The true life story of a kid from Bribie Island (I’ve been there!) running a marathon in Antartica, via being a touring musical comedian, doing things like this: This book is an interesting and light read, and came kindly recommended by Michael Carden, who pretty much insisted I take the book off him at a…
Tag: australia
Skimpy
I’ve had a bit of a thing about biographies recently, having just read the very good The Crossroad by Mark Donaldson. This book is a very different story, but I think still quite interesting. Kellie was a country girl with no real plans and an impulse control problem. While the book follows her formative years…
The Crossroad
Written by a Victoria Cross recipient, this is the true story of a messed up kid who made something of himself. Mark’s dad died of cancer when he was young, and his mum was murdered. Mark then went through a period of being a burden on society, breaking windows for fun and generally being a…
In A Sunburned Country
This is the first Bill Bryson book I’ve read, and I have to say I enjoyed it. Bill is hilarious and infuriating at the same time, which surprisingly to me makes for a very entertaining combination. I’m sure he’s not telling the full story in this book — its just not possible for someone so…
Don’t Tell Mum I Work On The Rigs
I read this book while on a flight a few weeks ago. Its surprisingly readable and relatively short — you can knock it over in a single long haul flight. The book covers the memoirs of an oil rig worker, from childhood right through to middle age. That’s probably the biggest weakness of the book,…
Don’t use Jetbus Sydney if you want to catch your flight
I had to take a flight a few weeks ago, and I thought I’d do the financially (and environmentally) sensible thing and use an airport shuttle service. Especially because the airport train in Sydney is so expensive and slow. I found Jetbus online, and paid with PayPal. The first time I used them they were…
In Australia, alive
So, after a somewhat traumatic 30 hour journey from America, I am now in Australia happy and well. I’m surprised by how not-jetlagged I feel, which is nice as well. Qantas in Melbourne were actually much better than Qantas in LAX about the missing bag. They were friendly, sympathetic, efficient and gave me $100 AUD…
That’s one way of doing it…
Does anyone else think it’s kind of creepy that you need a secret code to submit paper proposals for Microsoft’s TechEd conference? Cause I sure do. I guess that explains why there aren’t many community sessions at TechEd.
Mirror traffic during the last day of LCA 2007
It seems obvious to me that videos of LCA 2007 are good. Specifically: IPTraf # Statistics for eth0 ########################################################## # # # Total Total Incoming Incoming Outgoing Outgoing # # Packets Bytes Packets Bytes Packets Bytes # # Total: 241091 228940K 96646 18025370 144445 210915K # # IP: 241091 225548K 96646 16655328 144445 208892K #…
Getting ready to leave Sydney
I haven’t written much about the couple of weeks I’ve spent in Sydney. Nothing really exciting happened, apart from a trip home to see the kids (the Southern Tablelands were greener than I expected), a visit to CLUG another to SLUG, and a lot of time spent eating at restaurants on King Street in Newtown….