Last Saturday was St Valentine’s Day. It’s been some years since I had anything to celebrate on Valentine’s Day. Fate has ruled that the last four or five of them, I have been single, so I was somewhat out of practice with the whole Valentine’s Day concept.

Thus I was extra keen not to stuff it up this time. Flowers, perhaps? Jewellery? Some other kind of gift? A card, certainly. Not that I was panicking too much: my lovely girlfriend is very easygoing, but I did want to get her something nice.

She had a nice brooch on one of her jackets, so I thought maybe she’d like another one. There used to be a stall at the St Kilda Esplanade on Sundays which had some very nice ones with flowers embedded in them, so a few weeks ago I planned to go along. Preparation, you see. Don’t leave it until the last minute. Don’t stuff it up.

Well, that Sunday I couldn’t get along there. So I planned to go along the following Sunday, the 8th of Feb. But I was foiled: the St Kilda Festival was that weekend, the Esplanade making the transition from quiet Sunday market to central point of musical celebration overcrowded with hundreds of thousands of people from the profitable 15-39 demographic, a fair dose of very loud amplified music, and liberal distribution of alcohol into the bargain. Bugger.

Okay then, to the shops around the city. Plenty of them, so no problem, right? So I went looking for brooches one lunchtime. Where the hell are all the brooches? I could find barely any, and those that I could find were fairly high up on the horribleness scale. Do they hide all the decent ones away? Perhaps there is some special password and handshake required before the shopkeeper will summon you to a tiny hidden corner, pull back a thick curtain to reveal the brooches and other Precious Things.

And why is it that jewellers, particularly those around Bourke Street which claim to have been in existence for over a hundred years, seem to lack any kind of refinement, poise or dignity? Maybe it’s just me, but they all look so garish and trashy.

Anyhow I gave up on finding a nice brooch, and instead found a rather nice pendant, not in one of the garish jewellery shops, but in the Oxfam/Community Aid Abroad shop. They even gift-wrapped it in an eco-friendly cardboard box thing.

She seems to be wearing it rather a lot. I think that means she likes it. I think that means I didn’t stuff it up.

The Simple Life. After reading a pretty funny article previewing this show the other week, I thought I’d give it a look. It sounded funny. And it was, kinda. I mean, I know they’ve probably spent a lot of time editing this show to make Paris and Nicole seem stupid, but they wouldn’t have been able to do it if the raw material wasn’t there. However after 45 minutes of it (including a 15 minute break where I went outside and hung laundry on the line) I couldn’t take any more. Those two really seem to barely have a brain cell between them. It was getting excruciating. I don’t think I can face watching it again.

Lost in Translation. Funny, poignant, full of mesmerising Blade Runner-esque scenery. Bill Murray looking older than ever before (make-up, or does he really look like that now?) Great soundtrack. Terrific movie, very enjoyable.

Motorola E365 phone. This new phone is getting irritating. Possibly it’s mostly that I’m so used to the Nokia-style user interface on phones, but there’s also stuff I simply can’t seem to do on this phone. I can’t get it to display no background — it only lets you choose between various garish inbuilt wallpaper images or a photo of your choosing. After copying all the numbers from the SIM card into the phone, I couldn’t wipe them all from the SIM so they wouldn’t show up twice on the list — had to put the SIM back in the old Nokia to do it. I can’t label some numbers as “fax” or “work” or “home” without adding that to the name — and the name is limited to only 16 characters. There is no way of making the ring start off quietly and get louder. I can’t even look at the smegging time on demand — it only seems to show it when the phone has been idle for a minute or two. This is all beginning to annoy me far too much, and I’ve rung up the phone company and am arranging to return it in favour of something else.

At Jeremy’s 6th birthday party yesterday, Tony assisted in demonstrating how BHP Billiton came up with their new logo.

When you’re out to dinner in a group at a nice restaurant…

and you get the bill…

and the organiser says she’ll pay the balance of whatever everyone else puts in, as she’s also paying for others who had to leave early…

and everyone else decides to put in $30 each — which is a bit more than is due, so that it will avoid awkward calculations or the organiser (who is also the birthday girl) having to pay too much…

and then the last two people study the bill intently and declare that they only had Mains, therefore they’re only putting in $44 for the two of them…

Nevermind that they had some of the very fine Bruschetta as well, for which there was a separate charge.

Well, I think that’s a bit rude.

It must be the heat, but I thought as I walked home this morning that I saw a bloke wearing a Barry Manilow t-shirt.

Nah, can’t have been.

Ah, Friday the 13th, traditional for bad luck. So, what bad luck did I have on Friday the 13th? Erm… none really so far. (Admittedly the day is not over yet.)

This morning I slept through my alarm, which had been cunningly set to play the radio very very quietly. I blissfully slept until almost 8am, but since I didn’t have to be anywhere in a hurry, one might almost call this good luck. And yesterday I left my yearly ticket at home. It cost me an extra $5 to get to work and back, but not exactly fatal.

But just in case you are tempted to relax, thinking that nothing bad really happens on Friday the 13th, take note of this: a colleague of mine was in a rush this morning. He left the house with his laptop computer and some folders. Realised before he got to the car that he’d left something behind. Put them down, ran back into the house, got what he’d forgotten, and then came back and got in the car.

He drove out of his driveway, wondering why the car felt a little odd to drive. Stopped, got out, looked, couldn’t see anything askew. Drove off down the road. Realised a short time later that his laptop and folders were not in the car. Went back to find folders of paper strewn across the road, and the laptop computer missing, presumed stolen. Argh. He showed me one of the folders he recovered. Yep. Tyre marks.

So, there you have it. Some people do have bad luck on Friday the 13th.

Mystery Man has gone. Vanished. His desk is cleared. His computer is off. His deodorant is all gone. The nameplate from the top of his computer has been removed. Only his chair remains.

His last hurrah was his arrival on Tuesday morning, when he found his chair missing. This prompted that most rare of events - an actual conversation with the guy - which for my part I denied all knowledge of his missing chair. He then went on the prowl for it around the office, and spotted its legs and wheels in the clear bit of glass below the frosted bit of glass of the adjacent meeting room. He must have been very attached to this chair, because he then found a spare one from elsewhere, knocked on the door, and interrupted the meeting in progress to demand his chair back. Obviously the actions of a desperate man.

But now he’s gone. What he did (well, apart from show up for only a half hour at a time to make phone calls and read e-mails) will remain forever unknown.

4pm. Now his computer has gone too.

I bought a new mobile phone. If “bought” is the correct term — I paid no money up front, and the monthly fee I’m shelling out has actually dropped by ten dollars. Unlike the cinema last week, the phone company were happy to give me a discount for ordering direct from them over the web.

It arrived by courier yesterday, and in spare moments at work I tried to get it working. Eventually determining that my ancient SIM card wouldn’t work in it, I went to the phone company shop and they gave me a new one.

Voila! The phone lives! It takes photos. Lovely photos. (Well, depending on what you point the phone at, I suppose.) It has a funky full colour screen. It has a bunch of games in it. It sends multimedia messages. And it has those annoying polyphonic tones - for when you turn it on, turn it off, press a button, when someone rings you up or sends you an SMS… you get the idea. As soon as I figured out how, I switched them all off.

I know some people love their polyphonic ringtones. I don’t. I gather they’re all based around MIDI, a standard for playing music instruments. Theoretically MIDI songs can sound cool if played in full blown multi-thousand-dollar synthesisers. In almost any other environment, including on most computers, they sound like crap. This is why I have my web browser configured not to play the bloody things. The bestest piece of music can sound like crap when rendered as MIDI. Your favourite rock anthem in MIDI is not cool, it’s a travesty. It’s not much better than elevator music or supermarket muzak. And while phones are improving in their rendering of music, for the most part I think that (a) they don’t quite get there, and (b) even if they manage a perfect rendition, I don’t want my pocket trumpeting my favourite rock anthem when somebody rings me up.

Anyway, the phone is good. Is fun. New toy good. The catch? Well apart from wrestling with a whole new set of controls (including the “start call” and “hang up” buttons being on opposite sides), there is the issue of the huge collection of phone numbers in the old phone’s memory. Probably over a hundred, most of which are at least moderately useful. Ah, no problem — just slip the new SIM into the old phone, copy them over, right? Uh uh. The old phone wants a password when you change the SIM. A password from long ago, now lost in the mists of time. It’s probably just four little digits, and when I set it, it probably seemed like the perfect password, that nobody would guess but that I would remember. Now, three years later, I have no idea what the hell it is.