ajft

Sadly, although a GPS can tell where it is, it can't tell you where it is if you haven't got it... Stupidly I think I left mine lying on the ground next to the bike when I was leaving work one day this week. The usual routine is to walk outside, turn on the Edge, place the Edge on the top of the sign next to the bike, unlock the bike, put on my helmet and gloves, pick up the Edge and ride off. Since the Edge isn't at home, and isn't at work, and doesn't seem to be in any of my myriad pockets and bags, I'm assuming that I missed that vitally important second-last step and left it sitting on top of the sign outside building 28.

Annoyed that I haven't got it, but over the years it seemed to cause more headaches than it solved; eternally crap USB software, data that seemed to always be half held hostage by Garmin and/or Motionbased, dodgy hardware, faulty buttons, misleading warranty conditions. The amusing thing is that only last week I'd finally managed to convince Garmin that there was a problem with the timezones since they still don't cater for the new Australian daylight savings time!

March 23, 2006 to October 23, 2008, I'd only had it three days when I hit the first of many faults. Thirty-one months, $506.30, one replacement unit at ten months, a second replacement due at another ten months only I found that the warranty wouldn't cover me! I guess that's $16 per month for the fun of tracking most of my bike rides.

Anyway, if you happen to find a Garmin Edge 305 kicking around in a second-hand store or garage sale, serial #37465581, its mine and I guess I wouldn't mind it back.

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Bloody typical! Yesterday was “Ride to Work day” and I rode from home — Oakleigh — to Federation square then back to Monash and had a near perfect ride. Maybe it was all the publicity about the cyclist's death last month but everyone seemed to be pretty well behaved (which I always find a miracle on St Kilda rd, whether they're on bikes, on foot, or in cars). Had my coffee and roll and made it back for a slightly latish 9:20 start. Didn't really need a third breakfast at Wholefoods on campus!

This morning, back to the normal ride, straight along North road, carefully and legally not riding in the bus lane since its not yet 9:30am. Cars pass on the right, cars illegally pass on the left. Stopped at the lights at Clayton road with a car on my right and a turning car on my left, and a bus behind on the left. Bus driver calls out the window “Excuse me!” then proceeds to tell me over and over again that I am NOT allowed to ride on the road and MUST ride on the off-road path. “That is your path, over there, this is my lane.” I tried to point out that I was on the road, not in the bus lane and explain that bicycles are legally allowed on the road, she aint having none of it, louder and louder she tells me I MUST get off the road.

Lights go green and off I go through the intersection, with a continuous, deafening and intimidating blast of the horn she came up behind me and unfortunately I finally got annoyed and gave her the finger, she sped past on my left and I raised my hand up and hit the mirror since it was only about 30cm from my head.

Followed her to Monash bus loop and as I walked up to the bus there were four or five passengers¹ having a huge argument with her loudly complaining about her attacking cyclists and what the hell was she on about. I took her photo and she started yelling that she had video showing that I was attacking her and “road-raging her bus.” Once again she tries shouting that I must use the off road path “it is law” (crap, closest law is VicRoads rule 247 which says you must use an ON-ROAD bicycle lane where provided unless it is impracticable to do so².)

Not Grendas, it was Eastrans this time, driver's name badge says Maryla, 8:45am or so, bus registration 5485-AO.

Happy f'kin birthday to me.

references: 1, 2, 3

1. Talking to one of the passengers later, she said the driver had been in a bad mood all morning and had shouted at her to "turn her music down" on her iPod. I hope she's in a better mood tomorrow, or Monday, or the next time she drives 10 tonne of bus past 100kg of cyclist.

2. there is no on-road bicycle lane so rule 247 does not apply, and anyway, the off-road path is unsuitable for commuting, and is downright dangerous where it crosses side roads and uses a footpath past a primary school that used to be illegal to ride on and that now crosses a McDonald's drive through! Yet another bike path built by VicRoads with the attitude of "get the cyclists off the road" that nobody ever seems to use because it is no use!

The little paper seems to have a bit too much reliance on automatic spell checkers and too little reliance on human proof reading. Too many times they manage to put gibberish, nonsense or just plain inaccurate information in their RSS feeds, but get it mostly right in the online article. Today takes the cake — albeit somewhat tastelessly:

  Ballesteros brain tumour shock

> from Herald Sun

World News

SPANISH golf legend Seve Ballesteros, a five-time major winner, has been diagnosed with a brain.

Yep, that's all there is to the article, complete with the closing full-stop. Follow the link to the full article and you'll receive a more accurate write up.

Funny enough at the time. The background information you'll need is a Lotus Notes rollout that seems to include a lot of heartache for those forced to use it, a corporate “wellbeing initiative” that has boxes of fruit delivered that provide one piece of fruit per person per week, and a mail room with the only pigeon-hole system in the universe where the names are above the boxes not below them:

  **** A message has arrived from pluto on Fri Sep 19 08:41! ****
  From: anonymous1 [To: ajft anonymous2]
  sigh
  It would be bliss...
  Till Slowtus Goats came along I hardly ever swore. Now I could make a sailor blush!.
  It's turned me into something I'm not and I'm embarrased about it. I demand compensation!.
  And no. Not 1/5th of a banana a day. That will not do it.

  **** A message has arrived from pluto on Fri Sep 19 08:42! ****
  From: anonymous2 [To: ajft anonymous1]
  if typical Monash fashion you can have your 1/5 of banana, but someone else will take your orange LOL

  **** A message has arrived from pluto on Fri Sep 19 08:43! ****
  From: anonymous1 [To: ajft anonymous2]
  I could have an orange???.
  NIS must've taken it before I got to it...

  **** A message has arrived from pluto on Fri Sep 19 08:44! ****
  From: anonymous2 [To: ajft anonymous1]
  Xxx put one in the pigeon hole for Adrian, but he put it above the name, so in fact it was in Allan's pigeon hole, and thus Allan ate it

  **** A message has arrived from pluto on Fri Sep 19 08:45! ****
  From: anonymous2 [To: ajft anonymous1]
  well actually it was a tangelo I think

  **** A message has arrived from pluto on Fri Sep 19 08:47! ****
  From: anonymous1 [To: ajft anonymous2]
  I thought it was a mandarin.

In the centre of Melbourne is a road labelled "Swanston street walk", its a joke really, there is no walking along it. During the day it is closed to private motor traffic. It is a major north-south thoroughfare through the city for cyclists, who have to share it with trams... and horse carriages... and jaywalkers... and taxis... and courier vans... and delivery trucks... and tourists who accidently drive into it... and motorists who ignore the closure and deliberately drive into it... and tour buses.

Tragically, this morning a woman died under the wheels of one of those tour buses.

It touched a nerve with the hundreds, if not thousands, of people who cycle into or through the city and a memorial service was organised for 17:15 on fairly short notice and despite this and the rain, somewhere between 100 and 200 people showed up.

A last minute decision to leave work early and head into the city to join the memorial gathering for the cyclist killed by a bus this morning. A sudden rain shower, a double-parked car blocking the bike lane and a less than successful overtaking manoeuvre across the tram tracks.

Thumbs up to all who showed up for the memorial.

Thumbs down to the idiots I saw in traffic; on foot, on bike, in car.

...and congratulations to our two newspapers, who seem to be at odds with each other in their reporting:

The Age

"She fell into the path of an oncoming Gray Line tour bus"

The Herald Sun

"The woman, from Parkville, was riding south when she was hit by the bus, which was also travelling south."

Truly makes you wonder about the quality of reporting of events that you can't verify from other sources.

There I was riding to work along North road, same as I always do. Obeying the law and riding in the lane adjacent to the bus-lane, same as a I always do. Nearly every other person using the road seems to be able to safely and legally pass me, same as the always do.

But there's always one...

The driver of a tow-truck from Gardenstate towing, registration TOW-836, was somehow unable to pass me and instead drove along for 400-500m blasting on the horn, yelling abuse and gesticulating wildly for me to get off the road and into the bus lane. It tried to wave him past, he just kept on hooting and yelling, finally as we got to Clayton road he swerved from being in the left-hand lane behind me, across the right-hand lane and into the right-turn lane.

Why is it that once or twice a week I get to meet a neanderthal who is insistent that I break the law so that they aren't inconvenienced?

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Is this useful? I guess it could be, rather than the myriad of web presences and individual icons that every site uses, to have one default icon used everywhere.

Once you've registered on http://www.gravatar.com/ you can upload assorted image icons, these can then be referenced from anywhere via a URL based on the MD5 hash of the email address:

echo -n ajft@ajft.org|md5sum

See also: WP_MonsterID :: Dammit Jim!

What a pathetic joke. There's a problem with my Bigpond account and the online billing.

• I can see my bills online
• if I hit the "email" button to try and email any bill to myself I generate an internal error on the http://my.bigpond.com/ website.

Lodged the problem report with them exactly one year ago today, called several times during August 2007 and was told nothing helpful, then two months later had finally got it escalated and then was told I could not call them but had to go away and wait and they would call me when it is fixed!

Well a year has passed and it still doesn't bloody work!

Thread: last next

Another one bites the dust.... Korean Home-town Cooking has closed. A tiny shop, bright right fluorescent lights, half a dozen cheap tables and excellent food — I had a soft spot for the place since it first opened and the owner sat me down and gave me a pot of tea and a snack to help make the wait for my take-away meal more bearable. Closed, and in its place — and in its premises with the old decor — there is now Soban.

What better day to try them out then. Or perhaps not! Tonight was their very first opening and the two waiting staff didn't seem to know where anything was, and seemed in great danger of crashing into each other as they frantically hurried back and forth in and out of the kitchen. Placing my order I was told it would take half an hour or so — not good — that's double the wait we used to be told. “You go for walk,” accompanied by vague hand-waving towards the door. Even less impressed, it's around 8°C outside and starting to rain, but maybe if I go and walk around the block for quarter of an hour it'll make them less nervous.

Sure enough, it's half an hour until my food arrives, many smiles and wishes of good luck, and off back home.

Sadly uninspiring. How can anyone provide Bul-go-gi with no Kim-Chi? It all looks — and tastes — like generic bland shopping-mall food-court Asian food.

We'll have to give them another try in a few weeks once they're established.

From some browser tabs I'd left open over the weekend, here is a speed test I ran on the Bigpond ADSL 256/64 service I use:

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/

2008-Aug-05: Revisited

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 sillly, 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.

Now how is this for serendipity, up until today I had never heard this magnificent new verb(?), then all of a sudden it appeared in a mailing list that I read... and was promptly shot down by the grammar police. Incentivise.. now what the heck is that meant to mean and who on the planet made it up?

Half an hour later and I find that the BBC has compiled a list of the top 50 office-speak phrases you love to hate and there it is at number four! I expect to see the list in The Age in about a week and the Herald Sun a week or so after that, but I could have the order wrong.

Amazing! The combination of a very short commute and the cold winter weather means that on any given day I generally see no other cyclists, or around one or two a week. Maybe the rising petrol prices, a glitch in the statistics or a fluke of my timing, but in the last 24 hours I've met ten other bicycle commuters while riding to and from work! Maybe I should keep a log of how many other riders are about through the colder and then warmer months... Three on the cycle paths in Oakleigh last night, an older Chinese couple and then a woman who nearly fell off in front of me at the sharp-right into the station car-park — its a pain of a corner, she got her wheel caught in the channel off the concrete path, but its never made easier by the dumped shopping trolleys that get pushed to the end of the car-park and occasional beer bottle, syringe or illegally parked car.

Then this morning riding up North road there were another two guys, one fast in lycra on a road bike, one slow in jeans on a mountain bike, both riding up the bus lane and likely to be abused or attacked by the bus drivers. Had a chat to the roadie as we rode along and he was astonished to find that its illegal to ride in the bus-lane, that VicRoads has redecorated the road so that any cyclists have to ride in the next lane out, being overtaken on the left and right by faster vehicles — he claimed it was ridiculous and stupid, then carried on riding right where he was.

This evening there were another four or so, three of them riding home up North road in the bus-lane.

I wonder what would happen if the police started policing along here, booking every cyclist and motorist who illegally uses the bus-lane? Perhaps then a few more people would give a damn about the lanes and the laws if they found that they were actually enforced! The general Aussie attitude on the road seems to be "pass as many laws as you want, I'll ignore 'em and you won't enforce 'em."

What a magnificent use for the internet The Twat-O-Tron, sieving through the detritus that is the public's responses and rantings on the BBC's "Have Your Say" feedback.

For a piece of its magnificence, I quote you:

global warming climate change no such thing its just another tax does anyone realise that the bastions of political correctness are trying to kil lus all because they want to destroy us from within all englishmen should get out of the eu and get our country back soon this country will be majority muslim with a mosk in ever yvillage

No, I do not agree with the views above, the spelling, or the idiot who wrote it.

Now if only someone could write an equivalent that takes as input the vitriol and ignorance that rains down whenever there's an article in the press on cycling in Australia and daring to use a bike as an ordinary piece of transport, and not as something that is transported about on the 4WD for a Sunday ride in the park.

“Bumper stickers reveal link to road rage”

Hardly earth shattering, but their research shows that people who most strongly identify with their cars are the ones that get the angriest and are most prone to road rage.

“Hating cyclists: some preliminary findings”

Not much in the way of interpretation, but a large body of analysis of the feedback to any media stories on cyclist-motorist interaction in Australia.

“Road Safety and perceived risk of cycle tracks and lanes in Copenhagen” (pdf)

Fascinating reading, a safety report from Copenhagen, home of those "Copenhagen lanes" that Bicycle (paths) Victoria are obsessed with — when they're not obsessed with other bicycle paths. Reports what many cyclists already know or believe, that while cycle paths encourage more people to ride, they also increase the collision and injury rate.

Ah, the pleasures of a slight misreading of a news headline.

"Do not panic-buy petrol, says PM"

or is it

"Do not panic; buy petrol, says PM"

From $100 a barrel at the start of the year to around $139 this week, the "Australian motorist" screaming blue murder at the government that "someone ought to do something" as petrol prices rise from $1.33 a litre to $1.66 over the same period. My, my, even some of the Americans are starting to notice that their god-given right to drive a big truck is costing them a lot of money. Riots in Nepal, Indonesia and elsewhere as the price goes up, strikes by truck drivers and fisherman in assorted parts of Europe. Um, what do they want to have happen, a government mandated low price? I really can't see that having any workable effect.

There seem to be two opposing views to the source of the price rises; one is that its good 'ol "supply and demand", as two billion Chinese and Indians haul their economies into the first world, they want resources... lots of resources. Lots of demand and a finite amount of oil. OPEC responds by putting up the price. The other point of view seems to be that it is all completely artificial and driven by speculators, that the "real" price should be around $60-$70US a barrel and that it'll all come down to that in a year... two at the most....

Hmmm, a bit of the latter and a lot of the former I suspect. If I knew then I'd be very rich, but I'm not very rich so I guess we can infer that I don't know. Throw into the mix the elephants in the room of peak oil and global warming, together with appease-the-public governments with two-year maximum attention spans. Interesting times.... I'll just have to watch, live and learn.

From Bruce Schneir's Schneier on Security, possibly one of the best articles I've ever read on the increasing harassment of anyone who dares to wield a camera in a public place:

... The 9/11 terrorists didn't photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn't photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn't photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber Richard Reid. Photographs aren't being found amongst the papers of Palestinian suicide bombers. The IRA wasn't known for its photography. Even those manufactured terrorist plots that the US government likes to talk about — the Ft. Dix terrorists, the JFK airport bombers, the Miami 7, the Lackawanna 6 — no photography. ...

Thank you Bruce.

Is it my suspicious mind, or does the following Flickr Mail seem a little bit dodgy?

Hello

In a dutch magazine we would like to publish your photo of the ambulance in victoria. You have it verry small online, is it possible to send me a large size of the photo. We would like to publish it on 20cm wide. So we need it verry large. We can offer you a fee of 50,- euro for the photo.

You can contact me on my e-mail: X.XXXXX@gmail.com

We do need it on wednsday or thursday 29 may at the latest, so I hope you can answer me quickly.

Best regards, XXXXX XXXXXX

Seems to me that:

• there's no mention of which photo they're referring to (there is one that matches, but any search on http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/ambulance/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/victoria/ would find it)
• there's no mention of which magazine it'll be published in
• the "we need it verry large" sounds a little simplistic, rather than "we need at least X pixels wide"
• there's only a generic gmail address to respond to
• there's a sudden urgency to make me respond quickly
• there's no mention of how they'll pay

Or do I just have a suspicious mind?

Everyone loves a baby... including the government so it would seem. The government in all its myriad forms; Federal, State and Local, they all want in on the act, they're all here to help...

An inundation of glossy brochures and photocopied fact sheets, two DVDs, registering with local health care, state records, national medical insurance.

This morning the regional maternal health nurse came to visit, to record, to instruct and book us in for further visits at our "local" maternal health centre. Except it isn't our local centre, the local one is easy to get to and about four minutes walk — we've been allocated to one that's three times as far away, and on the far side of a six-lane main road. At least we managed to get reallocated, then had to sit and listen to about half an hour of an interesting mix of useful advice, the bleeding obvious, and what I think are personal opinions, all mixed in as one. She handed over a great sheaf of photocopies of local guvment advice, then carefully took her pen and crossed some bits out and made her own annotations. I guess that like all free advice, its worth what we pay for it.

Paperwork step one, register the baby with the Victorian Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages. You have two months, and if you do not all sorts of dire things will happen. Hating to be caught with an unlicensed baby, we leap at the chance to placate the government.

This one's not so bad, just four pages of questions that must be filled in, then signatures from both parents, both witnessed. One of the nurses from the hospital had told us we're allowed to witness each other's signatures, so we did. On the back of the form we then found a footnote saying that we're not allowed to witness each other's signatures. Oh well, we'll send it off and see what happens. Now on to the next one...

Half-way through filling out the four pager paper form to register the new baby with Medicare we find that you get to a certain point and then have to do part of it either online or via the phone, then transcribe some receipt number onto the paper form in order to continue. Typically convoluted. I started by going to the website, http://familyassist.gov.au/, but of course there is absolutely no indication of what you have to do! Fumbling around found a page that looked promising, but surprise surprise, you can't go any further without "registering" and creating yet another bloody account on yet another bloody website. I started filling this out, meanwhile Jo simply picked up the phone and started to call. She'd was in touch with a person and starting the process before I'd even got the rest of the way through creating the account on the website.

Hey, dearest government, if the only websites you can make are this bloody convoluted and hard to use, PLEASE DITCH THE WEBSITES and stop pretending you have an online presence!

Second surprise; despite us having sent any number of Medicare claims in to them in the past nine months, indeed quite a few over the past three years, they claim that there's no record of us at this address! This is despite them somehow managing to send us refunds TO THIS ADDRESS for the past three years!

Anyway, after giving out a whole lot of details over the phone, we are now in possession of a magic registering number which we can enter on the paper form, together with re-entering half the details already given out over the phone! We can then send off the form where all the details will be transcribed from paper back into someone's database — hopefully without too many transcription errors.

OK, we now think the paperwork has been dealt with. What's the next surprise in store?

At 18:07 Cameron was born after a very full day. I'm now a father, I'm now very tired, I'm now over the moon, I'm now having trouble expressing myself. I'm now very busy.

Hello world, Cameron Fidel Tritschler.

I defy anybody to make sense of the following gibberish:

Today's enterprise network landscape incorporates numerous discrete but interrelated infrastructure elements - applications, databases, services, and hardware - and encompasses a variety of management disciplines, interfaces, tools, and dashboards. Typically, these elements are lashed together with chewing gum and baling wire. Nevertheless, the expectation is that such a patchwork assemblage will work cohesively, even though in practice the cohesion among such diverse sets of components is seldom transparent and never seamless. Run Book Automation (RBA) represents an emerging technology space architected around various sets of standards. Early adopters turn to RBA to address basic enterprise needs for coherent, end-to-end task automation across the IT landscape. These early adopters also typically seek to fill the gaps using turnkey solutions instead of patching site- or system-specific solutions together.

...with apologies to the vendor who sent it to me.

Weddings, Parties, Anything know their audience well; they're all getting older, they're all getting fatter, many of them have kids... so for the last show in the series of the ten-year reformation Christmas in April it was a matinee show. Quite odd to walk in from the bright autumn sunlight to a dark pub bandroom and see not only a room full of punters but young kids darting about here and there, dancing on whichever of the two stages wasn't currently in use, and generally putting everyone in a good mood and making them laugh.

Even the merchandising was in tune with the audience, amongst the t-shirts, Hawaian shirts, CDs, DVDs and footy scarves there were bibs for babies! Your choice, either "Weddings, Parties, Anything.. 10 year reunion", or the magnificently tongue-in-cheek titled "Spawn of the Women."

I'm no good at writing gig reviews so I'll give it a miss, they opened with Wide Open Road, I think everyone had a good time, I ran into an old friend from years back and we all left contented.

If they all jumped off a cliff would you follow? From tbray.org:

nidhogg:~$ history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s \n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head
   42	cd
   34	ls
   10	grep
    8	make
    5	svn
    5	./ftqviz.py
    4	p9
    4	./ldapstaff
    4	export
    4	du

Hmm, cd, ls, grep, make, then yesterday I was fiddling with svn for a while, trying to get hold of the source for something interesting. The pything was analysing some numbers from a system performance utility, p9 invokes the rc shell of plan9ports. Then right down at number 8 we get to an LDAP wrapper script I use for work-related porpoises!

During some browsing around this partially migrated mess that is my website I've discovered that entries from June and July 2007 seem to have vanished. Did I do that? If so, how did I do that and when did I do that?

Where did they go, and can I get them back?

There must be something about their "professional training", I really can't think of anything else to explain it.

Every day I ride up North road, usually with no problems

Every day I am passed by several hundred cars, usually with no problems.

Every day I am passed by one or two buses from other bus lines, usually with no problems.

About once a month some maniac in a Grendas bus seems to want to kill me.

January, run off the road, then told to G* F*d by Grendas management when I wrote to them.

February, abuse screamed at me by a Grenda driver for being in the adjacent lane 3m from the bus wanting to do a hook turn!

Today, 6115-A0 passed at I guess 70-80km/hr with about 10cm clearance, blew my bag off my back and helmet half off my head. Any chance of pulling out a bit into the (vacant) adjacent lane next time? At the Clayton rd/north rd set of lights I pulled up alongside the bus in the middle lane, 'cos I thought he would be pulling into the bus stop after the lights, but instead WHILE CHATTING ON THE PHONE, he swerved out half a metre into my lane while pulling away from the lights then tore off up North road and through the Dandenong road lights as they went orange to red.

[2008-Apr-08] Revisited: Hmm, maybe someone at Grenda's is getting the general idea. Maybe I just met the other 29/30 day's bus drivers who don't have a problem. This morning Mr Bus driver of 6116-A0 was quite happy to go past with over a metre clearance, even though he had to almost change lanes to do so.

Before

After

We're getting there! Slowly, every so scarily slowly, the front room is progressing from a disaster zone to a bedroom.

The floor is in, the skirting boards replaced or reattached, the timberwork has all been primed, now the walls have been painted. Carpets and curtains and painting the trim remain... and the deadline gets closer.

Now that definitely leaves a bad taste in the mouth Mr Garmin.

You purchase a GPS in good faith, one that comes with a 12 month warranty and so when it breaks you send it back to be repaired. You can't send it to Garmin since they don't have a presence in Australia, instead you have to send it to GME, who are the “sole repair and distribution centre.”

When it comes back you assume that the replacement one has a warranty, then nine or ten months later that one breaks too... that's when you discover that according to GME “they're not real reliable,” but since its a repair unit it only has a 3 month warranty and it'll cost you $AU209 to have your unrepairable GPS replaced! Staff at GME claim to be "only a repair shop" and that I have to discuss it with "Garmin Australia" if I'm not happy with the warranty, or that fact that two out of two Garmin devices have failed in under a year.

Searching about shows that there is no such entity as "Garmin Australia", all references to a Garmin presence in Australia are directed straight back to GME! Garmin's "international office" in the US won't help, since I'm not in the US, and helpfully directed me to contact Garmin South-East Asia, which have a website in Taiwan that is solely in Chinese characters.

So two years of endless firmware hangs and two broken Edge 305 GPSs can be summarised as: nice concept, crap product, crap firmware, crap warranty and crap support.

Thanks Garmin.

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There I was, riding up Beddoe avenue to Monash uni. on my way to work, slowing for the roundabout, looking left, right and straight ahead for motorists, checking for ijuts riding on the footpath who shoot across in front of you, watching for some of our less knowledgeable overseas students who drive, ride or walk unpredictably or on the wrong side of the road, indicating right an' all — employing all the usual safeguards at this tiny little roundabout... then out of the blue whump

The attack of the jaywalking uni-student, he launched himself out from behind the power-pole, eyes on the ground, not looking left, not looking right. Straight into the front wheel, stopped me dead as I flipped up and over and down ontop of the bike. He apologised profusely, claimed he only looked for cars, left me a scrawled name and phone number and continued on his way.

The road bike is now unridable until I get new handlebars, and since the forecast is for 39°C it'll be a hot walk home.

Miscellaneous small bruises, and aching shoulders and wrists from the hand-stand in the middle of the road, but thankfully no major damage.

Yet another in the endless daily stream of people not watching where they're going, and finally the odds caught up with me and I failed to avoid him.

Playing around with google Docs. I can't seem to find a way to make an X-Y chart that has a date along the bottom. That graph should be from September 2002 to March 2008, but I can't figure out how to make the dates appear.

What's in a name? An awful lot it appears... especially if you're seven months pregnant, don't know the sex of the baby and have no real idea of what to call it.

Canvassing some outside assistance we appealed to the nieces on the weekend; according to one set of twins our options now seem to include Charlotte and Prancer — from Saddle Club I believe — try explaining that one to the kid when they're at school “Mummy, why am I called a reindeer name?” The other twins are quite firm in their belief that only babies have names, “It can't have a name while its still a lump inside, silly!” The silly aunt and uncle retired, suitably chastised.

Nephews had previously proposed Ann and Zac for a girl or a boy respectively, an impressive pun on the due date of April 25 (ANZAC day).

Driving home we thought that Reality was a good option, similar in style to a lot of translated African and Asian names that seem to sound slightly odd in English, but open to any number of puns like “You can't handle Reality...” and “There's no escape from Reality.”

Boy, Girl, Giraffe? Who knows. Currently known by the temporary name of Marty monster and apparently trying out for early admission to the Socceroos as striker.

Ugh, why did I volunteer for this? I admit it, I was hoping that BV's offer would put me on North road so I could see first hand just how few people really use the useless "bicycle lane". “Volunteer to take part in a bicycle commuter survey, tell us where you live and work and we'll place you somewhere nearby”. I volunteered, I specified Oakleigh and Clayton — 5km apart — they put me down on the Nepean highway 10km away in Moorabbin in the opposite direction!

So, a free orange tee-shirt in size extra-bed-sheet large and a $50 donation to the bicycle user group of my choice. That's what I get for standing on the corner of Nepean highway and South road for two hours being deafened by truckages. Below follows a very unscientific summary of two hours of my life from 7:00 to 9:00a.m. this morning:

One cyclist said hello, but she's a friend and she recognised me.

One commodore, 6:55am, P-plates, three lads, front passenger screamed C*#NT! while rear passenger spat out the window — I retired to higher ground in case they returned.

There is no coffee, bakery or toilets nearby.

Bicycle Victoria supplies nice neat sheets showing four roads and Left/right/straight for each of those four roads — 12 combinations to tick for each rider.

Melbourne supplies cyclists who ride up the footpath, the wrong way up feeder lanes, or diagonally across arbitrary combinations of pedestrian crossing and road — this makes ticking the tick boxes more interesting and open to interpretation.

In every given 15 minute period I saw more motorists illegally on the phone than I saw in cyclists.

128 cyclists in 2 hours, 1 recumbent, no penny farthings, 1 cyclist ran a red light, 7 had no helmets, 31 either arrived or left the intersection riding on the footpath.

...and surprise surprise, the most popular direction was the 41 people going straight north heading for the city.

Ah, yet again the wonders of the two newspapers. Same story, reporting the same court result, just look at the slant each gives:

Slow service killer gets 7 years

A restaurateur has been jailed for seven years for the manslaughter of a patron who complained about slow service.

...more

'Slow service' killer may be out quickly

A RESTAURATEUR who stabbed a patron to death after he complained about slow service could be free in little more than two years.

...more

So do you know what is going on in the world, or is your News Limited?

On it goes...

  Drivers find cyclists a road hazard
  from Herald Sun; State News

MORE than 60 per cent of Victorian motorists find cyclists are a road hazard, according to research carried out by insurer AAMI.

...

Anything to sell more newspapers, split the population into "us vs them", pick a minority and stir, this is the way of the little paper.

It contains such gems as "47 per cent of Victorian car drivers have had a close call with a cyclist", but somehow seems to neglect to ask what percentage of motorists have had a close call with another motorist.

Amazingly, in amongst all the diatribe and hate-mail posted in the feedback and followups, a few voices of reason have been allowed to be printed, and not (yet) removed by the editors.

Still the aggro continues.

Seems some bright spark decided a little vigilante action was called for on the weekend and spread tacks on Beach road, in amongst the reports from the police calling it callous, stupid and dangerous, and yet more diatribe offering to simply kill people on bikes, someone came up with this gem:

We may have finally found a use for all those new terrorism laws the Howard government was so keen on.

Provided we use the basic definition of a terrorist act as violence against civilians used in the persuit(sic) of a political aim (in this case getting bikes of Beach rd), then this should fit the bill.

So it goes on....

Meanwhile, outside it is magnficent late summer weather just perfect for cycling, the sun is out, its not too hot or too cold and there's not much wind, but inside, malignant spirits attack their keyboards and vent their spleens.

For the first day of semester it was amazingly uneventful; the mass of bods queued up for the bus at Huntingdale station delayed the bus for so long that I'd made it the entire way to Monash uni without being caught and buzzed by a number 900 "smart bus"

One brief hair-raising moment came in the carparks of the uni; the self-important security staff standing in the middle of the roads "guiding" traffic, telling people who wanted to turn left to turn left, telling people who wanted to go straight ahead to... um, go straight ahead. Unfortunately one of these geniuses told someone driving towards me to turn right straight across my path, then spun around and laughed as I slid to a stop to avoid going over the bonnet. A little traffic management training would be helpful guys...

Looking forward to my first encounter with "new student in shiny car going wrong way round ring road", it happens each year, somewhere before week 3...

Worst part of the day was the coffee machine — nearly three months old and its out of action again. Couldn't possibly be due to the rather haphazard weekly cleaning its been subjected to, could it?

I'd love to believe that Garmin's Edge 305 is a great piece of equipment, but unfortunately my experiences with the device — two so far — have left me unconvinced.

From day one it has been subject to battery draining hangs if you don't switch it off and disconnect it from the PC in precisely the right order, and even then sometimes it'll just hang. You get into the habit of switching off, unplugging, then switching it back on briefly just to check. A number of firmware updates haven't cured the problem, perhaps lessening the frequency though. Its the only USB device I've ever heard of that has this problem.

Another design flaw seems to be a loose mounting bracket and a mount almost at one end — it always seemed wobbly and eventually my first one fell out when I hit a bump and smashed the display. Just under ten months life for that one.

Four weeks later I received a replacement, still subject to the software hangs.

Nearly ten months into the life of the second unit, in early December 2007, and I noticed that one of the buttons didn't work anymore, but I don't tend to use the up/down arrows so I've no idea how long that was the case, then a few weeks later it started to randomly turn itself off if I hit a bump in the road. I resisted sending it back to GME until after the Alpine Classic in late January, then today posted it off for repair or replacement.

Now the wait, hopefully not another four weeks, until I get it back. A dodgy product or just bad luck and two bad items?

Updated: Ah damn, I guess I should have read all the data off it before I shipped it off, I think it unlikely that they'll send it back with the memory still full, especially if it gets replaced. Oh no, I've lost all records of my commutes since Feb. 8!

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