Moving right along.

Since I can't write, here is a photo instead. Taken one year ago yesterday from an overbridge in Heidelberg/Rosanna. I can't believe it's one year ago that I was roaming the streets, taking photos when I first hit rock bottom. The photo was taken with my long lost digital camera which I still have not yet replaced. The original was in colour but I reckon it looks pretty good in black and white.

I can't write!

I've been trying to write a post about what I did on Saturday since that night, but I just can't seem to get it right. I just can't write. Seriously, I can't remember how I managed to pass English in year 12, let alone write assignments at uni that made sense. I know what I want to say, but I can't express it, everything just get's so long winded and complicated (this post is a prime example). I need to find a way to untangle my writting. Part of the problem is that I'm just so tired by the time I think about writting a post. Working life eh...

Oh and yes part two of the powerbook chronicles is coming....

No really, it is.

June General Updates

I don't know where June went, but it's just flown past. It's probably because I got a job and am now employed at an hourly rate. If I hadn't got the job I probably would have posted part 2 of the powerbook chronicles by now...

And as for the driving thing, all going well I should have my license this time in two weeks.

Powerbook Chronicles - Part 1

About a year ago while in the grip of eBay fever and web surfing based procrastination (I should have been studying for an exam I think) I purchased an elderly Macintosh Powerbook computer. My reasoning for wanting a Macintosh powerbook was thus:

1: For one of my subjects at uni I had to use a Mac in the library for photoshop as these were regularly the only PC's that were vacant (Whoever designed those stupid "no button" mice has a lot to answer for). This got me intrigued in the whole Macintosh idea.

2: I was looking at an older windows laptop just because I thought it would be cool.

Surely it would be sensible to get a Macintosh laptop? Plus that way I would save money! So I won a Powerbook 1400 on eBay for about $30. After the seller eventually sent it to me I realised that I didn't particularly need it. I read a couple of articles on LEM about using this particular machine fore wireless internet, which sounded a pretty cool thing to do with such old technology. So it was back to eBay looking for a suitable 16 bit 802.11b PCMCIA card. From memory that cost me about $10 including postage. Bargain!

Next I realised that because the computer didn't come with a CD ROM (still working on that) I needed some way of getting the driver files for the wireless card which are bigger than a floppy disk (thankfully it has one of those) onto the computer. The answer came in a flash, literally, so I bought a PCMCIA Compact Flash adaptor for about $5 (I think that also included postage too) on eBay.

And that is where the project stalled for the next year...

Next installment coming soon.

General Updates

I'll try to elaborate more on one or two of these a bit latter but for now:

I am now on Centrelink's Newstart Allowance (AKA "the dole") and looking for a full time job. I hate the whole thing, the sooner I get a job, I don't care what, the better. This may have a detrimental effect on my degree by putting completion out another year.

I am taking driving lessons, all going well I should have my license in 5 or 6 weeks. Why 5 or 6 weeks? That's because after one and a half lessons my instructor decided I am capable of passing the test. So this week we are booking the test during my lesson (that alone costs in the order of $50!), but Vicroads has a waiting list of about 5 weeks, hence the wait.

S302 has been bought by El Zorro and will probably be seen in action working infrastructure trains around suburban Melbourne.

Macintosh has switched it's full lineup of iBook and Powerbook computers over to Intel Core Duo processors and are now known as Macbook and Macbook pro respectively. Also they have dropped the 12" iBook(Macbook) model, so it looks like my plans for one of those are down the toilet, they are now 14" only.

I could always get a second hand one at some stage though. But then again those black Macbooks are sexy...

Spam

For the first time today I got some spam that is actually purportedly from a bank I am a customer of, the contents are as follows...

Dear Commonwealth Bank of Australia member,

Due to recent hardware failure and partial loss of our database we decided to review
our customers account information to prevent security problems . If you
could take 3-5 minutes out of your online experience to verify your
account status , you will not run into any further problems .

Update your NetBank Account : Click Here

Thank You ,
Commonwealth Bank of Australia Management Stuff

Please do not reply to this confirmation email, as this message was sent to all Commonwealth Bank members.

Now for starters I'm behind the times and don't actually use NetBank, but that's not all. Oh no, if you were reading carefully or even just skimming you should have picked up a few glaring errors that give this piece of correspondence an air of rank amateurishness, they are:

1.

Dear Commonwealth Bank of Australia member

Since when does a bank have members?

2.

Thank You ,
Commonwealth Bank of Australia Management Stuff

I mean I agree that banks are full of management stuff, but this is just unprofessional even for a spamer.

Another dead give away, as with all these sorts scams is the presence of a URL with lots of .'s in it. And no I'm not including it for obvious reasons.

I should mention my method for dealing with spam, which is that my ISP flags messages as spam and I have a filter set up in Thunderbird to sort it all into a spam folder. The reason I send it to a spam folder is partly out of habit, partly out of the fact that the occasional legitimate email gets flagged by mistake and partly because I don't completely trust my ISPs spam filter for the afore mentioned reason. When it's in my spam folder I scan the sender and subject before doing a "CTRL-A, Delete" maneuver. And I must be doing something right because I'd be lucky get more than 10 or so spam emails a day. If it was worse I'd probably use a spam filter like mailwasher (that's the only one I can think of off-hand).

Bravo

Have you ever noticed how sometimes you keep seeing the same type car where ever you go. Not that you see them more than you normally would, you just for what ever reason notice a particular model of vehicle more than the rest. Yesterday it happened to me, the Mazda Bravo to be exact. I observed one parking outside the bank, the lady driving it came back 5 minutes latter and drove away. That was enough to get me going for the rest of the afternoon. Normally it's more to do with a friend or relative buying a new car. Over the course of the next 2 or 3 hours I kept seeing Mazda Bravo's. Then I started picking up Toyota Hilux's which at long range resemble Mazda Bravo's. The Toyota Hilux out numbers the Mazda Bravo by about 3 to 1. During the afternoon I even saw a few Holden Rodeos. One anomaly though was the over loaded, small Kia tray truck in Bell Street Heidelberg dragging it's rear mud guards along the road.

Now listening to:

I'm a Cuckoo, Belle & Sebastian

Keyboard Antics Again...

Finally got around to replacing my keyboard. I opted for a Logitech Standard Keyboard, which I found on sale at Dick Smith Electronics for only AU$ 9.95. It's just a no frils keyboard with a PS/2 connector. The only thing that comes close to a frill is the detatchable hand rest. It's not even listed on the logitech website, but does closely resemble the Access Keyboard without any of the one touch configurable buttons across the top. Like anything it takes a bit of getting used to.

Currently listening to:

Death Defying, Hoodoo Gurus

Keyboard antics

I spilt a glass of water on my keyboard again on Friday night...

Last time I did that I went to the trouble of unplugging the keyboard and drying it out over the heater. For some reason the following day I ended up prying off all the keys and giving it a really good clean. Beleive me, you don't want to EVER do that, there are all kinds of disgusting things lurking inside your keboard, unrecognisable at that. In the process however, I did learn that my keyboard had what seemed to be a water proof skin over all the electronic components inside.

...Back to the present. I went away over the weekend only to find out on Sunday night that my keyboard would do strange things when I pressed certain keys, strangely enough this mostly happened while using firefox. For instance, if I pressed the right hand arrow the "Find" toolbar would appear at the bottom of the screen, another one was that if I pressed the space bar while typing in the search box it would cycle to the next search engine in the list. The funny thing is that as far as I can tell none of these keys pressed have anything to do with any shortcuts to these functions. I have now decided that my keyboard does not have a waterproof skin. Finally I got fed up and am now typing on an old keyboard I had lying around. I think I'll have to let my normal keyboard dry out a bit more before attempting to use it again.

Although, I could go and get a better keyboard...

The old girl retires

S302 leads the 1240 Melbourne to Warnambool train through Footscray in Melbourne's inner west on 6 October 2005.

On January 9 2006 S302 made possibly her last journey as a front line locomotive in the V/Line fleet. In late 2004 the locomotive was brought out of storage and received much love and attention from EDI at Newport for a new lease on life. Returned to traffic in early 2005, she spent the best part of a year plying the rails on the daily 535 km round journey between Melbourne to Warnambool. Her return to service was not without trouble, having a reputation for unreliability and being speed restricted to 100 kmh as opposed to the usual 115 kmh for passenger trains on this route. Her future is uncertain.

Built in 1957 at Clyde Engineering in Sydney, she spent 37 years in service with the Victorian Railways (later known as Vicrail for a short period in the early 80's then V/Line) before being sold of in 1994. She was bought by the fledgling West Coast Railway along with other aging B, S and T class locomotives and other items of aging rolling stock. West Coast Railway was the private company that won the contract to provide the now privatised rail service between Melbourne and Warnambool.

This venture was somewhat of a success and acheived growth in passenger numbers. In the mid 2000s however things started to go wrong, first with the death of the company founder and CEO, followed by structural problems with the company's fleet of veteran diesel locomotives. This lead to the suspension of the rail service mid way through 2004. In late 2004 the company was wound up and rail services were again provided by the state owned V/Line, who purchased a number of items of rollingstock as well as locomotive S302 in order to be able to run the service.

Relevant links:

• Locopage S class page.
  
• V/Line webpage.
  
• Vicsig page on S302.
  
• Wongms blog entry on s302's last day in service.
  
• Martin Bennet's fotopic page documenting the last day.

I'm Ba-ack...

Yes, 'tis I!

Had a busy lead up to Christmas which is why the blogging stopped. Post Christmas it was the combination of couldn't be bothered with a side serve of being too busy.

Christmas itself was good, I didn't get many presents, but that's not what it's about. New years eve was OK too (not the greatest either).

Hopefully I'll be ably to think of more stuff to blog when I'm not quite so tired.

P.S there's no Chocolate crackles left either.

Chocolatey and crackely goodies!

Today I made Chocolate Crackles. They are yum.

Steam at Greensborough

Steamrail's K153 leads a train of BW cars through the 'S' curves at Greensborough on a shuttle trip to Macleod on Sunday 4th December 2005. Unseen in the photo is K190 on the rear of the train which will lead the return trip to Greensborough from Macleod. The occasion was for the Manna Gum Festival (it's an Arts Festival) at Greensborugh.

USB applications

For years I used floppy disks to transfer my work between school, then TAFE, then Uni and home. During that time the files just kept getting bigger and bigger. Eventually I got to the stage where I had to burn and waste CD's or FTP my work around instead. FTP was better than floppy disks, the latter having a tendency to fail at the most inapropriate moment, but having dial up at home made ftp a slow process for larger files.

It wasn't until last year after a bad experience with a rather large Powerpoint presentation that I bit the bullet and got myself a USB flash drive. After a bit of shopping around the various computer stores near uni I got myself a 128 mb Shintaro branded flash drive for about $45, which at the time was a good deal. Since then I have never looked back except for the fact I fill it up with so much crap that 128mb never seems like enough. I don't how I could do without it.

Lately I've been loading applications onto it. So far I've got:

• Irfanview
  
• OperaUSB
  
• Quickmailer
  
• npop
  
• Frontpage express
  
• Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzles

The best type of applications to use on usb drives are those that are self contained in their own directory, which do not rely on recources stored in other locations such as the Documents and Settings folder, and/or those that install their own registry keys. A wide variety of applications suitable for USB flash drives is available, including simple text editors, image editors (Irfanview), email (npop and quickmailer), office suites (open office), browsers (Opera USB) and even various linux distrubutions that can boot straight off the usb drive or an acompanying CD.

Some sites that I have found with informaiton on USB flashdrives and compatible applictions include:

• USB flashdrive - Wikipedia
  
• The Portable Freeware Collection
  
• Kazias.net |USB Applications
  
• Standalone Applications
  
• TinyApps.org

Corporate Symbolism...

Recently I have become aware that Vision Australia has a new symbol. I can't remember what their old symbol looked like but the new one is wierd, just a couple of coloured dots. Last week after seeing it on TV it occuded to me that it might be braile for something. Then yesterday a lightning bolt hit me as I was walking past the Vision Australia office in Mount Street Heidelberg. The symbol is actually a "V" and an "A" in braile. Don't know why I didn't realise earlier...


So I checked it out on their website and sure enough there is a page that explains the new logo and how it conveys the image that they want to project to the public, as well as being clearly visible to people with poor eyesight. In addition to that, Vison Australia have created an audio logo. Being an organisation that are involved with people who are vison impaired an audio logo is a great idea. Basically it's a recording of someone saying their name and tagline with a short chime at the begining.

I just found it intriguing.

Steam at Hurstbridge

Steam locomotive J515 is approaching the home signal at Hurstbridge. The occasion was the inaugural Wattle Festival on Sunday the 4th of September 2004, the train was chartered from the Seymour Rail Heritage Centre. J515 is on this end while diesel loco T357 was on the rear. This arrangement was used to avoid the need for the steam loco to run around the train at Hurstbridge, which is impossible given that it is a dead end terminus. The train ran a number of trips between Hurstbridge and Diamond Creek throughout the day.

The Wattle Festival was held again in 2005, but this time the train was chartered from Steamrail instead.

To the end of the earth and back again!

Well not quite but it may as well have been...

What really happened was that I wanted to go to Photo Colour in Heidelberg to drop a film off to get developed and put on CD. So I decided to get the train to Heidelberg. On the way back I decided that I would get the most out my 2 hour (actually was more like 2 and a half hours) zone 2 Metcard by taking a ride to the end of the line as I still had over an hour left. My metcard expired at 6pm. From Heidelberg I got on the next train to arrive, which just happened to be a Macleod train. This was no problem though as I only had to wait a few minutes at Macleod for the following Hurstbridge train.

The trip to Hurstbridge was fairly eneventful except for a problem with a couple of level crossings just on the down side of Eltham. To me it seemed like a problem with the track circuits that trigger the bells and gates, most likely related to the rain we'd been having for most of the day. So I arrived a Hurstbridge with half an hour left on my ticket. As I didn't consult a timetable I had no idea when the next train back was, but as long as it left before 6pm I'd still be able to use it for the return journey. I was hoping that the train I came on would go back to the city but as I suspected the Comeng continued on and joined a lonely X'Trapolis in the sidings beyond the platform.

A quick look at the timetable revealed that the next train departed at 5:56, cutting it fine, but all was OK. So I walked up and down the platform a couple of times, checked out the sidings adjacent the platform, checked to see what the lever on the platform did and various other gunzel type things. The train was scheduled to arrive at 5:51 but it didn't get in until at least the departure time. As a result it departed a couple of minutes late. For the record it was a Comeng and the leading car (where I was seated) was real groaner.

On the way back one surprise was a staff exchange at Diamond Creek, which occured even though we weren't scheduled to cross another train there. Checking the timetable that I picked up at Hurstbridge an explanation of Diamond Creek being open as a staff station was found in that, the train I'd gone to Hurstbridge on would form the next up train departing at 6:10pm, and that it would cross the next down at Diamond Creek. We would cross that same down train at Eltham. Even though the train departed Hurstbridge late we still arrived at Eltham on time and so had to wait the full five minutes for our cross there. From there on it was smooth sailing back towards my home station.

Boring I know but it's all I can think of to blog at the moment...

What is the world coming to?

I caught four trains on Friday. One from Greensborough to the City, one from the City to Box Hill, then tat return trip, and finally one back to Greensborough. What ties all of these together? All four trains I caught on Friday were X'Trapolis or "crappers" as some people call them. On all my journeys I saw plenty of other trains, all were a mixture of Comengs and X'Trapolis, with the only Hitachi in sight looking all forlorn in the yard at Camberwell by itself. What is the world coming to?

In other news

Ever since playing with a 12" iBook in Myer a few weeks ago I've wanted one. One drawback of the 12" versus the 14" is the lack of a DVD burner, but it would be easy enough to use either the wireless networking or external hard drive for backups/transfers of large ammounts of data.

Although I reckon I could get along just nicely with one of the original colourful retro iBooks. Second hand of course, which is the more likely scenario for me.


The fact is that I would just like a laptop, and the iBooks just look so damn cool.

It has come to pass that...

You Are an Emo Rocker!

Expressive and deep, lyrics are really your thing. That doesn't mean you don't rock out... You just rock out with meaning. For you, rock is more about connecting than grandstanding.

What Kind of Rocker Are You?

While not altogether bad, it's not what I expected. Although a lot of the time I think I feel "emo". Man I wish I was 10 years younger, I'd be all like the uber emo. Maybe I should just grow up...