Most movies are crap lately.

I may well be slumming it soon if we BUY here in melbourne. Makes sense to buy though, with the bonus finishing midyear and the market being ripe for longterm investments. Med finance companies to make it easier aswell

Well anyway, no choice but to deal, drink lots of water and yeh - why not some Dr Pepper.

USA Foods www.usafoods.com.au sells Dr Pepper, so I bought 24 cans. I also bought some Lipton raspberry flavoured instant Iced Tea, PopTarts (for Matt) and a can of Cherry (Code Red) Mountain Dew (crap).

Hooray for aircon - lets hope the energy companies have enough power to let us keep running it.

Oh yeah, did I mention some of connex’s (victorian rail) tracks buckled under the heat today.

The Black Cow, Launceston, Tas: Best restaurant in Australia. It’s a tough call and I have eaten at a few decent restaurants around Australia, but the Black Cow does a mean steak. Still water winery is responsible for the chef and the wine that matches it. The duet has come up with an awesome menu and some great wines to match. The local produce, both the lamb and the beef were just awesome.

Gordon River Cruises, Strahan, Tas: Great cruise, friendly staff and a nice 6hrs on a smooth catamaran. Two nice stop offs at the Heritage Landing and the ex-convict settlement: Sarah Island. The boat cruises down the Gordon River, right to the start of the Franklin river and all through the UNESCO world heritage forest. Oh yeah, it starts off with a cruise out through Hell’s Gates and into the southern ocean. From there all you would hit in one direction is Antarctica, or in another direction - Chile. On the way back in you go pass the salmon and ocean trout farms. Damn tassie salmon is good, and they serve it on the buffet in the boat aswell.

Strahan, Tas: overpriced, over-rated but yeah it’s ok I guess.

Hobart, Tas: pretty mad. I liked it. Nice cafe’s/restaurants/art galleries etc.

Boags Brewery, Launceston, Tas: mmm beer

Mole Creek Caves, Tas: cool, glow worms rock.

Cradle Mountain, Tas. They sell it as this amazing unique experience. Quite over-rated really. Admittedly it was very dry but it really resembled queensland and much of the lakes etc we see in QLD. I would love to go back in full snow, would be quite beautiful then I would imagine. Some nice mountains around tassie though, whereas QLD is quite flat.

HTC touch Diamond: Seriously mad.

Dandenong Ranges: A nice ride up. Pretty countryside. Nothing overly awesome though. Sassafras had some cute shops. I got Dr Pepper at a confectionary shop - yay.

Dr Pepper: still Awesome.

Chrstmas was a blast, kind of. I cooked an awesome macadmia/basil pesto roast pork, italian herb/garlic turkey, roast ham and steph took care of a multitude of salads. Her family enjoyed it, and I would say it is the best roast pork I have done. I like it when family visits but damn that’s a lot of people in a kind of small apartment.

Speaking of apartments, the landlord wants to increase the rent. Steph and I are considering what’s available to buy, or if we want to rent and research more. Fun times. But yeah, Melbourne is the GO. New years party tonight; who the hell picks the theme “9″. Oh yeah, Seth does. grr @ seth.

so… any ideas for the theme - maybe a cat (9 lives) or something - sms me as there are only a few hours left.

SMS hey…. I now have a new phone. I succumbed to the revolution and got a PDA/phone. The HTC touch Diamond:

WM6.1 / 4gig internal memory / wifi, 3G, sms, mms, office, mp3, mp4, voice calling, vid calling, 3.2mp, blahhh.

I am now with telstra, and they paid me $200 to go from optus to telstra (cost me $109 to leave Optus). Ahh business plans, so much better.

I am not the only person at work today - hooray for Dakang working his ass off too.

I am going to get back on top of things and not leave people/sites etc neglected (including logging into facebook more than monthly).

So… after doing parts of the Monash Micro Imaging Live cell imaging course and playing around with millions of dollars of microscopes from Leica, Olympus and Nikon … I’d have to say that yeah Leica rocks (depending on the model, the LX is a LEMON), olympus is ok (good images but buggy setup) and the Nikon a1: 

is damn good for the price.

So, the reason I just pimped Nikon? There was a lucky door prize and I just won a free Nikon coolpix S210 (3x optical, 8mp, vibration reduction, nikkor lens).

So yeah - one positive output from the week anyway.

Yeah what else - been shit busy with work… yay.

Bought a new GPS - 4.3″ widescreen, bluetooth and a built in DVB-T tuner (shh don’t tell the cops). - have virtually every piece of software available for it.

Researchgate is taking off… be a part of it.

Wrote a mini-review for the faculty of F1000 - an elitists society for scientific publications/evaluation etc. It’s good to have a boss with a big name.

Doing lots of crazy live cell confocal microscopy.. expensive lasers to play with, yay.

Just watched man city play man utd - damn good match!

It hailed down here last weekend, for no reason, and apparently even snowed in the city (very briefly). This weather is damp sporadic.

The christmas tree is up, where has the year gone. Where has my life gone.

My sister is pregnant, so is Em, so is Cindy, so is Lisle so is Panny, etc etc - so many kids around aswell.

and yeah.. that’s it. more soon.

e.g.

The above is from software called Imaris. $10k +$5k maintenance /year/computer. I have a 1 month off-site licence on my laptop for October (free, yay).

As far as tunes go - KMH’s new cd is out saturday. I have been listening to it on Nova. She has gone like mainstream alternative. i.e. it’s very much “quirky pop”… nothing really show’s off the potential of her voice. There are a few songs on their with real singing - but the rest are ok I guess. She is playing in Melbourne next month, I think i’ll go.

Photos - so many photos to go through and convert to jpg… eeek..