Eclectic Brain Salad

We awoke with another great day in store for us at Byron Bay. After some nice breakfast and a good deal of faffing about, I caught up on writing the last couple of day's blog posts while Kirsty and Gabriel headed to the beach, then walked down to the local record shop with Elva asleep to take a look. I had a great time in there chatting to a couple of locals about music, then I bought CDs by a couple of Aussie bands - Karnivool and Cog.

I then headed up to the Wifi-enabled Cafe to do some work mail and post the last couple of day's blog posts, and met Gabriel and Kirsty to go to lunch.

The afternoon was awesome! We spent the whole afternoon on the beach - I walked Elva round the beach for a while, then went in the water for ages with Gabriel, swimming in the waves and pretending to be X-men, then we built a castle out of sand with four turrets, walls and a moat.

The last part of the day involved getting home, cooking some great dinner, then chilling before bed. I also checked out the two CDs I bought earlier, and both are really cool. Cog are kinda like Tool crossed with Porcupine Tree, not quite as heavy as either but really proggy and interesting, and Karnivool play good quality heavy rock - I heard a bit of Queensryche here and there...

After the chaos of the previous night, Monday was a relatively subdued day. I gradually worked through my hangover, which was much less brutal than I expected it to be, then made breakfast for the family and got some work done. (Lach was an absolute legend, BTW - he not only got up and went out early to buy us all some breakfast things; he also went to work as normal).

In the early afternoon Kirsty and the kids went to the park with Lisa, and I went to the local internet cafe to get online and work through some e-mails. Then it was time to say our fond farewells and taxi it over to Sydney airport, where we were to bord a plane to Brisbane for the next part of our adventure!

I must say that the next few hours were a pain in the ass - unchracteristically the kids both acted up terribly during the half hour flight, causing us more bother than they did during the whole of the trip from London to Sydney! Yes folks, for the Sydney - Brisbane flight, we WERE those parents whom the rest of the plane all look with a mixture of disgust and pity.

When were got to Brisbane the kids had calmed down, but there was still the matter of a 2 hour drive to Byron Bay to content with. It went ok, but I was feeling pretty tired by the end of it. After finding the apartment with relative ease (despite the fact that it is pretty much pitch black in Byron at that time of night), we got some food sorted (all we had with us was some pasta, tinned tomato and garlic, but we made do), then drifted off to sleep.

Saturday, Saturday, Saturday, it's a Saturday.

Today was a fine day for a beach trip, so the plan was to go to Manly and check out some sand. First of all I caught up on some e-mail, then we headed out and had a most awesome breakfast at the cafe just down the street.

Then was the travel. I've decided that Sydney is one of the coolest areas in the world for public transport (apart from the occasional miserable bus driver). The buses are reliable, and the ferries - although not that cheap - are just an awesome way to get around and see the beautiful Sydney dock areas.

We got to Manly a little after lunchtime, but pretty much totally skipped lunch - we found a nice place on the beach and got busy. Kirsty and Gabriel spent about 4 hours digging two big holes and then attempting to connect the two together to form a tunnel. This proved mostly unsuccessful, as the tunnel kept collapsing, but eventually they managed to form a small tunnel and Gabriel successfully crawled through it a few times!



I spent most of my day walking Elva about so she could splash in the sea, look at shells and eat sand. Not quite sure how much she ate in the end ;-)

In the evening we went and had dinner at a nice little place near the sea front, then got ferry and bus back to Lis and Lach's house. We sat down, drank a few beers, and watched the dreadful-but-hilarious 60's Batman move adaptation (mainly doe Gabriel's benefit, but we kinda enjoyed it too!) After we'd put Gabriel (and Kirsty!) to bed, I introduced Lis and Lach to the delights of the Mighty Boosh, and more beer was drunk.

Eels up inside ya, finding an entrance where they can...

The first thing we did this morning was to have a killer fry up, to fill ourselves up for the day. It included bacon, eggs, toast, and the biggest fried mushrooms you've ever seen. They were plate-sized, pretty much. Then we set off to find the cool tourist cheese of the blue mountains. We first parked up and walked along a beautiful trail towards a lookout point right next to the Three Sisters. Then we drove a little bit further and found the Scenic World centre, which included cable car rides and trains right down into the valley, and a skyride across the valley, plus several kilometres of walkway through the jungle, all for $80 for the entire family. I was really impressed with this exhibit, in terms of quality of experience and low cost. Of course, the backpackers among you will say WTF, and say that a free hike would be much better on all counts. Ok, but with a seven year old boy and 14 month old daughter, this was the easier option.

Plus the near-vertical train ride with the Indiana Jones music playing in the background was rather awesome...we went on it about 6 times!

After staying there till closing time, we went back to the cottage, chilled out for a bit, rocked out a bit to the Matrix Soundtrack that I found nestled alongside all the easy listening on the iPod stereo system, played Wolfenstein RPG on the iPhone (which is really awesome), then I got sent out for food and beer. I happened upon a great Chinese place in Wentworth Falls, which I must say did the best black bean sauce I have ever tasted. Who woulda thought it!

Sleep then quickly descended upon us, as today had been a pretty long one, although a very blissful one!

This was a slightly more challenging day than the last one, work-wise, as Lisa and Lach are having troubles with their connectivity at home. So after getting some editing done offline of various articles and suchlike, I joined my family in walking into Annandale to find a place to lunch, and a place to get Kirsty's hair done.

I ate a really gorgeous meal involving corn fritters, bacon and haloumi cheese, then it was off to the hair dressers to get Kirsty pampered. At this point, the day kicked into life - John Allsopp phoned me to say that I had a guest lecture slot at UTS at 4pm. By this point it was 1pm, so I had three hours to work out what I was talking about, and get to where I needed to be! I love spontaneity, but this is kind of ridiculous! Still, major props to John and Yiying for helping me set this up - it was very nice to get another uni talk sorted out at such short notice (about 2 days from me sending them a request for help!)

So, off to the coffee shop to drink coffee, eat cake and check e-mail! I got my plans for later on that night sorted out, and caught a rather convenient bus to right outside the university. After figuring out the rather confusing building layout, I got to the right floor, and found the university contacts.

I ended up presenting a slightly abridged version of my Ukranian university tour slides, and they seemed to go down pretty well - I threw in some open web philosophy to start off with, then talked about SVG, CSS 3 and HTML 5, accessibility, mobile web, and a few other web 3.0 love nuggets. the students asked some great questions, and I was impressed with their knowledge and enthusiasm.

After a quick chat with the UTS folk, I made my way to the Ruby Oceania meetup, to listen to some interesting Ruby talks and drink some beer. I know very little about server-side programming, so it proved to be a very interesting learning experience! It was also nice to catch up with Lach, Toolmantim, and Ben Buchanan, and meet some cool new people.

I was rather amused that the very first talk was all about how we should just implement all our functionality in JavaScript and do things on the client-side, and sod Ruby...that guy had balls of steel ;-)

Other notable talks were Tim talking about how he implemented Tweeps (the Web Directions South Twitter aggregator app), and his fellow Agency Rainford cohort Miles talking about his new Unit Testing library.

After the talks were done, the beer started to flow very freely, and there was much rejoicing! On the way home Lach showed me the delights of eating a drunken doner kebab, Australian style...which is pretty much the same as eating a drunken doner kebab, English style.