I was just outside patting the dogs, and as Henry lay on my chest and moulted on me, I looked up. Way, way up, much further up than the landing jets that pass over our house, I saw something small, round and completely motionless in the sky. I watched it for about 15-20 seconds to see if it was moving at all, and it wasn’t. I thought it might be a balloon or a helicopter (although much further up than any I have seen before, certainly too far for me to make it out).

I went into the house to grab the camera and zoom lens, thinking I might be able to zoom in on a photo to see what it was. I came out of the house and the object had completely vanished. How spooky!

I saw this on my way to a customer today. Yes, the number plate is UFO…

This image encapsulates everything I dislike about the PC industry. On the bottom is the Acer Aspire 1700. On top is my 17″ MacBook Pro, which is a fairly intimidating machine. It’s completely dwarfed by the Acer, though. The Acer weighs around 7kg (versus 3.1kg for the MBP), and contains a desktop Pentium 4, desktop-sized RAM sticks and a desktop 3.5″ hard drive. The fans run constantly, it’s hot, heavy, and doesn’t take a battery. It’s utterly, utterly pointless and stupid, taking the worst aspects of desktops (large, heavy, non-portable) and notebooks (lack of expandability, bad keyboard and ergonomics) and creating a hideous turd that I suspect even the designer would be ashamed of.

But it’s cheap, and that mentality - “Sod practicality, looks, reliability, user experience, everything… as long as it’s cheap” - is what makes me hate the PC.

Seeing stuff like this makes me believe for a second that modern medicine truly can perform miracles.

Then I remember HIV, MND, MS and the other incurable diseases and I come back down to earth.

I’ve had two speeding tickets in a week, and frankly I’m over it.

The first one was an alleged 64km/h in a 60 zone, and that sucked. This second one, though, is for 70km/h in a 60 zone, which is 3 demerit points and a heftier fine. The interesting point is that the first fine had a 3km/h adjustment, whereas the second one only had a 2km/h adjustment… without which, I’d be in a lower bracket, saving $80 and 2 demerit points. How convenient!

I’ll be contesting this and asking whether they simply make up their tolerances from day to day or whether they’re just targeting people who do a shitload of driving all over the city and do occasionally go over the limit (without tailgating, failing to indicate, cutting people off, etc… but only speed seems to be relevant in preventing accidents, hoho).

Apologies to the three people that have been following this blog waiting for something to be written - it’s been a busy couple of weeks.

I’m dropping this link here for Crumpet and myself - it explains how to get pretty star trail exposures, which we want to try in the Northern Territory. Crumpet tells me the Wadeye sky is starrier than the starriest sky I’ve ever seen.