Logo for a Cardiologist friend who is setting up a practice, with Jessica and Robbie peeking through the background.

Well done Marat, a deserving winner. It was such a tease from Hewitt, he looked good to win in the early stages, until Safin found his range and with the form that knocked Federer out, he walked all over Hewitt.

Its been a great two weeks of tennis, makes me want to go out and smack some tennis balls with a passion now.

Now, back to the cricket, go Aussies!

Oh my! its the Bloggies.
Lots of great finds to be made, like this and this and this and this and this

Haline just finished Nissan Road Trip for all to see.

There’s one thing in Australia that is not right, and that’s the Tall Poppy Syndrome, where if someone rises up and does well, they are cut down for whatever minute reason by critics and people who will always have an opinion. One of these critics is Mike Gibson, knocking Hewitt for having passion and the will to win, for psyching his apponent out. Sure Hewitt went a little too far with his “C’mons”, but tennis is a tough game, if you want to play a more sissy sport, try badmington.

With 6 minutes left to what was Australia day, I, along with 4 friends were on the edge of our seats cheering Lleyton Hewitt on to win and jumping around when he did so after a grueling match that had more swings than a swingers orgy. Hewitt had what looked like an easy coast into the semi’s after taking the first two sets convincingly. John Alexander, one of the commentator said, “Hewitt’s got one foot in the door to the semi’s now. As things would have it, Hewitt’s injury caught up with him and he lost the next two sets. This was when it got tense. Point for point it went, Hewitt looked as though he would callapse.

But Hewitt is a courageous fighter, playing two 5 set matches injured, having the heart to give his all when his body wouldn’t, and then prevailing. C’mon, if thats not the aussie never say die attitude, then I don’t know what is. We should take inspiration from that and support him, not nitpick him for his game play.

Hopefully hundreds, if not thousands of young kids Australia wide will have seen this match and be inspired by this never say die attitude and pick up a racquet , bat or book and take inspiration from Lleyton.

Two more games to go, I don’t care if he wins from here on in, seeing him come through the last two matches was enough.

Khao Do who is an aquaintance of mine, has done us (by us, I mean the Vietnamese community, as well as the wider asian community) proud by being named 2005’s Young Australian of the Year.

Khoa Do (pron. Qwa Doe), from Yagoona West (NSW) was honoured for his contribution to the film industry and wider community. At just 25, he is a film maker, writer, director and actor and uses his talents to help others. In 2001, Khoa was nominated for an AFI Award for his screen play for the short film Delivery Day. In 2002, Khoa was asked to teach film and video production to ‘at risk’ youth in the Sydney suburb of Cabramatta. He saw no better way to teach them how to make films than to go ahead and make one with them. The life experiences of his students became the foundation of the now internationally acclaimed film, The Finished People. Khoa came to Australia as a refugee on a fishing boat when he was 2.

I’ve met Khoa many times through projects and friends, but have never really said anything more to him then, “Hi, how are you doing”, I’m not about to go up to him like I’m his best friend, but I will congratulate him for the award and for lifting the profile of young Vietnamese professionals above the sterotypical doctors, lawyers and pharmacists. Well done mate. You might know his brother too, Anh Do, the comedian, he’s been on the Footy Show a few times and has a few comedy gigs and appearances all over the place.

The last and only time a person of Vietnamese origin won was Tan Le back in 1998. Other notables have been, Lleyton Hewitt ‘03, Ian Thorpe ‘00, Kieran Perkins ‘92 and Cathy Freeman ‘90. I’m glad to see they went for a non sporting/movie star this year for both Australian and Young Australian of the year. There’s more to life than sports and film, Its the average people doing meaningful things that should matter.

Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website. Join up, its free, and stop those penis pill pushers! hehe

Vice Design Issue and its A to Z of design. Satirical with some real wit.

“Being a designer used to mean you drove a Benz and you could get good drugs. Now it means you own a computer. What the fuck? You start out thinking you’re going to blow people’s minds with your incredibly unique take on the beauty that surrounds us all, and by the time you actually get your career in motion you’re essentially a wedding photographer chained to a desk… Your ideas don’t mean shit to the client. He couldn’t be bothered learning how to use a computer, so what he wants to do is use you as a human paintbrush. Any idea you come up with, no matter how mundane, is going to be further bastardized by his shitty Guido taste until the final result is a perfect example of everything you hate. There, you got into design as part of the solution and now you’re just another part of the problem.”

Two sets all, Hewitt about to serve out the match after a massive C’mon! His apponent screams over the net some derogatory comment aimed at Hewitt. Hewitt looks up, throws his raquet down and runs around the net towards his apponent, fly tackling him and throwing punches. Every man and ball boy joins in, coaches and trainers fly down the stands punching and kicking. The ball boys are trying to wrestle the players away from each other, the commentators are in a frenzy, this is unheard of, a fight in tennis… then I drift into another pleasent dream.

I must be watching too much tennis, those Hewitt and Molik wins yesterday was good though. Here’s hoping they take out the title. Saw this at news.com.au this morning Nalbandian warns Hewitt to shut it.

The new version of News.com.au went live over the weekend. First impression, the old site was more usable (maybe because I’m so used to using it), this one has too many links and stuff happening on the page (smh.com.au is far worse) and the overall colouring is too light. I do like its cleaness and use of lots of white space (it’ll definitley get used to it), the little nice touches like the world times and weather is nice. Sad point is that some of the dynamic scrolling doesn’t work in Safari and still no RSS feeds.

Finally got a chance to watch the Macworld 05 keynote speech to check what Steve Jobs had to say about the new Mac Mini and iPod Shuffle, was a bonus to see they got my favourite guitar playing singer, John Mayer on to demonstrate Garage Band and perform his song “Daughters”, which is up for two awards, Song of the year and Best male pop vocal performance at this years Grammys.

I’ve come to the conclusion that its always very noisy in the mornings around my house. Especially on a Saturday morning. Some old dude from across the road always manages to mow his lawn, even though he mowed it a week ago, and he does it right after 8am, the legal council designated time you’re allowed to start operating machinery like mowers.

There are 3 or 4 different bird species either chirping, crowing, or coooing in the trees, on the roofs, flying overhead and on the electricity wires. These birds aren’t the lovely variety either, some of them are considered pests. I admit, waking up to birds chirping is nice, but not constantly. It must be mating season now.

My two dogs are barking because of the birds sitting on our fence eyeing the left over dog food and the blaring mower.

On top of this, my heavy handed mom, who manages to get up robotically early every morning, bangs away in the kitchen, throwing cutlery and bowls into the draws, then slamming the cupboard doors. Basically, she slams and bangs everything that makes a noise really loud. I know she does it on purpose too because when I do manage to get up early on purpose, she never does it. To make it worse, my room is next to the kitchen extension.

The road outside my house has been getting increasingly busier because it connects two other major roads at each end. So it gets everything going through like cars, motorbikes, trucks, buses and the occasional hoon and his deafening exhaust.

I’m glad there’s no jumbos flying overhead as well…

I’ve always wondered how the touch wheel and buttons work on the iPod. Synaptics is the company that supplies Apple with this technology. I wonder if my Wacom tablet works in the same manner, but with a pen?

Try to solve this, Kryptos. Extra reading.