sweaty

I've spent a good portion of the last few days sweating.

On Saturday, Jesse invited me out for 9 holes of golf at St Lucia with some work buddies of Alison's. It was the hottest day of the year - the mercury went over 40 around 2pm - but it didn't feel as hot as the numbers said. I went around in 42 (6 over), which is probably the best I've hit for 9 holes at St Lucia. I had a nice birdie on the second after a tee-shot within about a couple of metres of the flag, and generally I hit the ball well all day. Jesse shot 55 and showed good signs, and the other chaps battled away a bit shooting scores that don't bear mentioning. Fun day.

On Monday night, Matt and I resumed our tennis adventure. We've been playing fairly regularly this year, and although he's been beating me pretty regularly when we play sets, we have both been making great strides in the quality of our ball-striking and in our fitness. We played at on artificial grass at UQ this time around, as the Griffith courts were wet. I'm not a big fan of the surface, but for some reason I was volleying better, and my forehand continues to get more consistent, particularly when I remember to move my feet and hit through the ball. We hit for 2 hours, which is pretty demanding by any standards.

Last night was the continuation of volleyball. We were 4, as Sandy was feeling poorly, but the other team had 5 guys without any girls, so technically had to forfeit. We played anyway, of course, and although we lost on the scoresheet (I think), we played well - I think everyone is improving, which is what you hope to see.

I'm continuing to ride to work when I can. The floating walkway was out of commission yesterday and Monday, but I'm up above 50% for days ridden to work for the year now, and well ahead of schedule for getting to 1000km for the year (I expect to be at about 270km or so at the end of February).

more tennis

Had a game of tennis with Matt last night down at Griffith. We're getting noticably better (read: more consistent), and last night was the cleanest I've hit my groundstrokes in recent memory. Unfortunately, my concentration held me back from translating it into a set, and I generally played abysmally. When I actually concentrated, I hit the ball well off the ground, but I kept making silly errors at bad times, and my first serve was uncharacteristically absent and unable to save me. I recovered a little bit at the end of each set, and I was a brief show at the end of the second, but wound up losing 6-2, 6-4.

I was very frustrated during the match, but at the same time, my game and, even moreso, my fitness, are clearly improving, so that's nice.

doing more stuff

Tuesday night, Andy, Mick and I did the ten-pin bowling thing at Strike Bowling in the city. Expensive, and the music was kind of crap, and I bowled terribly, but it was pretty fun.

Last night was culcha, with a concert at the Powerhouse by Gretchen Parlato, an American singer, with Mike Moreno on guitar and the Steve Newcombe trio on backup. Paul, Julz, Kylie and Jan were also there, and it was a pretty good concert. She's certainly the best comp-ing vocalist I've heard, and a lot (if not all) of the songs were pretty cool, particularly Butterfly and On The Other Side.

My neck is super sore, and seems to be getting worse rather than better.

mine, beach

I played beach volleyball again last night out at Enoggera. I was again the only one calling balls, which was a little annoying. We got well and truly walloped, against the same team as last week. Later in the game I found myself calling other people's names a lot (which can be uncool) and accidentally stealing other people's balls (also uncool). Nonetheless, it was fun.

return to poly-sport

In my previous life in Brisbane, I was a sporting scattershot. I played regular tennis, and at various times also got into almost-weekly pickup basketball, regular golf, lunchtime indoor soccer, and anything else that was going. This disappeared in France, with only a brief period of basketball training, and another of sporadic tennis, to accompany my regular cycling.

My return to Australia, too, has thus far been light on sport. I've had a few games of tennis with Matt, and a few games of golf with Dad, but nothing to build a base of fitness or noticable acquisition or development of skills. This was accompanied, surely not coincidentally, by a realisation that my days of never worrying about my weight or physique, may be over. When I weighed myself over Christmas, I was 5kg heavier than the previous measure (which was admittedly a long time ago), and had the beginnings of a belly.

One of my main new year's resolutions, then, was to rediscover my previous sporting habits. I resolved to make sure I got 12 games of tennis, 12 games of golf, and 1000km of cycling done over the year. The tennis is going OK, with 2 outings (although I'm only counting it as 1 game, since the first outing was cut short by lights failure). I've had 1 game of golf (albeit only 9 holes), and my bike counter is reading 70km (of which 20km is probably from the end of last year).

Also, this weekend was positive for diversity. On Saturday, a bunch of us wandered along to Moorooka Bowls Club for barefoot bowls. There was barefoot dancing on the next green, but we basically bowled for a few hours, in various configurations of players and seriousness. On Monday, after a barbeque at Neil & Sandy's place for Australia day [sic], Andy and I filled in for their beach volleyball team, which was lots of fun, although a little less technical than the volleyball I'd played in the past. In the midst of that, I also got an invitation from Dave to play indoor soccer on Thursday nights, for which, with my new resolution in mind, I expressed my enthusiasm. Once I add tennis fixtures to the mix, I should be back into a the rhythm I once enjoyed.

Southern climes, again

Having started my new job just a scant week previous, last week our team trooped down to Melbourne. The purpose of the journey was to learn what we had really signed up for, taking over the code from CSIRO, both that which we are superseding, and that which form the firmament upon which we will build.

The work aspect of the week was good. We had 3 and a half very intense days talking with the previous developers, learning the nooks and crannies of the code. We also had a half day with the current and potential industrial partners, about the directions in which we might go, both technically and in a business sense.

The non-work aspect of the week was also really successful in the end. We were put up in nice digs, at the Oaks on Lonsdale; I was in an apartment probably as big as the one in which I live. What made the trip worthwhile, though, was that I didn't spend much time there.

On Tuesday night I popped around to Kris' place in Brunswick, for dinner with him and his girlfriend Lizzie. We had a great evening, very easy conversation. I get on well with Kris.

Before leaving, I had gone online and a bought a ticket for the Wednesday night session of the tennis. When I arrived outside Rod Laver arena, though, I looked at my ticket and was horrified to see that it was for the day session. I lay on the grass for 15 minutes or so, just cursing my carelessness and wondering what I would tell those to whom I'd boasted that I was going to see Federer play.

I wandered over the ticket office, by this stage a gathering point for people hoping (mostly in vain) to score tickets to the sold out session, to confirm that I had stuffed up, and if so whether there might be any tickets left I might buy. The lady was very nice, took some ID and presumably went away to check that my day session ticket had not, in fact, been used. At her urging, I hung around for about 10 minutes while she apparently worked on my behalf to find a ticket. When she did, she asked me not to appear to triumpant, or everyone would want one, but I thanked her heartily and wandered inside. In the end, I ended up with a really good seat - far better than the one I had bought - and had a great time watching a fairly good match of singles (Federer-Blake) and most of a match of doubles (Bryan/Bryan vs Bhupathi/Knowles). That I was so lucky to be there made it much more special.

To that ticket lady, whoever you are, you made my week, and I can't thank you enough :)

how does my garden grow?

my garden, originally uploaded by jsteel.

I have something of a checkered history with growing plants. Nonetheless, my dearest mum has kindly supplied me with herbs and other plants for my balcony. She did the same when I moved in, but the only survivors are a peace lily and the chives (both of which are thriving, it has to be said).

In our last drive down, I was supplied with a pot of baby spinach, which is also doing very well, and some basil, which had a brief episode with a caterpillar, but since then is looking strong. There was also some thyme, but it has gone brown at an alarming rate, and I'm doubtful as to whether it will see out the month.

So, for the benefit of my nursery operator/mother, here is the current (actually a day or two ago) state of my garden.

Hi ho, hi ho

It's off to my new job I go.

storms in an SCG-cup

The reason I'm back to blogging probably has a lot to do with the second test match having finished in Sydney yesterday. I basically missed out on the three first days, ironically because I was down in Sydney on holidays, but I saw a bit on Saturday, and lots yesterday.

The match was very exciting. Anyone who says differently, and I'm talking about Spanky Roebuck here, is full of crap. There were some real heroes on the day, from Hussey and Symonds building Australia's total, to Dravid, Ganguly, Kumble and Harbhajan who held out so well on a difficult pitch, to Michael Clarke who bowled well when it was finally demanded of him.

The umpiring was bad. I didn't see the decisions on the first first few days, but from what I hear they were pretty rotten, and Dravid's dismissal on the final day was a shocker, and was compounded by its importance. The Australians were excited, and the clip of the pad would have sounded like a nick to them in the heat of the moment, but Bucknor had to be better than that, and he wasn't. The bat was behind the pad, and although that's not a tactic I like (pretending to be playing a shot to avoid LBWs), Bucknor should have seen it for what it was.

The two catches with sniffs of dirt on them, by Clarke to dismiss Gangles, and by Ponting in an unsuccessful appeal for bat-bad against Dhoni, were handled properly. Ponting's was fairly caught, but there was reasonable doubt about whether the ball had hit the glove. Clarke's was close, but I've seen no replay which contradicts his claim that he caught it fairly on the first grab, and mumblings about his roll are just stupid.

Overall though, the Indians got a bum run with the umps, and deserve to say so. They've done themselves no favours, though, in immediately asking for them (and Bucknor particularly) to be stood down for future matches. The rules say they have no right to influence umpiring appointments, which is entirely correct, and if they'd waited a day or two then the ICC could have stood the umpires down of their own volition. Now that the Indians have requested it, though, the ICC's hands are tied. If they stand them down, the'll be seen to be bowing to Indian pressure, but they can't really let them continue after their performance in Sydney.

Harbhajan's suspension for racial abuse is a real shame, but he has no-one to blame but himself. Regardless of whether 'monkey' is a racial slur in India, it was made quite clear to the Indians in September that it was thought to be as such by the Australians. After that, there is no defense for having used the term. He might get his suspension knocked down on appeal though; I reckon 1 or 2 tests is more on the money.

Kumble covered himself in glory in the match, with both bat and ball, but stripped himself of it when he started questioning the Australians' approach to the game. The claim is baseless, and just comes off as hypocrisy coming from the team whose player has been quite rightly suspended for racial abuse. If he wants to make claims like that, then he needs to condemn Harbhajan's behaviour first. In reality, his real gripe should be with the umpires.

Its a real shame that all this crap interfered with the test, which was otherwise a pretty great contest.

visitor

Sandy has been out from France for the last 3 weeks, but had been staying out with friends in Cleveland, which is unfortunately a long way from anywhere else. On Monday she came into town and we hung out, before going to a couple of New Year's parties in the evening: a BBQ at Dave's in Paddington, and then dinner and drinks at Southbank with Chad, Mirri, Craig, etc.

On Wednesday, Sandy and I got up early and flew down to Sydney. The move proved wise. Brisbane had been pretty inclement weather-wise for the whole of Sandy's stay, but Sydney turned on some glorious weather. On Wednesday we walked around town, from Central station through Hyde Park, then around through the botanic gardens to the opera house, and through the Rocks to Darling Harbour. In the evening we headed out to Pymble to stay with Dave, a family friend of Sandy's.

On Thursday we did the beach thing. Manly beach was beautiful, but closed to swimming due to dangerous surf, but we had a lie on the beach, then moved to Shelly beach and then the inside beach for a dip and some more sun. I collected rather too much, and have some nasty red bits on my back and feet now. In the evening we headed to Andrew's place for a barbeque, which was lots of fun, both in terms of seeing their apartment, meeting Steven, and just hanging out with them for a while.

On Friday we again did the beach thing, this time heading out to Bondi, which was open. We didn't swim, though, just walking along the beach, then up and around the cliffs towards Bronte. We spent a while watching some surfers trying to get out to the big break off Tamarama. It took them a good half-hour to get out there, and in the half an hour we watched after that, they weren't able to catch any waves. To end the little holiday, we caught up with Dave in Darling Harbour before heading out to the airport and home.

a month is a long time in the blogosphere

I figured I hadn't blogged since around Christmas, but in fact it has been longer than that. Its been an interesting time.

I finished as a NICTA employee on the 21st of December. In fact, I took some leave after that and was on the books until Friday just gone, making it a neat 6 months since I had started. In the end, I just decided that the research wasn't interesting enough to me, and I missed the challenging software engineering problems that I'd faced previously, and that I hope to face in my new position, at QUT, which I start next week.

Liberated of work, I headed up to Toowoomba for a week over Christmas. I played 3 rounds of golf with Dad, shooting 99 at Borneo, 44 for 9 holes at Goombungee, and 101 at Middle Ridge. Every now and then, I look like I know what I'm doing with a golf club in my hands, but lack of practice makes those moments a little too few and far between for me to shoot good scores. One of my new year's resolutions is to make sure I play golf at least 12 times this year. In between golf, I watched a lot of cricket, bought myself a new bike, and just generally made the most of some family time. Lee was up, and with Mum and Dad we headed down to Mullum for Christmas to have lunch with Granny and Andy.

Last Saturday I headed back to Brisbane. First commitment was Gav's birthday dinner at Kedron Park, which was fun. The next day I went out for a hit of tennis with Matt down at New Farm Park. He beat me comfortably in the first set, and I hit the wall physically, but found a sort of second wind to come back and pinch the second set. Another of my new year's resolutions is to play at least 12 games of tennis (although if I pull my finger out and register for fixtures, that will be easily done).

Wire cuts

Courtesy of Tone, I'm remembering and anticipating the Wire. He says, quite rightly:

If you haven't gotten into The Wire by now, you are a complete dickhead.

... which isn't far off the mark. A year back, over at Tone's as it happens, that it was the best hour on television and it wasn't even close, and the intervening time hasn't changed that opinion. (I was hedging at the time by saying "hour" rather than "show", but I wouldn't now).

For those searching for more depth to an already very deep show, one of the best sources I've seen is Heaven and Here, a Wire blog set up (as far as I can tell) by Shoals of the once unparalleled and still occasionally excellent FreeDarko). H&H has been a little dormant, but, in what appears to be a reawakening timed for the show's impending return to the American (and intertubular) airwaves in January, they recently blinked and linked to this article at the New Yorker. As an aside, that publication will forever be characterised for me by the Kauffman character in Adaptation, "great, sprawling new yorker shit".

Perhaps true to form, then, their Wire article is 12 pages long. There is some good stuff in there, though:

... Simon told him that “The Wire” would be “a novel for television. Not in a ‘Rich Man, Poor Man’ sense. Each episode would be like a chapter in a book. You could digress, in the way a novel does.

That was said in the context of the show's differentiation in its first season from most other crime dramas, and it's spot on. There is a commitment to a season-long arc of the plot and characters, with almost no identifiably complete storylines within each individual episode. This really allows for a much more nuanced and fleshed-out storylines and characters.

Of course, none of this was by accident. Simon himself, in his pitch to HBO, is both ambitious and prophetic:

It is a significant victory for HBO to counter program alternative, inaccessible worlds against standard network fare. But it would, I will argue, be a more profound victory for HBO to take the essence of network fare and smartly turn it on its head, so that no one who sees HBO’s take on the culture of crime and crime fighting can watch anything like “C.S.I.” or “N.Y.P.D. Blue” or “Law & Order” again without knowing that every punch was pulled on those shows. For HBO to step toe-to-toe with NBC or ABC and create a cop show that seizes the highest qualitative ground through realism, good writing, and a more brutal assessment of police, police work, and the drug culture—this may not be the beginning of the end for network dramas as the industry standard, but it is certainly the end of the beginning for HBO.

There's a lot more in there, replete with big words like "grandiloquence" and "autodidactic intellectualism", but this post is already long. Simon comes across as part insightful genius, part tool, and you get the feeling that this might be his great work, that without the rapport he has clearly built up with the city of Baltimore, he might struggle for the cathartic insight that makes The Wire work. Overall, the article is solid, and if you bail after the first four pages or so, you'll probably have covered the best stuff.

I've said it before, somewhere, and I still think its true, that the closest thing I've seen to the Wire is Janus, made by the ABC back in the 90s before they outsourced drama to the Beeb's crime unit. It was a follow-on to Phoenix, which I missed, and may in some jurisdictions have been known as Criminal Justice or some such. The show had that season arc that the Wire does so well (does better, it has to be said), with the Hennessy family trial, but also the strung-out cop (Peter Faithful vs Jimmy McNulty) who gets too involved in the case, an archetype very difficult to express in an episodic format. I'd recommend getting a copy, but not only have the ABC stopped making Australian drama, and stopped showing Australian drama, they're not selling the stuff they've already made.

Lest I finish on that disgruntled note, let me get back on message to sum up. Don't be a dickhead: if you haven't seen The Wire yet, do so.

mo-ver

mo-ver, originally uploaded by jsteel.

Thanks to all those who donated to Movember. Our team, the Monkey Butlers, raised about $2000 for the Prostate Cancer Foundation and Beyond Blue.

I'm off for a shave.

Movember 29th

Movember 29th, originally uploaded by jsteel.

Remember, remember the Last of Movember,
The Moustache Treason and Plot,
I know of no reason
Why Moustache Treason
Should ever be forgot.

Strong words, and many of them.

Tomorrow is the last day of Movember, and a perfect chance to use that as a pretence, or even a reason, to give money to help address men's health issues, specifically prostate cancer and depression.

To give, grab a credit card and head over to the Movember donation page. The money goes to the Prostate Cancer Foundation, and to depression initiative Beyond Blue.

If you find my moustache insufficiently impressive to garner your hard-earn, go and donate via Michael Lawley, at whom such a claim could never be levelled.

Quiche-eating so-and-so.

tarte, originally uploaded by jsteel.

In France I learned that making quiches was really very easy, and I've been doing so ever since. Its not quite so simple here - shortcrust pastry is less easily available in the large sizes, diced bacon is not as common and not of as good a quality, and the crème fraiche is not as good either. Still, they come out OK.

This one, just out ov the oven, has fried bacon, onion and zuccini, some fresh asparagus (which I've not tried before), cheese, egg-creme mix, and some sliced tomato on top.

I might have a glass of white with it, too. I have something worth celebrating today (more details as they become prudently distributable).