Adrian Tritschler's stuff
My website, an agglomerative mess, probably half-eaten by a grue
© 1984 - 2026 Adrian Tritschler
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Cycling along the Kennet canal towpath
Adrian Tritschler's stuff
My website, an agglomerative mess, probably half-eaten by a grue
© 1984 - 2026 Adrian Tritschler
Streatly to Devizes
dst. (㎞) Today 80.0 Trip total 145.0 Odometer ??.? Today’s distance estimated.
The sun comes up at 4.30 am! Jet lag kicks in and I’m wide awake. Lie around until 7 am dozing and listening to the birds — and trying to stretch my neck and shoulders. Ouch!
Pore over the maps and changing my mind — my original plans were to go further north, I think I’ll explore Cornwall!
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Ceremonial first beer of the bike trip
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Along the banks of the Kennet canal near Reading
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Norky bike doing the tourist thing at Windsor castle
Heathrow to Goring
dst. (㎞) Today 65.0 Trip total 65.0 Today’s distance estimated.
Day the first, long and arduous. Out of Heathrow and found that the airline had ripped off the speedo cables — finally, after years of the cables looking “nearly ready to rip off.” Then I managed to twist the valve while trying to pump up the rear tyre and flattened it — always the rear. After removing wheel and tyre I repaired it and finally got on my way.
Melbourne to Heathrow
I woke up this morning feeling that my trip wasn’t really happening — I just haven’t prepared anywhere near as much as I should have!
It was noon before we went out looking for a box to put my bike in. The first three shops were shut, finally Lawrencia Cycles in Glenferrie road came through — with the only box on their floor! Absolute dismay at the size of the box, but after dropping the seat, removing wheels and pedals, and spinning the bars around it all went in.
Dentists and Motorbikes
Just what I needed first thing on a Monday morning — to have to go to the dentist! I guess it was better than getting a toothache halfway through my holiday, which was bound to happen if I hadn’t gone. Discoverered again that local anaesthetic and motorbikes don’t mix, riding to work afterwards was a hassle with my balance not feeling quite right.
One of the worst parts of going to the dentist always seems to be the inane conversation or questions that you have to listen to while your mouth is wedged open and you can’t answer.
![MLP — Bookmarks for [2001-05-22 Tue]](https://ajft.org/img/default4.jpg)
MLP — Bookmarks for [2001-05-22 Tue]
http://timbot.org/: Timbot
'ol music
Victim of a sudden old music attack: listening to the Undertones, and then found a couple of songs by the Thought Criminals, something I thought I’d never be able to do.
Sea-slug fanboy
What would you know, a quick attempt to find out a little about the sea-slug we found yesterday and I discover that there is a www.seaslug.com and www.seaslugforum.net! Not only that, but there are pictures of the beastie that we found.
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An evil-looking swarm of bugs
Things in rock pools
Meandering back along the coast from Inverloch to Melbourne we stopped in at a few of the lookouts and went exploring the cliffs and rockpools. The two most interesting finds of the day were:
A four-sided starfish! In amongst a myriad of small, green, pentagonal starfish, I found a mutant square one. A greenish weedy looking seaslug thingy, about 15cm long. When poked with a stick it squirted purple dye at us, then wriggled around across the pool.
QOTD
Quote from a conversation in the car:
That’d be either the Hairy Nosed Wombat, wombatus hirsutus, or the Combat Wombat, errr, the Common Wombat.
…oddly, there is a Melbourne band called Combat Wombat. Maybe not so odd after all, it does roll off the tongue quite well.
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Jo and the bikes on the bank of Lake Kerferd
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Jo on the banks of Lake Lake Kerferd near Beechworth
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Jo on the banks of Lake Kerferd near Beechworth
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Jo running around the lake at Beechworth
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Jo at Beechworth
Authentication and assimilation
I have been very lax. Almost two weeks since last I wrote and many things have happened.
Mainly spent the last few days at work looking into the feasibility of amalagamating the various authentication realms that we possess. It would be really nice to be able to seamlessly sign-on to the Novell NDS, Netscape MDS, Microsoft and MIT Kerberos systems all at once, then have SSH and everything else just work.
Full Moon 11:50pm (AUSEST)
Why do I have an empty post telling me that there’s a full moon tonight? It certainly looks like a diary entry from emacs has managed to escape and somehow got into the blog. Where in the history of the blog did something create the file – I could dig into the history, but it could be in mercurial for one version, or cvs from an earlier one.
Success
A highly successful day. Marko and I were dispatched to the far reaches of Brighton to rescue Jo’s car, with the aid of a little manipulation, a few choice words, and a judicious application of Brute Force and Ignorance we coaxed it into having two gears, first and third. A nail-biting drive home, but infinitely better than having to tow it.
Feeling that a job well done deserved some reward, we spent the rest of the afternoon riding around in the sunshine, out from Doncaster to Warrandyte, listening to the birds and the river, and the odd shout of abuse from the petrol-heads who aren’t fond of cyclists.
Damn, sell in distress
I was all set to spend the afternoon sitting around doing nothing, when the last of the morning was interrupted by a phone call from a damsel in distress. Jo’s car seems to have sensed that she wants to sell it, so with great skill it has coasted to halt and refuses to change into gear — any gear. As a result, it is sitting in Brighton, she is sitting on the train, and no one is happy.
The theme is beer
Finally got to have a social beer with cos, after we’ve been talking about it for many a month. Yet-Another-Franchise-Bar-Chain, a Belgian one this time, a decent place to be, and very enjoyable beers, but I’m not sure I like the increasing en-Franchisement of the pubs. As Ox said “what with all the Aussie bars in France, and theme bars here, pretty soon you’ll have to go to Europe to get a Carlton.
Celtic club for a pint and a song
The power of advertising! After spotting a special offer from the Celtic Club for a pint and a meal for $8.50, Jo and I went in for dinner. All that and live music from Stephen O’Prey (ex of Weddings, Parties, Anything). An intimate occasion, only about ten people in the audience, so we sat and ate and drank and chatted with Stephen during the breaks in his set.
Will I or won't I?
Tossed and turned all last night, a crisis of conscience regarding security vs adventure, comfy flat or bike touring… I think the bike touring has won. Now to actually do it…
Step one, eight weeks leave … accomplished! Damn, that was easy.
Step two, getting to Europe … not so easy on five weeks notice.
Lest we forgot
Anzac Day — Lest we forget. And guess what — I forgot my brother’s wedding aniversary. Even rang him up to say hello since we hadn’t spoken for a couple of months, but didn’t realise what day it was!
MLP — MRTG Bookmarks for [2001-04-23 Mon]
http://www.davincitandems.com/: Da Vinci tandems
http://www.mrtg.org/:
http://www.its.monash.edu.au/novell/monitor/: Monash ITS NetWare server monitoring
Rain, more rain
More rain, lots more rain! It must be one of the laws of motorcycling that the time to dry out your shoes is proportional to the time until you next need to wear them. Today they were just down to “damp” by the time I had to put them on and come home again.
Melbourne’s motorists did their best this morning to convince me that they have an expected life span measured in months, especially the semi-trailers doing 110 ㎞/h in low visibility and high water along the freeway.
Random cycling snippets
A bunch of random cycling stuff; after wondering over the weekend what had happened to the Wide Open Road tour of France in July, and making up my mind to mail them today, I received an update from them about their ride — now I have to make up my mind which has the higher priority — going on the tour, or living here in a place that I really enjoy…
Sunday too wet today
Drizzle, rain, and the occasional deluge. For the first time in two years I actually drove up the street to the café for brunch rather than walking. It helped that the other party present had a car with her!
So what else do you do on such a day but laze on the couch and listen to old CDs, reminding you of your youth and making you think more on Henry Rollins’ diatribe on “growing up.
Mr Rollins
Henry Rollins — what can I say, he walked on stage at 9.30 pm and spoke without pause for two and a half hours. The man has the most incredible presence and intensity! Not only that, but the opening topic of conversation was what my girlfriend and I were talking about this morning — when does getting older equate to growing up?
Sitting around dowing nowt
A lazy day at home, sitting around listening to music, sniffling gently to myself with a cold. Too lazy to do much at all.
Now the thunder is rumbling in the background, so there’s even less incentive to go out or do much but sit here, listening, sipping, watching…
Maybe I should play with rrdtool, see if I can rework the MRTG monitoring that I’ve been doing of the Monash Novell servers?
In need of a holiday
Another week ends, a relief — and it was only three days long! It must be time for a long holiday. … Which leads to the evening’s entertainment, sitting, looking in stunned amazement at the scenery in Evan’s photos of his and Kyllie’s recent walking trip in Nepal. Every time I see something like this I realise, there are no mountains in Australia!
Getting there was an exercise in itself — to Evan’s house, not to Nepal!
Bleh
Hour long divisional staff meetings, red wine, cool autumn evenings. Such is today. Work drags on, nothing much changes.
MLP — Bookmarks for [2001-04-19 Thu]
http://www.suzyj.net/: Suzanne’s place — a denizen of aus.bicycle
Back a'twerk
Picked up my latest photos at lunch time, forgetting my reciept and sweet-talking them out of the staff. For once I remembered to order a CD and it seems that the extra cost is well worth the effort. I must get around to getting all my other films scanned onto CD professionally. The first few of our daywalks in Magaliesburg look pretty good to me!
Magaliesberg, South Africa Riding home at dusk as it started to rain it was hard to believe it’s late autumn, the air was warm, it smelt like thunder, the rain felt like hail.
Nothing very much
Tuesday, wandering about at home performing essential domestic chores, listening to music and fiddling with my website.
I’d heard on the radio that Joey Ramone had died, so half the morning was spent nostalgically listening to old Ramones songs — 1-2-3-4 followed by 2 1/2 minutes of noise.
The journal idea has been rattling around for some time, so after checking up on a few websites I noticed that cos had rewritten ordinary world to use php.
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The Noojee trestle bridge
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The Noojee trestle bridge
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Marko posing in front of a cow
About
ajft looking stylish and black
…The Owner
There’s not much more I can add to who I am.
…The Site
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.
…The ISP
- Hosted by @cos