If life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Or, if you foolishly leave your climbing shoes at home, make awesome photos.
Jess climbing The Final Piece (25)
Tom climbing Wailer (25)
It was a lot of fun hanging on a rope taking photos of friends on spectacular rock climbs. Everyone’s getting really strong.
Is a very long time between posts. More than 10% of my life.
The trip I started in my last post was a resounding success. I rock climbed on 4 continents in 10 countries while travelling around the world. Celebrated the new year by sleeping in a snow cave on top of a mountain. Caught up with many old friends and made many new ones.
The time since then has been rather less exciting, but also much more relaxing.
My big holiday begins!
It’s 2am in Singapore, the first stop off on my way to Italy, and I’m making use of the free internet facilities at the airport. That was the longest leg of the flight, the next two portions are each half an hour shorter. There’s sooo much to watch on the plane, but nothing can keep my attention, am going to try and sleep some more this leg.
Neil Creek posted a few weeks back, a wonderful item on the right question to ask about photos and photography. Why?
Having bought a DSLR a month ago, I’ve been struggling to get out and enjoy taking pictures. It’s time to sit down and work out why I want to, and rediscover some motivation.
Last week I finally started work again after only about 3 months holiday. I’m not helping a Brisbane based web startup called MyNight. Everything’s going well so far, and it’s great not to be sitting around the house any more.
I’ve also changed the layout of my site. Hopefully only temporary (hah), and just a stock theme, but at least not THE stock theme.
Last weekend it was finally time to sort out the mess of data on my computer. First task was to free up some space to move, and burning a few of the ripped DVDs would help a lot. I’ve managed before in linux, using the command line, but this time I wanted a GUI.
Low and behold, recent versions of K3b actually allow this, it was only a few months ago that I was foiled.
It’s nice when things (finally) just work!
I’m back home now, after my two month summer climbing holiday taking in the best Australia has to offer. Starting out in the Blue Mountains in a house with QUT Cliffhangers, then continuing on camping at numerous places before ending up at Arapiles. Australia’s climbing ‘Mecca’.
It’s actually been a week and a half since I’ve been home, not a lot to report.
Hail storms are fun! A rather impressive specimen just roared through Brisbane. Luckily I was home to batten down the hatches.
The lunch and sweeps organised at work today for the Melbourne Cup were too much effort, so I’m now home for lunch. I’m not going to watch the race here either, thanks to an allergic reaction to the advertisement for ‘Dancing with the Stars‘, and then the painfully inane statistics being spouted by Bruce McAvaney.
Instead I’ll sit here enjoying my pasta lunch listening to the tuneful melodies of The Shin’s latest album.
There is nothing that annoys me more than the variety of different ways different countries write their dates!
The main problem affecting me occurs with Australian/UK and US formats, there is often no way to tell which is which. Most well designs APIs avoid them both, and sensibly order elements year-month-day, but many people decide dates are simple and reimplement it themselves, fools. The PHP date functions expect things to be ordered in the American way, and blindly produce errors for the unwary programmer.
Java solved the problem by adding layers of confusion. If you want to use dates in Java in a particular format, you need to learn about dates, and then date formaters, and then locales, and then cross your fingers and hope for the best.
Beware the evil dates!
