There’s a Cosplay lecture on at UWA on 8th September (see link for details) by Leng Leng Thang from Singapore.
The poster they have up in the lunchroom indicates there’s an iPod touch as a prize for best costume.
The 50 best Sesame Street moments, as rated by babblebaby.
Today I took a day of selfish annual leave to do handover swimming lessons with Puggle and Bilby. The day unfolds thus…
Bilby (as usual) wakes me up because she would like her Weet-Bix (the 5-grain ones are pretty good, although given how infrequently I eat commercial breakfast cereal I can still taste the sugar). Amazingly she then goes back to bed, leaving me to try to catch up on shuteye on the couch so as not to disturb anyone.
Finally others surface and it’s time for breakfast proper, with the usual battle with Puggle to convince him to get himself dressed.
Mum comes over to mind Bilby, then it’s into bathers and we’re off to swimming.
Puggle’s class is just us, the instructor and one other parent and child, which is good from my perspective. He’s working hard on his windmill arms. We have some olympic swimming footage to show him as inspiration 
The pool is nice and warm, but it’s cold outside and the day is getting cooler.
Lunch for Bilby (Puggle is still watching the concrete pour at the end of the street). Then it’s time to swim again. Bilby’s class is empty, except for us.
She swims to the point of exhaustion, I think she spends more time with her head under water than above it. She’s more comfortable with the lesson than I am.
After that it’s off to pick up the new car, Dad kindly gives me a lift. Cheque handed over, keys picked up, it’s time to pilot the battle wagon back home. You’d think if you wanted to make your customers happy you’d bother to sell them a car that doesn’t have the ‘empty’ petrol warning light on.
I forget that the new fangled ABS and EBFD don’t stop me spinning the wheels at the lights. Not used to having a V6 It happily cruises down the freeway.
Home and lunch. Then off to cash in receipts at Medicare, health insurer, then Medicare again (this time with a massive queue). A brief trip to Dymocks to pick up a new street map to go with the car.Then it’s home and with the car seats fitted it’s time to fill up and go for a drive.
$95 worth of petrol later…!
I get to check out the cruise control (sadly it doesn’t do the steering). Annoyingly I set it at the legal speed limit and it stays there, which means the car is going slower than most of the other traffic. Having the car attempt to get back to speed is amusing though, although it tends to floor it, not sure if it could spin its own wheels…
A stereo that works and plays CD’s (not that we’ve tested that yet)! Lots of bits that open and close… Two trip odometers. Sadly the manual is not yet with us, so some of the buttons just require guessing. But boy is it huge! I’m sure the back end is out there somewhere… Needless to say we’re trying to only park anywhere that requires going forwards at the moment.
Then after the drive it’s home and time to prep dinner, put the kids to bed and watch some Middleman.
May even get the tax return done tonight…
For those who can vaguely remember him from the Cadbury ads and those are too young to have seen him in action, check out these ABC videos of Professor Julius Sumner Miller in action.
via Make.
Fans of Philip Pullman might like to take a look at the documentary “Inside his Dark Materials” on ABC2, 8:30pm tonight (Sunday), put together by a friend of his.
Just awesome, check out the NASA photo archive (via Slashdot).
would be to not let your red LED sign on a busy intersection stay crashed for 3 days. At least it’s not displaying any spelling errors this time.
I’ve just finished reading Andrew Smith’s book “Moondust”, in which he attempts to interview the 9 remaining Apollo landing astronauts. (In one way it was strange because it kept referencing various popular artists I’d just been reading about in the previous book I’d started reading (“Culture Club” by Craig Shuftan )).
I guess the interesting bits I found were:
With only 9 remaining people alive who have walked on another world, it is amazing to read about how their lives were changed forever, being able to look at Luna and say to themselves “Hey, I was up there”. Mingling in the crowd at SF cons are people who have actually been into deep space, or walked on the Moon. Pretty much all of them agree they were the best moments of their lives, and everything since then has been learning to cope with the fact that the rest of their existence will be hard to compare to those moments.
Moondust is definitely worth a read if you’re a space fan or, perhaps more importantly, if you wonder what the effect of standing on another world and looking back at ours would be like and how that would affect rest of your life.
It would seem that there’s Mary MacKillop, the musical.
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