Gong xi fa cai! May the new year be happy and prosperous to all of you.

I had a mostly quiet day since my Perth-bound aunt from that side of my family is away, but there was profit to be had in the ang paos! It surely must be a sign of a booming economy when your good-luck money rises faster than inflation.

Some random links because I can’t be bothered writing more: Considering it’s the year of the dog, I was highly disappointed to learn that Sony have laid off their robotic dog division, the crazy penny-pinching bastards. Then again, that reliable geek tabloid the Reg reckons we have flying cars to play with instead (both via One Dog Said).

Meanwhile, the tennis was again quite entertaining. Baghdatis didn’t win, but that’s okay, cos he still put up a decent fight to the dude who is unequivocally the best tennis player in the world right now (well, for the first set anyway). And Federer cried on the podium! I had no idea Melbourne Park (or perhaps Rod Laver) meant quite so much to him.

There are certain truths that society holds evident. For example, the Nazis were defeated in World War II. America lost in Vietnam. In the game world, you can turn such historical truths on their head.

The SMH provides a horribly stereotypical, and yet surprisingly accurate, depiction of life as viewed through the eyes of your average console gamer.

Over in Melbourne, and in a different kind of game, it was tragic to see Justin Henin-Hardenne (easily one of the strongest female tennis players around) having to retire — sure I wanted to see Mauresmo win, but only after three sets! At least the men’s doubles immediately afterwards was an awesome game with some of the coolest lobs I have ever seen. All four of those blokes are champs.

Oh, and also, I just returned from Cam’s birthday party, which was awesome … for there was foosball!

Australia Day yesterday was a bit of a mixed bag. Unlike most of the LJs I’ve been reading today, I didn’t think the fireworks sucked (they really weren’t too far behind Sydney’s New Year show), but then I tend to be impressed by anything that’s shiny. ’Tis true that there were long periods of only a few explosions at a time, but there were also several new pyros that I’d never seen before.

But in the Hottest 100: Bernard Fanning, meh. I guess I’m not surprised, but few of the other Hottest 100 winners are quite so … bland. At least Wolfmother made a fairly good showing, in line with just about every prediction that I heard.

Meanwhile, Marcos Baghdatis is a hell cool champ, even more so than Chela was last week. Although no one seems to care that Cyprus is some seriously disputed territory, it’s really funny to watch Melbourne’s entire Greek community descend, half-drunk, on Rod Laver Arena and claim him as their own.

Afterwards, despite it being a suckey delayed telecast, the Hingis/Bhupati and Perry/Stubbs game was impressive for its super-fast pace. I’m also impressed that Clijsters didn’t just blame Rebound Ace for losing a match when she still had a strong chance of winning.

(Speaking of the tennis, PointTracker is the only cool thing on the otherwise poorly-built official site. It’s a completely pointless Flash animation, but it’s strangely enticing …)

So we have a new premier!

Paul Murray in The West is correct to point out that no one’s spent much time commenting on what sort of a premier ol’ Gallop was, but ’twas a bit mean to say that he deliberately made people focus on his condition. (If any illness deserves a better public profile, it’s depression …)

So, I’ll pitch in my two bob on what Gallop was like, and guess at what to expect from Carpenter. For starters, plenty of people have commented on Geoff’s media savvy, which dovetailed nicely with the fact that he really was an earnest, ideological, and very smart political thinker. Carpenter is also smart and knows how to play the media (those old ABC News clips are so funny!) but I doubt he’s quite up to Gallop’s standard on either score, so he mightn’t seem to be so much in control.

Economically, Gallop’s performance seems much like John Howard’s: he hasn’t stuffed things up, but then he’s riding very strong growth (yay China!). Carpenter will inherit the same situation, and he’ll likely play with the inevitable surpluses to follow — we’re already hearing the phrase “tax cuts”.

Gallop does deserves credit for seeing sense on the Mandurah railway (I mean, seriously, Kenwick?), but he hasn’t quite met his election promise of ‘fixing’ health, with his reforms so far causing more controversy than benefit. Whether Carpenter will achieve more or less than this remains to be seen … there’s enough similarity to Mark Latham that comparisons are emerging, but Latham did have some real goals for reform while Carpenter’s goals are unclear.

It was interesting, though, that Tony Blair didn’t comment publicly on his old uni mate until yesterday’s monthly press conference (the transcript misspells as “Gallup”) and even then only in response to an ABC journo’s question.

In any case, I look forward to the day that we get a Gallop Freeway, and it’ll be gold simply because it’ll be our first-ever autobahn. After all, how could you possibly stick to 100 on a road with that name?

Ever since I returned from my holiday there hasn’t been anything all that exciting to come in my e-mail inbox … until today, when I was invited to be one of the new round of guinea pigs testing Transperth’s SmartRider system.

I had read somewhere that folks in the current test group are getting all of their fares reimbursed, and there’s a tiny clause in the terms and conditions which says that the same thing will happen in this new trial. So I signed up, even though I’m a touch worried about all of the crazy glitches that I’ve heard of (fare gates at Perth station refusing to open, card readers that take like twenty seconds to do a single transaction, random errors in the online check-balance thingy). Actually it seems weird that there are so many problems (and so many delays) with this system when a similar smartcard’s been in use in Hong Kong for a decade now … then again, that system is run by ERG (a Perth company in which I own a few shares) while SmartRider is provided by the British mob who made the old MultiRiders.

Also today, I had a chance to see the Doctor Who Christmas special, the first full episode with David Tennant … and it’s bloomin’ awesome. He wears pyjamas for half the episode — “very Arthur Dent of me!” — and brings down the British PM with six words! Everything he does is with just as much panache (if not more) than the last Doctor. Aside from Battlestar, this is definitely the best sci-fi in production right now.

Some weeks ago I saw some unusual black billboards popping up around town; they asked rhetorical questions and gave nothing more than a Web address. This is a common method used by anarchist and anti-corporate groups trying to recruit people — pose a difficult question then direct people to your site with more details, and do it in an ad so that you’re appropriating the very means of the corporations you’re trying to bring down.

Instead, it was just an ad for Coke Zero.

What’s up with that — a foreign corporation using its huge marketing budget to imitate the very techniques that small grassroots organisations try to use against them? “Sorry sir, we ran out of ideas, but we know those far-left political groups are a threat to sales. Why don’t we just copy their tactics?” (And what’s the deal with that ‘blog’?!)

P.S. How disappointing, but entirely unsuprising, to see Lleyton Hewitt drop out of the Aussie Open. All those people who were pinning hopes on him to be the first Australian winner in ages have been proven wrong (again) and somehow I doubt that his form will improve enough to let him win in future. Meanwhile, that dude Chela looks like one to watch …