© 1984 - 2025 Adrian Tritschler
ten European starlings[1] and two Indian Mynas[2] on the lawn, finally a native, a Red Wattlebird[3] in the birdbath
[1] Common starling [2] Common myna [3] Red wattlebird
My ankle's aching, is the weather changing or am I just old and decrepit?
Damn, dropped my Samsung earphones into a mug of tea, the left one may be dead
Paranoid? Attempt to register a very bogus looking 'recovery address' for my email at google
Paranoid? Email trying to get me to login and unlock my Amazon account. Targetted or just spam?
Argh! The Cycliq Fly12 hasn't recorded any video since [2019-05-10 Fri]!
I plugged the Fly12 into my laptop this afternoon to see if I could extract the video of me catching up to, then overtaking, the motorist who choose to drive hugging the kerb and blocking the bike lane in Gardiner road yesterday. Frustrated that once again the Fly12 has failed me, this time there’s just not a single video since [2019-05-10 Fri]. I suspect that the SD card has failed, that’d be the SD card supplied with it that the camera has always periodically decided it can’t write to.
Surprise again! Oakleigh station car park partly closed for crane work on shops – but blocking bike path again
Every time they take the easy way out, rather than leave a footpath width aisle at the south side of the car park to keep the Djerring trail open, they close off the entire end of the car park and force pedestrians and cyclists out to make their own way – either through the shopping centre on foot, or under it through the tunnel with bus, car and truck traffic.
Surprise! East side ramp up from Oakleigh station underpass is closed off, go west and around
like being back in Skyrail construction times, Djerring trail closed for a week, trucks roaring up and down
Huge gravel trucks in and out of our street up onto the bike path, chain-link fence blocking access to the bike path. I think they’re removing the rest of the old signalling conduit and wiring and I guess doing some landscaping.
Riding home; low sunlight, currawongs[1] calling, 13°C along the creek, its almost winter
[1] Pied currawong
I've been listening to Tinariwen all day and my ears hurt
These headphones drown out cow-orkers, but eventually they make my ears hurt, especially my left one
Indulgently reading through a blog, entry by entry
Almost gluttony, like the current fad of “binge-watching” an entire TV series just because you can. I follow a link that looks interesting, to another referenced blog, it’s gone, the site now owned by what looks like a chinese plumbing firm. Serves me right.
There's a sticker on a lamp post "CASH PAID FOR GUITARS" and I think to myself, "I hope he did, hate to think he stole them"
Authentification she says, over and over, it bugs me but I can't bring myself to say something
Kuro5hin gone, how about that
Doing a little housekeeping on my RSS feeds, transferring some from feedly to my org-mode reader, changing some from HTTP to HTTPS, deleting some of the ones that haven’t been readable for years. Oh, what’s this, looks like kuro5hin vanished three years ago – I guess I wasn’t paying attention. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuro5hin
QOTD: "When cooking wild mushrooms, Dr Lebel says, “leave half for the coroner”."
Driving in to Lorne at night there were two kangaroos and a fox in Polwarth road
A picture of a Mandarin duck stirs up a memory
Country diary: iridescent beauties, pavilioned in splendour When I was 11yrs old we flew to the UK for my uncle’s wedding, I can remember a book of birds of the world that my grandparents owned. White cover, watercolour pictures, all 8000+ birds listed and many illustrated. In an obssessive count-them-all approach I think I wrote out the names in lists in an exercise book or on paper. I wonder what happened to those lists, if I kept them for a while or if they went straight in the bin once we left?
Best laid plans… or, best to book ahead
We had a brilliant idea, go to the M.C. Escher exhibition at the NGV for the afternoon and miss the worst of the heat, sadly, we didn’t bother to book tickets, thinking that it’d be ok to just turn up and queue up… checking online at lunchtime only to find the online tickets sold out and a quick phone call saying that there were some tickets at the door, but the queue might be up to an hour long…
Two hours of Windows wrangling, I feel soiled
Some time in the last week the Windows 10 laptop came to a grinding halt every time Jo started using it. Doesn’t help that with 4GB of RAM and three potential users, we need to make sure that we log out when done because a “hibernating” session chews up far too much memory and doesn’t seem to get swapped out – not to mention the odd time when the audio from the inactive session suddenly starts back up and plays through the speakers when someone else is logged in!
memories tumbling over themselves
Reading a fictional diary about time and memory and earlier today a factual diary with references that stirred up memories; Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five – I have memories of reading one of Vonnegut’s books while in high school, around year eight or nine I suspect, probably that one, none of the other titles look familiar. A debt owed to Ian I suspect, a highschool friend with an older brother, so through him we learnt of authors, of things to do with bike racing and touring, and of 2XX, at a time when Canberra had two government radio stations; 2CY and 2CN, and two commercial; 2CA and 2CC.
There’s not much more I can add to who I am.
Vanity site? Technology experiment? Learning tool? Blog? Journal? Diary? Photo album? I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you…
I experiment. I play. I write and I take pictures. Some of the site is organised around topics, other parts are organized by date, then there’s always the cross-references between them.
Its all been here a fairly long time. Like the papers on my desk, or the books on the bedside table, the pile just grew… and it all grew without much plan or structure. I try not to break URLs, so historical oddities abound.
Long ago it started as a learning experiment with a few static HTML pages, then I added a bit of server-side includes and some very ugly PHP. A hand-built journal/blog on top of that PHP, then a few experiments in moving to various static publishing systems. I’ve never wanted a database-based blogging engine, so over the years I’ve tried PHP, nanoblogger, emacs-muse, silkpage and docbook before settling on Emacs Org mode for writing and jekyll for publishing. But the itch remained… I never really liked jekyll and the ruby underneath always seemed so much black magic. So now the latest incarnation is Org mode and hugo.
