This weekend we had two 30th birthday parties on the same night, which invariably lead to having a super hang over, mostly thanks to a Dry Gin Martini I thought I’d try.

The first 30th party was one of Amy’s work mates. It was on a boat that sailed to a nice cove with a fantastic view of the Sydney skyline -

It was a great idea for a party and was great when we moored up into this position as we were out of the wind. Here’s Amy, Danielle, PH and JZ having a great time as we set off sailing -

Afterwards we had a quick drink at the Loft Bar on King Street Wharf and then jumped into the taxi to the second 30th of the night which was at Boronia House in Mosman for Andrea’s 30th which was fantastic, my battery ran out before we got there so no pictures from that event.

Tonight we are still recovering from our hangovers, we visited the cinema and watched The Happening by M. Night Shyamalan which probably wouldn’t be everyones cup of tea as its not the most action packed or interesting films but I was absolutely terrified of trees by the end of the film which is a pretty clever situation for a film director to get you in.

Last weekend for the Queens Birthday we went to Brisvegas and the Gold Coast for Cooper’s 2nd Birthday. We visited Burleigh Heads and stayed at Amy’s parents beach unit there. The sea was very calm but the coastal erosion from the week before was very bad, with the giant rocks on the beach that you get in Manly when the similar sort of thing happens. We also visited some new Burleigh apartments called “Ambience” but the first floor apartment was on the market for $1.7 million. As house prices are falling faster than they did in the 1930s “Great Depression”, I was thinking of putting in an offer of $0.3 mill.

Erosion on Burleigh Beach

Taryn and Wade came down with Zara for luncheon, which was on the ground floor of the 1.7 mil apartment block and was very nice, here’s a picture of me with baby Zara -

Baby Zara and Me

We headed back to Brisbane for a party at Simone’s parent’s house. Simone lived around the corner from Amy when they were grewing up and they were there at the same time as us. We even ended up getting the same flight out of Sydney and sat a couple of rows apart from each other! I recorded a short video clip of Stu standing outside the toilets on the plane which I’ve uploaded to youtube. That was good fun and we ended up (well I started off) drinking Simones dad’s homebrew beer which was very good.

The next day we were up early and over to Cooper’s parents house for the birthday party with lots of kids running around -

Amy and Cooper in the Garden

It wasn’t just a trip for Cooper’s Birthday, we had not seen the new baby Sister Ali -

Amy and Baby Ali

It was a fantastic trip and a very nice weekend. This weekend, after discussions with Justin about coffee makers and getting recommended one that was far from my price range and tasting the delights of Elliots lattes in Brisbane we have purchased an expresso maker in the Myer end of year stock take sale (just one of the sales that Myer has than seems to span the entire year). It is a entry level device as I’m not sure if I’m cut out for the mean machines with 400 bar pressure yet.

Cappucino Supremo

I’ve watched the DVD that came with the machine, practiced ‘Tamping‘ and have bought all the accessories I’ll ever need. I can’t tell now though if the coffee is any good because I’ve made about 30 cups and drank about one mouthful from each but feel like I’ve drunk way too much milk. The device is really a cost saver as it costs about 55c to make a cappucino and shops normally charge around $3 for a regular, then add another 80c if you want decaf or soy milk.

I want to give a shout out to Marcy’s blog (Marcy and Chris’ Blogaroo) who are some friends from San Francisco who are enjoying the Sydney life (check the blog to see what they’ve been doing).

A lot of time at University was spent playing around with Unix, reading UNIX Network Programming Volumes One AND Two. I still have those books, they pretty much taught me how the internet really works and still believe anyone who hasn’t read them still wouldn’t really understand or appreciate it.

A command that I used a lot back in those days was kill. It is used to send signals to processes and was particularly useful for killing processes that wouldn’t die (programming error or otherwise). The command kill -9 sends a non-blocking signal to a process telling it to die, here’s a screenshot of me killing an apache instance for no particular reason other than to show it in action -

Anyway, a rapper named ‘Monzy’ has created this song about it which is about as geeky as you can get, other than my fsck t-shirt -

Here is a little video knocked together of our Trip to Tasmania last weekend -

Also, if you have the time check out the Vice Guide to North Korea a 14 part (about 30 minutes in total) documentary of Shane Smith getting into North Korea. It is a fascinating insight into the isolated country.

Last weekend Amy and I got cheap flights to Tasmania. Where is Tasmania? You may ask. It is a small island located in the bottom right hand corner of Australia as you look at in on a map. I’ve added a picture of Australia and a reference for locating Tasmania below -

We got a fantastic deal on the flights and saved ourselves $20 each by getting the ‘light flyer’ option with jetstar, which meant that we could only take carry on baggage. We bought special suitcases that pass as cabin luggage but still carry a lot of clothes for $100 each, thus a total cost saving of -$80 each.

We booked a suite at the Cradle Mountain Lodge that was recommended to us by everyone so we needed a method of getting there as it was a 2 hour drive from Launceston, the airport we flew into. Our luck had started as we got a “double upgrade” on our car from the basic little cars to a nice Mitsubushi Lancer MI-VTEC. For all the top gear fans, I’d like to say it was a decent car, it was asthetically very nice and it was spacious and easy to drive, however, it lacked any real power and didn’t really feel like it was doing anything when pushed to 100 from zero which felt like it took about 10 minutes. I certainly wouldn’t recommend buying this model.

Hire Car with Hydro Plant in Background

We got to Cradle Mountain driving at dusk and nearly running over about 30 paddy melon’s. We actually saw a Eastern Quoll on the road but didn’t know what it was until later. After the “double upgrade” on the car we thought our luck had come to an end, but not so in Tasmania! The lady at the desk upgraded us from the room we had to the King Billy Suites. This was actually the room we wanted but couldn’t justify the extra costs. It was probably the best hotel experience I’ve ever had, it had a double shower, our own jacuzzi and a fire place that was fun to get going -

King Billy Suite

The next morning we walked down to the main lodge to get breakfast, the walk was down a little footpath and it was icey cold, we came across a lake which had a few lodges around it for this fantastic view -

Lake in the Morning

After breakfast we put on our thermals and hats and coats which we have not done since going to China and the UK and headed down to the actual Cradle Mountain to do some endurance walking. When we got down there we settled on the 2 hour Dove Lake circuit which was a boardwalk around the outside of the lake. Taking all precautions I signed our names into the walkers registration book and we headed off. Cradle Mountain itself is fantastic and the walk lets you take in some great scenary, waterfalls and ’suicide rock’ which was in the rock in the left hand of this photo next to the water (you can walk right on top of it) -

Cradle Mountain Itself

We were exhausted from the walk because lets face it we are no Rach and Mike so we headed back to our King Billy Suite and had a relaxing afternoon in the jacuzzi. Outside our door was a little paddy melon pademelon that was having a nice time eating a piece of apple -

Cute Little Pademelon

That evening we went on a night spotting tour in a 4WD which probably had the worst window visibility vehicle I’d ever been in, however it was still good fun to drive around with an informed national park driver and shine bright lights into these little creatures eyes (they didn’t seem to mind but I can’t imagine spotlights shined onto nocturnal animals is very good for them). We saw another Quoll which was very lucky apparently and loads more pademelons. We then saw a wombat with a joey and another type of kangaroo different from the pademelon.

Here’s me with the spotlight tour vehicle which deceptively looks like it has great window visibility -

Cradle Mountain Spotlight 4WD

That night we went to the restaurant which was very nice, I had a pancake thing which had beans in it and lots of butter. I probably wouldn’t have it again but it was good to try something different, Amy had Lamb which was very nice. To get a wine you go down to the cellar and choose one yourself which Amy thought was brilliant.

On our last day we did the shorter King Billy Track walk which took only 40 minutes and I found out that King Billy wasn’t just the name of our room type but actually a type of pine. Here’s Amy with the sign -

Amy and the King Billy Track

Our flight out wasn’t until late so we drove up to the North of Tasmania to check out the wine region. It was very nice but not as bustling compared to the Hunter Valley. We also checked out Launceston town centre, it was a bit depressing to be honest just a high street and a Myer’s that looked like it was stocking mainland Australia’s rejects.

It was a brilliant weekend and vey relaxing if you ever get a chance to go to Tasmania and want a nice relaxing time I recommend the Cradle Mountain Lodge King Billy Suites and they didn’t even have to pay me to say that! Video coming soon in High Definition!

This weekend was Stu’s birthday and for it we celebrated with two games of bowling at King Street Wharf, which is on the Darling Harbour side of Sydney on the trendy wharf. It was the same crew as the trip to Melbourne so it was a great reunion.

21st century bowling has really come on a lot, at this over 18’s bowling alley when you throw the ball down a second after it hits the ground a flash goes off and you can then review your stance on the overhead monitor and optionally pay out for a printed photo a lot like the log flumes at Alton Towers. Or you can do what everyone else was doing and take photos of the picture that they want you to pay for -

Me Bowling

Sunday morning we decided to take a drive up the Northern Beaches for a change of scene to have breakfast, we ended up at Dee Why and then did a kind of ‘Tourist Drive’ back to Manly. In the picture below you can see the city of Sydney on the horizon to the right of the telegraph pole, the beach in the front of the picture is Curl Curl and the buildings in the distant headland is Manly.

Curl Curl, Manly and the City

On a separate note, any Northern Beaches fans should checkout Grapevine Magazine, which I found in a boutique clothes shop in Freshwater whilst waiting for Amy to try on an overpriced dress. It is kind of like a VBS for the Northern Beaches.

BhangLassi filmed at the Cat and Fiddle in Balmain on the 10th April 2008. The band will be launching their new EP. “Orange” on the 10th July at the Excelsior - so get down their to get your copyas its sure to sell out in no time.

This is a first time HD video on G2007 of the song Four Degrees that rumour has it was partially inspired by Cooster - the video is in HD 720p format which is the same resolution as HDTV 1280×720 but clearly the bitrate of the video is a lot less (so that it doesn’t take 4 weeks to buffer) at around 1800kbps. You should be able to go full screen on this one and look ok as long as your monitor resolution is around the same level.

This is the first HD video on G2007 as I finally now have the software necessary to work with the AVCHD MTS output files of the camera. I used Sony Vegas 8.0 to produce it and the FLV Encoder of Flash CS3 to get the video into a format that can be played in a flash supporting browser!

The Vegas tool is fantastic, this is a screenshot of the original raw video from the camera which loses a lot of the colours thanks to all the red light -

Original Video Colour

After an extrodinarily long time without comments on the blog (thanks to 10,000 spam messages and akismis not really picking them all up) you can now add comments thanks to a system called disqus which will hopefully end spam, here’s a screenshot of it in action -

Welcome back comments!

This weekend T-Bone organised a BBQ at his place in Chatswood. It was great weather for it and Chris has a webber BBQ which was my first one.

T-Bone Webber Style

It reminded me very much of the BBQs had in England, as this one involved coal and fire lighters, but this time it had a slight ozzie twist to it in that it didn’t go out, we didn’t have to use the cooker and we didn’t get food poisoning from undercooked sausages.

Dylan who showed up his spider man stance in Manly last September (bottom photo here) has now gone one step further and got the full suit -

Spider Man - Spider Man

It was also great to see an old work collegue Ali, who you might remember was famous enough to have his wedding covered by the BBC and his wife Sarah at the BBQ, here’s a picture of everyone minus Dylan and myself -

Issy, Chris, Amy, Ali and Sarah

A great evening and some fun lego building.

Last weekend we went to Melbourne to celebrate Simone hitting the big three zero. Being in my mid-twenties it was an incredible experience of things to come for me in the distant future.

The Gang

Amy and I flew down early in the morning on jetstar, a cheaper airline that doesn’t actually fly you to your destination but actually to an airport somewhat close to your destination. So we got the bus that takes you from Avalon to Melbourne. It was just a shuttle bus but the driver obviously takes pride in his job so every 5 minutes we would get some information about what we were passing. So we now know that the nationwide distribution centre for k-mart is located just outside of Melbourne, where the Australian Army live firing range is and where Little River Band got their name.

We got to the hotel we were staying at in Elizabeth Street and met up with Simone, Roxanne, Tasleema, Stuart and Justin our fellow hotel mates and birthday celebrators. The hotel had a very vibrant orange colour on the walls which made me think it was perfect for Bhanglassi to stay at if they ever tour down here. Maybe a band photoshoot for Rollingstone, OK or whatever magazine at that stage of their career is covering them.

We headed out down to the south bank and hired bikes to ride around in the glorious sunshine it was a great time and also some good exercise. We then headed to the roof bar that Amy and me visited last time we were in Melbourne for a couple of post-bike drinks which was great fun.

Melbourne Bikes

That evening we went to St. Kilda and had a fantastic “mexican inspired” dinner after much searching around for something to eat. We were all fully stuffed and really tired from our early morning flights so we headed back to our hotel and fell asleep.

The next day we were up early for a visit to the Queen Victoria Markets, which was a bit like Borough Markets in London but on a smaller scale, here’s Amy buying “3 Cheese for $10″ which was great as the portions were huge and a great appetizer for later that evening.

$10 Cheese

We went to a place called Fitzroy for a lot of shopping fun. Justin went crazy buying clothes out doing all the girls, I ended up buying a top from Myer and Amy bought me some chocolate which was really nice. Fitzroy is a pretty trendy place, it has a lot of posters and stickers eveywhere so I couldn’t help adding a bit of Global Surfari fun to it -

GlobalSurfari.com Street Team

My favourite part of Fitzroy was probably the ATM crime scene -

ATM Carnage

One of my personal highlights of the trip was to find out J’s works for a well known coffee company that only has 85 stores in Australia but 171 in Manhattan and even more in London. He gets a staff discount so we went there and got some coffee and I got explained what coffee machine they are using as well as getting some tips on the coffee machine I should get at home. Here we are outside the coffee house -

Outside the Coffee House

That evening we went to The Long Room for tapas dinner and a multitude of cocktails, it was really good fun and we ate some great food and had an excellent waiter, we then moved on to ‘The Supper Club’ where we had a game of ‘guess the most expensive bottle of wine on the menu’ which turned out to be a 1986 bottle of Château Latour coming in at just under $12,000. I was reading a story in the Economist on the plane about the global food shortage and how a billion people earn $1 a day - which puts it into a rather sad perspective at the waste of money that would be to drink.

After a great weekend it was time to go back to our little airport in the middle of nowhere, here’s our plane coming in to pick us up -

Lets fly Jetstar

A great weekend!