Adrian Tritschler's stuff
My website, an agglomerative mess, probably half-eaten by a grue
© 1984 - 2025 Adrian Tritschler
Adrian Tritschler's stuff
My website, an agglomerative mess, probably half-eaten by a grue
© 1984 - 2025 Adrian Tritschler
Coffeeneuring 2018 no. 2 — Just like Spring rain…
My second ride of the eighth coffeeneuring challenge; a very different ride to a week ago and a lot fewer people about.
I’d woken up around 4 am to the sound of heavy rain on the roof, not a good sign, but by the time I woke a second time at around 6:30 am the rain seemed to have stopped, although everything was very wet.
I left under dull grey skies, temperature of 10.
Every day is ride2work day
Today is the annual event of “Ride2Work day” that Bicycle Network organize to try and get people to try cycle commuting, even if only for the one day a year. Free breakfasts at various places, promotions, you name it. If I’d been going to work on campus I could have helped myself to either of two breakfasts depending on whether I came in the north or the south end of campus, instead it was the first day of the eResearch Australasia conference and I found myself heading towards the city.
Coffeeneuring 2018 no. 1 — Saturday morning bay ride
Last year I stumbled on the semi-humorous “coffeeneuring” cycling challenge via the Chasing Mailboxes blog and had lots of fun as a result. The months have rolled around and here it is again, their eighth coffeeneuring challenge, my second time through. Seven rides to seven coffees in seven weeks… how hard can it be?
A quick perusal of the rules… hmm, I think rule 9 would have tripped me up last year – one of my coffees was taken during The Slog and wouldn’t qualify this year, I’d better be more careful!
Bits of technology I've owned
Something someone said somewhere prompted me to think for a few minutes and come up with a list of the memorable bits of technological hardware I’ve owned. I’m sure there’s something in there that I’ve missed, but here’s what I can remember:
Tandy CoCo Amiga 1000 TI99/4a Amiga 4000 Pentium P100 Palm Pilot III Pentium II/III Pentium IV i7 PC ASUS transformer
Natural History Illustration sketching homework
Took my lunch walk around to the lake and tried to sketch the ducks, breeding season and a strong gusty wind had them very skittish and rarely staying still. I should have chosen a more sedentary subject like a shrub – but even the shrubs were whipping around in the wind!
Google Plus or minus
Well that was an interesting announcement. Some months ago Facebook announces the Cambridge Analytica security breach and there’s a general wringing of hands, today Google announces a lesser problem and immediately announces their intention to shut the Google Plus platform. Wheels within wheels…
I’m sorely tempted to delete my Google Plus profile now but I think I’ll just let it end of life when Google shuts down G+. Unclear what’ll happen after that; I’ve not used Facebook for months due to the toxicity of both the company’s practises and the population on it, I’m teetering on the edge of dropping Instagram due to the Facebookisms – advertising, out-of-order posts, general algorithm-driven-fuckery.
ATBIAD, 50km on the tandem
A long day, truly magnificent weather and a fantastic day out for Cam’s longest ride ever – almost 70 km by the time we added in 9 km getting to the start and home afterwards.
Despite my misgivings about logistics and timing, it all went to plan, although as usual my body clock refused to trust the alarm clock, so I woke up pretty much every half hour from 1 am to 4 am, and barely got back to sleep in between.
ATBIAD preliminaries
After over a decade of not riding in the Around the Bay in a Day bike ride, this year Cam and I have entered for the family option on the tandem. It used to be that when you said you’d ridden “Around the Bay in a Day” it meant that you had, in fact, ridden around Port Phillip bay and that you had done so in a day. There are now so many options and distances that you can pay your money, ride 20 km from Albert park down to Elwood and back and say you have “Ridden in Around the Bay in a Day (event)”.
screen to tmux
Bit the bullet and jumped from screen to tmux, a slow jump kindled a few months ago when I was told that only old people use screen, sparking me to do something about it yesterday when I restarted my linux box and started a tmux session rather than a screen one. Now I’ve had to dig into manuals and blog posts to find out how it worksThree decades of Silvio's Pizza
Dinner at an old favorite, Silvio’s Pizza. Jo pointed out that she’d been coming here for 30 years, since physio work in 1988 in Church street. I’ve been coming here at least 20, since 1998 or thereabouts, calling in for pizza after cycling on a Tuesday evening with Mascott cycles. Cam the shortest, and proportionality the longest, since 2008, all 10 years of his life plus an in-utero visit or two.The owl says farewell
Packing up to leave Lorne in the dark after a three day weekend I can hear an owl somewhere off across the river. “Huh-hoo..” or however you’re meant to transcribe bird calls. I’d heard it calling on Friday night too, closer to the house and further round the hill up behind us. Sadly there’d been no sign of any Black cockatoos again this weekend, I wonder where they’ve all gone for the winter?Kookaburra at night
Some time in the middle of the night a few kookaburras[1] started calling. Not sure when, i think around 4am, certainly well before it started to get light [1] Laughing kookaburraan unlikely movie double
Walking past the Lorne cinema I saw the posters for this weekend’s movies, I chuckled and thought of a truly awesome double bill that could be presented: Ladies in Black (2018) and Men in Black (1997) – I think that’d get all audiences off sideenjoyable ride along the GOR
Cam and I rode from Lorne to Wye River and stopped for a coffee or hot chocolate, then met up with Jo on her way back from Skenes creek and rode together back to Lorne. Timed it perfectly to miss bus o’clock – the hour from 10-11am when all the outbound tour buses head down the Great Ocean Road, and even spotted an echidna in the grass on the way back down to St George riverLorne morning birds
8 o’clock and time to walk down to the supermarket for bread. A male Gang-gang[1] flies creaking out of the trees and across the road. Magpies[2], currawongs[3], wattlebirds[4] and a NH honeyeater on the way down the hill. Wood ducks and black ducks in the river, a solitary kookaburra on the grass. On the way back a pair of king parrots and one crimson rosella, others calling from the trees. Some swallows, lots of blue wrens flitting about, back to the house with sulphur crested cockies[5] circling overheadbugbear du jour
Mixing percentages and ratios and quantities – “…a quarter of X … and one in five of Y…” – are the reporters and authors deliberately trying to confuse people, or do they just expect that nobody really pays attention to the actual numbers?A very satisfied raven[1] just strutted past my window, a big fat chip from someone's lunch carried sideways in its beak
[1] Little raven
The flag of Papua New Guinea
There’s a house that I ride past in Huntingdale that has a flag pole in the front garden and usually has a flag flying; often the Australian flag, sometimes the Victorian. Today they were flying the flag of PNG – a striking design, it reminded me of when I was in primary school and interested in stamp collecting – PNG gained independence and Australia Post brought out a stamp commemorating it.
2018-09-16T14.45 gyrosco.pe/ajft
Rode 22.4 km in 1.6 hours
#lunch #yumcha
2018-09-10T15.09 gyrosco.pe/ajft
Bicycle commute home
World of Wonder & icebergs
From my childhood memories – the big stack of “World of Wonder” magazines that I inherited from some family friends and that then gave me years of fascinating reading. I was reminded of them because of a slashdot story on towing icebergs from Antarctica to the middle east – which was the feature article in one of those magazines from the early 1970s! Now if only I could find a picture of that particular cover image.
Homemade pasta #nomnomnom
Sunday Skyrail Bikepath Exploration
Off for an hour and a half to explore the progress of the bikepath along the railway… south and east along the line from Oakleigh to Dandenong, then turn around retrace my steps.
One of the benefits of the Level Crossing Removal Project. They say there’ll be a “Continuous Bike Path” from Caulfield to Dandenong, so off I went to see how far along the construction has progressed. Although they did say that for a while, then the wording changed a bit.
The Big Five
The daily newspaper quiz asks what “The Big Five” in Africa are. I can’t quite remember, number one son asks what the name means, we tell him it was a list of animals hunters would like to kill. He claims that clearly one of them cannot be the giraffe, as there’s no way that you could mount a giraffe head on a wall because the neck would stick out too far… cue ten minutes of politically incorrect giggles at the thought of enormously long giraffe necks mounted in small rooms.Black, the colour of this bear…
A little music while cooking dinner, Les Miserables turned up to be heard over the fan & microwave. Much laughter as number one son belts out his favourite #mondegreen – “Red, the colour of desire. Black, the colour of this bear…”Where is the small allen key?
After the Gravel Grind ride last Sunday, or the corrugated parts in particular, one of my bidon cages has worked loose and the bottle has wobbled to and fro on my rides to work. Hunting around for the correct sized allen key this morning I found out just how many of them I have lying around the house… and shed. Unfortunately I think I’ve only got one or two of the 2mm size that these bolts are I was beginning to suspect that I’d carefully put them somewhere safe – so safe that I couldn’t find them.post-ride aches
I really should give up on this idea of entering moderately hard bike rides and not doing any training. Relying on generaly fitness and my minimal commutes just doesn’t cut it! Today I’m a bundle of aches and pains, moving around the house like an old man and having trouble bending down to pick things up. The back of my neck and trapezius aches, probably from carrying the little backpack for the whole day.removed a half-eaten blackbird[1] wing from the path by the garage – someone's cat got lucky
[1] Common blackbird
Cold commute home
Riding home on the coldest day so far this year, on the third last day of what is officially winter. There was a frost this morning and it was cold and still all day, thankfully with a clear blue sky so any time you could get out in the sun you felt warmer.
Around 8 °C as I left the building, the sun still above the horizon for another half hour or so.
CRTs on the hardrubbish
Every year as the council #hardrubbish collection week approaches the same question appears in my mind – when will we run out of old CRT TVs, endlessly pulled out of sheds and dumped on the street?Office birds
My desk in the new office is up against the window, only 2m away from a flowering bottlebrush behind the mirrored glass. Every day I watch the antics as pairs of lorikeets[1] and noisy miners[2] attack the flowers, ravens stalk around hunting through the garden bed below. [1] Rainbow lorikeet [2] Noisy miner
Sunday Atomic coffee, cue blondie earworm
Coincidence around "The Meg"
A few months ago I saw a short for a movie and thought, hey, that’s the book I started reading last year some time. Sure enough, “The Meg” is a movie now. Sometime last year I was sitting in a coffee shop or pub or mini-golf place – I think – waiting for Jo & Cam and I picked up the only tattered paperback I could see – Steve Alten’s “The Meg” – got a chapter or so into it and had to put it down.
Two days of Black cockatoos
They’re two of my favourite birds; the Yellow-tailed black cockatoo – with their lazy slow wing-beats and creaking call, and the shy Gang-gang cockatoo, creaking and croaking from the trees, often accompanied by a near constant crack-crack-crack as they crack open gumnuts.
Neither seem very common in Melbourne, I sometimes see black cockies in the trees along the creek during the winter, but can’t remember seeing any gang-gangs, both are more a bird of the forests.
Avebury
Watching a documentary this evening as Tony Robinson was walking “The Ridgeway” across southern England and passed through Avebury, the village ringed by standing stones. I have vivid memories of a TV series from when I was a child that was set in Avebury, it gave me nightmares for years. Checking up on Avebury in wikipedia and I find the series was Children of the Stones and that:
The series is today considered a landmark in quality children’s drama and has been called “the scariest programme ever made for children”
Yellow-tailed black cockatoos[1] on the commute
Crossing over Dandenong road on the ride home and over the traffic noise in the damp and gloom there’s the unmistakable creaking call of a black cockatoo – no idea where it was, but they always bring a smile to my face [1] Yellow-tailed black cockatoofor sale
The car yard that’s been on the corner of Dandenong and Clayton roads for at least the past twenty years is up for sale. I suspect another big apartment development coming!About
ajft looking stylish and black
…The Owner
There’s not much more I can add to who I am.
…The Site
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.
…The ISP
- Hosted by @cos