so much VicRoads for what you have done to North road.

Refs: 2007-Dec-17, 2008-Jan-09, 2008-Jan-22, 2008-Apr-04.

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From the "Not quite the semantic web department" come a semi-standard use of Flickr's machine tags to label images with the genus and species.

For example, my photos of the Laughing Kookaburra (Dacelo novaeguineae), would be tagged with:

taxonomy:genus=Dacelo
taxonomy:binomial=Dacelo_novaeguineae

Hmm, I wonder if there are other conventions for kingdom, phylum, class, order and family?

References:

• http://pigsonthewing.wordpress.com/2008/07/04/triple-tags-on-twitter/

Continuing the conversation with myself — a possible sign of madness — and answering my own question from above, here are all the semi-standard taxonomy tags for the Wedge-tailed Eagle (Aquila audax):

"Aquila audax" "Wedge-tailed Eagle" bird taxonomy:kingdom=Animalia taxonomy:phylum=Chordata "taxonomy:class=Aves" "taxonomy:order=Falconiformes" "taxonomy:family=Accipitridae" "taxonomy:genus=Aquila" "taxonomy:species=audax" "taxonomy:common=Wedge-tailed Eagle" "taxonomy:binomial=Aquila_audax"

A text extract of the Australian bird list from wikipedia, a couple of minutes and a brief perl script and I've got myself a ~/bin/bird-tag that will generate the list of tags.

Odd how interests seem to align. A guy who is on a mailing list that I joined about some software I'm interested in turns out to be interested in photography and so I start following him on Flickr, then a recent photo of his of a geocache rekindles my interest in GPS and geocaching... I know the Garmin Edge 305 is no use in finding a location, but it could keep track of how I got to them.

A quick search on http://www.geocaching.com/ and I find that there are two caches within a five minute walk of my desk, and that Jo and I walked within metres of another yesterday — sadly I think the clues have been bulldozed by the clue-less Monash City Council. A week ago on Sunday we probably walked straight past at lease one other. Maybe I need to search a little more carefully!

Leaving work ten minutes early to catch the very welcome sun on a winter's day I tried a roundabout ride home with a quick search for a few of the caches... passed by the one nearest work, then off to look for the other on campus — nope — then down Ferntree Gully road to Brickmaker's park — nope. Round into Murrumbeena to the old outer circle railway — nope — then down Murrumbeena road to the last on my last — nope. Ok, that's five out of five, in each case I can find the start point or coordinates printed, but not one can I locate the cache itself. I guess I've got to put some serious work into my search technique!

Ah, Friday night in the 'burbs, dinner with the parents in law and a 9:30 ride home from Mt Waverley to Oakleigh. A simple task it seems!

It was cold, damn cold. Less than 10°C as I left the comfy warm house, then 58km/hr down Forster road is an eye-wateringly shocking wake up.

Onto the bike track from Mt Waverley to Oakleigh, No moon, no lane markings, overhanging bushes and no lights on the path. Of course there are no lights — its a bike path silly, and everyone knows that these are only used on nice sunny Sundays for recreation! The 5W Nightstick light helps, but on an unfamiliar track it all gets very exciting. Go slow and watch for stealth dogs 'n joggers.

...and then there's the people you meet.

WTF is this guy doing standing in the middle of the bike track in a duffle coat? As I cruised carefully past, his invisible mate spraying graffiti up on the freeway underpass screamed abuse down and nearly scared the crap out of me.

Across Dandenong road at the lights at Atkinson street and start the last stretch up the hill, more adrenalin as the white P-plate decorated Commodore screeches around the corner behind me, passenger sticks his head out the window screaming "KILL THE C### ON THE BIKE!", driver swerves at me but is going too fast, misjudges, almost goes up the kerb 2m in front of me, spins the tyres plastering me with gravel and burning rubber and tears off over the hill. The adrenalin keeps me warm for the last kilometre or so home.

Topped the night off with the Nightstick battery going flat two blocks from home, very little warning, just a brief dip in the light then a quick fade to yellow to orange and off. I really must get myself a backup LED light....

Aint riding a bike in Melbourne fun.

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

We've noticed that customers who have purchased or rated books by Leslie Charteris have also purchased “Operative Surgical Procedures: DVD and Handbook” (A Hodder Arnold Publication) by Mo S. Baguneid.

For those who don't know, Leslie Charteris is the author of "The Saint" novells, rollicking good pulp adventures from the 1930-1950s.

I think they don't have a large enough pool of people who bought X also bought Y, so small oddities can propogate through the system. Either that or their software is simply broken.

Favourite Amazon ads anyone?

I think I buggered Facebook's advertising analyser by have a status message saying I was "reading advertising on facebook about advertising on facebook." For about three days I got some very blank ads for incredibly generic things, nothing focused at all.