There's a shuttle landing tonight..

If all goes well, the shuttle should be landing at Cape Canaveral sometime shortly after 6pm tonight, AEST.

Just as an even more random bit of trivia, Cape Canaveral is quite close to Melbourne, Florida, which is itself almost due east of Sydney, Florida.

If you pay attention to the URLs above, you'll note that I had to search for "Sydney, Florida" and "Melbourne, Florida" - searching for just "Sydney" or "Melbourne" unadorned finds the more famous cities of the same name in Australia. If this is too difficult for you, don't dispair - Microsoft have decided that none of the world except the United States of America matter, so just a search for Sydney or Melbourne will work fine on MSN Virtual Earth. You can find the landing strip for the shuttle there as well, but in glorious monochrome only.

More seriously, this Saturday marks one year since the federal government voted in legislation prohibiting marriage between any other than a man and a woman. I'm carefully avoiding using any adjectives at this point, as anything I can say is going to be inflammatory..

To celebrate this re-affirming of our status as second-class citizens, several groups including Australian Marriage Equality and Community Action Against Homophobia have organised a rally for Saturday. The rally starts around 13:00 at Taylor Square with a welcome from Portia Turbo (there was something I was meant to tell her, I'm sure...), followed by some short speeches from speakers such as Senator Kerry Nettle and Professor Kerryn Phelps. Around 1:30 the rally will march down Oxford St to Hyde Park, where there will be more speeches from Tanya Plibisek MHR and Clover Moore M.P, amongst others. The rally will conclude around 2:30pm.

(as an aside: if you're affiliated with any of these groups, and you're looking for web/mail/etc hosting, let me know. I'm in the middle of migrating to a new server which has stupid amounts of spare capacity, and I can't think of many better causes to donate some of it to...)