Something happened to summer! Yesterday was looking great, woke up today and it was gray and rainy from start to finish. Felt more like December in England than December in Australia. What to do on a day like that? Sit inside and read and fiddle with the PC, try to find out why, ever since it was “upgraded” by my Employer, it won’t run for more than a day or two without shutting itself off.
Something must have re-sparked my interest in Plan9, so I downloaded and installed it on the spare 4G partition on niflheim. Unfortunately I discovered that once it was installed it had somehow clobbered the boot record so Windows XP now won’t boot.
[http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9dist/]: Plan9 [http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/]: Inferno [http://mapage.noos.fr/~repo]: homepage [http://einstein.ssz.com/hangar18/]: plan9 stuff from a weird mob
sigh discovered today that a person I know has just spent the last six weeks in hospital after being driven into by a drunk driver while out cycling. Apparently the driver simply fell asleep and ran into them. This didn’t put me in the best of moods for a quick jaunt in from Clayton to East Melbourne to attend a product demonstration. Then along the way I met:
A motorist travelling slowly who started to veer into my lane as I passed; surprise, surprise, he had the Melways street directory open across the steering wheel and was reading it.
TODO: I need to automate some of my Monday morning updates and installations. I’d look at playing around a little more with Narval if it wasn’t so appallingly slow and (so-far) unusable.
[www.Xemacs.org]: editor of choice. [www.cygwin.com]: utilities to make Windows2000 bearable. SNMP MIBs:
www.somix.com/software/mibs www.inotech.com/mibs/foreview.html
With much groaning and moaning we dragged ourselves out of bed this morning, applied sufficient coffee to achieve basic humanity, then made our way to Spencer St station in order to catch the train. Steam locomotive R711 of the South Western Railway Society was there in all its hissing and shrieking glory, ready to take us to Echuca and back.
It was a very long day. Four hours in the train to get up to Echuca, four hours of paddle-steamer trip and touring Echuca, then four hours back home again.
Last things first. Considering the early start tomorrow, going out to see an 11 pm show might not be the smartest thing in the world, but knowing what a big fan Joey is, I’d booked tickets to see Mick Thomas in the Spiegeltent. We turned up around 10 pm and sat around with a drink, watching the queue grow longer and longer. Eventually we joined it, wondering, along with everyone else, why nobody could get inside.
The motorists … the motorists…. This morning there was the lady who unsuccessfully tried to peel and eat a banana with one hand while trying to drive her Mercedes with the other. If she’d only looked before swerving into my lane I wouldn’t have had to blast on the horn. Now she’s probably going to tell everyone about the mean biker who appeared from nowhere, and how dangerous motorbikes are.
Laugh of the Morning: There I was, sitting at a set of traffic lights waiting my turn and watching the traffic go by. A non-descript, two-tonne truck caught my eye, company name COPE and slogan Fragile Cargo Specialists emblazoned on its side. As it rounds the corner BANG up the kerb, then BANG back down again. I wonder what fragile cargo it was carrying…
I’ve scored a win with Telstra. After battling last week through their voice mail system and a myriad of menus in an attempt to change my address details, only to be told that it must be done in writing, I duly sent off the change of address form.
Joey’s birthday seemed a great success.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the cold wind and torrential rain early in the day, we spent a wonderful five hours at the Healesville Sanctuary. Dodging a few brief showers was infinitely preferable to dodging the hordes of tourists and screaming kids that we could have met.
One of the most interesting events was during the daily raptor display. The first keeper wasn’t sure whether they’d be able to get through the three birds normally displayed, since the wind was gusting strongly and they were concerned that they might “lose someone” should they decide to fly off a few kilometres downwind.
Stupid, stupid me. It was wet and cold all day yesterday, you’d have thought I’d take a hint. No, foolishly I hopped on the bike this morning and didn’t put on my wet-weather gear. Ten minutes later I was soaking wet, freezing cold, and thinking about going home to change!
MLP [http://www.scenicroutes.co.nz/]: Phil advertised a two week ride in NZ in late December, early January. Looks interesting, I’ve always wanted to ride in NZ and Joey seems keen, especially since she’s likely to be out of work at the time.
Another episode in the saga of attempting to buy an outdoor table. I’m starting to think that businesses just don’t want our business.
Summoning up all of our courage, Jo and I drove off on a wet Sunday afternoon to do what every couple does — go furniture shopping. We tried another Barbecues Galore store, but they didn’t have the table we saw yesterday, in fact they didn’t have any small tables.
Election day… Bah! After the quality of the electoral campaigning over the last few weeks, I don’t think any of the politicians are worthy of running a school fete, let alone a country.
MLP http://www.vic.greens.org.au/: The state and national Greens party http://www.greens.org.au/: The state and national Greens party http://www.democrats.org.au/: Australian Democrats http://www.australianbicyclelobby.com/: not only one of the longest domain names I’ve seen, but a coalition of cycle groups raising political issues.
Stupid me, I thought it would be easy to buy a small table for our balcony. Just walk around a few shops, check out a few prices, buy one and go home….
Lots of ornate cast iron tables with curlicues and tile or glass tops…. Lots of huge tables that wouldn’t fit on the balcony…. Finally a suitable table in a Barbecues Galore store. Now the fun begins.
We’ve picked the one piece of stock with no price-tag.
Strange, I can’t find anything important happening on the date 9/11, I wonder what all the Americans are on about?
MLP [http://blog-java.sourceforge.net/]: Java servlet-based blog. Came from the enormous list of blog resources at http://www.larkfarm.com/wlm/roll_your_own.htm.
Well, I didn’t want to cycle to work today, but the mountain bike and the motor bike conspired against me and so I had to. The Honda started, ran for thirty seconds, then died when I turned the headlight on, trying to restart it the battery was too flat to turn it over. I really must try and fix that dying battery and voltage regulator.
Still raining, still grey, still miserable.
[http://www.groundeffect.co.nz/] — ordered some new bike nicks for me and a winter jersey for Joey. We’ve both been meaning to do this for weeks. Pity that they won’t turn up in time for this weekend’s Deadly Treadly Tour.
I think I’ve got niflheim re-installed and operating under OpenBSD now.
Every day the “shared path” that I ride along brings new and interesting challenges. Somedays its the dogs, other days the ankle deep mud, today, an aggressive pedestrian.
Walking towards me on the wrong side of the path, eyes on his feet, shirt and suit jacket unbuttoned, tie half-undone, two large armfulls of parcels, he nearly walked into me as I stopped on the bridge. I couldn’t get around him so I just stood there.
TODO: Since there’s a date-of-birth record in my copy of bbdb, wouldn’t it be nice if Xemacs’ calendar could extract these and give you warning of upcoming events. Oh bugger, it’s in the bbdb TODO list already!
It rained heavily again last night, so this morning the cycle track was covered in mud and crap and Gardiners Creek was flowing strongly. In the last few days I’ve seen so many birds that I thought I’d keep a list of them somewhere.
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.
