Adrian Tritschler's stuff
My website, an agglomerative mess, probably half-eaten by a grue
© 1984 - 2026 Adrian Tritschler
Adrian Tritschler's stuff
My website, an agglomerative mess, probably half-eaten by a grue
© 1984 - 2026 Adrian Tritschler
Why you hit me mister?
Ow ow ow! Another day, another motorised moron.
Rush hour traffic in Haughton road? A fifty kilometre speed limit and traffic in both directions? A road specifically narrowed by Monash City Council to stop everyone using it as a short cut through the suburb. A road narrowed so that motorists have to actually think and pull out in order to overtake cyclists safely. Not a problem for our local inhabitants. Speed up and go head-on towards oncoming cars, then swerve back in and slam on the brakes to avoid hitting the next car up ahead.
$0.98, $1.16, $1.25, $1.39, Bingo!
Cryptic numbers? No, its the price of petrol a year, a month, a day ago, and then today. You’d almost think that petrol rationing was about to start.
Riding to work this morning there’s chaos at the first petrol station — still $1.25/litre — and motorists queueing at all the pumps and out onto the road. Then ride up to the corner of North and Clayton roads where, bizarrely, the two outlet that face each other often have wildly different prices.
Life in the garden
The weather is oscillating between the end of winter and the start of spring. The bulbs are flowering in the garden, even the ones we had no idea were there — they must have been there last year when we looked at the house, mustn’t they?
The old apricot tree in the neighbour’s garden still manages to sprout some blossom, it’ll be a shame when it finally dies, but its probably got quite a few years left in it.
Oakleigh weekend
Time to make the most of the day, since this week I only got a one-day weekend. Clear skies, not a breath of wind all day, near perfect spring weather.
A bit of gardening, all enthused because we have a garden: first beans planted for the year, some wysteria seeds I took from mum and dad’s old vine, ripped out the broccoli plants from the winter. Jo and I even managed to catch the eye of the old Greek lady who lives over the back fence as she was in her garden and said hello — that’s two out of three neighbours we’ve spoken to, the third is unlikely — the gent in number ten seems too reclusive!
Working on the weekend
I was “volunteered.” Management can’t seem to work out whether we’re supposed to work between 8 am and 6 pm or 24 hours a day. They certainly won’t pay for anyone to be there out of the ordinary hours — but all hell breaks loose when you want to upgrade anything or install anything — “You can’t do that in production hours!” Bah! Who wants to volunteer for the evening? Who wants to volunteer for the weekend work?
Oakleigh and south...
Afternoon exploration, South into unexplored territory. Over North road and down along the fortified boundary of the golf course, a quick detour in along the driveway to see if we could see the clubhouse — supposedly a wonderful example of a pre-suburbia building preserved in the club — all we could see was the car-park and the watchful eye of the security cameras watching us…
Keep going south along the fence, Magnolias and fruit blossom everywhere, finally the golf course ended and we could turn left, but twists and turns of the roads conspired to send us still further south.
Lazy bike ride around the city
stats Distance 43.47 ㎞ Average speed 23.8 ㎞/h Spring weather again; albeit with a strong northerly wind. Off for a lazy ride around and around, exploring a few places I haven’t visited for a while. Up along the bike trail to Carnegie, lost through the back streets to Caulfield, head north up Glenferrie road, zigzag through Toorak, down to Richmond, nosiness sends me up the street where I lived for five years.
Fast Fiction?
RRR is nearly at the end of their annual radiothon, three days left to go and I’ve been meaning to get around to resubscribing, but was leaving it until the weekend…. This morning the Breakfasters had a guest from the long past — James Young — half of the old Fast Fictions team. I couldn’t resist, I had to give it a try. Rang up, resubscribed, made a donation, then offered to double the donation if Hound Dog can find me a replacement Fast Fictions CD to replace the one that I took to South Africa and left there sometime back in 2001!
Weather station
Moved the weather station from wyvern to fafnir.
At first attempt, oww won’t compile, so I’m using the binary from the old system.
Lunchtime meanderings
Too many times I spend my lunch break sitting at my desk, especially in the winter. A few weeks ago I decided to get out and go for a walk more often, today I headed off east through a nearby part of Clayton — I ride through here every evening, but in the nine years I’ve worked here, I don’t think I’ve once walked down some of the streets!
Inaugural ride
With much fanfare Jo declared it is time. Time to take her new bicycle out for a ride — one week old and it hasn’t been ridden yet! The weather doesn’t look promising and we decide we’re both getting old and lazy — its far too easy to just sit at home and wait for a perfect day… Off down Warrigal road, a brief stop in a car-park to adjust the seat, then head for the bay along North road.
To see the world in a piece of toast...
The Saturday morning ritual. Jo heads across to the bakery to grab a fresh loaf of bread while I make bacon and eggs and coffee. We prefer the loaves from the Vietnamese-run bakery in Chester street, but they’re often not ready until 9:30, so the earlier mornings’ bread comes from the market bakery. A split-Vienna loaf, often still warm from the oven. At least half the loaf vanishes with breakfast and lunch on Saturday, Sunday morning is usually toast made from the rest…
Welsh Daleks?
Anyone care to confirm the following bizarre question and answer that appeared in a discussion on Daleks?
Q: Whats the Welsh for EXTERMINATE?
A: since you asked, it's DIFODIWCH
Nearly Springtime
Dentist appointment at 9 o’clock this morning, just up the road from where — err, from where I lived until last October. Forty-five minute bike ride from home to Richmond now, so I had to get up early — or what passes for early for me! I could have got it down to thirty-five minutes by taking the car and being stuck in the crawling hordes on the freeway, by bike in the sunshine was far more appealing.
The Dutch Masters
I really ought to write something here, it was a very busy day! Food, friends, freezing wind, three hours walking around the NGV. Exhausting!
Dutch Masters from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. an impressive collection of paintings, and a few miscellaneous pieces of silverware and pottery. One of the glasses had me thinking, the sign on it said it was one of under five left in the world… I could swear I’d seen another!
Camera fun
One big win this evening — I discovered that my X-Drive external hard-disk/memory-card-reader thing can handle the SD cards from the IXUS700. I was worried that it could only handle the cards from the other camera. I then ran around the freezing cold house cooking dinner, reading the newspaper, trying to light the fire, listening to early ’80s punk on RRR and taking photos of things all at the same time!
People in cars
Bah! One of my colleagues from work spent the night in hospital and will spend the rest of the week off work. Motorist “failed to give way” and ran into him. I’ve seen him riding — lit up like a christmas tree, lights, reflectors, shiny vest, and always on the lookout for the idiot in the tin box. It only takes one lapse in concentration and the idiot will get you…
The Icy Claw!
Four degrees overnight and we’ve learnt that the walls of the old weatherboard house here in Oakleigh has a lot less insulation than the bricks and concrete of Richmond! The only heating in the house is the wood fire, light it at 6.30 pm and by 10.00 pm the place is just starting to feel warm — just in time to go to bed.
Bund is back, amusingly, a heat-related problem.
Outage
Uh oh… I’m off the air. So of course, nobody can read this. Something bad has happened and my friends at http://bund.com.au/ have been down since Sunday. Best wishes in exorcising the devils within the machinery guys…
Liberty, Fraternity, Photography….
The civil liberties of some Australians will have to be curtailed in the fight against terrorism, Treasurer Peter Costello says.
Thanks Mr Costello. More and more it seems that the terrorists win. Security becomes the justification for anything and everything.
Our Man of Steel, the Honourable John W. Howard wants thousands more cameras to monitor us every step of the way, meanwhile it seems that carrying a camera is now a suspicious activity.
Rain, Sun, Wind, Melbourne!
Just about to leave this morning to ride to work when the rain started hammering down on the tin roof, definitely time to sit for a quarter of an hour and tidy the kitchen!
Oddest motorist this morning — the lady stopped at the lights on North road. She drove up, stopped, her hands and eyes dropped into her lap and she started fiddling about. “Another idiot on the phone,” I thought.
Coincidence?
This morning I’m on my way to work when I meet, SKM-###, the garbage truck driven by idiots. First they’re stopped at the corner hanging out the window and yelling sexist abuse at a female pedestrian, then they came up behind me on North road, pulled into the bike lane as they passed, then just ahead of me kept on coming left until the truck almost met the railing, pulling back out the two passengers were leaning out the window looking back at me and laughing.
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