Here I am, back in Melbourne. It feels strange. I'm home, but it's not my home, but it is.

Flight was good, didn't drag. I'm getting tired already which is a bad sign. Got to keep awake. I'll find someone to entertain me.

I'll write more when I can. The Shadow of the Winds is a fantastic book, I read about half of it on the plane.

I was saying something? Oh, yeah. I hate the tub. Southwark to Green Park with luggage, have to stradle my case because no one thinks to let me rest it against a wall. Walk to the Piccadilly line is a small pain, no bother though really. Platform is packed, next train is for Heathrow - four minutes. More people, more people, more people. Can't get on the train, even though half a french school gets off the same carraige. Next train to Ruislip - seven minutes. Five minutes. Train after that, Uxbridge - seven minutes, more people. Walk back to the Jubilee line, train's packed. Get stopped at Baker Streen, customer alarm on the train ahead. Maybe I could catch the Hammersmith and City line instead. Maybe. Thank gods, the train is moving. St. John's Wood. Swiss Cottage. Shit. Should have got off at Baker Street. The train was stopped there too - as if I was being given a message. St. John's Wood. Baker Street. Bakerloo line, not far. Crowds getting out the gate. Heathrow Express, I get a cheap ticket with my young persons rail card. That's nice. Clean train. Won't be too late.

I'm watching the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games, just after 10am in England. It's so cool to sing the tacky anthem at top volume on this side of the world whilst watching flying trams, the Melbourne Symphony, the Australian Ballet dancing with motorcyclists, a flying skateboarder with a duck, the Yarra river lit up with spunky sculptures, flags and fireworks and of course the fabulous Cat Empire all in my beautiful hometown. I'm so happy to be going home in just over a week! Melbourne really is a great place.

Haydenand suitcase are at their last day of work, leaving tonight. Jonathan's going home for the weekend so it will be a quiet few days for me. But I can wait..

Claire Jones (harpist) and I will will be performing at the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square on Wednesday 15th March. It's part of the 'Wednesday Lates' series, where the gallery is open until 9pm and guests can enjoy a free music recital in the central hall, followed by live Jazz music and bar in the Sainsbury Wing Foyer. We will be performing a selection of entertaining Classical music - nothing too heavy - between 6-7:30pm, so if you're in London town, come and drop by!

I find it funny that the Brits have deemed the 'bloody' ad far too rude for mainstream audiences, and have banned it from TV here. It's amusing because by banning it, they're actually giving it more attention and as a result the ad has already been downloaded over 30,000 times in Britain.. before its launch.

Tourism Minister (of Australia) Fran Bailey said "How anyone can take offence at a beautiful girl in a bikini on a sunny beach inviting them to visit 'down under' is a mystery to me"

The timing was good... only 2 weeks until I leave.

And as per usual I've been programming. I'm slaving away over a disc cataloguing system I'm writing it for work. Well, it's a disc cataloguing system for work, and a programming project for me - hence the working on the weekend thing.

While Elisse was away over Christmas and New Years I used the time to start learning Cocoa, an Apple API based around objective-c. I'd not actually written more than a dozen lines in any object-orientated language before, so it was all failry new, on the other hand I've been programming in C for years, so that helped a lot. Since I was looking into disc cataloguing software at work, and couldn't find anything I liked the look of, I figured I'd write my own application.

So two and a half months down the track and I've almost got something I'm ready to show the world. I'm actually pretty proud of where I've got so far, it's already by far the biggest programming project I've ever worked on.

I'll have details and links up here in the next couple of weeks, along with a project page to detail revisions and user documentation (which is yet to be written). I'll be licensing it under the GPL, so if you're a programmer feel free to take a look at the source too - hopefully I will have cleaned up the worst bits of it by then. I'm actually using a GPL framwork, so I'll give it a bit of a plug now. If you're writing in Cocoa and want a database backend, go check out MySQL-Cocoa. It's a damn useful wrapper for the MySQL C API, although there's not documentation available at the moment, so you'll need to read through the source code for help and examples.

We had lunch with Masako and Grant today, who have come to England on what I think is their honeymoon (baffling destination). It was so nice to see them again - we showed them around the College briefly and then went to a cool 'world food/music' cafe for lunch. Afterwards Haydenand I scouted around inner London testing out some of the hidden pleasures this city has to offer - the island's greatest coffee at a new Australian cafe: Flat White and a very reasonably priced, forget-you're-in-england style smelly Italian deli where we picked up some hand made delights for dinner.

This morning I had a very relaxing flute lesson/coffee at my teachers home in Surrey, which was lovely.
All in all it's been a (very) good day, though you don't want to hear about it...

It's snowed this morning. A very nice thing to watch while we had breakfast. Then by the time I got to London Bridge station the sun had come out, which was also nice. The best thing though, was that when I woke up this morning the sun was already up. I've been waiting for that for a while

Been busy at work as usual. Starting to think about my trip to Australia (in about two weeks). Not too much else to report.

It's sunny and snowing in London today!

It's also pancake day


[edit: well, it was sunny for a whole 10 minutes this morning. False hopes.]

Elisse and I went to Portsmouth last week. Spent a couple of nights there and saw a bit of the coast, including going over to the Isle of Wight for a day. There wasn't a whole heap to see, but we did see a couple of films and eat at a great fish restaurant.

Other than that, Mike & Soph came and went on Monday and Tuesday. They're back home in Australia now, having seen more of Europe than I have so far. We're getting to it though.