The highlight of my Saturday would have to be flashing an Xbox with the wrong bios. BAM. Dead Xbox motherboard. Well there are a few things that I can do that I’ll try to fix it with. I nearly threw the whole thing out of the window when I realised what I had done. But its all good now. I am calm. Nothing much happened today. Knocked down the dead tree that was in our front yard. The stump is still out there waiting for me to dig it up with a hoe (Or some gardening equipment). It was a nice short day today (because of daylight savings kicking in) so it was all over pretty quickly. Anyway, I going to try and save this motherboard before I go see the Llama.

Sitting here with Tom, Steve and Erin. Waiting for Paulius to drive into the city. We love Paulius. We are all on to our forth beer and waiting for something to happen. PS I love you Mel.

Just got back from a Cognos seminar today. Just checking out what kind of functionality the product has, compared to Yellowfin. Lots of free food. All good. Even got a free Cognos hat and drink bottle. Bewyeah. About to go home and clean up. It was pub night last night so the house is a mess. Saw “Into the Blue” last night, despite the plot flaws it was still a good movie, mainly thanks to Jessica Alba’s bikini.

Well the Teva Adventure Race was yesterday in the Wombat State Forest. We came 18th overall, out of 54. We did excellently especially considering I had a tyre blowout on the first leg, unfortunately when this occured we were heading down hill and Mark and Paulius were in front of me. It took about 5 minutes for them to realise that I was missing, before they had to turn around back up the hill. Meanwhile I must have run nearly a kilometre next to my bike, while about 20 teams went passed. Any way we made up with excellent navigation by Paulius. I was feeling really drained throughout the race. Last race I lost about 4 kilograms in body weight, this race I lost none. I’m guessing I needed a little more bulk to get me through this race. Anyway my body is still aching and it probably will for another week. But all in all it was good fun.

Dunno whats causing it, but i’ve got a shocking headache. Dont know whether its cause of jet lag, or some weird pressure thing in my ears from the flight. Hopefully I’ll wake up well. I’m going to bed now.

Flew back into Australia last night at about 8pm. Good to see the border security was tight, letting us through customs and immigration in about 5 minutes. I bought some vodka and some perfume for Mel. The New Zealand trip was good, but i was very annoyed with my phone not working correctly. I could send and receive SMSs and I could receive phone calls, but I couldn’t make any calls at all. I think it may have had something to do with International calls being turned off by default on my plan. I’ll ring Telstra and make sure they fix it for next time. I also couldn’t get any data connections through the phone either, which was a bummer cause I wanted to post to this blog while I was over there.. I was probably too drunk to blog most nights anyway.

Went to work today. We were all in making final preparations for the New Zealand trip. Glen is coming round tonight at 11, and then we’re heading to the airport at 5 in the morning. I’ll have a look in the duty free shop but i dont think i’ll buy anything. I can usually find retail prices that are below duty free prices anyway, especially when it comes to computer hardware and digital cameras. Thinking about purchasing a Fuji Film s9000/s9500. It looks pretty nice.. 9 megapixel, 10x optical zoom. Maybe for christmas.

Have to work tomorrow cause our installer is not working to the best of its ability. Looking forward to a sleepless 3 day working trip in Auckland. I think the 3 hour time difference is going to root us up a little bit, especially when our hosts are planning on wine-ing and dining us every night we are there. My favourite metrosexual is down from Sydney this weekend, hopefully i’ll get to see him. But it looks like i might be too busy. I should get some sleep now.

Home alone this evening cause Mel is at camp in Daylesford with school. I made a big greasy dinner of onions, potatoes and sausages, good squishy. Just finished watching House which I taped for Mel. Did a Linux VLC to Xbox to VCR recording. Looks good on the TV, but looks pretty shitty when you play the tape back. I need to recompile VLC to do a transcode of the Digital TV MPEG stream to divx or something. At the moment I can only record the full transport stream to the hard drive, which is about a gigabyte per minute, which is annoyingly large. Tomorrow is Friday. Bewyeah.

Uneventful days. Went to see The 40 Year Old Virgin at the movies after the pub on Tuesday, which was pretty good. Been busy at work preparing for our trip to New Zealand on the weekend. I enabled my phone for roaming into New Zealand too, which I am pretty impressed with, because CDMA phones arnt known for their roaming abilities. Got the Teva adventure race next Sunday, so I’ve been running with Paulius to try and get fit. He messaged me this evening to see if i wanted to run from Sunbury to Diggers Rest and back. Maybe tomorrow.