On Saturday, I was in Burwood walking down the main drag. In Burwood on a weekend - there are lots of people shopping, eating, cruising around and being seen. There are young guys in suped up cars driving up and down the street. I trrrry not to be too negative about that sort of thing, because driving up and down in the street in you’re car, trying to look cool.. is in the scheme of things, pretty harmless.

And i’m sure I did lots of posing when I was young too.

I probably do lots of silly looking stuff now too. It’s all a matter of perspective.

Anyway, even though I say I try not to be negative… in some small way, deep down I probably am. The guys that drive there cars up and down the street, generally have loud mufflers, loud thump-thump music, too much goop in their hair and usually seem pretty aggressive. You know the type.

So on this particular Saturday I saw a large lady bus driver, maybe polynesian of some sort… she had jumped out of her bus and was helping another older lady to cross the busy street so that she could catch the bus directly opposite (I think the older lady had mistakenly tried to catch the wrong bus).

Doing this caused the traffic to become a little congested. Two buses on either side of the street and lots of cars being held up by the two ladies trying to cross. Just as the bus driver turned to cross back to her bus, a young ‘punk’ in a bright yellow, thump thump, big body kit, shiny alloy wheeled car approached. He looked impatient at the delay and I thought “yeah, this guy will use his horn or have some words here”.

The bus driver edged out into the traffic just as this guy got near. Everyone was moving slowly and he swirved slightly. Too my completely surprise, he had actually stopped to block both lanes and wave the bus driver across the street with a smile. It was actually a really nice gesture.

Anway, to all the young punks in ugly cars, too big shorts on skateboards and funny looking hats that I have misjudged. I’ll try not to in future.

Craving a lovely crab hotpot again! The recent weather in Sydney - you know that slightly overcast cold weather always makes me think of food. (What’s worse is my friends also too lazy to cook also crave it!). A few calls later, we are at our local Chinese restaurant pigging out on crab hotpot.

Steaming hot flavoursome noodles, lovely fresh crab! I just love peeling back the shells and scooping out all that wonderful crab meat!

Ah! I’m so full now I can hardly walk! It’s good to pig out once in a while…..

Spam sucks. Those auto spammer things really suck.

We have added the SecureImage plug-in to our site to try and prevent some of this. Apologies to anyone with a text-reader for which I doubt this works.

We did hack the code a little so that the text is centred and the colour is fixed. Also the background image stays as a grid. this may make it less secure.. but we’ll see how it goes.

One small note when installing… it was all smooth except i didn’t realise that the security feature will only appear for users that are not logged in. This is a nice feature.. but it took me a while to work out why it wasn’t working :)

I’ve often likened myself to a computer.

“Jay”, I would say, “… you may not be a Pentium 4 like these other guys, but you’ve got a big hard drive.. and that counts for a lot”.

I think it has always been a convenient way to make me feel better about myself when someone seems to be a little bit quicker off the mark or a little sharper of wit.

I like the idea that everyone has a talent. Some people can work things out quickly… while others just seem to know a lot. This idea extends beyond the intelletual and academic. Some people are good at dancing, some people are able to produce artworks that look like nothing but still make people stare in awe.. and others are just good at giving of themselves. I like to think that there is always something. Though perhaps it’s not always easy to find.

My computer analogy doesn’t always work for me when I come across someone who has a whole lot of knowledge and experience and has a really fast processor. Well it works.. it just makes me wonder what it is that I have. Is there anything special about me? I started to think that maybe I have a lot of RAM. If you’ve ever played chess, you might know that some people are able to think many moves in advance… and they can imagine all the permutations and possibilities of how a game might turn out. Well I attribute this skill (and ones like it) to RAM. I don’t have a lot of RAM.

Maybe my perseverance likens me to a sturdy 586 running linux.. or the fact that I am even thinking about this means that I have good diagnostic software.

As much as I like to think that we all have something special to offer, I also think, and you may call this a defeatist attitude, that there will always be someone who is bigger, faster, stronger or smarter. It’s probably a good idea that I don’t get too hung up with thinking about what makes me special. My self confidence shouldn’t lay in rankings against everyone else.