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© 1984 - 2024 Adrian Tritschler

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More idiots parking blocking the path

Thursday, Feb 19, 2009

@ Adrian Tritschler

Around and around we go; Connex and Monash City Council, Monash City Council and Connex…. Every couple of weeks someone decides to ignore the no parking signs, to ignore the huge white markings on the ground, to ignore the fact that they’re blocking the footpath and bike path, and decides to park illegally at the end of the Oakleigh station car-park. Anyone on foot who is skinny enough can squeeze past, anyone on a bike, with a pram or shopping trolley or who is fatter than average either cannot get past at all, or has to scrape along the side of the idiot’s car.

Kafkaesque bureaucracy; EPA & Monash City Council

Thursday, Jan 22, 2009

@ Adrian Tritschler

Monash City Council rang up today to verify that the rubbish dumping report that I made to the EPA that the EPA then gave to the council was a report that I wished the council to hand to their local laws officers to actually do something about. I have no idea why they make this so hard. The Red-Cross donation bins have a sign on them, the sign says to only place items in the bins and that anything outside the bins is dumped and should be reported to the EPA.

Incentivise! Incentivise! Incentivise!

Wednesday, Jun 18, 2008

@ Adrian Tritschler

Now how is this for serendipity, up until today I had never heard this magnificent new verb(?), then all of a sudden it appeared in a mailing list that I read… and was promptly shot down by the grammar police. Incentivise … now what the heck is that meant to mean and who on the planet made it up? Half an hour later and I find that the BBC has compiled a list of the top 50 office-speak phrases you love to hate and there it is at number four!

Stupidity, Security, Photography — the War on Photography

Friday, Jun 6, 2008

@ Adrian Tritschler

From Bruce Schneir’s Schneier on Security, possibly one of the best articles I’ve ever read on the increasing harassment of anyone who dares to wield a camera in a public place: … The 9/11 terrorists didn’t photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn’t photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn’t photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber Richard Reid.

We're from the government, we're here to help…

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

@ Adrian Tritschler

Everyone loves a baby… including the government so it would seem. The government in all its myriad forms; Federal, State and Local, they all want in on the act, they’re all here to help… An inundation of glossy brochures and photocopied fact sheets, two DVDs, registering with local health care, state records, national medical insurance. This morning the regional maternal health nurse came to visit, to record, to instruct and book us in for further visits at our “local” maternal health centre.

Most ridiculous British laws

Thursday, Nov 8, 2007

@ Adrian Tritschler

Adding to the meme, and courtesy of the ABC news, by way of the AFP, a list of the Most ridiculous British laws. I’m wary of these, how many times have we heard so called “laws” that turn out to be apocryphal? Anyway, here they are together with the percentage of surveyed people who thought it was the most ridiculous: Most ridiculous British laws It is illegal to die in the Houses of Parliament (27 per cent) It is an act of treason to place a postage stamp bearing the British monarch upside down (7 per cent) In Liverpool, it is illegal for a woman to be topless except as a clerk in a tropical fish store (6 per cent) Mince pies cannot be eaten on Christmas Day (5 per cent) In Scotland, if someone knocks on your door and requires the use of your toilet, you must let them enter (3 per cent) A pregnant woman can legally relieve herself anywhere she wants, including in a policeman’s helmet (4 per cent) The head of any dead whale found on the British coast automatically becomes the property of the king, and the tail belongs to the queen (3.

With glacial slowness….

Wednesday, Feb 14, 2007

@ Adrian Tritschler

Amazing, after nine months we have a new water meter Tada! A card appears in the mailbox, “Your water meter has been exchanged”. Well how about that, amazing! Now let me see, I first rang South East Water on May 10 but they didn’t seem to do anything until six months later when I got the “Call re. your recent enquiry” letter on October 10 then when I rang to make the booking for a meter replacement had the — “When will they come?

Australia Post and the Christmas spirit

Tuesday, Dec 19, 2006

@ Adrian Tritschler

A bunch of Christmas cards to post and a parcel to collect, I know that its a 15kg case of wine so I hopped in the car and drove over to the post office in North Road to collect it before work…. There was a careful selection of route so that I didn’t have to try and turn right across morning grumpy-traffic, but even so I was stuck for five minutes at less than a walking pace inching along North road towards Warrigal road.

Bureaucratic gibberish

Monday, Dec 4, 2006

@ Adrian Tritschler

The department is experiencing a no-growth period in its operational budget For #@(A@#)@#$ sake! The entire bloody university and every person in it is pathologically incapable of using the English language to say a single thing in plain ordinary terms. I’ve sat through meetings where each of the three managers say “at the end of the day” so many times to each other that I start to think that they are taking the mickey, I’ve heard “going forward” used four times in a single statement, and we are inundated with “issues” because apparently “problem” is now a forbidden word!

Speed of a Bureaucracy…

Friday, Nov 10, 2006

@ Adrian Tritschler

Meter series; two, the water meter An odd letter appeared in the mail yesterday, two very brief paragraphs: I refer to your recent enquiry to South East Water regarding your account for the above property. My what? I’ve no idea what they’re on about, the other paragraph merely asks me to telephone between 1 pm and 5.30 pm Monday to Friday. Unless…. Of course, how stupid of me! My recent enquiry was the telephone call I made to South East Water in May, six months ago reporting that I thought the water meter was faulty!

BigPond, BIG PAIN!

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

@ Adrian Tritschler

Almost half an hour on the phone to BigPond/Telstra trying (unsuccessfully) to change the billing address for my broadband connection to go to Monash. The online form has a number of small, fixed-length fields and no conceivable abbreviation of Rm 232, Bldg 28, ITS Division, Monash University, Wellington Rd, Clayton 3800, Vic. can be made to fit in the small, fixed length fields. The BigPond telephone staff tried, but finally admitted that they too were confronted by “the new billing system” with its small, fixed-length fields and could not change the address.

Gibberish

Saturday, Jul 16, 2005

@ Adrian Tritschler

“Going Forward on a Day By Day Basis” — Ugh! Congratulations NASA, that would have to be the bureaucratic double-speak quote of the day! No wonder the space shuttle has problems when the people in charge choose to speak such gibberish.

Issues, issues...

Friday, Apr 1, 2005

@ Adrian Tritschler

Blah blah blah … “experienced an issue” blah blah; “printing is experiencing intermittent issues” blah blah “an intermittent printing issue has been identified”. WHAT THE HECK? If it’s a PROBLEM, say that its a bloody PROBLEM! Maybe they’re too frightened to say the word “PROBLEM” in case they just might be expected to fix the bloody problem! Somebody please belt these people over the head with a thesaurus. Oops. End of rant.

'opital

Thursday, Jul 18, 2002

@ Adrian Tritschler

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!

A little bit of Bureaucracy

Tuesday, Oct 30, 2001

@ Adrian Tritschler

Why do organisations make it so hard to change my address? The Winesociety: I couldn’t login to their website for some reason. After calling them, it turns out that my email address had been chopped off at 28 characters. That was updated, then when I successfully logged in I found that I must provide them with my date of birth as proof that I’m over 18. The fact that they have already given me a membership seems to be irrelevant!

Nobody Home

Saturday, Aug 18, 2001

@ Adrian Tritschler

Jo telephoned to query how long it is likely to take to process our application and we got told the following: The landlord wasn’t expecting applications so soon as he didn’t expect the premises to be repainted so quickly. Since we’ve asked to move in on the 8th of September, which is “a fair delay,” the application must be referred to the landlord. The landlord is interstate and the application can’t be processed until he returns.

author portrait — 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

…The Grue