Jelly legs this morning, but rode to work anyway. The forecast is for 18 degrees, it sounds almost spring time. Certainly wasn’t warm for the first half of the ride though!
The major news of the day (or of yesterday I guess), is that I now have two new nieces. Hello to Casey Elizabeth and Zoe Anne, if you ever get to read this! 14:08 and 14:14 yesterday, at 7lb and 6lb 7oz respectively.
This evening I went on the Mascot Cycles ride for the first time in months. Seems that it has changed a bit, a lot of the faces I knew aren’t there anymore, and the people that are there are there for a more serious ride. The first lap was gentle enough, but as soon as we turned around the roundabout for the second, off they went, harder than I could keep up.
Monday morning, groan. Way too little sleep after staying up to watch the Tour last night. To add to that, whatever I did to my neck last Friday is still sore, so I was half tempted to stay in bed with a hot-water bottle, sulking.
2001 TDF jersey wearers I managed to find the answer to a question that has been bugging me for about a year — just who was wearing the polka-dot jersey on l’Alpe d’Huez last year when they shot past me?
So much for the nice weather! Today it was back to grayness, windy and cold.
Spent the morning being a good little aunt and uncle and looking after Jack while his mum and dad went off to a brunch. A rather entertaining time for all concerned as Jack explored the wardrobes in the spare room, just in case someone had hidden any trains in there, and attempted to drive a large steam-engine around the lounge room floor.
A beautiful spring-like day. The good intentions were to get up and out of the house early, visit the markets and be out shopping by ten. After a bad night’s sleep we woke around eight, but then fell asleep again, so it wasn’t until ten thirty that we could step outside the door. Markets and groceries, then breakfast at Via Ponte. Sadly, the coffee isn’t up to scratch. Not as bad as last week’s shocker, but still not good.
More thoughts on a new PC. The Shuttle SS51 looks pretty cool, as usual, it was brought to my attention on slashdot.
www.shuttle.com: the Shuttle SS51G product description http://www.satotech.com.au/: Australian supplier, and they’re nearby in Box Hill
Bloody bike lights! Half way to work this morning and my rear flashing light snapped in half and fell off. That’s the second one of these where the plastic clip has just fatigued after a couple of months use, there’s nothing wrong with the light. I managed to catch it as it bounced around on the pannier rack, and have reattached it with packing tape. Not quite as good as gaff tape, but it holds a lot of the world together.
Riding home I nearly ran off the bike track and into the trees. I thought I was on the track, then saw a red flashing tail light off to my right. Just as I started to head towards it I realised that a) it was only about a foot off the ground, and b) it was bouncing up and down. I swerved back onto the path just in time to see a Jack Russell terrier come bounding out of the shrubbery with the light on its collar!
There’s only one problem with staying up until 2 am watching the Tour de France, and that is getting up the next morning and going to work, especially when the radio informs you that its a pleasant 3.4 °C outside. All thoughts of cycling disappeared, a strong coffee and smoke-emitting toast helped me on my way.
Lunch time today and I sent off an email to one of the other guys from the France tour last year, wondering whether he’d stayed up last night to watch the stage.
Spent an interesting afternoon exploring parts of the CBD. It started as an optimistic trip to the shops, but the ones we wanted weren’t open on a Sunday, so we delved into the arcades and alleys. Found places I’d heard of, but only had vague recollections of where they were — on the other hand, I’m not sure I’ll be able to find any of them again…
We also wasted a little of our time and a little of someone else’s time by visiting an apartment that is for-sale and telling a few lies to a real-estate agent.
Hmm, some much-needed house work. A little archaeological digging and we rediscovered the lounge room floor. A visit to the Richmond markets and we’ve convinced the fridge that we still have a use for it. Then probably the worst coffee of the year, a shockingly bad serve from a favourite café, scalded milk and weak watery coffee.
Not much else, lazed around after being up half the night watching the tour.
A 9:40 am appointment at St Vincent’s hospital to see the Orthopaedic people. The doctor wasn’t happy about me managing to dislocate my arm for a fourth time and so he’s referred me to the hospital. Stupidly I thought that a 9:40 am appointment meant an appointment that started at 9:40 am. Turns out that it meant an appointment that started at 9:55 am, but only because the person before me had given up and gone home!
There are huge masses of kelp washed up along the beach and rocks today, but no signs of the whales that were seen on Friday. It’s getting to be a joke that where ever I go, there are no whales. Fishermen on the pier, coffees in the café, another relaxing day as we unwound from last week.
3.30 this afternoon and I decided that I desperately needed to get out and go for a bike ride, to try and capture the last of the sunny afternoon, so while everyone else snoozed on the couch I rode off along the Great Ocean Road, arranging for them to pick me up at Torquay.
Woke up, ate, went for a walk, ate, sat around the house, ate, went for a walk, slept. Nearly a perfect day really.
Marko offered what may well be one of the centuries more meaningful wine reviews. Sitting down to a magnificent beef curry with a large glass of red, he uttered the following:
Ere, this is alright; and there’s lots of it.
Truer words are rarely spoken.
Not a very productive week, the more machines that we install Sophos anti-virus software on at Monash, the more machines we seem to have that are experiencing problems. Or maybe that should be, that are eXPeriencing problems, since most of them seem to be on Windows XP. No amount of removal and reinstallations seems to work. The NetWare 6 native file access product is driving me crazy too, the test server works perfectly, the production one will let Windows machines login but not Macintoshes.
Cold Brr! Another frosty morning, and a very cold ride to work. Almost reminded me of Canberra.
MLP http://www.cofax.org/: yet another content management system. Java based, much nicer design, no ugly URLs… need more copious spare time to investigate further. Stupidity Received an interesting email today. In February I read a number of papers on possible future operating systems, all published by Microsoft. All were hosted on the website http://research.microsoft.com/ and all are publicly viewable and all have the authors’ names displayed.
PHP and emacs Useful snippet for formatting PHP files. Handy if I’m going to try and delve into postnuke any more. It is generating some abominable HTML, a mix of HTML 4.01, XHTML and just plain wrong.
(defun php-mode-hook () (setq tab-width 4 c-basic-offset 4 c-hanging-comment-ender-p nil indent-tabs-mode (not (and (string-match “/\\(PEAR\\|pear\\)/” (buffer-file-name)) (string-match “\.php$” (buffer-file-name)))))) TV and le Tour I carefully left work so I could drop in on friends and watch SBS’ 6.
XML Windowing Toolkit: Open-source framework for thin-client applications. Bicycle Tours in Russia: from bookmarks Cycle Touring Club: Oldest cycling organization in the world (I think). Generally I’ve found that their site isn’t very useful if you aren’t a member. Tandem Club of Australia: Infrequently updated, but fairly useful. Hack in the Box: Hack in the box. Foot and Mouth Update for Walkers and Cyclists: Timely updates of the 2001 Foot and Mouth epidemic in the UK.
An old friend from my Uni days is visiting Melbourne this weekend and he’d promised to call me so we could catch up. Vaguely I’d known that years ago John had said that he had a friend called Droo. This morning John called up and points out that Droo is Bund Droo, and so I know him already. On further investigation I probably met him years ago at John’s wedding! The coincidences were explored at great length over an excellent lunch at the Blue Train and a number of pints of Guinness.
polydistortion.net: Cos’s home http://bund.com.au/: Friends, colleagues, and providers of server Bicycle NSW: NSW state bicycle organisation Bicycle Victoria: Victorian state bicycle organisation
Gallery and PHP-nuke or Postnuke look like I should investigate them. This business of building everything from scratch has got to stop.
http://gallery.sourceforge.net/: maybe I should investigate using Gallery for my photo albums. http://phpnuke.org/: PHP and MySQL content management system. http://www.postnuke.com/: yet another content management system.
A throat full of razor blades and a steel band around my chest…. Not quite, but artistic license is always helpful when feeling sick. I’m spending today in bed, trying not to cough out my insides.
I’ve still got a cold, snuffling and wheezing, but its getting better. Lying in bed this morning I remembered that this time last year I was somewhere in France, but also had a cold.
Wondering what I was doing last year, I’ve ended up spending part of the afternoon catching up on some more of my journal. I got back from my trip with the best of intentions of transferring it from paper to here, so far so little has been done.
From The Age, Wednesday June 26. Originally from Guardian.
If philosophy’s your subject, here are some sites to help the thought processes.
The Argument Clinic: [http://www.univnorthco.edu/philosophy/clinic.html] — Submit an argument to the clinic and have it critiqued by staff at the University of Northern Colorado. The Atheism Web: Logic and Fallacies: [http://infidels.org/news/atheism/logic.html] — An excellent introduction to contructing logical arguments, together with an intriguing list of common fallacies. Bjorn’s Guide to Philosophy: [http://knuten.
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 [2002-07-31 Wed]](https://ajft.org/img/default4.jpg)
![Journal for [2002-07-29 Mon]](https://ajft.org/img/default3.jpg)
![Journal for [2002-07-27 Sat]](https://ajft.org/img/default2.jpg)
