Attack of the hippies. So yesterday I took a break at work, and headed down to the food court below the building to use the ATM. Just as I arrive in the lobby, a dreadlocked mass of hundred or so hippies storms in. Each was carrying a sunflower. Several of the more ambitious ones jumped over the security gates, trying to reach the elevators. They were whooping and hollering. Some of them followed me through a door they thought led deeper into the building, but actually led into the food court. They sheepishly ran back in. When I got back from using the ATM they were squatting in the lobby, chanting "One two three four, we don't want no global war." A couple were arguing with a security guard who they said was using excessive force in preventing them from getting through the security gates.

While I don't know what their specific beef was, I did figure out that they were protesting BHP Billiton, who we share the building with.

The police came, and I eventually made it back through the gates and into the lift.

We are definitely not in Singapore anymore!

Man of action.

Yesterday marks one year that we've been living in Melbourne. It doesn't seem that long at all. The amazing thing (to me) is that I haven't been on a plane since. I don't think I've ever gone a year without jetting off somewhere since the first time I flew.

Not that nothing is scheduled. We'll soon be flying off to Hamilton Island. I'm really looking forward to this.

May be starting a new project at work soon, which might send me to Adelaide on occasion as well.

Apropos of nothing, I have really bad hiccups right now, that have been going on for a half an hour. Perdue, help!

Marjorie often accuses me of having a fourth-grader sense of humor. I deny that. Actually, I think she's just mad because my sense of humor is rubbing off on her. She even makes puns these days.

Anyway, there's a song that my friend Jim used to sing that I recently tried to remember. It took a while for us to piece it back together, but I think we have it. It's very much the sort that would appeal to a fourth grader. Oddly enough, neither of us could find it anywhere out on the web. Sorry I can't post the melody, but here are the words:

Old Lady Bliss
Went out out to piiiiiiiii...ck some flowers
Stood in the grass
Up to her aaaaaaa....nkles, dearie
She saw a bird
Step on a turrrrrrrr...key feather
It broke her heart
She let a farrrrr...mer take her home.

Visit Austrlia. We may have one less apostle but we do have one more dolphin species.

Just bought a new 19" flat screen monitor that's big, bold, and beautiful. And what better way to break it in than some new pictures from space. I'm giddy. Earlier today the Deep Impact mission successfully slammed a coffee table-sized probe into the comet Tempel 1 to analyse the ejecta. The comet is a dirty snowball that has been sitting around peacefully since the time that the planets formed, so analysing what it's made of should tell us lots about the early solar system. Great work folks!

Update: Now with video. How did you picture a comet to look like, up close? I really had no idea. There's no sense of scale in the video, but the thing is about half the size of Manhattan. I've never thought of comets as things you could walk around on.

Last night we celebrated our anniversaries (three years of marriage, seven years together, and one year in Melbourne) by getting all dressed up and going out to the Waterfront Restaurant. It was nice, but we are a bit crapulent today.

Our new pub is fifteen minutes walk away. There are three or four pubs closer, which is why it took a while for us to find it. We like it quite a bit. Big and homey, with an interesting menu. They've decorated with some interesting kitschy touches, and have a couple of fireplaces and a mellow tabby cat that's given free wandering rights of the place. There's also a big lovely beer garden out back that we're looking forward to hanging out in come spring.

Last night we played trivia there -- it was their first night having it, I think -- and won. Took away two bottles of wine and six free drink coupons. Not a bad haul.

The Big Idea. Our company is pushing a big Thought Leadership initiative. They want us to come up with innovative new ideas, and leverage them into the market. (Did I really just say "leverage"?) There's even a prize for the best idea that's proposed within the next few months: a trip for two to Byron Bay.

Right about the time they announced this, an awesome new idea struck me. The particulars of it are technical (they're described at the end), but in short it would mean that at the very least our company could be producing much more reliable software. Conceivably the Idea would grow to become the ultimate new must-have testing tool. And further afield, I thought it might have the chance to change the way programming itself is done.

I thought about it for weeks -- in bed, on the toilet, on the tram. It would be difficult to write, but not beyond my ability. I had visions of leading a group of employees to develop and expand it, and to apply it to our existing applications. Or even to apply it to existing software (such as the Java Virtual Machine itself).

It would be hailed by one and all. And I would be feeling all smug and heroic while Marjorie and I relaxed up in Byron Bay, margaritas in hand.

The Idea was sitting out there, ripe and unplucked. I looked around, and could find no one else who had done it before. This was it. My big moment.

And so. Just before I started bearing down to work on a proof of concept, I decided to give one last look around to make sure it hadn't been done before. And as you've probably guessed by now, I found a product that does exactly what I had been thinking of, and then some.

Rather dismayed, I downloaded and ran it against our current project, and it found a lot of bugs. They did a great job with it, but the fact that it has not taken the programming world by storm is of some small consolation.

[Geeky technical description: I'll talk about how it applies to the Java programming language, but there's no reason why it couldn't be applied elsewhere. It occurred to me that you could, through code analysis, determine places in the code where null pointer exceptions would occur, simply by tracking variables as having a value of "null", "not null", or "maybe null". Methods would be tracked as returning the same possible values. So, it is quite possible to determine, for every pointer dereference, whether a null pointer exception was even possible. A program that passed such a scan with no possible null pointer dereferences would be guaranteed never to crash that way. And that is one of the most common ways for a program to crash.

After considering that for a while, it occurred to me that other unchecked exceptions, such as array index out of bounds and class cast exceptions, could be scanned for in a similar manner.

The program I found that does it is JLint. It finds many, many other kinds of bugs as well. You can integrate into the Eclipse API using this plugin, just like I was planning to do with my idea.

I don't know why it's not used more widely. Probably because it was done as a research project and has no advertising dollars behind it.]

Marjorie's parents have gone off home, leaving the dog to pine away alone on the weekdays, after two weeks of near constant attention. We'll post some images from their visit soon.

Next month we'll be celebrating our 7th year together, my birthday, and our one year anniversary in Melbourne. So we're going to go away somewhere. I get to pick, since it's my birthday, but there are just too many options to choose from.

When people ask you, "Who is the man?", how do you respond? Now, you can tell them, it's me. It's probably not good form to crow when the team loses the game but dang it feels good to score.

To spare you from having to endure these reports in the future, I've set up The Dull Blog, where I will be posting all my game results, in addition to books I've finished, movies I've watched, CDs I've bought, and a whole host of other unfascinating statistical minutia about my life. As the name implies, it'll just be things too dull to make it to the main blog. Well, I'll probably still crow a bit here when I score a goal or something.

Marjorie's parents have been in the country for a week and a half now, and seem to be having quite a good time. They've already visited Sydney, Cairns, and Uluru. They've ridden camels, held koalas, and snorkeled the Great Barrier Reef. They've actually seen more of this country/continent than we have now. Her dad says there's a few months worth of things he'd like to see here. Tomorrow I'm taking off work and we're going to go explore some more around Melbourne.

Marjorie's parents are visiting. They came all the way from the other side of the world just to bring us a suitcase full of American groceries. Isn't that nice. Oh, they're going to see a thing or two while they're here as well. Today Marjorie took them around to see some wildlife, and scored on all fronts -- koalas, kookaburras, flying foxes, lorikeets, galahs, pied cormorants, and brush-tailed possums. Later in the week they're all heading up to the Great Barrier Reef together, leaving me all alone and OH MY GOD I'LL HAVE THE WHOLE HOUSE TO MYSELF FOR A WHOLE WEEKEND -- uh, I mean, I'll be lonely.

Three years, three continents, three cities, seven apartments. Yesterday was our third anniversary. We just did a quiet evening at home, but we splashed out a bit on a bottle of wine. Let's see, first anniversary is "paper", second is "cotton", and third is "cold germs", right?

Sickie. Only my second week of work, and I'm taking my first "sickie". Actually, that word has connotations of "faking it", but I really am sick. My first big, brash, Aussie cold, and I got some big, brash Aussie drugs to counter it with -- all cold medicines are over-the-counter here, but they have codeine in them.

Laika is the only dog I've ever known who doesn't bark at visitors. Workmen came to fix the kitchen ceiling, and she greeting them with a wagging tail. Our kitchen is filling with dust as I write this.

My soccer team now has a website where you can read game reports. I know you will all be checking regularly. I'm back on the thirds team for now. And apparently I was chosen as "B.O.G" for our last match, which I hope means "Best of Game".

After upgrading our workstation to Windows XP, I made the mistake of not turning on the firewall.

Stupid.

IE had started rerouting my default homepage to some search engine that encouraged me to look up information on Viagra. We started getting popup ads for anti-spyware programs (which is like a burglar breaking into your house and leaving pamphlets for home security systems). Ad-aware just found 117 infected files, and cleaned them up. Hopefully. There's a good chance it didn't find everything.

Things like this make me start to reconsider my opposition to capital punishment.

Tonight is our soccer team's big social event of the year, in honor of the FA cup. There's going to be something like 130 people there. It starts with a trivia competition at 7:30pm, but the game doesn't start until midnight, Melbourne time. Then I have to be up at 7:30 tomorrow morning for, you guessed it, our soccer game. Sounds like poor planning but that's just how it worked out. I'll be rooting for Man U if Tim Howard is playing, or for them to lose big otherwise. This game is just a warmup for the big match next week anyway.

Tonight we rented I Heart Huckabees, an unlikely little movie that we enjoyed very much. Say what you will about Hollywood -- they still turn out a slew of daring, original titles each year that don't pander to the masses.

After Marjorie went to bed I heard a crash from over in the kitchen. It turns out a big chunk of the plaster roof, about a meter square, came crashing down on our kitchen counter. A nasty, dusty mess that took me a good hour to clean up. It got into the stove, toaster, and sink, so I hope our dinners aren't crunchier than usual this month.

Good news. I've been contracting for nine months with this company. They are choosy about whom they hire, it seems. But now they've asked me to join on, and we've agreed on a salary. Huzzah!

In no time at all, it seems, the sun started going down before we even get home from work. And the days are only getting shorter. We're on a comparable latitude with NYC, so I don't know why it seems so extreme, and so sudden.

It's roughest on the dog, who doesn't get the same sort of quality park frolic time she used to. Everyone here is in the same boat, and so the poo density in the park is increasing, as no one can find their little steaming piles of responsibility in the dark to pick them up. And thus nature provides itself fertilizer for the spring, and the cycle is complete.

As I alluded to, yesterday I played on the second "reserves" team, in addition to just the thirds team that I usually play on. I honestly can't figure out why, as there are much better players than I on the thirds, and that's not just false modesty. But I ended up playing pretty good, and had a really good time in the end. I like the bigger pressure. I got to watch the first team play afterwards, and hoo boy, I am most certainly not ready for that.

Before the game the seconds team coach collected my ID (they have stringent requirements here), and did a double take, saying "Hooray, I'm not the oldest guy here!". That gives me mixed feelings. I'll show these young hooligans a thing or two though.