Over the last few months my rear derailleur — 1996 eight-speed Shimano XT — has been harder and harder to change; I can change up to a bigger ring, but down is a problem, and I need to change two or three cogs and then back up. Jo has also pointed out that her changer is sticking and she was just about stuck in one gear almost all the way to and from work — not much of a problem around either of our commutes, which is why we haven’t done anything about it.
Ho-hum, a letter from the bank…
We understand just how tight the finances can get some months. You never know when you might need some additional funds to tide you over.
Um, yeah, I guess so… that’d be why there’s never more than about $1000 on my $5000 credit card, but you’re the financial experts so carry on…
We’d like to invite you to apply for a credit limit increase on your Starts Low Stays Low credit card, from $5,000 to up to $7,500.
I took advantage of Microsoft’s It’s Not Cheating offer last Friday and bought myself a $50 Windows 7 upgrade online, paid an extra $141 to get a DVD rather than battle Telstra BigPond and download it all myself. The DVD arrived yesterday, here we go. So it begins…
Of course like 99.9% of the people out there with Windows Vista on their laptops we’ve got Windows Vista home premium, and the Windows 7 Upgrade that Microsoft will happily sell us is for Windows 7 Professional, which cannot be used to “upgrade” the system, only to perform a clean install over the top of it!
A couple of months ago — January 22, wow I hadn’t realised it was that long ago — I was knocked off the road bike on the ride home by a guy on a MTB who suddenly braked and turned right without looking back or indicating. Big solid guy on a MTB, he took the front wheel clean out from under me. “Sorry mate, I was only listening for cars,” he said as he looked at the damage before riding off on his way.
All from Living by Design, Sunday supplement to The Age:
http://bachkit.com.au: bachkit, 1300.288.223 http://ecovilla.com.au: Eco-Villa 0401.448.443 http://modscape.com.au/: Modscape 03.9314.7769
Cam doesn’t talk yet, not in any recognisable way. Instead we get long involved fragments of fascinating jibber-jabber, it sounds as though it should make sense if only we knew the translation:
ma ma ma Ooo ya
owa owa owa
Eating out with a toddler is an interesting experience. Even with Cam, who eats nearly everything and seems well behaved compared to some, it can be a trying time. Finding places that open early enough that Cam can eat at a reasonable hour for him, finding dishes suitable to feed to a toddler — at least for us that’s an easy one, trying to ensure that a minimum of food is flung, squooged, smeared or anything other than eaten, trying not to be too self-conscious of any looks given by spoil-sports at other tables, all while trying to enjoy your own meal and eating it before it gets cold.
BV’s annual Ride to Work day met work from home day today; together with cold and flu day and drizzly grey rainy day.
With the best intentions in the world I’d signed up saying I’d ride in, thinking I could pop Cam in the trailer, trundle over to Clayton for a breakfast and a chat then head home. Reality dawned dreary and coughing and wet and so we stayed home with a large mug of tea watching the rain run down the windows.
Its five years this week that we’ve been living in the ‘burbs. Its seventeen months since a little boy appeared and any form of nightlife vanished. Its a long time since I’ve been to a gig!
Johnette Napolitano at the Corner hotel. Dinner at Sylvio’s — a large Sylvio’s special, garlic bread and a carafe of wine — quick, hot, tasty. Then back down to Swan street to the Corner Hotel.
Its bad enough this ridiculous business of door-to-door sales-scammers, sorry, salesmen, coming around for whichever company wants to annoy you the most, insisting on seeing your bills for product X and trying to sign you up for some competitors’ offer, presumably one that gives them a commission on every customer converted.
Yet another aggregator, yet another site that’s tickled my fancy and convinced me to create a login:
Revisited [2017-08-29 Tue]: The internet equivalent of #bitrot has occurred and the service has vanished
When not snowed under by the sheer weight of spam and rubbish mail, its important to take time out to find those little amusements in the day to day junkmail. Here’s one that came in today, personally addressed to a one-off email address that was on my site for a while, asking for a link exchange because clearly I have something to do with shonky weight-loss products.
Please use the following details for my link:
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!
I guess being a Tritschler I tend to overlook the other half of my family tree, I know a little about mum’s family, but not a lot of detail. Wonderful to read a little about Grandad Barker from Gina then:
Reg and Kitty at the Russell Hotel in London …My father died in 1987, my mother in 1980. So long ago. They were ‘older’ parents and I am the youngest and I envy people who still have their parents - take care of them, one day you will miss them as much as I miss mine.
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.
Yes, no, maybe? All the little 10" netbooks are attractive, but it seems that the more I look into it the more my options diverge, rather than converge to a model that I’m happy with. US prices on assorted models seem to be:
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-06.
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.
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 in the mail:
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:
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.
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.
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.
http://www.9gridchan.org: Building a decentralized grid with Plan 9 and Inferno http://j.9souldier.org/: If a centipede loses one leg, he can still walk; if he loses a hundred legs, he can still squirm. http://graverobbers.blogspot.com/: This site contains a collection of articles about Plan 9, Inferno and the technology transfer of their technologies to other platforms such as Linux. It will include articles about ongoing development, novel applications, and step-by-step tutorials on using the various technologies.
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.
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.
