Tobacco Road, 28th April

I especially went to Tobacco Road on Thursday night to get some pictures of Santos Renuentes playing an acoustic set, something that I hadn't heard them do before. There was going to be a delay with starting their set so my friend and I decided to get some food downstairs. I had just about finished my meal when I thought "hold on... they should have started by now". I raced upstairs and they were nearly finished. Sophia gave me a greeting saying something like "I'm glad you finally came to watch our show, Kristian." I found out later that while I was downstairs stuffing my face she did a shout out for me two songs prior because I always went to their gigs.... and I was nowhere to be seen at that time. Bloody hell.

Anyway, travelling to Miami to watch a live acoustic set and then nearly missing it completely - am I a knob or what? I did get some pics from their last song though that can be found here
. There is also a picture in that set of the back of Tobacco Road. You can see one of the members of the outdoor band playing through the entrance. Damn I love my new lens.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAD!

Yes, the birthdays are coming in thick and fast it seems, so while I'm at it:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY SEAN!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY MAHA!

Dang nammit!

It's currently 4:42am Sunday morning in Florida. I have to be up in 2 hours to get ready to go to the Fort Lauderdale Air and Sea show. How much do you wanna bet that I sleep through my alarm???

HAPPY BIRTHDAY BRO!

Yes, it's April 29th over in Oz and my brother is the big two-zero today. He's not a teenager anymore, and here's hoping he starts acting his age!!! Just JOSHin bro! Have a good one.

Bring your kids to work day

That's what day it is today at work. It's a day that makes me feel especially old, even though I'm really not that old at all on the scale of things. The kids are coming into meetings, they're playing with their parents' PDAs and running around and having fun. And then I'm trying to get work done. No, I am by no means angry, but I just wish I was a kid again. I remember the days playing in the sand pit, creating a spaceship out of a fallen tree, playing kiss-chasey and constantly falling over for some reason, 1-2-3 saw ya, "socc-quash", finding "bush tucker" on the Gum tree leaves, seeing my friend get his head stuck between two pieces of wood on a piece of play equipment . . . *sigh*

The gift

Because I've been a supporter of Flickr while it's been in beta I have a free pro account to give away to someone (free for one year, anyway. After that it's $25 US a month to maintain your pro status). To those who don't know what Flickr is, it's an online photo storage service that I use and now love. Much better than the crappy webshots I was using earlier (and which I still have to completely migrate away from). Send me an e-mail if you want one. I'm not going to give it away to anyone though. Here are the conditions:

a) You must actually know me.
b) You must use it well.

The advantages of a pro Flickr account compared to the free Flickr account?
a) 2 GB monthly upload limit (compare with 20 MB for free account)
b) Unlimited storage (limit of 200 photos for free account)
c) Unlimited photosets
d) Permanent archiving of high res photo images
e) Ad-free browsing and sharing (most of the time)

The popularity question

So I was driving to work this morning and I noticed that just about everyone I saw was talking on their mobile phone. All people seem to do over here is talk on their bloody phone. I looked at the total amount of time I've spent talking on my Razr and it's 7.5 hours. That's nothing. That's like what some people spend talking on a mobile PER DAY over here. I think I've already posted about Lincoln Mall in South Beach and how all the model-type people have a phone welded to their ear.

I was thinking about this some more and I decided that I do not talk to people back in Oz nearly as much as I wanted to. I have now set up a cheap international calling thingy so I can, and I'm also looking into Skype a bit too. Expect a call from me sometime (that is, if you know me :-)

Weird stuff

Lately I've been feeling a little. . . unusual. Maybe it's because work is just plain bloody hard at the moment. Well, allow me to clarify that for a moment - it's bloody hard for about 1/7th of the time and for the remaining 6/7ths it's an exercise in pure frustration as I try and make all the required changes across, firstly, 380 pages of architecture documentation; 100 pages of design documentation, god knows how many lines of code, unit tests to make sure it all works and finally, integration tests to make sure it all works *together*. Actually, I don't think that would have clarified anything for anybody outside of engineering circles. I thought I had to modify one application when I started this a couple of weeks ago. It turns out that application was actually 7 separate applications. I was originally supposed to finish this all in the space of 3 weeks. That's just crazy talk.

The weekend was interesting as well. Friday night I ended up going to the casino in Hollywood (that's Hollywood, Florida) to check out some of the clubs there. I expected them to be really commercial. They were, in a sense, but I somehow ended up enjoying myself. Saturday night I went to a party in South Beach. The apartment complex was very much like that you'd see in the movies. It was very cool, much like many of the people who were there. I think the last thing I ended up doing before leaving the party was spraying all the mirrors in the apartment with air freshener and then writing my initials. What possessed me to do that I just don't bloody know.

I rock!

Not a bad $25 souvenir

UPDATE: I was looking at this post again and was thinking "Wow, you got a parking ticket. That's. . . exciting". Well this is my very first parking ticket either over here or in Australia. I left my car overnight in some open space car park and apparently it 'closed' at 2am, which to me seemed rather stupid. Any signs indicating this in the carpark weren't very noticeable. Maybe I should have contacted one of those companies that specialises in trying to get your parking ticket revoked? It's not like there is a shortage of them over here.

Mind you though, this isn't my first car-related offense. Over in Australia I've been caught twice for speeding - one for rushing to a soccer game and the other for coasting down a hill in a stupid 50 km/h zone (and probably listening to DnB at the time), just after those zones got introduced. Over here, even though I regularly go 10 miles/h over the speed limit, I'm pretty safe because there are still people passing me. I was a bit worried that I'd get caught again when I went back to Oz recently as I was still driving like I would be on the I-95.

Dr Who

I heard that BBC was broadcasting the new Dr Who series over in the UK. I was a big, big fan of Dr Who as a kid. I've seen four episodes of the new series so far and what can I say - it's bloody awesome! It's got lots and lots of British humour which I just can't get enough of. I can't wait to see the next one. Oh, having Billie Piper co-star is also a help.

Bloody big tree

Stuff seems to be finally trickling in from the many people who have been hoarding the pictures on their cameras. This is one of them taken in front of a Giant Sequoia tree in Yosemite national park late last year that I've stitched together. You can see us standing there way, way down the bottom.

Big tree

I'm also in the process of moving photos from stupid Webshots to flickr so you'll see my flickr bar on the right of this page being updated as I find time.

Online cricket game

I've been invited to a hat party in a couple of weeks and I immediately thought "cork hat". I couldn't be bothered making one myself so I looked around for one on the net. I happened to stumble across this site: http://www.stickcricket.com/game.php and I've been playing it for the past 1/2 hour (at work). After working a lot of hours in the past week, I don't care if anyone sees me playing this.

Refer to last post, put "NOT" at the end

I've been reading a heck of a lot of stuff lately and even in the past day my views on things have swung around greatly because I haven't digested stuff properly. I was thinking last night about my last post and why I said I wouldn't comment on politics, even if I thought it was important. I now think that's a stupid idea, so to that end I *will* post the odd political story/comment *but only* if I feel it's important enough. I'm leaving the previous post as it is though, just to show how quickly my point of view can swing around when I haven't thought stuff through enough :-)

Part of what helped me change my mind was a story I received from one of my friends (thanks Nav!), regarding the upcoming oil crisis: http://www.energybulletin.net/4856.html (it was originally posted on the RollingStone website, but for some reason their link is currently down).

The reason why I found this story particularly interesting was because here where I live in Florida, there seems to be an excess of waste. There is a useless public transport system, there are massive SUVs all over the place. There might be some sort of recycling system here in Broward County but I haven't seen any evidence of one. There certainly isn't at my apartment complex - unless they sort through the rubbish later on and pick out what's recyclable. But I just get the feeling that the lifestyle over here isn't sustainable, what with the mega highways stretching all over the place and just the incredible number of cars everywhere. I have never seen so much development going on either. The suburbs continue to creep outwards at rates I haven't seen before.

Anyway, there are a couple of other stories off the linked website that make for interesting reading too.

UPDATE: Some other views and more info is linked from Boing Boing below.
http://www.boingboing.net/2005/04/13/peak_oil_article_in_.html

My last political comment

on this site, anyway. People who have been keeping up to date with this little distraction of mine may have noticed that I haven't written anything regarding politics for a while. Actually, I only ever wrote a couple of posts. I certainly didn't want to turn this blog into another political rant site. I haven't written anything regarding religion either, nor will I ever. Instead, it's now another site ranting about what stupid/cool/not so cool things I get up to. It will I hope become an outlet for other things sometime in the future... but that time is not now.

However, the title of this post *is* "my last political comment", and while I'm not actually going to say anything myself I will give a link to a site I've recently rediscovered which reflects my thoughts on politics quite nicely. Here 'tis: http://www.zmag.org/weluser.htm

Weird state of mind

It happens when you spend most of your weekend inside. I'm like solar powered - I need my sunlight to function properly, or I at least need to step outdoors. This state of mind is completely self inflicted though. I purchased Half Life 2 Friday night and downloaded the game from Valve Software's 'Steam' content service that same night. Thankyou cable internet. I finished it sometime Sunday. What else did I end up doing? Well, I went to work for a few hours both Saturday and Sunday night. Yeah, my project is pretty intense at the moment. So you can pretty much say I spent my whole sunny Florida weekend indoors. Idiot. Actually to be fair on myself I haven't played a computer game for yonks so I had to get it out of my system. Plus, I was evaluating the in-game music that Half Life 2 offered. I wasn't too impressed with it actually. The graphics on the other hand with all the features turned on high - wow. Really nice to look at. I did notice some inconsistencies with water reflections though - some objects just weren't reflected. Maybe I could pimp myself out as a quality consultant. "Here sir, try our Razr V3!" Response: "Yeah, it's a slick phone and all but the menus are too slow! Speed them the hell up!"

Ooh, I purchased a whole orchestra on the weekend. When it arrives I'll let you know how it sounds and maybe I'll try getting it to play an ensemble or two.

Garbage, one of my fav groups, is actually releasing their new album today! It's heaps weird because they haven't released an album in four years, and I haven't really checked their website for about two years. What chance is there that the day I check, they're releasing their new album? And what else did I find out about the group? They'd temporarily broken up? Dang. I gotta read more. I found this review of their new album, which I would've bought no matter how badly it was reviewed to be honest. I think the reviewer was getting a bit ahead of himself - April 25th already? Damn. Time flies. Maybe I took a bit longer than I thought to finish Half Life 2.

EDIT: The album is actually being released on April 12th here in the US and Canada. So I'm not as cool as I thought I was.

I'm in stitches!

Seriously, I am. If you ever thought things were going bad or just felt a little down, just watch this clip. It's some bloody funny 70's music video diamond in the rough.
http://www.zeronews-fr.com/flash/70s.php

I'm counting on you...

So says my project manager. So tonight and last night and probably the next two weeks I'll be burning the midnight oil at work. Yay!

Geez, it feels like ages since I last posted. Nothing much interesting has been going on. Well, hold on, I did get those tickets to see the shuttle launch. Hopefully the dates for the launch don't change around too much, if at all. Apparently you can see the space shuttle shooting upwards from here in Plantation. Keeping in mind that the Kennedy Space Centre is about 200 miles away from here, I'm pretty stoked that I'm going to be only 6 miles away when it does launch. Awesome.

I did do something really stupid recently. I have the ability to do this at least every week it seems. I had to retrofit a new DC power socket onto the end of a transformer that I bought over here that is used for Technics keyboards. No problemo I thought. A soldering iron, some solder and 5 mins later I had a working digital piano. That was until a couple of days ago when I moved the piano around and shorted out the transformer. You see, I left 2 wires going into the plug exposed. I meant to put electrical tape around one of them to isolate it from the other but was too slack. Now I really pay. I now have to open up the transformer and replace the blown fuse, and I can only open the transformer with a hacksaw. The screw heads are welded blunt. Now come on Kristian, repeat after me: "A stitch in time saves nine"

Another thing I'm pretty stoked about

Tickets for the next Space Shuttle launch go on sale tomorrow morning here in the US. Although it doesn't really matter if I don't get them - there are still places I can go to view the launch for free - the tickets get me the closest to the launch (6 miles away). That will be absolutely friggen awesome I think. Plus, Andrew Thomas from Adelaide is one of the astronauts. Even more awesome.

Did I ever tell you I love astronomy? I love it so much that I get pissed off when people say "look, there is the saucepan!" I'n my head I'm thinking "Well, that's actually part of the constellation Orion...". Bah! Anyway, I spent many a night with my telescope looking out at the night sky when I lived in Pata (we lived there for a couple of years again when I was beginning high school). You could imagine that viewing conditions there were awesome because there was nothing else around.

Anyway, one of the things I wanted to be when I grew up, apart from an archeologist, psychologist, biochemist, doctor or electronics engineer was an astronomer. The thought of going up in a space shuttle always freaked me out a little - especially after seeing the Challenger disaster in 1986, so I never wanted to be an astronaut. I guess at the time I settled for the next best thing, in a sense. But now that I like rollercoasters maybe I should give it a shot? Heheh.

More pictures to peruse

I've just uploaded 50 or so pictures from my trip to Australia. I'm still not completed with all the pictures though. There are some from the Adelaide 500 that aren't up, plus I'm missing a whole CD of pictures that are still back in Oz. Ahh well. The ones I have uploaded are here.

I only took a few pictures in Sydney because I didn't have enough time to get all touristy. Most of the pictures are from when I went to visit my Uncle and Aunt out on the farm(s) which is about 25 kilometres from Loxton. I think one of the coolest pictures though is of my 9 year old cousin driving a manual car. That was just awesome! You'll also realise I have a penchant for old stuff - whether it be old houses or broken down machinery. Not all of those pictures are up yet. Might I add: not all of Australia is like this! Most of the Australia population lives in cities along the coast. I've deliberately gone out of my way to show this side of Australia. Oh, and there are no pictures of kangaroos. We did see some, but they hopped away to quickly for me to get a picture of them.

There are also a few pictures from inside an old house. My uncle used to hold parties there apparently and everyone was given paint and they could paint whatever they wanted. There is some pretty interesting stuff there.

Nothing to see here, move along now

If you've been watching the news, Florida has been in it again. Damn, a lot of stuff goes on over here... or at least the media would have you believe that. What I have seen just made me sick, and everyone thinks they should have a say in what happens. It's really not anyone else's business. Let the people who are affected be in peace. But I'm not going to comment on that any more :-)

Otherwise, I've been struggling with a dodgy home internet connection this week, which sort of sucks because I've gotten used to data flying around at high speed. And I've been reading books and stuff. I've got nothing further to add though.

Oh, Sony did release their PSP over here this last week. I am not interested in buying one at all. (1)

Also, now that I remember, I did go to Opium Garden in South Beach last weekend. My quest to get to most of Miami's cool bars and clubs continues. It's a pretty awesome place and had some cranking music playing. I don't know how the hell we got in, considering we didn't have any girls with us. I didn't see any Hilton sisters or anyone famous, or at least I didn't recognise anyone famous. If I saw Puff Daddy (or whatever the heck he's calling himself) there I probably would have spat on his shoe (in my vibrant imagination, anyway) for all the unoriginal music he's pumped out.

(1) Yeah, right.

Pretty stoked about this

Here is a quick pic of part of my living space over here in the US. What I'm exceptionally happy about is that thing sitting to the left of the picture, for which I've finally found a power supply and is now working. Yay!


Also, the Ultrafest dance music festival was awesome. But I've gotta get the pics and movies from my friend's camera before I write a dedicated post about it. I was a bit unhappy that I didn't get a movie of Chris and Mike from Hybrid doing their DJ set - the battery on the camera I was using was too low. I did get a couple of pics though. Anyway, more about that later.

Ultra Music Festival 2005

I'm pretty stoked at the moment. I just received my ticket for Ultra Music Festival 2005. This is supposed to be America's biggest electronic music event, which is saying something in terms of size. Although I'm expecting it to be multiple times as large as Enchanted (approx. 50,000 people are expected to attend) I doubt it'll have the same charm as Enchanted as none of my Aussie Enchanted friends will be there! Ah well.

I'm incredibly bloody picky about what electronic music I listen to - a lot of the harder techno styles I think are utter crap and could have been written by monkeys, and most of the dance music I've heard whilst I've been over here has been... uninspiring. I dunno, if it's dance music it has to have a certain latin flavour for me to like it but then again it can't be too laid back. I don't really like the really hard drum and bass stuff either. Sometimes it sounds like someone with no music knowledge at all sat on a keyboard and pressed record. But then I still do like a lot of other DnB songs. Like I said, I'm picky. So on that front I'm very interested to see what this will be like. Once I've recovered from this event I'll write up a review, or something like that.

A song about Bambi

I think my flight back to the US was the worst ever for jet-lag and annoyance factor. American Airlines has yet to prove to me they can get me somewhere without being over an hour late. Well, here's hoping for the future!

I knew things were going to be bad when I arrived in the US because I had a connecting flight through Dallas, TX to Fort Lauderdale. Of course the flight from LA to Dallas was an hour late, so as I touched down in Dallas I was supposed to be boarding my next plane. I ran out of the arrival gate (A24 for future reference) and across the travelators to the adjacent terminal to get to gate C4. Just as I arrived I heard an announcement that the gate had changed to C11. After moving to that gate and waiting for about 15 minutes (yes, not surprisingly the outgoing flight was going to be late departing) we had another gate change to C2. On the way over to that gate there was a guy strumming a guitar with a girl tagging along with him. I said to him "you should sing us a song about all these gate changes!" So he did! It was pretty funny. His name was Ryan and when I asked him what he did he said "Dude! I surf, dude!" (I kid you not). I think he was actually a construction worker by day but lived right on the beachfront in California and surfed at night mostly. The girl he had with him, Krista, was also from California. He was your typical cliche surfer. Blonde hair, even a beard and the most surfie sounding voice I've ever heard. If you've watched Finding Nemo just think about all those turtles Nemo meets. Exactly the same sort of voice. It was freaking hilarious!

We had not finished the musical chairs with the gates yet - an announcement made over the PA system said that our plane was now leaving from gate A29. This was back at the terminal we'd arrived at originally. Amazing! We sat down - Ryan chose to sit in a wheelchair - and he played some more of the 'songs' he'd written. One was about Bambi and how one day Bambi was just minding his own business when a hunter shot him, took him to McDonald's where they processed him and then put him in a burger. I was in stitches because the words to the song seemed to be... I dunno, influenced by weed when he would've written them.

I couldn't resist taking a picture of a guy sitting in a wheelchair playing a $20 guitar from Target whilst singing songs about Bambi. So here ya go:

Nuff said? I think so ;-)

Radioshack sucks

Well the one at 8249 W Sunrise Blvd does anyway. I've been trying to locate a power supply for my piano (yep, I'm still talking about it) because the power supply I have from Australia can't run on 110 volts. I went to a piano store today where I got some extremely good service and I bought at very good prices a heavy duty keyboard stand as well as a 12 volt 2 amp power supply for a technics keyboard. This is exactly the voltage and amperage that I required! However I knew I'd have to change the plug for it so that it'd fit into my digital piano. No problem - I thought I'd quickly pop by a Radioshack and get a DC plug adapter kit or something similar.

Queue bad assumption.

I went into the Radioshack store and after waiting 5 minutes whilst the attendants crapped on about nothing I was finally served. I explained my dilemma to an attendant but only got back an impatient blank stare. He said it couldn't be done, to which I called bullshit. He said that the plugs they had were only rated to 1000mA, which he kindly pointed out was 1 amp, which, thank god, he also pointed out was less than 2 amps. This guy was really, really good! I was also thinking the statement that the plugs were only rated to 1 amp (or 1000 mA, which by the way is less than 2000 mA, 2000 mA being equal to 2 amps) was a bit of bullshit too. I'm pretty sure the plugs could handle a few amps at the very least. The amp limitation with such small scale situations would be with the transformer wiring that the plug is connected to. But anyway, after the attendant "helped" me he moved over to a keyboard/microphone setup and started playing random notes and attempted to sing. Both the keyboard playing and singing were absolutely terrible and nearly caused my eardrums to burst. I got out of that place quick smart. It sort of felt like I was in the twilight zone or something similar. A very, very surreal experience!

You're pretty cool for a guy who wears a kilt

Goldberg is a champion of drinking, there is no doubt in that. For his size I just do not know how he stays upright. I guess the only explanation is he has had a lot of practice.

This story begins with the wedding of Adam and Emma. Matt was drinking hard at the reception and was getting more and more drunk. He came to me at some point and said "hey dude... doooo ya reckon youuu can dddrive me into town tonight?? ?? I need a liffffft in becosh I've been drinking a little too mussh." (ok, it wasn't quite that bad). I had no problem with this as I wasn't really drinking at all (if you don't know why then read back a few posts).

What happened for the rest of the night is just amazing. We drove into the city later on and he drank about 1/2 a bottle of Sambuca on the way. We went to the Stamford Plaza on North Terrace. I don't know why we did, that just felt like the thing to do. Anyway at some point I noticed a grand piano down in the Cascades lounge and said to Matt "you gotta go play that!" About 10 minutes later that's exactly what he was doing. Remember that at this time he was completely and utterly off his face. The waiter approached Matt and said "can you play this" and Matt said "yeah, of course". After Matt had been playing for a while the waiter began bringing him free drinks! There were some other people there who were clapping and cheering Matt on too. What happened next was just weird. A few people had congregated around the piano requesting songs.


Not long after that a person equally as drunk as Matt started breakdancing to a bloody piano, or at least attempting to. Bear in mind we're listening to some of Matt's original songs, songs by Ben Folds and other songs by Billy Joel.





A guy wearing a kilt sat down next to Matt and started playing. He was a pretty good piano player too. This was when I heard Matt say to him: "You're pretty cool for a guy who wears a kilt!" I can't remember why the guy was wearing a kilt at 2am in the morning, but he was a percussionist (and it seemed a regular muso too since he could play piano) and had taken part in the Edinburgh Military Tattoo at least once. Here is a pic of Matt and the Kilt dude to Matt's right playing the piano.



Matt also plays in a band called "Bernee". I took some pictures at his latest gig which he's put up on the Bernee website. I wish I could have used my new f1.4 lens but I had to make do with what I had. Eventually I'll get around to putting my edited pics up on Flickr. Big emphasis on eventually.

Back in Florida

If someone could tell me what the hell happened in the last 2 weeks (well, it wasn't even that) then I'd feel a little more at ease at the moment. I really do not know what the hell is going on. I entered my apartment last night at 2:30am, slept until about 6pm and then have been wondering around in a daze for the last few hours. It certainly does not feel like I was just on a holiday.

I did not catch up with everyone I wanted to, that is a fact. Next time I do something like this I know how I'm going to do it differently. From the get-go I can name a few people who I didn't get around to catching up with (Frosty, Matt F, Guy, Paul K) which makes me a bit disappointed in myself. Sorry guys, I was completely and utterly out of time and frustrated at the fact that I didn't have more.

Anyway, I'm back here now. I know I've got a ton of work to do - god knows how I'll get any of it done but I've also got a couple of interesting stories from my trip back. I'll be posting them soon.

One thing you won't hear me talking about anymore is me trying to purchase my digital piano. I now have one! Yes I bought my Kawai ES3 in Sydney and now it is sitting here with me in my apartment. I thought for a while there that I would have to fedex it back or something which would have cost me upwards of $800. Ouch! Fortunately I was able to take it on the plane for free. I just went on a quick trip to Walmart to see if they had any 12V/2 amp AC-DC converters so I could play it but no luck. I also have to buy a heavy duty stand for it too. More $$$.

Anyway the daily show starts pretty soon so I have to catch up on that.

Back in Loxton

Ok. My heart rate has hit rock-bottom now. I'm now in the town where I grew up: Loxton, South Australia. It's a country town about 250 km out of Adelaide with a population of around 7000. It's a nice and tidy place to be - and I had my first schnitzel in over 8 months last night at the Loxton pub!

I'm not feeling weirded out today like I was for the past few days. I'd say that I got over my jetlag but I never had any to begin with. Now I'm just wondering how the hell I'm going to be able to visit all the people I want to see while I am back here down under.

I fixed the flickr problem with not being able to see the larger versions of pictures. That was a stuff-up on the configuration settings on my part. Now you just have to look to the right hand side of the picture where the photo info is and it'll say 'view larger versions' or something like that. Of course, I'm going to have to put some interesting pictures up for anyone to give a damn about looking at them!

I'm also using a computer at the moment that has instant messenger on it. I hate it. Yes, it can be useful for work but outside of work I just think it's a bloody annoyance (actually, when you're at work it can be an annoyance too which is why I have to switch it off sometimes). It is especially annoying if the people who try messaging you have names like: "my name ain't elmo but you can tickle me if you like" and "RIP Kahmatah MC Hydro Donnix she got that flow that makes your head spin like you're on antibiotix" - which by the way they've changed to "new york who" in the last 5 minutes because it's cool or something and they're trying to carve an identity for themselves but they're actually just giving themselves stupid f$&ken names that are the size of short novels like everyone else. Whatever.

Anyway, I'm off to eat a decent piece of bread, something I haven't been able to do for the past 8 months. I'm also going to have some Weet-Bix for breakfast - another 'luxury' that I've been missing out on.

Where am I?

I'm back in Australia.

Yes! It is true! I was keeping quiet about this because I was going to surprise some people but my cover was blown and so I'm telling everybody this now. I'm currently in Sydney hanging out with Nav and his mates. It's all really fanbloodytastic here and I now realise how much I love and missed Australia. It's an awesome country.

I arrived here on Friday morning and will be heading off to Adelaide on Sunday afternoon. I'll be hanging around Adelaide for about a week and then heading back to the USA. I'll try and catch up with as many people as I can while I'm here!

See y'all.

Remember to pay your bills

Especially if you run a business. *Especially* if you run a nightclub! Angry webmasters have easy ways of getting their revenge. This is a screenshot of the website for "Life", a club down in Miami:

You can try checking out http://www.lifemiami.com for yourself. According to Google's cache this website has been like this for at least the past 2 weeks.

Trawling the internets on a Saturday night

While I wait for this flu that I've got to go away, I've been finding crap on the net. Here is some of the crap I've found so far today:

Starbucks craptastification of Starship's "We built this city", which I actually used to like listening to as a kid (the Starship version, not this shite). Oh, and don't get me started on Starbucks! I'm not a huge coffee drinker but I'll have a couple of cups a week. My god the coffee over here is generally crap. There are a couple of Euro-themed restaurants that seem to get the coffee right but not much else does. I was working late one night and one of my colleagues asked me if I'd like a coffee. I thought "Yeah, that'd be sweet!" I really started looking forward to my coffee. When he came back I saw that he'd visited the local Starbucks. My mood hit the brakes and swung in the opposite direction. Let me say this: I really, really hate Starbucks coffee. I drank it anyway because he'd gone to all that trouble to get it for me but I think that was the worst coffee I've ever had. I was even worse than when I had a Starbucks coffee in Australia.

Ok, next site: How to win at Pac-Man

Next: Yahoo Serious is still around. Sort of. God damn I can't remember how many times I watched Young Einstein.

Next: The audio from of my favourite movies Office Space (because it's all so true) combined with the visuals provided from an old cartoon series called "Superfriends" involving Batman and Robin, Superman et al. Captain Planet had not been invented yet. Oh, oh, oh, the mash-up movie is here (I think this was done a while back, but it's the first time I've seen it).

More Christmas trip pictures

Are here. I've got pics of signs advertising a brothel called the "Shady Lady Ranch", a nice pic of a Joshua tree, pictures showing my affection with roads going off into the distance, having fun riding bombs, and pictures of highly sophisticated and blossoming towns.

UPDATE: When browsing Flickr photos, you may notice that you can't view higher resolution versions of the photos. They're making a stack of changes at Flickr, so this should be fixed in the near future. It doesn't really worry me at this stage because god damn at least they're actually making changes!

UPDATE: The problem with not being able to view larger images was with me and I've fixed it now.

Something's going right

You may wonder why the hell I'm making this post at 5:18 in the morning. Well, I got back from work last night as sick as a dog and fell asleep straight away. I woke up about an hour ago but have so far been unsuccessful in getting back to sleep, so I thought I'd strum the guitar and crank up the compy. I then saw my dead iPod sitting on my desk. I remembered I was supposed to take it in for a warranty exchange a couple of days ago. I thought 'well, there is no harm in trying to charge it again'. I put it in its dock and paint me green and call me Gumby, the bloody thing started charging. As you could imagine I'm pretty chuffed about that! I'm also at a loss to explain why it didn't charge before, even when connected to my friend's proper charger. Weird.

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*

Christmas/NY 2004 Part 3 - San Francisco

What can I say about San Francisco? I absolutely, without a doubt, positively loved it. A-friggen-mazing place. We stayed in a hotel which was about a one minute walk from Union square, more or less the centre square for San Francisco and we had the cable cars going past our window down in the street. Did I do a lot of walking? Hell yes! I was absolutely buggered from walking around but loved every bit of it. A nice change from all the flatness here in Florida.

We went out one night for some sushi and then went to grab a drink. Who would've thought that the first place we went to grab a drink happened to be a gay bar? No matter, the people there were bloody friendly and I stored my camera there for a while when we went to check out some straight places, with a gay guy as our tour guide of course.

I got a bit freaked out on the way home. My friends had gone home much earlier in the night (as to why, refer to my post: "The woman") and it got to about the time where I had to leave the group I was hanging around with (read: nearly sunrise). Did I know my way around San Francisco well enough to find my way home? No. Was I a bit scared? Yes. Luckily I found Powell street after a bit of looping around and was just crossing at the lights across the road from our hotel when the lens cap from my camera fell off. A bum who happened to be walking alongside me picked up the lens cap and began looking at it quizzically. I said to him a couple of times "Mate, can I please have my lens cap back?" No response. I knew I had a $1 bill in my pocket and offered to swap it for my lens cap. We did the swap and by this stage I was out the front of my hotel and I absolutely bolted it upstairs. There were always a few people around the whole time I walked home, but I was still a bit freaked out in some points. Scary stuff.

We did the whole touristy thing, checking out Alcatraz, Fisherman's Wharf and took a bus tour of the city. After staying in San Francisco for a little over 3 days I did not want to leave there. It was such a cool city. Ah well.

It also happened to be the city where I lost my iPod charger. I believe we all heard a clunk sound as we were packing the car to leave San Francisco. Upon reflection, that did very much sound like an iPod charger hitting the ground, even though we couldn't find anything. I think that bum who tried taking my lens cap snapped up my iPod charger before we knew what the heck was going on.

To feel my pain, sing this to the tune of "San Francisco" as sung by Scott Mckenzie:

If you're leaving from San Francisco
Please do take care
To not leave belongings there
If you're leaving from San Francisco
A bum's got your charger
And he couldn't give a care

Bah! Screw writing anymore lyrics.

Pictures start here.

Stuffed

Err, thought it would be time to update my blog. Well, I've started up tennis again. Yah! I haven't played a game since I got over here and now I plan to make it a weekly thing. I was missing it so, so much. The only sport I've been doing is the odd swim and I don't do it often enough to get anything out of it. Anyway, it's been good to get away from the computer for a while. I sit all day in front of one (which I hate doing... well, all day at least). I hate, hate, hate that part of my job.

Anyway, I thought it was pretty cool that someone had started researching Venus fly traps. I went on a rant about such stuff in this post a while back. The research discusses the mathematics of how the trap operates, but it still leaves open how the hell the plant *actually does it*. The research is here. I only hope I don't look like that guy when I'm talking about Venus fly traps. Actually, I probably look worse since I'm normally intoxicated at the time.

Could you imagine how happy I was when I found this site? Oops, did I just link directly to Salma Hayek? Oh. Heh, they do talk about the famous scene in "From Dusk till Dawn". Hats off. It takes quite a while to read through all the top 100 women (as voted by readers of askmen.com). I found it quite a good idea to have several pictures of each person. Noice. Enjoy guys.

Australia Day

Heh, happy Australia Day by the way. Geez, I nearly forgot. I don't know how I could have, it was on the news constantly over here.

Picture updates

Pictures from the Bahamas are here, featuring guest appearances from the "grass-weed" guy and my brother doing something useful: carrying beer.

A close call

I was setting up my new computer on the weekend, and I nearly lost all my pictures that I've taken so far. Yeah, most of them are on the web but they're not the full resolution pics. Not all of them are backed up yet either. I couldn't find the pics after I did a re-install and I swear to God I was nearly in tears once I realised what I had done. So tonight, the first thing I'm doing is uploading all of the pictures I have to the web and doing massive amounts of backing up *and* creating an automatic backup plan. Geez, I don't want to ever feel like that again.

For the nerds, the computer is ok. AMD Athlon 64 socket 939 3200+ and appropriate motherboard, 1 GB PC3200 RAM (at the moment, more on the way), 160 GB seagate SATA drive, logitech wireless mouse and keyboard, antec sonata quiet case. All that for just over US $600. Not bad I thought. I didn't upgrade the video card - yet. I'll do that once I get an LCD monitor... which won't be for a while yet. Also might upgrade the sound card. We'll see how my current one goes for a little bit.

I was playing Van Halen's "Jump" again last night and the computer is sooooo much more responsive. Hehe.

Stupid

I was in my third project meeting on Monday, having been on my new project for two weeks. Things weren't going so well. My computer was set up completely wrong for the sort of work I was required to do so I was working with the systems support group to get those problems resolved. Plus, as with any new project, there is a thing call ramp up time. Or, time taken trying to understand what the hell you're supposed to be doing. That takes a while. So, combine computer not working properly with ramp up and you've got a bad start.

Anyway, the reason I got put on the project was because someone said I was supposed to be a fast learner, that I was supposed to be what they call "smart". I can be a smart arse sometimes but that's about it I reckon. I gave my new project manager the low down on why I was a couple of days behind some of the other guys in the group. She just looked at me and said "I thought you were supposed to be smart?" My response? Nothing really. What the hell am I supposed to say to that??? I had a good laugh at it later on and it's the joke of the week with my friends and former technical lead (who I believe is the one who stated that I was "smart").

Needless to say, I'm not behind in my work anymore and if anything I'm even a little ahead - but it took a little unpaid overtime to get there. Now I'm thinking I'm actually not that smart and my manager was right. I think I walked right into this little trap that she set for me. And get that dangling carrot out of my face.

When bad things happen

Well, here is the first one. The northern gate of my apartment block got taken out last night by someone trying to get out of the complex. This happened between midnight last night and 8 am this morning. Likelihood that it was someone from the party on the floor below me last night? Pretty high!


But this is even worse than what happened above. I've run out of milo.


Ok, yes, there is some still caught in the top and if I scrape hard enough I can get what's left in the bottom, but, hell...

Things that go bump in the night. And then die.

Right, it's nearly 2:15 am and I'm pissed off. There is something in the exhaust duct of my clothes dryer that keeps on making a tap-thud sound. I heard this sound a few weeks ago but then it stopped. I thought it was the wind at the time and there was some sort of valve that was loose or something but it can't be that tonight because it's as calm as a Hindu cow... and don't get me started on Indians! There are a bunch of them having a party on the floor below me and they've got their freaking balcony door open. I think they work at my company, I'm not sure. It's bloody 2 am in the morning. Shouldn't they be programming or something!?! Bloody hell, I'm trying to get some sleep so I can do good work so I don't become a victim of outsourcing. Jesus!

Sorry, but they've been pissing me off just about as much as tap-thud sound. I've been trying to think of what it is. I'm wondering what stopped the sound last time. Perhaps it just died. It sounds awfully like a frog. But how the hell would a frog get up there? I'm on the top floor, 4 floors up. It could be a super frog or something like that, bred by Frenchies to have really good leg muscles. Maybe it somehow jumped in the exhaust vent for my dryer after having double dare/physical challenges with its Frenchie frog mates to see who could jump over my apartment building.

I can't check to see WTF is going on because there is no way I can look outside.

Maybe the people below sent it on a mission to piss me off.

I was thinking it could be a bird... but it's not chirping.

Oh shit it's really pissing me off now.

That's it. I'm going to wash some towels and dry them on high heat. I'll cook the f&*ker... and then I'm going to get a flamethrower and fry the people downstairs. Check the papers tomorrow.

Fair dinkum, good work NASA/ESA

Yeah, you can already tell this post is going to be full of all things nerdy. Well, I gotta say it, but hats off to the folks at NASA/ESA/Uni Arizona for getting a space probe to land on Titan. That's just freaking amazing when you consider what must be done to accomplish something like that. I had to laugh though when they only got half the pictures they wanted because someone missed a command. Hehe.

I actually think about that and then I can totally relate to my own programming screw-ups. Hell, I just spent 6 hours fixing up/improving some software I wrote ages ago. If I didn't do that though, I probably would have just sat in my bed watching "My cousin Vinny" followed by "Death to Smoochy". Instead, I feel like I've achieved something today... something I probably should have achieved last week but hey. I was spending too much time rediscovering the Monkees and so forth and when I get nostalgic everything else can go get stuffed.

I went to a really cool party on Saturday night. No rum barrels involved, thank God, but I had a smashingly fun time. It was a girl's 30th birthday and some gay ex-neighbours threw a party for her. Of course, the place was in immaculate condition. It was very, very clean and I have to say very tastefully furnished. My favourite thing though was an old rotary telephone that they actually use. I reckon I might try retrofitting one in my future home. A re-dial function would be pretty cool :-)

Everyone at the party was either married or engaged. Normally I don't mind being the third wheel - I mean a few of my mates back in Australia have girlfriends and so forth so I get pretty used to it. But shit, lately it's just been beyond a joke!

I did meet a nice couple who lived about an hour out of New York city. They were really cool and offered me a place to stay when I go up around that area. Excellent! I'm waiting on some availability for tickets to see the Daily Show. That will pretty much determine when I'll go up that way.

I have a stack more pics to put up yet, but I just can't be arsed using my current computer to do that. I've ordered a new beast which should be arriving this coming week and it'll be ideal for the music stuff I want to do. It's taking a bloody long time to get my music stuff sorted out with all this travelling that keeps getting in the way!

Hmmm, well I'm starting to dribble more than I do in person. I better go to sleep before I send you to sleep.

Rum Barrels - aka Baby Elephant killers

Last night I cruised along to a 33rd birthday party at a Thai themed place called "Mai Kai". It used to be one of the biggest and best places to go to in Ft Lauderdale back in the 50s and 60s and today it still rocks. Apparently there was a deal going on that if you bought one rum barrel you'd get another one free. Awesome. So I bought two, giving me 2 free drinks later on. A couple of points must be made:

1) A rum barrel is $14 *each*. Ouch!
2) I don't know what the hell was in them, but they were effen strong! Someone said that each rum barrel was like 6 standard drinks. Kapow!
3) I had 4 of these buggers. Boom!
4) I also had a few sake bombs *and* a Heineken. Thud!

I quickly pointed out to everyone there why my nickname is PK. Let's just say that I was incredibly drunk but still maintained my composure and my stomach contents. I swear people were looking at me waiting for me to keel over and die. I did get the comment that I had enough alcohol in me to kill a baby elephant.

"Here's to PK he's true blue.
He's a piss-pot through and through.
He's a bastard so they say,
Tried to go to heaven but he went the other way"

Wasn't I supposed to stop binge drinking once I left Uni?

Quote of the day

My friend said this to me whilst I was talking to him on the telephone. I didn't actually realise this myself...

It's not easy making lots of money

Damn. Damn. Damn. Oh well, I better save up some money for those lottery tickets.

North Korean hairstyle guidelines

Found this link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4157121.stm whilst trawling the net, where North Korea has launched an ad campaign against long hair. My favourite part of the article, because it's just so stupid:

It stressed the "negative effects" of long hair on "human intelligence development", noting that long hair "consumes a great deal of nutrition" and could thus rob the brain of energy.

How the hell does long hair consume any more nutrition when hair comes out of the scalp dead? I'm looking for some "gotcha" phrase. I can't find one. The mind boggles.

A supercharged weekend

NOT! This has been the biggest weekend of nothing I've ever had. I was feeling like crap all of last week at work. I think it *may* have had something to do with my trip over to California. Hmmmm... So I spent the whole weekend recovering in bed. I also discovered cable TV this weekend. Normally, I'd only turn the TV on to watch "The Daily Show" on the Comedy channel (oh, and Reno 911 and Drawn Together). But this weekend I watched the History channel as well and I watched a 3-hour special on stealth technology in the armed forces. Fascinating stuff.

I also spent a lot of time mucking around with my new Razr V3 phone. I've completely Aussied it up. The background is the boxing kangaroo and my ring tone is an mp3 of "Land down under" by Men at Work. Americans just love that stuff, and since coming over here I've become more of a patriotic Aussie anyway. ESPECIALLY since Australia is donating all that money for relief in the Tsunami disaster. Oi! Oi! Oi! (believe it or not, once someone found I was from Australia that's all they would say to me).

Goodnight!

Christmas/NY 2004 Part 2 - Los Angeles

This is where my journey started. Of course, I had the whole LA experience - touching down in the airplane and then being forced to wait on the tarmac for over 1/2 hour until a spot became free, leading to me being a total of 2 hours late.

Anyway, after meeting up with my touring crew we headed off to Venice beach. There was hardly anyone down there (it was the middle of winter after all) but it still had a pretty cool atmosphere. After checking out Venice beach we cruised down Santa Monica boulevard for a while and then went to Hollywood boulevard. Here I did the total tourist thing and got my pictures taken with whatever stars I could. I look back on it an think "what was I on?" - they were only names on the concrete after all, but anyway.

We then met one of the crew's friends. This is what I had been looking forward to all day. She was a former chick from Baywatch - not one of the main characters, but a background fill-in. But she was in Baywatch! She also played a small part in Jerry McGuire. Nowadays she seems to be obsessed with peace and scented oils. She also didn't look as young as I thought she would... but Baywatch was a while ago after all. We met up with her and her boyfried at a really cool bar in suburban LA. After that we went back to her place where we drank and where I attempted playing guitar whilst being drunk. Not advisable! Her boyfriend prepared us some appetizer that had Parmesan cheese and... cinnamon! What is it with Americans and cinnamon? They have it with everything! It actually tasted pretty good though. I spent a lot of the night trying to work out what the boyfriend actually did. He did a lot of things, but I think he was a cook but also trying to get into the acting scene. They (as in, actors trying to get a start) are apparently pretty secretive about that sort of stuff.

So anyway, the pictures from LA are here

It's by the friggin' Monkees!

There have been a few songs bugging me my whole life coz I like them a lot but I don't know who the hell they're by (and I don't know enough of the lyrics to google them). One I don't think I'm ever going to figure out until I actually hear it on some CD coz it's some Spanish song from the mid 80's or something like that. I've just solved the identity of one of the others however. I used to listen to this one when I was in Year 1. Yeah, a long time ago. There was a tape player out in the shed and I used to play this song over and over and then sing it at school. The name of the song is "Listen to the band" by the Monkees. I got it wrong at the time, I used to say "Listen to the fan." It didn't make much sense back at the time, and last week I thought about it again and determined that it must have been "band" instead of "fan". A quick google and a download of the song and voila! Mystery solved.

Today is a good day.

Christmas/NY part 1 - The woman

With any trip, you get highlights and lowlights. Highlights from my trip to California included sightseeing LA, San Francisco, camping in Yosemite and snowboarding Lake Tahoe. The low part of my trip was a constant hum in the background. That fly that won't let you get to sleep at night. The itch in the middle of your back that you just can't reach. It was... a woman.

No, it wasn't anyone I met people, but the one who was travelling with us. When I met up with my travelling group in LA it was all pot pourri. That sweet, sweet smell soon reeked of a sewage treatment plant. I have never met someone so neurotic in my life. I have never known anyone to take so long to get ready in my life (sometimes nearly 2 hours). Never have I met someone so insecure that they would blatently make their problem everyone else's.

Ok, let's set this straight: the girl was an ex of the other guy I was travelling with. But that relationship was over a long time ago. Actually, it was never even a serious relationship. He made it clear to her before she made her decision to come to the US: "we are all going to have a fun time, that is all. Don't expect anything else." This seemed all cool. We were all well into our 20's. Grown-up adults and all. However, she played the defenseless girl.

"Can you go get [some particular item] out of the car?" If you didn't, she'd be in a snoot for the next couple of hours.

When my mate and myself were having a laugh about something, and the attention was not directed at her: "This trip is supposed to be about me!" (I kid you not, she did say that)

Upon asking her if she'd like to do anything in particular, when no decision had been made: "I don't know"

Upon asking her if she'd like to do anything else once a decision had been made (because she couldn't make one): "Well you guys have made a decision already... what's the point?"

Upon suggesting food at reasonable prices other than the McDonald's which was always her first choice and was making me sick: "It's too expensive"

Upon learning that we may get snowed in at Lake Tahoe, something that we could do nothing about: "Well I have a plane to catch back!"

We needed to be somewhere, and somewhere early to get some sightseeing done. Not so! She had to spend over an hour putting make up on and doing her hair.

Obviously, this girl needed to grow up big time. Here she was, on the other side of the world, with the potential to have a fantastic time but she blatently chose not to. Her mood was constantly flipping between two extremes, spending most of it's time at the bad end of the scale. There is a major possibility that this will be the only time she'll ever be in the US. What a way to waste it.

On the trip back to Phoenix, which was the last part of the holiday, she was complaining about the music we were listening to. She claimed that we'd listened to far too much of our music (we were the ones driving). I decided I'd had enough. In a service station that we stopped at I saw a Cheech and Chong CD that looked really, really bad. I bought it and played it. She hated it so much that she forced herself to go to sleep so she wouldn't listen to it. Awesome.

The great thing is that I'm actually having difficultly remembering any more distinct examples of her being in a foul mood - let me say there were a LOT of them. I'm only really remembering the good stuff now... thank god the crap is being filtered out!

Holiday nearing an end

I've been heaps out of touch with everyone lately, but my Christmas 2004 vacation is nearing an end. Most of the time I've been away from Internet access to update this website. I hope everyone had a great Christmas and New Year! I'll be updating this website with what I got up to over the break in the next few days and believe me that's going to take quite a few posts.

Right now I'm in Phoenix, Arizona and I'm due to fly back to Fort Lauderdale tonight. I gotta go now and see if I can find my iPod charger... I think I lost it in San Francisco though :-(