I don’t know if it is a result of the drought, general changes in the bird population, or me just being more aware of what lives where in Melbourne now that I’ve lived here for ten years!
For the last few weeks, I leave work nearly every day on sunset and there is an enormous flock of crows or ravens in the trees and buildings around the north-east corner of the campus.
The 2007 Staff Attitude Survey is now open and will take no longer than 20 minutes to complete. Please click on the following link to access the survey online via a secure website http://www.voiceproject.com.au/monash.
It’s just wrong in so many ways. Since when has HTTP been a secure website? If this is the staff attitude survey for us, who the hell is voiceproject.com.au? That second question doesn’t seem to matter much since it bounces straight to another company I’ve never heard of, asr1.
More fun and games with Telstra; phone, email, phone — no, yes, no.
Seems to be differences in the emphasis in the email and phone calls as to the whether it can be relocated (email from sales department) and who requests and pays for it (support and faults department)
Today’s call, I stated the same question as last Friday and was again told verbally: The lead-in cable is Telstra infrastructure and neighbours are forbidden from touching it ($50000 fine if they do so).
Aw crap, what are they playing at?
16th May 2007
Owner XX XXXXXX XXX Oakleigh Vic 3166
The Residents XX XXXXXX XXX Oakleigh Vic 3166
Dear Sir/Madam
It has come to our attention, that you have a Telecommunication wire, trespassing across our property. As we have never given you permission for this to happen, we want it removed.
We noticed that you already have a pole outside your house, which would be more suitable for that wire to be attached to.
Quite amazingly, the TAC has finally decided that their 100% obsession with speed being the cause of all collisions is not the be-all and end-all of road safety. There’s a new campaign telling motorists to — shock horror — pay attention and put the phone down, stop fiddling with the radio, stop playing with the children and DRIVE THE BLOODY CAR WITHOUT KILLING PEOPLE.
A good start, but sadly reality intrudes.
You think that we’re being shafted by Telstra and the government now? Just wait till they’ve finished bending over backwards to pat each other on the backs with this one. At least some people are prepared to analyse the name calling and full-page for and against ads in the papers and look into why Telstra wants the government to “rein in the ACCC” (that rogue regulator) and let Telstra have monopoly access to $9 billion worth of not-yet-built broadband network.
Seems that May is bike month in America, not only that, but in Motionbased’s blog I get a mention as one of the two runners up for logging the most number of “commute” bike rides for the year. Hardly record breaking distances with my 5 ㎞ ride, but there would have been another month’s worth of entries if the Edge 305 hadn’t been off being repaired for all of January!
Jo on the Garfield station platform After yesterday’s V/Line farce, what wonders would the train home bring? At least we’d be spared the platform announcements, Garfield’s station is rather sparse — a small half-enclosed shelter on an open platform is all the protection you get, there’s a timetable pinned up away on the other side of the line, and a confusing sign telling us that the trains travel through Garfield on either the left or the right… depending on what time of day it is!
Oh well, “it seemed like a good idea at the time”. Famous last words… Jo and I decided to catch the V/Line train out to Garfield to visit friends for the evening, a chance to try these shiny new purple VLocity trains and see what all the fuss is about and whether they live up to the gov’ments hype about the “fast rail” service or the opposition’s “farce rail” retaliations.
A few days ago, while using stumble-upon, I stumbled on a site which showed how to conditionally append icons to the end of hypertext links using css. What made the article interesting was that it used CSS conditionally. For instance…
Finally got around to upgrading the memory of the system from 512M to 1.5G, there are two DDR slots in the motherboard, a single 512M DIMM already present, and the motherboard can support a maximum of 2G, A toss up between 1.5G or 2G, the former won.
Finally done it! The home PC has been thrashing for ages with “only” 512M of RAM and more and more greedy software…. Another 1G has been on the cards for quite some time. The catalyst was Jo deciding to finally buy her camera, which then needed some memory itself, and a trip to CPL for a 1G SD card for her, and 1G DDR 3200 DIMM for me.
A healthy 1.
Attempting to import photos into my Ubuntu system with f-spot, the import window opens, but contains the text:
An error occurred in the io-library (‘Bad parameters’): Could not find USB device (vendor 0x4a9, product 0x30f2). Make sure this device is connected to the computer.
Something is definitely wrong with the permissions, my account can’t read the camera, but root can:
ajft@fafnir:/dev/bus/usb$ lsusb Bus 005 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 Bus 004 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 Bus 001 Device 005: ID 05a9:0511 OmniVision Technologies, Inc.
Five or six annoying phone direct marketing calls in the last week and I see a notice about the Do Not Call register, I’ve decided to register the home number with them.. Here’s what happens afterwards:
You have successfully registered 1 telephone number(s) on the Do Not Call Register.
Your registration expires in three years on 4-May-2010.
How long will it take before I stop receiving phone calls?
It may take up to 30 days for telemarketing agencies to recognise your registration and stop calling your number.
An exciting morning, first we woke to the very unusual sounds of thunder, hail and rain on the roof — all very welcome in the drought and with Melbourne’s water storage dipping below 30% of capacity for the first time in 40 years. Next, Jo went out to pick up the newspaper and came back in with the news that a train had derailed itself just out of Oakleigh station, right outside our front door.
Ouch, ow, oh! Creaking old bones and bruises this morning, I’m definitely not accustomed to physical work like yesterday’s house-moving extravaganza.
There are bruises in the weirdest places, and my hands feel like I’ve completely lost all fine-motor coordination, picking up boxes is about all they can do. A perfect day to do nothing, laze on the couch and read the paper….
If only! A slight sleep-in then its preparation for Jack’s seventh birthday party, a cavalcade of cousins and a horde of aunts and uncles.
Take three abodes; in order these are a one-bedroom flat, a two-storey two-bedroom townhouse and a two-bedroom house. Starting conditions are one person lives in the first, two people live in the second and both the first and third are full of furniture — in the case of the town-house heavy, obscure, antique wooden furniture. Our mission, which we did in fact volunteer for, was to assist in moving half the furniture from the flat to the new house, half the furniture from the flat to the town house, and half the furniture from the town house to the new house.
Such a good day, and such a bad taste left from three bad experiences with Connex in under 24 hours! Last night’s train into the city — the trains that run every 15 minutes — was 19 minutes late to arrive, the only reason the 17:48 didn’t run into the 17:54 was because Connex cancelled the 17:54! Today’s train home was running on time, I guess, but the whole trip the pleasant recorded announcements were one station wrong, so were told that “The next station is Richmond” as the train left Richmond — it’s only ANZAC day, there’s only hundreds of visitors probably trying to use the trains and get useful information from the announcements!
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.
![Photos for [2007-05-24 Thu]](https://ajft.org/img/default2.jpg)
