Chilling out in LAX

Back in Fort Lauderdale it's currently 1:13am. This means that pretty soon I should be getting some sleep... yerr, that's just not going to happen. A couple of more hours and then I catch this bastard economy flight to Melbourne. I arrive at 12:30pm in Adelaide to a spanking new airport! It is working now, right??? Last time they were having fuel problems or something and we had to use the old building. Well, whatever, I never really had anything to say for this post, I'm only writing something coz I was able to find a free wifi spot.

An up and down Monday

Monday started off like any other Monday. Check e-mails received over the weekend, catch up with other people to see what they got up to, think about what had to be done for the week. There was one thing in the back of my mind though: the flight to Australia. Now don't get me wrong, I was sooooo looking forward to going back to Australia and meeting up with everyone I possibly can, but it's that damn flight that I was worried about. If you read this mess of words often enough you'd know I got bitten by a red-back spider a couple of days before flying back to the US. The bite got completely mis-diagnosed, I thought I was ok to fly, but in the end I wasn't. It's the only time I really thought I was going to die, and I say that in all seriousness. Since then I've had dizzy spells and numbness like I had on the plane, but nowhere near the severity. They've pretty much gone *now*, but I was still scared of getting on the plane, whilst going through my Monday morning thought process.

I mentioned this to my friend at work and said that it would have really been good to go on a couple of rollercoaster rides before I left, just to test if I was fit to fly. What happened next was amazing. He looked up the weather for Orlando - awesome day predicted. Orlando of course has all the major theme parks, "Islands of Adventure" being one of them. "The Hulk", one of my favourite rollercoaster rides, is also there. Orlando is also 3 hours drive away from Ft Lauderdale. It was 11am. The park closed at 10pm. We decided to leave work for the rest of the day and ride on rollercoasters instead. Totally random. Totally impromptu.

We went on "the Hulk" three times. We went on "Dueling Dragons" four times. We also went on the "Spiderman" and "The Mummy" rides. It was an awesome day, full of adrenalin. At the end of the night, while on the "Dueling Dragons" ride, fireworks were setting an awesome backdrop to an awesome ride.

I am fit to fly.

Going mobile and lacking sleep

It's currently past 5am in the morning. I didn't head out tonight, but I am at a mate's place (some dodgy Nicaraguan) working out some music stuff. At this stage I have had a few beers - Sam Adams and Presidente. I am loving my new laptop. I know someone reading this laughed when I said that I *needed* to buy a laptop. Well, I probably could have done my music course back in Australia by borrowing people's computers here and there, but that would be so damn inconvenient. Plus, now that I have a laptop, I am becoming a true geek. If I really want I could be one of those geeks who sits at Starbucks all day and surfs the net with their ultra-expensive T-Mobile access plan. There are two bad things about that - first, paying for the wifi access when many other coffee places have free wifi. The other one, oh so much more important, is that I still think that Starbucks' coffee sucks. Their frappuccino is the only thing decent there and if I drank them all day I'd probably turn out to be a pretty fat bastard, for some reason.

I try to adhere to a policy of not making blog entries when I'm tired and especially when I'm emotional or slightly drunk (I haven't been adhering to that lately, obviously), but what the hey. This site needed an update.

Hurricane season 2006

Alberto
Beryl
Chris
Debby
Ernesto
Florence
Gordon
Helene
Isaac
Joyce
Kirk
Leslie
Michael
Nadine
Oscar
Patty
Rafael
Sandy
Tony
Valerie
William

I'm going to be getting familiar with some of these names, I think. I should start a pool or something as to how many, and which hurricane/s is/are going to hit the east coast of Florida. I will bet on three hurricanes: Ernesto, Gordon and Patty.

I think if a hurricane is getting close and dangerous this year I'll head up to Canada - and probably have a snowstorm hit. Ah well, the powder will be good for snowboarding then I guess.

Another thing, the 10 most expensive hurricanes to hit the US (source = Wikipedia) (costs are inflation adjusted):

Katrina ($75B)
Andrew ($44.9B)
Charlie ($15.4B)
Ivan ($14.6B)
Hugo ($12.6B)
Wilma ($12.2B)
Agnes ($11.6B)
Betsy ($11.1B)
Rita ($9.4B)
Frances ($9.1B)

I've watched 6 of those come through while I've been here in the US. Daaaaamn.

Skype-ing it. Finally.

Sometimes it takes me a while to get around to stuff... like Skype for example. For those of you I know back in Oz, England, wherever you've gone, my Skype handle is daecks. So anyway, add me to your contact list! Or, let me know what other VoIP networks you may use. Or, continue thinking "PK, I don't really want to talk to you...". This stuff should be all operational within the next few days.

Brief return to Oz

I'm heading back to Australia for nearly 2 weeks at the end of this month. I'll be in Adelaide from the 22nd April till May 2nd. During the weekdays I'll actually be working but my weeknights should be relatively free. On the weekends I have to fit in a bachelor party, wedding and probably a 21st and a 50th as well. It would still be awesome to catch up any friends back there! Let me know if you'll be around by sending an e-mail to daecks@gmail.com. Due to me losing a lot of my contacts, it's probably pretty likely I don't have your number.

Some ultrafest pictures

are now online here. I don't know what I'm going to do about the movies yet. I'd like to post them but having a sort-of permanent hosting site for them is difficult. Well, perhaps I could try Google video or something.

Anyways, Ultrafest was awesome. I actually had to take my shoes off at one point because my feet hurt from jumping around so much.

There was only one thing that pissed me off that whole day and you know it's going to be one of those weird things that just get to me. In the Carl Cox tent there was a guy with some really expensive looking DSLR camera, much more expensive than mine. You know, he had the whole proper camera bag thing, the big hot-shoe flash arrangement, the I'm-too-cool-for-skool stance, a posse of fairly attractive women around him. I'm there with my point and shoot wishing I had my DSLR with me but knowing one had to have a special pass to bring such cameras in. Anyway, he was standing around the middle of the room, probably around 40 feet from the front of the stage. He brings out the camera to get a shot of the DJ, bear in mind it's pretty bright in the tent because of the insane lighting...

He uses his bloody flash. Looking down at the photo he's taken, and I could see the image result too, he sees some bright heads in the foreground reflecting the flash and not much in the background. The DJ couldn't reflect the flash coz he was just too bloody far away, wasn't he!?! I nearly went up to him and said "mate, forget the flash. Crank your ISO up. Set your shutter speed to something like 1/60. See what results you get". But I didn't, I thought I would have looked like a dickhead or something, or maybe he had a meat cleaver stored somewhere that he would have felt like using. Every shot he took he used the flash. Anyway, point is that's one of my pet peeves: people using flash for objects further than 10 feet away (perhaps 20 feet if it's a more powerful hot-shoe flash). It pisses me off. It almost pisses me off more than people who pull up at stop lights and are always moving forward trying to predict when the lights go green. Then, when the lights actually *do* go green, they stay there for like 5 seconds. That really pisses me off.

Pissed (the non-drunk meaning) Kristian signing off.

New guitar

PK can rock out now.

GET MOTIVATED!

Today I attended a motivational business seminar as part of a team building activity for work. In a nutshell it was one of the weirdest experiences I've had while over in the US. The end result is that I'm not really any more motivated than when I got up this morning but I did learn a few interesting things.

The speakers that I saw today included Steve Forbes, General Colin Powell and Zig Ziglar, apparently the #1 motivator in the US. There were other speakers I didn't get to see including Rudolph Giuliani, Don Shula and Jerry Lewis. I wasn't feeling too well (6 days straight of going out finally got to me) so my friend and I left early.

Basically the whole thing was very American. Duh. When a speaker got on stage to talk there was a massive blast of music accompanied by pyrotechnics. This brought on many a raised eyebrow by myself. There was also a lot of 'patting America on the back', where the speaker would mention how great the country was, how free it was, how it was the greatest democracy ever, how it brought freedom to other countries afar, and there were a few compulsory 9/11 references to boot. At *any* of these references the crowd would go completely wild and insane which caused me to shrink down in my seat and think to myself "I don't belong here..." If you know me then you know I totally and completely disagree with the whole Iraq thing and I think America's foreign policy stinks. A lot of the stuff mentioned simply did not fly with me.

So the whole thing seemed to be a little Republican convention. It was about being successful and how you can best serve your own interests. Just from what I've seen over here so far that seems to fit the Republican psyche very well. It also showed how effective the speakers were at instilling these belief systems in the general American public. There is so much pomp and fanfare and glitz and glamour that I nearly found myself getting caught up in the moment.

The whole day also seemed to be an telemarketing campaign where you actually paid (I didn't of course, my company did) to get advice from people pushing their own agendas. "This tool is the best... you can see when the three green arrows come up and that's when you buy stocks... this whole program is normally $7000 but today you can get it for only $1000! Hurry! This is a limited offer only available today!" While I don't doubt the effectiveness of the tool, the whole thing did seem to be very late-night telemarketing-ish. It also brought back memories of the timeshare experience I had a while ago.

An interesting day, that is for sure. I learnt a few things, although the things learnt were not intended to be sent across by the presenters, I'm guessing. I'm actually keen to go to a full-on Republican convention now. Call me a masochist, but I just want to see more of this sort of stuff to see how bad it can *really* get.

I think I should move to Miami

Don't get me wrong. I love the Ft Lauderdale pub scene and the general laid back feeling that you get in most of the places. However, if I start from Wednesday night I was at the Hotel Victor for a Hilary McRae gig.

Thursday night I was at The Road for another Hilary gig.

Today I had a lunch meeting at the Ritz-Carlton in Coconut Grove for a breast cancer walk I'm participating in with friends.

Tomorrow I'm going to Ultrafest, which I am pretty bloody stoked about.

Sunday is the NASDAQ-100 tennis open. I'm hoping to get some good pictures there... I'll be sitting in the VIP section ;-)

All this leads to the conclusion that I really should be living further south than I am now.

One heck of a cool movie

V for Vendetta. Just go see it. I can't remember the last time I've wanted so bad to go and see a movie again. If I can get to see another session tomorrow night I will. It genuinely had me shaking in a couple of scenes due to the just how powerful they were. What an amazing film.

The things that surprised me the most though? There were teenagers afterwards debating if what V planned could be classified as a terrorist act. It actually got people talking. I actually caught myself thinking that maybe there was some hope still... sometimes I feel that isn't the case. Sometimes I think I just need to chill out.

What I especially liked about the movie were the parallels one could draw to the current administration over here in the US, but I guess any movie that talks about using fear and the media as a means to get what they want from the general population would draw such parallels. It's nearly 2am. I'm out of here.

Star-spotting

It's always cool to see famous people out and about. I had great difficulty getting a picture of this guy, coz the damn bouncers kept on getting in the way...




P.S. You do know who it is, right?

News reporter of the millennium

Sorry Sandra Sully...

Melissa Theuriau - bonjour!

http://www.ryoni.com/news/123/ARTICLE/1099/2005-01-07.html

Gallery of the day

Goes to NBA cheerleaders.

I dream of the day I'll be allowed to take my telephoto lens into a basketball arena. *sigh*.

Calle Ocho

As I type this I am absolutely buggered. I have been running on a minimum of sleep for a while now. This, of course, is entirely my fault.

I can't remember what I did Friday night anymore... something.

Saturday night we headed out to the lovely South Beach area to check out some cool places. There were a few spring breakers about but not as many as one would expect since South Beach can get bloody expensive. We ended up at a really, really cool hotel on the beachfront called the Shore Club.

Sunday was spent at Calle Ocho where I saw a heck of a lot of hispanic people walking about (of course) and Santos Renuentes were playing there too. I of course have some pics from their gig that I'll put up later. I didn't get too many pictures of the crowd... I'm getting pretty paranoid these days about taking pictures of people. There were some angry looking hispanic dudes walking about in this case.

Sunday night was awesome. We headed to Nikki Beach, where I got some great movies and some pictures. They'll be put up online later as well. That place is awesome and oh so relaxing and there is *always* a bewdifal crowd there.

Coldplay and Fiona Apple

On the weekend I got to see Coldplay and Fiona Apple play in Orlando. Actually, ha, let me correct that. I got to see a bit of one Fiona Apple song - "Fast as you can" - and you can bet I was running as fast as I could to get to my seat when I arrived at the venue.

It turns out we had a bit of bad luck with the traffic that night. What should have been a 15 minute drive to the venue turned out being over an hour drive. Whilst sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic we had to get to exit 83B on the I-4. Fiona would have already started her set, and being support act, would only be playing for 45 mins or so. Anyway, we came up to exit 82A... 5 mins passed ... exit 82B ... another 5 mins gone ... exit 82C... at which point I stated "ha, wouldn't it be funny if there was an 82D exit!" Nobody in the car really appreciated the humour.

We arrived, sat down, and Fiona left the stage. Excellent. I can't really express how much I was looking forward to seeing Fiona play live. I guess I'll have to wait another 5 years or something now.

Coldplay were awesome again though. It was cool to see all the massive yellow balls fall down again during "Yellow". Afterwards we were supposed to meet up with some people who were going to get us into one of the cool clubs. Unfortunately, one of them had a bit too much to drink and she was getting sick in the bathroom HALF WAY through the Coldplay set! Awesome.

Downtown was also bumper-to-bumper traffic so we decided to grab some grog and drink up at our hotel. I can't remember much after that, although I do remember us watching my copy of "You shoot, I shoot" for a little bit. It's pretty difficult to concentrate on subtitles when you're not exactly sober.

More photos please

Some "different" things have been going on in my life recently. People recently saw these photos from the CD release party. Actually the person who saw them was Fernando, who apart from playing for Santos Renuentes also plays for Hilary McRae (among many other groups).

I was asked if I wanted to further practice my photography and take pictures of Hilary's first ever gig. Those pictures are here. They liked those, so since then I've taken pictures of another concert by Hilary (photos are not yet online) and another Santos Renuentes gig.

I had heaps of fun taking the pictures, but what's even better, I got to take pictures for some awesome artists. Hilary, without even considering it was her first gig, was just absolutely outstanding.

How to kill a RAZR

Last week was an up-and-down week. I was doing this new photography stuff and had lots on my mind. I had gotten back from the gym and decided to put a load of washing on. Sitting down to relax I went to check my phone for messages... I couldn't find it. A bit unusual I thought. I looked everywhere for it. Still nothing. I tried calling the phone using my friend's mobile and it was going straight to voicemail. "Damn" I thought, "I've switched it off". But then I thought about that some more. I clearly remember NOT turning it off. More thinking. Going to voicemail.... phone must be off... why is phone off?... flat battery... no, it's fully charged... load of washing... battery dead... load of washing... load of washing... LOAD OF WASHING!

I absolutely flew downstairs and emptied the washing machine. Down the bottom of the tub was a very clean looking RAZR phone. HOLY SHIT! It was off. NO SHIT! I took it into work the next day, dismantled it (nice instructions on how to do that are here, pity the people taking the pictures didn't know that if they used a high f-stop value then everything would have been in focus) dried it out with alcohol, and tried resuscitating it a day later. It didn't work. HOLY SHIT! All my contacts were stored on my phone and not my SIM. HOLY SHIT! Ok, so I did have a backup of contacts from a few months ago and I do have e-mails from people who have changed their numbers, but hell, this is a stupid process to be going through.

Proof #1764743347 that PK is very human. I love reverse engineering my reactions to stuff like this though, and how I cope. How did I cope? I went out and bought a stack of stuff, like a point and shoot camera (always needed one of these, just required the right excuse), flash kit for my Nikon D-70, oh and a stack of clothes.

Right now my awesome friend Maha has lent me a phone, a Motorola A630. I don't mind the little bugger, it's starting to grow on me. I definitely don't want to get another RAZR. They're too bloody common for my liking, everybody has a RAZR. I'm sorta leaning towards a PEBL. If anyone has some spare PEBL parts from which I can build a phone, that preferrably isn't tied into a carrier, pretty please send them my way :-)

A warning

If I ever happen to call you and get your voicemail, and I'm within reach of my computer or iPod, you will get a power ballad left on your voicemail. I promise. Recent victims have received Michael Bolton's song mentioned previously, Heart's "Alone", Pat Benatar's "Love is a battlefield" and Def Leppard's "Love Bites".

Ho hum

I'm bored at work, well, it's 6pm and I feel like dribbling on my blog. You're reading this so you must be bored too. Or maybe you're finding something to kick start your day. Look elsewhere!

I like to start my work day with a bunch of questions and my objective is to get answers to all of them by the end. Today is not one of those days as I haven't answered any of the questions and I actually have more questions than I started with. yay!

Michael Bolton. Now that you're awake, it's weird how you hear a name and then it keeps popping up. I hadn't heard of this guy for ages and last night I watched "Office Space" and have been hearing his name ever since (Michael Bolton is the name of one of the characters in the movie). This morning I listened to the Chris Moyles show on BBC Radio One and the lead in was "How can we be lovers?", i.e.


How can we be lovers if we can't be friends
How can we start over when the fighting never ends
Baby, how can we make love if we can't make amends
Tell me how we can be lovers if we can't be,
Can't be friends


What a power ballad! Whoa. I've posted up lyrics to a MB song on my blog. I could imagine Cartman from South Park singing this song...

Onto other stuff, I get along well with a couple of people here at work and we're always finding stupid stuff on the internets. Has anyone seen the VW Golf GTI "Fast" commercials? "Fast" is a little devil sort of thing in guys that influences how we drive, if you girls didn't know. I'm sure at some point they'll tailor the ads for the ladies, but at the moment it's a guys only affair. Here are some links to the ads:

"Hair"
"Take out"
"Streamlined"

Fellas, make friends with your fast. By the way, nice marketing VW.

More google videos that I'm enjoying:
Wicked electricity arc
More wicked electricity stuff
Substation explosion