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Awesome Friday night!

Today at about 3:37 I had gotten fed up with mess and decided it was time to go home. Or at least go have a beer. To which Neil suggested the Haha Bar, leaving at 4pm. To which I wholeheartedly agreed. So went down with the usual suspects and had a very pleasant couple of beers and mulled wines by the lake. Even the sweetie came in for a bit, which was lovely.

So we got home and Nat and Andrew arrived and we looked at Stu's Japan photos and cooked a pasta bake for dinner and played several games of Buzz. Best I could do on the leaderboard was one win - couldn't get fastest finger or most correct answers or even most taunts (I was robbed I tells ya!!).

Super fun evening :):):):)

Much better day today

Today was a much better day. Aided by the fact that I got to spend most of it documenting. We have a particularly complex application that had broken yesterday and I had no idea how it worked, so we spent a couple of hours trying to figure it out. There's documentation, but it's practically unreadable. So today I decided to learn how the application fits together by starting from scratch and redocumenting the entire dev environment. Not sure how the person who documented it originally will feel about that, but can't be helped I think. Heck even if noone else uses my doco at least now I have a much better understanding of how it works. Even if we found so many problems that we need to do a *massive* tidy up!

Tonight the sweetie cooked dinner, and then I geotagged Europe photos. I particularly liked my day in Amsterdam which included two canal rides and a bus ride (pinpoints don't include Random Camera photos).

Coast Weekend, July

Friday after work we headed down to the coast. We listened to a Harry Potter audiobook. Other than that, nothing eventful.

So arrived, and marvelled at the STARS!!

Then set about turning everything on. Except I couldn't turn on the gas. Knob was jammed. I was already hungry at this point, so was getting stressed and grumpy from low blood sugar level. Then we heard from Dave - he hadn't even left home yet! (people had bailed at work so he had to fill in for them). So we abandoned thought of using the spa that night, and went into Bateman's Bay to get some dinner.

We went to "Little Restaurant and Bar". With a super friendly waitress and chef. Lovely service.

Stu had a pork croquette dish off the specials board.

And I had lamb cutlets

For dessert Stu had banana and pecan nut pudding

And I had a Lindt Swiss chocolate slice

Accompanied by a nice pear cider.

All super delicious, a great find.

So we get back to the house and Dave had just arrived, to tell me I'd been doing it wrong, turns out there's knobs on each gas cylinder as well. That I couldn't actually see, from my angle, in the dark. Yeah so I felt completely useless. So had a breakdown and went to bed. As you do.

Saturday was just doing a jigsaw, a walk to the shops, crosswords, and that was about it for the day.

In the evening we cracked open the Heineken keg and ordered pizza (three smalls which got demolished in short order).

Warmed up the spa and enjoyed that for quite a while, getting through almost all of the keg between us. I was quite impressed with our effort heh.

This morning just more jigsaw, although I didn't finish it - sky is taking far too long.

Then we tidied the house and headed home, stopping at the Scottish Restaurant for lunch.

Did some fish tank stuff when I got home, as well as geotagging holiday photos and house tidying. So a productive afternoon/evening, but that didn't stop the Sunday night depression :(

Geotagging

I've been working through my geotagging steadily, doing a few days' worth tonight. I've now geotagged all of the Israel and Jordan photos. Next step will be culling out the truly boring ones (like all the pictures I took of everything I ate!) and burning DVDs for anyone in the group who wants a copy.

Some of the places were a little challenging as I turned off the GPS logger while I was at a place that involved just walking, because some of the days were very long and the battery wasn't quite good enough to last all day.

Here's the track around Jordan, including the flight to Cairo which carefully avoided Israeli airspace!

Being Sociable

Friday night we had Gaelian and Stephanie over for dinner. We ordered Dumpling Inn takeaway (when then arrived, finally at 8:20 ..hrmm), so I went and picked that up. All food was eaten, so no leftovers - doh! And then we looked at Stu's Japan photo highlights.

Saturday hanging around the house for the most part, except to go shopping in the afternoon.

Then off to Mishi's for a games night. We sat and chatted for a good while, and eventually had a game of Ticket to Ride. I won that, but everyone else tied with the exact same score :)

Today was another day hanging around the house. I spent some time on a 555 unit phizz torus, but it quickly became un-fun as I didn't realise when I cut the paper so small that putting it together would be really hard due to the lack of friction of bigger pieces of paper :( Seriously considering gluing it together to hold it together while assembling :/ Also did some geotagging of holiday photos.

The sweetie cooked an awesome roast pork belly dinner, and we had Josh and Ally and Soph over to share it. They put on Akira after dinner but I just couldn't stay awake :(

And that's the end of that..

Peter at the Dumpling

As is tradition when meeting people at the Dumpling Inn, went to Jamo and had a couple of beers with Neil, and joined this time by Aquila which was nice.

So Peter met us at the Dumpling Inn, where we'd tried to go last time but it was closed. Had shredded beef peking style, and the three cup wine chicken, and satay squid and it was all delicious.

And I didn't take any photos to prove any of it..! Shocking!!

Somewhere in between

This morning I actually had a bit of a sleep in. Which is incredibly rare for me. Must have needed it after this week.

Went to Dickson for brunch with the sweetie, then to an Asian grocery store so Stu could get some rice flavouring.

And suddenly my entire morning is gone. Hrmm :/

But I did have quite a productive afternoon, geotagging Eurasia photos (first six days are done), some bits and pieces around the house, getting all my RSS feeds read, and updating my FlightDiary.

Rainy Saturday

The plan was to clean the house and wash some towels.

But then it rained. So I didn't do any washing.

And we decided to go to the farmer's markets. So I didn't clean the house.

We did pick up some nice stuff at the markets.

I prepared a bolognase and chucked it in the slow cooker for the afternoon.

Other than, just some work on my holiday photos.

Boring.

Travelling Tech

Inspired by Luc's post, I thought I'd document what tech stuff I took away with me this trip.

So here's everything tech-related that I took away with me, including all baggies.

Cameras

Three cameras - my Canon 500D, the Sony TX10 "Random Camera", and a Sony handicam. I used the video camera a reasonable amount in the middle east, but not so much after I got to Europe.

Phone

My old iPhone 3GS. I didn't upgrade before I went away because if anything happened to it I'd have been very sad. If anything happened to the old one well then I could just get a new one when I got home.

Laptop

The Asus EeePC. Very cute, but not as cute as an ultrabook ;) Maybe next laptop ;) After two months of typing on that laptop and using its screen, it's very weird to come home to my super huge monitor and chunky keyboard and mouse!

GPS

Photomate 887 Lite. This is seriously the coolest device *ever*. It recorded almost my entire trip, except for between Hamburg and Kolding. I've yet to add up how far I actually travelled.

Backups

Multiple USB memory sticks. Sadly the 64gb one Stu got me for Christmas died, so I had to replace it with several 16gb sticks along the way. I didn't get the whole trip onto them, but did a backup of missing stuff to Stu's computer when I got to Japan so I could have a non-platter backup. Also a 320gb usb-powered external hard drive. One cable, very small and light, great for travelling with.

Power Converters/Adapters

One for the UK and one for Europe (also the middle east). I lost the European one somewhere between Cairo and Paris, so had to go buy a new one. Also an Australian double adapter so I could charge other things at the same time as using the laptop. Stu took a Japanese adapter to Japan, so I used that when I got there.

Other Charging Stuff

The "brick" for my iPhone, the battery charger for the Canon and the charger for the video camera (which had a long cable). As well as the charger for the laptop.

Cables

I got a super cool tiny little iPhone cable which I used to charge the phone off the laptop (and transfer photos). It's 10cm long - great for travelling! A ~30cm figure eight cable, also a good short length. The cable for random camera. HATE Sony and their proprietary cables >:( Why can't they use mini or micro usb??? A mini usb cable used to charge the GPS. It's fairly long, I could have taken a super short one, but I'm used to carrying that one with me everywhere, as it lives in the camera bag.

Other

A small mouse, my jetstar in-ear headphones that work on planes as well as regular devices, and a 12V usb double adapter. Couldn't get the adapter to work in the hire car we had, don't know why. Didn't need it though as the GPS was built into the car and there was an iPod dock in the glove box (and I wasn't running the GPS on my phone this time as I had the Photomate).

So this is what it all looked like packed up.

Where was I?

If you're a lurker you may not have known that for the past two months I've been travelling around Israel, Jordan, Egypt, UK, Europe and Japan. Actually you might have had some idea from all the beer of the day photos I posted ;)

There's no photos yet, but the text is all up at http://kazza.id.au/eurasia_2012/

Hoping to return to regularly scheduled programming from now..

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