The true evils of the Fitball Squat

Some of you may recall the name "Gerti" from this post not so long ago, and also the associated "fit ball squat" debarcle described within. Well, this morning I felt much better about the whole incident, and here's why:

As I was leaving the gym this morning, our young Gerti was against the wall with a fitball, looking just about as awkward as anyone doing a fitball squat does. She'd mistakenly chosen to wear something that was just a little unflattering, and I think was feeling incredibly self-conscious about the fact that I (not to mention everyone else in the gym) was there, which is awesome because that's exactly how I was feeling when I was the one with the squatting and the fitball and stuff. It was kind of like karma, but in a more selfish, vindictive sense.

However, what happened next actually transformed my glee into a small amount of remorse. My good friend who I go to the gym with was walking with me as I was leaving, and just as we left the gym, but still well within earshot of young Gerti, he delivered a blow that would be incredibly devastating to any girl at the gym, especially to one in the middle of doing fitball squats:

See! I told you she was podgy.

UnReal Estate

So I went to an auction today. I've never been to an auction before, and to be honest I didn't think there'd be any chance we could win it. However, the agent for the property we were looking at said, and I quote:

"The property will be sold on auction day."

Now, the interesting thing about this phrase, is that we believed it meant exactly what it sounds like - that there'd be an auction, and at the end of it someone who wasn't the vendor would walk away owning a brand new property, regardless of how attractive the bids were to the vendor. So we made some financial decisions based on this advice, which included purchasing a deposit bond so that we could pay for a property if we won. See, the property was a bit beyond our purchasing power, but if it was definatley going to sell then there was a chance that we might win. People mightn't turn up, and the market is pretty flat...
So, we went to the auction. There were three properties from the same vendor, and we'd decided we were going to bid on two of them - if we missed the first, we'd bid on the second. The property we wanted most was the first, which was convenient for us.
So they opened the bidding, and Rachel (who was handling the bidding, while I handled keeping our little boy happy) put in a bid of $180,000. People seemed rather shocked, but once the real estate types settled down their overemphasised disbelief, the auctioneer began asking for increases. There were none. Not-a-one. Going once, going twice... and... The auctioneer placed a bid on behalf of the vendor of $270,000.
Well, we were a bit stunned, but not overly worried. Rachel offered to raise our bid to $220,000 which wasn't quite the correct thing to do, but I think it was probably the best option at that point. Anyway, we got to the "going once, going twice" bit again, and then the property was passed-in for negotiation at $270,000. We went out and spoke to the real estate agent who spoke to the vendor on our behalf (I think I should mention at this point, it just so happened the vendor was the manager of the real estate agency running the auctions...). As it turns out, he wouldn't sell it to us at $220,000. He said that $220,000 wouldn't buy a property in that suburb. Apparently, he didn't intend to sell on auction day. He intended to sell if he got enough money - which to me seems no different from any other auction, and as such shouldn't be misrepresented, as it was, as a guarenteed sale on the day.

Now, I have to say, I feel rather misled. We knew we couldn't afford to buy these properties outright with the current expectations of the average seller in the current market. At the moment, there's a reasonable gap between what buyers are prepared/able to pay and what sellers are expecting to get. They still want the inflated prices they could get 12-24 months ago. We know this. However, I figured that based on the "properties will sell on auction day" line we kept on getting fed, that we might actually have a real chance. Well - I was lied to. We were told categorically that these properties would be sold - and yet they only actually sold one of the three properties. Actually, of all 5 properties that went to auction today, they only sold one of them AND they sold it below the vendor's bid. This tells me something - that sellers are expecting too much for their properties. But I already knew that really. The problem I have is not that we didn't walk away with a house. It's that we made the highest non-vendor bid on a property that we were told was a guarenteed sale on auction day - and yet the property wasn't sold to us.
So what do we do? Start looking again. I feel somewhat bitter, but there's nothing to be done. We just have to start over I guess... I think the most important thing I've learned is that the next time a real estate agent tells me a piece of information that I'm going to base my decisions on, my line will be:

"Really? Can I have that in writing?"

No Use For A Title

Have I mentioned I hate being sick? I believe I may have once or twice. Don't expect this course of events to change, by the way. I will get sick, and I will tell you about it.

{later that day...}

So I'm driving home this afternoon, and I'm in a bit of a rush. My wife had told me that she'd had a hard day with our son, and she was keen for me to get home. I stopped by the Games Wizards (my game/anime shop of choice) to pick up some DVDs, and was now on my way home. Between the shop and my home, there is a reasonably long stretch of road that is fairly straight, and has an 80Km/hr speed limit. My intent, was to travel along this stretch at perhaps a velocity slightly above that limit, as wanted to get home as soon as possible. That intention was foiled when I got caught behind a car travelling at 20Km/hr under the perscribed speed limit. The irony of this, is that the car was....

... A RED PORSCHE CONVERTABLE.

Now, hopefully you can see why this would be frustrating. I'm driving a 96 model Toyota Corolla (which is a great car, mind you) and I'm caught behind a car worth many times as much as mine is. A car which is expensive BECAUSE IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE FAST, DAMMIT!! The driver looks to be in his mid-thirties to early forties, and yet is driving slower then the average geriatric.
Now, let me not advocate speeding - because this isn't what this is about. It's about people driving at, or at least close to, the speed limit. I would have been fine if he'd been doing 80km/h, but it seems to me that the logical conclusion one should draw from this whole incident is that this guy and me should swap cars. I mean - he wants to go slow: my car will do that just fine. I want to go fast: his car is built to go fast. We should swap. It should be compulsorary for him. His car's image implies speed - speed which he doesn't want to use. So he should replace it with a car that doesn't imply speed; that being mine. After all, he was holding me up: it's only fair.
Needless to say, that I failed to mention this to him when I pulled up beside him at the lights. I hear* those things have GPS-enabled panic buttons in them these days that instantly send SWAT-like teams to your location to beat up anyone in your vacinity. (*Note: I didn't actually hear that - it's just a convenient falsehood to support my cowardice.)
The moral of this story is, that if you're going to spend a mint on a car that sells itself as being fast, at least drive at a speed that doesn't make you look like you're out to buy some Depends undergarments. I'm happy to sit behind someone driving at a cautious 5-10km/hr under the limit, but any more then that is just arrogent - you're holding other people up because you feel that they should conform to your desired slowness.
Shame on you, Mr. Porsche driver. No soup for you!

A short addition on the nature of time

SBS had another program on tonight dealing with Einstein's theories - in particular, his unfinished "theory of everything". It reminded me of a thought I had when writing this post, but didn't include.

If time is relative to the speed you are moving, then is it perhaps possible that we only experience time as we do due to the sum of our movement within the universe? For example, the world is turning at a prescribed speed + the earth is moving around the sun + the solar system is moving around the central point of our galaxy. Assume also that our galaxy is part of a cluster of galaxies that are also moving at a prescribed speed. Could it also be possible that at least one element of this sum of momentum is decelerating, which is what gives us the perception that time speeds up as we get older (ie: it's not an alteration of perception due to age, but rather an actual time-space phenomenon)? With the original thought, would that then mean if you could stand truly still (at "absolute zero momentum" so to speak) that time would cease completely? Or perhaps momentum is ultimately circular - so that standing "absolutely" still and traveling at the speed of light are ultimately the same. That would be a weird one - not that I have any basis for that last suggestion. Just completely random thought.

OK, I'm done. Bed time. Just some musings I wanted to jot down.

Almost nothing, and then...

Blal. That's really all I have to say at this point. I'm so completely flat and empty at the moment, I really don't have anything to blog about.

Oh, not entirely true - there is something.
Quite a while ago, I wrote this post about the pitfalls of doing computer work for friends of friends or relatives or whatever. Usually immediate circle is OK (eg: parents, cousins, friends) but if you expand to their circle (ie: friends/relatives of friends/relatives) then you run into hassles. Although that post was titled "Never Again", I now have another story to tell of the same nature.
A guy at my work has a brother who works for a particular frame/truss company. I would link them, but they have no web presence whatsoever, so the best I could do is link the Yellow Pages. Anyway, this guy at my work asked if I could perhaps go have a look at their computers. He said that they were using Win98, but the computers were all networked, and all they needed was for me to hook them up so that they could all use their new ADSL link, and I'd make some sweet moolah.

Nifty. I can do that.

Then came that still small voice: "Don't do it... you know where this will lead... It's hassle that you don't need right now..." However, I ignored that still small voice. I have a PSP without any games, and money would fix that. How could I possibly lose here?
I lose. I lose bad. I went to have a look at their computers. They are all running Win98 - they've never been updated, and most of them have spent time connected to the internet without antivirus or a firewall. Most of them have spyware-like toolbars installed all over them. The IP addressing is inconsistent and muddled. And then to top it all off, I try to change the IP on the ADSL modem, and it dies. Why? Well, see Bigpond (whom Blogger keeps insisting I should replace with "Fishpond" - might well be faster...) load custom firmware into their modems, and it just had a glitch. So I have to spend 20+ minutes hunting around for a manual over a dialup connection that just won't stay connected.
When I finally got it hooked up and working, the connection to the internet was solid enough (it would resolve domain names, and ping IPs with low response times), but using a web browser was like wading through marzipan. The guys who work there are keen to go home by this stage, so I leave it and tell them to get some anti-virus/spyware happening.
I get a call today at work via the guy who set me up with this job. They haven't changed a thing, but the internet isn't working. I get one of them to verify he can access the ADSL modem - all is good. I get him to ping www.microsoft.com. The DNS name resolves (it would be in cache), but the pings all time out. Great. So now their ADSL link is unreliable. Bigpond probably cut them off because their computers spent the night distributing some virus or spyware or something.
This hasn't been a really accurate/interesting description, but I wanted to just make one point. Whenever this happens - someone asks you to do them a favor and look at their mishmash computer network - it really isn't worth doing. All that's happened is that I've been given 2 hours in a room full of dusty bones and been asked to construct a live animal. However, the people I've done the work for won't be able to come to terms with that - they'll think that I'm just a substandard operator and that I've ripped them off because I haven't walked away leaving them with sparkly new things to play with. They'll ask me to come fix the problems, when the truth is that the problems aren't mine to begin with. They need new PCs. The ones they have are at least 6 years old, and are running an operating system that was developed before internet-connected networks were a commonplace occurrence. Sure, conceptually it should work, but the fact is that practically it falls down. For example, you can't disable NetBIOS over TCP/IP on a network adapter (ie: not a modem) that has TCP/IP as it's default protocol. Why? Well because Microsoft assumed that if you were running TCP/IP on an Ethernet adapter using Win98, that you were networking with other PCs (and probably Windows PCs) on a local subnet. Hence, seeing as Win98 doesn't have it's own built in DNS server, NetBIOS is an essential for name resolution. This doesn't apply directly to the problems I was having, but it's just interesting to observe the assumptions that are made within the OS.

(saved as draft - now following day)

So I've arranged to go look at this beast of a network this afternoon. I bought SSX on Tour for my PSP which I'm pretty happy with, but I could use another game. So if I can get $50 out of this arvo, I'm pretty happy. Also, I've done something clever. I have people coming over tonight for dinner, meaning that even if the whole thing is falling to crap, I still have to leave in time to get home for dinner. Nice. I'm also downloading everything I can think of that I might need. Anti-spyware, antivirus, manual for the modem - and I'm going to burn it all to CD. Should be great I hope. Basically, this whole thing is a puddle of stinking dog's vomit, and I hope to at least draw a smiley face in it. Hopefully that will help...

Church

My wife and I are looking for a new church. I don't remember if I've blogged about this before, but basically we decided that we weren't entirely happy with the direction and focus of our current church, and with our son coming up to the age where he'd be learning from sources other then us we wanted to make sure that the church we were attending him was giving him the foundations we believe are important.

So we've gone to a handful of different churches, but as yet we haven't really been grabbed by any of them. Perhaps we're looking for an impossible mix (AOG-style enthusiasm AND solid teaching like we both remember from our Anglican days) but I'm still holding out hope. We've been to a small handful of local churches but as yet we haven't really found one that's made us go "Ah, yes. That's what we're after." I think the closest so far is Hawkesbury Valley Baptist Church, where some of our friends and extended family go. They seem to be quite laid back with their approach to leadership and authority, which is a big relief for us coming from a church who were already quite focused on it, and then launched into a series to draw more focus.
{tangent}
Church isn't about control - and never was supposed to be. "Religion" is about control - Jesus is about freedom. I had a great conversation with my Dad about this issue on the weekend. {sub-tangent}My Dad is probably the one person who's Godly wisdom I value the most. He tends to worry unnecissarily about a lot of things, but when it all comes down he always has solid advice that's yet to steer me wrong when I follow it. {/sub-tangent}
{/tangent}
However, the thing about this is that I'm really quite surprised at how few churches we've been able to find. We've looked on the net for websites, and in the phone book and stuff, and there's just not the plethora of choice and style I thought there would be. Finding a non-"Hawkesbury Church Affiliated" Penticostal church in the area is impossible. And the fact is that churches that are affiliated with Hawkesbury Church all subscribe to the same set of teachings that made us want to leave in the first place...
Finding a good church I think is a saga in itself. There's people out there who I've spoken to who think the only way to find a really good church is to start your own. Now I'm not really a start my own church kind of guy, but I do like the mentality. It's not a "bitter at organised church" thing, as some might suggest - but rather an understanding that church was never about buildings and ordained Pastors and youth programmes. It's about people who love God spending time together and worshiping as a community. If you've got a handful of friends who can't find somewhere that feels like home, why not start your own church? Not that there's anything wrong with an "organisational" church either. I think both have their merits. And to be honest, that's what we'd be looking for at the moment, as we'd like somewhere that has an awesome kids programme. We're just trying to find a church where I can send my little boy off to Sunday School, and not have to debrief him on it when we get home. Somewhere where he'll learn about the faith of Daniel in the lion's den, rather then how vitally important it is to give 10% of his pocket money to church. Giving is all important, but tithing is Old Testement law used to spiritually guilt congregations into giving a minimum amount so that Pastors can feel financially secure. Don't like this statement? I don't care - it's my opinion and I believe I can prove the modern misuse of tithing as a law using direct Biblical text (as opposed to inference, which is what those little boxes in the Spirit-filled Life Bible use to bring tithing through to the New Covenant). There's a whole other rant right there.

Anyway, if you go to church somewhere in or near the Hawkesbury valley, and you think your church is pretty good, I'd be keen to hear about it. Post me a comment, and let me know where you go, and what you think of it. You just might see us at your place next Sunday. :)

Wow

For quite a while now, my musical tastes have had a side-tangent into punk rock. Punk rock music doesn't really correlate with my usual music tastes, as I tend to like more "intelligent" music; music that is slightly unusual, or uses different time signatures, tone colours, blah blah blah. But the thing I think makes me love punk rock is being a drummer. Punk rock and drums just seem to go together like a fat mistake and a grovelling apology.

Anyway, the one band I've always really enjoyed listening to is Blink 182. Unlike many, many of the punk rock bands out there, they are actually really good musicians. They and Good Charlotte are really the only secular punk rock bands I listen to with any great loyalty. However, one thing about Blink is that some of their lyrics are about pretty explicit subject matter. As a Christian, I've cringed many a time as particular songs have blared out from my stereo in a public forum. I personally feel that I can deal with it - but it's the whole "offends your brother" thing that bothers me.
So that being said, imagine my surprise when I read the following lyrics off one of the two new tracks on their greatest hits album (this is just some of them, btw):

Come here, please hold my hand, Lord, now
Help me, I'm scared please show me how
To fight this, God has a master plan
And I guess, I am in his demand

Please save me, this time I cannot run
And I'll see, you when this is done
And now I, have come to realize
That you are, the one who's left behind

Please stay until I'm gone
I'm here hold on to me
I'm right here waiting

I was shocked. "Wow... this from Blink. Normally they sing about drunken parties and lots of sex". While some of the song I'm not 100% sure about, it would have to be the song that has the deepest subject matter I've ever heard come out of this band. For punk rockers, this is pretty amazing stuff. Good on them, I reckon.

Anyway, I won't write any more. Just expressing my impressedness at this song. It seems perhaps that many of the people I listen to are dealing with the same issues that I am, although I guess with different starting points. Hopefully they'll find the right conclusions...

Hangups

EDIT(5/11): I absent-mindedly used a friend's wife's name to represent the main subject in this post, and consequently implied some pretty negative things about the name. BIG apologies to him and his wife. My enormous bad. All instances of the name have been changed to "Gerti".

Most of my normal readers probably won't get much from this. I've written it for my own benefit really. It's quite long, and a bit navel-gazey. Enjoy - or not.

I was going to write this yesterday, but after Nathan suggested that boingboing.net might link me thanks to him submitting my last post, I thought it best not to put my worst foot forward with new readership by indulging my crazy side. However, having thought it over, I really don't care. I'm bored off my tree, and this is a story that's needed telling for a while.

Some of you may recall this post I made after visiting the gym for the first (or close to first) time. I mentioned some people I'd seen there, including my ex(-ex-ex-ex-ex)-girlfriend's younger sister. Now this girl (let's call her Karen), has been coming to the gym ever since and I think she may have actually worked out who I was pretty early on in the piece. However, I'm yet to speak to her at all. This is OK - I'm good with the not-speaking. The problem is that there's been a couple of events recently which now require some discourse on why my ex(-ex-ex-ex-ex)-girlfriend is not someone I was keen to run into.

This begins with the fact that I'm not very normal. I mean, some people might suggest I'm approaching normal but unless people in general are covertly hiding the thought patterns that I would find familiar, I'm pretty sure I'm different in a rather obtuse way to almost everyone else on the planet - or at least all the people I've met. Now I've pondered if maybe the whole world is a colossal TV show or experiment with me in it's center, but I'm inclined to believe that my wife isn't in on the deception, so therefore it's not just about me, is it? So that debunks that theory. Anyway, one of the many things that made me feel different growing up, is that in my relationships with people of the opposite sex I was very aware of the end-game: one day, I'd be 45 and at that point I'd like to be married with at least a few children. Everything relationship-wise prior to marriage was mainly assessing the potential for something more, with a little bit of fun thrown in for good measure. This meant that at age 9, relationships for me were far more serious then what they were for the average 9 year old. Come on people - I'm 9, and I'm wondering whether my girlfriend (ie: the girl who sits next to me on the bus) will wind up being my wife someday. I'm not normal, and haven't ever been. Not that this is so bad, but it has some rather serious drawbacks.

So I'm about 14 or 15 years old, and I'm attending a Christian youth group at my parent's church. I'd been going for quite a while, and we even went through a period where I was one of 4 people who attended on a weekly basis. Anyway, needless to say it was pretty exciting when some more people started coming. There were about 20 - 30 people coming a week when I met up with a handful of girls who attended a local highschool and had heard about our youth group through a lunchtime Bible study group. They probably don't know it, but some of them became some of the best friends I've ever had. Anyway, I'm about 2 years older then them, and they're all local girls and start coming pretty regularly. One day, they bring along a friend of theirs that I'm going to call Michelle... No I'm not, because i've just decided I like the name Michelle for a girl, and being that I plan on having more kids, I don't want to add unnecessary meaning to the name in case I decide to use it. I'll call her Gerti. Gerti is a good fake name.
So Gerti comes along, and we hit it off in a rather awkward young person kind of way. Within a couple of weeks, we do the typical "going out" thing and that begins a month of being together. Here's where my not-normalness is in it's element. I remember so much about this time of my life that it's scary. I remember that on the day we got together that me and two others walked around to her house (which was a huge walk) and found she wasn't there, but she was just down the road at her Grandmother's. When we arrived, she was wearing a daggy purple and pink coloured tracksuit. We all ate chocolate that had gone that funny colour it does when you let it get warm, and she told us some stories about her auntie who worked for an advertising company - they'd just done some animated ads for "feminine hygiene" products, and her auntie had said she'd put Gerti as an animated character into the next ad. It was a good time. There's more to this story, but knowing my normal readership - if you're still reading, you're probably really bored. So I'll get on with it.
Gerti broke up with me after about four weeks, during which time there's a couple of other moments which I have as vivid memories of as the one described above. Her cousin had come to visit and obviously didn't approve of me, but in the long term this is less then important. Why? Because the relationship far from ended here.
I pursued this girl until a couple of weeks before she got engaged. We were at the same youthgroup for a couple of years, but after that we stayed in touch at varying frequencies. There were points where I'd not talk to her for a while, and periods where I dated other girls, but every now and then one of us would call the other out of the blue, and suddenly we'd be spending time together again. And here's where I start to get bitter. The last few times she made contact with me, she'd rung up to ask me out - to a movie, to dinner... something like that. I now know that she was doing this for a particular reason. The second-last time it happened, she was trying to get the attention of the guy who's now her husband. Date an old flame - suddenly you're more desirable, right? It worked. We went out twice, and then she was dating him and I stopped hearing from her. Later, she broke up with him, and called me again. She basically said "I've broken up with {insert guy's name here}. Did you want to go out?" We went out 3 times this time around... dinner, a movie, and then the zoo (just for something different). After the zoo, we were on the ferry back and she says to me "I think I should tell you that me and {other guy's name} are getting back together." Needless to say I was pretty shattered. This wasn't the first time this girl had emotionally slaughtered me in this fashion, but I have to say, it was the worst. Probably, because I knew that it would now end with her marrying the guy - and sure enough, it did.

Thankfully, although Gerti and I stayed in contact for a little while after the zoo debarcle (and had some competitive shenanigans surrounding which of us would get married first, I might add), I met my wife not long after this happened. Actually, I think we were already hanging out by the time this all went south. My wife has a few memories of me discussing the ups and downs of my relationship with Gerti, so I guess I wasn't a lot of fun to be around for the first little while!

The hard thing is, that I honestly was in love with this girl for the longest time, and through some of the most formative years of my life. I was talking about this with my wife the other night just before bed, and I think I summed it up like this:

"The thing is, when I see her next, I feel like I want to both throw my arms around her, and slap her as hard as I can across the face."

And this is the honest truth of it. I caught myself missing this girl the other day, but at the same time I despise her. What's to miss here? She used and abused my feelings for her ruthlessly many times, and I'm sure she'd argue that I should have known better, but I honestly believe it was pure manipulation - and yet I still wish that things could have ended on a more amicable level.
How confusing, yeah? Well, as you'd imagine, since I've been married I've really really wanted to not see this girl. Something inside me yearns for a resolution and for us to meet and be on good terms, but at the same time I want to yell in her face and tell her that I'm still feeling the effects of how she treated me over the years we were "friends".

It happened yesterday. Not the yelling or anything - just the seeing. Firstly, I should mention that I saw her a few days ago for the first time in years. I was playing squash with a mate, and then I turned around for a second, and there she was; standing there watching me play squash. I pretended like I didn't notice, and kept on playing.
Anyway, yesterday I'm at the gym. My good friend Tomas decided to pike out on me, so I'm there on my own and doing my full (extremely hardcore) program in like 80% humidity at unnatural heat for that time of morning. I decided seeing as I was on my own, that I'd push myself a bit and so I got really stuck into it. Sweating profusely, I was up to an exercise on my program called "Fitball Squats". Now a fitball squat is an exercise invented by skinny people to make fat people look stupid. You put an enormous ball between your back and the wall, and then squat down and stand up - and then repeat that multiple times. In my gym, the only decent wall space to do this in is right in the middle of where people generally walk when they first arrive, and this is where my gym instructor showed me to do this exercise. So I'm there yesterday - fitball squatting as best I can. Anyway, I'm on my second set of 20, and about 11 in. I'm mid-squat, when suddenly I hear the sound I've been dreading for the longest of times:

"Hello Justin"

In that moment, I had an epiphany. It goes like this: "If you grunt like an old man when you stand up, you'll never live it down." So I stood up with as little old-man-grunt as is humanly possible for a fat guy at a gym, and just did what any normal mentally anguished now-married-ex-boyfriend would say to his tormenter now-married-ex-girlfriend:

{exhausted smile}"Hi"

I'm sure this will be continued...



PS: I'd written and published this, and was about to go to bed when I realised there was something I needed to disclaim, just in case anyone thought it. This post is in no way suggesting that I'm contemplating trying to revive old relationships or anything like that. I'm 110% committed to the woman who is my wife, and just in case you've misread it, that's not what this post is about. This post is about me dealing with the hangups that get left over from past relationships. My wife and I have talked about all this stuff together, and she knows all of this, but also knows that I am hers and hers alone. Just wanted to make sure that's clear.

More American Smartness

The image above is a promotion on Microsoft's website for their Launch Tour this year. The little white dots are supposed to represent the cities in which these events are taking place. Please have a look at where the white dots are located on Australia. :)

I've looked these points up on a map, and they seem to match best with Kalgoorlie-Boulder (the southern most dot), and the middle of the Great Sandy Desert. This is fantastic really, becuase I hear the software development market is booming amongst the nomadic desert Aboriginals at the moment, as well as in the smaller outback towns/cities. Those outback types can write a mean Active-X control, and with all that spare time in between farming and mustering, I'm sure that Intel could make some awesome inroads with Centrino.

OK - hopefully you're all seeing the irony-styled humor here. If not, I've failed miserably...