knitting
I've started knitting myself a scarf. It's the simplest piece of clothing that you can knit, since it's basically a big rectangle. No dropping or picking up of stitches, no fancy patterns required, just plain old knitting.
It's actually been pretty therapeutic, especially while watching world cup matches. It cuts the tension right down because you can focus on something else for a bit until the commentators start getting excited and yelling names at random ("it's Chipperfield, Chipperfield to Aloisi, to Cahill, back to Aloisi -- across the front! Viduka gets it! Viduka! to Cahill! Right chip at the GOAL, IN THE AIR, PAST THE KEEPER!!! IT'S IN!!! WHAT A GOAL!!!!")
So far I have about 40cm done. I was aiming for at least a 1 metre scarf, but I think I'll run out of wool before then :( time to go back to Lincraft...
you know you're in trouble when...
you start trying to use Visual Studio shortcuts inside Microsoft Word.
("why isn't intellisense coming up?")
go the socceroos!
Yay for the socceroos getting through to the second round! Well done, kids!
It's really interesting seeing the depths that soccer fans will go to during the world cup. Some of my friends at work have been waking up to watch the matches in the city at Circular Quay or Darling Harbour; one has been watching the matches at Enmore Theatre where they've put up a huge screen so you can watch indoors. Several people have gone to pubs late at night, and there's the crowd that are happy enough to wake up and watch at home (myself included).
I think the best/surprising part is finding out
who is actually watching. People who I'd never guess were soccer fans are going to extremes like driving into the city at 4am or hosting parties in the small hours of the morning. I guess sport brings out the wacky fanatics in people. :)
My whole family have watched all of the Australian matches so far, I've sacrified a lot of sleep lately, and it's been fun! Go the socceroos!
the gift of giving
I donated blood for the second time in my life yesterday along with a few other colleagues. They gave me a keyring with my blood type on it! Unfortunately, I felt dehydrated afterwards and got a headache, so it took some warmth out of the 'I did a good thing today' feeling.
One of my friends made the comment that 100 years from now people are going to look back and think how barbaric blood donation is. They won't need blood banks anymore, because we'll be able to synthesise it. An interesting thought...
The Visa
I've just applied for the Working Holidaymaker Visa for the UK.
I'm leaving my hometown of Sydney on September 3rd, spending about four weeks in Canada and the U.S. (Vancouver, Jasper/Banff, New York, Boston, Montreal) and then I'm heading over to the UK where a sizeable number of my friends are already living :)
I've finally booked the flights and applied for the visa, so I can start planning the stuff I need to do with a firm date in mind. The list is very uninspiring - mostly administrative things like cancelling health insurance, consolidating super accounts, etcetera. And work doesn't really officially know yet (and I'm not planning to tell them until I have the visa in my possession).
There's some stuff that I'm really going to dread, like updating my resume and cleaning out old junk at home... Other stuff is fun, like a snow trip, and cramming in a bunch of fun sydney stuff into the last few weeks ("Let's go rowing at Audley!", "Let's go to Luna Park!", "Tetsuyas!")
10 weeks to go and counting. :)
New Office Applications
Here are some applications that my colleagues want in the next version of Office:
The "I'm checking in" Monitor designed to improve check in turnaround time. Whenever you flag a work item as "ready for check in", the check-in scheduler will have their music replaced by a continually looping wav file of the "I'm checking in" song that Homer sings while checking into the Betty Ford clinic. This irritating song will double in volume for every extra person waiting for a green light, thus forcing the check in scheduler to process the list more than once a week.
BossMonitor. A warning system for how close the boss is to your desk. The boss will have a GPS device planted on his clothing. As he wanders around the office, an icon in everyone's taskbar will turn orange if he's within a 5 metre range, and red if within 1 metre. This clever, self-preserving program will conveniently disappear from the taskbar if he is actually AT your desk, leaving the Boss none the wiser about its existence.
KitchenCam A webcam application that hurts people who surruptitiously leave their grotty, coffee-crusted mugs in the sink for others to clean up. Any individual caught in the act will be punished by a giant extendable arm with a hammer that whacks them over the head. The webcam will automatically analyse the image and intensify the strength of the hit based on an X-factor assigned to each individual (by me).
SpamKiller People who send more than 3 useless emails per week to the whole development mailing list will get creatively killed. It works in conjunction with a website that lets you register your frustration for every individual email sent. Those with the highest grievances get to suggest a new creative way of dealing with the spammer, and when someone's time is up, their punishment is randomly drawn from the pool.
Go Australia!
I'm watching the match - Australia vs Japan, Kaiserslautern Germany, 2006. It's a little past half time, and Japan have managed to get a goal ahead due to a referee oversight. (That's a bad refereeing decision that will be on convenient replay FOREVER.)
I just wanted to say GO AUSTRALIA!
[later edit: what a match!! Now, if only we could do that against Brazil...]
8:15
I woke up at 8:15 today, and still managed to get to work by 9:20 (including a 50 minute drive).
I rock!
fifteen minutes I'll never get back
I'm sick today.
I have a sore throat and a fever :(
To kill time while recouperating, I decided to watch some DVDs (as you do when you're sick at home). This was a fine idea, but the execution was a little trickier than expected. I haven't watched a DVD at my parents' house in over 18 months, and some things have changed. Somehow we have nine (9) remote controls on our coffee table, each with a perplexing array of audio visual options, and only one combination makes any given DVD player work (we have two). The scenario was not unlike Rachel Weisz in The Mummy, faced with impending danger and some ancient hieroglyphics containing the secret to killing the bad guy.
Unfortunately for me, there were no helpful instructions on the table for technologically illiterate to follow (read: my mother or the dog). Examining the back of the DVD player/TV/amplifier yielded nothing but an amazed "wow" at the huge number of cables we have connecting everything together.
So clearly I had no other option but to take the plunge and start pressing likely buttons. Anything marked "AV", "function", "input", "channel" or "video" was targeted, and after five persistent minutes I was rewarded with sound. Hooray! It was a satisfying victory.
However, the video proved elusive - a problem that five more minutes of button pressing and a phone call to dad couldn't fix.
I guess I'm watching free-to-air TV for the rest of the day.
ain't no other man but you!
I loooooove Christina Aguilera's new song. LOVE it. It's all sass and snap and attitude, it just makes me want to jump around in the car when I hear it. Two thumbs up. :)
