Confirmation that Spring is on its way arrived this morning, not with the scent of flowers in the air, not with the sight of blossom unfolding on the fruit trees, but with a crack across the side of the head as a swooping magpie [*] made its presence known. The bane of the cyclist’s life in the Spring!
Now if only I could train them to swoop and attack the motorists who yabber on their phones while driving….
Police call for text messaging ban in cars
By Jason Dowling
August 1, 2004
Text messaging from cars would be banned and the penalties for using hand-held phones increased under a push by Victoria Police to curb the alarming rise in road fatalities linked to mobile phones, one of the state’s top traffic police said.
…
Why do we need yet another law, the current law prohibits “use of a hand-held phone"?
Groove Train remains a favourite café, even though over the last few months they seem to have been getting slacker with their service, less inspiring with their food. Maybe its a change in staff, maybe its because the boss doesn’t seem to sit at his table in the back corner and supervise any more… he’s got a baby now and we see him far less often. Whatever the cause, tonight we dropped in for dinner and were treated to a magnificent meal.
I guess I blame it all on the rain… Riding in the rain always results in more punctures than riding in the dry, the water lifts up and moves around all the little bits of wire, glass and rock — today was no exception. Two thirds of the way to work, running late, down goes the back tyre. It’s always the back tyre when you’re in a hurry. Off with the wheel, spin it to check for glass — Ouch!
A coworker asked why I was yawning this morning, I explained that the live coverage of the tour didn’t finish until 02:30. Then came the question that dumbfounded me; “Have you ever ridden in the Tour de France yourself?” laughing I tried to explain that it was like asking me whether I’d ever competed in the Olympic games — they shrugged.
What can I remember about this year’s tour? The rain and crashes in the first week.
Suspicious activity on Yarra Boulevard? Three men alight from a car, mysterious devices in their hands, they pace back and forth around the phone booth… Terrorists? Bomb squad? Drug deal? No, I think they’re geocachers! ET Phone Home sounds very much like the location.
Smokers continue to astound me, I guess I should be used to it by now. I walked past an outside table on my way into the café for lunch and the girl with her back to me flicked her cigarette butt casually back and onto my shoe, ignoring the ashtray on the table in front of her.
I sat by the window in Café Cinque Lire, trying for a spot out of the draft and in the sun, the only drawback to the place being how open it is — great in the summertime, not so good in the winter!
A laugh and a surprise in “Drive,” the motoring section of the Age newspaper. The latest Citreon C4 is absolutely packed with safety features, airbags, anti-skid brakes, it even detects when the driver is drifting out of their lane — supposedly an aid in combatting fatigue and motorists running off the road. It works by detecting the car crossing the white lines without the indicators being on — fat lot of good this will do in Australia where no one seems to bother to use the indicators!
I guess we treat yesterday’s visit to the real estate agent and offer on a property as a learning experience. A quick call this morning, a higher offer has been made, thank you and good bye.
Masses of rampaging butterflies invade stomachs: news at 09:30… or that’s when I was meant to be meeting with a real-estate agent to put in an offer on a property. How do you play this house-buying game? How much do you offer? Is the asking price what they want, or is it an extra percentage based on them believing that you’ll believe that they inflate it and then you’ll offer them much lower knowing that they’ll ask for more knowing that you’ll offer an in-between amount letting them accept what they wanted in the first place?
The tour continues. In today’s paper there was a humorous human-interest story as the author hired a bike at l’Alpe to ride down to Borg d’Oisans and back up, to get some idea of what is was like, and to see how his time compared with Pantani’s 38 minutes. I don’t think he knew what he was getting himself into, his two and a quarter hours to climb the mountain certainly don’t sound earth shattering!
Note to self: If you go to the National Gallery of Victoria on a cold, wet, windy Sunday afternoon when there’s a major international exhibition — The Impressionists — showing, expect to encounter large crowds!
Was it only half an hour that we had to spend in queueing for the tickets, zigzagging back and forth through the barriers to eventually get to the counter?
Twenty dollars entry fee; no video cameras or still cameras allowed — OK.
There’s a movement afoot to build a better sense of community within the ITS division at work — all manner of wondrous social activities are planned…. Today was th first of these to be put into practice, the Friday social barbecue with a red clothing theme.
a small number of servers
Minor teething problem: too many customers, or was it too few providers? I don’t know, but its one of those elementary problems in queueing theory that nobody seems to be ever able to get right!
Nearly ended up being unable to go to work today! My key has finally stopped working completely in the front door, so Jo pre-locked the door on her way to work and left it open an inch or so for me to shut on my way out…
Using all three hands to shuffle bicycles around in the front room, I’d managed to balance Norky bike against my foot, had shifted Jo’s bike out with my left hand, and was extracting my old road bike from the back to ride to work… the front wheel spun round, the bike tipped over, the tyre hit the door and it started to shut!
More fun and games with doors and locks. This morning I couldn’t lock the front door, the spare key I’ve been using just doesn’t seem to work properly. After a few minutes I gave up and retried my old key — the one that got damaged by the outside door a week ago — it got wedged inside the lock and snapped in half.
Ten minutes of fiddling about with a pair of wire cutters and I managed to grip the snapped-off bit and pull it out, another ten minutes and I managed to get the door to lock with the spare key.
Ah, spam… if I can’t stop it at least I can derive some enjoyment from it:
My name is Mr.Mabo Lomas, a merchant in Dubai, in the U.A.E. I have been diagnosed with Esophageal cancer which was discovered very late, due to my laxity in carrying for my health. It has defiled all forms of medicine, and right now I have only about a few months to live, according to medical experts.
Oh good, it wasn’t just me… The chat forums hosted by SBS show that other viewers were thoroughly annoyed by the poor timing of ad-breaks over last night’s tour coverage, and the general lack of knowledge of the Australian studio commentators.
I was going to go for a ride today, honest, I really was… Instead I slept in late, had a lazy breakfast, then the only exercise I got was walking down the hill to the shops and watching other people race about in a surf life-saver competition.
Probably should have gone for a ride though, I’m sure it would have been less exercise than keeping a four year-old nephew entertained! Late in the afternoon it was either go out for another walk down to the river, or go crazy as he bounced off the walls — we chose the walk!
With impeccable timing we arrived home in time to throw ourselves on the couch for the start of SBS’ live coverage of the eighth stage of the tour — except that the first half hour is excruciating studio commentary from the Sydney studios. I have nothing against Stephen Hodge, as one of five Australian cyclists to win a yellow-jersey he has my utmost respect — but I don’t think he’s one of the world’s great commentators, or even one of the world’s acceptable ones….
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 [2004-07-23 Fri]](https://ajft.org/img/default2.jpg)
