August 2006 - matnkat.com

Thursday, August 31, 2006

Pulling my hair out

Mat: I've always had a love/hate relationship with my hair. For me, long hair is great because:

No need to style it, just tie it back
No traumatizing trips to the barbers
Can get away with not washing it as often
Fewer people tell me I look like someone famous (that's a subject for another blog)

But it's bad because:

It gets in the way, especially on windy days or when playing squash
Because I always tie it back, friends look at me strangely when I let it down
It takes ages to wash and dry
Everyone thinks I'm a computer geek

From the age of 13 I've had several cycles of growing it long, then getting sick of it and cutting it off. Today marks the end of the fourth cycle, and I'm basking in the joy of short hair again. I'd felt I was coming to the end of a cycle for a little while, and then I thought of a great reason to cut it off.

Sunday, August 27, 2006

50,000 beliefs!

Mat: I started collecting childhood beliefs for I Used To Believe at the end of 2001. At the time I thought I might get a few hundred if I was lucky, but by the time I'd exhibited it at our Open House in the Brighton Festival I'd already got about 200, so I was hopeful that one day I might even get to a thousand. This week we just got our 50,000th belief! Actually we've had over 55,000 submitted, but we've deleted about 5,000 because they weren't good enough or weren't appropriate. We've put up a page on the site with our favourite fifty of all time, and I'm working on some amends to the site to celebrate. We've got no idea what to do now, I've been focused on 50,000 for several months now and hadn't thought about the future beyond that...

Sunday, August 20, 2006

Lilydale-Warburton Rail Trail

Kat: Yesterday we cycled 38km through beautiful rolling Yarra valley countryside along a disused railway line. Look, there's Sam and me with my natty new handlebar bag!

There's always a point on a new ride that we end up at a highway or in the middle of a residential estate and think "Hang on, this can't be right..." We got ours out of the way at the beginning and from then on it was plain sailing. Warburton is a pretty little place; it's right up in the hills along the upper reaches of the Little Yarra river. Every shop is either a cafe or a new-age shop, which must be annoying for the residents when they want to buy a lightbulb.

Getting back was a bit of an ordeal: we got the bus back to Lilydale to catch a train back to Melbourne. There was only space for three bikes in the luggage compartment under the bus and the next bus wasn't for two hours; we got our bikes on board but it meant a kid couldn't get his bike on a few stops later. Sorry!

The ride wasn't too strenuous but Mat and I were looking forward to putting our feet up when we got home, while Sam was getting ready to go clubbing. He's more hardcore than us.

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Choccy

Yesterday I had some free time, so I built a small content management system for our mate Mark who's building a website for a dentist. It only me took four or five hours, so rather than charge him I asked to be paid in chocolate. Last night when we went out for dinner with Mark and Claire they presented me with 4Kg of Cadbury's chocolate!
3.6Kg of chocolate

The astute among you may have noticed that there is only 3.6Kg in this picture; a bar of Roast Almond has already been demolished. I'm taking bets on how quickly I can consume it all. And yes, the irony of working for a dentist and being paid in mouth-rottingly large quantities of brown gold isn't lost on me.

Sunday, August 13, 2006

Spring

Mat: It's been a gloriously sunny and warm weekend, so we've been out and about enjoying it. Yesterday we went on a long bike ride, reunited with our panniers thanks to my ma, to remind ourselves what it's like to go cycling carrying extra weight (much harder).

Today we took some pictures of our local area for Wikipedia. There are pages about most of the suburbs and major streets in our area, and a lot of them had no photos, so I stuck on the polarising filter to make the sky a wonderful deep blue and we set off. In the end we uploaded six photos this weekend, including the exciting Clifton Hill shot tower. Believe it or not it's the world's largest shot tower. I can tell you're excited.

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Census

Mat: Today is Census Day here in Aussie. Breaking tradition with Hannibal Lecter, I decided not to eat the liver of the guy who delivered the forms with some fava beans and a nice chianti, for which I'm sure he was grateful.

In 99 years time everyone will be able to find out the exciting details about our lives, like whether we did any voluntary work in the last year, what religion we subscribe to, and how many hours work we did last week*. Kat and I are both very excited to be included in a snapshot of Australian history, and only slightly disappointed to find that they're every five years instead of ten in the UK. We decided to test the Aussie government IT infrastructure by doing the census online, and were pleasantly surprised with how fast and pain-free an experience it was.

I decided not to bow to public pressure and give my religion as Jedi. In the last Aussie census in 2001, 70,000 people (0.3% of the population) gave this response. If you think that's a lot of people who are far too obsessed with Star Wars, compare it with 0.7% in the UK (more than said they were Sikhs, Jewish or Buddhists). But leading the field are the Kiwis, with a massive 1.5% of the population claiming to be force-manipulating, light-sabre-wielding, small-green-muppet-worshipping monks. Amusingly, this makes Jedi the second most popular religion in New Zealand! All I can say is that they must all live in the bush, because we didn't meet any.

* If you're really interested and can't wait that long, the answers are: no, none, 35 (Kat) and 15 (Mat).