John

How many of you guys and girls have met my Dad? I can't think of anyone except for the Shane-beast, and that's only because he lives about 3 kms away from him. Interesting statistic.

My Dad's name is John, he's a Pommy (stronger accent than me). He's tall (not as tall as me though). He's handy with building and fixing stuff, usually things like houses, boats etc (I am next to useless on these particular things).
John is semi-retired, works from home a bit, and lately seems to get out on holidays fairly regularly with his partner, Carol. I think that This Is A Good Thing.

So now you know a bit about him anyway.

I'm staying at Dad's place, which is in a small bay somewhere on the Central Coast. This is an area about an hour North of metro Sydney. It's a good place to come to if you want to relax and recover, which I did after the weekend's effort.

Just here for the two nights. I was going to head into Sydney from Weds to Fri, but I found out yesterday that there is a secret TISM gig tomorrow, so I've changed my flight to go back early. It's not so secret any more, as I told about 20+ people about it. Should be a good night. All I'm missing out on is a short meeting with the guys I just did work for, nothing that can't be done over the phone.

So somehow tomorrow I have to:

a) Get to Woy Woy station, get a train back to Sydney.
b) Stop at Niki's work and pick up Dougo's jumper.
c) Meet Alex for lunch.
d) Pick up my tools etc from Woody's.

All in time for:

e) Get to the airport by 1:30pm for my flight to Melbs.

Wish me luck.

D

Bucks

Ok the title is a pun, I went to a Buck's night on Saturday, and it's also a general comment on the amount of $$$ I've been spending lately. (This forum is pretty good, I get to amuse myself without any comeback on my poor jokes. Until you figure out how to leave comments for each post, that is.)

Anyway, Warren the Rock-God is getting married. I know Warren from my Stanmore days living with Arlie and the Shane-beast in Sydney, circa 1998/1999.

After finishing up (early) in Macau I flew back from Hong Kong to Sydney. (Brief stop in HK to buy some videoscreens and goodies for Elendil and I to play with in Darwin.)
Got into Sydney at about 8am, after not much sleep on a 9 hour flight. Arls picked me up, we had breakfast. I flaked it for about 4 hours while the bucks boys went and played go-karts. Cut to 5pm, I wake up and stagger into the lounge room and am immediately offered a beer and a scoob. Being a well-mannered boy, I find it impossible to refuse.

We then proceeded to James Squire, some pub near Darling Harbour. Still not fully refreshed, I slept on a bench for about 90 minutes. Not bad considering the AUS/UK Rugby game was on the bigscreen nearby, and not to mention all the bouncers that had to be told: 'Nah he's not drunk, he just flew in from Hong Kong, he's really tired'! Thanks Dr Arlie. After a while we headed to a strip-club of medium quality, Pure Platinum. $20 to get in, shock horror. Wazza showed form with the ladies: 'Hey baby', 'Hi baby' etc for a couple of hours. I had an amusing conversation in Dutch with a young lady who was making the most of her working holiday visa at the above establishment.

Next it was off to my favourite Sydney pub, the Century Tavern. Normally I like to arrive here at about 3am, but I'm not _that_ fussy. Beer, pool and an interesting conversation with a young Swedish lass ensued. Thinking I had gotten lucky, the rest of the crew bailed to Tank, a nightclub with another $20 wasted on entry. (It only took me 20 minutes to strike out, then I followed the herd) Next few hours passed quite pleasantly; I met Tamara the party-machine, Dave from Penrith faded in and out of existence, Warren's eyes (just) managed to stay in their sockets. I of course was the model of good behaviour, getting my kicks solely from water and redbull.

About 4am we called it a night, and returned to the bachelor pad. Tamara decided red wine was in order, so I didn't manage to crash until about 10am...and then only till about 3pm. Somehow we stayed up until 10pm or so on Sunday night.

Here endeth the Buck's night.

Bye Waldo!

Ok, I'm back. Before I forget, here's my memories of Macau.

Hotel Room: Toilet that looks like a spaceship. Stupid control panel next to the bed that does everything in the room. (You get up for a piss, walk all the way to the bathroom in the dark, then remember you have to hit this tiny button back on the bedside table. You also need a degree in contortionism to be able to change TV channels while watching to see what's on)

Waldo Casino site: Not ready, hectic, stupid cleaners sweeping dirt back and forth to each other. Walking from Basement 2 up to the 2nd floor about 7 times a day because the stupid elevators were fucked. Glad to leave when I did.

Streets of Macau: Dirty, but no worse than Hong Kong, better than Bangkok. Thousands of motor-scooters. Russian prostitutes (They sure get around!) Black taxis, with automatic door openers and funky little receipt-printers on the dashboard.

The Embassy Bar: This place tries to be like Raffles hotel in Singapore, lots of whitey ex-pats hanging out there, including some ex-FBI pensioner. A lot of casino-industry bods, mostly Australian. Filipino and Burmese bar staff. Jonas the soccer-mad Swedish manager. Getting too drunk one night and leaving my credit card behind the bar. Trying to chat up a 40 y/o Chinese dance instructor. Hearing the life/sob story of some poor-little-rich-girl (English, but born in HK)

Me: 'So Hong Kong sucks? So leave!'
Her: 'But do you know how much money I make, how much property I own...blah..blah.'

Ahh the extreme humour of messing with people's minds....

Anyway, I just needed to data-dump all that stuff before I forgot it.

Greetings from Macau

Hi gang. Sorry for the delay.. First couple of weeks of June was just my general slackness, but since the 14th I've been in Macau (China) and this has been the first chance I've had to get online. How to describe it here? Crazy - probably the best word for now. For those of you that have travelled in Asia, it's not much different to anywhere else I've been...more English-speakers than I expected, but maybe that's just within the casino industry. It's SNAFU here..as it always is on Asian installs...Been working balls-to-the-wall 10 hour days, and just when I thought I should probably take a rest-day I came down with some fever...hopefully not SARS! Anyway other than work I have absolutely nothing to report. I was hoping to meet up with my Dad, who was coincidentally in Hong Kong, or maybe take a trip to mainland China..but the workload/deadline here is too heavy for me to think about it. So as usual I will come back wishing I'd seen something other than the insides of the casino and my hotel. But as we say in Melbourne: 'You get that on the big jobs'!

See you next time, when I will have lost even more weight.
(No aircon, 30C minimum temp, 90% humidity!)

More of the same....

3:46am: At Ray's, doing jack shit...(Business as usual)
Here is a pic of Ray from my recently acquired phone-camera thingy.


Off home to dream of warmer places.

Invasion!

Seems this blog thing is getting popular...I now have at least one reader/viewer/critic or whatever he is. Hi Uncle Vince. Hopefully I can find a stupid and embarrassing picture of him to put up here. Meanwhile, his blog is here.

In other news: I was woken up this morning with _another_ job offer in Darwin. Seems like I'm destined to go up there...the jobs are finding me, I don't even have to go looking for them. This job could be OK, it's partly doing slot-machines/pokies as I have in the past, but a big part of the job is telecoms cabling, exchanges and other different crap.

So I get to do something I can do with my eyes closed, while occasionally learning new skills. It's all looking pretty good, even comes with a car. The other job I was considering was a bit more outdoorsy, probably a bit healthier...but considering those pricks haven't gotten back to me after me calling them 3 times...they can stick their job.

Plus there's only so far you can go fixing two-way radios...although I wasn't supposed to be getting concerned about career-advancement possibilities...Hmmm...do I take the slack dead-end job that would be fun for a while but then probably boring and repetitive, or the one where I'll be working hard from day #1 but learning new stuff, getting more $$ and a car of some kind?

I will contemplate this seemingly easy decision......

over and out