Baby’s first sunset over Sydney

]]> http://g2007.com/blog/gary/2013/02/18/g2008/feed/ 0 http://g2007.com/blog/gary/2013/02/04/happenings-2013/ http://g2007.com/blog/gary/2013/02/04/happenings-2013/#comments Mon, 04 Feb 2013 02:22:25 +0000 gary http://g2007.com/blog/gary/?p=1551 If everything goes to plan in the next few days we’ll have a new little member of the G2007 network! The spare time might be decreasing soon so I thought I’d get this last post out with what we’ve been doing!

We’ve been really busy planning for a baby, I had to move out of working from home and get an office and also start full time on my own enterprise, BuiltWith!

New Green Themed Office

Everyone is welcome to come and visit it is on East Esplanade opposite Manly Wharf.

Last November Amy and I went to ARIA for Amy’s birthday, it was a good night, the food wasn’t as good as I was hoping as it was supposed to be one of the best restaurants in Sydney but we had a good time anyway, and we got free drinks as they took so long bringing them to the table -

Amy and me at Aria Sydney

Also in November we did a trip to Paperbark Camp for our one year (paper) anniversary. It was a really nice camp in the forest at Jervis Bay, the camp was luxury camping, with no TV and limited power, but it was really good fun and we didn’t have to set the tent up ourselves (would have taken a week).

Amy outside the Paperbark Camp

Near the end of November Chris got a Groupon deal to go on a taster cruise from Sydney harbor on a huge cruise ship. It was good fun but felt like it was teetering on a riot as everyone was getting the most out of their one night special cheap cruise.

Chris  and I in cabin on our taster cruise

For Christmas we headed up to Brisbane and spent it at Taryn and Wade’s house. The rest of Amy’s family came over on Christmas eve. I got some new bike lights and a inventors kit which has an Arduino board in it, which was awesome!

Wade also let us drive is Range Rover around Brisbane which was really good fun.

Zara, Cooper and Ali opening their Christmas presents

New Years was spent at Simone and Stuart’s (who just had a baby) which is right on the water in Manly, perfect for the 9pm fireworks. Amy didn’t want to walk so I drove over which was a mistake because there was not a single parking space for miles, I almost drove home and walked!

Simone and Amy with New Years sunset

Well that is about it for updates hopefully I’ll get more going soon!

Another year and another change to the categories of “best of”, which shows the pace of change mostly in technology in the world. Album of the year is now gone as buying albums are a thing of the past and has been replaced with Mobile App of the year.

	Mobile App of the year – Spotify Having Spotify on the IPhone and the computer has opened a whole new world of music, as well as a new way to listen to it. At home I can listen to friends playlists or what they are currently listening to or use the playlist radio feature to generate recommendations for me. This means I’m constantly exposed to new music which is fantastic!
	Cinema Trip of the year – Argo This year didn’t have as many cinema trips as other years, I think because of AppleTV and QuickFlix means we get as many movies as we could possibly want already through the post. The other movies I did see weren’t as good as I was hoping, Dark Knight Rises and Prometheus weren’t as good as I was hoping they would be. Argo is a fictional (but based on reality) story of getting some US embassy workers out of Tehran. It’s a really interesting story and recommend the movie.
	TV Show of the Year – 30 Rock It’s awesome when you find a TV show that has been running for a few years but you never watched, it means you have hundreds of episodes to watch. 30 Rock is one of those shows, it stars Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin and is based on running a TV show at NBC’s NYC offices at 30 Rockafella Plaza. It’s extremely funny and I’m sad their last season is currently being filmed. A close second is Homeland, which we’ve also loved as well as the continuation of last years top TV show Boardwalk Empire.
	Game of the Year – Ski Safari This little mobile app game lets you control a little guy as he skis down a mountain. He jumps on the back of yetis and can do loops in the air. All of which get you various different rewards. It’s super addictive and great fun. It’s lack of “buy credits” options makes this an original game where the developers goal of making a decent game without all of the tricky ways other apps try and get more money out of you is refreshing, hence why it’s a popular game and in the top 20 apps on the app store this year.
	Website of the Year – Gmail I’ve never featured gmail as the website of the year as I’ve never thought of it as a website. The tab I have open on the web for the majority of the time is Gmail, so it should get the accolade at least once!
	Purchase the Year – Focus Bike I only got this at the end of the year but this bike is awesome. It has hub gears and disc brakes and is great to take out on bike rides around Manly. The lack of metal chain means the ocean won’t rust it as quickly with a bit of luck.
	Restaurant of the Year – Margan Margan was the venue that Amy and I got married at last year, we were really pleased with it. Recently we went back to the Hunter Valley for a weekend and we went back and had lunch there. I had Pork Belly for the main and a delicious dessert, the food is so good for a restaurant which is practically in the middle of nowhere. We also went to Aria this year which is supposed to be a top restaurant in Australia but I found it pretty disappointing from a food/service standpoint. A lot of online reviews say the same.
	Trip of the Year – Kyoto Amy went to Japan for work and I went along with her. We had a little bit of time away from work so we made a trip down to Kyoto on the bullet train. I love Japan in general but Kyoto was also really awesome and one of the highlights of the trip. I definitely hope we can make it back there again sometime soon. We made some other awesome trips, Bali, Fiji and Uluru and Paperbark Camp to name a few!

2013 has a very high possibility of being totally different from the previous few years so watch this space!

Helensburgh is about 1.5 hours drive from Manly or about a 1 hour train journey from Sydney, making it within commuting distance if you work in the big city. Manly to Helensburgh feels like a long journey though because you have to go through the city and put up with all of the traffic that brings so it actually feels like a holiday by the time you arrive.

We arrived on Saturday morning and Matt gave me a tour of their house, Amy has already been down twice but this is my first visit to Helensburgh save for weddings and trips to nearby Stanwell Park. It’s nice to have a house with lots of room and a garage where you can put things like bikes and cars! L&M also have this chicken that doesn’t actually do much egg laying apparently -

Matt and Lorraines Chicken

It was my job to feed the chicken, which wasn’t very hard, I just had to chuck food off the upstairs balcony into her pen. At lunchtime we headed off to the Helensburgh fair that was by chance happening that day, we bumped into all of the people we knew down there which was great and really nice to see them all again. Helensburgh fair had a “free books” stall where the books were free and Andrew got lots for his collection.

Afterwards we headed over to El and Alex’s house for a cup of tea and to see their new place which they’d recently moved into down in Otford. It was a beautiful sunny day and a great opportunity to take advantage of the large balcony and garden they had!

Gaetane had organised a PechaKucha at the Otford tennis court hall that evening, which is basically where you do a 6 minute presentation with 20 slides on the topic of your choosing. I was getting ready to meet lots of new people and it turned out the majority of them were people I knew which was strange for a place I’d never been to before!

PechaKucha at Otford Tennis Court / Village Hall

That evening Lorraine and Matt had prepared a fondue, El and Alex also came over and we enjoyed cheese fondue, followed by steak and salad followed by dark chocolate Fondue, followed by Cognac. It was delicious and really good fun -

Matt doing Fondue prep work

The next day we headed down the coast to Coledale Markets, where Gaétane and Andrew were running their stall - Plat Du Jour – La Crêperie. It was great seeming them at work and to finally taste one of their crepes. I had my eye on the salted caramel one since the beginning and I give it 10/10.

Gaétane et Andrew à l’étal de nourriture Plat Du Jour – La Crêperie

The Coledale markets had a cool sitting area and we sat in the sun and drank some coffee and tea with Matt and Lorraine before heading up the coast to checkout a pub and watch some hand gliders at Stanwell Park. Matt had asked if I wanted to try it out and I said I “wasn’t ready” – we went down the beach to watch some landings and I filmed some on my phone. It wasn’t actually windy enough for hand gliding apparently but one guy on a performance hand glider took off. Matt said to us, the worse thing that can happen is you land in the ocean. So we watched this glider come down the beach and then… crash into the ocean. He was lucky he was so close to shore and the life guards could help him as the seas were 4-5ft!

Here’s a panorama I made on the new iPhone 5 of Stanwell Park and the South Coast from the top of Bald Hill.

iPhone 5 Panorama at Stanwell Park

That afternoon we popped in to see Chris and Esther at their new place in Helensburgh (5 mins from Matt and Lorraine) and then headed back up the coast to Sydney, popping in to Potts Point to visit Marcy and Chris and see their new car and then go to Chiswick restaurant to belatedly celebrate Chris’ birthday (and give him his birthday gift).

A great weekend and looking forward to our next trip down the South Coast! Thanks for the hospitality Lorraine and Matt!

We got on the plane and saw another guy get on with us who had two bags of cheeseburgers. They sat in the overhead locker for 4 hours and were then handed out to his Qantas ground crew friends on arrival, who then tucked into them as if it was Christmas. It was disgusting to watch.

Central Australia Landscape

The scenery across Australia is incredible, you see the green of the coast, fade into the blue mountains and slow but surely it gets more and more red and crazy looking like that shown above.

We landed at Uluru airport which basically welcomes you to Ayers Rock Resort, as there’s not that much out here. It was lucky really as I hadn’t really planned anything and didn’t know how we were going to do anything. We went straight to the place we were staying which was called Longitude 131, which is 15 little tents that look out over the rock. The service there was fantastic we arrived and were told the itinerary for the days we were going to be there (which included some very early starts). Here’s Amy outside of our hut -

Amy outside our Tent at Longitude 131

 That day was already planned out and we went on a base walk of the rock. It was fun getting on the bus and travelling to the rock which is incredible from a distance as well as standing right next to it. At the end of the tour we came across a little area where some drinks and canapes were setup for us which was really nice.

Ayers Rock and Me

Having water all the time was required because the air was so dry, it was like being on a plane for 3 days in a row but with more leg room. That evening we went to the fantastic restaurant at the resort and had some delicious food before going back to the hotel room and falling asleep as early as possible as it was a 5:45am start the next day for our trip to the Kata Tjuta, which is another rock nearby which kind of loses out to Uluru but is just as impressive from a tourist perspective.

We walked down one of the nooks of Kata Tjuta and saw a Rock Wallaby and also some Camels, which ever since they arrived have taken over central Australia apparently.

Amy and me at Kata Tjuta

Although it was 30 degrees in the day time it was really really cold at night (and at 5:45am) hence why we had pullovers and ponchos to keep us warm!

That evening we did dinner under the stars, which was basically an area setup away from the resort where we had dinner around a table with all of the other guests and got told about the stars, although there was a full moon the entire time we were there which meant we didn’t see too many stars but it was still fun.

We opted out of any other early morning starts as we just wanted to do a bit of relaxing, although when I booked the trip a free helicopter ride was a part of the package. It was just a 15 minute flight over towards the rock and back again but it was really good fun and a great way to see the place.

Uluru from the Helicopter

That was the end of our package adventure and the rest of the time we just spent relaxing, talking to the other guests and I even jumped in the pool (it was freezing). One of the things that amazed me about the area was how green it was, apparently they’d so much rain the past two years it was unusual for it to be as green as it was.

Everything at the resort was all-inclusive, so the mini bar and the main bar at the hotel was all totally free, if you were into drinking you wouldn’t have been able to walk out of the resort at the end of it! Every day the room keepers replenished the cadbury chocolate bar supply in our room, which I would then take out and put into my suitcase, hidden under some clothes. On the last night I went to pack my bag and found one of the bars had been eaten by some sort of creature with claws! That was pay back for me stealing the chocolates I think -

Chocolate eaten by a creature of some sort

It was a fantastic trip and I would recommend it to anyone, we really didn’t want to leave which is amazing considering it’s the middle of nowhere!

Here’s the video for the trip -

Full blog post coming soon!

We flew into Tuban airport which is about 6km away from Seminyak but takes a good 1 hour to get to thanks to the infrastructure issues. We got through customs really quicky thanks to some pre-arranged meetup we had and headed to Seri Villas to meet up with the HK crowd, it was quite late when we arrived so we had a few drinks and then went to bed. I got myself re-acquainted with Bali and remembered all of its funny quirks, like not having pavements for pedestrians but instead just open holes and gutters and loose bricks that if you didn’t concentrate on where you were going results in injury. Sometimes I’d walk around annoyed at the westerners that take their children on motorbikes without wearing helmets as if because your on holiday it’s totally safe to do that!

Typical Bali Street (dangerous)

The shops are fun in Seminyak, you can’t really tell which ones are legitimate or not, for example one shop I found was called AVEDA, I visited the exact same shop in Japan and we have some of their shower gel and shampoo in the bathroom but this one didn’t sell anything like that, just dresses wrapped in plastic bags. I didn’t take a photo of this store but this guy did.

One of the first places we visited as a group was Ku De Ta, which is a well known beach hangout in Bali, it is really good to go to for a drink and something to eat. We had some day time cocktails on our first day which was really nice. The next day I did a marathon walk down the beach with Greg and Ilissa down to Kuta (which is a bit like Benidorm but for Australians) and they made me eat in a dodgy restaurant, luckily though I didn’t get food poisoning. That night we hit the W hotel, which was really cool. There was a wedding on the roof and so later in the evening they had some “throw safety out the window” fireworks display which was good because we got to be  really close.

Everyone at the W Hotel Seminyak

The next day was my birthday! The hotel staff knew because we gave them our passports and I also think Amy might have told them. They were really nice and got me a cake with a personalized message on top, it was very nice although the chocolate cake was so huge it lasted us the rest of the holiday!

Birthday in Bali with my Bali T-Shirt and the really nice staff

That night we went out to a restaurant called Living Room which was at the bottom of our street and really nice.

The next day we went out to meet up with Lorraine’s friends who live in her building, we ended up having some nice drinks at a bar looking over the beach with their other friends who was here with his brother, who turned out to be one of the guys from 4 Poofs and a Piano, a group that used to sing on the Jonathan Ross talk show when it was on the BBC!

We made a trip to Ubud and also Kintamani which I remember last time being truly an amazing site. Even though it takes hours to get there and you do the obligatory stops at temples along the way it really is amazing to see Mount Batur which last erupted in 1968 and as you can see from the picture the lava flow is still visible (black bits on the mountain).

Amy, me, Lorraine and Fi at Mount Batur

One of our favourite places we went to for dinner was a new restaurant at the bottom of our street called  Petitenget Restaurant,  Petitenget was the name of the area and this place had some of the best food. We went there for dinner on our second night and decided to go back a few times for breakfast.

Breakfast at Petitenget Restaurant

We could feel the end of the holiday getting closer, and the HK arrivals were leaving a couple of days before us. So before Fi left we went up to Bvlgari Hotel which is in Uluwata and a hour drive from Seminyak. It was a really nice hotel and although it wasn’t quite the same vibe as Ku De Ta or Potato Head it was a great place to have cocktails, enjoy the view out to see and have some amazing tapas food.

Here’s Amy and me enjoying ourselves there -

Amy and me at Bvlgari Uluwata

Bali was an awesome holiday once again, the food was great and it was sunny and warm the entire time. On our last night we went to a fantastic more family orientated restaurant where we had wine, starters, main courses and two deserts for $20 each which living in Australia is impossible!

Can’t wait for trip number three to Bali someday

Full post with pictures is coming soon!

So we left Friday night and did an overnight leg to Tokyo with Qantas, luckily we got upgraded thanks to all of the points we’ve acquired so it was not too bad a trip flying into the Northern Hemisphere. The first think I noticed was how quiet it was, it was the same when I visited here last but for some reason I’d totally forgotten it was 6am on a Saturday morning and things would soon change once the week got started. We arrived and it was a bit wet but the temperature was double that of Sydney, at around 28-30 degrees most days -

View from Tokyu Hotel and first night rain

In the first morning because we’d changed hemisphere’s we thought it was mid-day as we woke up when really it was about 6am, just because the days are so much longer than in Sydney at the moment.

On Sunday Amy and I visited the Meiji Shrine, it is in Yoyogi Park and is a nice tourist stop off, there were thousands of people by the time we’d got there and amongst all of the tourists there was about four weddings going on. In fact the whole area of Omote Sando had weddings going on.

There was also this thing happening with a massive flag. The guy holding the flag looked like he was going to pass out as it was hot and the flag must have weighed quite a lot -

Meiji Shrine Flag

We also saw some contestants from the amazing race, who were getting into taxis and who you can see in the video. We ate some amazing food on the trip and I photographed most of it, one of our favourites was this little place in Ginza where we had tiny sandwiches and green tea that had never ending fill ups. You can see in the photo below it’s Sunday because the street is closed (which happens in Ginza) -

Green Tea and Sandwiches in Ginza 

Whilst Amy was at work I headed over to Roppongi Hills to go up the skyview building. Last time I was in Japan I didn’t come to this one and opted for the free version. I actually found the skyview by accident and joined a queue at about 9:45am and was one of the first people in. The rest of the queue were actually there to go to some exhibition so I had the entire skyview to myself.

One of the cool things about Japan is that the culture is so different from anywhere else that you see things and cannot figure out what is going on. This happened on a number of occasions, first was outside a place called ‘Johnnys’, it had loads of girls queuing, no photos allowed and nothing really for sale that we could see. The second time was on the roof of this huge building in Roppongi. Around the helicopter pad are security guards and helpers with a Disney exhibition that spins around and plays loud music. The third time was after Amy and I had dinner at a nice restaurant hidden away down a back street, when we came out there was groups of girls all standing in silence on the street in neat little groups, like something out of a horror movie, we never figured that one out.

Me on the roof with the helicopter pad and Disney Show

At the sky view centre there was also a museum called the Mori Art Museum that had an awesome “Arab Express” exhibition that was designed to educate the Japanese about middle eastern culture.

It had some awesome displays, such as a fountain of oil, that was based on oil fields of Iraq, but by far my favourite was the works by Khalil Rabah, the image below is actually two paintings that look photo realistic. He painted two exactly the same photo realistic paintings to symbolise the throwaway nature of digital cameras (I think). Anyway it was amazing to think these are hand paintings -

Photo realistic painting by Khalil Rabah

I did so much walking in the week my feet hurt, I visited most of the major suburbs and tried one day to do it London style by walking between them. I made the mistake of thinking I could walk through the Togu Palace and ended up walking around the outside of it which took ages though.

London Bus in Shinjunku

At the end of the week we made a trip to Kyoto, we got the Shinkansen which is better known as the bullet train. It goes 270km/h and runs exactly to the minute with no delays. However the speed and timeliness is made up for by the price, it is extremely expensive.

Amy on the Shinkansen bound for Kyoto

We had one afternoon and one morning in Kyoto so we had to do a whirlwind tour of all of the places. Luckily taxi’s were in abundance here and getting from one shrine/temple/castle to another was easy (just the traffic was annoying). Here’s me at the Fushimi Inari Shrine, it wasn’t one of my favourite places because of all of the tourist shops with the junk they sell. The best was the Sanjusangendo temple, but you were not allowed to take photos, it basically had a room with 1000 life sized statues built in the 13th century.

Me at the Fushimi Inari Shrine

We also made a visit to Nijo Castle which was my second favourite place in Kyoto. That evening we went to a restaurant in Kyoto down town called Ninja Kyoto. It’s basically where you eat underground in little caves and you get served by girls dressed as Ninjas (some of them were sexy dressed ninjas) and then a “Ninja Magician” comes around and does magic tricks. Then at the end of the dinner you enter a labyrinth (maze) and have to find things whilst the Ninjas appear from no where and scare you. Basically the norm in Japan! Most of the food was black in colour but it tasted delicious although we’re not sure how they made everything so black.

Ninja Waitress in Kyoto

When we first arrived in Tokyo I posted a picture on Facebook and a friend, Mika, said we should meet up with her in Nagoya. It was a bit of luck because Nagoya is a major city, comparable to Detroit in terms of car manufacturing between Tokyo and Kyoto and is one of the stops on the Shinkansen.

Mika and me with view of Nagoya

It was really nice to see Mika and she took us to a fantastic Japanese restaurant right the way up this building where no tourist had ever been before (I don’t think I’d be able to find it again). We also tried some green tea (hot and cold with gold flakes) and did some shopping in the short time we had in Nagoya. We promised Mika we’d post her a Kangaroo when we got back.

When we got back to Tokyo we only had limited time so I took Amy to one of the places I remember being quite good on my first visit, the Sensoji Temple in Asakusa.

Amy at Sensoji Temple, Asakusa

We then made the trip back to the airport and back to Sydney, where luckily we arrived on a sunny but cold day. I really like Japan it is definitely my top Asian city (compared to Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai) that I’ve been to. The people are very friendly and it’s the safest feeling city I know of. Also for people who are scared of radiation from Fukushima, when I checked out the independent radiation level readings for the time we were there, it was half that of London and New York so nothing to worry about unless you plan on visiting Fukushima itself. As I mentioned it’s also a very culturally different to the point where you have no idea what is going on, which is quite hard to find thanks to globalisation.

Bring on Bali next week!

Full post coming soon!

Amy in the Living room with the fire

The house had three fires and because it was cold up the hill we lit them all. It was a round the clock exercise trying to keep them all going as normally one fire is enough work!

Here’s the kitchen fire, we tried to cook on it but it just wasn’t hot enough that morning -

Kitchen Fire trying to cook on it

On the first night Lorraine made a fantastic curry, the second day Stuart and Simone made a fantastic soup and for dinner we went to a restaurant in Berry called “The Hungry Duck” which was really nice as well, although they needed to do more on the heating front as it was cold! The next day Lorraine cooked a fantastic Greece style dish with lots of bits to share which was also fantastic.

Rambo the dog was also invited and when he wasn’t eating my slippers he was playing nice with Chloe, Nick and Lauren’s daughter -

Chloe and Rambo playing nice

Even thought it was freezing I was keen to go in the pool, however when we rolled back the cover it was full of dead worms at the bottom, so there was no way I was getting in. We settled instead to play a game of croquet although the games didn’t last very long, I think the weather played a large part into that. Here’s the house from the outside though with Croquet in the foreground -

Red Leaf house with Croque and cups of tea / egg nog

On the last night we remembered to take a photo, here’s all of us (apart from Amy, Nick, Lauren and Chloe) enjoying Lorraine’s Greek dinner she put together -

Greek Feast

And as a bonus here’s the video of Marcy getting her “suprise” birthday gift -

If this is what the guy who started PayPal can do in just 10 years, the future is looking bright for space exploration!

All the data is exportable and you can plot it on a map, however I was looking to create a nice looking map rather than the static lines between points that are shown in Google Earth if you import the exported KML file.

So I followed this guide at flowing data which uses great circles to plot lines between points on a map. The results are really impressive, here’s my general travel in and around Sydney. I’ve removed the backing map and just added indicators of some of the locations, as I think the lines alone look nice, the slightly different colours are based on if the travel was made from East to West or West to East. You can see the route you have to take to get to Highway 1 from Manly (there’s a national park in the way) -

Taking it to the next level I’ve plotted my travels across the globe since December 17th 2010 (click it for the larger version) -

If you’ve been tracking yourself on Latitude then export the KML, covert it to a CSV file with just the lat/lon results. Import them into R and use this code to plot them on a map (follow the flowing data tutorial first) -

movements <- read.csv("http://yourserver.com/yourLatLon.csv",header=TRUE, col.names=c("lat","lon"))
xlim<-c(-10,180)
ylim<-c(-50,70)
map("world",col="#efefef",fill=TRUE,bg="white",lwd=0.02,xlim=xlim,ylim=ylim)
for(j in 2:(length(movements$lat)-1)) { 
 lat_ca<- movements$lon[j] 
 lon_ca<- movements$lat[j]
 lat_me<- movements$lon[j-1]
 lon_me<- movements$lat[j-1]
 inter <- gcIntermediate(c(lon_ca, lat_ca), c(lon_me, lat_me), n=50, addStartEnd=TRUE)

 if ( lat_ca < lat_me ) coll=rgb(0.251,0.47,0.47,alpha=0.8) else coll=rgb(0.251,0.129,0.47,alpha=0.8)

 lines(inter,col=coll,lwd=2)
}

Hotel Beachside

We left on Friday and got the early flight to Nadi from Sydney, the flight is about 4 hours, we went straight to the hotel which was on the mainland and enjoyed the pool there and then had dinner at the hotels restaurant which was really nice.

Chris, Marcy, Amy and me with our Fiji water in Fiji

The next day we decided would be relax day, and so we had a late breakfast and then spent most of the time in the hotel just totally relaxing. The weather was fantastic for our entire trip and was so much hotter than Sydney already, at about 31 degrees the entire time. I walked down to the sea thinking I’d go in, but I saw a snake in the water and decided not to.

Cocktails on Castaway!

We looked at organising a boat trip the next day but couldn’t decide which one to get as they all left at different times and Amy and I didn’t want to visit anywhere that we’d already been to last time. We left it in the capable hands of Chris who came back after much discussion with the concierge and managed to get us our own boat for four hours the next day.

The next morning we had to hire a car (we got a little car which had bad boy alloys) to get us to Port Denaru which is where all of the boats leave from. The driving in Fiji is on the left hand side but the roads are pretty bad, at one point there was a 4WD just driving towards us on the wrong side of the road, as the driver didn’t want to go on the dirty part of the road! We got there safely and onto our little boat tour.

The first spot the boat took us to was a little reef that had a 3 metre by 2 metre bit of sand above sea level, it was cool standing on that, our own little island in the middle of the sea. We snorkelled around the reef for a bit and I’ve never seen so many fish in the same location, to the point where I couldn’t just look at one because there was so many swimming in front of my eyes at the same time!

I’m ready to snorkel everyone else is waving

Next stop was the Island that the movie Castaway was filmed. We shouted Wilson! a few times and the boat driver showed us some of the sites from the movie. Chris re-enacted the fishing scene and I sent an email (I had 5 bars and GPRS) – not sure why Tom Hanks took so long to get off the island, it’s surrounded by resorts (not actually on the Island though).

Monuriki (Cast Away) – if you look you can see Amy, Chris and I

We went back via a resort with the same name had a cocktail and then returned to the mainland and visited Hard Rock Cafe Fiji, which had exactly the same food as every other Hard Rock Cafe in the world but was good fun. We then did the drive back to the hotel which was extremely tiring. Marcy, Chris and Amy managed to get sunburnt on the boat and were feeling it when we got back, I luckily managed to avoid it!

The next day we sat by the pool and then made our way back to the airport arriving back on Monday evening and safely home by 9pm. One of the best long weekends ever! Thanks Marcy for the photos.

Some of the highlights include hermit crabs, sharks, blue skies, blue sea, Amy, sushi making, bike riding, food eating, cocktail drinking, sunset watching, Baros, Soneva Gilli, pool, Amy’s birthday and a water spout (really).

We wish we could go back right now!

When we arrived it was really hot and it stayed that way for the rest of the trip, hotter than Dubai I think. The weather was overcast for 2/3rd’s of the time but it stopped us from getting sunburned, which is exactly what happened when the sun was out.

After we arrived at the airport a little boat takes you to wherever you are staying. In our case the first port of call was a location called Baros. We had a beach villa which was totally private and it opened out onto the beautiful white sands and blue water of the Maldives -

The service at Baros was amazing, when we told them it was Amy’s birthday they organised a surprise breakfast and a surprise cake at dinner. The service really was the best we’ve ever experience on holiday -

The majority of the time we spent on the island was done snorkeling, or walking around the circumference, which wasn’t very large or walking along the lovely tracks that were on the inside of the island. The night times at Baros were spent drinking cocktails and choosing which one of the three restaurants we should go to that night. One of the restaurants at Baros is out on the water and you can see fantastic sunsets whilst drinking cocktails -

Amy and I also had a competition on the Island as there was a chess set, a pool table and a table tennis room. We had two games of each so was best out of six, I narrowly beat Amy by one game of pool to take the Baros Island Games Honeymoon Championships!

On one of our last nights at Baros it was Maldivian evening, where the food was all Maldives local based and we were given traditional Maldvian clothes to wear. Here’s us with a Maldivian lady (one of the very helpful staff at the resort) -

After our trip to Baros it was time to return to the airport and get another boat to Soneva Gilli, this time to stay in an overwater hut. I’ve always wanted to stay in one of these huts so it was fantastic to be able to do so on our honeymoon. The trip to Soneva Gilli is also about 20 minutes but in a different direction. We arrived at the island and got taken to our hut which was bigger than our actual home in Manly! We were also given bikes so we could get around the island easier and make trips to the restaurants, pool, shops, library and dive center.

What is amazing about the water in the Maldives which I’ve not seen anywhere else is the abundance of fish. Everywhere you look there’s tropical fish swimming about and then a sting ray and then a shark will swim past. I couldn’t enjoy the snorkeling with all of the sharks in the water, regardless of how many times the staff told me they were friendly sharks. Here’s Amy on Soneva Gilli probably pointing out a shark -

As we spent most of the time just eating and drinking, to try and keep fit I did bike tours around the island. The bikes were single gear and quite hard to ride on the sand, so it was fun doing loops of the island as fast as I could whilst also maintaining the obligatory wave to everyone as I went around. Here’s me on my bike outside our hut, the other huts can be seen in the background -

Our snorkeling adventures didn’t take us very much away from the relative safety of the hut, here’s Amy as far as she would go even through the water is probably waist deep at most up to the edge of the reef -

On one of the days we booked ourselves in for sushi making course at the Sushi restaurant which looked over the water. We got on our bikes and headed over to the empty restaurant to meet the nice chef who had worked all over the world to give us a personal one-to-one sushi training course. It was really good fun and we ate more than we made, I had a delicious soft shell crab maki and Amy and I both successfully made sushi rolls. After we’d finished we got some of the sushi we didn’t eat delivered back to our hut and then we biked back ourselves to have a little swim in the crystal blue waters I think that day was as close to “paradise” we could have got. Here’s Amy and I at our Sushi making course -

On our last night at Soneva Gilli we had a candlelit dinner on the roof of our hut, it was very romantic and sealed the end of our trip to the Maldives. It was an awesome holiday/honeymoon and one of the best I think I’ve ever been on. I took a lot more video than I did photos, so stand by and there will be a wedding, Dubai, Maldives video coming in the not too distant future!

Best of the year 2011, this year instead of a new category I’ve removed one (DVD of the Year) as we no longer watch DVDs and replaced it with TV Show of the Year!

	Album of the Year – w h o k i l l – tUnE-yArDs Merrill Garbus’ second album is awesome. I’ve never heard her first one, this one obviously got enough air play and buzz for me to hear it somewhere (I think most likely on Adam and Joe’s radio six show which has now sadly finished). Her live performance is apparently just her on her own looping tracks and it sounds like a lot of fun to see. Hopefully she’ll come to Australia in 2012!
	Cinema Trip of the Year – Source Code I liked the premise of this movie, the idea you can be inside someones mind for the last few seconds they are alive. Basically any movie which makes you question what is happening from the out set is a good one (Matrix 1 for example). The Adjustment Bureau and the King’s Speech are probably a close second to this movie.
	TV Show of the Year – Boardwalk Empire Set during US Prohibition, Nucky Thompson, play by Steve Buscemi is a man that has his feet in both sides of the law. He’s the treasurer of Atlantic City as well as a mover of illegal alcohol. The stories are very interesting and it’s a great show currently in its second season. Other show’s we’ve loved are New Girl, Louie, Portlandia and The Thick of It.
	Book of the Year – The Lean Startup I wish I’d read this book before spending time building software. He’s admission that he could of probably spent six months of software development time sipping umbrella drinks on a beach and the company would have been in the exactly the same place was a real wake up call.
	Game of the Year – F-SIM Space Shuttle I’ve not bought any games this year, just to prevent myself from wasting time. So the games I have played have been limited to the iPhone. F-SIM is less of a game and more of a simulation. You have to land the space shuttle as it re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere. The challenge is to come down on the ball bar and land the bird not too fast, not too slow, as close to the centre line as possible and not too heavy. It’s quite a challenge and really well made (it’s all by an indie developer).
	Website of the Year – Reddit This site is more of a college freshman site, but occasionally there’s some interesting information, such as AMA’s (ask me anythings) by interesting people. As well as “TILs” (today I learned) which has some interesting nuggets such as Magenta is a colour your brain makes up.
	Technology Purchase of the Year – iPhone 4s I went from iPhone 4 to iPhone 4s in only a couple of months but as one of the most used and useful tools for doing pretty much anything it’s the best technology tool I’ve ever had. Siri, although in its early days shows great promise, I can just imagine in a few years being in the car and saying “Siri, is this the best way to get to Timthanuel’s house?” (in the future people will be called Timthanuel) – and it will come back at me with a new route on an OSD to help me beat the traffic.
	Restaurant of the Year – Budda Bar This is a tough one, Budda Bar in Dubai was fantastic but we went there and were both very tired. The Green Curry Maki sushi roll was like nothing else I’ve tasted which is important for a restaurant. We went to some other good places this year, Celsius in Adelaide was fantastic and the food at Margan, the restaurant we had our wedding ceremony at was also amazing.
	Trip of the Year – Maldives We’ve been a bit lucky this year, I made a trip back to the UK, we went to Thailand for a week or two, Adelaide, Dubai and Maldives. Dubai and Maldives was our honeymoon trip. The Maldives is a pretty special place because it’s not really on the way anywhere and it has a lucky cross section of weather, water and service. We stayed at two places Baros and Soneva Gilli, both of with were amazing. More of that though in the honeymoon blog update coming soon.

Well that wraps up the Best of 2011! Have a happy new year!!

Amy and me in the bar on the Emirates A380

We arrived in Dubai really early in the morning and got driven to our hotel “The Mirage One & Only The Palace” at around 140km/h which seemed like the average speed for this country. It took us through the heart of Dubai where the tallest building in the world is. The main highway through it has skyscrapers either side of the main road and looks like something out of a futuristic movie -

Dubai looks like something from 2050

We arrived at our hotel really early which meant our room wasn’t ready so we had some breakfast and sat on the beach, which was facing one of the palms, man made islands in the shape of palms with Atlantis in the distance. At 9:30 we jumped in a taxi which took us to the “Dubai Mall”. I am normally bored of shopping after about 30 minutes but the Dubai Mall is fantastic. It has a huge Aquarium in it for a start -

Amy and the Aquarium

The mall sets some records as the largest mall in the world, the largest acrylic single surface in the world (the aquarium) and it also has the worlds largest sweet shop which we never actually found to give you an estimate on the size of the place. The quality of the shops is also really high, with all of the UK shops we don’t get in Australia and all of the US shops I’d never been to before that were really good.

After an exhaustive trip to the mall we headed back to the hotel, checked in and got ready for our night out. First off we hit the rooftop terrance and bar at the One and Only. It was happy hour so we got some cocktails. We were told drinks were expensive in Dubai but if you are coming from Australia they are about the same price which made it easier.

We then headed to the Dubai Marina to go to “Budda Bar”, we were feeling really tired so got there a bit early, so it wasn’t actually open. We went for a walk down the side of the Marina. You can see building work going on all through the night but with what looks like virtually nobody doing the work.

Budda Bar was an Asian fusion mashup of food and we ordered lots of little bits to try out. The best by a long way was the Thai Green Curry Maki, which was a cross between a California roll but with the filling of a Thai Green Curry which was delicious!

Amy the fire alarm and me at Budda Bar

We left relatively early from the Budda Bar at which stage it was starting to get busy. There was an impressive collection of vehicles outside such as the Mercedes SLS which its probably worth while having in UAE as it appears you can drive them as fast as you like.

The next morning we went back into the downtown area of Dubai to go our the Burj Khalifa, which is the worlds tallest office block, worlds tallest free standing structure, has the worlds highest restaurant, the worlds highest observation deck, the worlds highest nightclub and the worlds second highest swimming pool. Everything in Dubai has to be the worlds best it’s as if the Sheiks have delusions of grandeur but turn the delusions into reality.

The trip to the observation deck on the Burj takes you into an elevator which takes 1 minute or so to get you up 124 floors (there’s still another 40 floors above it). The views are fantastic but the height doesn’t really come across because of all the other skyscrapers around, although it is still impressive. The only downside was the hundreds of rat bag kids running around the deck at the same time.

Amy up the Burj Khalifa

After the observation deck we went back into the mall to get a quick bit of lunch and then back to the hotel to meet up with our 4WD driver who would take us out to the desert to ride camels and other things of that nature.

The drive out to the desert took us past some construction places such as Mall of Arabia which is planned to be the worlds largest mall, surpassing the one in the centre. It was a bit far out and in the middle of nowhere to be honest, which I think was caused by the GFC.

When we got to the desert we watched a bird show with a hawk for 10 minutes and then back into the 4WD for a trip across the desert. There was a lot of people on this package tour which meant loads of 4WD in convoy going across the desert. It was really good fun and our guide took some of the slopes a bit faster than I would have liked. Amy had a really good time and I was just holding on and trying not to feel sick as we were right in the back on the axle.

Arabian Days on a Camel

We got to a little camp in the desert where we had some food, watched a belly dancer and had our photos taken dressed up as people from the middle east. The photos were very good and I had to buy them but they were probably the most expensive photos I’ve ever bought though, such is the commission system for these sort of places.

Amy and I with a change of lifestyle

We then got back in the 4WDs and headed back to Dubai. That night we went to bed and got up early for our next plane trip off to the Maldives! Woo!

To be continued….

The website amy-gary.com will have all of the pictures, video and everything you can think of in an amazing online multi-media experice but first we have to go on Honeymoon! So expect an update in a few weeks!

Chris making his spicy pizza

There was about 12 of us so 12 to get through, lots of different pizzas were made including two dessert ones. Yuji brought home made meat balls and added them to his pizza which was my favourite. Somehow my pizza won overall at the end of the evening, I think my secret ingredient of Habanero sauce and the fact my pizza was quite late in the evening so a few drinks had be drunk and everything tastes better.

Yuji, David, Kitty and Tom with Kitty’s dessert pizza

This weekend we celebrated Chris’ birthday by hiring a boat on the harbour. It is an awesome thing to do as you get to see a lot of Sydney whilst also listening to music, enjoying some food and drinks all whilst being driven around. The skipper thought we were keen on sailing but we weren’t really but we did get the sail up and did some proper wind based sailing.

Lozza explaining something  across the heads

Marcy had made some fantastic cup cakes as a birthday cake and we had a lovely salad and Chicken based meal. Here’s the rest of the group on the boat -

Boat Crew with Greg driving (not the skipper)

On Sunday we drove up to Hunter Valley to do food tasting at Margan, where Amy and I are getting married in only six weeks now. Very exciting and also the food was fantastic!

Amy and I on the bought

Hopefully going to pick up the blogging pace rather than throw-away updates on Facebook!

Will do a longer post soon I can’t believe it’s been a month since the last one! We did a trip to Byron Bay since then and I’ll get that up ASAP!

Here we are all around the entertaining table with a fantastic dinner cooked by Lorraine -

 
The Group in the Blue Mountains

The food was Malaysian Chicken Curry and was very enjoyable. We stayed up for a few hours and then headed to bed and waited for Santa to arrive in the morning, which was also my birthday! My birthday arrived and we found out about all the people being killed in Norway and that Amy Winehouse was dead which was a bit depressing. The good news though it my mate who’s wedding I went to in the UK had a baby born on my birthday!

Amy, Marcy, Chris and myself headed into Leura to get some coffees, we went to a nice shop that sold various sorts of papers and I had a bet with Chris that the music store would be closed down but it was still open! We then went to Wentworth Falls in the hopes it would be raging thanks to all of the recent rain, unfortunately it was not the case.

We then headed back and had some nice snacks and sat around the fire. Out of nowhere Santa Claus appeared! He had bought us all gifts. Everyone sat on Santa’s knee and was given a surprise gift (that we had all bought each other). Here’s all of us with Santa with the tree in the background -

All of us with Santa and Hugo with his eyes closed

That night we had Roast Rib of Beef and all the trimmings thanks to Lozza, some delicious cup cakes made by Chris and Marcy and Chocolate fondant supplied by Nancy and Marcus which totally put us into a Christmas food coma. We then played a game of singing songs in the style of the song but from words in a magazine which was fun and then a game of charades.

Here’s Hugo in his winter outdoor gear -

Hugo in outdoor outfit

It was a fantastic Christmas weekend away and a great way to celebrate my birthday!

Downtown Adelaide from our Hotel

We stayed right in the centre of town, which was actually a bit of a ghost town on the weekend. We visited Adelaide Markets and also went to  few of the shops in the Adelaide mall. Afterwards we went to the Adelaide museum and looked at some stuff animals donated by the zoo.

We then did a long walk to an area that the tourist guide said was trendy but it turned out just to be a few cafes and some shops that were closed. We couldn’t really work out when people did shopping as the majority of shops weren’t open. We did find one shop that was really awesome, it was called Leigh St Luggage and is the only shop I’ve been in in Australia that sells Rimowa!

That evening Amy and I went to a restaurant called Celcius which was really good, the food was amazing. We didn’t go for the degustation but made our own meals up.

Amy and me at Celcius

The next day, our last day, we got on the tram and went to a little town called Glenelg which is the Atlantic City of Adelaide, the weather was pretty bad but I managed to find a Smashing Pumpkin single I didn’t have in a record shop there, which I thought was impossible!

Glenelg downtown

Well it was a fun trip, until the next time!

Here’s Carriages from the outside -

Carriages Hunter Valley

We met up our wedding celebrant, met the wedding hire person and the flower arranging person. They were all very nice which was fantastic and also because we are giving them money so I hoped they would be.

Amy and I visited Leaves and Fishes and I had one of the best pies I think I’ve ever had in Australia and then the next night we visited Roberts, another nice restaurant next door to Carriages. Here’s Amy and me about to enjoy the starter -

Amy and me at Roberts

Our little B&B was on a side road and whenever we drove down it there would be a couple of Kangaroos or Wallabies hoping around, here’s some -

Kangaroos / Wallabies in the Hunter

It was a fun trip up there! On another note I’ve learnt where to use “Amy and I” and “Amy and me” basically if you remove the “Amy and” bit and the sentence makes more sense with “me” or “I” that is the one to use! Should have paid more attention in English lessons!

So here’s an update on things that have  been going on.

We went up to Brisbane and met baby Angus which was a fun weekend, here’s a picture of Amy with the new baby -

Amy with baby Angus

We’ve also went camping at Easter to a place called Glenworth Valley with Lozza, Marcy and Chris. The campsite was a bit strange, there’s was horse poo everywhere. We wanted to go on a nice walk and the lady recommended one that took us to the top of the valley. Half way up I noticed I had worms on my socks, although they weren’t actually worms but leeches. They had crawled through my socks and were sucking my blood. Everyone was gross’d out by it but then it go worse as they all started to realize they were covered in leeches as well! So that walk ended pretty quickly. It rained almost the entire weekend which was ashame but Amy and I bought a gazebo which was fantastic, it kept us dry the entire time. Here’s Amy and I with the Gazebo -

Glenworth Gazebo

We’ve also been having some fun dinner parties, Marcy got really into making some fantastic cupcakes, these ones look like garden vegetables but are totally sweet -

Marcy’s delicious cupcakes

We also had Mike, Rach, Nancy, Marcus, Mia and Hugo over for dinner, we did a lamb roast which we messed up a bit when it came down to cooking it (we didn’t cover it properly) but it still tasted alright if not a little bit hard. Here’s Mia and Hugo playing with their toys in the living room -

Hugo and Mia in the Living room

So that wraps it up for the time being, we are going to Hunter Valley this week, I’ll take the camera and do photos sooner rather than later! Still have to make a video for Phuket trip!

At our engagement party Nancy and Marcy told me I was going to Adelaide, I honestly thought they had spilled the beans by accident. So I was all ready for a trip to a city in Australia I have not visited yet. Unfortunetly I kind of ruined the surprise when I picked up my passport holder to hide it before we left and it felt a lot lighter, both my passports were missing! I didn’t tell Amy I knew we weren’t going to Adelaide but I still had no idea where we were going which was exciting.

So we got to the airport and I read the checkin desk sign and it said Phuket! I was trying to figure out where that was, it is in Thailand FYI. So we got the nine hour flight from Sydney to Phuket airport. I still didn’t know exactly where we were staying so it was fun to be whisked away in a car at the airport, which took us to a port, where we got on a tiny little boat and headed out into the darkness to one of the islands!

Six Senses Yai Noi

So it turned out we were staying in a lovely little cabin on an island called Ko Yai Noi at a resort called Six Senses. It was an amazing little retreat and we had a great little hut complete with a swimming pool, indoor shower, outdoor shower, bath you name it -

Our hut and pretending not to fall in the swimming pool

Now unfortunately, the weather was not on our side. Thailand decided it was going to have the worse weather in March that they’ve had in  30 years. It was supposed to be the dry season but it was not! We did have some nice days of weather and we took advantage of those ones when we could. We made a trip out to Hong Island on one of the little boats which was fun.

We had a funny story from there, but first here’s Amy enjoying a nice cold bottle of Corona that we’d got packed for us as a picnic underneath a Tsunami warning siren beacon -

Amy enjoying a Corona under Tsunami Warning Beacon

So when we arrived on the island I was so busy taking pictures of the Tsunami evacuation route signs and making videos of it I didn’t notice the “No alcohol” sign. When we walked back from our picnic which involved drinking some booze I read the sign and it said “fines include one month in prison or 1000 baht fine ($30)”. If we’d got caught I was really hoping they’d let us go back to our cabin and get the $30 as I didn’t fancy one month in a Thai prison!!!

Amy and I on Hong Island blissfully unaware of our crime

On the penultimate night of our stay on Ko Yai Noi island, it was looking like 50/50 chance that we would be able to leave. It was ok because we were going to a hotel on the mainland and not back to the airport. Some people on that day were forced to stay and they couldn’t fly back home which would have been a nightmare. Fortunetly on our last day the boat was operating , although I wasn’t looking forward to it although I got the impression it was a bigger boat taking us back as we had to drive to the other side of the Island to get on it. When we got there though it was the same mini boat we came on which made me a bit nervous although the waves weren’t nearly as bad as I imagined them to be.

We sat in the back of this trailer to get to the other port on the Island and it was like we were being evacuated from a disaster zone. In the resort it didn’t feel like this the realities of outside were a bit different -

Ko Yai Noi Evac.

So we made it back to the mainland which was a relief and moved onto a new placed called The Pavilions Phuket, which was renamed from The Phuket Pavilions for what I imagine would be SEO reasons.

It was just off Laguna Beach and meant we could get out and about and do things in the poor weather. We headed to some malls, they had Zara in one of them, Australia still doesn’t! We even went to a show called Simon which was really tacky but brilliant at the same time. What made it more fun is that a lot of the audience were Chinese and whenever the lady-boys sang a Chinese song the crowd would go crazy. Not so much for the western songs.

Simon Show Phuket Lady Boys

So that was our holiday to Thailand and it was really good fun, we’ve also got a reason to go back now as we’d like to see it in the Sun!!!! Altogether a great little break. I’ve got enough footage for a video which I’ll create soon.

We made the right decision to move the party to our flat, Which was good as it gave everyone who have not been around a chance to see the place and it also worked out to be logistically much easier. We could make the food on-site, warm things up and keep everyone dry at the same time.

Thanks to Marcy and Chris bringing over their BBQ and Chris using some smokey wood chips we had a delicious spread of burgers, sausages and kebabs. We also had a great selection of little bits for people to eat such as mini-quiches, salmon and creame cakes and lemon tart and cup-cakes. Thanks to Marcy for taking these photos -

The Spread

The day went really quick and we had a good amount of people! Luckily some creative re-think of how our flat was laid out meant that everyone fit without many problems. We used the living room, dining room and bottom room as sitting/standing areas and also the outside porch and a chillax area.

We had a lot of visitors from the south side which is great as its a long way to come especially in the rain. It was good to see that crew we don’t see them enough. We also had a lot of babies in attendance, one of the funniest moments was when Mia gave Chloe a nice cuddle but then the kids being so young, balance was lost and there ended up being tears.

Chris on the BBQ

We got given some fantastic presents as well which we were very grateful for.

The engagement party day got extended into the evening and we went out for dinner at Jellyfish restaurant on what happened to be the brightest moon in 18 years or something like that Chris kept on telling us.

A selection of people at the Engagement Party

Marcy and Chris slept in the spare room and the next day we carried on the partying by having a lovely breakfast made up of all the left overs from the night before, with Marcus, Nancy and Hugo also coming around to enjoy that. We then went down the beach for a swim although we ended up not going in because the water was brown and their was things like washing up bowls on the beach (how do they get there from the rain?).

We then bought a large chicken and smoked that on the BBQ and had everyone over again for dinner, all whilst watching the massive amount of TV shows and movies I’ve managed to accumulate thanks to Stu and Simone’s hard drive they let us borrow!

At the end of it all and once everyone had gone home Amy and I stamped the engagement weekend as a success and felt a bit down after everyone had gone because it was so much fun having everyone over and hosting the party. I think we might do more parties at home if we can think of reasons to have one!!!!

The view from Angharad and John’s balcony in Balmain -

Sydney from Balmain

One of the rounds involved going outside and trying to keep two ballons in the air for at least 30 seconds. Another round involved watching a clip of Love Actually and remember certain bits from the film. Another round involved building a free standing structure out of pasta and chewing gum. Everyone had a different type of round which was great and very creative.

Here’s the other side of the living room in mid trivia workings -

Trivia in Action

One of the rounds involved tasting beer and guessing which one was which with bonus points for having a shot or drinking from the beer funnel which reminded me of old school -

Marcy, Ian and Chris with the Funnel

As the night went on and the more drinks were consumed the harder the quiz got and then the arguments about results started to happen but all in good spirits of course.

Here’s Amy and John doing the sorting of smarties with one hand into cups round -

Smarties challenge!

A fun night in which eight hours flew by!!!!

I tried to see how far I could go with just wearing a t-shirt. I managed to get all the way to Waterloo which is a train station in London. It is partially outside so the cold got too much and I had to put a coat on. My parents have got a lovely new house which I think is nicer than their old one, it has a thatched roof and nice wooden beams in the rooms. I helped my parents with some drilling and unpacking boxes and they showed me around Dorchester.

Parents new home in Dorset

One of the towns we visited was called Lyme Regis, which I vaguely remember going to on a trip with primary school. We went to a nice little bakery house where you sit on these benches and have pastries of all sorts and hot drinks. My parents got chatting to some people who ended up getting their phone number as their friend might be interested in buying their lawn mower, so the people down here are also really friendly.

Pastry Shop in Dorset

There was one guy out surfing with his mate in a Kayak, the waves were really not waves at all but just surges of water that broke on the beach but occasionally one would break far out enough that the guy paddled for it.

The next day we went to a place called West Lulworth which has a fantastic cove, it also has a walk you can do which means going up an extremely large hill, we didn’t do it but I imagine the views were fantastic.

Mum and Dad at West Lulworth

A place we visited a lot was Poundbury, this is where my parents lived when they were renting before they found the house they wanted to get. It was a model town designed or visioned by the Prince of Wales. It is nice but also a bit strange, I think it requires a few years of aging to get it to look a bit more normal. My parents say some people refer to it as Disney Land -

Poundbury

After staying at my parents house for a week I made the trip up to Yorkshire for Dinnie’s wedding. I got a flight from Southampton up to Leeds, where the temperature was significantly less and I was considering the one light pullover and adidas top that I brought with me may not be enough.

David and Betty met me at the airport and were kind enough to let me stay at theirs with their two cats, horse, two donkies, chickens and dog Poppy. We visited an auction, which was what eBay used to be like before they invented eBay.

On the Saturday I woke up and there was a layer of snow, which was nice to see and the forecast was not for it to continue. David and Betty drove me around the country side and showed me a farm with deer and bison -

Deer in the Snow in North Yorkshire

On Sunday I went to Crathorne Hall, where Ian was going to get married. Ian made me a bit of money in the early 2000′s when a picture of posted of him on this blog became the number one result for a google search of Paris Hilton Naked. A lot of traffic hit that page so I put ads on it!!!!

It was great to see all of the crew up there, Andy, Alex, Gin, Chris, Ian, Ian and Ki and was a lot of fun with a lot of laughs, it felt like nothing has changed which I think is a sign of good friends -

Mates from home and me.

Ian C as per usual got totally out of control, he says he has “no inner monologue” which is true, I’ve got some great video footage of him on the dance floor.

Here’s a picture of Ian and his new bridge Michelle enjoying one of their dances -

Ian and Michelle First Dance

It was a great wedding and a lot of fine, a bit or a soar head now. I then got the train down to London on the 13:16 East Coast service, sitting opposite Sir Richard Dalton, I didn’t need a magazine for the journey I just listened into his conversations he was having about Iranian diplomacy which at the moment is all up in the air which was very interesting.

I love visiting London it is a great city, you can walk around for hours and just find new streets that you didn’t know existed until you walked down them. I first stayed at a hotel near Marble Arch called The Arch Hotel but then moved to No. 5 Maddox Street for the rest of the trip, which was right off Regent Street -

Regent Street, London

The next day I met up with Mark, Karine, Nina and Felix at London Bridge, it was fun going down there. I used to live here when I first moved into London proper and Mark lived around the corner so it was just like the old days with the addition of Felix and Nina!

With the Ponsfords at London Bridge

I met up with the guys I work with/for in London at One Aldwych that night which was good as I have not seen them for a long time! The next day I walked around London a lot and met up with Matt my friend from University. We went to a bar called Sketch which was really trendy, the bar was in some sort of Dome and the restaurant had moving artwork around the outside of it. We then went to my favourite place to eat in London “Ping Pong”. I actually ended up going there three times during my trip to London!

The next day I met up with Lorraine who used to live in Manly and soon will do again. We went to see Legally Blonde at the Savoy Theatre. It was an awesome show and really good to see Lozza at the same time! Then it was back off to Australia on the A380 again, 32 hours later and I was back in Manly and I don’t have very much jet lag which is great (I can thank the business class upgrades for that!).

A380 with London in the background

The video is in the works of course! Check back soon.

]]> http://g2007.com/blog/gary/2011/02/28/big-society/feed/ 0 http://g2007.com/blog/gary/2011/01/09/hello-2011/ http://g2007.com/blog/gary/2011/01/09/hello-2011/#comments Sun, 09 Jan 2011 08:07:19 +0000 gary http://g2007.com/blog/gary/?p=1206 A little update from Xmas and NYE. We spent Xmas up in Brisvegas at a cross section of Sam and Elliot’s house and Taryn and Wades house which was very nice. My secret santa present an awesome iPad/iPhone charging device, a new wallet and some other bits that were all very useful.

Here’s Cooper, Zara and Ali on Christmas day getting ready for luncheon -

Cooper, Zara and Ali Christmas Day

It was amazing how much it rained whilst we were in Brisbane. It was raining when we arrived and it only stopped once or twice when we left, no wonder there is some flooding up in QLD.

Wink Wild thinks she’s a cat.

We returned to Manly and had our own Christmas/Nancy Birthday party, we got loads of balloons for the occasion. It was funny when Nancy came over she walked into the room whilst Amy and I looked on waiting for her response but she didn’t notice them for about 2 minutes whilst she explained how Hugo’s chair worked!!

Amy with Hugo and the dining room full of balloons

For NYE Marcy and Chris hosted a Mexican Party at their joint in Potts Points. We were lucky enough to get access to a friends balcony for the actual fireworks which looked over Sydney. The Mexican party was fantastic and Chris and Marcy made the best Mexican food mix up that is available in Australia. “You can’t get good Mexican food in Australia” as Chris keeps reminding us.

Chris Real Mustache Me Fake Mustache and a Dog

As midnight turned around it was a struggle getting Marcy awake as she had fallen asleep 15 minutes before the big event. We went up to Marcy and Chris’ friends party and had a good time their and watched the NYE fireworks -

NYE Fireworks and Opera House Silhouette

We were up until 2am which was the latest party night we’ve had in a long time. It was a good night and very relaxed. The next morning we headed down to Potts Point for breakfast. I really like Potts Point as a destination it has a great vibe.

This weekend Amy and I headed off for wedding planning technical work in the Hunter Valley, which is a couple of hours north of Sydney and is the home of a lot of wine. The wedding planning technical operation went well but the details are under wraps.

When we got to the hotel we were staying at they gave us a double bedroom unit with an extra room, so we rang Marcus and Nancy and they came up for Saturday night. We had fun in the swimming pool, had a BBQ and watched Lethal Weapon 4 on TV.

Marcus, Nancy, Amy and Hugo at Hunter Valley

So a good time had and successful wedding mission! Hope everyone has had a good start to 2011!

Yes the inaugural best of the year post! I’ve added a new category this year called “trip of the year”.

	Album of the Year – Angus and Julia Stone Down the Way This is probably the most “starred” record on my iTunes collection. My favourite tracks are “Santa Monica Dream” and “Draw Your Swords” off the album. Checkout this video of Santa Monica Dream live at Cafe de la Danse in Paris on YouTube.
	Cinema Trip of the Year – I N C E P T I O N Although there’s a few plot holes, I really enjoyed this film. It is intense to watch as your always trying to figure out what the twist is. If you have not seen it, go do it! Shutter Island, also starring DiCaprio came a close second.
	DVD of the Year – Modern Family The show takes the Office style genre to the next level. 3 “modern families” have a great comedy adventure and then there’s the serious message at the end of the show. Awesome. Hope there’s a third season! More Info
	Book of the Year – A Journey Have not quite got all the way through this book this year. It’s probably the only book I’ve bought (non-technical) and for that reason it is also the book of the year, purely because it has no competition.
	Game of the Year – Angry Birds This is a sign of the times right? The best game of the year and most played is probably Angry Birds on the iPad and iPhone. It’s a fun game where you swing birds at targets, you have to take into account velocity and gravity. It’s good fun! Angry Birds homepage
	Website of the Year – Hacker News I thought techmeme.com was the best site to visit on the web for tech related news. Not any more. YCombinator is a mashup of news for entrepreneurs and techies, so its a great place to get the latest tech. news from. It also has a cool “no procrastinate” feature which prevents you from visiting it for more than 1 hour a day. Hacker News.
	Technology Purchase of the Year – AppleTV This little device has changed the way we use the TV. Normal terrestrial TV is soon going to be a thing of the past. It’s certainly fading out at our house, the adverts are twice the volume of the shows, they do that annoying thing where the last 2 minutes of the program are prepended by 4-5 minutes of adverts. No thanks. AppleTV means we can watch what we want when we want. It lets you rent movies from iTunes or buy them outright and we can stream videos from the PC to the TV. We can also browse all the photos we have on Flickr and YouTube. It’s $129 all up so not a bad investment if it means no more rubbish TV.
	Restaurant of the Year – Gantleys This restaurant was one of our favourites for the year as it was the one we went to on the day we got engaged! It’s a cute little restaurant outside of Queenstown in New Zealand. This restaurant was closely followed by some of the fantastic meals we have with Chris and Marcy in WA this year.
	Trip of the Year – Queenstown This holiday was our favourite and probably most expensive! I didn’t do too much research on Queenstown so when we got there it was all the more amazing. Getting engaged was the stand out obviously. The helicopter ride to Milford Sound was also amazing one of the best experiences ever!

Well that wraps up the Best of 2010! Have a happy new year!!

Queenstown is a little town in the southern part of New Zealand, if you don’t know where New Zealand is, don’t worry, it’s a small island off the bottom of Australia.

Queenstown totally blew us away, flying into Queenstown airport in the plane, all you can see out of both windows is terrain, which is a bit scarey but amazing to think of the massive mountains that surrounded us. The airport is like as if we just arrived at some luxury ski resort in Europe, I wasn’t expecting that at all.

We stayed at a resort called Azur which is the best place we’ve ever stayed, the view from the window was spectacular and totally private, breakfast was served all day and canapés came down in the afternoon and for Amy it was drink as much wine as you can as it was all only a phone call away! The mini-bar was also free, which I’ve never heard of, it also had a dog called Elvis, can you guess why -

Elvis the Dog at Azur, Queenstown

So, Saturday morning came around and we rang in our breakfast order of fruit salad and pancakes and some cappuccinos. The sun was out and as we sat on the balcony I decided it was the right time, so I asked Amy if she wanted to get married and she thankfully said yes!

Engaged!!

After the excitement of getting engaged, we finished off breakfast and headed off towards Arrowtown, which is a small gold mining town. On the drive to Arrowtown there’s a river called the “Shotover River” which has canyon sections and a very quick boat that goes down them. Amy wanted to have a go on it, I would have been happy with a normal boat to view the amazing scenery but New Zealand and adventure sports go hand in hand, so here’s Amy and I doing a powerslide on the shotover jet boat -

Amy and I on the Shotover Jet Boat (bottom left)

Amy is waving in the above picture I am doing as the guy told us and hanging onto the bar. It was really good fun and amazing to go so close to the rocks at such high speed without hitting them.

We then continued on our drive to Arrowstown which was very nice, here’s Amy and I having our first luncheon as an engaged couple -

Amy and I in Arrowstown enjoying some Lemon Lime and Bitters

We had a great time in the town where we visited a shop called Ogle which I’m sure will get a letter from Google’s lawyers at some stage. That evening after a tiring day of being engaged we headed back to the lodge for canapés and to get ready for dinner at a restaurant called Gantleys. We had a hire car for the trip but we didn’t really need it, the lodge was happy to drive us around and even if the destination was further than they would take us, a free taxi would pick us up from downtown Queenstown and take us to the restaurant!

Queenstown suffers and benefits from a transient English backpacker population that do lots of jobs, so we were served by very few New Zealand people the entire time, mostly English which was funny.

Amy and I at Gantleys, Queenstown

The next day we drove alongside Lake Wakatipu to Glenorchy, a small town right at the end of the lake, I was intrigued to find out what was around the corner of the mountain that we were staying on. The view of the ranges after we got around the mountain corner was stunning, the trees are all ferns and we really could have been on a ski trip in Switzerland -

Amy with some mountains and snow peeks

It was a nice drive (you can see the road in the right hand side of the picture) and we got to see some sheep as well. We then headed into downtown Queenstown to get some lunch at a place called “The Cow” on Cow Lane. We tried to visit Botswana Butchery but it had burnt down

The next day we got the phone call the helicopters were flying, so we took a scenic flight out to Milford Sound and a cruise down the river there. Milford Sound is a four hour drive from Queenstown, or a 20 minute flight, simply because the road just won’t go straight to the Sound. The flight also had a quick stop off at the top of a mountain on a glacier, I put on a t-shirt and a light jumper and hoped for the best. Our pilot was a local farmer (they have to have helicopters to get anywhere) and was very nice, we even did a little fly over his house to wave to his wife and one of his children! Amy said she could see his dog and he told us he had 17 of them! We also asked him how big his farm was and he said its about 120,000 acres (187 square miles)!! Here’s Amy and I on top of glacier looking cold but having a great time -

Amy and I on top of a glacier near Milford Sound

Milford Sound was very beautiful, the boat trip was fun and we got to see some seals and a little penguin which made me feel really stupid not bringing a coat! That evening we tried the legendary “Ferg Burger” which was very nice!

The next day was our last day so what better way to spend it than go on the Gondola in Queenstown for a ride on the Luge! It was awesome fun but again could have probably have done with wearing a coat -

Amy and me on the Luge

So then we flew back to Auckland and then back to Sydney, arriving on Sunday night just before a load of planes arrived from Europe and Asia, so we didn’t have very many hassles at the international airport getting back home!

A fantastic trip and very happy Amy said yes to my proposal!

New trainers NikeID

It’s pretty cool and with the AUD being worth more than the USD so a good price. PayPal offer shipping redirect from an address you supply in the USA, so when the trainers left the factory in Saigon, a mere 6832km from Sydney this is the route they took -

NikeID Purchase Route – Google Maps

In total the shoes have traveled around 34,000km, that’s only 6000km short of the circumference of the Earth! Here’s a nice picture of all the cities the shoes visited -

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

They started in Saigon, visited Tao Yuan in Taiwan, Pampanga in the Philippines , Shenzhen in China, Osaka in Japan, Anchorage in Alaska, Louisville in the midwest USA, Portland on the West Coast of USA, down to Los Angeles and finally.. Sydney!

If only Nike let people in Australia buy shoes the route could have been a lot simpler and better for the environment!

We had a few guests over already, here’s Nancy, Marcus, Hugo, Marcy, Chris, Amy in the dining room at the first dinner -

Dinner at Pacific Street

We also had another dinner the next week with Simone and Stu which was nice and we went over to theirs the week after. Last weekend Amy’s parents and sisters came down and we went to see Jersey Boys in Sydney, it was very good and I recommend it to the max.

This weekend was Hugo’s 1st Birthday Party. It was on the beach in Manly on the harbor side. It was the perfect day for it with sun shining and no wind. The harbor side is much better in the summer, as its very well protected from the wind, where as the beach side normally gets windy with the on-shores.

Hugo’s 1st Birthday and 4th Croissant of the Day

That brings us up today, where Amy and I went to some furniture shops and to The Troubadour which is an excellent new cafe around the corner from our new place on Pittwater Road which just opened! Rather than giving out numbers to tables you get a little animal on a stick its very quirky and coffee come with a biscuit and a shot glass of fizzy water.

The Troubadour Panda

Good one!

We arrived late on Friday night and went straight to the hotel. The next morning, before we hit the road for our trip to Margaret River we did a little tour of Perth. Marcy had been in town a few days for work before so she showed us “London Court” which was a simulacrum of thatched style houses in the UK. It was fun and we had a coffee.

Amy, Marcy and Chris in London Court, Perth

We then set off on our four hour drive south to Cape Lodge. Amy got given a gift voucher for free accommodation at work and Marcy also managed to get it by guessing answers to a quiz, so we were partially “competition winners” and that was the running joke for the rest of the holiday.

The prize the girls had got from work was pretty good, we got a free dinner (degustation) and a free food plate to have on another night. Cape Lodge was pretty cool it had great views over a lake and DVDs we could hire from the room.

The degustation was fun, it was partial sea food but modified for Amy as she doesn’t really like sea based food. One of the courses was crab mixed with fish sauce and some other fishy stuff which was hard to get through but altogether very nice.

Degustation at Cape Lodge

We spent most of the time going around wineries tasting wine. I don’t drink wine (it burns my throat) so I was designated driver. One place had petanque and so I occupied myself with that whilst the rest of the team drank and bought vino. We had lunch at a fantastic place called Hay Shed Hill. We sat outside and had really good service and some delicious pizzas -

Amy and Marcy at Hay Shed Hill

We got take away one night and ate it in our rooms at Cape Lodge and had a movie night watching Darjeeling Limited and Pulp Fiction back to back. I forgot how good Pulp Fiction is as a movie.

When the free stay at Cape Lodge came to an end we moved onto Smiths Beach Resort, apartments next to Smiths Beach, not too far up the road from Margaret River. We had our own kitchen which actually made a nice change from eating out as I think we were all getting a bit sick from it. It had a BBQ and we had some awesome meals, including Mexican night which was one of my favourites. We drove into the town of Dunsborough quite a few times to get bits and bobs and it had a pretty good shopping area (at least for Marcy and Amy), Chris even took timeout to get his hair cut.

Amy at Smiths Beach Resort

I went into that pool for about 25 seconds and I think I came close to getting hypothermia.

WA has the advantage of the sun setting over the water (as it faces West) so we went down to the beach for sunset. We sat on the beach and drank some beers and watched th sun as it went down over the water, Marcy took a nice picture of Amy and I -

Amy and me on Smiths Beach

On one of the days we went to Ngilgi cave which reminded Amy and I of our trip to Sardinia where we had a similar Cave experience. It was much warmer than we expected in the Cave so pullovers weren’t necessary -

Chris, Marcy, Amy and I in the Ngilgi Cave

Next stop on our tour of WA was one night at the Quay West resort near Eagle Bay. We took a wrong turn one day and ended up down there stumbling across the resort and the amazingly blue waters of Eagle Bay. Here’s Amy and me with the sea (the water was pretty cold but not too bad once you were in, I went for a swim with Chris  the next day, just to say I’ve been in the Indian Ocean).

Amy and Me at Eagle Bay – Water really was this colour!

We stayed at the Quay West and had dinner there, Chris told the waitress how good the service had been on our trip to WA which really put her on edge I think!

The next day we headed back to Perth but not before stopping off at the Little Creatures Brewery in Fremantle for lunch. Fremantle is a cool little town we made a quick stop on the way down and decided we had to go back again on the way back.

When we got back to Perth we had a booking at a Ha-Lu a Japanese restaurant but before we hit that I went over to visit Charmaine, someone I used to work with in London who has just had a little baby Tom -

Charmaine with Baby Tom

The next morning we had breakfast/lunch at Subiaco, a little town of Perth and then went to the Casino (which was a wasted trip because of dress code restrictions). The flight back was only 3.5 hours thanks to the jet stream.

An awesome holiday and great to spend it with Marcy and Chris as well thanks guys!

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.

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!

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!

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 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.

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!

A banksy drawing  -

Who is banksy?

]]> http://g2007.com/blog/gary/2010/06/20/coincidence/feed/ 0 http://g2007.com/blog/gary/2010/05/30/ipad/ http://g2007.com/blog/gary/2010/05/30/ipad/#comments Sun, 30 May 2010 04:43:56 +0000 gary http://g2007.com/blog/gary/?p=1085 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!

Like everything good it had to come to an end and I’m happy with the final episode. Of course there are loads of unanswered questions but that I think is more fun then answering everything, if there’s not another good TV show to match this one, at least we can spend the rest of time discussing what we think happened on and off the Island.

As for the Lost finale, Justin and Tasleema organised a fantastic finale with props, boarding passes and weapons -

Inflight menu, safety brochure and of course a weapon

And here are some of the Losties, Simone a member of Dharma, Pregnant Roxy as Claire, Justin as Jack Shepherd, Tasleema as Ana Lucia Cortez and Stu as Dharma -

The LOST Final

A great night and sad that LOST is all over!

Here’s a video of arrivals to Sydney over a 15 minute period which I recorded, note that 50% of aircraft aren’t shown because they do not have the equipment on board for them to be visible.

And to make sure I’ve not been fooled, here’s Air Austral (the plane to the left in the red area – which denotes anything I can actually see by looking out the window) flying over Manly from Noumea on the way to Reunion registration F-OMAY.

So if you’ve ever bored, get Plane Plotter and get spotting!

Three guesses for who got murdered

The evening was spread out with a couple of murders and the help of a paid actor to keep things running along. It was very surreal we were all dressed up like 1930ies and dancing to the music of the era and pretending to be people who we weren’t. I was the local bookie and I had a little helper go around with me to collect all the debts, “ted the enforcer” was his name and he was very good at it.

Lozza with Ted the Enforcer

In the end we all get drunk and Marcus ended up with his shirt off which is a good gauge of a successful 30th party.

Simone, Stu, Bobby, Amy, Iain, Ian and Gayle

The next day we went for a scenic walk around Bundanoon with Mike, Rach and Mia who were also up but camping nearby which was very nice. That evening we got take-away (which we had to go and get as the lady reminded us we were in the country now) and ate it at the place and played a few rounds of poker and did some puzzles which is about right for people in their thirties I would imagine. Most people were nursing hang overs, especially Amy and Alex who couldn’t even eat their breakfasts!

A great time!!

]]> http://g2007.com/blog/gary/2010/05/03/there-has-been-a-murder/feed/ 1 http://g2007.com/blog/gary/2010/04/11/hong-kong-hd/ http://g2007.com/blog/gary/2010/04/11/hong-kong-hd/#comments Sun, 11 Apr 2010 10:08:39 +0000 gary http://g2007.com/blog/gary/?p=1064 Here’s a video that goes with our trip to Hong Kong!

Creme Egg with Pegs

The tooth size is probably too big for an animal such as a rat or mouse, my instinct tells me this was the work of a naughty child, who probably picked up the creme egg at the checkout of Coles and tried to take a bite out of it (foil still on) whilst his Mom wasn’t looking!!!

Here’s a picture of me on the red carpet, attribution goes to AIMIA for this photo as I forgot to take my camera. The lady with me is Kristin who was on the AIMIA board and was nice enough to give me a lift from the hotel to the event.

AIMIA Awards 2010 with Kristin from AIMIA

Friday night was awards night and whilst Amy stayed in and watched movies (it is expensive and I got a free ticket) I went off to the awards. I luckly met up with some people I knew and it was a good time. Stephen Conroy (the reason the side bar has a stop internet censorship) was in attendance and gave a little speech about the national broadband network but did not make mention of his censorship plans, which hopefully means they are on the way out.

We stayed at a hotel called “The Cullen” which is part of some Art Hotels which were was really awesome. It was in a district called Prahan which was just off Chapel Street (which has lots of trendy fun shots for Amy to visit and me to wait outside).

Here is Amy in the lift with an Andy Cullen Picture

On Saturday morning we went out down Chapel Street, went to some shops, Amy bought a new pair of jeans whilst I had a cappucino. It was a really hot day and we had to stay in the shade as much as possible.

Here’s a building on Chapel Street that looked cool

We were tired from our adventure so we went back to the hotel and watched “Funny People” as it was $16.95 to hire out and Amy had watched it the night before but we watched it again together to get some sort of value out of it. Whilst we were watching the movie we noticed it started raining. It turned out it was a bit more than rain -

As the storm came I was thinking Melbourne gets some pretty awful weather! I’d never quite seen a day go from nice and sunny to what looked like some sort of minor hurricane and the hardest downpour I think I’ve ever seen! We carried on watching the movie and then I popped out for a cappucino. I walked down the street and noticed half the shops were closed and thought it was strange for shops to close so early on a Saturday. On closer inspection, half the stores on Chapel Street were totally drenched and without power, so it was not necessarily a normal storm for Melbourne but pretty crazy!

That night Amy and I went out in the rain to a restaurant called “FOG” which was a French influenced place just behind our hotel in Prahan. It was really nice and we were glad we didn’t have to go far as the streets were pretty messed up from the storm, I actually kicked a junkies needle that washed up on the street by accident a bit earlier so I was very glad I was wearing shoes and not flip flops when that happened! The service in Melbourne is about 150% better than Sydney which is really nice. We went back to the hotel as the club we were going to afterwards was either not open yet because we were there too early or closed because of water damage. We hired another $16 movie and made sure we concentrated and watched it to the very end, although I’m pretty sure Amy fell asleep as per usual.

Amy and I at FOG in Prahan

The next morning the day wasn’t looking too bad so we hired a little Smart Car from the hotel. This was really fun as it really stands out. They are funny little cars to drive, the red line is way too low and the steering wheel is a lot like the one I have for the PC, complete with flappy paddles for changing up and down.

The Smart Cart and Mornington Penisula

They are semi-automatic so it seemed to change down but not up, but it told you when to change up. I was either doing something wrong or they had skimped on paying for the switch the connected the computer that told you to change gear with the gear box to do it for you.

We drove down to the Mornington Penisula and the sun started to come out which was really nice. It was a nice part of Victoria complete with beach houses that you find on the English coastline!

Mornington Penisula Beach Sheds

We then returned to Prahan dropped off the car at the hotel, checked out our baggage and got the taxi to the airport, which is where we are now. I’ve got some spare time on my hands because the flight is delayed due to a massive storm sitting over Victoria!!! Hopefully we’ll get home at some time or another.

On the way back home we bumped into Simone and Stu who were returning from Brisvegas, which wasn’t a devastation zone like Melbourne -

Amy, Stu and Simone at YSSY Carpark

Peace!

On Friday night we went to the ASX Thomson Reuters Charity Foundation dinner event at the Westin Hotel in Sydney that was a lot of fun. We got to the event late and our table was the only one that was empty but we soon made up for that being the last ones to leave.

Marcy and Chris at the dinner with Opera Singer

The entertainment was really good with an exceptional pianist and a great opera style singer to keep the entertainment going whilst we had dinner. Afterwards there was an auction for all sorts of fantastic prizes like tickets to the Wimbledon finals, US Open, Australian Open and French Open all with flights and accommodation looked after however these were all well out of the budget. You could even by the car in the picture above, although no one did.

Me, Chris, Marcy, Ian, Brent and Amy

It was a real fun event and the latest night out I’ve had in a while! Here’s a quick snapshot of some other things we’ve been doing -

We had dinner at Apres in Potts Point last weekend with a friend of Lozzas from Los Angeles, it was a very cool French restaurant which did the best steak frites I’ve had this side of Paris -

Dinner at Apres

We also celebrated Nancy’s birthday with a dinner at Artichoke and saw how much Hugo had grown up -

Nancy Birthday at Artichoke with Baby Hugo

Next week we are off to Melbourne again so expect another blog post sooner rather than later!!!!!

Baghdatis vs. Hewitt

There’s lots of things to do at the tennis, one of them is to get your photo taken with a giant tennis ball -

Amy with a giant tennis ball

The next stop on our trip to Melbourne was a place called Daylesford which is a small town North West of Melbourne, it was really nice and had Spa’s for the girls (and Chris). We stayed in an awesome house for the night and watched some more tennis -

Chris and Marcy in Daylesford watching Tennis

That evening we went to a restaurant called Mercato which was really good, it felt like we were in someones front living room but the food was awesome!

The next day we set off on our Great Ocean Road adventure, which would cover a lot of miles of driving through the country side, where we even saw a twister style wind tunnel caused by dust. Chris drove us to the Apostles which were a bit out of the way but it was fantastic to finally see them, here’s Amy and I with some of them -

Amy and me at the 12 Apostles

Initially I was a bit disappointed with the Great Ocean Road, at least from Apollo Bay to the Apostles because there’s not very much in the way of Ocean. However the drive from Apollo Bay back towards Melbourne is much more of a Great Ocean Road, we even saw some Koalas in the trees (the first time I’ve seen one in the wild I think).

Great Ocean Road Drive

That brings us to the end of our Melbourne adventure, it was great fun!

Totally the same person – they have almost the same bra after all!!

In the picture the girl is wearing a different bra and has different colour hair, so a total transformation! I clicked through to see how this website was trying to rip people off. The girl on the website has ginger hair so has been very busy at the hair salon! The website is basically a sales pitch which links through to another website for a South American berry juice and  “life cleanse” tablets. If you clicked these links and bought the product this original website would earn referral money.

I’m fairly sure their tactics of showing pictures of unrelated girls of different body proportions to advertise a product is against the law but I guess there’s no way of proving they are unrelated, it may be the same girl who loves getting her hair dyed.

The website had a comment section at the bottom which has comments like this -

“I just happend to click on your page one day. Your story has definitely inspired me, Michelle. I already signed up for my shipment.”

Again these could by true comments, it’s pretty difficult to prove otherwise but then this comment grabbed my attention -

That seems to good to be true, someone in the suburb I live next to ordered some from this site and it took less than a week to get delivered. Using the magic of remote desktop and running a server in the UK I visited the same website -

Same “comment” but with a different geo-location. So the comments are fake and definitely against the FTC Endorsement Guidelines (the site is hosted in the USA).

So I guess the morale of the story is, never click on an advert to buy something or ever think someone who lives down the road just bought the same product!

Ali, Zara and Cooper

We stayed at Sam and Elliot’s house for the first night to be woken up by Cooper early in the morning telling us there was loads of presents under the tree!

On Sam and Elliot’s street there’s a house not too similar from the house in the Griswolds (Chevy Chase movie) which we all walked up the street to see. It looks really fantastic -

Amazing Christmas lights on Sam and El’s street

Christmas day was spent at Taryn and Wade’s house where we had some delicious sea food for dinner and opened presents. We even had a swim in the pool and managed to get sunburn after only being out there for about ten minutes!

Wink was also happy to see us all there but was absolutely exhausted at the end of the day -

Winky absolutely exhausted on Christmas Day

The next day we all drove down to the Gold Coast and spent a night there at Burleigh Heads which was very nice. We had lunch at an RSL and spent the evening watching movies -

After lunch at the RSL

The next morning we woke and went to the airport to fly back to Sydney. We arrived in Sydney, went home, un-packed our bags, re-packed them again and then hit the road to drive up to Copocabana. Not the one in Rio but the one an hour North of Sydney, near Gosford. The place was developed by a real estate agency in the 50ies who named the place after Copocabana in Rio so all the street names are named like Del Monte Place, which is where we stayed – although it was no where near as bad as that sounds! We had some excellent views from the balcony of the ocean, mostly of which are filled with massive ships waiting to dock at Newcastle.

The weather wasn’t that great but it didn’t really matter for us as it was fun just being able to stay around the house, read books, play poker and get the occasional break to go for a surf down at the beach.

Amy, Nancy and Marcus on Copocabana Beach

One of the main reasons for the trip was to celebrate Lorraine’s 40th Birthday party which we did in style by Yuji cooking us some delicious Japanese style food, it was very good!

Yuji in the Kitchen

The views from the balcony were amazing, especially at sunset -

Sunset at Copacabana

We also celebrated Nancy’s birthday with a trip off to Chat Noir in Terigal which was a French restaurant and I think possible the first place where I tasted snails!

Nancy Happy Happy Birthday Song! Vive la France!

For New Years Marcy cooked brisket the same as she did at Easter and it was delicious! We then watched the fireworks from Sydney on the television and went to bed. Hugo was exhausted -

Emails checked, time for a relax.

An excellent Christmas and New Year period, although I managed to get shingles hence the delay in writing the post, however back on the mend now hurray!!!!!!

Yes the inaugural best of the year post! I’ve added a new category this year called “restaurant” fun!

	Album of the Year – M. Ward Hold Time Really enjoyed listening to M. Ward this year, feels like I’ve played his tracks a few thousand times on iTunes. I now also can’t remember the last time I bought a record not in digital format. Checkout this video of Chinese Translation on YouTube.
	Cinema Trip of the Year – District 9 I reviewed this film when I first went to see it. I thought it was so good I went to see it again with Amy (who didn’t think it was that good).It is an awesome sci-fi movie with a great plot. Let’s hope they make a District err.. 10?
	DVD of the Year – Gavin and Stacey This was first leant by Simone and Stu and after initially not thinking it was that good I was totally hooked and now wait for Season 3 of this funny show about a girl from Wales and a guy from Essex. Not really going to work for anyone not from England or Essex! More Info
	Book of the Year – The Girl Who Played with Fire I didn’t read any books worth mentioning this year (I don’t think I read a book) so this is a guest entry from Amy -“Having never had an interest in thrillers previously I was shocked to find my eyes glued to every page in this Swedish breakthrough series. This book also appealed to me as it reminded me of my travels to Sweden. Very well written and fresh.” Thanks Amy. More info about the Millennium Trilogy.
	Game of the Year – Modern Warfare 2 Last year’s game of the year was Modern Warfare 1, this year Modern Warfare 2 takes the title. MW2 is the biggest selling entertainment item of all time, that is right, bigger than any movie. It’s not as amazing as the first, because I kind of knew what to expect but it is still an amazing game with such great attention to detail.More Info Here
	Website of the Year – techmeme.com Keeping up to date with what is going on in the tech world without being overwhelmed with the amount of information that is out there is a tricky task. Thankfully TechMeme has succeeded something where other news aggregators have failed; putting tech news in one easy to read location.http://techmeme.com
	Technology Purchase of the Year – G25 Matt Bass invited us over for dinner, little did I know he would have a PS3 and an awesome steering wheel to go with it. So I sold the Nintendo Wii to save some space (as we never really used it much recently) and then filled that space with a G25! If you like racing cars and you have a good computer I recommend getting this wheel and GTR Evo and Race On for the PC.
	Restaurant of the Year – Ping Pong Soho Amy and I went here a few years back when we were last in London. It is so good that when we visited London again last summer (winter) we hit it up again and we were not disappointed. If I still lived in London I’d go here everyday. Great good and great drinks on a fun menu.Checkout their site for more locations.

Well that wraps up the Best of 2009 and for this decade! Have a happy new year!!

So for everyone in the Christmas snow here’s a typical Southern Hemisphere summer day trip from Manly to Sydney Circular Quay on the Manly Fast Ferry at 9h25 -

We are off to Brisvegas for Christmas which should be fun and then on to Copacabana (NSW not RIO) for NY!

It was Amy’s birthday last week and we had a little surprise night away at the Blue Hotel in Sydney as well as dinner at Kingsley’s restaurant on Woolloomooloo Wharf.

Amy’s Birthday and Kingleys

We stayed in a little cabin two level loft and we could walk to the city in the morning which was nice and made a change from getting the ferry across. Although I made a video of the ferry journey which I hope to edit into something to put on the blog however I’m back logged with video processing at the moment.

A couple of nights later and one of Marcy and Chris’ friends had somehow managed to persuade Bavarian Beer Cafe (a German restaurant) in Bondi to not only allow about 40+ people book out half the restaurant but also serve them a totally different meal which included Turkey and cranberry sauce to celebrate USA Thanksgiving.

Sue and Marcy enjoying Thanksgiving at the Bavarian in Bondi

It was really good fun and was just like Christmas dinner but a  few months early and a bit of Sauerkraut thrown in to mix things up!

Next up was Amy’s Birthday which she organised for us all to White Water restaurant in Manly, it was good fun and a good turn out, good to see Hugo could make it as well as Simone and Stu before they jetted off around the world on their Honey Moon -

Amy at White Water with her friends

It was a good fun night, Amy got really drunk and was dancing around Coles the super market for a bit which was pretty funny. We had a few drinks in Shore Club which is a popular 18-25 hang out, we saw some funny fashions and then decided to go to Mortar and Pestle for some Thai dinner before going home, it was a big night, especially considering the next morning we had to get up at 6am to go into Sydney, dress as Santa and then run from the bottom on George Street to Darling Harbour!!

Lucky the run turned out to be more of a walk and it was seriously fun. Here’s Chris and me outside Macquarie Bank looking like we’re going to rob the place -

Chris and I outside Macquarie Bank for Variety Santa Fun Run

Luckily we weren’t alone in the fun run, there was a few other thousand people doing it -

Santa Fun Run through Sydney

After our not so difficult run we headed off to Potts Point where we had breakfast in a little Italian cafe with Marcy and Chris which was very nice. We then returned to Manly, I had a quick surf in some not very good waves and it was off again to Lorraine’s BBQ which she had organised on her roof patio. It was a really hot day (luckily we were in the shade for our Santa run for the majority of the time) so it made perfect BBQ whether providing you could get some room under the umbrella -

BBQ at Lorraine’s Place

Lorraine had made some fantastic sauces and we enjoyed sausages and steaks which were delicious! It was the perfect end to a long and busy weekend!

Amy and I with the dogs of Candlebark Cottage

Rach and Mike organised a fantastic cottage on the out skirts of the town, when we arrived we drove past the entrance and started heading down a road that became more and more progressively off road and up to a point where a spider’s web crossed the road. However after a few problems with finding the place we were there no problem and it was very enjoyable.

The weather in NSW for the weekend has been a bit extreme, with 40 degrees on Sunday and maybe 35 of Saturday, which means the state is ablave with fires. When Matt and Mel visited the wedding location this time last year it was 7 degrees, so everyone had packed some warm clothes, little did we expect it to be absolutely boiling!

The wedding was very nice and was held in the grounds of a homestead.

Mel and Matt Wedding Ceremony

The speeches were excellent and a lot of fun was had all round. The cake was a huge stack of cup cake which were really delicious! Here’s Mel and Matt cutting them -

Matt and Mel Cutting the Cup Cake Cake

They also had a candy bar with lots of different sort of sweets which were really delicious although I felt sick from eating so many.

In the build up to the wedding we spent a lot of time in the Red Violin Cafe in Bundnoon and not drinking water out of bottles as they are banned in the town (Pepsi wanted to build a bottling factory). Here’s a snap shot of some of the gang (we pretty much took over the cafe) on the morning before the wedding enjoying themselves -

Mike, Rach, Seb, Jacqui, Cooster, Al and El in Red Violin

Amy, Gemma and I also managed to make a quick trip down the road we initial went down with the spiders web to see what was down there, turns out there was a view (sort of) from a trail we followed for a bit -

Amy and Me at the Bonnie Doon Lookup

It was a great weekend which will be remembered for a great wedding and also very hot weekend!

Some extra pics -

Amy and Me, Mia Feed Time, Amy and Cooster

Fantastic weekend!!!!

]]> http://g2007.com/blog/gary/2009/11/22/mel-and-matts-wedding/feed/ 2 http://g2007.com/blog/gary/2009/11/12/the-open-road/ http://g2007.com/blog/gary/2009/11/12/the-open-road/#comments Thu, 12 Nov 2009 07:44:32 +0000 gary http://g2007.com/blog/gary/?p=922 I just found this video of London from 1927, it’s pretty incredible having lived around the areas where the film first starts it’s amazing to see this in pseudo-colour!

Then and Now

And here’s the full 10 minute video -

The video was made by Claude Friese-Greene who’s father was an early day pioneer of cinematography. The colour was created by one frame being tinted red and the next frame tinted green, when played at full speed the brain makes the images appear as colour. The video above is better than the original as some modern day techniques have been applied. Loads more into at the BFI.

Baby Hugo

Hugo is sporting the guitar rock look in this shot. Looking forward to some fun times with Hugo!!

Slosh ball is slightly different in that a new rule is you have to have half a glass of liquid (preferably beer) in your hand at all times, which makes catching the ball (the idea of the game to get someone out) a lot more difficult.

You should also wear appropriate footwear at all times something that Amy, Lucy, Leisa and myself didn’t do. Here’s Lucy kicking the ball and loosing a shoe at exactly the same time -

Lucy Kicking the Ball and Loosing a Shoe at the Same Time

At lunchtime we had a picnic and enjoyed ourselves as much as we could before kickoff for the second part of sloshball.

Here’s the wedding party themselves with their special his and hers sloshball cups -

The bride and groom (not in that order)

We finished the day with more sloshball and some chilling out on the rugs. It was an extremely good fun day!

Me in Sloshball Action

On a separate note Amy went to Perth for work last week, I have not been there but if this photo is anything to go by I certainly won’t be driving when I get there -

Can’t believe this got signed off by the building manager

Until next time!

We also celebrated Amy’s dads birthday and Chris’ 30th with a get together at the house as well as the not so secret santa draw which took place. Amy took us all on a trip around Brisbane, visiting Mount Coot-tha via Toowong, Indooroopilly mall (no I’m not making these places up) and taking the river cat down to the South Bank which looks almost identical to the London South Bank. We were also lucky enough that the Brisbane festival was on at the Westend.

Amy, Chris and Marcy at West End Brisbane Festival

Here’s everyone celebrating Mr Wild’s birthday and Chris’ 30th Birthday at the Casa del Trassa residence -

Birthday Cake Celebration

After our trip to Brisbane we set off down to Byron, we stayed at The Byron in Byron for one night with Marcy and Chris, it was a fantastic retreat just out of town which reminded me of a mashup of Fiji and Bali. We went into town and had dinner at Orient Express and did some trivia questions such as what is the second smallest country in the world.

Dinner at the Orient Express in Byron Bay

The next day we had to say goodbye to Marcy and Chris and move on to Simone and Stu’s wedding. We were staying on location for the wedding at a place called Blue Water at Belongil Beach, about 1km outside of Byron but still in the bay. The location was beautiful but suffering the consequences of coastal erosion, as the garden had apparently got a little bit shorter after some storms earlier this year.

Belongil Beach Blue Water View

For Stu’s stag day we did an early morning golf round, starting off at 7am. Apparently no one could play golf but when people started playing that didn’t seem the case (if you can hit the ball in the air then in my opinion you can play golf) so when I tee’d off at the first hole the ball shot off at a 50 degree angle from me and hit a duck (yes the actual animal) but I think it was alright.

We also did a pub crawl around Byron and then played poker in the evening which was really good fun. When the wedding day actually came it was a beautiful blue sky day and the ceremony was beautiful. I was chief videographer for the day so I don’t have any pictures from the ceremony and Amy was bridesmaid so couldn’t take any. The evening party was at Clarke’s Beach and the first dance was a bit special, Amy took a photo, you can just about see me in the background doing some film work -

Simone and Stu Wedding Dance

It was a fantastic day that went all too quickly, not helped by John telling me it was 21h30 when it was actually 23h30 (he came down from QLD and got the timezone the wrong way around). There’s a video of the entire wedding, which almost didn’t happen, I had 5 minutes of battery left with about 30 minutes of filming left to do, thanks to Allison for dropping me off back at the homestead to get the charger and averting that potential disaster!

Amy Bridesmaid and Me at the Wedding

A fantastic week Amy that felt like a month with all the different activities we fitted into the time! Looking forward to the next trip!

Sandstorm from Space

After about 11am you wouldn’t have even known the sandstorm was here, it had completely disappeared and we were back to a normal blue sky day again!

Jamie T @ Metro 17th September

Last night we had a bowling evening with Mike and Matt, it was extremely fun but also competitive -

Amy, Matt and Michael Bowling Night

The highlight of the evening was when Michael got a strike and celebrated by throwing a wedge into the air -

Wedge Throwing Incident

F* CROISSANT!!

House with Amy, Nancy and Marcus on the Patio

Not shown in this shot was the pool, a very inviting clean nice pool that with the weather only in spring but around the high 20ies and tipping into the 30 degrees C it looks very welcoming. The reality of the pool was that the water was freezing, Marcus, Nigel and I managed to get in, I even put my head under for a few seconds but definitely not warm enough to be enjoyable!

The first full day we spent doing the obligatory wine tour, first off we hit up Tempus Two, probably the largest winery in the Hunter but with a fantastic selection of wines. There is now a little shop next to it which does a fantastic selection of cheeses, ice creams, olive oils and you name it! Here’s the ice cream section -

Ice Creams in the Freezer

Here is a shot of the group outside the Tempus Two winery post wine tasting -

Tempus Two Group

We then visited another winery called Audrey Wilkinson where I gave Amy a hug and then the people doing the wine tasting stopped and held up a sign saying no hugging/kissing allowed. It was a bit weird and I told Amy we shouldn’t buy any wine from there as pay back, it was all a big joke for everyone but I personally felt singled out and embarrassed – not the best way to try and sell wine (I didn’t buy any and will never drink Audrey Wilkinson ever).

We went back to the house where we played a lot of pool (there was a massive pool table in the kitchen area) and a bit of poker, the non-poker players cleared all the poker players up -

Poker on the Deck

We then had a lovely BBQ lamb dinner and Gail’s treacle pudding specialty that she also made in the Blue Mountains a few months back.

Here’s a picture of Amy with her new top and the fantastic backdrop to our Hunter Valley retreat -

Amy on the Deck with her new top

Altogether a fantastic weekend that did not last long enough!!

What’s good fun about the map above, consider all the things you see on that walk and it took a good couple of hours to walk, keep hitting the “-” zoom out button to see how much more exploring could be done!

First Stop Gloria Jeans for an Iced Cappuccino

An iced coffee helped set the pace for the 5.8km walk that I was about to start. I decided to do a non-ocean route as the onshore winds were blowing, but I couldn’t resist having a quick look at the surf at the end of walk!

Little Manly Boat Ramp and Fish Quota and Sizes

I’ve never seen this little boat ramp before (or just not noticed it) and next to it was a small boat storage dock -

Boat Storage at Little Manly

I then continued the walk past little Manly beach and headed towards my favourite beach in Manly, Collins Beach. On the way I spotted this little wasp -

Wasp on a Flower

Through the trees and away from Collins Flat there’s a pipe that looks like its part of the Dharma Institute -

Have Faith, try and get back to the Island

The walk up to the top of the hill from Collins Flat is a long uphill struggle but good exercise, at the top of the road there’s a sign for Bandicoots, which I thought were imaginary -

Crash Bandicoot

And that concludes the photos to the walk! Until next time!

This weekend we had a Mexican/Poker party at our house. We invited as many as we can fit into our flat (which is about nine people).

Simone, Stu, Marcus, Marcy, Me, Steph and Lozza

Lorraine gave me a fantastic recipe for chili which I had to make the day before but turned out great. We also bought some scene setters turning the living room into a full on Mexican party house. I even went as far as learning a couple of Mexican tracks on the guitar!

Marcy, Lozza, Nancy and Steph on the Mexican Poker Table

After mexican food we played two tables of poker on a quick elevation system for the blinds which meant we were finished within a reasonable time, Simone ($90) took the jackpot, I got second place ($30) and Marcy got third ($10) which was great fun. The coronas, sols and tequila margaritas were flowing all night it was brilliant!

The next day we were lucky enough to get invited out by Stephanie to go sailing with Lars and his wife and their friends. The weather was fantastic and was nothing like winter, although when we jumped into the water it certainly didn’t feel like summer, it was so cold that I could feel my skin actually burning from the coldness! We even did a bit of sailing with the sails up managing to get up to about 5 kts at one stage and we did some “tacing” and “jiving”, I was hanging in by the skin of my teeth in regards to the sailing terms being used.

Lozza, Steph, Lars and me on Push Pin

Push Pin was the speed boat that tagged behind the back of the hybrid catamaran and is named after the little pins on Google Maps! It was a geeks dream being on the boat with one of the guys that invented Google Maps and the project managers of Google Wave! It was a fantastic day and I think we all felt totally spoilt spending the day on such a luxurious boat with very nice people, so much so that I didn’t want the day to end as we headed back to the marina to park the boats.

Amy and me on Serenity

A fantastic weekend and a fine way to mark the 500th post on the blog, a lot more interesting that the very first entry nearly six years ago!

What causes it? It appears after doing a little bit of internet research that an algae called Dinoflagellates is the cause of these blue lights appearing from the water. I think Dinoflagellates are almost translucent in the day time, you only really notice they are there whilst in the water when you paddle and your hands feelslike they are going through some tiny jelly fish.

When the wave starts to break the membrane of the Dinoflagellate is deformed slightly which causes it to give off a burst of photons for 1/100 of a second, hence why it looks like the waves are lighting up. Source

Alien spacecraft over JHB

Most films which see aliens visiting Earth normally end up in the aliens, obviously a far more superior race, destroying the white house or impregnating humans from which aliens burst out of their stomachs. So this is a completely refreshing film as it casts the aliens as refugees. They arrive on Earth and decide to go to Johannesburg, rather than Washington DC, LA or New York as with most other feature films of the same genre, something which the film highlights and is very refreshing.

The films setting in South Africa is obviously related to the apartheid and “District 9″, the slum where the aliens live, is based on District 6, a real life former inner-city residential area of Cape Town where forced removal occured, which is also a theme of the movie. The trailer pretty much gives nothing away about the content of the actual film, which is another thumbs up as typically the trailer is actually just the highlights for all the best bits of a film -

The film is directed by Peter Jackson Neill Blomkamp and produced by Peter Jackon who is famous for the Lord of the Rings films but also known for his comedy horror films Bad Taste and Braindead so there’s a lot of body parts flying everywhere when the guns start shooting in this film, but they are so well filmed its a strange pleasure to watch.

The central character of the film is fantastic and a newcomer to movies Sharlto Copley, a completely believeable character, in fact as the film draws to a close as I started to question if maybe this wasn’t a science fiction film at all but a real life documentary, which is half how the film is portrayed.

Alien Eviction from District 9

So if you like science fiction, horror, action, alternate reality and politcal movies you must see this film. It’s the best sci-fi film I’ve seen since I can’t remember when!

Business vs. Economy

Singapore was fun and a nice way to break up the flight. We stayed at a hotel called the New Majestic which was a boutique hotel near the chinese district of Singapore. All the rooms are designed by local artists and we got a room which reminded me of Austin Powers -

New Majestic Room 310

We spent the majority of time shopping in Singapore. Going to some of the shops which Australia doesn’t have like Zara and Marks and Spencer.

After a very good flight from Singapore, mostly due to the fact we purchased some of those head pillows in the departure lounge of Singapore which allowed us to sleep for a full 8 hours we arrived in London at 5am, one of the first flights to arrive at Heathrow but very quickly followed by lots more. We got a hire car thanks to my Mum paying for one for us and headed to Novotel where we got a day rate to allow us to have a rest and a shower for El and Al’s wedding which we were attending later that day in the village of Bentley, Surrey. It was a fantastic large wedding in a converted oat house / barn. We met up with Mike and Rach and baby Mia at the wedding which was great fun.

El and Al’s Wedding

We couldn’t stay all night because the jetlag was getting too much so we drove back to Warwickshire in a haze of tiredness for a 5 am start the next day to go to the Royal International Air Tatto at RAF Fairford. We left early in the morning and arrived in typical British summer style to pouring rain. It didn’t seem to bother anyone apart from Amy who said “it wasn’t normal” for everyone to be walking around on almost sideways driving rain without really caring or noticing it. We saw some fantastic air displays of some fighter jets as well as a load of static aircraft which included the B2 bomber. We left the air show early and had our first Sunday pub lunch yummy.

RAF Fairford Air Tattoo

The next day we went with my parents for lunch at Lapstone and visited the village where Bridget Jones was filmed and then had a look at the lavendar fields at Snowshill which were very nice. In the evening we went and visited Ki, Weronika and William in Stratford and Gin cane around also. We reminicised about the good old days and said hello to the new baby. We are pretty sure Ki woke the baby for it to see us although apparently his eyes were already open when he went in to get it.

Weronika, Ki, William, Amy and Gin in Stratford-upon-Avon

We watched and interesting program that my Dad recorded on TV about how Britain works from a logistical perspective, one of the more interesting parts of the program was there is a guy at the national power grid that sits and watches Eastenders and waits for the ending credits at which time he has to turn on additional hydro power generators in Scotland and also borrow additional power from Nuclear energy rich France to power all of the kettles that get turned on almost simultaneously at the end of the soap episode, a phenomenon that only happens in the UK.

We drove to Bristol to hit the banksy exhibition at the Bristol City Museum. There was a two and a half hour queue to get in which was very civilised and went quickly. It was worth the wait as it was a fantastic exhibition. You needed to have a sharp eye as a lot of the banksy stuff was merged into the permanent displays. I was hoping at the end we would be able to gt a nice Banksy print but I do not think that was Banksy style as one of his artworks was called “exit through the gift shop”.

Amy at Banksy Exhibition

After our visit to Bristol to see the exhibition we drove back via Cheltenham to catch up with T-Bone (Chris), Issy, Dylan and Natasha at their house. They used to live in Sydney so it was good to see them all getting on so well back in England. They’d even started a vegetable patch in the garden -

Chris and Issy in Cheltenham

The next day it was my birthday and we celebrated with my parents and Earl by visiting Crabmill at Preston Bagot which is still one of my favourite restaurants in Warwickshire. -

Birthday at Crabmill

The next few days my parents, Amy and I went on a trip to the South of France via the Eurostar and TGV, which was a fun experience at I’d never been on the Eurostar. It is very quick and a bit surreal getting on a train in London and getting off of it in Paris. Our first stop was to visit Madame Huet in Provence about an hour north of Toulon which is where we got the train to. We hired a Citreon C4 which was a nice little car and fun to drive on the “wrong” side of the road. One of the towns near Madame Huet’s house is a tourist town called Le Castellet, we had lunch up there and did some shopping around the shops and enjoyed the view and fantastic weather -

Le Castellet

I used to spend summers at Madame Huet’s house and it was very nice, having not visited for around 12-13 years it was nice to see not much had changed. We had dinner with Madame Huet and their friends who made some fantastic food -

Madame Huet’s House with 1000 Layers Cake

After two days in Provence we went down to Nice which is on the French Rivera and stayed for two nights at the hotel where Mark and Karine had their wedding, we even had dinner at Le Castel the restaurant right on the beach which was very nice. We visited the old town of Nice and took a road trip around to see Villefranche, Monte-Carlo and Monaco. We didn’t get to see Mark and Karine because they live in Brussels but some good news is Karine is having another baby to join Monsieur Felix!

In Monaco we took a wrong turn and I was looking for a gap where I could do a u-turn back to the main road we just turned off. I found the gap but unfortunetly it turned out to be infront of a police station, so as soon as I was at point two of my three point turn a police man came out and told me I wasn’t allowed to do it. It turns out Monaco has the largest police force in the world per-capita and per-area (512 officers for a 2km squared area) so the chances of getting caught were against me. I also drove a part of the Monaco GP track which was fun although my speed was probably around 40km/h rather than 240km/h.

Villefranche

We headed back and made a quick stop off in London where we visited Matt for pizza which was good fun -

Matt and Pizza at Berkeley Square

We did a quick shop around London and even managed to get a London Pride Pint in at a pub somewhere in Mayfair -

Pint and Selfridges

We also visited a restaurant called Ping Pong which is a small Dim Sum chain only in London, you can’t order bad food from the menu and the fruit flavoured teas are a speciality and its all a very resonable price. Here’s Amy and I in Ping Pong in Soho -

Amy and me in Ping Pong Dim Sum

Altogether we had a fantastic but exhausting holiday taking in so many locations in such a short period of time. We could have done with some more time and it all seemed over very quickly. The flight back was not too bad, it was much quicker than our last return flight with China Eastern, we left my parents house at 16h30 on Friday and were back in Manly at 7h15 on Sunday.

Fallowfield Retreat, Leura Blue Mountains and MJ Tribute

The first day I picked up Amy from Leura train station as she had been away in China, whilst Amy was resting at home we all went into town and had lunch at a nice little coffee shop and had scones out of flower pots!

As the sunset the hot tub was fired up and Amy, Gail and Marcus went for a dip in the inviting water, here’s a shot of the tub and some vino -

Hot Tub and Vino

Christmas dinner was delicious and dessert was just as delicious, afterwards we retired to the living room and were surprised to see Santa had come round! He obviously wasn’t that busy what with it being July so it was nice to see him show up. It was ashame Marcus missed him arrive -

Santa Arrives to do Secret Santa!

We all swapped Secret Santa gifts, I was lucky enough to get Little Britain Abroad which was very funny. We  had a few more games of poker, put Bridget Jones’ Diary on the TV and ate more food and cheese, just like Christmas.

The next morning (Boxing Day) we walked the 50 meters to a lookout point, which turned out to be the same lookout point that Amy and I went to last year and took some pictures.

Windy at the Blue Mountains

A great weekend now we’re preparing for the trip to Singapore/UK/France coming out in a couple of days!

5th of July saw the Sun shining in Sydney, Australia for the third game of the season. A slight change of location due to our normal field being used for a concert. Who do they think they are? The sun was shining and some of the more sensible members of the Sunday afternoon kickball elite were warming up -

The all important warm up.

Sunday’s game was the first to have official kick ball sanctioned supporters, which included Dr. Roberts, Lorraine and Bo a German Shepherd dog.

A few new faces for me at least, at the game who’s names I’ve all but forgotten but very good to see a good turnout. After a few weeks of playing you can begin to see the development and advancement of the teams as tactics for kicking, passing and hitting are used to outwit the opposing team.

Powerdrive

After a promising start both sides succumbed to injuries, a couple of quad tension injuries, a knee injury and general bruises caused by a realisation that no one is under the age of thirteen, the median age for kickball in the USA.

After a good couple of hours of kickball with lovely sunshine and no wind we retired to the Woolloomooloo Bay Hotel for Nachos and cold drinks to celebrate our kickball achievement.

Kickball LA Paparazzi Style

I believe the heads of Kickball Australia were talking about a “one week recess” which for non-Americans means there will be a gap and kickballing will resume at 13h30 on the 19th of July. See you there. Peace.

Natalie, as I mentioned before in this post is a YouTube video blogger, her videos have been watched almost one hundred and eighteen million times to date, she is the number one most subscribed Australian and sixtenth most subscribed in the world, she can probably get through to young Australians easier than the government.

Natalie and me at Manly Wharf

I felt like a bit of a dork going over and telling Natalie I was a fan but I am very glad I did as it was good fun talking to Nat and learning a bit more about the videos and her trip to NYC. She is as funny IRL (which means “in real life” for the grown ups reading) as she is in her videos, it felt like we were getting our very own interactive community channel video!

I’ve embedded Natalie’s latest video below, but you should also checkout her back log of videos on her YouTube Community Channel.

I now have to endure Amy taking the mick out of me for my star struck behaviour for a couple of weeks no doubt!

This weekend was a big one and it involved cameras so here’s a proper blog entry to celebrate! Although most of the photos are from Nancy and Marcus’ camera.

Amy, Nancy, Marcus and I went up to the Gold Coast for a long weekend to relax, enjoy the more temperate climate of Queensland, do some surfing, eat out at nice restaurants and generally have a really good time. We covered most of that whilst we were away.

Amy’s parents kindly let us stay in their beach unit at Burleigh Heads for the long weekend. Queensland and Northern NSW were just coming out of some of the worst weather they’ve ever had (although the good news is the dams are full) and the surf was still pretty full on when we arrived. The first night we went to a Thai restaurant in Palm Beach that we knew was good from previous visits. Marcus and I went over to BWS (Beers, Wine and Spirits) to get a bottle of Rose. We weren’t sure which one to get but the guy there recommended we get one of the more expensive ones, which came to about six dollars each. I don’t think it was a very good one in the end.

As you can see from the picture below the beaches have all but gone following the storms -

Gold Coast Beaches Destroyed

On the first full day we went to a restaurant in Burleigh Heads and met up with Amy’s sisters for lunch. It was a good chance to see how the babies had grown up and see that Zara is walking now -

Lunch at Burleigh Heads

We then went for a little drive up to see the super bank and all the other surf spots along the coast there. They were all pretty brown and horrible from the storms but there were a couple of people out. We also drove up Boundary Street which has Queensland on one side and New South Wales on the other which Wade told us about last time we visited. In the summer they are in different timezones which must be confusing.

Amy, Marcus and Nancy at Burleigh Heads

That night we went to Broadbeach for dinner, which was very nice. The next day we met up with Uncle Jack (Marcus’ Uncle) for lunch at Connors, which is a nice cafe in Burleigh, Amy ordered a burger and it came out without the actual burger inside of it which was pretty funny.

Later in the afternoon we decided we would visit the Hinterland, so we drove the hire car inland, unfortunetly I didn’t see the signs saying “road closed due to landslide” so we didn’t get very far but we did have a nice hot drink at a tea house on the way back – it is funny how cold it is in the Hinterland compared to by the sea!

One of the highlights of the Gold Coast is the crazy golf coast (putt putt) that is just down the road from the unit. It has three different style of games, water, jungle and one I can’t remember the name of but looked liked a bad dream. It was good fun and we did the scoring properly as so it became competitive. Marcus did a fantastic shot where he said “this is how you do it” without looking, hit the ball, it bounced off two obstacles and went straight into the hole! I think he was fairly sure he was going to win, so when the winner of the first game was revealed… well, I’ll let the facial expression explain for itself -

Amy Wins Putt Putt

We then had another round and Amy won that one as well! Just behind the Putt Putt course was Hooters. I’ve always wanted to go to a Hooters, just to see what was going on. It turns out it’s a family restaurant, but we checked it out anyway. It is a strange concept because on the one hand there’s these girls wearing these outfits and on the other there’s children celebrating their birthdays. The waitresses are all wearing outfits that look like they are from the 80ies and the food is very American. It was good fun and wasn’t too bad, I got the impression that Nancy and Amy were not as keen on it as Marcus and I were -

Hooters Girls!

For out last day before going back to Sydney we went to Byron Bay. It is only one hours drive South of the Gold Coast so it is definitely worth the trip. Byron is a really nice town which we have been to many times. The surf was a bit better at Byron and Marcus went out at Shipwrecks to get a few waves which looked good -

Byron Bay Shipwrecks

Then our holiday had to come to and end and we headed back to the airport to fly back to Sydney. A fantastic break I wish we were still there. In between going out we watched the entire original Office season 1, I forgot how good it is!

BhangLassi in full swing

The gig was at the  Hopetoun Hotel which I think was one of the bands targets to play at when they first started playing. It is small chips for them now as they’ve headlined the Gaelic Club (and smashed a guitar live on stage).

Last weekend Amy, Lucy and I had breakfast at the North end of Manly on the front, it just happened to coincide with what was possibly the best day surf on Manly Beach I’ve ever seen. I wish I had my camera (I took an iPhone shot but it looked rubbish). Fortunetly someone at swellnet made a video of the amazing surf which you can watch here (it is very good) – the first wave is the “Bombora” which breaks out to sea and the big sets were probably filmed at Queenscliff as that was were it was really massive.

As is always the way with surfing, there was no waves for Marcus’ weekend but this weekend, with me being the only person who is dedicated to the cause, there were waves a plenty. In fact I’d have to say that the corner by the rocks in the picture below was one of my favourite surf spots as it was mostly lefts and protected enough to let you get out and then work your way into the bigger waves as and when you feel comfortable simply by paddling away from the rocks. It was kind of like a reverse Wategos at Byron. Obviously this isn’t how it always is but Easter weekend just had the right combination of pressure, swell and direction!

Morning Burn at Boomerang Beach

Chris took a few photos of me out there but didn’t  get any of me actually surfing any waves which is cool because I take ages, but here is one of some guy getting green room time -

Tube Time at Boomerang Beach

The place we stayed at was also fantastic. It is called TAMBAC and as you can see from the first picture has some fantastic views of the beach. The setup was one main house which had a bedroom and then two little smaller houses which had bedrooms and bathrooms. Here’s Amy and Lorraine on the first night -

Amy and Lorraine in the kitchen at TAMBAC

The kitchen area was used very well this Easter with some fantastic meals and drinks being prepared. Lorraine, Amy and I were the first to arrive with Lucy, Marcy and Chris arriving a bit later. Lorraine cooked a mexican based dish which was fantastic and which we ended up eating again for lunch the next day, it also started a food cooking arms race which was to last the entire holiday.

On the first full day Chris and I went surfing at Elizabeth Beach where when we paddled out a couple of dolphins swam past which sounds like a fantastic experience but it actually makes me a bit nervous, try to imagine how a dolphin would feel if you walked past it whilst it was out of water. So with that surf done we went back to the house and chillaxed on the decking with the weather which was forecast to rain -

Books, Scrabble, Braids and Sun

Lucy made some delicious hot cross buns from scratch (flour and other ingredients etc..) which were delicious  -

Hot Cross Buns with Lucy and Marcy

That night we celebrated Passover which is a is a Jewish holy day and festival commemorating the Hebrews escape from enslavement in Egypt. It was good fun and as the youngest person at the evening, I had to sing a song in Hebrew which was challenging but good fun. We drank King David – Concorde wine which probably the only wine I know of that doesn’t give me reflux and also had chocolate covered matzo which is delicious! Marcy cooked Brisket in some delicious sauce for passover which was very tasty.

Passover Reading

The next day I went for a morning surf at Elizabeth Beach again, this time with more people out and less dolphins and clearer water. I got a real nice wave which meant surfing was done and dusted for that day. I got back and we all went off on for a trip to Shelly Beach, which is a protected beach just to the right of Elizabeth Beach and much like the Shelly Beach that there is here in Manly, although this one had a rather large crowd of naked tubby old people on it which kind of ruined its tranquility.

Nudie Beach

That night Amy and I cooked BBQ with sausages, rissoles and salad. It was also the start of some serious poker games. The key with poker is to not allow any of the other players to be able to read your face -

Extreme Poker Face

The next morning the poker continued out on the deck with Lorraine showing a clear lead in the game. I went surfing three times that day out front, once in the morning, once again at lunch and once again at dusk. I went out on Boomerang Beach this time and it was brilliant fun. The waves were all breaking left and as an extra fun bonus there was a backwash giving every ride a Newport Wedge feel to it as whenever I was riding a wave there would be another smaller wave coming towards me at some point which when our paths crossed always ended badly. That night we played beer pong which is a good way to drink lots of beer, you basically have to throw the ping pong ball into one of your opponents cups, which is filled with a small quantity of beer. I imagine you could fill the cups with harder spirits but we are all too responsible for that -

Chris and the fine art of Beer Pong

That night we celebrated Chris finishing his MBA course with a roast dinner cooked up by Lorraine and chocolate cake with Easter eggs on it. It was delicious as per usual!

Lamb Pre Cooking

We finished the evening with sparklers and party hats on the deck. The next morning we went out on the deck to find this bad boy sitting on it -

Python on the Deck

The whole snake event turned into a media circus with me taking photos of it, the neighbors next door climbing over the fence to take photos of it with their mobile phones and the neighbors on the other side looking at it through the safety of binoculars. We finished the day with another BBQ after a delicious pumpkin soup that Lucy prepared for lunch. We played poker and watched Superbad on the huge TV the house had and then sadly the next morning had to make our trip back to Sydney.

Moon Rising (yes moon) over Boomerang Beach

Until next time!

]]> http://g2007.com/blog/gary/2009/04/14/easter-at-tambac/feed/ 6 http://g2007.com/blog/gary/2009/04/04/alls-well-that-end-swell/ http://g2007.com/blog/gary/2009/04/04/alls-well-that-end-swell/#comments Sat, 04 Apr 2009 23:37:18 +0000 gary http://g2007.com/blog/gary/?p=757 A couple of weeks ago we celebrated Marcus’ birthday at Manly Dam. Manly Dam is a exactly what its name describes although it is very difficult to find, most people who live in Manly don’t actually know it exists and those that do normally spend about 2 years looking for it. It is not very well sign posted.

Party at the Dam

It was a fun day cooking on the BBQ and cooling off in the dam. One of the presents Marcus got was an inflatable thing you sit on which I think was probably for ages 6-12 as it was impossible to stay on it for more than 2 seconds. We all gave it a good try and in the end Marcus got a black eye trying to stay on it -

Manly Dam with Inflatable Thingy

The weather was fantastic for the day we were very lucky. Recently though the weather took a turn for the worse bringing in some persistent rain and winds, however, this has its benefits as the surf reached 12 metres out at sea which meant there were some big waves around, checkout these shots of surfing at Shark Beach in the Harbour near Vaucluse (waves don’t normally break in the Harbour). I went around to the Bower one morning between the rain to see if there was anyone out, there were three people – it wasn’t actually as big as I thought it would be but big enough -

Beat the Breaker

This didn’t end as badly as you think it might -

Commit

Until next time!

I was excited as most people were here in Manly to get in on the Earthhour spirit. Like most things in the world, it takes the people at the top to start doing something to really make a difference so we look to the governments to get in on these things. Here’s Manly Wharf at 19h56 -

19h56 – Earth Hour T-Minus 34 minutes

As the count down began to the start of earth hour where people get to show the world how much we care about  looking after the planet, crowds came from near and far and arrived at Manly Wharf beach with their candles and drums to witness this great event. Drums played and cheers were being expelled by the crowd as the seconds of time ticked away to the start of this amazing event as we all in union switch the lights off and sit in darkness for a short period of time to tell the world we understand its plight.

And then, the moment arrived, the moment of time where human beings can stand together and say lets fight climate change, protect the future for our children and our childrens children and change the world -

BEHOLD! Earth Hour Manly Wharf 2009

This post was created because I felt sorry for the kids counting down to Earth Hour in the group on the beach (you can see them in the second picture) and then nothing actually happening.

The Manuel scandal really annoyed me because the radio 2 show he used to do with Matt Morgan, Mr G and Noel Gallagher was absolutely brilliant. The funny thing is if that had happened in Australia probably nothing would have happened as you can get away with pretty much anything on the radio here (swearing is allowed all day). In fact Russell even says they run TV and Radio over here like you would a farm or boot menders (watch the video with guest appearance by the Manly Ferry).

Russell Brand @ Enmore (previous night) – (C) Tea is Lovely – reproduced with permission

It was really good to see Russell again (after passing him walking out of a shop a few months ago) and really hope he comes back to Australia soon. Luckily there’s some more comedy coming our way -

Steve Coogan Live at the Enmore

Steve’s first tour to Australia and we got the tickets! Brilliant!

The night came and Amy and  I went to see Coldplay at the Acer Arena at Sydney Olympic Park, before we even left home we’d met the 3rd best golfer over the age of fifty in Australia who doubled as a NRMA battery replacer as the car battery was flat. The night before we’d had a massive lightening storm and I wondered if the car battery being flat might have been related to the lightening storm. Apparently it isn’t but I think the jury is still out as I’ve yet to find evidence stating otherwise.

When we got to Coldplay we parked on level 7 of the multi-storey car park which meant we’d probably have to wait ages to get out of the carpark after the gig.

The actual gig was fantastic, we had standing tickets which we bought off Hari for face price, we were very lucky to get them as the place was sold out and its a fairly big venue. They had lots of props, butterflies fell from the sky (paper ones) and during “yellow” big yellow balls bounced around the crowd.

Coldplay with the lights up

The amount of cameras and phone cameras taking photos was crazy! Lots of Gen-Y’ers I think. When we got back to the car this was in the parking space next to us -

Acer Arena Car Parked next to us

Not sure why it was there but it was pretty funny. I know over on the Coldplay blog they have little dolls that represent the band, maybe this was their ride.

]]> http://g2007.com/blog/gary/2009/03/16/was-a-long-and-dark-december/feed/ 0 http://g2007.com/blog/gary/2009/03/14/aimia-awards/ http://g2007.com/blog/gary/2009/03/14/aimia-awards/#comments Sat, 14 Mar 2009 11:49:10 +0000 gary http://g2007.com/blog/gary/?p=736 Last night Amy and I went to the AIMIA Awards at the Australian Technology Park that I was kindly invited to judge at. It was a good night with free booze flowing and little mini mexican food bowls, satay chicken and rice balls which was fantastic. The section I judged was won by the entry that I was hoping would win which was good news.

1984 won’t be like “1984″ stage setup

One of the highlights of the evening was finding out about Natalie Tran. She presented one of the awards and was introduced as having over 63 million views on YouTube and 150,000 subscribers which she didn’t seem to be that fussed about. Amy and I had never heard of her but we watched some of the videos she creates on YouTube and they are very funny. She starts off with an observation that she recreates using herself as all of the roles and then engages her fans based on comments they’ve left, I’ve embedded a recent video of hers called “to run or not to run” -

It was ashame I didn’t know who she was at the AIMIA awards as I think it would have been a fun person to meet.

Amy with the new Garden

I recently bought back a Yucca plant from the dead (the far left one, you can see it has one non-dead branch) and got so into it I ended up getting another one and then after I realised that it didn’t need much watering I got a much more demanding shrub (closest to camera) which requires watering twice a week. I’d love to get something which had fruit but our balcony doesn’t get much sun. I asked the guy at the garden center was he recommendation was and he said “move”. Amy has also got a new haircut which looks really nice don’t you think?

Anecdote: I once cooked dinner for Karine and Mark in London and used green pepper which I thought I’d try out before they arrived, anyway it ended up being so hot when they arrived I was still no where near ready to serve dinner and had yogurt all over my face to try and cool down the burning from the chilli on my mouth and lips.

This dinner party went off very smoothly even if we did cook the food 40 degrees hotter than we were supposed to, woops. I gave Marcus tomatoe sauce with ice cubes as a starter but he didn’t like them.

Marcus, Nancy, Lorraine and Amy enjoying Dinner

Afterwards “So You Think You Can Dance” was on television and it is necessary viewing for Amy and Lorraine so the girls sat around watching that whilst eating chocolates.

So You Think You Can Dance Required Viewing Plus Chocolates

That night I had a go at making melon cocktails based on the previous nights dinner at Rosie and Sean’s house where melon martini was the order of the day which was good fun and went down well!

You can see more of Keiths work at his Vimeo Page

Very Colourful Parcel

Inside was a nice little letter from Andrés and a DVD copy of Yami and Andrés’ trip over to Australia a couple of years ago now, it is funny because I was on my MySpace account, something I have not used for a while and for some reason, I think probably for a test, I uploaded the video there and watched it two nights ago reminiscing about those good times. So thank you Anhdres for sending the DVD version it is very nice!

The video is so good, if you have not seen it, here it is again in full technicolor -

Bondi Beach from our room

It was a surprise for Amy so we stayed on the beach front with a view over Bondi, when we arrived it was the hottest day of the year in Sydney at a blistering 42 degs. so we couldn’t really do much but lounge around, go in the pool and go into air conditioned boutique shops around Bondi. I wanted to have a look in the Aqua Bumps gallery but couldn’t find it. I later found it that night but then found out it was going to be closed on Sunday!

We went out in the evening for Thai at a place around the corner from us which was fantastic, mostly because the peanut sauce and other sauces were given in a jar so you could have as much as you want. The next day we went to Sun Cafe with Mike and Rach for breakfast and coffee, we then joined them for a swim at Icebergs, which is right on the water which was very nice. Mike swam 20 laps which was amazing. I did 2 but I was on holiday. We actually got sun burnt a bit at Icebergs not realising how strong the sun is even when there’s cloud cover.

Iceberg Dead Ahead

Rach and Mike recommended we hit “Rum Diaries” for dinner that evening, so we booked in. It is a tapas restaurant which was very funky. On the street outside there was a couple of couches with a real working old fashioned record player playing some tunes.

Amy and I at Rum Diaries

I had one of the best drinks ever called a “Hot Butter Rum” with their own reciepe that was absolutely fantastic, it tasted a bit like mince pies, it reminded me of Christmas despite it being 42 above.

A great holiday getaway weekend that proves there’s lots of things to see and do in very close proximity!

Anyway, to celebrate their marriage they held an Australian party for everyone on this side of the world. The venue was Artichoke in Manly in the up stairs bit which is a great venue to hire out.

Marcus and Nancy at their Australian Wedding Party

The dips were fantastic and there was a lot of friendly faces from all over the Sydney metropolitan area showed up -

Lorraine, Matt and Nancy

The decoration of the upstairs is very interesting, the walls are covered with famous paintings but with at least one character from the painting replaced with Mister Squiggle, lost of most non-Australians. In the picture above you can just about see Mister Squiggle looking away at the front of the boat.

Bobby and Tom

Marcus did a nice toast near the end of the night even though he had started to loose his voice partly from all of the shouting and partly probably from all the air miles covered in the recent month.

Amy and Me having a laugh

I was pleased for the occasion not only for Marcus and Nancy but also because Amy and I got to wear some new clothes that we got in the sales (I got some very good discounts at David Jones on Boxing Day, the only day of the year I actually shop for clothes now).

The Manor, Mosman

West Esplanade, Manly

The SCG

Kingsford Smith Airport – Boeing 747 and MD-11 (or 10)

Sydney Suburbs

Me with Bell 206L-3 LongRanger at Kingsford Smith Aerodrome

The 206L is a seven seater aircraft but there was six of us on the joy flight so everyone got a window seat. Two other people who went up flew in a helicopter that had no doors which would have been cool but you cannot take your camera on those flights in case you drop it. You have to wear a lifejacket for the flight, I thought a parachute would have been more convenient.

Having never been in a helicopter before it was a fantastic sensation taking off, helicopters don’t require a run up like planes so suddenly going from being on the ground to being up in the air is fantastic, plus the forward speed can be much slower in a plane so you get the sense of just floating in mid-air I really enjoyed it.

Australia vs. South Africa – 3rd Test at the Sydney Cricket Ground

After taking off from the airport and flying over a couple of parked 747s we flew over the SCG where a game was going on. The strange thing about flying in the helicopter was it reminded me of Flight Simular 2004 for the PC but with really good graphics.

Downtown Sydney

This is Fort Denison which sits in the middle of the harbour, it looks cool from the helicopter a bit like a Google Maps shot.

Fort Denison

We then header over to the Northern Beaches, stopping over Manly where I could see our flat. You can see how low lying the penisular of Manly is, I bet one day I do a blog post about how the Corso floods! The beach furthest to the right is Collins Flat, one of the finest beaches in the Harbour.

Manly with the Manly Ferry

The helicopter swang around and I got a great shot of Fairlight and our flat (three buildings to the left of the furthest right hand white building by the beach.

Fairlight and our Flat

It was a fantastic experience thanks to Amy, if you like these pictures then you can see all 313 photos at Flickr.

Sydney Skyline, Bridge and Opera House 1st Jan 2009

The party was fantastic and good to see some familiar faces as well as meet some new people, including a guy from Bruges which reminded me of the great film In Bruges.

When we left we were walking back into the city down Cathedral St. and I said to Amy how good would it be to see a cab come past now with its light on. Well 2009 started well for us because exactly that happened and the guy was happy to take us back to Manly and there wasn’t any traffic jams so it was fantastic!

Happy New Year to Everyone 2009.