I've just been thinking about the idea of a food bus. It would be a normal bus in every way except that instead of being full of people it would be full of cheap organic foods that people can browse through and buy. And instead of using usual bus stops it would use parking lots and malls and just nice shady spots by the side of the road. And instead of stopping for one minute at stops it would stop for one hour. And instead of driving with diesel it would drive with vegetable oil.

It wouldn't probably make money. It would have some nice seats for people to sit and chat on. If you spent a day on the bus helping then you would cheaper food. If you gave vegetable oil then you get cheaper food too.

I like food. And communtity. And also buses. So I think it would make me happy.

I don't even believe in the modern business-like notion of "efficiency". It dovetails with totalitarianism, facism. People say, "If it's decentralized it will be inefficient." I think that's fine. Let it be inefficient.

Arundhati Roy

Goodbye then all you fellows. I'm just popping off for a couple of weeks down the South-West. It will be a lovely stroll I think up and down some dear mountains. Perhaps I will post a map and some photos when I get back.

I went to see The Road by myself at The State Cinema in Hobart tonight. I was quite excellent. As I walked out one funny fellow gushed merrily to his friend that "it was every bit as bleak as the book." I haven't read the book, but I have heard stories. I think I will read it. I love Cormack McCarthy and John Hillcoat both.

It was also horrible. But so real. It's the first post-apocalyptic movie I've seen that is kind of real. And it's a fascinating thing to watch and think about. I also get a funny feeling that the author is making some pointed statements about the way we take the world around us for granted. It's not quite a global warming apocalypse horror story but it isn't that far off. The film is basically about what would happen to humanity if all the plants and animals suddenly died. I heartily agree with the films assessment that it would be fully like totally shit for everybody.

I do wish we were nicer to this poor little planet. I like it.

Sad times for the server. As always, whenever I get out of SSH range the smurf.footboot.net server decides to crash itself. This time it did it for about two solid weeks. 70% uptime for the last month. Oh dear. I haven't figured out why it was so unhappy. Perhaps it just missed me and was looking for attention. I feel like our relationship is a little up and down. Sometimes I do wonder if we'd both be happier without each other. But I doubt we'll separate. We've been two long together now I think.

I'll do a bit of an apt-get upgrade. Might make things better. Could make things worse. We will see. I'm going away for another two weeks on Friday. Poor old smurf.

I had to write an adjournment letter to Newcastle Local Court today. It took a bit of research to work out what I was meant to do, so I thought I'd post the resources I used.

• How to Adjourn a Trial Date
• Locations of Local Courts (NSW)
• SA Government Legal FAQs
• Information about CNI numbers
• Writing a Letter to a Magistrate - although as it turns out I'm writing a letter to the Court registrar not the magistrate

I won't bother attaching the letter, because it's pretty lame.

With my latest Rails project I'm using a new version of Rails than I'd been used (my last job was over a year ago). It seemed to me that the tests had got substantially slower. Problem was fixtures :all in the test_helper.rb. I changed that and things got much quicker.

The latest version of attachment_fu will give you this error. You need to replace a line in this file:

vendor/plugins/attachment_fu/lib/technoweenie/attachment_fu.rb:386

+ errors.add attr_name, I18n.translate('activerecord.errors.messages.inclusion') unless enum.nil? || enum.include?(send(attr_name))    
- errors.add attr_name, ActiveRecord::Errors.default_error_messages[:inclusion] unless enum.nil? || enum.include?(send(attr_name))

These are some numbers from Afghanistan.

US military expenditure for the war against (estimated): US $66 billion
GDP (Purchasing Power Parity): US $22.27 billion

So about three quarters of all money spent in that country is used for smashing and killing stuff. One quarter is used for everything else.

I get grumpy at all the three barreled strategies for utopia floating about nowadays. Usually you will a full stop between each word for extra effect. My least favourite so far is Think. Change. Do. for which we have the manicured self-satisfaction of UTS to thank. Now Friends of the Earth International, who I quite like, has mobilize, resist, transform. The words and ideas on their own are great and good. Chain them together with punctuation like that and you reduce the messy, uncertain process of social change to some gimmicky inevitability. Yuck.

Smug. Media graduate. Fuckers.

The cover article on one of the Sunday paper magazines today was Final Justice: Inside one of Australia's biggest true murder cases. It sort of implies there might be a bunch of bigger murder cases out there, but mostly fictional ones. I don't know what their criteria for "big" is, but I would have thought that when it came to murder cases being true kind of trumps being fictional in the bigness stakes. For things like marriage, it might be different and maybe they think of a big TV murder the way they think of a big TV marriage. You never know what is going on the heads of the Sunday paper editors.

We watched Skinny Tiger, Fatty Dragon for Halloween last night, because it had nothing to do with Halloween. And also because it's Hong Kong kungfu comedy which is the best genre of film there is. It was pretty awesome. Great fighting and actually hilarious. Massively sexist and inappropriate - a lot of jokes were about police sexually harassing women. Somehow the bits in between were still really good. Yet another one of the Hong Kong films that makes you wonder how Hollywood can never get it together. My only theory so far relates to OH&S laws.

Well, seven days after coming back from leave I'm off again. I couldn't really cope. This time it's for three weeks and I don't know what is going to happen at the end. I'm perhaps looking for a job that needs a web developing disabilities support worker with an economics degree.

Me: What did the two of you do this afternoon?
Them: He shouted me a chocolate cornetto in his cubby house. Which I ate. Then he shouted me a caramel chip cornetto and I ate that too. Then he shouted me a baked raspberry cheesecake. I ate them all, one after the other. When I finished one, I ate the next one.
Me: Goodness me. What a feast! How does he afford all this? Where does he get his money?
Them: [thinking] ...it's no problem. He has the money. The money is no problem for him.
Me: Did he inherit money from his parents?
Them: [doubtful] Yes... no... the cornetto is in the freezer. It's already in the freezer see. No problem. We don't need any money.

One or both of the wheels will have a spoke that looks different to the others. It will be a tube built into the spoke and the tube contains a lug with a spring to keep it in place. The lug holds the wheel onto the axle. You can create a hole in the plastic cylinder so you can manually slide the lug away from the axle. The hole needs to be a reasonable size to be able to move the lug far enough but you don't want to destroy the cylinder. Depending on the state of the mechanism you may just be able to put the wheel back by hitting the centre with a hammer. But the spring mechanism will probably need to be in tact for the lug to stay in place.

Them: Ryan, when can we go get a new teapot?
Me: Right now?
Them: [shouting and waving arms in the air] YAY! HURRAY! HURRAY! HURRAY!
Me: Wooooo! Yes! New teapot!
Them: OK OK. Keep your shirt on.

One of my housemates has learnt to spin underpants around on their finger like a stripper. It is quite a neat skill, but it makes encouraging them to get dressed in the morning a much funnier experience than is probably helpful.

Before I came to my current community, the image I'd always had in my head was of pleasant, peaceful assistants gliding around an immaculate house exuding a very unconfronting sort of spiritual glow. I knew I certainly didn't fit the bill, so I was reluctant to join up. Luckily, the reality wasn't nearly so intimidating. All my human dysfunction and general incompetence actually made me feel right at home. It was wonderful.

One might expect the story to end there, with our houses coasting along happily and marginally. However, yesterday a new kind of assistant arrived at my house. Unlike the rest of us, she seems to represent the miracle assistant that I had thought this community was filled with. Kind and patient. Interesting and interested. Conversational but certainly not dominating. Experienced. Prayerful. And despite all that, so friendly that no one even feels intimidated.