I think it’s safe to say that I live in the Coldest House in the Universe(tm). In fact I’m thinking of getting Guiness to come down here and declare it to be so. This morning, for instance, I awoke just the wrong side of 6am, and despite the double doona deployment on my bed, felt ... [More]
You remember in Day of the Triffids, particularly in the excellent TV version, how the plants would eerily click before attacking. It’s a bit like that at my house, at night when the wind blows. The enormous bush next to the front veranda, the one that defeated Cable And Wireless Optus Corporation, moves around in ... [More]
There’s been a lot of fuss in the blogging world over the last few days about Movable Type, and their new pricing. In a superb bit of customer relations, marketing and logic, they’ve bumped up their prices just a week or so after freebie tool Blogger delivered a big upgrade. I looked around at various ... [More]
4 cloth bags for $72 of groceries tonight. 1 Mars Lava bar included in the aforementioned shopping, after the subject of this new flavour seemed to continually creep into the conversation over the weekend. Yum. 6 correct in the footy tips for the weekend. 103.9 cents per litre for petrol. Damn, that should be a ... [More]
So I was looking in eBay at XBox games. Nothing that really grabbed me at a price that was enough below the retail to make it compelling. But at the bottom of the screen was one of those computerised guess things, where they have a wild stab in the dark about other items you might ... [More]
When I was starting primary school in the mid-70s, the second world war had been over for about 30 years. It was still in people’s minds — they still talked about it, a whole episode of Fawlty Towers was based around the recent memory of it. By the time I was in high school with ... [More]
A couple of years ago I was introduced to the range of Aveda (it’s German for wanky and expensive but environmentally friendly and rather nice and luxurious) hair care products. Well, one in particular: a leave-in conditioner thing which leaves my hair looking just slightly less daggy than it did before. I dab a little ... [More]
Recently I’ve been reading some of Jeff “Yak” Minter’s nostalgic look back at how he got into writing computer games in the 1980s, and it’s got me thinking about those days, and how it’s shaped my life — or at least, my professional working life. It’s something I have written about briefly before, but I ... [More]
Dear Sabrina Harman, you shouldn’t need the Geneva Convention to know what you participated in in that Iraqi prison was wrong. All you should have needed was a modicum of intelligence and humanity. Oh boy, are we all sick of hearing about Mary Donaldson yet? (Hmm, should the above have gone in the news section?) ... [More]
While some were at the footy on Friday night, Marita and I went to a truly excellent (new?) restaurant at Docklands — Renzo’s Bar. Utterly delicious food, and not expensive in the grand scheme of things — $61 for two, including an entree and some drinks, but no dessert or coffees because we were due ... [More]
It must be the month of May.
Winter is coming. And I have conclusive proof. a) Last night I was freezing my arse off in the kitchen while on a phone call, and vowed to seek out a new battery for the cordless phone, so I can make calls from the comfort of my superheated livingroom. Or from my double-doona-covered bed. Either ... [More]