The frighteners

We have been locking Clio out the back, that is we have been closing the adjoining gate so she cannot "disrupt" the pot plants. Today however she could not be seen when I arrived home. She wasn't sleeping by the back gate as I would have expected. It's not unknown for her not to hear my approach. Granted it is difficult to not hear the banging and clanging of garage and gates, nor is it difficult to hear my motorcycle as it approaches. Nevertheless, there have been occasions where she has been caught napping.

Lots of thoughts ran through my head, and I was just about to go ask the neighbours if they had seen anyone lurking about (nothing else was out of place) or if they had seen an escaping black labrador (less likely). Perhaps due to her turning 12 months

She was indeed napping. Napping inside the outdoor toilet that adjoins the garage. She had pushed herself in, and due to the small size of the room and her clumsy big arse, she had wedged the door closed and she could not get out. I have no idea how long she had been there, but she was happy to see me!

Athletic asylum seekers

The Commonwealth Games have certainly done alot for Melbourne. We have seen records broken and many faces of winners and the disappointment of athletes losing all at the last moment. Of interest though are the reports that as the Games come to a close, the size of the Sierra Leone team is rapidly dwindling as the team members go AWOL. They've lost 11 out of the 22 so far -- I guess they just don't wanna go back. It reminds me of the days of the cold war when we would see reports of the Russian and East German athletes scaling fences and squeezing out portholes in ships to claim asylum. This country however doesn't have a great record of treating asylum seekers well, with our government going to extraordinary lengths to avoid letting them in, not to mention the detention centres and the bad press they have always been receiving.

Jana wins by a mile

The Comm Games this evening were interesting and would've been more enjoyable but for two things; the yobs that were in the seats in front out of us that were more interested in drinking beer, and the sound system in the bay of the MCG we were in was unintelligible -- if not for a handy FM radio, we would not have had any idea on what was going on. The hi-light of the evening was Jana Pitman winning the Women's 400m hurdle and the 80,000 supporters in the stadium going crazy.

Channel 9 coverage of Comm Games

Watching the weightlifting coverage of the Comm Games tonight on TV tonight reminded me how much I dislike the commentary of Darrell Eastlake. He is so over the top it is off-putting and makes me either turn the volume down, or just turn off completely. I had thought he had chosen a different career, but unfortunately he's been let out of the asylum much to my dismay. Darrell, I'm not interested in your interpretation of what you think is going on in the athlete's mind as it is more often than not worth listening to.

This is the same Darrell Eastlake that was ejected from the 1990 Commonwealth Games in Auckland for "noise pollution".

Couldn't put it better myself.

Again with the games!

We went to the track cycling today at the Comm Games. I wasn't all that interested in the track cycling before going, being more interested in the road events like the Tour de France, however the atmosphere was great and we saw some top cyclists and even witnessed a Commonwealth Games record broken. It was held at the "multipurpose venue" which is an odd and boring name for the venue, considering I am sure it was called Vodafone arena a few weeks ago. But then again, Vodafone aren't a sponsor of the games and Telstra are...


One of the more memorable pics from the days cycling

I am supposed to pull some overtime tomorrow, which may be interesting considering I need to get into the CBD and the Comm Games Marathon is on. We'll see...

Never say never

Isn't that a bad title to an Ian Flemming film? Ok, it's more in reference to what our illustrious PM said on tv the other day about policy. It looks like he's strongly considering the sale of uranium to India, overturning current policy that doesn't allow such sales to non-signatories to the Nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

In other news, the AWB scandal is still heating up, with the AU intelligence agencies knowing about the kickbacks to the old regime in Iraq for eight years. Hard to believe the PM had not been informed or even took an interest in an Australian company breaking the UN embargo imposed on Iraq during the period after Desert Storm took place.

Commonwealth Games and traffic

Melbourne is currently hosting the 2006 Commonwealth Games. The Commonwealth Games are like a smaller version of the Olympics for all the countries that have been "colonised" by the English in the past few hundred years.

Because of the games, there are many roads that have had lanes reserved for games traffic. You would think would have the effect of increasing traffic congestion, however there seems to be less traffic within the city itself. Drivers appear to be frustrated and less tolerant at the moment as I have witnessed many more road-rage and accidents than normal.

I'm going to a few events, however for some I am sure that the games could not end too soon.

Pets and motorists

I've seen my share of crazy motorists in my time, but the irresponsible ones with the pets take the cake. I once rode past a Range Rover in one of the more affluent inner-city surburbs of Melb, when I had to do a double-take as there was a medium-sized "foo foo" dog sitting on the drivers lap.

Tonight, whilst waiting at the traffic lights, a car drove across the intersection. Nothing untoward in that, however inside the car on the front dashboard was a large fluffly white cat. Yawning nonetheless. Like this was a normal location for transportation. Not only that, but the driver (the only other occupant) was patting the cat.

"I'm sorry officer -- I was distracted when my cat lept off the dashboard and wrapped itself around my face like that scene in Alien"

Cartoon of the day

This cartoon is from The Australian today. For those of us not in Oz, there's a new TV ad for Tourism Australia that has been banned from UK TV for offensive language. Amusing, considering.

Restaurants

Thai is my favourite food, so my world is complete for the moment when the discovery of a Thai restaurant nearby is made, and we made that discovery last night. I'm in no way a food connoisseur, but I tend to judge the quality of a restaurant on the staples that I have compiled during my years of restaurant-going, so at Thai it's tom yum soup and/or curry puffs, and at Chinese it's sweet corn soup. The curry puffs whilst not the best, were passable and not oily so I shall reserve my judgement until our next encounter. :) The pad khing and the pad grapow were quite tasty however!

Jack of spam

I have become sick of it once more. I have heard figures that 30% of email into work is spam. That's an enormous amount and a huge waste of network bandwidth that needs to be paid for!

Recently, or at least in the past few weeks, I've been getting a rather large influx of spam to my person email account. "not satisfied with ur unit"
is the most recent subject line I have been receiving, so they're less explicit than they used to be but no less of an annoyance. Usually the anti-spam filters at work filter it out, but for some reason it has been getting through and it has become an annoyance. So I've decided to re-implement my updated anti-spam system of SpamAssassin and we'll see how it goes.

It has hit the news as of late that the Canadian Olympic skier turned Australian, Dale Begg-Smith is the purveyor of such spam, spyware and malware. I wonder how much spam he gets?

Star Wars I on TEN Melb this evening

They're playing that dog of a movie George Lucas calls Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace on free-to-air TV tonight. There's no subtitles for any of the non-humans in the movie! (or am I remembering it wrong?) Not that it makes any difference to the enjoyment or lack thereof in this movie, it just means they must have the trainee on the control room at TEN tonight. Why then am I watching it I hear you ask? Good question.

My fascination in all things Star Wars started waning after I saw this movie. We got gold-class tickets to this movie, believing all the hype. Needless to say the disappointment that I had after the movie got out was representative of the others in the group I saw it with. There was so much wrong with this movie that I can't even begin.

I wonder how George Lucas thinks of his more recent creations? Does he think of them like the black sheep of the family that are not spoken about in mixed company? :)

Returning to normal?

Life is slowly returning to normal. However, since being off work and at home I have noticed that this home ownership is hard work! Even though the house is in great condition, there's still tons to do -- mostly niggly little things, like fixing the gate etc, but there's lots of these small tasks to get done. Some cost money, others are just time consuming. This tends to take the novelty off the new home. :)

In other news, it's being reported that our beloved PM is considering changing AU Gov policy and selling uranium to India.

Online at last!

The ISP tech came out today and verified that my line did indeed not work with his equipment. That meant that it was their problem and not with my gear. :) It ended up being the port at the exchange and is now fixed. Life can now return to normal, at least that's how it feels!

My network at home consists of the ADSL modem that feeds into a unix workstation that functions as a file server, web proxy, dns & dhcp server. Unfortunately my ADSL modem is too ancient to perform some of the features the unix workstation can as some of the newer ones can. Might have to look at that if we need to save on power consumption. :)

Our cheesy PM John Howard is currently touring India trying to drum up trade and following GWB about. It seems the Indian PM is interested in purchasing uranium, however the AU Gov have a policy they will not sell to any non-signatory of the Nuclear non-proliferation treaty and he beat around the bush when the Indian PM mentioned it on the international news. Interesting news today had Hindu priests purify a site which GWB had visited. I'm sure there's a message in there somewhere.

Gardening days

This must be a riveting read. :)

Today has been set aside for performing some gardening duties. This yard is much easier to maintain than the last place we were in mainly due to its size -- that and the knowledge that it's mine, all mine. Having said that, there's still plenty to do! We've reorganised the garage to make it usable, and there's less boxes stored out there now.

It's 9:30am on a Sunday and the Greek music is blaring from a house down the street. Such joy.

There has been other Clio destruction, but pictures will have to wait for my broadband connection issue to be resolved. Hopefully Monday afternoon will show me back online!

Still no 'net and our bond

My ISP still hasn't got their arse into gear and got the ADSL going yet. Their computer says it's all done but it ain't working. I spent part of yesterday afternoon with their tech support on the phone going through the basics and it's like the Layer-2 is online, ie: the modem shows sync but I can't authenticate and I get the dreaded 678 error with WinXP. I guess we got the apprentice at the exchange this time. Funny thing is, last time I moved we had this exact same issue. It must be a complex task to organise, or perhaps I just have the shit touch in arranging these things. *sigh*. Besides, there are more important things to worry about.

The agent for the old place did his inspection and noted there were things that needed tending to. Nothing huge, just things that we (or I) missed when we were cleaning. We weren't interested in revisiting the old place and going through the rigmarole of picking up the keys and then dropping them off afterwards so we opted for just getting their cleaner to do the work and they take it out of our bond. We have enough around here to get sorted. *another sigh*.

Things to do around here (in no particular order):

• fix two leaky taps with new washers
• fix an intermittently dimming downlight in the lounge
• curtain for the kitchen
• hook for the rear blinds
• remove "fishy" transfers from over the bath
• finish setting up the surround sound amp
• finish setting up the computer room
• extend phone line to computer room
• do the kitchen up, complete with new appliances and more storage space!

Life without 'net and movin' on

Currently 'net connections have been the result of a modem dial-up, which is workable (as long as you don't want to do too much) albeit slow. My ISP say I shall be online by Thursday afternoon, and I've just tested and it would appear they work to tight schedules. Mornings have been kind of quiet and I've had to find other things to do rather than read the morning news.

We cleaned the old place, watched the carpet guy do his thing and then handed in the keys. The old place looks lovely and clean unless you look closely in certain areas. :)

Things I'll miss about the old place:

• The space -- it was a big house on a huge block.. it's a shame they'll tear it down to build units
• Location location location -- travel to work was probably a bit more direct than where we are now

Things I won't miss:

• Maintaining the garden -- the block was an irregular shape, so it was a pain to mow
• Tacks that poked up through the carpet joins and the crappy hard-wearing carpet
• The mice, rats and possums that infested the place -- we even saw a mouse on moving day
• The local council -- for no specific reason other than their recycle bins
• The animals the neighbours allowed to run wild in the court

The above means we have now officially moved. Nothing of ours is at the old place, it's all here -- piled in the garage. So, today will be a day of unpacking said garage and rearranging it into the house somewhere. Not very exciting, but at least it doesn't involve going out, and doing things that have a time limit imposed. Clio has already been unsupervised in the garage and the wave of terror has ensued and I will update the destruction list when I get back online.