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Sydney recent hosted the Vivid Festival curated by Brian Eno. I think the Opera House makes a pretty good canvas.
spring cleaning
Posted by: Ian on 15 April 2009
I spent a good amount of time of Saturday working on my road bike. After 4,500km the bar tape was getting a bit worn and the tyres and chain were probably past their best.
It was great to witness the transformation back to showroom condition – the dark grey sticky encrusted cassette being stripped back to former polished glory, faded & cut tyre carcasses replaced with clean black and the worn chain removed and a new one fitted that should be good for the next 2,800 miles.
As well as the dramatic aesthetic improvements, the clean also allowed me to look over the Focus checking for damage – the scuffs across the brake units from when I got hit by a car, the little rough patch on the clearcoat at the rear dropout caused by the rough bootliner when transporting my bike to my parents. Fortunately no cracks, chips or anything nasty to be found. It was good to minutely examine the frame and components as I went, reconnecting at a level that makes it more than just a tool for my enjoyment.
It seems there are 1,001 ways to wrap tape, but I went for the clockwise on the left and anti-clockwise on the right. Once it got the method down it was fairly easy to lay tight coils that nicely showed the embossed ‘Zipp’ logos to their full. A lot more padding than I am used to, but since I am thinking about getting new gloves (with thinner padding) it is probably a good thing.
Weather and miscellaneous other things kept me off the bike for the long weekend, but with luck the next 2,800 miles will start tomorrow.
on the beach
Posted by: Ian on 16 February 2009
My brothers were in Australia for new year and we spent a week up near Cape Tribulation in Far North Queensland where these were shot.
dropbox symlinks
Posted by: Ian on 18 December 2008
After my laptop got a (non fatal) soaking due to a burst pipe, I have been looking at additional measures to backup some of my data1.
Remembering a post by but she’s a girl, I duly downloaded and installed myself a copy of Dropbox. BSAG mentioned creating symlinks for folders rather than copying so that is what I tried since I didn’t really want to be dragging and moving things too much.
After creating a symlink/ alias with crtl+click, I dragged it to the dropbox folder where it was duly synced. The contents of the aliased folder however, were not. A few repeat & fails later a bit more searching brought me to this post that stated that this only works if you symlink out from the Dropbox directory.
So, as far as I can tell there are no GUI methods for this so it was off to Terminal for me:
Last login: Mon Dec 14 22:50:49 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
Ians-MacBook:~ ian$
Ians-MacBook:~ ian$ cd dropbox
Ians-MacBook:~/dropbox ian$ ln -s ~/WordPress/New\ Blog\ Backups "New Blog Backups"
That creates the symbolic link (ln -s) from the backup folder (~/WordPress/New\ Blog\ Backups) to the Dropbox-synced folder ("New Blog Backups").
Now whenever I backup my site via ftp & drop it into the normal folder, a copy gets pushed up to the remote server as well.
Since I only have one laptop at the moment, between-system syncing is not needed (though I am looking at either the MSI Wind or Lenovo S10 as a ultra-portable2).
Hopefully this system will serve me well & transparently to keep important documents safe from burst pipes.
- Man tries to pay bill with a drawing of a spider. Most bizarre, but I think emphasis needs to be placed on the word claimed in the report. (0) ξ
- Onwards and upwards to WP2.7. Not too painful, though my theme will be my own petard… (0) ξ
- Finally up and running with WP2.6.5, on the day WP2.7 is released. Looking forward to trying out the iPod Touch app. (0) ξ
what’s a girl to do?
Posted by: Ian on 17 November 2008
The Bicycle Film Festival was in Sydney at the weekend so I got to spent one and a half days at the cinema watching films that were all in someway related to cycling. Of the main features, Road to Roubaix was the standout with excellent cinematography and behind the scenes footage, although the (slightly too long1) 6-Day Races was a close second with tons of interesting stories from a near-dead form of the sport.
There were also a good number of short films, on subjects from Kierin to spare parts races; one of my favourite and most endearing being a video for ‘Bat for lashes’:
There was also much enjoyment had from the two minute ‘King of Skitch’ with Felipe Robayo hitching a ride from a Lotus before destroying a pair of carbon wheels.
If you are fortunate to live in Melbourne, Milan or Portland the film festival is still yet to visit so go get your tickets!
- Aparently the wrong cut was shown, and it should have been 20 minutes shorter. ↑
- It seems Apple have improved the navigation ability of the iPod Touch with firmware 2.0. How it works is a bit of a mystery (though I have a theory or two) – it would be nice if Apple would actually publish a user guide for new features once in a while. At least for now it is an improvement over the 1.1.4 implementation. (0) ξ
- Garmin’s David Millar is keeping a diary during the Tour de France. (0) ξ
