Since the last post:

• 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

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

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

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

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

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

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]

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

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

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

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