Andrey's Blog

Its been done

2007-07-31T14:21:00.000+12:00

I am a proud owner of a Class 1 and Class 6 learner license. This allows me to ride one of these.

So not to waste any time I just got back from a dealer and put my deposit on a brand new one. Delivery expected on the 20th of August.
Just about the only people who don't know about this are my parents. Lets keep it this way until they are back from their holiday in Europe. I will surprise them when they are back, probably by riding the bike to their house and parking it outside :)

This week I'll be doing some more practice riding on rental bikes (free from the dealer) as this is quite a big step from a tiny little 100cc bike I did my learners test on. Yeah ok its only a 250cc but it has a full size body (similar to a 600cc) and its almost as heavy (about 160kg dry).

Overall the motorcycle dealer (TSS Motorcycles in Lower Hutt) have the best sales people I have ever talked to in any industry almost to the point where I thought they are crazy to offer me all the stuff they did.

This is how it went. I showed to the dealership in the morning, 24 hours after getting my learners, so thats the total of 4 hours riding experience, none of which was on public roads. First thing i was offered a coffee. After showing me the range of their 250cc bikes (250 is the limit on learners and restricted) the guy asked me if I wanted to test ride any of them. I was like, err no thanks I dont think I will get far on one of them for now. So he offered me to take any of their older rentals for a test ride. I dont think a car dealer would ever offer a learner test drive of their brand spanking new cars.

Once we started talking about the price it was even better. These guys already have the cheapest price in wellington, on top of that you get a nice discount on all the gear. This is pretty standard. Whats not standard is that the gear discount if for life. Once I get the bike from them I will always get a discount on all gear from them and all service done to the bike. If there is something wrong with the bike and it needs work done, they will come to you, pick up the bike and give you a free rental while your bike is being fixed, again free.

On top of all that I get to use their rentals until I get my bike for practice so I feel a little more confident riding away on a brand new bike when I get it.

Now I don't know anyone who bought a brand new car from a dealership, but somehow I doubt you get same kind of deals.

So yeah, for the last couple of weeks thats pretty much all I've been thinking about. This scary thing is I would have to take the bike on the motorway on the first ride to get it to Wellington. Should be fun!!

In a few weeks...

2007-07-04T13:08:00.000+12:00

... I am about to do something that will dramatically increase my insurance fees and decrease my life expectancy. I will be a big danger to myself and everyone around me :) Who can guess what I'm doing?

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

2007-05-02T10:56:00.000+12:00

Enough said

T-Shirt Photoshoot

2007-03-02T13:59:00.000+13:00

Last Sunday Ksenia asked me to do a small photo shoot for her company, so I guess this is my first "Professional" photo shoot :). Actually the pictures were supposed to look amature. Amature is my specialty :). The T-Shirt designs are the reason for the photos by the way.

It was tons of fun. I had four models at my disposal: two Swedes, a Russian and a Brit. Not bad eh?

Well 2 hours and 500 shots later I thought I had some decent looking shots. Check them out on Flickr

Photos from holiday in Nelson

2007-03-02T10:14:00.000+13:00

Finally, I got some photos uploaded. This was probably the best holiday I've had in my life.

The first order of business was to get a pair of kayaks and dress up in skirts :)

After that we had about 30 minutes of basic training on how to control a kayak. Pretty straight forward. They are a lot more stable then people think. At one stage I was leaning as far sideways as I could and the kayak didnt tip over. The only time we would be in danger or tipping would be if a wave hit us broadside.

Abel Tazman has some of the most beautiful beaches I've seen in New Zealand. They are also pretty empty because you cant get to them by car, only on foot or by sea.

I've had more fun with my wide angle lens. Kim grew at least 20cm :)

This is what the weather was like for the whole trip. What can I say - Perfect

These shots were taken close to midnight. The light is actually from the moon. Southern Cross and Orion - the only constellations I can recognize in southern hemisphere.

What a view, no clue why I ever left that place :)

On the way back to Nelson we stopped by this place. There was a small track around it. Walking didn't sound that bad after 2 days of sitting on your ass in a kayak.

Next we were on our way to get PG1 Paragliding license. Kim and Rickard had a head start on their previous trip so I had to catch up on the first day. Its not as fun doing it on a flat field, so much more work :)

The instructors were very nice people. They always invited us over to their place for a drink after a day of flying. They also gave us a ride everywhere, including the beach during the day (we would normally fly mornings and evenings).

Tui ad?

Later we did some more flying of a steeper hill.

I'll see if I can get more photos uploaded to Flickr. Check back here to see more photos.

Wellington Carnival

2007-02-28T11:45:00.000+13:00

Just thought I'd post some photos from the wellington carnival last weekend.

There were lots of floats on display during the night, but I didn't get that many shots that were any good.

Rickard and I took a ride on this vomit machine. I've been on a much bigger one when I was a kid and I didn't feel sick at all, but on this one I could sense that another minute or two on the ride would make me sick.

These guys just thought they'd enjoy the parade from the comfort of their sofas.

This is definitely something I didn't expect to see in Wellington. Apparently it takes hours to put the paint on, so good on them for making the extra effort.

Yay, I'm finally on South Island

2007-02-06T17:36:00.000+13:00

I've been in NZ for over 11 years now and this is my first ever trip to the south island. The weather has been awesome so far. We just finished our 2 day kayak trip and got back into Nelson. Cant upload any pictures yet but there are some awesome shots on my camera. Every beach we've been on was amazing, and every next beach was better then the previous. Today we were supposed to take a day of rest but instead we are going to start our paragliding lessons early so I'm sitting in a nelson hostel, waiting to be picked up any time now.
Gonna write some more stuff later, but thats it for now. Laters.

Testing Out My New Toy

2007-01-29T23:28:00.000+13:00

I finally got myself a wide angle lens for my DSLR. Its a Canon 10-22mm EF-S USM, which makes it about 16-35mm on my 350D. I was actually amazed just how wide that is.

It was a pretty nice day so Rickard and I decided to go around town and see if we could get some nice shots. The Majestic Center was always one of my favorite buildings in Wellington so I wasn't going to miss this opportunity.

I liked this photo so much I'm getting my ATM card printed from it. Check it out here and make sure you vote :)

Then was a quick stop at Te Papa (by the way I've lived in Wellington for over 11 years and this was my first time in Te Papa). I took more shots in Te Papa but more on that later.

I have no clue what this is, but the colors were nice :)

The next location was Victoria University. Man what a hike to get there, cant believe I used to walk there every day for four years.

This is the view from the top, just to show how wide the lens is. Its two shots, one at 10mm and one at 22 stitched together.

Here we have the Hunter Building. Its the oldest building in the University if I'm not mistaken.

And here is The Quad. This is where all the cool people hang out between classes. Of course I studied CompSci, so I didn't hang out here :)

This is where I thought our trip would end. We were going to a party later that evening. Around 3am after consuming some alcohol we decided to leave and guess what - go around the city taking more photos :) On a side note - Absinthe and Red bull are never to be mixed in a drink.

So back to Majestic we went.

Night photography is great. 10 second+ exposure are pretty common and a tripod is a must.

Civic Square. Didn't really like this shot, I think I can do much better next time especially with some tricks I learned in Photoshop.

Part of Wellington Waterfront

A crane barge. Not photoshopped at all, thats exactly what the sky looked like. And thats only a few minutes after the previous shots where the sky looks clear. Only Wellington can do this.

This was pretty much it for the most part. I've also been learning about HDR imaging. This involves taking multiple exposures of the same scene and then combining the images to produce an image with high range of black levels and highlights. This is usually impossible with a single exposure as you are always likely to end up with either some washed out whites or too much black. Think of taking a shot of a room with a large window on a sunny day. Its pretty hard to take a shot that will have both the insides of the room as well as the view out of the window.
The way to solve this is by taking multiple shots each exposed for different levels of brightness. So you'd take one shot that is exposed correctly for the view out the window, one for the main part of the room and one the dark corners of the room.
Photoshop CS3 has a nifty feature to automate this process for you, but it is doable manually too.

For my first two tries I did exactly what every tutorial tells you to do. Find a bright window.

Doesn't look too natural but not bad for first try.

Stained glass windows are also a classic example of when HDR photography really helps.

I'm slowly getting better. This shot was hard, the brightly lit up statue makes very hard shadows.

I don't doubt that I can take great shots, its my photoshop skills that let me down most of the time. So Rickard photoshopped this one.

This is it for now. Next week I'm taking the whole week off work and going to South Island - another first for me. The plan is Kayaking, Paragliding and taking lots of photos.

Just Photos

2007-01-29T22:16:00.000+13:00

These are just some fireworks photos that I wanted to post ages ago but never got to it. Enjoy.

My lookalike

2007-01-25T16:25:00.000+13:00

Obviously I look nothing like these people, but its nice that the computer thinks I look like Sarah Michelle Gellar

I know what you did last summer...

2007-01-09T15:53:00.000+13:00

For most this summer holiday was time to get away from home. For me it was time to get to my geek roots :)

My home network needed a major overhaul and I couldn't think about a better time to do it then xmass break. The main idea was to rebuild the storage servers that hold all my ~~legal Linux isos~~ stuff. The dual one terrabyte servers I had were clearly not enough any more. They were too slow, too hot, too noisy, too power hungry. The solution was to create a single server with more storage, less individual drives. So I went shopping. I already had lots of parts I could re-use from old machines. All I needed were the new drives and the RAID controller to suit my requirements.

My fist requirement was that I needed over 2TB of redundant storage. I was shooting for around 3TB of total storage. After doing some basic maths on price/gigabyte I settled on 8x400GB drives and a 8 port RAID5 SATA controller. This would give me just over 2.5TB of redundant storage. The rest could be made up of non redundant drives as more space is required.

The second requirement was - the server had to have the grunt to stream HD Video content over the network to my media center and other PCs on the network. So this time I couldn't settle on some budget PCI RAID Controller. After reading lots of reviews I had to go up market a little and get a PCIex4 card as well as find a decent PCIe based motherboard. At first I was planning on getting a proper server motherboard as standard boards usually lack PCIex4 slots but then I spotted this. To my surprise this board from DFI featured a full speed x4 port and was a fraction of the price I would pay for a proper server board. So I grabbed one. I already had a spare Athlon 64 3700+, some RAM, videocard and a couple of 10,000RPM SATA drives to use as a system drive.

The last requirement was to make the system as quiet as possible while still making sure nothing overheats (constant problem with the old servers). I've already ended up with less then half of the drives I used to have in the old servers so that would make it quite a bit quieter and save some power too.
Now efficiently cooling this system was always going to be a problem. I wanted to use as many large, low RPM fans as possible (fast smaller fans make more noise for little effect). I settled for 2x120mm intake fans, 3x80mm exaust fans and a 120mm cpu fan on top of a heatpipe based cooler.

So here is my final solution in all its glory. Well sorta, some assembly was still required. This is where all the problems began.

Firstly, the CPU cooler ended up being way too massive to fit inside my server case so I had to revert back to standard cooling and a smaller 80mm fan. Second and by far the worst - while disassembling the old server (while it was still running) I miscalculated exactly how many screws were holding the had drive cage to the actual case and accidentally removed the last screw. This was a bad idea because it sent two hard drives into a 1/2 a meter freefall to the floor. Upon impact one of the drives died instantly while the other one suffered some mortal wounds. In other words it refused to spin up properly giving out lots of clicking and crunching sounds as it tried. This was a problem. Both drives were part of the same RAID5 array so loosing one drive wasn't a problem but I couldn't lose both as that would lose all the data on the array. Now I donut know where from, but I knew a simple trick that had a chance of bringing my drive back to life for a short amount of time. A shot of adrenaline so to speak to give the drive just that little strength if only even for a
short time (hopefully long enough to copy all the data off the array). The trick involves deep freezing the drive. No "Deep Freezing" is not some technical geeky term for anything. You take a drive, wrap it in some plastic non static bag and chuck it into a freezer over night. I have never tried this before in my life, but I heard and read lots of success stories about this method and I was willing to try it. So I present to you exibit A.

While the injured drive was chilling it was time for me build the new server. Whenever building a new machine I always prefer to lay out all the parts on a desk/floor and connect them all right there and not inside a case. This allows for much better access to all parts in case I need to move things around.

This was a great idea this time as I kept hitting more problems. The original plan was to run two 10,000 rpm drives in RAID1 of the motherboard onboard controller as a system drive and 8x400 off the PCIe card. So I plugged it all in, defined all the arrays, popped in the OS CD, started the install, popped in the RAID driver floppy. Everything was going smoothly until the first reboot. BAM! "Windows could not read from the boot disk" error. I was kinda surprised as it had no problem detecting the RAID0 array during the install process. I double checked I was giving it the right RAID driver floppy, all the cables, everything. Tried the process a couple more times - same result. At this stage any respectable tech will tell you - to find the cause of the problem strip the pc down to most basic parts and try the process again, add one extra part, repeat until the problem occurs. So it begins - installing windows over and over again is probably the most boring thing you can imagine but I had to do it.

First try: no PCIe card, single sata system drive - works fine
Second try: no PCIe card, RAID0 system drive - works fine to my surprise. Finished windows install. Hmm.. I thought. It must be the raid card. So I popped that in connected all the drives and, again, to my amazement it booted fine. Something was missing but I just couldn't put my finger on it. I thought I'd just go on with the rest of the process and see where I get. Rebooted and defined the array on the raid card, rebooted again - BAM! same error. Rebooted, deleted the array - no error. Defined array again - error. WTF! I thought. I tried several other combinations and eventually came up with another combination that worked - single system drive with PCIe card having an array defined. There seemed to be some sort of problem with having 2 arrays defined while booting of the first one. I didn't know why and at this stage I didnt care so I just went with this setup. Finished the windows install, drivers, patches, everything. I felt like I had done enough for a day. The next day was going to be the real test to see if the injured drive would spring back to life.

The next day I woke up sometime in the afternoon and got straight back into it. Ran down the the fridge to see how the injured drive was doing. Did a stupid thing by taking the drive out of the bag with bare hands (cold metal object tend to stick to your skin). Plugged it back in the old server and to my amazement the drive spun up. It was still making random clicking noises depending on which side it was sitting on. After playing with it for a while I found a position where it seemed to have the least clicks.

It was still not healthy as it was reading really slow, but it was reading!! Started copying everything. Estimated time - 8 hours :( So I met up with some friends, played some pool, you know, all the boring stuff :) Had another friend over for drinks. Ksenia was even nice enough to bring me dinner (If you are reading this, thanks, you are the best).

By the next morning all the data was copied, including all the other arrays of the old servers. In fact the rest of the process went without a glitch. I got everything finished before the 30th which is when I planned to go visit my family for new years. As always, they had lots of other Russians over for the celebrations. Lots of food and drink had been consumed. Got back on the 2nd and decided to clean up the flat and get rid of lots of useless junk from my room. Managed to fill 4 large boxes of stuff I didn't need any more just from my room.

Now I'm back at work still not realizing just how another year has passed by. Happy new year everyone, hope you had as much fun as I did during your break :)

Oh I also promise I will make another post with some more pics of what happened to me between this time and my last post (I know I slacked and didn't update my blog)

Since the last post:

2006-08-29T13:11:00.000+12:00

The world has lost a planet. I think the whole thing went something like this

I've grown a year older (not any wiser though)

I've been spending a lot of time snow boarding. If I keep going like this I'll probably be buying my own gear next season. Lets hope I'll get more use out of it then my paintball gear.

Other then that, life's good, work is boring - universe is in balance :) The days are running past way too fast though. It seems like I only have time to work/eat/sleep, at least during the weekdays. I'm going to break the cycle today by going to the movies. Thank You for Smoking is the movie of choice. Hope its as good as the trailer was.

Got news of another person from my college year getting married. Its so depressing - no not for me, for them. 25 is just too young.

Thats all for now, hoping to keep this updated more often then just once a month. we'll see how that turns out.

Snow, beautiful snow

2006-08-04T23:11:00.000+12:00

Finally got to go snowboarding last weekend. Saturday weather was amazing but the lifts were quite full, sunday was very windy and cold but a lot less people. Unfortunately it got too windy and cold so the lifts got closed. Still had two or three hours of boarding.
I was quite happy that I still remembered how to stand up on a snowboard. This is only my 4th trip to the mountian and the last one was almost a year ago. Still having troubles with my heel turns :( and keep forgetting to use my front foot to turn but I'm learnign quick.
On the subject of quick learners - Kim was trying skiing for the first time. She must be the only sweede who doenst ski or board, but she was picking it up pretty fast. We accidently managed to take her on a blue run instead of a green one and for a while she didnt look too happy. Sorry Kim, hopefully we didnt scare you away from skiing for the rest of your life.
I managed to do a black run a few times. It wasnt any more dangerous, just quite a bit more steap. Had to take my time getting down but it was still a bit of a challenge.
All in all great weekend, cant wait till next trip.
Picture left to right is:
Aimee, myself, Chris (bottom), Kim, Rickard
Photo taken by unknown girl on a snowboard :)

In other news - Kim's laptop has been misbehaving this week. It would randomly power off after booting off a CD. Did some testing and my thought was thats its an overheating issue. Both of our brains combined could not figure out how to take apart the laptop to get to the heatsink/fan and see whats wrong. So plan B was put to action. A vacuum cleaner provided more then enough cooling for the laptop to stay stable, but it would power off 2 minutes after the vacuum cleaner was turned off. At least we got the cause of the problem sorted, now just need to find a better solution :)

Last but not least I am proud to announce that I know one famous person now :) In fact I'm flatting with him. Its a long story so I'll let mr famous himself tell it. HINT: Click the link.

Found a new addicton

2006-07-20T13:18:00.000+12:00

For the past 2 weeks I've been pretty sick and the weather outside was crap so I decided to get back to some online gaming. Signed up for a trial Eve account. Its a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG). I've been slowly getting addicted to the game since. It brought memories of an old game I used to play - Earth and Beyond. Thats the game that got me through first 2 years of uni. For those who dont know, MMORPG games are based on a shared world (galaxy in this case) where all the players live. And they are not called massive for no reason. Eve resently set the most concurrent users record at just over 25,000. The great thing about the game is that you are free to do whatever you want. There are no set missions or any specific path you have to take. Total freedom. You can sit on your arse all day long talking to all the other players while your factories are making your cash. You can trade, manufacture, research without even moving around or you can go out in the big big world looking for greener pastures, figting pirates on the way (or joining them). You can solo or find a bunch of likeminded players.
The game is a huge timesink - hours pass without notice. Great for these rainy winters when you dont want to go anywhere outside. Hopefully I will still find something better to do on the weekends like snowboarding (the plan is to go up the mountain as often as possible). Hopefully going next weekend, might even get some pictures back from the mountain. Unfortnately I'm not confident enough yet to take a camera with me all the way up the mountain, but we'll see.

Laters

I've been pretty lazy lately

2006-07-06T10:06:00.000+12:00

It must be the weather but in the last couple of weeks its been very hard to get my arse off the couch. I've also been sick on and off which is quite unusual. Here is an update anyway, no pictures though - lazy.
Ahmed has left for greaner pastures. Quite literally the grass is known to be greaner over in switzerland. All the best of luck to him.
My friend Rachel came back from a long trip around Europe. Made me feel quite jealous when she started showing all the pictures. One day... I'll make it all the way to Europe too.
Got back on a mountain bike - first time in years. Had a huge bike accident when I was 17, pretty much gave it up since. Still feels good though, maybe one day I'll get back into it.
Watched the world cup a bit. I picked Germany vs Brazil final when the whole thing started, I guess I was wrong. Seems like France will take it this time.
Work is so so, nothing major happening really. Train people are on strike so there are no trains to work. Have to catch the bus which is not that bad, just twice as expensive.
Like I said no photos this time, my camera has not left my bag. Instead have a look at this video. For those who dont know - I'm a pretty big F1 fan. People say F1 is boring and I have to agree. These days its getting more and more boring. This is what it used to be like.

Gilles Villeneuve against René Arnoux

Pistol Shooting

2006-06-04T16:06:00.000+12:00

25 meters didnt sound that far...	Wow today was fun. Kim, Rickard, Ahmed and I tried pistol shooting at a club not far away from where we live. Rickard and Ahmed went first and they took their time. It looked like they were having a discussion with the instructor after every 5 shots. But eventually it was our turn. We got to shoot some semi-auto .22 calibre pistols, 50 rounds each, 25 meters away from the target. My only wish for the day was not to be humiliated by Kim who has quite a bit more experience with target shooting then me. After the first 10 rounds or so Kim was comfortably in the lead with a nice grouping around the centre while I kept hitting just below the centre. AND THEN we swaped the guns. The other gun was so much lighter. It makes a lot of difference just because your hand doesnt get tired as quickly. Finally I was getting some nice groupings in around the centre. In the end our instructor was kind enough to let us fire one of his guns. A .45 revolver. Boy oh boy that thing had a nice kick even though he said something about only using 1/2 power bullets. Managed to get an 8 on the first shot :) Overall a great way to spend a day considering the miserable weather outside.
She kept pointing the gun at the target but we all know who she really wanted to shoot :)
You can use your thumbs to feel what way the wind is blowing, to adjust your shot
She was saying just how good of a shooter I am :)
.22 lead, I also got to fire a copper, high velocity bullet
Not too bad for a first timer
I think Rickard managed to chew through his target ...
... but they gave him a new one
Yay for Wellingotn weather
Just playing with depth of field

Yeah I know it was long overdue

2006-06-02T09:50:00.000+12:00

Not many things have happened since my last post. Our soccer team has made it into the semis even though we didnt pay the club fee :) The rules are that if you pay the club fee you get 10 more points for the season. This almost certainly means that the teams who dont pay dont make it to the top 4 as there are only 9 games in the season and its quite hard to make up 10 points. We just managed to squeeze in the 4th place by winning the last game (11:6) and having some the right teams loose on the day. Unfortunately this means we now have to play the top team in the semis. They have not lost a single game this season including annihilating our team 14:3 Maybe we should have paid on time then we would have been 2nd on the table and had a much easier semi.

Watched some movies this week
Poseidon
The Producers
Munich

None of them really exited me that much, but they went bad either. I'd give them all 5/10

Long weekend coming up, hopefully something to write about.

Bad week

2006-05-17T11:51:00.000+12:00

It all started yesterday when I missed my morning train to work. Eventually I made it to work around 10.30 knowing that I will have to take a long lunch so I can go sort out some of the bank stuff. When I got to the bank, I spend an hour waiting in the queue just to get an EFTPOS card made for me. So that was most of the day gone. I knew I only really had to do one thing at work - fix a bug in one of the applications and release the update. Easy right? Sure it is as long as you dont do it in a rush. I've managed to fix the bug, test it and release the update. All the clients picked up the update automatically. I thought my day was done. HA! 10 minutes later calls were starting to get through about the app not working, basically crashing on start. It was weird because I've also installed the update and so did lots of other people in out company. It worked fine for them but not for people outside the company. After talking to one of the clients for a good half an hour and getting them to install and re-install the app I basically gave up making up some excuses on why its not working. As soon as I hung up the phone I had the stangest feeling that I knew what was causing the problem. It was such a newbie mistake - I've managed to release a development version of the application instead of the live one. The only difference between the two is that the live connects to the server via a remoting object (like a web service) and the development version connects directly to the server. But the server is not directly accessible from outside the company LAN, hense only the people outside noticed any difference. So I thought - Easy, I'll just release another update with the right configuration file so it connects where its supposed to. What I forgot is that the people affected cant run their applications to get that update.... I only realised that around 11pm that night. Sigh.

Today was a case of deja vu. I sleep in too long (ok thats not that bad) and missed the early train again. Finally released the update to the clients. It was time to do some more development. Unfortunatly my workstation didn't agree. SQL Enterprise Manager refused to start up. It looks like i will spend the whole day today trying to fix that and in the worst case - backing up all the files so I can re-image the workstation.

All I know is that I will look both ways before crossing roads today, if this week keeps following this trend I will most likely end up in the hospital by friday - or worse.

"Television - Teacher, Mother... Secret lover" [Homer Simpson]

2006-05-02T17:18:00.000+12:00

Finally after a month of waiting my TV is finally here. Now my life is complete. It got delivered to my work just after lunch - no work has been done since.

In other news:
Apartment now has an internet connection so there is lots of new movies and episodes waiting to be watched.
I tried 2 new sports in the past week - bowling and squash. Bowling was awesome. I was told the speed of the ball wasnt very important but i tried a couple of really fast ones to see what happens. Some of them went over 30km/h
Squash is fun too, already got myself a racket and a club membership. Impulse buying is great.

First Post

2006-04-20T14:34:00.000+12:00

OK, I've decided to make a genuine attempt at starting up a blog, so this is officially my first post. I’ll try to keep it short.

This is something new for me – my own little piece of the web. The priority for the next few days is to post some pictures from stuff that happened before this date (to make an illusion that my life didn’t just begin today). The next thing will be to play with the layout of the site, it’s a bit messy right now. The last, and probably the hardest goal would be to do regular posts to keep the site alive.

On a different note, things I’m looking forward to in the next few days:

Finally getting internet hooked up in the new flat, its been 2 weeks without the net and I don’t think I can handle another one.

My brand spanking new shiny 42” Plasma is coming next week – movie night every night

That’s all for now folks, time to go grab another coke to keep me going through the rest of the day.

2HOT2 HANDLE

2006-04-09T15:13:00.000+12:00

This must be the main reason I went to this show. Ferrari Enzo

Well, ok there might have been another reason...

Wow, amazing, absolutely everything on this car was custom painted

Another great paintjob. ...And those girls are back, its almost as I've been following them :)

I'd love to try parallel park this thing

The drags are about to start

This guy definetly had enough sponsors

Toyota Racing Series car, this is as close to F1 as New Zealand will ever get

Europe: 1, USA: 0

I always loved bikes, too bad I'm 192cm and have to be folded in half to ever fit onto one of these

Rocket car. I knew it was going to be loud but I had no idea just how loud. Car alarms were going off hundreds of meters away, you could feel the shockwaves in the air and in the concrete. I took my eye of it for a sec, the next time I saw it it was half way to the finish line.

Vodafone X-Air

2006-01-22T22:45:00.000+13:00

Crazzzyyy...

Dunno why but I just like this picture

Those guys were pretty lucky not to hit each other

And, of course, the main attraction - the bikini competition. This is where I really wish I had one of those 400mm Canon Lenses

King Kong Parade Comes to Town

2005-12-14T15:39:00.000+13:00

Mr Jackson

... and that guy...

I always get mistaken for a celebrity

Fireworks!!!

2005-11-05T13:58:00.000+13:00

My first snowboarding trip

2005-09-10T18:39:00.000+12:00

This is pretty much as far as I dared to take my camera. Maybe next time I'll actually take it up the mountain.. when I dont have to fall down on my arse every 20 meters.

mmmm... white stuff

Mt Mordor from Lord of The Rings