Interesting Polls
I don't believe that on-line polls account for much, as they're unlikely to obtain a random sampling of the population, and are subject to a variety of biases by clever people. Despite that, I still think the current trends at The Age newspaper on-line polls are most interesting.

You can also see what our Prime Minster's views are on this subject.

Rabbit
I lied about the rabbit. It appears he managed to find one of the monitors we had in storage, and chew through some of the attached cables. Luckily, 15" CRT monitors with failing brightness aren't worth very much.

Business
Working as a consultant for an old employer. Lots of happy people there who are glad to have me around. However, this means that I'm out of the office for 70% of business hours, which doesn't leave me with much time to run my business and attend to my less demanding customers.

Jacinta should be starting her first week of proper part-time work with Perl Training Australia this week, so hopefully she'll be able to keep things in check until they quieten down (about a month's time).

Health
Jacinta's all healed, out of the neckbrace, and fit enough to go diving. This is a very good thing.

Diving
Some very generous friends of ours gave us a free "dive experience" voucher which they had won, since they already had dive licenses and didn't need supervisors to hold their hands underwater. The "experience" was a lot of theory, hand-signals, and exercises, and less actual diving than I would have preferred.

Met up with an old friend from high-school on the day, who was helping out as an employee of the dive shop. Apparently it's a fun way to earn extra money to do diving, although I suspect that he's still working as a laywer when not in a wetsuit.

Tax
Q3 BAS done. I'm glad they only come around four times a year.

Chickens
The chooks are all more-or-less broken. One's broody, one's laying soft-shelled eggs, one seems to have an egg-eating problem, and the others aren't laying as much as they used to. It may be time to get new chickens.

Rabbit
Doesn't lay eggs, but hasn't destroyed any electrical equipment recently. Good rabbit.

Rain
We actually got a decent amount of rain in the last few days. Enough to fill most of the water tank, and turn our backyard from brown to green. I'd still like more rain, some of our trees are still rather stressed.

Phone
Have a new mobile phone. It's free (Jacinta's mother works for a telco), but obviously aimed at teenagers. It comes with colour screen, polyphonic speaker, and skateboarder animations. All the ring-tones sound like a slots machine going off. It's notably missing an infra-red port, so it doesn't talk to the palm pilot at all.

The nice thing about the phone is that it has a vibrate function. That's a good thing, considering how embarrassing the ringtones are.

The Week of Woe
Last week was one of those weeks that started off well, and then rapidly slid downhill. It went a little like this:

Australian Copyright Infringements
If you're reading this from Australia, then you better make sure that you don't use your VCR to tape shows from television. Most people don't realise that doing so is illegal in Australia.

In other news, I've managed to use my Palm Pilot to transfer music from my computer to my/Ian's mobile phone, and I have far too big a backlog of work and invoices to catch up upon.

Rain
None. Nil. Nada. Zero. Zilch. Victoria is in heavy drought right now. Water restrictions are in place, and there's no indication they'll stop anytime soon. We have a 1000 litre rainwater tank for gardening and livestock, so keeping our trees alive doesn't place any additional burdens on our resevoirs. Unfortunately, the tank is becoming rather empty, and the days are very hot and dry. I'm really hoping we get some rain soon, but the BOM doesn't thik that's likely in the next week.

Cereal Toys
Once upon a time, when you opened your box of corn flakes, you might get a little plastic truck or aircraft. Yesterday I got a Age of Empires complete game on CD in the cereal box. There was a huge shelf of them. Looks like the cereal manufacturer thinks they can sell more boxes if they put games in them, and the whole box and game intro pushes hard about how good the game expansion is, and why you should buy it.

Mind you, I'll admit the game's been more fun than a plastic truck.

Toys
Lots of toys arrived today. I now have much more desk space, and a huge bed with a 15 year warranty.