I survived my first week at my new job for FAST Search. A lot of "drinking from the fire hose" so far as the system is pretty sizable and just about everything is new to me (including the operating system -- Linux/Ubuntu/Gnome). I've been advised that there's lots of hardcore algorithmic stuff deep in the guts of the system that needs work -- sweet.

All the people seem really cool -- serious geeks but no social misfits. There's a MAME box in the lunch room. They have a system of lava lamps that are lit whenever various software builds are broken.

Sadly it's a bit of a sausage party -- all white males between the ages of 25 and, um, my age. The one woman in the whole office (of twenty or so people) is (to complete the stereotype) an administrative assistant. By an odd coincidence, the guy who's been helping me a lot this week happens to play on my soccer team (I didn't know he worked there until after I accepted the offer). Should be good fun.

Some pics from our recent trip back to the USA. We had a super, super time, practically every day of the trip. More details to come.

My last day at my current job (yesterday) happened to correspond with their quarterly event. So I spent my last afternoon climbing rocks, which was a lot of fun. At drinks afterwards I burned the heck out of myself on an hors d'oeuvre and so get to start my new job on Monday with a scab across my lower lip.

Greets from the USA where we're just about to wrap up a lovely visit with Mark's side of the family. All the kidren are playful and rambunctious and growing up too fast. With twelve people staying at my parents' house it was like My Big Fat Greek Family. We saw manatees and dolphins in the canal that runs behind their back yard. I took some photos and movies which I will post later.

Our big joke this trip is to say "Oh yeah" whenever we see something that we used to see all the time but had completely forgotten about. Sales tax -- "Oh yeah". Texas Pete's Hot Sauce -- "Oh yeah". Towel dispensers where you have to pull the lever down a foot to dispense three inches of paper towel -- "Oh yeah". Supercuts, Panera Bread Company, Lance crackers -- "Oh yeah".

The US seems stranger to me in general than on previous return visits. The things that strike me the most strange are pennies (Why? Get rid of them already) and toilets (they give you a veritable lake to pee into in the US; seems like a waste).

Note to me Atlanta mates -- will be going Atlanta next -- spending a few days with Marjorie's parents before heading into town. Will be in touch soon!

More commercial goodness. A commercial down here refers to Easter eggs as "tarted-up chicken butt-nuts". I love Australia...

Great fun last night as I went and saw From The Jam, which is basically two former members of The Jam, one of my favorite bands, who broke up after I got into them in, um, 1984. The played all their old songs, but with a replacement front man. Kind of strange, really, considering that most of the songs were written by the missing guy. But if it was an odd situation for the band, it didn't show.

It seemed everyone there, like me, knew all the words to every song. It was a dream set list, where they played all my favorite of their hits, plus all my favorite of their non-hits, it seemed. From memory:

In The City

The Modern World

All Mod Cons

News Of The World

To Be Someone

David Watts

In The Crowd

It's Too Bad

'A' Bomb In Wardour Street

Down In A Tube Station At Midnight

So Sad About Us

Thick As Thieves

Private Hell

Little Boy Soldiers

Smithers-Jones

Eton Rifles

Strange Town

Pretty Green

Start!

Ghosts

The Gift

Thick As Thieves

Town Called Malice

When You're Young

Going Underground

After the show on the tram I chatted with a guy who flew up from Tasmania for the show, leaving his wife and two kids behind. It did seem that there were a lot of people like me who were there by themselves, just because they had to. Come on, this is as close to The Jam as you'll ever see. (Well, I said that about the Pixies too.) But I still have a happy buzz from the show the next day just writing about it.

Oh yeah, I have a new job too.

Seeing as my feet are size 12, I think I'll avoid visiting Canada for a while.

Posted without comment. We just saw this commercial on TV down here.

Your literary quote of the day:

There was something distinctly intimidating about her stare. It seemed to come from a one-woman mob, separated only by time and chance from her knitting bag and a splendid view of the guillotine. -- JD Salinger, "Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters"

Somehow I never noticed this book on our shelves before. So I'm reading it on the tram now, and it's brilliant.

My new crusade: ALL words in book, movie, or song title should be capitalized. Leaving small words like "the" and "and" uncapitalized only leads to confusion. Why not just capitalize them all?

Yesterday we met up with my internet-cum-real-life friend who was in town visiting with his sister. This is the third continent we've met on (previously we've met up in Atlanta and London). Had a great time showing them the city and our neighborhood. He works for Apple, so I got my first look at an iPhone and was wowed. To my surprise, given all the hype and my previous distaste for most things Mac-ish. That is one sexy gadget. Want.

Arthur Dent never could quite get the hang of Thursdays.

For me, the problem is Sunday nights. Back in Atlanta, it used to be "wing night", where I'd go out with a group of friends, usually to Taco Mac, and basically just try to extend the weekend for another night.

I have no big friend group here, and no proper spicy wing to speak of. But I'm left with the stubborn refusal to go to sleep on Sunday nights. Last night was typical. I started drifting off to sleep on the couch shortly after Marjorie went to bed, around 10:00pm. But instead I woke myself up on purpose, and stayed awake watching a soccer game I didn't care about, until after 1:30.

It starts the week off all wrong for me; I yawn through my Mondays, and have to play catch-up the rest of week on sleep. But what really bugs me is that I can't fully articulate my reasons for doing it. Yes, it has something to do with holding on to my free time, to not being a slave to work, to the feeling that days are slipping away. But it feels like there's something missing in that explanation, something not in my front-brain, and and not really in my control.

I got a new phone last weekend, and gave Marjorie the old one. The old one was a Motorola C261, which is a good phone, and has a camera, but unfortunately has no way to download the photos you take -- you can only send them to someone else. So today I've been sending all the photos I took with the old phone to my new one so I can download them. The quality of them isn't great, but what do you expect from a phone camera?

Remember my soccer injury from the middle of last year? Here's a shot I took of my face immediately afterwards.

And here's a photo of a standoff that took place on a walk around Albert Park Lake. I really don't know who would win this. Swans is mean.

A mix tape for Grandmom? Marjorie and I have been trying to put together a mix CD for my grandmother. She doesn't have a CD player, I don't think, but we can at least play it when we're all visiting at my parents house next month. It's been an interesting cross-generational experience, downloading these old songs -- as you might expect, a lot of the stuff I remember her liking, we've been finding, well, grating. It's not a product of the times, I don't think -- I've been listening to a fair bit of early jazz lately (Louie Armstrong, Benny Goodman), but I'm trying more to remember what SHE has always liked, growing up second-generation Polish in southern New Jersey.

The three names I can recall are Bobby Vinton, John Denver, and Lawrence Welk. It's hard to imagine finding any of these names on a mix tape I'd make for any of my friends. Vinton at least does some polkas, but his love songs are pure schmaltz. Denver is not offensive at least, while Welk is pure elevator music to my ears.

I also remember distinctly a few 78s that us kids always played at my Grandmom's house -- possibly they were two sides of the same 78? The songs were "The House of Bamboo" by Andy Williams (which actually swings) and "See You Later, Alligator" by Bill Haley and the Comets. I don't know though, these might have been my mother's. We were actually able to find both of these.

I'll have to see if we can track down some stuff from the Mummers Parades as well!

It seems that my late entry into the Metamorphosis Valentine's Day Limerick Contest came away with the coveted Best limerick making fun of the limerick contest award. Props also to lisad (who has been known to occasionally comment here) for taking the slightly less prestigious third prize.

I just got back from the beach, and boy are my arms tired. For the first time since 1994(?), I went surfing. It was good fun. I hired one of those long floaty longboards, and was happy to stand up at least. It was hard not to continually remember that the place that we went, Ocean Grove, is not terribly far from some Great White feeding grounds. The big clumps of kelp in the water were occasionally disconcerting.

The weekend in review, once again:

Thursday: Billy Bragg in concert at the Prince of Wales. Some left midway through due to excessive preaching and politicking, but c'mon, it's Billy Bragg; what did they expect? It was still lots of fun and I'm amazed that one man can entertain a room full of people for two hours with only guitar and his ideas. Closed with a rousing rendition of "Waiting For The Great Leap Forward".

Friday: Moonlight Cinema showing of the Sean Penn movie, "Into The Wild". Giant fruit bats squawking off to our left for much of the time kind of added to the wildness. Movie was good but flawed.

Saturday: Rufus Wainwright at Hamer Hall. Our third time seeing him, and vastly different each time. This time it was with a full band and costume changes (white body suit with sequins, lederhosen, a white bathrobe, and, um, full Judy Garland regalia. I was repeatedly struck by how his shy and stumbling between-song patter contrasted with his confident musicianship and dynamic performance. He's a fantastic entertainer.

Australia Day weekend highlights:

• Took dog to Red Bluff, just to have a look around.


• Hit USA Foods for some salad dressing, key lime juice, and a Dr. Pepper.


• Used the key lime juice to make Australia's best margaritas.


• Took the dog to walk along the Yarra, around the Abbotsford Convent, which included a pass by the Collingswood Children's Farm. Laika was very interested in the sheep, cows, and goats, but didn't freak out, which was a good sign for the sheep herding clinic we want to take her to.


• Ice skating at Waterfront City.


• Ethiopian food at African Town.


• Chicken wings on the barbie.


• Bought a bag of lentils from an ethnic food store. Marjorie warned me they would expand when I cooked them but I didn't believe her. Ended up with three big tupperware containers of them, and tossing out a fourth. I'm not going vegan or anything, I'm just looking for excuses to eat more hot sauce.

Sick of it. I've been ill for eight days -- just a chest cold -- but I haven't improved at all. It's not getting worse, but it's not getting any better. The drugs don't work. At all. I have cold meds from the US that all do nothing, and I went to the doctor yesterday, who prescribed me antibiotics but so far they're doing nothing either. (Come to think of it, I've had these kinds of colds before, and I can't remember antibiotics ever doing anything for them.) I tried going into work back on Tuesday, but only lasted about an hour. So I've had a big long extension to my holiday, but it's all been sitting on the couch, watching movies, and I'm over it!

In case you missed it, Australia elected a new prime minister a few weeks back.

The election was, to us new citizens, fascinating. Australia uses instant runoff voting, which essentially means that we had to rank all the candidates from one to sixty-eight. Each candidate was listed in a column under their party's name, and there are lots and lots of parties, so it was a very long sheet. They have some interesting parties, too:

Senator On-line

Shooters Party

Citizens Electoral Council

One Nation

The Fishing Party

Conservatives for Climate and Environment

There were so many we had to take a cheat sheet in. But I think it's a great system; if your first choice doesn't get a majority of the votes, your vote goes to your second, then your third, etc., so that it's actually possible to vote for alternate parties without "throwing away" your vote. The whole world needs to adopt this.

The other great thing about the election was that it was announced, and then held just a month and a half later. America is killing itself with its year-long (plus) multi-billion dollar debacle that leaves the candidates all covered with mud and everyone feeling acrimonious.

Another quiet Christmas but it was nice. The day consisted of opening presents, champers, snacks, and a nap.

We also caught part of the Bing Crosby/Fred Astaire movie Holiday Inn. A happy little holiday romp, until -- Bing comes out in blackface. He starts singing a song about Abraham Lincoln. Cut to the band, all in blackface. Cut to large black maid singing, "When black folks lived in slavery/Who was it set the darkie free? Abrahaaaaam..." Enter the female lead, dressed as a pickaninny. Cut to Marjorie and Mark, sitting out the couch with our mouths agape. How the times have changed. They apparently edit this part out when they show this movie in the States. They sell golliwogs in a shop up the street here, so I'm not surprised we see it unedited.

The Summer of Mark. By a bit of bad luck I'm going to have two weeks off over the holidays.

I say "bad luck" because I wanted to work so as not to go into the negative on vacation days when we go back to the States in a few months. But there's just no work in my office to justify it.

Marjorie has to work, though. So I've been coming up with a plan for how to spend my time. The plan includes:

Bringing my techie website back on line

Updating my CV

Finishing up some personal programming projects

Tracking down some books for a certain relative

Sorting out our various frequent flier miles

Starting some kind of exercise program

Keep studying my Spanish

There's a distinct danger, though, that it might end up like:

Sleeping until noon, then surfing the internet all day in my underwear

Stumbling towards Christmas we are. Marjorie's parents just left, after a big long crazy visit involving planes, trains, more trains, helicopters, more helicopters, and automobiles. The only excursion I took with them for was the Puffing Billy one, which was a disappointment for all of us Americans who are used to at least some animatronics with their tourist traps. Anyway, my father-in-law Rob spent lots of time writing up a great account of their adventures, and hopefully I can convince him to start a blog instead of emailing it around.

Christmas, though, will be a quiet one again for us this year, but that's okay. We do sometimes pine for the good proper cold-weather, never-ending consumerist nightmare that is Christmas in America but I think in the end it's just the family part that we miss.

What a long strange trip it's been. Right this moment marks almost exactly five years since we got on the plane and left the States behind. At the time we had no idea whether we would be gone for six months, or forever. The plan was originally for five years, I think, but now we've reached that and still only have tentative plans to move back to the States in a year or two. Or sooner, or later. To some as yet unidentified city. Or to Europe. Who knows.

It's funny how fast the romantic notions of living overseas got replaced by the day-to-day reality. But it's still not an experience I would have traded for the world.