Right now, there's a bit of kangaroo meat stuck in my teeth.

It's actually quite good. I found some on sale at the grocery -- three dollars for three chunks of it. It looks kind of dark and unappetizing in the package. But it cooks up much like a beef roast; it comes apart in strands, but wasn't gamey at all. I ate all three pieces.

Laika likes it too.

Can't I just trade it for some free drinks? I won this funky bike at pub trivia. Any takers?

At work I got sick of trying to figure out every Friday how many hours I worked on various projects to log to my time sheet. We're supposed to show not only project by project totals, but subtasks within projects as well, down to every tenth of an hour. Some weeks it would take me nearly an hour to figure out everything.

So, during some down time I wrote a little program where you can enter your tasks and just click on them to start a timer. At the end of the week you can view the totals in a nice little table. It works like a charm, and I use it every day. My time sheets are accurate to the minute these days. And a couple of my coworkers have started using it as well. I'm going to ask if I can release the program as open source so anyone can use (or modify) it.

The problem is that I've been having "work dreams" almost every night recently, and it dawned on me that they started right around the time I started using my timer. I think the program is like a little Sword of Damocles that's been subtly poisoning my subconcious, to mix a metaphor. If I remember correctly, my dad once refused a job because he didn't want to punch a time clock. Something in my blood, maybe.

Name envy. On my current project, I work with people with last names of Oh, Ho, Ng, and Lam. It would probably save me a million keystrokes over the course of my career if my name were that short.

Had a dentist appointment today, my first in two years (I been baaaad). What was cool was that they had a telescoping camera and a TV on the ceiling so they could show me the inside of my mouth. What was not cool was that they showed me where four of my six fillings (I got 'em all in one particularly bad year when I was 14) were showing signs of hairline cracks and creeping rot underneath, meaning they'll need to be replaced. Nuts. My streak of twenty-five years of good news at the dentist has come to an end.

Confirmed for hip arthroscopy in late April. Recovery is typically quick; I should even be able to walk out, but no sports for six to eight weeks. Risks associated with surgery, beyond the usual anaesthesia and infection: slight chance of lingering numbness in my, uh, nether regions.

Sometimes you don't post for a while, and it gets harder and harder to finally post something...

Not much happening here. I mean, the Commonwealth Games are in town, but we could care less, really. If Americans aren't even invited to compete, well, why should I watch? Attendance hasn't exactly been setting records anyway, so we're not the only ones. Plus, they've actually delayed daylight savings for a few weeks because of these games, which is causing problems with our calendars at work.

Last weekend we checked out the Werribee Open Range Zoo, which was pretty cool.

Oh, you can listen to a nice radio interview with the author of the book I contributed to here. The interview starts about 23 minutes in.

Last night we checked out a really cool new, um, bar? in the neighborhood called The Butterfly Club. It's built inside an old Victorian house, and features (believe it or not) cabaret. In the States that usually equates to "drag show" or "live nude girlz" but here they're actually talking about the original, old-school style cabaret. The place is dripping with character, and I can't wait to see a show there.

Book news. Apparently the book is at sales rank #277 on Amazon, which is really good, and is the top selling book in the computer science category. This is all before Ron (the author) has done any press too. There are rumours that it will be reviewed on slashdot soon, which is just about all one could hope for (well, a positive review there is all one could hope for). Woot!

Interesting article on The 2006 Best of Web 2.0. ("Web 2.0" is just a buzzword, guaranteed to make most techies retch, for a supposed new paradigm shift in the internet.) But basically it's just a bunch of links to new sites that are proving to be particularly useful. I clued into it because I was already using a full 7 of the 10 sites. So, take my word for it, there will be something useful here for you. Here's a rundown of their picks, with my comments:

Flickr - essential for photo sharing.

Vimeo - basically, Flickr for video. Seems like it might be useful but I don't do a lot of video. Don't know how it compares to YouTube or Google video.

Del.icio.us - for tagging and sharing of bookmarks. I'm enjoying this more the more I use it.

Digg - essential for techie news. I check it more often even than SlashDot these days.

Bloglines - for aggregating feeds from blogs, news, or anything else with an RSS feed. Dare I use the word "essential" again?

Netvibes - slickly lets you build a page made up of all your favorite services, blogs, and other info. I just signed on, and this one is really, really cool. For amusement, add a Flickr content panel that searches on the keyword "drunk".

Writeboard - lets you create a document that's editable by people all over the net. I can't think of a use for this right now but I could see it being useful at some point.

Google maps - great, but would be more useful if there were better Australia map data.

Google local - again, this is probably more useful for those of you in the States.

Meebo - combines your AOL, MSN, Google, and Yahoo instant messengers into a web page. Only useful in getting around a workplace ban on IM chatting, as far as I can see.

We're planning on moving to another part of the city, where we could pay less rent, and Marjorie would have a shorter commute to work. We've been house-hunting in a half-assed manner on the weekends: we like where we're at now, and are not in a big hurry to leave. Luckily, we're month-to-month at our current place, so we have the luxury of being able to wait for the right situation.

This may sound strange, but our dream house is a duplex. We each want our own space. We can't afford that right now, of course, but we're quite serious about doing it eventually. It's not that we despise living together so much; it would just be nice to each have our own sanctuary that's all ours. As it is, now, we only sleep in the same bed two or three nights a week.

When we mention that sort of thing to some couples, they look at us like we're nuts. Others, you can see the wheels start to turn in their heads.

Yesterday we went on our second annual Grape Grazing tour. No striptease from the bus in front of us this year, unfortunately. In fact, the whole thing seemed to fly by. But it was still good fun.

There's a show we like on local television called Spicks and Specks. It's a low-budget music-themed quiz show, hosted by a local comedian. It's loosely formatted, and often breaks down into everyone just cracking jokes.

We went and saw a taping last night, which was a lot of fun. They have guests every week, usually Australian celebrities who we've never heard of, and last night was no exception. But they have a lot of amusing challenges for the contestants, like these we witnessed last night:

Substitute: One team member must sing a well-known song, but with lyrics substituted from another book (such as ones about Communism or picking up women, as we saw). They do this one on every show.

Watch thirty seconds of a cheesy video clip, and answer questions about it afterwards.

Recognize a song that's played backwards.

Guess what's missing from an old album cover with part of it blocked out.

Before the show, the host was warming up the audience, and asked if there was anyone here from outside Australia. Aside from a couple from New Zealand, there was only us. So he made a few jokes in our direction, and referred back to us a few times during the night (not while they were filming though).

Just watching the production was interesting to me too. They had to cut a few times to fix sound issues, then try to pick up where they left off in such a way that they can edit it together. There was even some funny audience comments that they wanted to capture on film at the end, so they had to ask the audience member to reenact it on camera. They filmed a good 45 minutes for each show, I think, that gets edited down into 25 minutes or so.

Gammy leg. The MRIs came back on X-ray sheets, ten big ones with twelve cross-section shots on them each. Most of the shots looked like grade-A nicely marbled rib-eye steaks. Looks like all the force-fed corn and hormone injections paid off.

Just got back from the doc, where we went over my MRI results. Bottom line, it was indeed the cartilege around my hip/thigh ball joint, and woo-hoo, no evidence of tendon or ligament damage. I'm now scheduled for a consultation with a surgeon next month, in preparation for probable surgery in April. Arthroscopic, so I should be up and around quite quickly. I may not even need crutches. No soccer this season though.

I'm a freak, apparently, because I like flying. Even the ridiculously long flights it takes to get back home, I enjoy. I can't explain why, really, but I'm pretty much alone on this one, from what I can tell.

I'm also fairly alone in liking public speaking, as I've just noticed the other day. If you know me at all, you might find that surprising, as I've had several embarassing public speaking disasters in presence of friends and family. Sometimes, I just can't form a sentence, and my voice decides it wants to sit halfway down my esophagus.

But the other day I gave a talk with a coworker at a staff meeting, about new web trends like del.icio.us and Wikipedia, and it came off superbly. If I had to do it for a living, I wouldn't mind that at all, believe it or not. And I can't wait for my next chance.

Tragically, hip. Saw a proper sports doctor this morning. He pretty much confirmed that it's the cartilege where my right femur joins the hip that's messed up. I got an MRI this evening to find out just how bad. I'll get the full analysis of it a week from Wednesday, but by all indications my options are going to be a) take anti-inflammatories, play for maybe one more year, and not fix the problem; b) quit; or c) surgery. I can't imagine how invasive it must be to get to the hip joint during surgery, but it might be better in the long run. I don't like any of those options much.

The MRI was cool because I got to choose the music I wanted to listen to, through (non-metallic, air tube style) headphones. I almost fell asleep. If magnetic insoles and such are really supposed to have curative effects, then how come you can lie in a 10,000-gauss magnetic field and come out feeling only slightly bored?

Just got back from the Big Day Out festival, where we caught Franz Ferdinand, Iggy Pop and the Stooges, and the White Stripes. From a distance, as people our age are wont to avoid contact with screaming sweaty drunks. Franz Ferdinand was sterile, but less so than their records, so it was actually pretty enjoyable. Iggy's still nuts; I saw him probably fifteen years ago or so, and if anything, he looks younger and still has the same energy. The White Stripes sounded really good but we were too far back by that time for any real involvement.

It was interesting to watch for cultural differences in a festival crowd as compared to shows we've been to in the states. Mostly it was subtle things. I like that the whole crowd here can sometimes act in unison; you hardly ever see that in the US.

I failed to mention that a few weeks back I went and checked out the Stanley Kubrick exhibit at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. It was fabbo. Lots of movie clips playing, along with original props, early press releases, protest letters, costumes, models, equipment; all kinds of wild stuff. I never knew that Kubrick put in the most work of all towards a bio-epic about Napoleon. It never got made, but just seeing his filing cabinet of notes, his stacks of books on the subject, production schedules, and repeated drafts of scripts was boggling. What's the most batshit crazy a person can be and still function in society? That's the place on the spectrum to look for genius. Exhibit's still running for a few more days if you're in town.

Marjorie hosted wine tasting at our place yesterday. It happened to be the hottest day that either of us can remember -- and we used to live in Singapore, so that's saying a lot. The high was 43 celsius, which is 109.4 fahrenheit. Yikes! Our place has no air conditioning, so we hooked up the bogan AC, which is bowlfuls of ice in front of oscillating fans. Wisely, Marjorie chose white wines, and everything went swimmingly.

Surreal moment during house cleanup beforehand. We encountered a number of spiders that were driven inside, presumably because of the heat. Marjorie, who's no timid country mouse, caught a big black one in a glass, and gave it to me to release. (Some of our best friends are spiders, so we don't kill them -- usually.) I ran across the street to set it free on a tree, which it promptly started climbing. What I didn't realise is that I had just condemned the poor creature to death. Halfway back across the street I turned around, just in time to see a minah bird swoop down, land, and do a quick hop up the tree to gobble up him up. It was literally less than five seconds after I let him go.

Nature, red in tooth and claw. All part of the food chain, I guess, but after that minah just pooed on me the other day, they're one species that's off my Christmas card list next year.

I went to see Fizzy O'Therapist a day after my last blog. Not being a true doctor, he couldn't give me a full diag- or prog-nosis, but the problem is definitely centered around my right ball-and-socket joint, where it joins the hip. And it's probably ligaments. He gave me some exercises to do, and I am going to see a real sports doc next Monday. At any rate, I'm a little more sanguine about my prospects for playing more, even if it isn't this season.