Wow!

We’re just in from seeing Roger Waters perform The Dark Side of the Moon Live in an arena that hosted the Australian Open finals last weekend and will contain very different waters next month.

I don’t know what to say about the gig. It was fantastic: gave the album at least one new dimension. There were several moments when the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end, not least during Brain Damage. And I had shivers down my spine during Comfortably Numb. I also had bass envy, but that’s another story. The show was awesome and you should go and see it when it comes within 500 miles of you. K particularly enjoyed the flying pig at the end of the first set!

Must get some sleep now, the 6 nations rugby starts late tomorrow night and there’s talk of going to see one Eric Clapton on Sunday. Two legends in one weekend!

Most of yesterday was spent setting up (virtual) Linux servers, at work. This reminded me that some time ago I published a list of applications that I couldn’t live without on a PC. My list for Linux / Unix is much shorter:

1. Vim (of course)
2. Zsh
3. GNU Screen
4. w3m
5. Mutt

That’s about it.

Tuesdays are bass days and I had my third lesson last night. Now that I’m starting to learn more about music in general, I quite fancy getting another instrument (probably a keyboard) so that I can play around with it and find out how it all works. I’m finding scales a lot more interesting than I thought I would.

I recently signed up for a Ringo account so that I could see some of a cousin’s holiday snaps (and very nice they are, too). Ringo offer a facility (as so many websites do, these days) to see who else in my address-book has an account. It turns out that lots of people did (am I the last person on the planet to hear of this site?). Being a nosey bugger, I pressed the buttons needed to ask my friends if I could see their photos (and they mine) and had lots of (positive) responses back within minutes (presumably because you are all nosey buggers and wanted to see my photos). Amusingly, none of my friends who were on Ringo before me have uploaded any photographs whatsoever, which is fair enough because neither have I (except the standard profile one)! I think I shall be sticking with Flickr for the foreseeable future.

Yesterday I mentioned how nice it is to be awoken by rays of golden sunshine, particularly when shortly afterwards you realise that you don’t have to go to work!

This morning I was awake before the alarm clock went off (despite staying up until the small hours of the morning to watch the Chinese Grand Prix). The alarm in question is a clock radio, which we have tuned to ABC Classic FM as I rate by woken up by radio commercials below being woken up by dogs barking. Usually, we find ourselves being eased into the working day by a soothing symphony, but this morning’s wake-up call was a little stranger…

I thought I was hearing things as sounds of a male voice choir filled the bedroom; the words were familiar, but the sound was not. Realisation dawned after a few seconds that what I was listening to was a rendition of the classic Australian hymn, Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport.

This may not be as good a start to the day as discovering that you have an entire day off work, but Rolf Harris never fails to entertain me, so I rate that as a good start to the day.

I’m a big fan of Rolf’s and have been ever since I was a small boy and he was cheerfully drawing cartoon characters on the television with huge, thick marker pens while whistling or humming a tune. I remember seeing his face on the box of the stylophone my parents gave me and thinking wow, that can’t be the same guy. Rolf was also part of a Learn to Swim campaign when I was small. Even them I remember wondering if there was any end to this bloke’s talents when I heard that as a small boy he was the Australian junior backstroke champion. Out of all of the entertainers in the World, Rolf is the only one who I can think of who has entertained me all the way through my life, including the time I saw him perform live.

My favourite Rolf memory (so far) is that he was kind enough to autograph a boomerang that James sent him, which we then gave to Kris as a present, hoping that he would return from his travels to Australia (isn’t it odd that now he and his wife-to-be are living in London and K and I are over here in Melbourne?). I’d like to buy Rolf a beer for that (Rolf, if you’re reading, do pop in and see me next time you’re Down Under)!

After some years of development, Bram Moolenaar has released version seven of Vim. I’ve been beta-testing it for a while now and recommend upgrading to the new version as soon as you can!

I’ve updated my Primitive colour-scheme (should anyone want to use it). I need to do some work on my .vimrc script (which started off life as gjvc’s .vimrc) to iron out a couple of niggles, but you’re more than welcome to use it.

If you like using Vim (or if you just want to help out the kids in Uganda), you can sponsor Vim. Now that Bram’s got himself a job, all of the money goes to charity!

It has been a good day. Not only did I get to watch a very exciting grand prix from just inside turn five (and without having to get up at ludicrous o’clock), but I got to meet a racing legend.

Sir Jack Brabham O.B.E. was in the paddock signing autographs next to his Brabham racing car. Somebody brought him a little chocolate cake as today he celebrates his eightieth birthday, so we all sang Happy Birthday to him as he blew out the candles.

If he wished for his countryman to win his home grand prix, he would have been disappointed, alas. I don’t think that would spoil the race for those of you who are yet to see it. I shall not say too much more on the subject for that reason.

If you have seen the race, or if you don’t care but would like to see some pictures of fast cars, they are now available from my Flickr account. Enjoy!

It’s a good day, I can tell you, when you hear The legendary Murray Walker being interviewed on Australian radio and talking about his "very good friends" Nigel Mansell and Damon Hill winning World Championships!

Sadly, I cannot hear the F1 action from my office, it’s about 14km from Albert Park. K assures me that she can hear "fast cars" from her office. Life is unfair.

On the upside, I get to stroll down to Albert Park on Sunday to watch the race. The official website seems to be under a lot of strain at the moment, so I cannot get on and look up the program of events this lunchtime. Hey-ho, I’m sure it will be excellent, whatever.

On an unrelated note, I’m now running v7.0 (Beta) of Vim, which has some very natty spell-checking. This may or may not improve the quality of my blog entries and emails.

Happy Pancake Day, dear reader. I must say that you are looking fabulous today.

Shrove Tuesday is one of the very best days of the year. Days when pancake consumption (with lemon juice and sugar, naturally) is encouraged are to be celebrated heartily!

Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday, which is (rather appropriately) the day that Anti-Smoking laws change here in Victoria. This will mean that smoking at bus or tram stops will be illegal. This may signal the start of long delays on the public transport in Melbourne: as I understand it, the one way of guaranteeing the instant arrival of your bus or tram is to extract a cigarette from its packet, put it between your lips and set it alight. We shall see. I hope this doesn’t cause too many problems from the influx of visitors expected to arrive in a fortnight for the 2006 Commonwealth Games.

On the subject of The Games, keep your eyes peeled for us on the television. Yesterday K bought two tickets for the closing ceremony, which I reckon will be pretty fantastic.

I have just changed this paragraph as I have taken a phone call to say that we have been accepted for our second choice of flat, which is a huge relief. It means that we’re not going to be homeless during the upcoming games. According the letting agent, who tells me that she had a choice of three couples, she had to choose us because the agent who conducted the flat inspection said that were the nicest couple! We are due to sign the lease tomorrow and move in a week on Saturday. We are going to chase the agents on our preferred flat as the facilities there are better and at the same rental cost.

On the subject of successful applications, I’m delighted that two of my good friends have emailed me to say that they’ve got exciting new jobs. One is in West Africa involving pyramids of Fererro Rocher. The other is working in the best industry in the world: booze! K and I wish them both all the very best in their new positions.

This time next week, K, herself, will be settled in at her new office overlooking Albert Park and impressing her colleagues with her charm and knowledge of how water works (work).

I have no news to report on my own quest for gainful employment except to say that my résumé has been delivered to a select few mailboxes in the city. I’m being particularly choosy with the positions that I am applying for while I can afford to be, which is good. Thank you for the kind words which have arrived in my own mailbox. I can only apologise for the lack of email coming from me at the moment, but I’m sure you’ll understand that I’m not ignoring you. I look forward to a day when I can sit in our new flat and email you all wirelessly without feeding golden coins into a machine or being bombarded with the most depressing music at volumes that even an iPodful of heavy metal would struggle to drown out!

Update: It’s All Good! We’ve got our first choice of flat. Even better than all that, we can move in TOMORROW! Very chuffed indeed.

The interval betwixt ‘tick’ and ‘tock’ is horrendously long at the moment. We saw an absolutely perfect flat / unit / apartment / whatever on Saturday lunchtime. We both decided that it was the business, so we abandoned the last scheduled viewing and bolted to the real estate agents to sign our lives away for the next four seasons. We filled out every last detail in their scrutinising application forms and handed them over, pleased that we had arrived at the office prior to the crowd of others at the flat. We were asked for a multitude of types of identification as well as past rental history. Sadly, neither of us is in the habit of carrying birth certificates, utility bills or suchlike with us and so we were told that our time would be better spent at home, gathering the required identity-confirming paraphernalia. In any case, applications would not be considered until Monday morning.

We stopped for a bite to eat at the local Subway, during which the skies darkened and the heavens opened. Thunderclaps rocked the building as we ate our lunch and watched the raindrops bounce up inches above the bitumen road outside. As the rain died down, we dashed for the car and drove back through torrential rain back to the hostel. We spent the afternoon gathering the required information and then spent the evening relaxing.

Yesterday was a peaceful day. The most strenuous thing we did was taking a stroll through the Queen Victoria markets where we picked up a few clothes that were more ‘office’ than ‘backpacker’.

After a restless night’s sleep, we were up bright and early and were at the real estate agent’s office when they opened at 0830. We presented them with our carefully-filled-in forms and copious forms of identification. They thanked us and said that they would be in touch.

From there we walked a few hundred metres to another agents and handed them a pair of similar forms (no ID needed) for our second choice of abode. They said that they understood our urgency (remember that we have but a fortnight left to vacate the YHA) and would get back to us as quickly as possible. We walked along Toorak Road in South Yarra to the tram stop feeling confident that today would be the day that we found our new home.

It is now a little after six on the sunny Victorian clock and we are yet to hear an affirmation from either agent. Fingers continue to tap, but a watched telephone never rings.

I did hear by email though that some words that I have written for TNT Magazine, a free antipodean magazine for travellers, would be published in the very next issue. Perhaps I should consider a change in career…

Phew! It is very warm outside and is likely to remain so for the weekend. This is, after all, what summers are all about. While the readership may be happily ensconced in the coldest season of the year, the writer is adjusting to February falling in between the Summer Solstice and the Vernal Equinox.

Melbourne, you shall be delighted to learn is lovely. It seems that there is much to see and do here, although we have been focussed on not seeing and doing everything in our first fortnight. The most significant landmark that I have investigated was Albert Park. I took a walk around the lakeside road while K was meeting with her new employers on Tuesday morning. Albert Park is beautiful despite the roadwork(s) that started this week in preparation for 2 April’s major motor sport spectacular. I hope to take some more photographs over the next few weeks to show the preparation that goes into turning the local beauty spot into one of Formula 1’s best circuits.

Inquisitive readers may be interested to know what we have been doing if we haven’t been sightseeing with cameras strapped to our persons. Our concentration has been mostly on finding somewhere to live. As nice as the YHA is, we cannot stay here forever. Firstly I would go insane at their restrictive and expensive Internet access. More importantly, the said hostel is fully booked from 14 March due to Melbourne hosting yet another major sporting event before the Grand Prix: The Commonwealth Games.

Finding potential places to live is easy. Websites like RealEstate.com.au facilitate finding properties that match our requirements and our budget. The agents, themselves, however seem to be trained in preventing people renting their landlords’ flats and houses. When we were letting out the house in Crawley, we found the market to be biased in favour of the tenants. Over here, we’re finding quite the opposite.

Our first encounter with a real estate agent (no fake agents, here!) was terrible. When we stated our requirements and budget, she told us that they didn’t have many cheap properties on their books! We found something that looked like it matched our requirements and filled out a form to view it. After some huffing and puffing, the lady behind the counter asked me for a AU$50 deposit and put the keys to the flat on the counter. I thanked her and asked for some directions: End of the road… turn left!

K and I walked to the end of the road, turned left and consulted the map. Turning right, then left and walking for about 20 minutes in the sun, we arrived at the building. The entrance to the flat was tucked around a corner, but we found that and inspected the flat. They would have needed to pay us to live in it! We took the tram back to the office, to ensure getting back within the hour and retrieving our deposit!

Thankfully our experiences since then have been better. We missed out on a lovely house in a prime location, which was a real shame. Like a couple of other viewings that we have been to, the agents will open the property for fifteen minutes per week and a crowd of about thirty prospective tenants pour in and rush to fill out an application form if the property is to their requirements. How they pick a successful applicant is a bit of a mystery, but on the occasion in question, they picked someone else.

We figured that we would probably stand a better chance of being chosen to pay rent if we put two incomes on the application form instead of just K’s. As such, the search for my next employer began yesterday. There are plenty of positions on Seek that I’m capable of filling and I have spent some time writing to the relevant companies and recruitment agencies to apply for them. As nice as the idea of being a kept man in one of the World’s most beautiful countries is, after a little under two months I found myself itching to start working on software again. Or maybe it’s just the mosquito bites?

I have mentioned to some of you that I have a great idea for a website that I want to create, but in order to launch that I’m going to need money for hardware, bandwidth and the like. So… hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s off to work I go! Of course if anyone out there knows of any work that would suit me, then I’d be happy to hear from you!

The plan for tomorrow is to take The Beast out for the first time since its arrival in Melbourne and visit a number of potential dwellings. Sunday will be, as the Good Lord intended, a day of rest. Now, though, the weekend has landed so I can leave the applications in the relevant mailboxes and concentrate on drinking cold beer and eating barbecued food.

K deftly negotiated the final kilometres of The Great Ocean Road on Saturday morning. We stopped to look at the waterfall at Carrisbrook and while we were there we got to see some koalas in the wild.

Koalas are fascinating creatures: cute as little teddy bears but with far sharper claws! I’m eternally amazed by the way that they choose the most precarious positions to sleep, at the farthest ends of eucalyptus branches, being intoxicated on the eucalyptus leaves and bark that they have fed on.

Sheoak Falls, some fifteen minutes’ walk from the car park at Angahook Lorne National Park was somewhat of a disappointment as there was no water to be seen. K saw something sizable slither into the undergrowth, so we beat a hasty retreat back to our vehicle.

The town of Lorne was very busy as we drove through and so we had to stop and have a nosey. The activities on the beach were part of the Rescue 2006 International Surf Lifesaving Competition. We spent a while watching the beach flag races. A British guy won his final that involved lying face-down in the sand and jumping up at the sound of the starter’s whistle and running in the direction his feet were pointing before diving for a stick protruding from the sand. And I thought we had to do some odd things in my lifesaving exams!

Some of the more windy stretches of The Great Ocean Road, the ones with rockfaces to one side and drops down to the crashing waves to the other reminded me of the old A5 route through North Wales. This would be the route that we would take to the ferry terminal at Holyhead for childhood trips to Ireland. It seemed appropriate, then, that toward the end of the Tourist Route we entered the Town of Anglesea!

It wasn’t long before we’d reached the peaceful town of Queenscliff (no ‘e’) in the borough of Queenscliffe (with an ‘e’), where we spent the weekend. It was a nice, quiet, relaxed weekend. I caught up on my reading and did very little else to be honest. It was great way to spend our last weekend on the road.

Two months to the day after we left Birmingham, we have arrived in Melbourne. We’ve settled in nicely at the Oasis YHA, where we’re booked in for two whole weeks. According to the odometer, The Beast has covered 16,302km (let’s call it a round 10,000 miles!) since we picked it up two days before Christmas. It’s nice to park the car up now since in essentially six weeks we have covered the mileage that an average driver in the UK would cover in a year!