Ugh, Saturday morning and I'm awake with a hangover. Finished work at 17:00 yesterday and took a taxi into Civic to meet some ISOC-AU folks at P. J. O'Reilly's for an end-of-week drink. Bloody noisy and smokey, that pub. I had three or four halves of fine Cascade Pale Ale, when Gemma joined us. I was so proud to introduce her to my geeky friends as "a Unix user" (hehe, she's upgraded her little iBook to Mac OS X lately). Geeks left, we stayed for more beer, then retired to our local, Filthy McFadden's in Kingston, where we had another couple. Hrm. At this point it seemed like the best idea in the world to pick up two bottles of wine and four new-release DVDs...



The coffee tastes goooood. Black Illy espresso from my stove-top Atomic...



Today we vote in the world's first electronic election, here for the state legislature (well, we aren't actually a state, rather a territory, and to be honest I don't really understand the difference -- Canberrans are fiercely proud of their Australian Capital Territory). The election is being run as a parallel electronic and paper poll, with all of the electronic code running as open source on Debian Linux. Gemma has just gone out to get The Canberra Times so we can plan our voting (we use the complex but exceedingly modern and fair Hare Clark system, but in my current pained state that is best left for another wup. Think I'll take some photos of us voting electronically today, seems like a good event to record. Wonder if we can C! an extra-good candidate...



Oh cool, I just remembered. I got a new phone, finally. I've been carrying around this sorry excuse for a modern cellphone, a Motorola Piece of Crap, for 10 months now. I have never hated an item of personal electronics quite as viciously as I hated that phone. So I finally gave in and swapped it for a sleek new Ericsson T29s which is a joy to have. The interface has matured so well since my last Ericsson, I'm amazed. It's a little flippy thing, sort of silvery, with deep purple features. It has five games (Tetris, a Qix clone, and three other things I don't really like). I couldn't help it while I was shopping, so I also got a DECT Ericsson wireless phone for home too (It was on special, honey, honest!), which is also extremely cool. Today I must punch all our Rolodex numbers into it's memory and retire the dead-tree format household number listing.