Because of the following:

1. I keep blogging about my cute new kitten.
2. I’ve just upgraded my wordpress install.

I’m going to repost something…

Edit: whooo, the wp visual editor seems to handle flash well.

I somewhat remember this… Airwalk shoes and t shirt and pre empting the tight jean craze by at least 2 years…

2007 was a stupidly unbelievable year. Just like the last one, except I didn’t graduate or live in a hotel with Lemmy from Motorhead like I did in 2006. Ah well, lots and lots of good things happened…

1.) I spent the entire year in Australia on a working holiday…

2.) I got a job that filled the working part of that holiday that I really, really enjoyed…

3.) I got sponsored by that job, which means that I can stay in Australia until 2011 if I want (and be a good PHP code monkey of course) and keep the job.

4.) I lost every little piece of skateboard related coordination I had.

5.) I can’t be bother pontificating on here right now.

Anyway suffice to say I’ve had a great year and I’m going to be staying in Australia for the next couple of years so I’m happy. Not bad for a year that started with enforced agoraphobia, a steve martin film, a jewish shoe shop and a house full of weirdos.

On a sidenote, I’ve lived in too many places this year.

Friday morning boredom leads me to dig very deeply into my Music collection and up comes “The Spaghetti Incident?”, Guns and Roses’ interesting excursion into the world of doing bad covers of punks songs. I always thought it was meant to be the other way round, with punk bands doing bad covers of songs. Well I say songs, they generally do covers of bad 80’s cheese like 99 red ballons (or however you say it in German).

Anyway, the significance of this album is that it was the first album I ever bought for myself. I remember seeing the cassette sat there in the local shop with the ever so enticing “explicit lyrics” sticker on. No ten year old boy can resist advertising like that. I think I listened to the album to death and moved on after a month or two to Meatloaf or something equally crap, but its nice to revisit it…

(nb. it wasn’t the first album I ever listened to, I do have fond memories of stealing cassettes off of my Mum and Sister)

I have a place to live… It’s good.

as of about 2 weeks ago I hit the six months in Melbourne mark. So the glass is literally now half empty and my time here is slipping away. Fun fun fun, so this came as something of a lit match under my arse, meaning I have to make the most of Melbourne and the rest of Australia before I drag myself somewhere else*, so I think I may be forced to make a list of things to do and put it up here so people can call me out if I fail to do anything on there. One of the things will be to do a skydive I reckon, my boss did one this weekend just gone, which has got me curious. It must be a wonderful sensation to be falling through the air, knowing you could become a jar of human jam pretty soon.

Oh and I got a job, hence having a boss. I do wed nerd stuff for real now! Oh and I just finished the build of the site for the UK bands, Gallows. Will stick up a link when it goes live.

I’ve officially run out of stuff to say now. Other than to share my thoughts on skate plazas…

* somewhere else being New York, Tokyo, Hawaii or San Francsico…

Obviously you all know that I’m in Australia, well the summer is well and truly over here, it gets dark at 6 and its a bit chilly, but in no way does it feel like winter. I can’t really put my finger on it, but it still feels very much like its early Autumn here, maybe its because I can see the sea from my computer desk, which definitely makes the hundreds of lines of PHP code easier…

Anyway I found some pictures of me in the snow from a few years ago. I don’t think I’m gonna see any snow for a long while…

Anyway, I like them as I look like a dork with beer…

Hang on, I am a dork with beer… (Sometimes)

As some of you may know, I am in Australia. I am here because I wanted to escape the british winter, see a bit of the world and generally get out of my stuck in a rut existence in Sheffield. I’m sure there could have been safer, less drastic options but I made my decision and stuck to it. The plan in Australia was to continue doing what I did workwise in Sheffield, i.e. being a freelance web nerd. The reason for this is that the british pound is healthy and what I earnt working for people in the UK was quite nice when converted to dollars and it gave me enough freedom to explore and generally keep my own time. This obviously led to me keeping odd hours and working when I felt like it and doing other stuff when I didn’t. This was all fine until a third bit of bad luck struck (See first and second).

There I was happily organising my podcasts in my RSS reader and trying to get it to play nicely with iTunes, when it the screen froze. Fair enough I thought, tried force-quitting stuff, no luck so I cycled the power, only for my Macbook to restart to a screen of a flashing question mark. Shit, I thought and got straight onto another computer to look for what this wonderful flashing meant. Apparently it means that the Mac can’t find a disk to start OSX off, so I figured I needed to use some kind of utility on the install disk to magically fix my problems. No luck with this, some internet forum suggested DiskWarrior. DiskWarrior being a $160 piece of software that I apparently needed. So off I went to the Apple reseller arround the corner from my appartment (very useful in this situation, not useful to my wallet the next time it has money in it). Came back, tried it out and nothing, according to my macbook, the hard drive no longer existed. Back I went to the Apple reseller, this time Macbook in hand and ended up putting it in for service, where it still is now.

So I guess the whole point of this post is tell everyone how lost I am without my computer. Well I’m not really lost, but being unable to work when I have a million good ideas floating in my head is torture. The fact I may have lost months of work is scary and I pray it isn’t so. So the moral of this post I guess is to back your stuff up regularly and don’t rely too much on computers for anything as they tend to have a mind of their own when it comes to deciding to work or not work. and they are terribly expensive to fix, just like a pet dog with a broken bit.

Without further ado, I’m gonna ring the service place for the 37th time today to see if there is any news and then I’m gonna go skate I guess…

I can’t really be bothered to write descriptions fo these pics, but here are some panoramas of my new appartment in Melbourne. Click to view them on flickr…

Read more »

Peter was the best dog ever…

Read more »

I’ve spent the last 4 or 5 days covered in a hideous rash due to the heat. I felt like that Merrick dude, you know the elephant man. It was ok though as I just hid out in the local library and abused the free wireless internet for my own purposes.

I shall just take a moment to point out just how great Libraries are. They’re full of excellent people that you might not otherwise bump into. It seems that the simple act of possessing a library card sets you apart from the rest of society in terms of excelling as a human being. The red wine I’ve been drinking all night is making me ramble somewhat, but last week I watched an old man sleep for approximately two and a half hours in front of my eyes, whilst I photoshopped naked women. Yes I was manipulating bosoms and such like in a public place, you’d think the international languages study group behind me had never seen naked flesh before.

Another excellent thing I’ve noticed about Australia is the cars.

Read more »