Today is the first day of the rest of my life – step one

posted by robert
Jul 14

The time has come to do what I’ve been saying for along time. Anyone who knows me probably won’t believe me because I’ve been saying it for so long. But the time is now. If you don’t know me, you won’t know what the hell I’m talking about. Sweet justice isn’t it. Stay tuned.

A while ago I was going to put my fairly large post up about the internet filtering stuff, but I couldn’t quite complete my argument for my point of view without seeming to support dodgy stuff. So instead I’ll just link to it’s time to tell mum because that’s got the same point of view put up way better.

So the Menzies classic was fun. Somehow I managed to get second place in the D grade Criterium and actually won money. About 8-10 minutes in I got frustrated with being blocked and kept mostly at the back of the group by the other riders and somehow managed to find enough energy to not only pass one or two, but to pass the whole pack, and launch off towards the break away where Matt was at the time. That little manoeuvre nearly burnt me out so a lap or 2 of recovery behind Matt and we went to work on it. After quite a few laps Matt was dropping back and somehow I managed to stay out there, solo, chasing after the leader, for what seemed like an eternity. Another rider managed to escape the pack and bridge to Matt and then eventually to me, she passed me for a lap or 2 which gave me a much needed rest but I was able to regain second place. Between us it was a sprint finish for second/third and I managed a 1 second lead by the official timings, but it was surely less and wasn’t much more than a bike length or so. The data logged off the Garmin was amazing, apart from it lapping on the up and back not just the up of the course. Note: Average HR: 186 bpm for nearly 29 minutes. Wot tha !

The following day was the actual Menzies classic race. Basically a 132km sprint. We left Kalgoorlie on the bus with a wet forecast and someone on the bus said they’d done the ride 15 times and it had never rained. That clearly jinxed it, because from at least half way to Menzies it was wet, and it was raining in Menzies on arrival, and didn’t stop while we were there. The gutters were flowing and there were pools of water in the road. It was cold and wet. So we spent an hour or so sitting on the bus to keep warm and out of the rain, before setting off at 10am. Thoughts running through my mind over the first 5 km where along the lines of what the hell have I done, why am I here, what am I doing and so on. Before the official start on the neutral section lead out, we got splashed with red mud (Kalgoorlie White as its known) all over our glasses, computers and what was clean team kit. I don’t exactly remember when it stopped raining and when I stopped being cold (fingertips especially), but by about 30km out we were working quite well as a group, cruising at about 40km/hr. The pace granularly slowed slightly as we went and it bumped up about 5km/hr back to 40 around the time C grade caught us at about the 75km mark. When B grade caught us at about the 95km mark the speed jumped again. From when C caught us, I was just able to hang on the back, and with B it was even harder. The group was surging to try to shake us off, and it very nearly succeeded, but with the slow downs between various inclines (there’s no hills out there) we were able to grab the tail of the group again. If it wasn’t for a guy crashing into a road sign about 1-2 km from the finish I would have been in the first main pack across the line, instead I was about 10 seconds behind. Still I was 39th across the line, and 16th for D grade. Not bad for a first go. Matt managed to win one of the interim sprints and got cash for that too. I’ve got no doubt that this would have made a nice bump to my average speed for the year. Averaging over 40km/hr for 132km is no easy task. So for what started out with me in a never again mood I finished quite pleased and will return next year to try to improve my result.

Now for an iinet support update. Reporting a no dial tone fault resulted in it being resolved for less than 5 days before the fault reoccurred. Of course I was not informed when it was fixed; we wouldn’t want to communicate with the customer after all. Logged the fault again, and after a few more phone calls they were able to fix it on the second go however the Telstra tech booked for 8-12 arrived after 12 and took quite a while to trace the fault and fix it. Epic fail, but it is iinet.

The Tour de France is on again, and to make sure I didn’t miss any of it, I setup a quick mythtv box. Using the PlayTV usb dual HD tuner on Fedora 13 was remarkably easy, and the box is running mostly ok. I still heavily dislike the overly complicated application that myth has become, to me it’s gone down the same bad road that poopnuke and so on did. Way too many modular features of varying quality. Poopnukes issue was poorly (insecurely) written modules and overly complicated design to support these modules. On the surface myth looks the same. Perhaps I’ll dig deeper; really all I want is a basic PVR (record, watch, schedule, EPG etc) and local media playback (video, music). Local – none of this DLNA bullshit, just plain NFS mounts from my NAS box. Really I don’t even care much about the PVR bit, it’s a nice to have. First off I’d ditch all this BS about weather, applications and so on. Reminds me of an old African saying my Dad told me; The more you have; the move problems you have.

I’m still watching a fair bit of TV too. Curb Your Enthusiasm has grown on me. New seasons of Eureka and Warehouse 13 have started; I’m yet to start watching either. Top Gear is awesome as usual. I’m slowly working my way through Treme, it’s good, but hard to explain why. I’m hoping it comes together towards the season end like The Wire did.

Oh one last thing. I made the team for the Tour de Timor. So I went out and bought a mountain bike for riding on dirt. Only taken it out a few times so far, and it feels like driving a big rig or a boat. I’m trying to come up with a suitably nautical name. Something like the SS Wally.

PS: word of the year so far, by a very long shot is: Credenza.

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More random ponderings

posted by robert
May 30

There’s just too much going on right now to put a real post together, so this will have to do.

On a trip to find out about some fixie wheels I bought a track bike. Much hilarity will surely ensue. Riding it on the paths and road around my house is both awesome and totally scary at the same time. I need practice, lots of practice.

So I signed up for the Menzies Classic this year. It’ll be my first real cycling race and I’m doing the Criterium too, so we’ll see how that goes. The 130km sprint should be a good laugh for sure. I’ve heard some rumours going around that the Tour De Timor will be on again and if that’s the case, and work’s going to do the same sponsorship thing they did last year, I’ll sign up, buy a mountain bike and have a go.

I saw an amusing and thought provoking comment on a news article regarding how the power company is allowed to cut off people in hardship. It was along the lines of how the gap between the “haves” and “have nots” is widening (rich and poor etc) and wondering how far it will go, perhaps back to medieval times with lords and serfs. I hadn’t really thought much about that before, but with the costs of what everyone assumes is a necessity going up around us for various reasons; it’s surely going to leave people behind. I’d previously thought about it when wondering what kind of people use pay phones at night after seeing someone in one near an IGA not far from where I lived, once off it seems ok, but regularly and it got me thinking about it. At the time I realised that if you don’t make lots of calls, why pay $20-30 a month every month for the privilege of having a phone. Yes privilege. Not everyone can justify that in their budget, and when you consider a prepaid mobile with no credit can still accept calls for up to a year after the credit expires (maybe more, depending on the last recharge value, network etc), why spend a fixed amount per month which could easily be done without. Now electricity is another matter. Without that, people are using candles or gas lanterns for lighting. Hopefully they have gas cooking and hot water too otherwise they are really left behind by modern society. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for user pays though, and if you can’t pay for power then they shouldn’t have to supply you with it, it’s just a pity that the lack of competition leads to poor management and cost overruns which then get passed onto the customer. With the price of gas so low, it makes me wonder how viable a small scale gas turbine would be (combined with inverter/charger to cope with peak loads). Purely from a science point of view, capital wise it’d be a cost overrun, but it could be an interesting diversion.

Speaking of diversions, I’ve been watching Life, it’s really good, pity it got canned. I also picked up Warehouse 13 after hearing of a possible cross over episode with the next season of Eureka. So far it seems ok.

Things that aren’t ok, still include my iinet connection. Since the fault which the call centre couldn’t resolve my throughput has been way down, 50% down, with no change in sync speed. No amount of modem and cable swapping, router swapping or speed profile adjusting makes any difference. Sync speed is basically the same as ever, but throughput is way down, even from their ftp. I would call the call centre but after the last attempt I’m half scared that they’ll not only waste an hour of my time but they’ll slow it down further. I’m convinced it’s their generic “port rebuild” solution which caused it but the shaved monkey on the end of the line can only press the button. Maybe the answer is to just switch ISP’s, after all there is no reason for customer loyalty. None at all. FAIL.

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TV, game and stuff update

posted by robert
May 5

The Wire is the most awesome and well written TV show I’ve ever seen. That sucked up at least 60 hours of my life over about 4 weeks but was so totally worth it.

This TV season I’ve picked up a few new shows that are quite good. Sons of Tucson (cancelled after 4 eps *sigh*), The Middle. Modern Family isn’t bad either. Stargate Universe is in a particularly strange place, it started off ok but a bit slow, then went downhill and just before the mid season break got better, they copped out on the resolution of the mid season cliff hanger (1 ep, come on!) and since then seems to have been ok. It has been renewed for a second season so hopefully some momentum will be kept.

I had some serious training to do for the 5 dams ride, which I did on March 14th. I think my total of 262km for a single day will stand as my PB for some time to come. The Tour de Freedom is on again, this time 1000km. Not sure where/how the route will change, but I’m going to do it again this year. Hopefully with sponsorship so it won’t cost me quite so much out of pocket like last year.

Over the past few months, storage was still a minor concern. Power usage reared its head again due to the price going up again. It wasn’t totally gone from my mind, as it’s still something I like to reduce, but quite often the up front additional cost for lower consuming devices is greater than the savings over a reasonable time frame. However even the minor power consumption of hard drives, makes fewer larger drives more cost effective than many smaller ones. Even at the 1-2tb range which is where I was looking. So the total own+run cost over 2 years is within 5%, and fewer drives are quieter and produce less heat and need less sata ports, so that’s a win there. So the result of that is I moved towards the 2tb range. Ok so I wrote that before I upgraded and just changed the tense, and since then the price dropped again, so the power usage would be a larger proportion than before.

I acquired Lego Rock Band from JB’s the other week, and promptly exported the songs for use in RB2. While I was at it I noticed the RB1 export code was finally available in the aus store, and thus I bought that and a ton of other DLC too. Pity they never bothered to release RB2 in Aus, because I really wanted to get the RB2 instruments (to compliment my RB1 ones) but as they didn’t bother my money ended up going to Logitech for their new guitars. Unfortunately branded GH and featuring the touch slider which doesn’t do anything in RB they just aren’t as good as the original RB guitars (no solo keys, the buttons pitch is the same as all GH guitars (too narrow), no effects switch etc). Hopefully when RB3 comes out this year it will come out everywhere at the same time.

I’ve managed to borrow Heavy Rain and had a play of that. It’s very well done and the story is engaging. I think to finish it I’m going to need some days off work as I just can’t find the time right now.

After all the news surrounding it, I watched MIA’s Born Free video clip. I can see why it was removed from the tooba, but I don’t think the fact the video showed a USA military force rounding up gingers was part of that. Not sure what the directors motivations were behind the clip was, could it have been politically motivated? Something related to the Red Army problems from Thailand or just USA vs The Free World. After all, the clip was titled “Born Free”. I still find it funny when someone doesn’t like something and it gets published and blown out of proportion by the media, it drives people who wouldn’t have seen it to actively seek it to see what all the fuss is about. Another recent example was Kick Ass, featuring the apparently foul mouthed 11 year old character Hit Girl. Needless to say I’m going to see that, I just haven’t yet. Prior to the news coverage I’d never even heard of it.

I bought a USB sata drive docking thing and it’s instructions had some great Engrish in them. I think the best bit was describing the Disk Management applet:

Right pop-up the additional disks menus choose “delete disk segmentation.” Click “Segmentation additional disks”, followed by a clew to operate. Then you can storage your data.

I have no idea what the clew to operate is so hopefully the manufacturer will get a clue and not auto translate instructions, they’d be better off not bothering and making it 10c cheaper.

Argh it’s nearly 6.10 AM ffs.

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