Up the road to the markets this morning — and first steps in taking the photos of all the pubs. Unfortunately, the best place to photograph most of them is half-way across the nearest main road, or risk having passing traffic blocking the view. Royal Oak, DHR, the Spready, three down, twenty four to go… Down to the Burnley post office to pick up a parcel, oh no! What has happened to the Grand?
I tried to find a little about the architecture of Richmond, and found a website all about walking in Melbourne. Then was reminded, sadly, that the St Kilda pier had burned down while we were away on holiday.
http://www.walkingmelbourne.com/: Walking Melbourne
Decided today to take a photo of each of Richmond’s pubs. Earlier in the week I’d seen a collection of photographs of English pub signs somewhere on the web, and I remembered how Jo and I had challenged each other to name all the current Richmond pubs — 17 I think — or was it 27… Vaguely starting from nearest home and spiralling outwards:
Springtime, wildly variable weather. I really should be used to it now after seven years of living in Melbourne!
DAML — Dam what? http://www.daml.org/2001/06/map/: DAML Map
Nearly had an all-in brawl across the street this evening. I’d just got home and was wondering what all the screaming and shouting was — three blokes were shoving each other around, chests out, swearing shouting and waving their fists in the air — “You F’en started, it ya C***,” “Nah, you F’en started it, coming round here ya F’en C***…” Meanwhile, three or four women shrieked like harpies telling their menfolk to lay into each other and “F’en kill the C***.
OK, this takes the cake for the weirdest spam to arrive in my inbox for quite some time:
Dear Portal Administration!
I have recently come across your site and liked it very much.
I suppose that the visitors of our resources belong to the same social group and my site could be useful for your audience so I suggest to exchange our links. This will help both of us to increase Link-Popularity and accordingly get top positions in many searching system, Google for instance.
More fun and games with Norky bike today. Off I went to deliver the spare wheel to the bike shop so that Jo’s dud wheel can be replaced with a spare — the infamous evil replacement wheel from hell (or Devizes in the UK). Casually mentioning that my gears aren’t quite working properly, investigation reveals that old bottom bracket and the new cranks don’t quite agree with each other, and a narrow bottom bracket is required… The shop is then turned upside down and many a box is emptied trying to find appropriate sized parts, and a quarter-hour quick visit turns into a leisurely hour and a half.
Babies, babies, babies… blah, blah, blah, blah, blah… One work colleague has just announced that he’s pregnant. Four or five of them then sat around gossiping for the next two hours — blah blah blah, babies babies babies… SHUT UP!
Bravely they entered Ikea, a place where many have ventured, but few have kept their cool after being herded, sheep-like, round vast and twisty passages… We survived, and even found a suitable thing to put the TV on, no longer must it sit on the temporary table, as it as done for the last eleven months!
Many jokes have been made about flat-packed furniture and “easy-to-follow” instructions. Very boring, I found them easy to follow.
123 days uptime, reset back to zero. All courtesy of CitiPower I guess. Damn, after checking logs, maybe the machine didn’t crash, maybe just the video and keyboard disappeared… Maybe its time to upgrade wyvern’s kernel since I’ve no incentive now to keep it running!
Busy day. I must be getting over whatever it was. After a slow start in the morning I ended up spending most of the afternoon spring cleaning — we now have the cleanest springs in the street.
Another day at home, two hours sitting reading, one hour sleeping in bed, repeat…
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/32732.html: Bill Joy leaves Sun. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/32780.html: Bill Joy, creator of vi I think this is the first time I’ve ever snarfed an entire Slashdot article, but I found so many of the subjects referenced interesting that it seemed the easiest way. I’ve just about given up reading anything below the article itself, 99.9% of Slashdot seems to be crap.
Disease 1, Adrian nil. Staying home today to wallow in self indulgent cold remedies — and old CDs that I haven’t listened to for months. While I’m here I might as well try and clean up some of the last month’s mess. All those newspaper cuttings and little jotted notes, for example.
I never did buy a replacement PDA. The Palm Tungsten looked attractive, but not enough research before we went overseas, so I had no idea what prices were good, bad or average.
Must be Spring! The university campus is full of nesting birds, including a rather aggressive Noisy Miner that swooped down and pecked me on the back of the head when I walked too close to its nest. A first for that species, I’ll add it to the list of magpies, mudlarks, swans and hawks that have attacked me over the years!
Always around when you least need them! This morning on the train a group of six ticket inspectors came through the carriage checking tickets and keeping the peace. After yesterday, is this a coincidence? Why can’t the train operators just face up to reality and put back one or two guards/inspectors on every train.
Aw hell, go away travelling for four weeks and what happens. Johnny Cash and Slim Dusty both dead, what else happened while I wasn’t looking?
Fun and games on the train this morning. A bunch of strung-out looking druggies were smashing the doors and each other, swearing and smoking, fighting either amongst themselves or with someone they didn’t like. Just as I was getting off at Huntingdale station, one of them decided to start hassling other passengers, asking for money and threatening to stab people. A long and fruitfull conversation with the police ensued, a call back later confirming that at least one of them is in custody for a later attempted robbery.
Nearly back to normal, apart from waking up around 4 am and gradually listening to the world come alive. Assorted chirpy birds, cars in the distance, the first train of the morning, the clip-clop of someone walking down the street, a ticking noise every five minutes from the lounge room… hang on, that’s the thermostat! Seems that the house-sitter must have turned the heater on sometime, then forgotten to turn it off — its almost impossible to tell by looking at the switch whether the stupid thing is on or off.
A four in the morning landing, hobble along to retrieve the bikes and the luggage. Time for quarantine and customs with the bikes, the boxes had to be opened to check for mud. AQIS staff polite and helpful as I’ve always found them, they even handed us tape to fix the boxes back up.
My sprained ankle Outside to catch the shuttle bus into town, and the first major problem of the trip with carrying bikes on public transport.
A blur of plane travel — a long, drawn out, uncomfortable blur. I took my shoe off and my sprained ankle swelled up so much that by Singapore there was no hope of putting a shoe back on. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get it comfortable. Even under the seat in front, airline hostesses managed to kick it as they served meals. Pointing out my bandaged ankle only seemed to elicit a “sorry” in addition to the kicks, but didn’t stop people tripping over it.
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 [2003-10-18 Sat]](https://ajft.org/img/default4.jpg)
