Anzac Day

April 25th is Anzac Day, a public holiday in Australia, so I wasn't at work.

Instead, my sister and I spent the afternoon having a leisurely meal in a seafood restaurant in North Hobart with family, friends and neighbours. I ordered the pear and parmesan salad, though I ended up eating half of Rose Marie's chips.

It was also my birthday, so you could call it a de-facto party (although I went off birthday parties when I was about 11 years old).

"How old are you?" asked one guest candidly. Well, let's just say it was the 35th anniversary of my 21st birthday.



We enjoyed a nice meal and I even scored a few presents: a book of science fiction stories, a coffee mug with a cat motif, a DVD, a flash-drive and the inevitable box of chocolates (yum, liqueur truffles!).

All in all, it was a pleasant and relaxing afternoon. It was nice that so many people took the time to make their way in to North Hobart to join us – I think we had six people who'd been members of the Amnesiacs quiz team at one time or another at the table.

The intriguing thing was that Jan called in after dropping her son Jamie off at a friend's house. He was going (get this) to a birthday party.

What are the odds on that happening?



Julie's car has been lacking a left-hand window for some time. She's done her best to replace it with a piece of perspex cut to shape, but it's not quite the same.

It's a Mitsubishi Starion and only about 1600 of them were sold in Australia - spare parts aren't exactly easy to come by.

So she was really pleased when she located someone on the mainland who had a spare left window for a Starion.

She sent off for it straightaway and he had it shipped over.

It arrived yesterday.

In about a hundred pieces.

Oh well, she'll just have to keep looking.....

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I've been amazed at the amount of old radio shows that are available on the Internet for free thanks to the generosity of some OTR fans.

But one website made me glad I had gone over to broadband. A zipped file containing 90 episodes of Suspense from 1944-46. I set the machine to download and waited.

And watched the total go up. 100MB. 200MB. 300MB.

How big is this file, I started to wonder.

625MB in the end.

"Try that on dial-up!" I thought.

But...

The following day, I returned and tried to open the zipped file. It now weighed in at only 622 KB and trying to open it merely got you a little sign saying it was either invalid or corrupted.

So I guess maybe the old saying is true – you can't get something for nothing.