javaList.add("Simon");

I'm guessing that what I'm trying to say is that i finally managed to get my Sun Java certification. I took the exam yesterday and it was pretty rock hard even though i knew what to expect. It was also a little weird as once you have finished the exam, the screen tells you it's printing your results. I went back to the reception and the receptionist trundled off saying that she'd get them for me. She was only about 10 seconds, but it felt like an hour...boy. Luckily it was a pass :) Woo ! 'Cause it was a Tuesday it was pub quiz night too, so we had a drink to celebrate with a little trivia, i just had to resist the urge to say "Compilation fails" to the questions. Oh, as a side note, Andrea was in the dance off and i think she did much much better than my "dad dancing" :)

Anyway, to do a Gweneth, I'd like to thank Andrea for being such patient girl and supporting me throughout...thankyou poppy xx

Right, where's the job listings :)

PS: I'm sure that Tim, Martin and Rob could do a better geeky heading for this post ;) Just as long as it's not VB or VB.Net ;)

The most geekiest thing we have done so far on this trip

We went to the Sydney Opera House to see a classical orchestra. It wasnt just normal classical music though, nope it was the music from computer games. Have a look at this link for more info: http://www.sydneyoperahouse.com/sections/whats_on/features/play/

It was in the biggest concert hall and was packed full of geeky gamers and me. It was amusing to see some people with their girlfriends, as im sure some of the girls had been dragged there. I will be honest though ive never seen a classical orchestra before and ive never had a desire to, so this was a perfect way of me seeing it. We were both really looking forward to it, and it wasnt a let down. We had front row seats which was very good for watching the action, it did mean though we were practically sat on the bass's knee and the view of the screens was a bit distorted by the music stand (what they put the music sheets on) for the bassist. It didn't matter though because it was all about the music. The most amusing one was super mario (to be honest it was one of the only ones i had heard off). Heres an example of what it was like. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2QWwXFOsoI If you watch this, you will see that about a minute in, they put mario on the screen and everyone started cheering. Simon cheered for Zelda and Gaycraft. The other thing i noticed was that like myself, i suspect a lot of people have never been to a concert before and therefore we do not know the correct etticate and this means that we werent entirely sure when to clap or when the interval arrived we all just sat there waiting for something to happen. I also ran out at one point for the loo and then wasnt let back in until a suitable time.

Now as we were having a posh sydney opera house evening we thought we would have a posh meal beforehand. So we ended up going into a bar and because it was full they directed us up to a beautiful bar upstairs with great views of the bridge. The bartender informed us that because they were between menus but the chef would be happy to sort us out for something. So we stupidly agreed, after a while the chef came out to talk to us and suggest some nibbles for $30. So we thinking oohh like tapas bits and bobs sounds good(£15) . So this is a meal that a chef makes for us especially which involved: some sorbet in a shot glass, cold soup in a shot glass (which i think is posh), a little cold toast thing with some ham on, and some minging bean thing on a spoon and for the great finale was (homemade apparently) a tiny amount of vanilla icecream. Needless to say we walked straight out of there and straight to a takeaway for our tea.

Last weekend we bought some champagne (sparkling wine) called Passion pop (i liked the name and it was $5). It tasted like Peach sparkling water and was worse quality then Lambrini, but i liked it and so did Diana.

This evening whilst waiting for Simon i ordered some wine at a bar and the guy started talking about the quality of wine and made a comment on how when he was a teenager and first started drinking Passion Pop was their choice of wine cos it was cheap and nasty. I didnt tell him that i had been drinking it only the previous weekend.

Just found this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8Kyi0WNg40&feature=active_sharing - thought it was quite amusing (its only 5 secs long)

The most difficult thing i have done so far on this trip

Was get my haircut by someone other then Jane. It was a bargain,($40 instead of $80) as it was at a hairdressers that has just been open for a month and I got a free mirror to take home with me. I havent had my hair cut since October and as well as being really long it was really stragly and hanging. Ive had a lot chopped off and my hair just feels so much lighter. Gonna get my self weighed tomoz, i bet ive lost weight.

Special evening tomoz we are going to Sydney Opera House so we are going for a nice meal first. So my hair cut couldnt have been better timed.

The girl who cut my hair was called Kate and was Korean who didnt particular speak much English so would try and do small talk (like they do) and it consisted of. So do u like dancing? and where do you live, how far is it on the bus. Really nice girl though and im chuffed with my hair.

Looks a bit stragly at the ends in the pic, cos i have just had a bath and got the ends wet - whoops

Driving in our family reliable Hyundai Elantra

After driving around in circles trying to find the shopping centre and ending up on the opposite side of the city, i drove back to the apartment block and parked outside the apartment. Simon later on in the evening discovered that I had actually parked in a non parking zone (20 foot away from parking zone) and said i should move it, I said he should move it. So we didnt move it until we then agree to both go down. The problem is that round here its really difficult to find a car park space anywhere. So we both went to go downstairs but the lift wasnt working and there was no way i was walking down 9 flights of stairs so we didnt move it. Simon then said ok we will move it in the morning as we were gonna get up early. So of course we didnt get up early and there was a parking ticket for $180 (90 quid) and it had only been on the car 20mins when we picked it up. What was really annoying was that the car hire for 3 days had only cost us $180. So whos fault was it. Mine for not parking it in the right place, or Simon for saying he would move it in the morning and didnt get up in time.



Why do the Australians love our Queen - because you get a day off for it being her birthday. If England did this then everyone would love the Queen.



Quiz night - I love tuesday Quiz night, it is the funniest quiz i ever been to and ever likely to. At one stage we all sang happy birthday to a girl and then we all realised that she was breast feeding her little boy at the time. At the end of it she just stood up and nodded laughing. The quiz master was very embarrassed. At the end of the night because 2 teams came joint first they had to have a dance off. 1 person from each team had to get up and start dancing to some corny music. So 2 girls got up and started dancing, they were funny but.. suddenly the boys got up from there table. There was about 10 people dancing very stupidly on the stage. Very very funny. This girl is extremly funny http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2P4YGrfKLzg Shes in the team 'Show us your pussy' and seems to have thrown down the gauntlet as to how funny it can get at dancing. Brayn from our team apparently did the best dance the other week which we unfortunatly missed. It involved him and the other guy doing a bit of a strip whilst dancing.

When we left mum gave me something very important. Her small handbag umbrella. This has turned into one of the most useful things that we own. Its not stopped raining for the past week now and its not like Manchester drizzle miserable rain it absolutely gushes down.

What's that Skip?....

Skippy
Originally uploaded by simbloid.

...Andrea's broke her shoes again and they need fixing!"

Well, this weekend was a bank holiday here so we took the opportunity to hire a car and go off into some of the yonder down under. By the way, the holiday was for the Queen's Birthday !! As you may (or may not) of heard there was some pretty bad storms here over the weekend, Thursday, Friday and Saturday were terrible.

Saturday the weather wasn't good and Andrea was in the mood to get some shoes (i wasn't tho, sorry). Anyway, she was planning to end up at a Broadway shopping center right by central station in the center, but somehow ended up at Bondi Junction. That's the exact opposite of where she was supposed to go, trust me. She said it was due to the fact that she couldn't turn left. She never got any shoes.

Sunday the weather got a little better and we headed south to Botany Bay. Andrea felt it was important to visit the place where captain cook landed in Australia as she's been getting a bit of stick from work for saying "Who's captain cook? Did he discover America?" After wandering round there for a bit we headed back to the visitor center where one of the workers there offered to give us a lift to the cliffs on the coast to do a bit of whale watching. We saw one spurting his water out and surfacing briefly, but the weather was so bat at this point that spotting anything at this point was hard. Leaving botany bay, we headed into the Royal National Park for a little drive. Audley was out first stop for some bad chips and a coffee. Sitting down there we were joined progressively by loads of cheeky cockatoos which were trying to pinch our chips. We then kept on driving through the park taking in the scenery and headed back to the flat to get ready for an all you can eat meal (The diet was on holiday too!).

Monday we went out to the Koala Sanctuary as we'd heard that you can touch and stroke them there.

It was small, but a great place to visit. They had kangaroos which you could feed and stroke, some of them even had little joeys in their pouches. Then we moved to the Koalas which you could also stroke. They were happy as long as they had some eucalyptus to munch on. The Cockatoos we could of missed easily as we see them all the time squawking and stuff. As we went up to their enclosure, they started talking to us with sayings like, "hello", "goodbye", "can i have a cracker", "hello darling", and wolf whistling. Head over to our photos for a better look. From there we moved onto a small town called Windsor which seemed to be a bit of a biker haven. After wandering around here for a bit we just headed back to the city stopping at Burger Fuel for the best burgers ever !

Our diet started back up on Tuesday...promise :)

Fire alarm(s)

The weather here today has been pretty bad, all rain and wind. I'm sat here at the moment writing java application for Andrea. I've been band from telling anyone from what it is because Andrea fears it will damage her reputation...however, if you pester her, i'm sure she'll cave in. :)

Anyway, whilst sitting here in the room coding away, the fancy fire alarm goes off. This time it was telling us to evacuate and then buzzing loudly. Obviously the proper thing to do here would be to do what it says, but it's chucking it down outside so i go and look out on the balcony in the bedroom at the building and see if i can see any fire/smoke. Andy, the new guy from 'nam then knocks on my door and says "what's going on", i said it's the fire alarm and then move to the other balcony in the dining room to check that side of the building. This time Diana, Daniels girlfriend, comes out of his room too. Now i have two people who really don't speak that good English following me round the flat. Opening one of the windows and peering down for a better view of the potential fire, i notice that both Andy and Diana are at my side also looking down. Diana then says "any fire", and i said "no, just Gustavo's cooking", at which point she erupted into the highest pitch laughter i've EVER heard. Andy had a blank look on his face, either it wasn't funny or it went right over his head. Anyway, I think Diana would make a cracking fire alarm as long as you don't mind loosing all your windows.

I'm back in the room now and the alarms off, so after writing this i'll be back to my coding. Ooo..whilst my editor in chief is away, Diana is like Andrea's mini-me ! Of course, Andrea hasn't got a laugh like that tho (thank heaven).

Regarding geeks...

Well, last week it was the Google developer day throughout the world. I was one of the lucky ones able to go to the Sydney one. Throughout the day all the food and drink (including beer and wine after) was free ! Woo ! Arriving there it was obvious that Google spared no expense, wifi access, recharge points, Google bean bags for blogging on, big plasma TVs showing live searches and other Google stuff, a Nintendo Wii, oh and did i mention the free food? Breakfast consisted of a danish and a strong coffee.

At first glance, you could be fooled for thinking it was singles night at the local club: 1000 people, 5 of which were girls! All pasty looking chaps that looked like they haven't shaved for around a week let alone seeing any daylight ! You know that PC vs Mac advert campaign that's showing on TV; I like to think that i fell into the "groovy" Mac side of geeks, even though i don't have a Mac.

When i got there, there was some faces that i knew from the Ruby geek meets, and also some people from Andrea's company...i clung to them as they we're "kinda" normal.
A schoolbell sounded and it was time for class. Going into the main arena, there was tonnes of Google welcome packs which included a Google Pen, stickers, and the most amazing notepad i've ever seen. I did my duty and stole another pack for Andrea too(Sorry Tim). The presenter was a bit like an Aussie Clive Anderson but funnier, he's quite popular down under and has a radio show and a "new inventors" show on TV which is like dragons den but nicer.

I wont go into the lessons as most of them we're boring. Some of the speakers were very good, others were terrible and sleep inducing. For morning break i had a cookie and another coffee. Lunch i had some Chinese noodles, a ham salad roll, a pie, and lots of coffee and soft drinks. Afternoon tea, i had an apple (:O) and more coffee. After the day had ended, beer beckoned with nibbles a plenty. As you can see, i fell of the dieting wagon today (that's what being a geek does to you).

Well, it wouldn't be a decent blog post about the Google day if i never posted something that i learnt, so here goes...



I hope you're all suitably impressed and wooed by my geekyness ;) Looking forward to next years Google developers day anyway.

Update: I appear to be famous...

checking the schwag or "Where's Simon"

and...

Not sure where to go? (incase you are in any doubt, i'm the short one)