You know your in Australia when internet cost 30 bucks for 1Gb!!!!!!
Bah.
But, on the upside, I have a mobile phone… and guess what… I dont pay a cent to take calls on it!!!
(So, can we call it even stevn?)
I worked 6 hours the day I arrived. The project is AMAZING! I get goose bumps just thinking about it.
(No, still cant say anything…).
Right, thats it for now. Sorry its short. Still getting my head in the right time zone.
Cant say much (no really, I cant)…. but I just found out a few hours ago that we have a project in Sydney that is interesting / unusual to the point where Opto is sending me as a consultant.
Fly out tomorrow night. Arrive in Sydney 9amish Friday morning, and I go straight to the work location.
Depending on how it all goes, we suspect we will be there for anywhere from 2 to 6 weeks.
At this stage, my head is still spinning too much to think about anything other than the technical details of the project.
Im still going to do my photo a day, but the posting of said photo will be hit and miss along with my internet access.
Blog you from the other side.
I got two presents this year. (Who’s a lucky guy?).
Freddy is buying me a wireless USB link for my camera to laptop so that I dont have to trip over the cable when I am shooting in the studio.
(Every single model that I have shot in the studio just loves the tethered shooting, they see their shot about 5 seconds after I take it).
That’s in the mail (well, it will be once I order it…. haven’t had time even get on the computer and order my own present… lame), so for the actual day, Freddy wanted to know what I wanted to do.
Since its been a while, I asked if we could go for a drive.
Both kids immediately offered to make my day a lot more pleasant by them staying home. And they did not even know where I wanted to drive!
So, Sunday morning, Freddy packed a picnic lunch and off we went.
We had a destination in mind, Desert View Tower.
It was a really nice drive out there. Mostly freeway, you have to hand it to the Americans, they know how to make smooth wide open freeways.
While we were heading south on the freeway, Freddy saw a helium filled gold star balloon float over the freeway. It was pretty weird to see it float over, seemingly in the middle of no where. But, we thought nothing more of it (hold this thought).
The tower is interesting, the guy is nice and friendly, but the view is just as good from the ground I suspect as from the top of the tower.
We headed off and just found a little place to pull over to have lunch in the car (it was blowing a near gale, so had no choice). The weather was really hot (38°C) so it was just as well to sit inside the car.
Here is the view we had for lunch.
Heading north, we were out in the middle of the desert, driving along, minding our own business, when a helium filled gold star balloon floated over the road in front of the car.. It totally freaked us out. It just had to be the same one…..
We then we stopped for a potty break and when we got back on the road, we noticed another side road, so off we went…. We both saw the ‘Dead End’ sign, but figured we would be Ok… heh….
It was great to get the Rangie out into the bush again, its been a while….
Amazingly there was some really stinky water out there!
After driving through lots of soft sand and some bog holes for about an hour, we came to a sign, in the middle of a road…..
We had no choice but to turn around. (So who knew, the dead end sign was right.. this one time).
Anyway, here are the stats for the day (in Kms!!!!!)
There are more photos from the day in my photo gallery.
As is my custom I take a photo of the wingtip of every plane I fly in…..
So, here is the trip up;
Since I had a bit of time, I messed about in one of the (many) photo editing apps on my Android phone.
I know its a bit warn out, but the old / faded look sort of fits.
The trip was a success. All our gear went in and worked like it was supposed to.
Time will tell if we get many sales from it or not, as one of the guys back in the hospital used to say ‘you have to speculate to accumulate’.
The only ‘downer’ was the fact that the last guy in the room next to me left his alarm clock set for 1:45am. I let it run for a bit thinking that the software guy of the company that made the thing would have programmed it to turn off after 15 minutes…. No, he just left the code open…..
I really should have called the front desk rather than just put up with it, but I didn’t, so did not get a lot of sleep, but, thats not all that new for me.
The trip home was pretty uneventful. I got a great seating allocation (A4), my best ever, so got a window seat up front.
It was a bit bumpy heading out, but soon settled down.
For the trip home I was lucky to get one of the new X-wing planes.
As usual, once we got home, things got humming.
We have two work experience guys from a technical high school in San Markos with us for 3 weeks.
Im getting them to work on one of the projects that has been on my to-do list for a while. It will be great for them as it should be doable for them to start it and finish in it in the three weeks. They should be able to go back to their class and show their work on the internet, and I will be much further along on that project.
In other news, I have started to try and learn Java. Another of the projects on my list centers around getting my head around Google Web Toolkit with uses Java.
Enough to say that it will help with what the work experience guys are working on, with one of our other projects and also on getting content on iphone, ipads and of course Androids.
