Why? Why not?

Went to see Jared Diamond speak on the weekend as part of the Sydney Writer’s Festival. Kind of wish I hadn’t already started reading his new book, as a lot of the material he covered is also in the book. That said, it was still a great lecture – he has quite a good speaking style. I’d highly recommend reading his book if you can.

Drove down to Canberra on the weekend. Being able to go to Canberra to visit Helena on a whim – good. Having to stick to P plate speed limit – bad.

We saw Revenge of the Sith with Helena – I was quite impressed. Like a review I read said, it was heaps better because you actually had some mythic significance this time. Much better than Eps 1 and 2.

First episode of the ninth Doctor was on on Saturday night – I thought it was quite good – Christopher Ecclestone was quite good as the Doctor, and it’s good to see the old traditions being kept up. (ie attractive assistant who travels with him for no good reason.)

Well, got the car checked out. Turns out that I managed to do more damage than I had hoped to the airconditioning system – it’s going to be pretty expensive. D’oh. Got the other stuff that wasn’t working on the car fixed, for what seems to have been a reasonable price, which is good. I’ve been driving quite a lot, meaning that I’m feeling more comfortable about piloting a ton or so of metal at high speed near many other mobile piles of metal. That’s one of the disadvantages of having a good understanding of physics – it makes it pretty obvious how fragile some things that everyone takes for granted really are.

Work is OK – the big upgrade went in OK, and things aren’t too bad.

Been playing KOTOR2 more, it really is lots of fun – playing the dark side first is actually making me look forward to replaying as light side, and seeing how many of the party I can turn into light-side Jedi. Not only that, but in this game, they really go all out on the dark side choices. You can really be a complete and total bastard. Quite surprising, really.

Wushu Website is now upgraded and using Wordpress as a CMS. Now all I have to do is get a gallery up and running.

Form wise, you can see from the new section on the right that I’m still learning the same stuff. Which is good, because it’s going to be some time before I’m comfortable with moving on. It’s funny though – I’ve been doing a fair bit of wushu teaching lately, and the extent to which my body has adapted to the exercise I’ve been making it do for the last four years or so is quite amazing.

Well, first crash GET! Yup, had my first crash in the car on Friday. I’m fine, the car is mostly fine. All-in-all, I’m lucky to have got off so lightly. I’m going to take the car in for repairs this evening.

Mother’s day was nice, although I look forward to the day when my mum has a job that isn’t quite so hard on her. Took Mum, Dad, Nana, and Pop out to see Kingdom of Heaven on Saturday night. Wasn’t too bad, actually. Orlando Bloom’s character came up with some tricky siege warfare ideas, which I was impressed with.

Work is crazy at the moment. Terms not to mention include but are not limited to:

VoIP
EIGRP
BGP
PoE
PABX
Static Routes
Telstra

I’m sooo looking forward to taking a day off soon and catching up on stuff I’ve been meaning to do.

In other news, my HECS is paid off! At bloody last! Finally, I get to actually keep that 6% of my gross earnings each year.