A photoblog and other things

So in my quest to find some good eatin’ food in Ft Lauderdale (the past two times have been somewhat ordinary, IMHO) I went with some friends to a restaurant called “The French Quarter”. Oh, quick disclaimer, I ain’t going to review this place like Chi-Hoong could at his website. He knows quite a bit more about food than I do and can probably pronounce the food on the menu better than I could ever hope to. However even if I can’t pronounce the damn food I at least know if it tastes good, because I eat a lot of food and have a good sample size to draw from.

Anyway, I digress. We went to this restaurant and I ended up ordering the Beef Wellington (I could pronounce that) with some wine. My mate got talked into ordering some more expensive wine but that didn’t worry me in the slightest. At least he didn’t go for top of the range on the wine list which was $15,000 a bottle (yes, you read that right).

My Beef Wellington was pretty good. I think the waiter originally screwed his nose up at me because I ordered it medium-well, rather than medium. Blasphemous, I know. The wine was so-so. I thought that a bottle of Saltram No.1 would beat it hands down but you can’t win everything I guess. Anyway at the close of the dinner the hurt came out to be $210 between the three of us. French, expensive, but okayish I guess.

I was talking to a guy here at work about the French Quarter and he said the person who owns it is a millionaire who actually owns a few of the strip malls in downtown Ft Lauderdale. That’s a lot of money, people. He said that the owner would most likely have been the one cleaning the floor. If I had known that I would have tried asking him to clean my shoes as well. I’ve never had a millionaire clean my shoes before. I would have tipped well.

For those of you I’d call ‘regulars’ you may well have noticed that updates are not coming as often as they used to. I think I’m burned out from blogging. Well, not only that, I’m just burned out in general. 70 hours last week at work really took out any remaining energy I had. My energy levels have not been this low for quite a while. But maybe this is all just a short term thing that I’m going through because I’m so exhausted.

I did order, what I thought, were some pretty cool shirts the other day. They should be arriving before the end of the week. One of them has a drawing of an island at sunset and it has some little graves on it. The writing says “Florida… stay awhile”. I was going to wear that one to work. The other is in the same style as the Nascar logo and says “B-O-R-I-N-G”. If I ever go to watch a Nascar race then I reckon I’d wear that one. Hopefully the rednecks would see the funny side of it, because you know, I’m actually at the race so how can I think it is boring? Well, we’ve all seen Jerry Springer I’m sure, so maybe they wouldn’t understand the humour, and maybe the last thing I’d see on this earth was a great bunch of toothless freaks wearing overalls bearing down on me with pitchforks. Was that too much of a cliche there?

I do like paying people out, just for a laugh of course, and I expect to get payed out in return. If I don’t get payed out, or they don’t see the funny side, then I assume there is a major lack of the humour gene and I’m guessing I won’t find them too interesting to hang around with. However I think I may have overstepped it when I went to Crobar in South Beach Saturday night. A girl was visiting down from Chicago and a bunch of us went out partying. Well it seemed that one of the girls in the group didn’t like the music, or was too tired, or something like that and she had her arms crossed whilst standing in the middle of the dancefloor. I saw this and immediately starting impersonating her. Then I thought “I’m dancing with my arms crossed… like Russians sort of do!” and so I started dancing like they “sort of” would. Admittedly, I was only going on what I remember from “Fiddler on the Roof”. I don’t think she appreciated it though because she called her friends to the toilets soon after that they left. I’d like to think it wasn’t because of what I did, but perhaps it was.

Best thing I’ve heard today: “Don’t work too hard… just get it done by tomorrow”.

Pfft, I really don’t know what to write for this post. My mind is absolutely fried and I warn you I’ll probably dribble on a bit. So far this week my shortest work day was 13 hours. I’ve been getting home just in time to watch the Daily Show and then I’ll fall asleep until, say, 6 or 7 the next morning and then get up and get ready for work again because I’m worried that I’ll get deported or something… well, not really. I just don’t want to let the team down. But I was pretty chuffed that I got the private call functionality, which normally operates only on a trunking system, to operate in conventional mode too! Like anyone would know what that means! What I mean is, I HACKED code like I did in uni. Thing is, now that code has to be inspected by a group of people who know far more than I do and I reckon it will provide them with comedy for weeks and weeks to come.

So Saturday morning I was up early waiting outside the West Palm beach auditorium office thing-a-me-jig to get some Coldplay tickets. Ooh yeah, I can’t wait until September now. The last time I saw them I was in Melbourne. That was an awesome show – sorta weird though coz I went to see them with my ex at the time and she’d only just given me the flick… but whatever.

So anyway I’m killing time now. I can’t code any more today. I’m waiting for a colleague to finish an inspection with some guys in Penang so we can go play some foosball. I’m still really crap at it… but god damn, I will beat him someday!!!

*sigh* signing out. Time to listen to more Radio One. Actually feeling a little sick but I’ll blame the Tim Tams for that. Now I’m trying to think of why I called this post “New territory”. Whatever and ever amen.

I’ve posted some of the pics from New Orleans up on flickr. You can check them out here.

At some point I’ll post up what I got up to. Perhaps tonight.