Adrian Tritschler's stuff
My website, an agglomerative mess, probably half-eaten by a grue
© 1984 - 2026 Adrian Tritschler
should have mowed the lawn last weekend
Adrian Tritschler's stuff
My website, an agglomerative mess, probably half-eaten by a grue
© 1984 - 2026 Adrian Tritschler
left-most snake bean is now a metre up the trellis work
The Fitbit HR hat-trick
Over the years the whole lifelogging / quantified-self thing has interested me, although not obsessively, so when the opportunity presented itself in late 2015 to buy a fitbit HR at a discount I jumped at the chance.
Order online, quote the discount code provided through work, pay, product arrives.
Cue several months of operation, with only one notable annoyance – the very square edges that have a habit of catching on things when I move my arm past them, often leading to it jabbing into my spouse or catching on the bed while I roll over in my sleep.
dream meetings
woke up this morning convinced that one of the things I’d have to deal with is a meeting, stupidly booked for 5-6pm this Friday. Got to work and checked my calendar and there’s no trace of it… I guess I must have dreamt it.no TV Tuesday
Many evenings recently, especially Tuesdays, have been spent watching a post-dinner documentary. Today there was nothing on free-to-air and rather than find an online one, we had a quiet evening. Just cicadas and birds roosting. I enjoyed it.found a nest of eggs – I suspect marbled geckos – while weeding yesterday under the plum tree
the wisteria we grew from seed from mum & dad's garden by the front tap hasn't died, lots of leaves
Jo saw a gecko race out of the compost bin, and two skinks on the front deck in the sun yesterday
neighbours finally picked up the rubbish they dumped on their lawn – not quite our garden
The mindset is just foreign to me; they wash and tidy their car every week, but are perfectly happy to just dump bags of unwanted clothes, old toys and rubbish on their front lawncicada skin in an unusual place, on a rose bush near the front gate – spotted by Jo on [2017-12-04 Mon]
Cam and I walk around from the side of the house so we couldn’t see it, but Jo walked out the front door and had a different angle. Unlike most of the cicada skins that are on the fence or 2m or so up a tree, this one is on a rose leaf only 1m off the ground.sandy little ant mounds appearing in lawn as the ants recover from the rain
Cycling 2017
An annual challenge, “ride every day,” and in 2017 I came the closest I’ve come to making it a reality. Some days I only made it around the block, or up to the local bakery, but every day of the year except two I got out on the bike and managed to clock up at least 1.5 ㎞. The two exceptions were two days spent in bed with the flu, at a holiday house in the Otways, while my bike languished outside on the roofrack of the car.
snake beans are just tall enough to start touching the trellis
solid rain all last night, 43mm in the gauge this morning
11pm and the branches are scratching and banging on the wall and roof near our bedroom, must trim them
cleaned the gutters, snapped some brittle dead branches off silver birch on south side
TGIF… omg, not friday at all
I think I just spent two hours thinking it was Frday, looking forward to a beer after work with colleagues, even debated riding in to Mountain Goat, then when I walked into the café I realised today is Thursday.not quite our garden, unfortunately one of the railway cypress trees is marked, probably for removal
There’s a big red cross sprayed on one of the clump of thick cypress trees that shield us from the railway – I suspect it means that this one, the end one, is marked to be removed.Perfect timing!
Leaving the office I walked across the hall to try and fill my water bottle before riding home in 35°C heat. The light on the door card-access reader was green… until I got a metre from it when there was a loud click and it locked, requiring card access, but only to the staff who work in there. No water for mehot dry weather is starting, the first dry patch of lawn has appeared
Listening to a podcast and wincing, why do Americans insist on pronouncing "solder" as "sodder"
intended to buy tomato seedlings at Oakleigh Rotary market, but didn't go due to rain
everything wet and green, we really should get some tomato plants
passionfruit flowering on the fence
more rain, snail pellets out around beans and beetroot, about half the beetroot gone
three beans looking healthy, not quite reached the trellis yet, some leaf nibbles
cicadas at night in the trees, an orb spider setting up near the box hedge in the front
The roses are just about finished, lots of dead-heading to be done
Coffeeneuring 2017 no. 7 -- Koonung Creek trail
A final ride for the 2017 coffeeneuring challenge and I almost thought I wasn’t going to make it over the weekend and would have to bend the rules. I’d thought I’d be going out for a longer ride alone, as it was we had a shorter one with the family. So over the three weeks, the rides were short short long, short long, short short. Which in Morse code is “U-A-I”.
wet after the rain, half a dozen cicada skins on the Bay tree, silver birch and fence
chives flowering between orange and lime trees
time to purge the lawn of the bindis or burrs I can see…
…while they’re still green, before they dry out and cause foot pain
Coffeeneuring 2017 no. 6 -- refuelling on the corner
My efforts for the 2017 coffeeneuring challenge have been split into four small rides during my lunch break from work, and three longer rides.
The first two little rides in were, almost coincidentally, to the south and then the east, so I made a conscious effort to go north for the third with the intention of then heading west for the fourth1. Today in the morning I’d attended a lab walk-through for SensiLab at Monash University Caulfield campus, so although today’s coffee destination is west of my normal workplace, I was heading east when I got there.
much needed rain, ants on the move into the house, some meyer lemons finally fall off
rain on the smokers
The rain is playing havoc with the smokers who hide in the building 75 loading dock for a naughty on-campus smoke. Too lazy to walk 50m to the cancer corner at the end of Woodside av, they’re now getting dripped on as well.
Which Indigenous countries, in Victoria?
Satisfying my own curiousity and not intending to annoy or irritate anyone with this, I took a punt at answering a simple question that may have been asked rhetorically, and certainly wasn’t aimed directly at me – “How many Murri nations have you visited?”
The entire continent makes the crowded SE corner map almost invisible, and I spend most of my time at home here in Victoria, so here’s a best guess of where I’ve stayed over the years:
possums have eaten off about a third of the beetroot plants at ground level
Fairly sure its possums and not snails from the way it all looks eatenfirst hot summer-like night, spider webs everywhere, crickets calling
another bean seedling half eaten, we suspect possums this time. Two and a half left
hard green plums everywhere, Cam is knocking them out of the tree then throwing them around the garden
Coffeeneuring 2017 no. 5 -- “The Slog” and a coffee
Fourteen years ago a church group – the 4Cs – decided to hold a fund-raising bike ride from where they were, in Pakenham on the eastern outskirts of Melbourne, to Sale, on the Gippsland coast. Thus the Slog to Sale was created. For fourteen years the ride has been held, I’m not sure when the name changed to The Slog and the route changed to a loop around the West Gippsland area, but that was what it was when I did my first one in 2012.
three live bean seedling, beetroot all recovered after a solid watering
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
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