Category: Uncategorized

Because I’ve been a supporter of Flickr while it’s been in beta I have a free pro account to give away to someone (free for one year, anyway. After that it’s $25 US a month to maintain your pro status). To those who don’t know what Flickr is, it’s an online photo storage service that I use and now love. Much better than the crappy webshots I was using earlier (and which I still have to completely migrate away from). Send me an e-mail if you want one. I’m not going to give it away to anyone though. Here are the conditions:

a) You must actually know me.
b) You must use it well.

The advantages of a pro Flickr account compared to the free Flickr account?
a) 2 GB monthly upload limit (compare with 20 MB for free account)
b) Unlimited storage (limit of 200 photos for free account)
c) Unlimited photosets
d) Permanent archiving of high res photo images
e) Ad-free browsing and sharing (most of the time)

So I was driving to work this morning and I noticed that just about everyone I saw was talking on their mobile phone. All people seem to do over here is talk on their bloody phone. I looked at the total amount of time I’ve spent talking on my Razr and it’s 7.5 hours. That’s nothing. That’s like what some people spend talking on a mobile PER DAY over here. I think I’ve already posted about Lincoln Mall in South Beach and how all the model-type people have a phone welded to their ear.

I was thinking about this some more and I decided that I do not talk to people back in Oz nearly as much as I wanted to. I have now set up a cheap international calling thingy so I can, and I’m also looking into Skype a bit too. Expect a call from me sometime (that is, if you know me 🙂

Lately I’ve been feeling a little. . . unusual. Maybe it’s because work is just plain bloody hard at the moment. Well, allow me to clarify that for a moment – it’s bloody hard for about 1/7th of the time and for the remaining 6/7ths it’s an exercise in pure frustration as I try and make all the required changes across, firstly, 380 pages of architecture documentation; 100 pages of design documentation, god knows how many lines of code, unit tests to make sure it all works and finally, integration tests to make sure it all works *together*. Actually, I don’t think that would have clarified anything for anybody outside of engineering circles. I thought I had to modify one application when I started this a couple of weeks ago. It turns out that application was actually 7 separate applications. I was originally supposed to finish this all in the space of 3 weeks. That’s just crazy talk.

The weekend was interesting as well. Friday night I ended up going to the casino in Hollywood (that’s Hollywood, Florida) to check out some of the clubs there. I expected them to be really commercial. They were, in a sense, but I somehow ended up enjoying myself. Saturday night I went to a party in South Beach. The apartment complex was very much like that you’d see in the movies. It was very cool, much like many of the people who were there. I think the last thing I ended up doing before leaving the party was spraying all the mirrors in the apartment with air freshener and then writing my initials. What possessed me to do that I just don’t bloody know.

Not a bad $25 souvenir

UPDATE: I was looking at this post again and was thinking “Wow, you got a parking ticket. That’s. . . exciting”. Well this is my very first parking ticket either over here or in Australia. I left my car overnight in some open space car park and apparently it ‘closed’ at 2am, which to me seemed rather stupid. Any signs indicating this in the carpark weren’t very noticeable. Maybe I should have contacted one of those companies that specialises in trying to get your parking ticket revoked? It’s not like there is a shortage of them over here.

Mind you though, this isn’t my first car-related offense. Over in Australia I’ve been caught twice for speeding – one for rushing to a soccer game and the other for coasting down a hill in a stupid 50 km/h zone (and probably listening to DnB at the time), just after those zones got introduced. Over here, even though I regularly go 10 miles/h over the speed limit, I’m pretty safe because there are still people passing me. I was a bit worried that I’d get caught again when I went back to Oz recently as I was still driving like I would be on the I-95.