After years of thinking I didn’t share a birthday with anybody exciting, I hit Wikipedia today and found out that Steve Wozniak was also born on August 11th. I stop complaining now.

I just spent a couple of hours recording music, and it was fun! Yes indeed!

That is all.

When reading this review of Amiga OS 4.0, I start missing my old Amiga 2000 (with 68040 expansion card and 17Mb of RAM!) and Frankenstein CD32-with-SX32-expansion…. quite a lot. Damn, the Amiga was a great home computer. I owned three between 1988 and 1998. My CD32 is still sitting in a box somewhere, but the SX32 expansion that turned it into a fully-functional Amiga 1200 was sold years ago.

We fielded many questions on Saturday night as to when Crumpet and I were planning on tying the knot. You only get those questions at weddings and lo and behold, that’s where we were.

Some pics can be found here.

Congratulations to Iain and Tara!

Crumpet just asked me to ’scroll across out of her way’ when she wanted me to move my chair from in front of the fridge.

I asked her if she’d prefer me to alt-tab to the fridge.

Crumpet and I saw Pan’s Labyrinth last night, and it’s hard to describe why I was so impressed with the film without giving too much away.

Suffice it to say that this is the film that I wish Terry Gilliam was capable of making - it’s a wonderful combination of sweet fantasy and dark, gritty realism that he never manages to find. Gilliam always injects too much comedy and farce into his ‘reality’ to give his stories the gravitas they demand. Guillermo del Toro may be my new God (let’s just ignore Hellboy, eh?).

Another way to put it would be saying that this film, which depicts a man’s nose being caved in with a bottle, a face cut open with a knife and a hand destroyed with secateurs, is one of the most beautiful fantasies I can remember and I consider it essential viewing. That is, as long as you don’t bring your kids.

Today I dropped my PowerBook for the first time. The tiny latch that holds the screen shut snapped (no other damage that I can see so far), but the latch seems to be integral to the bottom of the case. Replacing it (which I really need to do if I’m to continue taking this laptop around with me) will cost upwards of $350 as I’d need to replace the entire bottom case.

Trading it in on a nice MBP is tempting right now, but I’ll have to speak to some Apple repairers and see what cheaper options there might be. I’m sorry, Gonzales. You lasted over 2 years without a single scratch or dent, I guess it had to happen at some point.

Today was ludicrously hot. So hot that half the state is apparently blacked out. I know that Mopsy’s ambient temperature sensor reached 44ºC and the air conditioning was only really able to fight the heat when the car was in motion. Not that easy to do when you consider that about half the traffic lights in Melbourne were dead. It was surprisingly low-key at these intersections, with no police directing traffic… NOBODY directing traffic (except for one guy I saw on Bridge Rd, doing a sterling job in his white t-shirt and shorts, chatting on his mobile).

I wanted to check some news about the blackouts, but the Age site is down. I guess they’re having issues there too.
Somehow in my after-work surfing I found the story of Allegri’s ‘Miserere’ piece, composed during the 1600s and considered so beautiful that it was forbidden for any performer to copy and share the work, under punishment of excommunication from the church. This ended when Mozart heard the piece at the age of 14 (or possibly 12, the stories contradict) and wrote it from memory after the fact. Fascinating stuff. Was Mozart slightly autistic to be able to do things like this?

Mopsy had her 10,000km service today, and I had the greasemonkeys tighten a few screws inside the cockpit - some rattles seemed to appear around the time Steve and I headed down to the Great Ocean Road. A coincidence I’m sure.

Anyhow, the seat no longer squeaks (seat rails were greased), the B-pillar (right next to your head as you drive) doesn’t rattle when you’re travelling over rough roads… I’m happy.

What made me even happier was handing the key back for the loan car. It was a 6-month old Mazda 6 with only 6,500 kms on the clock, and it was bloody awful. Automatic transmissions haven’t gotten any better since Mum’s old 1984 XE Falcon; they might have more gears but they still suck power and get in the way unless you’re completely uninterested in driving the car. I kept an eye on the trip computer and found I was using more fuel in the 6 than I was in my turbo 3, simply because I was thrashing the engine to try to get some performance out of it.

Because the 6 didn’t have a line-in for the iPod, I pulled out the Mighty Boosh CD set I bought from Amazon UK a couple months ago and listened to that. I think I laughed more the second time through… great stuff.

I stayed off the internet all day and watched the MacWorld keynote ‘cold’ this afternoon. Finding that no new iPods were launched, I ordered my own 80Gb model. It’s white cos I’m oldschool, baby.

Pants in Motion has been GOOGLIFIED!

Ahhh, the joy of crawling through logs to find which search engine loves my posts more…

I’m already at the top of a search for “pants in motion”, but let’s see if I can get some other hits too.

Boobs. Lesbians. Um…. knitted pie.