Bike. Last weekend I bought a used mountain bike. There are some spots of rust but it rides good and I like it a lot. Marjorie already has a bike, so this will definitely extend our range, having previously being limited to walking and our single tram line. Not always, of course, but most of the time I'm glad I don't have a car. I think bike's are one of the greatest inventions ever. The fact that they've had the same basic design for a century says a lot.

Bikes I have owned in the past (that I can remember), and their eventual fate:

Age 5: Orange tricycle.

Age 6?: The bicycle I learned on. I seem to remember it was red and very stripped down.

Age 14: Red, white and blue bike with banana seat. This was a cool one.

Age 16: Ten-speed.

Age 18: Ten-speed. My college bike. Left it locked up over winter break and it was gone when I came back.

Ages 18-33: Nothing!

Age 33: Mountain bike. Great bike. Left it locked up at Music Midtown in Atlanta; came out and it was gone.

Age 37: Green crappy Carrefour (i.e. K-mart) special, in Singapore. Stolen from train station bike rack. And they say there's no crime in Singapore!

Age 38: see above.

Joy. We are freshly back from the Polyphonic Spree show, and boy are our spirits uplifted. It was like being at a religious revival. There were twenty-three in the band, by our best count, but it was hard to tell because they were constantly going nuts. Everyone dresses in choir robes. The eight-person choir spent half the time dancing like a cymbal crashing. Besides drums, bass, and guitar, and choir, they featured a harpist, trumpets, flutes, and a French horn. Great songs too. The audience ate it up; they turned on the audience lights at one point and I could see everyone was grinning ear to ear. Some people were going into paroxysms, like they'd just been healed. Hard to describe, but totally joyful and original.

We finished up our Australia day by going to see Closer, featuring equal parts Jude Law, Julia Roberts, Natalie Portman, and Clive Owen. It was engaging enough, but didn't see a lot of point to it. Nor did I particularly care for any of the characters, which isn't usually a problem for me, except that I get the feeling that I was supposed to. Clive Owen was his usual excellent, though, and I'm glad to see he got an Oscar nod for it.

I'm reading my blogs nowadays through an aggregator, which I highly recommend. I also use it to watch for updates to a lot of my other favorite sites, like Snopes and the NY Times Science section. There's hundred of other things you can subscribe to.

While we were gone today Laika got into a box and chewed up my drinking bird. Besides the "yikes" of her chewing on glass and doubtless tasting the red mystery liquid contained therein, it's kind of a bummer -- it was a gift from a friend. He got it for me after a discussion we had one day where we both found out, to our mutual amusement, that we each independently had a "random object" that we kept ready to mention whenever someone asked us to name a random object. Mine was a drinking bird; his was a doorknob.

Now that I think about it, we never found the drinking bird's head. Double yikes.

Happy Australia Day! We've celebrated in a relatively Australian way, by taking the dog to the beach and then enjoying a backyard BarBQ complete with lamb (for Mark, I find it a bit gamey). It's been one of the hottest days of the year today (35 C), so it feels like the fourth of July at home.
It's nice having a day off in the middle of the week. Particularly because today is sunny and the rest of the week is forecasted to be rainy. This evening we'll probably go see a movie, maybe one of the best picture nominees.

Aw yeah. The teams I root for never seem to make it to the final game, at least not since I was a kid. Today my Eagles made it. Woop! I had to get up at 7 to watch it, and I could only watch the first half before having to go to work. For the Super Bowl, you can bet I'll be staying home to watch the whole thing.

Who needs a phone? If you have a microphone on your computer, download Skype and give me a call -- my contact name is "angusmcpresley" (don't ask). I'm trying to hook up with parents this way, but they're asleep most of the time I'm on-line.

I realize this is like posting my phone number on the web, but if I start getting crank calls, I'll just change my handle. That's the other advantage of this over phones.

Update: I just had my first successful call to my parents. Talking around the world for free is hard to beat. The sound was only a little murky (possibly due to the hardware or connection speeds involved) but not too shabby.

While I'm elated that the Cassini/Huygens mission went largely as planned, apparently there was a glitch that went almost entirely unreported. A software bug caused the loss of nearly half of the 700 images that were hoped for.

See, that's why I'll never work on a project like this, despite being an enthusiast. I just can't imagine what it would feel like to be the one responsible for introducing a bug that dashes the hopes of your colleagues and costs millions of dollars, while instantly flushing at least a decade of your life down the toilet.

What will make a good weekend for me?

The Huygens probe lands successfully on Titan.

The Eagles beat the Vikings.

I get the shelves hung.

A bad weekend, obviously, will be the opposite of all those.

Update: Three for three!

I really don't like the new "typing pool" work setup. Very distracting. I feel like the guy in Memento, where every thirty seconds I forget what I was working on. I need to find an mp3 of white noise and some headphones.

We are in the process of trying to score some Rufus Wainwright tickets. We listened to his "Poses" album over dinner, and both just marvelled at it for the umpteenth time. So, as is our frequent wont, we started coming up with another music list over dinner. This list was, Albums That We Consider To Be "Old Friends", Mutually:

Rufus Wainwright, "Poses"

REM, "Reckoning"

Squeeze, "Frank"

Radiohead, "The Bends"

Jellyfish, "Spilt Milk"

Elliott Smith, "Either/Or"

Neil Finn, "Try Whistling This"

Soul Coughing, "Irresistible Bliss"

Soul Coughing, "Ruby Vroom"

The Kinks, "Village Green Preservation Society"

Hoodoo Gurus, "Mars Needs Guitars"

Elvis Costello, "Imperial Bedroom"

Sam Phillips, "Martinis and Bikinis"

Billy Bragg, "Talking To The Tax Man About Poetry"

Jiminy! Members of the Australian Cricket team are going to be in my building tomorrow doing a tsunami benefit.

Cricket (the sport) is ubiquitous here. I'm starting to appreciate it, a bit, though I still have no real connection to it, and I still don't fully understand it. Like most Americans, I'm learning it in how it relates to baseball. Though the spirit of the game is quite different, the comparison helps one learn the rules. Take baseball, but:

Give the pitcher a running start. No umpires to call balls and strikes; rather, if the ball hits the sticks, yer out. Get rid of first and third base. No foul balls either; everything is in play. Instead of trading sides every innings, have everyone bat. Then it's the other team's turn. Make a home run six points, and hitting it to the fence is four.

Actually, the main way I'm learning it is through playing the game that everyone in our office has been playing: StickCricket. My highest slog score thus far is 218 for 4.

Happy Birthday Lana and Rick! I hope you both have a great one.
Lana, I tried to email you and don't have your current email address. Could you email it to me?

I bet Jon Stewart had something to do with this decision. Thanks Jon.

The weather forecast for Melbourne today was a low of 12C and a high of 18C. The weather forecast in Atlanta today was for a low of 54F and a high of around 64F. These are almost the same, but it's supposed to be summer here (in spite of the fact that we are wearing sweaters and jackets). Brrrr.

An interesting read. The Edge magazine asked a bunch of really smart people, "What do you believe is true even though you can't prove it?". Their responses are quite interesting.

Doggie, doggie, doggie! OY! OY! OY! We've decided Laika is our "punk doggie". We imagine her singing "Smash it up, smash it up!" as she tears up the kitchen, typically when she's been left alone too long. Psycho doggie, qu'est-ce que c'est?

Today was the first day in Australia that we both went to our respective jobs, leaving the dog alone. She was pretty good, but she did get into the recyclables -- she dragged a six pack box and two empty Corona bottles to her dog bed. We're starting to take photos of the artwork she creates each day she's left alone; we'll post them en masse at some point.

Marjorie's at her new job, which I'll let her tell you about. Me, I'm in the new office building, which is a big, sterile Gattaca-like monstrosity. It does have a great choice of restaurants though (a giant food court, and Chinatown and the Greek area right up the street). Our office space is, unfortunately, a newsroom type of office; I can peek over my monitor and spot just about all fifty or so people in the company. Fifteen floors up, but the view is mostly just the ugly tops of other lower buildings.

Marjorie starts her new job tomorrow. I don't go back to work until Wednesday. Actually, most of my company doesn't go back until the 10th. We're starting in a brand new office building, that's right on the tram line that starts right by our house. Nice.

It'll be hard to get back on sleep schedule; I've been staying up until 3 or 4 a.m. these days. My interest in chess has had a resurgence; I've been up late playing people from all over the world on Yahoo games. I'm only a mediocre player, but the game still fascinates me. (Particularly the games of Bobby Fischer. Too bad he's completely lost the plot; it kills me that he and Kasparov are both still alive, and will never play each other.)

Ouch. When Marjorie was back in the states, she got me some Dave's Insanity salsa and sauce. It's, like, really hot and stuff. I can only do about a spoonful of the salsa at one sitting. It hurts, but I get a strange sort of happy buzz from it -- probably endorphins or something. Heat aside, too, i'ts actually tastier than anything you can buy here.

What year is it where you are? It's been 2005 for a couple of hours now here. At ten til midnight we took the dog down to the beach and watched the fireworks. We could see them in three different directions. There were a hundred or so people down there, including three guys who decided to ring in the new year with a screaming naked run into the bay. Behind our house, in the apartment over one of the Greek-owned stores, a bunch of guys are still singing away.

Happy New Year to all!

In an attempt to start the new year off right, Mark and I have donated some money to Doctors Without Borders to help out with the Tsunami relief effort. I urge you to do the same, there are so many organizations that are helping you can take your pick. I know CARE, OXFAM, and the Red Cross are involved. And if you need a selfish reason, the 31st is the last day to make a donation and write it off on this year's taxes (in the States anyway, I not sure what happens here). The devastation is so horrible, and unfortunately this is probably only the beginning of what is worse to follow in terms of disease and loss of income (many of the areas affected were largely dependent on tourism which is sure to lag for some time now).
In happier news, since we had a rental car until 5pm, we spent the day trying to keep Laika happy and took her first to the Yarra Bend Park to see some flying foxes, and then to the off-leash dog beach in Brighton, which must be the closest thing to Heaven she's experienced so far. The beach was perfect for the dogs, very wide low tide area with pretty much no beach to lay-out on, so perfect for the doggies without too much appeal to non-doggy folks. There were probably over fifty dogs there, which given the area didn't seem too crowded. Laika LOVED it!! It's a shame it's too far from home to take her more often.
This evening we're planning on cooking some chicken and corn on the BBQ and maybe walking down to the beach around midnight. Should be a very laid back new year's eve.