Moonlight cinema

In the botanical gardens, waiting while the Moonlight Cinema screen (in the background) is inflated:


Saw "Bright Sun", which was pretty good.

Calexico

Calexico, who we caught at the Thornberry Theatre last night:


Really good show. As their name suggests, their music is a mishmash of American and Mexican influences. Venue was interesting, kind of a banquet hall, with assigned seats at big round tables:

Pierogies

Had lunch today at Court Jester, a very interesting hidden-away Polish food restaurant:


Food was... not bad, but we won't be in a hurry to go back.

Skating

Marjorie, yesterday at Icehouse:



I'm a stinker.

Library

Hard to capture, but this is my favorite room in the state library. I gasped the first time I stumbled into it.

Protest

The Internet filter protest in front of the state library:





Smaller crowd than I was hoping for. As you can see, several different political parties were represented...

Jobless

So - we all knew this was coming, but yesterday our Melbourne FAST office was officially let go by Microsoft. They had decided to discontinue our product, a year and a half after acquiring us, since it wasn't really in line with their corporate vision. A lot of that was due to the fact that we are developing in Java on Linux and Mac machines, instead of using Microsoft products.

No one in the office was terribly concerned; my boss is working on acquiring the software rights to what we were making are starting his own company, which would be a Microsoft partner company but otherwise unaffiliated with Microsoft. I think everyone in the office would be happier working without the constraints that Microsoft put on us anyway. That said, Microsoft was VERY nice about the severance, even going so far as to provide us a career counseling service to help us find new jobs, even outside of Microsoft.

So, I had really been looking forward to the time off. I've been coming up with a big list of things I want to accomplish during my "Autumn Of Mark". But then today, on my first official day off, I got a call in the morning from the FAST office manager about a job opportunity, and I couldn't really say no. So tomorrow I'm going in for an interview. If it works out I will have some Java temp work for a few months until this other company gets off the ground. But I definitely didn't want it to happen this soon. Sigh...

Paintball

One of my bruises from our company paintball outing last Friday:


It's turned a particularly lovely yellow over the past day. Tons of fun though - boss supplied us with unlimited ammo on the company expense account, so the air was dense with paintballs. I came home with 17 different welts!

Botanical

Our friend Trisha's 40th birthday party at the Royal Botanical Gardens.


I don't know why I didn't take any shots with the beautiful plants in the background.

Mueck

Ron Mueck exhibition at the NGV:

Angst

Laika always looks sad in the morning when we go off to work:

Comments

Haloscan, the provider I was using for comments for years is going away. So, I've been forced to switch to the comment system that comes built in with Blogger. I have all the old comments saved, but unfortunately there's no way to import them to the new system yet.

I have all verification turned off on the new comments, which of course means it'll fill up with spam shortly. I'll have to do something about that when it happens but in the meanwhile, enjoy.

Super Bowl

How I'm watching the Super Bowl this year:


Typical. Geaux Saints!

Lizard

More crazy backyard finds. Found this lizard skin while doing yardwork today:


I have big feet too, to give you some sense of scale. Since it's just the skin, we're thinking the guy who shed it may still be around. Our best guess is that it's one of these.

Hat

After car shopping we went to City Hatters, which has thousands of hats but EXACTLY ONE THAT FITS MY GINORMOUS MELON:

Mini

We came home empty-handed from car shopping today, but figured out a lot about what we're looking for. Here's Miss Marjorie test driving a Mini Cooper:


(which we decided is pretty sweet, but generally too small.)

Mantis

Preying mantis in our backyard. About an inch long:

Jets

Australia Day jets over our backyard:

Anglesea

On the beach at Anglesea:

Ouch

Maybe I should have reapplied.