Spotted in Victory Park, Patterson Road, Bentleigh yesterday. (It’s where we go when the car is getting its tyres looked at.)

I’ve seen a few obscure pieces of playground equipment in my time, but what is this? I can’t figure it out. It’s too high to reach, even for an adult.

I wondered if it might be a light, but there’s no sign of any globes inside it anywhere.

So what, apart perhaps from a waste of my council rates, is it?

Unexpectedly this morning our ADSL at home got shaped — that is, slowed down to more-or-less dialup speed because we’d used all our bandwidth for the month. Fortunately it’s not the calendar month — it’s the month up until the 21st.

I could blame the excessive use of YouTube in the house, but ultimately it’s probably due to torrents of Sports Night, the Aaron Sorkin series from 1998 (pre-West Wing) which appears to be pretty much unattainable otherwise, and is the only TV show I’ve ever encountered with three characters named the same as people in my immediate family: Daniel, Isaac and Jeremy. (We don’t have any people called Casey, Dana or Natalie in our family however.)

It’s been something like 8 years since I’ve had to use dialup from home (apart from a short period after moving in 2003). While I could wail and moan about it. In fact I could easily buy a Data Block to see us back on broadband until the end of the billing period.

But in fact it’s a little like what apparently happened in Seattle recently when they shut down a third of a major freeway for construction works. People used it less, and the traffic just vanished.

I reckon we could do without YouTube for a few days.

“Computer people are the last to guess what’s coming next. I mean, come on, they’re so astonished by the fact that the year 1999 is going to be followed by the year 2000 that it’s costing us billions to prepare for it.”
– Douglas Adams, 1999 — Cited by Stephen Fry

I was recently remarking to my mate Brian that it was he who first introduced me to the concepts of eBay and portable music players (eg iPod).

I recall him years ago describing the iRiver player he was covetting — and eventually bought, if my memory serves me correctly.

And I remember him describing this new online auctioning system. People would list their items, others would bid, a small fee would go to the auction company, and everybody would be happy. It was called “eBay”.

Brian was always an early adapter, and I hadn’t heard of these things, and neither had most of the general public.

In both these cases I my response was to think “What a stupid name. And what a stupid idea.”

And I thought Gmail was a hoax.

I guess I’m not very good at predicting technology trends.

4:30am.

Something.

Something crawling on my face.

Swipe with hand. Like a shot, out of bed, turn on light.

Cockroach on bed.

Swearing ensues.

Oh gawd, yuck.

Two people I know, and some bloggers have noted the recent presence of cockroaches, despite keeping clean kitchens. I think the little bastards are getting more daring.

Spotted in Australia On Collins

Now call me old-fashioned if you like, but shouldn’t the location of life-saving fire-fighting equipment be indicated in a slightly less subtle way?

Oh boy, it’s going to be a hot night, and tomorrow’s not much better.

It’s still 38.3 outside, and about 30 indoors. No aircon here at home, but with the fans running it’s bearable, so I don’t plan on getting it.

On Monday we headed off to the Dandenong Ranges for Puffing Billy. It’s been years since I’ve been up there, and after taking a look recently at an old family video of one such trip, we were all keen to go again.

The removal of zone 3 has made these occasional jaunts to the city fringe a bit cheaper, and the train ride out was fairly uneventful (if a little slower than expected). But we were at Belgrave in time for the 10am Puffing Billy departure for Lakeside. If I had been wishing we’d brought my nephew Leo (who is train-crazy at the moment), that was doubled when I realised he and his mum or dad could have ridden on the Family ticket for the same price. Ah well, next time.

We didn’t get a spot on the coveted south side of the carriage. No matter, it was an enjoyable ride, and close to the engine so we could hear it working hard up the hills. There’s something quite magical about steam engines. It’s some kind of undefinable combination of nostalgia and old machinery that had me grinning from ear to ear during the trip.

From the look of them you’d be forgiven for thinking that the development of the steam locomotive was driven purely by aesthetic judgment, possibly with some old vicar at the helm giving his thoughts on the pitch of the whistle.
– Robbie Coltrane, Coltrane’s Planes and Automobiles

The ride hasn’t changed much. Oh sure, they’ve restored the line from Lakeside to Gembrook (which we didn’t ride that day; it seemed just a little too much, and from my memory there’s not that much exciting at Gembrook for kids, and there was only one train up and one train back), and they don’t issue those little cardboard “Edmondson” tickets anymore, but fundamentally Puffing Billy is the same as when I first went on it in the 70s as a kid. The (mostly) little engines, the little carriages, the tight curves, and the echo of the whistle through the mountains — all the same. A wave of nostalgia came over me. I had soot in my hair and smoke in my eyes, but I was blissfully happy.

One innovation since my last visit (or perhaps I just didn’t notice it last time) was the fire patrol, a little diesel-powered carriage that runs a few hundred metres behind the train making sure the steam engine doesn’t set fire to anything. Maybe it’s only used in midsummer. We saw a couple of those moving around, and later saw a fully sized ute with train wheels, which the kids considered mucho-cool.

As the train rolled through the forest, we’d come across the occasional level crossing. It must be a legal requirement that the locals wave at the train, though frankly I think if you saw a 100+ year old narrow gauge steam train rolling across your path full of kiddies waving at you, you’d have to have a heart of stone to not wave back. Every crossing we passed, everyone from little kids in cars to crusty old blokes in trucks waved back. Only one — a grumpy-looking young man in a P-plated Commodore, failed to wave back, and I believe the train crew would have passed his licence plate number to the sheriffs who will be paying him a visit.

After an hour or so we arrived at Lakeside, and a friendly Brummie offered to take our photos. I offered to reciprocate, but he said his family had already taken heaps, thanks.

We took a look at the model railway (2000 metres of HO track?! Whoa!) before sitting down for a lunch of pre-packed bagels. Suddenly my little backpack felt so much lighter.

We strolled around the lake, with Jeremy (who had last been there about 18 months before) noting the waterslide has disappeared — to my mind it was rarely in use even in my childhood, and now it’s been closed permanently. We almost went on the paddle boats aqua bikes, but the kids decided at the last minute that they didn’t want to.

The train back was hauled by a bigger loco than the traditional Puffing Billy specimen, a hulking big unit called G42, known by those in the know as a Garratt. We made sure to get a spot on the southern side of the train on the way back, to make the most of the sweeping vistas of the distant Cardinia reservoir, and of course that view — Puffing Billy’s money shot — going over the trestle bridge near Belgrave.

The kids loved that — with their feet hanging out the windows in the time-honoured tradition, they said it felt like flying.

Back at Belgrave, we headed back to the big trains, and headed towards home. It had been a good day.

SMS from an unknown number on NYE: “Happy New Year”. The number looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t work it out, and it was bugging me. Who could it be? I eventually replied saying “Happy New Year, but who is this, I don’t have your number in my phone.” They replied saying “Sorry, meant to dial xyz. But have a good new year anyway.” Ah, a wrong number - that would explain it.

A couple of Christmas cards addressed to people who don’t live here. I didn’t really know what to do with them, since neither had return addresses. Eventually I put them both back in the mail marked Return To Sender, and hoped the Post Office might be able to figure it out. Then a few days later, a neighbour said hello and asked if I’d got a postcard for him, and told me his surname, which I hadn’t known. Whoops. If I was smarter, I’d have checked the phone book for a matching name elsewhere in my street. He’s in there, too. Maybe Aussie Post’s Dead Letter Office will be smart enough to do that for me. Apparently in December they got 184,469 items to wade through, so it could take a while.

I found a plastic container while I was digging through the cupboards the other day. Very rounded. And not mine. I’m not sure whose it is — possibly someone in my family brought over some biscuits or something and left it behind. Or maybe it’s from Marita’s place. Or maybe it’s one of the people who came for my birthday. Anybody recognise it and want to claim it?