I just had one of those incredibly surreal experiences. The story starts yesterday evening when I received a phone call. It was from a guy at Fitness First. Turns out Ben Z had just joined at Rockdale and given them my name. One of those programs where each successful referral saves you $5 a month. Having thought about doing something to drop the excess fat I’ve been picking up over the last 5 years I was slightly interested, but wanted to think it over, so I gave the interested, but not that interested response and that was that....

This is from an article today on SMH: Faheem Khalid Lodhi, 36, of Lakemba, had planned to attack the Australian electricity supply system, likely causing widespread death and destruction. Without knowing exactly what this guy specifically planned on doing, I find it difficult to see how an attack on the Australian electricity system would likely cause 'widespread death and destruction'. Firstly hospitals have backup generators so no deaths there. A power plant blowing up might kill the staff and destroy the station, but thats not exactly widespread....

This is my third and final post on the internet and relationships. See part 1 and part 2. Kylie brought to my attention another negative aspect the internet plays in our relationships. While the internet makes it hard to have meaningful positive relationships with people (i.e. relationships where you are friendly towards each other) it makes negative relationships much easier (i.e. relationships that are about hurting the other). It is much easier to tear someone down, insult them or humiliate them over the internet....

I recommend you read part 1 first. Computers seem to be mostly about adding files, editing files, browsing files, and sometimes deleting files. On the internet we can do the same thing - we browse sites, and if we’re particularly savvy we might add and edit our own. Computers are all about managing data sets. A sad reflection on the state of our society is that the internet is turning our relationships into data sets that we can manage....

How many of you have ever spent hours and hours chatting to someone on IM over a month or so, but ever time you meet them in person its like you don’t even know each other? Well I have. It was quite strange. One of the more eerie moments in my life. You stand there thinking in your mind of all the hours you’ve spent chatting, of all the different conversations, and how the way it felt then feels so much more different to now....

From Kylie’s blog: My friend Caleb and I are starting a blogging war. He is jealous that my blog gets more hits than his. We decided that he needs to get embroiled in a scandal and blog about it to get some hits (there were suggestions of embezzlement and unwanted pregnancies). Check him out here so that he feels some love http://inference.blogspot.com/ and when he gloats that he gets more hits than me, I can tell him its cause all my readers hit him up out of pity!...

After all these years, I’ve finally got around to putting The Insectocutor online. Enjoy.

This morning I saw an advert on TV for Credit Suisse - some sort of Swiss bank. You can watch the advert too by following the link to “TV Spot 2” on their current ad campaign page. The ad consists (much like the pdf’s on that afore mentioned page) of a statement: ‘some think …’, followed by a redefinition in their terms: ‘we think …’. What left me gob-smacked was that each alternative they presented was essentially a buzzword....

There are some brilliant minds working for the RTA. The most interesting example of their brilliance is a particular stretch of road near where I live, that I daily travel on to get to work. The stretch I am referring to is the lead up to Tom Ugly’s Bridge on the Sutherland side. Tom Ugly’s Bridge actually consists of 2 bridges. The western, northbound bridge is a truss bridge. The eastern, southbound bridge is a fairly standard box girder bridge....

Living out of home means that you have to cook for yourself. Today I decided to get experimental and make something I call the Molten Mallowwich. The Molten Mallowwich is basically a toasted sandwich with marshmallows on it. I tried it with 9. I ended up with molten marshmallow on my hands and face. Next time I’ll use 4 to 6. Maybe I’ll mix it up with some peanut butter or jam too....