Anthony Malloy

Last night was the end of daylight savings; hooray, I hear you cry, an extra hours sleep. Well maybe for you it was.

It was around 2 and I was having this dream that was full of sirens, loud sirens growing even louder. A dream where Rae suddenly jumps out bed and the room and is full of blue and red flashing lights. Hang on, this ain’t no dream.

Two firetrucks had screamed up our street, stopping outside our place. Peeking through the blind like a good sticky beak I could see the firemen walking up and down in front of the houses opposite, flashlights in hand. Eventually the siren was turned off and after more wandering up and down and several conferences in the middle of the road the trucks drove off leaving the street in peace and quiet.

For half an hour. Then they came back.

Seeing as how this morning all houses are still standing and there’s no sign of a bush fire I can only assume this was totally unnecessary and that the Metropolitan Fire Brigade hereby officially owes me an hours bonus sleep.

Usually I wait until the end of the financial year before I go office equipment crazy but today I finished my home office set up.

I bought a shredder!

Yes, it is now safe to entrust me with your top secret file disposal. All those government documents you don’t know what to do with, the compromising photos and secret love letters you can’t keep can be cut into lovely 5mm strips.

I don’t have much to dispose of in this way but the thought of my bank, phone and business details sitting outside on the nature strip over night before the recyclers come and collect them makes me a little nervous. I think if I ever needed to adopt an identity in a hurry I’d drive around until I found a suburb who had paper collection that night and within the space of a few houses I’d have enough information on at least one person to get by for a while.

As it is all I’ve shredded is one print out of Visa card statement, but it’s a start.

Walking up to the G last night the sun was setting, the lights were on and there was a sea of yellow and black streaming from Punt Rd. I started smiling then and, save for a minute at the start of the game, I didn’t stop smiling all night. I drove back from Armadale with my scarf fluttering out the back window along Dandenong Rd, Kings Way and across the bridge; a Tiger flag flying high over Melbourne.

It’s only the first game, I know, and I’m not getting carried away, but to see the boys play with such passion and to finally see them play as a team (yes Jen, even Richo) made all Tiger supporter’s hearts soar.

Go the mighty Tiges.

It’s Footy time!

Season 2004 starts tonight and I’m too excited to type much more then that. I’ll be wearing my Tigers tie to work today, have dragged the essential footy equipment (cap, pen, radio, Tigers scarf) out of the cupboard and am all set to go.

May your team win, unless they’re playing us.

GO TIGES!

Well everybody, here it is – the prize you will all be fighting for in the footy tipping competition.

Thanks for the photo Daniel

And no, you can’t refuse it if you win.

The urn, prior to becoming the most sort after prize in footy tipping, had a chequered history. It, and its much larger sibling, were a wedding present given to my sister. Understandably she shoved them both in to a cupboard for a couple of years until we tried to sell them for her on Ebay. Surprsingly they sold. To someone in America. Who clearly could not read or didn’t understand how far away Melbourne, Australia was. She baulked at paying almost AUD$70 to have the monstrosities sent to her.

So we shoved them in to one of our cupboards.

They stayed there until Grand Final day last year when Miss Marita, the winner of Tony’s Tipping for 2003, was complaining long and loud that she had no prize to show for her efforts.

Well now she does and the urn has found a home for a year.

We’ll ship it interstate or overseas but it has to come back for it is now the perpetual trophy and the winners name will be added each year to be presented at our Grand Final barbecue.

So, get your tips in. The world’s ugliest urn is up for grabs.
Continue reading “The Prize”

It’s Autumn.

The sun is setting early, leaves are changing colour, warm days, cool nights, winter woollies being dusted off, dew on the cars in the street and I’ve just placed my first footy tips for the year.

Yep, footy is four days away and the great Tony’s Tipping Competition is once more open for business. I was hoping to write my own system this year but time got away from me. All blog readers are invited to join in, just go to www.footytips.com.au and join in the competition called “Tony’s Tipping”.

Marita currently holds the perpetual trophy and it will be tough to prise it from her grasp. Don’t worry if you know nothing about footy as Nigel, an Englishman who has never seen a game in his life, is living proof that the less you know about the game the better. He almost won last year.

He’s here, the BBC have announced the new Dr Who is Christopher Eccleston. What a great choice, he was superb in Shallow Grave and chilling in 28 Days Later.

This is getting exciting.

And twisted. That’s me.

a) I was supposed to go on the 2004 Orange Great Melbourne Bike Ride? tomorrow and even though I’ve done no prep I was going to give it a go and try to keep up with Rob. At least if I made it up the West Gate Bridge I could cost back down to home and collapse but no, my freakin PC is not happy – the hard drive now stops for no apparent reason so tomorrow I’m going to sit here, screw driver in hand, poking and prodding until the damn thing works again.

b) Trivia nights. At the behest of Zita (Rae’s mum) we went to a trivia night tonight. All was going well until, with two rounds to go, the host told us we were equal for the lead. Instantly Rae and I turn in to Mr and Mrs Competitive and this thing becomes the most important event ever in the history of humanity. It was made even worse when, after the next round, we told were one in front by one.

Bad choices, vague questions, dead wood at one end of the table and a bit of bad luck saw us drop a point in the final round which resulted in a tie. A tie! Freakin heck. It was announced the tie breaker would concern tennis. Nigel, why the hell don’t you live on this side of the world?

Of course no one on our table knew anything about tennis and we lost. Mr and Mrs Competitive were not happy. Now it’s way past my bed time, we have no prize, I won’t get to take a photo from the top of the bridge and my PC is liable to freeze before I finish this post.

You may wish spend an hour and a half trying three different drivers and poking around with sound cards and settings in an effort to get sound coming out of your computer but a much more time efficient method is to check that the volume dial on the actual speaker is not turned all the way down.

I learnt a lesson tonight.

My PC came with Windows XP Home, and has been functioning well for a year and a half, happily doing all I ask of it. No breakdowns, no faults, running smoothly so what on earth made me decide it would be a good idea to ‘upgrade’ to XP Professional? That would be my Stupid Voice.

Put the CD in, run the upgrade check and no problems found, for a system only a year and half old that’s not surprising, so off I go. All is well until ’34 minutes to go’. The install stops. It waits three minutes and restarts the PC. Which restarts the installation and all goes well until ’34 minutes to go’. The install stops. It waits three minutes and restarts the PC.

It does this fifteen times. No operating system fully installed means no PC.

The cold sweats started about restart #5.

You know it’s never good when you start dismantling your PC to remove the hard drive. The aim was to see if I could plug it into Rae’s PC to salvage as much as I could. Unfortunately the other PC refused to acknowledge it had a new drive. I’m much more a software guy than a hardware guy so I decided to plug the drive back in to my PC where, by the some Divine intervention (and most probably thanks to me removing everything except the monitor, mouse and keyboard) it magically decided to finish the install on restart 16.

It’s been six hours since I started the install that should have taken 40 minutes to complete. I’ve pulled apart two PC’s, my PC is still in pieces (yet functioning), it tries to boot from the A: drive and I can’t find the BIOS settings to stop it doing so, I need to reinstall internet sharing for Rae’s PC and I’m very very tired.

But my PC works.

And I’ve learnt my lesson. Next time I’ll just buy a new computer with XP Pro pre-installed.