NickNacks

This blog is hosted by DreamHost, a US website hosting company. They are very cheap and offer a number of features that make them attractive to those who like to tinker in a Unix environment.

They are cheap and, although you get what you pay for, they have a good track record of responding to customer’s issues and sorting things out quickly. Unfortunately, they’ve really dropped the ball lately.

They’ve had all sorts of issues with hardware over the last couple of months and, while you can tell they’ve being trying to fix them quickly, it’s starting to reach the point where customers are going to desert them.

For me, it’s almost at that point. They had an issue with a cluster manager that affected the server that hosts this site. They fixed after it was down for several hours. A week later (yesterday) it has gone again and I can’t do any administration on any of my sites. This time, it has been down for over a day and no-one knows what is happening. Come on, DreamHost. You already know the cluster manager backwards, you installed it only a week ago. Fix this please.

Boy, is my sleep cycle out of control. I’ve got into a pattern of a few hours in the night with an early wakening around 6am then exhaustion hits about 10am and it’s back to bed for another two or three hours.

The problem is that I still sleep only a few hours during the night no matter what time I go to bed. So I can toddle off about 11pm and wake up about 3am, or I can turn in at 2am and wake at 6am. Worse, I don’t start to get tired in the evening until midnight or later, so going earlier means I just lie awake for an hour before drifting off. End result is the same as if I’d gone to bed later anyway.

I’m sure you can imagine this is getting frustrating. Not too sure how I’m going to fix it, and I’m a little concerned about how I’ll go with the week or two of long daily drives I have coming up (driving Canberra to Perth). I won’t drive nights or evenings due to the roos, so daylight driving is the only time I have.

I’m not too concerned about the number of days available for driving since I can take as long as I like, it doesn’t matter. I am concerned that I get really tired mid-morning; I don’t want to drift off while I’m driving. That would be Not A Good Thing ™.

Had lunch with Ben today at a local pizza restaurant. It will be the last lunch I have with him as I leave in five or six days.

We chatted about not much. The drama with the dragon over the last few weeks didn’t come up, intentionally for me and probably the same for Ben.

Pizzas were very nice, home made style with tasty fresh basil and tomato and real mozzarella and boccaccini cheese.

Afterwards, Ben helped me load the Ducati onto the trailer. We struggled a bit at first, which was not helped by not having a key so that the steering lock was engaged (I thought I had found the key previously and put it somewhere safe, but, as always in the manner of these things, it wasn’t where I thought I’d placed it and we couldn’t find it). We managed to get the front part of the bike on the trailer, but, since it is a single axle trailer, now that the weight was over the front of the axle it tipped forwards to make a big step for the back wheel. continue reading

I woke this morning in a half-sleep, the dream still strong and me still assuming that its interpretation of the nature of the universe was reality. It had induced a sense of awe and joy at the intricate woven nature of things, and wonder and admiration at the higher unseen levels of the workings of reality.

I also knew it was the foundation of a really good book or, perhaps, a film. It was full of special-effects, mystery, plot and drama, interspersed with interesting characters, notably the villains. It was both reality and fiction in one, quite common in my sleep and, I assume, everyone else’s.

What on earth am I talking about? It was a dream, stupid. Based, it seems, on the original Stargate movie, the dream had Egyptian culture coupled with high technology (or perhaps mysticism and magic instead of technology) as its base.

I discovered, to my amazement, that there were demi-gods wandering the Earth, trying to order its inhabitants to their own individual liking. They wore Egyptian linen kilts or loincloths, embroidered in patterns, and tall peshents or khepresh, which are those tall, quasi-cone like hats that swell out then in and slope back. I always imagine them as a strong aquamarine-blue for some reason. The demi-gods used a staff with a beam-emitting fitting for a weapon, as do the gods in Stargate. Somehow they could move quickly through the air from one place to another. continue reading

I hand painted a set of registration numbers on the back of the trailer today, so we are good to go.

Victoria has a very smart trailer registration scheme where small trailers  that are used for household stuff are exempt from registration requirements.  The only thing is that the trailer has to display a registration number which is the same as the towing vehicle.  It’s an intelligent scheme and Victoria is the only state that does it.

The ACT’s registration scheme is about $120(!!) for the first year then dropping back to under $100 after that.  Probably the most expensive registration scheme in the southern hemisphere.

Since I’m leaving the ACT in a week and driving straight to WA, and since my car is registered in Vic, I’m not going to register the trailer here. Instead, if I get picked up, I’ll plead ignorance and the move to WA.

I’ll register it in WA, of course, where the registration is a far more sensible amount, something like $15 a year.

Really, what is the ACT government think it is doing when it charges $100 to register a measly little 6′ x 4′ box trailer. This sort of studied stupidity in government is one of the reasons I’m leaving.

Hooray!  At last.   I just sold the CRX.

There was a message on the answering machine that I’d missed.  I rang the person last night and they came around this morning.  They didn’t look too impressed, but said they’d ring back tonight.

I’d advertised it for $3,200 and they offered $1,500.  After a bit of too and fro, we settled on $1,800 and for them to remove it at their expense (since it doesn’t run).

It’s a relief because I’d pretty much resigned myself to selling it to a wrecker for scrap.   I’d be lucky to get $1,000 if I did that.

See you  little car, it was a lot of fun, but I’m glad you’re going to a new home.

 This is a photo I pulled off the web.

Show me the money

They were late turning up to get the car. I was starting to think that they had decided to pull out and I wouldn’t see them, when they drove up in a 5 tonne flat-bed truck.

We put in a new battery and tried to start the car. Nothing. It turned over fine, but no start. We decided all the fuel had evaporated and one of them went off with a jerrycan to buy some. continue reading

Don’t you love coming across a new, interesting word? I was reading Paul Raymond’s obituary in The Age and the author, who, judging by his word usage, appeared to be British, used the word louche to describe Raymond. What a great word, I love the rounded vowels and the soft ‘ch’ sound. It rolls out of the mouth and has a certain fullness to it that is rewarding to the mouth and lips. You can exaggerate it nicely by pouting the lips, drawing out the ‘ch’ sound and then chopping it abruptly. Very satisfying. I am definitely going to have to use it.

For some reason, I had thought that a louche was a small monocular magnifier that jewellers use to examine gem stones, but of course that is a loupe, a very different thing.

I’d never hear of Raymond before, but that is not surprising. He was initially a tits-and-arse man not in the overtly blatant style of the US publishers like Hustler, but in the Benny Hill or Frankie Howard style and then, as smut became more liberal, like Playboy. We in Australia probably saw more of the US magazines and our own home-grown versions than the British imports and I doubt that Raymond was a well-known name here. He wasn’t to me certainly, I was too young when he was at the peak of his empire-building.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Raymond appears to have been something of a pathetic character. In that, perhaps he was the British equivalent of Heffner. One of his models is reported as saying that she doubted he ever actually slept with any of the models on his arms that he would display. By that of course, she meant that he wasn’t able to have sex with them.

Louche. I’m going to have to find a clever way to use it, hopefully at the expense of my friends and not at the expense of me :).

Well, the end of summer, as evidenced by the very last of the roses:

We had a good summer for roses this year, not too hot, and no frosts.  I used my new patented fish poop fertiliser¹ and it worked great.  Last year the blooms were fairly ordinary, but a year of fertilising really paid off with the best blooms for years.

Although, we’re now having the hottest autumn for sometime.   A week of over 30°C so far, and nights haven’t been too cold either, about 16°C.

---

¹ I use the water I drain out of the fish tank. It’s full of nitrate and phosphate goodness.

I had planned to stay at my sister’s place when I arrived for a couple of weeks.  This is to give me some time to find somewhere a bit nice rather than settle for the first place available.

It turns out she has some stuff going on at home and can’t take visitors.  Rats.  I might have to find some temp accommodation just for a few months while I settle in.