Bottom line. Our president has taken us from peace to war, and from surplus to deficit. He took a worldwide expression of good feeling towards the US (following 9/11) and squandered it completely. Not to mention that 1000 US soldiers are dead for a wrongly justified and poorly planned war for which no wrongdoing has ever been admitted and that has only replaced despotism with chaos.

I understand the lines are long, but take a book with you if you have to, and vote!

Two things I haven't seen in years, that I just saw:

A rainbow, on our way home from the dog park. Then, half an hour later --

Hail.

The Good Life: Today was beautiful; high of around 30 degrees Celsius (around 85 F). We took the dingo to the beach so she could roll in smelly low-tide debris, and run around like mad with other dogs. I'm so pleased that she is the type of dog that gets on well with other dogs. Nobody likes the mean dog. She's so happy at the beach, it's contagious. She doesn't swim so much as romp in the water. Mark says she's doing the butterfly stroke.
We're loving Melbourne. It's no secret that I was not terribly happy in Singapore, but Melbourne is about as perfect as a city could be. No mystery it's been voted the most livable city in the world. And I suspect I'll be employed by the end of November.

Move your bloomin' arse! For once, the weather was crappy leading up to the weekend, then turned beautiful: not the other way around. We just went city exploring, like we hadn't done in a long while. Me in shorts.

Late in the afternoon, we headed back to a bar just across from Flinders Street station, which is in the very heart of town, to watch people come back from the races. It's great stuff, and we can't wait to do it up ourselves next year when we have more disposable income. It's rather like Ascot opening day in My Fair Lady, except that everyone is like Eliza instead of the snobby rich people. Ladies in fancy dress and big hats with feathers; men in suits or tuxes; everyone drinking a lot. Monday (and maybe Tuesday, I haven't quite figured it out) is a work holiday here in Melbourne, just for the Melbourne Cup, which all the other races have been leading up to. Of course, being paid hourly, there's no real motivation for me to take a holiday.

Marjorie had an interview the other day that sounds like it went really well. We'll keep our fingers crossed. That'll be a good one to check off the list.

Happy birthday, Mom!

The dog continues to provide comic relief. Now she's taken to attacking her tail. Not chasing it, but actually catching it.

I'm fascinated by the race of hobbit people that have been unearthed. I'm sure the scientists are cringing about them being called "hobbits" everywhere. The significance of this find can't be overstated. I mean, the reason you've heard about neanderthals is because they used to be considered our nearest neighbor in the evolutionary tree. Now we have a new closest relative. Wild stuff.

Everyone seems to know a list of celebrities that they share a birthday with. More interesting to me is the list of people who were born the same year as me. I came across just a list. A few of the notables:

Troy Aikman - Rick Astley - Stephen Baldwin - Halle Berry - Edie Brickell - Jeff Buckley - Cindy Crawford - John Daly - Stefan Edberg - Jon Favreau - Ben Folds - Samantha Fox - C. Thomas Howell - Janet Jackson - Paula Jones - Sinead O'Connor - Luke Perry - Andy Richter - Chris Robinson - David Schwimmer - Matthew Sweet - Mike Tyson.

What a graduating class that would be.

When I was a kid I remember occasional visits to relatives where, after dinner, I would be made to sit at the dinner table while the adults talked, when what I really, really wanted to do was to go play. How could these adults want to just sit here and talk? There's all these great toys, right over there!

That, I think, is what the life of a dog is like. In my efforts to empathise with the new dog, that's the example that keeps coming back into my head. There is nothing she wants more than to be out on walkies. Her tail starts wagging every time one of us walks in the direction of the front door.

But, too often, she's stuck at the dinner table while the grownups talk. She's definitely settling in, and has already learned to manipulate us with sad looks, especially when she thinks she's about to be left alone. She's also testing her limits a bit at the dog park and the beach, not coming when she's called. She's a very silly girl, though, and is continually providing us comic relief.

Look Ma, no cord! With the help of a downloaded patch, our wireless internet connection now works, and I'm blogging from bed. Sweet!

We tried a new Mexican restaurant tonight, Los Amates in Fitzroy, as part of the monthly Dems Abroad meeting. It was just okay. We think the problem may be getting the necessary ingredients imported into a country with very tight agricultural import restrictions. Poblano peppers just do not exist here.

I really don't understand how Bush is still doing so well in the polls. It seems so obvious to anyone paying attention, Democrats and Republicans alike, that this man is the worst president our country has ever seen. It's mystifying to me. Are that many Americans really that stupid? I just keep hoping that on November 2 America proves the pollers wrong and elects Kerry in a landslide victory.
Oh, and if you haven't seen the video from Jon Stewart on Crossfire you owe it to yourself to check it out. Jon Stewart's on my hero list this week.

Fight the liberals! On another blog I commented that for the next election a foundation should be started to collect money from conservatives in the US to "help fight the Liberals in Australia!" (the Liberal party here actually being the conservatives). So he took the idea and ran with it. Too funny.

Atlanta, 1996. The Olympics are in town. At a neighborhood restaurant I end up dining at the next table over from Pierre Salinger. This is a year before his ignominious exit from ABC news.

I remember thinking, wow, those are some eyebrows.

I mention it only because I only rarely have brushes with greatness and now it seems he has died.

Laika Update: She's settling in well to her life here. Our afternoon routine usually consists of going to the off-leash dog park where she can run around like mad with the other dogs. She already has more friends here than we do, and it's very nice to see that she gets along well with other dogs. Today we went to the off leash beach where we ran into one of her park buddies and she was able to run like mad on the beach and in the water (definitely a waterbaby), and eat lots of disgusting things like starfish.
She's a funny girl, and she's fairly well behaved. We just need to work on a few things.

In other news, I'm looking hard for a job. Hopefully I'll get an interview soon. And we both really like Melbourne. I think once we get settled in, with two jobs and furniture, we'll be really content.

I love articles like this: Endangered species: US programmers. To quote in part:

Since the dotcom bust in 2000-2001, nearly a quarter of California technology workers have taken nontech jobs, according to a study of 1 million workers released last week by Sphere Institute, a San Francisco Bay Area public policy group. The jobs they took often paid less.

What they don't realize is that the quarter of the programmers they said were forced to take other jobs were the quarter who didn't belong there in the first place. The business was overrun by people from other fields who had no business or aptitude for the subject, but just wanted their piece of the pie in the dotcom boom. At my old job we rejected hundreds if not thousands of applicants.

Anyway, I really do love articles like that, because they tend to discourage other career opportunists. And as for offshoring, I know a lot of companies that have tried it once, but not many that have tried it twice.

My job here seems to be going exceedingly well, all in all. It's a good bunch of people, and they seem to be really happy with the work I'm doing. I've gotten my groove back, and have also discovered the key to happiness at work, for me: stop screwing around on the net. I've had jobs in the past with free reign to surf at will, and it's a dangerous lure. Without it I'm considerably more productive, and more content as a result.

This new work philosophy comes at a price, though; in idle moments where formerly I would wander out on the web, I now take to biting my nails. It got bad for a while, but I'm stepping up the battle -- I mark up my hangnails with a ballpoint pen so I don't bite them, and have even taken to covering them with band-aids.

Speed. Hoorah! Just got our DSL connection going. The hardware was delivered this morning, and Marjorie got it set up all by herself (almost). Speed is good. We also got the wireless modem, but are just wired in at the moment. Will try to get the wireless working tomorrow, which will be nice.

Yesterday at the dog park Laika noticed for the first time a metal statue of a dog that sits off to one side. It was hilarious -- she started by barking at it, then circling around it growling with her teeth bared and hackles raised. She was totally freaked out by it.

We're getting to know everyone who goes to the dog park regularly. The people we talk to, but no one knows each other's names, just the names of everyone else's dogs. Funny how that works.

Geek alert. I was reading in a book that the late great physicist Richard Feynman once invented a computer science algorithm for computing logarithms that's still being used. While I can hardly hope to match his brilliance in just about any area, it did remind me of an algorithm I came up with, way back in high school I think, that (as far as I know) is mine (although it's probably been invented independently a number of times). I doubt it's of any serious significance but I like it just the same. So here it is.

I was writing a routine to compute the average of a big list of numbers. The typical way you do it is to just sum the numbers, and divide by the size of your list, like this:


sum <-- 0;
for i <- 1 to n
sum <-- sum + number[i];
average = sum / n;


This routine didn't work for me, because I noticed that sum kept overflowing. But I realized that if you compute the average as you go along, you don't need to keep the the running sum, because sum is always going to be equal to average*i, where i is the number of items you've processed so far. So you can compute a new average by using that as your sum, adding the new number, and dividing by the new count of items, like this:


average <-- 0;
for i <-- 1 to n
average <-- ( average*(i-1) + number[i] ) / i;


But here average*(i-1) can just as easily overflow as the running sum we kept in the first example. However, at this point you can just manipulate the algebra terms so that no big multiplication needs to take place:


average <-- 0;
for i <-- 1 to n
average <-- average - average/i + number[i]/i;


So there you go -- an averaging routine that can compute the average of just about as many numbers as you want without overflowing. I've actually used this in real applications before.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled dog stories.

More language. Some other differences:

Entrée -- here, it means "appetizer" as opposed to main course. This is actually truer to the French meaning, I think.

Reckon, as "I reckon it's dinner time" -- actually this means the same thing back in the states, but it's considered more of a redneck term there. Here, everyone uses it. Except me; I can't bring myself to.

Fillet or filet -- this means the same thing too, but they pronounce it "fill-it" here, instead of "fil-ay".

Slab of beer -- means, a case of beer. I like this.

I also like the official country cheer at sporting events. America's is just "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" which generally gets derisive laughs from other country's fans for its simple-mindedness. But Australia's is just so silly that it practically makes fun of itself: "Aussie Aussie Aussie! Oy Oy Oy!"

The dingo ate my sunglasses. Laika did that yesterday when she was left alone in the house for an hour when I returned our rental car. She also has a tendency to nip at hands and sleeves when she's overexcited. But in general she's a good girl. She's walking fairly well on her leash with the help of her "halti" a mouth harness that works like a choker chain, but more humanely and more effectively. She's funny too. She likes to attack her leash when she's excited on walkies, and in an attempt to remove her halti (which she hates) she's turned more than one somersault in the grass. Inside she has a fondness for flipping her bed over and pulling it to other parts of the room. She's not perfect, but she's got the potential to be a very good dog.
In other news: I found both Kasari cheese and salt bagels here recently. Two items I love but couldn't find in Singapore. Now I just need a job.

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." (Groucho Marx)

Laika had her first trip into the Albert Park Library today. Yes, into. I tied her up outside -- her first time being left like this -- and went in to get something to read. I was well inside when she broke her leash and came bounding into the library after me. Apparently she has some abandonment issues.

She's a funny girl. She keeps grabbing the side of her bed and dragging it and flipping it over, or sometimes just holding it, or thrashing it around.

All in all, though, not many behavior issues. She nips at you if she's excited by play, and pulls a little on the leash, but for a pound dog, if those are the only problems, that's pretty good. Even those problems should be fixed with the help of obedience class in a few weeks.

Laika came home today. She's two years old (almost) and was surrendered to the pound because her last people had young children and apparently not enough time or patience for her. She's a little unsure of herself here, but she's becoming more confident. We're a little freaked out too- we've waited so long to get a dog that it seems a little unreal that she's actually here and ours.

Her name, Laika, is an homage to the little Russian astronaut dog that went to space on Sputnik 2. Laika (the original) has figured into our thoughts on dogs for quite awhile and we toyed around with the name Sputnik, but Laika fits our girl better.

TV. We have satellite here now. We're not disappointed; many of our favorite shows are in heavy rotation. At any given time, the Simpsons, Frazier, or Seinfeld are on. Marjorie gets a lot of her shows which I don't like; I get a lot of the sports and such that she doesn't (NFL football, English Premier League soccer, etc.).

There's only one Australian show we've latched onto -- Kath and Kim. We actually discovered it while in Singapore though.

Weeknights at 11:30 we get The Naked News, in which women newscasters read the news while they take off their clothes. Full frontal. The news seems to be two weeks old, at least, but no one seems to be complaining. It's actually the least sexy thing you could imagine. Especially when they cover US election news.

For the second time in a month, I am wigging from an intense episode of Six Feet Under. It was the one where David helps the guy who runs out of gas. I had bad dreams about it all last night, and couldn't get it out of my head all day. Is this the best show on TV? Definitely the best acted.