stats. Today ??km Trip km Breakfast, finish packing, put the bags in the car and drive down to Alexandra parade to the start of yet another Deadly Treadly… somewhere along the way Jo asks whether I’ve checked that we really are starting from the same place as all the previous rides! We are, and about a hundred people have shown up, quite a few more than the last couple of times.
Hi there! Sorry for an e-mail out of the blue, but I just did a search for the term samsonite briefcase on Google and found ajft.org ranked
Weird. There was I thinking that I’d never mentioned samsonite briefcases here, with the obvious exception of this page, a check with Google and sure enough — there it was on 07-Apr-2002, a briefcase with Bluetooth built in.
Uploaded the photos from the trip last week and then realized that I’d forgotten to reset the time in my camera — yet another device that knows the time but can’t learn it from anything else. Sick of changing back and forth in daylight saving, I’ve set my camera to UTC!
This evening we hoped it would be third time lucky for the Curry Club, but it turned out to be “three strikes and out.
Last day of my holiday. Two weeks seems such a long time when it involves an escape like the bike trip. My paper journal is full of empty pages from last week, but that never seems to work, I either leave too much or too little space, or I just don’t get around to revisiting the days — time just keeps flowing forwards. At least the electronic one doesn’t get its pages wet or have problems with cheap paper and felt-tipped pens — on the other hand, I don’t think a handheld PC would have stood up to last week’s deluge!
Back in Melbourne, miserable weather and all! Somewhere around Seymour the sun came up on a dull grey sky. Cloud turned to drizzle turned to rain — welcome home to Victoria! Somehow the train managed to run an hour late, I tried to call Jo to let her know, no luck, there’s mobile phone coverage for people driving up the Hume highway, but none for those in the trains.
stats. Today 0km Trip 188km Things continue to improve. Its a sunny day, breakfast at a reasonable hour. A visit to a laundromat and a coffee in Beaumont street. Definitely an improvement.
In the afternoon Ron and I trundled into town on Big Bertha for a beer at the waterfront brewery, then along the sea-wall to the lighthouse, and around the point. Eventually we ran out of path and Ron tried to take the flexy old tandem over a skate-ramp, but sanity prevailed and he pulled out at the last moment.
stats. Today 73km Trip 188km Stuff-ups and more stuff-ups! Up at 4 am as the cooks got up and started to prepare breakfast. A quick pack up and dress, then down to the showground in the mill owners 4WD. Put the bags down in a corner where we could see them and started on the bikes, preparing and loading them into the trucks. Within minutes the sheep-like hordes had dumped bags on our bags and buried the lot.
stats. Today 5km Trip 117km There was little to do all day except walk around town and look at the floods. Some of our more quick-witted friends ignored the BNSW organisers, arranged to have their bags taken in a van, and rode the 100+ km straight down the highway to Newcastle. Others, who had friends in the area, arranged to be picked up and taken there in cars. The rest of us sat around wondering what miracle of logistics was going to occur that would take over a thousand wet and pissed off cyclists, their luggage and their bikes, away from the flooded back roads, and over a hundred and twenty kilometres to get them back on the planned route.
After eight and a half hours standing in the rain and packing bikes on trucks, the dirty dozen pile into the mini-bus to go to Bulahdelah -- we were very tired, very wet and very hungry
stats. Today 36km Trip 112km Breakfast took longer than anticipated, the weather saw to that. Ominous dark clouds threatened while some chose to pack up before eating, others chose to eat first and pack later. I was one of the latter group, not only had I not packed up, but I was only just joining the queue as the downpour began and put a delay in the proceedings. The sudden deluge caught me between toilets and breakfast so I huddled under shelter to wait it out, then managed to grab some food, eat and pack in hurry all while not getting too wet.
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.
![Journal for [2004-04-08 Thu]](https://ajft.org/img/default4.jpg)
![Journal for [2004-04-01 Thu]](https://ajft.org/img/default3.jpg)
