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!!!!

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