Anthony Malloy

I was doing the last minute flick through channels last night when I stumbled across Iedereen beroemd! on SBS. Of course I suckered in and watched it all.

This great little Belgian comedy (now there’s a phrase I’ve never used before) ended with a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it link to my wonderful home town, Melbourne, that featured a true blue Aussie accent. This got me thinking – where on earth did they get that accent from? Did they walk out in to the street while looping and grab the first Aussie tourist looking for a pub? Did they dial a number in an Australian phone book at random? Or is there a secret herd of Aussie actors hiding out in pockets of Belgium, just waiting for the phone call?

After yesterday’s whinge it’s time for two things that made me happy since the three things that made me grumpy.

1. Rain.

It’s been bucketing down like the end of the world these past couple of days. But I’m not happy for the garden, or our parched water reserves or even the ducks. I’m happy ’cause it means I can wear my new Canucks windcheater (sweater for our fine foreign friends) that arrived in the post the other day.

2. Rae

My wonderful Rae, completely independent of my complaints, tracked down a cheap copy of NHL 2005 for me. We even had a chance to play a little Canucks v Devils last night. What a great game – the controls are impossibly complex but straight away I could tell it’s a game I want to master. Now if I could only get rid of this pesky work thing that pays the bills I could go and spend the rest of my life perfecting my slap shot.

Three things that made me grumpy today.

1. Target, Malvern Central.

I’ve been wanting a copy NHL 2005, mainly, well only, because it has Marcus Naslund, the captain of my beloved Vancouver Canucks, on the cover. As Target was having a 15% off day, and Target price match K-Mart where it was cheaper, I thought I’d wander down to the local Target and pick it up.

There it was, just sitting on the shelf waiting for a Canuck loving Melbournian Xbox owner to come along and take it home. I took it to the counter and asked if they’d price match.

“No, there’s no K-Mart near here.” came the reply.

So, even though K-Mart and Target are part of the same giant Coles Myer conglomerate, and they were guaranteed a sale, a decision had made that would require me to hop in my car, drive to another store and pay them there. Their policy, while apparently good for them in some unfathomable way, did nothing but drive this customer to their nearest competitor. I will now go out of my way to ensure Coles Myer don’t get my money for this, and other, Xbox games.

2. Ebay.

Rae and Phee have fallen in love with Midtown Madness 3. Being the good bargain hunters we are I turned to Ebay to grab a copy so we can give Daniel back his loaner. Everything was going fine until, with 7 minutes to go, I thought I’d bid.

Of course Ebay, for the first time, crashed. Couldn’t place a bid for love or money. Doubly of course a couple of minutes after the auction closed it was working fine. And the damn thing went for only $15 too. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

3. Car Park

I was leaving work today, as I always do, through the public exit. This gives me traffic lights to turn right across traffic and makes life a lot less stressful than leaving by the staff exit and risking car and limb each night.

The big four wheel drive in front of me surrenders its ticket and drives through the boom gate. I swipe my pass only to turn and see that the four-wheel-idiot has stopped just the other side of the boom to give way to a car; a car it didn’t have to give way too under any laws I know of.

So as this good Samaritan idiot sits there, probably feeling quite good about themselves, the boom comes down. I swipe again but no, the computer is cunning. It knows I have already left and haven’t come back in so the boom stays down as four-wheel-doesn’t-have-a-clue drives off. I had to go around the other side of the building, hop out of the car, swipe myself in and then drive back to swipe myself out again.

Bloody four wheel drive drivers.

My god I was scared. I was typing away at this very keyboard when something flicked against my hand, I shook it and it flicked again.

One second later I looked down to find a European Wasp sitting on my t-shirt sleeve. And it wasn’t a little wasp, it was huge – 2-3cm. I think this makes it a Queen or Male. I reacted in a very manly way and screamed to Rae to come and help. I only had one hand free so I held the sleeve out in case the bastard tried to sting me through my top.

Rae, who was just about to jump under the shower came running out, towel in hand wondering why I was screaming like a litte girl. Yes, I may be the only person in the world rescued by a topless exterminator. She bundled the wasp up in the towel and dumped it in a convenient bucket of bleach sitting in the laundry trough. This only stunned the monster and it took the extreme application of a sneaker to make sure it was really dead.

Now, according to all the horror movies I’ve ever watched, we will have to sit up keeping vigil until the dead of night when a swarm of super killer wasps will try to invade the house to avenge its death.

Excuse me while I go to plug up the fire place.

Where has the past week gone?

In my case it’s equal parts work and feeding the Ipod. Yes, my baby is now fully functional and has 3709 songs on it, there’s still about a hundred CDs to go so I should almost make the 5000 mark. As well I’ve added a skin to protect it, an Itrip (with thanks to Rob) to listen in the car and an Italk to record speech. Of course, I am now broke.

I’m going to use the Italk in a special project. My dad is 82 and has lived in and around Shepparton for most of his life. He’s seen it grow massively from a small country town that was a days journey from Melbourne to a large rural city, two hours by freeway and getting closer each year as the freeway inches almost to Shepp’s door. I want to capture some of his memories of this growth and his recollections of Shepp and now is a good time while he’s still able to walk, talk and remember with no difficulties. To have my dads stories, the ones I’ve heard so many times, in his voice recorded for me and our family will be wonderful. Dad, of course, will be chuffed ’cause he gets to be the centre of attention for a couple of days.

Work is keeping me busy and I’m feeling guilty about being inside typing and clicking instead of outside mowing the lawns and wipper-snippering the jungle around the edges. This afternoon, or maybe tomorrow evening now the curtains are fading in the extra hour of daylight.

Phee has managed to contract the latest craze from school – school sores. The poor scabby faced girl was so upset she didn’t want to go to drama yesterday. The whole house has turned in to a contaminated zone with disinfectant, separate towels and utensils for the inflicted one. No kisses and the constant cry of ‘don’t touch your face’. They’re clearing up after a day and by Wednesday when she’s due back at school the doctor tells us they should be gone.

Driving back from a quick trip to Officeworks Phee was going in to minute detail about a new game at school that involves pointing to different features as you count to the number of your birthday. The feature you land on apparently determines what you are. Land on your skull and you are brainy, your cheek and you are cheeky and, apparently your shoulders means you are gay.

“Oh”, I ask, “what does gay mean.”

And, in the most nonchalant and knowing voice, my little eight year old replies “It’s about when you get some sex with someone.”

I was still choking as she jumped out of the car to chase the cat around the front yard.

Monday night I had 387 songs on my Ipod.

Thanks to a late night last night this morning I have 1906.

Now I have to grab the pod and head off to work. Hopefully I’ll be able to stay awake.

The Ipod and I are locked in mortal battle.

It now works, in a manner. It’s supposed to run off my USB 2.0 ports, making for lightning fast transfers from my PC to Pod. That’s the theory – in actuality it only runs on my USB 1.1 ports. That’s like buying a car that can run at 480kph and then having a speed limit applied so it only goes at 12kph. It’s painfully slow to connect and synch.

My computer is two years old now and doesn’t have native USB 2.0 ports. I’ve tried two USB 2.0 cards with the pod and neither functions. The Apple Support line suggested I get one that’s stamped with the Microsoft Windows seal. Another issue Itunes is saying I’ve already used up 22gig – with two albums? It’s really beginning to bug.

Maybe it’s time to update my PC.

Well it finally happened, thanks to Rae’s tertiary student card and the good people at Virgin Credit I got myself an Ipod. A 4G 40 gig model.

And I should be very very happy. But I’m not.

The stupid thing refuses to work.

I have followed every instruction to the letter, performed system roll backs, reset my PC and the Ipod so many times I have lost count, swore, grumped and generally harrumphed but to no avail, the bloody thing just won’t communicate with my PC or vica versa. I’ve tried every suggestion I can find on the Apple site, Ipod Lounge and in Google but always end up with one of two errors; both boiling down to the computer knows there is something connected but doesn’t know what it is or how to write to it.

“Just call Apple support” I hear you say. Good idea. If they were open and/or not charging. Their free service hours are 9:00am-6:00pm Monday to Friday, so heaven help you if you work ‘normal’ hours, or pay support on Saturdays only. Excuse me, I’ve just spent a small fortune on one of your lumps of plastic and now you want to charge me to get it working? Apple’s much lauded design skills and user friendliness are slowly being lost on me.

So now I sit here on Sunday morning, looking at a nice shiny white paper weight counting away the hours until Monday when, hopefully, I will finally get my Ipod.

UPDATE

And further more my Ipaq won’t synch if the Ipod is connected on the same USB2 card.

Regular readers will know how much I love my wide-screen television shows that are brought to me via my digital set top box.

People who know Rae will know how she is tragically addicted to Neighbours (he says skipping lightly over how he has been dragged in to the same addiction).

The only problem is that the two aren’t compatible.

Every night, some time between 6:30pm and 7:00pm, weekends included, Channel 10 becomes unwatchable on digital. All the other channels are fine and 10 comes through no worries on analogue. It was the same when we lived just around the corner.

Any ideas? We thought it could be a factory shutting down, but it’s the same time on weekends too. It’s summer and winter, daylight savings or not so it’s not solar.

What’s playing with the frequency in Melbourne’s inner west?