Update on birthday madness

Here are some pictures from the Thursday night. Looking at the first picture we have Eddie, Andrea, Jon and PK! I'm pouting/pursing my lips in some of the pictures (as are the other guys) because Andrea's ex never smiled in any of his photos, and always did that with his mouth. We are always paying her out about that. I'm particularly impressed with my effort in the second photo.






The pictures were all taken at a hispanic club called 'Spice' in downtown Hollywood (the Florida Hollywood, not the California one). We apparently went there again Friday night, but Friday was a bit of a big one for me. I can't remember anything of what happened after the first hour, and I was out for 10 hours that night. At one stage I was supposedly dancing with one of the awesome bar chicks at Spice, but I can't remember that at all. I'd give anything to get that memory back!

Happy birthday to me!

Shameless plug, yes.

I am tired. Really tired. Last night I got back to my friend's house and crashed on the couch at . . . 4:30am. So I guess I really got back this morning. My project group this morning was serving up breakfast, so I had to be at work at 7:30am. That hurt a lot, especially now that I'm 28! OMFG my bones are giving up on me, I'll need a walking frame soon and where the hell did I put my falsies???

P.S. I'm talking crap above. Although I am running on a couple of hours of sleep I have never felt better. Bring this older age business ON!

Viva Las (ow my head hurts)

So for the past few days I've found myself in Las Vegas, catching up with a friend who is in the US on a work assignment with some of his colleagues. This place is a LOT of fun. "I don't gamble", but I have been playing a few blackjack tables here and there and doing okay. Last night though at the Hard Rock casino my mind finally gave up on me and I could not even add together 7 and 4. No, I lie. I could add that together fine, it's just that 5 seconds later I forgot what the total was. After realising that wasn't helping me (I forgot I came to that conclusion several times) I decided to have an early night (4 am) and reboot my mind. Looking forward to doing it all over again tonight!

So I wanted to make a pavlova. . .

and then I found that my flatmate does not even have half the necessary baking gear for such a task (and it *is* only pavlova). 'tis a sad, sad day for Pavlova Kristian.

You know, I could run off to a Walmart and buy all the stuff I need, but I actually feel much better bitching about it on my blog.

Yes, this was really just a post to keep my blog updated.

=~=

Something more interesting, I'm listening to Quantic's latest album "An announcement to answer". It's so freaking cool. Soul, funk, hip-hop, latin beat, electronica, all blended together to form that tasty cake mix you end up eating half of before putting it in the oven. But it gets even better after a couple of listens! (i.e., bake @ 175 degrees Celsius for 35 minutes) . . . yep, baking is definitely on the brain.

Congratulations Kynan and Debbie

Recently my friends back in Australia, Kynan and Debbie, had their first child Cooper, a healthy looking baby boy. Congratulations Kynan and Debbie!

K-9, someday you'll have to teach your son to do this. None of us standing there could believe you did it:

Congratulations Javi and Glenda!

Recently my friends here in Florida, Javi and Glenda, had their first baby. Her name is Veronica. Congratulations Javi and Glenda!

I took photos at their baby party recently, so now you know who I'm writing about.

How to save a wet cell phone

Hah! I cracked up laughing when I saw this website. Firstly because the pictured phone is the same damn one as mine that got a 'little' wet in the clothes wash a while back. Secondly because I failed at step one:

Get it out of the water as soon as possible. The plastic covers on cell phones are fairly tight, but water can enter the phone over time. But this time may be quite short - 20 seconds or less. So grab your phone quickly!

20 seconds is a lot less than 10 or so minutes, right?

Scrubs at work

Oh, this is great. A recent episode of 'Scrubs' had Colin Hay, of 'Men at work' fame, singing 'Overkill'. Outstanding!

Thanksgiving?

I had many good plans for this year's thanksgiving, even backup plans. Over the last few days I've watched each plan get struck down. Now I just don't know what to do at all. I certainly don't want to go somewhere I've already been, I really hate travelling by myself, and I sure as hell don't want to stay in Florida.

(puts thinking cap on)

hmmm . . .

NO BLOODY WAY

"THE United States has slapped a ban on Vegemite, outraging Australian expatriates there"

Link to news story

If I needed an excuse to leave this country, this is it.

I HAVE TWO LARGE JARS OF VEGEMITE, BITCHES!!!! COME AND GET ME!!!!

Some kewl new music

I used to follow a band called Zephyr Timbre, out of Brisvegas. They had some pretty cool tunes. Relaxed, funky, soulful... those are some words I'd use to describe them. Eventually they went their separate ways, much to my dismay.

However.

For a while now I've been following a new group formed by a couple of the ex-members of Zephyr Timbre. The group is called "My Ninja Lover", and a few weeks ago now they released their first EP "Silk and Daggers". It's awesome, and I love it. Go buy their EP from any of the stores (physical and online) listed on their website: http://myninjalover.com/. Preview their music at their myspace page.

Views from a plane

I've created a new set called 'views from a plane' on Flickr as I saw some interesting stuff when I last visited Australia. Here are some of the pictures (more to come). Set link is here.

Bye bye New Zealand

This is a bit of a weird one. Currently I'm sitting on the upper deck (business) of a 747, awaiting takeoff to LAX, leeching the wifi signal from the Auckland international airport terminal.

An explanation.

Just under two weeks ago I got asked if I would like to fly to Australia for a work trip, helping the customer in Melbourne with testing of one of our new products. I had two days to prepare everything, and I spent a pretty hectic week in Melbourne with work related stuff. I was in Adelaide for about a day total and spent a couple of days back in rural SA catching up with family members. My brother and I staged quite a surprise for mum, thank God she's still around, we thought we'd nearly sent her to an early grave there for a while. I'll just say that she wasn't expecting either of us there when she walked into the kitchen.

I caught up with some people back in Oz, but not nearly as many as I wanted, as is always the case (really, I was only in Adelaide for a day). Some people I didn't catch up with I'll be seeing later this year anyway, and you know who you are.

There is only one bad thing about this whole trip: how the hell am I ever going to fly economy ever again after this excellent treatment? :-p

P.S. I must learn to say 'no' more often to 'would you like more wine?'

P.P.S. Also, it's not like I spent a large amount of time in NZ... all of about 2 hours I think.

Miami at night

I took this HDR picture of Miami the other night. It's a few pictures taken at different exposures slapped together with photoshop. I ended up forgetting that each photo taken for a HDR really should be one-stop different from its 'neighbour', and the highest exposure photo wasn't nearly enough to bring out the reflection in the water. Also, I was in the sort of spot where I didn't feel completely safe, so I didn't hang around for too long.

Is that enough excuses yet?

Note this is a very small snippet of the Miami skyline. It's a lot larger than this and is due to get a *lot* larger than it is now. Count the number of cranes in this picture. I think there are something like ten of them.

Click on the pic to access the larger versions.

Top Gear presenter in crash

I am a massive, massive fan of the BBC car show "Top Gear". The trio of presenters work just so well together and make it absolutely hilarious to watch. Frosty (who at one time maintained his blog!) used to have screenings during work back in Adelaide, something I always looked forward to.

Richard Hammond, one of the presenters, was recently in a car crash while trying to beat the British land speed record. I'm not surprised at that, I'm surprised he actually got injured (and pretty badly too). Here's hoping he recovers soon!

Story is here.

Cafe Tacuba

I've really, really been getting into the Spanish/hispanic thing lately. I've started listening to a lot of the music, local bands like Minimal and now branching out to some other groups like the superstar Mexican group Cafe Tacuba. My fav song from them so far: Eres. Even if you don't know a lick of Spanish, it still sounds damn good.

Felicidades Omar y Jessie!!

Wow.

One of my best friends over here in the US, Omar, and his wife, Jessie (who is also a best friend), just informed me that they are six weeks pregnant. I was informed of this via a text message today that said:

(news)We're pregnant, talk soon!"

It took me a little while to recover from falling off the floor. Awesome, awesome news. Congratulations again Omar and Jessie! I know you never read my blog but what the hell I just had to write this down anyway!

This adds to the list of friends over here and back in Oz who are pregnant or who have had kids recently:

Plugger and Kate
K9 and Debbie
Cepi and Arlene
Javi and Glenda
Todd and Heidi
Susan and Rick

Wow. Just wow. The ground is covered in babies.

Nice conversations

Americans like having discussions while occupying the toilet. It's a fascinating if slightly disturbing habit. Americans also like guns. Also fascinating, also slightly disturbing. Now that I've got those major generalisations out of the way, let's combine them: talking about guns while in the toilet. Today there was a three way conversation about guns going on. One guy was talking to a fellow gun-toting dude over his phone, some other guy recognised his voice and love of guns and decided to join in. "have you bought your gun yet? ... all I need is a .45 and my collection will be filled out..."

Nice.

It's obviously too quiet in toilets around here, so people feel the need to occupy the silence with their important conversations. I say that massive speaker systems should be installed in the toilets, with fully sick subwoofers, and volume knobs that go to eleven. If they could wire those speaker systems into Radio One, that'd be pretty awesome. Problem solved!

Wassup, PK?

Time has been... interesting, lately.

So I went to Nicaragua, again, "to see what I missed out on last time". The photo set I recently uploaded to Flickr is here. The set consists more of people shots than anything else. It's not complete (the sets never are, it seems. There are many pictures where I think "hmmm, that needs to be edited a bit..." or "ok, I have to turn this into a panorama"), but it's a start.

[... emotional content snipped :) ]

The Fifth

I'm currently chillin' in Miami airport waiting for my flight to Managua, so thought I'd upload a video of a recent night out at "the fifth". It's a very SoBe sort of club. Very expensive too (da, that's SoBe as well). The music was a bit dodgy earlier on, but once the DJs decided to do away with the "hey, we're a club, let's play hip hop" cliche and actually play some decent dance music, then things got a little better.

Here is a pic of one of the dancers at the club:


Here is a short video clip from the club: