I went to Sydney for a laugh ! Chris and I were talking around 4pm one friday about what we were up to on the long weekend, and we pretty much both said, nothing much, drinking, tele and that’s it, so we both got tickets on the red eye to Sydney. We flew out 8hrs later to Sydney ! It was such spur of the moment that we booked our accomodation once we got there, or more specifically, got garbs to do it before he flew over to join us on the saturday afternoon !

As I’d never been to Sydney we did the touristy things, Opera house, circular key, looked at the bridge, thought about climbing it (but the weather wasn’t too great), went up the Sydney tower, yay, did some shopping.

Funny thing was we got to Sydney at like 6.30am saturday morning, the trains weren’t running, so we got a bus into the city, and then there was nothing open till about 11am, nada, all we found that was open was the odd coffee shop (eg starbucks). So we managed to walk all the way to the opera house before the shops opened, all of this with our bags as we had no place to stay. Saturday night garbs arrived and we went out to Kings Cross, we didn’t get killed and we even walked back to the hotel. The clubs in the cross are dodge, they all say we’re the only club in kings cross that serves real alcohol, no need to say we got ripped off and spent some time in the seedy joint. Though the irish pub the taxi driver pointed out was great, we (I) had about 7 pints of kilk there before losing track of how many, and it wasn’t too expensive either, from there we went back to the seedy club and got further ripped off by overpriced watered down drinks. I didn’t even find the entertainment that entertaining. Though earlier in the night I had asked the stripper who’d just come off the stage if she could recommend a place for my friends and me to have some food, she recommended HJ’s up the road LOL, we ended up having maccas.

Sunday we went back to the opera house (so garbs could have a squiz) and then I dunno, we lost some time, and ended up in Natural bay (north side of river) having some drinks with some friends of Chris’s and had some japanese where you cook you’re own food. My lack of cooking skills were not noticed. My entree (which I forget the proper name for) was basically thinly sliced beef, which had been cooked ever so slightly, such that the outer 10mm if that had any sign of cooking, and the rest was so raw it still had blood on it. As bad as that sounds, I ate it (chopsticks and all) and it was really nice. My overactive gag reflex didn’t cause any embarrasing scenes. My main, was tiny bits of beef, this time completely raw, with some vegetables (no idea who eats them, must be for decoration), but of course you were meant to cook your main, on the gas burner in the middle of the table, which I did, and no one picked me up on my lack of cooking skills, though I ended up using tongs rather than chopsticks when actually cooking. After this meal we went around the corner to a little cake/coffee shop (open 24hrs) for desert, I had a milkshake, mmmm. The most entertaining thing here was the waiter/waitress whom could have been either gender, I’d lean to wards male with a high pitch voice, but you had to wonder. Besides it was late at night.

After this, we caught a taxi back to the city, and went around taking photos of the opera house and circular key by night, followed by a quick monorail ride around darling harbour (where we realised we need to go back) so after getting more clothing (it was raining after all) we went back to darling harbour to get more photos. We walked right around it getting heaps of pics, and this was around 2am anyway. At least there wasn’t a crowd!

On Monday we were going to get up early to go to the channel 7 studio in the pitt street mall to hold up a sign to the window saying something like Dear Boss, sorry but we missed the flight back to Perth, will be late to meeting but couldn’t get out of bed early enough. This was probably for the best, because a friend of mine at work pointed out that 7’s sunrise program is filmed in Melbourne. The other early riser thing I wanted to do (but couldn’t get out of bed for) was to camp outside Kiribilly house and ask the PM something random on his morning jog. Though the same friend at work pointed out I probably wouldn’t be able to get close enough to ask something anyway. The weather changed for the worse on Monday, so we spent most of the day ducking in and out of shops and malls, Chris managed to buy one of his “london coats” (long woolen wrap around coat), we went up the Sydney tower and got some nice pics even though the weather was pretty shoddy. Either way, we bought some cheap dvd’s and some touristy stuff (actually, I bought 2 Mr Potato heads, maybe that’s not touristy). I managed to have a play with a PC running RealFlight with a RC controller attached (in a hobby shop). This was of course before finding Mr Potato head. Next time if I see an etch-a-sketch I’m so getting it. We didn’t really do anything that night, and we flew out the following morning at like 6am, so 5am at the airport. Oddly enough, we landed at 9am (perth time now) and were at work by 10am (normal time for me).

All in all, it was a spur of the moment instant holiday which cost me around $1100 for 3 days. Not that it was a bad thing, I’ve now been to 3 states/terrorities of Australia (WA, NSW, NT) and next month will be off to Gold Coast (Qld). I learned a bit. This trip I was trying to travel light, because I knew I’d be carrying my bag around on the saturday until at least midday. I also saw the short comings of my camera, even though it’s a great camera, it’s not that portable, so sometimes when you’d like a camera but don’t want the bulk I missed out on some shots. Though the 10x optical zoom was helpful and the picture quality of some of my shots is awesome. No doubt more skills would have made that better (or luck in maintaining focus lock on the right object). Improvement I’m thinking of doing before next months trip, a basic compact point and shoot camera. And probably a different bag. Though the next trip I’m going with a troop of geeks, so they’ll be trotting over there with laptops on hand, though I might too, not sure yet. This has definately shown that travelling light is a must, and who knows, maybe I’ll backpack around somewhere in the future. Thus a better bag and more compact camera hint hint.

Oh, photos are up in my Gallery.

In other news, after getting back to work, I’m still bored out of my brain, but I have 2 Mr Potato Heads to play with ! First weekend back I get called for a work problem (even though I’m not on call). A change would be nice I guess.

Kid, I’m a zoo clown. Now buy a giraffe or go to hell.

I started playing Eve Online. It’s awesome, and so far I really like it. Of course I don’t really have much time to spare playing an MMORPG but it’s so much fun. This could be a contributing factor to the lateness of this post. Funny flash vid about eve.

There was also Reload 21, our first lan to hit capacity of 112 people. Our first lan to be full gigabit and our first lan to feature a large screen LCD with xbox360. It was of course my xbox360, and my LCD tv. Dunno if I’ll be assed to do that again.

Ebay, this could also be a contributing factor to the lateness of this post. Somehow I found myself looking for Optus Satellite cards on ebay, and getting one, and later on looking at roombas and their clothing. But you get that.

Work has been silly again, I haven’t enjoyed work in ages. I managed to avoid a training course that didn’t interest me and would have shoe-horned me into a report creation role which is not what I want to do (not that anyone here actually listens to what you do want to do, they say they do, but they don’t, it’s a trap for young players).

I bought the Dilbert tv series on DVD, NTSC region 4, but still region 4 so it’s better than having to import it, though NTSC does suck. I also aquired DOA4 on xbox360 and it’s sweet. This could be another a contributing factor to the lateness of this post. In fact it is, I’ve completed the game with nearly all of the characters already.

And of course I watched a few movies again, the list on the right is nice an up to date. It’s important to keep on top of them otherwise you lose days catching up.

Ooh ooh, and I went to the gym again. I really need to go more often than weekly to get any real benefit, but at least I’m doing floorball twice a week. The scenery at the gym was nice, I should go more often for that reason alone.

OpenWRT. It’s good. It’s very easy to install on a linksys wrt54gs (so easy in fact you just flash the image using the web gui). It’s web gui isn’t perfect, but does most things people would want. The more complex things fortunately retain settings from linksys land. But of course if you didn’t set them in linksys land you have to go the hard yards and set them in the nvram. Or alter the init scripts to just use the files on disk.

The final episode of Malcom in the Middle aired recently and it was a good ending in my opionion. They even brought back one of the audio tracks from the original episode which I felt rounded it off really well. They even ended the show with the sign of hope, that the story of the middle child will continue, though you could view it as a rebirth or the completion of the story loop back where it began. It made me warm and fuzzy inside after watching.

A haircut to aspire to ? Rat Boy.

I bought more hard drives again. Impulse buy if I’ve ever had one.

LOL

Holiday is coming up.

This software never has bugs, it just develops random features.