I just came back from Tyrone’s 2nd birthday party. It was a Wiggles theme and lots of people had skivvies on. About an hour after it started, Hamish and Andy and a film crew from Rove turned up to say hello as part of their weekend party marathon. This was the 14th party they had been to so far and they though they were on target to get to 30 before the night was out. What a time NOT to have a camera.

Now that half of the children have left the nest, the house is starting to look a bit empty. There are rooms that don’t even get visited every day, so it seems about time to find a smaller place to live. Having only recently completed the renovations, the plan was not to move for about two years. However, the other day we were driving home and saw that a nearby apartment complex that has been under construction for the last six months, was open for inspection. We just went in to have a quick look and walked out having bought one.

It is only two bedrooms, but it is brand new and has plenty of space. The complex has a park in the middle and the apartment backs onto the park with a gate straight into the back courtyard.

Check out the preliminary pictures. (This is the display version, ours is actually not finished yet).

Last night I had the honour of attending a gala dinner at the Sydney Hilton to receive a Bronze Award for the Sydney Water Annual Report in the Australasian Reporting Award. I work as one of the three people on the editorial team that puts the report together.

It is the second award since I have been working on the report, the first being for the 2005 report. (We didn’t enter in 2006). Now it is time to start working on the 2008 report. Head down bum up from now till it is finished.

We managed to recover the missing piece of the puzzle from the dog today and the bookcase is complete!

Ahhhh, the joys of flatpack furniture. We just bought two bookcase/wall units from Oz Design called Wangaratta or West Wyalong or something. Had they come from Ikea (Swedish for poor service) they would have had strange names like kuksugare or fittaö Anyway, these things are designed to explode across the room as soon as you open the box and then it takes about three hours to make sure you have the 20,000 pieces that are 3mm long. Once that is all in place you work your way through the instructions written in clear Chinglish (or Swedeglish) and 3 days later end up with something that looks like a different item in the catalogue.
There are professional flatpack furniture assemblers who will come to your house and do this. Yes, people actually make a living out of it. When you ring for a quote, if you have already started building the furniture they also include the cost of a marriage counsellor.
Anyway, last night we had a crack at the second piece of furniture and it all looked to be going well. The bookcase was assembled and only the small doors needed to go on two of the compartments. It was at this time we discovered the danger of sorting the pieces on the floor.
The doors required small round plastic hinge bushes to be placed in the wood to hold the doors in place. They are about the same size, colour, shape (and possibly taste) of the kibble that we feed the dog. Jules had taken great interest in our work and seems to have internalised some of it. So now we have to follow the dog around for 48 hours to await the delivery of the missing piece. Oh crap!

If you are reading this on 27 January you should stop immediately and un-plug your modem, for today is World No Internet Day. So instead of staying inside and playing a computer game, go outside and play a real game, have a real face to face chat with a real person in a real room, and let the emails wait for 24 hours.

In an interesting experiment to see how quickly Google Adsense can bring traffic to your site, a Sydney blogger has set up a page to collect Heather Ledger Jokes.

Initially the traffic was high and cheap, but the click thru price of the Google search soon went through the roof, with a price of $6.50 for a click thru on the phrase “Heather Ledger Dead”.

As for the jokes themselves, the quality is not that high.
My favourite?
Q: Which script does Heath Ledger wish he’d read?

A: The one from the chemist.

With an honourable mention to:

Grim Repear stands with Heath Ledger in front of him and yells, “you morons, I said bring me the DEATH LEDGER”.

Damn, I knew I shouldn’t have joined the “al Qaeda Appreciation Group” in Facebook. It seems one of the directors of Facebook is also associated with a technology venture capital firm set up by the CIA.

So it seems that this social networking site is an easy way for the US government to obtain private information about millions of people around the world, without them even knowing.

Have a look at this article from The Guardian.

This video has been gathering dust on my shelf for years now. It shows me jumping out of a perfectly serviceable aircraft for no apparent reason. I was a bit hung over at the time, but that soon ended.

Enjoy