Back from Sydney. Our last full day there was mostly spent doing the 6 km walk from Bondi Beach to Coogee, which was fantastic. In addition to spotting a whale just outside of Bondi Bay, we saw a ton of new birds, the most impressive being the sulphur-crested cockatoos and the Australian King Parrots. Also spotted were honey-eaters, fairy wrens, and Willy Wagtails.

I'm one of those sickos who loves to fly, and the flight back was a very interesting one. We passed directly over the famous Uluru (formerly Ayer's Rock), but it wasn't until we were already well past that I noticed our flight path took us right over it. Bummer. North and west from there is some serious desert. There was nothing -- not a house, not a road, nothing -- for about 400 miles. Drawing on their most imaginative thinkers, the Aussies have named this the Great Sandy Desert. The name is even more embarassing when you learn that the region is almost devoid of sand. We flew off of Australia near Derby, then south under Bali and Lombok (we could see the volcanos again), over Java, and up the Javan Sea, over very many small uninhabited islands and atolls.

Entertainment on international flights just gets better and better. Every chair had its own little video screen, as is now the norm, but now there were over 30 movies to choose from, and you could pause and rewind all you want. In addition there were tv shows, video games, news, and a do-it-yourself playlist for music where you could pick songs from about fifty different albums. I can't wait to read back on this in ten years and laugh at how paltry it is. And I'm still waiting for the free in-flight internet access.

We survived the bridge walk -- it was a lot less strenuous or scary than we expected. It was pretty cool, mostly in the way that for all my life, whenever I've driven over a suspension bridge, I've always wondered what it would be like to be able to climb up the supports. A bit of fantasy fulfillment, there, but I'm not sure it was worth the price. Fantastic view, if nothing else. We have pictures we'll scan in when we get home.

Tomorrow we're going to walk the trail along the cliffs down around the famous Bondi Beach. We talked about seeing a rugby match but apparently they only go on on the weekends.

Weird musical coincidence, along the lines of the Christmas/Ho Chi Minh City/Clash one six months ago -- Elvis Costello has a song with the Brodsky quartet that goes:

Care of St. Ignatus House
Willoughby Drive
Parramatta, New South Wales
This fifth day of July

Parramatta's right up the road, and the fifth was just the other day while we were here. Wonder if there's a St. Ignatius House on Willoughby Drive.

Space! Our new pad has space! We spent our first night there last night, and slept well. Apart from no hot water in the kitchen (it has a separate heater, which doesn't work), all seems fine. There's a convenience store, a butcher shop, a cafe, and a small restaurant as part of the complex, which will be nice.

Transportation will be the continuing headache, though. It took me 45-50 minutes to get into work today -- a longish walk, a long wait for a bus, a short bus ride, and a long subway ride. We're going to have to figure something out.

Funny exchange of emails with people on my soccer team.

Yesterday the coach sent out this game report, from Sunday's game (which I didn't play):

Yesterday's results'
Ventz 3pm beat Shanghai Flowers 2-1. Stephen and Mark scored the goals

3pm played a good game and avoided a repeat of the game 2 weeks back by
having the better play and still ended losing. We scored all 3 goals (one
spectacular own goal!)

Since I didn't play, I had to ask --

Is there a new Mark on the 3pm team, or is "Mark" just what you call people when they score an own goal these days?

And someone responded:

Mark - you wouldn't believe this but from the new 2003 Oxford dictionary -

mark, verb 1a. : to make or leave a mark; b: to follow an opponent closely
(see also "David"), c: to label as to indicate.
defender "pulled a Mark" to put us 3-0 up>

I guess this is my own fault!

Today was for packing. We're moving over the next few days, and it's amazing how much junk we were able to accumulate in six months here. Later in the week we're off to Sydney, as the third leg of Marjorie's whirlwind tour of the continents.

Don't know what the deal with the comments is; hopefully they'll have them fixed soon.

Marjorie's back. Here's what she brought me back from the States:

The Cosmos collector's edition DVD box set. Woop!

Five bottles of wine.

The new Fountains of Wayne CD. Sounds fabbo so far.

My cool fuzzy pants, for our trip to Australia.

The Big Lebowski DVD.

A Cookie Monster t-shirt. Huh.

A Scrabble computer game (thanks, Linda!).

Various housewares for the new apartment.

My CD player.
And most importantly,

Her bad self.

These are dangerous times. I promise to be careful.

I've been playing with Google's programmer interface for some potential work projects. This is a service they provide that allows you to do Google searches from within programs you write, instead of going to their web page.

It occurred to me that I could use it to revamp my old "misspellings" page. So, here it is.

The Google API was amazingly easy to use. Quite a number of the queries I sent failed, for whatever reasons, but I can still see this as a handy thing to know how to use. And kinda fun.

I rule. I played bar trivia last night at Shamus O'Donnell's, all by my lonesome, and won. I had no hope on the Rugby questions and such, but cleaned up on the movie questions. I hope my wife will forgive me for missing the Beatles question ("What Beatles album features the song 'Ticket To Ride'?"). The prize was a bottle of vodka, which we surely DON'T need, as the bottle we got at Duty Free on our initial trip out here has hardly been touched.

Burgerlicious. Here's the placemat from Mos Burger where I had lunch today.

How long do you figure it'll be before McDonald's comes out with THEIR version of the squid-scallop-prawn burger with carrots and asparagus?

Notice too that the bun is made of rice. Actually, it sounds moderately edible.

Goooooaaaal! A beautiful cross; I extend my leg as far as it will go, and tuck the ball neatly into the side of the net. The keeper never had a chance.

Too bad it was our own goal.

Phooey. To add injury to insult, I stubbed my toe on the play, too.

Time to de-stinkify myself and go get some Injun food.

End of the line. I rode Singapore's new MRT line out to the bitter end, Punggol, today, just for shits and giggles. I wasn't the only explorer on the train. For one old Chinese woman it was her first time in a subway, apparently. When the train started moving she pointed at the concrete walls sliding by the window and grinned hugely, revealing rows of neglected teeth.

On the way out, I happened to read in Bill Bryson's "Made In America" how they used to build amusement parks at the ends of the railway lines to encourage people to use them. Well, when the train reached the end and we all got out, staring around blankly like we just got dropped off the mother ship, I realized that this wasn't so much an amusement park so much as a WHOLE LOTTA NOTHIN'. Just a treeless waste with a whole lot of featureless HDB housing highrises. It looked like Communism with a splash of orange. Why would people live out here? I walked around a bit, then headed back.

Yet another photo of me at Disney, with my mother and sibs this time. Love those glasses on my mom. My brother and sister don't look all that happy to be there.

Name-dropping. I just learned that one of the stars of C.S.I.: Crime Scene Investigation, Jorja Fox, went to my high school. While I was there, too. Earlier, she was even in the excellent Memento. Were this a proper name drop, I would right now be hinting that we used to knock boots. As it is, I don't remember her at all.

Writing wrongs. I've been doing some proofreading of a proposal by someone whose writing skills are, shall we say, lacking. Incoherent ideas, run-on sentences, and rampantly misplaced punctuation, you name it. I much enjoy proofreading (probably because I get to point out other people's errors). And I'm generally considered a top-notch technical writer (my college professor on the subject even asked if I was looking for work). Outside of tech writing, though, I feel totally hot and cold. And lately, just cold.

When I'm writing well, the whole idea is there in my head beforehand, and the words just spill out, like I'm taking dictation. At other times, though, I just have some random collection of thoughts, and start writing anyway, hoping a common thread will pop up. Like I'm doing now.

I used to dabble in the Usenet newsgroup talk.bizarre, which is essentially a creative writing forum frequented by some extremely bright people (and plenty of dummards, to be sure). Despite the anonymous nature of the internet, participating there was often nerve-wracking (especially since many there could deliver absolutely withering put-downs). But I learned more about writing there than the sum total of my schooling ever provided.

The constant pressure to be "on", while self-imposed, is likely why I stopped visiting there. Now I'm worried that I've plateaued. Exactly in line with my guitar-playing ability, I just don't feel my writing has improved at all in the last ten years.

As a kick in the pants, I was considering entering the National Novel Writing Month this year. But I don't think I'll find the time. I think deep down I don't want to write a novel, I want to have written a novel.

So I guess I'm stuck where I'm at, for now. And you, my suffering readers, will have to endure.

Dish fairies. I've been known to do the dishes, as the photo I posted in the last blog will show you. However, I usually leave it to the dish fairies to put the dishes away after they dry. They seem to have been on strike lately, though, starting at around the time Marjorie went back home. Now dishes are piling up in the drying rack. What did I do to get them angry? How do you lure them back?

Awwww... My blog about Disney prompted my parents to scan in this photo of me doing the dishes when we stayed at Fort Wilderness. All that beautiful hair, *sniff*. Strange how I remember all the little details in the picture; the bowls, the dishrag, the dining canopy -- like I can still smell them.

There are lots of foot reflexology centers in town, usually featuring a wacky sign like this showing the link between places on your feet and your various vital organs. I of course put no stock in it as a science, but I did visit one of these places on Friday night for a foot massage. They do like the rough stuff here. It was pinchy and hurty when they worked my toes, but I got more into it as the session wore on.

Learned a new term: "slurp shop". This is what they call those small food outlets specializing in noodles, where you see lines of customers crammed onto tiny tables and chairs, bent over their bowls of soup. I had a good meal last night at one of them; then, after a failed attempt at (geek alert) finding a geocache, I checked out some live music at the Singapore Street Festival, then went to watch the skateboarders for a while at the nearby public skate park. I miss that stuff. If it didn't hurt so darn much I'd still be riding...

Interesting article on the demise of cursive. Like countless others, I had cursive drilled into me for many years, all for the sake of my signature. That's honestly the only thing I've used it for since I left college twelve years ago. And my signature ain't all that.

Quote from the article:

"The letters you write to people are beautiful, and they'll cherish them forever. Have any of you ever received an e-mail that you cherished?"

Um, yes?

Why spend years grilling the kids on a practically useless skill? To appease some dewy-eyed English majors? Teach the kids to write, not to write cursive...

We are all booked to go to Australia next month. This is just a fun trip. My work trip to Tasmania is again a possibility (the word from the guys in Australia is that our position "looks good, mate!"), and that might involve a side trip to Melbourne, so we're going to go to Sydney this time. Woo!