Is that not a beautiful photo? I’ve never really like Elisha, I think it’s because I found her character in 24 so annoying. But the picture below is just amazing. I love it. Speaking of 24, I watched Mirrors last night. With Jack Bauer himself, Kiefer Sutherland. It was alright, had some cool ideas but I felt the story just didn’t gel together at the end. The motivations behind the things in the mirrors didn’t make sense to me.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been totally addicted to a new HBO show called True Blood. It’s about vampires living in the southern region of America (Texas?). It’s a bit silly sometimes but I love it.

I’m getting better at work and seem to be able to help most of my customers now which is a big relief. It’s amazing, I’ve only been there for about 4 weeks now but I feel I’ve learned so much. It’s great, and there’s still so much more I don’t know.

April performed some songs with Kevin last week. I shot some footage but am going to mix some of together for a music video. Will post some of her singing along side the main band a bit later. I’m just in the process of uploading some old footage from ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ onto youtube. We performed it in my final year of high school, I played Don Jon (the bad guy). It was heaps of fun and I’ve meaning to upload all the footage for ages. So anyway, I don’t have the entire thing so I’ve just uploaded most of what I’ve got in sequential order. I’ll create a page for it in the videos section maybe.

How you doing?

So April and I went to Forster to swim with Dolphins but weren’t able to get into the water because of bad weather and a lack of Dolphins. We did have a great trip though, we rode up on train and coach on Friday and stayed in at a cottage at Forster Gardens. It was nice getting away from the city and it was my first time taking the Country link train which was lots of fun. We did get to see some humpback whales and we did see some dolphins swimming underneath our boat. We’ll have to plan some other trip with Dolphins that’s a bit more reliable next time. I’ve added 3 videos up on Youtube, one from our Forster trip and two others from a while back. They are viewable in the videos section under misc.

April Hula Hooping in Chinatown

Yesterday, I completed ‘World of Goo’, a puzzle game out now on PC and the Wii. I just wanted to let everyone out there know that playing it was one of the best game experiences I’ve had in a long time. I usually like shooting games and stuff but I love a good puzzle if I can find one. And not only were the puzzles in World of Goo fun, but the art direction, music and little bit of storyline were so inventive and inspired. It just made the whole thing fun to play. Not to mention how addictive it was. Anyway, below is a video a fan made of the game. The game is available on PC, Wii and soon, Mac’s. Go to the games offical site here.

We celebrated April’s birthday this past weekend. I don’t have all the photos as Amanda took some nice shots with her SLR and I need to get them from her…but I got the pics from April’s cam (Yes, I am still without a small digicam). I took April to ‘The Summit’ on Friday, it was quite nice and classy…except for the guy who let out a big burp beside us. It was quite expensive but that was the point, minimum spend at the bar is $9 so you can potentially, go up, have a drink or two at the bar, chat with friends and still enjoy the ambience and view without paying much. I suggest it as it does have a nice view and very swanky vibe, I can’t compare it to too many places as I don’t go out to places like that much.

On Saturday, we were suppose to dine at a place called Mario’s, but we weren’t allowed to book a table so we showed up early with about half the people who were going to be there to try and get seats for everone. But they wouldn’t give seats to us unless we were all there. By the time a few more people arrived, there weren’t enough seats available and the guy simply said…No seats available. Not sorry, maybe you can try this, blah blah blah. Just rude, didn’t care and didn’t bother to even pretend to care. So we headed to this other place called Souk…which was amazing, not only was the food good but the service was the best we’ve ever received. No booking, no problems…Omar, whom I think owns the place, was great, he treated April like a princess and threw flower petals on all of us and welcomed us into his restaurant. The waiters made jokes with us, and it felt like we weren’t only dining at a friends place, but a cool and funny friends place.

April at Souk

After the great dinner, we headed out to Goodbar, which I’ve never been to before. It was alright, there were way to many guys in the place though and not enough hotties. Later in the night, it even seemed like there was some men dressed as women in the place…I guess that’s how desperate they got to make it seem like there were women there. It was fun though, we danced and drank then stopped by Maccas before heading home. I left April Sunday afternoon as I had to get home and prepare some stuff for my first day of my new job, which was today. April’s actual birthday was today…so I headed back to hers last night with her presents so that I could spend her birthday morning with her. She opened them up this morning and seemed to like them so that’s good. Although one of the body butter girlie things I got her seems to be dry and not creamy like it’s suppose to be, so we might have to replace it. Over all, it was a fun weekend.

And, my first day of work was great. I have a general understanding of a lot of the topics and things that were discussed so I think I’m going to pick things up quickly enough. I sure hope so. I’ll be adding more photos to the gallery when I grab’em off of Amanda’s camera.

April on the bus, heading to maccas

That’s right folks. It’s not a joke. The Government is proposing that a filter be put in place to ‘protect us’ from bad things. I don’t fully understand it all yet but it seems to me like they’ve already spent a lot of money into the research and development of the filter so either, there going to implement it, or, they’ve just wasted a lot of tax payer money (what’s new). Read some links below if you are interested to find out more. And let me know where and when you plan to protest cause I’ll come and join you.

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/10/15/australians-censor-internet

http://www.efa.org.au/2008/10/16/efa-alarmed-at-creeping-clean-feed/#more-98

http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;1399635276;fp;16;fpid;0

Now, besides reports that this will slow down the internet (which is already very slow compared to other developed countries), my main concern is with the government filtering what I see and do on the net.

“Most worrying of all is the ever-increasing scope of the filtering scheme. “The definition of inappropriate material has never been well defined,” said Jacobs. “With Government-mandated software monitoring each Internet connection, we expect the scope to expand further as time goes by. How will the Government resist pressure by Family First or other special interest groups to permanently block material considered by some to be harmful?””

Sure, there are standards for TV programs and censorship is general in all countries. But the great thing about the internet is you can get everyone’s opinions (sure, many are terrible). But people who write on a blog or website don’t need advertising money, so they are free to say or do what they want. They don’t need to worry about offending the wrong person and being shut down or not paid. By having access to the different points of view and opinions, you can see things that traditionally, you may not have had access to. For example, you can gain access to points of view on a war that wouldn’t be shown on a tv station. Allowing you a more rounded view by having access to all content, from all points of view.

Essentially, it it’s most extreme form, with the government filtering what we see and do on the net they could eventually block anything negative about themselves, rewrite history and maybe even decide that it is dangerous and not in our best interest to drink, eat, dance or have a different opinion. Yes, this is extreme and unrealistic but who decides what is inappropriate material? …it’s totally subjective.

First, they will just block illegal content, but as we all know, you bend a little now, then bend back a little later, and eventually you realise, ‘what’s happen, where have all my rights gone?’. It all started when 9/11 happen, our governments are pushing to protect us more and more while taking more and more of our freedoms away. So I say no to this, and I’m sure many others will agree. So go read up on it and decide for yourself what you think.

I don’t know if this will ever come out here in OZ (I’ll probably have to get it on DVD) but I’ve been following it for a while. Sometime last year, the first teaser went up online which was hilarious.

the teaser

Now, a proper trailer is available which actually shows what the movie is about…sure most people might not find it interesting but I think most guys who grew up watching his films will love it or at least be interested to see it.

US trailer

To get the bad taste of the Max Payne movie off of this website…I’m going to have to try and post a few things in the next few days and get all Max Payne related material off of my front page hehe. So to start with, in case you haven’t heard, there is a new Prince of Persia game coming out. I’ve be a fan of the series since playing the first one back in the early 90’s. And I also loved the ‘Sands of Time’ trilogy which is kind of what brought the franchise back to life lately. Again, they’re making a movie of this game and it will probably be just as bad as Max Payne was. But anyway, there seems to be a lot more freedom and speed in this new Prince of Perisa. So check out the video below, it’s about the new moves and abilities the designers are giving the game character.

I watched Max Payne over the weekend and was greatly disappointed. I’ve embedded below the first few cut-scenes from the game (It’s disjointed as the gameplay is cutout, but you can still see that the game has a better structured plot than the movie does). How does a video game have a better structured plot and make more sense (storywise), than a movie? I can’t believe they screwed it up so badly.

Moving on…I’ve been staying home a lot lately as I’ve been wanting to get a lot of my homework done. I haven’t been too successful in getting it done though. There are some really useless assignments that I’m having trouble with. They don’t teach me any IT related information and ask me things like “How would I answer the phone if I was working for so and so company”? I don’t know what kind of people they think are taking these courses but questions as stupid as that just fustrate me and for some reason, I have a really hard time finishing assignments that I don’t believe are relavant. Like an OHS assignment…I’ve worked in various industries in various roles. You can’t teach people to observe their environment and be safe. They either do it or they don’t and no amount of reading or answering questions will prepare them for it so there is no point in having units based around it.

I’m going to stop my rant. I don’t like complaining in written form as it’s permenantly placed here and can bite me in the behind later.

http://www.pgporn.tv/