Monday, May 31st 2004

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Japanese Mice

While we were eating cheese last night...

... Yuko mentioned that prior to the introduction of cheese to Japan from Europe, Japanese mice had never tasted cheese. Poor mice!

The question is: What did the Japanese put on mousetraps when there was no cheese?

Encounter

While walking in Lane Cove at lunch-time, I encountered three shifty looking characters walking in the opposite direction. I was wearing a jacket with a logo which matched the logo worn by one member of the group, so I hid mine from view, but I think they may have recognised me anyway. I told them they would not find what they were looking for in Lane Cove. They replied that they were aware of this and only intended to mill around anyway. I suspect at least two of them were also members of the TPF.

Plates

Yuko got away from me for 30 minutes and bought a set of plates...

...which we used in the evening for John Dory.

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Mother

Mother had some difficulty with her new answering machine. When I tried leaving a message, it answered with the built-in American voice rather than the message I recorded. Mother doesn't like an American voice answering her phone so I'll have to go there tomorrow and re-record the OGM.

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Sunday, May 30th 2004

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Umbrella Story - Part 2

Yesterday in Part 1 of Umbrella Story...

A young girl went to school with an old tattered
umbrella. But the other girls laughed at her and
made her life a misery. The girl asked her father
to buy her a new umbrella, but he refused. The girl
was taunted and ridiculed for the rest of her school
days and she became bitter and twisted.

And now, click here for the shocking conclusion...

Not Epitome

We didn't go to Epitome today! Instead, Yuko suggested that we be disloyal to Epitome and go to the cafe at Woolwich which we saw yesterday. So we did.

We sat at a table with a view of the harbour (bridge included) and it was very pleasant. The music was peaceful and relaxing. The atmosphere was too nice for me to consider getting my computer out and doing some work.

We both ordered eggs and the food was nice, but I didn't think it was quite as nice as Epitome.

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Saturday, May 29th 2004

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Umbrella Story - Part 1

Once upon a time, in the Land of the Rising Sun,
there was a young girl who was happy and joyful.
She looked forward to the day when she would grow
big enough to go to school where she would meet
other children and make lots of new friends.

When she was old enough, the young girl's mother gave
her an old yellow umbrella and sent her off to school.
When she arrived at school with her yellow umbrella, she
saw that the other girls in her class all had new fashionable
umbrellas which were much nicer than hers. The other
girls laughed and said:

"Look at the ugly yellow umbrella!.
It's old and tattered and out of fashion!"

The young girl was very sad. She went home and said
to her father:

"Father, all the other girls at school
have nice new fashionable umbrellas.
They laugh at me because my umbrella is
ugly and tattered. Please buy me a new
umbrella so that the other girls will
not laugh at me."

But her father said:

"I will not buy you a new umbrella!
Be satisfied that your old yellow umbrella
keeps the rain off your head. Away with you
my greedy daughter and don't bother me."

So the young girl went away to sulk in a corner
and she was condemned to use the ugly tattered
yellow umbrella for the remainder of her school
days. And the other girls continued to laugh at her
and taunt her because of her ugly tattered umbrella.
And she was sad and bitter.

To be continued...

Part 2

Woolwich

In the afternoon, Mother called and said there was a house open for inspection over at Woolwich. So we went. It was just a few doors along from the former house of Thelma (Mother's aunt who died a few years ago).

It was a very old house, built around 1890, but it was partly modernised inside resulting in a nice mix of old and new. They're asking something around $4.5Mil. We decided not to make an offer, but rather, to buy coffee at the Woolwich Pier.

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Friday, May 28th 2004

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Mind Games

Yuko wore the red jacket today to continue the mind games with Patricia. Yuko denied ever having a green jacket and Patricia was suitably freaked out.

Dream Accountability

Yuko had a dream in which I did something bad. She therefore wanted me to apologise for it although it wasn't really me! Patricia agreed with her so I guess it was probably my fault!

Girls' Talking

Yuko went for a "Girls' Talking" meeting. I dropped her at the station at 11.30am and she went into the city by train.

Yuko, Keiko, Seiko, Keiko

While Yuko was out I had free time.

Hangiri

Yuko used the hangiri in the manner outlined by John Smith a couple of days ago...

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Thursday, May 27th 2004

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Autumn...

...has arrived (according to the big tree at Epitome). The leaves are really falling now. This lets more sun through and helps us keep warm. We hope the tree will be bare ASAP because it's getting too cold to sit outside except in the sunny bits.

Yuko wore her green silk jacket and this confused Patricia who could have sworn that Yuko's jacket was red! Yuko stuck to her story that it's always been green. I told Yuko to wear the red one tomorrow so that we can continue the mind games with Patricia. We have already convinced her that our names really are Dorothy and Toto!

Yuko took this picture without my knowledge while I was engrossed in my book...

Cardigan

Because Yuko recently bought another red cardigan, she decide to give the other one to Mother. So we dropped in to Mother's house at about 12.30pm to bring her the present.

She was very happy!

Silk

Yuko thought that her green silk jacket would suit me, but I'm skeptical.

Mother

Mother's answering machine has been slowly dying. She therefore asked me to buy her another one. So I went up to Chatswood in the afternoon and bought this little machine. I took it round and connected it up and she was very happy. It's only drawback is that it has an American accent!

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Wednesday, May 26th 2004

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Yuko Shops

Although I knew the possible result, I allowed Yuko to go off alone after breakfast while I stayed at Epitome. When she returned, she was laden with stuff and slightly poorer.

The stuff included another silk jacket and a wooden sushi bowl...

Solicitor

It turns out that my solicitor has not absconded to South America with Bob's money after all. While I was sitting in the plaza waiting for Yuko to return from shopping, the solicitor came strolling by. I accosted him and demanded to know the status of the estate. He gave me the stock answer: "the letter is in the mail".

When we arrived home the letter was indeed in our mailbox! It outlines the proposed distribution of money. I just have sign the form and send it back. This will give him authorisation to abscond to a tax haven of his choice.

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Blog

Due to the email notification problem with the blog, I decided to add a feature to display links to the most recent postings. But while I was doing that, the problem fixed itself. In fact, a few hours after that, I started receiving the email notifications from yesterday's postings!

Actually I've decided that my whole web site is a technical crock and I should re-do the whole thing using up-to-date web standards. Currently there is a lot of deprecated crap!

Of course it might also be a literary crock, but that is more subjective.

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Tuesday, May 25th 2004

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Strange Day

It was a strange day.

When I woke up and looked out the window there was water falling from the sky! Water continued to fall from the sky at various times throughout the day.

Blog Hack

When someone posts a comment to this blog, I get an email notification containing the text of the posting. However, today there were a couple of comments posted but I did not get notification emails. Could it be that the Mole hack had more profound effects than I first thought????

Probably not. I think it's just a gremlin.

Walk

I haven't been exercising enough recently, and I didn't play badminton last week, so today I went walking. Water began falling from the sky as soon as I set out. But I continued and only got moderately wet.

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Disney

I received a distressing and harassing email from an employee of the Disney Corporation. He claimed his workplace was filled with "bizarre and oddly shaped creatures". I assume he was on mind altering drugs at the time which is probably a requirement for Disney employees.

Raindrop

I've got through half a page of Raindrop. I know the notes - but I still need a lot of practice to get it right before I move on to the next section.

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Monday, May 24th 2004

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Silk

Yuko bought a silk jacket at Lane Cove, so I have to show it.

In the public toilet at Lane Cove, I noticed the following story written on the wall. It is a surprisingly detailed account of a typical evening at home for a family in Lane Cove. As it gives an insight into the culture of the local people I felt it deserved a wider audience. I have edited the image a bit where the original handwriting was unclear.

Music

I got through a few more bars of Raindrop. Progress was helped by the fact that some of it was a repeat of the first bit.

Hacker

Laughing Mole hacked my blog and succeeded in making the fist half of May (from May 19th to the bottom of the page) look a bit funny...

I guess I should robustify* my reply-posting software.

* I claim to have invented this word and its variant forms including, but not limited to, robustivity, robustification, robustivism, robustifismist, robustified and robustifier.

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Sunday, May 23rd 2004

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Tom Tom

My second first cousin twice removed has been named Tom, after his grandfather. But we've decided to call him Tom Tom.

Fortune

At a Chinese restaurant on April 26th I got a fortune cookie containing the following fortune...

Well... today it came true. When I was getting out of the car at Lane Cove, I spotted this...

And did this...

So, just as the cookie predicted, I travelled to Lane Cove and came into fortune.

Music

Since I moved my keyboard to the living room, I have been practicing a lot more than I used to because it's right there next to me all the time. Mother has also been nagging me to practice more and whenever she visits she forces me to play so she can check my progress.

In the afternoon I decided to pull out my Chopin book and learn to play something new. Although I know how to read music, I can't read fast enough to play directly from sheet music. I have to decipher it one note at a time... and then practice... and practice and memorise... but I get there eventually.

So I decided to learn two bars of this:

Yes, Prelude Opus 28 No. 15. A delightful piece which readers probably know better as "The Raindrop Prelude". I thought two bars would be as much as I could handle in one day. I was therefore surprised to get through 4 bars quite quickly. By evening, I could play them adequately most of the time.

Although I can already play a couple of other Chopin pieces adequately, I only play simplified (baby) versions of them rather than the original full versions. If I can learn "The Raindrop" it will be the first Chopin piece I can play fully the way Fred himself intended. Actually it might be the only Chopin piece simple enough for me to be capable of playing in full.

Trivia Note: The name Raindrop comes from the repetition of one note (A flat) throughout most of the piece, which mimics the sound of water dripping.

Clothed Sushi Chef

Compare with the Naked Sushi Chef from February 19th

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Saturday, May 22nd 2004

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Auction

In the morning we skipped (actually delayed) breakfast and went to the auction of a house in our street. We looked through it about a month ago.

First, we went to pick up Mother and found that an archeological dig was in progress outside her house.

Then we proceeded to the auction.

The people gathered round in a semi-circle to enact the auction ritual, but it was not very exciting.

We expected the price would be well over $1Mil, so we were shocked when the first bid was only $750,000. The auctioneer sneered at this bid and at first declined to accept it. He eventually accepted it but immediately made a vendor bid of $950,000. The original bidder (the guy whose legs line up with the photographer's head) made one more bid of $975,000 and that was it. It was passed in with only one bidder. This may be a manifestation of the property slump we've heard about.

Then, a garage sale. Yuko only bought an egg slice for 20 cents. She wanted to buy a Japanese jewellery box, and she was just about to offer $6.00 for it, when the woman said they wanted $100. So Yuko decided not to make an offer.

Organ

In the afternoon I practiced playing horror movie themes for pipe organ...

Korean

In the evening, Mother invited us to the Korean BBQ restaurant.

It was crowded!

This time, I was not abused by any of the patrons.

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Friday, May 21st 2004

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Anniversary

Today is an unpleasant anniversary for me. One year ago, I was called to a meeting at which CISRA informed me of certain things (which I probably can't mention), which forced me to initiate certain actions (which I probably can't mention), which prompted CISRA to sack me three months later.

Happy anniversary CISRA.

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No Badminton

I was listed as a reserve for badminton so I assumed I wouldn't be playing today. But when I checked my email at about noon, a spot had opened up and I could have played. However, having psyched myself up for not playing, I decided to pass. They had an abundance of players anyway.

Free Time

I requested free time, and it was granted.

I had a couple of boring things to do... Pick up my dry-cleaning and get a tyre fixed.

Misty's left-rear tyre has been leaking for a while so I decided to take her to the tyre doctor. I went to Mathews Tyre Service on the Pacific Highway at Artarmon. I like that place because there's plenty of space so you don't have to worry you're blocking someone in when you drive in there; and the service is good too.

They could have told me I needed a new tyre and I would have believed it - but they found a puncture and fixed it without even asking me if I wanted a new tyre. So it only cost $25.

Photos

It was an unusual day today. I didn't take any photos!

However, I'll post some anyway...
In relation to Wednesday's quiz about the identity of the person in this picture...

Click these thumbnails for a clue...

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Thursday, May 20th 2004

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Christians

Two Christian women came to the door this morning just as we were about to leave for Balmoral. One of them asked me a confusing abstract question about "the problems of today" which seemed like a lead-in to an extended theological debate.

So I told them to go to hell.

Balmoral

We skipped breakfast (except fot coffee on the back patio) and instead went to Balmoral to look at houses for sale. First this unit right on the beach front...

I didn't like it that much, except for the location. There are many nicer houses right here in Riverview (without the beach front). They expect to get about $3.5Mil for it.

Then a house located up the hill a bit. It would be a pain to have to walk to the beach from there.

It was a tad small inside...

But Yuko estimated it would be worth about $4.5Mil, and thats exactly what the agent said when we asked him. So again, Yuko was spot on! She's very good at estimating house prices.

After looking at houses, we continued with our plan to picnic on the pseudo-island that separates one end of the beach from the other. We bought lunch at the Bottom of the Harbour and took our blanket to a grassy shady spot.

We were harassed by several seagulls who were too lazy to catch their own fish. I gave them a good talking to and told them that we, being human, and without fishing equipment, had to buy our fish at the shop; while they, being seagulls, were supposed to catch their fish in the sea with their own beaks - but they were not very receptive to my rhetoric.

Later, we were visited by Nou Nou, who was much more polite...

The Blogger From Baghdad

There was a guy called Salam Pax on Enough Rope the other day. He became famous by writing a blog from his home in Baghdad during the war. He turned it into a book and now he's in Sydney for the Sydney Writers' Festival. Today I found his blog and added it to my other blogs page. It looks interesting, but I haven't had a chance to read much yet.

Heart Failure

I saw items of three TV news programs tonight about a new implantable device for correcting heart arhythmias. The ninemsn site has the story. They talked about it as if this is a completely new idea; and yet we were making defibrillators and anti-tachycardia pacemakers at Telectronics 15 years (or more) ago?

I'm sure it's much more sophisticated than the ones I worked on, but from the description on the news, it sounded like tachy-reversion is a brand new invention.

Keiko

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Wednesday, May 19th 2004

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Blog Changes

I've been posint a lot of images recently and the page for a month can be quite big when displayed in full. So...

I've modified the blog so that by default it displays only the five most recent entries. This limits the size of the page to what I hope is a reasonable size for dialup access.

Of course the full month can still be displayed by using the new link at the top of the page.

1C2R

I have a new second first cousin twice removed.

Kylie, my first cousin once removed, has given birth to a baby boy, who is therefore my first cousin twice removed. And because I already had a first cousin twice removed, he is my second first cousin twice removed. He's big too... 4kg.

If I had a baby photo, I wouldn't post it. But I don't have one so I won't post it anyway.

City

Yuko had to go to the City for XXXXXXXX XX XXX so I went with her and we had lunch at a Japanesey cafe called "Yama" in the QVB.

I say "Japanesey" rather than Japanese because it has Japanese and European food. Yuko thinks it's probably run by Koreans.

Yuko took this picture, not because she wanted a picture of me, but because the guy behind me was wearing a Rolex...

Then while Yuko went to XXXXX I went to browse at Abbey's Bookshop in York Street. I found a excellent book about XXXX so I bought it.

Mother

Mother asked me to perform some illegal acts. She will contact me again when she has all the necessary supplies. I'd better not mention the details here...

Quiz

Does anyone recognise this CISRA person?

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Tuesday, May 18th 2004

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Epitome

Yuko let slip that we'd gone to another cafe yesterday and Patricia rightly chastised her for disloyalty.

Purses

Today, Yuko washed her purses and hung the up to dry...

Turning Air into Ink

Usually, when the low ink indicator on our printer comes on, we buy a new ink cartridge. Well, it came on the other day and Yuko took the cartridge to the shop to ensure she got the right one. They didn't have it in stock so she brought the cartridge home and I put it back in the printer. The low-ink light did not come back on. Then, today, we printed about 20 pages of full colour photos using the "empty" cartridge, and the low-ink light still has not come on!

The lesson... when your ink runs out, just shake!

You can with an Epson!

Hoax

The other day I was watching the CBS Evening News from the U.S. They were talking about the fake photographs which have been published recently (in relation to the war in Iraq). They talked about the faking of photos in general and showed a familiar picture...

This was interesting as I beleive I know the person who created this image. But of course, I may have fallen victim to a hoax.

More about the shark photo.

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Monday, May 17th 2004

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Not Epitome!

We decided not to go to Epitome today. Instead we had breakfast at the Bathers' Pavillion at Balmoral Beach...

The weather was perfect for this beachy diversion from our regular routine. Although I took Fifi, the beachy atmosphere made me too lazy to do any work, so Fifi stayed in the bag.

Then we went for a walk and Yuko harassed Billy the dead dog...

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Beheading

I watched the full video of the beheading of Nick Berg. It was not as graphic as the violence in some Hollywood movies to which we have become so desentitised. But the knowledge that this is a real murder makes it quite a chilling experience to watch it.

Postscript: After Yuko read the item above, she wanted to see the video too. I let her watch it and she was appalled.

Tabloid TV

It's 11:30pm and Yuko is watching Jerry Springer! I thought I'd weaned her off it! There are two big fat twin sisters having a punch up over some guy and one of them is getting naked...

Note: Pixelisation done by broadcaster

And yet... I can't look away... I'd better get drunk...

Video (1Mb)

Jerry! Jerry! Jerry! Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!

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