All Roads Lead To

I think there is no town called Roslyn, it is more of a locality. There are a number of roads into Roslyn, this one starts at Cotawalla, 5 Kms south east of Crookwell, another from Laggan (13 Kms) and another I found on the Laggan-Taralga road. Here is a Google Map of the area.

Today's Lesson(s)

A couple of months ago I installed Ubuntu-7.04. What I didn't say was that the installation was on a caddy and as it turns out this is not a very wise thing to do.

It was a 20Gbyte hdd and the menu.lst resided there as well. Someone suggested I should at least move the caddy grub to my first hard drive. That I did, grub-install hd0, reboot and BANG.

Heart attack pills were taken in great quantities, another reboot with a rescue CD failed, the BIOS wasn't picking up the hard drive and its slaved CDROM.

The drive was 8 years old, and I did have some warning last month. Putting a new 80 Gbyte hard drive into the caddy fixed the problem, and a Super Grub disk found all the grubs that allowed me to pick a standby system to use. A migrated site for Super Grub is here

Put Ubuntu back on, but this time on hdb, and will use the caddy for trail installations.

Sure wasted a day!

Some New Fiberglass

Deteriorated               As New       

The roof over the front patio finally had to be replaced. The wind was lifting the fiberglass roof, breaking through the securing nails. Only a couple of bricks kept on! After removal, I was surprised to see that the exposed epoxy covering to the fiber had all but been eaten away. The "as new" photo was taken on a section that lapped another sheet.


The New Roof


Getting the new roof on was a bit of fun, apparently I had put the original up some 17 years ago when I was a bit more sprightly. These days, climbing ladders and like activities are fraught with danger. My days of this sort of work are well and truly coming to an end. I was also shocked at the price of a sheet of fiberglass ( the replacement stuff is polycarbonate sheeting ) AUD$25 + per sheet. Reminds me of my father in law, sent in 1962 to buy a pound of butter, came back spitting chips cos it cost 2/- . When he last bought butter, it cost him 3d. (approx 20cents and 3 cents respectively)

Another job out of the way.

And Today's Excitement Was

A Frosty, Freezing and Foggy Day
It was a typical frosty, freezing and foggy Canberra morning, but our social ride started close so I braved the cold for mornings ride and some coffee.

There are a number of tandem riders organized to take blind people on rides, and this morning we had three of them. On a downhill run onto a main road, one tandem clipped the rear wheel of another bike, and down they went. What a mess!.

Andy on the Phone

I wasn't quick enough to get a photo, but the blind stokers helment would have been a good advertisement for wearing a helmet. I think she was pretty shook up and they took her off to hospital just in case.

We all glad to get going again, and although I got lost as tail end charlie, I met up with the bunch about a kilometer from the coffee stop in Federation Square.

Katie Bender

Katie Bender was born 18 Sep 1984 and died 13 Jul 1997
.

They demolished the Royal Canberra Hospital by implosion. It was made a public spectacle and Katie was among a group of people on the other side of the lake, maybe 500 metres away.

The implosion went wrong, shrapnel went everywhere and one piece killed little Katie.

It should never had happened, but it did.

The memorial is on a path, by the Lake where she died. On wonders what path she may have taken had this tragedy not occurred. All very sad.

And ten years ago today.

Ginninderra Creek

Ginninderra Creek is a small creek which eventually finds it way into the Murrumbidgee River. With civilization, it became a fairly marginal creek but in the last decade or so, the government has taken remedial measures.

 

The most important of these has been the removal of thousands of willow trees and the construction of run off traps in the feed gullies. There is also a positive reaction to potential pollution as indicated in the photo below.

Fortunantely very little oil had spilt into the creek.

It looks like the car had hit some black ice and careered down the embankment into the water. Judging by what I saw, the occupants must have been rescued by smashing in the front screen.

And I thought I was safe on bicycle paths!

Bicycle Cleaning Day

I was off to a social meeting today and being nice and fine, could actually see my bike, and it was a mess, simply did not realize how much crud I had picked up in the cluster and frame, not to mention my saddle bags, they were disgusting!!.

So I set to work all morning and did the cleaning and forgot about the meeting. The only thing I couldn't do was to remove the removable link to the chain to facilitate cleaning. That is still a bit of a mystery.

Anyway, all is now done and I can proudly take my bike to visit the Queen :-)

Calendars

Guess ever since computers have been around, there has been a plethora of calendar type programs. Now with the internet, there are endless online calendars but in the end, I am not disciplined enough to use them. I still like the paper ones.

That is half an A4, I get four months on a sheet of A4. It gets pretty scrappy by the end of four months so it's easy to make another print out.

I use Google calendar as well, I like it because it can be programmed to do endless years into the future, like birthdays, and send me an email reminder. As time goes on, I definitely need that reminder.