Lazy me

I know that I have been a little lazy with updating this, but I will make up for it by putting a pictur of me in a to-to at the bottom of this post.
I am on my second trip since my last entry, last week I was up in Port Hedland and Karrattha with work. There is nothing to great about those places but then again they arn't really hoiday places. Everone there is on good money, and they work bloody hard for it as well, but that also means that the price of everything there is high.

At the moment I am in Bunbury and it is the first time that they have sent me away with out an engineer. It is a lot better as I am in control of what we do and when we do it, but of coarse that means that I am working harder than I have been while away in the past.

The beaches are amazing down here, but the photo's always say more than I can.

and of coarse there is that I promised you all:

Away again

Towards the end of last week I started some night shifts at work. The first one was a bit tough but after that they got easier as I was able to sleep during the day. One thing I noticed was that if I had to much coffee or redbull during the night I couldn't sleep during the day and that meant that I had to have more the next night.

Neil and I spent Sunday cruising Freo and visiting the beach. That night I had Neil, Chris and Caz around for a barbie. It was a good night and I think that the Dog was a bigger hit than me. They loved him, but most people usually do.

I got the call Sunday lunch time letting me know that I am going country. Tonight I am in Pinjarra and the only accommodation that we could find was in the local pub. The rooms are small, no private bathroom TV or anything like that. It's a bit of a shame when I'm spending less than a third of what the company is willing to spend on me.

I am not to sure what the next few days have in store for us. We are going to head in the direction of Albany tomorrow. If we are giving more work we will stay there, if not we will head back to Perth.

Booze Watch

Check out this page, it rocks......

www.boozle.com.au

A decision made...

Over the weekend Gwen was here, she arrived on Thursday and left again on Saturday night. We spent most of our time in Margaret River, such an awesome place.

It was hard to say goodbye a second time, but I have made a decision. I am moving to QLD at the end of this job. Not sure the date yet, if the job finishes mid December I am going to hang around Perth until Chrissy.

I also hope to drop in on a few friends on my way over, maybe a stop in Adelaide and a stop in Melbourne.

Away again

Well I have been back in Perth for a few days, but it is time to move on again. Still with work I am off to Collie tomorrow.
The plan is to be back on Sunday, but I am well aware of how easily that can change.

There is one thing that I know, and that is that I am going to be back in Perth for Wednesday night when Gwen arrives. We are planning to go away for a couple of days.

Back in Perth

Well I have been back in Perth for a couple of days now after being away for a week and a half. Work is good, things seem a lot quieter in the office then they are on the road, it is 0825 while I am typing this and there is 4 people in the office, while we where on the road we always started at 8 some times earlier....

Last night Pete Pat and I played squash, we played for about 2 hours. I think that is the longest that we have played since I've been back in Australia. We where fairly well matched up last night with all of us taking away some good victories.

I am not to sure when I am heading off into the country again, I think that it may be as early as tomorrow but I'll find that out later on today. I would be happy to work another weekend as I need the money and the tax man doesn't hit me to hard for working 7 days compared to 5 so it is still worth it.

Steve Irwin, RIP

I heard the news when I got back into the car after lunch. Steve Irwin has died while filming an underwater documentary on the Great Barrier Reef.
He leaves behind a wife and two children.
This is a tragedy for all of Australia. I used to always watch him on a Saturday or Sunday morning when I was in the UK. He was always such an emotion charged figure, a true icon of Australia.

Rest in Peace Steve
22 February 1962 – 4 September 2006

Margaret River

Well we have been in Margaret River now for 3 nights and we have just booked in for a 4th. The test numbers still aren't working and we can't call 3G TO 3G so there is not much to do. But being Monday we are being paid again so it is all good.
On the weekend we managed to get out and about, but I only got a couple of photos. On Saturday we headed out to see one of the caves. We went to Jewel Cave but missed the tour by about 10 min and the wait to the next one was about 50 min. So we headed off to Mammoth Cave. We got a audio guide so we could see that cave at our own pace. The cave was amazing, but I much prefer going through a cave with a torch, but I understand that with thousands of people going through these caves there needs to be some systems in place to protect the cave it's self.

After we went to the cave we moved on to the beach for lunch. We went to The Sea Garden Cafe for lunch, it was a mazing, it looked over the ocean and the food was good. We then moved on to the Leeuwin Winery where we sampled some nice wine, but not to much as I still had to drive. After that we found the chocolate facturty and then another winery on our way back to Margaret River for the game (you shouldn't have to ask what game).

I went to the Settlers Tav to watch the Docker vs Port Adaliade. Of coarse the dockers thumped them and cemented their place in the top 4 teams for the finals. Next week they play Adaliade in Adailade, it will be a tough game but we are playing very well and we should win the game.

On Sunday we hung around town for the morning to see if they could get the problem fixed, come lunch time we realised that they wern't going to so we moved on. We spent the afternoon in Busselton and then went out to my Uncle and Aunty's farm in the afternoon.

Now we are sitting out side the local IGA Supermarket just trying to kill time until we can do some work.......

Cow Crossing

I just found this photo on my phone, it was from when we where near Pemberton. We had to stop for about 15 minutes while the cows crossed the road....

Margaret River

Well it is confirmed that we are not going to be able to do any work today (Saturday), and there have even been rumors of me returning to Perth on Monday. It seems that Marcio has to get an X-Ray to forfill some visa requirement. Marcio is an RF Engineer that I have been working with. Most of the engineers on this job have been brought in from overseas and there fore visa requirements are always hampering the time line for the project. I think we might spend a bit of the day today checking out the wine region as well as some of the caves in the area.

We are testing the 3G network for telstra. It hasn't been launched yet but as we go around we turn on the network. We are testing Video and Voice calls as well as HSDPA (high speed internet) calls. What this means is that from your mobile you can get speeds faster then most people have in their home from the internet. It also means that where ever we go we have access to the internet. At the moment I am sitting in the car out the front of my motel in Margaret River typing this as the internet here is faster than everyone else.

Well I am not sure what we are doing this weekend but I'll keep people posted.

Just a quickie

Well at the moment we are in Margaret River, we are going to spend the night here but we still have about 2 hours of work.......
The number that we are using isn't working, hopefully it will start working soon otherwise this job is going to take longer than we ever thought.....

Well once again things go wrong in a nice town, lets hope we aren't here for 3 days this time. I am looking forward to getting to the Settlers tavern for a drink tonight. I am almost turning into an alcoholic on this trip, if I didn't have to drive every day I think I would.

Pemberton

Well what was meant to be just an overnight stop has now been extended to at least 3 days. It seems that there is a problem affecting all of WA and it means that we can't continue until it is working.
I can think of a lot worse places to be stuck, this place is amazing, it is unfortunate that we can't take some time to do some tours as we are still working, even though we aren't doing anything. We have to wait and see if we can make a call, and when we can we will start working again. There is one good thing coming out of this, I am still being paid for hanging out here not doing much :-)

Photos

I was going through some of the photos on my phone, thought I'd post some of them:

It looks just like a road in Australia, but it is a road linking LA Beach and Hollywood

These are the great busses you heard about in my earlier posts

My brother Dave at Michaels house in Rossmoyne

I swear there just mucking around

See, I told you

A road I drove down on the way to Pemberton

The Zutons playing at The BBC Radio 1's Big Weekend in Dundee

My desk in Edinburgh, clean isn't it.....

And my new desk working with Ericsson, at least it is a comfy chair.

Batteling his way through a pint

Empire State Building

Some Bastard in Edinburgh

Sunday - Walpole and Denmark

On Sunday we decided to go and do a half day as to ensure that Monday wasn't going to take 14 hours to complete. We left Albany at about 9am, and plan to be back for the derby that kicks off at 2pm, however I am not sure that we are going to make it. As I type this it is 1245 and we are still 45Km from Denmark, but we are making progress.

While we where out this morning we stopped at the Walpole Tree Top Walk, Valley of the Giants. It was so worth it, only $6.00 to get in and there was a tree top walk over a bridge that wobbled with every step and then a ground Forrest walk, past some great old trees that had been hollowed out with years of fire and fungi growth.












We also stopped at a look out, over looking the Walpole Inlet. A number of times during the morning we have seen parts of the Biblinum Track, seeing it again almost makes me want to try walking it. It's amazing that there is a walking track that links Albany and Perth, a trip that takes you about 6 hours to drive at 110km/h.....

Away Again

Well less than 4 weeks after I landed back in Perth I am on the move again. Nothing as fancy as round the world this time, nor anywhere as relaxing. I am away with work, traveling the south west of WA.

I am working for Ericsson testing the new Telstra 3G/HSDPA network. I started on the 16 Aug and after a bit of training I was sent off with another guy (more on him later). At the moment I am in Albany and we are testing the network in this area. I haven't been away with work before so getting my accommodation, food and any work related expenses covered is a bit of a novelty. Even the internet that I am using to type this is paid for by the company.

We are staying in Albany, and we plan on being here for a few days. It is great to be somewhere a bit different for work. Not that Edinburgh wasn't different, but when I was there I was living there, I called it home. When I am in Albany I am here as a tourist. On our time off we are seeing some of the sights, having a look around the town, doing the normal tourist thing.

I am traveling with a RF Engineer from Brazil, Marcio. Spending a lot of time with him makes me realise how well we have it. I am hearing stories about corrupt governments, bad healthcare and education, poor unemployment benefits and still high taxes.

We are making our way around in a new Ford Territory and I must say that I am glad I don't have to pay for petrol. It is about 1.40 a liter here..... No wonder I don't own a car yet.

We are staying at the best western motel, it is a nice place and of coarse I have my own room, with foxtel, a clean shower and toilet. It is a lot different to hostelling it around the world.

Well until next time, I might tell you a bit more about what I am doing, and how I am typing this blog.

Back in Perth

Well I got back in Perth late on Friday night and since then I have been taking it fairly easy. Playing a bit of squash, walking the dog things like that.

I am back living with my Mum, which is fairly weird but she is an awesome house mate :-). She is also allowing me to use her car when she doesn't need it.

In the last few days I have been spending a bit more time looking for a job. I am looking for a Technical Analyst position or really anything in IT. I have a job interview on Friday lunch time and as long as the pay is right I think it'll be a good job. I have also registered for the Dole, I don't plan on being on it for more than a couple of weeks, but just in case I will have some access to money.

Honolulu

I landed in Honolulu late on Tuesday night and I had one day to see the place. I decided that I wanted to learn to surf, and what better place than in Honolulu to learn? I headed to the beach early on Wednesday morning and I booked my self into a surfing lesson at 1000.

After breaky I went back and meet up with my instructor, she ran us through the basics and we hit the water. I managed to catch the first wave that I went for and I even stood up on the board. Now admittedly we where using long boards but I was still fairly happy with myself. I stayed on the water for about an hour and by that time I was well and truly stuffed. I managed to catch a number of other waves, now I don't think that I am going to be winning the Ripcurl Masters or anything but I am happy with the progress that I made in only a couple of hours.

Later that night the hostel was having a pub crawl, so I decided to tag along. We went to a lot of bars, but I did get the feeling that it was a bit of a cash for guests thing. We went to a few bars and they where quite, not really the pumping bars that I was hoping for. But as always after a few drinks I didn't really care.

I headed back to the hostel at about 2330 as I did have a plane to catch the next day and I didn't want to be to tired for the long trip back to Perth.

Los Angeles

After a nightmare bus trip back to LA I decided that I was going to get a cab to the Hostel. After I checked in I went for a bit of a walk and managed to find and internet cafe that had Skype.

I spent the next day just walking around, much the same as I did on my first day in LA. I had to get a plane that evening so I didn't go to far. However I managed to finally chat to Gwen. I hadn't spoken to her in about 3 - 4 weeks and it was so good to hear her voice again.

Later that day I headed for the airport and left the mainland US.

Las Vegas

On Friday the 21st July I set off for Vegas.

I went to the bus station a couple of hours early so I didn't miss the bus. However I did manage to go to the wrong bus station so I missed my bus. I got a transfer to the Los Angles bus station and I was set to get on a bus

We where staying in Harrah's, it's quite a nice hotel/casino on the strip. One think that did concern Mustard and I was that they put us in the Mardigra Tower... After checkin we headed over to meet Pete and Mike Coucil.

We meet them at the Paris Hotel, it is an amazing hotel that has a fake Eiffel Tower and an 1/8th size replicular of the Arc de Triumph. Inside the casino the roof made it look like you where out side during the day, it was a great blue with clouds and there was even a breeze blowing in the casino it's self. The drunker we got the more we thought we where outside. We played rapid roulette, and I didn't do to bad, I think I made about US$20 on that game and we played for a couple of hours and we had a few drinks. After that we moved over to another casino <<<<>>>> where I didn't do as well. I think that night I lost about US$100, but I was fairly drunk and if your playing you don't have to pay for your drinks.

My room on the first night had bed bugs so I didn't get much sleep. I went to bed at about 0530 after a huge night of gambling and got up again at 0930 to find that I had been bitten. I went for a walk, got some breaky and then went back to bed by 1130. When we got up at about 1530 the bites where worse and there was a lot more of them.
Mustard and I went down to the lobby to speak to the manager and she was very quick to get us into another room, but that was about it. We had to wait about 40 min for security to come down (but they did give us a $50 voucher to make up for that) and take a report we where told that we would be contacted in 3 working days by their risk management people. They weren't going to do anything about it then. It wasn't until we started to get annoyed and angry that they did something. If you know anything about bed bugs you will know that if you just move rooms with out cleaning your clothes then you will just take the bugs with you. We complained and said that we didn't want to pay for the room and that we wanted the hotel to clean our clothes. After a bit of talk they agreed to this and we still haven't heard from their risk management people (now Wednesday), so I am glad that we didn't leave it up to them. It is frustrating that while we where understanding and patient with them they weren't going to help us out, we had to get annoyed and almost yell at them before they would help us.

They moved us into another tower, this one called the Carnival tower and the room had a much better view (of the pool and the strip in the background) it had a larger bathroom and more floor room in the room it's self. We sent our stuff off to be cleaned by the hotel but it wasn't going to be back until Sunday night.

Earlier that morning Pete and his brother headed off so it was just Mustard and I left to run a muck in town. We had specific instructions from Pete that we had to got to a strip show in Vegas, and I'm sorry to say Pete, we never got there. But we did do one other thing that I knew you wanted to do but you'll hear more about that later.

On Saturday after we had sorted out all the crap with our rooms we decided that we would live it up a bit. We planned to go and play a bit of $5 blackjack at O'Shires and then move on to the Bilago for a but off dinner and to check out their casino. We went to O'Shays but they only had one $5 Blackjack table and there was no chance of us getting onto it so we played a bit of roulette before heading over to the Bilagio. We had dinner there and then made our way onto the gaming floor. I couldn't believe the amount of money people where betting on cards on the main floor. The kind of bets they where placing I thought belonged in the High Steaks room, there where tables there win a min bet of US$500 and US$1000 for blackjack, a game that moves quite fast.
We played the machines for a bit before hitting the roulette (it was one of our fav games). Things where going well with our system of the black/red betting before a table had a run of about 15 black numbers. By the end of it I was betting US$150 on each spin, but I got all my money back when it came up red :-)
After that near miss we headed back to the Hotel to get some sleep, it was ealry for Vegas (0130)

On Sunday we started early (1200) and headed out for breakfast before finding a $5 Blackjack table. We sat down there for about 4 hours and tipped the hostess that was bringing us our drinks and so they came faster and stronger. The rest of the night was a bit of a blur, but I will try to recreate it. After we left there we headed back to our Casino where we saw that they where doing karokee in the piano bar, as you all would know I couldn't walk past that. Mustard and I stopped in there had a had a little sing. The question was what song. We realised that there was only one song that we could sing, Down Under.... So we did and everyone loved us, we where the hits of the night. Infact I think if we had our green cards the hotel might have hired us, well that is what it seemed like at the time. After that we went and had some dinner in the restraunt in the Hotel, thanks to the $50 voucher that we had. I know that we had Calimarie for a started but I can't really remember what we had for the main, it might have been a burger. A few more drinks there and we decided that we where going to a casino that we hadn't been to before, the Hilton. The Hilton is a theamed casino, and it is of coarse..........STAR TREK........ Unfortunately by the time we got there the Star Trek Experience has closed for the day but we still managed to get a lot of good photos around the place.

We headed back to our hotel after that and Mustard called it a night. I wasn't ready for bed so I hit the casino again, this time winning about US$70 before I went to bed. The next morning we had to check out and we found that they had charged us for the laundry, it came to US$180 to wash our clothes. We went down and spoke to them and told them that we weren't paying for it and they removed it from our bill.

My bus trip back to LA wasn't as successfully as my trip to Las Vegas. I got to the bus station at about 1100 for a bus that was going to leave at 1200 and I still managed to miss the bus. The line to pick up the tickets was huge. I managed to get on a but at 1330 however about an hour into the trip as we where crossing the desert came apon a traffic jam. It turned out that a truck had caught on fire and was blocking the road. It took us about 2 hours to get past that and then 30min later we had to stop at another Greyhound bus that had broken down. It turned out that it was the 1200 bus that I was meant to get and they had been sitting out in the desert for about 3 hours, now you have to remember that the temp out there is about 48 Celsius, not to cool. We put most of them on our bus and then headed off again. When we stopped at the lunch break we came across another group of Greyhound customers that had been stranded there so we filled the isles with those people as well. We finally got into LA at about 2330, when I was meant to be there at 1800. I got a cab back to the hostel where I went straight to bed.

Los Angeles

After I landed in LA I knew that I had to get most into the one day as I left on a bus the next morning to go to Las Vegas. I got the shuttle to the Hostel that happened to be across the road from the walk of fame and also the location that they hold the Oscars.
I went for a walk down the walk of fame where there where guy's all dressed up in costumes, there where budding musicians wanting you to listen to their music, break dancers on the street and there was on that caught my eye, he was giving away tickets to live filming of shows. I grabbed one for amazon.com’s fishbowl. It was interesering to see the filming of a live show, and something that I didn't know before was that they have a paid audience as they can not always guarantee that they are going to have enough people to fill the seats.
That evening I went to see a movie, as you do in Hollywood. I went to the El Capitan Theatre and saw Pirates of the Caribbean - Dead Man's Chest. It was great; they had an organ player when everyone walked in. After that there was a bit of a light show and there was also a display set up behind the screen and with lighting they put on a bit of a show.
The next morning I headed to Las Vegas.