February 28, 2008
So I did the bike thing this morning. No problems on the train (although I didn’t put it in the guard’s carriage and got a rebuke from the conductor for my trouble) and under 15 minutes from Southern Cross to the St Kilda Rd office at a lazy pace.
Beautiful.
February 27, 2008
I’m working on St Kilda Rd 2 1/2 days a week at the moment (and will be for another 3 months) and have been experimenting with public transport from Southern Cross station to the St Kilda Rd office. The results? Best travel time so far has been 35 minutes. That was when I left the office at 4.55pm, got straight onto a tram, got off the tram at Swanston/Collins and straight on a 109 to Southern Cross. Worst case was 55 minutes. Average is 45 minutes.
Yep, 45 minutes to travel 3.9km.
The V-Line from Southern Cross to South Geelong, which happens to be about 75km, takes just under 60 minutes on average. Makes those trams look like a joke, doesn’t it?
So today I decided to bust out the Hammer. The recent decision to allow bikes back onto peak hour trains means I can chuck it in the car, drive to South Geelong, put it in the bike rack on the train, hop off at Southern Cross, click in and ride to the St Kilda Rd office, probably via Clarendon St, the top bit of Albert Park and a bit of St Kilda Rd. I’m expecting it to take less than 20 minutes, and that’s just cruising.
I had a problem though - the Hammer hasn’t been outside the garage since we moved here in July 06. It was covered in cobwebs and dust, the tyres were flat and the Deore gear shifters weren’t working at all.
A quick Google for “shimano shifter fix” threw up a bunch of sites that suggested WD40, and the blokes in City Cycles on Bourke St confirmed that the Deore shifters were built to last and shouldn’t need to be taken to bits for a fix. They also suggested WD40. Guess what … it worked perfectly. The Hammer’s back on the road and ready to put Melbourne’s public transport (the trams, specifically) to shame.
And, as an aside, doesn’t it look a picture? OK, so it’s not as techy as the latest dual suspension all mountain bikes but it looks (and is) light and fast.
Waiting for public transport. Again., originally uploaded to Flickr by martinjy on 27th February, 2008.
Aah, train platforms. I’ve seen a few.
February 26, 2008
Late last year I signed up for Facebook and had some fun finding some old friends, playing a bit of poker, throwing some sheep etc etc. I haven’t used it much in the last two months except to continue my quest to beat Saul Follett at either chess or Scrabble (unsuccessful so far).
Every now and again I read blog posts about how the number of daily users is dropping, and an email just dropped into my inbox that, when you put two and two together, seems to confirm that there’s a growing sense of desperation there somewhere. The Texas Hold’Em Poker application used to give you $500 in chips to play with every day. This is the content of the email:
All returning users are eligible for $55,000 bonus chips.
Claim chips [link]
!!!!!!!!!
Stumbled upon blik this afternoon. They take threadless t-shirt graphics and turn them into removable self-adhesive surface decals to stick on your wall, car, whatever.
e.g. this threadless t-shirt design (Frida’s Garden by Dale Sattler)…
…becomes this blik wall decal.
The decals are USD$70. To me the one in this picture really seems like it’s part of the room, as opposed to just a piece of artwork hanging on the wall. Permanent instead of temporary.
Nicely done.
Didn’t take this today it was on the 24th but Flickr’s shaky post-to-blog featurette failed again so here it is two days later.
February 24, 2008
Every now and again I make a web site for someone. A while ago it was a six pager for an inspirational book written by the husband of a work colleague, this time it’s a slightly bigger site for a child care centre attended by the children of a work colleague.
North Ringwood Community Children’s Centre
It’s a simple site that’s organised to inform the reader about child care in general as well as about this specific centre. The design and layout went through a few iterations as there was almost no existing branding to work with. In the end I kept it simple, deciding that pictures of the kids having a good time spoke louder than any flashy design I could dream up. The site’s built in Wordpress, which makes maintenance simpler and enables a blog to be implemented quickly if one’s required at some point down the track.
The old site was full of frames, dodgy fonts, bad code and had a weird content structure. Now it’s got nice clean search-engine-friendly code (it’s now listed 4th in an all-web search for “north ringwood”), a fresh look, simple navigation and some happy faces.
I’d like to do more of these but finding the time to do them is tough. My spare time’s precious to me and it can be difficult to set aside the 20 hours or so it takes to do these things properly. Maybe it’ll be easier in winter-time…..
