Day Forty-Seven
Over Europe (?)
23 September 2007

Not much to write about today.  We woke at around seven, ate a quick breakfast and headed for the tube.

We disembarked at the wrong terminal but there is a free train between the terminals at Heathrow.  It took 20 minutes before it even left.

It’s easy to see why people take the train all over Europe.  While the actual plane part is fine, all the security having to check in hours before, it’s very time consuming.  We even had to take our shoes off for a scan!

Again a large plane with no personal screens to keep us entertained.  Being in a large plane for a dozen hours is surreal and when you finally get off it’s sometimes hard to remember when it’s supposed to be.

Today only lasts 12 hours (for us), so it’s surprising there’s little to talk about.

OK, so it’s been a while since I’ve posted. I’ve been lazy. In the time between this and the last post Christmas has come and gone (thanks to everyone for the hospitality and gifts; sorry I didn’t do the ‘haul’ roundup as usual), as well as the New Year. The drive-in the other week was cool, too.

At the behest of Justine, we made a trip into the city today to visit the Melbourne Museum. I hadn’t been to the museum since it was on Swanston Street and the underground train station nearby was called ‘Museum’ station. The exhibits at the new museum were — for the most part — quite underwhelming. The only exhibits that gave me any sort of pleasure actually centred around Melbournian history over the last hundred or so years.

The first, a short history of Melbourne, showed objects and explained what Melbourne life was like. I learned that Little Lonsdale Street was a slums to compete with some of the best slums in the World, as well as a red light district. Much of that exhibit wasn’t interesting but some of it was interesting enough to make me want to write about it here.

The second exhibit I found interesting was CSIRAC, which was Australia’s first computer and the World’s fourth (Wikipedia says fifth, but the exhibit says fourth, strange). The machine has six large cabinets to house it’s memory, which totals something like 2000 bytes of memory. Other large cabinets run the valve-powered 1000 Hz CPU and the 30,000w of power supplies. Obviously punch cards were a thing of the future in the 1950s, since CSIRAC actually used rolls of punched instructions. An amazing thing to see and it’s really the only unique thing I found at the museum of any interest to me that wasn’t a reproduction of the real thing.

There were also a couple of other 1960s computers which were interesting, but didn’t compare with CSIRAC.

So, Melbourne Museum: It’s OK … I guess.

I’ve been struggling to think of things that I can be bothered to talk about recently. Whenever I come up and an idea for something to write about, I’m not near a computer and when I do get near one, can’t be bothered anyway.

But I feel bad for not writing anything, there’s going to be a lot of writing here, and if I keep up with my recent slow pace, you might want to read a little bit of this post every couple of days.

We’re almost at the end of the US TV season for 2005/6 but a lot of decent shows popped up in the mid-season. Whether they were new shows or ones I hadn’t noticed, here’s what I’ve been watching recently:

Prison Break
I’m guessing everyone knows the plot by now, so I won’t bother regurgitating it. We’re at the business-end of Prison Break now, with only two episodes left in the season. The plot twists and turns are totally unbelievable, sure, but it’s still a fun show.

How I Met Your Mother
A little bit soppy, but this is still a decent enough sitcom which centres around a guy who decides he wants to get married as soon as possible. The interesting thing about the show, at least up to what I’ve seen, is that a lot of females are introduced in the show but none have yet been the “mother” to which the title refers.

Love Monkey
This show only lasted three episodes before it was “retired”, but VH-1 has picked up the remaining five and are airing them. Based on the book of the same name, the show revolves around a mid-30s A&R Rep for a music label based in New York. Fun, lots of music, and different. Pity it didn’t last.

My Name is Earl
Sitcom about a ne-er do well who, in hospital after being injured, decides that karma is the answer to all his life’s problems. The central character — Earl — writes a list of everything bad he’s ever done and tries to make it up to each person affected somehow. This is one of the better recent shows.

Weeds
Drama slash sitcom set in a rich, white neighbourhood. A single mother sells marijuana to the people of the neighbourhood to make ends meet after her breadwinner husband dies suddenly, leaving her with two kids and a mortgage to pay off.

Hustle
British show which has now finished it’s third season. No idea why I hadn’t heard about this earlier but it’s a really great show. A group of conmen each week try to con someone who should know better out of a great deal of money. Lots of style and a tongue-in-cheek manner make this show really fun.

Well, that’s a hell of a lot of writing so I think I’ll sign off for now.

Weather not much improved. Went to conference opening cocktail party thing which was rather boring.

Grabbed some dinner and am absolutely knackered.

Excluding naps, I’ve been up for 21 hours which is pretty rare for me.

Sleep time.

Today at work I chaired interviews. This means that I was the “lead” interviewer of a panel of three people.

There were three people we were interviewing today, for a short-term IT job in our office. I’ve only ever been to maybe a dozen job interviews and I really don’t like them. Asking the questions as opposed to answering them is quite a different experience. Some people in my office have told me they were as nervous being an interviewer as they were an interviewee. Thankfully, this didn’t happen to me.

I won’t go into much detail about the three people being interviewed, as this is not the appropriate place to talk about such things. Something interesting though, is that I asked all three a technical question (regarding Windows, file copying and permissions) that all three interviewees got wrong.

After the second interviewee answered incorrectly, I began to doubt myself and thought maybe I had the answer to the question wrong. When the third person answered incorrectly I was almost certain. I asked Richard back at the office and he also answered incorrectly. Four people vs. me? Obviously I’m wrong.

We Googled the answer and as it turns out, I was right all along! So three potential employees and one current employee got a relatively simple question wrong. Lesly managed to get the answer right, and of anyone he was the one I expected wouldn’t get it right (as he doesn’t have a lot of Windows server experience)… just goes to show.

Prior to conducting the interviews, I’d narrowed the selection of applicants to three and had had a hard time deciding which I’d liked. After the interviews, I’m in exactly the same position as before, except I don’t have interviews coming up to help make a choice! “Eenie meenie”, anyone?

Got up early, as predicted, had an average meal (almost cold), went to work and sat in a meeting room from 9:00 until 15:30.

During our short break for lunch, someone asked Anne and I whether we’d seen Henry the elephant seal who was visiting Geelong since we were staying just up the road from where he’d decided to use as his own private beach. Neither of us had ever heard of Henry so shrugged. We were told where he was and I knew that place well enough (I don’t know Geelong too well but some parts I know).

As we left Geelong we decided to go and pay Henry a visit. So, we went to where he was supposed to be and sure enough, there was a 500kg seal lying on the beach, with his head on the footpath.

We seemed to have arrived at a good time, as two wildlife rangers were attempting to get him to move back from the footpath. So, instead of seeing a fat seal doing nothing, we got to see a fat seal doing nothing, moving for a bit (in that blubber-rippling way) and then doing nothing again.

I took a photo with my phone’s camera but it’s pretty crap, so I’m not going to bother posting it. You should all know what a seal looks like anyway… right?

We’ve all seen those ads for Hutchinson Telecom’s 3 phones, where people are having a video call and using the magic of vision to show the other party what they’re talking about.

I don’t have a video phone since they’re too big and the coverage isn’t good enough to bother. The camera feature of my phone is used mostly for taking photos of funny things or as a last-ditch camera because I don’t have any others.

When I was getting some stuff at the supermarket today, I couldn’t remember whether Justine had asked me to get one thing or another… It was a capsicum or something, really uninteresting (just like this post!) Technology was the answer to my conundrum! Why talk and describe the two things when I could just show Justine what I was rambling on about?

Of course, I ended up getting a call shortly after I sent the message to clarify which things she wanted, so it didn’t really end up being very useful.

Thanks, technology!