We had a pleasant morning at our hotel, with another good breakfast, then we headed out for the airport. Check-in was painless, even though it felt a little weird not to see any of the familiar domestic airlines I'm accustomed to. We took a bus to the international terminal to return Arlene's rented cellphone and have a look around, then we went back to the domestic Qantas terminal to take off. Our flight was uneventful, except for the fact that almost all of the cabin crew were men, and that we took a 767 for a 70-minute flight-- on a US airline, we'd have been squeezed into an MD-80 or 737.

Upon arriving in Melbourne, we found that the weather was much cooler-- around 50°F, with a stiff breeze. The airport is actually located some distance away from downtown, so we took a 30-minute taxi ride to our hotel, which is located smack in the middle of the Collins Street district. After dropping off our bags, we went off to explore and found a number of pleasant department stores in the Bourke Street Mall. Along the way, I am happy to report that we found a street café that sells canned caffeine-free diet Coke! I'll be going back there for sure.

I just got done booking Arlene on a Gray Line tour to go along the Great Ocean Road, a route down along the southern coastline. She's wanted to see the Twelve Apostles since her first glimpse of them on a postcard, and happily they're only a short drive from here. It's an all-day tour, but I'll be teaching that day, so we'll go our separate ways in the morning and reunite around dinnertime.

I forgot to mention that this morning at the airport, I was busy doing shots. No, my membership in the church isn't in jeopardy; this particular shot was wheatgrass juice. A local outfit called Doctor Juice has a booth at the Sydney airport, and we stopped to get Arlene a fresh-squeezed OJ. There was a sign claiming that wheatgrass was really good for you-- one shot of wheatgrass juice allegedly contains an equivalent amount of vitamins and minerals as 2kg of raw vegetables. Since my vegetable intake is, shall we say, limited, I thought I'd try it.

What did it taste like? Imagine the smell of a freshly cut lawn, on your tongue. That pretty much captures the essence. Arlene had a small sip of my shot, then politely declined her own. It wasn't the best thing I've ever consumed, but no doubt I am much healthier as a result.

We set out again to explore this evening and ended up at a Chinese Peking duck restaurant. There were lots of ethnic Chinese eating there, along with not a few ordinary-looking Aussies. The food was only OK, but we were able to stop off at the Golden Door café on the way back so I could pick up some more diet Coke.

Shrine of Remembrance on the grounds of the RBG

A little bat nap

Arlene and some camellias

It was only a short walk from the shrine to the Gardens themselves, and they were a real treat. It was drizzling when we left the shrine, but by the time we emerged from window-shopping at the gift shop the rain had stopped. While we were there, the clouds cleared and the weather was absolutely flawless.

There are a number of large lawns at the gardens, plus walking trails that go through various types of indigenous and imported flora. We saw several different varieties of birds, none of which I could identify. There was also a group of palm trees filled with flying-foxes. We'd actually call them bats. They were really fascinating, chittering to one another and flapping around between adjacent trees. The area directly beneath them was roped off, so we had to observe them from a distance.

Past the bat trees, we found a big ornamental pond with plenty of swans, ducks, goslings, and seagulls. Of course, this pond also had eels, not exactly the usual fare for botanic gardens. We fed them some hard rolls from the tearoom, then went in and had some lunch.

I learned a lot more than I expected to about Australian flora and fauna, too. For example, macadamia nuts are native to Australia, and there are pockets of tropical rainforest all up and down the east coast. They're generally surrounded by eucalypt forests, though, which are very prone to catch fire, endangering the rainforest. This year has been particularly bad for bush fires, too. That's all I can remember at the moment. Anyway, we took the tram back from the gardens to our hotel, then walked up the street to get Thomas a sucker.

Not just any sucker, mind you. I'd ordered a shopping guide to Melbourne, and on the cover it pictured a display board from a local candy shop, with several suckers prominently displayed. Tom took a liking to the picture, so when Arlene asked him what he wanted from Australia, "Tom want blue sucker" was the usual response. So, we trucked over to Suga and got that boy a blue sucker. Of course, we had to buy some other candy, too, especially after watching them make some from scratch.

Arlene needed some Neosporin, an antibiotic cream that most of you probably know is available over-the-counter in the US. Guess what? It requires a prescription here, even though there are a number of drugs available here that require prescriptions in the US. The pharmacist (oops, I meant "chemist") could see the scratch Arlene wanted the ointment for, so he eventually relented and sold us some. Score one for lax drug laws. After a bit more browsing, we caught the #67 tram to the University of Melbourne to set up for my class. That went poorly, since I was missing a few items, but eventually we got everything fixed up and trammed back to our hotel area.

We decided to be adventurous and eat at a diner. Let's just say we won't make that particular mistake again.

One good point: I was able to get a floppy drive from the class kit and read the floppy with our bridge climb pictures on it. Here's a sample.

No update from yesterday because we were just too busy. After an early breakfast, Arlene & I walked to the Gray Line bus stop, then I took a tram to the university to teach my class. Actually, I thought I was going to the university, but I was actually going in the opposite direction. By the time I figured it out, I was way out in the suburbs, so I had to catch a cab back to the student union, and class started about 15 minutes late. Not an auspicious start, but things went much better after that.

Arlene had a long day on the bus, but she brought back some fabulous pictures of the Twelve Apostles, London Bridge, and other landmarks along the Great Ocean Road. I'll be adding a page of nothing but pictures a bit later; for now, here are two samples to whet your appetite:

London Bridge. A couple once was trapped out on the rock after the arch that used to connect it to the rock at far left fell into the ocean. A major rescue effort ensued, but the couple declined all publicity, as they were married but not to each other.

The famous Twelve Apostles. I asked Arlene if they had names, but she said that if they do, Gray Line wasn't telling.

After Arlene's return on the magic bus, we went back to the Royal Botanic Gardens and had a thoroughly enjoyable tour of the observatory there. The sky was still fairly overcast, but we saw some great slides (our tour guide is working on his Ph.D. in astronomy at Monash University) and got to play with the 1870s-era telescopes. It's amazing that the astronomers of the time were able to do as much work and gather as much raw knowledge as they did, considering how primitive their instruments appear to us. Of course, the history of astronomy is full of people who labored away, gathering data that was of no immediate use but could be combined with other data to produce a useful result. For example, the men who calculated the ratio of orbital speeds and planetary sizes for the other planets relative to Earth were producing data that had no intrinsic value; it wasn't until Captain James Cook measured the solar transit of Venus (which is why he went to Tahiti) that we knew how far the Earth was from the sun, which made those other data useful in conjunction.

Even though the night was cloudy, we got to use the telescopes to observe some nearby buildings and Proxima Centauri. Pretty neat.

This morning, we got Arlene's stuff packed up and I put her in a taxi to the airport, then took the tram (the right one this time) to the university.

Today was supposed to be uneventful, and it started out that way. After breakfast, I loaded Arlene into a taxi and waved goodbye as she headed toward the airport, then I caught the tram (in the correct direction this time) to start my teaching day. My day was uneventful until around 4pm, when Arlene called, from the plane, to say that the plane had some kind of electrical problem and that they were diverting to Auckland. Since she already doesn't like to fly, I can imagine that being stuck in a 747 with "electrical problems" while over the open ocean must not have been too thrilling. On landing, they blew a tire. After landing, United provided a stereotypically confused situation report; it turns out that she'll actually be on the afternoon flight tomorrow, which will put her into LA basically a day late. She called later to say that United had put her up at a (dumpy) airport hotel, and that the emergency landing was on the news. So, she's a celebrity and got a free trip to New Zealand into the bargain.

Meanwhile, I trammed back to the hotel and had a delicious pizza with ham (not Canadian bacon, or Australian-style ham, but real ham) and pineapple. I got back to my room just in time to watch part of the third Presidential debate. Here's the problem: I think Al Gore is an opportunistic liar ("I am a person who keeps promises"), I disagree with most of his policies, and I feel like he will say or do anything to get elected. I also think he is inescapably tainted by his long association with Bill Clinton. On the other hand, Bush is coming across as a flaming idiot in this debate. He's evading questions, providing largely incoherent answers, and generally looking like a frat boy who wandered onstage during the debate. The Republicans have engaged in an ongoing program of character assassination against Gore, and they just don't seem to be able to get it together. It is very disappointing to me that we ended up with two such poor choices. Viva John McCain!

Arlene's on her plane from Auckland, hopefully headed all the way back to LA. She'll get home a day later, but that can't be helped at this point. Right now we're having a big old-fashioned thunderstorm outside, like the kind we get in the southeastern US. Pretty neat.

Technically, this update doesn't belong here, as I am now back in Sydney. I'm even at the same hotel, although this time I inexplicably got a much nicer room.

Tomorrow morning I'll be accompanying some folks from the local Microsoft office to a customer meeting, then I'm at my leisure until I fly to Adelaide on Saturday, along with approximately 115kg of luggage. You should have seen the look on the Qantas agent's face when I showed up with three large, heavy equipment cases, plus my mega-suitcase. Priceless. The agent was actually very helpful and accomodating; not so the aircraft I was on, which had by far the narrowest seat I've ever been in. I'm not that broad in the hips, but when I sat down I literally got stuck between the armrests.

My cab driver was asking me about becoming an MCSE, and that got me to thinking about the state of the IT industry, both here and in the States. It used to be that equipment was very expensive, proportionate to labor costs, and the reverse is now true-- people costs, in general, far outweigh the costs of the servers and networks that they maintain. You would think that IT companies worldwide would be hungry for labor, and in the States that seems to be true, as the recent battle over the H1B visa numbers shows. Here in Australia, though, there seem to be two parallel universes: one of workers trying to find jobs and striking out, and the other of companies hungry to hire warm bodies, training them as necessary. It seems like there's a large, valuable untapped resource going to waste here.

That train of thought led me to thinking about a comment in Bill Bryson's book. He mentioned that it's very rare to see Aborigines in Australian cities, and that in general, mentioning the current state of relations between white and Aboriginal Australia is a good way to stop a conversation cold. I have experimentally verified both of these facts, and I'm not sure why it seems odd. I suspect that any unabridged history of the British colonization of Australia would show a shameful assortment of atrocity, ranging from random murders of natives to organized, almost genocidal, attacks on local tribes. In that light, it seems reasonable that the local newspapers and magazines make frequent (perhaps too frequent) mentions of what the Sydney paper calls "the national spirit of reconciliation"; that seems to be code for "whites making reparations". On the other hand, I have the nagging feeling that the reason white and Aboriginal cultures seem to be so separated is because both sides prefer it that way, and that trying to reconcile them may be fruitless. I contrast the effort of reconciliation to the process of cultural integration that occured in the US in the mid- to late 19th century for Irish, Jewish, and Italian immigrants, or the Californiaization of Vietnamese and Laotian immigrants in the 1970s and onward. Something tells me that model is more likely to work than one in which one side says "sorry" (perhaps insincerely), while the other says "thank you, but we don't want to be part of your culture." On the other hand, as my Aussie friends would probably point out, I'm an American, so what do I know?

Uneventful but tiring day yesterday; I spent the whole day meeting with a very large Microsoft customer and reviewing their network design. They did a very good job with it, which is a little unusual. They also had some extremely specific questions that I spent a lot of time last night researching, which is my excuse for not writing an update. This morning I got a call from Computerworld at 0530, asking whether I'd like to subscribe. That's what I get for bringing a US cellphone number 16 hours away from the US Central time zone.

This morning I'm going to head to the Sydney Temple, then my flight to Adelaide leaves about 2:30. Between the temple and the airport, I have to repackage all the junk for my class, since I don't actually have to take all of it to Adelaide-- I only have 11 students, so that means I need six laptops instead of eighteen.