Our new dog--

...is still out there somewhere. We visited the no-kill pound and the RSPCA today, but came home dogless. In a big city like this you'd think there'd be hundreds of dogs available, but there were maybe 20 combined at both places, and none of them were our dog. One at the first place almost was -- a very sweet black lab that was a little gimpy in his hind legs, they think from being crated too long as a puppy. We left to think about it, and later they called us and told us that they decided our living situation wasn't right for the dog, so there you go. We were kind of glad that they resolved it for us.

Vernacular. I've started incorporating some local phrases in my daily speech patterns. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes unconciously. A brief rundown of the more common ones:

"No worries." (Translation: "No problem" or "That's okay" or "You're welcome") Probably the most commonly used Aussie phrase. I've fully assimilated this now, and use it without thinking.

"How are you going?" (Translation: "How are you doing?" or "How is it going?") I say this now pretty commonly too. (Marjorie wondered aloud the other day why the remaining permutation, "How is it doing?" is never used anywhere. Maybe we can start a trend.)

"G'day." (Translation: "Hello") Relatively common. I've never been able to say this.

"Ta." (Translation: "Thank you") I've tried this a few times, but it always feels like I'm saying goodbye, as I think it means in England. It feels almost dismissive to say, especially when you're trying to thank somebody.

"Nice" (Translation: "Good") This still seems odd to me; I'm used to "nice" meaning "friendly". It's odd to be asked if the lunch you had was "nice". To pronounce it in true Kath-and-Kim Aussie style, say "noice".

"Haitch" (Translation: "Aitch", i.e. the letter H) I was advised that this is "low" Australian, but I have yet to encounter an Australian who DOESN'T say it this way.

"Mate" (Translation: "Friend") Marjorie doesn't like this one. I do, but I can't seem to describe my friends as my "mates". It sounds too British to me.

"Good on ya." (Translation: "Well done") I think I've used this a few times.

"Crook" (Translation: "Sick", as in "Mary is crook and will not be in today.") A more obscure one, that I've never used.

One other note about the cold house --

When Marjorie was gone, I found the perfect antidote to sitting around a old, cold, drafty, half-empty house, feeling a little bit lonely: Tom Waits. Specifically, "Alice". The last five songs had me just staring at a wall; I haven't been captivated like that in a while.

Internet at last. Dialup, at least. We got our phone line connected, at last.

The house is still quite lacking in soft edges. Hardwood and tile floors, wooden chairs, and still only an air mattress (we're still waiting for our bed to be delivered). It had never before occurred to me that cushions are a modern necessity.

Last night we escaped up to the bar at the Albert Park to play trivia. Marjorie nailed a bonus question before the whole rest of the bar (Announcer: "Who am I? I was born in 1967 in Smyrna, Georgia..." Marjorie: "Oy! Julia Roberts." The prize: three CDs of DJ mixes of songs by artists we've never heard of.) We did only average overall, but I met a couple of guys who play soccer in the area. The season doesn't start until March, but they might be doing a pick-up game or two soon.

There will be some new softness in the house very soon -- on Saturday we're getting a dog. Marjorie wanted to get this one until she realized that it's in a totally different area of the country. I have no doubt, though, that we'll walk out of the dog adoption place with the dog with the biggest ears.

Where we've been. No internet access at home means no regular updates. We'll have it hooked up soon, though, I hope.

We're just trying to set up house at the moment. It'll be another two months before our stuff arrives from the states, but in the meanwhile, we have to make the place more livable. It's a great house in a great neighborhood.

Job is going exceedingly well. I've managed to solve some problems that had been plaguing them for weeks, and it looks like there's every chance I'll be hired on at the end of it. We're building an application that ambulance drivers ("ambos", in the local parlance) will run on their tablet computers to enter all the information about the vital signs, treatments, and procedures followed for each case.

I had a good Friday night happy hour last week with about thirty people from work, and chatted with just about everybody. Good buncha folk.

Today the AFL (footy) Grand Final is going on, which is the equivalent of Super Bowl Sunday back home. Strange, but they only had about an hour of pre-game shows. Still, it is quite obvious a HUGE deal here. The town was overrun with people from Adelaide and Brisbane, all wearing their colors. I suppose we should have watched, just as part of our cultural indoctrination.

Spent last night in the new place. It was BITTER COLD.

Of course, it was (I think) the coldest night of the year. I couldn't get the main heater to work, so I only had a small little space heater. And I'm sleeping on an air mattress on the floor. I woke up at about 2:30am, just from the cold. I draped my blankets over the heater, so it was blowing directly underneath, and after five minutes, the heater STOPPED. Panic. Luckily, it came back on after five minutes. But I was still cold. I thrashed around and cocooned myself for a bit, then began to realize that whatever part of me was against the bed was what was getting cold. So if I was lying on my left hip, my left hip would get cold. Strange. I finally figured it out, that, being on (hardwood) floor, my left hip was basically three inches from the bitter-cold crawlspace. I made an effort to spread out my weight, and everything was okay. I need to lay down a layer of insulation or something though.

Today I bought a fridge and a washing machine, all by myself. I'm a big boy!

Frances. The family is okay, apparently, but no word yet on how the houses in Cocoa Beach and Cape Canaveral fared.

Was glad to see that they have Six Feet Under here on regular TV. Totally unedited, too. I am still wigging from last night's episode.

The bulk of our packages mailed from Singapore have arrive, after nine weeks. They promised five to seven, but we're more relieved than angry. Still three more on the way. There are now twenty-seven boxes in this little studio rathole apartment I'm staying in until the end of the week. Then I get to move them all myself. What fun.

A different world.

In the US, there are commercials imploring adolescents who've turned 18 that they are now adults, and they have a civic duty, required by law, and it is to sign up for the draft.

In Australia, there are commercials imploring adolescents who've turned 18 that they are now adults, and they have a civic duty, required by law, and it is to sign up to vote.

Yikes! Hurricane Frances is bearing down on my family. It looks like it going to hit land right between where my brother's family lives and my parents and grandmother lives. Then it moves on towards my sister's family and my aunt and uncle on the west coast. My parents are in the process of evacuating. They're veteran hurricane dodgers, but there are others in Florida who aren't so smart. This thing is going to be nasty.

An 'A' for originality. Or maybe a 'B' as in 'Blaine'.

We're definitely not in Singapore anymore. In Federation Square, the busiest square in the heart of town, a band (the Regurgitators) have set up a bubble where they will live for three weeks, writing and recording an album.

On September 21, they will emerge and immediately play a concert of their new album, start to finish.

I don't know if they're any good or not. I haven't been by yet either, but I probably will go check it out this weekend.

An Australia moment. I'm helping to build a website at work. The computer keeps telling me it can't find one of the pages down a certain directly. I look, and the page is there. I stare at it in frustration for at least ten minutes before realizing -- nay, realising -- that the file is in a directory called "notrecognised", while in the configuration file I typed "notrecognized".

Language issues aside, work is going quite well. I start my new project next week.

WOO HOO! So I'm browsing Slashdot, and I notice that the new IOCCC winners have been announced. "Bummer," I think, because they always email the winners before announcing, and I hadn't heard anything. Then, I read the winners list, and lo and behold, there's my name. GEEK BLISS! That's win number six for me, but it still feels pretty good.

They make up the categories every year, but they often get re-used. My category, "Best Non-Use of Curses", is a new one -- in explanation, "curses" is a C package that lets you do animation. My program simulates character animation without it -- by generating a string which you then paste into the "vi" editor. The act of pasting is what actually starts the animation.

The source code won't be posted there until mid-October.

That Best of Show winner sounds pretty sick -- someone implemented a whole operating system (such as Windows) in 4096 bytes (about a page of code). Now that's some serious geeking.

R-U-N-N-O-F-T. She's gone not even two days, and I miss her. How will I last 23? I'm so married.

Today was a day that was not beautiful, it was be-YOO-ti-ful. Sidewalk cafes were packed with folk enjoying the warmest day of spring thus far. I myself spent the day out-of-doors, working at a booth in the central business district doling out absentee ballot request forms to US citizens. (You can get yours on-line if you haven't already done so.) It was an interesting experience. I was even spat upon, but it was by a shabby British nutter with brown teeth who occasionally spat as he rambled on to me about the monarchy. Either in favor of it or against it, I'm not sure. But we got a good small handful of people signed up.

In the late afternoon I got a couple of new library books and had a pizza around the corner from the house we're about to move into. Quite good. Then I walked down to the beach and sat on a bench to read while the sun set over the bay. There were about a hundred seagulls in attendance, and two penguins.

Fish are jumpin', and the cotton is high.

You betcha. Interesting concert experience tonight -- strangely, our first real concert since coming here. We went and saw Betchadupa at The Tote. This is the band fronted by Liam Finn, son of musical legend Niel Finn. We saw him playing backup guitar for his father about six years ago, when he was maybe 13. Now he's trying to make it on his own. From the sounds of things, he's inherited a lot of talent. Just about the tightest band I'd ever seen, and they use lots of interesting time signatures and such. Not as hook-laden as I had hoped though. But they could fill out a bill with Sloan and Superdrag nicely. I felt old, though; there were maybe two or three guys there that were older than me. Sigh.

Apropos of nothing. Back in 1982 I attend the Governor's School for Excellence, "a one-week summer program bringing together academically and artistically talented sophomores from Delaware high schools." I remember lots of things about that week, but one really odd memory came back to me the other day.

We did a "meet and greet" sort of exercise, where you had to write down something about yourself that you hadn't told anyone about yet. The list was compiled, and you had go around and figure out who everybody was, based on their personal factoid.

One guy wrote, I throw rocks at my cat while it's going to the bathroom.

You read that right. I don't find it memorable so much in the fact that somebody would do that (bad enough as it is), but that he would choose that tidbit about himself as the one he wanted to first reveal. I throw rocks at my cat while it's going to the bathroom.

When I found the guy who wrote it, he explained, "It's funny. The cat won't move, because he's going to the bathroom, and you can just sit there and throw rocks at it."

I wonder what happened to that guy.

He's probably a senator or something.

Another check for the checklist over on the right. We've put down the deposit on a house we'll be renting in Albert Park. Nice little two bedroom place, hardwood floors, big kitchen. Location, location, location -- we have a nice little cafe that's spitting distance away, plus a pizzeria, video store, convenience store, etc. etc. About three blocks up the road is another nice row of stores and restaurants, and a library. Eight blocks from the beach too, and a half a block from the tram. Sweet!

First day. At some point today at my new job I looked around and thought, wow, I work with a bunch of Australians.

Actually, there's two irish women (both named Joan), a Sri Lankan, and a Chinese guy, who I'll be working closely with for three weeks. And he lived in Singapore for five years. The more things change, ...

It seems like it'll be a fun place to work. Everyone seems cool. I'm right in the middle of the CBD (Central Business District), twenty-two floors up, with views out in every direction, if I get up from my desk and walk a bit. I'm in a room with four other developers and testers. For three weeks I'll be helping develop a website, then moving onto another project that sounds really cool, involving Bluetooth and tablet computers.

The weather with you. We rented a car again today to drive around and look at apartments. They do things kind of weird here -- there's a window, sometimes as small as twenty minutes, where you (and about a dozen other people, typically) can go view the apartment. We saw a few near misses, and one that we liked a lot. But our suspicion is that we will have trouble competing for a place against native Australians with lots of local landlord references.

Complicating our search was the worst weather that Melbourne has seen, apparently, in six years. Rainy, cold, and windy all day. This is not my beautiful August. Still, it's better than dodging hurricanes like my relatives just had to do in Florida. Luckily, everyone's safe.

Woop. Notice a new check mark on the To Do list over to the right?

Company 2 came through. The contract will be for a little over three months. Even better, they want me to start this coming Monday.

We celebrated for about a minute before thoughts of the remaining To Do list items started peeing in our Cheerios.

Still, the plan is a step closer to fruition.

Quite a weekend. As I said, we rented a car on Friday. On Saturday we got up (relatively) early and headed down to the Great Ocean Road. An amazing drive. Here are some pictures: Marjorie / me / Bells Beach (world famous surfing destination). The only real wildlife we saw was on these signs.

Today we drove up to Warrandyte State Park (more specifically, the Pound Bend Reserve) hoping to find some wildlife. This time we had better luck, as Marjorie spotted a koala before we had even parked the car. We ended up seeing six total -- all just lumps of fur up high up in the trees. Still, very neat. (The latest in a growing list of animals that we can snobbishly bypass the next time we're at the zoo: "Pish, seen it.") There were supposedly wombats and platypuses (platypi?) there as well, but none spotted.

On the way back we stopped by Yarra Bend Park for another gander at the flying foxes.

So now, to our future visitors, we can pretty much guarantee you sightings of 1) koalas, 2) flying foxes, 3) kookaburras, 4) brush-tail possums, and 5) penguins.