Have you ever wondered what the future might look like? Well wonder no more, it looks a little bit like this -
Amy on an Offroad Segway
This weekend we went to Olympic Park which is out West. It wasn’t the gun crime scene that the news portrays but a nice cafe by a river and fantastic park. Angharad, Amy, Leisa, John, Martin and myself went over there for a fun afternoon of luncheon and to learn how to ride Segways.
These devices are $10k a pop which means they cost more than our car. They are pretty awesome very hard to hurt yourself on them but you do stick out like a soar thumb. You start off in “turtle mode” which means they only go about 2km/h so there’s no chance of injury. Later, after we had got used to them the instructor unleashes them so we can get up to 20km/h. The instructor kept coming back over to me to check that he had switched off turtle mode, I obviously wasn’t pushing the envelope enough. I actually quite enjoyed crusing around at a low speed, the top speed of the Segway wasn’t exactly nail biting stuff so a lesiurely pace was all that was needed.
Segway-ing off into the future
It was a great time and a great new experience! Well organized Angharad.
So the iPhone 4 has been out in Australia for a while but it is totally sold out, meaning you have to get on a waiting list for one. I’d rather just walk into the store and get one. I figured out I’d actually save money getting the new iPhone as I previously used pay-as-you-go with Telstra and was constantly getting caught out with going over my data usage and ending up paying more than it was worth a month for me to use. Basically if I forgot to top-up my data the phone would go through $50 of credit in 2 days. Very annoying and a cash cow for Telstra.
So after 2 years and 4 months of having the very first iPhone I’ve now got the latest one!
iPhone 4 Unboxing
The most overwhelming change with this version is the quality of the screen, it really is amazing, it looks so crystal clear you could easily read from it, like a book, without getting eye strain.
The next coolest feature is FaceTime. Marcus is the only other person I know with the iPhone 4, the best thing of all is its free to use, so we don’t pay Telstra to use it -
Facetime with Hugo (and a duck infront of his Face)
The camera also shoot 1280×720 video, which is fantastic and it takes a much better picture as well. The wifi device within the phone is also a lot more powerful.
What about that deathgrip? Yes I can make it happen, if I grab it really tight the bars go down, but I could do that with my old iPhone as well. If it starts to effect actual calls I’ll post an update but so far so good.
Altogether so far an awesome upgrade! What happened to the old iPhone? Amy has got it and she really likes it.
Today was a pretty full day of activities, first off it was Tasleema’s birthday at Public Dining Room in Balmoral. It was really nice and the coffee’s were actually quite strong, I left the place shaking!
Next up, Eddie, who used to live upstairs on Marcus’ level at Uni was in town. Last time I saw Eddie I’m pretty sure it was in a bar in Farringdon about 7-8 years ago, so it was a change of scene to go out surfing in Manly.
The waves were really good this afternoon, after a storm came through the surf looked awesome, so Marcus, Eddie and I headed out for a surf! Nancy was kind enough to take pictures with the SLR. There’s 111 of them on Flickr in the Eddie Would Go set, my favorites are here -
Marcus Smashing the Right
For a monkey wedding day the weather turned out to be fantastic for our surf session -
Me Smashing the Left with Shelly Beach in the Background
Eddie was learning so not much stand up time which is not unusual for the early days I remember them well!
Eddie Would Go
Altogether an excellent Sunday!
Surf wise it was going off today so at lunch I biked over to Deadmans, I’ve never seen anyone surf it before. The video makes the waves look smaller than they actually were. It’s on these sort of days where I think a sandwich and a camera are better than a wetsuit and a surfboard. The video doesn’t really do the size of the waves justice.
First up is a guy getting a nice barrel, the second part of the video shows a guy who paddled off the rocks at the wrong moment as the biggest set I saw came through, he luckily made it through all of the waves so close to the rocks it must have been scary (I know I was scared for him). Whilst at the same time another guy who doesn’t quite make the take off gets smashed and then smashed again by the next wave and loses his board!
If you have not seen the video to my 30th have a look I think it’s my best production yet!
So I organised a weekend away with as many friends as I could afford the deposit for at a location somewhere on the Northern Beaches. It was fun not telling anyone the location as it is more of a surprise when they arrived. The place we rented for the weekend was on Morella Road in Whale Beach, with an amazing view over the surf. The place was very vertical and it had its own elevator. The elevator still didn’t take you to the living area making it a bit redundant but useful for those first few steps.
First off in the morning we met up with Nancy, Marcus and Hugo for a surprise breakfast near their house, which was really nice. It was also where Amy gave me my birthday present which will last a lifetime, although Marcus put a downer on that one when he said I got it a bit late!!!!!
Rimowa Cabin Trolley Present
I was also lucky enough to get cash from my parents and six laps at high speeds around a racing track in Sydney, which is going to be awesome and a blog entry in itself I’m sure.
So the first evening Amy made a lovely chicken dinner with potatoes which was very nice, we also played Bingo which I bought especially for the night. The next day we ate so much food it wasn’t funny, I made a breakfast, Stu and Simone made a delicious home made pizza and Marcy and Chris did their famous Brisket dish for dinner. Nancy and Marcus made a very delicious chocolate cake for dessert which doubled as a birthday cake!
Stu the Pizza Chef Teaching me the basics
Note also in the above picture the clock says ten minutes to three and just below Stu’s arm you can see Marcus is still wearing his pajamas.
To get an appetite for dinner after all of the eating we’d already done before 3 o’clock we headed down the beach to play catch, the USA version of this involves a special glove like the one used in baseball, here is Amy in action -
Amy playing Catch
In the evening we used the roof deck table to play beer pong, Chris, Marcy, Marcus, Stu and I played this awesomely fun game. If you have never heard of it you probably weren’t in a fraternity and didn’t live in America. The idea of the game is to throw a ping pong ball into a cup. If you get it in the other team have to drink the beer that is in the cup. It is a fun drinking game -
Me, Chris, Stu and Marcus playing Beer Pong
The house and some pretty strict rules, one of them was that if we forgot to take a bin out then there would be a $60 fine for each bin they had to throw out themselves. So when Marcy played pretend baseball with a carrot and came within inches of throwing it through the window we counted ourselves lucky as that probably would have been a small fortune to repair, you can see the action in the video.
The Gang around the table
So overall a very memorable 30th, the next one of the weekend group is Hugo’s…. in just over 29 years!!
So this weekend we celebrated my 30th birthday. I’ll do a proper blog entry about it soon but here’s the video of the awesome time I (we) had -
When we went to see Russell Brand a few weeks back, he was telling a joke how Australians have lied to the rest of the world, it is not hot and sunny all the time. Mr G the poet laureate had only bought t-shirts from England. The reality is it does get cold anywhere South of Queensland and at the moment its about 14 degrees, which is the coldest winter in Sydney for a long time.
So what better way to celebrate that than a trip ice skating as part of the Sydney Winter Festival.
Amy and me skating (looks like Amy is going shopping)
It was a fun night, I did a skate train with Chris and Marcy, Chris went too fast for my beginner skating style and Marcy and I ended up crashing. Some nice people helped us up and said “that’s what you get for messing around”, they looked as if they were about 19 years old which I thought was funny.
Amy, Lucy and Angharad enjoying the pro skater and some fake snow
It was an awesome evening and felt like Christmas. I really enjoyed skating hopefully we will get down to the Bondi one.
I have not done an updates about goings on for a while so this is a kind of amalgamation of a few weeks worth of bits and bobs that we have been doing in one post.
A few weeks ago Lorraine cooked us one of the best meals we’d ever had at her house. She did two curries and they tasted amazing. We then played a few games which I’ve got some great video footage of which might make it into a video I’m going to make sooner or later.
Amy with the Curries at Lozzas
We then had to say goodbye to Lozza as she departed on her world tour visiting countries such as Alaska and South Africa to name two of them, so we said our farewells with a dinner at Manly Grill, which is one of the crowds favorite although I still like Ribs and Rumps! One of the advantages of Manly Grill is the amount of sauces you can get, I took it to a new level and decided to get three, one is generally the accepted behavior but that is not fun.
Me with 3 Sauces at Manly Grill
The following week was Marcy’s birthday, we celebrated this at their house in Potts Point. A chef came over and showed us how to make pasta from scratch which was good fun, and then we ate truffle pasta and had some other delicious food which was really good fun.
Chef doing pasta demo at Marcy’s Birthday party
It was good fun and Chris had a go at making the pasta himself and he proved very good at it, a little too good as his turned our better than the ARIA trained chef!
Group photo for Marcy’s Birthday
So that is it for the moment, lots of fun things coming up soon, including the big 3-0!
So it has been over 2 years since the “iPhone Unboxing” that I did. The phone has been absolutely awesome and it is no surprise to me that Apple’s Market Cap has overtaken Microsoft’s. Microsoft have tried very hard to play catch up with Apple and now Google but have failed pretty badly. Their Zune copy of the iPod isn’t that great and two years after purchasing the 1st generation iPhone, walking around the Telstra store a couple of months ago there wasn’t a single phone anywhere near it (two years later). Google appear to be making some inroads with their Android operating system which is very exciting but their hardware partners are still letting them down.
So yesterday we went to Bondi Junction to see a movie and I picked up a 3G iPad, I consider it a fine investment considering I have not put down my iPhone at all since purchasing it.
New iPad and 1st Gen iPhone
The iPad is awesome and will probably replace the iPhone for web browsing and checking email and will be great for trips away. The onscreen keyboard is great and I’ve already started to use multiple fingers at once when typing which is much more productive. The iPad works with all the old iPhone applications, although to be honest they are a bit rubbish as they only appear in a small window which you can resize to 200% but you loose all the quality of the application, although slowly but surely all the apps are starting to be ported over.
Hopefully iPhone/iPad applications will be officially be able to develop on them using Visual Studio (rumoured for the WWDC event next week) and then things will really get exciting!
