Schinckel.net

There’s three guys on the train behind me, and they have spent the whole trip talking about cars. It has bored me shitless.

Why is it that when I’m on time, or early, the train is late; but when I’m running late, the train is on time - or early? I had to run to catch it again. I’m so unfit. For someone who used to play or ref 12-odd games of touch per week, I’ve lost heaps of fitness. What is up with the 2 girls who catch the train from Lynton to Torrens Park? It’s a 15 minute walk!! Do yourselves a favour, save some money & walk. And get some better sunglasses. A week or so ago we had some rain - it seems to have cleared up a bit now - and I got off at Mile End, as I was on the later train and didn’t have time for a coffee in town. The underpass had a bit over an inch of water in it, and there was no other way off the platform. I had wet feet that day. As I catch the train I have ample time to ponder, and passing through the Keswick railyards fills me with sadness. I see dozens of old rail-cars. Do they still work? Is there some sort of rotation happening, or are they no longer used? Have we passed through the golden age of rail? Will governments see the long term benefits of having a comprehensive rail network? Or will rail fade, as they close down station after station? What would be required for TransAdelaide to re-open the stations like Millswood & Clapham? How would they know there was a demand for these shut-down stations, if they aren’t operated? Maybe lots of people would use the train from these zones, but don’t because it’s too far to walk to Lynton or Torrens Park. Was it really such a drain on resources to have these stations open at all? Surely their costs to upkeep would be insignificant compared to the overall costs of the rail network.

At lunch on Sunday, I had to do my usual trick of re-fixing Ray & Joan’s digital set-top box. Not that anyone had stuffed it up or anything, but it must have been reset at some stage, and all of the ’extra’ channels, which are just duplicates of the first, had reappeared. This in itself was a simple, 2 minute job, but it gave me an idea of a possible business venture. Setting up people’s entertainment units & systems, and teaching them how to use them. I often have to do similar tasks at both my parents’, and Jaq’s parents’ houses. Most of the time it’s reconnecting hardware, but sometimes it’s optimising settings. I wonder how much I could charge Joe and Jane Average to do this, and show them exactly how to use their stuff. I could do DVD/TV/STB installations, PC usage, and even digital cameras. Another thing I could do would be CD library -> MP3 conversion, and DVD -> AVI/MPEG conversion (for Xbmc, PVR, etc setups). I’m even thinking of a name: GeekGuys. www.geekguys.com.au - I’ll have to do a search and see what similar services are available.

During a family gathering today, I remembered that there were some rumours about a Puma or Panther (or several) living in the Grampians Mountains in western Victoria. I wound up others at the lunch with my belief in the urban (rural?) myth, and provided quick corroborating evidence in the form of several web pages. But do I believe in it? Anyone could come up with evidence to support any point of view, if they wanted, just by googling. I was able to quickly find about four sites that were all quite well written, and the only info I found that was anti-Pumas was so poorly written, and so badly thought out that I might start believing in the Puma just for that sake:

Personly, i bleive after being in the grampians just yesterday, and 3 days befor there are NO puma’s in the grampians. All evedence suppporting the matter should be ditched as it is a hoax. They might have used to be there, YES, but now i think not. I understand that people may have seen them, but to me… “seeing is bleiveing” not today. i saw 0.0 puma’s, no sheeps up trees, or foot prints. they are no longer living in the grampians! mabey somewere elese, only god knows! CYA L8R

Liam: you are a tool, and you should be taken out and shot. Let’s examine your argument in detail (ignoring, for the time, you clear lack of spelling ability).

1. You were in the Grampians ‘yesterday’ (9/6/05). Good for you. Somehow this makes you an expert as to the existence or otherwise of big cats in the whole mountain range. Did you visit every square kilometre? Did you take your rock that keeps Pumas away?
2. All evidence (I do know how to spell, most of the time. I also know how to use the ‘Shift’ key on the keyboard. Capital letters are often used at the start of sentences, as well as in places where you want to emphasise a point. But I digress.) should be ditched. Why is this exactly? What evidence (See, I still know how to spell!) have you got that the evidence (Still!) is a hoax?
3. Technically, the evidence itself could not be a hoax, but false. The story could be a hoax, but evidence does not have the property in itself to be a hoax or otherwise. Only true, or false. (Or partially true, or undetermined).
4. Okay, now we come to it. You did not see a Puma yesterday. Or any sheep up trees. Or foot prints. Got some news for you, buddy, the Grampians are a big place. I visited them several times, and never saw a Puma either. Or sheep up a tree. I did see a koala up a tree though. Although, not on the last time I visited. Does that mean that there are no koalas there anymore? Or does it just mean that there might be koalas, but I didn’t see any?
5. Oh, and the plural of sheep is sheep. Funny little word isn’t it.

Reading some of the other posts on that page, and there are a lot of them, makes me start to believe in the story. I think I want to believe (not just to prove Liam a tosser), and a couple of the posts/comments are fairly well thought out, and believable. There are a lot of other pages, too, that give plenty of evidence supporting the Puma theory. I think the best one is from the Bulletin.

In the rugged Geranium Springs Valley in the Grampians, sheep carcasses were found on a narrow ledge, 300 metres above the valley floor. Mutilated animal carcasses were also found on the valley floor. Droppings recovered from the valley were identified by a leading US big cat expert as matching puma faeces. Within a hidden rock shelter on Mount Bepcha in the Grampians, many animal remains - ranging from large cattle bones to those of freshwater tortoises - were found. Researchers also took casts of two large carnivore prints, later judged by US experts as matching those of a puma.

Apparently these three quotes are all from a report by Dr John Henry, a 1970s Science lecturer from Deakin University, and now Professor of Education. This report is fairly conclusive, and quite detailed, by all accounts. Tim Winton wrote a book based on this rural ‘myth’. I’ve not read any Winton, and I’ve been meaning to. Perhaps I will.

My Movie and TV collection on my media server is starting to look good, but heaps of the movies and programs start with a black frame. By default, this is the Poster Frame when the movie is previewed on a computer. Quicktime Pro has the ability to set the Poster Frame, but cannot just add this information to the file, it must re-save the file. With even the smallest of my files (The Simpsons episodes), these files are in excess of 100Mb, which takes a long time to re-save. Particularly over a network, and with the NSLU2 using a USB Drive. I want a way of just telling the movie file that it needs to use a particular frame as it’s Poster Frame, and not have to go through the whole rigamarole of re-encoding the movie. I don’t mind if it runs on Win32 or MacOS, as long as it does the job quickly and easily. Even if it’s a CLI program that requires the frame number: I’m sure I could come up with a way to find that out…

I saw a great ad on TV tonight. It had a female cyclist walking her bike along ready to cross the railway tracks, and then cut to two young boys walking/playing along a section of track. The boys played with a ball, and then it cut back to the cyclist, as the lights started to flash, and she stopped at the crossing. The boys’ ball bounced ahead of one of them, and he ran to get it, the other heard the train coming, and moved off the track. The train was shown going right up to the boy, and then some Computer Graphics virtually made him turn to dust as the train would have hit him. The cyclist waited until the train had crossed, and then proceeded to cross the tracks, not seeing the train on the other set of tracks, coming from the other direction. The same CGI effect was used as she was hit by the train. I’d record and post the ad here, if I had a digital video recorder… The power of these ads was quite impressive. I catch the train, and I have to cross the track every morning and night. (There is an underpass at the other station I get off at). Whilst there is only one metro train track - the trains need to wait at a larger station if one of them is a little late - there is a second line, for interstate freight and passenger transport. It surprises me how often I see a kid get off the train, jump down onto the track and walk off along the track. And the thing about it is that doing that isn’t any quicker. I have seen kids do that, and leave the tracks at the crossing, at the same time I arrive there. I guess it’s just a need to do the wrong thing, but most of the time they are by themselves! The other morning I saw a kid walking along the track towards the station - I didn’t see from how far he walked along the rails, but it must have been a significant distance, as there are no houses or roads near where he came from. I can sort of understand someone getting off the train knowing there will be no train for at least 10 minutes (due to the single track), but unless the morning kid saw a train go past, he could not know how long it would be before the next train arrived. The one from 5 minutes ago could be late, and he might not realise in time…it scares the hell out of me. Not for my safety, but for the fact I would be the person who witnessed the accident. I would have to live with the consequences of a stupid kid being hit by a train in front of me…maybe I’m being selfish, but I don’t care. I actually have a fear of being hit by a train. I’m not sure why, but every time I walk across the track, I think that I will get my foot caught in the line, and not be able to move in time. I also don’t take my wallet out of my pocket until I am in the train, as I see myself dropping it, or my train ticket down the gap between the train and the platform. This means that at Adelaide Railway Station, I go through the gates, taking my wallet out, and putting my ticket into the machine. I then put my wallet away before I get to my train, and board the train, and then take my wallet out again. I think I’m crazy.

Funny or interesting things I’ve seen, thought of or heard during the last day or so.

1. I misread the colour of something in the hardware store yesterday - I thought it said Missing Brown.
2. I thought I was going to be waiting for ages for the train this morning, as when I got to the crossing, I could still see the back of the last one. When I got to the platform, the next one was coming. If only the trains came that often all of the time. Oh, and the one I ended up catching was virtually empty. Not surprisingly.
3. When my train was going through Keswick station this morning, there was a conjunction of trains, where all four were at nearly the same place at the same time. Different tracks, obviously.
4. I misread fortune cookie as fortune wookie. Okay, that one isn’t that funny either.

Microsoft Wordâ„¢ 2002 (10.2627.2625) has an extremely crap ’new feature’. When you press the Delete key with a block of text selected, nothing happens. If you notice down in the bottom left corner, Word asks if you want to delete the block, requiring you to press the Y key. Talk about crap interface design. Having to press two keys to delete a block of text, when there is a perfectly good undo system in place if you accidentally delete the wrong text. How often do you accidentally delete a block of text, anyway? And why not make the consistency of having to press ‘y’ when you go to overtype a block of text? Or press Enter when a block of text is selected? I’m now going to have to use the latter, rather than delete. Microsoft, you guys suck.

I was thinking tonight of how we used to live - specifically, how my first share house ‘worked’. There were four of us, originally, living at 81 Alabama Avenue, Prospect. All four had been at school together (to some extent) at Naracoorte. Derek and I had been good mates, and apparently Heath and Bruce had “Gotten on okay.” The best way for us to live together in relative co-operation was to be somewhat competitive. For instance, if you wanted to do a load of washing, you had to do your own. The trick was, if there wasn’t room on the line for your clothes, too bad. That meant that we used to actually get up earlier than expected on weekends to do a load of washing. Of course, Uni was not all day every day, so you would often have time to do a wash during the week. But the rule still held. I remember a clash between Bruce and someone (it was always between Bruce and someone else…) to do with the moving of clothes on the line. Nasty stuff. The other way we used to compete was with cooking/dishes. We were in ’teams’, Derek and myself, Heath and Bruce (poor Heath), and each team took it in turns cooking. Co-operative. Washing up was another matter. Each team took it in turns to wash up, with ideally the team who had not cooked having to wash up. But if they left it a day, then they had to wash up tomorrow, and do both days washing. Whilst sometimes we went a few days with a sink full of dirty dishes, the teamwork that your team-mate would coerce you into washing up, or you would them. Everything ran pretty smoothly for the first year, but eventually we got sick of Bruce, and kicked him out. Instead we got Derek’s younger brother, Dane (or Moper, as he was called) as our new house-mate. I seem to recall the system breaking down somewhat then.

I found an error on Whereis.com, or rather, a couple of errors. The first one I’m happy to let slide - they only recently changed the northern end of Pondham Road, Hynam to be Schinckel Road. The other one I’m not so happy with: Check the travel time. It does not take 38 minutes to drive down the road that the Meatworks is on!