"Growth is good"

Until half your tree falls over from the mass of the fruit.

I've taken a liking to a bit of garden work. Since I don't actually own the garden, there's no real long-term repercussions if I stuff up so I can experiment. Pruning is good fun. Unfortunately I had only gotten to the front two trees before this happened. There are some rules to follow and it's reasonably straight-forward. Think of it as tidying up or giving your tree a haircut. Getting rid of the cut parts is a bit annoying. I think I'll have to bury most of the fruit.

Getting around Canberra

Canberra public transport happens to be introducing smart cards too. I think theirs will work since they don't have zone boundaries. Their magnetic ticketing system seems to be dying just as Metcard is. However, their single-trip tickets sold on buses are made using a different machine to the validator. This means they can still sell tickets when the validator is broken.

Their 10 trip ticket is worse than Melbourne's in that you can use more than two trips in a day - it's not capped. Their weekly tickets are slightly more expensive than a 10 trip ticket.

Buses are frequent and in peak time can come every 5 minutes or clump together. The bus bays in Civic don't seem so well planned out as a dozen buses fight over four spaces.

The buses seem generally older than Melbourne, lacking low-floor and air-conditioning. However, they do give the impression of being well-maintained.

Older bus stops do look nice and appear to give more shelter than the newer glass ones. Getting to the bus stop is another matter. There are more big ants in Canberra. Street lighting and footpaths are sorely lacking in suburban ACT.

 Commuter unicyclist in office attire with backpack.

Also, bus drivers seem extraordinarily nice. They will give you a verbal greeting when boarding and validating your ticket. Well, I suppose they could be nice from treating the whole city as a joke. :S

Rear doors are not used except at interchanges. So at minor stops, people will need to walk to the front of the bus.

Giant Dandelion seed

I want to steal it/take it home. Any ideas on how to keep it in one piece?

How to deliver a package

This image should have given me some warning as to what was going to occur.

I had been expecting a package from England, tracked online and with email alerts. 3kg but rather bulky as it was my bicycle panniers.
I checked my email at about 12:30 on Saturday to find this:

from Tracknoreply
to
date 13 November 2010 12:20
subject Track Advice Article EE095204810GB
mailed-by

Please be advised of your article delivery status.

Article Number EE095204810GB
Total Articles 1
Date/Time 13.11.10 12:08:17
Current Status Attempted Delivery
Location Messenger Post VIC , Australia

That's absolutely ridiculous because I was home the whole time, along with everyone else in the family. A truly pitiful 'attempted delivery'.

 Tight timings: must have it all ready for collection at Box Hill Central by 12:30.

getting carried away

I didn't expect to end up in the city on Wednesday. All that I had planned was a cruisy bike ride tracing out the Monash Freeway. The meeting time came and went but I had prepared a book. My comrades arrived within two minutes of each other. Impressive given the almost exactly thirty minute delay.

Cycling wind noise is really not conducive for conversation. Plus it adds to the risk of going off-track by being a distraction. The path was generally foolproof once we had learned to trust the differences in surface and line markings.

I don't think I've been on this side of the road before this date.

Choosing lunch in the city took a bit longer than expected due to previous work experiences reducing the number of acceptable food outlets.

The outdoor cycling track/velodrome thing was where my pannier failed again. It got sucked into my rear wheel and caused some misalignment. It's definitely worth a visit. I didn't notice the wheel misalignment while cycling back. It does however, touch the brakes for about 5cm every rotation. Not as bad as last time.

At the end of the day - 80.2km in total. 54 of which were spent in transit from Monash Clayton to the CBD.

MSP430F2012 (ez430 usb stick target board) to breadboard

In between accepting delivery of a ez430 USB stick programmer and when my Launchpad boards come (if ever) I decided to cook up a slot-in method for using the F2012 target boards.

 No fewer than 26 right-angled SIL header pins were used. Though I could have gotten away with 24 had I not connected the SPW pins.

 Hopefully this minimises the overhang from the target board.

It's turning out to be a lot more effort than Arduino but the marginal cost is a lot smaller, given that there are free samples of the microcontroller itself. I'll have to cook up another board to program the 14-pin dual inline packaged versions though.

Dodgy USB pen camera

I bought a pen camera in Shenzhen while on exchange last semester. It took me this long to realise that it's dodgy - 2GB instead of 4GB. I tried recording a friend's thesis presentation but failed.

It appears as "company pmp platform opn usb" in device manager.


Warning: Only 3646 of 3647 MByte tested.
The media is likely to be defective.
1.7 GByte OK (3730824 sectors)
1.7 GByte DATA LOST (3736184 sectors)
Details:1.5 GByte overwritten (3327203 sectors)
0 KByte slightly changed (< 8 bit/sector, 0 sectors)
199.6 MByte corrupted (408981 sectors)
123.5 KByte aliased memory (247 sectors)
First error at offset: 0x0000000000000000
Expected: 0x0000000000000000
Found: 0x05d5522043425355
H2testw version 1.3
Writing speed: 1.40 MByte/s
Reading speed: 5.47 MByte/s
H2testw v1.4

These were helpful:
Setting the time - the microcontroller eats up the text file. 
http://shaddack.twibright.com/projects/reveng_spypen/ 

Create a file named "SystemTime.txt", with a single line in format
e.g. 2009-10-05 04:30:00
Then save it to the root directory of the spy pen. 

Reformat to proper capacity using low level format:
http://fake-memory.com/forum/index.php?topic=567.0 

good week

• Frolicked about the laboratories in my Vibram Fivefingers imitations
• Got a call to schedule a Melbourne-based vac work interview
• Got back an essay with no comments marked 25/30 - I was typing this up until 6AM on the day it was due
• Missed a departmental photo but instead had lunch in very amiable company
• Got to see the effects of five midday beers on a Malaysian kid (after the departmental photo/bbq)- 太贪心了
• Set a personal best cycling commute time of 35 minutes to make it on time to a friend's thesis final presentation
• Broke my pannier bag clip trying to make the return journey in the same time
• Had the pleasant company of graduating classmates over a steak dinner
• Bought a $5 government subsidised helmet
• Converted a 20+ page report (done mostly in the 8 hours before it was due) into 30 slides and got through my mid-thesis satisfactorily
• Consulted with a classmate about my laziness/procrastination and whether it can be attributed to post-exchange syndrome

quick ride

While riding the 50km Around the bay in a day trip, I realised that my odometry on my bicycle computer is screwed up. The calibration resets, along with the clock, every time I reset the distance counter. Lame.
The 50km ride is pretty quick and flat - even the Westgate doesn't pose much of a challenge because of the huge lead-in making the slope fairly gentle. I saw no fewer than three unicycles along the way. There were also three guys on a triple bike. A lot of corporate groups, some couples and lots of solo riders. I'd say if you have anything faster than a mountain bike, 50km isn't worth doing more than once. I got 1:27 there, 1:10 on the way back. On the way back I was keeping up with a teenager on a road bike.

Figure 1: Monash manufactured enthusiasm.

Figure 2: Evolved pest.

I can confirm that Melbourne is a flat city and great to ride it. Unfortunately it doesn't apply to the suburbs.

wording

ambiguous
ambivalent
cagaguous?
Okay... not really sure was my supervisor was saying by the third big word but it was an interesting journey getting to that strange conversation. He had been giving some second-year kids a grilling over plagiarism. Each of them got about thirty minutes and each of them was unsuccessful in disputing their plagiarism charge. They seemed like overseas students who wouldn't be able to appreciate those kind of words (although I'm not sure whether he was speaking to them with the big words too). Kids nowadays... What was he thinking? Being wrong and then teaching his mistake to other people. Good game.
I think there was something a bit strange about that kid though. He asked why I was here and I explained that I was here to see him about my project. He said 'same here'. I wandered off to speak to a PhD student. When I came back we ended up exchanging those exact same words.
I'm going to try to find out what that third big word was.

fooding

Here's a Cafe-de-coral inspired creation.

I especially like how proper plates were more common in Hong Kong. Big ones too! When going to my 8AM lecture I noticed how most food outlets weren't even open to serve food.

This division is interesting too:
 http://www.cafedecoral.com/web/sbu/sbu3_4.htm

Pricing is positioned with a slight premium to reflect consumers' psychographics' need.
Customer profile is cosmopolitan, young and upwardly mobile executives who are image conscious and need an upscale and sophisticated environment, with superior food quality, at a slightly higher premium on price fast food shops.

the podiatric journey begins

collision

I was late to work today. This week I've been catching the bus. I had managed to injure my leg while coming downhill and riding off a 30m cliff getting off my cousin's trial bike. Anyway, hopefully my leg will be better by next week for ride to work/uni day (in order to claim free breakfast).
Anyway, the 902 had a hard time getting southbound through Glen Waverley. Two cars had collided in the turning lane from Springvale Road into Coleman Parade. Police cars and a fire truck blocked off the adjacent southbound lane as well as the eastbound exit of Railway Parade North. Springvale Road down to two lanes should be bearable but it wasn't.
It turns out that another two cars had managed to sandwich a motorcycle in the next lane. They had stopped and weren't helping with traffic flow. Two policewomen jogged over to help. Springvale Road southbound was down to one lane only. Ridiculous.
Since the eastbound exit of Railway Parade North was blocked, the bus driver took us around the back of Novotel via Kingsway. Good on him for trying.

escaping reality

Oh, so this is a club. I seemed to have a much more elaborate image in my mind but it turns out to be a densely-packed loungey area with excessively loud music coming from behind an even more densely-packed standing area. The pulsating coloured patterns projected upon the ceiling were nice though.
It would certainly be interesting to run experiments on groups of people with loud sounds that affect balance and fake drinks that have no alcoholic content.
I also found that the environment is not conducive in the slightest manner for conversation. It is difficult to convey ideas to new people in such an environment.
It was also an opportunity to observe the inebriated. Here I see a very different facet of a colleague and it's not one that exemplifies his best qualities as a person. It seems as though people want to spend as little time in this 'real-world' as possible. They recreate their dreams or unawareness by excessively loud music, alcohol, lighting effects and possibly other elements.
Another matter - how can foot traffic be so heavy in such a small area. Where is everyone going? There aren't all that many destinations within such a confined space.
One colleague certainly demonstrated his 'can-do' attitude.  Although he had no fewer than three 'attempts', he declared the session a failure.  It begs the question of how to measure success. Perhaps it is impressing sufficiently with a dance in order to exchange contact details (sounds like a David Attenborough narration). Otherwise it could be related to that strange conversation emanating from a male toilet cubicle. hrm
Nevertheless, I'll try to keep an open mind on what others enjoy. It might even help on a developing professional relationships interview question. Having said that, Government House was a lot nicer.

Good for you!

It was quite an interesting twenty-four hour period for me earlier this week. I got fitted for Vibram Fivefingers shoes and talked to some people.

Of course I’m not putting the correct emphasis on those events. Monday afternoon was my interview session for ATO vacation work. It was only supposed to take thirty minutes but I ended up wasting forty minutes of their lives, asking a few questions at the end. ATO dress code seemed pretty casual. I found it funny how the interviewers brought up work-life balance as a pull factor towards the ATO while revealing that they don’t have scheduled lunch breaks, or any breaks for that matter, on interview days. They kept on saying congratulations on getting this far in the process – it started sounding tiresome!

Making the most of my time in the CBD, I decided to get fitted for Vibram Fivefingers shoes. My feet are too small for the men’s range. The ladies range has some outrageous colours. All the prices are pretty steep though.

The next part of the day was at Government House. I had only really orbited the place in high school as part of cross country running. Today I had a follow up for my exchange program. “Thanks for taking our money and doing stuff overseas.” Well more on that later. It was a bit messy outside the gate. There was only one person verifying guests coming in by car and on foot. Luckily for me there happened to be quite an attractive young lady within my field of vision with whom I could query the matter. Her hair was most impressive and she had an interesting voice.

While waiting for the ceremony to begin, a buxom lady who works in administering the program talked to me about a variety of topics. It was an opportunity for her to see who she administers the program for. At this stage there was finger food and alcohol floating about freely by waiters emblazoned with EIIR.

Important people made their speeches. The grants help strengthen ties in this global world. Apparently they’re fiercely contested too. Hmm. Each awardee was presented with a slab of glass labelled with their name. It’s pretty thick too. Looks nice. Group photos were taken in another room. Due to the official party being composed of largely tall people, the awardees had to be moved backwards, up stairs to be visible to the camera. I ended up next to aforementioned young lady due to a photographer instigated swap.

My mother wasn’t very helpful in the next part of the evening. She wanted me to make the most of the food and drink floating about. I had planned to talk to some representatives of a locally-based company owned by the group that finances these exchange grants. The organisers were helpful in helping me locate a representative. Unfortunately he was a few levels too high, being the chairman and all. It was nice to learn about the field from those managers. I liked how a CEO of a related company said he started off by living in a hut while installing hydro generators. Another guy who reminds me of Richard Dawkins managed to use “good for you” as a filler phrase while there was nothing said. I shall endeavour to try that at some stage. It was also stated that current graduates are expecting too quick a career progression, but can overtake older engineers by rank on merit, rather than the old system of age. I ended up having to drive the car home.

On the morning of the following day I had an interview at a detergent factory for vacation work. It was quite a long drive and the time was over allocated. It was interesting to note that this organisation runs its vacation work solely as part of its corporate social responsibility programme. There are no graduate positions available and only three engineers employed. Oh well, hopefully I get something suitable for this summer.

sub-culture

I find myself obfuscated by certain realisations in the past few days. Little did I know that tattoo subculture was so pervasive. It's like every second person displays it as one might whip out their Iphone in a casual setting, or Macbook in a lecture theatre. This was at a sit-down birthday party though. When did this happen? Why is everyone getting them? Why is the guy who is admitting to having a fake one telling me that he's getting a real one in two weeks? And, woah, that guy doesn't have much bare skin left on that arm thing. hrrm
If this is indeed a growing trend, there certainly is money in it and quite some potential. Perhaps business-minded readers might like to comment on the prospects of a chain of stores with these kind of services.
Before this I thought the next biggest realisation was the amount of preparation required for a job interview. Typing out all answers, trying to think out random ones, etc. hah
Anyway, I've been cycling a bit more and cars are annoying. One stopped perpendicular to traffic flow on Canterbury Road in Box Hill. Just as I'm trying to power up this hill, I find a lady in a convertible reversing out due to some problems in parking. There's another person trying to turn into the driveway coming down the hill and someone trying to get out of the driveway.

bloody technology

Yes... it's that time of the year. Spamming all of your favourite organisations for work (and also some not so favourable ones). I think it's great how some companies have web-based systems that can take in your CV and churn out the details into the appropriate text boxes in the application process. At least for the details part, but not employment history, it's been pretty accurate. Fantastic.
The part I don't understand is why academic results need to be entered manually. If they're smart enough to rip heterogeneous data out of a CV then surely they can deal with fairly homogeneous data from a spreadsheet.
Of course you're thinking something annoying must've happened otherwise he wouldn't be ranting like this. Well, the page decided to refresh just as I was about 70% done with it. It returned with empty cells.
This wouldn't have happened in an email or snail mail application.

generosity

I paid for seven five-cent postage stamps and three ten-cent postage stamps using coins at the Monash University post office. To my surprise, the lady walks away from the counter. I thought she wasn't pleased at the coinage. Instead I get a free small envelope to house the postage stamps. Bargain.
These are, of course, to top up the unfranked fifty and fifty-five stamps that still keep coming in.

musings

Figure 1: Tank with a party hat

Well, that's not quite what I wanted. So I researched the matter a bit further and have come to the conclusion that my graphics memory may be faulty. Apart from the strange objects, this particular computer seems to have trouble resuming from S3 - suspend to RAM. It seems plausible that if the graphics memory is stuffed then the stored information is too corrupt to resume from.

Another thing is the Tablet PC... I should investigate whether that sideport memory is a bit stuffed too. I have been getting BSODs on that though so it might be the GPU instead.

commuting to uni

I planned for the worst-case but the journey was pretty much spot-on prediction. That put me on campus 25 minutes before class started. Breakfast was something to mull about. Originally I thought that the Subway $2 deal would be something good to take advantage of. However my optimised route bypasses any reasonable store with annoying efficiency.
Today I found traffic lights annoying. I think my previous journeys on foot and two wheels have had too-optimised paths and I'm not used to waiting for light changes. On the other hand, I think I'm becoming more confident with lane changing... funnily enough from being on a bike rather than in a car.
Two layers of clothing is more than enough and I found myself short on luggage stowage once the jacket came off. Riding with a tshirt with vest was quite a good compromise.
Hills remained annoyingly slow, with a instantaneous speed of around 10km/h. On flats I managed 35km/h. Downhill, but not today, I've managed 45km/h before my eyes water so much that I can't read the display.
Classmates enjoyed seeing the helmet-mounted mirror and remarked on the rear-weighting and the thinner tyres.
I'm not all that pleased about my front derailleur. It seems to fail in changing a fair bit. Cornering was a challenge with the full load.
All up it was quite a good first run. 48 minutes for a 11.5km run with full-load. That's pretty much the same as the bus ride with walking to the bus stop.

polling assistant-ing

Last weekend I had the pleasure of working at a polling place for the federal election. It was not without issues in gaining employment in the first place. The AEC seem to ignore their web applications. It was only after some eavesdropping, round-about thinking aloud from co-workers and other weird human interaction that I was verbally prodded into following up my application by telephone. To my delight the AEC was both eager and desperate sounding on the phone and promised me a call back later that evening. This was on a Thursday.
On Friday I received an email telling me to do the online course. It goes through all you need to know but won't remember. There's a 1% pass rate required on the quizzes.
Saturday was when it all happened. The officer in charge, OIC, gave me the role of ballot box guard. It sounds quite alright but in reality it's not that interesting. It mainly involved making suggestions to people about which box to put their ballot papers in. One fellow didn't take kindly to my suggested, retorting that he'd been doing it for 70 years already. It was reasonably straightforward except that some people decided to fold the House of Representatives paper into the Senate paper.
It took until around 1PM for the queues to die out. After lunch I had a stint as ordinary issuing officer - just the regular name marker person. It does require marginally more knowledge and more brain-sapping interaction. Although it was quiet when I got into it and so I went to sharpen some pencils and clean out the booths. I really wouldn't mind the job of 2IC - it seems like a position where you can jump in to relieve people while holding experience and knowledge but not so much that you're flooded with paperwork like the OIC.

Days like this also provide an opportunity to see the whole spectrum of the community. But firstly, I did happen to make myself known to my granduncle and his mob. The generation+1 members didn’t recognise me at first but ran back in five minutes after putting in their ballot papers to confirm my identity. This is one of those days where people who ordinarily wouldn’t be seen in public with their parents are caught doing exactly that. It was notable that white male Asian female couples tended to be older and not always arriving together and almost certainly without the children being present. Asian male white female couples tended to be younger and with kids in tow, or rather man happily pushing stroller. The kids from a darker man with curly hair (possibly West Indies) and Asian female were absolutely adorable. “I voted” stickers turned out to be an absolute winner with the kids, but not so much with the adults. That is, except for a group of mid-twenties dark-dressing group of four (Goth or something?) who were thrilled to be offered a whole roll of stickers.

By the close of polling I had managed to stuff down two meals in a space of four hours. A class of 2006 MHS dude joined the crew and we developed an effective way of sorting Senate papers. Well, at least much more effective than the others. I think the 2IC was impressed, especially with the gravity-assisted compact temporary storage. There’s still a place for time and management studies and it would be rather cool to implement it in the next election.

Party-appointed scruntineers turned out to be much more well-mannered than the OIC and my work manager made them out to be. In fact, everyone was really nice! An old lady said that to me in the morning after I bode her a good day as she walked past the ballot box. I thought the OIC didn’t have to be that nice – there were plenty of things that would have ticked me off. Mainly ignorant questions.

All up it was quite a worthwhile experience. Recommended. 10/10

Transport Rant

Real Metcard compensation


Get train compensation and cash it out. This part assumes that you've all been diligent in claiming compensation from Connex and later Metro, travel through both zones one and two and works best if you're on concession. 

1. Claim your compensation for those months where train performance was low enough to allow for it. You will have been using a zone 1+2 monthly of either of the fares.
2. Claim your compensation for one-off incidents such as the July 27th incident.
3. Gather up your full-fare zone 1+2 daily Metcards. Not used ordinarily due to poorer value in that you'd rather reinvest that face value into a monthly and/or use a concession fare instead.
4. Glance at the tram zone boundary changes. http://www.metlinkmelbourne.com.au/news/news-promotions/tram-fares-simpler-with-zone-changes
5. Fill out this form and send it in by September 30 to get cash back on all of those sub-optimal tickets: http://www.metlinkmelbourne.com.au/assets/PDFs/Application-forms/MetcardRefundApplicationForm.pdf

Myki 
Am I better off?
Due to the discrepancies/averaging in calculating Myki pass daily rates, it may work out to be more than the equivalent Metcard in certain months. But I'm thinking about the actions involved. Metcard requires the wallet to be opened once for a journey. Myki requires the wallet to be presented twice but not opened. A bit of a trade-off. I'm leaning towards Myki for this having enjoyed Octopus in Hong Kong.

Figure 1: Myki miscalculation


The above image shows Myki miscalculating the best fare. A reasonable person would use their 10x2 hour zone 2 ticket for the bus and then a 10x2 hour zone 1+2 ticket for the rest of the evening after 6PM. That would involve $1.01 plus $2.48 giving $3.49 rather than the $3.95 here. Myki staff were prompt in replying but they refunded me $1.47 instead of changing it to a zone 1+2. I was under the impression one was not permitted to extend a non-periodical ticket into another zone. Ah well.


As an aside, the almost Asian-looking Myki-mate is a champ... working at Monash on those miserable (and rainy) days and nights at the exposed bus loop. 

Figure 2: Myki gg


Myki was a bit slow in loading on my pass. It had used my Myki money in the morning. I thought that it would be unreasonable for a pass to become active in the middle of the day after my Myki money had been used, meaning I only get half a day's utility from that first day of the pass. I'm optimistic that the system is robust enough to work that out and refund me. Hopefully that message means it's considering the matter rather deeply. I did buy a thirty-two day pass but I'm almost regretting it because I could cycle on that last day before the MSB.


Bicycle

Figure 3: Bicycle port-side

Figure 4: Bicycle stern


Yeah, now I can carry lots of 'stuff' while on the bike and maybe even try to beat the bus to uni on some days.


Long bus

Figure 5: Big bus

Figure 6: Something cool


Yeah, I thought it was cool.

Subway vouchers at Box Hill

After having the delightful experience in the late afternoon of being in a stationary bus during which a car collided into it, I found that I was going to be late to an event that evening.
It was an opportunity for me to kill the time to the next train by using my Subway vouchers. I had a few, but the one i decided to use was the buy one six-inch get one free as long as you purchase a regular drink. It was all going rather smoothly until the Chinese guy took my voucher. At first he was confused by the lack of a price on the voucher. He was then berated by his boss in Mandarin for not understanding English. Funny guy.
It was a pizza sub. The whole deal ended up being $6.45 and the boss said the other voucher works out to be the same (I threw it in just to confuse the first guy). Ordinarily the foot-long sub would be $7 without a drink.
Win.

sleepy

I nodded off in a 9AM lecture and 11AM tutorial. Ahh good days. Neck is sore from sleeping in the bus.

I ended up next to a smoker for a random activity... geez that smells awful.

Thanks for the comment spoon/hamburgular.

this is how we roll

On Sunday 25th July I was graced with Mr Tho Pham's presence for a gentle ride through Melbourne's eastern suburbs. My guest brought his decently-sized bike along in the back of a Corolla. He was well-equipped but didn't have a good concept about gears until fifteen minutes into the ride. I like his bike - it's tall enough for me to extend my leg fully in a normal cadence, which is a lot more than what I can do on my ten-year old MTB.

The Eastern Freeway trail was full of promise since I had used it to get to Mr William Xian's house and found the under-road tunnels quite convenient. However, going in the other direction meant light gravel and traffic lights. At Park Road, Donvale, we had to cross to the other side of the freeway due to a lack of path on the southern side. While crossing we encountered some teenage blonde females who seemed to be a bit too apologetic about being on the footpath when we were [not supposed to be but couldn't be bothered crossing the road to ride on the other side]. It reminded me of an article saying how children in China were taught to salute cars.

I found the sight of boomgates on a freeway quite odd.

The back of Donvale/Mitcham was a really nice whup-whup area. Lots of trees - so many that you can't see the houses on the other side. Eerily quiet. Much more than behind a freeway sound barrier which might be good for a home theatre setup. hmm

Nice smells came from the Taberet near Maroondah Highway. The Heatherdale Hungry Jacks was also visible. Tho nearly stacked when turning a corner on the wrong side of the path. An apology was issued.

An error in navigation was made when I didn't notice the turnoff onto gravel away from the Eastlink trail. This landed us at Burwood Highway x Mountain Highway instead of Bunnings 1km west. Riding on Burwood Highway wasn't too bad. Three lanes were plenty. I disposed of two sealed lead-acid batteries and an assortment of Ni-Cd cells at the Whitehorse Waste Transfer Facility. My pack didn't feel a great deal lighter though. Onwards we encountered a dirtbike facility. The gradients on this section were much more manageable than the hills near the Eastern Freeway.

Climbing up High Street Road westwards was a struggle... for Tho. He dismounted. He was lame. Glucogel was procured at a discount pharmacy on Springvale Road and we proceeded to Urban Burger, due to the reasonably generous two burgers for $15 voucher I had in my possession.

At that stage we had covered 26km and settled for lunch at 3PM. The man was nice enough to cut the voucher out himself. We were joined by a white man and an Asian woman. The guy didn't seem very interested in things. The lady thought we were international students and wanted to help us with directions and all that. She spoke to me in mandarin but her four years experience in Melbourne doesn't really beat my whole life here. There were some misunderstandings along the way owing to my crap aural comprehension but some notable points developed during the course of conversation. She took hold of the fact that I trace my roots to Shantou and that the man's great something-or-other was from there and came to Australia for the gold mines. He was not enthusiastic at all about the point that she was making about how he could be related to me. hehe

Our bikes were still secure so we proceeded back to Box Hill via a sort of plan B. Riding on Springvale Road was almost deadly, so we stuck to the service lanes and footpath. I was getting a bit cold on the way back. In total, 38.5km was covered in that afternoon.

Run Melbourne

Notable occurrences:

• backflab
• female toilet queue on course
• unsanitary Gatorade (people plunge a paper cup into a bin full of the blue stuff and stir it with a large rod)
• congestion
• starting at the back gives you a good feeling from overtaking a lot of people but that gives a false sense of performance
• why no sprinting?

For next time:

• Start in a faster group
• don't waste time with toilets
• adopt a sense of urgency after 15 minutes

On a nicer point, I compared results with my friend who didn't sprint at the end. It seems like I overtook 293 people in 83 seconds.

autoethnophilia

Kean Wong suggested philautogeny.
Wikipedia calls it ethnic nepotism.
I think autoethnophilia sounds more interesting though.

In some ways it's so simple and happens without thought (I can't remember if it was in Dawkins' Selfish Gene book). At other times it just seems plain dodgy.

It's not quite the phenomenon of Asians herding together or whichever racial group... it's more favouring and can be weird.

I was told that a lot of the traders in Shenzhen speak Teochew dialect and that if you happen to be able to speak that dialect, you won't get ripped off as much. This is even though the area is geographically Cantonese (and Mandarin is standard). So there's a bit of favoritism going on there based on dialect/ same village origins.

My dodgier example involves two Hong Kong guys cruising around in a van trying to sell home theatre equipment, saying that they want to help out fellow Chinese with a great deal. This happened in Box Hill. Their excuse was quite dodgy, saying that they didn't want to drive back to the warehouse in Sydney with all this extra stock/mass. I found his English better than his Mandarin although he did ask whether I understood Cantonese. Reading back it doesn't seem too weird, but just seeing guys trying to sell stuff out of a van and use some magazine to put the price into perspective was quite a new experience for me.

Hmm maybe they just weren't confident enough to deal with any other kinds of people. But then I wouldn't have my excuse to make up such an awesome word.

Have you been a beneficiary or victim of autoethnophilia? Leave a comment below.

Myki workings

I thought I may as well have a go at some commentary on the Myki system after having enjoyed Octopus for five months. Not the food.

Myki rollout
Obviously the timing could have been better and whether it was delayed due to engineers watching Youtube on their second monitors or something else, I don't believe allowing it to be used only on trains in Melbourne was very useful.
For example, a smartbus driver yelled at a young brunette with earphones in and an older lady who probably doesn't understand all that much English for trying to use Myki. Partial implementation doesn't really help these people and just adds another opportunity for confusion or ignorance.
Is it really necessary to promote a system that's not fully operational with mobile kiosks and all? Especially at shopping centres like Chadstone which aren't even in walking distance of a train station... Fantastic - it'll just make more angry bus drivers and more boarding delays at their bus terminals.

Concession
Concession doesn't really need to be printed onto the card. Really. Octopus allowed time-limited concessions to be applied on photo-personalised cards. The same deal could happen here and upon showing proof of concession, the card could be coded with concession status for another period.

Periodic Tickets
I don't think periodic tickets have any reason to exist anymore. There should be something like "Myki money rewards" instead of periodic tickets where once you spend enough, you get a discount. I think I worked the threshold out to be 18 days of travel in a month for zone 2. Myki is supposed to be able to calculate the best fare for you. I received a pretty boring reply from Myki as regards this matter at the end of last November, suggesting the use of Myki money for uncertain travel (read: I don't know whether I feel like attending class). I still don't believe it should be necessary to commit to such a ticket that doesn't need to exist in electronic form.

Passengers that didn't plan ahead
This one lumps a few issues together. I found that "exact fare only" worked pretty well on HK buses, minibuses and trams. There was also some whinging in the paper about the loss of city saver fares under Myki. Since you can't select anything at the touch-on panel and a tram driver is in no position to change it for each passenger, it doesn't seem like it could have worked. However, I think that an immediate-use fare machine catering for exact fare and Myki will be a suitable compromise. It could be just one specially-marked machine on the tram, replacing the vending machine and giving a paper receipt for exact fare passengers, with a timestamp and route number. The Myki passengers shouldn't need anything since it the system would know about it.
For buses, the bus driver could toggle the fare (rather like how one asks the 'bus captain' for the cheaper Central fare if not proceeding all the way to Causeway Bay on the number 8 minibus). We could have an exact-fare bucket and receipt printer near where the Metcard machine is currently.
Fares don't need to be complicated. A flat $2 for the ride or $1 for concession doesn't seem too far-fetched. Honesty system applies for concession. Interestingly, I've never had my Octopus checked by any ticket inspectors and my classmate expressed horror at the Youtube video of Melbourne authorised officers on the train network.
No-nonsense top up on trams and buses. No change given. However much you hand over is that amount of credit added onto the card. I haven't read any information about how this was planned to work on buses and trams.


My own whinging (not about Myki)
People who complain in the Whitehorse Leader about how hot or cold or whatever Box Hill bus terminal is... in my eyes Doncaster is far worse than Box Hill. The shopping centre grew so much bigger, has a complex active system for counting car park spaces and yet hasn't improved conditions for public transport users. Sure there are two smartbus routes ploughing through but the bus shelters are no more than the standard roadside ones. Puddles form at the waiting areas! Harumph.
On another note, I seem to be able to rely on a smartbus being on time/closer to being on time than a train on the Belgrave/Lilydale line. Weird... and it really shouldn't be that way.

Perhaps I could get a better view of the other side if I were to gain a summer vacation position at the transport department.

Myki worked

Odd... I was expecting worse.
Though it could have been better in detecting through my wallet rather than having to get it out.
I found it quite alright otherwise. I put on money. It opened a barrier at Southern Cross. It opened a barrier at Box Hill. It read at the top-up machine and told me how much there was left.

Easter - Lijiang account

I have an excessively long account about my Easter travels here:
http://hklogs.blogspot.com/2010/04/easter.html 

questions

While abroad and in a 'multicultural' environment, I've noticed some situations consisting of a peculiar style of 'conversation'. A person might have a series of questions.  However, the next question is fired off (not necessarily to the same previously-questioned person) before a response is given to the first question.

This kind of time-division doesn't seem to work well in reality. Perhaps there is some truth in that Hitchhiker's quote:

If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working.

idiot...

I had recently discovered that many buses have reclining seats with a push-button release - rather like on aircraft. So here I was trying to recline a seat but getting nowhere. I turn around to discover that it has a bright yellow vertical support right through it with a red 'press for stop' bell!

food apathy?

I think I feel a kind of apathy towards foods.
Observing how some groups may extract satisfaction from hopping about one dessert store to another made me reflect on my own attitudes towards foods.

Others seem to be quite vocal about how good they perceive the food to be...
...like some sort of "I can't believe its not butter?!" incredulation. [1]

I just don't see what all the fuss is about after a certain point. Perhaps it'd be better explained with the aid of a diagram:



Perhaps my x-axis label is wrong... but this is the feeling I'm getting anyway.

[1] Adapted from Mr Goh-Chew

Banking in HK - a very narrow view

I wanted to do a bit more than what the bog-standard savings account was letting me do.
My main concern was that if I made a telegraphic transfer, I would be converting AUD into HKD at a certain rate at a random time of the day. HSBC updates its rates virtually every minute inside internet banking and every fifteen minutes on the noticeboard webpage.

Things turned out to be favourable for me...

 

Well, I'm not expecting to be a professor but I'll take the 12 months fee exemption anyway.

Yeah, Hong Kong Banks don't have student fee exemptions. Instead you need to maintain a minimum balance. I'll get to savings in a moment.

So with this Advance integrated account, it can take values in a whole bunch of different currencies, including AUD. Now I can wait a while and click when the exchange rate is right instead of leaving it up to chance (that includes the change between being at a computer lab and getting to the branch to change notes).

I even get a chequebook. I asked the teller about the difference between current accounts and savings accounts. 

Me: So cheques use the current account right?

Teller: Yes.

Me: Are there any other differences?

Teller: You can earn interest on your savings account balance.

Me: What's the current interest rate?

Teller: *stupid grin* Zero point zero zero one percent.

Another perk is access to express lines at some branches.

Upon receiving the welcome pack in my email, (yes, they don't give out much paper/rubbish/recycling material) I decided to do the questionnaire about values and what drives my financial decisions.

I actually bothered to put the link in that picture so you may click on it.

There were questions like this (kind of getting to what you've been wanting me to post about Sam):

I think 4 or 5 can be appropriate for Q27 if one works for a dodgy boss. Hmm Phonetec.

Anyway, I got a whole bunch of things that don't all seem to agree with each other and me. Oh well. Funny enough seeing those two questions from a bank website.

Your values, beliefs and interests
This section outlines how your values impact on your general approach to life, what motivates you, and how others see you.
You place great importance on making full use of your talents, and on generally getting on and succeeding in life. You like to feel intelligent and capable – and want others to see you that way too. You are driven and keep pushing yourself to reach your own challenging goals, with people likely to respect you for your motivation and energy. At the same time you want to have some fun. Your ‘joie de vivre’ and an active social life keep you from turning into a workaholic and being perceived as someone who is all work and no play.
You like to be spontaneous. Stability and security are things that other people strive for and you fight against. Well, where’s the fun in knowing what’s around the next corner? Let’s be honest, you’d feel stifled by a predictable or sheltered way of life. After all, life is for living and you’d hate to let it pass you by. You don’t want to miss a moment of it!
You are probably someone who is content with familiar things. You’re comfortable with people you know and may be less keen on meeting new people. You may prefer to spend time in familiar surroundings, rather than exploring new places. If you’ve had a good holiday somewhere, you might prefer to return to the same destination instead of experimenting with somewhere new. Stability, familiarity and routine are important to you and when others suggest trying something risky or unknown, you may feel a little dubious. You might be the sort of person who worries that trying out new things could be a waste of time, money, or worse!

Your career
Whether you are currently in work or not, this section outlines the career and work environment likely to be best suited to your values, where you will be happiest and able to perform at your best.
You’re probably good at what you do and you feel it’s important that this is recognised. Your ambition will probably help you to climb the career ladder a little quicker than others. You like to work somewhere where you are surrounded by people who are as ambitious and capable as you are. There’s also a good chance that you’re not one to suffer fools gladly and could be frustrated by what you see as ‘sloppy standards’.
The entertainment industry is right up your street. If not, then leisure, communications, advertising, publishing or publicity would suit you too. Even if you don’t work in these areas, you’ll fit in as long as you don’t work for a staid organisation, with a manager who believes in all work and no play.
You’ve probably gone for a role that changes by the day and doesn’t restrict you with routine. You may have even selected a job that has an element of risk, or even danger. Jobs in compliance, security, or health and safety are for other people to apply for, as far as you are concerned. You may find that you’re also suited to an entrepreneurial role or to working for yourself.
Your personal life is important to you, and why shouldn’t it be? It just means that you prefer a job that has an element of routine and a little predictability, so it can fit around your lifestyle. You’re probably a reliable, reassuring and stable influence at work. You probably don’t fancy a job that involves too much travel, change and ambiguity, or you’d have applied for one like that, wouldn’t you?

Lunar New Year - China attacks the senses

Last week I had the pleasure of travelling by coach from Hong Kong to Shantou to stay with relatives over the new year period. The border crossing is quite something with no metal-detecting arch for people and an optional x-ray scanner for luggage. Also, it seems that a RHS driven coach doesn't detract from driving quality in a LHS drive system.

After exiting the coach, Shantou, China stimulates the senses in several ways:

• The air is surprisingly reasonable after being in Hong Kong for a few weeks
• It's noisy - horns are used unsparingly, quite like how children use bicycle bells. Consumer fireworks make noise and then cause car/bike/scooter alarms to go off.
• It's bright - useless lights show off wealth, but also flood the night sky such that stars cannot be viewed. And again with the random fireworks.
• The place does feel rough and unmaintained. There's vision impairment tracks along the footpath but the footpath itself is uneven and there are huge gaps between the footpath and the elevated shopfronts.
• The taste of the food is much more to my liking.

 

My uncle's home was quite cosy... here my smallest cousin doesn't look too impressed at my uncle taking the random picture. Also note the ridiculously small teacups - managing and drinking from these can kill a lot of time, even with only intermittent conversation. I think it helps with under/unemployment in Shantou.

Here's grandma. Note my uncle's place is on the sixth floor with no lift.  We managed to talk about stuff in Mandarin, although she got some tones mixed up once or twice. Everyone watched 'the show' on the night and I helped uncle pull the song off QQ news so he could practice singing it. >.<

Number Two trying to enjoy GTA2 with little English and the Chinese way of driving. He took the laneways and drove the wrong way up highways, but wanted to stop at traffic lights. A start eh? Hmmm
The Chinese also kindly blocked Facebook, Blogger/Blogspot, Youtube, Picasa web and Google documents. Very kind of them except I actually wanted to wanted to waste time.

Here's some cool consumer fireworks - apologies for not making up my mind about the orientation earlier.

Usually thrown individually.

Launcher reuse for mini-rockets.

Anyway, onwards to another matter - Chinese traffic.

I've found that Chinese traffic doesn't paralyse at an incident in town - they just go around it as usual as they weave and come from all different directions (there's no uniformity to turning from one major road to another like how we have an arc marked out). However, their dodgy ways causes trouble on the expressway. When traffic slows down for some reason [requiring an ambulance], traffic fans out to three lanes. That's not really helpful for the emergency services who need to get there with haste to clean up the mess.
My coach had tried to overtake on the shoulder but had to merge back upon seeing a motorcycle. The same driver also got lost in Shenzhen and had to ask for directions. The second bus driver used his GPS which complained about the matter of speed.  A coach in Shenzhen tried to do a three-point turn on a three lane dual carriageway highway. Weird stuff.

There's also a rule of thumb for wet weather travel.

1. You may ride a bicycle and hold your own umbrella.
2. You may ride a scooter and have a second person hold an umbrella (or launch medium-sized fireworks on the go)

responsibility

I've been eating a lot more fruit lately. I think it could be because I'm now directly responsible for the fruit in my room and whether it rots/over-ripens in my drawer or on my table. So I can't just blame someone else such as my mother for buying clearance, already over-ripened fruit.

segregation

I'm going to rant about exchange-y stuff at hklogs.blogspot.com while this one will remain for other ramblings. Good day. :P

What is at Ada No 2 Mill?

Not much really.......

 If you have no/low expectations and are in it for the journey (it's a pretty steep hike), there shouldn't be too much whinging.

The camping grounds at Latrobe River camping area weren't as good as Starling Gap - no grass and crappier toilets. Good for caravans, ATVs and loud music. Not so great for this sorry lot.

I made this all by myself while waiting for the others to wake up. It took a lot of really crappy matches (not striking and also breaking in half) and a fair bit of sunbaked Chinese newspaper from 2007. Unfortunately, the marshmellows had amalgamated into one hideous gelatinous glob.

Seven-Acre Rock had nice views. Most of the area isn't signposted well, though it's easier to get lost on the road in a car than on foot.  The path is well worn and reasonably obvious, although at times it would have been easier to give up and turn back - but that would be a waste.

Anyway, any random comments from all readers? :)

Happy new year to all.