Thanks .info!

Yes I guess this makes me an uber-nerdy bird watcher; or should that be listener?

Picking up the one dollar coin was a no-brainer; hey it’s a buck. Now over the years I’ve managed, somehow, to develop a reasonably well honed risk-reward brain function. There was fifty cents a fair way toward the centre of a very busy Elizabeth street with large, heavy buses constantly passing by amongst a multitude of smaller but just as deadly cars. I decided it was best to forfeit it and I was quite proud of this decision!

Not more than five seconds after arriving at this very sensible course of inaction an elderly lady beside me hobbled over onto the road and expended a great deal of effort to bend over and retrieve the silver specie. Bless! I thought to myself. What a nice lady — of course I’ll let her keep it when she offers. Except that she didn’t. She pocketed the treasure and with nary a sideways glance resumed her position next to me, not more than two arm lengths away. Flabbergasted is probably an accurate description.

That was the second time within a fortnight that I had been swindled by a woman, although the previous incident was far more costly and, in turn, far more embarrassing. And no, you won’t get that one out of me

Then one day, beyond prediction and imagination and without context: a house is built around me while I thought I was outside, giving me two places I want to be rather than here. A new turmoil to be sure; one that leaves me reeling: wondrous, breathless and afraid.

My involvement revolves around a series of four lectures that I give to the students involved in designing the web site hosting the search engine, in which I cover topics such as:

• The World Wide Web: Past, Present and Future
• HTML: Semantics and validation
• CSS: Joy from the separation of content and presentation
• Accessibility: Making the web truly world wide

On the Thursday night of the school we hold a programming competition over two hours where students break up into teams of three to tackle a series of programming and web design questions. Scott and Matt from Atlassian were kind enough to volunteer as mentors for the night. The mentor’s role during the competition is to provide encouragement and direction to the team that they are assigned to as well as to discuss career options within the IT industry. It was particularly awesome to see Scott and one of his students working feverishly with pen and paper (and later a laptop) over dinner, discussing how to implement a recursive descent parser.

The event culminates in an all night work-a-thon on the Friday night where students and tutors stay up all night to complete their work followed by a presentation to parents and the client the next day. This is the most satisfying part of the experience for teachers and tutors as we get to sit back and enjoy the efforts of these talented students. I was absolutely thrilled to see students using fully CSS based layouts for their web site designs. One team even managed to add a touch of AJAX to their search form with search suggestions as you type, with no input from me I might add!

Huge congratulations are in order for Drs. James Curran and Tara Murphy whose tireless efforts every year are critical to the success of this event and to the many tutors who attend to guide their teams through the grueling program that is the NCSS.

Long to reign over you
God save your Queen

The next time that we go to a referendum the pro-republic campaigners should rub our noses in this; the motion ought to pass by a light year. To allow this rubbish to continue would be downright un-australian.

Watch the skies? I wouldn’t — it’s probably the wrong direction entirely.

Hey — just because there is no need will rarely prevent me from doing something — but you knew that already.

Ikaruga arrived the other day in my mailbox, after I had to painstakingly scour the Internet for a place from which to purchase the PAL version, after the incredibly stupid GameNation/Atari Australia decided to can the Australian release, on the very day it was going to be released. I could go on about my feelings toward GameNation at the moment but I have released all my fury with them over the last two weeks and I will instead simply say this: Ikaruga is awesome, in all of the ways an arcade game should be awesome. Quite simply it is perhaps the best $90 I have spent in recent memory. You can read some great reviews about the game elsewhere so I will not make any more comments on it other than that. For those of you who have an abnormal fetish for shoot–em–ups as I do, may I recommend Shmups mk2 to you? Thanks.

Ikaruga’s “old school” action has enticed a surge of nostalgia to wash over me — so much so that I have actually pulled out my A1200 from the mausoleum that is my chest of drawers and hooked it up to my amp and television. This venerable beast has to be around seven years old now and when I turned it on, it quickly got to work booting and within seconds a familiar looking Workbench screen appeared and seemed to quip “How’s it goin’ mate?” It is exactly how I left it when I switched it off all of those years ago and even the clock in it has kept the time perfectly. Within another few seconds I had instinctively given “The Chaos Engine” icon a swift clicker-roo and was enjoying a long over due blast with my old two button digital joystick and that exhilarating sound track booming from my new home theatre system. Before I knew it I had completed the first world and was so engrossed that just about everything else I had to do today had vanished in a wisp of vapour that must have escaped through my left ear. Absolutely fantastic stuff.

As I sit here now, typing on this — this thing — this monstrosity that people today call the modern PC, I can’t help but get a little angry and annoyed. I look at the Amiga — how good it was, how good and perfectly functional it still is, and how it absolutely outclassed everything in its day (yes including my beloved Nintendo’s SNES) and then I look at this multimedia behemoth with its hulking, barely manageable operating system and I cringe inside. I am not going to sit here and say, as I once did, that the Amiga is better than the PC. What I will say however is that today’s home computer experience should be a whole lot better than it is.

Do not let anyone tell you that capitalism and the free market produce the best products — it doesn’t, it’s just a popularity contest, and we know how great and exceedingly fair those are.

• Extreme pain inflicted during a paint ball session
• A university graduation ceremony
• A compulsively purchased surround sound system along with the associated painful re-organisation of my room (read: full) to accommodate it
• The purchase of a god damn massive television by one of my friends
• An Easter long-weekend (fake Easter mind you)
• Some longer than my usual workday training courses
• etcetera

I hope to have you a more substantial diatribe posted by this weekend. You know I am good for it.