Month: September 2007

Okay…  so it’s Spring here and I will be vacationing in Fall in the USA and Canada,  Today I leave for San Francisco and the first item on the itinery is San Francisco’s huge LoveFest parade and party.   It should be a fun Saturday afternoon as all the freakky costumes come out.   I missed it last year as I was lost somewhere near the Golden Gate Bridge.   But I’ll be there tomorrow!
Then on Sunday we’ll be checking out the Folsom Street Fair before the touring starts on Monday.  I’ll be putting trips updates here as I travel around with Thomas the laptop tiger.

It was like waking up to Christmas this morning!   Today I fly to San Francisco (via Sydney) with Qantas.   And I jumped online to see if Qantas had granted my upgrade.  I was preparing to fly in economy because I know the flight is pretty full today (thanks Seatcounter.com).   And the first indicator that I’d been successful was that my points balance had dropped.  And then I checked my flight to see the magic word above…   business.   Oh…  and upper deck too!   I can’t wait to slip into those Morrissey pyjamas (Qantas).

It’s just 1 week now till I leave for San Francisco (and then on to Vancouver).  The first weekend in San Francisco will be very busy.  I’m meeting up with my friends Bill and Luke over there.   On Saturday the Love Festival (or is it Love Parade?) is on and then on Sunday we’ll go and check out the Folsom Street Fair (a huge leather fetish festival).   It’s a huge freaky weekend in San Francisco.  After that we are planning on doing a whole lot of touring.   I can’t wait.
I should find out during the week if I have gotten my upgrade to business class on my Qantas flight from Sydney to SFO.  The pic above is from San Francisco last year.

I was really sad to hear the news today that one of the members of the very first Big Brother household died in a hospital in China.   Gordon “donkey dick” Sloan (also known as Flash Gordon) became a larger than life character in the channel 10 reality series 7 years ago when reality TV was quite new to Australia.   He was a huge boy who would fill the days in the house by doing hundreds of crunches and thus had an amazing body.   His fame followed him to Iraq where he was to become a human shield there during the war in 2003.  He also helped set up a shelter for homeless children.   I last saw him in one of Tim Brunero’s interviews on Ohbrother.com during this year’s Big Brother series.    The rumour is that his death was drug related.   He was just 34 years old.

I haven’t heard anything so stupid for such a long time.   It is looking likely that the Liberal Party (lead by John above) will not be voted in as the next Government for Australia later this year.    And the polls seem to point at the dropping popularity of it’s leader.   His leadership has been under question for the last couple of years.    Mostly he is coming off as an arrogant smug idiot who doesn’t know when to quit!    
The news today is that he wants to stay the leader of the party (win one more election) and then he promises to retire part way through the next term….   
Before today I might have bought a used car from this guy…   but now this is low!    Does he expect us to believe this?   He allegedly promised the same thing to Peter Costello before he was elected as the prime minister.    It’s so blatent now…  the man is a liar.   There is only one thing I want to see on TV this year….   John Howard giving his losing speech.

Continuing with the Airport series of movies this weekend I checked out “Airport 79 The Concord”.   It was nice to see some of the characters from previous Airports getting a seat again.   This time they actually spent a bit of money.   I had no idea the concorde existed in 1979…  or that it could fly upside side to avoid heat seeking missiles.    The big surprise was the passenger list.   JJ from Good Times and the husband from Greenacres.  
The story line didn’t have us in the air much…  even though the concorde was attacked on both legs of it’s flight from Washington to Moscow.  There was a lot of time spent on on-ground romances, hookers in hotel rooms, evil men “fixing” the plane and some corporation building the heat seeking missiles.   Oh and Robert Wagner played the part of the bad guy.   He had his on personal groovy 70’s jet…   with colour TV!   I won’t tell you how he ends up in the movie….   but he doesn’t pick up his luggage.   The best thing about this movie is very funny manouvering of the concorde as the cartoon-like missiles come after the plane…  I can see why they decided to make Flying High after watching this movie.
I still think Airport 75 is hard to beat for all it’s camp 70’s glory.   Next week we’ll check out the original “Airport”.

Nothing but the best for my visitors!   This morning I took Scott out for a free coffee at the opening of the ANZ bank in Bourke Street Mall.   I used to bitch about my bank a lot.  But this year they have opened 2 branches in the city which stay open during the weekend.   And!!  They staff them with nice people!   I’m really amazed at how nice it has been to deal with them over the past year.   When I go in there the staff actually know what they are doing, they don’t stop serving to talk to the other staff who don’t know what to do.   This week a new 7 day a week branch opened in the mall and they were giving out free bags, coffees, balloons and Scott also found the man walking through the mall in a large foam ATM  (handy bank).
I doubt he will find anything as exciting as his trip to my bank for the rest of his stay in Melbourne.

I got an alarming email from my web host last night saying that I had almost reached my bandwith limit.   And when I checked it seems that my 4GB site has been downloaded like crazy over the past 3 days.   And only being the 9th day of the month this means the site will disappear soon unless they let me buy more bandwith.   Immediately I went and checked the stats and found that one password had used 87 gigabyte in 2 days!   I have the guy’s name, email address and home address  (it’s amazing what you can find on the internet).   Needless to say that he won’t be logging in again.   The only way this could have happened would be if he shared the password with some public group….  and they all logged in for free.  I have no idea how many different IPs used the password, I’m just glad my host warned me at the 80% bandwith level.

I won’t tell you who the guy is but I can tell you the culprit country….

So the President of the United States arrives in Sydney just an hour from now.   I don’t remember the last time that Air Force 1 came to Australia.   But I’m sure that a lot of Sydney-siders wish he wasn’t coming.   The amount of disruption his visit and the hosting of APEC is causing in the harbour city is amazing!   A giant wall built through the city to protect the visitors from protestors and the whole city closed down for a day!   That’s right…  all of Sydney has been given a holiday this Friday to avoid traffic chaos in the city as all the visitors arrive.
There is predicted violence from the protestors travelling to Sydney, so there will be thousands of police in the city as well.   It won’t be a nice place to be this weekend.  
As Air Force 1 arrives in Sydney tonite I will be waiting to see if CJ Craig follows Jed Bartlett down the steps.

Oooh…   could this be my new toy?   I was quite impressed by the latest release of IMACs and the new software.   I’m thinking that the time to change from PC to Mac could be very soon.  My company is also offering a 9% discount on Apple computers to employees…  nice!