Rumour has it that "Alexei", our bloated noisy smoky neighbour (but with a heart of gold), the guy who once broke his toilet, has got married and moved out. That explains why his beaten up old brown car isn’t in the driveway anymore. I wonder if he’s found himself another of those Internet brides. I remember hearing in the dead of night the distinctive "Uh oh!" sound of ICQ messages arriving downstairs.

Well, good for him. And for me - it probably means no more 4am visits down there to ask him to turn his telly down.

Shit shit shit shit shit! Thanks to me filling in my tipping form incorrectly, the cleaner has caught up with me to hold equal first place! Damn. Never mind.

Hands up who remembers the 80s… endless afternoons after school in front of the TV. If you weren’t playing pirated games on your Commodore 64, you were watching Doctor Who,Get Smart, The Goodies, Kenny Everett and Monkey. Or maybe that was just me.

Well anyway, Monkey (aka Monkey Magic) is back on the ABC, with its badly dubbed soundtrack, Jackie Chan-esque fight scenes, occasionally quite nonsensical narration and oh-so-70s title sequence.

Recovery have apparently run out of production money and been kicked out of that house in Elwood they used to broadcast the show from. Instead for the next few weeks they’re showing 4 episodes of Monkey every Saturday morning from 9am. So, if you’re like me and it was years later when the whole Buddhism thing really clicked, and would like to see it again and re-live afternoon TV in the 80s, tune in!

Alas, the funniest show on TV, The League Of Gentlemen, has finished. Now I can’t go past the "Local Cash Trader" in Elsternwick without smirking.

I think maybe Koornang Road in Carnegie doesn’t like my car. This is not some unfounded irrational fear of a particular street. Twice last weekend I had umm…. driving altercations there.

Last Friday night we piled into the car for a little shopping at Chadstone - Chaddy, as it’s known. Cruising down Koornang Road on the way there, a cyclist came from nowhere. Well, not from nowhere, from the left-hand footpath, straight onto the road.

If he’d been about a second later, I would have had a fair bit of trouble avoiding hitting him. He wasn’t looking where he was going, he wasn’t wearing a helmet, I don’t think he even had lights on the bike. What he did have was a kind of out-of-this-world grin on his face that made it obvious to me that he wasn’t thinking very much about his personal safety or my insurance premium, and certainly wasn’t paying any heed of my car horn.

Then on Sunday afternoon we were back in Carnegie, stopping off for a little shopping. I began to execute what was hopefully going to be one of my extremely skilful reverse parallel parks. I eased back into the space. A little more… a little more… slowly… a little more… Thud. Oops. Suddenly I sense the spirit of my driving instructor. He was probably nearby, I see him all the time.

I got out and looked. No damage to my car. No damage to the other one either, except that the front number plate appeared a little wobbly. But was it normally wobbly? I had no idea as to its normal state of wobbliness, and the driver of the car wasn’t present to make a statement on wobblitude. So I did what any reasonable person would do: I left a note on their windscreen, apologising and asking them to call me if they felt there was any damage to be accounted for. I put my sister’s name and number, and left. (Only kidding sis!)

No calls, so either the note got blown away, not noticed, or perhaps that number plate was always that wobbly.

Well well well, so another bunch of teenagers made pipe bombs and blew themselves up. And of course they got their instructions… all together now… Off the Internet!

Even now I can see the tabloid editors foaming at the mouth for headlines. "Kids download bombs"… "Deadly Internet"… "Web bomb"!

Oh goodness, what a surprise. The last one was real.

Yep, once again, let’s blame the Internet. All it’s got on it are bomb instructions and pornography, after all. People will be asking once again: Why is this stuff allowed to be on the Internet.

Perhaps a more important question to ask is: shouldn’t these guys have known better? How many times have people been blown up by pipe bombs from instructions on the Internet, anyway? How stupid do you have to be to try it yourself? The headline above also said "Teen tragedy linked to Internet". Why not put instead "Teen tragedy linked to stupidity"? 

And how did they get to the stage of actually having made bombs without anybody noticing?! Hmmm.. perhaps they just didn’t tell anybody. It’s not as if the family conversation went like this:

"So, what are you kids up to tomorrow?"

"Well we thought we might go out to the shed and make some pipe bombs."

"Ah, very good. Let me know if you need a lift down to the shop to get gunpowder."

Sitting outside a cafe on the weekend with the family, I kept Isaac busy (and learning too!) with a game of I Spy. After spying cars, a clock, a tram, a dog, I decided it was time for people.

"I spy with my little eye, something beginning with P."

Isaac looked around. Then loudly, and obviously not quite grasping the rules of the game, he proclaimed "Penis!"

I’ve just got to have a rant. This whole Olympics marching band thing has got way out of hand. From the sounds of it, some SOCOG dweeb made the wrong decision to start with, and they’d already got loads of overseas marching bands to come over when someone said "errr, how about letting some Aussies play?"

Now the Americans who were originally going to play at the opening ceremony are whinging about it. They’ve been offered the chance to play just about everywhere except for the opening ceremony, including the Sydney Opera House steps, but have apparently rejected it.

What a bunch of bloody whiners. Whose Olympics do they think it is, anyway? SOCOG is running the show; and no matter how stupidly they’re going about making these decisions, how do some hopeful minor players like this think they have a right to demand everything?

Did the rest of the world have a screaming fit at the Atlanta games people for the far more significant problems they had? Did we all say "look, your transport was crap, and you still haven’t caught anyone for setting off that bomb".

Oh, I even heard some feeble-minded band leader on the radio trot out that old line "we saved your asses in World War 2". Yeah, and we’re going to be hearing about it for the rest of time, aren’t we, thanks to gits like you, who conveniently forget that the US only entered the war when given no choice but to when Pearl Harbor was attacked - and this was two years after it all started!

The Opera House steps may not sound impressive, but there are few more spectacular places in the world you can stand. With the sun glistening on the water, the Opera House towering behind you, and looking across at the Sydney Harbour Bridge, it’s a sight that few people ever forget. Crowded House chose their farewell concert site well.

If I was running the Olympics, then about now I’d be saying "Right you idiots. We’re having the Olympics in Sydney. It’s going to be great. You can either come over and help us celebrate, or you can sit at home sulking. Your choice. Either come and play, or shut the flugelhorn up."

Well, just my luck, the hard drive I thought I’d resurrected started dying again. This time I cut off life support: unplugged it from the machine. I just couldn’t bare to see my data go on suffering like that.

As it turns out, it was a snip to go out and find a new drive - one that was cheaper, three times as big, and faster. Such is the world of computing.

You’d hardly know I was using the same computer that I bought four years ago - just before Windows 95 was released. Just about all of its guts have been replaced. New mouse, new CDROM, new memory, new motherboard, new video card… the keyboard and the monitor are the originals, though quite frankly I’ve been eyeing up those nice 17 inch monitors in the shops. This old 14 inch doesn’t quite cut it. Not that size is everything. But it helps.

So for probably the fourth time this year, I’ve been merrily installing Windows and all my applications again. The sad thing is that when you’re halfway through the Windows 95 installation, it reboots the machine and puts up an animated prompt that says, with no hint of irony: "Preparing to run Windows 95 for the first time…"