Zo's Blank Spot

Middle of this week we leave Sydney for almost a week, starting with a flying visit to Melbourne.

Thursday morning we jump into a hybrid and begin a 5 - 6 day road trip through parts of rural Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland, finishing up back in Sydney.
Despite taking as many sealed roads as we can along the way, there will be a few unsealed bits. It'll be a good test for a hybrid car otherwise used to being a city vehicle... and for this reason we'll be taking an EPIRB, and our 24/7 NRMA come-to-you-anywhere-in-Australia membership with us. Just in case.

I'll be keeping a journal each day of this journey... it's been a trip we've been planning for awhile. Originally we were going to leave from Sydney, but on the news we'd managed to get into the studio audience of the Hey Hey Reunion down in Melbourne the day before we were due to leave, we decided rather than spend extra money flying back, we'd just move the starting point from Sydney to Melbourne instead.

We'll try and make little mobile updates each day on Facebook at least, prior to the full blogging on LJ... not sure how much wifi we will get in some of the places we'll be heading to!
That will be followed up with photos of course... along with the bootleg of you-know-what-and-if-you-don't-then-take-an-educated-guess.

So... until next week!

Something *very* geeky happened to me this morning.

( Read more... )

Anyone that has moved vast distances in their lifetime will know that in time, sometimes events unfold that actually help define the way you perceive your new home... a bit like an unofficial induction into the local culture. So as twelve months tick by since my own jump interstate, I thought rather than share more of my thoughts about this city, I'd share one of the more amusing of those thought-provoking moments.

( A Melbourne Icon Versus Sydney Pedestrians... )

One Belkin N1 Vision ADSL2+ wireless modem router (F5D8632au4A). Never been used - still in shrink wrap. In fact was still in box that it was originally shipped from the Belkin factory in until a few days ago.
Does 802.11b, g, n (draft) and of course, LAN.
Selling as we ordered two but one was enough.

$215.

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( What's in the box, plus geeky specs... )
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Will go to eBay if no nibbles amoungst friends (it goes there for approx $250 in auction, and $300 "Buy It Now")...
Contact if interested.

In Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane, all the commercial and public broadcasters in those cities banded together this morning and staged the biggest outside broadcast event airing on individual frequencies held at one time in the morning... in the world. Ever.

In an event that was dubbed "Radio United Australia", to officially launch digital radio in Australia (and to educate people on what it all actually means), from 5.30am until 9am a massive team of commercial radio stations and networks along with both public broadcasters - SBS and the ABC - all broadcast their breakfast shows from Federation Square in Melbourne, Martin Place in Sydney, Reddacliffe Place in Brisbane, Victoria Square in Adelaide and Forrest Place in Perth.

At 7.40am in each city, every participating station also simultaneously played an audio piece, each piece with DJs from the relevant city describing what they thought was the most memorable moment for them on radio.
The pieces are backed by a version of "You're The Voice" sung by Emma-Louise Lobb, who won the New Artists 2 Radio competition.

Each version aired can be downloaded here:

Sydney 7.40 audio
Melbourne 7.40 audio
Brisbane 7.40 audio
Adelaide 7.40 audio
Perth 7.40 audio

We were fortunate to get ourselves out of bed early enough to attend the one in Martin Place, and were surprised by just how much buzz there was. Especially given that digital radios are still $150+ to buy... however, much like when digital television came in, the equipment will gradually get cheaper over time.
It was still great to see people getting excited about it, though. Once I picked up a little iRiver digital radio earlier today at the "Listening Post", I found it very hard to put down again. They were giving lots of them away in competitions... hopefully in the next 24 hours at least one of us managed to pick one up!
We actually already have a digital radio, in fact we've had one for quite some time... since Sydney started doing digital test transmissions in fact. They were fascinating to listen to.

Once it becomes affordable, the number of listeners switching to listening to digital will no doubt happen quite fast. There are already some new radios that can do both analogue and digital, but no car stereo systems. For those, you need a special adapter of which they were openly spruiking at the event.

If you didn't hear about Radio United until you read this post, well... I don't blame you. The launch was rather under promoted, and most people who didn't dial flick wouldnt've realised what was going on unless they actually flicked the dial at 7.40am and kept doing so for 4 minutes, trying to find something alternative to listen to.

It was nice to see so many stations there, putting competition aside and having some fun ambushing eachothers' shows, etc. CK got a lot of pleasure walking up to and having intelligent conversations with a few DJs he listens to on ABC News Radio, whist I got a lot of pleasure out of trying to capture everything going on in photos everywhere else.
It'll certainly make the news tonight... I got in the way of at least 7 TV station cameras in the midst of my photographic endeavours. The place was just crawling with media, yuppies, audio engineers and tecchies run off their feet, CFA volunteers giving out free sausages, and a gorilla giving away free bunches of bananas.

And yet I felt surprisingly at home in the midst of all that organised chaos. :-)

So earlier in the year we were offered a filming job for this event happening in a little town called Gunning outside Canberra in September.

( Read more... )

... will be a very interesting day indeed.

This journal entry is one I have been working on for quite some time... so much is happening almost every second day that the posting of it has been delayed since as early as the beginning of October last year.
So here goes.

( WARNING: 3900 words under this cut... )

In more recent news, I now own an Olympus E-420 dSLR. The depth of field and quality of full scale images - even in JPEG format - is impressive, especially outdoors. I'd like to have more zoom, but of course lenses capable of that are quite expensive. So we'll see about that at a later stage.

It's nice to finally have my own SLR camera, though.

 

Today as I was logging into Hotmail, a splash screen pops up notifying me of some changes that have been implemented.

And in very small print at the bottom of the page was the following:

"We've designed Windows Live Hotmail storage to grow with you, but at a reasonable pace. That means you should have plenty of storage unless you suddenly want to store the planet Jupiter on Hotmail, in which case we'll send you a nice e-mail asking you to please not try to store planets on Windows Live Hotmail (although gradual storage of moons and asteroids is ok)."

Now.... it's OK for Google to be witty. And IMHO it's even OK in my book for Apple to have the occasional sense of humour.

But Microsoft??

I dunno, they have always come across as such a "serious" brand...
Perhaps some dry-witted programmer at head office was sitting at his desk one day and thought,  "Maybe we need to lighten the hell up! Maybe that's half our problem..."

Still, for some reason it just doesn't quite sit right with me.

Microsoft being funny?
No... no, no.

Not working.

I' ve been waiting for ages for somebody to post some decent audio from inside a stadium full of people.

So, on Sunday night I decided to take matters into my own hands: I took our black furry friends for a walk 20 minutes down the road to Acer Arena... and attended the Australian record industry's big night: the 22nd Annual ARIA Awards for 2008.

( Read more... )

This was on a photo somebody took and posted to failblog.

On the side of a bag of toasted pine nuts:

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ALLERGY ADVICE.

Recipe: No nuts.
Ingredients: Cannot guarantee nut free.
Factory: Before being prepared for manufacture of this product, the equipment was previously used to make products containing nuts.
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Took me about five minutes to stop laughing.

I do exist... I've just simply had way too many distractions and adventures to feel drawn to a giant backlog blogging!

So meantime, a quick moment from the weekend just gone.

For a friend's 25th birthday, ten of us hired a houseboat and went motoring down the Hawkesbury River for a bit of a pirates 'n hacks weekend. It turned out to be a really cool idea, and along with films and photos, yes, there are recordings (including sound effects of both the expected and unexpected variety).

So!... We'd eventually moored on a bouy in Jerusalem Bay - an area surrounded by national park, and a pretty peaceful area.
Two smaller boats happened to be moored there as well... and it wasn't long before some inter-boat communication happened of its own accord.

The smallest boat directly opposite us had its radio turned up, and clearly the guy on it wasn't from Sydney as he was listening to the tail end of the AFL Grand Final, which just happened to be on that weekend.
So the first and only conversation went something like this:

Guy on second boat: "WE WON!!"

Silence from the other boats. So he tries again:

"...against GEELONG!!"

CK: "WHO CARES!!!"

*laughter from third boat*

Funny, but we never heard from him again for the rest of the weekend.

I have arrived in Sydney, and officially left Melbourne with the remainder of my gear on Sunday.

CK flew down on Saturday (the booking reference number for the flight bared a very close resemblance to the word "RELIVED", which was kind of amusing!), and after a change to car rental plans, we ended up with a much better car - a rather shiny spacious red diesel powered 4WD Pajero.

We arrived after a fairly adventurous road trip via Mount Hotham, Omeo, and Mt Kosciosko National Park (plus countless dirt roads caked in snow) extremely early Tuesday morning... and life is good!! A more detailed post will follow after we've finished unpacking/setting things up, and ADSL2 is connected (we are currently waiting for Telstra to come tag the line which gives us churnability to something other than them!). After a lot of investigating and some serious debate, we eventually decided we will hop on the Yes Business 40 gig Signature plan with Optus, as it is only bottlenecked to normal DSL speed after exceeding the limit, and as TPG not only means connecting to Telstra, but also really crap on peak speeds. Plus the line rental bundled with DSL2 is only $13 per month, so it's kind of worth it. So whilst we wait (and as there are no open access points around here), we are using one of those "Unwired" devices (faster than dialup, but slower than ADSL) that'll probably either go back after the landline is properly connected, or kept for emergencies. $10 for 200 meg to be used in 7 days, afterwhich it expires.
So we don't intend to be using it for too long.

The apartment is great - nice and secure with sun coming in the windows each morning all year round (*VERY* nice to wake up in, or fall asleep under a full moon in as we did a few nights ago), in a health conscious neighbourhood (ex Olympic village), transport a stones throw away... and I now have my very own kitchen to refine my culinary skills in with a willing helper!
 
Anyway, lots of stories to tell (including the Tassie trip), photos to sort through, still lots of unpacking/setting up to do, and eventually a house warming to host.

So!... more on the explorations of my new home and its surrounds soon.

And so there I was, getting a late night tour along the footpaths of Newington from within a rickety rattly old metal shopping trolley.
Ah, such a quiet neighbourhood, only to get disrupted by such inconsiderateness (actually, I was almost half hoping somebody would stop us and say something, just so I could climb out and continue pushing it along, now all the noisier of course having removed the extra weight... just to make a point)!!

As we rattled along, a crowd cheering could be heard every so often off in the distance - a sports event being held at the very same stadium the Sydney Games were opened and closed at back in 2000. The bass of the cheering can be heard at the shopping square where we stopped for a Subway dinner... yet definitely far enough away from the ex-Olympic village to not really worry anyone.
I really will try to record this, and additionally find a way to record from within it, too.

Yeah so, we've got our mode of transport about the local area sorted now. Good fun, too!

We'll upgrade to bicycles eventually.

It's surprising - each time I move, I've noticed the proportion of recyclables to hard matter is considerably high. A paperless society would be good. But then you look at the flip side of it and realise: if they did that, we could pretty much guarantee our future generations to see this as another dark age.
In fact, I've often wondered if with all the technology there is that would be useless without one bit or the other, that it already *IS* going to be a dark age... and if perhaps it's worth digging a hole and placing some letter that was sealed in some way... indicating the precise location of the surface at the time of burial, and listing all the current/recent world events, advances in technology, discoveries, etc.
Just the key ones - not a huge novel... and written by an every day citizen. And maybe even a second one by somebody that knows "state secrets" or something, as an added insight into present day world events.
You know - just in case a big ball of fire came out of the sky and singed all the paperbacks off the face of the planet or something.

It'd be incredibly insightful to any future archaeologist that dared venture here in their spaceship in the aftermath of such a devastation.

I know of at least one museum with some invaluable item that in the event of a crisis, drops the item down into a nuclear bunker...

Hmm.

So what other protection of items and solid evidence of data that doesn't easily decompose and is readable/accessible by future generations is there in the modern day (aside from skeletons)??
We don't scratch our communications onto rock tablets anymore, aside from the occasional "I LOVE TOM" etched into the wall of many a coastal cave.

Might be worth a Google.
And interesting to ponder out loud about.

So last night I found myself on Messenger giving relationship advice to one of the guys (a non-native English speaker) from work.

This is not unusual in itself - we all look for a bit of that from time to time. And it's not uncommon for people from different cultures to sit down with me and attempt to try and nut out the Australian way of life...
But it was the spelling mistakes and grammatical errors that made the conversation oh-so-very entertaining... :-)

Person: I want to tell a girl I like her, but I scared.
Me: Maybe you should wait until she tells you?
Person: Whaaaaaat?? Girls never do that! Is the boy that has to say that first, not the girl.
Me: That's a load of crap! Girls say they like boys before the guy does all the time!
Person: She gives he me her number - girls never give he the number unless they seriousness.
Me:.... also.... a load of crap.
Me: <proceeds to give a lecture about how men and women can be just friends, and *STILL* have each others phone numbers without necessarily being physically/emotionally attached, which goes on for several pages>
Person: On a different plant, maybe!
Me: I don't live on a plant.
Person: Yeah, you from difrert glaxy.
Me: A different flower bed, maybe. Ok - I shall see you at wok, toburrow.
Person: Ohhh that's how yu spell that word! Has always wondered.
Me: No, it's not...

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This conversation went for a fair while (I condensed it)...
Aside from all the accidental/intentional spelling/grammatical mistakes, it amazes me that this attitude still reigns supreme in some cultures.

Ok - so I can be exempted and forgiven for being from my very own "plant"...
But since when does a woman need permission to say her feelings before a man does in Australia??
It might happen less often - but not *THAT* much less... and I certainly don't think a brick wall to the possibility has to be built around it to stop it from ever happening...

Cultural boundaries and religions are so self-inflicting sometimes...

Just my 2 cents worth.

Just a quick one to let people know if I haven't told you already...

Due to a few fairly substantial decisions that were made recently, the move to Sydney is now definitely happening mid August.
I'm pretty happy with this outcome in the end as logically it lines up with lots of things.
Now quite excited!!

I'm creating a Facebook event in the next few days and adding everyone that is on there to it - if you would like to catch up before I go, change your status to "attending", or just leave a comment here on this post.
I'm thinking about having two separate gatherings, one in Geelong and one in Melbourne. At this stage I'm not sure if they will happen before or after we've transplanted me, but I'd like to catch up with at least a few of you that I haven't seen in awhile.

If enough people can/want to catch up, the two gatherings will go ahead. If not, then I will just make the time to see people either in small groups or individually - see how we go. I may be back in Melbourne in September for a few days anyway, depending on things.

I will have some spare time fairly soon whilst CK transplants himself into the new apartment (settlement is today!!), so I'm likely to be availing myself to a fair bit of this catchup stuff over the coming weeks.

Lots of other big and little newses to report, including the trip down to Warrnambool in a PT Cruiser over the weekend... this will come in a later post at some point.
If not in the form of an album of photos on FB anyway.

Ok, more later!

I just noticed it's been about three weeks since I last posted - heh!
A condensation of events follows...


Well, I think that's about it for now!

Dover and trout.

Yesturday I got an sms whilst still at work, urging me to watch the ABC at 9.30, and that it was "MAXIMO IMPORTO".

So I get home, turn on the TV and find the ABC's first Q and A... and tonights' guest is the man in the top job - the Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd.

This is a new show that is basically broadcast live, has a studio audience who had all submitted questions for the guest, and in which they also accepted submissions from outside the studio from the watching public. They had it mostly planned out, and took a few questions from the audience as well that were not planned, etc.

This stuff isn't usually hugely fascinating enough to me to keep me engaged for a prolonged period of time, but as it was a special event in itself and it had been recommended, I continued to watch.
So I was just settling down into the couch to absorb the hours' worth of information... when a *very* familiar brown coat caught my eye.

I sat forward. "Waiiiiiit a minute....."

And sure enough, about ten minutes later as a guy called David asked the Prime Minister about his stance on gay marriage - there was CK, sitting right next to him and clearly taken by surprise.
HEH!!
His delighted facial expression as the camera gradually zoomed him out of shot said it all.

Five minutes after the show finished, I quickly SMSsed:
"So... when were you planning on telling me about the new boyfriend?"
Less than a minute later came the reply:

"The context was delicious! I almost did a you-n-me finger thing..."

If only he had!!!





Edit 24/05/08: Not that I could possibly make this post any more Googlable (apparently by an interesting flukey coincidence, this post alone is presently the number one search result for "come outance"  on Google worldwide - with or without a dash. Heh!), but...
http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/video.htm?pres=20080522&story=1
(scroll down the playlist and click on the "Religion & Gay Marriage" one)