Australia
The big holiday of this year is fast approaching: tomorrow I will be on a flight to Australia, where I will be not doing any work for at least three weeks. Hurrah!

We're flying to Sydney (via Kuala Lumpur for a few hours), where we're staying at the Wake Up! Hostel (exclamation mark required, apparently) for four nights. After that, we hire a car and start driving south down the coastline, calling at some, all, or none of the following locations:

• Kiama
• Berry
• Pebbly Beach
• Eden
• Mallacoota
• Lakes Entrance / Bainsdale / Sale
• Wilson's Promontory
• Phillip Island
• Melbourne
• Great Ocean Road
• Port Fairy
• Adelaide
• Kangeroo Island
• Grampians National Park
• Blue Mountains

On the return to Sydney we're having a night at the Intercontinental, to make up for staying in mud huts the rest of the way around.

Any feedback on these choices or anything else that is essential viewing between Sydney and Adelaide will probably be ignored, but hey, feel free to persuade me otherwise. If you're all really lucky I may be able to find the time to type up the odd travel diary on the way! Woo!

Pistachios
It turns out that if you microwave these little blighters they create a smell that is identical to popcorn, which confused lots of people in my office yesterday.

Watching
Watched Heat the other day; it's a good mixture of moral ambiguity, action and tension as the LAPD go after a gang of thieves led by Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro). It's a clever script and there's some great scenes; I particularly liked the diner scene when the head of the LAPD's team, Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), discusses with Neil McCauley how they would take each other down without hesitation, despite a growing respect for each other - also when he figures out why the criminal gang was in an urban wasteland pointing at potential targets - so that the LAPD would go to where they were standing, allowing the gang to figure out who was hunting them - very neat.

Vector graphics
The combination of potrace and Inkscape makes it easy to convert crappy bitmaps into rather nice vector graphics. Specifically, turning the logo at the top of this page into this picture didn't take too long, and I'm quite impressed with the result.

Also interesting to see that Xara (a product I used to use on the old Acorn RISC machines, back when it was ArtWorks) is being open-sourced.