ajft

Who views my photos, why, how often, what brings them here?

Every day or so I check with Flickr to see what is being viewed the most, and what has been viewed the most overall.

Oddly, my most viewed image has more than ten times the views of the next most viewed, and to me is a fairly boring bland photo. Linking to it here would only drive the view count up higher, so I won't!

  New office desk, just like the old office desk
  1760 views / Nobody counts New office desk, just like the old

office desk as a favorite / 0 comments

It hasn't been there a great deal of time more than other photos, it's only posted to one group, nobody posts comments on it and I have no idea why it gets viewed so often. Any ideas?

Next on the list

  10/365 - Dad, are you sure this is an approved baby carrier?
  116 views / 1 person counts this as a favorite / 1 comment

Now I can see why number two is popular, but not number one. Very puzzling.

Generally the most recently posted photos get a few views, I guess from my friends and contacts as they popup in feed-readers and various "what's new" lists, but oddities stand out and I'd love to know what causes them. Surges of interest seem to come and go; one day it'll be tandem bicycles, the next Milford sound, the day after that any parrots. Topical subjects in the news, both very local and world-wide, act as triggers, the PBS/RRR Community Cup and Melburn-Roobaix both kicked off an interest as their times of year came arond. Of course this posting itself will have an effect, you can't measure something without affecting whatever it is you're measuring….

Tinkering about I add tags here and there and have found that the more, and better, tags that photos have then the more likely it will to be viewed — hardly surprising, it means people can find it. They're tagged, and where appropriate I try and find machine tags to add, and nearly all have latitude and longitude information in the EXIF data and in the geo-tags and can be found on the Flickr map.

Photos of the two weeks in China seem to attract a continual low-level interest, but nobody ever leaves comments on them so I have no idea who is looking at them.

All in all its a fascinating insight into what appeals to others, from a set of photos that vary wildly in quality and interest.

Being part of a household that watches approximately an hour of television a week, at most, I've mostly ignored all the shiny new Australian digital TV channels showing the same old crud with the same overbearing ads and deliberate schedule slippage to render any recordings unusable. In the words of the TV executive, “We're not in the business of letting people not watch ads.”

All of a sudden a deadline emerged, mid-July, the Tour de France, this year SBS will be broadcasting their coverage on SBS2 — their digital channel. Much head-scratching occurred, reviews were perused, some catalogues were read. What do we want? We've got a widescreen TV, albeit CRT, but the venerable TEAC still does the job. A digital receiver, yes. A hard-disk recorder, yes. Access on the home network? Backup copies of our other data? Photo store?

The LaCie cinema looked attractive, certainly physically attractive, but very expensive and reviews tend to indicate that they've got noisy fans. Back to the studying of the literature….

DViCO TVIX HD M-6500A, what a mouthful of letters and numbers, but the specs looked ok, the reviews sound good, the price seemed reasonable. Thank you Mr Rudd, I'll be spending that stimulus of yours, yet more money flowing from Australia to Asia, Korea this time, http://www.tvix.co.kr/ to be exact. EYO technologies in Sydner helped lighten my wallet, no less than three progress emails to tell me the steps my order was taking along the way and then 24 hours later the box is at the door.

First impressions? as always; the good, the bad and the ugly.

Neither good, bad nor ugly, but to quote the immortal words — as the actress said to the bishop — “Its a lot smaller than I expected.” It looked physically bigger in the images and I lazily didn't measure out the dimensions that it said on the brochure.

Neither the hard disk nor the HD tuner was installed in the main unit, but installation is dead simple and they slot together without screws or any other fasteners. So far so good….

The HDTV receiver was trivially easy to setup, the display rock-solid and far better than our analogue TV reception — and the antenna cable it is plugged into simply vanishes into the wall and I've no idea what on the roof it is attached to, or where the antenna points.

Manuals? As with most consumer electronics now you don't get one, just a CD and you're on your own to go and print the 68 pages yourself.

Now for the ugly, the onscreen display is woeful on our TV screen. I almost gave myself a headache navigating through the menus and setting the system up. Not sure if it just simply isn't designed to work with an analogue TV — but if that's the case then don't sell it as something that is! The onscreen display of the TV itself is fine, as is the menus from the DVD/VCR and the old X-box, but with the 6500A you'ld better have the manual in front of you to help guess what the words and numbers are.

The bad? Wifi support only with a third-party USB dongly plugged in the back — a dongle I haven't got yet — and I couldn't get the wired network to work. Connects easily enough as an external USB drive which let me transfer all this year's photos, all my old scanned APS photos, and a handful of DivX videos for testing. The JPEG software simply cannot handle two-thirds of my photos, I've no idea if they're too big, or if the EXIF and/or IPTC headers confuse it, but the majority of my photos simply display a black screen, timeout and move on to the next photo that simply displays a black screen. No problems viewing them on websites or under Windows, Mac OS or Linux, just on a media player that can't display media….

To finish, I suspect that the user interface to setting up scheduled daily recordings is going to be difficult. Appears to be more of a media player with TV and recorder functionality tacked on over the top, and I'm starting to have my doubts….

Oh dear, oh dear. Can't tell their h1n1 from their hini. Can someone please get them a clue, or maybe even fix their spell checker.

Update on HINI 09 influenza

Following a significant increase in the number of confirmed cases of HINI 09 in Victoria

:

It is important that staff and students act responsibly in the interests of their own and their colleague’s health. If you are unwell and think that you may have flu-like symptoms, it is important you consult your own local doctor immediately and do not come to University until your doctor advises it is appropriate to do so.

That last paragraph really bugs me. The vast majority of people simply do not have a "local doctor" and cannot see "their doctor". Due to the way the health system works they go to multi-doctor health clinics where you're lucky to see the same doctor twice in any two visits, forced to sit in a waiting room with up to twenty other sick people for an hour or so, and if you don't have something contagious when you walk in, you're pretty much guaranteed of it by the time you leave.

It then goes on with an injunction to wash our hands a billion times per day, and for me to wash it every time after touching my face — surely in order to not bring the virus into contact with me I need to wash my hands before touching my face — it would do wonders for the water bill and lead to a truly stupendous amount of virus transmission as everyone rushes to the taps and the door handles; over and over and over again.

Remind me again, just how many people in Australia have died of this? Oh, that's right, none. Meanwhile 20,000 people in this country die each year of ordinary household non-catchy-named flu.

It passed like a blur at times, like a glacier at others. From zero to one in twelve months. From a baby to a toddler, albeit a toddler who doesn't quite toddle… yet.

Two more weeks before I manage to make time to myself to even write this up, two weeks since one year since 2008-May-08.

New beginnings, a change in work arrangements with both of us working three days a week and me working one of those three at home. Split child minding with me on duty Monday to Wednesday and somewhere shoe-horning a day's work into the hours between leaving work on Friday evening and getting back there the following Thursday. So far, so good….

So many beautiful lonely Russian ladies writing to me. I'm so sorry girls, I just can't seem to find the time to get back to you all individually. As a homage, here's a photomontage of all those pretty pictures you keep sending:

Having rebuilt my home PC and started the laborious job of reinstallation and reconfiguration, I thought I'd better check with BigPond to see how many megabytes the patches and updates had cost me. A simple task? Of course not. Nothing is ever simple or easy with BigPond, nothing other than being billed that is. Splat across the homepage of http://my.bigpond.com is the following, in place of the dialog boxes that are supposed to let me login:

  Member Login
  Trouble with Login?

Active Server Pages error 'ASP 0113'

Script timed out

/homepage/default.asp

The maximum amount of time for a script to execute was exceeded. You can change this limit by specifying a new value for the property Server.ScriptTimeout or by changing the value in the IIS administration tools.

It went clack, clack, clack, clack, CLACK. Then it stopped.

Part way through a very ordinary ubuntu package upgrade the hard disk in fafnir made an horrendous sound and the PC froze. It wouldn't respond to a soft restart, it wouldn't respond to a hard reset, it wouldn't even come back up after powering off and on. The hard disk has had it. A single consumer-grade IDE disk running almost continually in a desktop machine since about June 2004, what can I say, it was bound to fail eventually.

Now about those backups and my personal disaster recovery plans….

I'm helping to clean up, fix up and conserve the environment. Come along to the 'Operation Oakleigh' Clean Up Day and help us to make Oakleigh shine. There will be a free BBQ for volunteers and prizes to be won.

So says the effusive little introduction from the co-ordinator of the “Cleanup Oakleigh” group of “Cleanup Australia Day.” What, you didn't know that it was “Cleanup Australia Day” today? That's funny, neither did I. No advertising, no signs, no mention anywhere. Pure luck that I heard a mention of the Surf-riders' association doing a cleanup on a beach today as part of it all and a suggestion to lookup your local area on the website — http://www.cleanup.org.au/ — if you were interested in helping.

The entire railway reserve from one end of the suburb to the other is ankle deep in rubbish, every road and footpath in the suburb is full of crap, every time I walk to the shops I seem to end up picking up bottles or newspapers and putting them in the bins; but today for a special event they've nominated a nice clean and tidy park — with playground for the children and easily accessible barbecues for afterwards — as the big site to “clean up.” Forgive my cynicism, but the three blokes I watched standing about drinking take-away coffees for half an hour then getting a rubbish bag out and directing the two kids from the local Air League squadron to pick up a few cans and plastic cups all seemed a bit of a joke.

Cameron and I had headed over to the park for a play on the swings and maybe to join in the cleanup, but as it was we just spent our three-quarters of an hour watching nothing happen, then went home for a nap and a coffee respectively.

Maybe next year I can direct them to the piles of paint cans, mangled pieces of furniture, builders' rubble and destroyed shopping trolleys that have been sitting along Haughton road for the last four years. On the other hand the locations that do need cleaning up aren't so good for photo opportunities and barbecues afterwards….

Yay, finally! After four months of battling “Ubuntu who knows best,” I've finally managed to convince it to reinstall a current NVidia driver that works on my PC and gives me back the 1280x1024 resolution that I'd been using for four or five years! For some reason the 8.10 upgrade had removed all traces of the NVidia packages and refused to recognise that I had hardware that could use them.

Now if only I can get it to fix my local cyrus IMAP installation that also went belly-up with the Ubuntu 8.10 “upgrade.”

Only two more months until the Ubuntu 9.04 “upgrade” happens and I find out what wonders it manages to break….

No thank you Senator Conroy, I do not want mandatory internet filtering of all Internet content in Australia, slowing everything, especially when the blacklist that is filtered is a secret from the very people it is "protecting". Communist China filters the internet to "protect its people," lets not have that sort of protection from our government.

Around and around we go; Connex and Monash City Council, Monash City Council and Connex....

Every couple of weeks someone decides to ignore the no parking signs, to ignore the huge white markings on the ground, to ignore the fact that they're blocking the footpath and bike path, and decides to park illegally at the end of the Oakleigh station car-park. Anyone on foot who is skinny enough can squeeze past, anyone on a bike, with a pram or shopping trolley or who is fatter than average either cannot get past at all, or has to scrape along the side of the idiot's car. The council — Monash City Council — seem to ignore this and rarely police the car-park and even more rarely book the cars. Understandably, a number of people on foot or on bikes get annoyed, but unfortunately a lot of them take it out by ripping the mirrors and wipers off the offending car, an act that is hardly likely to give the driver charitable thoughts towards the next cyclist they meet.

One too many cars parked here, this morning I rang up Monash City Council and spoke to their “local laws” officer and asked to have the offending cars ticketed. As usual, whenever I speak with the council a Kafkaesque miasma descends. The staff member I spoke with insisted that the car-park is a railway car-park and is the operated and policed by Connex, and that the council is not allowed to enter it and issue any tickets. OK I thought, I'll just ring Connex… ha ha, not so easy. After the usual voice mail menus and irritations I got to a human and they insisted most strenuously that Connex is only responsible for the car-park and surrounds — an area that I have never seen them clean or maintain, but that's another problem — and that only the local councils are legally allowed to issue parking tickets and that I will have to speak with the council. Pointing out to Connex that this was the opposite of what the council said I was politely told “Not our responsibility.” So thank you everyone, thank you for buck passing.

At least I know that at some stage in the past the council has got off their lazy arse and booked at least one car that parked there, I've got a photo of it from back in September 2007!

Oh well, here's hoping that either the council starts to book them or a few cars get torched, maybe then people might stop parking there!

I don't know what I want to say, how I'm feeling, its all just a bit numbing.

Bushfires are a normally just a part of the Australian summer, eucalypts and the bush burn. On this scale though, and with all this warning so many deaths?

Two weeks ago Melbourne's weather set a record for three days in a row over 43°C, then on Saturday another record with the hottest day ever at 46.4°C — and with howling hot winds, fires broke out all over the state and continued through the night. Sunday in Melbourne was grey and cool and drizzled with rain, but just out of the city to the north the fires raged on and now 108 are confirmed dead.

Places I'm familiar with have been devastated, a map in the paper shows one of our cycling routes; Wittlesea, Humevale, Kinglake and St Andrews, only in this case each town is accompanied by a number, the number of people confirmed dead.

• http://www.abc.net.au/news/events/bushfires/

Given the enormous number of toys that young Cam has to play with, what do you think would be his favourite things? Is it the stacking cups, the boxes, the wobbly inflatable thing, the mirror or the rings?

Of course not. Like kids everywhere he has more fun with the cardboard box than with the toy that it contained. Having stocked the house with far too many baby toys he finds the most fascinating things are; the track pump, a length of aluminium tubing, the cast-iron door-stopper, the door itself and the rattly handles on the coffee-table drawers.

Three days of ridiculously hot weather have ended, three days in a row with a maximum temperature over 43°C; 43°C on Wednesday, 44°C on Thursday, then 45.1°C on Friday. Records have been broken, together with some of Melbourne's infrastructure, tempers and a few too many lives.

Walking around Oakleigh and Murrumbeena this afternoon the grass is brown and crisp and covered in leaves, every second tree has shed its leaves to conserve water — some of the eucalypts have shed branches too. Half a dozen dead ringtail possums were lying on the ground through the park, a dead Tawny frogmouths (Podargus strigoides) on the ground under its nest, parent bird a stock-still silhouette against the sky above. If it hadn't been for the dead fledgling we'd have walked past and never spotted it.

Back home the lemon tree has dropped all its lemons and strange burning smells came from my ADSL modem, the BigPond SpeedStream has always been a lousy performer in the heat, this week the wireless simply shutdown — amazingly it recovered after being switched off and allowed to cool down. Hopefully the scorched leaves and wilted plants will recover after they've been allowed to cool and rehydrate….

Following on from yesterday it was uncredibly hot overnight, I slept with the windows open but as it only dropped to an overnight low of 28.7°C it was just as hot inside as out, a little less stuffy but more light and noise from the street.

Third hottest Melbourne night on record with an overnight low of 28.7°C; 1902-Feb-01 was hottest at 30.5°C followed by 1997-Jan-21 with 28.8°C. I wonder how hot it really was in our house? The old OneWire weather station seems to think it dropped to around 21°C, lying on its side on the tiles in the kitchen — maybe that's where I should have slept!

As the day wore on our office stayed cool, although the air-conditioning in various other places broke down and staff were sent home. Power consumption throughout Victoria hit new records as every man and his dog cranked their air-conditioners up… endless suburbs of big brick boxes of houses with poor design, no shade, little insulation and the assumption that heating and cooling can all be done as an after thought with power-hungry equipment.

From http://business.theage.com.au/business/power-hits-dangerous-low-20090129-7scr.html

Victorian power demand has hit a new record today, depleting electricity reserves to critical lows, as the state sweats through a summer heatwave.

Demand on the state's electrical grid exceeded 10,000 megawatts for the second consecutive daily cycle, dropping the excess power on the grid to zero before hovering around the 1% mark, according to power-monitoring service Global Roam.

Odd that I clearly recall a statement on Monday by the premier that there would be at least 10% capacity available on top of any anticipated maximum peak demand this week….

I wonder if the power will be on when I get home?

Oh look, and the train system is melting:

…198 trains cancelled by 4pm and services suspended on three lines.

Between an asset-stripping kind of privatisation to Connex, decades of government neglect and go-slow unionism the whole debacle grinds to a halt. Connex blames the government and the rail unions, the unions blame the government and Connex, and the government blame previous governments. Tracks buckle, trains have air-conditioners that only work up to 35°C, and unionised train drivers pull trains from service for a range of faults, too technical to be explained to the lay person but sufficient to make the operators and the government look bad. Public transport to be free for the next two days, not that it'll help everyday commuters who have weekly or monthly tickets, if there is no public transport available due to breakdowns in the heat!

Second day of cycling home in 43 degrees, I really wouldn't want to make a habit of it. A couple of cars broken down in the heat, a V/Line train crawling along at dead-slow, a few motorists in their air-conditioned boxes either dazed and confused or just plain 'ol grumpy. Home at last, a trifle cooler inside than out, some clouds on the horizon starting to promise a possible change later….

Stupidly hot today, the rest of the family escaped to the coast leaving me to get hot and grumpy by myself, rather than hot and grumpy in the company of others — something that is never pleasant for the others.

I'd gone in to work earlier than normal as the temperature was already climbing towards, or maybe even past, 30°C but its still simpler and quicker to ride in slowly for fifteen minutes than to take walk to the station, catch a train, wait at the station, catch a bus, then walk ten minutes to get to work.

During the day people seemed to spend half their time watching the temperature climb inexorably upwards — apparently if we have three days in a row of 43°C or more it'll set a record for Melbourne.

Hanging around after work wasn't making it cool down, turns out the highest temperature of the day was at 18:15! I think it was around 42°C when I rode home, slowly, carefully, and frequently squirting myself with the drink bottle.

Monash City Council rang up today to verify that the rubbish dumping report that I made to the EPA that the EPA then gave to the council was a report that I wished the council to hand to their local laws officers to actually do something about.

I have no idea why they make this so hard. The Red-Cross donation bins have a sign on them, the sign says to only place items in the bins and that anything outside the bins is dumped and should be reported to the EPA. I watched someone dump a boot-load of crap next to the bin. Ring the EPA to report it and they say it should go to the council!. The EPA then "help" by handing the report to the council. Then the council ring and see if you want the report acted on.

As an aside I also pointed out to Monash council that the signs that they put up all along the railway telling people to report dumped rubbish to the EPA all have the wrong phone number on them — a number that doesn't exist! Apparently this will be reported to the supervisor.

2009-Jan-29: I've now had a phone call from the local laws officer and have to make an appointment with him to make a statement so that they can take it to court! It just goes on getting harder and harder….

Thought for the day: If you ride a tandem bicycle with only one person on it you will be subject to endless strange looks and wise-cracking comments from passers-by about the empty seat. Meanwhile, you'll be surrounded by cars all with four or more seats, mostly empty and containing just one driver….

Prompted by: http://www.melbournecyclist.com/profiles/blogs/double-tandem-standards

Back in October I upgraded my Ubuntu system from 8.04 to 8.10 and as seems to happen far too often, once again something went wrong. This time it removed the nvidia support that has been running for years and all of a sudden I can only run X at a resolution of 1152x864 instead of 1280x1024.

Far more important though, the LVM system that, once-again, I have been successfully using for a couple of years and a couple of upgrades has now been rendered unbootable. For some reason the new kernels that are installed keep on generating initrd images that will not support a root filesystem in LVM.

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-2.6.28-4-generic
Running depmod.
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-4-generic
W:copy_exec: Not copying /sbin/lvm to $DESTDIR/sbin/lvm, which is already a copy of /lib/lvm-200/lvm
Not updating initrd symbolic links since we are being updated/reinstalled
(2.6.28-4.9 was configured last, according to dpkg)
Not updating image symbolic links since we are being updated/reinstalled
(2.6.28-4.9 was configured last, according to dpkg)
Running postinst hook script /sbin/update-grub.
Searching for GRUB installation directory ... found: /boot/grub
/usr/sbin/update-grub: line 297: /sbin/vol_id: No such file or directory
Searching for default file ... found: /boot/grub/default
Testing for an existing GRUB menu.lst file ... found: /boot/grub/menu.lst
Searching for splash image ... found: (hd0,0)/grub/splashimages/debsplash.xpm.gz

Found kernel: /vmlinuz-2.6.28-4-generic
Found kernel: /vmlinuz-2.6.27-7-generic
Found kernel: /memtest86+.bin
Updating /boot/grub/menu.lst ... done

Examining /etc/kernel/postinst.d.
run-parts: executing /etc/kernel/postinst.d/dkms
run-parts: executing /etc/kernel/postinst.d/nvidia-common

I finally worked around it by moving the root partition back out of LVM and onto /dev/sda2, which was still unused since my migration off physical partitions and into LVM back in May 2006!

Revisited 2009-Feb-24: Finally fixed the NVidia display after four months!

First post of the year…
First work day of the year…
First bicycle commute of the year…
First puncture of the year.
Bugger.

Cartoon drawings depicting the Simpsons naked, the cover of Nirvana's Nevermind album, Angus Young of AC/DC or Chrissy Amphlett of the Divinyls sexualising themselves in school uniforms. All classified as child porn by your new all-seeing all-knowing Australian government. Some likely to be filtered by the new mandatory internet filter for Australia, but you won't know which, the list of what is to be censored is itself not available to the public.

As stated in Mein Kampf.....

“The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation”

Keep an eye on your government people! You never know what they'll do next “for your own safety and protection.”

Via http://benjamin.smedburgs.us/blog/2008-11-24/abc-meme/

Instructions: type the letter “a” in your browser location bar and choose the first match from the dropdown. Repeat for each letter of the alphabet.

Browser: Firefox 3.0.4

a: ajft - User profile
b: Bicycle Victoria Forums - View Forum - Cycling discussion
c: cat-v Considered harmful
d: Novell: Downloads
e: Camel - Wikipedia
f: Welcome to Flickr!
g: Google Chrome - Downlaod a new browser
h: http://machinetags.org/wiki/
i: Iometer project - Downloads
j: JRB Software
k: King parrot - Wikipedia
l: ajft's Music Profile - Users at Last.fm
m: Gmail
n: NOVELL: Support
o: Twitter
p: polydistortion.net - andrew j cosgriff
q: QNX Realtime operation system
r: Home - Rate the PLATE Australia
s: NOVELL: Support
t: TinyURL.com
u: ajft's Music Profile - Users at Last.fm
v: Bicycle Victoria Forums - View Forum - Cycling discussion
w: Google Reader
x: QNX Realtime operation system
y: YouTube
z: —

I cheated a little, where the first URL in the dropdown list would be inaccessible to someone other than me, I picked the second... or third... and so on.

...

...

...

...

...

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Mallacoota is one of those places that I've always heard about, but never visited — hence the reason we wanted to go there on this trip.

...

Three very tired people go on holiday.

After Steve and Anelyn's wedding yesterday we all woke up tired and a little hungover... ok, Jo and Cam were only tired. Breakfast and packing for the week took place in slow-motion, but amazingly we managed to get into the car and away only a little after noon.

Cameron announced it was his lunch time as soon as we got to the outskirts of Melbourne, treeless farmland devoid of rest-stops or picnic areas, the first available place to stop was a detour into Nar Nar Goon — and with a name like that how could I resist.

...

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.

Thread: last next

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 ain't 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!

REVISITED: 2008-Nov-11: Following a written complaint to the bus company from the University transport office and the Monash University BUG we received a comprehensive apology.

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. I 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?

last

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!

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