Oh bugger, guess who forgot to shut the freezer last night. The freezer now contains half-melted meaty things in bags, soggy bread, and some rather leathery looking ice-cream.
Still itching to rework some of http://ajft.org/. I want to use a proper CMS (so long as the resource hit isn’t too high), and I want to redo the styles — neat and clean but interesting.
MLP http://billgatliff.com/: Cross compilers and using GCC for embedded systems.
Wow, what a wind last night! It was one of the times when I was wishing for a recording anemometer. Assorted crashes and bangs seemed to indicate that various neighbourly tin-sheds and garbage bins had come loose, this morning there were large trees down in all the parks, both near home and Monash.
Dinner with señor Marko — the poor lad was exhausted — the wind yesterday and today meant that the SES1 had over 3000 jobs to do, removing fallen trees from anything and everything, and running around putting roofs back on.
Monday, back ‘a twerk. I need to get more inspired and write less rubbish.
QOTD While there are strict laws on driving while intoxicated, strangely, there is no law against “driving while stupid.” And you know, the intoxicated person will eventually sober up, while the stupid person will go on being stupid.
Spring weather for the first day of Spring — almost unheard of.
Walking along the beach this morning there were even kids swimming, I know this isn’t proof of warm weather, but to a casual glance it makes it look like it! The low tide was I think the lowest that I’ve ever seen, flat expanses of sand, the whole of groyne exposed, weedy rock pools that are normally hidden. In addition the water was incredibly clear, from the pier we could see the bottom where it was at least 2m deep, again, something I’ve never seen before.
stats. Distance 93.8 ㎞ Escaped in the afternoon for a ride along the Great Ocean Road. Despite all my best efforts I couldn’t quite manage to get my average speed up to 30 ㎞/h. Very light traffic, surprisingly few idiots on the GOR, a clear sky and magnificent views. Average speed was 29 ㎞/h when I got to Apollo Bay, and despite the tailwind on the way home, fell to 28 ㎞/h by the time I returned to Lorne.
[http://www.typo3.com/]: another promising content management system for me to play with. I had problems accessing their demo from Mozilla, it tells me to “use a 4+ browser"
A fine sunny afternoon, time to finally go out and explore the mysterious reaches of the Docklands development. Jo and I had been meaning to go and have a look around there for months, walking nearby on the way to the football the other week had rekindled the idea, so today we set off to explore. The usual mix of absolutely lunatic motorists in Bridge road had us alternately laughing hysterically, swearing copiously, or just swerving wildly to keep out of their way.
Life’s too short to be served bad coffee. Two bad coffees in a row and now we can’t bring ourselves to call in at Via Ponte. A sad thing when both Ian and Michael are such nice guys, but with all the other cafés in the street — Bridge road — we keep walking past theirs and on to somewhere else.
A longish ride in the afternoon. Just like last Saturday I headed out in short sleeves, half thought of coming back for a warmer shirt but didn’t.
So much for the spring-like weather! Almost warm this morning on the ride to work, then cold and grey and drizzly rain all afternoon. Not the kind of weather to inspire me to leave work and ride home, maybe it was a plot created by the ITS management to make me work longer hours.
This evening I explored the strange behaviour of tra. Or maybe I’m just not understanding how it works yet.
It must be springtime. Whooosh, KLACK! and the first magpie of the season swooped me as I rode along Yarra Boulevard this morning.
Banks The Commonwealth Bank of Australia has announced a $2.66 billion profit and says it will axe 1,000 jobs as part of a restructure.
Banks! They still haven’t managed to process my change of account request from June! I wonder if they can manage to replace my credit card before it expires and renders me moneyless?
It was with great apprehension that we informed Jo’s parents of our engagement—actually that’s not true at all. This evening we finally managed to visit them now that they’re back from their holiday and let them know!
Monday morning; traffic banked up along the freeway all the way back to Warrigal Road. Nudging the motorbike along behind the lady in the Honda Accord — she weaves from side to side, mostly staying within her lane, the phone’s in her left hand, or sometimes resting on the passenger seat, she’s busy chatting. Flashing the high beam does nothing, she glances up and continues babbling. To top it all off, the left rear tyre of her car is so flat she’s just about driving on the rim.
A very slow day. A little too much Pinot Noir last night, or maybe it was the Guinness or the champagne… In any case, neither of us felt inspired to do much today except lie on the couch and read the paper, or in my case, Graeme Fife’s history of the Tour de France1. A fascinating mix of his personal ride and historical anecdotes.
“A Sunday Afternoon Drive in the Country,” just the name seems to be enough to make me cringe, but we decided that we had to get out of the house for a while.
stats. Distance 68 ㎞ I don’t think I was ever intending to get up to go riding at seven this morning, I’m just not cut out for the early morning rides when I can stay at home warm and comfortable. After some morning household chores I headed out by myself at the far more civilised time of about half past noon to ride down to Mordialloc and back.
It almost looked like a warm spring day.
Headed out this evening to see the Importance of Being Earnest at the Como. We were both surprised at how few people went out to the movies there on a Friday night. The cinema was half empty and there was hardly anyone turning up for the session next door.
Funny, witty, and true to the play — a play that I’ve never seen or read — when we got home I read half of it sitting in bed before realising I couldn’t keep my eyes open any more!
Interesting ride home this evening. After a random comment yesterday about Gardiners’ Creek path being far too windy and slow I decided to try the road today. The distance was slightly less, the average speed while riding was higher, but I spent so much time sitting at red lights that I think it ended up taking me longer. That was using a combination of Dandenong road and Orrong road, I’m sure there are other ways.
Blah, not much to say. Wow, how did it get to be half way through the month already?
After scanning through wyvern’s Apache logs I noticed that I’ve been Nimda’d recently and it irked me, so I rummaged around and have installed EarlyBird on the box. Only time will tell if it actually performs a useful function.
EARLY BIRD: A real-time HTTP worm attempt reporting utility.
Proof that television is bad for you: After lugging the TV down the stairs and into the boot of Jo’s car, I’ve managed to pull a muscle in my back; and after a rotten night’s sleep, today decided to stay home and rest it rather than try to hobble in to work.
One thing I did manage to do today was to fill in a lot of the missing details of last year’s bike trip in June and July.
A slight chill in the air, a vague threat of rain and hail in the morning, a sore back from the weekend. They all added up to the decision not to ride the bicycle to work. This evening as I went to leave, boy was I glad of that decision! Strong winds and icy rain made the ride home unpleasant on the road, rather than potential lethal on the bicycle track.
The grocery shopping isn’t meant to get exciting. Normally its a very routine event. Today it was looking perfectly ordinary until we got home, I tried to get the eggs out of the egg carton, and discovered that they were cemented in with dried yolk from one that had leaked. Attempting to prise them out of the carton, one exploded, showering me with rotting egg, and filling the kitchen with a truly evil stench.
stats. Distance 78.89 ㎞ With some misgivings I dragged myself out of bed this morning to go riding with Mark. Evan and Kelvin turned up on time, I couldn’t think of a better way to get from home to Carnegie so we rode up Gardiners Creek bike path, Kelvin muttering that he’d only been on his new bike an hour and here I was taking him around a myriad of right-angled bends on poor surfaces, determined to tip him off.
“Would madam like a ring with her breakfast?”
I don’t think the two of us could stop grinning or laughing. Half of it is relief that we’ve finally got the bloody thing and don’t need to spend our weekends surreptitiously shopping.
Jo decided not to wear it to work, not just yet, she felt strange not having told her family.
This evening we hit the phones and I called my parents and brother, I tried my sister first, but as usual she was outside with the horses, so she didn’t get to be the first to know.
A memorable day. My “quick trip into the city at lunch time” turned into a bit of a nightmare. There was a parade to celebrate the home-coming of the Australian Commonwealth Games team, so Collins Street was closed off, assorted side streets were closed off, traffic police were directing traffic every which way, and general mayhem was in the air. I eventually managed to park on Elizabeth street and walk up the road to pick up the mighty secret which can now be revealed to the world….
I just finished reading Tim Moore’s “French Revolutions” this evening and have been struck by a great longing to go away again on another bike tour … so many of the things in his writing were so evocative — the slug tennis for example — or just the descriptions of the riding.
French Revolutions, Tim Moore
ASIN: 0312316127 Buy at Amazon
Joey is getting all twitchy about the length of this week and the great secret to be revealed…
House cleaning. House cleaning. Then a little more house cleaning.
Somewhere in the past few weeks we seem to have omitted a few of the routine chores. This morning they all caught up with us! There was a frenzy of domesticity, followed by relief at being able to see the kitchen bench, comfortably walk across the floor in bare feet, and enter the bathroom without needing a full decontamination suit.
The Aggregate: The Aggregate refers to a collection of researchers and the technologies that they use to make the components of a parallel computer work better together. Since before our first Linux PC work in the PAPERS project, we have been considering all aspects of Compilers, Hardware Architectures, and Operating Systems (KAOS) together, optimizing system performance rather than performance of the individual parts. The only aspect of our computer system designs that is set in stone is our name.
Incredible for a Saturday — we were breakfasted and out of the house by ten o’clock. The secret shopping mission kept us occupied for most of the day, was completed by four pm, so we adjourned for a well-earned glass of wine at South Bank, closely followed by an equally well-earned pint ‘o Guinness.
Somewhere along the way I succumbed to an advertised “sale” and bought 256M more memory for wyvern, turns out that Dick Smith’s sale price is still well over the average green guide price, but at least I’ve finally bought some, so there’s no more excuse.
Just to make sure I don’t forget, Casey and Zoe are now firmly recorded in my address book. I even sent their birthday present.
Wow, there was a huge thunderstorm this evening while we were up the road having dinner. Getting home involved leap-frogging from shelter to shelter along the street. Thunderstorms aren’t meant to happen here in the winter!
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 [2002-09-04 Wed]](https://ajft.org/img/default2.jpg)
![Journal for [2002-09-03 Tue]](https://ajft.org/img/default3.jpg)
![Journal for [2002-08-21 Wed]](https://ajft.org/img/default1.jpg)
