Ultrafest 2005

You wouldn't believe it, but I finally got the movies from Ultrafest from my friend. You need Apple Quicktime to view these files. The files are of a Drum and Bass tent, Moby, Oakenfold (I think it was anyway) and a quick location shot. Click on this link to get to the files. If you don't feel like waiting to download them (who would?), you can log in using the username "iwannalook" and the password "letmein" (without the quotes). Someday I'll find a hosting site that's a bit more friendly. Someday.

Here are some crappy snaps of some of the more interesting groups of acts for the festival. I didn't get to see all of them as we arrived later in the day.

Don't try this at home

For some reason, I had not eaten since last night when I had a red bull at 3pm today.

DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME! THIS IS A BLOODY STUPID THING TO DO!

Although I was typing at a rate that seemed like 100 words per minute and thinking relatively clearly after consuming the Red Bull, at 5pm I can safely say I can no longer think straight nor can I even type. My mind is wandering off far from home base. I have all the symptoms of being drunk but I have not consumed any alcohol. This is fricken weird.

Yes, Red Bull gives you wings, but where the f?#k have I landed?

Damn fuel sensors

I will say no more (for today) :-p

I am fricken stoked

I did not expect this at all, but the launch viewing tickets arrived in the mail today. That's fricken awesome.

The last straw

After a long day sometimes one just wants to retire for the night and do absolutely nothing. Firstly though, one must find a car park. This was the only car park "vacant" near my apartment:


Seriously, who "parks" their mountain bike in a car park?

At any rate, I bought the perfect thing to take my mind off the real world on the weekend and take part in a virtual one. 100 big ones got me a Nintendo Gamecube, controller, memory card and 2 games (Metroid and Zelda). This should keep my mind off of trashing people's mountain bikes, for a little while at least.

Difficulties

I was really, really looking forward to seeing the shuttle launch at Kennedy Space Centre this Wednesday. I was going to tie an Australia flag around my shoulders and shout out
"Go Andy! Go you good thing go!"... and yeah, he'd hear that from 6 miles away. However as things go it seems I'll be observing the launch from somewhere else. Call it my stupid absent mindedness but the tickets I purchased way back when (beginning of April I think) were valid for that launch and the next rescheduled launch, if that happened. I know the launch has been rescheduled at least twice, but for some reason it never clicked with me I'd have to order more tickets. I think I just plain forgot at the time about the rescheduling terms.

Here is the part that bites. You don't get refunded for tickets. Period. It's sort of like paying $50 to go see a performer, the show gets cancelled, but they keep your money. I don't know what to think of this - there is a pain in my head where I think of how I just lost $100 for the satisfaction of... nothing. Yeah, this was all in their terms and conditions that tickets were not refundable and I bought the tickets *knowing* that but not really *thinking* about it. I feel like I've just given away money to some guy who claims he's selling Nikon D70s but is really based in Spain or somewhere else outside of the US and is trying to rip people off (I wonder if he did get any people's money...).

I don't really care about going to watch it offsite anymore because there are supposed to be other places to see the launch from. But you know, even an e-mail saying something like this would have been fantastic: "Your tickets for the original launch are now invalid. You can re-purchase tickets starting from such and such a date and time". Perhaps some tickets will just magically appear in the mail for me in the next day. Yeah - pigs, flying, stuff.

Weird day

I don't know what other people were doing but I spent most of my day just watching the news regarding the terrorist attacks in London. I was extremely grateful to get e-mails from people who I knew were in the area, telling others that they were ok. So to those of you over in London, I hope you continue to remain safe.

It's times like these that Wikipedia (that free, online encyclopedia for those not in the know) really shines. They have an excellent summary of the situation as it stands, and I actually found myself wandering off to other parts of the wikipedia site to, for example, read about Pan Am Flight 103. I do this because I'm an information freak and I like to try to understand the reasons why people do things like this. Plus, the poet Sylvia Plath wrote some poetry about the macabre nature of humans and how we are in awe of tragedy. I guess I'm expressing that part of myself by monitoring the Internet.

In other news, it seems Florida is about to be bombarded with another hurricane. The season starts in June and ends in November, and we've already had a couple of tropical storms come through. Hurricane Dennis is poised to come past the west coast of Florida. This of course will also likely delay the lauch of the space shuttle Discovery on Wednesday which I am extremely keen on seeing. The space shuttle has delayed a lot of my visits to other cities in the US - I don't want to plan a trip and then find that the shuttle is going to launch the same time I was due to go on holiday. Oh yeah, my problems are just huge...

July 4 Fireworks

I have to quickly blog on what is probably the most impressive fireworks display I've ever seen (well, the year 2000 fireworks display in Sydney was pretty good too). It's not impressive because of the fireworks themselves, it's impressive because from my lucky vantage point everywhere I look I see fireworks. Suburban South Florida is putting on a heck of a free show.

Independence day weekend

Is already off to a good start. I woke up this morning with a painful feeling in my mouth that indicated the slice of pizza I had at 3:30am this morning was indeed hot. I spent last night in Fort Lauderdale with some friends mostly attempting to dance to RnB. I succeeded for quite a few hours and then I just got sick of it.

What was most surprising about last night, for me anyway, was that Karma lounge is in fact not dead. I spoke to one of the people behind the bar and they said "yeah, that person who wrote the article got it wrong... we don't know where she got that information from. She was actually here last week...". So, there you go. I think they've actually turned down the volume by a few decibels too, but there still weren't many people there.

It's pretty cool how fireworks can be purchased at the local supermarket for July 4 activities. What I found really funny though were the names of the fireworks, like "Freedom fireworks" and "Desert strike". Ok, so they're even trying to put subliminal messages through fireworks these days. I was wondering if when the fireworks exploded they said "Mission Accomplished" (or as the Daily Show put it in an anagram, "C'mon, I lied. So scampish"). I'll get back to you on that one. Seriously though, there are fireworks going off in quite a few areas when I was looking over my balcony before. There is a pretty cool vibe around the place at the moment.

I've worn my "Florida... stay awhile" shirt that has the drawings of graves on an island a few times now. I've had quite a few compliments about it so far from people who I think thought that I was being patriotic or something like that, so I've had to point out to them what the graves on the island mean and then I explain that I'm moving over here, and that the shirt is me having a go at myself. Ummm, a lot of people don't get that.

Well, I'm off to watch some more backyard fireworks before deciding what to do tonight. Adios!

A "what the heck is that person doing now"

I sometimes get curious and find out what people are doing today who I remember from my childhood. Can any of you remember the movie "The Wizard". I can remember loving this movie at the time because it had Super Mario Bros 3, a huge gaming screen, and a Nintendo Powerglove. Mind you, I haven't watched it since then... I didn't want to ruin the childhood memory of it being a great movie. Anyway, there was a girl in the movie, Jenny Lewis, who apart from the guy with the powerglove is one of the people who I remember most from the movie. I even forgot the movie had Fred Savage in it, but I only associate him with "The Wonder Years" and facial moles these days.

I digress. These days Jenny Lewis is actually the lead singer for a band called "Rilo Kiley". They're an indie rock band from California and after listening to some of the tunes on their website I thought they weren't too bad at all. I think their latest CD would be quite appropriate for cruising around on 2-lane American highways.

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.

I'm back

You know, I thought my post last night regarding this actually made it into the blogger brain... but obviously not. Pity that, actually. It was full of wit and humour that would have left even the most discerning critic wondering why I spend my time monkeying about with code rather than writing jaw-dropping literature.

Illusionary world aside, yes I'm back from New Orleans, Nawlins, the Crescent City, Big Easy, whatever you feel like confusing people with. After driving 1850 miles this is a quick-arse summary of my thoughts of my extended long weekend of travel:

1) New Orleans is a pretty effing cool city.
2) New Orleans actually looks better during the day than at night. Contrast this with Miami, which is a pretty city at night but not too pretty during the day.
3) Florida actually has undulations in its terrain up around the panhandle.
4) Miles don't click over quickly enough.
5) Aquaplaning for about 20 metres during a big arse thunder storm on the way back is "interesting".

New compilation album to get...

Just heard it on Annie Mac's Radio 1 session - Liquid V club sessions, for all good things DnB.

Dang, I gotta go. Got Santos Renuentes to see *yet again* tonight at Tobacco Road. I wish they'd play in like, New York or something like that. I need an excuse to fly up there*. Plus, tomoz I have to go to... New Orleans! Oh I'm bored already. hehe.

* WTF am I talking about, like I need an excuse???

Muvico

There is a huge movie complex not far from where I live called Muvico. Actually, there are a few of them around the place. This one has 24 cinemas - nothing to write home about when you come from a city that had a 31 cinema complex - but this place is all Egyptian themed and tries to be impressive in that respect. These cinemas weren't as good as the 31 cinema complex though. Maybe it was the crowd.

I've noticed a bit of a contrast to movie-goers here and over in Australia. Over here there are a few people who lack respect for anyone else watching a movie and don't recognise the fact that other people actually did pay to see the movie too. These people were constantly checking for messages on their mobile phones. I remember once I had a guy listening to his CD player at full volume sitting right next to me.

Point being, I went to see Star Wars episode 3. It was oooookay - but that was from going in with extremely low expectations. I guess those expectations were met. The wooden performances had me laughing in a couple of spots. I was thinking "does Lucas really expect me to buy into this?" Well, he got my money so I guess he really doesn't care. The movie experience was perfectly summed up though when during the silent parts I was able to hear some guy behind me snoring.

It's done!

So, the future is going to be even more exciting. In the next couple of months I'll be going through the motions of buying a car, finding a flatmate, getting a fortnightly salary (compared to the monthly one I've gotten so used to) all American style. To be perfectly honest, I didn't make this move for the money. I won't be much better off here than I was in Australia, but the difference is I *won't* be in Australia. Mexico is only a couple of hours away by plane. Jamaica ain't that far either. South America - just a wee bit south. Problem is that due to my Visa extension I won't be going outside of the US for another few months until processing has been completed.

That doesn't matter though, there is enough going on over here to keep me busy. The French food and wine festival is on this coming long weekend in New Orleans and I've made plans with a couple of friends to go for a road trip. I haven't been a tourist for a while now so "I'm excited".

Adios muchachos.

Update on change

I've given myself the weekend to think about this and do some more figures. I should know myself better. Although I've been thinking about doing this for a while, I have a gut feeling that says something isn't right with the current terms and conditions. I'll update how things go on Monday, which is my deadline for replying.

Change

I'll put it sort of cryptically - tomorrow I hand in a piece of paper that says 'next time, my flight from Australia to the US won't be return'.

(Kristian == nerd) == TRUE?

Noooo! Lately I've been feeling it... I've been working absolutely ridiculous hours at work and I'm nearly getting used to it. I'm coming to expect it of myself. This has to change, and it has to change now. I admit I may be a little nerdy - heck look at my bloody blog icon - it's from a bleedin' 1986 Nintendo game. I used to read microprocessor spec documents 'for fun'. Shit shit shit.

I watch Dr Who, I watch Battleship Galactica, I own Star Trek tapes.

Crap crap crap.

Well, I may as well accept the fact.

So you can imagine how cool I find the Electronic Entertainment Expo! Dang, those PS3 videos look absolutely awesome http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/05/16/news_6124681.html.

*sigh*

However, I am proud to say that I couldn't care less about missing out on the premiere of Star Wars and actually only getting to see it in, ooh, a week or two. Episode 1 sucked hard, Episode 2 sucked a little less and maybe this one will be ok. Meh, whatever.

Winky vs Trinidad

I went to a friend's house Satdee night to watch a boxing fight on HBO pay per view. Now let me get this straight - I ain't the biggest fan of boxing. Actually I'd usually go out of my way to avoid watching fights because I just think it's sort of cave man like but I tucked all those thoughts away and just watched the damn thing. The fight was between Winky Wright and Felix Trinidad. The 'local' boy Winky ended up winning, even with a rather distracting boil or whatever the heck it was on his neck. Dis-gust-ing. Check the link here for some more fight details.

What I found really funny about the fight was the absolute crap and fluff the commentators dribbled to fill in time. It was just incredibly stupid stuff. My absolute favourite part though was when one of the commentators was trying to make a point that something was the exact opposite, so he resorted to this analogy (not exact wording but): "Take for example Afghanistan and then being all the way on the opposite side of the world . . . like Denmark". Hmmm, stick to the boxing world buddy. The real world is probably too big for you. It sort of surprised me he didn't say Iraq, because that's another country that the media here has been mentioning for some reason.

Speaking of funny, what I saw today cracked me up a bit. I'd pulled up at a set of lights and was watching some people get out of their car at the intersection and push it across because it had broken down. What was written on the windows? "For sale".

And to finish off the triple play of funnies, here is a website dedicated to chicks being filmed trying to get their bogged cars out of mud and so forth.
http://www.carstuckgirls.com/.
It's funny how you come across sites like that which are totally unrelated to the material you're reading at the time. I checked out the FAQ to get a 'please explain' for the website and all it had was help in sorting out technical difficulties with getting the videos to play. Oh, and it describes how they keep the packaging discrete. I guess that's so your significant other doesn't find out you have a . . . chicks-getting-cars-stuck-in-mud fetish? Ohhhhh kaaaay.

Bro's causing problems again!

At the moment my Bro is lying in a bed in the Royal Adelaide hospital and has been there for the past few days. He's had multiple CAT scans and MRI scans. I've been talking to him and he seems fine at the moment but has to stay in hospital once results from all the scans are in. The doctors said they actually found something - a brain! I say check again!

Anyway bro, hope you get out of there soon - and leave the female French doctors alone, ok? ;-)

UPDATE: He's now out of hospital.

Cinco de Mayo pictures

There was a Cinco de Mayo celebration at Tobacco Road last Thursday night and Santos Renuentes were playing there again. I've got pics from the night uploaded here.

Hard Rock casino

I went out Saturday night to the retail area around Hard Rock casino which has all the clubs and shopping stuff. I've been here a few times and it's pretty good, all things considered. I hadn't been out with that group for a night out before and damn, I ended up having a blast. I think seeing chicks riding mechanical bulls really sealed off the night.

We started off at an Irish pub that was playing songs like "Loveshack" by the B-52s. . . yeah. The "DJ" there could not mix fricken salt and water. It was absolutely terrible. I was glad to get out of there. Next we tried getting into a club called "Pangaea". It seemed a group our size was not going to have any luck in getting in without buying a couple of tables though (at $250 each).

Since people were getting restless the decision was made to go to watch some mechanical bull riding at a place called Tequila Ranch, a Mexican themed restaurant. This place apparently doesn't have the best Mexican food around, but it made up for that in other ways. I have to say thankyou Todd for being so pro-bull. Not that Todd will probably ever read this blog but his name is now in here. Words can't describe how fantastic it was to see two girls at once riding a mechanical bull. "2night" were there and here is a link to pictures from the night. I was thinking that'd be a cool gig - taking pictures in all the cool clubs around Miami and surrounding areas with my digital SLR. . . how awesome would that be?! I think it would be as awesome as using someone's fist as a microphone to sing "No woman no cry" and "One love", which is something I ended up doing that night even though I wasn't drunk.

We closed out the country bar and most of the people in our group left after that. Those of us remaining went back to Pangaea hoping to get in this time. We got in no problemo and even slipped past the girl at the door collecting money because she was busy messaging someone on the phone (normally it would cost $20 to get in).

Pangaea is a pretty good club considering its location. Click this link to see a sampling of people who were there the same night. They have an obligatory RnB/Hip Hop room and in another room they have the dance music, which was ok I guess. It was a little too techno if you know what I mean. Too much beat and not enough style. Maybe some other nights they play music which is similar to that on their website.

I was at the bar in Pangaea ordering a drink when I noticed a guy having an epileptic fit on the floor not far from me. There was the typical crowd of stunned onlookers - of course no-one could have done much at that stage of a fit. But once the fit subsided I didn't see anyone putting him into the recovery position and checking his airways etc. So can you guess who had to do this? I didn't hang around for too long though as there were a few of his friends who were there to take care of him.

All things considered though, it wasn't a bad night at all.

Kung Fu movies and beer

Don't mix them. Especially don't mix beer and "Kung Fu Hustle". A friend and I did that Friday night and I think it was the weirdest movie experience I've ever had. That movie probably doesn't need the help of alcohol to make it interesting anyway.

Ft Lauderdale Air and Sea show

On Sunday here were the reasons why I hauled my arse out of bed at 7:00am in the morning to get a good seat for the Ft. Lauderdale Air and Sea show:

F-117 Nighthawk
B-2 Stealth Bomber
B-52 Stratofortress
A-10 Warthog
F-14 Tomcat
AV-8B Harrier
V-22 Osprey
last, and certainly not least, F-22 Raptor.

None of those planes showed up the whole damn day. I haven't seen any of these planes in real life yet. Exactly these planes were supposed to be there (pending operational availability blah blah blah). Was I disappointed? Yeah, a bit. I did get some pics though and a tan and I did get weirded out several times during the day. What I mean is, the show was obviously very American. Duh. The whole "support our troops" slogan was getting compressed into my ears and that just made me realise I really was over in the US. I go by every day not really thinking about that too much. Then a reality spin thing happened when I didn't really believe I was here and everything seemed to do a 180 degree turn. I also got that tinnitus or ringing in my ear just to help with the outer-body feeling. It was weird.

Here is the link to the damn pictures: click me, click me now.

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