The intention was to leave in the morning and drive west to visit the Otway Fly treetop walk, then head back along the coast to stay the night at Lorne. A long breakfast, too much sitting around chatting, and a stroll around the local shops meant that we didn’t leave Oakleigh until noon! A quick change of plans and we headed straight to Geelong and spent the afternoon wandering around the waterfront in strangely summer-esque weather.
A fascinating invitation arrived in my inbox today from a restaurant. I think I put my email address down once long ago when we went there for a nice dinner, as a result, I periodically get offers for events that are completely out of my budget. The food and service were fantastic, but they need to work a little more on their email:
Wok Tossed Queensland Bug Meat1, Green Papaya, Macadamias, Spanish Onion, Chilli Salad, Passionfruit Mirin Dressing
OK, I’m guilty. I took a camera into the local shopping centre! A bizarre rule I know, but nearly every single shopping mall in the country seems to have sprouted signs in the last few years banning cameras. (I’m not sure what you are meant to do if you buy one inside).
Additionally, in some fit of wisdom, the management of the Oakleigh Centro have decided that keeping the doors open at night is a security hazard, and since everyone knows that the entire population of Australia drives everywhere in their cars, they lock all the doors except the one into the car-park and the one that is diametrically opposite the train and bus station on the far side of the building.
Adelaide this time, another dead cyclist, another drunk motorist gets off with a slap on the wrist. Five glasses of wine, then run into someone in your four-wheel drive and kill them — NO PROBLEM — the court will acquit you. What the hell does it take to convict people in this country? Oddly enough, the police found that they had time and resources to take a blood alcohol reading from the victim, but had insufficient resources to take a reading from the lawyer who had hit him!
Two years, so quick! I organised a surprise for the evening, timing, funding and lack of planning quickly reduced it to one of the simplest I could come up with — out to dinner somewhere reasonably nice, but a little quirky. The Colonial Tramcar Restaurant fulfills both criteria, rattling around Melbourne in a dignified manner, the inside reminding me of the ornate 19th century railway carriages of royalty!
Silver service, or as close as you can get while inside a w-class tram, paté, a choice of two entrées, main courses a cheese plate and desserts, and a never-ending stream of wine with the food and a liqueur with coffee and dessert.
More links and accounts. Added myself into Audioscrobbler so that my potentially dubious taste in music can be revealed to the world [RSS], and to Feedburner to amalgamate my Flickr and Fotothing pictures, and my del.icio.us bookmarks [RSS].
Jo is in the middle of reading a biography of Natalie Wood, so last night we watched Rebel without a Cause a movie I’d never seen before. Talk about being type-cast though, one of the police characters made both Jo and I almost collapse in giggles each time he appeared on screen. Edward Platt, imortalised as The Chief in TV’s Get Smart.
Eek! I can’t control myself. Into the bookshop and out I come with Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson for $27.95 [ISBN]. Was going to add it to my list in http://allconsuming.net/, but it looks like they’re having problems.
http://www.43things.com/: yet another lists ’n communities kind of thing.
Blah blah blah … “experienced an issue” blah blah; “printing is experiencing intermittent issues” blah blah “an intermittent printing issue has been identified”.
WHAT THE HECK? If it’s a PROBLEM, say that its a bloody PROBLEM! Maybe they’re too frightened to say the word “PROBLEM” in case they just might be expected to fix the bloody problem! Somebody please belt these people over the head with a thesaurus.
Oops. End of rant.
Arrg, the one day I leave my camera at home is the one day that I get a perfect opportunity for a photo. There I was, stopped at the red light when a “cyclist” appeared, riding illegally along the footpath and across the pedestrian crossing. Dead flat tyres, knees almost hitting his chin on a way-too-small bike, the bag and clothes and appearance indicating he’s one of the myriad of overseas students here at Monash University.
Following on from yesterday… plus one to Unisuper, after I telephoned them they changed my address — to the same, new address I changed it to in January — and they changed my login password so I can login again. Minus about five for the 24 hour delay in answering an email enquiry, an answer that told me to telephone them, and for not being able to tell me why an address change via their web site had reverted back to the old one.
Moving house, then finding, then changing, the myriad of address records is hard enough — it doesn’t help when the address reverts back to the old one! Tomorrow our mail redirection runs out, yesterday I received a six-monthly statement from Unisuper that had been redirected from old to new address by the post office. Today, I checked back through my emails and there’s the one from mid-January when I changed my address!
stats. Today 76.0 km Trip 293km The ride from Bacchus Marsh to Melbourne is always a bit of a slog — first there’s the seemingly endless plains of red dirt and rocks, broken only by the great swooping descent into the gorge over the Werribee river, then there’s the interminably mindless eight kilometres along the Western Highway with the mind-numbing roar of the traffic and the ever present danger of the idiot’s towing their caravans and not realising how much wider than the car the ‘van is.
stats. Today 91.2km Trip 217km There are some magnificent swooping descents in the last few kilometres to Bacchus Marsh, ending in a hill into town with a 60km/hr speed limit, a hill where a bicycle can quite easily reach that speed limit! Unfortunately there seems to be some local law in effect in Bacchus Marsh that insists that the local motorists must be abusive, ignorant and stupid, I don’t think I’ve ever ridden into town without someone being yelled at, swerved at, or had something thrown at them — today was no different, halfway down the hill at 62km/hr on the tandem, some ignorant petrol-head pulled out of a side-street straight in front of us and nearly got 150kg of tandem and riders right up his boot.
stats. Today 80.3km Trip 125km It was cold and frosty overnight, for the first time in many years my old sleeping bag seemed to not be enough and I woke up cold. Stepping out of the tent showed frost on the grass and the tents, and fog rising over the lake. A beautiful sight.
Out of Beaufort and south to Snake Valley, lunch at the Snake Valley pub. I had no idea there were places with names like that in Victoria — it sounds like something out of a bad western!
stats. Today 45km Trip 45km Another Good Friday morning, another Deadly Treadly Tour commences! A little too far from Oakleigh to the city to do the car and bike shuffle, so Jo and I hopped on the first train of the day, loaded down with bags and helmets and the tandem. Arrived at Flinders Street station to discover that we had to carry the beast up the stairs, no easy task while wearing a large backpack!
Problems with machine hanging with irq errors, and X not running. Reset results in fsck, lost files, long delays. Suspect multi-processor implementation of the kernels I’ve got.
Poking around on Flickr, there seems to be some consensus on tagging images with the Australian postcode in the form pcNNNNN, I guess it’ll have to do until there are tools around that can put the location information into the EXIF headers in a defined way, read it back out, and pass the results around. Plain tags just don’t have enough context — is Victoria a girl’s name, a state in Australia, or a city in British Columbia in Canada?
First evidence of the so-called “Free Trade” agreement between Australia and the United States of America — a multi-national corporation (Sony) in America attempting to get the Australian government to overrule a court ruling allowing mod-chips. Free-trade my ass! More like “Enterprise Bargaining” that seems to go on in many work places: “We’re the Enterprise, you, you can start bargaining.”
My iPod got sick… but it seemed to get better. I’m not sure what is happening, but sometimes it won’t power off, ever since I got it, it doesn’t seem to like powering off when in the photo menus. Today it got very confused, started displaying screen images over the top of other screen images. After about half an hour I could finally power it off, then when it came back on again it was behaving normally.
Aha! In a blinding flash, Inspector Clouseau spots the difference between clear and cleared and all of a sudden half my style sheet problems go away. I’d managed to misspell it in dozens of places, and it was bugging me why pages weren’t breaking where I thought they should..
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 [2005-04-20 Wed]](https://ajft.org/img/default4.jpg)
