I couldn’t work out where I was this morning, at first I thought it was still only Friday and that I was home in bed and had to go to work! Waving my arm around in a half-sleep I managed to hit the rough old plaster of the wall — very quickly woke me fully and brought me back to Bungendore!
It’s been around 30 °C here for a about two weeks, today is no different, nobody is doing much around the house except sitting around or moving slowly, trying to stay cool.
Off to Canberra for the weekend — and flying up for once! The seven hour drive is just too long for only a two day visit, and cheap (almost) airfares make flying a possibility.
It seemed very strange to be sitting in the bar in the airport departure lounge, sipping a very expensive beer and thinking that in an hour or so we’d be in Canberra — none of the mind-numbing boredom of the drive up the Hume.
More RDF and FOAF things today. Too many of the tools out there in the big wide world don’t seem to be able to handle people that have more than one email address… and that’s a big problem, since many of the people in my FOAF file do have more than one address. There’s just not enough smushing going on!
Ouch — another head-on on the bike path this morning, but thankfully it wasn’t me. One of the guys that I see fairly frequently in the mornings heading the other way, today he wasn’t heading anywhere, just lying on the ground while two other cyclists phoned for an ambulance. Same stretch of narrow bridge with steel railings under the freeway where I’ve had a few close calls and one elbow to the head…
Further in the Bicycle NSW saga — I finally received a response to my enquiries, but it seems that Bicycle NSW have no idea of the reality of attempting to travel by public transport with a bike in Sydney. “Just catch a station wagon taxi from the airport.” I politely pointed out that the combination of the LPG tank and the steel luggage safety mesh prevents a bike from fitting into the station wagons, gave up on their transport entirely, and booked a seat on the train direct to Gloucester!
Bicycle NSW managed to raise my hopes then drop them back down again all with the one email. There I was assuming that the item in my inbox from Warren Saloman, the RTA Big Ride event director, was a response to my enquiry last week — the one where I was told “Warren will call you back” — the one that I haven’t heard from yet. No, of course it wasn’t, its just another advertising brochure, telling me to enter!
Strange things appear serendipitously when searching through the house. Today we ransacked every room in the hope of finding some glue that we know is in there somewhere… It could not be found, it might just has well have vanished off the planet. What we did find was the spare key for my motorbike disc lock! Now if only I could have found it two years ago, there would have been no need for Marko’s universal key.
Attempting to find out some more details on Bicycle NSW’s Big Ride; details like when the bus transport from Sydney to the start leaves, where it leaves from, and how on earth someone from interstate is meant to get themselves, their bike and their baggage to this place. They haven’t answered email enquiries so I rang. Fun and games — the bus leaves at 06:00 in the morning — so a night’s accommodation is required — and from somewhere that has no public transport access!
The costs of the bike collision keep creeping up… Investigating why my seat was still wobbling, I found that the bolts aren’t loose — the whole top of the seatpost has cracked, and only about 10% of the metal was holding it together! I’ve lost track of when I bought it, but I think it was sometime in late 2002. So much for the Sonic brand seatpost.
Initially I thought there was no damage to the bike, unfortunately there’s a lot of things to check, and shock doesn’t help.
I think my bicycle has ears — or something. Half way to work this morning I met a girl walking along, pushing her bike. It was a scruffy old town bike, one of the pedals had sheered off at the crank, so she was walking home. I mentioned that there was an old-style bike shop in Oakleigh, the kind of place where the owner was likely to have a box of old pedals and could make a cheap repair.
All this interest in RDF, FOAF and annotating my photographs — today there was a Slashdot article on one of the Microsoft Research projects — World Wide Media eXchange. Amusingly enough, their server fell over under the slashdotting. Even more amusing are some of the Slashdot comments “is Microsoft, therefore is bad.” First impressions are that it’s a very slick interface, but typically Microsoft — all the data and photos are uploaded to their server.
One less bike in the house — the “Colnago” from the other day has gone to a new home at the Salvation Army’s recycling centre. To be sold for $20 or so and make someone happy, I hope… On the way I dropped in to Ray’s shop to show him the find — he was especially impressed by the paint-job over the top of the brake cables.
Riding up the street it occurred to me that the bike would make an ideal pub bike, if only we had a shed to keep it in, but sadly, it had to go to clear up the front room.
Finally got a round tuit, then I got sick of making bad jokes and took Mr Damage off to see the mechanic for new fork seals. With his eagle eye, the mechanic quickly spots that I am not mechanically minded, and points out that a new set of front brake pads would be well received also.
$332.90 later, I have new fork seals, new front brake pads, and a shiny front end of the bike where its all been washed and cleaned.
Just my luck, after struggling through last week feeling almost well, finally whatever cold virus I’ve found has got the better of me and I felt like crap all weekend.
What else to do in the evening than to watch the DVD of Ladyhawke, a joking comment while shopping last week that I’d never seen it resulted in it appearing as a thank-you gift. Jo says it was one of her favorite movies, but long ago when she was in high-school.
Just like the last big storm, after yesterday, today the bike track was ankle deep in slimy mud and washed-away mulch from the gardens — and the council had only just finished replacing the last lot!
Sunrise 6:33am (GMT), sunset 8:32pm (GMT) at Melbourne, VIC, AU (13:59 hours daylight) Critical Mass uptime: ws-cl-28-g09-a up 0 days, 00:47:27
Amazing! links actually works as a web browser, and can cope with the Monash authenticating proxy.
Good news. Ten weeks from Friday will be a pretty good day.
Drizzly rain all day, and of course I left my rain jacket at home — somewhere my subconscious doesn’t think I should need it in the summer.
I left work in light rain, wondering about all the motorists with their headlights on. Got to Hawthorn to discover that the bike path where I’d crashed was now covered in mud, water, wood chips and miscellaneous garbage from overflowing bins. Council workers were wading around clearing up the larger pieces, and sirens could be heard all around.
After yesterday’s exertions, today was a lazy day. Zero inclination to ride my bike anywhere! We sat around in the campground for the morning, watching the ducks and slowly packing everything away into the car.
A stroll into town for more food — still hungry after the ride — took longer than expected when we ran into a couple from Queensland who had a Trek-200 tandem, very similar to ours. I’d seen them yesterday riding back into town after they’d ridden up Mount Buffalo, today they were taking it easy as well!
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.
