Panoramic pictures

For a little while now I've been looking for some good panoramic stitching software. Panorama tools has always been my first choice but I couldn't find a suitable front end for it. That is until now. I've found a really good open source frontend called Hugin. I use this combined with Panotools and Photoshop to produce the panoramas. If you want to dabble in panoramic photography just follow the guidelines on what to do in the download section of the Hugin website. They have a pretty good summary of what other tools you'll need. Then you just blend any seams between panoramas using Photoshop and these guidelines.

I got interested in Panorama photography in my final year of Uni for my Honours project, titled "Panoramic Video Imaging", whereby my task was to control a pan/tilt unit to take a series of photographs of background scenery and stitch these images together to form a panorama (1). This image was then to be used to aid in motion detection to subtract from the current scene the background information at that pan/tilt position and weed out the interesting data. I never got it finished, although I did mathematically derive and code by myself routines that warped images onto a spherical manifold according to the provided pan and tilt position. I could also perform a reverse transform too (is all this sounding pretty technical now?!? ;-) I was pretty chuffed about that at the time because I thought I'd never get that far. Apparently one of the people who continued on with the project the next year didn't like my stuff. So I went to that year's engineering expo, looked at what he had done and listened to him bag the guy who did panoramic stuff in the previous year. He didn't realise that I was that guy though. I was feeding him questions on stuff I knew I didn't have enough time to complete the previous year and then I let him run with that. I had a good chuckle. Good on ya mate.

I've updated flickr with a panoramic picture taken as we were heading out of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. It's a big picture for those on dialup internets connections. There are still some things I have to fix with this panorama. I did stitch it pretty quickly though without much time spent to tweaking. Firstly there is a bit of blurriness in the middle of the picture. Secondly the clouds near the horizon look washed out from overexposure, although this wasn't present in the initial pictures. If Panotools was able to handle High Dynamic Range photos and I was able to take such pictures reliably, I wouldn't have that overexposure problem. Ah well.

(1) Hats off to my fellow team members on that project: Mark Norman and Phil Galbraith who worked on the hardware and Guy Blucher who did some pretty snazzy motion detection stuff. Also big kudos to Matt Fettke our guide through the whole ordeal, and of course Matt Goldberg, who kept on annoying us from the next room over (jks).

Calvin and Hobbes

A while back CJB started sending out Calvin and Hobbes cartoons. I had never really read the comic strip before, and it took me a little while to get hooked, but I rather enjoyed reading then after a while. This website has a whole stack of Calvin and Hobbes cartoons. Now someone just needs to do something similar for Footrot Flats, the comic strip I used to read as a kid.

RIP iPod

My iPod died a couple of days ago. I thought I just had to connect it to a proper charger to get it working again (not the USB or Firewire ports) but as I found out today - no go. I guess it caps off a brilliant week :-)

RIP iPod. You saved my ass lots of times. Of course by using my warranty you'll be replaced and forgotten about in the near future, but I'm thinking about you now.

WTF is going on?

Ok, so I must be suffering from some stress symptoms or something. I went to work around 3pm today and just got back 1/2 hour ago. It's a freaking Saturday. A lot of stuff wasn't working again, and it's really pi$$ing me off. Or maybe my liver really is stuffed. No! My liver has to be stronger than that. It can't be that wussy.

I rang about 20 piano stores within a 15 mile radius of home looking for my Kawai ES3 digital piano. You know what? None of the buggers stock it. The only place that does is 'certified' to and they charge US $1600 for it (pre tax). Blood sucking bastards. Considering I can get it for just over AUD $1800 back in Australia... well that's just dodgy. I'm going to walk in there on Monday with a printout showing the Aussie price and let the guy know that I know he owns the only place that sells such pianos in South Florida (as far as I know know know know). He has two choices - either sell me the piano at the equivalent Australian price or lose a sale. I'll bring in cold hard caaaaaaash too to put a bit more pressure on him. And you know what else? I didn't talk to one nice person out of all of those people I spoke to today. At least in Oz people would sound nicer over the phone. Bastards. The Yanks aren't getting tipped so they can justify treating you like crap over the phone. Wankerchops.

I'm glad I'm finally getting over this cold sore thing so now I can go out. But now my left eyelid is throbbing and is causing me a bit of pain. But you know what? I'm going to say "No! F$%k that!" I'm going the hell out and I'm going to have fun because for the last week and a half I've been having everything but. I'm surprised how good my mood is at the moment actually. I'm feeling on top of the world right now despite a whole heap of problems that are knocking at my door and everything just not going right. Do you wanna know why I'm feeling so good people? Ya wanna know what has helped me to cast all my problems aside just for tonight? Listening to Billy Ocean. That's right, BILLY OCEAN.

A worse day... than yesterday?

I couldn't believe how bad today was. It was just absolutely, undoubtedly, the worst work day I've had over here in Florida. I swear to God I was nearly in tears when people were going through pointing out mistakes I had made in resolving merge conflicts, and why the program could not be built. Err, merge conflicts. Basically you have many people working on fixes/improvements to a program. Each person has their own separate work environment and eventually all the work done has to be brought together. That's where I stuffed up. We were hoping to release the version that had everyone's changes today, and I stuffed up. Yeah, good work K. My tech lead trusted that I could do the work in his absence, I thought I could do the work, but it was shown that I couldn't. I guess I'm being pretty hard on myself since I've never done this before - and it's not straightforward text source code files that I was merging either. For those who know, I was trying to resolve conflicts in Rational Rose Realtime code models. A nightmare. Incredibly complex, but hell, I thought I could do better. Oh the humanity!

A depressing day

I've just arrived back from work. Let's see... nearly a 14 hour day. Not bad, not bad. It'd be a lot better though if I actually felt like I'd achieved something today. I wish I could just laugh at things when they get like this but I just don't have the energy to at the moment. I swear I was going flat out the whole day and then spent most of the night fixing problems arising from the day's work. I discovered a lot of the problems weren't mine - which is sort of a relief, but then it's also a pain in the ass because I'm the one who worked the overtime. Ahh well. At least I'm back in time to watch the Daily Show.

I'm also a bit depressed because I had psyched myself up over the past two days to make a very expensive but also very important purchase today. I had saved up enough money and today I was going to spend it all in one shot. That wasn't to be because of how busy I got. I can't do it tomorrow because I'll be busy again but I guess I'll get it done on Saturday. Because I thought I was going to make the purchase I was extremely happy this morning. Not so now, but hey I'll get over it.

Things are starting to warm up temperature wise over here in Florida. Maybe I'll see more people out and about? It's apparently too cold for the locals to go out at night over here. Wusses! Anyway, it like hasn't rained for the last 2 months. My car has been showing it too. I don't wash rental cars, but even so I was starting to get a bit embarrassed driving around in it. So I washed it last night. And today it rained. I can't believe it! Anyway, looks like we've got a stack of thunderstorms coming around which is all good coz I love thunderstorms.

There is talk that it may be another big hurricane season this year. The high pressure system that was sitting over the Atlantic and steering the hurricanes towards Florida hasn't moved, so they expect more of the same. Should be an interesting year!

Well, gotta go now. I've gotten sick of sitting in front of a computer today. Cheerio.

Stupid things I realised I'd done today

- Put the icecream in the fridge.
- Put the margarine in the freezer.
- Failed to declare $VOB_ROOT in my rational rose realtime environment, thus causing me an amazing amount of pain over the last 2 days. It never told me it wasn't declared!!!
- I had one beer. C'mon, it was only one and it was happy hour! Wanna know what I ate? No? Well don't read on. I ate the same damn thing I eat every damn time I go to Wednesday night happy hour at the Davie ale house. Zinger Caesar Salad, medium hotness.



P.S. I'm still waiting to see if Vanilla Ice turns up at the ale house. I've been told he lives in the area.

New stuff, great stuff

A change is in the wind. You know, I actually used to believe my mum when she said "Don't pull a face like that or the wind will change and you'll stay that way forever." Ahh the pure innocence. From that to being told by a doctor to stop drinking 20 years later. Nice.

The reason for this post is to alert you to a new sidebar I've created. This sidebar will be updated with the latest pictures that have been posted to my Flickr account. Yes, I'm about to ditch my Webshots account in favour of Flickr. Thats what you get, Webshots, when you're shit. Sure, the professional photographs are nice but hell. I've already found Flickr to be an order of magnitude better. Thanks though for the suggestions that people have as to what other options there are out there. Flickr won hands down for me though. So what I've uploaded are some pics from my visit to the Kennedy Space Centre. They aren't edited yet as I've just put them up there for the moment for a bit of testing. Album is here.

Well I'm off now to eat some icecream. It's supposed to be good for my liver.

The problem with PK

When I first went into the doctor about a month ago my resting heart rate was 80. That was the bloody highest resting heart rate I've ever had I reckon. I weighed 179 pounds (approx 81 kg) which for being a tiny bit over 6 feet this placed me within the medically safe region. My blood pressure was in the normal region. I considered this bad because I normally have a low blood pressure.

This was all before I went on the extreme anti-PK regimen. Anti-PK meaning in this instance, anti-Phat Kristian. I went in again today and this time my resting heart rate was 60. Ahh, that's better. My blood pressure was now 110/80 (I think that's what she said). I now weighed 175 pounds, although who knows if I'd actually lost any weight because that was such a small difference.

But here is the clincher. Adding to my "Rock Star no more" post I had to laugh today when my doctor told me the results from my blood test last week. Her words were pretty much "You got to take liver test now! You drink too much! No more party!" I said "You're joking!" She said "No. No more South Beach for you!" She was smiling when she said this so I can only assume she meant that I could go, but just lay off the alcohol a bit. The funny thing is I haven't been drinking that much lately. Yeah, I've been staying out late, but not drinking that much. Hold on, what the hell am I saying? What about all those rum barrels? Hell... I guess the moral of the story is don't get any blood tests done. You'll only find out how much you've been abusing your liver.

Anyway, in line with my anti-PK regimen (which now actually means anti-Pissed Kristian as well) I'm going to cull the alcohol intake by a considerable margin. I don't really need beer goggles around South Beach anyway.

->> iPod update: somehow I've placed an "S Club 7" mp3 on my iPod and now I'm being forced to listen to it. I wonder how Rachel is going these days? Oh, great. Oh, hold on!

DnB Fort Lauderdale

It was a bit weird to hear that Traffic, the premier place for Drum and Bass in Adelaide, had closed its doors recently. The big memory I have from there is when I saw DJ Marky and Stamina MC play and that was simply *awesome*. However, that and maybe a couple of other performances aside, one thing I had against the place was that there was way, way too much cigarette smoke inside. I was constantly in search of some nice clean air or some decent ventilation. It sort of sucked like that.

Anyway I was out at Karma lounge here in Fort Lauderdale a couple of weeks ago on a Wednesday night which is when they play DnB. I snapped this pic of the name of their DnB night:


Any of you guys over in Oz (u no who u r) wanna come check out this Traffic? Free accommodation and transport * will be provided :-)

* By transport I don't mean the flight over, hehe.

End to a great weekend!

If you classify not doing anything as being great, then yes, this weekend was great. I read some books, surfed the net, read some books, slept, listened to music, slept, read, slept, played some music, slept, read.

Ok, I sort of lie. Today I did venture outside because my face was looking relatively normal again. It just looked like I had a lipstick malfunction (I'd believe this too if I did actually wear lipstick. Not in this lifetime.) I played a game of Tennis today because it was too much of a nice day not to. I think Javi, who I played against, may have felt sorry for me as he let me win by a 6-0 6-1 6-1 margin :-p Thanks Javi!

I exhausted my supplies of OJ, milk, bread and cereal last night. Earlier today I still did not want to venture outside to be seen in the general public so I just drank water and ate whatever I could find.

God damn this is the most boring post ever! I feel bored just writing it. I guess I just had to update that I'm still alive and I survived my weekend of nothingness without too much pain.

P.S. I don't know if this happens to anyone else, but it's been happening to me recently. Something has toggled my doomsday switch. I'm imagining doomsday scenarios that just pop out of nowhere. I see planes flying in the sky and then my mind plays a doomsday scenario where the plane crashes where I'm standing. I think about astronomy and then my mind plays a doomsday scenario where an asteriod hits Florida. Weird stuff - and I think I just made this post not so boring anymore!

Rock star no more...

I have to say that for the past couple of weeks I have been living like a rock star would... well, sortof. There hasn't really been a night out where I've gotten home before 7am. Awesome. I had more of the same planned for this weekend until I woke up Thursday morning and noticed... a cold sore. I was left thinking "where the f$8k did that come from?" I can't remember the last time I had one. If anything it would have been in primary school I'm guessing. That's even if I actually have had one. I had to leave work early Thursday because I had a heck of a fever. Had my lifestyle finally caught up with me? Were the gods trying to strike me down? At any rate, there is no way I'm going out in public. Not at all. I'm not going to leave my apartment. I have enough supplies to last me until Monday at least. I've got a few books in storage to read so that will see me through ok.

I hope y'all have an awesome, excellent, totally bodacious and most triumphant weekend.

P.S. Don't know if many people have heard the song, but Rammstein's song "Mutter" has a part where the lead singer sounds like Timmy from South Park when he says "Mutter? Mutter?? Mutter! Mutter!!!". It's crack-a-licious.

Still at work

It's nearly midnight and I'm still at work. No! Hold on, back up. I'm *back* at work. I've already been out for a couple of drinks tonight and I had to come back and get some stuff done before tomorrow morning. The problem is, I'm finding nearly everything and anything is distracting me at the moment. Plus, I'm still listening to Rammstein from Valentine's day. It's pretty difficult to head-bang and code at the same time, ya know?

CJB-1000

Inspired by my previous post, I have released the CJB-1000 v1.0. This thing has been sitting on my computer for a while and Picasa found it for me again the other day. I've tweaked it a bit but can't be bothered tweaking it anymore. I could have sent this out via an e-mail, but where's the fun in doing that?



* For those of you who don't know WTF I'm talking about this is an animated picture of one of my mates, CJB, that I created from a photo taken at one of the social get togethers that my company had a while back. That was back when life was easy and work was breezy. Oh yes, it was good back then. We all danced like that at one stage. Well, not all of us actually. I lie. Just CJB.

Elevator music

I wish I'd tried this at University. I think the only thing we ever ended up doing was turning all the chairs in a lecture theatre so they were facing the rear wall. Maybe we put a stack of chairs in an elevator as well. Anyway, cool elevator music link is here.

*sigh* this reminds me of the fro-bro days.

Yay yay for Valentine's day

I just love this day of the year. Nothing screams out "sucked in for being single" more than today. Luckily around work with a bunch of nerdy engineers you don't notice anything different. Well, no, I might have noticed something different if I moved from my desk today. I stayed firmly planted in front of the computer screen blasting tunes away on my iPod. Nothing says "I love you" more than Rammstein screaming out "Bestrafe mich". Anyway, I actually feel sorry for the people in relationships who look forward to Valentine's day because they know they'll get roses/chocolates/hand made Teddy Bears. Because, you know, Feb 13th and Feb 15th aren't good enough days for that. If that's the only day they actually receive that sort of attention? Well... I pity them.

Hold on, I lied up there. I did leave my desk today. I had to go get some blood samples taken for my new doctor. Talk about pain - and I don't mean getting the needle stuck in my arm - but having to fast for a day beforehand. I eat, and I eat a lot, and when I don't eat I become extremely agitated. I think that's why I was so pissed off with Valentine's day this year 'round. Normally it doesn't affect me this much.

You know, here I am complaining about the finer things in life, Valentine's day and not eating food for a day and sometimes I forget about the people I support monthly through Oxfam and what sort of lives they may be living. You know what? I might just go give the money that I would have spent on Valentine's day (or any other day if I was not single) to Oxfam instead. That will make me feel much better.

High Dynamic Range photography

This may be the coolest thing I've found on the net today, and I don't know why I haven't stumbled across it beforehand. It's called HDR (High Dynamic Range) compression. In a nutshell, it enables a greater range of light to be displayed in a single photo.

It's particularly useful where photos have both light and dark areas. Normally to capture detail in the brighter parts of a scene you'd have to underexpose but then detail would be lost in the darker areas. Conversely, to get detail in the darker areas you'd have to overexpose but then the brighter areas are all washed out. With this technique you get the best of both worlds where both light and dark areas show detail. The only drawback is that you have to take multiple pictures of a scene at different exposures. This requires a tripod to avoid camera shake.

Hopefully image sensors in digital cameras will get to such a high sensitivity that you can use much faster shutter speeds to achieve the same exposure. For example, the longest exposing picture in the sequence that took 1/4 second today would only need 1/500th of a second sometime in the future. You could choose to take an HDR picture on your digital camera and it'd take a sequence of pictures all at different shutter speeds say in less than 1/100th of a second, meaning you wouldn't have to use a tripod. That'd be awesome.

Examples of HDR pictures can be found here. Since pictures speak 1000 words you'll probably understand what I mean a lot better by looking at them.

New version of my site

This just cracked me up... for about 5 minutes or so.
http://sites.gizoogle.com/?url=http://daecks.blogspot.com

That shit is whack

So we're heading west along the 595 to Fort Lauderdale last night at around 11pm, looking forward to hitting the town after a hectic week at work. At the intersection of the 595 and the Florida turnpike traffic had slowed to an absolute crawl. All I could see ahead of me were flashing lights everywhere and my mate and I were speculating as to what it could be. "Wow, there must be a huge pile up of cars ahead". Emergency vehicles were bloody everywhere. There were a couple of smashed cars along the side of the road but as it turned out that wasn't what was causing the problem. We looked towards the exit ramp for the 595 leading onto the turnpike and there were 30 or 40 emergency vehicles parked the whole way along. Then we looked a little more to the right and there were bloody flames everywhere! I don't know how we missed that to begin with. We didn't know what the hell was going on. We thought it could have been a plane crash or a petrol tanker. As it turns out a petrol tanker had overturned.

The enormity of things over here never ceases to amaze me. There are some seriously screwed up things that have happened while I've been over here, like four hurricanes hitting Florida and this and God knows what else.

What else? Ok, how about this one. This happened on my Christmas vacation trip at the end of last year. We were heading to Lake Tahoe from Yosemite at around 10pm and most routes in had been deluged with snow and had to be closed due to the threat of avalanches. So yeah, it was snowing pretty heavily. (Actually, because the snow was so thick it had a psychedelic effect as you drove along. It was incredibly distracting). We were about 20 miles out of Lake Tahoe and visibility was nothing when we had to put snow chains on. As we were doing this, "the woman" in the car shouted "Did you see that?!?!" We said we didn't see anything at all. A car coming the opposite direction had just gone straight off the side of the road. Fortunately there were quite a few cars pulled over so a few other people had seen what happened. We all rushed over to where the tyre tracks left the road and saw, about 150 feet down a slope that nearly went *straight down*, an upside down SUV wedged between 2 trees. We were calling out to anyone who may have been alive down there... we actually didn't think they would be. Fortunately, they were alive and fairly well. I threw a rope down to them and helped pull them up. They were a bit shaken up and had a couple of minor cuts. Considering what had just happened, I found that absolutely amazing.

Again, that shit is whack.

Nerrrrd

I've just completely nerded up this site. I think it's not too difficult to see what I've done to accomplish that.

To the rescue!

Noticed this little charger in the outdoor area not far from my cube:


I don't know what type of bird it was, but it sure was small:


He was puffing a little bit, but after a while he flew off to a tree. I hope this little charger finds his little charger friends:

Time for a change

I'm getting sick of using Webshots. I think it sort of sucks a little. The uploading service is pretty flaky, it's bloody hard to reorganise photos in an album, it crops my photos automagically, and it's been the same ever since I started using it.

I've been investigating another online photo album provider, Flickr and am thinking of switching over to that. Does anyone else use it or use a different online photo storage provider they can give a good review for? Now is the time to use the comments section! Or you could just do nothing. Your choice.

Hello Santos Renuentes!

Heh, this is pretty funny. My friend Omar from work informed me that one (or some) of his other band members had found a site that gave excellent reviews for all the Santos Renuentes gigs that the person had been too. They told him "see, you never know who comes to see our shows". Well, yes that's true... but if it weren't for Omar I doubt that I'd ever had heard of Tobacco Road or Santos Renuentes or whatever. Maybe I would have gone along to see some live music one time and seen their band. If I did take that path, I'd probably have given them a good review anyway ;-)

Keep up the good work Santos Renuentes!

Lunch today

This was the view I had at lunch today.

If I looked to the right I saw this:


If I turned a little more to the right I saw this:


I hope you enjoyed your lunch today too.

A man and a parrot

This story made me laugh a little because I intially thought it was a joke, but then I felt a bit disturbed:

"POLICE in the US state of Florida charged a 34-year-old rescue worker with cruelty to animals after a weekend incident in which he bit the head off a parrot."

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,12196119-401,00.html

Found the pics from Rumi in South Beach

You can find the pics here. Go to picture 127 which is on the last page for Rumi restaurant. You'll see me looking like a goose in a red shirt. The guy next to me is my mate Sean from work (aka Saeed). The people are all Nina's friends AFAIK (1). I think they're all Persian except for the girl with the light brown hair. I think she was from Peru. Nina is the one all the way to the right in the brown top.

ed: I've updated the previous post.

(1) for the non-l337 (2) Internet users, AFAIK = as far as I know.
(2) Sorry, there I go again. l337 means elite.

Christmas/NY 2004 Part 4 - Yosemite

I can't put it into words how freaking amazing Yosemite national park was. It had some of the most beautiful scenery ever. Just absolutely amazing. I also experienced the coldest weather I've ever been in. We camped outside for 2 nights and the second night was just absolutely freezing. We're guessing it got down to about -1 or -2 degrees F, which translates to something like -16 degrees celcius. My sleeping bag was only rated to 0 degrees celcius, so... very bloody cold. Of course that was made up for by the fact that when I woke up after the second night of sleep I stepped out into snow. I'd never been in snow before. Absolutely awesome.

We saw Yosemite Falls, Mirror lake and a bunch of Giant Sequoia trees which were just truly huge.

Right now that's about 1/2 of the photos. My mate Timbo has the rest (including pics of Sequoia trees) but he's been a slack bastard in getting them to me (as I've been in getting my photos to him). When I do get them, I'll post them up ASAP.

I would have actually taken more photos myself but I encountered a limitation in SLR cameras. It was so bloody cold that the shutter froze shut and I couldn't take any more pictures. This was after trekking through snow a couple of feet deep in some places for about a mile to get to the trees. That's the only time I've been disappointed with my camera.

Things that I need to work better

I think the most important is a phone conversation recorder, and I don't know why it isn't automatically built into the phone systems that corporate engineering companies (well, this one at least) use. When I'm having a technical discussion over the phone with my tech lead or something (and sometimes these conversations can go for over an hour, especially when a group discussion is going on) I always miss stacks of points. There are a couple of ways I know of to record what was said during the conversation: make notes while you're listening, or listen very hard and try to understand so no notes need be taken. If I'm doing the former I'll miss key points without realising it because I'm concentrating on getting down on paper the information in a form I'll understand later. If I'm doing the latter I'll just forget stuff. Why don't they give us a "record" button on the phone so I can play back the conversation later to see if I missed anything? Maybe there is stuff out there that can do this, but they don't supply it to us by default.

Secondly, I reckon we should all get a drawing tablet. This would be especially useful when doing a netmeeting with someone. You can't draw with a mouse, that's stupid. You can't do it quickly with Word, you end up with what looks like fat Lego blocks. We need a drawing tablet so we can draw diagrams etc. quickly and easily. Please!!!

Pet peeve

People talking on their mobile phones in the restrooms whilst sitting on the toilet seat. Not cool guys. Not cool.

Google just gets cooler

Google is so cool. It helped me in my job so many times by getting me the best search results. It's just like an external brain... there is a heck of a lot of stuff I don't know but then I google it, get the answer, answer the question and then I *seem* smart, when in actual fact I'm probably not - I just know what keywords to use. I guess it's like how people in South Beach *seem* perfect (or walk around like it) when in actual fact of course, they're not (1). They just find ways around it (read plastic surgery). Oh, and I'm not talking about personality here either. I'm actually just dribbling.

Anyhow, Google has just released google maps: maps.google.com. I'm a big supporter of clean, usable interfaces (props to Frosty who actually got me thinking about that stuff in the first place) and this interface rocks. It's so quick, clean and intuitive I just love it. You search for a business nearby and va-voom! There it is. I'm saying goodbye to Mapquest from now on. For now maps is only US-centric but I expect that will change as Google modifies it to cater for other countries in the future, especially considering it's still only a beta.

Also, I'm now an even more major fan of Google because of their Picasa photo organising program. I thought I'd give it a shot and see how it'd do with organising my 7+ gigs of photos on my computer. No problem. It found ones I'd actually forgotten about and because the interface is so damn good I had no problem in actually realising this.

Oh, I also use blogger, also (now, anyway) by Google. And I use gmail (e-mail addy is daecks@gmail.com by the way) Why? Because they're piss easy to use and I've never had any problems with any of them.

(1) - ok, I don't think she was from South Beach but it's a funny story anyway. At the Superbowl party I went to on Sunday night these stripper-like girls turned up. I thought "wow, these parties really go off!" but as it turned out they were only friends of friends (2). Anyway, the blonde one was looking at a globe of the world later on in the night and showing us where her family comes from. She didn't know where Belgium was. I don't think she was even looking in Europe.

(2) - that's not to say of course that a friend of a friend could not be a stripper. Had to make that clarification. A friend who was a stripper would be even better though. Had to make that clarification too.

South Beach - finally

*Finally* I went for a night out in South Beach. Only one word describes that night out: awesome. When you're kicking on to breakfast at 6:30am in the morning and making sure that a friend is ok as they've been getting sick in the toilet, you know you've had a good night. I *think* we ended up in a place called "Pearl". The name of the place was "Rumi". Check out the pictures of this place! They played some bloody good music but only towards the latter part of the night. It seems that the music has to be dumbed down a lot earlier on in the night to please the fickle part of the crowd (err, rethink that. It's South Beach. The fickle part of the crowd is the crowd) and they only play the non-commercial, actually good-to-listen-to stuff later.

The club's closing song was "no woman no cry" by Bob Marley so I grabbed someone's cigarette lighter and ended up walking down the stairs at the head of my group swaying the lighter from side to side. It kept on extinguishing and I ended up flicking the little steel drum out of the lighter somehow, and at some point I burnt my thumb although I only found that out the next day.

I crashed at Nina's place in South Beach which was about one or two streets away from the club. Her and my friend from work (she was my friend's cousin, and my friend is from my workplace) had another breakfast (at 3pm) at the Big Pink. I tell you what, the potato omelette they make there is bloody fantastic. That is completely neutralised by the fact however that they don't know how to make an iced coffee. And what is it with this cinnamon thing again? Why do they have to have it on everything???

Anyway, gotta get back to doing the thing I was sent over here for: work.

*sigh*