Singapore and the UK have banned this ad for Australian tourism in their respective countries.

Singapore I can understand, but the UK? The people who brought us this and this and this?

Had my visit today with Arthur O'Scoppy (he's friends with Fizzy O'Therapist).

The last time I had surgery I was in my twenties, and so had that immortal, indestructable feeling going in. This time I was a little more apprehensive. Still, I couldn't have been that nervous, as I took an hour long nap before the operation after they were done with the prep work.

I couldn't help having the opening theme from Six Feet Under in my head as they wheeled me down the hall, though.

They put me on the operating table, then turned on my drip and said "You're going to start to feel a little strange." "Stranger than being surrounded by all these people and lights and equipment while half naked, you mean?" That was the last I remember, before waking up in post op and asking, "Stupid question, I know, but have I had the operation yet?"

Apparently, it took about twenty minutes. I can walk, without crutches, but slowly and gingerly. It's six hours later, and I just took a couple of pills but probably could have done without. Signs are good for a quick recovery.

No numb groin neither!

Last fall every weekend was gorgeous, it seems. This fall, not so lucky. Today was drizzly and cold. But, we went to check out the Melbourne Sports and Aquatic Centre and had a nice romp around their facilities. It was good practice for our impending trip back to the states -- we're planning a big family gathering at Disney's Typhoon Lagoon. Fortunately, Marjorie and I still have the ability to run around like kids and even went on their waterslide.

The other movie we watched last weekend, at least partly, was Devdas -- the most expensive Bollywood epic ever made.

The quality of music, dancing, and acting were an order of magnitude above your average cheesy Bollywood potboiler, but that only made it less fun.

In fact, several incidents really gave us pause. In one, the main character Devdas finds that his true love is marrying someone else, after he spurned her. They argue, and he sucker-smacks her with a necklace, making her bleed from the forehead. On her wedding day, I might add. Instead of her giving him the heave-ho, they instead decide together that this injury will be a symbol of their love.

In another, her mother is expecting his family to welcome her daughter, but instead they reject her, because she is of low caste. The mother, distraught, is heard to comment, "I came here to wish you a long life and grandsons. But instead I wish you granddaughters!"

India's a messed up place.

Happy Easter! Just wrapping up a nice four-day weekend. Highlights:

Soccer practice on Thursday night. Scrimmaged when I probably shouldn't have, but it was a tonne of fun. Drinks afterwards at The Limerick Arms.

Lots of movies. Somehow I had never seen "Glengarry Glen Ross": outstanding.

Bowling at Melbourne Central while waiting to see "March of the Penguins". Video jukebox played our videos on screen right next to the scoring. Sophie Ellis Bextor, woo hoo!

A fine bottle of Prosecco to celebrate Easter.

Sleeping in.

Finally found the book in a local Borders. Fun to see your name (and words!) in print. Would've bought it, but I can get it cheaper back in the states. For some reason, I didn't expect to see it in the "self help" section. While browsing there, I learned an interesting fact: women, it seems, are from Venus, while men are from Mars. Who knew?

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.