Posts

Heh, this is pretty funny. My friend Omar from work informed me that one (or some) of his other band members had found a site that gave excellent reviews for all the Santos Renuentes gigs that the person had been too. They told him “see, you never know who comes to see our shows”. Well, yes that’s true… but if it weren’t for Omar I doubt that I’d ever had heard of Tobacco Road or Santos Renuentes or whatever. Maybe I would have gone along to see some live music one time and seen their band. If I did take that path, I’d probably have given them a good review anyway ;-) ...

This story made me laugh a little because I intially thought it was a joke, but then I felt a bit disturbed: “POLICE in the US state of Florida charged a 34-year-old rescue worker with cruelty to animals after a weekend incident in which he bit the head off a parrot.” http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,12196119-401,00.html

I can’t put it into words how freaking amazing Yosemite national park was. It had some of the most beautiful scenery ever. Just absolutely amazing. I also experienced the coldest weather I’ve ever been in. We camped outside for 2 nights and the second night was just absolutely freezing. We’re guessing it got down to about -1 or -2 degrees F, which translates to something like -16 degrees celcius. My sleeping bag was only rated to 0 degrees celcius, so… very bloody cold. Of course that was made up for by the fact that when I woke up after the second night of sleep I stepped out into snow. I’d never been in snow before. Absolutely awesome. ...

You can find the pics here. Go to picture 127 which is on the last page for Rumi restaurant. You’ll see me looking like a goose in a red shirt. The guy next to me is my mate Sean from work (aka Saeed). The people are all Nina’s friends AFAIK (1). I think they’re all Persian except for the girl with the light brown hair. I think she was from Peru. Nina is the one all the way to the right in the brown top. ...

This was the view I had at lunch today. If I looked to the right I saw this: If I turned a little more to the right I saw this: ...

Google is so cool. It helped me in my job so many times by getting me the best search results. It’s just like an external brain… there is a heck of a lot of stuff I don’t know but then I google it, get the answer, answer the question and then I *seem* smart, when in actual fact I’m probably not - I just know what keywords to use. I guess it’s like how people in South Beach *seem* perfect (or walk around like it) when in actual fact of course, they’re not (1). They just find ways around it (read plastic surgery). Oh, and I’m not talking about personality here either. I’m actually just dribbling. ...

People talking on their mobile phones in the restrooms whilst sitting on the toilet seat. Not cool guys. Not cool.

I think the most important is a phone conversation recorder, and I don’t know why it isn’t automatically built into the phone systems that corporate engineering companies (well, this one at least) use. When I’m having a technical discussion over the phone with my tech lead or something (and sometimes these conversations can go for over an hour, especially when a group discussion is going on) I always miss stacks of points. There are a couple of ways I know of to record what was said during the conversation: make notes while you’re listening, or listen very hard and try to understand so no notes need be taken. If I’m doing the former I’ll miss key points without realising it because I’m concentrating on getting down on paper the information in a form I’ll understand later. If I’m doing the latter I’ll just forget stuff. Why don’t they give us a “record” button on the phone so I can play back the conversation later to see if I missed anything? Maybe there is stuff out there that can do this, but they don’t supply it to us by default. ...

*Finally* I went for a night out in South Beach. Only one word describes that night out: awesome. When you’re kicking on to breakfast at 6:30am in the morning and making sure that a friend is ok as they’ve been getting sick in the toilet, you know you’ve had a good night. I *think* we ended up in a place called “Pearl”. The name of the place was “Rumi”. Check out the pictures of this place! They played some bloody good music but only towards the latter part of the night. It seems that the music has to be dumbed down a lot earlier on in the night to please the fickle part of the crowd (err, rethink that. It’s South Beach. The fickle part of the crowd is the crowd) and they only play the non-commercial, actually good-to-listen-to stuff later. ...

What can I say about San Francisco? I absolutely, without a doubt, positively loved it. A-friggen-mazing place. We stayed in a hotel which was about a one minute walk from Union square, more or less the centre square for San Francisco and we had the cable cars going past our window down in the street. Did I do a lot of walking? Hell yes! I was absolutely buggered from walking around but loved every bit of it. A nice change from all the flatness here in Florida. ...