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:

Thank God for ears!

I'm lying here on my bed (no work today due to the storm) listening to Hybrid's latest studio album, "I choose noise", which got released today. In a word, it's fan-friggen-tastic. It's everything I hoped for in an album of this genre (think a symphony having a head-on collision with break beats). Listening to it is like diving into a massive pavlova and finding Tim Tams at the bottom. It's available for download in a "quite unlike iTunes" non-restrictive audio format, called MP3, from their label, distinct'ive records.

Not only that, but BT is also releasing his new album today, "This Binary Universe". I had to order the album the old fashioned way and wait for it to be delivered. I couldn't find a digital download (a.k.a.: torrent) to appease the consumer-whore in me that can't wait for delivery by the postman. The really cool thing about this album - apart from the fact that I know it's going to be cool because BT is the ultimate in his field - is the fact that one of the discs is recorded in full DTS surround sound! It makes me want to fly back to Oz and give it a listen on my old faithful sound system. I wonder if my subwoofer is still doing a decent job back in Adelaide... ahh yes, I can feel it now.

GO AWAY!

I have some plans to go back to Nicaragua next weekend. Ernesto, don't you fcuking dare...

Ultrafest!?!?

It's amazing what one can accomplish when one chooses to not sleep.

Here are some videos from Ultrafest 2006. I've been meaning to put these up for months and months. You'll just love how the little microphone on my camera has no clue what to do with all the bass that's hitting it.

I can't remember the name of this band, but the lead singer kept saying that one of their songs was on iTunes' top 100. Apart from that, he sang a lot about how weed would solve all the world's problems.


Eric Morillo, with cruise ship visible to the right. Ultrafest on a cruise ship would be pretty awesome.


Carl Cox dance tent. I didn't want to put up the actual video of Carl Cox DJing. Anyone who has "Carl Cox" spinning on the display behind them while they DJ won't get any space in my blog. Unless, of course, they have "PK" spinning on the display, then that's cool.


Drum and Bass set.


Pendulum - look out for the dude wearing the flashing glasses, it's sort of surreal as he walks past. I felt like shooting the MC with my mind bullets during the Pendulum set, he was annoying the fcuk out of me. Oh, the reason why I was so far back? My feet were hurting like hell from jumping up and down all day, so I decided to go barefoot for a while. Those of you who have seen people dancing to DnB know that your feet would not be safe even if they're protected by steelcaps! The Prodigy cover that Pendulum ends on in this video leads into...


The real Prodigy! Awesome, awesome, awesome. We couldn't get any closer though, no matter how much we tried. You might see some wafts of smoke in the foreground during this set. That's not any special effect, that's something that causes special effects. I swear I was passively getting high during this set.


Van de Graaff generator. Check out how something wrong starts to happen. I was waiting for it to explode, but you do get to see some little sparks fly off the shaft.


BT. This was such an awesome set, and was by far my favourite of Ultrafest 2006. Fan-bloody-tastic, BT!