Search Terms…
WordPress is nice enough to provide some stats on how people have landed on my blog. This includes a list of search terms that have been used in Search Engines which have resulted as my blog being one of the search results. Most of the search terms are car related queries due to this post.
There were also quite a few about twitter and random followers. However, the funniest by far:
meerkats playing badminton
Ha!
London calling…
Its Monday night and I’m already writing a blog post about what we did on the weekend. Efficient! Maz and I spent a busy couple of days in London after scoring some bargain tickets due to a sale online. £3 each way ($6 AUD) which is awesome!
We got up nice and early (that’s 7am for us) on Saturday and headed to the train station for a 1 hour ride into the city. Once we arrived we navigated The Underground no troubles to arrive at the stop nearest our hotel. Stepping out onto the street we were greeted with this:
I didn’t realise at the time but the variety of modern buildings scattered about ancient masterpieces turned out to be one of the things I liked most about London. Using the underground to pop up around various places with London you’re constantly treated with a mix of modern and historic architecture. It results in a fairly unique feel for an Australian, a relatively young country in comparison!
Once we’d dropped our bags off at the hotel we popped back down to The Underground, heading for Leicester Square in an attempt to locate some nice cheap theatre tickets for the evening. We seemed to be able to navigate The Underground without many problems but what struck me was the craziness of the stairs, tunnels, escalators and ramps that you walk around when changing lines and locating your train platforms. Here’s a bad example, but I like the photo anyhow:
Here’s a photo of Maz in da Undeground:
Once we made it to Leicester Square we were presented with a ridiculous amount of outlets promising cheap theatre tickets but on Maz’s dad’s advice we headed for the centre of the square where the official cheap ticket booth was located. We’d previously decided that the musical we both wanted to see the most was Wicked however there were no tickets available! We looked at what was on offer, decided upon Peter Pan and joined the silly long queue:
Whilst we were in line an elderly gentleman wandered past claiming that he had tickets for sale for a few different musical, including Wicked! Given how much we wanted to see it we foolishly made a snap decision, asked him where the seats were, and purchased some tickets. After we had handed over the money we quickly checked the theatre map to figure out where we had to go, and then walked off.
After about 5 minutes we both realised that we may have just made a huge mistake. We didn’t ask the guy any details about where he got the tickets from, or for any details at all really! We spent the rest of the day wondering if we were even going to get into the theatre!
After that we took a wander to Trafalgar Square. Last time we visited there was some restoration and construction work going on but this time everything was looking good! Amazingly popular with the tourists too. No surprise but there were people everywhere!
From Trafalgar Square we jumped back on The Underground and headed out to Camden Markets. This was a recommendation from someone we met at Frisbee and it didn’t disappoint. Crazily busy but really good shopping. Bit of a hippy vibe but if you ever need a tattoo or a piercing there were plenty of places on offer here! The shops were pretty decent from the outside as well. We didn’t get to see all of it but spent a few hours here, got some dodgy KFC for lunch and then headed back into London central.
For some reason The Underground was going a bit nuts in the afternoon. It was getting really hot and was fairly icky to be honest! Crowded much:
We spent the afternoon on Oxford Street where I spent way too much money and Maz didn’t find anything to buy 
That evening we made our way to the Theatre a bit early in an attempt to get there early and avoid the crowds. We sat down at a restaurant for dinner, realised we didn’t have time, got Subway and headed off to the Theatre. Once we arrived at where the Theatre was supposed to be we realised that something wasn’t right. A quick look at our tickets and a check on the ol iPhone and we realised we were in completely the wrong place and the actual theatre was across town!
After a couple of horrifying seconds we got our heads together, found where we needed to go, jumped on a train then into a taxi and made it there in time after 20 minutes of stress! Luckily we’d gone nice and early in the first place! We managed to get into the Theatre fine and as expected, the show was excellent 
The next day we decided to check out Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre as it was nice and close to our hotel. Was a decent tour and an interesting place (even though its not the real one). It was hard to take good photos in there!
After the tour we wandered back into town via the Millennium Bridge (from Harry Potter omg!). For some reason there were loads of jets flying around:
After that we scooted back into town for some more shopping before heading back to Brighton. The train ride went really really quickly as seemingly I fell asleep! As the weather was so awesome that evening we decided to go for a wander around the Marina. It was quite a trek but it was really mild and sweet to be outside in the evening without being completely frozen! Going to be tough to go home after living here for a while:
Next weekend – Sheffield!
Southampton Sojourn…
After a busy week of work Maz and I jetted off to Southampton for the past weekend. We stayed with Stu and Shani whom I met when I was on a contiki tour in New Zealand. They treated us to a fine Southampton weekend with a variety of lovely foods and beverages and also some decent Southampton touristy experiences.
On the Friday night after a long boring train ride we went out for a few drinks then to the most amazing purple Indian restaurant I’ve ever seen. Everything was purple including the custom made carpet and pointy shoes of the guy on the door. We ended up eating at about 10pm before heading out to see the residence of Stu and Shani.
The next day we went to Portsmouth to visit some famous ships. We went on a couple and also saw the hull of a ship that was dredged up from the bottom of the sea a number of years ago. First we went onto, and inside the Warrior:
Portsmouth Harbour
There were about 30 of these, all for running the engine.
We visited another ship and a museum before heading to the pub for some drinks and then out for Italian. The next day we decided to go for a jaunt in the forest with the intention of riding some bikes around. We got stuck in traffic for about an hour and then found out that the bikes were stupidly expensive so we headed off to the pub for lunch.
Some horses laying around in the forest…
Maz and Shani Feeding Horses…
Yorkshire pudding…aww yeah…
Now we’re back at work and tonight we decided to cook a joint dinner and declare it Pimms’o'clock! Time to eat!
Jess preparing the Pimms…
I know I said we were busy…
Well we’re still flat out! Tuesday night we rushed off after work to play some Ultimate with the Brighton frisbee community. Their website was a little misleading so we had to wait around for around 1.5 hours until the games started but aside from that it was awesome. The people were all really friendly and it was a super casual, but fun, game.
I was reminded of Hobart Ultimate about 2 years ago whereby there was a huge amount of beginners and inexperience coupled with some really good intense players that liked to huck between themselves. Maz was assigned to one of the four teams and Col and I to another. We all won the games we played in, which means our team is playing Maz’s team in the finals next week! Regular frisbee bbq to follow – should be sweet.
Last night (Wednesday) we had a work dinner. We have a lot of staff in the UK who work remotely from the office but this week they are all in Brighton for training. We went out for Thai and it was really yummy Tonight we were going to play virtual golf but it fell through as the place shut at 9pm.
Tomorrow we’re heading off to Southampton for the weekend to spend some time with Stu and Shani, friends I met in NZ. The train tickets were pretty expensive at $80 but we made up for it with return tickets to London for the weekend after for $24! Super cheap!
We’re now trying to figure out the best way to get to Sheffield on the long weekend to see some of Maz’s family. The train tickets are quite expensive and its cheaper to hire a car… but its a 4 hour drive! Not sure what to do ..
Anyhow – should be some new pics in place after our weekend in Southampton.
Feeling rather English…
After a busy few days and work Maz and I are now half way through our first weekend in Brighton. Its been great so far! After introducing our UK office to the concept of Friday afternoon beers we then headed down to Brighton beach for some fish’n'chips. Maz also got a side order of Mushy Peas to fully Englishify the experience. It was a beautiful summer sunset on the beach and a perfect evening to wander around for a while before heading home.
On our way home we attempted to pick up some beers to sample with our dinner but unfortunately we couldn’t find any that were cold to buy! Whilst they sell alcohol in the supermarket, its just on the shelf not in the fridge! We couldn’t find a bottle-o around here either so we ended up lining some brews in the fridge to try the next day!
On Saturday (today) we ventured out of Brighton for about an hour on the train. Our destination was the village of Arundel which has an awesome castle! Unfortunately we weren’t allowed to take any photos inside but we got plenty of snaps outside. It was sweet to wander around the village/town and it was once again beautiful weather.
Tomorrow we’re planning on spending the day in Brighton. Our next few weekends are already booked up so it will be good to just spend some time in the city we’re living in. We have a few memorable shops that we visited last time we were here that we’re keen to visit again so overall it should be a fairly relaxing day.
Anyhow – I’ve uploaded some photos to facebook of what we’ve been up to so far. You can see the album here:
These photos will all make it onto Picasa at some stage but for now this was the easiest way to share them!
Early Impressions…
Given that my last post was probably rather boring, here’s a summary of my impressions of Brighton:
Likes
- Nice warm weather. Its so nice to wear shorts n tshirt after being in the middle of a Hobart winter
- Huge variety of people out and about
- English accents everywhere
- Crazy little streets full of English houses
- Dr Pepper readily available (although I’ve yet to buy one)
- Our little apartment, its fun living with some other people again.
Dislikes
- Impatient angry bus drivers
- Relying on public transport
- Not having a bike (I really want to ride to work)
- The surprising cost of travelling anywhere outside of Brighton by train
Overall its really good! I’d like to source a bike so I can ride to work (its faster, cheaper and more fun!) but I’d feel bad if Maz couldn’t get one as well. We should be getting out of the city a bit more over the weekends and I’m definitely going to have to start carrying my camera around more often. I’m keen to sample a few European beers as well
Busy in Brighton…
Well here we are in Brighton! Maz and I arrived here very early Tuesday morning (5:00AM!) and have been busy ever since!
We started off by jetting from Hobart to Melbourne. We had a few hours to kill there before getting on our first major flight to Kuala Lumpur. This was a 7 hour flight which was pretty uneventful. By the time we landed we were both really tired but had managed to stay awake in an attempt to make sure we slept on our next flight.
Despite our tiredness we were very happy to be off the plane and walking around. We were also quite impressed with the KL airport. We definitely felt like we were in an established Asian city and we both felt like we really wanted to stay there for a while to explore! Luckily we have more than a 2 hour stopover on the way home.
After some confusion with timezones and my watch we realised we had about 2.5 hours in KL however we were too tired to really do anything. I started feeling quite sick and was desperate to get on the flight so I could get some sleep. Eventually we got onto our next plane for a 13 hour flight across to London. Turns out I was quite sick so didn’t really enjoy the first hour or so of the flight but once I got over that we both fell asleep and stayed that way (well, as well as you can stay asleep whilst sitting up on a plane) for about 8 hours.
Once we landed at Heathrow we decided that we’d head into London city and catch some sites before heading to Brighton. It was 8:00am in the morning after all. We both felt pretty jetlagged but the opportunity was too good to miss. Unfortunately we soon discovered that it would cost a fortune to store our bags somewhere so we couldn’t really do a lot. We did manage to cruise around between some train stations a bit before heading to Brighton.
Once we arrived Brighton we made our way to our apartment. Its quite small but surprisingly nice and has everything we need. Minor drawback is that our bathroom doesn’t have a shower, but just a bath with an extendy nozzle type thing. Its not ideal but does the job – I’d hate to have to use it in winter though!
Thus far the weather has been beautifully warm and Brighton itself is more than charming. Its quite an experience living and working in such a different place. My biggest issue seems to be that my brain is caught between work mode and holiday mode. Everything I do each day makes my brain think that I should be on holidays. I’m catching public transport, I’m trying to decide what tourist related things we can do in our spare time and it feels like lovely summer every day! Unfortunately the reality is that I have to work daily and there’s still as much pressure as ever in that reagard. In fact, there’s probably more pressure as I know my time here is limited and precious for the guys I am here to train.
I need to find a healthy balance so I can get my work done appropriately, and relax and chillout in holiday fashion at the same time! I’m hoping a couple more days (and the upcoming weekend!) should get me there no worries!
The thing I dislike the most about the iPhone…
The thing I dislike the most about the iPhone is the YouTube Application icon. Here’s a pic of my home screen:
iPhone Home Screen
For the most part, I like all the icons that are represented there but I cannot understand the thinking behind the YouTube icon. The iPhone is clearly a fairly cutting edge technological device. It has a smooth interface and everything looks shiny and slick. However, the YouTube Application icon is a picture of an old crap looking TV. What’s the deal?
Perhaps the designers thought it was cute and its there as a kind of “tongue in cheek” design element. I don’t agree with this thinking. I find it really off-putting and also not very clear as an icon itself. I’ve never really thought about it until recently but as I’m using my phone more and more lately it really started to bug me last night!
Personally I’d even prefer a YouTube logo instead of this stupid looking TV. Perhaps Apple aren’t allowed to use the YouTube icon on their device? Even if this is the case we’re all well aware that Apple can design some really nice looking things! A different kind of TV, or something that represents video would be much better in my humble opinion.
Meanwhile, aside from the YouTube icon I only have one other complaint about my iPhone. This in itself is quite a miracle given the amount of different things this device can do! My second complaint is regarding the lack of unified inbox in the Mail application. I have two email accounts and its a pain to switch between the inboxes. The Mail app on my laptop has a unified inbox!
That’s the end of my rant. Minor issues really overall.
A subtle shift to organised bliss…
Recently a number of things happened that have resulted in me shifting the way I use technology every day. Up until recently I would’ve sworn that a laptop is the only way that its possible to work in my current job. Everything is with me wherever I go and I can access all my stuff (work stuff, personal stuff) easily all the time. However, some recent events have muddied the waters of my strong opinion and I now feel that I am more flexible as a result.
It’s no secret that I love technology. I thoroughly enjoy reading about new technology, discovering new hardware and also exploring software pieces that let me integrate my life into the digital realm. There’s plenty of people like me out and about that take a secret pleasure in tweaking their applications just right (Firefox add-ons anyone?) and discovering that extra hidden feature that makes things fit together just right. It’s also no secret that I am a Mac user, for good reason. Some might call me a fanboy given the way I avidly follow apple news and rumours, perhaps I am. However for me what it boils down to is that my experience with Apple products, both hardware and software, have provided me with the best “digital life integration” results.
As mentioned, some factors recently changed my fairly rock-solid opinions about how I use technology. These factors are:
- Apple released a new iPhone, the 3Gs. I knew it was coming months ago and I fully intended on purchasing one.
- I became quite tired of having work thrown in my face whenever I wanted to check my email, so I decided to move my personal email to a dedicated email application rather than check it through the same application as my work email. I now close my work email program when I leave work, and open it again when I get there in the morning.
These two factors combined got me thinking about how my information is organised on my laptop and how I could improve it. I ended up making a whole bunch of changes and configurations that have resulted in a really neat integrated system. Here’s how:
To begin with, I had a 2G iPhone for two years so hadn’t really had any mobile Internet access available to me (aside from at hideous costs). Whilst the 2G iPhone offered some great features I was really looking forward to taking advantage of those mobile internet based applications. Specifically, email, web browsing and most importantly, Twitter (of course!).
The second factor meshed nicely with the first. Until recently I had loyally relied on Thunderbird as my email application. Due to the volume of email I get through work, coupled with some very useful add-ons, Thunderbird is basically a must-have for my work-based email usage. We manage all our support work through email presently however I’m currently working towards implementation of an Incident Management system and I was looking forward to drastically reducing my email volume. Given my positive experience with Apple products I was thinking that once the work-based email volume had decreased I would switch away from Thunderbird to Apple Mail. My desire to use Mail increased when I watched the 2009 World Wide Developer Conference Keynote. In the end the decision seemed logical and I moved my personal email accounts out of Thunderbird and into Mail. I now run two eMail applications when I’m at work, and one when I’m not.
The shift to Mail immediately highlighted a new problem – I’d lost my email contacts. I had my iPhone synced with Address Book however this only included mobile numbers and was basically a mess of names hearkening back to the days when I used to store all my contact information a SIM card. I immediately saw the advantage of populating Address Book fully. Given that I was planning on getting into some 3G action and using the email feature it made perfect sense to get all my email information into Address Book so email addresses were available in Mail on both my laptop and on my phone. I spent a good while populating all my Address Book contacts from my Thunderbird address book and also from checking people’s profile on Facebook.
Once that was completed I remembered that I had another little program installed that I could use to make things even better! AddressBookSync is a nifty little application that matches contacts in your Address Book with your Facebook friends. It grabs their profile pic, their birth date and their location and adds these to the relevant Address Book entries. As it turns out, well over 90% of the people in my Address Book are on Facebook so the end result was great. This was keeping me quite entertained and there was more to discover.
Once I had birthdays recorded against everyone in my Address Book I remembered a nice feature of iCal, you can turn on a Birthdays calendar! Right there in the General preferences there’s a little check box:
iCal Preferences
So now I was really getting somewhere. In preparation for purchasing my shiny new 3G iPhone I decided I may as well go ahead and set up eMail on the iPhone, but it turns out I didn’t need to bother! I have two personal email addresses, one I host and a gmail account. iTunes let’s you synch any accounts you have set up in Mail straight to the iPhone. Under the “Info” tab when viewing your iPhone you will see the following options:
iTunes Mail Preferences
Finally, whilst playing in Address Book I noticed an interesting little option titled “Synchronise with Google”. I’ve never really used my Google account for mail much but have at times needed to rely on webmail and gmail was a great fall-back. However, in the past I’ve never had any contact information stored in there. It turns out there’s a little trick to getting this feature to work. You also need to check an option in your iPhone Contact preferences in iTunes:
iTunes Contact Options
Once this is checked, the contacts from your Address Book will be sent to Google next time you sync your iPhone. This was brilliant and had a nice added effect on Google Reader as I can now easily share articles with my contacts, if they too have Google Reader accounts.
So now I have a great little setup. I can ignore work whilst I’m not there but have all my personal contact information readily available. All my Address Book contacts have pictures associated with them which subsequently show up when I receive emails and phone calls from them. I see people’s birthdays when in the past I would have been completed oblivious! Furthermore, a large majority of information that used to only be available to me on my laptop is now available directly on my phone – and I don’t need to do anything to keep it up to date. As an added bonus my gmail account is populated with users and my Google Reader sharing audience has much more potential.
Of an evening I now find myself leaving my laptop upstairs plugged into my desk (external keyboard, monitor, mouse). I carry my phone downstairs and can basically keep on top of things from there. I check my email regularly, update twitter and browse the internet easily. Last nigth I wrote a few forum posts as well, including links to further information (which would have been a nightmare on the previous iPhone OS).
Overall this whole experience tickled all the right nerdy nerves for me. I appreciate the seamless organisation I now experience, and also the idea that I have access to so much stuff on the go. I’m probably about a year behind in this experience but I’m certainly appreciating it now.
I’m getting desperate…
Whilst going for a run this evening after work I saw someone get into a Nissan 300zx and drive away, and I felt a little bit jealous! To my mind this is a definite sign of desperation.
To explain, I’m a bit of a car fan – without a car. I love cars and I love driving. I look at cars constantly whenever I’m near a road and I often think about various car models and how they would suit me. As a teenager, seemingly not interested in much at all, my dad was quite surprised when I got my first car and started taking a distinct interest in it and spending time on it. By the time I was 19, having had my license for 2 years, I was already on my third car. Each successive vehicle was a substantial upgrade to a better vehicle and I spent more time and money on each one to make it more to my liking.
As soon as I finished uni and got a full time job I bought what I considered to be my “dream car”. I didn’t have unrealistic expectations of buying a super-car but it was certainly sports car with a hefty price tag. I was happy to be in debt and paying ridiculous insurance fees to keep it on the road. Over the three years I owned it I had awesome fun with it, spent huge amounts of money on it, crashed it significantly once, and turned it into an awesome looking car which I miss daily.
For those interested, my car history is as follows:
- 1983 Subaru L Series 4WD Sportswagon
- 1985 Holden Camira JD SL/X
- 1987 Holden Astra (Nissan Pulsar Clone) – pic
- 2002 Nissan 200sx (Siliva) Type S GT Spec – pic
In 2007 my girlfriend moved in with me and bought her first car, a 1994 Honda Civic VTI hatchback. Living in the middle of the city meant that owning two cars was overkill and I was starting to get ideas of buying ourselves a house. I decided to sell the Silivia. It took many months and several price drops but I eventually sold it and we now own an awesome house in South Hobart.
Whilst undergoing the house purchase I always had thoughts that I would buy an good car again at some stage. I’ve got nothing against the Civic. Its a great little car and I’ve always loved small cars. It looks good, runs well and is a bit unique due to being a VTI. However, it doesn’t quite have the “wow” factor that I appreciate in cars. It deserves a bit of respect but is still a small hatchback with a few additions rather than a sports car. Now over a year after buying the house I am itching to get myself back into a good car.
Over the last two years I’ve had to reassess my thoughts on cars and what I would like to own. The Civic offers some great practicality (we can fit two bikes in the back) which would never have been possible in the Silvia. Maz and I both ride to work so we only use the car on weekends really, and the Civic is also cheap to run. However, in all honesty what I really want is another sports car. A sports car shows that you love your cars and are willing to make some sacrifices to obtain the driving experience you’re after.
Unfortunately there’s a bit of reality to deal with however and realistically speaking however, what I need is a practical car that has some decent sports car characteristics. There’s a few options in this category, mainly newer versions of what we have in the Civic (ie – sports car/hatchbacks). For example, the Subaru WRX, the Ford Focus XR5, the Honda Civic Type R, the Audi S3 and also the VW Golf GTi. All of these cars have their various good and bad points. The VW Golf GTi is certainly my pick of the bunch but is way out of any price range I can imagine affording right (as are all the examples really).
The thing that continues to surprise me is my passion for cars. It still feels weird not owning a car and I am seriously looking forward to one day owning a “sports-car” again. I think the reason I was jealous of the 300zx (even though I don’t actually like the car) is because it reminded me that I used to be in the position where I could drive a sports car and appreciate it. Wildly impractical and probably expensive, the owner has made the decision to purchase a sports-car and enjoy driving it. Not only that, but sports cars look pretty sweet on the roads and certainly catch my eye, and I assume the eye of others like me.
As a side note, you can see some pictures of the Silvia here:
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| Nissan 200sx s15 |
