Category: personal

When you’ve ‘done’ with the caves at Buchan, what can you do? Well, there’s a very nice walk to a place called Granite Pools that’ll get your appetite up, but what do you do then?

Well, we’d done the tourist walk through Royal cave – quite spectacular and beautiful – and then a good long walk, so when we returned to our car to find a flyer under the windscreen wiper advertising a gourmet cafe, we felt obliged to give it a try.

Very welcoming it was too, like a little bit of Brunswick Street in Buchan. Comfy chairs, eclectic decor, smooth jazz, enthusiastic staff and a tempting menu, The Two Fat Ladies and her delivered on most counts, though unfortunately the food wasn’t up to the promise of the name. It was good, but lacked finesse. Still, we enjoyed it thoroughly and this was only it’s third week in operation, so there’s plenty of potential for improvement. Definitely worth a visit.

I’ve just seen the news report about a protest by Victoria’s Mountain Cattlemen – leading cattle, in defiance of the new laws, into the mountains in the Wonongatta Valley in the east of the state. I know it’s romantic, and it’s been going on for over a hundred years, but I’m afraid – at least in my opinion – they’re wrong!

Back at the coalface today, bit of a letdown after a fabulous 11 day break. A relaxing Christmas with family and far too much good food, but a few other items of note.

Fly Fishing: those of you who know me well, will be aware that I don’t get out fishing anywhere near enough to satisfy my wishes, but holiday times offer me a glimmer of hope. So, boxing day saw my father-in-law and I head up via Adaminaby to an old favourite stream. Perfect weather, swarms of grasshoppers, and abundant small Rainbow trout intent on self-harm, punctuated by the occasional slightly larger brown. Nothing huge, but a wonderful day out… definitely what keeps me coming back.

Then there was the heat. I’m also a fairly keen weather watcher (you have to be living in Melbourne!), so the prediction of a 42° New Year’s Eve had me nervously watching the numbers. At noon, it looked like being a fizzer – the unpredictability of Melbourne’s weather seemed to have got the better of the forecasters. Even at 3pm when we went into a movie theatre, it was only 32°, but when we came out a couple of hours later it was 10° hotter… amazing. The airport recorded 43° and 43.1° on consecutive hours. So, it was a sticky and uncomfortable New Year’s Eve, we saw the fireworks at Docklands and went home to a restless night. Melbourne didn’t disappoint… the next morning there was rain, a south westerly and we were wearing jumpers! I love Melbourne!!

I’m not a big moviegoer, but circumstances saw me visit the wonderful Nova Cinema twice this weekend.

First up was “The Constant Gardener“. I’ll admit to not being that keen to see this one. I found the book so sad that I thought it would spoil my enjoyment of the movie. Sure, the movie was sad, but the story was so sympathetically reproduced that I’d still say it was well worth seeing. The real positive was the colour and music of Africa that the medium of film could bring to the story. Excellent!

Next up was a preview session of “Walk the Line” – the Johnny Cash story. Now, I’m a bit of a fan of Johnny Cash. Along with “Hard Day’s Night” and a Louis Armstrong record, Johnny Cash was the only other artist I remember from my family’s LP collection. I grew up with these songs.

Obviously, I enjoyed it! It was great. A story about the extraordinary forces that helped shape his life and talent. Some of the historical detail was new to me, but one of the most impressive ‘forces’ in Johnny’s life was June Carter. She must have been a force to be reckoned with… and Reese Witherspoon did a fantastic job of the part. I believe she sang her own part in the music too. Respect!

I get a laugh out of online auctions. Lots of people seem to add the words ‘online’ and ‘auction’ together and come up with = bargain! wrong!!

Take this auction (no longer online) by traditional auction house Gray Edsell Timms at GraysOnline. It’s an auction of the hottest electronic toy around – iPods. Current models too, about 10 Video, 13 Nano/4G and a lonely 1Gb Shuffle.

The auction still has two days to go, but the top bid for each item type (not each item – yet!) comfortably exceeds the cost of buying the product new from the Apple website. It’s not immediately obvious, because GraysOnline charge a 12.5% ‘buyers premium’ (whatever that is!) and $12 delivery. So by the time you bid $169 for the shuffle (as ‘K.M’ from Epping NSW already has!) and add the extras, it has cost you $202. Apple have it for $199 – free delivery. Duh!

The top bid for a Nano already totals $16 more than the Apple Store!

I’ll be watching this auction with interest and I’ll report back with the final prices. Should be worth a laugh!

OK, here’s the update

As the auction closes it’s got even sillier than before. Someone has bid $204 for the Shuffle which will cost them a total of $241.50, that’s $42 dollars more than if they bought it from Apple!

Now, here is a screen grab of the current Nano price at Apple Australia. So, you wouldn’t want to bid more than $309 (do the maths) at Grays, would you? Well, that’s exactly what 13 people did today, one of the bids will end up costing $45 more than the retail price… yay! fools and money 🙂

There was less interest in the 60Gb Video model, two people actually beat the retail price by $5, another five got a price equal to retail, while few nongs paid up to $27 more than retail. I just love it!

Today when I logged into del.icio.us I noticed things were a little different. It’s had a freshen up in the colours, but it’s the little interactive bits that make it so nice. I’m sure there are little, new changes each week, but it’s all done with such little fuss and so much finesse!

Oh, and the import feature is up and running again – a bit late for me given I migrated back from Furl a few weeks ago.

To celebrate the new changes, I set up the feed of my last 10 bookmarks in the sidebar.

I watched (on TV) Australia’s Socceroos qualify for their first World Cup appearance in 32 years. It was spectacular stuff… the event was huge and there was certainly drama and action aplenty… but what is it with this acting? how can they get away with that?

I was impressed that the Spanish referee seemed on several occasions completely ignore the agonised writhings of one particular Uruguayan player – who was then left with no choice than to make a Lazarus like recovery and rejoin the game, but that didn’t seem to stop his team mates or, I’m sorry to say, a few of the Australians from diving and writhing whenever an opportunity presented itself.

Those watchers of ‘contact’ sports, such as AFL and the various Rugby codes around the world will be quite familiar with the body language that accompanies pain inflicted on a football field, and it’s nothing like the ridiculous squirming that soccer players seem to learn from some bad acting school. We know when something hurts – we don’t need interpretive break dancing to tell us.

I don’t know if it’s possible to eliminate this, but each time it happens, the game loses a bit of credibility. The referee certainly helped by ignoring several instances, but as is the case with Cricket, cameras are everywhere and they concentrate on the mistakes the referees/umpires make, so it’s a problem that is not going away. There definitely needs to be consideration of a sanction for overacting… maybe three instances make a yellow card, I don’t know.

I’m not a huge soccer fan, so I’d like to say I don’t care, but lately this sort of thing has been seen in Aussie Rules games. There’s nowhere near the scope for it in ‘our’ game – the pace is so much faster; ‘incidents’ so much more intense, and it is a ‘contact’ sport – but I certainly hope umpires don’t let it get to the ridiculous levels it has in the ‘world’ game.

Better get used to it I suppose… there’s going to be a whole lot more in the next 9 months!

The building I work in is beautiful. Very old, very grand, sorta gothic sandstone. My office has real windows we can open and there are lawns outside the window. Alas, old buildings are expensive to maintain, the sandstone parapets are broken in places and the facade is cracked and flaking – mortar and finishing are deteriorating all over.

So, I was pleased to see this morning that some workmen had blocked off my usual entry to the building and had erected some scaffold. Was this the start of renovations? The answer was appalling…