To my utter astonishment, the plumber bloke turned up. He came on Wednesday, which come to think of it, wasn’t that much of a surprise, given that he was due last Saturday. It seems like about a tenth of people in service industries have no idea what time or day it is, and just do their thing whenever the hell they feel like it, and it seems like my landlady hires most of them. Quite possibly they even have to pass a test in it. Tardiness-124, something like that, to prove they have a total contempt for the whole concept of appointments.

So anyway he came. He wandered into the bathroom for a bit of a look, pulled out a notepad and scribbled some incomprehensible plumbers gibberish on it, and mentioned that the landlady was unlikely to be happy, which I took to mean that fixing the dampness coming through the wall was going to involve a fair amount of money. Basically a new shower, it sounds like.

My place could, quite frankly, do with a new shower. It could also do with some new carpet. The carpet here is not only a totally hideous colour (and it didn’t get that way by having kid/s living here for five and a half years) but it also has a number of rips. Not the dangerous beach type of rip that will take grown adults to a drowning death, but the conventional type of rip of a carpet that has quite definitely seen better days.

But we have to take things one step at a time, and if the shower happens to pop up first on the list for replacement, that’s fine by me. The door is pretty rickety, almost as much as the door frame. And the less said about the glass, the better. The shower head itself is okay, and blasts the hot water down nicely, but most of the rest of it is probably past its use by date.

What next then? I will await with some eagerness the announcement that my landlady is going to splash out on an entirely new shower. But once again, I’m definitely not holding my breath.

On Friday Iris and I got a little culture: theBatsheva Dance Company’s Anaphase was on at the State Theatre, and very good it was too. On Saturday we took the kids to Luna Park for a bit, then got them back to their mum’s place so I could lie in wait at my place for another one of my landlady’s mythical repairmen.

Years ago, she proclaimed that a man would come to fix the hallway carpet. After ten months of asking "did he come?" she gave up, and had it tiled over instead. Which, for the record, took another four months.

Well, now she’s on a mission to fix the dampness seeping through the wall behind the shower. And she appears to have called a repairman of equal reliability to the carpet guy. In fact, who knows, it might even be the same person, though I’m still not confident he exists.

Sure enough, about half an hour after he was due, she knocked on the door, and asked "did he come?" Of course, he hadn’t. Lucky it’s not an urgent problem, because I’m definitely not holding my breath.

I’ve got way too much damn e-mail. Outlook tells me that something like 200Mb of my hard drive is filled with the bloody stuff. It would take me years to read all that. Oh, about 90Mb of that is supposedly Deleted Items. I suppose it’s useful to have that stuff temporarily stored so I can get it back for a little while if I need to, but that seems a bit over the top.

Mind you, the amount of disk space it takes up doesn’t really worry me. I’ve got plenty. Not so much that I can keep burning it up, but enough to get by with. What really worries me is that I’ve got 76 items in my Inbox. Imagine if it were a physical Inbox - it would be overflowing!

It’s not helped of course by the roughly 20 spams I get every day, advertising Viagra, get rich quick schemes, and just about everything in between. But one of mails I got during the week on a programmers’ mailing list I’m on, was a joke about a hand-operated e-mail virus. It said the virus operated on the honour principle, and that I should forward the message to everyone I knew, and delete all my files myself. I didn’t do it, but within a few hours, my spare PC found itself as good as wiped.

From here on it gets a little bit technical, but geeks amongst you may like to keep reading.

I should have known better. My spare PC, the one I used to use before I got this spanking shiny new one a couple of months ago, had been misbehaving a bit. Normally Iris uses it in Windows NT to do her work, but I foolishly wanted its Windows 95 persona to work as well, which it wasn’t. After wrestling with it for some time, I decided that simply re-installing Windows 95 could be the way to go.

Bad move. I should have remembered back to a day in 1995, when a colleague of mine (hi Mike) tried this on a dual-boot Linux/Windows machine. It must have been before Microsoft adopted the philosophy of "embrace and extend" to rival technologies, instead aiming for "squash and strangle", because back then it zapped the nice dual boot menu.

And by golly, trying it today with that same old version of Windows 95, it still does the same thing. With the really nasty bit being that it also loses track of non-FAT partitions: in order words, the partitions holding Windows NT and all my precious data.

Lucky my data wasn’t all that precious, because I’d moved all the important stuff onto my new PC, and Iris’s stuff was also running off the new PC, from a mapped drive.

All attempts to get Windows to recognise the other partitions failed. Even the Windows NT setup didn’t seem to like it. It might have stood a chance had I made an Emergency Repair Disk. It would have only taken a couple of minutes to do. But I hadn’t. I won’t make that mistake again, but in the mean time, it’s re-installation time, what fun…

Simmering away… and very useful as a sundial, too. If you look too carefully, you’ll see spotlets of it on the wall - the product of careless stirring. A vital ingredient if you can’t be bothered doing all the little fiddly bits yourself: Mr Newman. (I hope the cheque’s in the mail) Mmmmmmm… SpagBol….

Most people would agree that spaghetti bolognaise is just about the easiest meal anybody can cook. It ranks just slightly above boiled eggs and toast in complexity, probably because you can basically throw the ingredients into the pan in almost any old order, and it’ll turn out edible. This makes it the ideal meal for me, and today, I cooked a batch. Here’s my recipe.

Ingredients:

• Premium mince - about $6-7 worth… or about a kilogram in the old scale
• Big jar of Paul Newman’s Sockarooni sauce
• About 3 tomatoes - more if you can be bothered
• An onion - my sister recommends brown, but white seems to be okay
• Some olive oil
• Pasta of your choice - I reckon Angel Hair spaghetti is brilliant
• Some grated cheese. Traditionalists may prefer Parmesan, but for me, nothing goes past Coon
  - delicious. (Before the PC police pounce, it’s named after its inventor: Dr E W Coon).

Method:

• This step is vital: Get all the stuff listed above from the supermarket
• Get out your biggest frying pan and start heating it up. Bung the olive oil on
• Peel and chop up the onion. Try not to let the tears stream down your face if there’s anybody you want to impress around
• Put the onion in the pan and let it get brown (or browner, if it’s already brown)
• While that’s going, chop up the tomatoes
• When the onion looks like it might be getting bored, put the meat in with it. Mush it up a bit and let it cook for a few minutes
• Pour Paul Newman all over it, and the tomato on top
• Pump up the Powderfinger really loud on the stereo, and let it simmer for a while (the sauce, not the CD), stirring when you feel like it
• The longer the simmer, the better. An hour or two is good; a couple of days would be brilliant, I reckon. Perhaps go and write out a recipe while you’re waiting
• When you can’t wait any longer, cook the pasta, throw it all in an enormous dish with the sauce, put some grated cheese over it, then let your mouth rejoice in tastebud heaven
• Any leftovers, chuck into a container and pop in the freezer 
• If your pan was overflowing (like mine was), be prepared to clean the stove, and the wall behind it…

A reply!

Meanwhile, my search is over. They’ve been found, and what a relief. Yes, my sunnies turned up. My precious Raybans. *sniffle* I’m so relieved.

I think my life is a bit too enjoyable at the moment, which leaves me in a bit of a quandary. Usually I like to have a good whinge about something. But right now, there’s not much to whinge about, and I’m sitting here on Monday night, wanting to send at least a token diary entry to the mailing list, but unable to think of anything witty, intelligent or whiny to say.

Ah! Got it! Thanks to the wide-reaching tentacles of the Internet, stupid people are always available to whinge about, or at least poke fun at. So here’s the dumbest mail I got last week:

It’s a beauty, isn’t it? How does one even begin to answer a mail like that? Is she going to fail her chemistry class or what?!

Well, she will if she uses any of the stuff I put in my reply. I’m so helpful, aren’t I!

Just goes to show, you can’t believe everything you read on the Net.

I await her reply with interest.

I’ve been playing around with GuruNet. It’s a very cool little program that sits in the background on your computer, just waiting, just itching for you to Alt-Click on a word to find its definition. It can look up entries from a dictionary or encyclopaedia, maps, weather reports for cities, and so on.

I was just mucking around with it, looking at the entry for Melbourne, and thought I’d take a look and see what it had as a map. The map appeared, and… very, very spookily, included a "You Are Here" marker, placed right over my suburb.

I don’t mind telling you - I panicked. Not the brown trousers kind of  panic, but certainly I think my heart rate increased momentarily. How could they know? Did they track my IP address? Did they query my ISP
to work out what suburb I’m in?

What else did they know about me? Did they know my name? Where I shop? My shoe size? That I’m addicted to Cadbury chocolate? Did they know how untidy my desk is?

Then I realised they just plonked that "You Are Here" in the middle of their map. Which just happened to be my suburb. I tried looking for a map of Sydney, and sure enough, they claimed I was in the middle of that map too. Phew, that’s a relief. (Not a relief map, just a relief.)