:: four :: snowboarding, sydney's first flashmob, birthday surprises.

Welcome. Ahh to have fallen into the same trap as soOo many in this online age, the unfulfilled promise of the update.
"More soon" they cry. Terrible last words.
Today is the day after my 30th birthday, and i feel great. The guys surprised me with an awesome dinner out at Taings in Darling Harbour on Saturday night, which was a friendly little thai place with awesome food : highly recommended. Let me see: who came : Fredescu, Mchunraha, Link, Miguel, Myles, Gibbo and myself. Other than the first two, who are my current housemates, it's terrible how little I get to see my friends in this great age of interconnection. I like the idea of future mobile phones having a buddy-list like icq or messenger and alerting you when someone on your list is in the vicinity. I wish that :
A: this was my idea
B: the technology was more easily available for the layperson to dabble with. Such a system would require a close vicinity network in order to be truly useful, but such network are the backbone of the *new wave of wireless mobile computing* ie; grabbing your mobile phone/pda and requesting : "
"Where is the nearest restaurant selling seafood laksa for under $13?" or "For gods sake, will someone tell me where the nearest public toilet is?"
All too soon, no doubt, there's money to be made.
Anyway, now where were we?
Aha. the night of the birtthday... after dinner we ventured (in the start of the winds and rain that blasted sydney [up to 140km/hr!] the next day) across to the Star City Casino and up through it's imposing atmosphere, to the cocktail bar on [i think] the 7th floor. That was a sweet time, often whe we organise group dinners [omg it's been way too long] the thrilling part for me, while it's fantastic to have everybody i love around me, is often the feeling that I'm perforating an atmosphere that I would not normally. That is...
...And i hate to give the game away...
but the lives of my friends and I are not usually [or at least that often] what you would call the swinging, dapper, cocktail crowd.
But i guess thats not the point, and if it IS the point, then it's probably a fairly obvious one.
Most people love the escapism from the trudgery that throwing on your best clothes and sipping cocktails above the city affords them. And.. Hell! living like a little bit of a slob part of the time not only saves you cash for such high-flying ventures, but also enhances the appeal when actually out and at it. Until you come home that is.

so yeh, anyway, the big surprise that i had not expected was a shiny new hp scanjet 3750c waiting for when we got home. Thanks guys, I know i said it at the time, but here it is officially. a VERY nice gift.

A couple of weeks ago a group of 6 of us guys (mostly from work) took a week or so off work to head down south for a bit of snowboarding. And maan was it great. SoOo very addictive, Its not going to be the last time that i strap on a snowbaord i truly hope. After a week of that, and the associative partying, I bid the lads farewell and caught the bus down *south from canberra to melbourne. I was wondering why it was so cheap ($60) and that became obvious when I realised it was Canberra to Melbourne via Wagga Wagga ... aah t'was grand to see my old stomping ground again, if only for 3 minutes as we passed through.
The important thing is that I got to Melbourne eventually, (and quite frankly was relieved to be able to sit down for 9 hours) and *shock* horror* actually met Dale who I have been friends with for approx 3 yrs now via web and phone. We got to spend some quality time together, and I really appreciated him making time. I also was able to see my friend Tamara, and had a great day at the Outre Gallery with Trina, a friend I made via one of our corporate customers at work. The gallery is highly recommended. Go and support them, there should be more places like that on the planet.

Dale and I spent a day and a half in Ballarat, we did a couple of tourist things, which were surprisingly interesting, and I managed to hit the town for a night as a local... getting back to the hotel at 4am. Its amazing how you dance when you realise you'll most likely never see any of these people again.

Sydney had it's first flashmob on Saturday 23rd August. Naturally I had to go, and I'm happy to say that it was a resounding success, mad props to all involved, I can't wait until the next opportunity to engage in a little en masse tom-foolery.

..aah thats about enough for the time being.
..more soonish.

:: three :: concerning transport and visitors from afar...



well, here we are, a month older than our last chat. Quite a bit has been a-happening...
I've actually picked up my car. Shock! It was a little bit of a hair-raising journey, but we made it in one piece. Much better at getting around now, in case anyone reading is considering launching into emergency driving tactics when they encounter me next out in peak hour. Sydney traffic is a strange beast. I try to not get caught up in all the hoohar and just think how it pumps around this great city of ours, like the blood I guess traffic, in essence is. What would more constitute the blood flow of a city than the seemingly endless ebb and gush of cars, truck and motorbikes. I'm pretty dissappointed with Sydneys attempts at bicycle lanes. I guess congestion is peaking enough without sacrificing another slab of the all-so-precious roadway to such a minority. Pity. I'm also going to be a bit of a nancy-boy and say that good ol' Syd is a bit more hilly than Wagga, for instance, (and to be honest, Sydneysiders are a little softer than the country folk, the taxi drivers are often telling me that bizness takes a savage downward turn at the first hint of a cooler change. Maybe thats just cabbie talk though. Maybe it's not.)
So, yeh, i'm vehicled. Not sure I'm sold on the idea entirely, I've said it before, but i LIKE public transport. All the complaints that ppl may have, that it smells, that there are strange ppl around, that it's unreliable, it all in a way feel like just part of the adventure of getting somewhere. Perhaps part of me is still a bit rural?, but i don't really feel like that. In fact, i never really felt like a rural, even though i spent the first 18 yrs of my life there.. I never ever, considered the option of staying in Leeton, which is odd in that personally, i always considered myself to play it pretty cozy and safe, yet i ran as soon as i could.



Amiko came out from Japan on the 25th may for a week of madly running around sydney with me. We had a great time, went up to Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains, which is definately a place i'd like to explore a bit more. It was nice to have my shedule completed uprooted for a while. The fog in Katoomba was amazing.
Did i say that i had to call the NRMA for the first time this evening, I got out of work to discover that I'd left the lights on and the battery was dead flat. Aah, i think it's almost an initiation isn't it?
Whatever.
Anyway. 2moro is saturday and i'm rostered to work from 10:30 till 7. Hope it's quiet.
I've got some music to listen to.
goodnight.

[::] two:

hello again... It's probably a surprise to both you and i that we're back here again, so here goes.
Attempt number 4 to pick up my car is planned for this saturday morning... It's the first car I've had in too many years [yeh, one of those odd ppl who actually *like* public transport] ... it's actually been quite a while since i've driven at all. bah no problem! Like riding a bike. [been a while since i've done that too, actually] It's a zippy little thing, but i certainly don't think i'll be dragging at the lights anytime soon. too bad, i hear you cry!
The Cobb got back tonight from a week or so in qld, his main dietry intake over that time does appear to be beer, but he seems happy enough.
We've just been in the garage recording our latest hit just now, it's another horrible delight i must say. I'll put some links up here when we can be bothered to record/webetize anything good enough.
I'm taking the next week off work to hang out with a friend of mine coming from japan. Can't wait. It's going to be a fun sydney on a budget, i on'y hope that it doesn't bucket down rain as it has been for the last week or more. Being Autumn here it's normally very wet, but while the rest of Australia is in drought, we've had quite an amazing amount of wet stuff fall from the sky... it just doesn't get over the Blue Mountains, i'm afraid.

more soonish.

[::] one:

why hello there. Welcome.
Latest gnuz: moved into the new place at epping, we are more or less formally 'the dentists'. Have moved in with goodSteve and badSteve, named as such as to put the cat amongst the pigeons as for easy labelling too. It's handy, you should try it. So we've been in this place for a little while now [since the 25th march, actually], and we're starting to settle in nicely for the coming winter. Still some things are in boxes, and that's where they'll probably stay for a while at least.
It's an interesting beastie, the semi-regular house move. I've been renting for almost 12 years now, and at last count that would be :

1* 23 pugsley ave estella estate
2* that house in tumut
3* edward str wagga [in a cupboard]
4* collins street wagga
5* fox street wagga
6* 266 quarrie rd north ryde nsw
7* 42 jeanette st east ryde nsw
8* 24 long avenue north ryde
9* 53 trevitt rd north ryde
10* and currently : dent st epping.

...and no indication that this journey in the land of renting is coming to an end just yet.
We finally had ADSL connected last week, which is awesome. It was about 6 weeks before that on dial-up which is a bit of a shock to the system after cable internet for several years. So yeh, back on it again.
This house is considerably smaller than any other place we've had up to this point. This is not neccessarily a bad thing, the large places we've been lucky enough to get previously have been more than enough for ourselves and all our junk and the various and numberous freeloaders that we call friends, and indeed ourselves from time to time. ~(:^D) We had nine ppl at one stage at the original junglehouse [42 jeanette] and i think seven in the last place at trevitt rd. This makes for a horrendously disorganised but very fun environment to be in. But things change. After a while, the preference of keeping the chaos just a little away from the front doorstep rises to the yellow frothy top of the australian shared house experience.
...And we're doing ok so far too. Did i tell you that in the move from the last place to here we threw out 760kg of junk? Sure there was a lounge in there, but whoah, was there a lot which wasn't lounge. Even with all the spare change and cigarette lighters that such lounges invariably eat, a lounge isn't going to contribute too heavily to that total eh.... certainly not the lounges we'd buy anyway.
I have not much more to say right now other than it's been raining continiously for about 5 days here in Sydney, while the rest of nsw is in drought. It's been raining so much in the last 2 months that a 45cm long aquarium i have in the backyard has almost conpletely filled with rainwater.
...a dark stagnant damp winter approaches..

...more soonly