Welcome to the year two thousand. The very fact that you’re reading these words probably means that the dreaded Y2K bug didn’t eventuate. At least, not in a huge way. I’m sure the residents of Hobart and Adelaide aren’t too disappointed that their bus ticket machines stopped working for a while. (Oh, commiserations if you’re ... [More]
Well, here we finally are, the eve of the year 2000. Will the Y2K bug (design decision, actually) destroy civilisation as we know it? Somehow I doubt it. I think there’s going to be a lot of embarrassed survivalists on Monday, humming and haa-ing and wondering what on earth they’re going to do with all ... [More]
Well, it was a sometimes cloudy, sometimes sunny Christmas. We woke early, let the kids unwrap their presents, throw paper around and generally make a big mess of the livingroom, which is definitely a Christmas tradition. For lunch we went over to my mum’s boyfriend Peter’s place and sat in the garden and stuffed ourselves ... [More]
Well, just one sleep until Christmas… the gifts have been procured – well, all but one, which is somewhere between being ordered from an online music site and being physically delivered to the mailbox. Oh yeah, and I really must try and get them wrapped in the next few hours… Father Christmas aka Santa has ... [More]
Couldn’t resist having a swipe when I saw this article in Saturday’s Age.
I hit pay dirt at the library on Sunday. Earlier in the year I’d been looking for a book… not a book essential to my work or way of life, but a book I was reasonably keen to borrow and read. It was out and overdue. So I bided my time, I waited for it ... [More]
While other Australians are off seeing the world, some of them journeying off to obtain the world championship titles in cricket, netball, hockey, rugby union, baseball or tennis, I’m just sitting at home. Working from home in fact. Yep, new job, new challenges. I only started doing this a couple of weeks ago, so it’s ... [More]
I was socialising a bit on Saturday, and met an elderly couple who I’d heard were a bit quirky, particularly in the food department, but who in person seemed quite nice and normal. Until someone mentioned airline food. These two were visiting Australia from (insert name of far away continent here – heck, they’re all ... [More]
Went to a bit of a buck’s night on Saturday. A bit of a pub crawl through the city. There was one casualty of the evening, and it all happened before we even started! By the time we were in the restaurant chowing down some delicious Mongolian food, our missing comrade had already managed to ... [More]
At work today, typing mid-sentence I started to type the word functionality. I stopped after a few letters, because it was all coming out wrong: the first letter was missing, and the order of the next four letters got muddled, resulting in a word that quite definitely should not be in a system design document…
George’s has closed its doors for the last time. If you think this is old news, if you think I’m really slow to be telling you months and months after the fact, then I should mention that I’m not talking about George’s Department Store, the up-market shop in Collins Street, Melbourne, that has been yoyo-ing ... [More]
On Saturday afternoon I found myself being fitted up. For a mate’s wedding. Yes, Brian’s finally getting hitched to the lovely Deanne, and I’ll be there along with a handful of others in matching suits trying to bring some sense of dignity and occasion to the umm…. occasion. What I’m trying to say is that ... [More]
Yes, I’m back, in fact we’re all back from gallivanting around Europe. Survived the crossing the street in Rome, dodged the pickpockets on the Metro, minded the gap in London, missed the Paddington rail disaster by about two hours, and even somehow flew there and back without the kids sending us completely insane.
This was something of an eventful day. Quite apart from being our last day in Europe, it was to be a day of plans, problems, revised plans, revised plan problems, revised-revised plans, revised-revised plan problems… and so on. The first bit went reasonably smoothly: We said goodbye to Uncle Hew (since he was going to ... [More]
Being our second last day in England, we took things pretty easy, as apart from embarking on a 22 hour flight home the next day, we were also planning a whirlwind trip to Legoland. So first of all we gave Hew’s washing machine a good workout, while the kids ran around his back garden, and ... [More]
After some consultation with the Lonely Planet guide about what else we could see in London, we headed into Victoria and wandered around the multitude of bus stops trying to find where the 24 to Camden Town went from. We found it, and the bus, just starting to depart. We dashed up waving our arms, ... [More]