Posts on Sine Qua Non

Coffee Beans from Peru

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 21:38:00 -0500

All very decent so far. I’ve finished the Altomayo, Villa Rica, but the Puku Puku are my favorite (I’m yet to try the Artidoro Rodriguez).

Atlanta Nov 2025

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 15:12:00 -0500

Outdoor plant destroyer

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 14:53:00 -0500

One of my outdoor plants had been flattened. I found the culprit (say “hi!” to Timmy).

2025 Lunar Eclipse Timelapse

Fri, 14 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Omakase at "Rakki Sushi & Omakase"

Fri, 17 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

An excellent omakase experience here in Doral!

Lunar occultation of Mars

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 21:05:00 -0500

I was able to grab a couple of images of the Moon as it passed in front of Mars. First, the “full moon” version

and then a zoomed-in version, where you can just make out a fuzzy little Mars.

Beaver Lake, Montreal

Sat, 19 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

California Road Trip 2024 - Part 2 - San Fran down to Monterey

Mon, 22 Jul 2024 23:03:00 -0400

From San Francisco we drove south, passing the Apple campus and Steve Jobs’ old house where Apple got started. We picked up the PCH through Monterey and into Big Sur, making it as far as Nepenthe for a late lunch before our planned turnaround just before Lucia, where the road was still closed from a rockslide the year before. We looped back north to Monterey for the night.

A low layer of clouds hung over the coast the whole way, obscuring most of the views, but it made for an amazing view at Nepenthe restaurant. The next morning we did the 17 Mile Drive out of Monterey, then cut inland and headed south to Hearst Castle (part 3!)

California Road Trip 2024 - San Francisco

Mon, 22 Jul 2024 04:00:00 +0000

For our first day in San Francisco, we took a small-group tour with Dylan’s Tours, which was excellent, and Adriana and I dominated the music quiz that the guide gave as we drove around. It brought us to several interesting spots around the city, a great viewpoint for photographing the Golden Gate Bridge, Muir Woods, and Sausalito for lunch (we ate at Taste of Rome), before wrapping up at the Alcatraz ferry departure point.

Videos of 2024 eclipse: entering, in, and exiting totality

Sun, 28 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Entering

During

Exiting

2024 Eclipse from Texas

Tue, 09 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Exiting totality

In totality, with visible promenances

Custard-based ice cream

Sat, 02 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A delicious ice cream using Bird’s Custard powder for that classic vanilla custard flavor.

Ingredients

Serves: 4
Prep time: 30 minutes › Cook: 40 minutes › Total: 1 hour 10 minutes › Calories: 300 kcal

5 tablespoons of Bird’s Custard mix
2 cups of whole milk
3/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
1 1/2 cups heavy cream
3 tablespoons vodka

Directions

Follow basic directions for preparing custard using the specified quantities of custard mix, milk, and sugar.
Cool the custard down in a refrigerator or ice bath.
Pour custard mixture along with vanilla essence, heavy cream, and vodka into a Cuisinart chilled ice mixing bowl.
Mix for about 20 minutes.
Put in freezer for about an hour before serving.

Note: This recipe is designed to be made using a Cuisinart ice cream maker.

Podcasts and Mailing Lists

Sun, 10 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Mailing Lists

Pointer

A reading club For software developers. A newsletter about what current and future CTOs are reading and thinking about.

Podcasts

The Skeptics Guide to the Universe

Weekly science podcast produced by the SGU Productions llc. Also provides blogs, forums, videos and resources.

Miami Spice - Miss Crispy Rice

Sat, 26 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This is our first outing for Miami Spice this year, and we’re off to a great start! This was an excellent $60 per head dining experience in Wynwood. Photos are of the interior, some of the servings from the 12-course menu, and the Wynwood area immediately outside.

Lobster Tails

Mon, 14 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A delicious and simple recipe for preparing lobster tails.

Ingredients

Serves: 4
Prep time: 5 minutes › Cook: 10 minutes › Total: 15 minutes

Four lobster tails
3 tablespoons non-salted butter, melted
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon smoked paprika
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 lemon

Directions

Prepare each lobster tail:
- Cut top of lobster tail shell
- Pull back shell to expose meat
- Wedge fingers between bottom of shell and meat to separate
- Place 1/4 lemon under the meat to prop it up
Season the tails:

Honey Crackles

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Also known as “Honey Joys” in some regions. A sweet treat popular in South Australia.

Ingredients

Serves: 12
Prep time: 5 minutes › Cook: 10 minutes

1 tablespoon honey
2 tablespoons butter
3 ounces sugar
5 ounces cornflakes

Directions

Melt honey, butter, and sugar in a saucepan on low heat. Stir with a wooden spoon until sugar dissolves.
Pour hot mixture into a large bowl with cornflakes. Mix quickly before mixture cools.
Place 12 cupcake liners in a muffin baking tray.
Evenly distribute the mixture into the cupcake liners using a spoon.
Put into a warm oven at 250°F for five minutes.

Kitchener buns

Thu, 15 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Assumes US measurements. At sea level. In Florida humidity.

Ingredients

Serves: 8

2 1/2 cups flour
salt, to taste
5 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon yeast
1 1/4 cups warm milk
3 tablespoons butter
vegetable oil, enough to deep fry the buns
Caster sugar
Raspberry jam (best if seedless)
Whipped cream

Directions

Preparation: 15min › Cook: 20min › Extra time: 30min rising › Ready in: 1hour5min

Sift together the flour, sugar and salt. Put the yeast into the milk.
Rub the butter into the flour then add the milk and yeast mixture. Combine and then knead until smooth.
Divide into buns. Leave to rise for 30 minutes.
Heat the oil to 180 degrees C. Place the caster sugar in a shallow dish.
Deep fry each bun, turn if required so light brown all round and cooked through to the centre; about 3 minutes total.
Immediately drain and roll in the caster sugar.
When cool, slice almost through, spread with jam, then add cream just before serving.

"Wings Over Homestead" Air Show 2023

Sun, 09 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Photos taken from the annual airshow at the Homestead Air Reserve Base.

New England Roadtrip 2022 - Whales off Cape Cod

Sat, 13 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We took a ~ 3.5 hour trip off Cape Code with the awesome Hyannis Whale Watcher Cruises.

Lunar Eclipse, May 2022

Tue, 17 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This is the best I could get before the clouds took over :-(

Kite flying

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

An initial stab at the Orion nebula

Thu, 03 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This is my first ever attempt at an astrophotography image that isn’t a wide field of view or one of the moon.

2021 EOY Road Trip - U.S. Space & Rocket Center Panorama

Tue, 28 Dec 2021 12:40:00 -0500

Marco Island, December 2021

Tue, 14 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Alanis Morissette and Garbage @ West Palm Beach

Tue, 21 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Alanis can still wail

Building the Prusa Mini+ 3D printer

Sat, 19 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Here are some shots of building the printer. You can get it in kit form or pre-built with minimal assembly. Because I am a masochist, I elected to do the former. Total assembly took around 8 hours, I had to go in reverse for a bit because I had placed a stepper motor in the wrong location, but luckily they supplied gummy bears to go along with the build.

Florida Cooter laying eggs

Sat, 19 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Spotted while walking around my neighborhood

Looking up!

Sat, 19 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

On another of my walks around the neighborhood, looking up I spied a nice combination of sky, clouds, tree and flowers.

"Out of context"

Sun, 14 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

People at the tower of Pisa taken out of their intended context

Penny and Nickel - rescue kitties

Wed, 03 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Our new additions to the family

MFOS analog synth: Jesus take the wheel!

Mon, 01 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I tested the power supply yesterday and today connected it to the rest of the synthesizer. And wouldn’t you believe - things appear to be showing some signs of life! A couple of LEDs are not blinking - I would find it hilarious if I wired them up the wrong way - but VCO 1, the white noise generator, the, ADEG 1 and ADEG 2, and the LFO, are all putting out the correct waveforms. VCO 2 is doing something completely weird that is going to be “fun” to debug.

MFOS analog synth: Getting there...

Fri, 29 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

All the wiring for under the board is done, allowing it to be mounted and the wires as seen in the photo to be soldered to the board.

Android on a Raspberry Pi 4 - Part 1 - Building the images and setting up the sdcard

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

As I’m fresh-out of Android development boards, I decided to try and repurpose a Raspberry Pi 4 for Android experimentation in preparation for when the next version of this book comes out: http://newandroidbook.com/. I had originally tried this with my Raspberry Pi 3A+, but only found real support for the 3B.

First, you need a version of Android that is customized for the Pi 4 . I used this repo and followed the guide: https://github.com/android-rpi/device_arpi_rpi4

Compressing video with ffmpeg

Sun, 29 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I was looking into what was taking up space in my Dropbox account and found some older videos, each a few gigabytes in size, where I didn’t really care if there was a small loss of quality to make them much smaller. I found some options with ffmpeg that worked pretty well

ffmpeg -i input_file -vcodec libx265 -crf 34 output_file

This will re-encode the file using x265. The “-crf” option specifies the amount of compression, with a range from 0-51: “0” being lossless and “23” the default. With the default I was able to halve the storage space required with negligible video loss. I upped it to “34”, as above, and while there was a bit of loss in video clarity, it didn’t matter for the video content. The result? A file originally ~ 2.4 GB in size was reduced to ~ 300 MB.

Views from Marco Island

Sun, 29 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Main board, front panel, transistor matching - MFOS Soundlab mini synth mk II

Sat, 19 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The main board is coming along, this is before I placed the remaining capacitors and IC sockets.

Here I’m matching transistors with an ATmega328-based component tester.

And then the placing the potentiometers, sockets, and switches on the front panel

Errors while running Rust on Virtualbox

Mon, 17 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I got the following error when running “cargo run” on my “Roguelike” follo-along project (https://bfnightly.bracketproductions.com/rustbook)

Err` value: CreationErrors([NoAvailablePixelFormat, NoAvailablePixelFormat])'

I found the error was due to 3D acceleration being enabled on my Linux Mint 19-based development environment, running on Virtualbox 6.1.10. That is, make sure you have this in your vboxmanage line in your Vagrantfile:

vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--accelerate3d", "off"] # Disable 3d acceleration until Virtualbox team fixes it

Remembering back as to why I had that line set to “on”, I think I was playing around with getting the Android emulator to work in Virtualbox, which as of 6.1 supports nested virtualization. I came close to getting that working, ultimately I don’t think it’s possible right now.

Power supply - MFOS Soundlab mini synth mk II

Mon, 17 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The supply that powers the +/- 12v rails is done! I think I’m about 1% of the way there.

Building the MFOS Sound Lab Mini Synth Mark II

Tue, 11 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This arrived in the mail today from Synthcube

It is the Music From Outer Space (MFOS) Sound Lab Mini Synth Mark II, an analog synth from the great late Ray Wilson. There is quite a lot of involved soldering - though I did do more soldering back in the days when I was constructing the Electronics Australia Playmaster series of pre-/subwoofer/stereo amps, but it actually looks like the wiring to all the pots/plugs may be the killer.

Comet NEOWISE

Mon, 27 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

As seen from the Everglades to the west of Miami

ESP8266 RGB controller

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I had a sizable pile of infra-red RGB controllers that came with every RGB LED strip I’ve ever purchased. Still, one was never around when I needed it, and the transmission range was so small that I’d have to move closer to the LED strip to change the color anyway. Finally, there were really only a few unique colors - most looked the same as the next. I decided to instead replace the RGB LED PWM generator with an ESP8266 (as a NodeMCU) that I could control via a web interface from my phone.

On working from home

Sun, 21 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I follow DHH (creator or Ruby on Rails, among other things) on Twitter and he always has great insights on tech. I found myself one day reading the Basecamp (of which he is a co-founder) employee handbook, thinking it was going to be something like the one from Valve, but to me this was so much more. I stopped reading every now and then to think “wow, can work life possibly be like this?” and was left wondering how I as a small cog in a corporate machine could hope to make any changes like this.

Configuring OSMC for high quality audio

Tue, 09 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

And what I mean by that is, “default all audio output to a USB device, not unlike an O2+ODAC kit from JDS labs”.

Step 1: Install OSMC, which is a Kodi-based media entertainment distribution that can run on Raspberry Pi (https://osmc.tv/download/)

Step 2: Configure ALSA audio to use the USB audio device as the default (this way, I don’t always have to keep the USB device powered).

Pushing to Bitbucket vs Gerrit

Wed, 20 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This is totally for me in the future because I always bloody forget when switching to a Bitbucket project:

Bitbucket (creates the branch remotely, ready for you to make a pull request and add reviewers):

git push -u $(git remote) cool_branch_name

Gerrit (creates a review against the project_ci branch, whatever that is, ready for you to add reviewers):

git push $(git remote) HEAD:refs/for/project_ci

Goldfinger - "Here in your bedroom"

Mon, 13 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

So glad a colleague at work pointed me to what Goldfinger were up to - making the most of social isolation in times of Covid-19! This video, “Here in your bedroom”, is a nostalgia trip.

https://www.facebook.com/goldfingermusic/videos/231918244594308

Will this still be available in 10 years? God knows, but I might go check out what some other great bands have been doing online during this time.

Gameboy and music

Sun, 09 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I recently got my music bug again, and with my recent trip to Australia was able to bring back my original Gameboy. Combining the two, I thought I’d check out what music-making capabilities the Gameboy had. The most popular software was “Little sound DJ” (https://www.littlesounddj.com/). I purchased the full version of that, and while I could run that on an emulator, I wanted to run it on the real deal. To do this, I purchased a Gameboy flashing cartridge, “Flash BOY” ( https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/223590080458). This came with few instructions however. I was able to plug it into my laptop’s USB and see that it displayed as a FTDI device, but would need drivers. I installed some from here: https://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/VCP.htm but after more googling for flashing software, found that this also provided some drivers: https://sourceforge.net/projects/gbcf/

Setting up a raspberry pi photo viewer (with music)

Sun, 09 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I set up a Raspberry Pi photo viewer at work to display photos from members of the photo club.Â Members were instructed to put their photos on a Google Drive location (accessible only within the company VPN) and then the viewer would sync down the photos at a predetermined schedule.Â To get access to Google Drive, I used rclone.Â To display I used ‘feh’, which was also used to put text indicating the name of the photo.

2020 New Year in Atlanta

Mon, 06 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A journey with "Embedded programming with Android": part 1

Wed, 13 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I purchased the Kindle edition of this book: https://www.amazon.com/Embedded-Programming-Android-Bringing-Scratch-ebook/dp/B013IQGX3A

and since I’m going through the book in 2019, there are a few gaps to bridge.Â Â The first was creating an emulator.Â I did this via command line, and step 1 was to get a basic Android SDK downloaded.Â I use Vagrant/Virtualbox for my development, so this was used to set up the SDK

put this here

Once that’s done, I need to configure my emulator to use Android API 15.Â To get an idea of what I can install, I use the sdkmanager tool to list all the available options:

Server performance monitoring with "Netdata"

Tue, 12 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I run a couple of servers at work for my skunkworks projects, and I was trying to find a good monitoring tool to see how much stress I was putting them under.Â I already use “monit” (https://mmonit.com/monit/), running on a Raspberry Pi, to monitor whether a server (and services running on it) is there at all, but for more detailed monitoring, Netdata (https://github.com/netdata/netdata) was the killer app for me.Â It’s super easy to install, and once up and running you just go to :19999 to check the status.Â If you leave it idle for a while, it’ll stop updating (nice!), which I thought was good because it does provide a metric ton of information.Â The really nice thing is that because my servers host a bunch of Docker containers, I can see what *each container* is doing.Â Too awesome.

Moon test shot

Fri, 16 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Testing out a tripod shot of my new 200mm - 500mm telephoto lens with 2x magnification on 1.5 DX crop (~ 1500 mm equivalent)

Adding existing NTFS mount to Linux Mint 19.1

Mon, 17 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I had a Windows machine that had a Vagrant setup on a different drive.Â When I replaced the Windows partition with Linux Mint, I wanted to have the other drive, already formatted as NTFS and containing my Vagrant workspace, mounted as /vagrant in the Linux machine.

First, I found out the properties of the drive:

sudo fdisk -l

I found it was a device under /dev/sdb1 and formatted as type HPFS/NTFS/exFAT.Â Now to open the fstab file

A quick visit to: Daytona Beach

Wed, 27 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Google+ can't be updated - oh no!

Fri, 22 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A 2019 reading list

Tue, 08 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Here be the books I’m attempting to get through this year. Most have been sitting in my book case forever. I was going for one a month, but decided to add a few more, since: I got to the last part of “The War on Science” nearly a year ago; have already read the first edition of “Wolfenstein 3D”; and have already started “Algorithms to Live By” and “The Disaster Artist”.

Docker image to run a quick PHP test server

Sun, 05 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I had a need to run a PHP-capable web server on my Vagrant box to locally test some Javascript that queried a database via PHP, and then presented that via Google Charts. This Docker image suited that use case just fine. Replace as appropriate:

sudo docker run --name web-server -p 127.0.0.1:80:80 -v /opt/mysql:/var/lib/mysql -v <full path to location you want as root>:/web -d osws/php-web-server

Install nodejs

Sun, 05 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Here is how I install nodejs to get access to cool tools like “tldr” (a summarized version of the typical man pages) and “ungit” (an interface to Git to ease people into using it).

Run these two commands to get nodejs:

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_9.x | sudo -E bash -

sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

then you can install ungit, tldr, whatever you want.

sudo npm install -g tldr

These commands work with Linux Mint 17 (or Ubuntu 14.04).

SpaceX Falcon Heavy test flight

Tue, 06 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Liftoff!

Up up and away!

Returning twin boosters

Relocating Git repository to new URL

Tue, 30 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The best way I found to do this was by running these two commands:

git clone --mirror old-remote-url-ending-in-dot-git

then move into the directory (ending in .git) that would be created, and run this command:

git push --mirror new-remote-url-ending-in-dot-git

All existing branches and tags would get pushed at one fell swoop.

Fixing Virtualbox network configuration issues due to Vagrant public/private networking changes

Sun, 06 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

A few times I’ve switched from the default private networking (NAT with port forwarding) to public networking (bridged) in the Vagrantfile. Â When switching *back* to private networking, I wasn’t able to SSH back into the machine (i.e, “vagrant up” will time out).

Assuming you’re using a Linux Mint guest (or other Debian-based) OS, a fix for this is to open the /etc/network/interfaces file and remove anything in between the #VAGRANT BEGIN and #VAGRANT END section. Â Next, run vagrant reload from the host OS to reload the guest with the updated network interface configuration.

Proximity

Thu, 13 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

IMG_20131011_163512.jpg

… after which it moves to an undisclosed location.

A quick photo update

Thu, 24 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Here are some photos that Adriana took recently, first of me playing with Connor, and then the aftermath:

And then one containing the many faces of Maya: serious, spooked, happy, chipmunk, goofy, and pissed-off.

Music time

Sat, 05 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Here is Maya and Connor having a bit of fun in their favourite play spot while listening to the song “Wolf” by Pyramid.

Just chilling

Sat, 21 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

IMG_20130921_130707.jpg

Photos by Elzee photography

Sun, 08 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Recently Maya and Connor had a photo session at the excellent Elzee Photography, who specializes in photos of newborns and children.Â We got a fantastic set of photos back, and it was totally worth it in every respect.Â We are definitely planning to take them back there again for upcoming milestones!Â Â I have uploaded the photos to my flickr account, available here (web versions) and here (print versions).

Some early baby photos

Sun, 25 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

*very* early, when they were only a hundred or so cells in size. Of course, we have no idea which is Connor or Maya.

Welcoming Maya and Connor

Sun, 25 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

On August 3rd at 9:30pm, after a long and arduous journey, our twins Connor (left) and Maya (right) were delivered at the Baptist hospital of Miami.

The three weeks since then (and it only seems like this all happened a couple of days ago) have redefined how much sleep you really need to survive, although recently it’s pretty obvious I am ‘broken’ and find myself walking around in circles due to constantly switching between all the tasks I need to get done. Although we’re extremely exhausted, we’re also overjoyed and are so unbelievably happy. The fact that Maya and Connor are our children is slowly starting to sink in - for a while it felt like we were renting them. They are both very, very distinct in their movements, the sounds they make, the way they feed, and right now it’s hard to see how they could be brother and sister. However, Maya definitely has some of Adriana’s traits and Connor… well, his head size reflects mine that is for sure.

China loot

Sun, 04 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

After spending a month in China here is the loot that Adriana and I acquired. It includes things made of silk, many types of tea and ways to drink it, obligatory panda stuff, and ingredients for cooking Sichuan food. All good.

Tracks from a honeymoon

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

While over in Italy for our Honeymoon back in 2010, I used my trusty G1 for all our navigation. Â Two years later, I finally got around to uploading the GPS tracks into Google Maps. Â I had to use a trick to get the map into one page (typically, Google Maps tends to split the tracks over several pages, so you don’t see the whole view), but phew, I finally did it.

Some scavenger hunt photos

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I recently participated on a photo scavenger hunt on Google+ arranged by the awesome Chrysta Rae. Â The idea behind the hunt is that you have about a month to take photos of ten different subjects. Â The use of Photoshop/Lightroom is encouraged, although I didn’t explore heavy editing that much. Â Â You cannot use photos you’ve previously taken - they have to be taken during that month. Â At the end of the month, Chrysta compiles the photos from everyone (500 people are in the group, with about two-thirds of that participating), Â and the photos are judged (Chrysta is not one of the judges, of course).

A dynamic texture engine for Frex

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This moment has been a long time coming. Â The first step I’d taken on this journey, and shown in previous posts, was to create a fractal scene piece-by-piece and then simply paste all the pieces together to create a final image. Â The image was zoom-able but did not allow the user to pan in any direction. Â I thought a good way to enable panning was to create a tile-based engine. Â That is, the scene would be divided up into equal-sized square tiles and if the user panned from the left to the right, tiles to the left of the screen boundary would appear while visible tiles near the boundary to the right would disappear. Â That seemed ok, and followed what existing tile-based game engines do (think Metroid or Super Mario Bros). Â However with engines like that the tiles used to create the final image already exist. Â For fractals, and their infinite nature, that can’t be done.

The very hungry caterpillar

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I recently couldn’t help but notice that one of the shrubs in our back garden had been reduced from something like this:

To this:

I thought that my mind had wondered while spraying for weeds a few days prior, and I’d accidentally killed most of it. However, while out watering I noticed something about the size of my little finger clinging to the side of one of the newly bare stems.

So those Australia photos

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

A long time ago in a land far, far away, Adriana and I caught up with family and friends. And then I fell into some sort of Internet coma. I showed some signs of consciousness with Frex (still working on it), and now here I am with another post.

So, Australia.

We went to Oz back in May. I’d never been to Uluru before, even though I’d been to Alice Springs for a wedding (it’s not really that close to Uluru, but while you’re in the general area…), but at the time I was a university student with no money, and getting a day trip to the rock was well out of my price range. This time around I wasn’t going to miss it, so decided that a 3-day camping tour out of Alice Springs would be the ticket. We had a couple of days in Alice Springs to catch up with friends I hadn’t seen in yonks, acclimate (that is, let all the Florida humidity I’d acquired over the years evaporate), and try and sync up with the timezone. We also accumulated enough red dust to last us till we returned to Florida.

Frex - with zoom

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

After a lot of refactoring, Frex now has a code base that I can understand the next day. I took the opportunity to install version control on my laptop to save me from any potential “oh f%*k” moments, or at least make them not as bad. I chose subversion for this, and as the repository is located in my dropbox folder, I’m not worried about having to back it up.

A little bit of Android coding

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Back in high school, a friend gave me his book on fractals (thanks Damo!), and I spent hours and hours generating fractals using the bundled ‘fractint’ software. It didn’t matter that I was using a hand-me-down AT PC (everything was ok though, as this was the 8 MHz version!), watching the fractal generate line-by-line was fine by me.

Today I found the time and ambition to create for the Android platform a program that generates the Mandelbrot fractal. That’s all this program does (for now). It does it very slowly, with absolutely no bells and whistles. Say hi to “Frex” (“FRactal EXplorer”).

Costa Rica - 2011

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Adriana and I (way back in February now) spent a week in Costa Rica, dividing our time between the Arenal region (to see a volcano that turned out to be camera shy) and Quepos, a town on the southern area of the West coast.

Hiring a car turned out being incredibly expensive, mostly due to the mandatory government insurance that can nearly cost as much as the rental itself. We found car hire necessary however, although we did not get a 4WD but instead opted for the cheap Toyota Yaris. For the one place that required a 4WD for access, we got there via a tour bus.

Visitors

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Cover your ears

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Ages and ages and yonks ago, we went on a drive up North to Georgia and South Carolina. On the way we stopped off in St Augustine and among other other things, saw Castillo de San Marcos, the oldest masonry fort in the US. They were firing a cannon, so I filmed a somewhat shaky video of it.

I procrastinated for ages in fixing up the shakiness, never bothering to fix it offline. Today Youtube came to my rescue by adding some new editing features. I used the powers of Youtube against the video and I’m pretty impressed with the results (I ain’t doing anything about the child-like glee at the end). I did notice a funky 3D-like parallax effect in areas where there was a lot of camera movement, but I think that also depended on the strength of the effect. Also, the higher the amount of shake reduction you want, the more cropping that will occur. Note that the brightness difference in the edited video below is intentional.

The jumping spider

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Adriana and I were out with friends at Markham Park in Broward on Sunday. It’s a pretty cool park that has a model airplane field, mountain bike trails, areas for jet skiing, a shooting range, and a Jamaican guy with a van that had a fully sick subwoofer, a couch, and 420,000 miles on the odometer.

I got distracted by a very active jumping spider, which was indifferent to my efforts to try and get it to ‘sit’ still. When you only have a depth of field of several millimetres as I do with my macro lens at its closest focus point, shooting a moving object can be frustrating. Having a speedlight handy gives some extra light so you can increase the f-stop and get a much larger depth of field, so I was happy I brought my whole kit along.

Peru 2010 — Colca Canyon

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

From Arequipa we went on a guided tour of the Chivay/Colca Canyon region for a couple of days. The canyon is approximately four kilometres deep, making it about twice as deep as that of the Grand Canyon, so I was pretty excited about seeing that and possibly a Condor.

The small tour bus took us around the extinct volcano Chachani towards the town of Chivay where we’d be staying the night. We went past a huge processing plant, which I could only guess was some sort of cement factory. The landscape at this point was a contrast of pale grey dust, green valley and man-made structures:

Peru 2010 - Arequipa

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Arequipa is the second largest city by population (approximately 900,000), and is located in the Andes in the southern part of Peru. It’s up fairly high, at an altitude of about 2300m, although taking the whole trip to Peru into account, that’s about half of the highest altitude that we reached. It has a nickname, “La Ciudad Blanca” (The White City), due to the fact that many of the buildings are constructed of a white volcanic rock.

Australia Day 2011

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The last Australia Day I hosted was back in Australia and it involved beer, cricket, couches in a park and a TV with a looooong extension cord. I’d yet to host one in the United States, so I thought this year would be as good as any. Planning the full menu for a party of around eight people turned out to be a bit of a huge task, but I think it turned out fairly well (even though I was preparing and cooking food for nearly four hours… although I must admit, that time did fly). I’d nearly forgotten how many fantastic dishes there were to choose from, and thanks to the Internets, choosing the right recipe was made so much simpler.

Antioquia artist

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Isabel (a friend of Adriana’s) gave me a bit of interesting info the other day; the artist who painted the homes and businesses in Antioquia is her cousin, and he has a website!

http://www.enriquebustamante.org/

Thanks Isabel!

Peru 2010 - Lima

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This is the first of three parts of the photos from Peru. I think I honestly spent more time reworking my Lightroom to Flickr workflow (I’ve reuploaded photos to Flickr several times working it out), so now I should be able to get photos up online a lot faster. This is going on the assumption that I *feel* like doing it immediately after taking photos, which has always been rather hit-and-miss with me (ask Adriana). I guess I also spent a bit of time working on my new website, so if you went to the old daecks.blogspot.com and ended up here (you should have), welcome!

Upcoming Peru photos

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I’m finally getting around to uploading the Peru photos to flickr. If anyone reading this (people do?) is friends with Adriana on Facebook, you’d have seen some of the photos. For some awesome reason, Facebook mangles some of the photos to appear grainy… not like Facebook is a great photo sharing site anyway (it’s fine for drunk or phone photos). Having said that, some of the sets are on flickr already, but I’m re-doing my Lightroom workflow and so they’re going to be updated with more info and some calibration edits, so I’m not ‘publishing’ them here yet.

Honeymoon photos — Venice, Bologna, Perugia

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This last post regarding the honeymoon covers the couple of days we spent in Venice, and the subsequent drive down to Perugia via Bologna.

We found Venice to be amazing, and loved wandering around the maze of buildings and water, not really caring when a dead-end was encountered. One of the very first things we checked off the list of things-to-do was a gondola ride:

I am: blue glow-stick guy

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Seen at the Hybrid DJ set at Revolution, downtown Ft Lauderdale.

Honeymoon photos — Pisa, Milan, Lake Como, Verona

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The hire car (a Fiat Punto) really got a work-out on this stretch of the trip. Driving from Florence we arrived in Pisa, walked to the Leaning Tower and saw this:

Now, I get enough of that sort of stuff with Wii Fit at home, so Adriana and I got a very creative photo taken, and I think you’ll agree:

Honeymoon photos — Cinqueterre

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

About an hour’s drive north of Pisa is Cinqueterre, or “The five lands”. This national park protected area consists of five ‘preserved’ towns situated along the west coast: Riomaggiore, Manarola, Corniglia, Vernazza and Monterosso al Mare. All are connected by train and walking paths (you can walk between all of them in a day), and most are connected by water ferry.

We spent two nights in the area, giving us a whole day to explore the towns, starting with Monterosso al Mare:

Honeymoon photos — Civita, Florence, Siena and surrounds.

Sun, 04 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The flickr link for this part of the honeymoon is here.

We spent around five days sightseeing Rome (and getting over any jetlag). After that we picked up our car rental, somehow navigated our way through Roman traffic, and headed up towards Florence. On the way, we stopped off at a small town called Civita (civita di Bagnoregio).

Honeymoon photos — Rome

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Firstly, thank you to everyone who contributed to our online honeymoon registry (and thank you of course if you contributed in some other way). Adriana and I had a fantastic time in Italy. Over the next week or so I’ll be uploading photos from the trip, starting today with Rome.

A link to the set on Flickr is here.

Some photos:

Ducktales (episode 3)

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

So, Razzi and the ducklings have now left the shelter of casa Kristian y Adriana. This is the last photo I have of them at their condo abode:

I’m fairly impressed, and relieved, with how Bropey has stepped into the role of protector and is looking after Razzi and the ducklings. We’ve also noticed how brown he is getting, after having either black or dark green feathers only a couple of weeks ago.

Ducktales (episode 2)

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

They have arrived.

We were starting to wonder when they were going to hatch, if ever. As it turned out, we were a week off of when we thought Razzi actually started sitting on the eggs. To see the first duckling appear this morning was absolutely amazing. To see another breaking out of its shell was incredible. At the last count there were ten ducklings.

Ducktales (episode 1)

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

One of the Muscovy ducks that hangs out around our place is called “Razzi”. Meet Razzi:

I noticed one day that the calla lillies in one of the planters on our patio were all flattened. I uncovered a bit of debris from the flattening and found two duck eggs. Anyone who knows farmer boy PK could guess that I was absolutely over the moon! A week or so later, the planter looked like this:

A photo in Playboy magazine!

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Yes, but it’s not the type of photo one might associate with that magazine. Yonks ago while on a road trip with a couple of other Aussies, I noticed a sign advertising a brothel called the “Shady Lady Ranch”. I was able to quickly snap a photo of the sign as we flew past it (I’m still using that 200mm zoom lens, I love it), posted it up online and never thought of it again. I was contacted by Playboy magazine for permission to use the photo in an article on the ranch. I never did receive the free copy of the magazine I requested, but I was able to track down the Oct 2009 issue which had the article, shown below.

Wedding Photos!

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I have created a Flickr collection containing photos from each of our wedding events. These are the full-size versions of the photos, much better for printing than their counterparts floating around on Facebook.

Click here to go to the collection.

Visiting Key West

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000

My parents have arrived back safely in Oz after their trip over here for the wedding (I’ll post another update about that later tonight), but before they left we took them to see Key West. Although we didn’t get to see the ideal sunset at Mallory Square because it was too cloudy, we did get to see some awesomely massive bubbles, and a nice gimmick where the dog would go around collecting tip money. The next night at Bahia Honda state park we watched the sun set in a completely cloudless sky. Here are some photos, the whole set is here.

I'm on a boat!

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Well, I *was* on a boat. A few days before the wedding we had the opportunity to go on a boat around the bay of Miami with my family, courtesy of friends of Adriana’s parents. It was awesome.

The full set (including a few photos from Wet Willie’s beforehand) is here.

Here are some sample photos from the ride:

Ideas and thoughts

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I haven’t been able to be much of a couch potato lately, what with all the wedding organising going on and due dates for work deliverables shouting out “you’ve forgotten about me!”

I haven’t, dear deliverables.

So some part of my brain, the part that likes to be a couch potato, came upon an idea at lunch time. How about creating a device that replaced your dreams with your Netflix queue, or the contents of your DVR while you slept? Then, your dreams wouldn’t be dreams anymore but rather what you wanted to be watching while sitting on the couch, but of course you don’t have the time to do that anymore… but you do while you sleep!

Being shagged by a parrot

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I found this gem earlier today on my BBC youtube feed, and I just cannot stop watching it. The ’look’ on the bird’s face, the awesome Englishman commentary… it’s just fantastic.

STS-128 launch

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

It finally launched! Adriana and I spent the better part of a week trying to see this thing lift off (weather problems, followed by a valve problem), but it was completely worth it. This was a night launch, and while it was much ‘shorter’ than a day launch, it was soooo much prettier. A shuttle launch still is, by far, the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. Click on the image below to go to the set.

More space-rock, please.

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I love me some space-rock. Muse is my favourite band by bloody far, and anyone who knows me just … knows that. I discovered today an unsigned band from New Zealand called “Battle Circus”, and they sound so much like Muse that I love them too. Here is one of their videos.

They have an EP out which is quite good, and are working on an album which is scheduled to be released later this year. Check out their website for links to facebook, twitter, whatever: http://www.battlecircus.com/

The hermit crabs

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Here are photos of the six hermit crabs I’ve been looking after, along with a photo of the setup I used to take the photos.

The active hermit crab

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

While my friend was away on vacation, I got the opportunity to look after his hermit crabs. I had also recently purchased an intervalometer for my DSLR camera, so I could do time-lapse photography. The video below shows a rough test of that, with each frame 8 seconds apart. There are quite a few things that need to be fixed for my next attempt. I have to fix the depth of field so more of the tank is in focus, the ambient lighting could be a bit better, I have to cut down the reflections on the front of the tank (perhaps a light source from behind), fix the white balance, and not move around when the photos are being taken. That final point is what makes some frames darker than the rest.

Photos and videos from Nine Inch Nails and Jane's Addiction

Sun, 10 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The Nine Inch Nails set is here.
The Jane’s Addiction set is here.

I can’t really express how seriously awesome that night was. NIN were just damn amazing. It also makes quite a difference when posting these pictures to the appropriate groups on Flickr, here is the latest view-count graph of all my photos…

Quite possibly the best game ever

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

You can’t beat a game with a title “Robot Dinosaurs That Shoot Beams When They Roar”. You just can’t.

http://www.arcadebomb.com/play/robot_dinosaurs_that_shoot_beams_when_they_roar.html

Misseri Studio

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I just completely stumbled across this on Youtube. Misseri Studio were the creators of a great deal of the short 5 minute programs that were shown on ABC in Oz when I was growing up. Don’t remember any of their stuff? Here is an example:

Go there. Now.
http://www.youtube.com/user/MISSERISTUDIO

Farewell, wisdom teeth.

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I just had all my wisdom teeth removed. Before being injected with the novocaine, I attempted to see how low I could get my pulse. I guess I did an ok job, hovering around the mid 60s, especially since I was freaking out a little.

The whole procedure took 45 mins, with three straight pulls and one impacted (soft flesh, so it hadn’t come right through yet). I remember the dentist saying “now you’re going to feel good”, and then after that, being wheelchaired out to the car.

Piano song, Movement 1

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I posted this to my facebook profile a few days ago. Here is the info:

Originally composed on a Kawai ES3 (I love that Piano), pumped via USB-MIDI into my computer running Cubase Studio 4, re-converted to piano choones using Synthogy’s Ivory Grand Piano, normalised and converted to MP3 using Audacity. Still can’t think of a proper name for it. Sorry if it auto-plays, I don’t know how to stop that with this app (actually, I’ve disabled it for now until I get a better solution).

The Snuggie

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Fulfill your Monk-like desires.

It's a damselfly, not a dragonfly.

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

This post was wrong. I was surfing Wikipedia and found that a damselfly’s wings run parallel to its body. A dragonfly’s wings are perpendicular, like on the one I found out the front of our place a while ago:

Peru photos - part three - Cusco!

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Here are the photos from the Cusco region of Peru, which includes Cusco itself, surrounding ruins and towns and of course, Machu Picchu.

Link to photo set.

Machu Picchu HDR
Originally uploaded by daecks

Llama!
Originally uploaded by daecks

Peru photos - part two - Ica!

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Here are photos from the region of Peru called “Ica”, which includes the coastal sites of Paracas and the Nazca lines.

The set is here.

Sealion
Originally uploaded by daecks

Spider deja vu
Originally uploaded by daecks

Peru photos - part one - Lima!

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Photos and some videos taken in and around Lima are now online in Flickr. There are more to come from Ica (Nasca lines) and Cusco (many Inca ruins).

Click here to visit the set.

Indian Market
Originally uploaded by daecks

Rainbow fountain
Originally uploaded by daecks

Berklee music project

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

For my latest online Berklee music course, we had to create background music and effects for a movie scene out of a video game. I did mine for a scene from Aeon Flux. Here ’tis, with the music track only…

Little dragonfly

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Little dragonfly
Originally uploaded by daecks

This little guy was hanging off a Staghorn leaf just outside our place.

Brown Anole

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Brown Anole
Originally uploaded by daecks

Another example of the critters found around where I live. This one would return every night to the same spot to rest. For scale, the head would be a little under 1cm long.

Australia trip photos

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

These have been up for a while now, but for relatives who do still check this page (mum), here is the link:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/daecks/collections/72157605414305482/

Kiss me

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Kiss me
Originally uploaded by daecks

This was out on our terrace the other day. I have no idea what species of frog this is, somewhat due to the tail protrusion.

Spiny Orb-weaver

Thu, 15 May 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Spiny Orb-weaver
Originally uploaded by daecks

Am I tempting fate by wanting to take photos of spiders?

Funeral picketing

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I would like to see them try… just to see their arses get kicked. Although you have to wonder if they know how far away Australia is, or even where it is, or even if they realise it will be there *rolls eyes*.

Time for an update, eh?

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Well I hope everyone had a good Christmas and New Year break. I made the mistake of attempting to work during that time, and was not as successful as I would have liked. Since this has turned into more of a photo blog rather than random musings/bitchings (stated right after a bitching post), here are some photos.

Trip to Washington, D.C.

Bitch time

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

It’s bitchy PK here. I can be in a completely good mood, and all of a sudden on comes a commercial with a song that has the most stupid lyrics ever. Take one of the new iPod Touch ads, with lyrics like these how can you go wrong?!?

“Music is my boyfriend
Music is my girlfriend
Music is my dead end
Music is my imaginary friend
Music is my brother
Music is my great-grand-daughter
Music is my sister
Music is my favorite mistress”

I heart Floridan critters

Sun, 21 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I spotted this guy the other day climbing up a tree near our place. He was about a metre long, and looks like he’s been around.

BTW: I heart Australian critters more, especially Red Back spiders.

Update: Another Iguana.

Just so you know

Sun, 21 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

PK is PK right now.

I’m on Corona #5, drinking with a bunch of Peruvians, making squashed frogs for the girls, and I’m running low on Midori.

Update: Midori is finished. )-:

Photos around the place

Sun, 21 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve noticed some photos of mine are on certain websites around the place. I find it interesting to see which of my photos are used. Here are some links:

Fantasy-fest devil
Diesel the family cat
Kitten in Nicaragua
Major Mitchell cockatoo
Heller International building, Chicago
Little chargers
Murray river

Adriana's b'day party

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Photos from Adriana’s birthday party held on the weekend are online. The star of the party (apart from Adriana)? Squashed Frogs.

The rest of the set is here.

Photos from London

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Wow! Finally…

Set is here.

Monaco panorama

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000

This is a 16 mega pixel stitch of Monaco, taken from a wheelchair viewing area.

Photo used in online publication

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I just got an e-mail from an online publication re the use of one of my pictures in their article! I’m always stoked about something like this. The picture is one I took of a kid in Nicaragua in the Granada islands area. He was one of the sons of the tour operator.

Here is a link to the article, it’s in Spanish, but it talks about how a study conducted by Stanford university showed that post traumatic stress during childhood makes people more vulnerable to stress, anxiety or depression later in their lives.

What is Ben smiling about?

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Can you find it? Click on image for larger version (or here for the answer, you cheat).

Die-al up

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Since I’ve been in Australia, I’ve been cruising on the Internet at dial-up speeds. It is so awesome. I love it. In the near future you’ll see the execution of a 56k modem once I ‘get back up to speed’.

From Australia

Mon, 13 Aug 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I’m currently in Australia (Loxton, to be precise) after making an emergency trip from the States for my Grandpa’s funeral. As far as funerals go, it was awesome. What was even more awesome is that we drank the club, where refreshments were served after the funeral, out of port. I contributed in no small way to that. Of course, my love of port comes from Grandpa himself and his influence on me when I grew up with him as a kid. Many frequent trips were made by him to the stash of flagons out by the shed, and every now and then I guess I’d try a sample of the Tawny as well (Tawnys made by Penfolds, Yalumba or Seppelts are a good start). Good times. (-:

July 4 fireworks

Mon, 16 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I took the opportunity to practice some firework photo shots.

Fireworks at Tamarac:

Fireworks at Hallandale Beach:

The set is here.

Photos from Prague

Sun, 15 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Photos from Prague are online.

St. Vitus Cathedral:

Silhouette of Church of St. Nicholas:

Old town square:

Adriana and the guard:

Photos from Germany

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Berlin Cathedral

Neuschwanstein Castle

Berlin Wall

Old mill near Nechern, where the Doecke side of my family came from

France/Monaco photo update

Mon, 02 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Some photos have been online for a little while now. First up, France

Night Light

At the Louvre

Eiffel Tower

Eiffel View

An update

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Obviously I have been back from Europe for a little bit now. Let’s just say I spent most of last week being exhausted and a little unwell. I spent most of this week catching up on work. Family celebrations over here have also been occupying some time.

I have been working on the 2600 or so photos I took whilst on vacation. A lot of these were experimental, some panoramas, some HDR test shots (for the record, I hate how some people are seemingly abusing the HDR concept on sites like Flickr. Some of the photos are just god-awful). One thing that I am kicking myself about is that a lot of the photos had dust marks on them. It’s taking me a while to remove such spots. I tried cleaning the lens whenever I could, but sometimes in the excitement of it all I forgot about that, not that I could see such spots when reviewing photos on the small screen of my D70.

Countdown

Thu, 17 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Planning for Europe

Tue, 08 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Everything is almost planned for the trip to Europe that Adriana and I are going on later this month. It is certainly going to be one fast-tracked experience, with visits to Paris, Rouen, Caen, Milan, Nice, Monaco (F1 Grand Prix), Berlin, Dresden, Prague, Munich and London in the space of three weeks.

I’m trying not to get flustered about it (and some people who know me well enough could imagine what I’m like right now), but it’s difficult not to. Part of me wishes that the organising part of the trip was finished a couple of months ago. Unfortunately things happen, schedules must be changed, and that is what I’m going through right now.

Let people download

Sat, 28 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Something that has piqued my interest lately is how labels are reacting to the fact that people are downloading music rather than buying CDs. Some labels are reacting to this. One of my favourites, Distinctive records (the label for “Way out West”, “Hybrid”, “General Midi”, among others) has embraced music downloads and I’ve downloaded several albums from there (if only they’d tag the damn mp3s properly). Thankfully, I can play those mp3s on any device as there is no DRM (Digital Rights Management) on the files. iTunes is now offering DRM-free music from EMI, so as an aside I’m glad about that too.

Muse in concert

Mon, 23 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I am in a pretty damn good mood right now, having just come back from my first Muse concert. How can I say they were fucking awesome without swearing? Even from as far back as I was sitting I could see Matt Bellamy strutting around on stage and working that guitar like nothing else. It was awe-inspiring. “Supermassive black hole”, “Knights of Cydonia”, “Hysteria”, “Stockholm Syndrome” were just some of the songs they played and I was lapping up every damn second of it.

What's going on?

Wed, 18 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Things have been especially busy lately. I’ve been hanging out with my girlfriend Adriana a lot. Yes Mum, I’ve met the family, and they’re absolutely hilarious! So things are good there.

I recently helped organise a “baby shower” (I use the quotes since it had guys there too, and showers as such are normally a female-only affair) for my friends Jessie and Omar, and I took pictures at another shower party for friends Maha and Matt.

Wedding in South Beach

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

On the weekend I attended a double first: a Cuban wedding, and a wedding in South Beach. It was an incredibly short church service, but that just meant more time to party afterwards. Which they did. A lot of. I’ve never seen so much dancing (and good dancing at that) at a wedding. Congrats go out to Milly and Val!

Some pictures are included below, click here for the set slideshow.

Tornado in South Florida

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Apparently there was a developing tornado spotted in South Florida this afternoon, specifically forming over Tamarac, where I happen to live! It didn’t touch down, and not much damage was caused, apparently, but I’m curious to see what damage was done on the drive home tonight.

UPDATE: Absolutely no damage whatsoever. Yay!

I have to add, and this is the craziness in me becoming more apparent, but as soon as I heard there was a tornado forming I wanted to go home, grab my camera and take some pictures. I didn’t do that… perhaps next time.

Tiesto who?

Sat, 03 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Heard a funny story at a work luncheon yesterday. I’m going to paraphrase this one, I can’t remember all the details due to me laughing so much while the story was being told.

One of my friends who lives down in South Beach was invited to dinner by a friend. “We’re going to have dinner with Tiesto!” For anyone who listens to dance music, that would be quite a dinner to attend. Except, she hadn’t really heard of him. Anyway, they’re out at dinner, she asked him questions like:

MySpace

Wed, 10 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I gave into this phenomenon, which is an exercise in usability frustration, a long time ago. If you got sucked in like I did, let me know at http://www.myspace.com/daecks.

Update on birthday madness

Mon, 11 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Here are some pictures from the Thursday night. Looking at the first picture we have Eddie, Andrea, Jon and PK! I’m pouting/pursing my lips in some of the pictures (as are the other guys) because Andrea’s ex never smiled in any of his photos, and always did that with his mouth. We are always paying her out about that. I’m particularly impressed with my effort in the second photo.

Happy birthday to me!

Fri, 08 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Shameless plug, yes.

I am tired. Really tired. Last night I got back to my friend’s house and crashed on the couch at . . . 4:30am. So I guess I really got back this morning. My project group this morning was serving up breakfast, so I had to be at work at 7:30am. That hurt a lot, especially now that I’m 28! OMFG my bones are giving up on me, I’ll need a walking frame soon and where the hell did I put my falsies???

Viva Las (ow my head hurts)

Sun, 03 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

So for the past few days I’ve found myself in Las Vegas, catching up with a friend who is in the US on a work assignment with some of his colleagues. This place is a LOT of fun. “I don’t gamble”, but I have been playing a few blackjack tables here and there and doing okay. Last night though at the Hard Rock casino my mind finally gave up on me and I could not even add together 7 and 4. No, I lie. I could add that together fine, it’s just that 5 seconds later I forgot what the total was. After realising that wasn’t helping me (I forgot I came to that conclusion several times) I decided to have an early night (4 am) and reboot my mind. Looking forward to doing it all over again tonight!

So I wanted to make a pavlova. . .

Wed, 22 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Congratulations Javi and Glenda!

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Congratulations Kynan and Debbie

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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:

How to save a wet cell phone

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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!

Scrubs at work

Thu, 09 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Oh, this is great. A recent episode of ‘Scrubs’ had Colin Hay, of ‘Men at work’ fame, singing ‘Overkill’. Outstanding!

Thanksgiving?

Wed, 08 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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

Mon, 23 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

“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

Thu, 19 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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

Tue, 10 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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

Tue, 03 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Miami at night

Fri, 22 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Top Gear presenter in crash

Fri, 22 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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!

Cafe Tacuba

Thu, 21 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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!!

Wed, 20 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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!

Nice conversations

Tue, 19 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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…”

Wassup, PK?

Wed, 13 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The Fifth

Fri, 01 Sep 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Thank God for ears!

Tue, 29 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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.

GO AWAY!

Sun, 27 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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

Ultrafest!?!?

Sat, 26 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Volcano Concepcion

Sat, 26 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000

This is a video I took of some cloud moving over the top of Volcano Concepcion on the island of Ometepe in Nicaragua. The speed has been increased by a factor of eight.

Bad Friday

Fri, 25 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Today I am just in the worst, most depressed mood ever. I don’t even know what to blame it on . . . many things I guess. No, I’ll blame it on distance and the fact that work is sucking right now.

But anyway, for some reason I am inspired to take pictures of bugs and maybe a Miami skyline at night. I’ll see how I go with that this weekend.

Fatality in South Beach

Sat, 19 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I was having dinner with friends down at Lincoln Mall in South Beach and couldn’t help but notice this…

a fatality. broken. wasted. it not just any broken bottle, it’s a broken bottle of Evian water. oh, so SoBe.

New blogger: cool

Wed, 16 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/08/new-blogger.html

I’m not one of the special people who can do the switch to the new version of blogger yet, but a new funky layout could just be what this site needs. Of course, ‘funky’ is completely in the eye of the beholder. Some people around here are still convinced that wearing brown belts with white sneakers is totally funky.

(whatever, pk).

Nicaragua: It's beautiful! I love it!

Fri, 11 Aug 2006 00:00:00 +0000

My holiday in Nicaragua was quite simply the most eye-opening, amazing trip I’ve ever been on. I’ve never seen such extremes in my life. I went to the upper class club “Hipa Hipa” in Managua and then drank ToÃ±a in a bar made of sheet iron on the island of Ometepe. I’ve never lived in such extremes, from the very nice Holiday Inn in Managua to sleeping at a place that only had a fan and no hot water on Ometepe (when there was water at all). It was just amazing to experience the two extremes.

Nica, baby!

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I was going to complete what happened on the rest of the roadtrip… but screw it. One of the highlights was when a girl I was chatting to at some bar in Asheville, North Carolina, basically proposed to me. If it weren’t for the 5 pints of Guinness I’d had already, I might have even considered the offer. I don’t even know how that makes sense. All I’m really trying to say is that a fair chunk of the pictures from the trip are online here.

Lambada

Fri, 14 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

The forbidden dance, and Kaoma’s song is one of my favourite songs from growing up in the 80’s.

Check out this page and get your 80’s fix today!!

Favourite news story of the year

Wed, 12 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

From http://msnbc.msn.com/id/13825566/?GT1=8307

“Paleontologists say they have found the fossilized remains of a fanged killer kangaroo and what they describe as a “demon duck of doom.””

The guys here at work are loving this story. Australia must seem like some magical mystery land of killer creatures.

Demon duck of doom. That’s awesome.

Worst hotel/motel ever

Tue, 11 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

It almost seemed like we were never going to get on the road the Friday night of the road trip. I had left my camera tripod at Tobacco Road from doing photos the night before, and thinking that I might need to use it (I never did end up using it), I drove all the way to Miami to pick it up after work. Eventually my partner in crime Eddie and I left my place at 9pm … that’s a bloody late when we were intending to make it to Jacksonville that night (about a 6 hour drive, sticking to the speed limit).

Still alive

Mon, 10 Jul 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Believe it or not, I’m still alive. The last couple of weeks have been especially hectic, with me finishing up part of a music course and work being insane. Oh, and fit a supermassive road trip up through South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia in with all that on the past July 4 weekend. I’ve again been updating Flickr with pics from the trip so if you click on the badge to the right you’ll get to them. I have some weird arse stories to share from that trip…

Black Holes and Revelations

Sat, 24 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

So, my favourite music group just has to be Muse. I think it used to be Coldplay or Hybrid, but that sort of changed when I rediscovered them during hurricane Wilma last year.

I’ve got a copy of their latest album, “Black Holes and Revelations”. My pre-order using iTunes doesn’t come through until next month . . . I couldn’t wait that long but when it is able to be downloaded I also get some bonues videos. Cool.

Santos Renuentes v2.0

Sat, 24 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

This past Wednesday I took photographs for my favourite Spanish-rock band “Santos Renuentes”. I’ve written about this group a lot before. They underwent a change recently where the drummer, lead guitarist and singer were replaced. Yeah, that’s a pretty major sort of change. It was only a practice warm-up friends-invited-only session, but what’s resulted from all the changes is a band with very different group dynamics and, in my opinion, a much better sound. It was just amazing to hear and see the difference in the band.

GO HEAT - AGAIN!!!

Wed, 21 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Woohoo!

This is insane. Miami Heat. NBA champions.

People are going insane around here. Cars everywhere honking horns.

And just announced - Dwyane Wade - MVP.

Awesome, awesome, awesome.

Gotta go now, gotta go party.

GO HEAT!

Mon, 19 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Wow. What a game of basketball with a final scoreline of 101-100 in favour of Miami. This is the second time today I haven’t been able to sit down to watch a sports game, the first being for the loss of the Socceroos against the Brazilians in the World Cup. I swear I need new feet from all the pacing that I’ve done in front of the TV. I definitely need a good strong liquor right now.

GO GERMANY!!!

Wed, 14 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

So I’m sitting in my cube, watching in disbelief the matchcast of the Germany vs Poland match. I took this screenshot because I didn’t believe that Germany could have so many shots on goal and not get anything:

And then I saw it. Such a beautiful thing. In the last moments of the last minute my screen updates beautifully to show this:

Go Germany. After Australia, this is my favourite team. Ich liebe Deutschland (und Australien!)

GO SOCCEROOS!

Mon, 12 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Woohoo!

I’m sitting here in my very grey cubicle at work looking at the final score between Australia and Japan, and it’s all good baby! I’ve got my green shirt on today and combining that with the face colour of my watch and maybe a few post-it notes, it’s green and gold all the way. Pity I couldn’t watch a live telecast as I had to be at my desk, so I ended up refreshing the main page of the Fifa website over and over again to get match updates.

They start 'em young in Oz

Mon, 12 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

From this link
“The 10-year-old and his brother, 6, decided to take the family car for a 100km spin to visit their grandfather in Moree, in the NSW northwest, about 12.30pm on Sunday.”

This reminds me of my cousin Levi, who is quite adept at driving a car as well (click on pic for details)

That doctor visit...

Fri, 09 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I got the results for my tests back.

According to the results, there is absolutely nothing wrong with me at all. Nada. Nichts. Jack $hit.

So now I ponder and wonder what the hell went on, whether I get a second opinion, or whether I ignore it ever happened. My doctor told me it was probably an anxiety attack of sorts.

Whatever the case, it’s time to move on in some direction, albeit more cautiously than before. I’m sick of staying home. I need to get out and do some stuff again.

On the other side

Tue, 06 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

So I’ve come through what seems to be a rather weird ride. Whatever caused me to pretty much collapse and have difficulty breathing, resulting in a rush to the emergency room, has gone. I have not been able to link it to anything that I ate. I’m thinking that somehow my body was telling me to slow down a bit. Perhaps.

I’ve had a CAT scan, 24 hour heart monitor and blood tests done. I’m getting sick of all these blood tests. My arm skin is a slightly yellow colour around the region where all the needles have gone in. I feel like a pin cushion.

Down memory lane

Tue, 23 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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?

Tue, 23 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Complainers, whingers, whiners

Thu, 18 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Recently

Thu, 18 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Weird Saturday stuff

Tue, 09 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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.

I'm back

Wed, 03 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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”.

Seeya Australia!

Mon, 01 May 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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

Thu, 20 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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

Wed, 19 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Going mobile and lacking sleep

Sun, 16 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Hurricane season 2006

Thu, 13 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Brief return to Oz

Thu, 06 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Skype-ing it. Finally.

Thu, 06 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Some Ultrafest 2006 Pictures

Mon, 03 Apr 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Prodigy

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.

GET MOTIVATED!

Thu, 30 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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.

New guitar

Thu, 30 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000

PK can rock out now.

I think I should move to Miami

Fri, 24 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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.

One heck of a cool movie

Mon, 20 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Star-spotting

Mon, 20 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000

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?

Gallery of the day

Wed, 15 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Goes to NBA cheerleaders.

I dream of the day I’ll be allowed to take my telephoto lens into a basketball arena. *sigh*.

News reporter of the millennium

Wed, 15 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Sorry Sandra Sully…

Melissa Theuriau - bonjour!

http://www.ryoni.com/news/123/ARTICLE/1099/2005-01-07.html

Calle Ocho

Mon, 13 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000

As I type this I am absolutely buggered. I have been running on a minimum of sleep for a while now. This, of course, is entirely my fault.

I can’t remember what I did Friday night anymore… something.

Saturday night we headed out to the lovely South Beach area to check out some cool places. There were a few spring breakers about but not as many as one would expect since South Beach can get bloody expensive. We ended up at a really, really cool hotel on the beachfront called the Shore Club.

Coldplay and Fiona Apple

Wed, 08 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000

On the weekend I got to see Coldplay and Fiona Apple play in Orlando. Actually, ha, let me correct that. I got to see a bit of one Fiona Apple song - “Fast as you can” - and you can bet I was running as fast as I could to get to my seat when I arrived at the venue.

It turns out we had a bit of bad luck with the traffic that night. What should have been a 15 minute drive to the venue turned out being over an hour drive. Whilst sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic we had to get to exit 83B on the I-4. Fiona would have already started her set, and being support act, would only be playing for 45 mins or so. Anyway, we came up to exit 82A… 5 mins passed … exit 82B … another 5 mins gone … exit 82C… at which point I stated “ha, wouldn’t it be funny if there was an 82D exit!” Nobody in the car really appreciated the humour.

More photos please

Wed, 01 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Some “different” things have been going on in my life recently. People recently saw these photos from the CD release party.

How to kill a RAZR

Tue, 28 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Last week was an up-and-down week. I was doing this new photography stuff and had lots on my mind. I had gotten back from the gym and decided to put a load of washing on. Sitting down to relax I went to check my phone for messages… I couldn’t find it. A bit unusual I thought. I looked everywhere for it. Still nothing. I tried calling the phone using my friend’s mobile and it was going straight to voicemail. “Damn” I thought, “I’ve switched it off”. But then I thought about that some more. I clearly remember NOT turning it off. More thinking. Going to voicemail…. phone must be off… why is phone off?… flat battery… no, it’s fully charged… load of washing… battery dead… load of washing… load of washing… LOAD OF WASHING!

A warning

Mon, 20 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000

If I ever happen to call you and get your voicemail, and I’m within reach of my computer or iPod, you will get a power ballad left on your voicemail. I promise. Recent victims have received Michael Bolton’s song mentioned previously, Heart’s “Alone”, Pat Benatar’s “Love is a battlefield” and Def Leppard’s “Love Bites”.

Ho hum

Thu, 16 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I’m bored at work, well, it’s 6pm and I feel like dribbling on my blog. You’re reading this so you must be bored too. Or maybe you’re finding something to kick start your day. Look elsewhere!

I like to start my work day with a bunch of questions and my objective is to get answers to all of them by the end. Today is not one of those days as I haven’t answered any of the questions and I actually have more questions than I started with. yay!

Yay yay for Valentine's Day!

Wed, 15 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Hold on… this is sounding a lot like last year.

Actually, this year was a little better. I ended up giving someone a Valentine’s gift, and I dropped it off at 7am on their front porch on one of the coldest Florida mornings I can remember. Of course, we ain’t getting blizzards down here so I can’t really complain.

So last year I actually listened to some Rammstein. Maybe if I listen to the right sort of music, I can actually convince myself that everything is ok. How about “I feel loved” by “Depeche Mode”?

CD release party photos and geeks

Thu, 09 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000

There are online here. I kind of stuffed up the gamma in Photoshop… things were a bit iffy there for a while. Also the pictures were taken from the same perspective the whole night. There were lots of people in the club and some stupidly placed VIP tables. It was the best spot I could get.

Hey has anyone seen “The IT crowd”, a British take on geekism? I’ve just watched 5 minutes of the second episode before posting this. It’s not that bad! It reaches out to the geek lust buried deep within my tricuspid valve.

Lou, the goldfish battler

Thu, 09 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000

UPDATED: Lou is actually looking normal now! He/she/it got rid of the buoyancy problem and is discovering the bottom of the fish tank.

I’ve posted about this fish before, but Lou’s resilience and battler attitude has impressed me. It’s a sign that even though something bad in your life may have happened (in this case, the swim bladder is all screwed up), then you can still keep charging along.

Or maybe the fish is just thinking “when the hell are they going to let me f#%ken die?”

The Muse, it is good.

Mon, 06 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I have just rediscovered a group that I first listened to 5 years ago. Ah, I remember fondly the days blasting out some ‘Muse’ in one of the project labs at my university, trying to figure out how to warp pictures into spherical coordinates so I could form a panorama. Those were the days *sigh*.

Fast forward to today and I have rediscovered them. Recently I played Muse’s first album and thought “damn those guys are good”. They have since released two more albums and both are effin fantastic. Definitely some good listening, definitely one of my favourite bands.

Santos Renuentes' CD release party

Wed, 01 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Woohoo! This is one thing I’ve been looking forward to for a while: the CD release party for Santos Renuentes. Awesome. To those in Australia reading this, you have approximately 5 hours to get down to South Beach. Sorry for the late notice…

Debut album out

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Santos Renuentes have finally released their self titled debut album! It’s in stores now all around the US, but in short supply as there were only 5000 initial albums pressed. Here is a link that contains their first single and music video, “Marcha”. This video is on rotation on local latin MTV-like station “Mun2” alongside Coldplay and the Darkness to name a few. For me the great thing is that the CD sleeve contains all the words to the songs which will help in my learning of Spanish. I can’t wait until the CD release party next Wednesday night at Macarenas in SoBe. Awesome.

Pics from the phone

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, here are some other weirdness pics I’ve taken with my crapola RAZR camera…

This fish looks like it’s dead, but it’s just got an airbubble in it’s tail so has to spend most of its day upside down. Poor bugger.

Nice car, eh? Take a look at what is hanging near the rear view mirror - a disabled parking permit. Ok, so maybe the driver really is disabled… ya.

Updates

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Have been made to this post. I somehow got my iPod working again and another third of the pictures have been processed and the ones I like uploaded.

More Australia 2006 photos uploaded

Sat, 21 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Slowly yet surely I’m returning to normal, so here are some photos! None of them have any comments yet, but whatever (update: some do). This is the result of me going through a third of the photos I’ve taken. There is still another third I cannot get off my iPod (unknown device problems which I just can’t solve - update: I’ve fixed my iPod and have uploaded those photos) and the other third is in Wagga. God knows when I’ll be able to get stuck into them.

Spiderman

Sat, 21 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I could not stop laughing when I came into work last week and found that someone had modified a Spiderman poster in photoshop by replacing Peter Parker with an image of myself. Hats off Mark!

Revenge of the redbacks

Mon, 09 Jan 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I had the absolute, without a doubt, worst flight back from Australia ever. There were times - and I say this with all honesty - that I thought I wasn’t going to make it. Allow me to explain.

Whilst watching “King Kong” with a couple of mates I noticed that the inside of my left leg just above my ankle was hurting a little. My sock had folded over a couple of times but I thought it extremely wussy of my body to be complaining about that so I ignored it at the time. Later on that night at Garage club whilst playing some fussball I noticed the pain had increased and the left side of my groin was also starting to hurt. Standing in the line for the Vodka bar I felt my left leg go extremely numb and more of a general numbness over my whole body. My teeth started chattering, my pulse was racing and I was finding it difficult to stand up. I pretty much said “I have to go… to the hospital”

Xmas in Loxton

Sun, 25 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Ahh, good ol’ Loxton. How can I describe this place? How about this…

Heart rate anywhere but Loxton: **********************
Heart rate in Loxton: …..*………*………*……..

Well, something like that. Loxton has changed a little this time around. The high school has undergone a massive overhaul and a lot of the buildings I had classes in are gone. My primary school has also changed a bit in that “the mound” has been demolished. Ahh, the mound. Such fond memories of rolling down that thing and trying to stop from falling off.

Back in Adelaide

Fri, 23 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Cool. I am now back in Adelaide after spending a couple of days in Melbourne with my fantastic hosts Steve and Jen. I had an awesome time back there even though I was as sick as a dog (as in really bad cough, earaches) and still getting over jetlag.

But none of that matters as I am back home. I’m just waiting for my brother to finish the dishes (shock! horror!) and then I’m heading off for a walk down Rundle mall for old times sake. After that I’m going to head off to Loxton for Christmasy stuff, and I’ll be returning to Adelaide on Boxing day at which point I’ll catch up with all the Adelaideans.

Knight rider

Mon, 12 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

This is awesome. iTunes has picked up some classic NBC shows and one of them is Knight Rider. I couldn’t really remember what happened in the episodes anymore - all I can remember is enjoying watching the show as a kid. It’s so 80’s, it’s awesome, I love it.

Scared

Mon, 12 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Last Saturday (as in Dec 3rd) I had my birthday party and unfortunately, people got to see the bad side of me. Well that’s if you call throwing water at people and cursing in German *bad* *things*. I also spent a bit of the night dancing around a sombrero and throwing packets of tim tams at people.

Problem with all the above is that I can’t remember doing any of it. I can remember up to the short cricket game we played outside (short because we were hitting neighbours’ cars with the tennis ball and decided to get back inside before the police got called), but after that the night is pretty much forgotten as far as I’m concerned. Forgotten that is if it were not for cameras. Some people got pictures of me doing these things and looking rather unwell and I’m scared. I haven’t seen any of these pictures yet. God knows what I’m doing in them. I have a feeling that pretty soon I’m going to get some pictures in my inbox and I’m going to think “ha, what a dic…. hold on, that’s me.”

Christmas and New Year's in Oztralia

Fri, 09 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I’m going to be there ;-)

I’ll be arriving in Melbourne on Tuesday 20th December. I have a Visa interview on the 22nd and then I’ll be heading off to Adelaide on the 23rd, arriving some time around lunch. At some point along the way I’ll be in Loxton, probably for Christmas but otherwise I’ll be in Adelaide catching up with all you fine people back there. I’m going to try scheduling some golf, tennis, bowling and some other stuff with some of you guys back there I think. Also, Savvy is crying out for some attention, as is the Botanic and even Worldsend. Awesome. I can’t wait to get back there!

Shameless plug for...

Thu, 08 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

my birthday! Yay!

Good on ya December 8th.

Hello Australia?

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Some of you may know that I’m trying to get back to Australia for Christmas. To those of you who didn’t know, now you do. There are some major complications that have arisen which may prevent me from doing so, but just to let you know I’m trying to work through those and I’m also trying to figure out a stack of alternative plans. I really, really want to catch up with y’all there.

Sunrise in Florida

Sun, 27 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just confirmed occurs at 6:45am, or thereabouts. This has been a pretty good thanksgiving weekend, and although I didn’t originally plan on going out at many nights as I did it’s always good when things work out for the better.

I’d like to thank Starsailor for getting me home this morning with their cranking new album. Guys, I didn’t like the second album too much - couldn’t get into the choones - but it’s nice to see that you’ve fully redeemed yourself with this third album “On the outside”.

You might be a redneck if...

Mon, 21 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

You go and watch NASCAR! Which is exactly what I did on Sunday.

I came away from NASCAR not really getting drawn into the whole thing that much. In fact, I left half way through because I was bored couldn’t get into it. The tickets that we got were free, thank goodness, because at $90 a pop I really would have felt ripped off slightly disappointed had I actually payed for them.

Hot chicks

Thu, 17 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Now that I have the attention of half the people reading this, I will write hot *nerd* chicks. There is something about an attractive girl and maths equations that I find particularly alluring. I’d write a maths equation to describe the relationship but I think these equations are better.

oZomatli pics

Wed, 16 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

First off, BIG PROPS to Johanna, who was visiting from Puerto Rico, for taking these pictures at the Ozomatli concert in South Beach recently. BIG PROPS to Arlene for passing them on to me. BIG PROPS to me for posting other people’s pictures!! But I know there are a couple of Ozomatli fans out there who read this little site-o-mine so I had to share them.

Asdru shouting it out to the crowd. Take particular note of the shirt he is wearing…
Yes, it says ‘Womadelaide’. I get bagged for harping on about Australia and in particular Adelaide all the time, but anyone who bags me hasn’t been to Australia yet and just doesn’t understand…
Wil-dog on the bass.
Jabu - awesome vocals…

Shef with DJ Spinobi in the background…
Raul and Jabu…
This part was awesome: after the set had finished oZo came into the crowd and continued to play, battling with the DJ’s at the nightclub who were trying to spin some musak…

Ende!

Farewell

Tue, 15 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Back in February I made this post about a picture I had located from a night out in South Beach. That night was excellent and I’ve had other good nights out with people in that group since then. I learnt today that Azadeh, the girl in the green top, died in a car accident last night. A person driving under the influence (in fact he had been convicted of DUI 3 times prior) was driving the wrong way on an interstate highway ramp and hit her car head on.

A road safety notice for Floridian drivers and bicycle riders

Mon, 14 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Part 1: The flashing traffic lights.

This has really been getting to me recently and in a lot of cases is making driving more dangerous than just after Wilma when we had virtually no working traffic lights. Some lights at intersections are still not working properly and as such the lights flash yellow for one flow of traffic (eg northbound/southbound) and flash red for another flow (eg eastbound/westbound). If you are travelling and encounter a YELLOW FLASHING traffic light you may proceed with caution. If you are travelling and encounter a RED FLASHING traffic light you must treat it as a stop sign, hence, you must ALWAYS give way to those drivers who are encountering a YELLOW FLASHING traffic light, who by the way should be travelling through the intersection with caution.

Frobros

Sun, 13 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I was browsing through my computer and found some pictures from what seems like another lifetime. Ok, it’s actually only a couple of years ago and these pics are from one of the infamous social club nights my company had. This one had a blues brother theme and stars the Chief and CJB as my fellow fro-bros, da Boss, and Nav. I’ve only got a few pics and they are here.

An apology

Thu, 10 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I have an apology to post to this blog. It has been brought to my attention that I’ve been using “cell phone” instead of the correct term “mobile phone”. I’m sorry.

I would like to point out though that I still like the letter U and I use it whenever possible to honoUr my upbringing in the proper spelling of words in English. I would like to apologiSe if I have accidentally left that little bugger out.

Get to know your neighbours

Thu, 10 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

This is what I was able to do during Wilma, and this was one of the conversations I had.

(I’m babbling to my flatmate about something)
Neighbour: Hi! Where are you from?
Me: Australia.
Neighbour: Where in Australia?
Me: South Australia
Neighbour: Where in South Australia?
(I’m starting to raise my left eyebrow at this point)
Me: Adelaide.
Neighbour: Adelaide? Really? I used to work there on the railway lines.
Me: What? You’re kidding me!
Neighbour: I used to work there back in the 60’s for a little while. I’m from England originally and moved to Australia for a while and then back home to England. I wanted to move back to Australia but they wouldn’t let me back in so I moved here instead. I really want to go back there.
Me: Wow. I didn’t think I’d be living next to anyone who knew where Adelaide was.
Neighbour: Yeah, yeah. Lleyton Hewitt comes from there, right? Tennis player?
Me: Yeah, that’s right.
Neighbour: I also did some work for the railways out in the bush.
Me: Oh really? Where abouts?
Neighbour: I used to work in a town called Barmera. Lake Bonney.
Me: WHAT? You know about Barmera? My Grandma lives there.
(Barmera has a population of around 4000 people. It’s not huge, so I’m amazed at this point this guy knows about Barmera).
Neighbour: I also used to work in this little town on the way to Barmera coming from Adelaide. You had to go past Kingston and then you had to turn off not far from there.
Me: You mean Moorook?!?
Neighbour: Yeah, that’s it, Moorook.

Must stop, must stop...

Mon, 07 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

The partying has taken its toll. I’ve been out every night since Wednesday now and I pretty much finished up on Saturday night by going to Voodoo lounge in downtown Ft Lauderdale. They were actually playing some pretty decent dance music, what I mean is, they played some Mylo which makes them about 7 or 8 months late. Well, whatever. Good vibes that night and good people.

I decided to finish the weekend by visiting a friend’s place last night for an excellent BBQ. I was pretty stuffed and they decided to watch “Revenge of the Sith”. They’re real hardcore Star Wars fans, that’s the only reason I could think of why they’d do that. Normally I’m complaining about the acting every 5 minutes and the only way to shut me up is to either gag me or promise to show me scene 14 from the movie “From dusk till dawn” afterwards. I was so tired and exhausted though that I only complained about the acting once; that part where the Stormtrooper hands back Obi Wan’s lightsaber just before order 66 is executed. “Oh, here, I found this” or whatever the hell he says. That acting is primary school play quality but without the parental attachment that makes it watchable.

Stargazing in Fla

Mon, 07 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

While the power was out during Wilma there were fantastic opportunities to do some stargazing as most of the street lights were out in the ‘burbs. Although there is some overlap between the constellations I could see in Australia there are of course many new ones to look at. Below is a shot I took out the back of my apartment with my camera mounted on a tripod. This pic has notes so move your mouse over a box to read a description of the constellation. You can see the original without lines or notes here.

Calling all can't stoppers!

Fri, 04 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I’m going to take Annie Mac’s “can’t stopper” tag and run with it here for a bit. I’ve been going freaking crazy lately. After the whole hurricane business and getting cabin fever and so forth I’ve decided to make up for that. Wednesday night I went to see Youssou N’Dour with an Egyptian orchestra backing him. That was just simply amazing. Thursday night I went to see Depeche Mode. Might I add that they weren’t playing in Fort Lauderdale - that concert got cancelled - but they were playing in Tampa which is over a 3 hour drive away. Not bad for a Thursday night. Big props to the driver for keeping us all awake with the cool music. Tonight is Ozomatli in South Beach. Tomorrow night I’ve been given a tip that “La Covacha” would be a good place to check out. It’s a full-on Latin club and I’m wondering if they understand Australian there.

Hurricane Wilma photos

Fri, 04 Nov 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Most of them are online here.

Back at work

Mon, 31 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Most of this morning has been spent catching up with workmates and what their experience with the hurricane was. Although many have had their power restored, some haven’t (including myself) and it actually shows. I made a fairly good effort to make it look like stuff was normal by shaving this morning and this has fooled people into thinking that I have power back. It is taking me a while to get any sort of intelligent thought back into my head though.

In Orlando and out of south fla

Sat, 29 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just arrived in Orlando for a halloween festival and I must mention just how glad I am to be out of South Florida. Hurricane Wilma was the first real hurricane I’ve experienced. From watching amazingly stong winds blow down trees early Monday morning to living without electricity, phone or drinkable water until I left this afternoon, it is something I don’t really want to experience again. The experience was worthwhile, yes, but that’s enough thanks. One of the most dangerous things I’ve had to do is drive around without working traffic lights. The traffic lights weren’t working not only because there was no electricity, but because in a lot of cases they just weren’t there anymore. Trees everywhere were down. Powerlines were strewn across roads. The scenery changed so much that I drove past an entrance to a street because I didn’t recognise it anymore - and of course a lot of the street signs had been blown down. There were massive lines for car fuel at the few pumping stations that were working (there was no power to pump the fuel so some stations had to get backup generators in). The only time I really bothered with a car was to visit friends and to find reception for and to charge my cell phone. All the other times I travelled about was on a mountain bike to pick up water or get cell phone service.

Riding out the storm

Mon, 24 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Hopefully I’m able to hit “publish post” before the power goes out this time…

Wilma is nearly upon us (as in, the worst is yet to come) and not long ago I was woken by the howling winds outside my bedroom window. It’s still pretty dark outside. I added another notch to my belt of experiences in the US, that of putting up hurricane shutters. I was able to convince my flatmate yesterday that this would be a good idea so we spent a few hours figuring out how the shutters got put up. That was a downright pain in the arse but we got the big windows on the bottom floor shuttered up as well as a top floor window that was pretty large.

Florida Panthers, Hurricane Wilma and other stuff

Fri, 21 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just gotten back from another Panthers game, and this time they won! This doesn’t happen that often when I go to watch a game. It seemed for a while there that I was not going to see a Florida team win in any of the baseball, basketball, college football or ice hockey games that I went to watch. One thing I was hoping to see was a bit of fighting action. Call it the neanderthal in me but there is a saying that goes: “I went to watch a fight and a hockey game broke out” - and a bit of a fist fight always adds a bit more to the game. Yes, how primitive of me. However I must let it be known that I do not enjoy watching boxing. Not in the slightest.

Friday morning therapy

Fri, 21 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, so I’ve just arrived at work and I’m feeling a little better this morning, but I think I need some music medicine to get the rest of the bad demons away. I’m going to see if this little concoction will work:

Writing to reach you - Travis (to match my mood)
Easy - Faith no more
I feel loved - Depeche Mode
Sweetness and light - Itchy and scratchy (classic track that one)
I still haven’t found what I’m looking for - U2 (awesome, awesome song)
Last train to trancentral - KLF
Anything but you - Way out west (awesome dance track)
No leaf clover - Metallica
Hold your colour - Pendulum (wickedly awesome DnB from some Oz guys)
Feelings - Shy FX and T Power (nice DnB track)

PK is still in da house

Thu, 20 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

It’s 12:20am, I’m in a writing mood. I actually went to see Santos Renuentes play at a place called Hoy Como Ayer in Miami. The section of Miami this place was located in is known as “Little Havana” and it lived up to its name as I was surrounded by Cubans and the place had a very Cuban-like atmosphere (well, that I could imagine anyway. I haven’t actually been to Cuba yet). But hey, the DVDs they were playing before Santos Renuentes began sounded a lot like Buena Vista Social Club. Santos Renuentes were good again of course. So I won’t elaborate any more on that.

Coldplay in Adelaide?

Fri, 14 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Nah, just messing with ya. I think it unlikely that Coldplay would visit the fine city of Adelaide for one of their tours in the near future. I thought there was hope though when I received a Coldplay newsletter stating more shows in Australia, only to find that they were scheduling more shows in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne.

Bugger.

At any rate, I’m not in Adelaide and I got to see Coldplay a month ago. They were pretty damn awesome of course and I don’t know why I didn’t mention that fact on my blog. Perhaps I did… I dunno. Here are some shoddy pictures from the concert taken with my phone camera:

Congratulations Steven and Carrie!

Sun, 09 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

My long, long, long time friend Steve W called me from Australia just before I was due to leave for New York to inform me that he was now engaged to Carrie. This didn’t come as a shock to me at all of course. But heck, it does make me smile a bit when I think back a few years to a particular pub crawl… Steve did you really know what you were getting yourself into? Haha! I kid, I kid :-)

New York City roundup

Sun, 09 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

All I can say about New York City is “wow”. What a city. I found myself not wanting to return back to Florida after spending time in NYC. Here is a quick summary of what was accomplished:

Helicopter flight around Manhattan
Boat cruise around statue of Liberty
Saw an off-broadway production “Slava’s snowshow”
Saw a lot of of the districts in Manhattan - Soho, Meatpacking district (nightclubs are big there), Harlem, Times Square, Chinatown, Financial district… the list goes on and on
Walked across Brooklyn bridge
Saw comedy acts at Dangerfield’s club
Jazz at a place called “Smalls”
A funky salsa-like band at a place called “Cafe Wha”
Museums including the Intrepid, Guggenheim and museum of modern design.
Walked though Central Park
Went up the Empire state building
Tour through NBC studios
Whilst travelling on the subway, saw the following: some guys doing flips in the middle of the car; some mexicans playing some mariachi-like music; a guy with a bass guitar playing “my girl”; a preacher woman telling us all to repent.

I did not in fact get to see any of the shows like Dave Letterman, the Daily Show nor in fact did we get our mugs on the Today show (that turned out to be way too early in the morning). The shows actually required a little more planning to see. There is always next time I guess, and there definitely will be a next time. Hopefully for an even longer time :-)

Updated photo sets

Sun, 09 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been going along and updating photos in various photo sets, mainly because I’ve visited those places more than once and I’ve been hauling my trusty DSLR along with me. Sets that have been updated are:

Around Florida
The Keys
The Everglades

Oh, quick point about the Everglades, I noticed this story a couple of days ago about a python taking on an alligator. Wow.

Florida Panthers

Fri, 30 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

The NHL ice hockey season is back and so I went to go watch the Florida Panthers play the Carolina Hurricanes. Unfortunately the Panthers lost in penalty shoot outs 1-2 but it was still a pretty good game. There was even a fight where gloves came off, as did helmets, and some fists got thrown about. All in all, just what I expected :-)

Start spreading the news...

Fri, 30 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Well, I actually leaving tomorrow, but *finally* I am heading off to New York. This ain’t a real short trip either as a friend and I are going to be there for 6 straight days. This is also the most unprepared I’ve ever been for a trip as well, in terms of planning what things to see and do. But I really don’t think too much preparation is needed, right? Apart from the obvious places to visit (statue of liberty, times square, empire state building, yadda yadda yadda) these are some of the other things I want to do:

Pics from the phone

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Errr, unusual welcome message:

How icecreams die:

How is this pronounced?

No comment required.

Takeaway Hooters

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

What’s the freaking point?

I now have my car

Mon, 26 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I finally picked up my car last Friday. Over the weekend I’ve been pinching myself because it really doesn’t seem true. It took such a long time to get the car, mainly because the title to the car got lost for a while. Without that title I could not do a damn thing.

As it turned out even though the title arrived on Friday, I nearly didn’t get the car that day because I forgot about state tax on the car and didn’t have enough cashola on me. I had to go to an ATM and withdraw more cash. I had hit the limit for that day on my US bank card so I tried my Australian bank card. It did not work. I tried it in several more ATMs. Still no go. I had to go back to my bank at work and withdraw more cash from my US account. Over the weekend I found out why my Aussie card was not working. Apparently the bank had blocked the card because some wankers in Malaysia were fraudulently using my card details. Nice.

Old skool

Mon, 26 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I just learnt that Ministry of Sound have released a new album called “Back to the old skool” and it’s got some wickedly old tracks on it. Saying that though must mean I’m getting old. Is 26 really that old?

Anyway, I think this album would be most appropriate for a rollerskating farewell party.

Photos from Chicago

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Blues Bar

The Bean Reflection

View from Sears tower

Chicagoland

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

First off, I’d like to thank Su-Yin and Chi-Hoong for being fantastic hosts and laying the groundwork for an absolutely bloody awesome weekend in Chicago. I had a blast. I can’t write about everything that happened because that would constitute a best-selling book, and this is but a blog. I’ll post updates when I haven’t got writer’s block.

UPDATE: Before I hit the sack tonight, I must share the lack of luck I had when journeying back from Chicago to Fort Lauderdale. I was feeling pretty damn sleepy when I arrived at the airport and thought I could use the extra space afforded in Economy Plus class - a whole 5 inches of extra leg space! - to help me get to sleep. For the privilege I had to pay an extra $30.

Chicago

Thu, 08 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been looking forward to this afternoon for a while now, for it is this afternoon that I fly off to Chicago to visit “Choza” and “da Boss”. I’ve got a list of places I want to see and a lot of things I want to do. Hopefully I can forget about the backlog of work I have to do at the moment. There is so much stuff I have to get done it’s incredible. Ahh well, such is life.

Farewell Robbie

Thu, 08 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

This is somewhat of a sad post. I just learned that an old friend who I went to primary and high school back in Australia died in an motorcycle accident last night. Although I didn’t keep in contact with Rob much since I started Univerisity, there are things that come to mind when his name is mentioned:

- Him not allowing me to play on the play equipment with the other people in my class back in early primary school. I don’t know why he did that, but I remember standing up to him one day and saying something like “I will play with my other friends because I want to!” We got along fine after that.

The return

Tue, 06 Sep 2005 00:00:00 +0000

This is the first post from my new apartment in the US. My flatmate and I just got the wireless network up and running and everything seems to be working a-ok.

From the gap in the blog postings you may have thought that I had run out of steam. Not so. I’ve just come back from a long weekend of partying in Key West, frolicking with alligators and having an awesome sing-a-long/play-a-long session at a friend’s birthday party. Prior to that I very busy with work and trying to tie up loose ends over here in the US. To those of you I have promised things or have e-mails to reply to - you know who you are - you’ll be hearing from me in the near future.

Monday

Mon, 29 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I honestly could not think of anything more appropriate than the above title. Honestly.

Yes, Ft Lauderdale and surrounding areas got hit by hurricane Katrina last week, which meant we got Thursday and Friday off of work! Of course, that didn’t really mean you could do anything… it was too dangerous to go outside not only because of what might be lying around, but because a lot of traffic lights were out and that’s just scary.

Here we go again

Wed, 24 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Righty, another storm looks like it’s going to hit here. Whether it will be a hurricane by the time it makes landfall is another story, however from the brief visit to the Target store I just made I could plainly see that some people were in a state of hysteria again. It was all “hurricane this… hurricane that” at the cash registers and people were stockpiling big time.

Onto other interesting things, there was a discussion with my lunch group regarding gay marriage and whether it should be allowed or not. The discussion got very heated but I didn’t really join in as I have not formed an opinion on the issue yet. I don’t think I ever will actually as I don’t really care about it. Some people in the discussion were against it because it would indicate to people that being a homosexual was normal, when in fact they argued it was not. Others argued against that saying that it’s their right to get married if they want to. The counter arguement to that was that the only real rights we have are to food, shelter and safety or something like that. This went on for a while and it sort of got into a “think about the children” case.

A tiring week

Fri, 19 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Right now I am completely and utterly exhausted. Hold on, I think I’ve written a post starting like that before. During the week I sealed the private purchase of my new car. I’ve sent the cheque off to the seller’s financing company but I won’t be actually picking up the car until next week. Once I get the existing title, but more importantly the insurance sorted out, then I can pick up the car.

Attack of the drones

Tue, 16 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Today when I arrived at work I witnessed something quite amazing. What I saw could be best described as a sure-fire way of finding redundancy candidates.

At my work there are boom gates such that when an employee pulls up next to one, access into the facility is granted via waving an ID in front of the scanner to raise the boom gate. Sounds complex? No bloody way.

So what do you think would happen if there was no boom gate? What if the boom gate had been broken off by some fuel guzzling SUV earlier on in the morning? Do you think people would analyse the situation and not bother scanning their ID because it isn’t fricken required? Some people would, BUT, statistical analysis showed over half the people wouldn’t. If you want comedy that comes in the “I can’t believe I’m seeing this” flava, all you have to do is watch this for 5 minutes to see that over half the people at your work are drones.

Insane

Sat, 13 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000

This week has been absolutely insane, hence, no updates. I think I pissed off a lot of car salesmen last weekend when I went looking for cars. That tired me out a lot. I think for most of the day I was saying “no, I’m not interested in buying!” They are extremely persistent buggers over here, much more so than what I experienced in Australia. Once they actually realise you’re not going to buy they turn into incredibly rude people. Mind you, I was looking at used car dealerships where they’re not really interested in forming a relationship with the customer so maybe that had something to do with it.

Crazy lightning

Mon, 08 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Crazy Lightning

Flickr: Crazy lightning

Over the weekend there have been some massive thunderstorms here in South Florida. Today in fact there was a strike so close that it made my speakers squeal from all the interference. Here is one of the shots I was able to get. The lightning in this shot was striking ground somewhere behind the apartment. Still pretty damn close though.

Err, pick another consulate

Fri, 05 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000

A little while back I had to book a Visa renewal interview at a consulate outside of the US. This interview was set for early September at the consulate in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. I actually would have liked to have found one in Canada because that’s further away and I can visit Mexico pretty easily from where I live, but I couldn’t even find free slots in Canada before the end of the year for some weird reason. It seems I’ll be trying Canada again though.

Car purchasing

Thu, 04 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I’m now getting pretty excited about the whole car purchasing thing, and I’m finding it quite fun to go about looking for cars. I felt I was restricting myself to the Pontiac Vibe/Toyota Matrix thing too much because I really hadn’t researched what else was out there.

So I went for a walk around in a caryard to see if I could find anything that I liked. What was the closest caryard? The one just outside. There are probably a couple of thousand cars in the parking lot and this gives me the perfect opportunity to go around and look for something that fits the above criteria. I found one that caught my eye: the Mazda Protege5. This is based upon the reliable Mazda Protege platform and from what I’ve been reading on the Internets is pretty good value for money and very reliable. I’m leaning towards a second hand version of whatever car I get because, believe it or not, I’m in money saving mode at the moment and I’m really tightening down the screws so I can afford to travel around.

Percentage of valid voice mails

Wed, 03 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000

To my work number: 0%

Every damn phone call I get is not addressed to me. It’s either to someone who no longer exists (1% of the calls) at my number, or some damn telemarketing company (99%). I get about two of these calls a day and always have some on voicemail when I get to work. I actually ended up putting my work number on the “do not call” list. Fingers crossed that works, although I’m not holding my breath…

One year in the US of A

Mon, 01 Aug 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Today marks exactly one year of me living in the US, up from the original 3 months I was supposed to spend here. By the end of August I will have officially severed the ties with my job in Australia and will be paid in US dollars. This also brings to an end the fantastic benefits of being an expat: free car, free accommodation and a daily spending allowance. I have already made plans to stay with a friend either as a flatmate or until I find somewhere else to live. I haven’t decided yet, but that decision can wait.

Flickrgraph

Fri, 29 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I found this cool Flickr app that shows the social relationships between people at Flickr.
http://marumushi.com/apps/flickrgraph/
You just plug in the user name and off exploring you go. Mine is “daecks” (without quotes of course) and you’ll see how much of a lamer I am with only 2 contacts (currently, of course!)

How to nearly miss a shuttle launch viewing

Wed, 27 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Get up at 3:30 in the morning. Have a quick shower and then get the hell on the road because I’ve got to get to the Kennedy Space Center at 7am (3 hours is normally plenty of time. I’ve done this before. I’m a professional.)
Cruise north along the I-95. When going through West Palm Beach, get delayed for over 1/2 hour due to a traffic jam at ~5 in the morning!

STS-114 Shuttle Launch

Wed, 27 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Edit - me from 2025 came to say: they’re fine. Here are some of the photos, no Flickr jump needed

(original post below)

Some of them have been uploaded to Flickr.

Liftoff!

Tue, 26 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Wow wow wow.

I saw the Discovery Shuttle launch just over 6 hours ago and my hands are still jumping around with excitement as I type this (or perhaps that’s from the Jolly Rancher ‘Screaming Sours’ soft and chewy candy that I just ate). Whatever is causing this feeling, I know that what I saw today was just freaking amazing.

Cross another item off the “things I’ve always want to see and do” list. Pics coming later. I am f#%ken stoked.

I need access to this when choosing movies

Sun, 24 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a sucker for blurbs on movie rentals that I haven’t really heard anything about. If something says “Fantastic! A wild ride” by even some anonymous John Doe sort of reviewer, I’m prone to being wooed in by the review snippet and I’ll rent the movie. After I’ve watched some movies though using that method as a guideline however I tend to end up thinking “that reviewer must be on crack”, but I don’t end up changing my ways. There are two people who may be reading this blog (seriously people, get outside and get a breath of fresh air or something, it’s much more beneficial) that I know of who are probably nodding their heads right now. Nav is one of them.

What the?

Sun, 24 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I was sifting though the documentation for a new power supply I had been given at work when I came across a gem of a cartoon regarding lightning protection, which is oh so appropriate for Florida. Note this piece of equipment is made by a reputable company so I’m wondering why they have an offbeat cartoon like this. Not that it’s a bad thing of course.

Yes, “Unprotected power/control lines and antenna installations can be hazardous to equipment and personnel” (and your butt).

Shopping at Bal Harbour

Wed, 20 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Update: Google maps has been updated again. Now you can see the Bal Harbour shops from above hybrid stylie

I had to get a new Amex card recently which required me to travel to the Amex travel centre at Bal Harbour shopping centre. I only got a quick glimpse of what this place was like at the time, but hell, the fact that I had to pay to park and that everyone looked like millionaires made me want to check this place out some more. I did that recently and holy crap, I’ve never seen stuff cost so much before.

Damn fuel sensors

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I will say no more (for today) :-p

Don't try this at home

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000

For some reason, I had not eaten since last night when I had a red bull at 3pm today.

DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME! THIS IS A BLOODY STUPID THING TO DO!

Although I was typing at a rate that seemed like 100 words per minute and thinking relatively clearly after consuming the Red Bull, at 5pm I can safely say I can no longer think straight nor can I even type. My mind is wandering off far from home base. I have all the symptoms of being drunk but I have not consumed any alcohol. This is fricken weird.

Ultrafest 2005

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000

You wouldn’t believe it, but I finally got the movies from Ultrafest from my friend. You need Apple Quicktime to view these files. The files are of a Drum and Bass tent, Moby, Oakenfold (I think it was anyway) and a quick location shot. Click on this link to get to the files. If you don’t feel like waiting to download them (who would?), you can log in using the username “iwannalook” and the password “letmein” (without the quotes). Someday I’ll find a hosting site that’s a bit more friendly. Someday.

I am fricken stoked

Tue, 12 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I did not expect this at all, but the launch viewing tickets arrived in the mail today. That’s fricken awesome.

The last straw

Tue, 12 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000

After a long day sometimes one just wants to retire for the night and do absolutely nothing. Firstly though, one must find a car park. This was the only car park “vacant” near my apartment:

Seriously, who “parks” their mountain bike in a car park?

At any rate, I bought the perfect thing to take my mind off the real world on the weekend and take part in a virtual one. 100 big ones got me a Nintendo Gamecube, controller, memory card and 2 games (Metroid and Zelda). This should keep my mind off of trashing people’s mountain bikes, for a little while at least.

Difficulties

Mon, 11 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I was really, really looking forward to seeing the shuttle launch at Kennedy Space Centre this Wednesday. I was going to tie an Australia flag around my shoulders and shout out
“Go Andy! Go you good thing go!”… and yeah, he’d hear that from 6 miles away. However as things go it seems I’ll be observing the launch from somewhere else. Call it my stupid absent mindedness but the tickets I purchased way back when (beginning of April I think) were valid for that launch and the next rescheduled launch, if that happened. I know the launch has been rescheduled at least twice, but for some reason it never clicked with me I’d have to order more tickets. I think I just plain forgot at the time about the rescheduling terms.

Weird day

Fri, 08 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t know what other people were doing but I spent most of my day just watching the news regarding the terrorist attacks in London. I was extremely grateful to get e-mails from people who I knew were in the area, telling others that they were ok. So to those of you over in London, I hope you continue to remain safe.

It’s times like these that Wikipedia (that free, online encyclopedia for those not in the know) really shines. They have an excellent summary of the situation as it stands, and I actually found myself wandering off to other parts of the wikipedia site to, for example, read about Pan Am Flight 103. I do this because I’m an information freak and I like to try to understand the reasons why people do things like this. Plus, the poet Sylvia Plath wrote some poetry about the macabre nature of humans and how we are in awe of tragedy. I guess I’m expressing that part of myself by monitoring the Internet.

July 4 Fireworks

Tue, 05 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I have to quickly blog on what is probably the most impressive fireworks display I’ve ever seen (well, the year 2000 fireworks display in Sydney was pretty good too). It’s not impressive because of the fireworks themselves, it’s impressive because from my lucky vantage point everywhere I look I see fireworks. Suburban South Florida is putting on a heck of a free show.

Independence day weekend

Sun, 03 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Is already off to a good start. I woke up this morning with a painful feeling in my mouth that indicated the slice of pizza I had at 3:30am this morning was indeed hot. I spent last night in Fort Lauderdale with some friends mostly attempting to dance to RnB. I succeeded for quite a few hours and then I just got sick of it.

What was most surprising about last night, for me anyway, was that Karma lounge is in fact not dead. I spoke to one of the people behind the bar and they said “yeah, that person who wrote the article got it wrong… we don’t know where she got that information from. She was actually here last week…”. So, there you go. I think they’ve actually turned down the volume by a few decibels too, but there still weren’t many people there.

A "what the heck is that person doing now"

Sat, 02 Jul 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I sometimes get curious and find out what people are doing today who I remember from my childhood. Can any of you remember the movie “The Wizard”. I can remember loving this movie at the time because it had Super Mario Bros 3, a huge gaming screen, and a Nintendo Powerglove. Mind you, I haven’t watched it since then… I didn’t want to ruin the childhood memory of it being a great movie. Anyway, there was a girl in the movie, Jenny Lewis, who apart from the guy with the powerglove is one of the people who I remember most from the movie. I even forgot the movie had Fred Savage in it, but I only associate him with “The Wonder Years” and facial moles these days.

Turtle power!

Wed, 29 Jun 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Allow me to introduce the hero in a half shell in my car today:

As I was turning into my apartment a guy was crossing the road with turtle in hand saying to me “dude, do you know where there are any sewers ponds around this area?” I did in fact, so I took the little charger under my wing and transported it to the closest one I knew of. As I was releasing him back into the “wild” I was able to take one final farewell shot:

I don’t know why my arm was turning purple. Someone told me it may have to do with radioactive ooze in the area, although I was supposed to keep that a secret.

Bubble Tea

Sat, 25 Jun 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Recently the canteen at work has brought in sushi to the selection of foods available. This makes a nice change from the salads that I normally prepare from the salad bar and I now have another healthy eating option for lunch. Thankfully though all the sushi is made by an external company, as I’m sure those in similar corporate environments could attest, the food made in the corporate canteen isn’t the best at times. I just wouldn’t trust them with sushi.

Karma Lounge dead

Sat, 25 Jun 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I found out from this article that Karma lounge in Fort Lauderdale has shut down because I was thinking of going out to it last night. I haven’t actually been there for a while but it was probably the coolest place to hang out at in Fort Lauderdale. It played pretty good music and on Wednesday nights even played Drum and Bass, which in Lauderdale made it stick out like a sore thumb. I’ve posted previously though that it couldn’t work out what it wanted to be - with the volume the music played at you’d think you were supposed to be dancing, but there was nowhere to dance. So you had to stand around instead which led to talking, but you had to shout because the music was so loud. Good idea, a nice refreshing vibe which set it apart from the normal Ft Lauderdale commercial crap, but very poorly executed. I guess I’m not really surprised that it shut down.

Conquer the code

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Finally stuff seems to be working out, but only after a lot of effort and a few tears here and there (joking about the tears part). I have conquered part of the code and the damn radio seems to be doing what I’m telling it to do! Amazing, yes. God damn engineering is frustrating. I’m also amazed how much taking a step back from the work can be in getting it completed. Example, I was up till midnight trying to get this code working and then I gave up in frustration. I came back this morning and *bam* I instantly saw what was going wrong.

Frenchie, please clean my shoes

Sat, 18 Jun 2005 00:00:00 +0000

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.

What to write about?

Tue, 14 Jun 2005 00:00:00 +0000

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.

New territory

Thu, 09 Jun 2005 00:00:00 +0000

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.

New Orleans pics

Mon, 06 Jun 2005 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Ooh the Coldplay is good

Thu, 02 Jun 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I have been listening to BBC’s Radio One today, like I do every other day when I’m at work now, and god damn the new Coldplay album sounds good. It’s so good that I when I preordered the album on Amazon I got the fastest delivery method I could (in hindsight, I probably could have just gone to a CD store. It seems I’m so addicted to Amazon it’s not funny). Tickets go on sale here this Friday and there is a growing group of people I’m going with. Hopefully we’ll all be able to get tickets to the concert. That’d be just friggin’ awesome, know what I mean?

I'm back

Tue, 31 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

You know, I thought my post last night regarding this actually made it into the blogger brain… but obviously not. Pity that, actually. It was full of wit and humour that would have left even the most discerning critic wondering why I spend my time monkeying about with code rather than writing jaw-dropping literature.

Illusionary world aside, yes I’m back from New Orleans, Nawlins, the Crescent City, Big Easy, whatever you feel like confusing people with. After driving 1850 miles this is a quick-arse summary of my thoughts of my extended long weekend of travel:

New compilation album to get...

Thu, 26 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Just heard it on Annie Mac’s Radio 1 session - Liquid V club sessions, for all good things DnB.

Dang, I gotta go. Got Santos Renuentes to see *yet again* tonight at Tobacco Road. I wish they’d play in like, New York or something like that. I need an excuse to fly up there*. Plus, tomoz I have to go to… New Orleans! Oh I’m bored already. hehe.

* WTF am I talking about, like I need an excuse???

It's done!

Tue, 24 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

So, the future is going to be even more exciting. In the next couple of months I’ll be going through the motions of buying a car, finding a flatmate, getting a fortnightly salary (compared to the monthly one I’ve gotten so used to) all American style. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t make this move for the money. I won’t be much better off here than I was in Australia, but the difference is I *won’t* be in Australia. Mexico is only a couple of hours away by plane. Jamaica ain’t that far either. South America - just a wee bit south. Problem is that due to my Visa extension I won’t be going outside of the US for another few months until processing has been completed.

Muvico

Tue, 24 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

There is a huge movie complex not far from where I live called Muvico. Actually, there are a few of them around the place. This one has 24 cinemas - nothing to write home about when you come from a city that had a 31 cinema complex - but this place is all Egyptian themed and tries to be impressive in that respect. These cinemas weren’t as good as the 31 cinema complex though. Maybe it was the crowd.

Change

Fri, 20 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I’ll put it sort of cryptically - tomorrow I hand in a piece of paper that says ’next time, my flight from Australia to the US won’t be return'.

Update on change

Fri, 20 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve given myself the weekend to think about this and do some more figures. I should know myself better. Although I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while, I have a gut feeling that says something isn’t right with the current terms and conditions. I’ll update how things go on Monday, which is my deadline for replying.

(Kristian == nerd) == TRUE?

Wed, 18 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Noooo! Lately I’ve been feeling it… I’ve been working absolutely ridiculous hours at work and I’m nearly getting used to it. I’m coming to expect it of myself. This has to change, and it has to change now. I admit I may be a little nerdy - heck look at my bloody blog icon - it’s from a bleedin’ 1986 Nintendo game. I used to read microprocessor spec documents ‘for fun’. Shit shit shit.

Winky vs Trinidad

Mon, 16 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I went to a friend’s house Satdee night to watch a boxing fight on HBO pay per view. Now let me get this straight - I ain’t the biggest fan of boxing. Actually I’d usually go out of my way to avoid watching fights because I just think it’s sort of cave man like but I tucked all those thoughts away and just watched the damn thing. The fight was between Winky Wright and Felix Trinidad. The ’local’ boy Winky ended up winning, even with a rather distracting boil or whatever the heck it was on his neck. Dis-gust-ing. Check the link here for some more fight details.

Bro's causing problems again!

Wed, 11 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

At the moment my Bro is lying in a bed in the Royal Adelaide hospital and has been there for the past few days. He’s had multiple CAT scans and MRI scans. I’ve been talking to him and he seems fine at the moment but has to stay in hospital once results from all the scans are in. The doctors said they actually found something - a brain! I say check again!

Cinco de Mayo pictures

Wed, 11 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

There was a Cinco de Mayo celebration at Tobacco Road last Thursday night and Santos Renuentes were playing there again. I’ve got pics from the night uploaded here.

Hard Rock casino

Tue, 10 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I went out Saturday night to the retail area around Hard Rock casino which has all the clubs and shopping stuff. I’ve been here a few times and it’s pretty good, all things considered. I hadn’t been out with that group for a night out before and damn, I ended up having a blast. I think seeing chicks riding mechanical bulls really sealed off the night.

We started off at an Irish pub that was playing songs like “Loveshack” by the B-52s. . . yeah. The “DJ” there could not mix fricken salt and water. It was absolutely terrible. I was glad to get out of there. Next we tried getting into a club called “Pangaea”. It seemed a group our size was not going to have any luck in getting in without buying a couple of tables though (at $250 each).

Kung Fu movies and beer

Mon, 09 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Don’t mix them. Especially don’t mix beer and “Kung Fu Hustle”. A friend and I did that Friday night and I think it was the weirdest movie experience I’ve ever had. That movie probably doesn’t need the help of alcohol to make it interesting anyway.

Ft Lauderdale Air and Sea show

Wed, 04 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

On Sunday here were the reasons why I hauled my arse out of bed at 7:00am in the morning to get a good seat for the Ft. Lauderdale Air and Sea show:

F-117 Nighthawk
B-2 Stealth Bomber
B-52 Stratofortress
A-10 Warthog
F-14 Tomcat
AV-8B Harrier
V-22 Osprey
last, and certainly not least, F-22 Raptor.

None of those planes showed up the whole damn day. I haven’t seen any of these planes in real life yet. Exactly these planes were supposed to be there (pending operational availability blah blah blah). Was I disappointed? Yeah, a bit. I did get some pics though and a tan and I did get weirded out several times during the day. What I mean is, the show was obviously very American. Duh. The whole “support our troops” slogan was getting compressed into my ears and that just made me realise I really was over in the US. I go by every day not really thinking about that too much. Then a reality spin thing happened when I didn’t really believe I was here and everything seemed to do a 180 degree turn. I also got that tinnitus or ringing in my ear just to help with the outer-body feeling. It was weird.

Tobacco Road, 28th April

Tue, 03 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I especially went to Tobacco Road on Thursday night to get some pictures of Santos Renuentes playing an acoustic set, something that I hadn’t heard them do before. There was going to be a delay with starting their set so my friend and I decided to get some food downstairs. I had just about finished my meal when I thought “hold on… they should have started by now”. I raced upstairs and they were nearly finished. Sophia gave me a greeting saying something like “I’m glad you finally came to watch our show, Kristian.” I found out later that while I was downstairs stuffing my face she did a shout out for me two songs prior because I always went to their gigs…. and I was nowhere to be seen at that time. Bloody hell.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAD!

Sun, 01 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Yes, the birthdays are coming in thick and fast it seems, so while I’m at it:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY SEAN!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY MAHA!

Dang nammit!

It’s currently 4:42am Sunday morning in Florida. I have to be up in 2 hours to get ready to go to the Fort Lauderdale Air and Sea show. How much do you wanna bet that I sleep through my alarm???

Bring your kids to work day

Thu, 28 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +0000

That’s what day it is today at work. It’s a day that makes me feel especially old, even though I’m really not that old at all on the scale of things. The kids are coming into meetings, they’re playing with their parents’ PDAs and running around and having fun. And then I’m trying to get work done. No, I am by no means angry, but I just wish I was a kid again. I remember the days playing in the sand pit, creating a spaceship out of a fallen tree, playing kiss-chasey and constantly falling over for some reason, 1-2-3 saw ya, “socc-quash”, finding “bush tucker” on the Gum tree leaves, seeing my friend get his head stuck between two pieces of wood on a piece of play equipment . . . *sigh*

HAPPY BIRTHDAY BRO!

Thu, 28 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Yes, it’s April 29th over in Oz and my brother is the big two-zero today. He’s not a teenager anymore, and here’s hoping he starts acting his age!!! Just JOSHin bro! Have a good one.

The gift

Thu, 28 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +0000

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:

The popularity question

Thu, 28 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Weird stuff

Tue, 26 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +0000

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.

I rock!

Sun, 24 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Dr Who

Tue, 19 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I heard that BBC was broadcasting the new Dr Who series over in the UK. I was a big, big fan of Dr Who as a kid. I’ve seen four episodes of the new series so far and what can I say - it’s bloody awesome! It’s got lots and lots of British humour which I just can’t get enough of. I can’t wait to see the next one. Oh, having Billie Piper co-star is also a help.

Bloody big tree

Sun, 17 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Stuff seems to be finally trickling in from the many people who have been hoarding the pictures on their cameras. This is one of them taken in front of a Giant Sequoia tree in Yosemite national park late last year that I’ve stitched together. You can see us standing there way, way down the bottom.

Big tree

I’m also in the process of moving photos from stupid Webshots to flickr so you’ll see my flickr bar on the right of this page being updated as I find time.

Online cricket game

Fri, 15 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been invited to a hat party in a couple of weeks and I immediately thought “cork hat”. I couldn’t be bothered making one myself so I looked around for one on the net. I happened to stumble across this site: http://www.stickcricket.com/game.php and I’ve been playing it for the past 1/2 hour (at work). After working a lot of hours in the past week, I don’t care if anyone sees me playing this.

Refer to last post, put "NOT" at the end

Wed, 13 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been reading a heck of a lot of stuff lately and even in the past day my views on things have swung around greatly because I haven’t digested stuff properly. I was thinking last night about my last post and why I said I wouldn’t comment on politics, even if I thought it was important. I now think that’s a stupid idea, so to that end I *will* post the odd political story/comment *but only* if I feel it’s important enough. I’m leaving the previous post as it is though, just to show how quickly my point of view can swing around when I haven’t thought stuff through enough :-)

My last political comment

Tue, 12 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +0000

on this site, anyway. People who have been keeping up to date with this little distraction of mine may have noticed that I haven’t written anything regarding politics for a while. Actually, I only ever wrote a couple of posts. I certainly didn’t want to turn this blog into another political rant site. I haven’t written anything regarding religion either, nor will I ever. Instead, it’s now another site ranting about what stupid/cool/not so cool things I get up to. It will I hope become an outlet for other things sometime in the future… but that time is not now.

Weird state of mind

Mon, 11 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +0000

It happens when you spend most of your weekend inside. I’m like solar powered - I need my sunlight to function properly, or I at least need to step outdoors. This state of mind is completely self inflicted though. I purchased Half Life 2 Friday night and downloaded the game from Valve Software’s ‘Steam’ content service that same night. Thankyou cable internet. I finished it sometime Sunday. What else did I end up doing? Well, I went to work for a few hours both Saturday and Sunday night. Yeah, my project is pretty intense at the moment. So you can pretty much say I spent my whole sunny Florida weekend indoors. Idiot. Actually to be fair on myself I haven’t played a computer game for yonks so I had to get it out of my system. Plus, I was evaluating the in-game music that Half Life 2 offered. I wasn’t too impressed with it actually. The graphics on the other hand with all the features turned on high - wow. Really nice to look at. I did notice some inconsistencies with water reflections though - some objects just weren’t reflected. Maybe I could pimp myself out as a quality consultant. “Here sir, try our Razr V3!” Response: “Yeah, it’s a slick phone and all but the menus are too slow! Speed them the hell up!”

I'm counting on you...

Fri, 08 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +0000

So says my project manager. So tonight and last night and probably the next two weeks I’ll be burning the midnight oil at work. Yay!

Geez, it feels like ages since I last posted. Nothing much interesting has been going on. Well, hold on, I did get those tickets to see the shuttle launch. Hopefully the dates for the launch don’t change around too much, if at all. Apparently you can see the space shuttle shooting upwards from here in Plantation. Keeping in mind that the Kennedy Space Centre is about 200 miles away from here, I’m pretty stoked that I’m going to be only 6 miles away when it does launch. Awesome.

I'm in stitches!

Fri, 08 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Seriously, I am. If you ever thought things were going bad or just felt a little down, just watch this clip. It’s some bloody funny 70’s music video diamond in the rough.
http://www.zeronews-fr.com/flash/70s.php

Another thing I'm pretty stoked about

Mon, 04 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Tickets for the next Space Shuttle launch go on sale tomorrow morning here in the US. Although it doesn’t really matter if I don’t get them - there are still places I can go to view the launch for free - the tickets get me the closest to the launch (6 miles away). That will be absolutely friggen awesome I think. Plus, Andrew Thomas from Adelaide is one of the astronauts. Even more awesome.

More pictures to peruse

Sun, 03 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just uploaded 50 or so pictures from my trip to Australia. I’m still not completed with all the pictures though. There are some from the Adelaide 500 that aren’t up, plus I’m missing a whole CD of pictures that are still back in Oz. Ahh well. The ones I have uploaded are here.

I only took a few pictures in Sydney because I didn’t have enough time to get all touristy. Most of the pictures are from when I went to visit my Uncle and Aunt out on the farm(s) which is about 25 kilometres from Loxton. I think one of the coolest pictures though is of my 9 year old cousin driving a manual car. That was just awesome! You’ll also realise I have a penchant for old stuff - whether it be old houses or broken down machinery. Not all of those pictures are up yet. Might I add: not all of Australia is like this! Most of the Australia population lives in cities along the coast. I’ve deliberately gone out of my way to show this side of Australia. Oh, and there are no pictures of kangaroos. We did see some, but they hopped away to quickly for me to get a picture of them.

Nothing to see here, move along now

Fri, 01 Apr 2005 00:00:00 +0000

If you’ve been watching the news, Florida has been in it again. Damn, a lot of stuff goes on over here… or at least the media would have you believe that. What I have seen just made me sick, and everyone thinks they should have a say in what happens. It’s really not anyone else’s business. Let the people who are affected be in peace. But I’m not going to comment on that any more :-)

Pretty stoked about this

Tue, 29 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Here is a quick pic of part of my living space over here in the US. What I’m exceptionally happy about is that thing sitting to the left of the picture, for which I’ve finally found a power supply and is now working. Yay!

Also, the Ultrafest dance music festival was awesome. But I’ve gotta get the pics and movies from my friend’s camera before I write a dedicated post about it. I was a bit unhappy that I didn’t get a movie of Chris and Mike from Hybrid doing their DJ set - the battery on the camera I was using was too low. I did get a couple of pics though. Anyway, more about that later.

A song about Bambi

Fri, 25 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I think my flight back to the US was the worst ever for jet-lag and annoyance factor. American Airlines has yet to prove to me they can get me somewhere without being over an hour late. Well, here’s hoping for the future!

I knew things were going to be bad when I arrived in the US because I had a connecting flight through Dallas, TX to Fort Lauderdale. Of course the flight from LA to Dallas was an hour late, so as I touched down in Dallas I was supposed to be boarding my next plane. I ran out of the arrival gate (A24 for future reference) and across the travelators to the adjacent terminal to get to gate C4. Just as I arrived I heard an announcement that the gate had changed to C11. After moving to that gate and waiting for about 15 minutes (yes, not surprisingly the outgoing flight was going to be late departing) we had another gate change to C2. On the way over to that gate there was a guy strumming a guitar with a girl tagging along with him. I said to him “you should sing us a song about all these gate changes!” So he did! It was pretty funny. His name was Ryan and when I asked him what he did he said “Dude! I surf, dude!” (I kid you not). I think he was actually a construction worker by day but lived right on the beachfront in California and surfed at night mostly. The girl he had with him, Krista, was also from California. He was your typical cliche surfer. Blonde hair, even a beard and the most surfie sounding voice I’ve ever heard. If you’ve watched Finding Nemo just think about all those turtles Nemo meets. Exactly the same sort of voice. It was freaking hilarious!

Ultra Music Festival 2005

Fri, 25 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I’m pretty stoked at the moment. I just received my ticket for Ultra Music Festival 2005. This is supposed to be America’s biggest electronic music event, which is saying something in terms of size. Although I’m expecting it to be multiple times as large as Enchanted (approx. 50,000 people are expected to attend) I doubt it’ll have the same charm as Enchanted as none of my Aussie Enchanted friends will be there! Ah well.

Radioshack sucks

Thu, 24 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Well the one at 8249 W Sunrise Blvd does anyway. I’ve been trying to locate a power supply for my piano (yep, I’m still talking about it) because the power supply I have from Australia can’t run on 110 volts. I went to a piano store today where I got some extremely good service and I bought at very good prices a heavy duty keyboard stand as well as a 12 volt 2 amp power supply for a technics keyboard. This is exactly the voltage and amperage that I required! However I knew I’d have to change the plug for it so that it’d fit into my digital piano. No problem - I thought I’d quickly pop by a Radioshack and get a DC plug adapter kit or something similar.

Back in Florida

Wed, 23 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000

If someone could tell me what the hell happened in the last 2 weeks (well, it wasn’t even that) then I’d feel a little more at ease at the moment. I really do not know what the hell is going on. I entered my apartment last night at 2:30am, slept until about 6pm and then have been wondering around in a daze for the last few hours. It certainly does not feel like I was just on a holiday.

You're pretty cool for a guy who wears a kilt

Wed, 23 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Goldberg is a champion of drinking, there is no doubt in that. For his size I just do not know how he stays upright. I guess the only explanation is he has had a lot of practice.

This story begins with the wedding of Adam and Emma. Matt was drinking hard at the reception and was getting more and more drunk. He came to me at some point and said “hey dude… doooo ya reckon youuu can dddrive me into town tonight?? ?? I need a liffffft in becosh I’ve been drinking a little too mussh.” (ok, it wasn’t quite that bad). I had no problem with this as I wasn’t really drinking at all (if you don’t know why then read back a few posts).

Back in Loxton

Mon, 14 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Ok. My heart rate has hit rock-bottom now. I’m now in the town where I grew up: Loxton, South Australia. It’s a country town about 250 km out of Adelaide with a population of around 7000. It’s a nice and tidy place to be - and I had my first schnitzel in over 8 months last night at the Loxton pub!

I’m not feeling weirded out today like I was for the past few days. I’d say that I got over my jetlag but I never had any to begin with. Now I’m just wondering how the hell I’m going to be able to visit all the people I want to see while I am back here down under.

Where am I?

Sat, 12 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I’m back in Australia.

Yes! It is true! I was keeping quiet about this because I was going to surprise some people but my cover was blown and so I’m telling everybody this now. I’m currently in Sydney hanging out with Nav and his mates. It’s all really fanbloodytastic here and I now realise how much I love and missed Australia. It’s an awesome country.

I arrived here on Friday morning and will be heading off to Adelaide on Sunday afternoon. I’ll be hanging around Adelaide for about a week and then heading back to the USA. I’ll try and catch up with as many people as I can while I’m here!

Remember to pay your bills

Tue, 08 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Especially if you run a business. *Especially* if you run a nightclub! Angry webmasters have easy ways of getting their revenge. This is a screenshot of the website for “Life”, a club down in Miami:

You can try checking out http://www.lifemiami.com for yourself. According to Google’s cache this website has been like this for at least the past 2 weeks.

Trawling the internets on a Saturday night

Sun, 06 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000

While I wait for this flu that I’ve got to go away, I’ve been finding crap on the net. Here is some of the crap I’ve found so far today:

Starbucks craptastification of Starship’s “We built this city”, which I actually used to like listening to as a kid (the Starship version, not this shite). Oh, and don’t get me started on Starbucks! I’m not a huge coffee drinker but I’ll have a couple of cups a week. My god the coffee over here is generally crap. There are a couple of Euro-themed restaurants that seem to get the coffee right but not much else does. I was working late one night and one of my colleagues asked me if I’d like a coffee. I thought “Yeah, that’d be sweet!” I really started looking forward to my coffee. When he came back I saw that he’d visited the local Starbucks. My mood hit the brakes and swung in the opposite direction. Let me say this: I really, really hate Starbucks coffee. I drank it anyway because he’d gone to all that trouble to get it for me but I think that was the worst coffee I’ve ever had. I was even worse than when I had a Starbucks coffee in Australia.

More Christmas trip pictures

Sat, 05 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Are here. I’ve got pics of signs advertising a brothel called the “Shady Lady Ranch”, a nice pic of a Joshua tree, pictures showing my affection with roads going off into the distance, having fun riding bombs, and pictures of highly sophisticated and blossoming towns.

UPDATE: When browsing Flickr photos, you may notice that you can’t view higher resolution versions of the photos. They’re making a stack of changes at Flickr, so this should be fixed in the near future. It doesn’t really worry me at this stage because god damn at least they’re actually making changes!

Something's going right

Thu, 03 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000

You may wonder why the hell I’m making this post at 5:18 in the morning. Well, I got back from work last night as sick as a dog and fell asleep straight away. I woke up about an hour ago but have so far been unsuccessful in getting back to sleep, so I thought I’d strum the guitar and crank up the compy. I then saw my dead iPod sitting on my desk. I remembered I was supposed to take it in for a warranty exchange a couple of days ago. I thought ‘well, there is no harm in trying to charge it again’. I put it in its dock and paint me green and call me Gumby, the bloody thing started charging. As you could imagine I’m pretty chuffed about that! I’m also at a loss to explain why it didn’t charge before, even when connected to my friend’s proper charger. Weird.

Panoramic pictures

Tue, 01 Mar 2005 00:00:00 +0000

For a little while now I’ve been looking for some good panoramic stitching software. Panorama tools has always been my first choice but I couldn’t find a suitable front end for it. That is until now. I’ve found a really good open source frontend called Hugin. I use this combined with Panotools and Photoshop to produce the panoramas. If you want to dabble in panoramic photography just follow the guidelines on what to do in the download section of the Hugin website. They have a pretty good summary of what other tools you’ll need. Then you just blend any seams between panoramas using Photoshop and these guidelines.

Calvin and Hobbes

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

A while back CJB started sending out Calvin and Hobbes cartoons. I had never really read the comic strip before, and it took me a little while to get hooked, but I rather enjoyed reading then after a while. This website has a whole stack of Calvin and Hobbes cartoons. Now someone just needs to do something similar for Footrot Flats, the comic strip I used to read as a kid.

RIP iPod

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

My iPod died a couple of days ago. I thought I just had to connect it to a proper charger to get it working again (not the USB or Firewire ports) but as I found out today - no go. I guess it caps off a brilliant week :-)

RIP iPod. You saved my ass lots of times. Of course by using my warranty you’ll be replaced and forgotten about in the near future, but I’m thinking about you now.

WTF is going on?

Sun, 27 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, so I must be suffering from some stress symptoms or something. I went to work around 3pm today and just got back 1/2 hour ago. It’s a freaking Saturday. A lot of stuff wasn’t working again, and it’s really pi$$ing me off. Or maybe my liver really is stuffed. No! My liver has to be stronger than that. It can’t be that wussy.

I rang about 20 piano stores within a 15 mile radius of home looking for my Kawai ES3 digital piano. You know what? None of the buggers stock it. The only place that does is ‘certified’ to and they charge US $1600 for it (pre tax). Blood sucking bastards. Considering I can get it for just over AUD $1800 back in Australia… well that’s just dodgy. I’m going to walk in there on Monday with a printout showing the Aussie price and let the guy know that I know he owns the only place that sells such pianos in South Florida (as far as I know know know know). He has two choices - either sell me the piano at the equivalent Australian price or lose a sale. I’ll bring in cold hard caaaaaaash too to put a bit more pressure on him. And you know what else? I didn’t talk to one nice person out of all of those people I spoke to today. At least in Oz people would sound nicer over the phone. Bastards. The Yanks aren’t getting tipped so they can justify treating you like crap over the phone. Wankerchops.

A worse day... than yesterday?

Sat, 26 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I couldn’t believe how bad today was. It was just absolutely, undoubtedly, the worst work day I’ve had over here in Florida. I swear to God I was nearly in tears when people were going through pointing out mistakes I had made in resolving merge conflicts, and why the program could not be built. Err, merge conflicts. Basically you have many people working on fixes/improvements to a program. Each person has their own separate work environment and eventually all the work done has to be brought together. That’s where I stuffed up. We were hoping to release the version that had everyone’s changes today, and I stuffed up. Yeah, good work K. My tech lead trusted that I could do the work in his absence, I thought I could do the work, but it was shown that I couldn’t. I guess I’m being pretty hard on myself since I’ve never done this before - and it’s not straightforward text source code files that I was merging either. For those who know, I was trying to resolve conflicts in Rational Rose Realtime code models. A nightmare. Incredibly complex, but hell, I thought I could do better. Oh the humanity!

A depressing day

Fri, 25 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just arrived back from work. Let’s see… nearly a 14 hour day. Not bad, not bad. It’d be a lot better though if I actually felt like I’d achieved something today. I wish I could just laugh at things when they get like this but I just don’t have the energy to at the moment. I swear I was going flat out the whole day and then spent most of the night fixing problems arising from the day’s work. I discovered a lot of the problems weren’t mine - which is sort of a relief, but then it’s also a pain in the ass because I’m the one who worked the overtime. Ahh well. At least I’m back in time to watch the Daily Show.

Stupid things I realised I'd done today

Thu, 24 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

- Put the icecream in the fridge.
- Put the margarine in the freezer.
- Failed to declare $VOB_ROOT in my rational rose realtime environment, thus causing me an amazing amount of pain over the last 2 days. It never told me it wasn’t declared!!!
- I had one beer. C’mon, it was only one and it was happy hour! Wanna know what I ate? No? Well don’t read on. I ate the same damn thing I eat every damn time I go to Wednesday night happy hour at the Davie ale house. Zinger Caesar Salad, medium hotness.

New stuff, great stuff

Tue, 22 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

A change is in the wind. You know, I actually used to believe my mum when she said “Don’t pull a face like that or the wind will change and you’ll stay that way forever.” Ahh the pure innocence. From that to being told by a doctor to stop drinking 20 years later. Nice.

The reason for this post is to alert you to a new sidebar I’ve created. This sidebar will be updated with the latest pictures that have been posted to my Flickr account. Yes, I’m about to ditch my Webshots account in favour of Flickr. Thats what you get, Webshots, when you’re shit. Sure, the professional photographs are nice but hell. I’ve already found Flickr to be an order of magnitude better. Thanks though for the suggestions that people have as to what other options there are out there. Flickr won hands down for me though. So what I’ve uploaded are some pics from my visit to the Kennedy Space Centre. They aren’t edited yet as I’ve just put them up there for the moment for a bit of testing. Album is here.

The problem with PK

Tue, 22 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

When I first went into the doctor about a month ago my resting heart rate was 80. That was the bloody highest resting heart rate I’ve ever had I reckon. I weighed 179 pounds (approx 81 kg) which for being a tiny bit over 6 feet this placed me within the medically safe region. My blood pressure was in the normal region. I considered this bad because I normally have a low blood pressure.

DnB Fort Lauderdale

Mon, 21 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

It was a bit weird to hear that Traffic, the premier place for Drum and Bass in Adelaide, had closed its doors recently. The big memory I have from there is when I saw DJ Marky and Stamina MC play and that was simply *awesome*. However, that and maybe a couple of other performances aside, one thing I had against the place was that there was way, way too much cigarette smoke inside. I was constantly in search of some nice clean air or some decent ventilation. It sort of sucked like that.

End to a great weekend!

Mon, 21 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

If you classify not doing anything as being great, then yes, this weekend was great. I read some books, surfed the net, read some books, slept, listened to music, slept, read, slept, played some music, slept, read.

Ok, I sort of lie. Today I did venture outside because my face was looking relatively normal again. It just looked like I had a lipstick malfunction (I’d believe this too if I did actually wear lipstick. Not in this lifetime.) I played a game of Tennis today because it was too much of a nice day not to. I think Javi, who I played against, may have felt sorry for me as he let me win by a 6-0 6-1 6-1 margin :-p Thanks Javi!

Rock star no more...

Fri, 18 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I have to say that for the past couple of weeks I have been living like a rock star would… well, sortof. There hasn’t really been a night out where I’ve gotten home before 7am. Awesome. I had more of the same planned for this weekend until I woke up Thursday morning and noticed… a cold sore. I was left thinking “where the f$8k did that come from?” I can’t remember the last time I had one. If anything it would have been in primary school I’m guessing. That’s even if I actually have had one. I had to leave work early Thursday because I had a heck of a fever. Had my lifestyle finally caught up with me? Were the gods trying to strike me down? At any rate, there is no way I’m going out in public. Not at all. I’m not going to leave my apartment. I have enough supplies to last me until Monday at least. I’ve got a few books in storage to read so that will see me through ok.

Still at work

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

It’s nearly midnight and I’m still at work. No! Hold on, back up. I’m *back* at work. I’ve already been out for a couple of drinks tonight and I had to come back and get some stuff done before tomorrow morning. The problem is, I’m finding nearly everything and anything is distracting me at the moment. Plus, I’m still listening to Rammstein from Valentine’s day. It’s pretty difficult to head-bang and code at the same time, ya know?

CJB-1000

Wed, 16 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Inspired by my previous post, I have released the CJB-1000 v1.0. This thing has been sitting on my computer for a while and Picasa found it for me again the other day. I’ve tweaked it a bit but can’t be bothered tweaking it anymore. I could have sent this out via an e-mail, but where’s the fun in doing that?

[CJB-1000 animated GIF - image missing from migration]

* For those of you who don’t know WTF I’m talking about this is an animated picture of one of my mates, CJB, that I created from a photo taken at one of the social get togethers that my company had a while back. That was back when life was easy and work was breezy. Oh yes, it was good back then. We all danced like that at one stage. Well, not all of us actually. I lie. Just CJB.

Elevator music

Wed, 16 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I wish I’d tried this at University. I think the only thing we ever ended up doing was turning all the chairs in a lecture theatre so they were facing the rear wall. Maybe we put a stack of chairs in an elevator as well. Anyway, cool elevator music link is here.

*sigh* this reminds me of the fro-bro days.

Yay yay for Valentine's day

Tue, 15 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I just love this day of the year. Nothing screams out “sucked in for being single” more than today. Luckily around work with a bunch of nerdy engineers you don’t notice anything different. Well, no, I might have noticed something different if I moved from my desk today. I stayed firmly planted in front of the computer screen blasting tunes away on my iPod. Nothing says “I love you” more than Rammstein screaming out “Bestrafe mich”. Anyway, I actually feel sorry for the people in relationships who look forward to Valentine’s day because they know they’ll get roses/chocolates/hand made Teddy Bears. Because, you know, Feb 13th and Feb 15th aren’t good enough days for that. If that’s the only day they actually receive that sort of attention? Well… I pity them.

High Dynamic Range photography

Mon, 14 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

This may be the coolest thing I’ve found on the net today, and I don’t know why I haven’t stumbled across it beforehand. It’s called HDR (High Dynamic Range) compression. In a nutshell, it enables a greater range of light to be displayed in a single photo.

It’s particularly useful where photos have both light and dark areas. Normally to capture detail in the brighter parts of a scene you’d have to underexpose but then detail would be lost in the darker areas. Conversely, to get detail in the darker areas you’d have to overexpose but then the brighter areas are all washed out. With this technique you get the best of both worlds where both light and dark areas show detail. The only drawback is that you have to take multiple pictures of a scene at different exposures. This requires a tripod to avoid camera shake.

New version of my site

Mon, 14 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

This just cracked me up… for about 5 minutes or so.
http://sites.gizoogle.com/?url=http://daecks.blogspot.com

Nerrrrd

Sat, 12 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve just completely nerded up this site. I think it’s not too difficult to see what I’ve done to accomplish that.

That shit is whack

Sat, 12 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

So we’re heading west along the 595 to Fort Lauderdale last night at around 11pm, looking forward to hitting the town after a hectic week at work. At the intersection of the 595 and the Florida turnpike traffic had slowed to an absolute crawl. All I could see ahead of me were flashing lights everywhere and my mate and I were speculating as to what it could be. “Wow, there must be a huge pile up of cars ahead”. Emergency vehicles were bloody everywhere. There were a couple of smashed cars along the side of the road but as it turned out that wasn’t what was causing the problem. We looked towards the exit ramp for the 595 leading onto the turnpike and there were 30 or 40 emergency vehicles parked the whole way along. Then we looked a little more to the right and there were bloody flames everywhere! I don’t know how we missed that to begin with. We didn’t know what the hell was going on. We thought it could have been a plane crash or a petrol tanker. As it turns out a petrol tanker had overturned.

To the rescue!

Sat, 12 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Noticed this little charger in the outdoor area not far from my cube:

I don’t know what type of bird it was, but it sure was small:

He was puffing a little bit, but after a while he flew off to a tree. I hope this little charger finds his little charger friends:

Time for a change

Fri, 11 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I’m getting sick of using Webshots. I think it sort of sucks a little. The uploading service is pretty flaky, it’s bloody hard to reorganise photos in an album, it crops my photos automagically, and it’s been the same ever since I started using it.

I’ve been investigating another online photo album provider, Flickr and am thinking of switching over to that. Does anyone else use it or use a different online photo storage provider they can give a good review for? Now is the time to use the comments section! Or you could just do nothing. Your choice.

Hello Santos Renuentes!

Thu, 10 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Heh, this is pretty funny. My friend Omar from work informed me that one (or some) of his other band members had found a site that gave excellent reviews for all the Santos Renuentes gigs that the person had been too. They told him “see, you never know who comes to see our shows”. Well, yes that’s true… but if it weren’t for Omar I doubt that I’d ever had heard of Tobacco Road or Santos Renuentes or whatever. Maybe I would have gone along to see some live music one time and seen their band. If I did take that path, I’d probably have given them a good review anyway ;-)

A man and a parrot

Wed, 09 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

This story made me laugh a little because I intially thought it was a joke, but then I felt a bit disturbed:

“POLICE in the US state of Florida charged a 34-year-old rescue worker with cruelty to animals after a weekend incident in which he bit the head off a parrot.”

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,12196119-401,00.html

Christmas/NY 2004 Part 4 - Yosemite

Wed, 09 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I can’t put it into words how freaking amazing Yosemite national park was. It had some of the most beautiful scenery ever. Just absolutely amazing. I also experienced the coldest weather I’ve ever been in. We camped outside for 2 nights and the second night was just absolutely freezing. We’re guessing it got down to about -1 or -2 degrees F, which translates to something like -16 degrees celcius. My sleeping bag was only rated to 0 degrees celcius, so… very bloody cold. Of course that was made up for by the fact that when I woke up after the second night of sleep I stepped out into snow. I’d never been in snow before. Absolutely awesome.

Found the pics from Rumi in South Beach

Wed, 09 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

You can find the pics here. Go to picture 127 which is on the last page for Rumi restaurant. You’ll see me looking like a goose in a red shirt. The guy next to me is my mate Sean from work (aka Saeed). The people are all Nina’s friends AFAIK (1). I think they’re all Persian except for the girl with the light brown hair. I think she was from Peru. Nina is the one all the way to the right in the brown top.

Lunch today

Wed, 09 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

This was the view I had at lunch today.

If I looked to the right I saw this:

If I turned a little more to the right I saw this:

I hope you enjoyed your lunch today too.

Google just gets cooler

Tue, 08 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Google is so cool. It helped me in my job so many times by getting me the best search results. It’s just like an external brain… there is a heck of a lot of stuff I don’t know but then I google it, get the answer, answer the question and then I *seem* smart, when in actual fact I’m probably not - I just know what keywords to use. I guess it’s like how people in South Beach *seem* perfect (or walk around like it) when in actual fact of course, they’re not (1). They just find ways around it (read plastic surgery). Oh, and I’m not talking about personality here either. I’m actually just dribbling.

Pet peeve

Tue, 08 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

People talking on their mobile phones in the restrooms whilst sitting on the toilet seat. Not cool guys. Not cool.

Things that I need to work better

Tue, 08 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I think the most important is a phone conversation recorder, and I don’t know why it isn’t automatically built into the phone systems that corporate engineering companies (well, this one at least) use. When I’m having a technical discussion over the phone with my tech lead or something (and sometimes these conversations can go for over an hour, especially when a group discussion is going on) I always miss stacks of points. There are a couple of ways I know of to record what was said during the conversation: make notes while you’re listening, or listen very hard and try to understand so no notes need be taken. If I’m doing the former I’ll miss key points without realising it because I’m concentrating on getting down on paper the information in a form I’ll understand later. If I’m doing the latter I’ll just forget stuff. Why don’t they give us a “record” button on the phone so I can play back the conversation later to see if I missed anything? Maybe there is stuff out there that can do this, but they don’t supply it to us by default.

South Beach - finally

Mon, 07 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

*Finally* I went for a night out in South Beach. Only one word describes that night out: awesome. When you’re kicking on to breakfast at 6:30am in the morning and making sure that a friend is ok as they’ve been getting sick in the toilet, you know you’ve had a good night. I *think* we ended up in a place called “Pearl”. The name of the place was “Rumi”. Check out the pictures of this place! They played some bloody good music but only towards the latter part of the night. It seems that the music has to be dumbed down a lot earlier on in the night to please the fickle part of the crowd (err, rethink that. It’s South Beach. The fickle part of the crowd is the crowd) and they only play the non-commercial, actually good-to-listen-to stuff later.

Christmas/NY 2004 Part 3 - San Francisco

Tue, 01 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

What can I say about San Francisco? I absolutely, without a doubt, positively loved it. A-friggen-mazing place. We stayed in a hotel which was about a one minute walk from Union square, more or less the centre square for San Francisco and we had the cable cars going past our window down in the street. Did I do a lot of walking? Hell yes! I was absolutely buggered from walking around but loved every bit of it. A nice change from all the flatness here in Florida.

Stuffed

Sun, 30 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Err, thought it would be time to update my blog. Well, I’ve started up tennis again. Yah! I haven’t played a game since I got over here and now I plan to make it a weekly thing. I was missing it so, so much. The only sport I’ve been doing is the odd swim and I don’t do it often enough to get anything out of it. Anyway, it’s been good to get away from the computer for a while. I sit all day in front of one (which I hate doing… well, all day at least). I hate, hate, hate that part of my job.

Australia Day

Thu, 27 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Heh, happy Australia Day by the way. Geez, I nearly forgot. I don’t know how I could have, it was on the news constantly over here.

Picture updates

Tue, 25 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Pictures from the Bahamas are here, featuring guest appearances from the “grass-weed” guy and my brother doing something useful: carrying beer.

A close call

Mon, 24 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I was setting up my new computer on the weekend, and I nearly lost all my pictures that I’ve taken so far. Yeah, most of them are on the web but they’re not the full resolution pics. Not all of them are backed up yet either. I couldn’t find the pics after I did a re-install and I swear to God I was nearly in tears once I realised what I had done. So tonight, the first thing I’m doing is uploading all of the pictures I have to the web and doing massive amounts of backing up *and* creating an automatic backup plan. Geez, I don’t want to ever feel like that again.

Stupid

Thu, 20 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I was in my third project meeting on Monday, having been on my new project for two weeks. Things weren’t going so well. My computer was set up completely wrong for the sort of work I was required to do so I was working with the systems support group to get those problems resolved. Plus, as with any new project, there is a thing call ramp up time. Or, time taken trying to understand what the hell you’re supposed to be doing. That takes a while. So, combine computer not working properly with ramp up and you’ve got a bad start.

When bad things happen

Tue, 18 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Well, here is the first one. The northern gate of my apartment block got taken out last night by someone trying to get out of the complex. This happened between midnight last night and 8 am this morning. Likelihood that it was someone from the party on the floor below me last night? Pretty high!

But this is even worse than what happened above. I’ve run out of milo.

Fair dinkum, good work NASA/ESA

Mon, 17 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Yeah, you can already tell this post is going to be full of all things nerdy. Well, I gotta say it, but hats off to the folks at NASA/ESA/Uni Arizona for getting a space probe to land on Titan. That’s just freaking amazing when you consider what must be done to accomplish something like that. I had to laugh though when they only got half the pictures they wanted because someone missed a command. Hehe.

Things that go bump in the night. And then die.

Mon, 17 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Right, it’s nearly 2:15 am and I’m pissed off. There is something in the exhaust duct of my clothes dryer that keeps on making a tap-thud sound. I heard this sound a few weeks ago but then it stopped. I thought it was the wind at the time and there was some sort of valve that was loose or something but it can’t be that tonight because it’s as calm as a Hindu cow… and don’t get me started on Indians! There are a bunch of them having a party on the floor below me and they’ve got their freaking balcony door open. I think they work at my company, I’m not sure. It’s bloody 2 am in the morning. Shouldn’t they be programming or something!?! Bloody hell, I’m trying to get some sleep so I can do good work so I don’t become a victim of outsourcing. Jesus!

Rum Barrels - aka Baby Elephant killers

Sat, 15 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Last night I cruised along to a 33rd birthday party at a Thai themed place called “Mai Kai”. It used to be one of the biggest and best places to go to in Ft Lauderdale back in the 50s and 60s and today it still rocks. Apparently there was a deal going on that if you bought one rum barrel you’d get another one free. Awesome. So I bought two, giving me 2 free drinks later on. A couple of points must be made:

Quote of the day

Wed, 12 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

My friend said this to me whilst I was talking to him on the telephone. I didn’t actually realise this myself…

It’s not easy making lots of money

Damn. Damn. Damn. Oh well, I better save up some money for those lottery tickets.

North Korean hairstyle guidelines

Tue, 11 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Found this link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4157121.stm whilst trawling the net, where North Korea has launched an ad campaign against long hair. My favourite part of the article, because it’s just so stupid:

It stressed the “negative effects” of long hair on “human intelligence development”, noting that long hair “consumes a great deal of nutrition” and could thus rob the brain of energy.

How the hell does long hair consume any more nutrition when hair comes out of the scalp dead? I’m looking for some “gotcha” phrase. I can’t find one. The mind boggles.

A supercharged weekend

Mon, 10 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

NOT! This has been the biggest weekend of nothing I’ve ever had. I was feeling like crap all of last week at work. I think it *may* have had something to do with my trip over to California. Hmmmm… So I spent the whole weekend recovering in bed. I also discovered cable TV this weekend. Normally, I’d only turn the TV on to watch “The Daily Show” on the Comedy channel (oh, and Reno 911 and Drawn Together). But this weekend I watched the History channel as well and I watched a 3-hour special on stealth technology in the armed forces. Fascinating stuff.

Christmas/NY 2004 Part 2 - Los Angeles

Mon, 10 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

This is where my journey started. Of course, I had the whole LA experience - touching down in the airplane and then being forced to wait on the tarmac for over 1/2 hour until a spot became free, leading to me being a total of 2 hours late.

Anyway, after meeting up with my touring crew we headed off to Venice beach. There was hardly anyone down there (it was the middle of winter after all) but it still had a pretty cool atmosphere. After checking out Venice beach we cruised down Santa Monica boulevard for a while and then went to Hollywood boulevard. Here I did the total tourist thing and got my pictures taken with whatever stars I could. I look back on it an think “what was I on?” - they were only names on the concrete after all, but anyway.

It's by the friggin' Monkees!

Sat, 08 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

There have been a few songs bugging me my whole life coz I like them a lot but I don’t know who the hell they’re by (and I don’t know enough of the lyrics to google them). One I don’t think I’m ever going to figure out until I actually hear it on some CD coz it’s some Spanish song from the mid 80’s or something like that. I’ve just solved the identity of one of the others however. I used to listen to this one when I was in Year 1. Yeah, a long time ago. There was a tape player out in the shed and I used to play this song over and over and then sing it at school. The name of the song is “Listen to the band” by the Monkees. I got it wrong at the time, I used to say “Listen to the fan.” It didn’t make much sense back at the time, and last week I thought about it again and determined that it must have been “band” instead of “fan”. A quick google and a download of the song and voila! Mystery solved.

Christmas/NY part 1 - The woman

Wed, 05 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

With any trip, you get highlights and lowlights. Highlights from my trip to California included sightseeing LA, San Francisco, camping in Yosemite and snowboarding Lake Tahoe. The low part of my trip was a constant hum in the background. That fly that won’t let you get to sleep at night. The itch in the middle of your back that you just can’t reach. It was… a woman.

No, it wasn’t anyone I met people, but the one who was travelling with us. When I met up with my travelling group in LA it was all pot pourri. That sweet, sweet smell soon reeked of a sewage treatment plant. I have never met someone so neurotic in my life. I have never known anyone to take so long to get ready in my life (sometimes nearly 2 hours). Never have I met someone so insecure that they would blatently make their problem everyone else’s.

Holiday nearing an end

Mon, 03 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been heaps out of touch with everyone lately, but my Christmas 2004 vacation is nearing an end. Most of the time I’ve been away from Internet access to update this website. I hope everyone had a great Christmas and New Year! I’ll be updating this website with what I got up to over the break in the next few days and believe me that’s going to take quite a few posts.

Merry Christmas to all!

Fri, 24 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +0000

To all who are reading this blog, I wish you a merry Christmas! I don’t know where you’ll be spending yours but I’m seeing what San Francisco has to offer in the way of Christmas festivities. Alright, it’s been a hell of a ride so far and I have to go now for some sightseeing before I get called a nerd again.

Checkya later.

Sightseeing California

Fri, 24 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Well, I have absolutely been having a blast in California so far. I arrived in LA a couple of days ago feeling pretty agitated because my flight was over 2 hours late, and the fact that we had to wait on the tarmac for over and hour. After that though things got pretty good pretty quickly. We went cruising around LA, seeing the sights and meeting a few friends around the place. I met one of my mate’s friends who was a former baywatch babe and also appeared on “Jerry McGuire”. That was cool. I also got my photo taken with a lot of the stars on the ground. I think my favourite was one taken with the “Kenny G” star. We also visited Venice Beach and Santa Monica Blvd (for which I played Sheryl Crow’s song “All I wanna do”).

Ready for the trip

Wed, 22 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +0000

I really should be getting some rest at the moment, but I have a problem with getting any sleep before I’m due to catch a plane the next morning. I have this fear that I’ll sleep through my alarm so I’ll spend most of tonight waking up every half an hour and checking the time - and that’s even if I do get to sleep!

I got this SMS from one of my friends who I’m meeting up with in LA:
“Hey Gringo! Campfire tunes are going to crank. We just purchased a guitar, maracas, bongos and a flute from Mexico :-) Adios amigo!”

Christmas gifts

Sat, 18 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +0000

I’m going to a Christmas party tonight and I’m trying to decide what to buy for a secret Santa gift for a woman who has a good sense of humour and a couple of kids. Three options are currently buzzing around in my head:

America: The Book
Heidi Klum’s Body of Knowledge: 8 rules of model behaviour
“Has Been”, by William Shatner

The Heidi Klum book is just up there for a laugh. I could just imagine a mother wanting to take life advice from a model.

Lincoln Mall

Mon, 13 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +0000

This mall is one of the most awesome malls I’ve ever been to. It’s the premier mall in South Beach and it’s as pretentious as hell. Everyone there looks and walks like a model. I’d probably be looking like a kid in a candy store or something like it coz there are just so many good things to look at. The girls are absolutely stunning! Hehe.

Everyone is always talking to someone on their mobile phones because they like to appear just so damn busy and important. When I went last week for my birthday I saw one girl walking around for about 1/2 hour with her mobile phone to her ear constantly. She didn’t say a damn thing the whole time. It seems either a way of her avoiding being spoken to or a way of feeling important. Maybe I should set up a phone line that people can call and have some automated service dribble $hit to them (and not your typical phone sex service, that’d be just too plain expensive and, I’m assuming, not required for the ladies?) just so they feel important. Maybe I’ve already been beaten to that actually. Hmmm…

Slow motion day

Mon, 13 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +0000

It seems that today is one of those days that just seems to drag on forever. I’ve been trying to get motivated to do my work but so far that’s taken nearly 7 hours to do. My body just feels like it’s a ragdoll.

I went to see Santos Renuentes play last night at a place called Broadway in Aventura. They were awesome again. They have a new lead guitarist who’s only 24 but he added a whole new dimension to their sound. It was a really, really good performance. I was talking to the band members commenting on how good they sounded afterwards and everyone seemed pretty pumped from the performance. They’re hoping to get a record contract in the near future. Good luck guys!

I... am... stuffed...

Fri, 10 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +0000

There are just so many things that are stuffing up at the moment. Things getting lost, things just not going to plan, it’s hard keeping track of it all. I’ve been getting virtually no sleep in the past couple of weeks thanks in no small part to the air mattress I’ve been using at night. It’s something I should have gotten rid of a long time ago because every time I move it makes a god awful rumbling plastic squealchy sound (Ed: pfft, nice explanation mate) that is freaking loud! I can’t understand where all the sound comes from. Anyway, if I move during my sleep I’m woken up, guaranteed.

72 97 112 112 121 32 66 105 114 116 104 100 97 121 32 116 111 32 109 101 33

Tue, 07 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Yay! Well, it might not be quite that day over here but it is in Australia anyway and that’s pretty much what counts for me. So what will I be doing? NOTHING! Actually, I’m going to celebrate by having lunch down at South Beach and then maybe I’m going to go do some shopping or something. Of course, I’ll be having the typical Wednesday night happy hour drinks at the Davie Ale House so I’m looking forward to that too. Yay!

Busch Gardens, Tampa Bay - Awesome!

Mon, 06 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve driven about a total 500 miles today to go to Busch Gardens in Tampa. Why? Because there are some *awesome* roller coasters there. Oh, and the guy who came with me is going back to Australia tomorrow and I thought it would be a good send off. Here are the rides and here are the number of times we went on them:

Gwazi (old school wooden type) - 3 times
Kumba - 5 times
Montu - 4 times
Python - once
Scorpion - once

WHAT!!!??? YEAH! OOOO-KAAAAY!!!

Mon, 06 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +0000

I must admit, I didn’t know much about Lil Jon until I saw Dave Chapelle do a skit about him on his show. That was a couple of months ago now, and it’s weird to find that I’m actually seeking out Lil Jon’s music just so I can hear him say “What?”, “OK!”, “Yeah!” in his or other people’s songs. It’s awesome. And yeah, my family has been getting an earful of it while they’ve been over here. You hear A LOT of him being played on the radio… partially because the rap/hip-hop/rnb stations here like to repeat a lot of the same music… partially because he’s an East side artist. You could imagine my joy when I found this soundboard. The samples are of Dave Chapelle impersonating Lil Jon, but it’s still cool.

Enchanted

Sat, 04 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +0000

To all the people who were going to enchanted this year back in good ol’ SA: I HOPE YOU HAD FUN!!! I really wish I could have made it. Unfortunately, due to circumstances out of my control I couldn’t be back at this time. Nav, CJB, Ben, I spammed all your phones and Nav I left return phone numbers (the 75225533 number was “PKCALLED”, the other number was my real number here in the US). I couldn’t call from my Australian mobile phone as my family were using it in New York.

Jump

Sat, 04 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +0000

I’m completely cracking myself up at the moment. I just found a really cool synth sound that reminded me of Van Halen’s “Jump”, and I played along with the song for at least 1/2 hour. Cool.

What’s cracking me up even more is the South Park episode that’s on TV at the moment. Paris Hilton has opened a whore store in South Park, and the writers are taking the piss out of Paris really well. It is one of the funniest episodes I’ve ever seen. One really bad/sad thing I noticed during one of the breaks in South Park though - an advert for an electric jar opener. What are us guys going to do now? Our job is to open jars. Men are slowly being replaced by machines. I feel lost.

A nice sunny day

Fri, 03 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +0000

it’s about 23C outside, nice and sunny but I also happened to notice the smog hanging about, and then the number of SUVs around with only one person driving. Which bothers me a little. I used to car pool a lot when working back in Adelaide. So if it’s one thing I’ve noticed while I’ve been over here, it’s how incredibly wasteful American society is. It’s just downright amazing. The number of SUVs is just the tip of the iceberg. The fact that I’m not even given the option of recycling paper and cardboard at my apartment is another ice crystal in that massive iceberg.

The mind of a player

Fri, 03 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve mentioned “the player” on this site before, and through discussions I’ve had with him recently we may as well be from different universes. First a background profile on “the player”. He got divorced about a year ago after a 7 year marriage. He has 2 kids, aged 5 and 7 years old. He’s in his early 30s.

“The player” for the past year has constantly dated women. He has a problem with being alone (as in, not dating) for more than 2 weeks at a time. He has no problem with dating more than one woman at a time, but he will will be honest with his date and tell them he is dating another woman if they ask (and if that is the case). His thoughts on dating are that it’s ok to date more than one girl at once, so long as you are honest with them. Furthermore, he says his time is mostly spent on thinking about dating women, and he is completely and utterly absorbed in experimenting with chatting up women and finding that recipe of words that will make them his. He seems pretty confident that he’s nailed most of that, and seems certain that for any given night he will pick some girl up. He also has no fear of being rejected, which would obviously help.

Sports update

Thu, 02 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +0000

On Tuesday night I got to see another Miami Heat game. They lost again, and I’m beginning to think I’m some sort of jinx or something because at every sports game I’ve attended, the team I’ve been barracking for has lost. Heat went down to the Raptors 92-94. That was a pretty damn close game and the whole stadium was electric. Everybody was standing up and making a huge noise, and Heat nearly did win the game - a shot from the three point line in the last second hit the basketball rim.

Australian Music - pushing the boundaries

Wed, 01 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Don’t ask me how the hell I found this site… today hasn’t been the most productive work day. Anyway, here is the link to the site: http://www.convictcreations.com/culture/music.htm.
It only really gets interesting about half way down, but this is the part that really made me laugh:

“Australian men are renowned for having the dancing rhythm of Frankenstein…their lack of rhythm and stiff knees has many of them resembling a chicken or jack in the box bouncing from side to side.”

The day I nearly became a redneck

Wed, 01 Dec 2004 00:00:00 +0000

This post is already a little weird from the headline, but I was a little apprehensive when I walked into a barber yesterday to get a haircut. My view of the US and haircuts was not a good one. I don’t know where I got that perception from, but it’s been stuck in my mind for ages. The barber spoke very little English and I was trying to tell them step by step how to cut my hair, because it seemed the Spanish-speaking barber didn’t understand “one-inch off the whole way round”. Anyway, I finished with the ordeal and walked outside. I put my hand on the back of my neck and felt something weird… something I hadn’t felt since the 80’s. Something that I thought I’d put behind me a long time ago. I had a mullet. I looked at the reflection in the barber shop window and saw a redneck. I had an urge to smash my front teeth out and buy a check shirt and braces and call myself “Cletus”. I fought the urge, raced back inside the barber shop and said “This won’t do!” and got that mullet removed. Thank God for that.

Home sweet Floridian home

Sun, 28 Nov 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, let me try and sum up the Bahamas in a few short points:

- The most rubbish lying around I’ve ever seen.
- The most run-down places I’ve ever seen.
- The clearest water I’ve ever seen.
- The most stray dogs I’ve ever seen.
- The most pot-holes in roads I’ve ever seen.
- Surprisingly expensive.

Actually, that summary only applies the New Providence and Paradise islands. I have approximately 700 more islands to visit to get a real feel for the Bahamas.

I'm in the Bahamas, mon

Fri, 26 Nov 2004 00:00:00 +0000

and it’s been quite an experience so far. I rented out some rooms at a place called the “Orange Hill beach inn”. It’s quite unlike the normal resorts you see around this area, but that’s exactly what I wanted - to get away from that sort of stuff. So many people come here to the resorts and end up spending most of their time gambling in Casinos. We had an authentic Thanksgiving day meal at the inn last night - it was pretty nice. So far I’ve seen a place burning down, a guy ask us if we wanted to buy some weed, and some crazy arse drivers. Lots of damage around here due to the hurricanes that came through a couple of months ago. Anyway, my internet cafe time is up and I have some sightseeing to do! checkya.

Time for an update, me thinks

Tue, 23 Nov 2004 00:00:00 +0000

I am soooo bloody tired at the moment. I drove my family back from Orlando last night. It’s about a 3 1/2 hour drive (the actual time of course depends on if you feel like driving 20 MPH over the speed limit, like everyone else does) and we only left DisneyWorld at 12:15 am. Yeah, the Magic Kingdom is cool and all, but I found myself going on the Space Mountain rollercoaster-like ride three times. It was the only ride there that could appease my desire for rollercoaster thrills. I probably did the wrong thing at one stage by driving past Universal Studios’ “Islands of Adventure” and saying “look, there’s the Hulk ride!” After that everyone didn’t really want to go anymore, and it seemed fairly pointless going to Islands of Adventure after that :-(

Hats off family (and Arnott's)

Wed, 17 Nov 2004 00:00:00 +0000

I picked up my family from Miami airport last night and took them down to South Beach for a quick drive. My bro seemed to take notice of the rims on the cars quite a bit, and Mum was trying to get over me driving on the other side of the road. Dad was pretty chilled out it seemed. The extra bonus of my family coming over was they brought a lot of cool stuff with them (at my request)

Weird day at work

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 00:00:00 +0000

I met my technical lead for the first time today. She looked absolutely nothing like I thought she would (well, I only ever had a faceless person in my head like the people who appear in dreams), but heck, it was a bit mindblowing. I’ve been working with her for 5 months now and this is the first time I’ve seen her. Of course, I made myself look like a total dumb-ass on several occasions today. Here’s to tomorrow and more opportunities to make myself look stupid!

F-A-U!

Mon, 15 Nov 2004 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve got a bloody FAU (Florida Atlantic University) College football chant in my head now. I’d like to thank the girl (who sounded very much like a guy) sitting right behind me during the game for getting it stuck in my head. FAU got absolutely flogged by New Mexico State, but hey, it was still pretty cool to see a game of college football. I got the tickets for free too!

NBA game - Heat vs Mavericks

Fri, 12 Nov 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Wow! I just came back from watching the Miami Heat play the Dallas Mavericks. Heat got whipped, but I did get to see Shaquille O’Neal, which was pretty cool. The game entertainment was pretty cool and the whole place was pumped up so much! They play a whole lot of power songs throughout the whole night to keep the vibe going. It’s just amazing how much energy there is going around the place even before the game has begun.

Fantasy Fest pictures - part 2

Wed, 10 Nov 2004 00:00:00 +0000

The non-worksafe ones. Ok, some of them are probably sorta worksafe in some parallel universe, but whatever. Click here to see them in their raw glory. Note: Yes, some of the pictures contain nudity, so don’t click on the link if you’re easily offended!

I'm a rollercoaster junkie

Mon, 08 Nov 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Orlando absolutely rocked again. On Saturday the Kennedy Space Centre was just amazing. Today (or Sunday), the Islands of Adventure at Universal Studios were just plain fantastic. Although after going on just about every ride there was, and going on “The Hulk” rollercoaster 3 times and the Dueling Dragons rollercoaster twice, I can safely say my voice will not be with me tomorrow (oops, I mean later on today). I wouldn’t be surprised if I slept all day through Monday. Hell man, I gotta get to sleep.

Fantasy Fest pictures!