Down memory lane

Whilst I've been bed-ridden recently, I've summoned the energy up to entertain myself with a little surfing of the internets. This post is a whole lot about nostalgia, so see if you remember these little youtube gems that I've found.













Anyone got any more? Ones that I just can't find are "AEIOU", with those little characters drawn in the sand who fight some dragon or something. Another is "Robo Story", where the white leader keeps calling everyone else "imbeciles".

What's up with PK?

So Sunday night I found myself in the emergency room of a hospital. Three scoops of icecream is all it took to turn me into a mess of a person who had difficulty breathing or swallowing, was very light-headed, shaking, had a high pulse rate and was just about to collapse. I scared the hell out of my flat-mate, but rest assured, he wasn't as scared as I.

I've been talking to doctors, venom experts from Australia, etc. etc. etc. to see if this had anything to do with the bite I got in January. The consensus was that no, it didn't, and that the venom only lasts for 5 days anyway. So whatever I've got now is supposed to be unrelated to the bite, supposedly.

The major theory going around is that I have an allergy to something. Obviously, this allergy must have developed this year (since the bite, I reckon) because as my friends know, I eat a heck of a lot of food. Currently I can't eat any type of food without getting a reaction. Even a glass of water yesterday caused something to happen. In the past few months I have at times experienced numbness in my legs and just a general light headedness. I've told this to doctors etc, but they've either put it down to the bite or just don't know what is going on and that I'll recover from whatever it is.

Yay, so now I'm probably allergic to anything you can eat or drink. This is a problem. I'm not expecting anyone out there to solve this, but it's just for my friends and family to know.

Complainers, whingers, whiners

We're all allowed our fair share of whinging and whining and complaining I think. You know, people have to get that stuff off their chest every now and then. But hell, the number of times I hear people complain about the weather around here. I actually like weather in general. I like its unpredictability. The day we can control the weather is the day I'll start complaining about it.

But seriously, I can't even get people to sit outside when it's slightly humid. They'd rather stay in the air conditioned building and when they leave work they get into to their air conditioned car and when they get home they get into their air conditioned house. I constantly hear about it being too humid, too rainy, too hot, and they hardly spend any time outside.

Pause.

Deep breath.

IT'S FU#KEN FLORIDA! WHAT THE FU#K DO YOU EXPECT FOR FU#K'S SAKE?!?

Complaining about complainers. Hmmmm....

UPDATE: It was pretty hot the other night out though :-p

Recently

Recently something happened... I can't remember what it was...

nice one pk.

P.S. Although I haven't been making too many posts lately, I have been taking quite a few pictures. Like, the flickr badge to the right has been in a state of constant update, pretty much. Apart from that I've been pretty flat out. Some major stuff coming up in the next few months. Hope you're having fun y'all.

Peace out.
PK.

Weird Saturday stuff

Last Saturday was a pretty weird day, in that everything I had planned didn't work out. The original plan was to:
- go see Fiona Apple at Sunfest in West Palm beach.
- drop in at a friend's birthday party in Plantation.
- have dinner at Thai Orchid in Coral Gables.
- see Mimimal play at I/O lounge in downtown Miami.

That plan was pretty damn ambitious, since it involved traversing three counties in one day. I like the ambitious plans though, so I was all for giving it a shot. Unfortunately, as the day wore on, I realised that I just wouldn't be able to get to see Fiona Apple. I had to drive to Sunfest the next day anyway to shoot photos for another of Hilary's concerts. I couldn't be bothered. I also wanted to spend more time at the birthday party so I cancelled my dinner and told the people I'd meet up with them at the Minimal gig. No real drama.

The birthday party was next. I ended up arriving at the party precisely one week early. I haven't done anything like this before, but I'm sure it brought some laughs to the birthday girl. There is a good reason why I stuffed this up - I'm stupid.

So, not having a birthday party to go to I called up the dinner friends and told them I could come. One of them offered me a lift to the restaurant from his place so I took that offer up.

Later, after mucking around with some music stuff, we left for the restaurant. However, he'd forgotten where he put some flyers for the band that night. We ended up going back to his house and spent well over an hour looking for the damn flyers. They were absolutely nowhere to be found. I thought I'd seen him put the flyers on the car so I went for a pretty long walk to find any suspect flyers all over the road. I didn't find anything (apart from a few pairs of shoes, which I thought to be pretty weird actually).

We left his house, defeated. Calling the friends we were meeting for dinner, we were informed the restaurant was actually shut. Bugger! We made alternative plans and ate somewhere else. It was getting late and we all thought we'd missed the Minimal gig. We arrived at I/O lounge and discovered that they were actually still playing - although one of our group had forgotten their ID and couldn't immediately get into the lounge. Great! After some convincitroning (word?) we all got in and enjoyed a couple of Minimal songs. I guess that one thing sorta did turn out alright.

I took pictures on the night. I'm dragging my camera with me everywhere these days it seems. Click on the picture below:


You'll start working out pretty quickly who I hang out with here in South Florida.

I'm back

And I'm bloody exhausted. I had accumulated about 2 hours of sleep when I arrived in Miami last night - I just can't sleep upright. Period. Sleeping pills (which I tried this time around) made me feel very tired but then I couldn't fall asleep.

I watched some cool movies on the way over though - "House of flying daggers", "Capote", "Good luck and good night", and my favourite of the flight, "Enron: The smartest guys in the room".

I also have some pictures that I uploaded from the trip. They're not all up, but click on the cute cat below to get to what there is...

Seeya Australia!

I'm currently waiting in the Melbourne airport for the gate to open for my flight to Los Angeles. I've taken a quick picture of the plane I'll be flying back in so here it is:



Anyway, seeya to all the people I caught up with in Oz. To the people I didn't catch up with, I'll see you around sometime. I don't know when I'll be returning to Australia again, so I expect to see you overseas, ok? Good.

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