I loved Monkey Island. I’m not really sure why since I pretty much sucked at them and had to frequently resort to hints sites or walkthroughs to get through difficult bits. I haven’t the patience to try all the permutations of different objects together to achieve some effect. But I did like seeing how the puzzle was solved, even if not by me. I’ve got all the games, and I do go back and play them every year or two. I find I’ve forgotten half of it by then and it’s like playing a fresh game again. I’ve always thought it was a shame they didn’t make another game. Well, now they have!

My plans for giving to charity have advanced one step further – I’ve now signed up for the Unicef Global Parents program. That pretty much takes care of the international and extreme poverty end of the spectrum. At the more local and personal end of the scale, I also support the Auckland Rescue Helicopter Trust, since several of my family members have needed this to get to hospital.

I promised myself many years ago that when I finished my thesis I would buy myself a PDA. I had my eye on a Palm LifeDrive at one point. But that was a long time ago, and PDAs seem to have gone out of style now – what you have are smartphones instead.

I went to Melbourne for a shopping trip this weekend. My sister overflowed her suitcase, but I only got a few pairs of shoes and a few tops. Shopping isn’t really my thing. Next time I go to Melbourne, I’ll spend a bit more time sightseeing. Still, it was the first holiday/break I’ve had in several years, so it was good.

Here is the finished product:

This semester, my students were creating a website which features a to-do list. Anyone who registers on the site can create their own to-do items which they can retrieve later. Unfortunately, some of the students hadn’t quite implemented authentication properly when their sites went live, and one of their classmates was a vandal with fellatio on their mind.

This is the second part of the story of my hospital visit. The first thing I had to learn about being in hospital is that nothing happens to a timetable. The nurses come around every few hours (whenever they are free) to take vitals and dispense pain meds. The doctors come around at some time, usually in the morning or evening and usually in flocks to ask a couple of questions and dispense directions. Meals arrive at times roughly correlating with breakfast, lunch and dinner but varying up to an hour or more each day. The phlebotomist arrives sometime in the morning. They’ll come and take you to surgery sometime in the morning. You’ll be discharged sometime tomorrow. There’s no point asking for specific times for anything – the hospital just doesn’t work like that.

Almost every semester I get one case of plagiarism. Some are more blatant and idiotic than others. I’m never sure whether I’m upset with them for cheating, or for thinking I was so stupid that I wouldn’t notice.

As most of you already know, at the beginning of this month, I spent a week in hospital having my gallbladder removed. I’ve had gallstones for the past three years, but generally they only gave me a night of pain every few months or so and armed with tramadol (the next step down from morphine), I could handle it. Unfortunately, one night at the end of June, I got the gallstone pain again and it didn’t go away.

“Secularism means food and fireside, roof and raiment, reasonable work and reasonable leisure, the cultivation of the tastes, the acquisition of knowledge, the enjoyment of the arts, and it promises for the human race comfort, independence, intelligence, and above all liberty. It means the abolition of sectarian feuds, of theological hatreds. It means the cultivation of friendship and intellectual hospitality. It means the living for ourselves and each other; for the present instead of the past, for this world rather than for another.”