Sunday was race day. Team Confundo, consisting of Paulius, Devo and myself, started our race in the best way possible, well rested and well fed. Actually I lie, daylight savings flicked over during the night, depriving us of an hours sleep, and Paulius was up all night partying, and he skipped breakfast. We started off on the Run Leg first, this consisted of us running around the bush finding check points, it took us while to do this maybe an hour or two; It must have been about a 10 km loop. The second leg consisted of bike riding, a ride and tie and a run up to the top of Mt Macedon. Paulius made a navigation error and we ended up riding down the Calder Freeway, before having to jump a cyclone fence with our bikes. After 5 hours of riding we came to the second last check-point, where we were instructed to run to the top of Mt Macedon. Paulius went wacko from lack of food, and couldn’t climb the hill very fast. I think it took us an hour to climb up. He rolled his ankle on the way down. We finished the race in about 6 and half hours. It usually takes us 4 at the most. I think we’ll be hurting for a few more days.

Aloha from your favourite Islamic state, Malaysia. My work trip was postponed from last week to this week. I have been here 3 days now. I caught the 12:15 flight from Melbourne to Kuala Lumpur on Sunday night, I think I may have got about 1 hour of sleep on the plane. It was so uncomfortable and they kept on waking us up for food. I think breakfast was at 4 o’clock in the morning. I arrived in KL at about 6:30, I managed to catch a train and taxi to find the Federal Hotel which is located in central KL. The train ride from the airport into the city was pretty awesome. There were acres and acres of plam trees, I think they farm them for oil. The train also went through areas of development, with new residential high-rises, and older areas consisting of run-down housing blocks to small shanty villages. All of Kuala Lumpur is currently very hazy, because the Indoneasians across the straight won’t put out their bush fires. Apparantly this happens every year. The haze keeps it a little cooler though, It is about 30 every day, and really really humid. There was a little bit of monsoonal rain this afternoon. The rain was so heavy that in the 15 seconds it took to run to the car, my shirt got completely drenched.

Malaysia seems to a safe, peaceful country, but there seems to be a little bit of corruption around and there is some really dodgey traffic. It consists of mainly Malay people, but also has high populations of both Chinese and Indian people. There is a festive feeling in the air as it is the Islamic new year next week, and there are decorations up in all the shops and businesses. It is pretty much assumed that if you are white that you are made of money. I went for a walk around the block last night, every 10 metres I was stopped and asked if I wanted a foot-massage and this evening I was approached by some dodgey guy who was pimping out a “young pretty girl”. The $60 Australian dollars worth of “Ringut” I got out of ATM has lasted me nearly all week. Meals are about $3 and I got a 15 minute taxi ride across town for $3.




Work is going well. We had a few issues getting things going but now things are looking fairly promising. Maybe IBMs Universe database will take out my most hated database award.




OK. This is a long blog. Have a good one. Here’s a photo of big building:

Well, I off to Malaysia on Sunday night, for five days of work. It has been a fairly stressful week. I have been worried about JDBC connectivity to U2 Universe database. I got it working today so I am a little less stressed about the client installations in Kuala Lumpur. So thats all good. I’ll take some photos. I’m thinking about buying a digital SLR on the way out. Unsure whether that will happen or not though.


It was Mels B’Day on the weekend so we went to the Melbourne Zoo to check out the elephants. It was a nice day, and I think half of melbourne must have thought that it was a good day to go to the Zoo. It was also Grand Final Day on Saturday. Mel and I went to Steve and Dani’s for some BBQ and Beers. All Good.