More fun and games with the Monash City Council. They responded to my email, claimed that they were collecting the rubbish, that the trolley contracters are the ones dumping things. They even helpfully gave me a couple of phone numbers to report future litter. I tried one this morning, since in the last 24 hours someone has dumped a trailer load of household garbage, a TV, a chair, garden cuttings, etc.
Damn it was cold this morning! I must be getting soft in my old age. Radio reported that it was 3 °C while I was listening in bed, coldest I can remember hearing while I’ve lived in Melbourne, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a decent frost here!
Riding to work was a numbing experience for the fingers though, foolishly I left the warm winter gloves at home and opted for the ordinary ones.
I thought it was never going to happen, but we finally got to use the free Gold-Class tickets to see a movie at the Village cinema in the Casino. The tickets have been sitting on the kitchen bench for over a year, expiry date, a couple of days ago! Very civilised though, sitting in very comfortable armchairs in a cinema of only thirty seats. Oh yeah, the movie … Matrix Reloaded.
From The Age:
Man jailed for car-door attack on cyclists
A car passenger who attacked a group of cyclists for fun was yesterday sentenced to 15 months’ jail. The Tasmanian Supreme Court was told Stephen Leonard Campbell, 43, was travelling in a car driven by his learner-driver son when they approached five professional cyclists on Hobart’s East Derwent Highway in March last year. “As the car overtook the cyclists, the passenger opened his door, deliberately striking the third cyclist with it, Justice Alan Blow said.
There must be some kind of record for slow bicycle riding — today Jo and I managed to cover almost 40km in five hours! I guess spending an hour in Christie’s viewing the sad remnants of their stock didn’t help. The MT800 Cannondale tandem looked mighty tempting; but even discounted, its still a lot of money at $3750… not to mention being a rather bileous shade of toothpaste green. I guess the KHS Alite really is looking attractive — especially at almost half the price. I consoled myself by buying a Vistalight “Code 15 Nightstick headlight.
Well here goes Sigmasport, an email is on your way. Is 16 months and 10,000km an unacceptable life for your products, or do you believe that I should be buying a new bike computer almost every year?
The site keeps evolving… In keeping with the current interest on RSS and RDF, I’ve added an RSS feed of my latest ten photo albums. Its all done with an evilly mangled perl script — one that I’m too ashamed of to reveal in public.
FoAF More FOAF stuff. Playing about with the FOAF explorer when I should have been working…
You can check me out in the explorer, or view the raw XML+RDF [foaf.rdf]. Cycling Stupido! Riding home in the rain, I calculated that the bike speedo would read 9,997km when I got home… I was already wet, an extra three kilometres wasn’t going to be too much further…
So on I rode up Yarra boulevard, around into Bridge road, then up Burnley street to the concrete monstrosity — Riverside Gardens —, over the river, up the bike track in the dark and then a kilometre or two along Kew boulevard.
More pollution; today it was petrol flowing down Gardiners creek, it all seemed to be coming out of a drain in the golf course, maybe they overfilled a lawn-mower… It was enough to annoy me about yesterday though, and send off an email to the City of Monash asking them to clean up the crap.
Gotta love it: An extract from “High and Mighty,” Kevin Bradsher’s book about 4WDs (SUVs) in America.
Damn. Spent way too long trying to get cwm running on the WinXP laptop only to get bitten by Windows. The authors have two files URI.py and uri.py in the same directory, Windoze still only allows the one.
Monash city council seem to be doing their bit to increase the amount of litter in the City of Monash. Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to gather up the abandoned shopping trolleys that were lying in Gardiners creek and drag them to the side of the path.
Here’s a challenge for our American friends: How many of the Australian states can you name? This morning Jo mentioned that Australia’s states had such boring names, while American ones were at least interesting. As a result of that we started naming them — eventually managing to remember 49 of the 50… I think we forgot Delaware.
Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Connecticut Delaware District Of Columbia Florida Georgia Hawaii Idaho Illinois Indiana Iowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York North Carolina North Dakota Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas Utah Vermont Virginia Washington West Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming
Man jailed for car-door attack on cyclists
A car passenger who attacked a group of cyclists for fun was yesterday sentenced to 15 months’ jail. The Tasmanian Supreme Court was told Stephen Leonard Campbell, 43, was travelling a car driven by his learner-driver son when they approached five professional cyclists on Hobart’s East Derwent Highway in March last year. “As the car overtook the cyclists, the passenger opened his door, deliberately striking the third cyclist with it, Justice Alan Blow said.
Sufficiently weird quote in [9fans], I just had to preserve it for posterity — I hope it makes it to the fortunes file.
No, I won’t be bringing either the Harley or any guns, since apparently, I can get a pass without them.
Coincidence. Last night we were discussing strange kids names that parents choose — we’ve recently heard of Atticus. To me it was a reminder of Roman generals, to Jo, of Atticus Finch — Gregory Peck — in To Kill a Mockingbird.
Bike riding — it sure does provide rich and varied experiences… this morning’s priceless moment started with me watching the small truck drive out of the discount tyre place in front of me, slowing as it turned to drive off in front of me, then me hitting the brakes and swerving as it launched a brand new truck tyre out through the open rear doors. Tyres are round, they roll really well!
The perfect end to the day… There I was, minding my own business, riding home along the bike track under the Citylink tollway when all of a sudden a girl heading the other way yells out “Slow Down!” I rounded the curve to find a Volkswagen Golf stuck at the bottom of the track, nose up to the bollards that are designed to prevent motorists from driving in to the bike track.
The laughter abounds. It seems that recently, every time I try to look at an Australian product website, I find that they’ve been written by a demented 10 year-old who would fail basic English.
Q. Can I divide partition the Anypak Drive?: A. Of course you can, just like any other drive. However due to a bug in Windows, it is recommended that for stable use, you do not partition the drive.
The vending machine up the hall decided today not to give me any change. Nothing special there, but just this once I had my phone in my hand and decided to call the 1-800 number to report it faulty… Deadly seriously, all my details were taken, details of the fault with the machine, then a promise to have it seen to, then a promise to send me my change in the mail!
With a minimum of effort, XF86Config now appears to be managed by debconf. Magic command to reconfigure everything is:
dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86 Key points to remember are that the RivaTNT video card has a driver type of “nv.”
Give a man a Subaru Imprezza WRX and he thinks he’s a world rally champion… until he slides it backwards off the Great Ocean Road and leaves it hanging over a cliff. One of two great Kodak Moments(™) that I should have taken a photo of today — the other being the road sign: “In Australia, DRIVE ON THE LEFT” — I guess a few too many international tourists stop at the lookouts and then drive off on the wrong side.
Fourth day of riding in to South Melbourne for a course at Excom — learning all about Windows XP (or at least enough to be dangerous). I could get to enjoy this — out the door, down to the end of the street, right turn onto Swan street, ride to the end, right turn onto Alexandra parade, through the tunnel and onwards along City road, then, right turn onto Montague street, stop.
Bah! Debian unstable is living up to its name for me. Following whatever my most recent updates are, Evolution is refusing to run, just crashes on startup, and after downloading the tonne of DEBs that is KDE, it generates a crash when starting, then gives me a neat-o blank screen with a pointer. Maybe having Gnome and KDE on the one machine is a bad idea — certainly for anyone not owning a 100G hard disk.
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 [2003-06-25 Wed]](https://ajft.org/img/default4.jpg)
![Journal for [2003-06-24 Tue]](https://ajft.org/img/default1.jpg)
![Photos for [2003-06-22 Sun]](https://ajft.org/img/default3.jpg)
