I'm so tough, I'm amazed I haven't rusted

The office isn't equipped with enough bike parking for everyone that wants to ride when the weather is good - if you aren't in the garage by 0730, good luck with finding an easy place to park the bike. It reached the point this year where we were going to have to start double stacking to fit them all in. Cycling to work, and on weekends, has become so popular that the company is now handing out branded kit to cyclists for participation in events, and the last such event saw a pack of 30 of my work mates tooling down the highway together.

That was summer. When the weather was nice.

It's now getting pretty ugly. It's not that cold yet - I haven't switched over to the full length gloves and dug out the undershirts - but it's nippy enough to need booties and limb warmers. And we're now getting rain reasonably frequently.

I don't mind the rain, as the cloud cover makes for a warmer morning. Yes, there is a big difference between 7 degrees and 11 degrees, even if one is dry and one is wet. For me, a wet 11 degrees is comfier than a dry 7 degrees.

The rain though has washed away all the soft cocks. There were a few days last week where mine was the only bike looking for a parking spot. Everyone thinks I am nuts, but the only things you need for riding in the rain are a good spray jacket and a tough mental attitude. The body might be soft, but the attitude is not. Whenever I start riding on a miserable, dark, wet morning, I think of this:

• I slept in a warm, dry bed last night
• I had a full night's sleep
• In 45 minutes, I will be in a hot shower
• After the shower, I will dress in dry clothes
• After that, I will have a good breakfast with a nice coffee

I then think back to my time in the reserves many years ago, and the miserable conditions during every winter exercise. Broken sleep. Hard ground. No shower for a fortnight. Rat packs. Rat pack coffee. Being wet and cold for days at a time. Filthy clothes. Shaving with cold water. Thawing frozen fingers in a container of coffee.

Compared to then, riding to work is pretty comfortable. So I suck it up and turn the pedals, and before long, I'm relaxing in that hot shower.

Goat over, goat out

When I want to wind up my green-leaning friends, I tell them about how I want to get a mountain bike and start riding in national parks.

With a rifle on my back.

I call it environmentally friendly feral animal reduction.

Here's a nice story (with video) on how a national park in the Galapagos has been clearing feral goats which have denuded the vegetation.

I worked on a sheep station up north for a short period and saw the damage that large numbers of feral goats did to the vegetation - essentially, they stripped everything bare and left a dust bowl behind. Since they could climb trees to a reasonable height, they took out the trees as well as the grass and shrubs. Unless you've been there and seen the goats in action, it's pretty hard to explain it to a Balmain dweller who hasn't set foot in anything rougher than their local council-provided landscaped park (with doggie cafe and nice lattes).

I've also been to Kakadu and seen the damage done by wild pigs around the water holes - it's really impressive. Greenies would go nuts if I drove my 4WD around and around a water hole and messed it up beyond belief, but they seem to have no issues with pigs doing the same damage (and more).

I'd steer clear of eating any pigs I shot due to worries about disease, but I am fond of goat curry. If I do splash out and get the mountain bike, the hunting licence won't be far behind.

Just what we need - artists defined as "key workers"

The story - there were 15 or so "artists" living in a run down house in a very posh suburb in the eastern suburbs, until the owners finally got around to doing the place up and kicked them out. The house was so decrepit, they were paying $500 per week.

That warmed the cockles of my heart. In my younger days, I too spent years crammed into low rent flea pits with all manner of neer-do-wells. It took me back to a time when I was carefree and had enough cash in my pocket for at least two raucous nights out per week. At one point in the late 1990s, I spotted an ad in the paper for a very large, relatively cheap house at Bondi. It was obviously a dump, and it would have required 7 or 8 people to live in it to afford the rent of about $100 a week each. I was sorely tempted to take the lease and then fish around and collect a gaggle of bums to share the place.

It's a problem faced by aspiring young creative people across the city: how to afford to pursue an artistic career in Sydney, rated this year by The Economist as the world's third-most expensive city after Tokyo and Osaka?
The City of Sydney is proposing one answer. The council is pushing to have artists included in the definition of ''key workers'' - a category traditionally limited to low-income public sector workers who provide essential city services such as police, nurses, teachers and paramedics. The change would make artists eligible to apply for the limited supply of affordable housing set aside for key workers.
''There's all kinds of workers that a city needs, and not all of them will earn $100,000 a year but they are still crucial to city infrastructure and city liveability,'' Rachel Healy, who runs the council's cultural policy, says. Even established artists often earn well below the average wage, and ''there's a strong view that artists should be recognised as key workers''.
While all young people are hit by the high cost of housing in Sydney, there are strong economic and cultural arguments to help early-career creative artists to stay in the city, Healy says.
The creative industries contribute $8.2 billion to the city economy, and the sector is growing faster than all other industries, according to a recent state government draft report.
Creative people contribute much to the liveability of a city, and that cultural overlay helps attract mobile, educated graduates from all industries, Healy says. If creatives are priced out of the city, ''the overall experience of Sydney is profoundly compromised,'' she says. ''It's a very different kind of problem than, 'Oh well, it's just a bit sad that it's only the lawyers and accountants live here'.''

Ah, those were the days.

Anyway, how is a struggling artist supposed to make do in an expensive place like Sydney?

Simple - do what we did. Grow up and get a fucking job.

When did young drivers become so pathetic?

When I was young, I drove like my nuts were on fire and I needed to get somewhere very fast in order to put them out. A slew of accidents testified to the fact that I thought I was a much better driver than I really was, coupled with excess speed and a fairly reckless attitude around getting from A to B.

Whilst there are still plenty of young drivers wrapping themselves around power poles at 0300hrs, I've noticed an increase in totally pathetic P-platers. My weekend road trip took me through a number of fixed speed cameras. They were advertised well in advance, so there was no hope of anyone actually getting booked for speeding. However, instead of slowing down to say 89km/h to go through a 90km/h camera, I was stuck behind a series of young numpties who insisted on slowing down to 60km/h in a 90 zone.

60!! If the kids weren't in the car, I would have been turning the air blue with expletives. What's gotten into the little buggers?

More adventures in Gongolia

Spent the weekend at a friend's place down the coast, just past Gongolia. I've come back without the major symptoms of Gongoloidioness, which generally involve writing long rants about random stuff.

I took the bike. I'm trying to decide whether that was a mistake or not. The land around our place is relatively flat. The land where we stayed was anything but, and I failed to consult a topographic map before going on my ride. Hills. More hills. Huge freaking hills - one after the other. Good for your fitness, but insanely hard work. I thought I was going to die.

But dying of heart failure on the outer Gongolian hills was the least of my worries. Getting mangled on the drive back was a greater risk - because some of the morons driving home on Sunday night were either driving with two blown headlights, or they couldn't work out why they had a hard time seeing where they were going on a pitch black freeway at 9pm. Don't ask me what it is about Gongolia that does this to people, but it's pretty frightening.

Death to flappy straps

I hadn't thought about this in years, but it was forced into my consciousness recently.

I have a thing about flappy straps on back packs. Those of you who have lugged the green variety around should understand my lunatic obsession. When I get a new back pack, the first thing I do is set the straps to the correct length, then either cut off the excess strap or roll it up and bind it with insulation tape (black only). Or I cut a fair bit of strap off, leave a bit in case I need to loosen it later and then bind up the excess straps with tape.

There can be no flappy straps. All loose straps must be neatly tidied away.

I hadn't even realised I was doing this until Junior borrowed a back pack recently. When it was returned, all the straps were flapping loose - he'd pulled off the tape to adjust the straps, but then hadn't tidied them up again before returning it. (Actually, I found it on the floor in his bedroom under a pile of rubbish, socks and noodle packets when I had to go looking for it).

I was about to launch into a loud rant when I caught myself and stopped. How on earth was I going to explain the whys and wherefores of this non-flappy strap requirement? It was better to just shut up, find the insulation tape and tidy them up again.

How crap was your car?

Fascinating look at how the cars of the past have faded away. Here and here.

I love these videos

I love these videos that show how quickly new inventions have been adopted over the last century.

Overdrive

Overdrive - a word I suddenly thought about when I was considering taking the teenagers for a practice drive around the block. It's presumably meaningless to most of the teenagers of today - I'll have to ask them if they really understand what it means. Having grown up in the days of the three on the tree, and considering a 4 speed floor shifter to be the height of automotive sophistication, it's amazing to consider the advances that have now given us 7 and 9 speed automatic transmissions, flappy paddles and all that sort of stuff.

Back in the 1980s, I was lent for about a year a small sporty car that had overdrive. I think that was the only car I've ever driven for an extended period that was fitted with it. It was operated electrically by a button on the gear knob. Being an English car, it amazed us by working - most of the time. Whether it produced better fuel economy on the long country drives was another matter - I didn't notice any improvement. However, I'm sure it allowed car salesmen to shift a few more units of product.

I'll have to think of some more words that no longer really have a contemporary meaning. Whilst people still talk about shifting into overdrive, the overdrive itself is long gone as a useful product.

Why can't the public sector develop good services?

Catching a bus isn't that painful these days thanks to a great app called TripView. After trying the free version, I was more than happy to spend a huge $2.99 on the full version. Anyone paying a visit to Sydney with the intention of catching a train, ferry or bus should buy it before they get here. It's brilliant.

It doesn't eliminate the smelly, fat people that you have to deal with on the bus occasionally, but it takes the hassle out of catching public transport at the right time.

The software was developed by a private company. When they started, they didn't have real time information on the location of the bus or train that you wanted to catch - that was introduced this year. In fact, the public monopolies were so manic about keeping their timetabling information to themselves, that the company had to develop a way to scrape the timetables from their websites. It just goes to show how individual persistence and ingenuity can overcome bureaucratic stupidity and inertia.

Many years ago, I used to drink with a bloke who was a software developer for the railways. This was back in the days of the Nokia banana phone - the one used by Nemo in The Matrix. That's how long ago this was. He managed to convince his boss to buy something more advanced than the Nokia 3210, which was the most popular phone at the time. He got one that came with a very basic data service, and in his spare time on weekends, he developed an app that could push timetable information to the phone.

It was pretty hopeless, but it demonstrated what could be done with a very clunky phone and a data service that ran at no more than 9kb/s. It was also expensive to run as data services were in their infancy.

So it ended up being a total failure, but it was an interesting experiment. He tried to get some internal support to take it further - to turn it into a customer facing app - but management couldn't be less interested. Making life easier for the customer was not in their remit. They didn't think anyone would want to use it. In the end, he moved on, and I haven't had a beer with him in quite a while.

When the conservatives got into power, one of the things that they did was to force the public transport operators to open up their timetables and real time information feeds to private software developers. I imagine the Transport Minister had to beat the bureaucrats over the head with a baseball bat for months to make that happen. Resistance would have been intense, and I bet one of the reasons for resisting would be the idea that they suddenly wanted to develop an app like this, and allowing private competition would put that project at risk.

I saw things like that happen a few times when I was in the public sector. The bureaucrats would have less than zero interest in doing something until someone from outside popped up and said that they could do it. With great rapidity, the bureaucrats would circle the wagons and mount a spirited defense to ensure that the interloper didn't trespass on their turf. Once the interloper was beaten back, they went back to doing nothing about that particular issue. Protection of their turf was key. Delivering a service to the public was barely even considered.

So if you ever get to use TripView, you can thank the current Minister and her staff for belting the bloody bureaucrats until they relented and made the timetabling and real time information public. Or at least partly public. Whenever I have to catch a bus or train, I say a silent thanks to Gladys.

And people wonder why I always get my iced coffee from the same place

I have often been accused of being a man of rigid habits - for not trying new things on a whim - and instead sticking to the tried and tested. I won't argue with that too much - I have my moments where I throw caution to the wind and give something new a go, but generally, I go with what I know.

I had an early morning meeting at the other end of town this week, so I breakfasted at Vivo Cafe. After scanning the menu, I discovered that they sold an iced latte that looked awfully like what I always want - just coffee, milk and ice. However, there was a wrinkle, as the menu explained:

Cold Brew Coffee 
All our cold coffee drinks start with this base. This method of cold extraction gives a sweet, full bodied flavour without any bitterness. It takes over 8 hours to extract 3 litres of coffee!

This I was not so sure of. I always ask the barrista to pull me a fresh shot of coffee straight from the machine, and to add extra ice if necessary to cool down the drink. If the coffee and barrista are any good, this pretty much guarantees a good iced coffee. However, I decided I'd give this "cold brew" method a crack.

And the results?

For $5.80, it was almost the most expensive, disgusting iced coffee I've ever sampled. It wasn't the most expensive, or the most disgusting - but it was up there (or down there) with the worst. The coffee was insipid and sickly sweet - almost undrinkable. It's what you get when your palate has been fouled by the commercial "iced coffees" that pollute the supermarkets across the eastern seaboard - products that have 10 times too much sugar in them and nowhere near enough coffee. It's what you get when you believe the market is crying out for yet another sweet, sugary concoction. As if we don't have enough of those already!

The breakfast itself wasn't bad. Can't complain about the service. Price was what you'd expect in the middle of the CBD (ie, expensive). But the iced latte was the pits.