Immortality Here I Come!

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/duncan/17658/

Weekends

This is the best weather we've had for ages! Sunny on a weekend too. Today I spent the morning with Eugene and Fred cleaning up the apartment. We spent an hour or so sweeping, dusting and wiping down surfaces and then all tackled the bathroom with gusto! It looks so much better now. It's amazing what Jiff and Spray and Wipe will combine to do. The amount of hair that was stuck down the drain was incredible (and gross.. ). Fred pulled on one strand, and attached to it was a massive hairball - I almost threw up. I'm glad that I hadn't had breakfast yet.

After a while my appetite returned and we went to a cafe down the road. Fred mentioned that this was his first weekend in Sydney, which is crazy - Eugene and I both agreed it seemed like he'd been here longer, but then his first weekend was the one where he came down to the snow with everyone, so he was right. After Eugene took off with Horng to pick up a bday present for Max I showed Fred around the area a bit - down the massive park at the end of our street, the Buddhist temple and we checked out a garage sale (which, as with all garage sales, was disappointly selling junk that noone could possibly need or want). I think Fred's enjoying Sydney so far. He mentioned that one of his friends from Brisbane had put some doubts in his head about the place, but he's been saying how much he likes Glebe, and how happy he is with the house and all, so that's good. It's good having flatmates who are happy.

Mindy had a truly TERRIBLE last day in London and I really felt for her. I wish I'd been there and not working so I could have sorted out a lot of the administrative crap for her. Her bank and removal company really combined to screw her around and make her last impression of London a miserable one. The moving company failed to deliver boxes as they had promised to do, so she had to chase them up. They asked her to pick up the boxes instead, so she had to carry a bunch of massive flat sheets across one of the windiest bridges on the Thames, nearly getting blown off into the water a couple of times. Then, having done that and packed up all her stuff, the delivery man who arrived to take them proceeded to berate her for not taping up the boxes and said something like "I can't believe that you want me to do this.. this is why you were sent boxes and tape!"

At this, Mindy just blew up - no, she wasn't sent anything, so how dare he lecture her! Totally justified. And then he says that his EFTPOS machine is broken, so she'll have to pay credit. And because she's paying credit, she'll have to pay an extra 1% on top. WTF!? Anyway, similar story at the bank, which hasn't managed to sort out internet banking access for her in the entire 3 months she's been there. Truly poor service. It sounds worse than the Aussie banks even!

Then her flight from London Heathrow was delayed...

Right now though, she should be somewhere over west Asia, inbound to Singapore in a couple of hours. It'll be good when she gets there and can catch up with her parents and a few friends, I think, though I'm of course looking forward to her getting back to Sydney in a couple of weeks :)

Speaking of Singapore, tonight I'm looking forward to Australia's final warm-up match before the Asian Cup! Singapore vs Australia. Eugene is bringing a bunch of his singaporean friends down to a pub in the city, to meet up with my Aussie friends. It should be a fun night!

And then tomorrow I need to go shopping and start getting ready to receive some guests for dinner. I've decided to cook some Chili Con Carne, to suit the cold weather we've been having recently. After dinner, some Bond, James Bond (Timothy Dalton hardnut style) will be put on the DVD player. I can't believe that some people haven't seen 'The Living Daylights'. One of the best Bonds, in my opinion, before it got all gadgety and more like Star Wars than ever before. Looking forward to having people over for dinner and cooking! Haven't done that in a while. I just hope my stupid blocked nose goes away tonight. It's been steadily improving, so fingers are crossed.

For the record, my prediction for the scoreline tonight is 3-1 to Australia, with Singapore scoring first, and Kewell getting two goals.

S N O W

One good thing about the cold weather and constant rain recently has been reading the snow reports of massive dumps of 30cm or more of snow every day, especially in the week leading up to us spending the weekend down there.

Overall the trip was great - everyone had a good time and agree that we have to go down again as soon as possible, after Mindy gets back (So Soon! Yay!). After a day of crashes and going slowly even on the easier slopes I got my confidence back up to the point where I could go a bit quicker, and not be totally out of control any time I sped up a little bit on the patches of ice that were still showing. Also, having UHF radios on the slopes was awesome as it made it really easy to keep in touch with the different groups of people - there were 14 of us down there altogether, and we had 4 radios, so we could distribute them based on how we all split up. Most of the time, we could all contact each other without having to fiddle about with mobile phones in our massive clumsy snow-gloved hands. Staying in an apartment in the middle of the village at the base of the mountain was awesome as well!! It maximised the amount of skiing we could do, which was a good thing considering we only got there on the Saturday morning, and left on the Sunday evening.

And I still haven't satisfied the crazy KFC cravings that I got on the way back to Sydney dammit! I need a KFC dinner sometime soon!

Google Maps

Follow the instructions below..
Follow these steps [in order of course]
1. go to www.google.co.uk
2. click on maps
3. click on get directions
4. Type in "new york" to "london, england"
5. scroll down in the directions to number 21
6. laugh and then re-post this ASAP so other people can enjoy, before Google discover it and change it!!

Gloom

Thinking about Mindy being in London, well, in Paris for the weekend, while I'm here has made me feel a bit lonely and sorry for myself. The days have been going pretty slowly this week and I don't really feel like I've been enjoying anything that I usually would very much lately. Just feels like going through the motions, i guess, sighing as i go.

Studying hasn't been going that well these past couple of days. I've felt just distracted and that my heart's not really in it. I don't think it's really that difficult, I just can't keep my mind on the subject at hand.

I'm hoping that I'll start feeling better once I get into or past exams. Maybe, I guess. Anyway. Exam tomorrow. I should study a bit more and then get to bed before midnight. Get up tomorrow, studying some more before I go. Ho hum.

Australia

If you haven't, get The Shins new album, 'Wincing the Night Away' and listen to 'Australia' at full volume with headphones on. It'll make you jump around like an iTunes silhoutte, with a great big smile on your face, i swear!

=(

Feeling sad and poorly

The London Times

The first week here was a bit of a non-starter. The first two to three days I was getting over my jetlag and falling asleep in the mid-afternoon. I was just getting over that, when Mindy fell ill with a high fever and I spent my time taking care of her during her convalescence. Somehow the word had got around her work that I'd arrived although she swears that noone knew. So naturally her boss and everyone assumed she was "sick" from work because I'd arrived. Oh well - seems like no trouble from it anyway.

This week I've done more exploring around town. Mindy and I went to the National Gallery and the British Museum in the past few days. The artifacts in the museum are pretty incredible, if a little daunting - it seems like the most precious items from a handful of cultures are boxed up in that building. Including an almost complete ancient temple from Turkey. The gallery was great, but a bit overwhelming - too many classic paintings in one go. I did visit again on another day and went through another wing. I'm not sure the place ends anywhere.

I've been looking at the UK job market out of curiosity and was getting a bit discouraged after applying for a plethora of jobs online without any results. I mean, I was hoping at least for a couple of rejects or "we'll keep your CV on file" responses. But.. nothing. So, like I say, I was getting a bit disheartened when today I called up a recruiter that Mindy had recommended. I got through and the recruiter I spoke to said my CV sounded "brilliant" over the phone. I sent through a soft copy and she emailed me back details of three positions that she thought sounded suitable for me right now. I'm meeting with her tomorrow to talk through some details. So once again feeling better about the whole deal! Obviously I'll have to head back to Sydney for a couple of months more at the least to finish my uni exams this semester.

Speaking of which... have to check my exam timetable and make sure I don't have any assignments creeping up on me. Pretty sure that I have another week in the clear, but I should probably get started on my next c++ programming assignment. Damn I'm hating c++ right now!

Oh, and some new photos are up from London!

Tired, so very tired

It's a mistake to stay up until 11pm and then get up at 5am two nights in a row. I keep yawning and my eyes feel heavy. I'll have to do some packing tonight, i think, and get the majority done so I can run around like a headless chicken on Saturday morning frantically searching for things that I've already packed. Flight is at 2:35pm Saturday. Not long now!

Starting to get excited, despite my tiredness...

Wednesday

Just got back from soccer and I'm feeling a lot better, i think. Even though I wasn't looking forward to it, it was fun to run around and chase a ball again. I made a couple of good runs, but both times the ball was nicked off my boot just as i was winding back to shoot. In frustration, i took a punt at goal from further out, but only succeeded in hitting their fat defender in the ribs under his arm. Oh well, at least it was a good kick.

Work was really hectic and strange. I've only got one important project to finish before i go on Friday, but I keep getting given this little trifling stuff that's pretty distracting. I figure as long as I get the big one done it doesn't really matter about the others.

As I got home, Eugene was just showing another potential tenant around the house. Markus and his friend Marie. After we were clear that we were only looking for a single tenant (and they said that Marie was just a friend, not moving in) we got to chatting and sat down and had some tea. Markus seemed ok, if a bit stiff. I got a phone call while we were chatting and it turned out to be another girl who was looking for a place. She introduced herself as Kimberley, and she'd moved up from Melbourne and was working for Channel 7. As I was planning to work later tomorrow night, I arranged for her to come see the place on Friday night. I got a good vibe from her and we were able to chat for a while. She sounded really positive and keen on the house as she'd already decided that she really wanted to live in Glebe. So, we'll see i guess!

Right now, Zatoichi is on tv - awesome movie! Blind swordsman comes to town, fights with swords, administers justice. Transvestite geishas out for revenge, Mad deluded Samurai boy, lots of sitting on the floor and drinking sake! Gonna go watch it now

MADNESS?? This is COMMSEC!!

Looking back through maintenance tasks completed in the past 2 months...

Me: 22 + 3 failures reinstalled
John Chen: 9 + 4 failures reinstalled
Irma: 8 + 1 failure reinstalled
Kushan: 5

And I need to "lift my game"? ffs...

Oh well, off I go now to a meeting to discuss “What are the five most powerful actions I can take to remove barriers that stop my team from providing excellent service”...
1. poke out my eyes with a pen

Fireworks!

Yay, biggest fireworks i've seen from the window upstairs today. Over the Glebe Island Bridge and over the city. I never know what they're for, but they do seem to be every other weekend or Friday! Whatever, it's cool to have fireworks all the time =)

The pasta dish I attempted was one I'd never tried before:
Click here for the recipe

It turned out reasonably well. I don't think it was that great, but people finished their food and helped themselves to seconds so it can't have been too disgusting! :)

After dinner we amused ourselves with playing Table Tennis on the XBox 360. I find it really amusing that the table tennis game is made by Rockstar games, the same people who do the Grand Theft Auto series.

Having trounced Luke in our previous match I was brimming with confidence in the first match of the night. I shouldn't have been so confident. Luke managed to whip me dead in straight sets! What the hell happened?? Oh well. I managed to beat Brock and Ceez (and lose convincingly to Gareth also, but it's his xbox, so no shame there).

We played table tennis for a really long time, and by the time we'd finished it was time to call it a night. It was really good having everyone over for dinner and hanging out, especially on a friday night. I mentioned to Eugene on Saturday that it already felt like it was Sunday to me, since we'd done that on Friday night. I enjoyed preparing the food too, even though I wasn't totally impressed by the result. I don't think I'll cook that recipe again. Have to have people around more and cook more.

Whining dogs

This must be how the dog next door thinks. Except while he's thinking, he's shouting "HEY! HEY COME BACK!"

Seriously - all hours of the morning and night. Even when the neighbours are home!

Weekend Comes

It's been a pretty uneventful weekend after a very busy week. Once again, the week just gone was the longest four day working week i've ever experienced. Back until past eight a few times, missing lunch due to the work on. I'm just glad it's over!

On the friday night was Rachel's farewell - I got mixed up and thought she was going to Dubai, but actually she's going to Mumbai. She had a great night - playing pranks and generally taking the piss out of people. She's pretty mischievous, so it's a shame she's leaving. Another office character on the way out! We went out to Crystal Bar, which is a really nice place actually. It's down about three flights of stairs in Martin Place, decked out in the most opulent curtains, drapes and cushions decor that I've seen in quite a while. As I was on my way to the drinks I bumped into Kay! She was wandering the streets looking for Bond street, and she was heading in totally the wrong direction - towards China Town, and she was already almost at King Street. I walked her to Bond street, chatting away, and found out that she is in town until the end of May. So cool! I haven't been able to hang out with Kay in a long time, since she moved to Perth. Usually her trips back are for two or three days, and she's got to catch up with so many people during that time that we only get to meet up for a coffee for half an hour or so.

So I spent the night dashing between the two parties and getting texts from the other party whenever I was at one ('Where R u?', etc) but it was still a great night out. Until later, when Mindy called. She was really upset and depressed - the long distance relationship thing is hard. I'm glad she's having fun and enjoying England, but I wish I could go with her. We spent almost an hour talking on the phone about various things and hopefully sorted a few things out. It's still all a bit new and unsettling right now. Maybe things will calm down in a week or two and then it'll only be two months to go! Hopefully I'm joining her for 2-3 weeks in July! Yay! The plan currently is to meet outside the UK, as she finishes work in late January. So Maybe Italy, Spain or France is what I'm thinking. I've never been to Spain or France, and Italy is just great so I wouldn't mind going there again. I think Mindy has her heart set on Italy, so I'll have to try and convince Luke and Ceez to join us there. The only problem is that they're attending a wedding in Paris, so they can't exactly not go to that.

Photoshop...

Uploading a crapload of photos to picasaweb right now.. check them out

Hercules!

Hercules the Big Dog: I want to saddle him up and ride him around.

Tired; So very tired

Desperately in need of a good night's sleep right now! Last night's work and the night before's study are starting to take their toll after the long Tuesday night movie. This is the longest 4 day week ever!

Sydney FC's ACL match got rained out, postponed due to a flooded pitch. The Indonesian field had no undersoil drainage system, so when a storm broke 90 minutes before kickoff the water just pooled on the surface. The local groundskeepers, police and volunteers tried to clear the pitch using a single pump, supplemented with brooms and using the advertising hoardings to try and sweep the pitch clear of water, but when another storm broke it was all over. Match to be replayed at 1:30 this afternoon Sydney time, so I think I'll head down to watch it next door while eating my lunch. Sydney needs to win or their hopes of progressing are pretty slim since only the top team out of four progresses!

Hell Day

Work was stupendously bad today. What made it worse was that the whole day things seemed to be going pretty well. I stupidly miscalculated the time difference between London and here and called Mindy when it was 6am there instead of the 9am I thought that it was. But it was ok! She'd been awake since 3am.. poor little one. Still it was good to talk with her and find out about her day. While we chatted I read a bit of her blog and left a comment. I was pretty amused by her enthusiasm about the shopping and wish I'd been there to see it in person. Other things that went well were, an urgent task I was working on got semi-cancelled, another one got postponed a day and all that stood in the way of me and the 6-a-side soccer comp kick off (followed by the second half of the Sydney FC vs Persik Kerdiri ACL match) was a measly little IPO change that had passed through dev, test and staging environments with barely a noise... until production.

In production, things aren't like they are in UAT and Test, where they get fairly regularly updated and poked and prodded by developers doing their work. Production is like a sacred shrine.. or a dusty unlived in house. Very liable to break with a careless step. Mostly it's ok, but in this case.. it was not ok.

Everything broke. One problem fixed led to two more things breaking. As we went things just weren't going our way.

One slightly comical break in the catastrophe was when i got a phone call from Eugene. When i picked up all I could hear was "EEEAAAOOOOWWW EEEAAAOOOOWWW EEEAAAOOOWWW" Haha I had set the alarm when I left that morning and he'd obviously gotten used to it being off, since usually I or Gareth had arrived home before him lately. After I reminded him of the code, he laughed, cursed me and said that from now on he was going to set the alarm every day until i got caught out like he had.

At around 6:30 pm we decided to pull the plug and back track. Easy? Usually yes... tonight? No. So, at quarter to 8 on Wednesday night I trudged home having achieved a sum total of nothing.
Massive cleanup job ahead of me tomorrow, as well as explaining what went wrong to a little table full of business and management types, probably. Ugh. And the semi-cancelled and postponed jobs are both on tomorrow night as well. Triple ugh. At least I don't have to worry about rushing off somewhere tomorrow night... i can spend the whole night at work if i have to...

Easter Movie Marathon

Whew... so, I made it through Easter relatively unscathed. Normally Easter is the crest of the Blockbuster Big Movie season, and since it coincides with a long, long four day weekend it's practically compulsory to deprive yourself of sleep and see as many movies as you can, for better or for worse.

Movie damage so far:
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Friday)
- No movie on Saturday... rest
- Hot Fuzz (missed 10 min of climactic plot expounding) (Sunday)
- Hot Fuzz (it was that good) (Monday)
- 300 (Tuesday)

I really am a big fan of Simon Pegg who did Hot Fuzz and before that, Sean of the Dead. He's got a wry sense of humour and his own distinctive style of cinematography and story-telling which is pretty rarely successful these days. Most times people will stick to the tried and tested and succeed in spite of unoriginality, or they'll try something different with terrible results thereby encouraging everyone to be the same.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was only memorable for the last line of the movie where Michelangelo proclaims "Argh! He's in my mouth... he tastes... disgusting!" which, when you have a peurile sense of humour you can take out of context and it's quite funny ;)

300 was... underwhelming. The first fight was good, but after that the mechanics of the situation made it too predictable and there was nothing new to do, really. I mean, there's only 300 of them against a million. So they're not going to win. And not too many of them can die at a time or the movie will be over already!

On Sunday, the day of rest, I went out to dinner with mum, dad, boubou, phoebe and mum's friend Katie. We went to the chinese place at Greenwood in North Sydney. Big mistake. The Greenwood Tavern had some really loud rave going on at the same time; I couldn't stop bobbing my head to the music. Some of the people in the restaurant had the wristbands on that proclaimed that they had spent their $40 or whatever and were simply lining their stomachs with the greasiest food they could in preparation for the night ahead.

One particularly noisy bunch right behind me were really annoying. There were three of them, two boys and a girl, who looked to be in their early twenties and they were celebrating a birthday with way too much food for the three of them, plus a bottle of champagne. I was concentrating on my dinner when i heard the owner of the restaurant suddenly shouting out "WAit! WAIT!! Hey wait!!!" What do you know, the three noisiest diners from right behind me had finished half of the food and champagne that they ordered and then bolted away without paying for it. It kind of put the whole restaurant in a bit of a subdued mood after that. A small mood-lifter after dinner when we were walking to our cars was when two kids handing out flyers to the next all-night rave tried to give their flyers to boubou and Phoebe. I assured them that they had already got their tickets and we shared a bit of a laugh.

Earlier on Sunday, Mindy had just arrived in London. She sounded like she'd taken the long flight pretty hard. She was tired, scared, headachey and was bleeding from her ears! I wish I'd been there to baby her and tuck her in and fuss over her until she was feeling a bit better =(

Monday was a pretty good day. I got up late, talked with Eugene and Gareth for a bit before inviting them to come hang out with Luke and Ceez for a while before seeing 300 at Imax. Gareth wanted to get on with some work, but Eugene was keen so we headed around to Lane Cove. We played on the Wii for a while before realising that Luke was a bit handicapped in Splinter Cell. We were creeping along corridors, sniping and strangling guards and generally slipping through the shadows with ruthless efficiency until we came across some lazer trip wires. I naturally stopped when i saw them, but Luke continued edging forward. I assumed he knew some trick to slipping past them, so i watched in mute amazement as he sidled right up to the, extremely close, and then into them... blowing us both to bits. Game over. It turns out that he couldn't see the red lazer beams at all. Blast his colourblind eyes!

Luckily Ceez had made a perfect chocolate gateau to distract us from our failure. Brunet rated it as very good and I agree - it was really rich and soft - not too dense at all - and quite sweet without being sickly. The layer of syrupy jam in the middle was still warm from being melted too =)

After the cake we headed into the city to get to see 300 at Imax. Eugene had asked us if we already had our tickets, but we assured him that not that many people went to Imax and we'd have no problems getting our tickets for the 9pm session after dinner. Nevertheless, we decided to get tickets before dinner, just to be safe. So we rocked up at 6:30pm, two and a half hours before the movie, and were confronted with sold out signs all around! Damn it, Eugene was right. So we got tickets for the 6pm session for the following day on the Tuesday.

Stupid Rain!

Went jogging just now and it felt pretty good, although now it feels a bit gross, sweating even after a shower! I did a Gareth though - exactly halfway through my circuit, when I'm farthest from home, the skies open and I get soaked. One nice thing though, was seeing my second 'full' half-circle rainbow in as many days. It reminded me of Mindy's 'Rainbow' tag on msn...

Family (circa 2000-ish?)

The family (me with the medieval pageboy hair)

Man, Picassa isn't too bad - really easy to upload photos. Dunno if it's better than Flickr, though. Have to try that out too when i dump a whole lot of photos from my camera later.

Good Friday

After waking up late, finding clothes strewn on the floor (though bizarrely I'd taken the time to neatly hang my trouser pants on the hanger) and several missed calls and messages on my phone it dawned on me that I'd had quite a big night on the Thursday night leading into the extended long weekend. After going for a couple of drinks at CBD with my friends from work we moved on down to Slip Inn to meet some friends of Luke's. Eugene had said that he might meet us there after his work function and Gareth had promised to make an appearance as it had been a long week.

On the walk down I got the text from Gareth saying that he was tired, going home, sorry. Oh well. I was surprised when we got to Slip Inn that the entire downstairs was booked out for a PwC function! I called Eugene to find out whether he was there too (everywhere was packed!) but he seemed a bit confused and said that it must be some other function, probably a farewell or something. Oh well. As it happened Eugene couldn't make it either. Luckily there were a lot of people there with the combination of floorball and CommSec people. Mindy wasn't there though, which made me think how unhappy it was that she wasn't around for this long weekend, since she'd been pining for a long break for quite a while. Plus whenever we go out Mindy and Ceez are usually sticking together and chatting the whole night which both of them seem to enjoy, so I think Mindy would have liked it. The whole city was packed the whole night and it went quite late. I think I ended up getting home about 2am and waking up Eugene who surprised me by sleeping on the bed outside my room! I think because they were going down to the south coast the next day, so Max must have been sleeping in his bed.

So, after i woke up, i saw i had some missed calls from a 'withheld' number - gotta be Mindy. So i tried to use the calling card number she'd texted the night before. No luck - no credit. Tried to top it up by guessing my new card's expiry date. No luck. Damn! So i texted and caught her online instead. I'm really happy to hear it when she's out doing something, with friends, shopping, getting coffee, getting her hair done. I know it's really hard on me being apart; i can only guess how hard it is on her too. So i know that it's good to be doing something instead of just sitting around at home like i was this morning. I felt really sad and a bit disoriented when i woke up and she wasn't there. Well, I suppose this is something we'll both have to learn to deal with over the next couple of months. I'm sure we'll do it. Really sure.


Plans for tomorrow: Help Ian + Sheena move house, meet Bayliss for lunch... study study study! And jog lots =)

FP!

Being new to the whole blogging thing the first post is a bit intimidating. I suppose I just announce that I have a blog (which is pretty obvious by now) and that i'll post a lot (ok that's a lie).