こんにちはたかのせんせい. おげんきですか.

きょうはすいようびです.

きょうはにがつにじゅうごにちです.

あめはこぶりです.

にほんごがすこしわかります.

upgrade from mildly wet to soaked — rain all night & still raining this morning…

attitude adjuster — exactly what was i moping about yesterday? can’t recall. i mean, most of the same stuff (plus more! hurrah!) is still in front of me, but today, not so much of a problem…

MITOpenCourseWare — learn, learn like the wind… how cool is this? & yes, there are japanese resources available:

• beginning japanese i
• beginning japanese ii, &
• intermediate japanese i…

rain in vain — another mildly wet one in sydney today… i’ve got japanese tonight, which is Good. but at the moment i’m at work, which is Bad. not having a good day. current status: vaguely unwell, intensely uninterested…

(don’t let me hear you say) / life’s takin’ you nowhere (aiiiin-gel…)

so yeah — minorly moody, but attempting to (or at least considering how i could conceivably) snap out of it…

greetings to his royal daveness! (remember: ice cream!)

bowie — so bowie was fantastic… he played for about two hours & yeah, mixed up some new material with the old… evan kept track of the set list but i didn’t think to make a copy… highlights for me were a killer version of “hello spaceboy,” a great “white light, white heat,” “the man who sold the world” (watching bowie do this at 57 kind of made me think about what a waste that whole thing with kurt was), “i’m afraid of americans,” “heroes,” & “ashes to ashes”… the energy levels were a bit up & down (everyone got into the recognisable songs, tended to drift off a little during the new stuff), but i thought the performance was brilliant (even if he didn’t play “it’s no game part 1”…)

escapology engenders attitude — as usual at work at this time of year, i’ve too much to do & not enough time in which to do it… but! i’m leaving the country, so you know, i’m tryin’ to do the important stuff & refusin’ to do the rest… & if you’ve got a problem with that, feel free to talk to the hand… (so far today, three people have attempted to converse with the hand… hint: the hand neither listens nor cares, people… now please step away from my desk &/or never call this number again…)

there’s a brand new dance / but i don’t know its name…

spreadsheet: 1. (noun) software tool for creating vast, undocumented arrays of apparently random (& only partially complete) information which can then be passed to your information systems people with the expectation that they’ll somehow be able to make sense of it all <here’s the spreadsheet you need for your report>; 2. (verb) to be royally screwed <oh man, you would not believe how badly they spreadsheeted me>.

as they pulled you out of the oxygen tent / you asked for the latest party…

sinusoidal life — it’s been an up & down kinda week… i may be marginally pre-viral or something, but i’ve been doing the whole mood swings & sudden bouts of tiredness thing… interspersed with periods of not quite manic energy & my nature going all irrepressible… well, whatever… going to see bowie tonight with the marrickvillains & canberrantulas… (unless simon was kidding about the whole spare ticket thing, in which case i’m just gonna hafta beat him with a spreadsheet or something…)

ground control to major tom / your spreadsheet’s dead / there’s something wrong / can you hear me major tom? / can you hear me major tom? / can you… heeeeeere am i / sitting in my tin can / faaaaaaaar above the world / planet earth is blue / & there’s nothing i can do…

scary monsters/super creeps — doh! at 6.15 this morning (gozen roku ji juu go fun) i decided i really did wanna see bowie this weekend, so i invoked the mystical power of the internet & started perusing gimmeyamoney.com… friday was sold out, but i managed to grab a seat for saturday… all going to plan so far… of course, at 8.48 this morning (gozen hachi ji yon juu ha ppun) chrisT emailed me to say that der Simonster had a spare ticket for friday…

one phone call to der Simonster later — anyone interested in a ticket to see bowie on saturday night? i mean, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if i had to go twice, but you know…

update — the bowie problem has been solved…

ow — i guess it was bound to happen sooner or later… swerves to avoid delivery truck, avoids delivery truck, runs out of road, grabs handful of brakes, buries front wheel in gutter, does slow motion endo head-first onto the footpath… so much for style &/or skillz… what i shoulda done was keep off the brakes & hopped onto the footpath, but you know, refer to the so much for skillz comment above…

no damage — well, apart from one of my shins, which now features a black lumpy bruise about the size of a golf ball with MOSH stamped into it…

kickin’ back — had a kinda warm but relaxing weekend… spent some time chatting with Sumie; put in about five hours on the bike; studied some more japanese; wrote a couple of poems; gave Keri a hand with the referencing for her thesis; made (yet) another list of things i need to do; played squash with Andrew; helped Louise & Richard move some furniture; had lunch with Louise & Richard; did my laundry; sat around in coffeeshops reading my japanese notes; got into a mild funk about not having a job yet; got out of said funk; sat in the park; bought a new pair of fox boardshorts… oh yeah, it’s a rich & varied life…

the silicon chip inside my head… just got switched to overload…

[ time passes… ]

& welcome to the much calmer afternoon — okay, today has been officially downgraded from hell day status to just another regular monday… remember kids, as the government says, be bemused, not becalmed…

thank you — had lunch with claire on glebe point road… exactly the circuit breaker my day needed… thanks claire…

[gazes blankly into the middle distance] — i’ve been trying very hard not to slip into the whole if (resigned) then (no longer care) thing, but some days are worse than others… yesterday, for instance… roll on april 15…

new(ish) pedals — bought myself a pair of platforms & swapped off the cleats a couple of weeks back… the cleats do make a huge difference when climbing hills, but it’s been a minor revelation having the platforms… so much easier to just jump on the bike & wander down the beach, for instance… &, despite thinking i wasn’t all that fazed by being clipped in, it’s amazing how much more confident i am with the platforms, especially when i’m wobbling around & going up & down gutters & splitting lanes & the like… & you know, my new pedals have MOSH stamped on them in big silver letters, so it’s all good…

the sun is a mass/of incandescent gas — oh, we got heat if you want some…

manager, information sauna — so it’s about 38 degrees or thereabouts… certainly feels like the hottest day we’ve had this year… wouldn’t it be great if someone set off a fire alarm & tripped out all the airconditioning in the building? yeah, that’d be peachy… so far the aircon’s been off for about two hours, but you know, it’s not like it’s the middle of the day or nuffin…

airconditioner party at my desk! three hours later & the aircon finally came back up…

big bridge — currently running a special feature on australian poetry…

hell week — yi-ai-ai…

testing — i think i’ve come up with a workable solution for the whole poem mark up question… the stylesheet’s currently in beta, but it generally seems to be okay… also currently testing a new design for the rest of the site, & pondering what to do with a lot of the — how you say? — less valuable content that’s accreted over the years… if i can find time over the weekend, i might implement the new look… sorting through the detritus could take a while…

possible heads up — because i need to find something to do with my time (apart from, you know, finding a job in tokyo, learning japanese, organising to move countries, organising the transition for my replacement at work, writing, editing, sorting, packing, etc) i’ve decided i’ve gotta do something about all the things about this site that are annoying me… which, fortunately, i can quickly sum up as pretty much everything… so… expect some changes over the next couple of weeks… pages may move &/or disappear (i’ll endeavour to redirect anything that does shift &/or vanish) & expect the look & feel of the pages beyond the journal to fall into line with the new stylesheet… what else? oh yeah, i have a strange desire to bring the whole thing into the 21C & recast it as semantically marked up, valid XHTML… of course, it’s possible i’ve just had too much coffee this morning…

a question — has anyone figured out a sensible way to mark up poems using XHTML/CSS? the particular problem is getting the line indentation right… there’s no tab character in HTML (at least, not that i’m aware of) so you run into all sorts of hassles… i’ve traditionally marked up poems as single paragraphs, used <br /> to, uh, break the lines & used a 1px high transparent gif to fudge the indents, but that’s really a bit too kludgy… so, my current thinking is something like…

1. declare a .poem class in the stylesheet to set the linespacing, font, etc
2. declare other classes that set the various indents (.poemIndentX1, .poemIndentX2, etc)
3. wrap the poem in a <div class=”poem”> & mark up each line as an individual paragraph, using <p class=”poemIndentXX”> to set the tabs when necessary…

i guess that will work, but i can’t help thinking there might be an easier way… any suggestions happily considered…

& wow — the language book centre has, uh, lots of language books… i managed to restrain myself to the purchase of a single dictionary, but yeah, it has lots of language books…