No learning, no hugging

11:12am: Just a link
A sad story, but sweet too: http://www.ocregister.com/articles/pixar-up-movie-2468059-home-show

One of those stories that helps keep things in perspective.

6:49pm: The Hub
Kate & I had an idea for a business.

It will be like the ultimate nerd hub. It will feature a cafe/theatre sort of area with squashy couches & tables & a coffee bar. Through one door is a gaming shop with cards & board games. Through the second door is a LAN gaming room (pay per hour!). Through the last door is a bookshop with an emphasis on quality books & niche markets. It will be called The Hub, because the cafe part of it will be the hub between all the other parts, and the place in general will be a hub of nerd activity. The cafe could even have a cinema screen for alternate nerd movies, & it can act as a gaming area or a place to read & chill out.

I figure people will come for one thing & be lured into more. I think it would work if we can find a place (maybe a town) where this would represent a monopoly on the nerd market. Nowhere that has a gaming shop already, we want to be the only one.

Who wants to invest?

7:14am: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_nutricula

Turritopsis nutricula is a hydrozoan with a life cycle in which it reverts to the polyp stage after becoming sexually mature. It is the only known case of a metazoan capable of reverting completely to a sexually immature, colonial stage after having reached sexual maturity as a solitary stage (Piraino et al. 1996, p. 302). It does this through the cell development process of transdifferentiation. Theoretically, this cycle can repeat indefinitely, rendering it biologically immortal.

These jellyfish can spend eternity being horny adolescents. They are only half a centimetre long so the oceans aren't likely to choke with them despite their immortality. However, their tiny size does mean their eternal sexy-time can be ended by a passing goldfish. Seems like a mixed deal overall. I think I'd take it.

6:35am: Homewards
Yup, so, I've been in the UK with very scarce internet for the past two-and-half weeks. I was visiting my sick aunt, who is now much better - I think it was the drugs she had been given by various doctors (20-30 pills a day) that were doing damage. She is off them all now, & seems to be revived.

The UK is much the same. It's gloomy. It's going into deep recession due to ineptitude by the banks, who, (by the way) they hate over here with a passion that leaves Australian bank-bashers in the shade. The skies are grey, which doesn't seem to help - when I say it's probably 40 degrees in Australia they moan about how much they'd love that - but I don't think they really would. They still imitate us though. There are few proper beaches in the UK so they substitute by finding gravelly patches of land that happen to have ocean bordering them. They call these stony pits "beaches". When you spread blankets on the stones and lie down under the grey drizzly skies it's called "sunbathing". (I asked, & it's definately not called "denial"). I think lying on stones may actually be good for your back though, I see few UK folks with back problems.

The UK has layers. Down one street you'll see tudor era buildings rubbing against 70s office blocks. Victorian buildings against shopping malls in another street. The layers of history stick out like a fossil record of architeture, but so haphazard that the only way to interpret them is by knowing what they are already. I like it. Way different to Australia, which has had a lot less time to become eccentric.

Anyway, I'm nearly done in the UK now. I have pics but I can't show 'em - they are 3 megs each & there's nothing to be done about it with only MS Paint in my arsenal.

Hope all goes well in Australia...

3:00pm: Ah....yes
Do you "have" a blog if you yourself have forgotten it exists until some random bookmark shuffling turns it up? Is it enough to remember the password or does it become yours only when you imbue it with ownership and purpose through regular updates?

Yes, well, anyway. What's new at the house?

NYE party went fine, had an omgwtfbbg with actual sausages and an actual gazebo (a structure frequented normally only by Jekyll).

I bought a canvas. I'm going to paint something. I know little, well nothing really, about painting technique, but I want to paint without being constrained by expectations, or techniques, or suitability as an artist. If it doesn't work, I will give it someone as a present and act all offended if they don't hang it.

We had a recruitment round at work. I had to chair the recruitment panel because everyone else who might have done it was away. It is a sizable chunk of work & I'd never done it before... but luckily I didn't make more than one mistake in the presence of any single person. I just have to hope that said individuals never meet and compare notes. It is tough times in Canberra all of a sudden - I was weighing up the applications of people with considerably more qualifications and experience than me. Soon I'll have to negotiate salaries with our lucky winners & it will all be done.

We had celebrations about the US election. I have been looking into some of the old presidents in the hope of the answering the question of whether Bush is in fact the very worst president in history. I think he probably is. The awful early presidents (the ones on either side of Lincoln) acted in a void of information and a time in which events could proceed a long way before any kind of presidential response could take practical effect. They failed, but by modern standards they were helpless in the tides they were riding. Nixon had some notable achievements prior to Watergate that at least ticks his economic & diplomatic boxes. Bush has no such redeeming features, and his role in derailing climate talks for 8 years may end up ultimately doing more damage than any previous president could have accomplished, even if they purposely set about to ruin the world. As our ecological footprint gets bigger, the impacts of our actions on the future expand exponentially. The decisions of leaders affect the whole biosphere rather than just the nation they govern. And even if you exclude that stuff Bush is a horrific failure who gutted his nation's self belief and standing in the world, while taking it backwards economically, environmentally, politically, morally, intellectually, and even militarily. It sounds like Gilbert & Sullivan, but it's true.

I hope it can be turned around. I'm still catching myself in the act of thinking of America as the bad guy. Historically it's not so, but the last 8 years... sheesh.

Hope all is well with everyone so far in '09. I am going to blog more this year. That is to say, I am going to remember the blog exists and act accordingly. *My blog* is back.

7:16pm: We got a cat, and his name is Jekyll.

This is Jekyll. His only known previous address was Queanbeyan pound.

It snowed on Sunday, like, really snowed.

Jekyll isn't quite settled yet, he has to be kept inside for a time. But he's a curious boy & often tries to sneak outside. Last weekend he finally slipped out... at the very moment of the snowstorm. He raced to freedom but found freedom uncomfortably full of dogs & snow & sleet & people following him. He bolted back inside in double quick time.

There were no more escape attempts for a whole day afterwards.

3:25pm: I dreamed of a museum of email forwards, where all the best email forwards from years past were stored in giant glass cases. A room was dedicated to the funniest forwards, I went in, the room was full of silver light and hot girls (my conscious mind objects to objectifying women, but my dream-narrative respects no-one).

Past the hot girls was a display case which contained an email forward which supposedly listed the funniest attacks on bad writers and bad writing. I thought that was a cool idea for an email forward & began to read it. My dream self had to improvise and came up with "this writing is like being eaten by piranhas". I thought, well that's not very funny, what does the next one say? My dream self then panicked and I woke up.

It's a shame one can't come up with genuinely comedic stuff in a dream. Imagine what a useful skill that would be to cartoonists & comedians. You could sleep & call it work.

11:35am: Up....date?
Obviously we've moved into the new house now. It took longer than we thought, in fact I didn't get the last junk off my bedroom floor until a few weekends ago. But it's done. And we will be having a housewarming. If you're reading this, & you're in Canberra this weekend, & you know some or all of us, send me an email. The haphazard organisation may have left a few Canberra people out of the loop.

Yesterday was the budget lockup. You get security checked before you're allowed in, & the check of my person turned up a spider-man comic. I think I might be the only person to ever bring such an item into a budget lockup. The bringing was kind of unintentional & there wasn't much chance to read it, but it still felt historical. To me.

I recently watched one of the new cartoons—some anime-looking thing—and & it occurred to me that cartoons have really changed since I was a kid - & in ways beyond just the animation (which is obviously way better). The cartoons in my day featured a certain epic scope that no longer exists. Bad guys were attempting to conquer the whole world & kill everyone. I credit those old cartoons with instilling a certain amount of interest in really epic stories that I probably wouldn't have otherwise gotten into. It also gave me a framework to understand how storytelling worked which still guides my expectations. But in modern cartoons there's nothing much at stake—the bad guys are mischievous rather than evil, their plans are comedic rather than mean. I wonder how it will affect kids expectations of the storytelling medium.

8:26am: I dreamt that I was inspector (whoever), & was assigned to investigate a murder in a classroom. After painstakingly compiling clues, I deduced that the murder was committed by one of the students. Noting scratches & cuts on the guilty student, I further deduced that the student was schizophrenic, & that the murder was committed by one of their alternate personalities. Suddenly, I was sucked into hell & found out that my subtle theory was wrong. The murder actually happened because every single student in the classroom was a demon.

In hell, we appeared in a giant vegetable garden. It had a long row of vegetables protected by netting (which you put over vegetables on earth in order to keep birds away, but the hell-netting was 20 feet high & had arrows of fire running across its surface). There were giants nearby, & they saw us, but I knew they were lazy creatures so I dragged the corpse of the murdered student behind a gravestone. See, when you're in hell, the vegetable gardens are also graveyards because the corpses are the seeds from which hell-vegetables grow. That's dream-logic for you. Anyway, the giants were too lazy to come look for us - we weren't big enough to be worth the effort of finding & eating.

Then I escaped from hell, still carrying corpse of the murdered "student".

Case closed, my dear Watson!

Oh, & the presentation went Ok, though I was pretty quiet & probably seemed daunted. But I'm glad I did it. And now I have 9 days off to move. Being a low-volume updater, I'd guess my next entry will be written from the new house. Woot.

12:06am: On Wednesday I'm going to present to Kim Carr on the economy. I've worked on these presentations for 4 years now, but I've never actually delivered one to a minister myself. It is my First Time.

No pressure or anything.

Also moving house in a few days which makes this an official Week When Stuff Happened.

The Newberhouse awaits.

11:52am: We rolled for our fortune in 2008 & I got a 20. Yet the house doesn't seem to be experiencing a "20" year so far. Recent days have thrown up irritations & worse:

- Kate had a run of ill fortune, capped off by the likely loss of her car;

- A family friend died of a heart attack in his 50s;

- We got hampered on settlement of the new house because the bank's name wasn't spelt out to their satisfaction on the insurance certificate;

- I found out that I'm likely to lose my very sweet office position in the departmental re-org;

- I found out that people I knew in Sydney visited on NYE & I didn't know about it;

- My car went wonky again, having previously appeared to have fixed itself;

- The stupid back fence fell down, necessitating us paying to have it re-mounted;

- We got final confirmation that our gym is closing (boo!);

- Our favourite card game appears to be in trouble (double boo!);

Other things too. Tallying it all up would get boring though, & there are far more eloquent dissertations on modern life around. These things flare & die like the tides, & things seem to be coming back around these last few days.

I'm considering applying for the research job that ex-PM Howard has advertised. I think it would be interesting to travel & hang out with him, despite political differences.

7:14pm: Hope everyone had a good news year's eve. As ever, success has a thousand fathers but encrusted barf on the bathroom wall is an orphan. The televisual highlight of the night occurred when people were making predictions about 2008. A tarot card reader predicted that interest rates would rise by 0.25% in February. The journey from a vaguely scythe-looking thing on a card to "0.25% in February" being apparently no problem for an experienced reader of the tarot.

Overall 2007 turned out to be a pretty dramatic year (compare it with 06 for example), but maybe that's fitting for a year that ends in "007". I expect 2008 will be more comfortable & relaxed.

I open 2008 with questions of etiquette. I got 4 or 5 "happy near year" messages that were clearly generic. Should such things be treated as spam or should one reply?

11:17pm: Totally hammered at work lately. That's a change of government for you. But that's ok—one figures that one owes some extra work in light of one's extremely minimal workload during the caretaker period.

The house continues to throw up new surprises though. The back fence is rapidly shifting from a boring ol' vertical alignment to a new and interesting horizontal one. The neighbours are totally jealous—I can tell. And of course, the possums have continued their siege and are now inside the walls. We are breached, & are thus obligated to listen to their gyrations (if you know what I mean) at all hours of the night. I now know why they sleep all day.

February can't really get here soon enough. The new house is structurally excellent according to the building report. No possums in the walls & the fence is metal. I comfort myself that it's not going anywhere.

And now for Christmas. Already? Goddammit. On the upside it's a holiday with food & whatever, and the old choral carols are sweet to hear & comforting on some level. On the other hand the santa songs are toxic sludge. The spiritual side of christmas is being overrun by the tacky commercial feeding frenzy that drives materialism into the most impressionable age groups while obnoxiously separating the haves & have-nots. I'm doing a no-presents thing this year. Seriously... I have a full-time job & no kids. If I think of something I actually want, I'll probably just buy it on the way home tomorrow.

I started playing warhammer again. Having had a long break from it (6 or 7 years) it's like starting a new game, only I already have all the figs. Very cool, although my first outing didn't go so well—Gavin used a concealed skaven assassin to bump off my general. I was shocked: back in my day, skaven fought with courage & honour, & would have never resorted to such underhanded chicanery.

10:55pm: Does anyone, anywhere remember this show?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tecqb9pb0ss

If it weren't for these occasional tiny glimmers on the internet I'd probably be thinking I hallucinated it.

10:20pm: Nightmare picture
I found a scan of a "haunted picture" recently. The one-time owner sold it online because they thought a boy depicted in the picture was floating out of the frame when they turned out the lights. It was probably more that the picture has an obscure origin, & the boy in the middle is sort of luminous. Plus the thing is totally freaky to look at, full of visceral elements that seem calculated to play on people's phobias.

Here's the picture. I'm curious to see whether other people think it's freaky too.

7:47pm: Obligatory politics entry
Canberra is buzzing at the moment. A change of government is a particularly big change in this town & it's a fair bet that my department—Industry Tourism & Resources—will be reshuffled. We always are. The ground rule is that any department with an "and" in its name is going to face chops & changes when a new government comes in. But that's ok—it's one thing to work for a government because the public service is non-partisan, but it's bound to more satisfying if you support the party that's in charge.

People are still amazed at what happened. The mainstream theories about WorkChoices & excessive arrogance being the government's downfall are all true to a a degree. But I think what's just happened actually traces a fairly direct line back to events that took place around 2001. Two things happened that year which almost certainly led to the defeat of the government on the weekend.

The first thing was that a boat full of asylum seekers sank off the coast of Australia and had to be rescued by the navy. With the 2001 election looming, ministers made a few glaring comments about it in the hope of inciting a bit of xenophobia that would translate into votes. What some might not know is that a public servant called Jane Halton headed a dodgy committee which "investigated" the incident. The committee, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, reported that asylum seekers had tossed their children into the sea in order to blackmail their way into Australia. The government, full knowing that the findings were made up, used the report anyway and fanned it with inflammatory rhetoric ("we decide who comes here and the circumstances in which they come"), which gave them a brief burst of nationalist support for the subsequent election. The idea at the time was that the dodgy committee would then be publicly blamed (but secretly rewarded) when the truth came out after the election.

And so it was: almost straight after the 2001 election, the government tried to brush off accusations of lying by saying they'd acted on the advice they received. And the corrupt Jane Halton was promoted to the rank of department head shortly after.

Unfortunately, the whole thing proved to be such a huge deal that the government's plan of blaming it on their concubines in the public service didn't cut the mustard. I don't think they were expecting the media to pile on the issue for months and months. But that happened, reputations were trashed, political games were exposed & the months of relentless coverage created an impression of Howard as an untrustworthy PM in the public consciousness. And that air of mistrust persisted long after the specific events that inspired it were forgotten. The WorkChoices scare campaign used that long-held impression as its foundation.

The children overboard scandal was also heavily featured in Bennelong. In the lead-up to the election the Asian language papers were full of references to it along with statements Howard made in the 80s about the excesses of Asian immigration. Rejection by the Korean community in Bennelong seems to have been a key reason for Howard's defeat. Howard played the race card in the 80s in a ham-fisted fashion, and again more subtly in the case of children overboard, but it caught up with him devastatingly as his seat grew more multicultural. It was a fine case of poetic justice at work.

Curiously, another asylum seeker boat sank in Australian waters very recently-only a week or two before the latest election. It even required naval rescue akin to that of 2001. But this time around the government did nothing but release a tersely worded and factual press release outlining the naval operation, with not a single fiery speech or ad anywhere. The government didn't dare try those tactics again, but the leaflet scandal in Lindsay showed how much damage had already been done. Lots of people (unfairly) saw the events in Lindsay as fitting a pattern that began with children overboard. In fact, the leaflet scandal really was an isolated incident, & the Liberal candidate for the seat kicked her husband out of their home when she found out that he was behind it.

The other thing that happened around that time was the implosion of the Democrats. The Dems were on the ropes with their own membership for supporting the GST, but had crept up somewhat in the polls thanks to a new & popular leader in the form of Natasha Stott-Despoja. What crushed the party for all time was the actions of four of its own senators, who the media dubbed the "gang of four". These four senators openly rebelled at a moment when the party really needed unity. They presented to their leader a list of demands which ranged from needless humiliation (in the form of a forced public apology from Stott-Despoja to the Democrat's ex-leader) to outright attacks on the heart of Democrat beliefs (such as the transfer of many powers from the membership to the parliamentary executive, which the "gang" controlled). The demands would have devolved power to the executive while simultaneously discrediting it, and Stott-Despoja quite rightly resigned to avoid having to submit.

What the gang were after is anyone's guess, but their actions tore down their own party from within. The situation led to the loss of the Democrats popular leader, and left the party open to a barrage of negative media which permanently crushed its public support. However, the senate has 6 year terms so the remaining senators were left as a ghost-like presence long after the party they represented had rotted away.

Why does that matter? Because the loss of public support in 2001 and 2002 meant that all three Democrat senators up for election lost their seats in 2004. Those senate spots were won by Liberals, which gave them their infamous senate majority. The senate majority was what enabled the government to introduce WorkChoices, which in turn caused the government's ultimate demise.

Politics is like that. Stones that were chucked in the pond seven years ago continue to make waves, and in this case the waves washed out a government in very unusual circumstances. Sadly, the 2007 election also saw off the remaining 4 Democrat senators, which consigns them to oblivion. The loss of the Democrats is tragic and will have long term effects on the way the senate works. One effect is that the Rudd government is very weak. The newly elected senators don't take their places until the middle of 2008, so the Liberals have a senate majority until then-meaning Rudd will need their support to pass legislation. Once the new senate takes their place, the situation isn't much better-if the Liberals oppose legislation, the government will need the joint support of the Greens, the Family First party and the no-pokies independent from South Australia. As the Greens and Family First don't really agree on anything, you'd have to say the new government is going to have problems. That's how it's going to be from now on: without a single third party holding balance of power, governments will veer between being very strong (with a senate majority) to very weak (needing support from multiple parties who often oppose each other).

So Rudd will struggle in the senate. I don't know much about the no-pokies guy but he got a huge share of votes in his state (more than 15%) so he's not going anywhere. Family First are basically vapid bible thumpers with a narrow agenda that resembles the class ideology of Marxism, except that the two classes are "people with kids" and "people without kids". Their idea is that people with kids should be treated as superior to those without. In their last term, as a condition of their support they forced the government to add statements to all their cabinet documents outlining the "impact on families". The rule was so stupid and created such a bureaucratic and practical nightmare that the government quietly welched on the deal after about 6 months. But the Rudd government will be more vulnerable due to its senate shortfall - not to mention its own relentless rhetoric about "working families".

However, while his government might be weak, Rudd's own position within it is unassailable. That will hopefully lend the new government some unity for what will be a difficult term. But whatever other problems they face, a serious Liberal challenge isn't likely to trouble them. The Liberals are devastated. For the first time ever, they hold no governments anywhere in the country, and unlike the Labor party, they can't park their political helpers in unions when the funding of government is denied to them. The Liberals will crumble in the weeks to come as their best and brightest advisors and tacticians leave to seek new jobs. Costello was very justified in refusing to pick up the pieces left by the leader the party chose over him, but for the Liberals it's yet another hit. John Howard's time as leader has left the Libs at the lowest ebb in their history.

So it seems that both the Liberals and the Democrats have ultimately been sunk by a domino effect from events that should have been dusty history. But the ghosts of the past can be pretty corporeal sometimes. And the inevitable loss of power is part of its price. Politics is the ultimate all-or-nothing game.

And that's all I have to say about that.

12:33am: Ding Dong
It didn't sink in until Howard appeared & conceded defeat. He had assumed such an aura of invincibility over the past 11 years, that to see him diminished & defeated was almost unreal. A long, long period of status quo has changed. This was the most significant night in politics since 1983.

Labor will do it tough given that the Libs still control the senate, but the Liberals will be devastated & a huge victory has been won. It's going to be interesting for a while, but tonight is the night that will be remembered.

11:15pm: Five days to the election. I'm intrigued that we might see the status quo in Australia finally shift after so long. In 1996, I was watching the election & a miserable Labor guy said to me: "we're out for 10 years now". I said, "no, come on, it's not that bad. Anything could happen before the next election".

Totally wrong. 11 years on & it's still Howard. But a poll gap that's lasted a year has to close in the next few days for him to survive this time. And those who follow his famous power walks have said that he's getting slower, & seems to be having trouble with his hip. A coalition victory will pay $3.80 for a $1 bet at the bookies. Pretty unlikely in other words, but that's ok with me. I think it's time. They've gotten puffed up with hubris, alternating between shooting the messenger when things are reported that don't suit their line, & pushing their born-to-rule attitude that says they're the only ones who can hold the skies up. They need a term in opposition to renew, & to deflate a bit.

My recommendation is a Labor vote, this time. Those who are worried about wall-to-wall Labor (which is fair enough) should focus on tossing out the crap Labor governments in NSW and Tasmania. I'll be right there with you.

11:37am: Keating! (the musical) is really good. The actor who played Keating himself carried it well, though his singing voice wasn't remarkable. The use of lighting & smoke & pose was exceptional though - very important if you want to depict someone like Keating. The lyrics were fun & had most of Keating's more memorable quotes woven into the music. It also featured the most withering take on Howard I've ever seen - more stinging than the typical Howard-hater rhetoric because it was more funny. The same actor played Hawke, too, but cast him in a far more affectionate light.

Keating isn't aimed at the lowest common denominator... those who don't know nuffin' about politics or history aren't going to get it. But it keeps selling out, & for good reason. Australia is getting bland at the top - the colourful politicians & entrepeneurs have faded into grey men & venture capitalists. It's good to remember that we used to be more interesting.

2:23pm: Pics of the house Kate & I just bought are behind the cut. We're moving in February.

( Uberhouse II )

4:41pm: So ... we're buying a house. Kate & I have a place picked out. We're waiting out a long process of checks & financial approvals but we're still in the saddle with the finish line in sight.

So the uberhouse will shortly be uberhouse mark two. Twoberhouse?

We were out to dinner tonight & Kate made it rain. The popular theory is that rain is caused by friction between air currents in higher parts of the atmosphere. In fact, it's caused by Kate going to a lot of trouble to get an outside table. We even had the staff carry tables outside specially. Clouds followed in startlingly short order. Sorry to everyone who was caught in it. Our bad.

Meanwhile, at work, we are increasingly forced to invent our own tasks—caretaker government is a pretty dozy experience for those trapped inside. I've actually gotten a lot of non-work related stuff done. I built a supergroup base in COH & have begun watching Heroes season 2. Cushy, you might say, but the election is looming & after that it's going to be crazy-busy for a bunch of weeks. The election remains too close to call, but the latest poll has the Labour party about as far ahead as it was this time last election. Although in this case it's a low point with a bounce-back highly possible, where last time it was a high point from which the party skidded for the rest of the election.

A friend had to be taken to hospital this week. Our group didn't hear about it until well after it happened & by the time news reached me she was already on the mend. Which was something of a relief.

Our thoughts are with you in all this. Stay safe, & be well, & hopefully we'll all catch up soon.

10:11am: It's strange, but I didn't know the term "existential crisis" until I saw it on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_crisis).

I've had those symptoms since I was about 13 or 14. But in all that time I've never known it was an actual documented condition, & that other people have the same flashes.

That's strange to think about, but oddly comforting on some level.

12:54pm: The word.... is Hyde!
I had the opportunity (over the past six weeks) to watch Jekyll right through for the second time, in a dark room & in the one-per-week format that it originally ran in. It added a lot to the experience to see it that way.

Currently there's not much about this show on the web. So I thought I'd use some of the yawning chasm of free time I have at work (yay for caretaker government) to write an analysis & review. It has spoilers.

( here t'is )

7:34am: http://www.moviehole.net/news/20071004_serenity_2_a_new_hope.html

Well well well... let's hope so.

I've been going to the gym lately. Not something I'd normally do but Kate was going & it seemed like a time to start. I think I've improved over the past bunch of weeks.

Inspection is this Sunday. We've lost some of the good relationship we had with our landlord over some problems with the plumbing (& the plumber). It would be a shame if we got kicked out given Winnie has just arranged to move in nearby.

Emma found out about my birthday & organised a lunch thing for it yesterday. I'm somewhat startled, and touched, that she worked out the time despite my allowing it to slip under the radar this year. Hope those that were there enjoyed the lunch. I guess we'll watch Jekyll on Sunday too. The last 2 episodes are so integrated in terms of their story that it's really more like one cracking long episode that happens to be split in half. It's a pretty intellectual group so I'm sort of idly wondering whether anyone will predict the twists. I've been tempted to watch it at work but that's probably not a good idea. Makes it very easy for people to sneak up on you.

Oh yea, & I have a (weak) shot at promotion to EL2 in the next few months. It probably won't work out but will be good if it does ... it'll mean we can add an extra bedroom when we buy the house. And six gen X/gen Y people living in one house will be recipe for wacky shenanigans and crazy hijinks.

7:46am: The Wheel of Time turns no more
Robert Jordan has died. He succumbed to a terminal bone disease on Sunday. His life's work (and the longest story ever written) was the Wheel of Time series, which remains unfinished. I've been following his story for 12 or 13 years & it's been a constant through all that time... his 11th book sits next to my bed even now, I think I read some of it on the day he died.

You won't have to look hard to find plenty of stories about him from fans & admirers. RJ was a kind and humble man who fought his illness with courage and humour. He brought interest & pleasure to millions of people. He will be missed.

RIP.