Pentankh Eternal’s Blog

A lot has happened since my last post. Over a month later and here I am living in Sydney.  I’ve had a wonderful and busy time.

Lisa helped me settle in the first day and it was great catching up with her.  I stashed most of my stuff in storage and am living in a spare room in my friend’s rental.  It’s nice having people around to talk to.

I started my new job position. Basically doing the same sort of stuff, but in Sydney and supporting a different client.  My workmates are great. Easy to get along with and friendly.  One of them has the same sense of humour as I do so we are having fun.  The most amusing thing was when we were talking about our work passes.  We have biometric scanners to get into the building, along with magnetic identification cards.  I was commenting about how anal the guards are about us wearing our passes and he pulled his up on it’s elastic band and says "MOOLTIPASS!!!".  I was almost in stitches.  Fifth Element rocks.  One of my favourite shows and Striker and I are always quoting it.

The next weekend I went to my cousin’s engagement party.  I had a fantastic time making friends and talking to people there.  They are a mad bunch but friendly and amusing.  The next day I got Trejkaz to come with me for a drive and we went to see Striker at the Liverpool Markets.  He sells Poffertjes.  Little Dutch pancakes.  He was surprised to see Trejkaz as they haven’t managed to keep in touch for years so we all had a good chat while I teased Striker. His coworker said I am welcome back any time to annoy Striker heh.  I helped by offering free Poffertjes for them to passing potential customers.

I also popped in to see Chris and Jo’s new baby, Micah a couple of times. I got to see him have his first bath. Congratulations Chris n Jo!

Last weekend I got up at 8:30am and managed to get my NSW licence.  Now I’m legit ;)  I phoned my cousin Michael and suggested we go to Newcastle for the weekend.  We drove up and stayed overnight. It was great to catch up with our cousins.  My mum and dad drove down to see us the next day so that was nice.  I dropped Mike off that afternoon and went to Lisa’s to wash my clothes and watch TV then came home.

This weekend I was going to go to Newcastle again to see other relatives but I have a cold and don’t feel up to the drive. I also don’t want to spread my cold to their kids.  Might take it easy in Sydney instead.

The weekend before last I went to see Star Trek with Lisa.  I saw it again Wednesday night with Chris, but this time at iMax.  It was even better on the big screen.

Next weekend I’m going to catch up with my friends Lea & Graham and their kids.  They recently moved to a new home out west which is about 45-60 mins drive. Luckily they have a spare room and I can crash overnight.

I’ve been emailing and phoning Sienna a couple of nights a week. I do miss her terribly but not much I can do about that. I just hated Brisbane too much to stay.

So last weekend I was in Melbourne. Friday night I had dinner at a Greek restaurant called Othello.  I had a really nice dinner with some Pepperjack red wine.  I also had the Many Berries Cheesecake. Yum! I don’t often have dessert. I was so full, but hey, I was on holiday.  I visited the Crown "Entertainment Complex" ie. Casino. I wandered around for a while and ended up trying a game of Blackjack.  I didn’t do too badly at first, but in the end they took my money. Never mind. It was $50.  I was at the $10 table.  I had fun anyway and headed back to my hotel room at the City Square Motel. It’s a nice place. Nothing lavish, but it served it’s purpose, was worth it and not expensive. I have no complaints to make about it.  The hotel closes at 10pm but you get a code to type into the electronic pad to open the door out of hours.  I got to sleep around 11pm.  I’m a light sleeper so if the hotel was noisy I would have been kept awake. But I slept.

I got a phone call at 6:50am the next morning.  The 2IC guy told me I’d get a phonecall Monday to offer me a job position in Sydney.  He wanted me to have time to think about it.

I got up since I was already awake and got showered and dressed. I went for a walk to Federation Square and hopped onto the free Tour bus which drives around Melbourne telling you about the history.  The driver was very friendly and amusing and reminded me of a guy I worked with at AAPT in Brisbane named Gary.  When the tour was over I jumped onto the free Tour Tram (City Circle) and went around on that to learn some more. Much better than walking, particularly when you’ve been woken at 6:50am!  While on that I received a phonecall from a friend I’d made on Second Life. She had not been able to meet me the night before but her lunch friend had cancelled so she suggested we meet up for lunch.  We had a nice lunch at Cookie.  At 2:30pm I’d already arranged to meet up with another couple of people from Second Life so we parted ways and I caught up with my other friends.  We walked around the city a bit and nearly went to the aquarium until we found out the entry price was $31 each. Well, none of us were keen for that so we wandered around and ended back at the Casino.. er.. I mean Entertainment Complex (No, I don’t really!)

We had some drinks and Andrew played "Match Maker". (Not much info on that webpage yet). Basically it’s a $1 game whereby you put down bets on whether the two dealt cards will match by the value (ie pairs) which gives 11:1 payout, by suit which gives 5:1 payout or neither which is 1:1 payout.  Andrew started with $10 and got up to $65 in the game.  He had a ball as he’d not played at Casino’s before.  He was in his element.

We had dinner at the Casino restaurant "Steakout".  Once that was over we went back and played some more Match Maker until about 9pm when Andrew and Jodie had to go home and I was tired enough to sleep.  They walked me most of the way back to my hotel and caught the train. I watched some of Hot Fuzz on the TV and went to sleep.

Sunday morning I woke up and got dressed and showered.  I was going to eat breakfast in a cafe but had to go find an ATM. By the time I got to it, it was getting to around 9am and I needed a quick breakfast so I could get ready for the wedding.  I just bought a Hungry Jacks breakfast and ate that then went to my room and ironed my stuff.  I got dressed and went to buy a wedding card.  I jumped in a taxi and after a bit of driving around with his GPSr we found the place.  I had a look inside but was about 45 minutes early so just wandered around outside until it was closer to starting.

The wedding was fabulous and Kate was in a lovely big corset, her bridesmaids in smaller ones, but all looking ravishing.  I only had time for the entree and I had to go call a taxi to get back to the city.  The taxi arrived promptly and drove me back to the city.  I picked up my bag from the front counter and walked down to Southern Cross Train station.  I arrived 5 minutes before the bus was due to leave and jumped onto the bus.  I flew back home and got the train home, however there was trackwork on my line so I had to hop off at Central and catch a Rail Bus to my station. Luckily it was an express bus.  I walked home past the local Dominos pizza shop and picked up a pizza to eat for dinner.  I put on Dylan Moran’s DVD and watched that to chill out while eating then it was off to bed!

This morning I got a Jetstar flight to Melbourne. We just flew into Avalon airport. I’m here until Sunday as a friend is getting married on Sunday. I’m also meeting up with friends from Second Life. Should be great!
I drove with Chris to Melbourne many years ago to see the Avalon Air Show. So this will be my second visit albeit the first on a plane.
The flight was very smooth and safe. It was a great trip. I’m not sure why people hate Jetstar so much. Maybe they just like being waited on. Still, it saved me $100 on the flight.
I’ve got a hotel in the city for $80 per night. It had better reviews than hotels $50 more!
I think the flights were about $334 all up.
On the Sita Coaches bus on the way to the hotel in the city. Takes aboutan hour from Avalon but only $36 return. Sweet!

New Microsoft Laptop Hunters ad says Macs are for kids

engadget.com — Microsoft’s latest installment in its popular series of ripped-from-the-headlines, real-America style ‘puter buying adventures follows a mom and son duo — Lisa and Jackson. They almost buy a Mac, but Lisa notes they’re "popular at this age" (we guess what she meant to say is that they’re for children).

Let’s see. What have I been up to?

Well. I’m beginning to wonder if there’s much point in updating this blog so I haven’t done it much lately.  Most of the things I am currently doing, I post to Facebook. Photos go to Facebook and/or Flickr and most people I know whom would be interested in what’s going on are on my Facebook anyway so it seems like I’m doubling up here.

I guess for the few whom may read this on occasion it will get the odd update.  You can keep up to date with some of it by reading my LifeStream page and column. They will show my Twitter posts, YouTube favourites and Facebook status changes.

I’ve been spending a lot more time in the game Second Life again, catching up with my good friend Striker Stormbringer and making other new friends. I hang out at a club in there dancing with a new friend from USA and talking to others.  I have decided to do some DJ work in Second Life and have set up a webpage to take requests when I’m broadcasting.  I’ve just put in applications for two clubs to DJ at so I just have to wait to hear from them.  I had a really good headset with boom mic I got for about $70 from Harvey Norman, but Sienna accidentally snapped the cable, so I have an older mic handy and have plugged that in until I get my Ruddy money.

My friend Lisa is on her way here to stay for a couple of days. That should be nice. I like to catch up with her whenever we can.  Sunday night I’m going to see Mindless Self Indulgence with Mil.  A couple of weeks back we went to a beginner’s introduction course in Archery and had a fantastic time.  Sienna came along and had fun too.  She didn’t do any Archery, of course.  On Monday, a friend of mine I used to work with at AAPT on the Gold Coast is coming over to play the Wii and catch up, so that should be quite good as well.

Next Friday I’m flying to Melbourne to go to my friend’s wedding.  I will also be meeting up with some other friends I’ve known for years on Second Life.  I can’t wait for that!  I had just paid off my CC and cut the limit to $500 then had to book my plane tickets on it, so will use my money from Krudd to pay that off again, then I’m square.

Now I remember why I don’t like typing up posts in WordPress. The textbox keeps adding in new lines automatically, particularly when I use capital letters or the word ‘I’ by itself. I have to keep backspacing to where I wanted to be. Stupid thing.

I had a week off work last week due to being very sick. This week I worked 3 days and had today off to go to Sienna’s Easter Hat Parade. I have next Friday off to fly to Melbourne, so it’s two weeks of 3 working days. Sweet!

For the last week, I’ve had mum, dad and Sienna visiting.  Mum’s sister is over from New Zealand and has been staying with mum’s brother not far from where I live (about 45 minutes).  I picked up Sienna the Friday before last and Saturday morning we went swimming then my parents arrived.

Over the last week we’ve had many fun activities.  We’ve visited various shopping centres, including the Mt Gravatt Westfield shopping centre, Capalaba Westfield shopping centre and the Victoria Point shopping centre.  Mum got lots of clothing and things.  I bought Sienna a new pair of shoes as the ones she was wearing were getting too small for her.  Unfortunately the new ones scrape her heels a bit so she hasn’t worn them much.

The other night, Sienna had her first tooth fall out.  She woke up and must have worked it loose, so went into the lounge room and showed it to her poppy.  Unfortunately she lost the tooth for most of the week so it wasn’t until her nonna found the tooth yesterday that she could put it under her pillow for the tooth fairy to find.

We caught up with my uncle a few times and even had dinner with the family at his local golf club.  It was a nice night out.  They had a kids game room so Sienna played there a while.  When we arrived she found some things to do in there, then we found our table and were going up to get some food when she realised she had left her princess wand in the kids room. She ran back to ask it back from one of the other girls who had turned up and found it to play with.

On Friday we also went for a drive up north and went to the Big Pineapple.  We rode on the Nut Mobile around the park and had some macadamia nuts.  After that, we had some lunch and headed south to the Opals Down Under shop.  Sienna got a girl’s lucky dip prize of a bracelet made from pink rocks.  She also got to search around in an outdoors area covered in rocks, in order to find some pretty rocks to put in a container we had bought.  Her nonna also bought one and filled hers to the top.  From there we went to Aussie World and went on many rides.  This time I was not keen to go on the spinning ones as I always get sick, but we had enough fun on the others.

During the week I had to wait to dial into a teleconference Tuesday morning for work to see if I still had a job. Another round of redundancies were going through our group. Fortunately, I was not one of the guys who were made redundant.  Before lunch we headed south to the Pacific Fair shopping centre and had lunch there.  Then I took Sienna on the train ride around the shops.  She really enjoyed herself.

On the Friday before last I got confirmation from a friend at work that my PC was going to be ready for pickup.  His friend at another company had had all their computers upgraded when they were bought out recently so were selling off their old (good) computers cheaply.  I managed to purchase the last available Dell Dimension 9150 computer, complete with Samsung SyncMaster 940N 19" LCD monitor.  I was very pleased with the purchase as I’d recently been contemplating purchasing a Mac OSX computer, but when Apple announced new upgrades to the lineup they put the prices up $300 so the cheapest one was AUD$1,999.  I didn’t want to pay THAT much.  My other choice was to upgrade my current PC which meant purchasing a new motherboard, CPU and RAM plus one or two other things, but I would have had to keep my old CRT 17" monitor.  This would have cost around $300. Well, the price of my new PC came to $175, including LCD monitor. AWESOME!!  I spent an evening recently installing Windows XP onto this new machine. It came with 2Gb RAM, a 250Gb Hard Drive and a 512Mb Graphics card (my previous one was 128Mb!).  I could not be happier. Windows XP is so ZIPPY now and the LCD monitor is the icing on the cake.  I had a 200Mb IDE Hard Drive which I left in my old PC after transferring all the data to my new machine, which has 3 x SATA hard drives in it now. I left that in the old computer and installed Windows XP on it, along with some applications for mum and dad. They only have an old Windows 98SE computer, so this will be a major change for them. The old PC is an AMD 3000+ with 2Gb RAM and a 128 Mb graphics card and 200Mb Hard Drive.   Just installing dad’s favourite Texas Hold’em Poker game showed just how much faster it really is compared to his old one.  I even found about a couple of dozen freeware games to install on it.  There were some games he used to have on his old computer but it had been upgraded slightly and lost some of his games.   Now he is very happy and so am I!  In fact, I’ve checked some websites and the Dell Dimension 9150 apparently can run Mac OSX very well, so I shall look into that in the future.