Good news everyone!

I have two pieces of good news. The first is that my wife got me a Test Tube Alien! It does say ages 7+ on the packet and I'm 31 so it must be ok for me to use right? Ok, ok, she bought me a kids toy cause she knew I'd like it. Or as I tell people, "I'm interested in the technology behind it." But that's just to save face. In reality I have the heart of a small boy......in a jar on my shelf.

Oh and I almost forgot*, my wife had her second pregnancy ultrasound this morning and we're having a boy! The due date is in April, so there's still some time to wait, but it'll be great having two babies. My wife has got away without too much discomfort so far, but last night not long after I'd joined her in bed, she suddenly felt nauseous (I'm pretty sure it was a coincidence that I'd just joined her!) and had to rush to the bathroom. Thankfully she made it out of our carpeted bedroom, but unfortunately didn't make it any further than the wooden floorboards of the hallway, before vomiting everywhere. Amazingly this was outside the baby's bedroom and she didn't even wake up. You know its love when you are cleaning up someone's upchuck in the middle of the night without thinking about strangling them.

(* I was joking when I wrote that I 'almost forgot' about the ultrasound!)

Bad TV and Good Website

I happened to see some of the Australian version of 'Comic Relief' recently and I have to say that although it wasn't very comical, it was certainly a relief when I turned off the TV. The concept is a great charity idea, but to keep people interested and donating money, any TV charity has to be either quite funny or at least entertaining. This was neither. They had dredged up some awful, old comedy acts such as 'Kylie Mole', from 'The Comedy Company', a show that hasn't been on TV for years. Most of the other skit stuff that I saw was incredibly weak, even though some of it was coming from comedians who I normally find hilarious. I felt that it could have benefited from more decent stand up comics doing bits, rather than the too tired sketch comedy approach that they went for. Did anyone else see this? And find it amusing?

Now to balance this post out with something positive. I recently bought some perfume online for my lovely wife for Christmas (getting in early this year). The site that I went to was www.strawberrynet.com and I have to say that it is a good business. I believe it is based in Hong Kong and the prices are pretty damn good. The thing that prompted me to praise them like this is that the shipping was free! And to make it almost too good to be true I received the package in only 4 days! In my pervious overseas internet business dealings this is almost unheard of. So if you're looking to get some perfume or aftershave or anything like that I'd suggest you check out www.strawberrynet.com .
P.S. This is an unpaid and unprompted advert, and from me that's rare. :-)

Rant - lateness

I can't stand it when people are late. I'm ok if someone now and then turns up to things late, but it is the people who are consistently never on time that bug me. 5 minutes is ok, 10 minutes - maybe traffic, more than 15 minutes is incompetence and disorganisation. Let me give you a recent example. I have a friend who is renowned for being late. Great guy, but if he had to pick up $1 million by a certain time or lose it, he wouldn't end up being any richer. This guy will likely not even be on time for his own funeral. He told me he was coming around to my place at 1:00PM. About 12:45 I get an SMS saying that he will be around closer to 2:00PM, but hopefully before. So I go about my business and lose track of time (because I don't have to go anywhere). When I look at my watch its 2:30! He finally turned up at 2:45! This guy's life is not THAT important. He is single and lives with his parents about 15 minutes away from me, so WTF is he doing that makes him nearly 2 hours late?? In this case he didn't explain, but in the past when he has they are always very weak excuses. While this of course is not a massive disruption to my life cause I was at home and had stuff to do, similar incidents have happened while going out somewhere and I hate waiting for others. It's rude and inconsiderate to be late, so if you're this kind of person, get a fricken watch, spend the microsecond it should take a normal person to estimate how much time you need to get somewhere, then give yourself another 20 minutes cause you're probably an idiot without a realistic concept of time and then prepare yourself to go early. IT'S NOT THAT HARD!

This is also a problem in my workplace. Without going into the politics of my work, even though I work with a small team of people there are some who are constantly late. EVEN when they are on a shift where it is just them and the boss!! How stupid is that?! The boss might grumble at them, but there is no punishment! I'd be docking pay for it, cause a line has to be drawn. It means that the person who is on first often has to do more work and if it's busy of course it's even worse. Again there are other reasons the boss isn't too hard on us which I won't go into, but ultimately these people make the whole team look bad. If I can wake up early (which I hate as much as anyone) and make it into work on time, then anyone can. I too would like to spend an extra 10-20 minutes at home either sleeping in, or having more breakfast or whatever, but being on time to things demonstrates that you are a reliable and competent person which is how I would like to be seen.

Well I'm glad I got that off my chest. I should really state that I don't "hate" people who are late as such, but basically don't understand their behaviour for the reasons mentioned above. I hope this post doesn't come across as a Michael Richards racist, rage tirade type of thing. ;-)

The Joys of Moving

Everyone knows the horror of moving house and the annoyance of just moving stuff around. Although I didn't have to move house, I did have to move rooms recently, and all because of that baby. Oh she'd been eyeing off my study ever since she was born! Or more accurately her old room which was still fairly bright in the evening had become increasingly more so since the introduction of daylight saving and its accursed extra hour of daylight. I mean who but God has the right to go meddling with time like that?! So what if it was getting darker or lighter earlier...or whatever the hell it was doing, just let it be. Anyway my study was the darkest room in the house which suited my nefarious purposes and it was also bigger than the baby's room. But 'she who must be obeyed' had the bright idea of switching the baby's room with my study so that bubs might be able to go to sleep earlier. As this was somewhat aligned with my goals (eg. baby asleep = chance of action), I agreed. Then I remembered that the baby's bed does not fit through the doorway and needed to be disassembled....also that for a 13 month old, she has a lot of junk...also that I have a lot of junk, two desks, a bookcase filled with heavy books, a big TV, a set of drawers and various other small bits of furniture. In short after a long day with the baby at the in-laws and my reassembling the baby's bed, only to find that my wife had misplaced a screw, my finding it and having to reassemble part of it again, I can't be stuffed ever moving anything again.

Also, I still haven't gotten any action! (Ah, who am I kidding, I'm too tired anyway)


* Javatari's bad joke of the week (true story) --> I was driving past this chinese restaurant today called Sha Tin. I thought to myself, "I really wouldn't want to dine there. After all, who wants to eat in a place that's been ShaTin." Boom-Tish!!

Magician Profile/Review - Derren Brown

What Derren Brown does, is a combination of magic, psychology, suggestion, misdirection and showmanship. He is one of those performers that can read the mind of a spectator while actually looking like he is reading their mind. He doesn’t use a phony, over the top persona in his presentations and the spectators he uses in his demonstrations often buy him as being ‘the real thing’. Brown of course admits to the things he does as being trickery, sometimes even when he’s demonstrating them, yet still is able to amaze people, including me.

Although any description of a trick is a pale imitation of actually seeing it done I will attempt to explain one of Derren’s effects. In his trick ‘Smoke’, he spreads out a deck of cards in front of a spectator who is asked to look at one and remember it (while he turns away). Upon turning back he then reads the spectator’s mind and tells them the card that they have looked at, admittedly sometimes on the second try, but often on the first. While they are reeling from this Derren pulls out a cigarette which he lights up, while commenting that it is interesting that they picked that card as it isn’t even in the deck. The deck of cards which has been sitting on the table in plain sight this entire time is once again spread and they cannot find the card they looked at before. Derren then coughs and takes the burnt ‘cigarette’ out of his mouth and it is shown to be their rolled up card! This description is as accurate as possible as to what you would see it you witnessed this effect. Just think for a second how impossible this would look if someone did this with you. I do know how’s it’s done and with all great magic it’s fairly simple and very deceptive.

To actually see him do a demonstration look here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFGG6zWByhM

One of the TV shows he did in Britain was called ‘Messiah’, where he flew to the US and presented his skills to various so called ‘real’ psychics and various new age kooks. Now, they didn’t know he was a magician, but his ‘rule’ was that if any of them asked him, he would freely admit that it was a trick and that he was using ‘magic’. Strangely enough in the episode that I saw, where he demonstrated the ability to replicate the drawings of someone in another room, the psychics all took it at face value and no one questioned his ‘powers’.

What I like about him is that he is a thinking man’s magician who rather than using brightly colored props makes people question whether what they are seeing is real or not while entertaining them at the same time.

I'm a fruity gardener

At the risk of sounding older than my 31 years, I have to say that I rather enjoy gardening. When we bought our house, I was able to put in a vegetable garden and have gained a strange sense of satisfaction from tending to and eating the stuff I've grown. So far we've had lettuces, radishes, snow peas, normal peas, celery and a couple of potatoes from the garden. Two more recent plants that I put in were a strawberry and a raspberry plant. So it was with great joy that I ate the first raspberry of the season a few days ago and happily watched as the second was soon to grow to fruition. Also the first strawberry was almost ripe as well.

Now flash back to yesterday, it was a public holiday in my state of Victoria, but because of my contract I still had to work and worse still, I wasn't getting paid any extra. This put me in a bad place to start with, so I dealt with the day in the apathetic mood that it deserved. When finally it was over with, I was happy to go home to my beautiful wife and daughter. It was there that I received the worst news of all....the nearly ripe raspberry and strawberry were gone! Birds had swept in past our large and useless guard dog and taken them! As I went out to witness the horror for myself, music from several war films was running through my head. How dare those feathered finks take crops that I had put my blood, sweat and tears (not literally) into! Due to the difficulty, legality and environmental concerns associated with killing off all birds in the region I had to combat these avian adversaries though other means. And how did I do this? Well, using all the ingenuity I could muster, I put small plastic bags around the remaining unripe fruit. Let's see them take those off with their pitiful talons. The moral of this story is that you should never come between Javatari and his fruity garden!