So yesterday was Australia Day, where everyone gathers around and celebrates - er - the public holiday. Or maybe celebrate being Australian. I dunno. Me, I celebrate having a bunch of friends. That is, it's an excuse to hang out with a group of friends. Funnily enough, less than half the people at the party we went to were actually Australians.

But the general publics Australian Spirit was showing - which meant that we had to move the cars or else they'd get damaged. You figure it out.

Currently I'm having a discussion on IRC with Darrell about why I feel about Australia the way I do. To be frank, I don't feel one way or another about being "Australian". It's not that I dislike it (although there's plenty to dislike, as much as there is stuff to like), but there's nothing here that makes me feel "Woooo, I sure am proud/glad/happy/whatever to be an Australian!" It seems that some people think that this means that I'm not allowed to be Australian. So demote me to being "australian" then. Fuck you, I don't care.

Australia is an okay place to live.

Now, if I actually *had* a reason to "love Australia" then things might be different, but I would *always* respect the other persons right to a point of view. But it's the blind patriotism that is part of the reason I don't feel anything. It's not a binary love/hate relationship. There's a third state in between. The state of 'meh'. Whatever. It seems that people have a hard time understanding this. But then I'm no stranger to having people unable to understand simple concepts like that...

At least it's not America.

This one always brings problems. "Oh, so Australia isn't such a bad place after all?" Read the text, kiddies. All it says, is given the choice, I would prefer Australia over America. I can't say more without repeating myself.

Another argument that shits me off is the "Well everyone worked hard over 200 years to bring this country to where it is now, and that's all you've got to say for it, you ungrateful little sod?" I would start of responding "200 years and that's all you've got? You broke a lot of shit getting it here, and there's huge room for improvement, mate." Then I might then say that I could find the exact same argument in any country. Does that mean that every country is the best bloody place on earth? Perhaps it's just me, but I don't feel that I should owe anyone anything for something that happened years ago (or even now), especially when it would have happened without me being here right now anyway. Australia (or anywhere for that matter) isn't here for me anymore than I feel I should be here for Australia.

"So why don't you leave then, you Aussie hating scum?" Believe it or not, someone said this to me once. I didn't exactly ask to be here, nor do I particularly want to stay here: I will leave one day. But I'm no Aussie hating scum. I don't love nor hate Australia. It's people like that though that make me almost hate Australia. But I have no less or no more right to live in Australia than the person that tells me this.

<rant>

I work with a bunch of Morons.

The departments website is a fucking mess. Information is just placed where it's convenient, with no real thought about if it's really relevant to the section it's being linked from. Digging around today I've found pages I never knew existed. Important pages. For example, a list of MSDNAA software that's available is linked from the "My Account" area. I'd been looking for this link for months. It should belong somewhere more appropriate like the "Student Area". Or something. Not with a bunch of scripts that are supposed to help you manage your account.

I think it's not an exaggeration to say that most people think the site is very much in need of a reorganisation. When the subject is broached, the justification for not reorganising the website is that people are used to it, so we can't. Even trying to move the above mentioned list is an exercise in futility because "People have to authenticate to view that list" regardless of the fact that they would still have to authenticate, but just from a different page.

These are the same people that automatically reach for the camera any time someone mentions that the site could do with a redesign. They think that putting up some pretty pictures makes it all better. Is this not enough to persuade them otherwise? These are the same people are against any suggestion of change for the better.

To you guys, if you're reading this (and I'm sure that you do occasionally), Go Fuck Yourself.

</rant>

Bloody hell - if I'd known the car was gunna cost that much to get fixed, then I woulda got it fixed weeks ago... And to think I was gunna get my rage on when the mechanic guy told me they only replaced one core plug, not all three. Turns out the other two didn't need it. Saved me a bundle in labour...

So the other day I played with HTML::Tree, a perl library that does decent job of parsing HTML and building a DOM tree. It differs from XML::Parser because it's actually tolerant of bad HTML, where XML::Parser will barf on any errors. So a little code here, a search function there, and I've got a decent parsing library set up that I can use for all sorts of things. Hmm, I 'spose I should actually convert the DOM it generates into XML, to consolidate...

So that was fun.

No really, that's scary. Scary that it was fun. Hold me.

Lower.

This rant has deliberate grammar and spelling errors because Michele is reading "Eats, shoots and leaves". This is different because usually all the grammar and spelling errors are entirely acidental. Go Team Me!

In other news, I miss the Powerbook. I have Mac Envy. It's kinda like Penis Envy, but I suffer from it. Mac Envy, not Penis Envy. I'm quite happy with my todger. The scourge of Windows plagues me once again. I don't know what scourge really means, but it sounds good. Ah, dictionary.com to the rescue. mmm. That sounds about what I thought it meant, so I Am A Winnar! I'm even contemplating installing Teh Loonix on the desktop again, but that's probably just Crazy Talk again. There are certain apps that I need to use for work (and at home) that plain and simple _aren't_ available except under linux. VMWare licenses cost too much, and Bochs buggers up too. Hell, I even tried installing PearPC, but something buggerred up and stuffed if I'm gunna wait the 3 hours it takes to install OS X each time to fiddle around with it. It's too slow anyway.

Woe.

Today is the second day of the seminar that I'm missing out on. Damn you car and credit card bill! 'Spose I've only got myself to blame - and indeed I turned down an offer for a loan for the fees to get there - so it really is my fault I'm not there. Still sucks though. They'll all progress in Iaido and Jodo much faster than I will now. OMG I'll be lining up at the other end of the dojo because they'll all grade! Actually, it's probably a good thing, because I'll get to re-learn and hone the first few kata and build a solid foundation to progress from ^_^

Thought for the day: If you like random violence, turn on the TV and flick through the channels.

Michele and I started Wing Chun yesterday. After an hour and a half session, I can't really comment, but it does sound interesting. The instructor is really good at explaining things, but I feel that he was trying too hard to justify the various differences in techniques between Wing Chun and other martial arts. Punches, for example. I just think the point was a little laboured, especially when I can understand and agree with the reasoning. It was still a good training session, and the isometric exercises that form the first ... form ... are really good. I'm gunna have to try and work them into a daily routine. Hell, I really need a daily routine.

It occurs to me occasionally - when I rise from the slumber that is my daily life - that Perth is boring. Really boring. Or maybe I'm just out of the loop. There's some secret club that all the cool kids are in - where they hand out the flyers to all the cool stuff that happens, and everyone has a good and interesting time. I mean, life must go on, right? People need to do things, right? But unless you like the pubbing and clubbing, or you like the telly, there doesn't seem much to actually *do*. You hear of other places where there's stuff to do, but you don't hear or see any of that here. You need to be in the loop. In the club. Down with it.

I reckon it's partly due to the lifestyle 'choices' that you 'make'. Here I am, working a 9-to-5. I get home in the arvo, relax in front of some email (HAH), get some food, and contemplate what's going on. My job doesn't really encourage the sort of social interaction that might lead to anything interesting, and after hours there doesn't seem to be anything going on around the place. You look around the place, and people just seem to be inside. I don't know what they do any more than I know what I do. So what kind of things do people do when they get out? Play some organised sport - sure. Wander around the river or the beach, sure. Go out for a meal - sure. See a movie - sure. What else? I don't know. Myself, I train 3 nights a week - and I like it. But the other 4... Maybe I just want some more options - that interest me (ie: no movies, pubs, clubs, etc - even aimless wandering gets boring after a while). More importantly, something that I can share with Michele.

I think I like the idea of new cultural experiences, where I can learn and understand new things about other people and myself. But I don't like the rehashing of typical Australian culture, which I find bland and uninteresting. It seems that there's only the later available. Maybe that's why Perth is so boring - the fun and interesting things that people get up to are the things that I don't like :P

That got way too serious for a moment there. Allow me to retort with ... uh ... a distraction! Look! Look over there! No, there. Shiny stuff!

I'm hungry. I should eat.

I had to 'give' the Powerbook back yesterday. The guy who 'uses' it wanted it back. It's no more mine than it is his (and vica-versa), but I do think I'd use it more - I was seriously thinking of using it as a desktop replacement. So that sucked. I'm only slightly mollified by the fact that he didn't get to use it, because the head of department came by shortly afterwards and grabbed it for his own use - if only because he didn't want to take his brand new laptop away with him, because it's 'too big'.

So now I'm back on XP. And I'm looking at making it look like OS X. Apparently Michele had this installed and it looked and worked okay. I'm going to give it a shot and find out for myself.

On Monday I forgot to mention the fires in the hills area east of Perth. Some arsonist(s) decided to start a series of fires in the hills area, jeopardising lives and property over a wide area - including my mum's house. One of these fires was at the end of road leading to my mum's house, a mere two hundred metres away. While she wasn't evacuated, and we've had closer before, it's still unnerving. What's slightly more unnerving is mum's blase attitude towards preparing for evacuation. Instead of being prepared, she figured that it was still too far away to pose any threat. It was only later that she realised how close it really got.

One of the larger, more persistent fires picked up with the wind yesterday, covering the majority of the metropolitan area with a thick layer of smoke. Even though it caused severe respiratory problems for a lot of people (and minor problems for many, many more - including me), the orange colour of the light was something unusual and spectacular. Unfortunately, no photos as I lent my camera to Daniel for his trip to Malaysia. The building here at work still stinks of smoke.

In lieu of motorised transport, I rode the 20 odd kilometres to and from training on Tuesday night. No great feat, but a combination of headwind, heavy bag, iaito, and poor fitness made it seem so. Never again though. I'm just glad I decided to leave the bokken and jo at home because it was awkward. Luckily enough the car is getting repaired on Monday, so I'll have some form of transport again.

Damn. I lost the first version of this before I saved it. Poop. Okay, so here's "The sounds of silent screaming - Take 2"

I'm much happier than I was the other week. I managed to bash out two really good emails to the people at HR, and in the end I was paid correctly (minus a few cents). So all's well that ends well. Unfortunately, it doesn't help the fact that the job sucks in the first place, but it makes it more bearable...

The car is still broken, but now I have the means to fix it. Over the next couple of pay checks, the car should be in and out getting various little bits looked at in preparation for selling it. It's kind of a bummer to have to fix it up only to sell it, but I really need to get over this hump (of a credit card debt) so I can plan things for the future. That's life, I suppose...

On Saturday I went to see BeatleMania at UWA's Octagon theatre, with Michele, her family, and some of their family friends. Michele's mum was singing in the choir, which was dressed up in 60's regalia. The effect was great - they looked like a bunch of hippies (albeit, aging hippies). There was also some (apparently famous) local talent that kept the audience amused with guitar sing-alongs to Beatles songs, but I think the real show stopper was the sextet that played beautiful arrangements of some of the best Beatles songs. Ever. They've just formed their own group called "Odyssey", so I think I'll have to keep an eye out for them.

Some people might know that I've been playing with Mac OS X on works spare Powerbook G4. I've been trying to use it as a replacement desktop OS for the past couple of weeks now, with good results. It's a bit of a paradigm shift from Windows and X environments (the way I like them anyway), but it's not a bad shift. It's a useable interface, and after dicking around with some configuration and customisation, it turns out that it's a very nice system to use. I think I knew I fell in love with it when I was watching a DVD in one window, and then I had a transparent terminal window overlapping it, and the video was running perfectly through the transparency. The people at Apple got it right - use the graphics card to render the video, and then you can add all the shiny stuff that the card is suited for with ease.

A couple of essentials that I found made my life with Mac OS X bearable are:

• Desktop Manager, for multiple desktops
• Fire, a decent MSN (amongst others) client
• Firefox, a good web browser - I like it better than Safari and use it on windows anyway
• GVim, a decent text editor
• Microsoft's Intelimouse drivers, so I can configure the mouse buttons better
• Microsoft's Remote Desktop Client, so I can connect to and use Windows machines still
• SmoothWheel, a Firefox extension that makes scrolling in Firefox under OS X a not-as-ugly affair.
• MPlayer OS X, and assorted codecs, so I can enjoy my media files
• Video Lan Client, and assorted codecs, so I can enjoy my media files

OS X has some annoyances though, which is ... annoying. One of them is consistency. There seems to be inconsistencies in behaviour between certain applications. Some of these are (apparently) deliberate, but others appear to be left up to the application programmer to work out how to make the application behave. Another is the lack of customisability available, but I can actually understand and respect that. The other big one that I've come across is the Terminal program that comes with OS X. By default, page up and page down are mapped to scroll through the terminals buffer, not send page up or page down to the terminal. this is really annoying. After much swearing, tinkering, googling, I finally found the solution (after announcing that I'd given up on OS X, of course). Sure, it's a small problem, but it's little things like that which can drive people away from converting to OS X. I had searched for other terminal alternatives, however they are sadly lacking.

It seems that the majority of OS X users are not very "computer savvy", which is fine, but the people at Apple make some decisions that limit the people that are perhaps more "computer literate". As a heavy unix user, who's grown at least accustomed to working in a somewhat configurable Windows environment (as opposed to the favoured X environment of choice), the lack of configurability, the limiting choices, and some of the behaviour is uncomfortable, and initially hindering. However, the change in paradigm is not unsurmountable, and after a while working with Mac OS X seems almost pleasurable.

I'm not sure when I'll move back, or even if I move back, but or now I think I'm enjoying this.