A trip to Seymour

 

J was on her way back from an art workshop in Tasmania.

Ordinarily she would have got the appalling SkyBus in from the airport to Melbourne and then got a train to Wangaratta where I would have picked her up.

Unfortunately there are only three trains a day and they need to be reserved in advance, and the timings are such that the only sensible choice would have been the 6pm train.

Her flight from Launceston got in about midday, which would have meant she would had about six hours to wait with her single large case full of art materials.

 So, while possible, the train was not an optimal solution.

I could, I suppose have driven there to pick her up, but the problem is Melbourne’s appalling traffic - on a good day it would probably take about three hours, but on a bad day it would be closer to four hours.

And then we had a lateral thought. Broadmeadows railway station is only a $15 Uber from the airport and roughly every hour there’s a diesel V/line commuter train to Seymour.

Seymour lies well to the north of Melbourne’s urban sprawl and is just off the main Sydney Melbourne freeway, meaning I could drive to Seymour station from home in just under two hours.

So that’s exactly what we did. We agreed that I would meet the 3pm train, which would give her plenty of time to get her bag back and get an Uber, and if the worst came to the worst I would wait until her train arrived.

As it was, Jetstar was thirty minutes late, but she managed to get to Broadmeadows with ten minutes to spare, and I met her at Seymour station at 3pm as agreed.

As a solution it worked, but it just showed how completely inadequate public transport is. There should be a train from Melbourne Airport and there should be more than three trains each way per day on the Albury line.

It’s telling that V/line offer  a mid morning bus service to Seymour to connect with a V/line commuter train in lieu of running an extra train service...

Jonquils

 Despite the weather, our jonquils have begun to flower

always cheers me up, reminds me that spring is on its way ...

Another cold wet week

 

A slightly disjointed week this one.

I've already written about my foray to Wodonga public library, and how we were relatively unaffected by the Crowdstrike debacle.

Workwise, I went down to Dow's to finish off my preliminary sketches for the additional documentation that I've been asked to produce, and since I'm home alone for a few days while J is in Tasmania, I hope to work on these this week, especially as the weather still looks to be fairly horrible - more cold days and wet sleety rain.

I also played with Gemini, Google's AI tool, putting it through 'the hat box test' with slightly better results than I obtained from Microsoft's CoPilot.

As I was taking J down to the airport on Friday, I missed my weekly session at the Athenaeum, but I did have some good news.

The Lake View house project is back on - the building had been closed while some fairly serious leaks were investigated and resolved, especially as there were damp patches developing with the accompanying risk of mould.

The good news is that the leaks have been resolved and the damp patches have dried out without the need for conservation work, and what's more there's no mould!

J and I have organised to have some quality time in Queensland next month, so my plan is to get the Dow's documentation finished before we go, and to restart in September when hopefully not only will it be a little warmer, the light will be better for photographing furniture and heavy items in situ...

The great Crowdstrike debacle ...

 Strangely, it wasn't much of a problem for us.

I was taking J to the airport to catch a rescheduled early morning flight (Thanks Virgin!) the next day to Launceston. It was actually our wedding anniversary so the idea was to have lunch in a cafe we like in Euroa, continue down to an airport hotel and have a not particularly romantic dinner - our preferred airport hotel, the Mantra, does a perfectly competent if unimaginative dinner menu, and I would see J onto the airport shuttle bus at stupid o'clock before driving back.

So, off we went. We had an enjoyable lunch, and then about ten to three, we pulled into Wallan services on the freeway to fill the car. This was of course about ten minutes before the planet started going offline, so as far as we were concerned it was just a normal Friday afternoon drive through horrible Melbourne traffic.

When we got to the hotel, I noticed that the pair of public computers they have in the lobby for people to print boarding passes or confirm their check in had blue screened, but that's not exactly unusual.

The hotel could check us in, take money off us for the room, and book us a table for dinner, and the hotel wifi worked and we could login.

It was only when we logged in to check our email that we discovered that the world had gone to shit while we were crawling along the M31. The ABC news channel was full of stories about cash machines not working, supermarket self service checkouts going off line, and more concerningly that airport checkins were generally down, and trauma of traumas, McDonalds was offline!

Strangely, I wasn't concerned. I've seen my share of IT cockups, and while one could ask very pointed questions about contingency planning and roll back strategies, and perhaps contemplate taking the team responsible out to the car park and lining them up against a wall a la Ceausescu, I was fairly certain that people would be working on a way to undo the autodeployed patch.

And so it was, by the time we went to dinner there was a fix, it was being tested and looked to be working.

The ABC had a confusing interview with a security geek who was struggling to explain that because reboots were required some services might take longer than others to come back, and some poor engineers were going to spend Friday evening driving round to remote locations to do server restarts.

By the time we'd finished dinner, Virgin was happily claiming the J's flight would depart as scheduled. 

Just to be on the safe side we set our alarm for 0500 to give her plenty of time in case they were having to resort to old school check ins and bag drops, but actually everything was more or less working.

Due to the early start we'd skipped breakfast. I'd originally planned to have breakfast at one of the cafes in Euroa, but due to my super early start, none of them were open, well except the McDonalds on the way out of town, and they managed to produce  both a ham and cheese toastie, and what they claimed was coffee, but was more like hot brown water than anything else.

I did stop at the big Coles supermarket on the edge of Wangaratta to pick up some fresh vegetables, bread and salad, and their self service checkouts were still down, but they'd solved the problem by throwing people at it - every old school checkout was manned with the result that everything flowed really smoothly and it was quicker than a usual Saturday morning.

So, even though the world might have seemed to be ending, it wasn't really.

There are however serious questions about corporate reliance on (a) Crowdstrike and (b) Microsoft products.

Crowdstrike themselves put our a statement to say that anything reliant on Linux or Mac backends should be unaffected. What was worrying was the sheer number of critical systems that went off line and the extent to which corporate IT has embraced a single point of failure ... 

[Update]

And for those of you who are concerned Virgin did take off more or less on time and deliver J to Launceston only twenty minutes later than claimed, mostly due to a pretty dramatic storm coming out of the Antarctic this morning ...

Feels as if I've been busy

 I'm more or less recovered from my flu - apart from the occasional coughing fit that is, and this week I feel as if I have been busy.

I don't think I have though - my work cataloguing the contents of Lake View are on hold at the moment while a potential structural problem with the building is investigated, but I did go down to Chiltern one day this week to work on the additional documentation that has been asked for - essentially draw up some floor and wall plans and mark them up with my location data and then number the locations for cataloguing - so that what I might have originally described as 'dispensary corridor, assemblage 2, shelf 3' becomes 6.2.3, and that this is used as a prefix for the objects, so that bottle 2142 becomes 6.2.3.2142.

Very simple, very mechanical, but because I'm the only person on site who understood the initial cataloguing process (let's be fair I invented it in the absence of a formal plan), it fell to me to do the diagrams.

I thought I'd be able to get all the rough diagrams done this week, but it took a little longer than expected so I'll have to back next week for another session.

After that, it'll be a case of redrawing the diagrams without the scribbles and corrections on my originals and updating the set of markdown finding aids I wrote to describe which object is where with the numeric cataloguing codes. Hopefully by then the problems with Lakeview will be resolved and I can again get access.

I also had a session up at the Athenaeum this week - essentially going through bundles of archived papers and assessing their significance. I must say it's fun going to the Athenaeum as there's always something interesting going on with people researching family history, or the history of the apple industry, or indeed in earlier days the goldmines and the now vanished Chinese community in the area.

Otherwise, despite feeling as if I've been busy not much. 

I've been down a couple of internet rabbit holes including one using Google Lens to track the origin of an image from wartime Italy, but it's all good fun, and helps keep my skills up to scratch.

The cold weather has gone for the moment, but we're promised another Antarctic storm tomorrow with an outside chance of snow. 

However, despite it still firmly being winter, the bulbs are beginning to stir and the first daffodils are struggling to flower, and three weeks after midwinter, the days are beginning to get just that little bit longer ...

The UK General Election

 So, the UK Election.

As we now know the UK Labour party has won a massive majority on the back of an anti Tory protest vote. Under scrutiny, the figures do not look quite so good, roughly 40% of the registered voters didn’t vote, and of the non Labour vote, if you lump together the Conservatives and Nigel Farage’s Reform party, you would have seen quite a few seats that turned Labour stay Tory - basically if they had preferential voting as we do in Australia, Labour would still have won, but not by nearly so many.

However, I’m not going to indulge in political commentary. I left England for good over twenty years ago and have no intention of returning there to live. All I’ll say is that having gone back for a family visit last year, the first since well before the pandemic, Britain was noticeably poorer than previously.

While there’s no real reason to do so, I’ve kept my British passport as well as my Australian one, as I thought it might simplify the application process when I became due for my UK aged pension - as I’d accumulated around two thirds of the National Insurance contributions for a full UK pension it was worth claiming

When I first moved to Australia, while you could register as a UK elector, the process was purposely cumbersome to discourage you from doing so. Then, with a change of policy, they made it simpler and encouraged you to register, with the proviso that you would lose the right to vote after fifteen years overseas residence, something  that made perfect sense as if you’d lived overseas for fifteen years you probably no longer had any real connection.

And then this year, another policy change and they got rid of the fifteen year rule, probably to allow the members of the Alicante Golf Club to vote, so being a good little vegemite I registered with no intention of actually voting.

Now, when we lived in York, the last place we lived in was a commuter village outside of the city which wasn’t in any of the city electoral districts, but was attached to a sprawling predominately agricultural electorate, where quite frankly a baboon in Union Jack underpants could get elected if it was the Tory candidate. (I used to vote Green as one person protest against environmentally destructive farming practices.)

Not even preferential voting would , in a normal election, allow the election of a non Tory MP.

But the times were not normal, and amazingly, it looked as if there was a chance of Labour unseating the Tories.

So, despite having said I wouldn’t vote, when my postal vote finally arrived I filled in the ballot and sent it back - this was only just over a week before the vote, so I’ve no idea if it got there in time.

In the end, it wouldn’t have mattered, the rural voters of Goole and Pocklington elected a Tory, albeit by a reduced margin, and my postal vote wouldn’t have made any difference.

Will I vote next time?

Probably not. I’ve no close connection to the area and it’s only an accident of electoral geography that I have a vote in a rural electorate, and frankly, if they didn’t elect a non Tory candidate this time they probably never will ...

That was the week that wasn't

 Last weekend was a washout.

Due to my catching what I'll call flu, even though I've no real idea what it was, except it wasn't covid, the weekend was spent coughing, spluttering and feeling feverish and sorry for myself.

However, paracetamol and whisky, both in small quantities, worked their magic and by Wednesday I was well enough to drive down to Dow's where I've been asked to put together some additional documentation to supplement my survey data. (My data is being processed  with openRefine and the like and over half of it has already been ingested into the Trust's asset management system.)

I'd long since given back my key to the building and I needed to confirm that the alarm code and wifi password were still the same as last year when I finished up, and check if any of the access procedures had changed.

That made for a pleasant trip and a chat.

And then today I had my morning session with the Athenaeum. I'd been working on accessioning t-shirts and baseball caps but hadn't quite finished the task before I went sick.

However it's not all been kleenex and archiving - I successfully talked myself out of buying an Olympus XA-1 film camera - there's always the temptation to buy a new bit of retro kit that will finally break the logjam and get me playing with film again, but I realised that I already have more than enough in the way of film camera and a well thought out retro photography kit, and that the real problem was in my head and not likely to be solved by another fifty year old retro device.

The other amusing thing that happened was that I was helping J tidy and reorganise her desk and we found the laptop I bought her second hand as an emergency replacement at the start of the pandemic when her previous laptop died sitting plugged in under a pile of files.

I logged in and everything was working despite it having sat idle for close on three years.

I'm now in quandary as to what to do with it - normally I'd install Linux and use it as a project machine, but truth be told I've enough Linux machines, just as I've enough Windows machines. At a pinch I could use it in place of my old Thinkpad that runs Kubuntu and still has a spinning disk inside of it ...