Mikey's Blog

After MPE's recent post, I decided to put together altitude profiles for the various mountains around Canberra that I've ridden up. They are normalized to 0m at the start. Black Mountain is the greatest altitude difference and the steepest. Red Hill is almost as steep as Black Mountain but much shorter. Stromlo is the longest but shallowest.

Updated: Added Mt Ainslie.

After months of work by a large and diligent fact collecting team, we finally have AntonBlanchardFacts.com! All items have been triple checked for accuracy.

Grubby and I did the Cotter-Uriarra loop on Saturday. Really nice ride. Not many cars around, even being a mid morning/lunch on Saturday. Not as hard as I though, but still lots of climbing, especially out of Uriarra coming back to Canberra. We also did a quick run up Stromlo after for good measure.

I've added a total altitude loss and gain summary to my GPS page. The complete ride yesterday was over 1000m of loss and gain. The Cotter/Uriarra loop is around 600m loss and gain.

Dunedin was fun. There are some photos here.
One particular night, we went out to a bar to grab some beers (this was regular (read: every night) occurance during the conf). We ended up standing outside but then a bouncer came up and said we had to have a seat if were to remain outside. So, while we were gathering out thoughts, the bouncer also said "Hey, are you guys at that Linux conference?".
"Yeeeaah?" we replied.
"Well, I'm studying and I use Debian all the time!" he said back, much to our amusement. We talking to the bouncer for a while longer as we started to head inside.
Then over came another bouncer who was a huge scary looking guy. He comes up and says "Hey, I'm a Debian user too!". Hence we now have The Depricator! (see picture)

The current Liberal government is nuts!

Some CControl stuff happening. I have a Mercurial repo here, if you want to try my additions and merges with other people. I'm starting to get into Mercurial which is great for a distributed project like this.

That's pretty much it for now. For all the stuff I've missed, checkout Bruce's boyfriend's blog.

Despite having 3 (yes 3 people!) separate blogs, Simmo is quite a smart guy. In a recent post, he mentioned The Ugly Stick which is a new show on community TV. So trusting Simmo I downloaded[1] the first 2 episodes. It's pretty silly stuff and plays a lot on our lazy Australian culture (I'd be surprised if people from another country enjoyed it). Anyway, check it out.

No updates for a while, so here's some snippets:

Jo and I headed back to Adelaide for Christmas and New Year. We had a great but tiring time catching up with lots of friends and family. Thanks to those who made the effort to see us, it really means a lot.

While back, we went flying a couple of times with Dad in his new plane. First trip we went for a longer flight over Goolwa and Strath. Afterwards I fixed Dad's GPS which didn't have a power adapter for the plane and was chewing through batteries. After heading down to Jarcar for some components, I made up a small circuit board to regulate the plane supply voltage down to what's required for the GPS. After looking at the plane's electrical schematics, we decided where to splice into the supply, pulled out the trusty soldering iron (trusty being that it was purchased 5 min before hand at Jaycar) and soldered it into the plane. Much to my amazement, it all worked.

For the second flight, Jo went up with Dad and I went up with Larry (another "fly boy"). We ended up flying around only 100m away from each other, which was a very cool experience. There are some photos and videos of this flight here.

Congratulations to Brad and Tennille who are expecting their first child in August. Congratulations again to Brad for winning the University medal for best PhD at Adelaide Uni in 2005.

Seeing Machines IPOed. You can watch all the fun here.

I'm off to LCA in Dunedin, New Zealand next week. I'm then back in Canberra for a busy week with Duncan and Alex staying with us and loads of post LCA work functions.