Adam Searle » Blog

So the next few weeks will be uber uber busy with work. Then I’m taking some time off! About a month or so until I go into my ‘next phase’ (research / ‘back to the lab’)

So time off. Things I want to do…

TV related
-OC marathons in the day. Damnit, someone has been recording OC episodes on our foxtel dvr and I have a craving to watch. Old skool ryan and marissa!
-24 marathons. I’ve been deliberately not watching season 5 as I want to see it all in one hit. I really want to do 24 in 24! Well more like 24 in 18hrs. But yeah, 24 marathons - maybe all 5 seasons in a week. How uber..
-More seinfeld! I’ve now seen seasons 6 7 8 9. 1-5 to go
Games related
-Buy a 360!!! I’m going to cave. So yep, 360, graw2, and exploitation of eb ‘rentals’ I think
-Half want to play more online pc games but really cant be arsed. Since julian stole my steam account (I kid, I kid) I’ve wanted to play some CS:S again heh

Travel
-Wanna get out of town for a bit. Might stay with some family out in orange at the farm! Yes, a real farm (well more about trees and fruit, than livestock). It rocks. Country air > city air. So remote however there is no broadband (other than next-g), which suits me fine! 3 will rape me with roaming fees if I even consider hitting up the mobile internet
-The shepard might return to his duties and try and get the bdm folk out one weekend, yehaw!

Time to like stop and think!

Oh, and I want to hit the gym like.. lots. I had to skip the gym last night and I am craving it. Blah!

So thats my time off idea for now. Fighting the desire of the oc right this minute!!

Edit: OK lets add in play some old dreamcast games (all I want by the offspring is playaing atm - reminds me of crazy taxi! time to revisit that and the sonic adventure series! SHEN MUE FOR JULIAN!!), and deus ex (in my top 5 games of all time, for sure - just announced they are working on a third, excellent!)

At some point in time, you work out to whom your allegiance lies. You work out its not to work, or to commitment, but to those who are close to you. I’ve known this, but recently it has become more true. Ultimately, my allegiance lies with my friends and family. Really, I need to honour that, and carry forth. It’s a matter of priorities. Tonight was a night of harsh words to a few people - as much as I hate burning bridges tonight the flavour was letting my vision be known.

So in this rut that I’m in, the life lesson is to work out who I need to continue to trust and rely on, and get shit done for them. Without this, what are we?

Don’t we all love long weekends. Bloody oath! Being a working man now, with the joys of super long uni holidays every few months past me, long weekends are greatly looked forward. To have some time away from it all is awesome. The last long holiday I took (only 10 days), I came back with a completely new outlook on life, and a new set of priorities. I took up a health craze, somewhat resigned, and planned how I’d get overseas next year. Yes, a lot can change after a holiday haha!

Easter was great. Thursday started off as a bit of a bludge - we had a company bbq meeting in the day, then I had errands to run in the afternoon. That night I went down to coogee for my brothers bday, where he was out on the booze with his work mates at Cushion, the bar of the crown plaza coogee. After that made a quick stop over in town to say hi to Ben, it being his bday the day before! Drinking and driving dont mix so that was a light night on the booze..

Friday was a bludge. I needed it to catch up on sleep. I think I’m sleep deprived. Quite possibly true actually..

Saturday was back on the booze, for it was the big city drinks night. As usual we ended up at jacksons. As usual it was pretty good. I started late that night, so an exercise in rapid consumption was required heh. Highlights of the night include a bouncer recognising me. Negatives of the night include that same point, meaning perhaps I’m there too often

Sunday was geeking it up with the boys over at Johnnys for an xbox lan. 4 xbox 360s, 4 24″ or greater lcds, and a boat load of games. I’m in love with ghost recon at lans, and we had 4 copies of ghost recon 2 to rip through. Great fun! Thanks to julian and johnny for sorting out the games and having us. And to stephen for buying those maps we’ll some day have to check out! heh

Monday was.. gems bbq. Much fun! What a pesky neighbour, considering the minimal amount of noise. But we had a great time, and it was the first time I’d played the game of life, which is pretty cool! Every now and then, board games (decidedly old/low tech) dont seem so bad eh.. that and risk, that game rocks

Tuesday was the highlight! I went out on a boat overnight! See, this is a big deal for me, cos I’ve had a bit of fun before hiring out little day boats with the guys and generally making an ass of myself/ourselves (parking the boat dramas - damage that hopefully no one noticed after..). But I’ve never slept on a boat before. Never been on a cruise, etc. Well, one of our family friends just got his hands on a beautiful 37 foot long boat, and had us over for the night! Great fun. This needs piccies, so see below..

The boat is named Paradiso II. We took it up to refuge bay for the night.

Ya kinda have 4 main areas. Up top is the flybridge - you climb a ladder to get up to it. Up there, you have the main controls for the boat if you wish to drive it from up top. Two seats, a lounge like area, and a great front row place for hooking up a laptop to watch movies at night hehe.

My bro on the booze as usual, behind the wheel (stationary

Next area you have is the deck on the back. Terrible pic, but this is where you set up a table and chairs for meals etc. Great for chilling out the back. Jump off the back to go for a swim. Boats are amazing for the little hidey holes they have for storage - all kinds of little compartments in the walls around!

When you step inside, you have an enclosed area for general entertainment, kitchenette, etc. Off to the left is a table and lounge around it, to the right you can see more controls (can drive the boat up top or from inside). Kitchen is forward to the left. Through the tiny corridor up ahead are the cabin areas. One main cabin, a second with twin bunks on the right. Everything in a boat is like living in a mini apartment. Mini rooms, mini doors, mini door handles! Storage is *everywhere*. Under the floor - heaps of storage compartments. Behind every panel is storage pretty much. Oh, plus you can see the tiny tv - haha. Yeah they need to replace that.. ‘integrated vhs’ for the win!

As I said, we took the boat up to refuge bay for the night. Absolutely stunning up there. It’s in the middle of a national park, inaccessible via road. In that particular bay there were 10 to 20 boats moored, depending on the time of day. The next bay along is Americas bay. Lots of nice little areas of land to moore up for the night. There was a little beach with a huge waterfall - very hawt. We took the little dinghy (apparently called a ‘tender’ - what an odd name for a boat!) over to it (macho rowing man here, haha).

I’ll end with a couple of extra piccies, take a look.. its beautiful up there! I’d love to go again, maybe later this year haha. Summer would be AWESOME on a boat lol

The little beach and waterfall

Midday at refuge bay

Late afternoon on the water

Awesome long weekend, bit more relaxed Back to the grind now!

So there we were.. 5 of us in total at maisys. I had the car, and the mission was to drop everyone home and use lots of toll roads (free preferably). So..

Start at maisys (cremorne) -> northbridge -> *maisys gateway/military road onramp toll (free for now)* -> maisys (long ass return trip, just wanted to use the 40 meters of toll road)

-> *harbour tunnel* -> *ed* -> jasons

-> dover heights (jo anne)

-> *harbour bridge* -> *lane cove tunnel north* -> hoojs

-> debs

-> my home

All in all we got 2 uses of the new lane cove tunnel (free for a month). Quite a cool tunnel; lot of road for your money. Plus we got to use the ‘maisys gateway’ as stephen named it And the usual harbour tunnel/bridge/ed

Tune in next time for some cross city tunnel, m2 m4 m5 m7 action I bags not driving next time, as my bludgy road trip crew were asleep for all of it after the second stop

The weather in Sydney these past few weeks has been so whack. Rain, sun, hot, freezing, all in the turn of half a day. Whenever anyone bitches about the weather now, I just respond ‘climate change’. Doing my thing to raise awareness haha.

This past week has been pretty huge. I concluded my 2 months of physical rehab; I didn’t really want it to end! It’s been a great time there.. I’ve improved, met a lot of awesome people there, and you always feel great after it. Now it’s up to me to keep my program running at the gym (my second home these days) - definitely looking long term. If I keep this up for the rest of the year, I should see solid improvements. But yeah, I’m sad to leave the folks up at lady davidson. Whenever sunday hit, I would be so looking forward to monday morning - best way to start the week. Kat and Duncs particularly, you guys are awesome! Huge help to me, and I feel really lucky for having crossed paths with ya. Hope to see you again some day.

Finally confirmed my longer-term plans and told the boss - I’m going to be moving on from my current place of work in a few months, and will be going ‘back to the lab’ to bone up on ultra cool geeky things. I plan on sinking my teeth into php and mysql for what I see my line of work for the next year or two; web apps (how web 2.0!). Server side coding is crucial for rounding out what I do; going from ‘flash developer’ to being independently able to make the whole web app widget. Not sure if I’ll touch on AS3 yet as it wont be until later next year I’ll be able to use it for projects realistically; when flash 9 reaches a decent installed userbase. So, in a few months I’ll be off the work grid and doing my own thing. Can’t wait!

Still on the health craze, and enjoying it. Got a plan for where I want to be in 6 months, so there is something to aim for. Next year increasingly looks like I might be working overseas (Marky and Dagra will be over London way, would be much awesomeness to stay with them there!). Who knows, maybe I’ll get around to organising that 21+1 sometime….

I said maybe

Been a while since my last blog post!

The renovations are going well. Cement base has been laid, bricking starts shortly. Still, 4 months to go! Thanks to all those who have offered for me to crash at theirs, appreciated, gunna go a little insane in a couple of months..

Completed my month session of back rehab last week. Its been fantastic - new outlook on life - back into putting health as my top focus. Have been doing that twice a week, hitting the gym many nights a week, and my physio has a bunch of stuff for me to do at home as well. In short, as Jason put it, I spent more hours last week on health/gym than actually doing work.. lol.. kinda true. Anyhow, it was all very successful, so I’m going to do another month of it. Technically its more about overall fitness and mobility than ‘back’ rehab, but yeah, I’ll stay as long as they’ll have me haha

I’ve taken on another semester of teaching at cofa. We’re about to begin week 2, and I think I’ll enjoy it. Plus, I dont mind droning on for an hour or two about flash, especially if it helps. My teaching feedback from last semester was awesome, so its very encouraging to be back at it. Had a really good class last year, looking forward to repeating that!

These last couple of weeks have been pretty trying, managing everything at once, but we’ll get there. Gotta try and settle into a sustainable routine.

Storms coming. I love the rain! Catch ya all later

We’re about the renovate at home. In theory it starts tomorrow. Actually it was meant to be today, but the weather wasn’t great. So, basically, half the house is getting gutted and another 50% is getting added on the back, good cos its too small otherwise. Problem is this is going to mean 5 months of people waking me up with noisy equipment at some insane hour like.. 7am. By law, builders can’t start work before 7am, so that’s kind of cool - 7am still sucks however though

So, if you have a spare room around the sydney region, and can put up with me for a short while..
We had our last bbq out on the deck (first thing that will be ripped down with the renovations). Kind of sad actually, the whole pergola/deck has served us well over many years of hot aussie summer days, bbqs, christmas events, etc. Due to silly local council laws we need to maintain a percentage of grass on the property, which means we cant immediately build a new deck out on the back - it has to be something small to fit in with the local limitations. So, the end of having a large outdoor area..

Fare thee well old friend! And bugger you 7am

But whose counting
Bit more on track now. Last week was a disaster, got shit all done as far as work went. On every other front it was great however! Back rehab continues to go along well, keeping up the gym, feeling better already over these past two short weeks. March on!

Trying to remember what I did last week. Thursday night caught up with Shant, an old primary school friend. Its great to hang out with people from so far back - I wouldn’t recognise anyone from that era anymore, let alone actively do stuff with them. Thursday was also a legal meeting for the company, which was tops - good progress there. Friday we did drinks to celebrate adelaines first job (congrats!) - and what a rockin night! Cabana bar was awesome as usual. Quite a few of us there, so great times with everyone. Adz finally met us all after work (and unfortuantely after last drinks), so we went off to the cremorne hotel - never been previously but it was actually ok. Open really late, drinks weren’t too overpriced, but the main point was by this stage it didn’t matter, it was an awesome night. Finished up at maisys at like 3am, latest coffee run ever, probably the most unnecessary too!

Saturday was the case of two fionas. Had lunch with the wizardlover13 one at north sydney in the day. Whale of a time! haha. Went to the farewell of the tall one that night. Saw children of men (again.. hmm) on the outdoor screen - which itself was quite an experience. Bon voyage to fiona d, and all the best overseas! After that met up with the remenants of the nights cabana bar crew, mark gem and debs, and (being sober) drove them to maisys (yes, again..). Actually pretty cool, quite laid back, and mark storys first time there too - yet another convert, woohoo! Also, out of the blue, we ran into adelaine there, haha. Small world!

Sunday was a quiet day in at home. Neighbours down the road recently finished a rather extensive renovation, and I popped in there for after dinner drinks - right when monsoon type rain began. Awesome view and vibe from their new family room out the back, felt very holiday-ish. Funny, right now, anything holiday-ish that takes me away froom the day to day grind is great.. counting the days till the next break!

So yeah, last week was pretty awesome I guess, work aside. Back at it this week.. onwards ho. Feeling fitter is a big deal for me, and I am, so.. that’s a big motivator