Dude, this ‘blog is sooo two years ago. I moved most things to craiga.id.au some time last year, and frankly, I’m a bit surprised I didn’t note that here sooner. If you’re just interested in my witty observations and whatnot, I’ve got a newer thing going on at Tumblr, because, hey — who’s got time for all these vowels in this fast-paced Web 2.0?

I’ve spent seven weeks looking for a one bedroom flat somewhere around either Kensington, Flemington, Yarraville, or Northcote. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been the #2 applicant. I’ve certainly lost count of the number of places I’ve applied for. I’ve offered two year leases. I’ve offered months of rent in advance. I’ve offered more rent than they’ve been asking for. I’ve included pay slips, references from previous landlords, and cover letters.

I still can’t find a place.

Anyone out there know of any share houses looking for people?

One of the side-effects of re-ripping your CD collection into iTunes is that you get an idea of which CDs you used to own have disappeared. Can anyone help me out by admitting they borrowed one of these CDs and have neglected to return then?

(Rob and Karen — I’m looking in your direction…)

Excel is annoying to use (you can’t edit a cell without using the mouse), and OpenOffice still needs X11 to run (and don’t get me started on that set up guide). There has to be a better spreadsheet application for Mac OS X … doesn’t there? Or is the Mac software community petrified that Apple are about to release that spreadsheet product that’s been rumoured for years now?

Last week, I finally sent my iPod off for repair. It had been showing the dead iPod icon for quite some time, and the only advice I could get from Apple was “I’m sorry, but it’s cheaper to buy a new one.” I’m happy to report that I got it back today, and everything’s working hunky-dory.

If you’ve got an iPod that needs repair, I can heartily recommend Steven Svitek’s iPod repair service. The entire process cost me less than $80, and he’ll offer to buy your broken iPod from you if it can’t be repaired.

Karma’s a bitch. After spending most of the previous few days giggling to myself while replaying the music video to Living with a Hernia to myself in my head, I did something odd to a muscle somewhere deep inside my gut. Don’t ask me which muscle it is, but it’s the one that you really need in order to get up out of a seat, roll over in bed, bend over to pick something up, sit down on the toilet … you get the idea. Doing any of these things result in incredible pain.

I think I got this injury on Saturday afternoon by getting into Rob’s car (an average-sized Subaru station wagon from the 1980s), but I’ve got no idea how. Maybe I was tense from listing to Rob and Sam bitch and bicker like an old married couple. Regardless, I’m well on the road to recovery now.

I’m hoping I’ll be close to 100% by Saturday, as I really want to go to The Tote to see The Bakelite Age’s CD launch. Fans of good time rock ‘n’ roll should do the same.

Anyone else interested in coming along to “Weird Al” Yankovic on March 23rd at Hamer Hall? I’ll be getting my tickets later this week.

I’ve finally figured out a way to run Impulse Tracker under Mac OS X.

1. Download DOSBox and Impulse Tracker. DOSBox emulates the DOS operating system and some common hardware, including the SoundBlaster 16 and Gravis UltraSound sound cards.

2. Unzip Impulse Tracker and put it inside an otherwise empty folder. I created a folder named DOS inside my home directory, then copied Impulse Tracker into another directory inside of that.

3. Install and run DOSBox. Installation is as simple as copying DOSBox.app into your Applications folder.

4. Once DOSBox has fired up, you’ll need to mount a directory on your hard disk as your C drive. To do this, type MOUNT C /Users/craiga/DOS into DOSBox (where /Users/craiga/DOS is a folder that contains Impulse Tracker).

5. Switch to the C drive by typing C:, then fire up Impulse Tracker using the command line IT s7. This will force Impulse Tracker to use the emulated Gravis UltraSound (there seems to be some trouble with the emulated SoundBlaster 16).

6. Impulse Tracker will now be running and will be usable, though playback will be a little jumpy. To make it smoother, switch to full-screen mode by hitting Command-Option-Shift-Return. To switch back to a windowed view, use that same key combination.

Friday, 23rd March, 2007. It’s gonna be awesome.

Here is some more. Plah…

I can forgive Oxford University Press Australia for having an ugly, poorly laid-out web site. Building web sites ain’t their bag. What I can’t forgive is poor grammar from the publisher who is supposed to define the English language. From their Site Map:

• Is Oxfords site secure?
• …
• What is Oxfords return policy?
• How do I get my name on Oxfords mailing list or obtain a catalogue?

It’s pretty simple stuff. Oxford is a proper noun. When it posseses things, it has an “’s” tacked on the end. Oxford’s site. Oxford’s return policy. Oxford’s mailing list.

MacBook Pro

It finally arrived last week. I love it. Oh, and I finally got Skype — I’m craigeanderson.

Movember’s coming along nicely, although I’m looking forward to December 1. If you’d like to see it stay a little longer sponsor me and I’ll consider it. If you want it gone, sponsor me anyway.

I love moving. You get to find long-forgotten treasures such as the original cassingles for Ice Ice Baby, Do The Bartman, Super Mario Land (by M.C. Mario and the Ambassadors of Funk) and the pièce de résistance, Check Out The Chicken by Grandmaster Chicken and D.J. Duck.

Now all I need is something that can actually play tapes.

…my MacBook Pro with a 2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (whatever the hell that means … it’s supposed to be pretty damned fast), 2GB RAM, 160GB Hard Drive … it’s even got an integrated camera so I can post photos of my trashed camera phone to Flickr!

I wrote about it a while ago, but the Nintendo Wii is hitting the shelves soon and I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on one. Not only do the actual Wii games look like great fun, but the list of old favorites you can buy from the online Virtual Console service just keeps on looking better.

Nintendo have just announced that The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time (probably the best video game ever made) will be available for approximately $15 AUD, along with other favorites like Sonic The Hedgehog and ToeJam and Earl from the MegaDrive, Gradius from the NES, Super Metroid from the SNES, Lylat Wars from the Nintendo 64, and many more. Of course, not all of these games have been confirmed for Australia, but Nintendo wouldn’t hold out on me like that … would they?

It will also be interesting to see if they release the TurboGrafx-16 titles in Australia. The TurboGrafx-16 console never saw the light of day in Australia (probably due to the fact that it never really took off in Europe where it competed with the MegaDrive), but from what I understand the games are quite good.

I won $115 on the cup yesterday; I had five $5 bets: Art Success to win, Art Success to place, Delta Blues to win, Delta Blues to place, and Tarqueet to win. My winnings covered the cost of a boozy afternoon out very nicely.

Today I start with a clean slate. It’s Movember 1st, and I’m clean shaven. Hopefully, in 30 days I’ll have the meanest moustache this side of Chopper Read.

While I’m doing this, I’m also trying to raise money and awareness of male depression, and prostate and testicular cancer. If you’d like to sponsor me, head over to the Movember web site and search for me — my rego number is 2146.

Bowie asks about “anymore” vs. “any more”.

“Anymore” is a word in American English, but not in British English. According to the Oxford Manual of Style, it means “nowadays”, which is a separate meaning from “any more”. It does have an entry in the Macquarie Dictionary (the definitive resource when it comes to Australian English), but I can’t tell you any more than that without paying AUD 12.95 plus GST to subscribe.

P.S. the Macquarie Dictionary is on my del.icio.us wishlist if you’re looking to buy me a gift.

I’ve just taken a look at the Dogs’ 2007 fixture, and I’ve got to say that it looks really, really good. Highlights for me include:

• Only one game at both Adelaide (against the Crows) and Subiaco (against West Coast). Sure, it would’ve been even better if the games were against Port Adelaide and Fremantle, but you can’t have everything.
• We only play Sydney once at a neutral ground. The Dogs haven’t played the SCG well, so I’m more than happy to give it a wide berth.
• The only back-to-back interstate games we have are Brisbane at the Gabba followed by Fremantle in Darwin, which is then followed by the mid-season break.
• Twelve games at Telstra Dome, including a run of six straight in July through to the first half of August.
• We play Geelong twice at Telstra Dome again.
• Four Friday night games, three of which are in a row, and five Saturday night games.

The only thing I’m a little disappointed in is that the last of our five fixtured games at the MCG is on the 1st July. It would’ve been nice to get a little more practice at the ‘G closer to the finals series, but it could be much, much worse — West Coast only play there once for the entire home and away season.

From The Age, via elrobbo:

Burger Burger
Style: Hamburger simulation
Developer: Gaps

Instead of designing theme parks, this sim lets you design hamburgers. How does it go again? “Two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese…” Burger sims are huge in Americana-obsessed Japan, and after tinkering with Burger Burger, we’re inclined to see why. Coming up with your own creation to rival the Big Mac or McTeriyaki while beating your competitors into a ketchup-splattered pulp is a right laugh. Players can customise everything on their menu, hire pre-pubescent staff, select the site for their burger empire and even choose novelty items to keep the kids happy. Just don’t dream of running some ill-conceived Monopoly competition with last year’s tickets…

Hell yeah. My double-chicken-’n'-beef chilli burger* would kick some serious arse.

*– No such burger exists, and if it did I’d strong discourage anyone from actually eating it.

If you’re going to put together a spreadsheet for your personal budget, make sure that you get all your formulae right.

If you’ve got a big long column of monthly expenses with a total at the top of the list, make sure the total includes those little items at the top of the list. You know, things like rent and car repayments.

Check your projected balance at the end of the month. If it’s -$350, something’s probably wrong.

The discussion between Andrew and Polly about cover bands (and why they’re hated) has really got me thinking.

Writing a good song is really, really hard. Walking into any original music venue in Melbourne will tell you that. While I’ve got all the respect in the world for bands getting out there and plying their trade, most of their songs suck. The bands I’ve been involved with are just as guilty of this as anyone else.

So why wouldn’t you start a cover band? The hardest part of starting a band is writing songs, so why not draw on the collected efforts of every songwriter who has gone before you? You could say that it’s the difference between being a musician and an artist, but who would deny the artistry of Johnny Cash, Miles Davis or the multitude of other great artists who have made great careers out of (at least in part) performing the songs of others?

Most successful bands get around their average songwriting by being entertaining. I don’t think that U2 have ever written a really great song. U2 became popular by working hard and having a really good live show; not by being great songwriters. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Most successful bands are in the same boat. Many of them have written one great song that got them noticed, but their continued success is due to hard work and providing entertainment.

This is why most bands fail. They’re just plain boring, or they just don’t work hard enough. Again, I’ll put up my hand and admit I’m guilty of this, too. I guess a bad band is just a bad band, but a bad band playing good songs is better than a bad band playing average songs when you’re trying to sell bourbon and coke.

The Melbourne Atlas 2006 has been made available for free download. From what I’ve seen it pretty much reinforces the stereotypes you probably already hold — Melbourne’s public transport system hasn’t really changed since the 1950s, the highest rates of domestic violence occur in Frankston and Hume, 20-29 year olds live in the inner suburbs, and so on. Still, I love stuff like this.

I haven’t written anything substantial here for a long time. I’ve been up to a lot, but nothing much that’s appropriate for writing about in such a public forum.

Other than the things I’d rather keep un-public, I’ve been doing all the usual stuff — watching football, working too hard, buying Johnny Cash and Woody Guthrie records, taking bad photos with my phone, and playing Nintendo.

I just discovered my first grey hair. I was about to pull it out, but I’ve decided to keep it. I’ve always wanted to grow old.

Check out www.thekarateparty.com — a Craig ‘n’ Cat Joint.

I was browsing the iTunes music store last night when I noticed they were selling this box set of three Bob Dylan albums (Oh Mercy, Time Out of Mind, and Love and Theft) for $0.99, which is even cheaper than the equivalent on allofmp3.com. If you’re interested in Bob Dylan, you might as well grab a copy while the going’s good.

I just realised that I haven’t written anything about my recent trip up to Sydney.

For the uninitiated, I was invited up to Sydney last weekend to do a DJ set at the launch party for Chaos Is An Order Edition #2, which features an interview with Look Who’s Toxic. I’d always wanted to DJ, so I jumped at the chance to do it — my theory was that if I stuffed it up badly, at least I wouldn’t know anyone in the audience

Despite a serious lack of sleep and the beginnings of a cold, I had an awesome time.

After getting home from Buck 65 the previous night around 1:30am, I was up again at 5:00am and in Sydney by 8:30am. I spent most of the morning wandering the streets of the city, drinking coffee and trying to find some clothes to buy. I didn’t find anything.

My hotel room became available at 2:00pm. I’d never DJed before and was feeling pretty nervous, so I spent most of the afternoon listening to tunes on my iPod, making little notes that would help me along the way and drawing a big, convoluted chart of what songs I felt would run into with other songs well.

Around 7:00pm I found the venue, had a few drinks and met up with the organisers of the party. I wasn’t supposed to be starting until 10:00, but I figured I’d need a few drinks to calm my nerves. Thankfully I got to have a play with the CD players and the mixer, so I was kind of familiar with what I was doing.

The turnout for the launch was pretty disappointing, but that was fine by me — the combination of the whiskey and lower than expected numbers meant I went into my set with my confidence sky-high.

The first song I played (Dang by Buck 65, taken from Strong Arm) was recieved very, very well — pretty girls and record nerds (two of my favourite kinds of people) were coming up to the desk, asking about the song and letting me know they thought it was awesome, which was really cool. Unfortunately some of the record nerds bum rushed my set and started playing an obscure 7″ record from the 80s which was a bit of a bummer, but I got to play out the rest of my set, so that was cool.

After that, the story follows the usual downhill path you’ve probably come to expect from me. I ran into Spod and got talking with the pretty girls from the party, but the ol’ memory starts getting a little shaky after that point. The next thing I remember is waking up in my hotel room alone and fully clothed at 4:00am.

Anyway, in summary, if anyone needs a DJ to play Rock, Pop, Electro, Hip Hop and Country music, give me a call. I’d definitely be up for it again.

Like any good upwardly mobile young man, you’ve got your record collection in iTunes (probably on an external hard drive, because you’ve got way too many tunes to fit on that piddly 60GB drive that Apple shipped the computer with). You also like the idea of making a mixtape for your sweetie (a-la DJ Rob Gordon), but iTunes gives you no option for doing mixing tracks, which is essential to the carefully crafted emotional message you’re trying to convey.

Your options are to shell out hundereds of dollars for something like ProTools (you’re not that upwardly mobile), or hand-crafting your mix in a wave editing program and losing the ability to mark tracks on your CD. This just isn’t good enough.

Enter iMixtape.

This simple application will allow you to grab tracks from iTunes, place them on a grid, fade them in and out of each other and place track markers. iMixtape will then burn it to a CD for you. It’d look something like this:

Those ‘volume envelopes’ indicate the volume of the track. The top of the track indicates 100% volume, the bottom indicates 0% volume. The ‘envelope points’ are the parts that are dragable. There’s always an envelope point at the start and end of each volume envelope. Additional envelope points can be created by clicking on any point of the volume envelope. You can drag these envelope points around inside the track, and the volume envelope will move to create straight lines between them.

Does this make sense? I think I’d buy this application for $20. It would be fun. Would anyone else?Is this a dumb idea or a good idea?

Buck 65 on Friday night was the best show I’ve seen in a long, long time.

I was pretty skeptical when I saw that his “band” was a CD player and a single turntable, but within five minutes the entire audience was hanging from his every word. It was inspirational.

The show basically comprises of the character Buck 65 standing at the microphone, delivering his poetic ramblings to backing tracks built from sampled guitars, pianos, synths and long-forgotten country records, punctuated with some extremely sensual appearances from Mrs. Buck 65 (Claire Berest) and some of the most bizarre, poignant stories you’ll ever hear at a hip hop show.

I really don’t know how to describe it properly, but if you’re a fan of Johnny Cash, Tom Waits, Hip Hop music or storytelling, check out sides one and two of Strong Arm, the downloadable mixtape he’s made available on his web site.

The new housemate has just pulled out.

And the ads at Readings went up last night, meaning I’ll have to wait another full week before putting another ad up.

F*&k!!!

We have a new housemate!

Welcome Rob from Dr. Invisiablo to the Roden Street fold.

Speaking of Roden Street, I did finally fall down those stairs at home (just after showing a prospective housemate through the place and making the comment “I’ve lived here for two and a half years and have never fallen down them”), but thankfully I was sober enough to get away with nothing but a sore left leg and arm.

P.S. After deciding that fuckinghelldude.net wasn’t such a wise choice of domain name (Google doesn’t like swearing), I’ve registered craiga.id.au as my domain name. WordPress.com now has an export function, but I need to wait for WordPress 2.1 for the import function (EDIT: it looks like I might be waiting a while; it’s only 34% complete at the moment).

Since the last time I thought about the progress of the Dogs' season (which was just after our round nine loss to Collingwood in which we lost Bob Murphy to the Dogs' knee curse), things have gone a lot better than I had imagined. We've racked up wins against Hawthorn, Fremantle and Brisbane, despite Grant being our only regular tall option up forward. The wins weren't always convincing, but we've shown enough to score the four points, which is all that matters in the end.

We're now sitting fourth on the ladder, a position we'll still be in at the end of the round if Collingwood can get over Sydney. We have eight wins so far, and only need four more for the rest of the season to secure a berth in the finals. And if the Dogs can keep up the classy, gutsy performances, we'll do more than just make the finals.

…and just to prove it…

Anyone want a pet mouse? His name is Gerald, he's got his own cage, wheel, and so on. Free to a good home. Hell, free to a mediocre one — it's got to be better than Roden Street, right?

"Doukutsu Monogatari" (that's "Cave Story" in English) is a side-scrolling action adventure game that's very reminisient of games like Castlevania and Metroid, right down to the NES-era graphics and sound.

You start out in a cave, by yourself, with no idea who you are or what to do. Pretty soon you figure out how to get out of the room and enter a town. In this town, you find out you're in the strange world of the Mimigas and they need your help to rescue one of their own.

As far as I can tell, it was developed years ago by a Japanese group calling themselves Studio Pixel and made available for free. Another group translated the game into English, and now it enjoys a huge cult following — so huge, in fact, that a company called Variant Interactive is currently working on a sequel for the PSP.

You can grab the game and the English translation patches for both Windows and Mac OS X over at http://www.gameflaws.com/cavestory/, a site dedicated to the game.

Awesome!

Canadian hip-hop artist, MC and turntablist extraordinaire Buck 65 plays a one-off Melbourne show on Friday 7th July, joined by special guests The Bird and Curseovdialect.

I've never seen him live, but I love the Buck 65 records I have to death. Now to find someone who wants to go with me…

Fighting is way cool.

If you've got the bandwidth to spare, download the 112MB video.

(found via Channel Frederator)

Over the past year, Mum and Dad have collected the components of a pretty good home theatre system. They've got a massive 106cm widescreen plasma television and they've got a surround sound system, but I've got no idea how to hook the two of them up.

Their DVD player and their television have the standard left and right RCA audio outputs, but the sound system has five RCA inputs – front left, front right, back left, back right, and the subwoofer. There may even be another input for a small speaker in the middle.

How is this supposed to work? Is there an amplifier that takes the two audio signals, processes them and outputs five? Is the DVD player or television supposed to have more outputs? I can't imagine that a $2600 television would be lacking such a feature, but I guess it's possible.

Most Bulldogs fans are understandably feeling a little down at the moment. In the minds of most fans, Robert Murphy’s knee injury represents the end of hope for the Western Bulldogs’ forward line. However, consider the tall timber we have playing at Werribee, or out due to short-term injury:

• Will Minson
• Travis Baird
• Cam Wight
• Tom Davidson
• Kieran McGuiness

Travis Baird is, by all accounts, quite a talented forward option with strong marking ability. He was a chance for selection against Port Adelaide before he injured his shoulder, and probably would’ve been selected ahead of Kieran McGuiness in Sydney.

I think Baird will be making his debut for the Dogs very shortly, almost as a direct replacement for Bob Murphy. He’ll get the opposition’s second best defender (assuming Grant’s playing forward), who will probably be able to keep Travis quiet. At best, he’ll be able to create a few spillages to the advantage of our multitude of talented, small, creative types — Johnno, Robbo, Cooney, and so on. The important thing is that Travis is keeping the defender from manning someone else.

Will’s return will not only be a huge boost for our ruck department, but also our forward line. He has history playing forward in the SANFL, and Eade has been working with him to improve that part of his game.

When Minson isn’t rucking, I imagine he’ll be ‘rested’ deep in the square, taking another tall opposition defender, doing his best to create opportunities for those small players.

With the opposition’s best two or three defenders on those players, the small, quick, leading forwards suddenly have a chance in hell of getting their hands on the ball and perhaps kicking a winning score.

Let’s take a look at what lies ahead for the Dogs:

• Hawthorn at Telstra Dome
• Fremantle at Telstra Dome
• Brisbane at the Gabba
• West Coast at Subiaco
• North Melbourne at the MCG
• Carlton at Telstra Dome
• Geelong at Telstra Dome
• Melbourne at the MCG
• Richmond at the MCG
• Adelaide at the MCG
• St. Kilda at the Telstra Dome
• Essendon at the Telstra Dome

Looking through that list, there are at least five games that are very winnable — Hawthorn, Fremantle, North Melbourne, Carlton and Essendon. After last year, we’ll play Brisbane at the Gabba with confidence. We’re a chance against Geelong (especially if their horrible form continues), as we are in the games against Richmond and St. Kilda. The only game on that list I’d put a black line through is West Coast at Subiaco.

Our last eight are all in Melbourne, so travelling won’t be an issue as we (hopefully) storm into the finals.

To make the finals comfortably, we need a total of twelve wins. We already have five, and I’ve pencilled in another five. We’ve only got two more games against any of the current top four sides. All we need to do is pull of an ‘upset’ in two of the remaining seven matches, and we’ll be in the finals. In such an even season, it’s possible that 11 wins will be good enough, too.

After finishing work on Friday, I somehow managed to drag myself all the way home, pull my spent body into bed and fall into a deep, deep sleep. I was so exhausted after a really tough week I barely remember any of this, but I do remember what I dreamt of that night.

It was a cold, cold night at the MCG. I'd met up with some friends and friends of friends — all of us Dogs supporters in full livery — and we staked out a claim about eight rows back on the top floor of the new Ponsford stand. There were a lot of Collingwood supporters milling about, but I had a sneaking suspicion that our Dogs would do well against the more favored Pies.

And for the first quarter, they did. The crowd were highly entertained by a high scoring, free flowing brand of footy. 'Eccy' Eagleton starred for the Dogs, racking up 15 touches in that first quarter. We went into quarter time one goal up and feeling good about the remainder of the match.

In the second quarter, my dream quickly took a turn of the worse. Bob Murphy had somehow found himself contesting a mark against Anthony Rocca inside Collingwood's 50 metre arc. Murphy backed into the bigger man and they both leaped for the ball. During the contest, one of Murphy's gangly legs got tangled up between Rocca's. Rocca, being the much stronger of the two, came back down to early solidly with a strong grip on the ball. Murphy's desperate lunge for the footy had sent him falling uncontrollably. His leg, still caught between Rocca's, contorted to a sickening angle that no human knee could stand. The Bulldog medical staff rushed onto the field with a stretcher, and after a few minutes of fussing about, it was clear that Murphy would take no further part in the Dogs' season.

Thankfully, it was all just a dream.

I'm trying to figure out why I haven't been reading. Not reading is making me feel stupid.

A few years ago, I couldn't get enough of reading — I was reading at lunch, when I got a spare moment at home, when I went out for breakfast on the weekend … I was reading at any chance I got. I even bought a big book case, which is now home to quite a collection of books (which I'm slowly cataloging over at LibraryThing, which is fun for the Nick Hornby-eqsue obessive part of my personality).

Now, I'm watching television, playing video games, drinking booze, or working on web sites.

I don't know if this decline in my reading habits is due to working in the publishing industry, but that certainly seems to be part of it, which is a worry — does that mean that if I were to work in the music industry, I'd stop listening to music?

Another probable reason is where I live. Being seen as intellectual just isn't the done thing in North Melbourne — we drink, laugh and fight, but we sure as hell don't think. I've always been the type to be easily influenced by those around me, so perhaps that's what's happened? Maybe because I've surrounded myself with people who are happy in their ignorance and lack of culture, I've taken their values on board.

I've bought myself a few books and I'm trying to get back into the swing of reading. Peter Carey's My Life As A Fake seems like a good book, but it's a tough read — the author wrote the entire book without quotation marks, which is a problem when the story is being told to a narrator.

Maybe I should start re-reading old favourites. Maybe buy copies of favourite books that I don't own. Everyone should own copies of 1984 and Catcher In The Rye, shouldn't they?

I've heard that Salman Rushdie's later work is a lot more accessible than some of his earlier books. Fury is one of the most amazing books I've ever read. Maybe I'll give him another shot.

I'm going to start getting out of the office for an hour each day to eat my lunch and read. Except for today — I've got too much to do at work.

I just bought New Super Mario Bros. for my Nintendo DS on eBay, along with Tetris DS.

I've been excited about this game for ages… I can't wait.

Yesterday the boys from Look Who's Toxic were interviewed for Sydney-based fanzine, Chaos Is An Order. You can check out what I had to say over on the LT3 web site.

Haven't been updating very much recently, as I've been far too busy at work. Looks like I'll be having a busy weekend, too.

• Early Friday night: Karate Party's sort-of debut gig at Glitch. I have zero idea what to expect, but I'll be doing my damnedest to remain supportive.
• Later Friday night: Group Seizure and Taste The Venom at the Town Hall. Group Seizure are back from a bass player-less hiatus, so it will be good to see what they're up to nowadays. I've been wanting to see the Venom girls for a while, too.
• Saturday night: Look Who's Toxic and K' Road Queens at the Town Hall. Two nights in a row at the Towny… should be just like the good ol' days.
• Sunday night-ish: Schottky Noise at the Arthouse.

See you out there, kids.

OK, so after much complaining about my mobile woes, I've finally taken the plunge, broken out of my current contract, and have signed up for a $79 capped plan on Vodafone with a Sony Erricsson K750i.

I can't get too many numbers out of the old hunk of junk, so if you'd like to be in my new phone, please SMS me your name and contact details.

Wow… thank you so much to everyone who turned out for our CD launch last night. I think we ended up with more than 100 people there on a Sunday night, which was just awesome.

Extra-special thanks to the eating competition contestants as well. Xavier took it out easily, followed by Liam, Willy and Mick Z. Mick V. was looking good for second or third place, but sabotaged his own efforts by insisting on eating his sausages with bread. In a desperate attempt to pinch second place, Mick V. attempted to eat his final three sausages at once, but was forced to leave the competition when he failed to keep them down.

Hopefully there'll be some photos of the night coming soon.

I guess this idea is very similar to my Licenced To Ill 2006 idea, but I reckon it'd be very cool if someone — say the RRR, The Espy and The Sacred Heart Mission — got sixteen bands to each record one club's theme song. They could stick them on one CD, which can then be sold for $8 each. That's 50 cents per song, so you don't feel too ripped off at having a 15 minute version of Freo Way To Go ruined by some electo-anarcho-punk collective. All profits from the CD go to The Sacred Heart Mission.

Is this a good idea or a dumb idea?

Look Who's Toxic will be interviewed on 3RR's Respect The Rock some time between Midnight and 2:00am next Thursday night (or Friday morning, depending on how you think about it).

This is what I believe to be true:

• "Bracket" is a general term, which can be used to describe a parenthesis ('('), a square bracket ('['), and so on. Confusingly, "bracket" is sometimes used to describe square brackets.
• "Parenthesis" describes one of the round brackets that are common in English text ('(').
• "Parentheses" is the plural of parenthesis.

Again, feel free to correct me. My source is Wikipedia.

I've put a new message board up on the Look Who's Toxic web site. I'm planning on applying a theme to it to make it look like our actual web site and to remove all the guff about reviewing membership applications, but for now it's using Vanilla's default theme.

Check it out and get posting already!

After being discouraged by my slowing rate of weight loss, I've been very slack over the last five or six weeks. My trial membership at the gym expired, and while I had evey intention of joining up for twelve months, I started making excuses for myself — it's a big financial comittment, and I still wasn't sure I'd really make use of the gym for the whole next year.

Things got worse when I wrecked my bike by falling off it while drunk. I was still walking to work, but was driving in at least a couple of times each week. I was eating badly, my exercise dropped right off, and I started getting sick.

A couple of weeks ago, I signed up for a twelve month membership at the gym on Errol Street, but I've been a bit lazy there too, so you can imagine that I was expecting the worst when I stepped onto the scales at my new gym.

But, lo and behold, I'd actually lost weight since the last time I'd weighed myself. It's true that I'd never used these scales before, but if you can't trust those huge, hospital-grade scales, who can you trust?

Hopefully now that I have access to a good set of scales, future weight updates won't be quite so up-and-down.

Alright! Pleased To Eat You is finally mastered and at the printers, and will be ready to go for the CD Launch + Eating Contest. There are MP3s available for listening and download over at lookwhostoxic.com.

By the way, we’re still looking for gluttons to compete in the eating contest. If you’re feeling hungry, let us know and we’ll hook you up with a bib & bucket.

Anything that lets you buy Weird Al songs instead of records is pretty awesome in my book.

The mixing of our forthcoming EP is done and it sounds amazing. I'll stick some MP3s up once it's mastered, which is happening on Wednesday evening.

After some healthy debate here at work, I believe the quality of our lives have all been improved by coming to a deeper understanding of the ellipsis (three dots which signify trailing off). For those who turned up late:

• An ellipsis is three dots long.
• In HTML, you can use the entity … to signify a horizontal ellipsis (as opposed to the vertical ellipssis, which we'll ignore for simplicity's sake).
• In Microsoft Word (and WordPress for that matter), three full stops will automatically be converted to an ellipsis, much in the same way quotation marks and apostrophes are converted into left and right quotation marks and apostrophes.

Here are the important points:

• In the middle of a sentence, an ellipsis should be surrounded by spaces. For example, "I can't believe it … you seriously did that with your mum?!" is correct.
• At the end of a sentence, there is no spacing around the ellipsis, but to be perfectly correct, there should be a full stop after the ellipsis. So, "I just can't believe it…." is correct. However, this practice is pretty rarely used, so "I just can't believe it…" is acceptable.

Note that this is just my understanding, but I'm pretty sure it's correct. If anyone can correct me, feel free to do so.

Sometimes there's a cause so good and so pure, I can't help but to support it.

Unbeliveable.

It's the only word I can think of to describe our 115 point thumping of Richmond on Friday night. Other than perhaps the not-quite up-to-scratch performances of Rohan Smith (whom is surely due for retirement at the end of this season) and Sam Power (who, according to media reports, is due for some massive and long-overdue improvement this season), every single player on the field played a stellar game.

Nathan Eagleton was seemingly involved in everything. He kicked four goals — five if you include his pass from forty metres in front of goal, to Brad Johnson who was on his own ten metres out; and was involved time and time again across the midfield and half-forward, sending precision passes right into the waiting arms of our small-but-skillful forward line in the manner you might expect Lindsay Gilbee to do. In fact, we were so impressed with his performance we've given him a new moniker — "The E", complete with the catch-cry "He's peakin'! He's peakin', man!"

Brad Johnson, Scott West and Daniel Cross were their usual, amazing selves. Crossy seems to have worked a lot on his kicking, too — he kicked two goals. I don't want to get ahead of myself, but I'm starting to think that if this kid keeps improving, he's going to end up better than Scott West.

Ryan Griffen looks fantastic. He seems to have really bulked up, an looks a lot more mature than his 19 years. Did a lot of great things, including a late goal, streaming through the midfield into the forward fifty to kick truly from about forty meters.

Adam Morgan at full forward looks like it might be worth persisting with, although I remain to be convinced he's the second coming of Simon Beasley.

If Matthew Boyd hasn't got a spot in the side next week, there's something wrong with the heads of the Bulldogs selectors.

Will Minson was OK in the ruck. He's good, but I think his cult hero status sometimes outshines his actual ability at the moment.

Adam Cooney, Daniel Giansiracusa, Mitch Hahn, Lindsay Gilbee, Brian Harris, Dale Morris, Ryan Hargrave … they were all fantastic. Robert Murphy and Matthew Robbins were a little quiet, but still very smart.

But perhaps was the most pleasing thing about the game was the pressure we put on Richmond at every opportunity. It seemed that none of their possession forward of the centre circle (and, quite often, behind the circle as well) was uncontested. Matthew Robbins was his normal, terrier-like self, but everyone seemed to have step up a couple of notches when it came to their intensity. Brian Harris continued his improvement in the hard-man stakes, at one stage being particularly rough with Judas Tiger Nathan G. Brown, pushing his head into the Telstra Dome turf, perhaps explaining the error in his judgement when he jumped ship to play for Richmond.

When I watched the replay on Fox Footy, I was struck by how pedestrian the Tigers' "running game" seemed when compared to that of the Dogs. They just weren't fast enough or skillful enough to play that style of game against us, and that's the reason we won — Richmond tried to play the game on our terms and were spanked. In my mind, this raises the question of what happens when we play with their own style of play who are able to impose it upon other sides. Essendon have always seemed to be very good at this against us, as have Sydney. I think Adelaide will be able to win an arm-wrestle against us too.

Next week we have Melbourne, who I think are too weak-willed to work their way back if we go out, guns blazing. I'm looking forward to Saturday afternoon.

This is pretty cool:

To celebrate Craig's birthday and his 28 years on this planet, i have decided to do a short tribute to the guy, since i cannot be in melb to help celebrate.

Therefore, Craig, friends of Craig – read on for…

SAM'S FAVOURITE CRAIG MOMENTS!

– cue cheesy music –

• Craig running across the Eastern Freeway several times with Rob in peak traffic to remove the pieces of my shattered bookshelves (a moving mishap)
• Drunkenly ringing Switzerland from Pony on Fender's mobile
• Being the only one to care that Pigdon St's outdoor toilet was going up in flames. Some genius had put a candle on top of the toilet and it had toppled over. see www.flickr.com/photos/craiga/15240983/
  Despite his drunkeness, Craig was the only one at the gathering to responsibly organise water distribution onto the flaming cistern. Incidentally, my fave Craig quote was one that i heard that night – "Rob you dickhead, stop laughing and get a bucket of fucking water!!!!!!" (second one is "It's 5am. The trams are running. Where is my goddamn taxi?!!")
• Denting the shit out of Jacinta's cookery pan in a drunken music-inspired moment
• Wiping up the vomit from the kitchen floor at my 21st (what a champ – wasn't even his vomit)
• Playing bass in Look Who's Toxic

So there is my Craig tribute – u can add any other memories and send it on. Hope u have an ace birthday Craig!!

Thanks Sam-in-Switzerland. That's gotta be one of the nicest messages I've ever gotten for my birthday.

Neil also sent me a lovely birthday message, showing me at my best.

Thanks guys.

It's my 28th birthday this Friday. I haven't really organised anything, but it would be good to go out, see a good band and get shitfaced (after the footy, of course).

Let me know if you want to join in, and I'll let you know what's going on.

EDIT: For what it's worth, there's not much going on that night, so we're just going to meet up for drinks at the Towny. I'll be there after the footy, around 10:00.

Now I can't get my phone out of silent mode, which makes it very difficult to find.

If you need to get in touch with me, send an email to craig@lookwhostoxic.com. I've got a little notifier on both my work and home computer that will tell me as soon as I get an email so, provided I'm on my computer (and I'm a pretty big nerd, so it's likely), I'll get back to you quick-smart.

My mobile phone continues is long, drawn-out death.

During the week, unknown callers were being displayed as "Private Numbe>", and after this weekend I only have phone numbers for people with names beginning with Z. Which is great if I need to call Zac or Zoltan, but if you're Aaron, Yolanda, or anyone in between, sorry, but you're out of luck.

As some of my closer friends already know, a couple of weeks ago, I had a little trouble… errr… downstairs… you know, around the back.

Yeah… anyway.

I may have tracked down a cause. On the day before the unpleasantness began, I had the Grilled Fish of the Day at The Rose Hotel on Napier Street, Fitzroy for lunch. I had the same dish (a different fish, but still grilled in the same way) yesterday, and I haven’t been feeling too flash ever since. I’m not saying there’s a problem with the fish at The Rose, but there’s definitely a problem with the fish, The Rose, and I.

Recently, Hayso wrote a rather blunt opinion of a band his band played with. There was a rather nasty reply from the other band, which led to Hayso apologising, which led to Neil getting angry, which led Hayso to ponder whether he should be a prick or not.

In my opinion, it’s the responsibility of anyone who writes anything on the internet to be very thoughtful about the words they choose. Once you click that Submit button (or type mput *.html if you’re old school), those words become part of the public domain. Even if you delete them from their original source, chances are that a copy still exists in Google’s cache, the Internet Archive, RSS readers, and so on, and people are going to be able to find them.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t express an opinion. I encourage that. I’m just saying that you should exercise a little editorial control. If you couldn’t be bothered, maybe the opinion just isn’t well formed enough to be comitted to public record.

I’m not sure what to make of our Sydney audience. We worked our arses off and played a really ace show, but, to me, the audience just didn’t seem very appreciative at the time. Maybe we’re crap and Sydney people are too polite, but everyone I spoke with afterward said they really enjoyed the show.

Maybe Sydney is even worse than Melbourne when it comes to showing appreciation? Maybe it’s because we were playing on Sunday afternoon, just after everyone had Kangaroo burgers? Maybe it’s because up until then, they’d only had artsy-electro-noise to entertain them?

Either way, we enjoyed ourselves. I finally got to meet Karen and Ben — Karen is Jo’s younger sister, Ben is her husband and the gig was their wedding anniversary. I met a whole bunch of pretty cool people, just like this guy, Chris. A lot of them seemed to be English, but I guess that makes sense since Ben’s from Manchester.

I also managed to befriend the two beautiful bartenders who were working at the venue, who kept my glass of whiskey full for most of the night. I was hoping to meet up with them later at The Metro, but I couldn’t get in, probably due to do with my inability to walk or talk straight.

Somewhere in the suburbs of Sydney on our way home, just a few hours after joking about how much of a pain in the arse it would be if we got a flat tyre, it happened — the rear, driver’s side tyre burst.

I pulled over by the side of the M5 Motorway, about two feet from the side of the road. Matty and I unloaded three speakerboxes, four guitars, the spare tyre, the jack, and the crowbar and, after I fumbled about with the winding mechanism, Matty jacked up the car.

We tried to remove the wheel, but had no luck. The van’s previous owner had put mag wheels on the car, and the crowbar that I had wouldn’t fit into the tight space around the nuts. I’d always assumed that mag wheels were just covers you clipped on top of your normal wheels, but I was wrong.

So, we were stuck by the freeway with a flat tyre and no way to get it off the car. By this time, Neil and Rob were at our meeting point — Krispy Kreme donuts, of course — so we asked them to get a telephone number for the NRMA. I wasn’t a member, but I thought they might be able to help us change a tyre for a small fee. Unfortunately, again, I was wrong.

At this stage, Matty took control of the situation — I was hungover, angry and very little help. He got in touch with Neil and Rob again and tried to explain that we needed a thinner crowbar, and asked them if they could find an auto store to buy one from, but I’m not sure if the message got through. Then Matty decided I was going to join the RACV, and lent me the membership fee.

An hour or so later, a tow truck showed up to carry the car from it’s dangerous position beside the freeway to a suburban shopping centre carpark. Matty went to get us some food and I waited for the NRMA guy to show up.

About two and a half hours after the tyre actually burst, our mechanic arrived and the end of this ordeal was in sight. He jacked up the car with relative ease and removed four of the five nuts. I’m not quite sure what was wrong with the fifth one, but he ended up having to snap it off with his nut-removing power drill. It was strangely satisfying to know that even if we the correct crowbar, we still couldn’t have done anything and the $170 I paid for RACV membership was, in fact, worth it.

We attached the wheel to the four remaining bolts. The mechanic assured us that the wheel would be perfectly safe for a drive to Melbourne, but also warned that I would have to get it fixed as it could become a problem.

After around three hours, we were finally back on the road. Matty wanted to skip Krispy Kreme and just get the hell out of that devil-town, but I was determined to get those donuts. I picked up three dozen (one for home, one for work and one for the family) and without question they were the best tasting donuts I’ve ever had.

We’re finally back home.

Instead of telling the stories in one big entry, I’ll break it up into a bunch of smaller ones.

It’s only just struck me that we’ve done just about zero promotion for the Look Who’s Toxic show at Pony tonight.

Come to Pony for the Look Who’s Toxic show! Look Who’s Toxic are amazing! 9:30! Whoo! Whoo!

I’m off to Sydney tomorrow morning, so it’s time to get your Krispy Kreme orders in. Their site has a list of what’s available, but no prices. We’ll be leaving Sydney on Monday morning, so I’ll try and pick them up then.

After much deliberation, I’ve registered fuckinghelldude.net. I guess that makes me gutter trash.

Feeling really stupid right now. If anyone can remind me how to do long division (the way an Australian kid born in 1978 was taught; not the 1948 way), I’d be eternally grateful.

Looks like I’m finally getting the overdrive pedal I’ve always wanted — an Electro-Harmonix Hot Tubes.

Funny that Andrew has just posted a rant about how expensive pedals are when I’m excited about paying “only” $300 for one. Thanks to Neil for the hook-up, too.

Bought two new CDs today: Mcluskyism and Gold Sounds.

The “very limited edition” triple-CD version of Mcluskyism is a collection of their singles, b-sides and rarities. There’s 56 songs, which includes twelve singles and 44 other songs, most of which I’ve never heard. The singles collection includes the awesome There Ain’t No Fool In Ferguson, which was released as a single and was on high rotation on RRR’s breakfast show, but was never released on any of their records.

Gold Sounds is a collection of Pavement songs played by a jazz quartet. I don’t have too much to say about this one other than I love the idea. I’ll give you my opinion after I actually listen to it.

I finally sold my old car for $1650. The final transfer happens tonight.

I’ve also named the panel van. Next time you see her, say hello to White Julie.

I’ve got a free domain name registration just waiting to be used, and I’ve decided to use it to set up my own little personal site.

Which domain name should I register?

• craigeanderson.net?
• canderso.net?
• anothersundayhungover.net?
• fuckinghelldude.net?
• something else?

In an ideal world, I would’ve used craiganderson.net, but someone’s taken that for some dodgy purpose. I should probably steer clear of craigeanderson.net too, as people will probably get confused. Another problem with both of these is that they end with “son.net”, which makes me think of that song by The Verve. And I don’t like The Verve.

I’m not sure registering a domain that’s not related to my name is a good idea. anothersundayhungover.net sounds OK to me now, but what about in six months time when I’ve given up the booze?

canderso.net is my favourite at the moment. I find it really easy to type, as it was has been my login to many NT networks over the years.

Anyway, give me your ideas. You can check if a domain is registered using the WHOIS Search on Network Soloutions’ web site.

I’m pretty worried about the way the Dogs’ preseason is going. We put in a pretty insipid performance against the Demons at Marrara, and we were caned by an undermanned Richmond in Shepperton. I know that it’s only the preseason and we don’t want to peak too early, but I’m getting a strong sense of deja-vu — it feels just like we’re playing with “our mastermind” Peter Rhode at the helm.

On the plus side, it sounds like Peter Street and Travis Baird put in a pretty good showing in Shepperton. If these two can put together some form, they might just be able to cover for Darcy’s absence.

Maybe I’ll have a good, long chat with the boys at the Family Day.

You think the song you’ve got stuck in your head is annoying? Try the music from Super Mario Brothers 2, World 1.

Now that I’ve lost faith in my scales, I’ve decided to use Mum and Dad’s scales as my reference point. Last night, they told me I weighed 118.2 kilograms. Since the middle of September when I started my 100 kilo campaign, I’ve only lost 17 kilograms — not the 25 I thought I had lost. Needless to say, I was pretty bummed out.

When you start to look at the numbers, though, maybe it’s not too bad. I started on the 13th of September, which was 168 days ago, or 24 weeks. They say that a healthy rate of weight loss is about a kilogram each week, but they also say that muscle weighs more than fat, and I’ve definitely put on muscle.

I’ll be starting at a new gym soon, so I’ll have a talk with them about it.

It seems that one of the average punters’ favourite things about Look Who’s Toxic are the songs we do with backing tracks played from my iPod. Those backing tracks are all written in a program called Impulse Tracker, a program that predates Fruity Loops, Reason, Logic, or any other sampler/sequencer programs that kids nowadays are using — it even predates Windows 95. The reasons we use it are simple: it’s what I learnt on, I understand what most of the features do, and they do just about everything I need.

One of our Impulse Tracker songs, Do The Fetus, is getting another run as the opener on our upcoming EP. Last night, after getting some very solid advice, Rob and I spent a few hours putting a little extra spit and polish on this new version of the song.

Previously, whenever we’ve used Impulse Tracker in recordings, we’ve composed and mixed the song in Impulse Tracker, and then recorded the result as a stereo signal directly from the line out of the computer. Last night, Rob and I spent a few hours sticking a click track at the very start of every channel, recording each instrument individually, synching up the recordings, and then mixing it in ProTools.

The results were amazing. I’d never really noticed how lifeless and dull things sound coming out of Impulse Tracker until now. The ProTools mix has the lovely deep bass notes and little trebly accents I’d always imagined, but was never quite able to get right. My theory is that the lacklustre sounds are a result of some kind of phrase interference and/or optimisation that’s going on inside Impulse Tracker — remember that this program was designed to run on 386es and can do real-time mixing of up to 64 channels — a very impressive feat in my book.

Now I want to go back and do new mixes of all my old Impulse Tracker songs, but I’m sure Rob wouldn’t be too into that. Maybe if he showed me how to do it in ProTools myself I could give it a wack.

Today marks the start of my beard’s third week, and I’m happy to say that it’s coming along nicely and will probably stick around for a few weeks yet. Neil has suggested Richard Karn as a guide to where I want to go — I reckon he might be onto something.

Last Thursday I was 110 kilos. On Saturday night, I was 120. I weighed 115 kilograms on Sunday morning. Something tells me my scales are lying to me.

Microsoft is offering prizes to users of it’s MSN Search Engine. I like free stuff, so I thought I’d give it a go.

I went to msnsearchandwin.com and looked at their “How To Play” example, which uses the phrase “Xbox 360″ as it’s search term. So I tried the search out on Google and MSN.

Google

Google gave me what I expected. The page started with a couple of links to news articles about Xbox 360 shortages, and then the results proper started. I got xbox.com, xbox.com’s US homepage, and the Xbox page on microsoft.com. I generally browse with a pretty small window, so that’s all I saw other than the ads on the right of the screen.

MSN Search

MSN Search, on the other hand, gave me three ads in a green box, followed by a series of links to buy an Xbox 360 from a variety of retailers. These things took up all the room in my small browser window, so I had to scroll down, something I rarely have to do on Google. The first actual result was displayed as “http://msid.msn.com/mps_id_sharing/redirect.asp?www.xbox.com/en-US/”, which is actually a redirection to the same xbox.com site Google gave me. Next was a link to “xbox360s.freepay.com – Get a FREE XBOX 360!”, which just reeked of spamminess so I ignored it. The final link I saw was to IGN’s Xbox 360 pages.

While I still love free stuff, MSN isn’t going to win me over that easily.

Look Who’s Toxic had an actual band practice last night, which was a refreshing change to sitting in Rob’s bedroom mixing our recordings. We worked on a few new songs, one of which has the working title “Hot Niggaz”. Add this to our recent songs “Asians Feed Me”, “Lebbo Justice Now” and “Tell Me Why I Don’t Trust Homos” and a worrying trend begins to emerge. Maybe Neil and I need to start writing some of the band’s lyrics.

Even I can notice a difference now.

I’ve got a two-week trial membership at a local gym that starts tonight. I’ve always hated the idea of a gym — I’m convinced that it’s going to be horribly demeaning, just like high school PE — but I’ll give it a go for a couple of weeks. Hopefully they’ll be able to give me some advice as to some exercises that I could be doing. And it will shut my dad up.

See? I told you so! C’mon Rosebank, how about a Rockin’ Retro Stackhat?

(thanks Andrew)

Rumour has it that Nintendo and Opera are set to announce a web browser for the Nintendo DS. Most of the pieces seem to be in place — there’s Internet connectivity, a decent amount of screen space, a solid rendering engine, and an effective input method (although typing anything longer than a domain name is still a pain in the arse — they need to licence Inkwell or something).

In fact, this might blow my argument for getting a MacBook right out of the water.

EDIT: Heh, post #69…

After feeling sick all day yesterday, I’ve decided to give up booze for a while. I won’t be touching a drop until the 24th February at the earliest. This ruins my plans to take a bottle of whiskey to see Walk The Line for Valentines Day, but it will be worth it.

This has me pretty excited — the return of the side-scrolling platform game. There’s a video of it available, too.

I found this pretty appalling. The Socialist Alternative has put posters with the headline “Capitalist Kerry Carks It!” up and down Smith Street, with the tagline “one down, a whole system to go”. While I think his portrayal as a saint was pretty far-fetched, he’s still a human being and his memory deserves respect.

I wonder what they’d think if I started putting up posters proclaiming the leader of the Socialist Alternative a “lazy, dirty hippy who did nothing but get stoned with their mates at Trades Hall” a week after their death?

Beard, 6 days old

I’m trying to grow a beard.

Is this a good idea or a dumb idea?

I tried out a K750i out last night. The joystick did feel a little temperamental, but I think I could get used to it.

What concerned me a little more is the number of buttons on the thing that control the various functions. Like a Nokia, there’s a left and a right function key, and they both have a label that appears on the little screen and changes depending on what you’re doing. Then there’s a ↩ key, a C key and another one that looks like the offsite link symbol in Wikipedia.

I guess that the last one is a shortcut to the main menu, but I’ve got no idea what the other two do. I imagine the C stands for “clear”, “cancel” and “crap, I didn’t mean to do that”, but that’s also what I’d expect a ↩ key to do, too. It looks like “take me back”, or “undo that last thing”.

Maybe ↩ is supposed to be analogous to an Enter key. If that was the case, wouldn’t it be easier to mark the buttons Yes and No, or colour them green or red, or mark them with little thumbs up and thumbs down symbols, or a happy face and a smily face… anything other than C and ↩.

The camera was even better than I’d imagined. You slide open the lens cap and you go straight into camera mode, so there’s no fucking around in the phone’s menus.

Oh, and the phone had a tennis game on it by Sega that reminded me of Virtua Tennis. It was very impressive. Maybe I’ll be able to get Doom for my mobile phone now.

Am I the only one who has seen an incredible increase in the number of stock trading related spam emails lately? I’ve never known Gmail’s spam filter to be so ineffective. Hopefully it’ll get better with time.

OK, I’ve been messing about with my iTrip for a little while, and here’s what I’ve found:

• The best frequency for your iTrip in Melbourne is 91.3 MHz.
• Sound quality isn’t too bad. It’s certainly far below CD quality, maybe a little worse than a typical FM transmission, but I don’t have much of a stereo in my car, so that’s fine for me.
• I keep my iPod in the tray on my dashboard so it’s reasonably close to the antenna. I’ve stuck one of those eTag holder things onto my dash to stop it from sliding around too much.

Andrew has been writing down his ideas for a four day week, and asked for people to post their comments. These are mine.

Lots of people need to work with other people. Crane operators need people on the ground. Teachers need students. Stockbrokers need investors. Lumber yard guys need carpenters. Office drones need managers. Junior editors need senior editors.

The management overhead of coordinating everyone you need to be at work for you to work would be nightmare. Sure, you could hire more people, but that’s going to bring more management overhead, which will result in having to hire even more managers, and do you really think the world needs more managers?

I’m all for flexible working arrangements. Got a job where you don’t need to interact with others? Sure, work a four day week. Ten hours a day, give up your annual leave, whatever. You could work from home if you’d like. But too many of us are too deeply rooted in the workings of industry to be given that kind of flexibility. But hey, that’s why we’re being paid, right?

Licenced To Ill is a great record with some awesome songs, but the music is very minimal and it sounds pretty dated to my ears.

I’d love to get some bands to record their take on each song from the album. Imagine Look Who’s Toxic’s version of Time To Get Ill, Tri State Lovers’ Paul Revere and The Drones doing Slow And Low.

The only rules are that you have to stick with the original lyrics in their original order, but you can substitute your name for any names in the original. In Time To Get Ill…

“I’m cool calm collected – from class I was ejected,
Just me, Mike D., and M.C.A. – we’re rarely disrespected”

…becomes…

“I’m cool calm collected – from class I was ejected,
Just me, Deepaul, and Heavy C – we’re rarely disrespected”

Imagine the CD launch — the stage is set up with all the equipment every band will need, then they play the entire record, tag-team style.

Is this a good idea or a dumb idea?

My current phone is getting a pretty crappy. The buttons are tempramental, the screen’s rooted, the camera’s all scratched up and it’s getting harder and harder to hear what the hell people are saying to me whenever they call. Thankfully, I’m able to get a new phone from the 28th of February.

I’m thinking that the Sony Erricsson K750i looks alright. It has a two megapixel camera, which could serve as a medium-term replacement for my old camera, may it rest in peace. It also has a sliding lens cover, which is a nice feature. I’m hesitant to buy another Sony Erricsson as my last one got to the point where the joystick was unusable, but I’ve been reassured that these problems have been fixed.

I had a nice weekend planned for my bike and I. On Saturday, I was going to ride out to Hawthorn to check out the Crumpler Factory Outlet, and then on Sunday, Jo and I were going for a ride along the Merri Creek to have a picnic in the Edinburgh Gardens.

I was out on my bike on Friday night, riding home from work via Matty’s place in Brunswick, and everything was hunky-dory when I put it in the laundry. When I got up on Saturday, however, my bike was stuck — the back wheel has become buckled somehow and it was rubbing right up against one of the brake pads.

I took it to Brunswick Street Cycles, thinking it would be a pretty cheap and easy thing to fix. After all, the bike cost me $200 — a single wheel couldn’t be any more than $40, could it?

Of course, I was wrong. The cheapest wheel I could get was $80 plus $20 labour, and they can’t get around to doing it until Thursday, which is when I’ll be picking it up.

Looks like it’s going to be a pretty good weekend for gigs. Tonight’s going to be awesome, and I’ve got to get along to at least one of these shows tomorrow night as well:

• The Seedy Three, The Retreat Hotel (Brunswick), 7:00 pm
• Solid Waste, The Public Bar (North Melbourne), 10:00 pm
• Solid Waste, Pony (City) 2:00 am

Despite it getting soaked on Saturday, my Nintendo DS is back in full operation. No such luck with my camera, but who cares about taking photos when I can play Mario Kart?

I want to listen to my iPod while I’m on my bike, but I don’t want to wear earbuds — I’m still a little nervous about riding my bike through town during peak hour, so I want hear everything that’s going on around me.

So, why doesn’t someone put some little speakers inside my bike helmet, right above my ears? I’m not overly fussy about sound quality; I just want to listen to a little Johnny Cash as I ride home after a few drinks, or maybe some Daft Punk or White Stripes to encourage me to get up that damn hill.

Is this a good idea or a dumb idea?

Looking forward to this one. The Bakelite Age, supported by Love Cuts Kill and The Cheats at Pony on Friday the 3rd February. Then Kamikaze Trio at 2:00 am.

I saw The Cheats a few weeks ago and they were pretty good. They’re a drums and guitar-through-an-octave-pedal-into-a-bass-amp band, a-la Local H. The other bands all kick arse, so you should be there.

Do you think I’ll get beat up?

Originally uploaded by Neil Moog.

I had to post this. These are the clothes Rob gave me to wear after I got saturated on Saturday’s bike ride.

Look Who’s Toxic now has a manager… not an experienced one, but it is someone who believes in what we do and will hopefully be able to sell us better than we can sell ourselves.

It was an overcast summer’s day in the inner suburbs of Melbourne. I’d just pulled myself out of bed and was about to cycle to Rob’s house. At the last minute, I decided to take my camera along to take some happy snaps of the guys while we did some mixing, and maybe take some shots of anything interesting I found along the way. My camera and Nintendo DS were already in my backpack, so I strapped it on and set off.

Initially, I was glad I took my camera. There had been a car accident on Errol Street, where a car had ended up on the footpath and took out the verandah* in front of Burger Republic and the Chinese place next door — it looked pretty spectacular. I locked up the bike and took some photos of the carnage, thinking they’d look nice on my Flickr page (it would’ve been a good way to push those silly South Park characters off the front page, too). There was a little spitting of rain, but I didn’t mind and didn’t think anything of it.

After taking the photos, I got back on my bike and was on my way for real. The rain was getting very annoying on my glasses. I got some respite from the rain when I reached the leafy bike path that runs alongside Melbourne University, but by the time I reached VicRoads on the corner of Cementary Road and Lygon Street, I was getting seriously wet. VicRoads was closed, so I rode up to the undercover walkway and waited for the rain to pass, taking silly photos of nearby puddles and learner drivers struggling with the rain to pass the time.

Eventually, the rain looked like it was settling down, so I set off again, only to get to Foodies on Nicholson Street before the rain started getting a bit too heavy again. I waited it out, taking more silly photos.

Once the rain had come to a complete stop, I set off again, through the streets of Fitzroy North when the rain started belting down, far worse than before. I’d made it up St. Georges Road, almost as far as the Merri Creek Bridge and was contemplating what to do next. The rain was retarded, I was soaked through, but I was probably closer to Rob’s than I was to home. I decided to wait for another break in the rain and then get to Rob’s a quickly as possible. I took more photos, and eventually got back on my bike.

It was wet and dangerous, but eventually I made it to Thornbury. I was soaked and freezing, much to Neil and Rob’s amusment. Rob gave me a warm shower, a pair of shorts, a T-shirt that didn’t fit and a horrible windcheater with a unicorn on the front I think he was given as a joke.

After showering and getting dressed, I started telling Rob and Neil stories of my bike ride. Neil, being something of a gourmet around North Melbourne, wasn’t happy to hear of the accident out the front of Burger Republic, so I got my camera out to show him the photos I took. I tried to turn the camera on, but no luck — water gushed out from underneath the button, but the camera wouldn’t work. I opened it up as best I could and left it out to dry, but no luck. The Nintendo DS isn’t in a good way either. The top screen works, but the touch screen is intermittent. Hopefully I can get that fixed, but I’m not holding out much hope for the camera.

Birthday Wish List:

• a camera
• a waterproof bag

* — I know it’s not actually a verandah, but I couldn’t remember what you call the roof over a footpath out the front of a shop.

My new iTrip came in the mail today. An iTrip is a little add-on for your iPod that broadcasts a low-powered FM signal from your iPod so you can listen to it through any radio, such as the one in your car.

I was pretty disappointed in it when I tried it out in the car this morning. It took me five minutes to get the hang of how to use it, and then any frequency I tried produced pretty poor results… mind you, I only tried one or two, so I’m not passing judgement quite yet. A quick search of the ‘net gives me people recommending 89.3 MHz 91.3 MHz, 96.0 MHz, 99.9 MHz and 104.8 MHz for different areas around Melbourne, so I’ll have to give them a go and see which works best for me. It seems that 91.5 MHz was the best option for everyone until Vega FM started broadcasting on that frequency.

This morning I weighed 112.5 kilograms. I don’t feel hideously obese anymore, which is nice.

I’ve been riding my bike a lot lately. On Monday, I rode home from work via the bike track along the Yarra River, which took much, much longer than I’d expected. I think my legs are finally starting to get over it.

Kathryn was beautiful, funny, mysterious, and all I ever thought about. In fact, after making a date to see a movie on Saturday, it took me a few hours to realise that it conflicted with the Preliminary Final — the game that could see the Dogs make the grand final for the first time in 36 years.

But I didn’t care. I was going out with Kathryn (something that was all too rare, thanks to her over-protective father), and the Dogs were heavily backed favourites. In my mind, they’d already won, and I was too busy being excited about the Grand Final to worry about silly preliminary games.

I picked up Kathryn (and our chaperon Wendy — Kathryn’s Dad insisted we take a chaperon, and Wendy needed cheering up after being dumped) and drove into town, parking somewhere along Exhibition Street.

After the movie, we were heading down the hill at the end of Exhibition Street, getting ready to turn right into Flinders Street, when I saw a swarm of Adelaide fans.

Draped in yellow, red and black, they were waving thier flags, tooting their horns and dancing in the streets. Every smile, every silly little thing they yelled out, it all made me feel nauseous. I can’t remember what I said. I know I felt like crying. I probably pounded the steering wheel within an inch of snapping it off. I’ve got no idea how I managed to drive through it all. The only thing I do remember is turning to Kathryn, looking for comfort, and getting nothing but her saying “ha ha”.

Her voice was so cold, so devoid of emotion, so lacking any kind of empathy. It went right through my heart and broke it in two.

I drove her home in silence, and broke up with her the next time I saw her.

A friend and I have been talking about writing a book: a collection of tales of football-related heartbreak tenatively titled Sorrowball. As I get around to it, I’ll add stories to the Sorrowball category I’ve just created.

If you have your own story, please add it to the comments here.

We’ve been kinda focused on recording recently, which I’m actually enjoying a little more nowadays (read: “my dread of the recording process had changed to a toleration of the recording process”). This week I laid down the vocals to Neil Moog (Neil would like me to spell this as “Neil Moooog”, but I think he should change the spelling of his name to “Neil Mogue”) and the more I think about them, the more awesome I think they are — not much on blowing my own trumpet, am I?

Other than that, we played at the Town Hall last weekend which was pretty awesome. Most of the show was recieved really well. The only exceptions were Keith Urban (I’m giving up singing that song as I just can’t do it justice, and Neil needs a song to sing) and Elves In Space (Rob ran out of in-tune guitars with a full compliment of strings, so it sounded like a early, drunken Pavement jam — the idea of which sounds much cooler than the music).

I’m closing my old LiveJournal in favour of http://craiga.wordpress.com/tag/music/look-whos-toxic/. Fans of LiveJournal’s Friends page should get themselves a feed aggregator and move into a new era of time wasting.

I finally got my copy of Ween’s Shinola (Vol. 1) yesterday. As a Ween record, it sits somewhere in the lesser half of their work (it is a collection of rejects, after all), but it’s still a damn sight better than the regular records of most bands out there.

Gabrielle is worth the price of the record alone. It’s Thin Lizzy done better than Thin Lizzy ever did. Throw in Monique The Freak (old-school Prince with Daft Punk voiceboxes), Big Fat Fuck (perfect for a self-deprecating dieter such as myself, with big fat bass that seems to resonate in my belly) and bizzarre little ditties such as Boys Club and Israel, it’s definitely something that all Ween fans should have.

One thing I did notice while listening to it (and I know it’s not strictly true as both Big Fat Fuck (track 4) and Monique The Freak (track 11) were on Craters of the Sac) is that the songs seem to be in close to chronological order — Tastes Good On Th’ Bun (track 1) sounds very much like something from The Pod, and the later songs sound like they could’ve come from some of Ween’s later records.

A final word of warning though — this is definitely not the place to get started with Ween. If you’re starting out, go pick up copies of The Mollusk and Chocolate and Cheese followed by Pure Guava before you try this. I’m sure if I showed this to the uninitiated, they may well be scared off Ween for life.

You’d better believe I want one. Now it’s just a matter of figuring out a way to pay for it.

1 × 1992 Ford Falcon EBII S. Registration No. PRL 198. Four speed automatic transmission, 4.0 litre engine, 242,400 kilometers, CD player, air conditioning, power steering, central locking, six months registration. Very reliable, excellent mechanical condition, and a huge hit with the ladies. $2000.

There’s a Flickr set of photos of the car if you’re interested.

A brief overview of what I’ve been up to over the last two weeks:

• Got my hair cut while drunk by my even drunker housemate. I reckon it looks really good… best haircut I’ve had in years.
• Did the family thing over Christmas. Got nothing but gift vouchers, which was a little disappointing. Then again, I was pretty slack in the gift giving department this year myself.
• Bought a Nintendo DS, Mario Kart DS, Super Mario 64 DS and Futurama Series 3 with my gift vouchers.
• Watched the Boxing Day Test. I took my Dad to the third day as his Christmas gift.
• Played a lot of Nintendo.
• Maybe met a special someone.
• Got very drunk on New Years Eve in Robbo’s backyard.
• Did some recording.
• Watched the New Year Test.
• Finally fixed and cleaned my old car so I can sell it.
• Ate too much, drank too much and didn’t do enough exercise.
• Played a kickarse gig on Friday night.

Look Who’s Toxic exchanged Kris Krindle gifts last night. I got a bike pump and a little Gel Seat Cover so my arse doesn’t kill after riding my bike (in theory — I’m yet to give it a test); Robbo got Knight Rider Season 1 on DVD; and Neil got a copy of Mclusky Do Dallas, which he seems to be enjoying.

I wonder if he’s realised the now obvious irony of my last Kris Krindle related post yet?

I just found a video of how the upcoming Nintendo Revolution controller may work. It’s pretty cool, but the last demo (the fictional “F-Zero Revolution”) excited me the most. It proposes that you hold the controller NES-style, but instead of steering the car with the directional pad, you steer it by tipping the controller to the left or right — just like you probably already do.

…that Ween and Weezer have “secret” albums that can be downloaded from the ‘Net? Well, you do now.

The moral of the story is to make sure you read your favourite Bands’ Wikipedia entries

A while ago, as part of my weight loss/health kick, I gave up coffee. It was tough at first, and only become marginally easier. Mornings were OK, as breakfast usually provided me with the pick-me-up to get me through to lunch time, but the afternoons were a bitch.

I’m not entirely sure why I gave up coffee. I knew it wasn’t the best thing in the world for me, but I wasn’t doing this to live like a Monk — it was supposed to be about getting my weight down to 100 kilograms.

After a while I got sick denying myself, so I joined the four o’clock office pilgrimage down to the Cafe a few times each week. The effects were a little unfortunate — without fail, I’d be running for the toilet within half an hour of starting the coffee, taking the seat for five or ten minutes as my body passed the drink through my digestive system just as quickly as I’d put it in.

I persisted, thinking my body just needed time to remember how to handle coffee, but after three or so weeks of Cappuccinos and Lattes, it just wasn’t getting any better. That’s when I thought I’d try my old favourite — the Long Macchiato. No reaction from my bowels whatsoever. For some reason, it seems that the reaction between the coffee and the milk was sending my bowels into a fit.

I finally got my market research drink in the mail; turns out it’s a slab of new Coke Zero, which is along the lines of Pepsi Max (i.e. it contains no sugar). It’s tastes better than Diet Coke and looks better than it to in it’s sleek black label; but it’s nowhere near as good as the real deal.

If you want to try it out, you’d better come and visit me soon — my housemates are relentless.

To (sorta) conincide with the actual return of The Rentals, Matt Sharp has posted some MP3s of his their pre-Return Of The Rentals demos under the title “For The Ladies“. It’s interesting that many of these demos sound like they’re much more like his solo record than what The Rentals became.

Holy crap. In Japan (those lucky bastards), Nintendo are teaming up with Namco and coming out with Mario Kart Arcade GP.

I really miss being a Nintendo owner…

Pretty cool, eh?

The blue ones say “Eat Sleep Code,” the orange ones say “Eat Sleep Design.” And yes, I know I should’ve closed my legs.

I guess this is part two of the series “Drunken Craig’s Humiliation While Talking to Girls” (the “I’m a bum; I sponge of my boyfriend” incident is part one).

Last night I was out the front of Rrose on Errol Street with Simone, having a Scotch and Dry before I went home to do some work on lookwhostoxic.com, when I ran into Daniel Gordon, a guy I hung out with from High School (he was a couple of years younger than me, so he didn’t get an invite to the reunion). He was there with a diminutive but lovely girl, who I was introduced to by:

“Craig, this is Blahblahblah, my fiance; once you tried to pick her up once with your business card.”

Well, I’d often joked about doing this, but I had no recollection of actually going through with it. As if to back him up, she then said:

“Yeah, I was cleaning out my car last week and I found your card!”

I was incredibly embarassed. All of this was conducted at a volume far higher than I would’ve liked, but I’m not sure if Simone and her family heard or not. By the time I’d dealt with all of this, they’d packed up and left.

I’m going to Steven Malkmus tonight with her and her boyfriend, so I guess I’ll find out there.

What happened? Well, it looks like our old host disappeared all of a sudden. Anyway, lookwhostoxic.com is back online… kinda. At least my email is working again.

It’s tough to get a cab in town, especially at 2:00 am on a Saturday night. I ended up walking from Docklands to the corner of Lonsdale and Spring Streets looking for a cab to take me to Brunswick Street, which wasn’t that far away from where I’d walked to, really… at least I saved myself some money.

When I did finally get a taxi, I sort of wish I hadn’t. We’d just started on our way, in the right lane heading up Nicholson Street just in front of the hospital, when an early model Magna pulled out right in front of us and slammed on it’s brakes. The taxi driver slammed on his own brakes, saving my life. “What a fucking idiot! Fucking teenagers in a stolen car; they almost killed us!” the Tax driver screamed. He flipped on his high beams on and sped off after the probably-stolen Magna. It’s driver, probably terrified of the road raging Taxi driver, took a sharp right turn into Palmer Street, a little Fitzroy back street next to the Catholic Girls School. The Taxi followed him, now right up the Magna’s exhaust. The Magna then turned wildly right into Royal Lane, taking out the house on the corner’s picket fence. The taxi driver, not wanting to beat up his own car, let him go, but not without thinking of taking off after the Magna again. “Just… just let him go…” I emplored, not wanting to get involved in something resembling a scene from Grand Theft Auto.

When I finally arrived at Bar Open, I felt like I really earnt a scotch. Shame it was just about to close by the time I arrived.

Went to my 10 year High School reunion on Saturday evening. To everyone who told me that I shouldn’t go, I’d like to admit that you were right and I was wrong.

I shouldn’t of gone. I hated high school, I had no friends in my own year, everyone was fucked-up christian and absolutely nothing has changed. I still found nothing interesting about these people at all. I just didn’t care that Michelle was pregnant and living in Wodonga with a baptist pastor. I didn’t care that Luke had just moved back from Western Australia. I didn’t care that Kate was a housewife in Newcastle.

In another ten years time, I probably would’ve forgotten all about this stuff, so if you’re reading this now and we’re still in touch in ten years time, please remember — don’t let me go to another school reunion.

Fucked if I know. Either way, if you need to email me, send it to my Gmail address. I’m going to change hosting companies because I’m a little sick of this.

Go to http://www.ys.net.au/pollinate.asp if you’re interested in participating in market research for a new soft drink. The quotation marks have me a little worried though.

This is awesome. SBS is making each weekly episode of John Safran’s new show Speaking In Tongues available as a free video podcast.

Translation for the non-geeks out there: you can now get the weekly episodes of Speaking In Tounges delivered to your computer each week to watch at your leisure. It’s the next best thing to having DVDs mailed to you for free. This is perfect for me. I’m a fan of John Safran, but I don’t get SBS reception at my house.

I am afraid that I’m going a little Podcast crazy though… I’ve now got a 22 podcasts I’m subscribed to, and while I’m interested in all of them, there’s just not enough hours in a day to keep up with them.

A little under a month ago, I said that I wanted to be 117 kilograms for my Christmas trip. Well, the Christmas trip was last weekend and I’m very pleased to report that I was actually 116 kilograms when I left, and I managed to keep my weight at that level despite all of the horrible, delicious things I ate and drank.

My next target is to be 113 kilograms for December 25. Wish me luck.

December is party time, and it’s becoming pretty booked out. Check out my Saturday timetable:

• 11:00am: Helping Sam move her stuff into storage before she ships out.
• 1:00pm: Heath’s birthday pic-i-nic.
• 5:00pm: My high school reunion.
• 8:00pm: My co-worker Priya’s housewarming.

All this despite the fact that most people are headed for Meredith.

P.S. I’m in the middle of writing a detailed account of my holiday, but it’s taking a little longer than expected.

From tomorrow morning until Monday afternoon, I’ll be on Hamilton Island. Don’t feel too bad for me; I’ll get by OK.

• My housemates – it’s not OK for your boyfriend’s band to rehearse in our lounge room, especially when you’re the only one in the house who’s out that night, and especially if it’s not your bedroom directly underneath the lounge room.
• Nokia – Thanks for building an alarm clock into your phone. But why the f*ck doesn’t it go off if someone sends me an SMS in the middle of the night?
• Victoria Street and Smith Street Traffic – it took me half an hour to drive in to work today. Half an hour. It only takes me 45 minutes to walk.
• Mucus – While I was driving to work, I sneezed. It was pretty powerful. My hand had a thin layer of snot on it, which wasn’t nice. What was even worse was the massive globule of snot that fell out of my nose and landed on my shirt. I didn’t see it until I finally got to the office and parked my car. Thank christ I saw it when I did.

That is all.

Saw this on Rocketboom (a great video Podcast; iTunes users should go and subscribe to it now):

Vote Chris Christmas Rodriguez this Christmas

I’ve got two invites to sign up for a wordpress.com blog. If you want ‘em, come and ask for ‘em.

Booyah. Cracked the 120 kilogram barrier. I’m now eating breakfast after after my walk to work, and that seems to be working better for me.

I’ve also got myself a pedometer. Black Julie from the Town Hall and I were supposed to be having a competition to see who can get the most steps in a week, so I’ve been walking myself stupid. Yesterday I walked from North Melbourne to Prahran and back (~20,000 steps) and today I walked along the river to Punt Road and back past the MCG (~15,000 steps). Apparently my daily goal should be 10,000 steps, so I’ve done pretty well for myself.

Unfortunately, Julie “forgot” to wear hers, and she doesn’t think she can participate in the competion now that she’s leaving soon. I say she’s chickening out now that she realises how obsessed with the walking thing I am.

Apparently, I was quite drunk on Thursday night. I’ll have to take everyone’s word for it as I don’t remember too much after getting the Taxi to the Jawa Bar. I remember the work barbeque, I remember the very boozy little bottles of champagne I got stuck into once I ran out of CC & Drys, and I remember the big glasses of bourbon I gulped down at my boss’ place, but I don’t remember too much after that.

The next day I did front up for work. It was horrible.

The Commonwealth Bank doesn’t want my superannuation anymore. They’ve shut my fund to new applicants and anyone who changes jobs.

For now, I’m switching to an MLC fund, but I’m considering putting my hard-earned into one of those crazy ethical funds. Of course, the hard part about this is doing the research…

They’ve redesigned the Western Bulldogs site, and I reckon it looks fantastic (well, compared to the old site, it looks fantastic). Shame about the layout of the content–the “Broadband Features” on the right there is basically an ad for Telstra BigPond.

I’m getting very, very frustrated. I’ve been working hard. I’ve been careful about what I eat. I’ve been walking to work just about every day (I’ve even started taking detours through the city; my walk home is taking me around an hour now). All of this has been to no avail–I just can’t seem to get below 120 kilograms. I’ve been hovering between 120 and 125 for months now.

Personally, I think it’s because I’ve started eating breakfast, but everyone I ask about it seems pretty adamant that eating breakfast is a good idea. Maybe I should leave home without having breakfast, then eat some fruit when I get into the office? Or is it important that I eat breakfasty foods? I’ve never been good with the idea that particular foods are only for particular meals. Cold pizza for breakfast, Coco Pops for dinner, ice cream sundaes for lunch… wait, this is how I got into this mess in the first place, isn’t it?

Turns out that none of my hundereds of readers could leave a comment, even if they wanted to. So now they can–anonymous comments for all!

Neil’s missus Rachael gave birth to Milo Jay Moog last night this morning. Weighed in at 10 pounds and is 59 centimetres tall, which is pretty big apparently. Either way, congratulations to all.

I’m not overly political, but this is a lot of fun.

On 21/11/05, Robert Vecino wrote:

…give me a call if it’s gonna be a problem (once you’ve got your phone from your parent’s dr. absent minded)…

I can’t believe that Robbo called me absent minded. Welcome to Bizzaro world.

In November 2004, Mclusky decided to do a band Kris Krindle. The only rule was that no band member could pull their own name out of the hat; as rock stars, the cost of the gifts was obviously of no concern.

First time around, Andy picked out his own name. “Err… guys, I’ve got a problem…" he called. The scraps of paper went back into the hat and they picked names again. This time, Jack went first and pulled out his own name straight away. He threw it back in and the process started again, this time finishing with Andy pulling his own name out again.

After six or seven false starts, Andy finally picked Jonathan’s name from the cap and held the little piece of paper to his chest, not wanting his bandmates to see. Jonathan and Jack pulled out their bits of paper and everyone was finally satisfied.

Driving home through the Cardiff fog, Andy started thinking about what he would get, and who his Kris Krindle would be. After a little thought, he came to the realisation that he already knew!

Andy already had Jonathan, and Jack couldn’t have his own name in his pocket, so that left one possibility–Jack was Andy’s Kris Krindle. With that realisation, Andy smiled a cocky little grin, until he realised that Jack was a shit gift-giver.

Maybe this is old news, but Firefox 1.5 supports the CSS3 outline property.

Outlines differ from borders in the following ways:

1. Outlines do not take up space.
2. Outlines may be non-rectangular.

This makes them very useful for showing the edges of layout blocks. Borders influence the size of an element, outlines don’t.

Seriously. Free fricking beer. Makes me very sad I don’t drink it anymore.

It’s the Solid Waste Live Recording Booze Party, Friday the 18th November (that’s Tomorrow) at Cumbersome Records (93 Johnson Street, Collingwood). Beer starts at 7.

Is this Western Bulldogs’ mascot Woofer’s new look?

Let’s hope not. That moustache is creepy.

“Kids, don’t go off with that strange looking man!”

“But mum, he looks just like Woofer!”

Speaking of the Dogs, I finally got my membership renewal today. I’ll have to check if Matty’s renewing his membership too–otherwise I’ll be stuck sitting with some weird creep between Neil and I.

EDIT: Wait a second, Matty is a weird creep. I meant to say “some strange weird creep between Neil and I.” Yes, that’s much better.

From The Age:

KARL Norman, the tall defender Carlton found too much trouble to handle, has failed to front up to training with the Western Bulldogs.

Norman accepted an invitation to join the Bulldogs for pre-season training and was being considered as a late draft pick, but has not appeared since he was scheduled to show last Thursday.

Bulldogs coach Rodney Eade confirmed yesterday that the club had experienced difficulty in getting hold of Norman, who had been enthusiastic about training with the club with a view to being drafted.

Before now, I wasn’t against the idea of drafting Norman, but now… well, if we draft him, we’re a bunch of bloody idiots.

Bought the new Brant Bjork and the Bros double CD “Saved By Magic” last week after hearing an interview on Respect the Rock, and it’s one of the best records I’ve bought in a long, long time. Nice, laid-back, groovy rock ‘n’ roll with a really strong sense of rhythm.

I knew Brant used to be the drummer from Fu Manchu, but what I didn’t know was that he was one of the founding members of Kyuss. Time to grow my hair and buy a skull-bong, I guess.

Round 8: Kangaroos 13. 14. (92) def. by Western Bulldogs 18. 10. (118)

After the unexpected victory in Brisbane last week, I let myself get excited about football again. People in the press were calling it the upset of the year, which is what it felt like, but still I ignored them, preferring to believe that the Dogs were finally maturing into a force to be reckoned with.

One of the only games we won last in 2004 was against North Melbourne. It was Matthew Croft and Simon Garlick’s farewell game and emotion was running very high. Garlick ended up kicking 2.1 and Crofty kicked 5.1 from full forward. I still smile, remembering screaming “kick it to Crofty!” from high above the half forward flank. Good memories.

Anyway, North Melbourne was one of the few teams that we didn’t fear, so, filled with arrogance brought on by our win in Brisbane, we were set to play two first gamers: key position prospects Cameron Wight, a lanky looking guy who it was later pointed out to me bears a striking resemblance to Urkel, and Tim Walsh, a much more built kid, who also happened to be the son of North Melbourne president Geoff Walsh.

I invited Ben (a North supporter) and Simone (a Dogs supporter) to come along with Emily, Laura, Patty (another North supporter) and myself. I met up with Emily at The Lounge on Swanston Street with my scarf in my pocket–I didn’t want a repeat of The Green Room a few weeks before, where I was denied entry for being a footy fan–and headed down the the Dome. I was excited, but the North supporters amongst us were cocky–they’d started the season very well, and were expected to win.

The first quarter was a bit of an arm-wrestle, but North looked the better team. Sav Rocca booted a monster goal in the second quarter from the centre square, which even I had to applaud. Tim Walsh looked pretty useless playing on the half forward flank.

The cockiness of the North supporters was really starting to grate on me, so the next time I went for a beer I found a seat in the middle of the Footscray fans I was there with. The second half was a completely different story, with the Dogs romping away with it in the third quarter, outscoring the Roos seven goals to two. Chris Grant managed to sneak forward and pop through a fantastic blind shot at goal. Patty was saddened, and you could see the metaphorical storm clouds gathering over Ben’s head.

In the end, the Dogs pissed it in, winning by 26 points and gaining thier first back-to-back wins since Peter Rhode took over the reigns and won in Round 22, 2002 and Round 1, 2003; before that, our last consecutive wins were in Rounds 17 and 18 2002.

Grumpy Ben, Simone, Emily and I then headed to Robbo’s housewarming party, where we regaled Neil, Rachael and anyone who wanted to hear with tales of a great victory.

Since the point of this blog is to give my little writing projects a decent home, future installments of my famous Footy Season in Review series will be posted here. For the uninitiated, however, here’s the first four episodes:

• Part 1 (Round 1 vs. Collingwood, Round 2 vs. Melbourne and Round 3 vs. Richmond)
• Part 2 (Round 4 vs. West Coast and Round 5 vs. Adelaide)
• Part 3 (Round 6 vs. Geelong)
• Part 4 (Round 7 vs. Brisbane)