Good Day Sunshine

It's a beautiful sunny day today, and I've been for a job interview. The job is at The ABC - the Australian equivalent of The BBC. It's based in an area of the city called Ultimo, which sounds rather like the name of a superhero, don't you think?

I'm waiting to hear whether I got the job. I'm on tenterhooks - literally - and hoped to have something to report by now (4.30pm). I'm getting a little anxious now, since recruitment consultants have confirmed my suspicions that a lot of potential recruiters will be taking the next two weeks off.

I've spent the afternoon looking into things to do at the weekend and relaxing. I had a sunbathe and read in Hyde Park again with my picnic lunch. There were hundreds of tiny school children everywhere! I tell you, I don't know where they get their energy from. Not one of them stood still for a second. It was like they were trying to make a large scale model to demonstrate the principles of Brownian Motion. (Though they'd neglected to include a representation of the smaller particles which hit the bigger particles, so it wasn't a very good model. Or, rather, that's not a very good analogy.)

For the last hour I've been fiddling with my blog template (twenty years ago people would have followed that with "Oo-er missus"). You may have noticed (who am I kidding?) that the layout has improved a little lately. This is thanks to my looking into HTML a bit, and to my friend, Tony, in the UK who has been busy looking at the source coded and offering advice. It's a good time for me to take an interest in the technical side of web-publishing - when I'm paying by the hour in internet cafes for web use.

Anyway, my latest addition to this diary is a comments facility. Blog readers can now add comments to each post. Who'll use it? Possibly no one - we'll see. Try it out by leaving a comment on today's entry (click on "comments" below).

When Anne finished work last night, after she'd quizzed me about the jobs I'd done during the day (sigh) we went swimming at an indoor pool. Very good of us, I thought, though we were aching and exhauseted all night. We woke this morning groaning and complaining like people three times our age.

Look at me, at The ABC

Hooray - I've got the job! (The above title is a play on the current ad campaign by The ABC. It appears on the side of buses here. I can't believe you didn't know that.

I start tomorrow (Thursday). Look at me - three days off work and I'm a nervous wreck. I really have to work on this by the end of the year. I'm sure I'll be fine when we're travelling proper, but we'd decided to try to pay our way through Sydney with work.

Anyway, a little about The ABC (or what I know of it). It's funded by the government, and not by a licence fee. As with The BBC they call it "Auntie". I don't know why - I was a bit surprised by that. Then again, I don't know why we call The BBC Auntie in the UK. It sounds like I'll be recording processes and suggesting improvements. It should involve a bit of Excel work, including designing worksheets and models - that is good, I like that. I can hear people clicking on links to leave this page as I write. We'll see how it goes.

The building at Ultimo is new pretty spectacular. Here's a link to some info about it.

Now I have a job, and an income, I can get started on the final two Sixties Nine Magnums. Anne wants to see Punch Drunk Love tonight. I think we'll make this a celebratory cinema visit. (Anne's current contract finishes on Friday. She may be entertaining you by blog next week.)