crafterm's weblog

Wakeboarding!

Easter weekend was awesome. Every year while I've been away in Germany, many of my mates from University have always told me about their fun up at Deniliquin, just over the New South Wales border along the river.

Most of them go up there almost every weekend throughout the summer to a camp site where they have ski, wakeboarding, and all sorts of sports boats docked.

Easter is the last weekend before autumn and winter set in and is often the big party that closes the season out. Well, after being away for 8 years, this easter been was my first trip up to Deni to see what it was all about.

What an awesome weekend it was.

Rod, Lisa and I drove up from Melbourne on the Thursday afternoon to beat all of the long weekend traffic. After 3 hours of cruising north from Melbourne we came to Paringa, an awesome campsite right on the river line, which is where we stayed right through to the ending hours of Monday.

The boys all have their own permanent sites set up with all the luxuries you can imagine, en-suite bedrooms, plasma TV's, hi-fi's, out door fire stoves, BBQ's, etc. Some of the set ups would rival apartments in Melbourne's inner city.

They also have some of the best boats in the business. Professional quality Malibu wakeboarding boats, and man do they rock. After spending a few days partying and relaxing with many of the regulars that also visit Deni weekend after weekend, Rod took me out for a Wakeboard.

No, not me, but one day :)

It was only the second time I've ever Wakeboarded before, but it was so awesome. I can only compare it as powered surfing along a wake that never ends. After getting comfortable standing again and used to the feel of the board it was great to be able to glide across the water and slide from side to side of the boat, feeling the spray of water with your fingertips and riding the wake at speed. I'm so looking forward to getting out there again for some more.

I'm also so grateful for having such awesome mates. Every year when I've returned from overseas to visit they've always been there as if I've never left. Top blokes and true friends for life.

DSL 2/2+ in Australia!

The South Melbourne telephone exchange is lucky enough to have DSL2/2+ ports available, so when I signed up for my internet connection I was able to get a DSL2/2+ deal. In Germany I had DSL 3000 through 1und1.de flat rate (*). DSL2/2+ on the other hand is up to 24000 with a flat rate - yep 24mbs, awesome.

In combination with a DSL2/2+ connection, iinet offer a free SIP phone service so you can make calls via the internet with a VoIP DSL modem (or a software phone).

It hasn't all been plain sailing though, I decided not to go with the default DSL modems sold by iinet (Belkin) but get a Billion DSL modem instead. After finding some issues with the unit and getting it replaced, it turned out that their firmware didn't work when I was accessing it (web based) using a Mac, neither with Safari nor Firefox.

When I used a work Windows machine with IE, no problems (See a screenshot of the error).

Australia also has a different concept to flat rate bandwidth than Europe, I presume due to the distance the traffic has to travel, and/or other reasons. Essentially, you get a fixed amount of high bandwidth traffic for peak and off-peak times (eg. 20gig peak, 20 gig off peak) and when you exceed these limits, your bandwidth rate is shaped down to a lower amount (eg. 64kb) for the rest of the month. It's still within the flat rate terms/conditions so there's nothing extra to pay, but it's obviously not as fast as 24mb DSL2/2+. It's an interesting and better approach to bandwidth limiting rather than having fixed limits or charging extra. Something that's cool though, is that your upload traffic doesn't count (yep - I can hear all of the Euro BT users screaming in joy from here) :)

Looking forward to some high speed internet access in the future!

*) They tried to get me to leave after seeing I was using their flat rate too much - apparently this hasn't been the first time either.

First month in Australia!

Well, it's been just over one month back in Australia now and things are going great. It's been a really busy time, even after all of the apartment hunting finished, other things like getting furniture, whitegoods, etc, started which has taken endless amounts of time and to this day are still not finished.

It's great having your own place though. For anyone curious, I was able to find an apartment in South Melbourne, inside the old South Melbourne State School building that was converted into residential space a few years back.

The building is heritage listed and protected which means it's in it's original state, and can't be modified in any way without special permission. Inside there's essentially two levels of apartments. Mine is in the photo above on the second floor - the two top right right hand side windows.

The apartment is split over three levels, loft style, which basically means each level overlooks the one beneath of it. Imagine each floor being a balcony over the one below it.

It's a beautiful place, each level has timber floors, and the rooftop is high with a lot of open space. There's so many possibilities for decorating the interior it's tough finding where to start.

There's two tram lines nearby which means I can be in the city in around 5 minutes, and the closest main street (Clarendon Street) leads directly into Spencer street in the city.

Melbourne has been the centre of Australia's attention the past month as well. One week after I arrived Melbourne hosted the Commonwealth Games (which for those of who don't know, is essentially the Olympic Games for those countries in the British Commonwealth - within the Commonwealth it's a very big deal). The Games went for two weeks and Australia did very well, leading the medal tally at the end of the games.

Directly after the end of the games, we had the Australian Formula 1 Grand Prix in Melbourne which was also awesome. The track is in Albert Park and is only a few hundred meters from where I now live. I could hear the cars screaming around the track from my apartment - man they are loud, although I must admit, the F-18 that they had fly over the track was even loader and made the ground tremor! ;)

The Australian Football League 2006 Season also started on the same weekend the Grand Prix so it was a weekend of car racing and footy! (Not to mention the Clipsal 500 Touring Car race in Adelaide the week before as well)

This weekend it's the Davis Cup Tennis with Australia playing Belarus.

Work has been going well, although it's been an experiment finding the best way of getting to Box Hill from South Melbourne, after a few days of trial and error and also traffic management I think I've got the most optimal route to work now.

Also, unbelievably during the Grand Prix, my favourite DJ ever, Paul van Dyk was touring Australia. These days it's hard to see him spin more often than once a year as he's travelling so much and is always on the road. The last time I was at one of his gigs was the last week of September 2005 when he played at the Octoberfest Sessions in Munich. I visited the gig with a friend of mine who was travelling through Germany at the time and it was amazing. The whole event took place at Badeanstalt, which is a dance club made from an old public swimming pool - the dancefloor was actually the empty pool space floor.

This time it was in the Metro, an old theatre on Bourke that had been converted into a club (with an awesome laser light show that has to be seen), and it was an awesome event. It was actually the same tour that I saw in Munich (for the release of his 'Politics of Dancing 2' album). It was also a late night with his set starting at 2.45am and going through till 5.30am! :)

All in all, things are going pretty well, I'm starting to settle back in to Australian lifestyle. It's also been great being able to see my old Uni mates again and see the Melbourne office work colleagues. I'm also eagerly awaiting Kristin's arrival at the end of the month so I can show her some more of this cool city too. It's been quite a few weeks without her being around so it will be great when she arrives as well.

Well, that's about it for the moment - more updates soon!