One of my earliest memories of New Zealand was staying in a cabin in Abel Tasman National Park. On this trip, I was lucky enough to drive to the park, catch a water taxi to Torrent Bay, and hike the 12-13 km back to where I had parked. Although I never found the cabin, I had a great walk, and the pictures speak for themselves. One of the best parts of the hike happened before I even left. I had a short list of travel items I needed but could never find at the right price. One was a tiny collapsible backpack to use as a daypack. Just before leaving, I stepped into an outdoor shop and found exactly that. After trying it on, I knew immediately that I should buy it. It worked well on the trail, and I looked forward …

Europe 2011 Day 1 It had been almost seven years since I last went to Europe, so with nearly 40 days of paid leave accrued, it seemed like a good time to take a few weeks off. I had also just finished a PhD, so the break felt like a well-deserved reward. While planning my trip, I realised that my dad and Cathy would be in New Zealand around the time we were considering leaving. I arranged to visit them first, then take advantage of a good AirAsia fare to Paris.

Six months ago, I purchased a new bike. I cycled frequently when I was younger, but had not ridden for about eight years. In fact, I had done relatively little physical activity during that period. The new bike changed that. When I lived in the Blue Mountains, I rode the Oaks, a 25-kilometre fire road, several times. Anderson’s Trail is a longer 35-kilometre route that connects to it, and I had been meaning to try it. Fortunately, a colleague invited me on a ride; I would have become hopelessly lost on my own.

I don’t know how many times I’ve lost tiny parts and had to spend time trying to find them. I realized after removing the back of my monitor that I’m starting to learn from those mistakes; instead of just sticking the screws in a box with other screws, and then having to dig them out, I taped them to the back of the monitor.

If you’re like me there is a box of hard drives sitting in a dusty corner somewhere. Some are mine, some are others’, but they are all in a failed or semi-failed state. So, why have I lugged them around? I’ve been a bit paranoid about throwing them away. Some of the hard drives are encrypted, others aren’t, and the drives from friends certainly aren’t. Although the chances of somebody getting the drive from a landfill and restoring it is minimal, I never wanted to take the chance. So, I kept lugging a bag of drives through each move. My friend Clinton has recently returned from Europe, and he brought me a gift: a Swiss-made Victorinox, the ‘CyberTool’. After playing …

A short while ago I wrote about visualizing transport by using 131500’s TDX data, converted to GTFS, and served by GeoServer. Because I’ve started playing around with Google’s Fusion table, I thought it would be interesting to see what all the transit stops in Sydney look like in FT. So, voila!

Recently I tried editing my Cisco’s ACL at home on the train. It went something like this: I logged in I started updating the ACL I hit a blackspot in my 3g coverage My command stops at “router(config)#access-” I get an alert saying my home internet was down Although it is simple enough to just ask her to “flip the switch on the black box”, I still don’t like doing it. Plus, if she’s not home, I’m stuck. This accident immediately reminded me of one of a trait of the ‘reload’ command: it can be scheduled.

If you want to use Graphserver to do some analysis with GTFS, you will need to convert GTFS into the database. This is how I did it. I used the following AMI. If you have enough memory, you don’t need to do this. ami-7000f019 Lookup and read the GTFSDB INSTALL.txt document sudo apt-get install mercurial hg clone https://gtfsdb.googlecode.com/hg/ gtfsdb sudo apt-get install python-setuptools sudo easy_install psycopg2 sudo apt-get install build-essential ubuntu@domU-12-31-39-00-5D-B8:/mnt/gtfsdb$ pwd /mnt/gtfsdb sudo python setup.py install sudo wget http://cdn.kelvinism.com/google_transit.zip sudo apt-get install python-psycopg2 EDIT 16-03-2025: I’ve since removed these files.

I decided it was time to take a vacation. There was a problem, however: I was under a lot of pressure to finish school-related work. Is it possible to take a vacation without taking a vacation? I came up with the idea of flying to Perth over the Easter long weekend and then catching the Indian Pacific back to Sydney. On April 22, I caught an early-evening Qantas flight to Perth and took a taxi to my guesthouse. Although tired from the flight, or perhaps from the two beers I had with dinner, I decided to explore the CBD. The lights were blazing and, despite it being the start of Easter weekend, plenty of people were out. Perth appeared more diverse than I had anticipated, with a strong Asian influence. Many …

I’ve had several conversations with neighbors and co-workers about the “lack” of forward thinking, or at least the lack of forward action. Of course, I keep in the back of my mind that we aren’t “experts”, and the more I learn about transport the more I learn how complex it is. Dr. Sussman’s CLIOS process (Complex, Large- Scale, Integrated, Open Systems) appears more and more true the longer I work in and study transport. There is a plethora of excuses that can be made, but the general conclusion was that the earlier we prepare the better. I can remember working near Zhongshan 7-8 years ago and driving around on huge roads in the middle of empty fields. There …