By popular request, some jokes:


Man in a doctor's office: "Doc, it hurts when I go like this."
Doctor: "Hmmm, step up on the table and let me have a look at that."


Later...
Man: "Doc, when this heals, will I be able to play the violin?"
Doctor: "Yes, you will."
Man: "That's a relief. You see, I'm a concert violinist and I was worried that this would affect my career."


A tourist visiting Manhattan: "Excuse me, how do you get to Carnegie Hall?"
Pedestrian: "It's three blocks up, on the right."


Q. Why did the chicken cross the road?
A. Probably in search of some food, but it's difficult to tell the motivation of animals.


"Take my wife, for instance..."


There was an airplane about to crash. The pilot had a heart attack and there were 4 passengers on the plane but only 3 parachutes! Right away one man grabs one of the chutes and said "I am Tiger Woods -- the greatest golfer of all times and I am taking one." He put on the parachute and jumped out of the plane. The next one to get up was Bill Gates. He said, "I am the smartest and most successful businessman in history, so I deserve one as well." He put on the pack and jumped out of the plane. The two people left were the Pope and a small five year old boy. The Pope turned to the boy and said "Bless you my son. I am an old man and I have lived a long and good life. You are young and have everything to live for. I insist that you take the last parachute and jump." The boy turned to the Pope and said, "Thanks!", and he put on the parachute and jumped.

Kind of cool. Looks like in a few weeks I'll be working on the Lonely Planet website. This is not just some Aussie-based version, but the global site. We've always used their guidebooks, and I used to even consult their site a lot, so it should be interesting to work on. The downside is that it might mean an extra 20-30 minutes commute most days.

Aside: apparently there's some London-based nutter that's been harassing them for something like eight years now, posting inappropriate material to their forums two or three times daily, creating a new login each time after the old one gets kicked off. Seems he's disgruntled after being rejected on a book deal. You just can't compete with crazy.

Recommended reading. You wouldn't think something written in 1889 would still be funny. I'm halfway through Jerome K. Jerome's "Three Men in a Boat". Here's a excerpt, where he's talking about his hypochondria:

In the present instance, going back to the liver-pill circular, I had the symptoms, beyond all mistake, the chief among them being "a general disinclination to work of any kind."

What I suffer in that way no tongue can tell. From my earliest infancy I have been a martyr to it. As a boy, the disease hardly ever left me for a day. They did not know, then, that it was my liver. Medical science was in a far less advanced state than now, and they used to put it down to laziness.

"Why, you skulking little devil, you," they would say, "get up and do something for your living, can't you?"--not knowing, of course, that I was ill.

And they didn't give me pills; they gave me clumps on the side of the head. And, strange as it may appear, those clumps on the head often cured me--for the time being. I have known one clump on the head have more effect upon my liver, and make me feel more anxious to go straight away then and there, and do what was wanted to be done, without further loss of time, than a whole box of pills does now.

You know, it often is so--those simple, old-fashioned remedies are sometimes more efficacious than all the dispensary stuff.

And the beauty of books that are this old is that the copyright has run out and you can read them online.

Soccer season is over, save for a few cup games and one-offs. Great season as we finished as the strongest team in the league. I ran the numbers today, and the last half of the season went like this:

Team	Played	Win	Draw	Loss	Gls For	Gls Agnst	Pts
MIDDLE PARK FC	9	8	0	1	23	10	24
vermont	9	7	2	0	42	7	23
south port utd	10	7	2	1	38	8	23
caulfield cougars	10	5	2	3	39	15	17
kooyong jfc	9	5	1	3	31	29	16
carringbush	9	4	2	3	23	15	14
marcellin eagles	9	4	1	5	21	14	13
olympiakos east kew	9	4	1	4	25	22	13
kew deaf united	8	3	0	5	21	40	9
highlander united	8	1	0	7	5	37	3
port melbourne	11	1	0	10	8	53	3
oakleigh series	9	0	1	8	8	26	1

We were pretty near unstoppable for that stretch. Pity the season was longer than just that though.

Kudos to the doctor who fixed up my hip so well! Pretty much a complete recovery, aside from a strange out-of-whack feeling occasionally when I ride my bike. It'll still be nice to take a week off and let my feet and calves recover.

More geeking. John has between 2 and 5 apples. Mary gives him between 3 and 7 apples. How many apples does he have now? If you can understand this simple question, you have the gist interval arithmetic.

I first heard of interval arithmetic while working at Kennedy Space Center; we used it to model pressures and temperatures of liquid oxygen flowing through pipes. There are other applications beyond physical modeling. It is sometimes used in finance to track the rounding error during financial calculation, so people can't steal fractions of cent from each transaction (like they did in Office Space).

I've started a project that provides a Java library for developers wishing to use interval arithmetic for whatever purpose they want: check it out. It's open-source, so anyone is free to download, use, and even modify it. It's still in a very raw state, but I'm hoping to improve it, especially if there is outside interest.

(I'm torn about hosting it on SourceForge; they're the biggest and most widely known repository for projects such as these, but I hate hate hate Unix-y interfaces, huge lists of features that nobody uses, and sparse and inconsistent documentation, and that's what SourceForge seems to be all about. Maybe I'll switch to Google's?)

Geek alert. Flying back from the states, I came across a contest called "Crossing Capitals" in the back of Games Magazine. The object is to take the 50 US state capitals, plus all of the Canadian capitals, and fit as many as possible into a 19 by 19 grid, crossword puzzle style. This is a regular sort of contest they do, called a "stuffer" contest.

This sounded like a fun thing to write a program to solve, so I set to the task, and was soon generating some pretty good results. I started running it overnight at home, and pretty much constantly at work -- I'd estimate a good eight weeks of total computing time. I'm not sure how many million combinations were tried, but it was a lot. I also did a lot of fine tuning of the algorithm.

The deadline is now passed -- here are the results of the effort:

M

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That's thirty-four capitals. The tie breaker is the total count of letters used; my total is 243.

Unfortunately, I found a forum for people who do this sort of thing all the time, and it looks like at least three people managed to fit in 35 capitals. At least one did it by hand, too, without computer help! I would have thought that everyone in contention to win would have done it by program -- interesting that brains and computers are so evenly matched.

Steve Irwin died today. The news raced around Australia like wildfire -- I heard it almost simultaneously from about four different directions. Quite sad, I think. He may not have been the best role model for kids, but he was the real deal. Did you know that all the profits from his movie went to environmental causes?

No one's too surprised that he went out like this, except maybe those who were expecting it to be a croc. And yet, somehow, it's hard to imagine him dead.

Fun yesterday as I played golf for the first time in four years, at Yarra Bend. I was predictably terrible (shot 108, I think) but it was the soccer team's annual golf outing, and the weather was great, so it was good fun. Tons of wildlife on the course, most notably the colony of giant fruit bats, but also a lot of eastern rosellas, noisy miners, rainbow lorikeets, and a flock of some sort of black cockatoos.

Then last night we caught the Melbourne Victory beating Sydney in front of the biggest crowd in Australian club soccer history -- nearly 40,000. I'm sure it was the biggest crowd that a lot of the players have ever played in front of as well. Great game and a fun atmosphere.

Not much new to report. Spring is slowly arriving, though, which has made us delay our search for a new neighborhood -- Albert Park is too too nice when it's warm.

Two restaurants plugs:

Santiago -- great tapas, great wine, great atmosphere. Reminded us very much of Spain.

Tandoori Times -- maybe the best chicken vindaloo I've had.

A few weeks back we saw the Picasso exhibit at the NGV. We're both fans, but Picasso's ability to excel at every medium can really piss you off. Like, ooh, I'm so freaking talented. Bastard.

Next week I'm claiming my birthday present -- we're going to the Melbourne Victory match against Sydney.

Brushes with celebrity. For no good reason, here are the famous peeps I've peeped, not counting actual shows, lectures, readings, etc.:

Elvis Costello: Met him after shows a few times. Also sat behind him at a Ron Sexsmith show where he didn't perform, so it counts.

Michael McKean (Lenny of Lenny and Squiggy fame): Sat two rows behind him at an Elvis Costello concert.

Henry Rollins: Saw him in a Starbucks in London. Henry Rollins in a Starbucks.

Gurmit Singh at our grocery store in S'pore.

Molly Meldrum at a footy game. Well, they tell me he's famous.

Shaq, at a nightclub in Orlando. A head taller than everyone else, he was hard to miss.

Horace Grant, at the same club. Shook his hand.

Ted Kennedy: Spooked him in an airport when I suddenly reached into my bag for my ticket just as I recognized him. His bodyguards got him out of there fast!

Michael Stipe, on a street corner in Athens, listening to (what I'm guessing was) a backing track through headphones, and mouthing words over it.

Mike Mills, in a bar in Atlanta. Also saw him driving down the road once.

I'm sure I'll think of some others...

Comeuppance. Right after my IQ test, I walked out into the street feeling pretty smart, and immediately almost got run over by a guy on bicycle. I was looking for the tram coming the other direction. "Watch where you're going, dickhead!" he said. I needed that.

"Dickhead", btw, seems to be used down here where we'd say "dumbass" in the States.

Off to see Augie March tonight.

Guinea piggery. One of Marjorie's cow orkers who's working on a psych degree gave me an IQ test this evening, and boy is my brain tired. This was the face-to-face interactive test (not an online mouse-clicky thing) and is a lot more full-on than you might expect. There were 14 tests, and most seemed to start out easy, and ended with you feeling stupid. Here's a run-down of the sections, and a representative question from each:

Information - "Who was Mahatma Ghandi?"

Comprehension - "Why is it necessary for the government to collect taxes?"

Arithmetic - "An item is on sale for one third off the original price. Its sale price is $400. What is the original price?"

Similarities/Differences - "In what way are a friend and an enemy alike?"

Vocabulary - "Define 'tangible'."

Digit span - "Repeat these digits backwards: 4,3,6,2,8."

Letter-Number Sequencing - "Given this sequence, tell me the digits in order, followed by the letters in order: 5,K,2,P,1,J,9,Q."

Performance - "What's missing from this picture?" (A typical picture: two people running along the beach, one leaving no footprints.)

Digit Symbol - Coding - Each digit had a code, and I had to draw the code for a sequence of numbers.

Block Design - "Which picture completes the block?"
Matrix Reasoning - "Which picture completes the sequence?"
Picture Arrangement - "These cards each have a picture on them. Arrange them so the scene makes a logical story."
Symbol Search - "Circle 'Yes' if one of the two symbols on the left appears in the list of five symbols on the right, 'No' otherwise."
Object Assembly - "Arrange these puzzle pieces into a coherent picture."

This after a long day of programming. But it was interesting. I get the results in a week or two.

For the record, I just had my second visual migraine. Woo hoo.

There's a ping pong tournament going on at work, and I'm all bitter because I had planned on at least making it to the quarter finals (where I would have had to play a guy that used to be ranked sixth in Australia) and instead I went out in the second round. I was winning the first game 16-7, then just kind of froze up and started trying not to hit the ball into the net, which of course always results in hitting the ball into the net. To the other guy's credit, he took me off my game. Nuts. I blew $10 on a quality new paddle too.

But soccer's going good; my fitness is back and my hip has seemingly made a full recovery. There are hints here and there that the weather is warming up. Fish are jumping. The cotton is high.

Hmmm, that's odd... Eight minutes ago, I started experiencing my first visual migraine. Luckily, my brother had one a little while back, so I know what's going on. It started as a little blind spot, that was making it hard to see the letter on the screen that I was looking at. It has since grown and moved off to the left. It's now like if I were looking out a window where someone had frozen the letter "C" onto the glass, causing a rainbow diffraction effect, except that the ice is also shimmering. It should end within the half hour, by all reports, and I might get a slight headache after. Very strange, and it would be scaring the tar out of me right now (think: stroke) if I didn't know what it was.
Update: It passed as predicted, in about a half an hour. I got the slightest of headaches afterwards, which is also typical. I found this Flash animation that gives a very good depiction of what it was like (except that the distortion was more of a "C" shape for me).

I knew I could do it. A year or so ago I quit biting my nails, thanks to a product marketed under the great name of Stop That (in America, I think it's called Bittrex). Stop That is a highly bitter substance you put on your nails for a little instant negative feedback whenever you put them in your mouth.

The problem was, I still had the tendency to pick at my nails with my other nails (or even a nail clipper), quite incessantly. I wasn't biting, but my fingers still didn't look too good. I tried all sorts of tricks to stop that, without much luck.

In the last three days, though, I've quit the picking. How? With a little product called Stop That. I just applied it to one nail, and whenever I caught myself picking at my nails, I made myself take a lick. Gross, but effective. I had to reapply several times at the start. But now, after three days, I pick no more.

The Chagall print we got is Lovers in the Red Sky. Marjorie loves Chagall and goats, so it was a good choice for her, and me -- well, boobies.

It actually came mounted wrong -- with the goat at the bottom and the houses on the left. We're trying to decide whether to leave it as it is or fix it.

Mostly as an exercise in Google Maps, Javascript, CSS, and web hosting, I've started a page of weekly pub trivia nights here in Melbourne. Check it out, but please remember, this is not an exercise in graphic design (which I have no real flair for).

Birthday was nice, actually, and not at all angsty like you might expect. On Saturday we went shopping for art (my birthday present request; we have a lot of bare walls in our house). I didn't find any winners but Marjorie picked out a nice Franz Marc Chagall print that goes great in our living room. At night we went out for Cambodian food, which was only just okay, but the neighborhood itself was a great find that made it worth the visit. We've added Yarraville to our list of neighborhoods to consider moving to. Sunday, my actual birthday, featured soccer followed by a massage, followed by pizza.

And instead of a mid-life crisis little red convertible, we rented a Hyundai Getz.

You are cast into the world naked, screaming. You learn, you grow. Trends come and go and come again. People move into and out of and into your lives. You get wiser, but at the price of a body that heals. The world gets more accessible, more polluted, more chaotic -- more fascinating. But did the world change, or you?. Then one day you wake up and you're... 40?

The web's biggest trend of the last year or two is surely video clips, AKA viral videos. They seem to come in just a few varieties:

• Short funny clips from comedy shows, especially The Daily Show.
  
• Stupid stunts.
  
• Crazy nature vids.
  
• The video editor with too much time on his hands.
  
• People acting goofy in their dorm rooms.
  And my favorite,
  
• Musical virtuosity. Check out these examples. As a frustrated musician, these pain me a little bit.
  
  
  
  • Guitar
    
  • Mandolin
    
  • Drums