Craziness after the youth service

So, the delightfully named youth service "6ish" started at about 6:10 last night. It finished at about 7pm at Ballina Pressie. We went to the Mexican restaurant at Lennox Head and ordered some of their extremely generous serves of nachos in full-sized AlFoil cake tins. I didn't finish it. It was too huge.

One of the guys I was dining with was also on the front cover of the Ballina/Lennox Head and surrounds White Pages. After discussing this, everyone in the room mentioned someone they knew personally who was on the front of a magazine or something. One of the guys was on the TV advertisement for the Worker's Club. Small town. A bit surprising for a city slicker like myself.

"Let's go for a walk!" We went for a walk to the icecream shop. The icecream shop was closed, so the girls just looked in at the darkened shop and drooled.

We keep walking, burning off any excess calories put on by those huge serves of nachos. We get to the playground and start playing on the swings.

A bit of cultural knowledge for any of you south of the Murray. In far north NSW, "Tiggy" (Tag) is known as "Tip". And it's not "you can't tig the baller back", it's "you can't tip the butcher back".

"Let's go down to the beach!" Mind you, it's about 9:30 at this stage. It's dark, the swells are reasonably big, but it's low tide. Some of the guys test the water and declare "we're all going in!" I'm not going in! It's my bedtime in half an hour!

They don't jump in just yet, so we walk down the coast aimlessly looking for a good place to jump in. Some of the guys taunt the girls about the presence of sharks in the water. Most of the people jump in, but a few of us party poopers just watch in the dim light on the beach.

I subtly encourage some of the guys to steal the clothes of some of the guys. They walk down the length of the beach (maybe about 400m) in their underwear.

When we get off the beach, we find their clothes dumped into a tidy pile right underneath the nearest street light. Somebody takes a video on the phone as they walk up.

Another girl does an excellent impression of a dog barking on the way back. She gets all the neighbourhood dogs aggravated. They get all excited and don't stop barking for another half an hour. At which stage the girl's barking again.

I pity the neighbourhood of Lennox Head.

We get back to the house and everyone decides to take a nap in the middle of the street. We discuss life's most fundamental questions, like what to wear at school formals and the wonders an ashpalt bed will do to your back.

We head home at about 11pm, an hour past my bedtime.



Why don't we ever do stuff like that at home?

Wayne's Words of Wisdom, 1:2

The Simpsons is the vanilla ice cream of television. It's nothing particularly special, and it can get rather bland, but it's consistant and popular and you always know what you're going to get.

Wayne's Words of Wisdom, 1:1

Random thought, unrelated to any particular event in my life:

In public places, such as shopping centres, the mens toilet is normally situated a slightly further walk away from the ladies toilet. This arrangement is fair and good, since it helps to compensate for the difference in time taken whilst in the toilet.

Love story

"Tell Wayne how your mum was a pickpocket, Trish!"

Trish's mum is Phillipino. Her dad, an Australian, once visited the Phillipines, where her mum worked as a tour guide.

"Excuse me sir, please give me your wallet for safe keeping in case of pick pockets."

"No, I'm a big tough Australian and nothing is ever going to happen to me."

Trish's mum then proceeds to slide Big Tough Australian's wallet out of his pocket, and returns it to him.

And they both lived happily ever after.

Ooh, flashy lights!

Somebody once posed the question, "why do evil robots in movies have red eyes?" We finally concluded that the answer was because red LEDs were cheaper.

I got a phone from the company. It's a Nokia 1100. Nothing to write home about. Except that it has a "flashlight" feature.

Now, by flashlight, Nokia means a little tiny white LED mounted on the top of the phone, which turns on when you press the "C" button on the phone. It illuminates to a distance of about 10cm in pitch black. You could probably pick up a similar LED for about 70c from your local electronics store.

I know, I know, I will probably end up using this feature all the time. But that doesn't mean I can't poke fun at it for a little while.

The IBM Thinkpads I have at work and home (before they got bought up by the Chinese Levono company) all have a little light at the top of the screen so you can "see" your keyboard in the dark. (Never mind that the LCD screen gives off much more light than that little thing.)

The IBM laptop I bought a year ago had a white LED. The IBM laptops bought earlier this year have red LEDs. Talk about downmarket.

(I just demonstrated this "feature" of the laptops to the people on site yesterday. They were suitably amused. "Now I can work all night!")

Somebody once said that all computer programs continue to evolve until it is able to send email. I used to think that electronic gadgets were the same except that their target was the ability to take photographs. Maybe it was an LED flashlight instead.

Let them eat cake

There's this tradition at my company to provide two cakes for the people in the office when your birthday comes. For the benefit of those sitting at the desks at time of cake delivery (pretty much everyone), people often will send an email to the entire office alerting everybody about the presence of the aforementioned cake.

The thing is, most people send their cake emails to everyone registered as a worker in Victoria and Tasmania. This has the net affect of alerting everyone who is on site that there is a cake that they physically cannot access.

We had cake on Saturday. So, with a grin, we dutifully emailed everyone in Melbourne that there was cake in the smoko room up here in Ballina.

Welcome to the Internet.

Everyone: I'll probably be online from about 8-10pm from now on. Thanks to the magic of a laptop, a mobile phone and an infrared connection.

I used to tease people on dial-up.

"I remember when I was on dial-up."
"Hang on, actually, I don't."

Now dial-up is speedy in comparison to the 9,600 ones-and-zeroes that trickle through an infrared connection.

I'm now Web browsing with images turned off. It isn't quite as bad as I thought, but then again, cooking rice in a saucepan on an electric stove isn't quite as bad as I thought. (It's bad, it's just not that bad.)

Any rumours you might hear that I'm at the point with Kingdom of Loathing that I can play it just as well without images as with are totally false. Except for the one that's true.

Wet times.

One week of working at the water treatment plant up here. I've found a church, a Presbyterian church where the people are fairly nice. The only thing is that I didn't get a car, which means that I have to walk about 45 minutes into town. (For some reason, my company's web filtering system blocks http://www.presbyterian.org.au/, citing "Traditional Religion". Weird.)

I went to the 10am service, where I found out that there was a 6pm service for the younger people. (I went to the family service, which meant I could amuse babies for a bit.) I stayed in town until about 3, then since it seemed like such sunny weather I went back home to get my swimming gear.

I decided to go to the 6pm service, so I set off at about 4:30 to get to town early and maybe pick up some dinner. I ended up facing a storm front looking something like this.

About 15 minutes into the walk I decided to turn back. There was a takeaway shop there, and I asked for a burger with the lot. It took a bit longer than I expected, and by the time I left the shop, the storm front had just started to display its power. I took refuge in a nearby bar and listened as people with their beers stood around and talked about "drinking out the storm".

Ten minutes later it had subsided and I left the bar to walk the ten remaining minutes in a light drizzle. My trusty digital camera survived the storm.

Bal´·lin·a

You decide to work in Ballina for four months. You don't bother packing until two days before you leave, so you end up packing two days before your plane for Ballina via Sydney actually leaves.

It's not until you stop over at Sydney for 50 minutes that you realise that you're actually carrying about 42kg of luggage in three separate bags, and that you have to walk from Qantas Terminal 3 to Regional Express Terminal 2.To make matters worse, apart from a few vague road signs, you have no idea how to get there.

You finally make the plane with five minutes to spare by lugging one piece of luggage at a time down the footpath, all the time hoping no dodgy pedestrians or overvigilant security officers pick up the remaining unguarded bags.

It's quite a workout though.

You gain 12 Strongness.

(?)