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Forgive me, Dr. Atkins, for I have sinned. Did I mention that I fell off the low-carb wagon in a big way last night? I had a G&T (no diet tonic available), two pints of sweet, sweet beer, and a big vanilla milkshake. (Though the milkshake isn’t as bad as you’re thinking, since here they’re mostly milk and not really any ice cream.) But still. I know. The amazing thing is that according to my testing strips, I’m still in ketosis. So either that’s residual ketones still in my system, or I luckily managed *not* to exceed my as-yet-undetermined daily carb level. And it might’ve helped that I went to the gym yesterday and worked my ass off. But I promise to be a good girl from now on… Well, at least until Tuesday, when I take the Snook out for his birthday to a big, surprise, fancy-pants restaurant!

Slashdot Meetup – This was excellent. The Snook and I showed up about ten minutes early, not knowing what to expect. It was at the Lord Nelson Brewery in the Rocks, which can get pretty busy with the after-work crowd. We found a little table and started looking for likely nerds, but we weren’t having much luck. Then, as the Snook went for another round of drinks, I saw a guy reading sci-fi nearby who was approached by another geeky looking type. They both said something, looked relieved, and shook hands. I took the opportunity to run over and confirm that, yes, they were Slashdotters. The Snook and I joined them, and soon our merry little group was discovered by one of the evening’s “hosts”, who had procured a big table. Pretty soon there were about eight of us crammed in. (As expected, I was the only girl.) Anyway, the talk was definitely less nerdy than expected. We talked about all the poisonous animals in Australia (my topic), the job market, home networks, digital cameras, hacking, etc. (Okay, so it was pretty nerdy.) Later we discovered another smaller enclave of people on the other side of the bar, including another girl! After a few hours and several beers, most of us headed off to The Rocks Cafe for some chow. It really was a lot of fun, especially for me, since I don’t know that many people here (much less ones that I can discuss PHP with). We’ve even made plans to meet up with some of them again soon!

I figured as the girl, I’d be the only one to remember to bring a camera. I was right. Anyway, here are some pictures of us:

Gael linked to this fabulous archive of pages from a 1970’s playground equipment catalog. It’s not generally the type of link I go nuts over, but I checked it out anyway. And how cool is this? I’ve played on, like, all this stuff. I’m having some serious nostalgia here. My elementary school had the Mountain Climber, and I seriously think it’s the first thing I ran to on the first day of kindergarten. I loved that thing. I’d play house in it. And the playground near my Grandma’s house was even cooler. It had several of the Saddle Mates. I’m positive I’ve ridden the ram, the donkey, and the duck. It had a Buck-A-Bout and several Rainbow Climbers too. I also remember making it to the top of a Bell Buoy. (We cheated and used our bare feet to kinda “walk” up the second pole.) Playgrounds were so fun back then.

The interview went really well! Thanks for all the supportive messages, and apologies for my random stress postings. As Hello Kitty points out, I “easily feel stressful”. Luckily she has advice too: “Only with a little bit of additional work plus controlling your temper, you would then lose energy. Not only you would accumulate your stress, you are weak to release it. For this type exercise and Karaoke will be the best way.” Huh. I don’t know about karaoke, but I am going to the Sydney Slashdot Meetup tonight. What better way to unwind than sharing some much needed alcohol with several fellow nerds? 🙂

Now that I’ve got my CompactFlash card reader working, getting pictures off my digital camera is a million times easier. That makes me want to take a million more pictures. Tonight I was somehow compelled to snap the front of our refrigerator. I think you can tell a lot about a person by their fridge. (The coolest one I ever saw was my friend Kel’s, which was completely papered in beer bottle labels.) Going clockwise from the upper-left, on ours is: a calendar/menu from Trisha’s, a local Indian restaurant; a “Smile!” sticker from the Newtown Hari Krishnas, over which I have added a note reading “TAKE BUGS SNOOKUMS!” to remind him to take his probiotics; a Notre Dame postcard my Grandma sent me; a Kenner Star Wars Ewok Village postcard Max sent me; a postcard from the Bad Ass Café in Dublin, Ireland; the aerobics timetable for my gym (it’s there for the guilt factor, more than anything); a Star Wars: Attack of the Clones postcard; a Guinness magnet; a Big Ben magnet (a going away present from our London housemates); a postcard of an orangutan mother and baby that I got at London’s Natural History Museum; and a “SODOMITE” postcard that I picked up free at my gym (it’s a parody of the “Vegemite” label). Now wasn’t that interesting? What’s on your fridge?

(Yeah, I’m just blathering and navel-gazing. But it’s ten hours before my interview and I’m a little nervous.)

Good news! Firstly, I’m approaching the end of my first two weeks doing Atkins and I’ve lost approximately thirteen pounds! (That’s about six kilos for you metric types.) I’m definitely going to stick with this for a while longer. And secondly… I have two job interviews lined up! One tomorrow, and one next week. Wish me luck!

Remember I told you about EyeTV yesterday? Well, I e-mailed the company asking if/when they were going to release an international version. They replied today saying, “We are working on bringing EyeTV to countries with the PAL broadcast television format. Watch http://www.elgato.com for announcements in this area later this year.” Of course, that doesn’t address the issue of whether they’ll make program guides available for every country (especially as they don’t charge any subscriptions and thus make no money off them). I hope they do, though, as otherwise it’s pretty useless.

Okay, folks, you’ve got one more day to throw out suggestions for our first book. It’s odd; we’ve had a lot of contemporary fiction listed, but not much older stuff. Huh. Anyway, check out what’s there and see if anything strikes your fancy. You can even read introductory chapters for most of them via their Amazon links. In a day or so I’ll put up a poll and we’ll have all weekend to pick one. Sound good?

I feel pretty bad looking at all the unsuccessful searches that led people to my site. All those disappointed people! I mean, I don’t know if Anna Kournikova is ovulating. Nor do I know a website hack for Weight Watchers. But I can answer one question: Where’s Russell Crowe’s farm located? It’s in Lowana, near Coffs Harbour in New South Wales. See? I’m all about helping you folks out whenever possible.

This completely blew my mind. Okay, pretend you’ve turned to the financial section of the newspaper and you’re looking at all the stock prices. Now imagine that we took the first digit of each number and fed them into a computer and counted how many times each digit (1-9) appeared. You’d expect there to be a pretty random yet equal distribution, right? Wrong. The digit “1” will appear 30% of the time, and each of the subsequent digits in decreasing percentages. “9” only occurs 5% of the time. This works for stock prices, baseball statistics, and just about any other random collection of data you can dig up. Isn’t that nuts? Apparently it also works on accounting books, which is how the IRS can tell if you’ve been fudging the numbers. Craziness. How do I know this? The Snook randomly brought it up in dinner conversation the other night and I’ve been obsessed with it ever since. Here’s a page of more information about the phenomenon. Now see if you can sleep at night.