stats. Distance 68.53 ㎞ Average speed 18.93 ㎞/h Riding time 3:37:14 Odometer 19884 ㎞ The weather is starting to resemble spring time, the excuses for being lazy and not going out on the bike are getting harder to come by — even with the inflammatory anti-cycling attitudes being drummed up in the media — so Jo and I took off for a ride this morning. Just the normal ride, along North road to the beach, turn left and head down to Mordialloc.
Every day our little street fills up with people parking their cars while they work in the offices or the singing school across the road — no problem, except for whoever drives this car that parks closer and closer to our driveway. He seems to have assumed that because we don’t often drive it during he day, that we’ll never drive it during the day and so he happily parks blocking our exit.
Aha! Finally found the bit of Victoria’s Road Rules that I’ve been after for months. Paragraph 2, Rule 134, Part 11:
134. Exceptions to keeping to the left of a dividing line
(2) If the dividing line is a single broken or a continuous line, or a broken divided line to the left of a single continuous dividing line, the driver may drive to the right of the dividing line to overtake another driver.
Another one of those wet Melbourne weekends! During the afternoon Jo and I headed over to the other side of Oakleigh for a walk through the wetlands — what used to be an uninspiring patch of flood-prone vacant land with a concrete storm-water drain through the middle, has been landscaped and replanted as a native wet-lands. Apart from the massive quantities of cans and plastic rubbish washed into the creek, it all looks quite attractive and is obviously very popular with the local bird life.
Its been a while since I’ve met quite such an aggressive motorist, one who’s prepared not only to scream abuse but to try and hit me with their car — unfortunately tonight was such a night.
I pulled up at the lights to turn right from Clayton road into North road, drawing alongside a dark blue/green Ford station wagon stopped in the through lane. As I got level with the driver’s window she flicked half a cigarette’s worth of glowing ash straight out, half in my face, half down my leg.
The days are getting longer, the sky is sometimes still light when I ride home in the evenings, warm and sunny at lunch time I escaped from the windowless brick box and went for a walk. Around the shiny new multistory concrete car-park and over to the lake. As soon as I sat down the pigeons started waddling over to beg for food.
It seemed to be a day ideally suited to sitting inside and eating. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, chocolate biscuits, walnuts, apple strudel…. Cold and windy outside, swirls of rain and the threat of hail.
Warm and tasty scrambled eggs for breakfast, accompanied by the second half of our weekend tasty fresh loaf from one of the Oakleigh bakeries.
A brisk walk in the wind took us over to Hughesdale, or maybe Murrumbeena, I’m not sure exactly where one suburb ends and the other begins.
“Going Forward on a Day By Day Basis” — Ugh! Congratulations NASA, that would have to be the bureaucratic double-speak quote of the day! No wonder the space shuttle has problems when the people in charge choose to speak such gibberish.
Gaslight music has closed for the last time! Heard it on the radio and read it in the news — it must be true. Seems to be ages since I last visited, its been years since I spent a lot of time and money buying CDs, and I never spent much time in the CBD anyway. Good memories of the shop and the people though, there always seemed to be something of interest when I did get in there…
Where’s the BikeCam™ when you need it? Not once, but twice this evening on the way home I came within inches of being flattened by morons who decided not to bother giving way to traffic on the roundabouts. First one was just out of Monash on Woodside avenue, moron in a red station-wagon, Subaru I think, rego. ###-###, flying up Koonawarra street, doesn’t bother to slow, straight out in front as I’m halfway around.
stats. Riding time 3:25:37 Maximum speed 65 ㎞/h Odometer 19810 ㎞ Distance 79.05 ㎞ Too many months of being lazy and only riding to and from work. No more excuses, time to go out today and ride up a mountain — a little mountain at least! After yesterday’s miserable weather today was fine and sunny so I took the opportunity while Jo was out for the afternoon and headed off eastwards to Ferntree Gully and up and over Mount Dandenong.
Are the neighbours moving out? Has the old lady died? I wonder if I’ll ever know, in nine months we’ve never been able to speak to them, the guy seems to avoid eye contact the few times that he is out in the front garden.
My camera behaved oddly with that second photo too. It claims that the data is corrupt, yet downloaded it and other programs can view it. Is it the camera?
I thought that it was about time I entered Bike Vic’s ATBIAD ride. Hang on — $110 for a soggy salad roll and a ferry ticket? No thanks. Jo and I may well ride down to Sorrento and back, but I don’t think Bicycle Victoria will be getting over $100 for the privilege! With over 5,000 entries, what do they do with the more than half a million dollars from the entries?
Jo is beset by end-of-financial-year woes and had to go in to work today for a few hours, I spent the time constructively poking around at the local markets — unsuccessfully looking for a nutcracker to deal with yesterday’s fresh walnuts — then went on another exploratory walk along the railway and down into Huntingdale. The amount of dumped rubbish is amazing — and depressing. Seems that the industrial residents of Monash have little, if any, respect for the littering laws.
Go the giant catfish! So this is what was lurking around in the Mekong while I was boating around above!
646-Pound Catfish Netted in Thailand
Fishermen in northern Thailand have netted a fish as big as a grizzly bear, a 646-pound Mekong giant catfish, the heaviest recorded since Thai officials started keeping records in 1981. The behemoth was caught in the Mekong River and may be the largest freshwater fish ever found….
After a slight hiatus of a month or so, Jo decided it was time to resume her search for a shiny new road bike, so off we went to see what is on offer now, with the end of financial year possibly inducing sales in the stores… Fitzroy Cycles were covered in signs loudly proclaiming 20%-50% off everything — the only problem seemed to be that the bikes we’d seen for $1500 six weeks ago had been marked back up to the RRP of $1899 and then “discounted back down to $1499!
Yeesh, I rang Canon to say I didn’t want to go ahead with the repair, since $164.13 is more than a second-hand IXUS300 can be had for, and to ask when can I pick up the camera…
Surprise… there’s a $44 fee for rejecting the quote. Feels to me almost like blackmail the way that one is worded!
Did anyone tell me this when I brought the camera in? No, of course not.
A bit of fun and games and I’ve managed to configure privoxy to automatically add in the headers to work with the authenticating proxy here at Monash. No more 407 errors for me!
HTTP’s Basic Authentication is quite basic. With a username of username and a password of password, a single header is added to every HTTP request, of the form:
Proxy-Authorization: Basic dXNlcm5hbWU6cGFzc3dvcmQ=\r\n The username and password are base64 encoded, to find your string, something along the lines of:
A grey morning, poor visibility, wet roads. Just what I need, first moron of the month — the lady in the blue Ford Falcon wagon (registration ###-###), she sits beside me at the lights SMSing on her phone, then when the lights go green drives off, eyes still firmly on the phone in her lap as she veers into my lane towards me. I point at her and shout out, “Put the phone down!
A “Children, Dog and Goat friendly event.” So goes the advertising for the Community Cup, a friendly footy match between the Megahertz from Melbourne community radio stations PBS and RRR, and the Espy Rockdogs, various band members from the Melbourne music scene.
Early start for me this morning, I managed to leave the house by 8.30 am! I truly am not one of the world’s early risers at the moment. Saw my first Melbourne frost for the year along the railway reservation, 7 °C as a I arrived at Monash with blue and stiff fingers. Then I found the 75 Degrees South blog. Currently -28.5 °C down at Halley base in the Antarctic!
“Where’s my camera? Is it repaired? How much will it cost?” I asked yesterday. Today I receive a voice mail message stating that they will endeavour to repair it next week. That is all. I call back to ask how much and get told that the help line can’t help me — the help line has to email the technical support line who might be able to help me. She did tell me that I would be quoted the price of the repair prior to the repair being performed.
Four weeks and no word from Canon. Where’s my camera? Is it repaired? How much will it cost? I rang the help line, the help line can’t help, the help line has to email the technical support who might be able to help. Sounds familiar…
So the 69th Tour de Suisse has just finished, and on their last stage they had to ride up the Gotthardpass. Two years ago Jo and I got to ride down that side of the pass!
Chopping firewood yesterday. Aching body today. Cause. Effect. It must be good for me — it certainly is satisfying to belt enormous chunks of tree trunk with a block-splitter and reduce them to handy, bite-sized pieces. There are so many other problems where the block-splitter could be applied too… an example follows.
Grey and windy today. Winter in Melbourne. Bus driver tries to frighten the crap out of me by driving through the red light at Dandenong road.
A late afternoon walk along the rail line in Oakleigh, off to investigate the gleaming colours coming from the coathanger’s graveyard. The new colourful pile is an equally huge mass of plastic car body panels, we don’t know whether they are being stockpiled for recycling, or whether its just easier to rent an old warehouse and dump them on the ground for storage! Also dumped in the vacant land at the end of Downing street was a mass of shopfittings, newspaper racks and shelving — then I realised, the newsagent in Portman street closed a week or so ago — guess they thought it was too expensive to dispose of their crap legally.
“Hey, what’s that?” was the cry at breakfast. A pair of Black-faced cuckoo-shrikes were flying about the garden, from the washing line to the gum tree to the apricot and back. OK, it must be about time that I wrote down all the birds we’ve seen in — or above — our garden. The following table is from the Monash city council, I’ve added in a column for our house!
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 [2005-07-29 Fri]](https://ajft.org/img/default4.jpg)
