Early start: got Dave to work at 9am. Bought some more gas at Paddy Pallin; it was cheap in the first place (ten bucks for 460g) and more so with a ten-percent discount, but I blew fifty cents on parking in Lonsdale St. Had a coffee at The Front Gallery & Café in Lyneham, surprisingly open and busy at 10am. They're so considerate they even have free wireless.
Drove down to Gundagai in some brain-boiling heat. The Hume is much unloved around that town, oscillating between (crappy) single and (reasonable) dual carriageway all the way to Albury. Had lunch in Gundagai and also tried swimming in the Murrumbidgee near the old bridges. The current was a bit too strong for me. Pushed on to Albury and more successfully swam in the much more popular Murray at the Australia Park, quite near the State border. Beautiful, and I wish I'd known about it before.
After consulting Camping in Australia (Cathy Savage, Craig Lewis), I prevaricated about camping near Wangaratta at the Wenham campsite in the Warby State Forest or opposite the iconic Puckapunyal army training site (about 80km from Melbourne). Wangaratta won as it leaves me with a decent (230km) drive for tomorrow. Got into town too late to find out anything from the info service, and my invitation to crucifixion (an old Nick Cave The Lyre of Orpheus tour t-shirt) was roundly ignored.
The book lead me up the garden path. The camp ground is about 20km from Wangaratta in the middle of the state forest, with the last 5km or so along some dirt tracks. There are no views (though none were promised) and the purported camp-ground is covered in sheep crap. Yep, it's secluded, free and tonight there's no-one else about, but where's the fun in that? The Ovens River probably has some nice sites.
Thoughts for the day:
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The material and labour market economies put Pareto optimality at the forefront of everyone's mind. (Roughly, some magical process (the market) arranges things so no-one can be made better off without making someone else worse off.)
The currently celebrated scenario where this doesn't matter is of course peer-to-peer networking, for things that are cheap to duplicate and distribute. This also gives some insight as to why leaching in these domains is more about morality than anything rational — see Shirky for more (Ratios don't make much sense as the whole game is zero-sum anyway, and also very dependent on demand.)
Another that struck me is driving: a lot of people tail-gate, giving the impression of wanting to overtake. I'm more than happy for them to do so; I just wish they'd realise they could make me a lot happier by backing off until they're in a situation to pass me.
- HTML still sucks.
- There was a story on Confucianism on Radio National; a lot of it sounded like conservative claptrap of the form "respect and obey your betters". Perhaps the philosophy distinguishes comprehension of social mores and acceptance of them, but that didn't come through in the program. (Raymond Smullyan's portrayal of taoism is conversely quite irreverent.)
- I need to put a new notch in my belt. The magical mystical disappearing waistline.
