The picture on the right says it all really.

From SMH:
Nine people are confirmed dead, and 39 injured in hospital, after a peak-hour commuter train derailed in Sydney's south today. The driver was killed, many people remained trapped in the wreckage and it was feared that the death toll could rise.

Initial reports were that it was a south-bound train (heading away from the city), but there were conflicting reports, and I worried about some friends of mine that live in Helensburg and catch the train to work. A mobile phone call later confirmed they were ok.

In a way it was a good thing that it was a southbound train, as the casualties could have been a whole lot higher if it had been a citybound train.

My brother (who works for Cityrail) got to the site, he said it was pretty bad.

For some bizarre reason this affected me a whole lot more than the Glenbrook train disaster - prolly cause this is so much "closer to home".

I really do have more meaningful stuff to say today.. like that I got my support mail job back at cia (yayyy).. and the search terms used to bring people to my blog are just as crazy as the search terms used within it (eg kazza when people really mean kazaa - don't even get me started on that).. and the plants in my fish tank are growing like crazy.. and I hate microsoft with a vengeance (unpatched sql system=secure; patched sql system=vulnerable).. but it's This or That Tuesday (Wednesday by the time we get it), so here we go.. :)

1. Kleenex or tissue? Tissue
2. Soda or pop (or tonic or whatever)? Lemonade?
3. A sandwich on a long roll: sub or hero (or hoagie or grinder, etc)? Roll (unless it's at Subway, when it's a subway :) )
4. Glasses or spectacles? Glasses
5. TV or television (or boob-tube, or telly, for our friends across the pond)? TV or tele
6. Movie or film? Movie
7. Sofa or couch? Lounge
8. Stove or range? Stove
9. Remote control or clicker? Remote control
10. Supermarket or grocery store? Supermarket

Oh well, it wasn't even a very interesting one this week

I was fiddling around with the config of my blog today and noticed you can get an activity log of entries added and search terms used. The following are some of the keywords entered into the search thingie in my blog:

'arvrillavinge-i'm with you'
'sex'
'porno'
<lots of other sex-related entries from the one ip address snipped>
'movies'
'kazza'
'vodafone credit codes'
'free top up codes '

the last two and avril lavinge make me wonder the most. Like, isn't it *obvious* that my page is a blog?? And I don't even have any entries even *remotely* related to those search terms.

People are weird!

Wednesday nights I usually go walking with my friend George(ina). Tonight, both of us needed milk, so we decided to walk to the shops. Along the way we passed several abandoned shopping trolleys. One of them was from Target, about a suburb away. Another was from K-mart. The nearest k-mart was three suburbs away! I can't believe people walk their shopping trolleys those sorts of distances! That's just nuts if you ask me.

Closer to the shops we passed two more trolleys belonging to the centre, so we wheeled them the rest of the way. People watching must have thought we were crazy :)

Then we had to walk back to George's place with kilos and kilos of milk - good arm muscle workout if nothing else! Although I tried to minimise using my right hand, which is suffering from RSI at the moment from spending my life operating a mouse. It's aching quite a bit at the moment, even after spending all of today and some of yesterday using the mouse with my left hand - such a bizarre thing to get used to! We're looking at getting either a rolly-ball or joystick mouse for work that we can use when our wrists get sore from our ordinary mouses.

Urgh it's after 11. I wanted to be in bed by 10:30 tonight. /me grumbles off in the general direction of bed.

The image to the right is the bushfire "hotspots" around Canberra for the past 72 hours (different colours for the different days). I got this off the CSIRO site - they have a site called Sentinal (actually spelt Sentinel, but it appears people have been mistyping it into search engines and coming up with my blog - scary! currently located here) which has all the bushfire hotspots around the country.

My heart goes out to all those people who lost their homes and loved ones. Not much else I can say about that - what a tragedy .. 400 homes in one go and 4 deaths (so far) with hundreds of people injured, many badly burned.

I'm also kicking myself for not going to Mt Stromlo a couple of weeks ago when I was down in Canberra. It was on my list of places to see, I just didn't have the time to get there. Now it's all gone :(