Mobile Phone Transmission
From the smses Dad is sending me it sounds like France is getting majorly shit on by Denmark. Goodbye France from the world cup.
From the smses Dad is sending me it sounds like France is getting majorly shit on by Denmark. Goodbye France from the world cup.
Erm, does anyone have any idea what is causing that Javascript error on load up? It just started happening all of a sudden one day… mail me please.
Two bits of news on OSC’s novels. His latest instalment in the Ender universe is Shadow Puppets. The first three chapters of it are previewable on his site. Secondly, Ender’s Game and Shadow are to be combined into a movie directed by Wolfgang Petersen. The only problem I would envisage is finding a bunch of 6 year olds that can act, but seeing Hollywood’s penchant for casting 20-something year olds as high school teens, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a 15 year old Ender. Will be interesting in any event.
A woman meets a gorgeous man in a bar. They talk, they connect and they end up leaving together. They get back to his place and, as he shows her around his apartment, she notices that his bedroom is completely packed with sweet cuddly teddy bears. Hundreds of cute small bears on a shelf all the way along the floor; cuddly medium-sized ones on a shelf a little higher; and huge enormous bears on the top shelf along the wall.
The woman is surprised that this guy would have a collection of teddy bears, especially one that’s so extensive, but she decides not to mention this to him, and actually is quite impressed by his sensitive side. She turns to him… they kiss… and then they rip each other’s clothes off and go to bed.
After an intense night of passion with this sensitive guy, they are lying there together afterwards; the woman rolls over and asks, smiling, “How was it for you?”
The man says, “Help yourself to any prize from the bottom shelf.”
Dave bet on Uruguay to win last night which meant that they didn’t. (They drew.)France is in real trouble now – the next game is a must win one, and preferably one where they win by a large a goal difference as possible. For tonight, I would back Argentina, but a better bet would be to check who Dave has his money on and go the other way :).
If you are going to get Chinese written into your skin, at least know the characters you want written there. Otherwise,
something undesirable could happen. Sure is funny…
Need a guaranteed positive return short term investment? Why don’t you bet on the World Cup? BetBrain’s sure bets compiles odds from bookies around the world. Some odds are so different, that if you bet on all outcomes (win/lose/draw), you will still make some cash. The main factor that makes this work is that odds in each country are highly affected by personal factors like patriotism. I think Dave could do with this.
Dave’s pick last night: Portugal to win by 2.
Result: USA defeated Portugal 3-2.
His record: not good.
I learnt how to play Go last night. I love it, it’s a really cool game. You know how in chess some guy moves a pawn and the commentary is something along the lines of, “dominating move, wresting control of the critical squares from his opponent, choking his supply lines”, and every normal person is like… wtf? Well, the cool thing about Go is that you can actually describe the board that descriptively, just by the patterns of pieces of the board. Go has been described as fighting a multi-front war, and, although that’s a fairly extravagant description for any board game, it’s true. The 19×19 square board is massive – I haven’t played a game on the full board yet. Go is not Reversi/Othello. The object is not to put down as many pieces of yours on the board as possible, but to control as much territory as possible. As opposed to chess, the emphasis is on controlling space through linking pieces and not through movement. Naturally, I’m a total newbie at this game, but it’s far easier to pick up than chess.
Dave’s bet for last night’s game: Poland to beat South Korea.
Result: South Korea won 2-0.
Dave’s record: 1 from 7.
Why England v Argentina is a must-watch match.
Dave, my roommate, has lost like his fifth world cup bet tonight. That’s out of six wagers… He keeps picking the wrong team!! Meanwhile I think I got 5 points off Rivaldo in the fantasy league, plus a few more as a result of Italy denying Ecuador the chance to score. Stephen picked Vieri (two goals, six points) though, so I think he’ll shoot to the top of the table tonight once the web site refreshes. The Brazil/Turkey match was interesting, especially with the two red cards in the last half (and a melodramatic acting performance by Rivaldo, clutching his face in agony after the ball struck him in the … leg).
We got our privacy group assignment back in record time after handing it in last Friday. We scored 94% which was immensely gratifying.
“But when she took a bite, she felt a strange texture.”
Just had an incredible weekend. As you know, last Friday was my 21st. It wasn’t the most auspicious of starts to the day. As midnight struck, oil was still being burnt in the form of last minute efforts for a security and privacy group assignment due 5pm later in the day. The usual flow of happy birthdays arrived over ICQ, from those still awake. Wanting to know how I was going to celebrate, I just kept telling everyone to keep July 6 free. Eventually I turned into bed a bit after 2am.
I was aroused from my slumber at 7 to the surreal sound of my doorbell ringing. I groaned a bit. The bell rang again. I grunted, made a half hearted attempt to get out of bed, but then decided to try ignoring it. Who could be so obscene as to drop in on me at that hour? For the third time, the peace shattering sounds of the bell reverberated through the air. Reluctantly I stumbled to the doorphone and grunted, “Hello?”
“Hi, delivery?”
“Yep, come up.”
I answered the door obviously half asleep, shivering in the morning cold. A woman dragging along a garbage bag stood at the door. “Hi,” she said, before opening the bag, from which immediately emerged a bunch of helium balloons. “Happy Birthday!”
“Hey, wow, thank you!” I murmured, trying to sound enthused, but I think my mind was still off in dreamland.
She bid me a good day and left me standing there in the doorway, holding a bunch of psychadelic balloons, sent to me from my gf Soph. An unpleasant awakening followed by a pleasant surprise to kick off the morning.
I got into work to the tunes of, “Hey happy birthday… so how old are you? 21? Huh? What the hell are you doing at work today??” I was wondering that myself, actually. We went out to lunch to celebrate my 21st, and another colleague’s 28th (hers was for the next day). When I got back from lunch, our assignment group had officially gone into “panic mode”. New sections were still being written, other sections being proofread. There was confusion over compilation. Over 50 e-mails, with attachments, flew back and forth. Everyone was also at work, so we were juggling our uni work with work work. E-mails switched to frantic phone calls as the 5pm deadline crept closer. At one point I rang up Skye to ask her about something. During the conversation, call waiting started beeping, but I let it go. That call happened to be Grace, who rang Skye after she was unable to get through to me. So Skye was speaking to her on her work phone and to me on her mobile. Not that unusual a situation, except that Grace also happened to be talking to Kit as well (at least I think it was him)… so there was a sort of weird four-person teleconference happening in serial. Unable to negotiate a 30 minute extension on the deadline with our lecturer, Grace, being physically closest to uni, got e-mailed the final version of the assignment. She bolted into uni to hand in our 80 page report in the nick of time. All very stressful.
The plan for that evening was a quiet dinner with Soph, with my parents supposedly coming up from Camden for dinner with me on Saturday. I caught the train/bus home. Once home, waiting in the mailbox was a present from my cousin (mentioned in the previous post). It turned out to be a gift voucher for a defensive driving course. I have no doubt it was a tongue-in-cheek gift inspired by my car accident a couple months ago. That cheeky bastard. Anyway it’s a pretty neat course, they teach you how to recover from skids, take corners properly, react to other drivers on the road and so on. As the car was still at the crash repairs – after two months, they are taking a damn long time to get it repaired – Soph drove over to pick me up. We headed off for the city, and I was beginning to feel the fatigue from the stress of the assignment. We got caught in a bit of a traffic jam and I spent my time trying to explain to her how the world cup worked, but the effort spent trying to drive and comprehend sport simultaneously was just a little too much for her :). My cousin called me up asking about his present and told me he might be around in the city later so we might be able to meet up.
“Reservation for two?” Soph inquired as we walked into Tony Roma’s on Sussex St. As we were led to an upstairs, my cousin called again, “Yep I’ll definately be in the city, where and when do you want to meet?” We got to the top of the stairs and I realised that before me was a set of closed frosted glass doors. It took me a moment to realise it was a private room. However, I find it extremely hard to talk on the phone and do anything else at the same time, and I was concentrating on the phone call at that particular moment. A few steps closer and I realised there were a bunch of silhouettes behind the doors. My eyebrows furrowed and alarm bells went off in my head, but nothing clicked. As the maitre-d opened the doors, my cousin was still chattering away on the phone and I was trying to interrupt him, “Uh… Gerald… could you hold a sec, I think something is hap–“
“SURPRISE!!”
I recoiled in shock and by reflex blurted out a “Holy Shit!” as I walked straight into a room full of screaming people. It took me a good three seconds to realise (because I was still sort of on the phone) that (a) there were a helluva lot of people aiming party poppers at my head, (b) I happened to know all of these people, and finally, (c) this was a surprise birthday party. I was half asleep at the time, but it didn’t take long for that to change. I sighted Gerald in the room and it all clicked that his call was an effective ruse to distract me up until the last moment.
Throughout the rest of the night I discovered that the past 2 weeks had been an exercise in subterfuge, deception, scheming and outright lying to me. I also discovered how downright gullible and unperceptive I am (on the walk from the car park to the restaurant, we must’ve gone past at least three cars I would’ve recognised had I not been so blind). A lot of the people there were people who had previously asked me, “so, what are you doing for your birthday on Friday?” when they damn well knew what I would be doing. But it was a mind-blowingly awesome night. Tremendous surprise, definitely unforgettable. (Even the speeches, where I got absolutely roasted. My reputation was ruined… tales about assault with a torch, profanity-filled dummy spits, and the other usual 21st stories came out. Even Hear Ye! was used against me. A post on canteen prices from over four years ago, when read aloud at a 21st sounds really sad – hey, I was doing Economics in school at the time!).
A massive, gargantuan Thank You must go out to Soph, Shen and Lill who organised everything, and to Mum and Dad who funded it :). Thanks to everyone who turned up on such short notice too, much more than I would have expected for the birthday I was planning to organise for July 6 (that I thankfully won’t have to anymore heh). The effort was much more than I deserved and really means the world to me. It’s been a busy and draining few months, especially for the BITs, and this it was just such an uplifting night.
Items from the birthday stash include: a nice jacket, cap, a metal/leather chess set, levitating Yoda figurine, large Yoda lego set, Stormtrooper t-shirt, Star Trek minature starship models, Star Trek TNG Season 1 DVD set, Lian Li PC-68 computer case (mmm), cd rack, cuff links, an internally lit globe, glass crystal with laser-etching of a dragon inside, books, much needed movie vouchers, cash, etc. Hmm, I guess people caught on to the fact that I like sci-fi!
World Cup 2002
The World Cup also started on Friday and I’ve spent a lot of the weekend watching it. I entered a fantasy league and joined a league with some mates. I’m currently coming third, but it’s tight. If you have any opinions on my lineup, let me know. I’m going to transfer in some Cameroon players later, seeing that Saudi Arabia got slaughtered by Germany 8-0 on Saturday. Cameroon are the next in line to demolish the Saudis.
Well, this is it, the Big 21. Strange age to “move” into adulthood, really. Australians, at 18, have all the legal rights and responsibilities of an adult. I guess it takes three years for the maturation process to start occurring – you go silly with those newfound rights one has at 18. Then, you slowly get over the fact that you can now walk into a bar, club or porn store without getting kicked out. Life has sure changed a lot since I was in first-year uni. Back then, there really was not a lot to worry about. Uni subjects were easy (and ultimately unimportant), free time flowed like beer on St Patrick’s day. There were so many new people to meet, and uni itself was fresh, new and the sudden freedom after 13 years of school life was liberating. Now, at the tail end of a uni degree, the pressure is on to find a job, push out a quality thesis, and prepare to move on to the next stage of life. Free time now flows like beer after 1am in NSW country towns. But anyway, that’s probably because I’ve been working full time for a year now on top of a lot of other stuff. I will be making the most of the rest of uni and living it up.
My cousin, who rented a car and taught me how to drive a manual last year, is claiming that his present this year will top that idea. He claims the present will (1) potentially save my life and (2) make me shit my pants. I wait in anticipation.
Timezones deem that I won’t be able to (legally) drink in the US for another 16 hours.
On the bus today, some girl in reference to a baby: “He’s so cute I could EAT him!”
I sure haven’t heard that expression before. Oh wait, I have. Mike Tyson said it, but the word “cute” didn’t enter into it.
Got a spare bit of cash? Pay a few thousand, and you can take a joyride in a Russian Mig. For a bit more you can experience weightlessness via a parabolic flight in an Ilyushin-76. A bit more, and you can journey to the “edge of space” in a Mig-25. For 100 G (that’s grand, not Gs as in multiples of gravity) you can book a flight on a one hour sub-orbital flight that goes over 100km high. And if your last name is Tito or Shuttleworth, and you don’t mind a price tag with 7 zeroes on the end of it, then a journey to the ISS is in order. See space adventures. One day in my lifetime, sub-orbital flight may become as affordable as taking a first-class airplane flight is today.
I get this feeling a lot, too. What a shame, people actively trying so hard to make themselves way bigger than they actually are. Well at least they haven’t claimed that “Weblogs are more popular than Jesus” … yet.
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6:10pm (GMT +10.00) from my mobile phone