Turtle power!

Allow me to introduce the hero in a half shell in my car today:

As I was turning into my apartment a guy was crossing the road with turtle in hand saying to me "dude, do you know where there are any sewers ponds around this area?" I did in fact, so I took the little charger under my wing and transported it to the closest one I knew of. As I was releasing him back into the "wild" I was able to take one final farewell shot:

I don't know why my arm was turning purple. Someone told me it may have to do with radioactive ooze in the area, although I was supposed to keep that a secret.

OMG this was the most non-funny lame-arse post ever. For real though, I did for about 5 minutes today have a turtle for a passenger. I hope your day was just as interesting.

- SplinterKristian

Karma Lounge dead

I found out from this article that Karma lounge in Fort Lauderdale has shut down because I was thinking of going out to it last night. I haven't actually been there for a while but it was probably the coolest place to hang out at in Fort Lauderdale. It played pretty good music and on Wednesday nights even played Drum and Bass, which in Lauderdale made it stick out like a sore thumb. I've posted previously though that it couldn't work out what it wanted to be - with the volume the music played at you'd think you were supposed to be dancing, but there was nowhere to dance. So you had to stand around instead which led to talking, but you had to shout because the music was so loud. Good idea, a nice refreshing vibe which set it apart from the normal Ft Lauderdale commercial crap, but very poorly executed. I guess I'm not really surprised that it shut down.

Bubble Tea

Recently the canteen at work has brought in sushi to the selection of foods available. This makes a nice change from the salads that I normally prepare from the salad bar and I now have another healthy eating option for lunch. Thankfully though all the sushi is made by an external company, as I'm sure those in similar corporate environments could attest, the food made in the corporate canteen isn't the best at times. I just wouldn't trust them with sushi.

I digress. I was munching away on the sushi which today was wrapped in tapioca. That got me thinking about something that I haven't had for a while - Bubble Tea! Ahh, delicious tea with the added texture of tapioca pearls. Now, you know my opinion of Ft Lauderdale foodstuff isn't the highest at the moment but I was thinking that somewhere should serve bubble tea given that there are like a million people living around the area. I actually found a search engine that specifically looks for Bubble Tea at www.bobafind.com. You know what? I had to broaden the search to include all of Florida to get any results. According to that search engine, there are 10 spots where you can buy bubble tea in all of Florida. Ten. I thought that was a bit low for 18 million people, so I looked towards Google local search. There is one place I could find in South Florida that serves bubble tea, and it's at a place called Lan Pan-Asian Cafe in Miami. I'm going to make a special trip there pretty soon - I have a craving that needs to be put to rest.

Conquer the code

Finally stuff seems to be working out, but only after a lot of effort and a few tears here and there (joking about the tears part). I have conquered part of the code and the damn radio seems to be doing what I'm telling it to do! Amazing, yes. God damn engineering is frustrating. I'm also amazed how much taking a step back from the work can be in getting it completed. Example, I was up till midnight trying to get this code working and then I gave up in frustration. I came back this morning and *bam* I instantly saw what was going wrong.

I think my accent is slightly changing, but into what I don't know. I listen to BBC the whole day pretty much, and then I probably watch the latest Dr Who or Top Gear episodes when I get home. That's a lot of Brit accent. Then I'm hearing American accents at work - what's a real crack up is when a guy with a Brooklyn accent gets fired up and starts swearing. It's hilarious! If I end up sounding like that when I cursed I wouldn't care too much.

I got news yesterday that my Visa renewal petition had been approved, so at some point in the near future I'm to take a trip to Canada and go snowboarding or something. Oops, I mean, get my Visa renewed at the consulate there.

Frenchie, please clean my shoes

So in my quest to find some good eatin' food in Ft Lauderdale (the past two times have been somewhat ordinary, IMHO) I went with some friends to a restaurant called "The French Quarter". Oh, quick disclaimer, I ain't going to review this place like Chi-Hoong could at his website. He knows quite a bit more about food than I do and can probably pronounce the food on the menu better than I could ever hope to. However even if I can't pronounce the damn food I at least know if it tastes good, because I eat a lot of food and have a good sample size to draw from.

Anyway, I digress. We went to this restaurant and I ended up ordering the Beef Wellington (I could pronounce that) with some wine. My mate got talked into ordering some more expensive wine but that didn't worry me in the slightest. At least he didn't go for top of the range on the wine list which was $15,000 a bottle (yes, you read that right).

My Beef Wellington was pretty good. I think the waiter originally screwed his nose up at me because I ordered it medium-well, rather than medium. Blasphemous, I know. The wine was so-so. I thought that a bottle of Saltram No.1 would beat it hands down but you can't win everything I guess. Anyway at the close of the dinner the hurt came out to be $210 between the three of us. French, expensive, but okayish I guess.

I was talking to a guy here at work about the French Quarter and he said the person who owns it is a millionaire who actually owns a few of the strip malls in downtown Ft Lauderdale. That's a lot of money, people. He said that the owner would most likely have been the one cleaning the floor. If I had known that I would have tried asking him to clean my shoes as well. I've never had a millionaire clean my shoes before. I would have tipped well.

What to write about?

For those of you I'd call 'regulars' you may well have noticed that updates are not coming as often as they used to. I think I'm burned out from blogging. Well, not only that, I'm just burned out in general. 70 hours last week at work really took out any remaining energy I had. My energy levels have not been this low for quite a while. But maybe this is all just a short term thing that I'm going through because I'm so exhausted.

I did order, what I thought, were some pretty cool shirts the other day. They should be arriving before the end of the week. One of them has a drawing of an island at sunset and it has some little graves on it. The writing says "Florida... stay awhile". I was going to wear that one to work. The other is in the same style as the Nascar logo and says "B-O-R-I-N-G". If I ever go to watch a Nascar race then I reckon I'd wear that one. Hopefully the rednecks would see the funny side of it, because you know, I'm actually at the race so how can I think it is boring? Well, we've all seen Jerry Springer I'm sure, so maybe they wouldn't understand the humour, and maybe the last thing I'd see on this earth was a great bunch of toothless freaks wearing overalls bearing down on me with pitchforks. Was that too much of a cliche there?

I do like paying people out, just for a laugh of course, and I expect to get payed out in return. If I don't get payed out, or they don't see the funny side, then I assume there is a major lack of the humour gene and I'm guessing I won't find them too interesting to hang around with. However I think I may have overstepped it when I went to Crobar in South Beach Saturday night. A girl was visiting down from Chicago and a bunch of us went out partying. Well it seemed that one of the girls in the group didn't like the music, or was too tired, or something like that and she had her arms crossed whilst standing in the middle of the dancefloor. I saw this and immediately starting impersonating her. Then I thought "I'm dancing with my arms crossed... like Russians sort of do!" and so I started dancing like they "sort of" would. Admittedly, I was only going on what I remember from "Fiddler on the Roof". I don't think she appreciated it though because she called her friends to the toilets soon after that they left. I'd like to think it wasn't because of what I did, but perhaps it was.

Best thing I've heard today: "Don't work too hard... just get it done by tomorrow".

New territory

Pfft, I really don't know what to write for this post. My mind is absolutely fried and I warn you I'll probably dribble on a bit. So far this week my shortest work day was 13 hours. I've been getting home just in time to watch the Daily Show and then I'll fall asleep until, say, 6 or 7 the next morning and then get up and get ready for work again because I'm worried that I'll get deported or something... well, not really. I just don't want to let the team down. But I was pretty chuffed that I got the private call functionality, which normally operates only on a trunking system, to operate in conventional mode too! Like anyone would know what that means! What I mean is, I HACKED code like I did in uni. Thing is, now that code has to be inspected by a group of people who know far more than I do and I reckon it will provide them with comedy for weeks and weeks to come.

So Saturday morning I was up early waiting outside the West Palm beach auditorium office thing-a-me-jig to get some Coldplay tickets. Ooh yeah, I can't wait until September now. The last time I saw them I was in Melbourne. That was an awesome show - sorta weird though coz I went to see them with my ex at the time and she'd only just given me the flick... but whatever.

So anyway I'm killing time now. I can't code any more today. I'm waiting for a colleague to finish an inspection with some guys in Penang so we can go play some foosball. I'm still really crap at it... but god damn, I will beat him someday!!!

*sigh* signing out. Time to listen to more Radio One. Actually feeling a little sick but I'll blame the Tim Tams for that. Now I'm trying to think of why I called this post "New territory". Whatever and ever amen.

New Orleans pics

I've posted some of the pics from New Orleans up on flickr. You can check them out here.

At some point I'll post up what I got up to. Perhaps tonight.

Ooh the Coldplay is good

I have been listening to BBC's Radio One today, like I do every other day when I'm at work now, and god damn the new Coldplay album sounds good. It's so good that I when I preordered the album on Amazon I got the fastest delivery method I could (in hindsight, I probably could have just gone to a CD store. It seems I'm so addicted to Amazon it's not funny). Tickets go on sale here this Friday and there is a growing group of people I'm going with. Hopefully we'll all be able to get tickets to the concert. That'd be just friggin' awesome, know what I mean?

There isn't a heck of a lot else going on at the moment. I'm probably comparing to Bourbon street in New Orleans though... I'm still trying to recover from the long weekend. Things that don't make this easy are getting the latest computer music magazine and finding some great tutorials on the various types of sound synthesis that exist (additive, subtractive, FM, granular, ooh, I'm going weak at the knees now) and then testing out some sounds on the computer till the wee hours of the morning. Some things I'm now stoked about are the fact that the right channel monitor for my home studio set up has mysteriously repaired itself. For a while there the treble wasn't working at all. Plus, the plugpack that I'd hacked into to get my Kawai digital piano to work over here went on strike a couple of weeks back, something to do with voltage shortages or whatever. A replacement arrived today that wasn't complaining about the voltage and other working conditions and I'm oh so happy about that. Stick that one up you, you power converter union you!

Right, anyway, I'm obviously suffering from bad coffee overdose with a combination of artifical sweetener overload and whatever is in the water over here.