Cranes

Cranes. Where are the damned cranes. That's not a crane.

Ah, there's the cranes. They're working on the Barangaroo redevelopment. I'm wondering whether this lot will go the way of World Square, which started as a big hole in the ground at the lower end of the CBD and remained that way for years after a financial crisis.

Rowers, rowers and more rowers. There's lots more in he background. And notice the lovely smudge that the kiddies fingers left on the lens.

Yep, I was up pretty early that morning. The camera is great at gathering even the dimmest light - to my tired eyes, it was not this bright. In fact, it was pretty bloody dark!

A few obligatory bikes. This bloke was carrying a bit - a backpack and a laptop bag.

Thursday photos

Ugh oh, there's a battleship in town.

I was out much earlier than usual on Thursday, which meant I saw the Bay Run being used by a different population group to what I am used to. At my usual riding time, there are quite a few commuters heading into town, and the fitness groups are generally winding up, giving people time to get somewhere and shower and change before work. Because I was out so much earlier, there were absolutely no commuters but heaps of runners. These guys must start running before dawn most days. There were packs of them everywhere - and the majority were women.

Wednesday photos

I'm normally happy to be up about 0545, but the body clock went haywire this week - I've been waking up at 0500 instead, so I've been riding into work earlier than usual most days. Not that I'm bothered - it's the best part of the day.

Lighting conditions are tricky though - I'm usually photographing whilst looking into the sun.

This bloke was wearing a jersey advertising a very interesting sounding beer. If it wasn't for that, this photo wouldn't be here.

You can tell it's an early morning shot - the lack of light leads to blurry action shots.

Tuesday photos

White Bay power station smoke stacks

The smoke stacks of the old White Bay power station in Balmain, silhouetted against the dawn sky. Notice how skinny the stacks are? And there's no cooling tower like a modern power station. Those stacks used to pump out good old CO2 and soot and ash, and maybe a touch of steam. Funnily enough, this dreadfully polluting power station was originally built to power Sydney's electrified tram and rail network (which is usually seen by Greens as being a Nirvana compared to the motor car).

Check out the surreal colours of the city in the early light.

I just about smashed into this couple as I passed - they were incapable of riding two abreast without swerving around a bit and occupying both sides of the bike lane.

And now for some different - sunset.

Got a spare 30 minutes?

Thanks for the tip, Paco.

Shooting fish in a barrel

And I thought I had a lot of stuff........

I have two places in the house for storing my cycling stuff.


I have one drawer dedicated to "sports" stuff - swimming gear, sports socks and my cycling knicks etc. My jerseys and undershirts take up about 1/20th of my available hanging space - I have enough knicks and jerseys to last me 4 days. Then it's time to wash.


I have another spot - a few small shelves in the laundry - where I store things that get wet and dirty - helmet, gloves, shoes, spray jacket, sunglasses, repair kit and pannier. That space is shared with my swimming and gardening stuff. The missus gets cranky if I walk through the house soaking wet in my riding shoes leaving puddles from one end of the place to the other. And she really doesn't like me leaving my sweat soaked, stinking gloves in the bedroom. When the cold weather is over, I pack all my winter kit away in the shed in a storage box so that it doesn't clutter up the house (my "winter kit" consists of some full fingered gloves and one pair of leg warmers).


For a while there, I was thinking that I had accumulated a fair amount of cycling kit.


Silly me.


Check this bloke out. That is some very nice kit. I now see that I have some shopping to do........

Sunday funny

Some good links

Paco - hilarious as always


To go along with our Titan Of Industry, we have a Corporate Bullshit Generator. Must get one of these for the office.


The Queen is a binge drinker. Seriously. By this definition, most of my family should have been dead decades ago.


Dutch give up on offshore windmills. These things cost Dutch taxpayers $5 billion last year. $5 billion! What a scam.


The Apple iPhone is bigger than Microsoft. On top of that, developing apps for mobile phones and tablets supports 500,000 US jobs.


I am never going to complain about cycling in cold weather ever again.


Wind turbines - I wish they'd build a stack of these around the Balmain peninsular and let the inner city lefties live with them.

Lots of very cool maps

You must have a look.

How distant are we from our agrarian roots?

Booby trapped tomato?

Two small things that happened recently made me think about how far most of us are removed from our agrarian roots.

One side of my family grew up on a farm - I did not. Although I worked and played on plenty whilst growing up. As a kid, I stayed on a family farm where there was still horse tack hanging in the barn from the days of horse drawn plows, and milking stools from when cows were milked by hand in that same barn. For fun, we'd get un-pasteurised, un-homogenised milk from the local dairy and churn it into butter in a hand cranked churn. That's not for the faint hearted - yet it is something my parents and their siblings did every day as kids. In my parents day, most people worked in agriculture, or were directly related to someone who worked on the land. When Dad was running his own business in the 1950s, he was occasionally paid in chickens and other produce. Interestingly enough, you can still pay your school fees in Papua New Guinea in pigs.


I doubt most people these days could tell the difference between cow crap and sheep crap. And they wouldn't have the sense to avoid stepping in either.


The first thing was that we visited some people who have a lot of fruit trees in their yard. They had tossed a few large boxes full of fresh fruit aside - it all looked good, and I asked what was wrong with it.


"Worms", was the answer.


Sure enough, I cut one in half, and the delicious looking fruit was full of wriggling white worms.


When we got home, I noticed that my tomato crop was starting to look a bit dodgy. Then I harvested a few kilos, started cutting them open and found that about 5% were also infested with worms.


It was then that I remembered that I have never, ever seen my parents bite into any form of fruit. They always slice it up first. The same went for all my uncles and aunties - they always had a clasp knife on them, often attached to their belt. If you visit the Flemington Markets in Sydney at 0600 on a Saturday morning, half the fruit vendors will be wielding knives and slicing open samples of their fruit to show the passing customers that their produce is fresh and good - and free of bugs. 


That's not something I ever expect to see happening in Coles or Woolworths.


Carrying that sort of thing these days is a good way to get locked up - the cops will be all over you for carrying an offensive weapon.

Arsey tomato?

Try explaining to a judge (or a fresh young copper) that you need a knife to cut up fruit and vegies to inspect for insects.......they'll think you're mad.


The stuff we get in the supermarket is so sanitised and perfect, we forget that fruit is in fact very tasty to a wide variety of insects and animals, and it's also a great place to raise your young. I haven't smothered the garden in chemicals - not because I am against chemicals and sprays - it's just that I'm too busy/too lazy to spray most of the time, so through sheer laziness, I have an "organic" garden. 


So now that I have a garden and am growing some of my own food, I've adopted the habits of my forebears and am now religiously cutting everything open before eating it.


Yeah, I know how that sounds - "I'm turning into my bloody parents". Well, some of the things they do are really quite sensible. But we rarely stop and think why we do the things we do. 

Thursday photos

I like it when the morning looks like this. A bit of colour first thing is nice.

Unfortunately, most have been dull and grey like this.

No picturesque, touristy shots of the Opera House. What I was trying to get is the shaft of light in the middle of the photo. It all but disappeared by the time I stopped the bike and grabbed the camera. I had a 5 second window to snap the photo, and I pretty much missed it.

Down by the jetty landing..........

For a single speeder, this bloke was quick - he left me for dead. He wasn't into the safety kit much though - no helmet or gloves (useful for when you slide off and your hand hits the tarmac) and his rear light appeared to be covered in tape.

We rode towards the Pyrmont Bridge with another bloke who was quite aggressive - when we hit the bridge, the Rangers who monitor foot/bike traffic started waving and yelling at the other bloke because he was going too fast and cutting up the pedestrians. I've never seen that before.

There's a big difference in attitude at different times of the morning. I try to leave home a bit after 0600, and at that time, the roads and paths are pretty empty. Cyclists, runners and walkers are all generally calm and courteous. Even the tradies in their utes aren't too mental at that time of day.

However, I slept in one morning this week and left closer to 0700 - and was I in for a shock. I ran into more lunatic, aggressive cyclists during that one ride than I have seen so far this year. One bloke got right up my bum coming around the Bay, and he tried to overtake me on blind corners (nearly rubbing out people coming the other way) and he got narky when I slowed down for parents riding with young kids etc etc (one thing about kids - expect them to always to the unexpected, like suddenly dart in front of you without warning). When he eventually went past, he suddenly found he couldn't actually go any faster than me. He was fast when trailing in my slipstream, but useless when he got out front.

Moron.

The common thread

We're had two financial disasters in NSW lately - the Cross City Tunnel going into recievership, and now the Waratah trains consortium needing a bailout from the state government.

Here are snippets from two articles:


Sydney's Cross City Tunnel could soon enter receivership for the second time, due to a dispute between its owners and the state government about stamp duty.


The Office of State Revenue has given the owners of the motorway until the end of the month to pay a reported $60 million bill.


The bill relates to the $700 million price the owners of the motorway - Royal Bank of Scotland, Eiser Infrastructure Partners and Leighton Holdings - paid when they bought the roadway out of receivership in 2007.

and another:


The major private partner in the troubled Reliance Rail project has welcomed a restructure of the group's financing.


The NSW government has agreed to invest $175 million in 2018 in return for 100 per cent of the equity in Reliance Rail, which is delivering the $3.6 billion Waratah train project.


The troubled consortium consists of engineering firm Downer EDI, Royal Bank of Scotland and interests managed by AMP Capital Investors.


Notice the common factor?

The Royal Bank of Scotland.

Here's what The Spectator had to say about them back in December:


Voodoo business


West Register is the name of a narrow street in Edinburgh that my team of local researchers tell me boasts a cocktail bar called the Voodoo Rooms. West Register is also the name of a subsidiary of the Royal Bank of Scotland, whose fine old pre-Goodwin headquarters is just around the corner. This is the subsidiary into which RBS injected its ‘distressed’ property assets — commercial real estate of which it took ownership in lieu of repayment of loans that the bank (or its NatWest arm) should never have offered in the first place.


West Register’s purpose in life is to sell off these assets whenever someone makes a halfway decent cash offer, and this week it got shot of 918 tenanted pubs, known as the Galaxy estate, to Heineken for £412 ­million. The holding was a relic of the lost era, a decade ago, when owning pub chains — seen as cash-generative businesses, ripe for improvement and sitting on solid freeholds — was a hot fashion for City investors. Now pubs are closing all over the country, and Heineken in turn is expected to dispose of many Galaxy sites that are now unviable.


Taxpayer-funded RBS is well out of the struggling pub trade, but still has tens of billions worth of other skeletons in its cupboards. West Register has also just sold Great Leighs racecourse in Essex, and is trying to make something remunerative out of Newhaven docks in Sussex. Its portfolio includes shopping centres where no one wanted to shop, hotel and apartment schemes where no one wanted to lay their head, and acres of empty offices. Behind every distressed asset is a loan decision that looked good at the time and earned someone a bonus. If trade ever falters at the Voodoo Rooms, West Register could turn it into a showroom for everything it has left to sell and rename it Voodoo Banking.

You have to wonder how much due diligence was undertaken when Labor was in power if they allowed this banking disaster to get involved in funding a variety of projects. I wonder what other NSW projects they've got their sticky fingers in?

No more underwater cabinet meetings in the Maldives?

Remember how the cabinet of the Maldives gained a lot of publicity a few years ago by holding a cabinet meeting underwater?

They might not be doing that anymore.

A few photos

I stupidly left some things at work on Friday, so I had to pop into the office on the weekend to collect them. What better way to travel than by bike? For once, the sky was clear and I didn't get rained on.

The wedding planners must have been grateful for some good weather at last - The Rocks was full of wedding parties being photographed. 

Lots of people at Darling Harbour - dragon boat racing time.

There's always a nimrod willing to go through red lights. 

Weekend cyclists tend to be a very different bunch to the regular commuters. This threesome gave every indication of not really knowing where they were going, and they certainly didn't know all the ins and outs of this particular road (I know every pot hole and crack, and could steer around them in my sleep). Their riding style was quite different - they were riding as a threesome, and then the bloke in the distance just took off and left the rest of us behind. He was getting his thrills.


I enjoy the weekend rides when I'm heading in any direction except the city - I don't feel the need to be anywhere at a particular time, and I enjoy the ride for what it is. Only problem is that I don't get to do that often enough.

This is worth a read

White sun of the desert:

So what have I done differently?  Nothing.  I still maintain a somewhat abrasive and opinionated manner of working, emphasising results rather than means.  In fact, I transferred the working practices I developed in Sakhalin almost wholesale to my new position.  The crucial difference is that I have not felt the need to badmouth management, being as they are not complete fuckwits.  When I ask them for help I get it, I get good advice when they feel it necessary to dish it out, and I am given room to run my own department without unnecessary interference.  This is the first job I have had where I am offered a modicum of respect for my knowledge and abilities.  I have not been dragged into the office of some ageing failure and lectured on how my youth is no match for his alleged 20 years of blinding brilliance.  Nobody has tried to be my dad, and appealed to me to treat them as a mentor.  Nobody has told me off for telling the truth about something.  Nobody has asked me to lie to save their blushes.  None of this was the case in the period leading up to my dismissal in Sakhalin.  That lot also told me I “didn’t listen”.  And they would be right, if they appended the qualification “to fuckwits” on the end of the remark. 

I like this bloke already.

Be vewy, vewy quiet

For me, the trick to having an easy start to the morning is to get up early and go before the rest of the family wakes up. If the youngsters wake up, they'll hound me for something silly like chocolate custard for breakfast. And knowing that daddy is an easy mark, they might just get it.

So there are times when I try to be super-organised. Shirts are ironed and work and cycling clothes are laid out in the bathroom where I can get changed without any risk of cupboard doors banging shut and waking kiddies. Lunch is pre-packed and in the fridge. My "every day carry" of wallet, keys, glasses, phone, building pass etc etc is all squared away and ready for grabbing as I sneak out the door. It's all about getting up and getting out as quietly as can be.

Of course Sod's Law kicks in more often than not. I was very nicely prepped this morning. And then the kids woke up 5 minutes before my alarm went off, and I spent the next 40 minutes fending off demands for chocolate custard whilst I tried to dress, pack, eat and leave.

And no, they didn't get any.

We were out of chocolate.

Chopper

My first bike was like this - a chopper. I was about the sage age too. Except mine had tassles hanging from the ends of the handle bars, and the front forks were way longer. It was magic for popping wheelies, and it had a three speed shifter mounted on the top tube (in the stupidest place imaginable, but it was soooo cool.) You just don't see bikes like this in the shops anymore.

Pinched from Copenhagenize.

Economics is fun part 2 - price

More economics

This is part 3. Part 2 is on price. If you watch the video, you can find part 2 after it finishes.

Thanks to Samizdata as usual.

Thursday photos

Crap in a sock - it's February already. And we've still only had one sunny day of summer. Our "summer" days are either gloomy and wet or grey and wet.

The camera isn't getting used much as it tends to get wet when it rains, and that means photos with big raindrop smudges on the lens.

I like the way the trees are rushing past me here.

Not a good look - this guy has "lack of mud flap bum" - ie, a big wet stripe up his arse where the water has flicked off his rear wheel.

10 seconds after taking that Opera House photo up the top, the back wheel started going wobbly - I'd clearly punctured. Nothing like sitting on the side of the road early in the morning and changing a tube.

It was a big lump of glass - for a bike tyre.

I wasn't the only one with mechanical troubles - this bus had broken down and was getting some help from the bloke in the white bus maintenance van.

These little buggers have kept me away from the computer of late. I stupidly planted cherry tomatoes, which means I am getting heaps and heaps of small tomatoes. They're great for snacking on, but a pain if you want to roast them. I've been collecting over 2kg per day since we got back, and as that's too many to eat, I've been roasting them and turning them into a sort of chunky sauce. The time consuming part is chopping them in half and pushing the seeds out with your thumb. 2kg of cherry tomatoes equals hundreds of tomato halves to de-seed.

And then you just chop up some garlic and basil, add olive oil and salt, and roast for half an hour. It's great with sausages, and will probably go well on pasta. I guess we'll be sick to death of it in a week or two, and I will never plant tomatoes again.