Christmas with Grandma

This year we had Christmas in Melbourne at my Aunty's place in Surrey Hills.

We were planning to go to Dinner Plain near Mount Hotham where my family own a chalet, but the bushfires near Harrietville made it too risky. The last major fires in 2003 did some big damage.

Instead, my Mum, Dad and Grandma came over to Melbourne to have Christmas with us. It was the first time I'd seen Grandma in ages. My brother Chris couldn't make it, since he was visiting his girlfrend in Boston.

We had a roast turkey, a few glasses of wine, and ended up watching March of the Penguins, a present Mum gave me. It was actually quite a pleasant and relaxing day.

The next day, we went to the Yarra Valley to go wine tasting. By the time we got there, it was about 2pm, so we were all fairly hungry. We ended up going to Yering Station, which was the first place we found advertising food!

They have a big homestead turned into accommdation and dining. Had to go thru a waiting room to get a table. Once we sat down, the waitress tried to put a serviette on my lap. I looked at her funny as if to say "I am perfectly capable of doing this myself!", then looked a little sheepish and apologised. It'd obviously been far too long since I'd been to a silver service restaurant!

I had a steak with mustard and chips arranged in a box shape. Presentation obviously counts! It didn't taste too bad either. :-)

Mum and Dad at Yering Station

We then spent the rest of the day driving around looking for wine to taste. The main one we went to was De Bortolli, which seems to be quite famous in Melbourne. I was the designated driver (just to be sure!), so I didn't end up trying anything. Entered a TAC designated driver competition. (With my luck lately, you never know!) Dad didn't have any interest for the wine, so ended up trying cheeses. He's become quite a wine snob since taking a more keen interest in the Coonawarra, McLaren Vale and Barossa Valley! Instead he found an old Italian style of cheese made from raw (unpasteurised) milk for about $60/kg!

Grandma at De Bortoli

We then came back via Healesville. The trip was quite scenic. Reminded me of driving thru the Victorian alps. It was quite windy. Apparently there's a well-known motorbike run nearby called the Black Spur that a frend Nag told me about.

The next day, we went to the National Gallery, had lunch at a really modest (but delicious) Thai restaurant on Southbank called Jasmine, saw Casino Royale (which was really good), then Mum and Dad went home.

Year of the (Lucky) Monkey

2006 has turned out to be my luckiest year ever.

After winning world cup tickets in May, I've just found out that I've won a season double pass to the Moonlight Cinema.

There seems to be a bit of a theme developing, as I won the competition at Bear Brass on Southbank by buying a James Boag's beer.

It's a shame the year's about to end, because 2006 will be a hard year to beat!

Melbourne House No More

Melbourne House closed yesterday. It was one of the longest running Australian games development companies.

They were involved in the production of Xenon by the Bitmap Brothers. I have fond memories of it, as it is one of the first games I played on my family's Atari ST.

Some of the employees will be moving on to Krome, while others including my frend Sud will be looking for a new job!

Comedy at the Spiegeltent

Last night I went out to see a comedian called Sammy J at the Spiegeltent with Katie, a girl I met at speed dating the other night.

The show was really good. Actually much better than the two comedians I saw at this year's comedy festival, Wil Anderson and Rod Quantock, who seem to be a bit out of form lately.

Most memorable moments include stealing a joke from Seinfeld and singing a song about the Melbourne train network, mentioning every station in order!

I think he's coming to the comedy festival next year, so I recommend you go and see him!

The Grates and Faker

Went to see The Grates last night. They were really gr... good! Sounded very similar to their studio work, but they were worth seeing for the sets (snowmen and snowflakes) and the singer Patience jumping around like she was crazy. I also didn't realise the drummer was a chick.

They were supported by Faker, who didn't really impress me. They have a song called "Hurricane" which is a little bit catchy, and another "Love For Sale" which seems to have interesting lyrics, but apparently it's a cover, so they can't claim credit for that anyway. Other than that, they were just a bunch of guys playing too much distorted guitar without much musical merit.

Also found a fun arcade game on The Grates' web site. It's quite fun. The game's soundtrack uses Grates songs, but does it in a really retro way that reminds me of Commodore 64 games.

World Cup Tickets!

I just got a fone call telling me I'd won free tickets to the Australia versus Brazil World Cup match!

There was a promotion for Bitburger beer at Dan Murphy's, so I bought a slab last week and entered the competition.

It was such an awesome surprise after not getting any tickets in the draw! I was so excited I started talking like people do when they win something on commercial radio. "Oh my god, thanks so much!" :-)

The flight takes me to Munich on June 15 in time to watch the match on June 18. My return flight is for June 20, but I'll see if I can stay longer.

Time to start practising my German!

iTunes 6.0.3

I just installed iTunes 6.0.3.

Unfortunately, as with iTunes 6.0.2, it crashes whenever I try to start playing a song!

This is so ridiculous. The problem has been known for months now (lots of people have been discussing this in Apple's support forums since December last year), yet they still haven't fixed it.

It doesn't leave a good impression of Apple's quality assurance/testing or their customer service.

Kosheen

I heard on the radio today that Kosheen is playing at the Corner Hotel in Melbourne next month.

I had been interested in her stuff for a while, since hearing "Hide U" on Triple J years ago. I figured it would be good to find out some more, so bought a ticket.

Also went to JB Hi-Fi after work to buy one of her albums. Turns out she only has two, so I picked up the old one with all the songs I had already heard of.

Shame the album was $27. JB Hi-Fi's usually got better prices than that. Will have to see what it costs on iTunes...

Fax Machine

We recently recently got a new Xerox multifunction center at work.

I finally figured out that to send faxes, I had to configure it to dial 1 before the number keyed in.

This struck me as odd, because the phone line it uses is a direct line, and if it was connected to our PABX, it would have to dial 0, not 1, to get an external line.

Now it's configured to dial 1, it doesn't actually do so, but obviously it's set something inside that makes it work.

This machine is quite possibly the hardest to use device I have ever encountered!

World Cup

I had been hoping to go to the soccer world cup in Germany this year.

It was a long term plan of mine to revisit Europe after staying in Austria for 8 months as a 15 year old on a student exchange.

I started trying to get tickets as soon as I watched the qualifier between Australia and Uguguay back in Sydney, and applied for tickets in the ballot, which apparently was already up to round 3 of sales.

I got an e-mail in early Feb telling me that I hadn't been allocated any tickets. I thought that was pretty bad luck, since I'd applied for the maximum possible, all three of Australia's round 1 matches, and figured it was fairly likely I'd get at least one. It wasn't good news, but I still held some hope of getting tickets in the last round of sales.

Round 4 started last night at 10, so I got to the web site about 9.45 to try to get in early. At about 10 o'clock, the site opened for business. I was optimistic, as it told me there were still limited tickets available for two of Australia's three round 1 matches: Australia versus Brazil in Munich, and Australia versus Croatia in Stuttgart. I guess there weren't any for Australia versus Japan, as the match was being played at Kaiserslautern, which can't fit as many people in the stadium.

On my first attempt, after selecting the tickets I wanted, I got as far as "the waiting room", which was supposed to be the last step before getting the tickets, but for some reason I could go no further. On subsequent retries, I just kept getting error messages. They didn't say anything meaningful, but I assume that Yahoo!'s web servers were so busy that they just couldn't handle the load.

I sat there retrying until about 1am, when I decided I needed to get some sleep. I set my alarm and went to sleep.

I woke up again at 2am, and was disappointed to find there was nothing left!

Going to keep going back to the site regularly to see if any more tickets have come on sale, but I guess I'm going to have to rethink my plans. :-(