Disaster

Sad news for the World-Cup bound Socceroos (yep, thats the nickname of the Australian soccer team). As if being in the same group as the favourites, Brazil isn't bad enough, we've been rocked by two injuries to Aussie players in the EPL this week.

Mark Schwarzer, our #1 keeper, had his cheek broken in Middlesbrough's weekend FA Cup loss, and Timmy Cahill has suffered knee-ligament damage in a boredom match with Birmingham. Schwarzer is out for 4 weeks, which means he may appear, but not with much game fitness. Cahill on the other hand is looking at 6 weeks on the sideline. Disastrous.

How I have waited to finally get to watch Cahill threading midfield balls to Kewell who crosses to Viduka... it may not be a reality now. I know there is precious little of my blog-audience that understand what I'm talkin' about, let alone cares. But still I exclaim: "Bugger!"

The saving grace here is that for this to be our best ever World Cup showing ever, our target is low. Score a goal, or grab a point. Preferably both.

ANZACs

Today the Aussies and Kiwis celebrate ANZAC Day, a memorial day in honour of the Australia and New Zealand Army Corp that sacrificed themselves at Gallipoli.

Thanks, you glorious diggers, you loyal mates.

And yes, it's also the name of a tasty biscuit.

Maybe this Thursday, instead of the regular Poker game we should commemorate with a few games of Two Up.

Is this any way to spend an Anniversary?

Would you let this motley crew celebrate your first wedding anniversary?

More worringly, one where your wife was actually in attendance? Lapse of judgement on my part, to be sure.

I needed someone who could carry me home, so I cleverly played on the fact that the Gorgeous Wife had a midday flight to Brisbane on the cards for Saturday, so I deceitfully committed her to a "no-shots" pact.

That pact held up (give or take a shot), but her disgusting sobriety at 12am meant she still had the energy and drive to go dancing. Dammit! Caught in my own web of deceit!

Click the image to see the rest of the photos!

Mad Folding Skills

Finally, a You Tube video that may change your life. Since my teenage retail jobs were never in the clothing industry, I think I missed out on some valuable experience. So I tested this with interest, and it works as advertised!

Tracking Your Doom

Don't think the Threat Advisory is worrying you enough? Concerned you won't be able to see the cause of your death coming soon enough to permit you to run around saying say "I told you so" to those irritating nay-saying optimists?

Then this is the site for you.

Basically, it's time to follow the example shown in 1959's On The Beach and head home.

These cats can steer!

Tried to embed this video to no avail, so here's a link straight to the WMV stream for your enjoyment. Stick with it, its 3-4 minutes long, but some of the best stuff is in the latter stages.

As I recall from my many trips there, you have to be this good a driver in Paris just to find a parking spot in the city.

Spring Change

Changed up the blog look, and am working on a couple of different header images to break-from-the-template a little, but finding the 600 lines of CSS a little difficult to decipher! I think I'll post what I have now, and some wise web-designer savvy mate can advise me as to the fix for my rounded corners. Give me a few days... in the meantime, can someone tell me why the first paragraph break (see older posts converted to this template below) in every post is not double-spaced? Can't find the p{} element that is controlling that, so I am enforcing the first paragraph tag with an extra break currently. Advice?

So in the meantime, my occasional penchant to actually read the "Terms & Conditions" we get inundated with every time we try to do anything these days (a habit which my wife loves that I do, but simultaneously it infuriates her when I do it!), revealed this gem from a recent sign-up I had with an American Express service:

YES, I want to enroll in the Membership Rewards Options® program. My enrollment in this rewards program is fee-free and is subject to the terms and conditions, which will be provided to me after my enrollment."

Hopefully you caught the amazing part there: "after my enrollment". It's like a blank power-of-attorney.
And they wonder why the average person hates lawyers.

Lightning over Norfolk

Lightning over Norfolk Uploaded by juzzyp.

Straight from the Canon Digital Rebel to blog. Sometimes, you just get lucky!

Mind you, that luck was amortized somewhat by about 40 attempts and 20 swear-words.

Speaking of shot, Wilkes-Booth shot Lincoln on this day in 1865. Here's hoping my night out goes a tad better than that.

X-Ray Rated Sex

All in the name of science, someone finally managed to convince people to have sex in an MRI machine so they could track the positioning of organs during the act. It's a very interesting read you can check out here (finally, porn pictures that are safe for work!), and make sure you follow the link to the related article talking about what another study found out by taking MRIs of the female brain during orgasm.

Yeah, there's a few cheap jokes possible here, like "what about all the pre-med colleg students who had sex in the MRI", or "females have orgasms?", but I'll leave that potentially rich-vein to the commenters.

Heavenly Drinking

Apparently, astronomers think there may be alcohol in space. That International Space Station may be fun after all. Then again, maybe it's just the remnants of a universe-wide party held by unknown creators when they celebrated the completion of their intelligent design project.

A Fruity Birthday for the Geeks

The Web is awash with birthday wishes for my favourite computing fruit, the Apple. Everyone has there little say on the company that started personal computing, lost the battle, and then resurrected itself from 90s when they were supposed to just die like so many other non-Windows PC makers did (how I loved my Amiga!)

Wanna be a true Macolyte? Apparently you have to celebrate with a tattoo! (some true, some Photoshoped). I'll settle for a bumper-sticker me thinks.

C|NET has a nice summary of Apple trials and tribulations, and Wired has a great screenshot gallery of all the previous Apple OSs.

Another nice read here, of which I particularly liked the notes on the Apple Retail stores success in the face of almost unanimous condemnation that it would fail. This highlights a long held view I have of "what is an expert really worth"? They all said Apple's retail stores would flop, because it had for Gateway, Dell etc.

Thats the thing about "experts" (and here I am primarily referring to stock pundits, who examine companies and make recommendations on stock value based on what _they_ think the company is doing) - they can only base their opinions on what has happened in the past, not on how a new approach may work. This approach just cannot work all the time. The sad part is, companies stock prices go up and down based on such "expertise", which affects real people's job security. That is an amazing amount of power when a few dozen opinions can affect thousands of real people's livelihood. The stock market is not a system that resists rumour.

And here's a quote my current company needs to take to heart:

And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don't get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We're always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it's only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important. -- Steve Jobs to Business Week, Oct. 12, 2004

Anyhow, here's to many more years of superior fruit products.