Adrian Tritschler's stuff
My website, an agglomerative mess, probably half-eaten by a grue
© 1984 - 2026 Adrian Tritschler
2018-09-10T15.09 gyrosco.pe/ajft
Bicycle commute home
Adrian Tritschler's stuff
My website, an agglomerative mess, probably half-eaten by a grue
© 1984 - 2026 Adrian Tritschler
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!cheese?
I read that there’s something called “American White Cheese” and something else called “American Yellow Cheese”, and I am truly afraid
Dancing the Wemo config. dance
So a couple of weeks ago I checked the vendor website for my ADSL router and found that there was updated firmware available. Just as I’d done two or three times previously I downloaded the firmware, logged in to the router’s administrative page, uploaded the new firmware and pressed the on-screen button to restart the router. Only one problem, there’s a tick-box to select whether to restart with the current settings or to perform a factory reset.
Panic!
Very strange. I’ve had my wedding ring on my left hand ring finger since around Anzac day 2013, I’ve never removed it since it was resized to fit. At some point this afternoon my right hand felt odd, I glanced down and had a momentary panic attack when I saw no ring on my right hand – thinking I’d lost it!The birds, the birds!
After two weeks in Vietnam and Cambodia where we saw almost nothing in the towns except sparrows and a few swifts it was sheer bliss to be back at work listening to the lorikeets[1] shrieking outside the window, currawongs[2] calling from further away, and hear a kookaburra[3] on my lunch time walk [1] Rainbow lorikeet [2] Pied currawong [3] Laughing kookaburra
English language
“English is like a goblin roaming around the world with a sack, finding words it likes in other languages, bashing them on the head and mangling them a bit and stuffing them in the sack”Finally through Cambodian passports
So little wildlife in Vietnam
Sparrows, swifts and that’s all. A single pair of kingfishers on the river and one egret in a field yesterday. No pigeons, seagulls or water birds. No ducks, only domestic ducks and chickensCam quote
Sometimes when I wake up my brain is confused and I get money and time mixed up and think there’s 60 cents in a dollarCrazy wind
I stepped out from the shelter of the Menzies bld and a sudden gust hit. My hat made a bid for freedom. 4-5m up & 20m away it came down only just this side of the building site fenceTiming trouble
Such a minor annoyance, receipts & cash registers never seem to have the right time. Stands out when all the phones & online pay systems do
2018-06-30T16.36.40_samsung
The new Hughesdale railway, still under construction
Lunch in a cafe, cages hanging from the ceiling
I think the cages need occupants, something whimsical like a stuffed owl, or an animatronic teddy bear. Can i fit one in our study?A convenient fire drill
Just starting to pack up to go to lunch when barp barp barp the fire alarm starts up. Just a drill says the building warden over the PA. Off we go to lunchAlmost sunny morning
No fog today and only light broken cloud cover. A pair of magpies[1] warbled and chortled at me from a park as a butcherbird[2] called incessantly in the tree overhead. Arrived at work and the lorikeets[3] are still screaming [1] Australian magpie [2] Grey butcherbird [3] Rainbow lorikeetAnother misty grey day
It’s been grey and overcast all day, again with alight mist around. The gum trees are still flowering and the lorikeets[1] are still deafeningly loud, at odds with the overall feel of the weather [1] Rainbow lorikeetOrgzly to micro publishing
Thinking yesterday of ways to tie together the tools I have and my website workflow. I write in org-mode, then publish via hugo… with a few too many manual steps. Can i work out a more automated way of pushing short notes?Winter commute
Another cold and misty day, 3.5°C on the ride to work and a low fog bank off to the east filling Dandenong creek valley. A hazy mist in the air all day and a magnificent full moon rising through it on the way home
2018-06-23T08.19.22_samsung
R707 steams through Hughesdale at the head of the Snow Train
Samsung galaxy S8 camera problem
I’m not sure if it’s due to the Samsung S8’s fingerprint sensor, but almost every time I try to take a photo the camera won’t focus and hunts around until I clean the lenses. Never happened with the S6morning commute
Chilly ride to school and work, then got here and made the lift break down – I pushed the button, the indicator said it was at 3, 2, 1, G…. Then all the lights on the board went out and I heard it shut down. Waited a few minutes, pressed a few buttons, then gave up, hoiked bike up onto my shoulder and walked up the stairs to the third floorWhere in the world?
Following a bouncing ball from Aaron Davis’ Read Write Collect to Hacking an Ontario Extend Visited Countries Map I found myself looking at the URL for a map of the world and countries visited. I’ve had the list in my “where” page for ages – although I also just realised that I’d left off Malaysia after our trip to Borneo a couple of years ago.
So where next? I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you….
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