Some bad habits are so easy to slide into — and so easy to get out of. I think its over two years since I last spoke to a very good friend of mine, we just got out of the habit of meeting or calling up. I wasn’t even sure if he was still living in Melbourne. In a fit of action this morning I looked him up in the phone-book, called up, and we’ve arranged to meet up on Wednesday. The bizarre aspect of it all is that he’s apparently doing some contract software development for Monash University — and is having weekly meetings in the same building that I work in!

Marko, Lesley, Joey and I headed out to Scienceworks for the afternoon. Neither Jo or I have ever been there, and its been on our list of things to see for ages. An ad. in yesterday’s paper for their steam-engine day guaranteed that Marko would be interested, and so off we all went.

There’s far too much to see to go there for just half a day, especially when you arrive after 2 pm! Next time I think I’ll try and get there as the doors open in the morning. We did manage to see the steam engines, a phenomenal old Bulldog tractor — with something like a 9.5” bore and a 10” stroke, it would run on anything that you could pour into the fuel tank — and a steam calliope, now running on compressed air but still deafeningly loud.

Some fantastic examples of Victorian era engineering are on display in the old Spotswood (sewerage) Pumping station. I had no idea that this was here!

Back inside the exhibitions we had time for a brief look in one of the halls at some of the sports exhibits before we were all asked to leave as it was closing time. Amongst the exhibits were one of Oppie’s bikes that he used to set some world records on, and the bike pictured, wired up to an exercise-bike, but with a motor driving it so that you can see how the skeleton moves on a bicycle.