Dancing Dragon
On the bus down George Street. Chinese New Year has begun!

I totally missed Groundhog Day this year, but apparently Phil predicted six more weeks of winter. Does that mean the Southern Hemisphere gets six more weeks of summer? Woohoo!

Help! Any artists in the house? We’re playing around with ideas for the wedding reception cake, and we’d like to get a nice cartoon of Elvis to put on there. Nothing complicated; just some stylized line art of the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll. Google Image Search is turning up nothing. Anybody interested? Alternatively, does anybody have a good picture of Viva Las Vegas-era Elvis – like from a book – that they could high-res scan for us?

Later: Nevermind! We went with one of these instead.

I’ve recently become obsessed with the Wicked soundtrack, and today I found this page full of pictures of the original Broadway cast. Useful if you’re from a country that won’t get a production for probably years…

If you couldn’t tell from the fact that DeskCam has finally changed, I got my computer back! Looks like the G5 was suffering from a faulty logic board. The guys at Apple Centre Broadway replaced it and she seems good as new. I would’ve had her back sooner but Friday is my only weekday off (and I didn’t fancy carrying the thing back from Broadway myself). Just in time to print out all our reception invitations…

Related link: How to Backup Your Mac with rsync. I was lucky in that I managed to boot up in Firewire mode and transfer everything to the laptop, but I really should be doing regular timed backups.

Damn it. Remember my Simpsons Valentine that I made back in 2001? Somebody else has done an identical version and it’s even been linked on Boing Boing. I don’t want to accuse the guy of ripping me off; it’s not like it’s a totally original concept or anything, and if we both traced the same screenshot then it just follows that our drawings would look alike. I guess I’ve just got sour grapes that now somebody else is getting all the official credit for having the idea.

Edited: Upon further inspection, there are some significant differences in the drawing. I squared mine up, while he left the bottom a little skewed. His wheels are also drawn differently to mine. Oh well. I guess great minds think alike!

Massive needlecraft news of the day: Lincraft’s gone into receivership! Our only wool competitor in the center of Sydney has basically declared bankruptcy! My world is officially rocked. (I suspected that they were foundering a few weeks ago when a couple of their employees stopped by our new location to spy. They seemed clueless and – I’m totally not being bitchy here – one of them had a full-on ‘tache. And it was a girl. Not that that has anything to do with their financial situation, but it certainly gave the whole store a creepy vibe that might have had something to do with it. I’m just sayin’.)

Top 100 Singles of the Decade’s First Half. Oh, good grief. I’m so out of the damn loop. I’ve only heard, like, ten of these. When did the Snook and I become so old? I used to listen to Triple J when I had a long car commute to work – which kept me relatively on the cutting edge, music-wise – but nowadays the only radio we listen to is 2WS while we’re cleaning house. We never watch live TV anymore. We float through the days listening to our mp3s and watching shows that we’ve TiVoed days before, and it just feels like there’s this massive disconnect between the stuff we experience and the stuff that’s actually happening. Does anybody else get that? (Original link courtesy of Max, who in an ideal world would be my neighbour and meet me for coffee every day so he could fill me in on what “the kids” are listening to.)

Sydney Friends and Family: Our Australian wedding “reception” is officially booked! It’ll be held on Sunday, February 27th. The invitations will be in the mail by this weekend, but I just wanted to let you all know to keep that day free.