Friday, August 24, 2007

whats there to do?

nothing much it seems. I want to go out and buy my Mazda 3, but thats probably a couple more weeks to go. I'm going to package it as part of my salary, so gotta talk to a financial planner, and the consultants who do the salary packaging for St.George. After that, theres actually looking for the car, and the delivery of it. Seems like my car will be 1-2 months away. Sigh.

In the meantime, maybe I'll just upgrade my computer. I acquired a new game today, 'Overlord'. Started installing, and the message:

"Your system does not meet the minimum requirements for this game"

what the hell!? it hasn't felt that long ago that I had to get new parts for my computer... and now it can't play new games anymore. Zzzzz. Maybe I really should consider getting an Xbox 360. Then I won't have to worry about this systems requirements nonsense anymore. Ughh... but then even Fatts stopped playing his xbox liao. No real motivation to buy anymore. Aihs.. What to do..what to do?

Suppose to continue blogging about the NZ hor? It feels like so long ago, even though its only been 2 weeks. Feeling lazy to blog about it already. When I think about it, it doesn't really sound like we did much actually. 2 1/2 days were spent on the slopes and nights were spent recuperating.

The most exciting stuff we did (apart from the snow) was bungee and the shotever jet. Jumping off the Kawarau bridge was great. Damn good feeling. I'm going to go for the Thrillogy package the next time I go back to Queenstown. Jump off Kawarau, Nevis Highwire and the Skyline Ledge (not sure if it has Skyline in the name...). Real sweet! You basically get 3 jumps for the price of 2. Should have done that in the 1st place. Oh well.

looky at the camera...

shotover jet was good as well, but I didn't bring my camera so didn't have any pictures. Didn't buy the photo packs as well. Dom did take some pretty nice pics with his cam around the Shotever river though. SLR camera with wide-angled lens. Pretty cool.

team Queenstown!

I think I have these photos up on Facebook as well. Easier to publish albums up there, rather than in a blog. The other 'big' thing we did was go to Milford Sounds. What is it? A place with lots and lots of:

waterfalls...
and waterfalls...
and more waterfalls.

Apparently theres not that much that day either. Suppose to be thousands of them after heavy rain. Would be an impressive sight.

Sunday, August 19, 2007

holiday blogging

didn't take me long to become lazy to update my blog's template. don't really know what to do with it now. just gotta put back the links section, and I think my non existent statistics collector too. Quite annoying how old those things go missing when you update the template.

I just joined Facebook a couple days ago. Looks a lot nicer than friendster. Seems to have a lot of nonsense on it. I've uploaded some of the NZ pictures on it. Seems easier than putting up photos on the blog. Not sure if the photo album on it is public. Can't seem to link to it, so if you wanna see it, you gotta join facebook too :)

Just a sampler:
@Lake Pukaki

The scenery there is absolutely gorgeous. 1st time I've seen so many snowcapped mountains. Thredbo is nothing compared to the snowfields in NZ. I'm rather tempted to go back there next year, but there are other places to travel too as well. This is one of the times you wish you were bloody loaded. I could just fly down to Queenstown for a snow weekend at anytime. Its gonna take about the same time as driving to Thredbo. Maybe add an hour or two for the stuffing around in airports.

Just a bit more about our trip. Theres 8 of us in total. The 4 of us in the picture about: me, thos, michelle and yenny (mich's friend). And the other group of 4 is mich's sister's (i.e. carol) gang. I reckon this is actually a good way to travel. Break up a big group into 4s or something. Makes it pretty easy to move around, since we can either do our own things as a either a big or small group.

Anyway, we flew in to Christchurch a day earlier than Carol's group so we could spend the next day doing the scenic drive to Queenstown. Lake Pukaki (pic above) was one of the stops we made. Lake Tekapo was another:

this was actually b4 Pukaki

Whole drive with all the stops took us about 9 hours, but it would usually be about 6-7 hours from Christchurch to Queenstown. We stayed at the Oaks Shores Apartments.

balcony view

I'd highly recommend it to anyone staying in Queenstown. A really nice apartment to stay in. Flat screen TVs, 5.1 surround sound system, roaring fireplace, modern interiors, lake and mountain views. I was bloody impressed since I wasn't expecting the apartment to be that nice. I took some pictures, but had to delete them cuz I was running out of space on my memory stick by the end of the week.

to be continued...

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

making some changes

figured i'd make some changes to the look of my blog now that the adsl is back. was thinking of putting some NZ pics, but at the same time kinda lazy to figure out how to implement it into the blog templates. can't remember my CSS and HTML coding anymore, and not too bothered in putting too much time into it.

was hoping I could cheat by modifying some of the existing blogger ones. but its already time to sleep. maybe next time.

Sunday, August 12, 2007

still alive

didn't realise i haven't posted since the thredbo weekend until jacq complained to me. thats actually lots of stuff to update, but i'm feeling quite tired now. Just got back from New Zealand a few hours ago...feeling a little depressed now. Absolutely loved it there...but now I'm back home. Back to the routine of waking up early to go to work...instead of waking up early to hit the snow. Sighhh...

More on the holiday later, when I get the pictures up. Work-wise. I've already handed in my resignation about 2 weeks back? So I'll be starting my 'new' position on the 27th. Can't wait till I get my 1st new paycheck! Definitely will be needing it after the NZ holiday, and the recent sharemarket madness. Lost a lot of money over the past few weeks. But not too bad I guess. Hmmm, its weird how I can think of losing a few thousand as 'not so bad' nowadays. All in perspective I suppose. I'm fairly confident I can make that money back, so I don't stress about it too much.

Waiting for dinner now (pizzalicious pizza!) so I'm just going to bum around till it arrives. On a downside to the holiday, I'm 2-3kgs heavier now from just 1 week of eating good food & not gymming. Ouchh....