Tag Archives: melbourne

Whirlwind Month

Since I left Auckland at the end of August, it’s been a pretty hectic month, with flights all over the place and adventures in Wellington, Hastings, Melbourne and Sydney!

After we left Auckland, Lisa and I enjoyed a relaxed week in Wellington just spending time catching up with friends, having coffee, beer and just basically having a week of holiday.

Wellington wanders <3

After a week in Wellington, we drove up to Hawke’s Bay for one last road trip in my trusty Toyota Starlet and spent the weekend with Lisa’s family, before I departed leaving her there, so that I could spend two weeks in Wellington tidying up affairs down there, whilst Lisa worked on tidying up and reducing the amount of stuff she had stored at her parents place.

Spending so long apart really sucks, but we both needed to do so in order to get stuff done, and there’s just not enough space at my parents place for us to stay for much longer than one night.

I ended up managing to sell off my beloved Toyota Starlet and a number of other items including my gaming computer, lots of computer cables, software, old flat stuff and other bits and pieces – it’s amazing how much stuff you collect over time, but I’ve managed to get it down so that I have two suitcases plus one cubboard at my parents place only – essentially only storing anything that will have use once I return to NZ in a couple of years.

After packing two suitcases, I flew out of Wellington on the 15th of September on a one-way ticket to start my AU adventure!

Kitty wants to come too!

I arrived in Melbourne looking for work and managed to spend a few days there doing job interviews, getting some basics like my bank accounts and cellphone sorted out and generally tripping around a new city and trying not to freak out at the fact that I’ve just moved country and in a single step changed EVERYTHING in my daily life.

I ended up booking and staying at the Miami Hotel, a 3.5 star place out in West Melbourne near a friends house, since I wanted a bit of my own space – it’s somewhere I’d happily recommend to anyone traveling on a budget, thanks to it’s around $90 a night

Thankfully I do have a number of friends in Melbourne, plus some Twitter friends I had not yet met in person, who helped take me around the place and to get some new sights.

It’s not a hipster bar, until you sit on crates drinking organic beer and watching a DJ in baggy pants wearing a cap with ears designed to look like a horse re-mix popular tracks.

Melbourne CBD, from up on Rooftop Bar

More Melbourne!

There’s no better introduction to Melbourne than starting my first day by visiting a hipster bar, followed by a rooftop bar looking out over the city and catching up with all my Melbourne Twitter friends. :-)

I also spent some time wandering the Victoria Markets, huge amount of stalls and fresh produce – even a meat hall which my friends had great delight dragging me into. :-/

Fluffy kittens! And a fuzzy kitten adventure tube!

I did a lot of walking whilst in Melbourne, I was staying up in West Melbourne, so ended up walking through the CBD almost daily and getting a feel of the city and learning new places.

Tanqueray tram, just for @pikelet

Trams! Tower blocks! Melbourne!

The Yarra river – I personally wouldn’t go swimming in it any time soon, looks a bit murky. :-/

Rain clouds moving into the city.

Misty walking bridge.

I also ended up training and tramming around the city lots, the transport system in Melbourne is amazing, so rapid and easy to get around, I got across town in about 15mins by jumping on a train, then a tram and using the Android Tram Hunter and Train Tracker applications to check schedules and routes.

Woot, trains!

Melbourne at night, when coming out of Flinder’s Station

It’s a pretty amazing city – it took me a few days to get settled a bit more, but keen to spend a lot more time there.

Sadly my plans to get work there were interrupted, I had only been in Melbourne for a few days before I got the sad news that my grandfather in Wellington has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and has less than 4 weeks to live. :-(

I decided to take the time to fly back to NZ sooner rather than later, so that I could spend some time with him whilst I still can, so booked a flight back to Wellington at short notice – sadly this meant that I had to pass on a couple interesting opportunities that had arisen, but I guess there’s never really a good time for this sort of thing to happen.

After having booked my return flight, I then got a call at short notice from a contract recruiter, who had a position for a 3-month contract in Sydney for a Linux engineer – I managed to re-arrange my travel plans, and instead of flying directly back to Wellington, ended up flying into Sydney, spending a day there to interview and then flying back to Wellington from there.

Doesn’t get much more iconic than the Sydney Harbor Bridge. Unlike Auckland, they were actually smart enough to put rail, walk and cycle crossings on it.

Circular Quay Panorama

Sydney CBD from the botanical gardens down by the opera house.

Sydney CBD viewed from Pyrmont.

I will have to make some time to actually go on and explore these awesome machines – looks like it’s possible to actually go and tour inside the submarine!

Fuck yeah Monorail!

After all this crazy tripping around Melbourne and Sydney, I flew back to Wellington for a few days to spend time with family and then flew to Hawke’s Bay to spend time with Lisa.

Meanwhile the job interview in Sydney returned good results, so this weekend, Lisa and I fly to Sydney to start my new 3-month contract in Sydney from the 1st of October!

Going to be a lot of fun and will offer some new challenges in a whole new city, 3 months will give us a chance to sample Sydney and figure out if we want to stay there for longer term, or we can shift to Melbourne at a later stage.

Getting there!

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Whilst I’ve been selling off a lot of stuff lately, I started attacking the apartment properly this weekend and the evenings since, going with a system of 3 piles – stuff to take to Melbourne, stuff to store in Wellington and stuff to sell/donate/trash.

The Melbourne pile is actually really small, at the moment I might be taking as little as some clothes, my laptop, some books and a router. I’ve cut down the stuff to store in Wellington a lot, mostly just a few boxes of personal stuff I want to keep (mementos, books, Libretto laptop collection).

I haven’t decided whether I want to take my IBM Model M keyboards yet or not, they’re amazing keyboards, but part of me is pondering going laptop-only whilst in AU – giving my laptop only a go this week as I’ve now packed away the keyboards and LCDs.

OMG look at all the desk space now!

OCD box organization.My label maker and I are having a lot of fun together with this move.

Couches are gone, lounge looks like even more of a bombsite.

The computer desk, TV and bed have now sold, but still need to sell the dining table, otherwise it’s going to have to squeeze into the van heading to Hawkes Bay and to be sold from there. :-/

Other items that haven’t sold, I’ll re-try from Wellington, along with a lot of additional things I have down there.

Meanwhile I’m loving the new found minimalism in my flat, I kind of want to go to Melbourne and have an empty apartment with nothing but my laptop and a stereo.

I’m particularly resistant to having a TV again, I find them a real intrusion into regular life – when there isn’t one around, I’m much more productive and do useful things or read, rather than blobbing – even when it’s not set to recieve TV broadcasts, they just consume so much space and become a focal point of the lounge.

I am taking my Mac Mini to use as a media center, but may just attach a large 27″ computer panel to it when in AU to watch movies when wanted – just pondering the best way to setup my flat that it’s still easy to watch stuff when desired, but in such a way that the media center isn’t the focal point of the lounge – I really want to spend my time in AU being way more productive and creating lots more content, rather than consuming.

Of course considering that my big KVM and file server is going to stay behind in NZ, I’m going to have much less access to my content, which may force me to do useful things like blog and code more. :-)

Goodbye NZ, hello Aussies!

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So it’s official, Lisa and I are heading off from NZ for a while to try our luck over in that other small island nation across the Tasman.

The idea is that we’ll spend a couple years in AU and from there, either do further overseas adventure or end up returning back to NZ – presuming of course that we manage to escape AU at all. ;-)

Whilst part of the lure is naturally AU’s strong economy and plentiful IT jobs, the real drive is to have a bit of a change of lifestyle and for me personally, to get involved in some more challenging and exciting projects.

We haven’t decided on the exact city yet, it’s most likely going to be Melbourne, but keeping options open and considering other locations such as Sydney, depending what interesting challenges are around.

We’ve both given work our notice and finish on the 24th of August, with a departure date from Auckland of the 26th of August. That’s only 3 weeks now, so starting some pretty frantic efforts of selling off all our stuff, trying to line up work in AU and organizing a million+ other details and things to be done.

At this stage it’s looking like I’ll end up spending 1-2 weeks in Wellington before flying to AU for a week or two aiming to line up some job opportunities, however still trying to figure out the details. We’re mostly focused on sorting out some work for myself, it’s much easier to live on just my IT salary than just Lisa’s writers salary. ;-)

I have a number of job types I could go for, but will probably aim for a Linux/Open Source engineering or consulting role in a senior space, I’ve been getting a bit bored with my current role simply due to the low challenge level of work, so really need something that pushes me into new challenges – and I don’t even want to *see* a desktop computer ever again. ;-)

If you know of any employers seeking staff or some good contracts for this sort of work, send me an email and I’ll send through my CV. :-)

Meanwhile, I’m selling almost all of my stuff before I go – check out my Trademe auctions, there’s anything from computers, components, cushions, furniture, cables and more, most of the smaller items I’ll ship anywhere in NZ.

Once I get to Wellington I expect I’ll list a few more items as well, I want to clear out what I have left at my parents some more as well, there’s a lot that’s ended up there since I moved to Auckland last year, and I probably don’t need to store a toaster for the next several years or a small data center worth of Cat6 patch leads.

Ideally my dream apartment in AU is going to have a laptop and a router on the floor with nothing else in the room, but I suspect that Lisa will want a few more comforts than just this, so maybe I’ll have to compromise a little….

I’ll do another blog post once I’ve confirmed dates for our initial trip over to AU and hopefully I’ll be able to confirm “final move” dates not long after that. :-)

Great Ocean Roadtrip

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The weekend before linux.conf.au, I decided to go on a roadtrip with @chrisjrn down south of Melbourne for a roadtrip through the rural areas and along the Great Ocean Road.

I started the trip with a pickup from @chrisjrn from the Melbourne International Airport, after a short stopover at the Virgin lounge for some food, we headed out to drive through Melbourne CBD and along the coast to Sorrento.

My crazy tasmanian driver, @chrisjrn

Melbourne CBD skyline in the distance

Once at Sorrento, we took the Sorrento-Queensclift ferry from Sorrento to Queenscliff with the car, around a 1 hour trip across the main shipping lane into Melbourne.

Yay, I'm on a boat! (Crossing the Melbourne harbour)

Moar Boats!

After getting off the ferry and negoiating deep fried deliciousness from a local takeaway joint (silly aussies not understanding NZder accents), we hit the road and got onto the Great Ocean Rd.

It’s a pretty neat drive with many twists, turns and other interesting bits. The amount of tourist-specific signs is amusing, with always a sign stating “In Australia, we drive on the left” after every major tourist turnoff.

It also appears that every Australian rural town is required to have a carnival on, I must have passed around 20 of them during this trip.

After driving for some time, we started getting our first views of the Australian coast line, shortly followed with a stop off at the Split Point lighthouse, offering expanded views over the coast.

Start of the Ocean View Rd

View along the coast line from Split Point lighthouse

View out into the far distance from Split Point lighthouse

Split Point Lighthouse

Some dreamy looking tourist. Off-camera: hordes of fine ladies swooning nearby.

Me looking dorky by a lighthouse.

Split Point lighthouse plaque

These pillers are littered along the coast and form a major series attraction called the Twelve Apostles further along the road.

As it was getting late in the day (18:00+), we decided to pull in at Lorne and looked for some accommodation. After spending some time looking around, we determined nothing was open or available, before finding a cabin/motel online further along the road, towards Apollo Bay.

Stopped to look for accommodation in Lorne, view from seating area.

We ended up in a cabin up on the hills, with a partial view out over the bay and lots and lots of wildlife around.

Pretty boys came to visit our motel - saw at least 8 at the same time and could hear them running over the roof.

Pretty birdies!

Red birdies!

The next morning we set off to the Twelve Apostles, pillars of sandstone formed by erosion of the clift-face.

I'm Jethro. These are the Twelve Apostles. (or actually 11.5, since one has kind of fallen down now)

I think these huge clifts are to stop the New Zealanders from invading easily.

View platform on exposed clift face that is slowly being worn away... will eventually be an additional apostle.

Awesome signage.

Even moar rocks!

After taking pictures of lots of rocks and my hair moving dreamily in the wind, we headed up to Ballarat for the conference on the rural roads of Victoria.

Rolling through the outback. Well, kinda.

Rural Victoria looks very much like a dry Auckland at times, but with the addition of eucalyptus trees.

And that completes my trip around rural Victoria – next up, LCA posts. :-)

linux.conf.au 2012

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In a couple days I’ll be flying out to Melbourne, Australia for linux.conf.au 2012, the undisputed greatest week of the year, being held in Ballarat.

I’ve been attending this conference since 2006 in Dunedin and it’s continued to be an amazing eye opener in the world of technology, open source and amazing people – considering when I first attended the conference, straight out of high-school being the only person out of 500+ students interested in technology, to finding that there are hundreds of even more hard core geeks that me, was totally amazing.

I’ll be doing a bit of tripping around like I did last year (see category linux.conf.au) – this time I’ll be spending 2 days before the conference doing a road trip with my mate Chris, followed by another 2 days after the conference where I stay in the Melbourne CBD for exploring the city in more detail.

Key dates:

14th Jan – Early morning flight from Auckland to Melbourne, Roadtrip with Chris
15th Jan – Roadtrip with Chris, arriving in Ballarat in the afternoon.
16th Jan – Start of linux.conf.au :-D
20th Jan – End of linux.conf.au :'(
21st Jan – Melbourne CBD Adventures
22nd Jan – Melbourne CBD Adventures
23rd Jan – Melbourne CBD Adventures, afternoon flight back to Auckland.

If you’re in Melbourne and want to catch up, let me know via email, twitter or XMPP and I’ll be keen for coffee/beer/seedybar. :-)

October AU Travels Plans

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I’ve been in a bit of a travelling mood lately – first a North Island roadtrip then snowboarding, next I’m off to visit Melbourne and Brisbane, two of my favourite cities .

I’ve visited both places a few times now, but keep getting drawn back, particularly to Melbourne it seems – going there again for the food and going back to Brisbane because I love the river and city so much.

I was tempted to visit Sydney again as well, but I couldn’t really fit it into the schedule – not sure about Sydney, I enjoyed my visit there, but not sure what living there long term would be like, especially compared to cities like Melbourne….

Unlike past trips, this time I’m taking @splatdevil – it’s going to be our first international holiday together and I get to introduce her to the awesomeness of both places. :-)

To help organise meetups with internationally located friends/readers/stalkers, here is the travel plan:

Oct 20 – 08:00 – arrival in Melbourne
Oct 22 – 13:00 – depart Melbourne for Brisbane, arrive around 14:00
Oct 24 – 16:00 – depart Brisbane for Wellington

That gives us around 2.5 days in each city – so if you’re around and want to catch up with Lisa and/or myself, please let me know when you’re available and I’ll schedule stuff in. :-)

We haven’t planned any specific activities yet, so please feel free to make suggestions/recommendations on things to see and do. :-)

Melbourne: Day 02

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For my final day in Melbourne, @MissNickiBee had organised the greatest tour of all time – a visit to CISRAC at Melbourne Museum and then to Monash University’s computer museum.

After starting the day with coffee, we headed off the Melbourne Museum on foot through the mean streets of Melbourne suburbs.

Melbourne architects seem to love sticking turrets on their brick buildings.

Exhibition hall thingy

It took a bit of effort to find CSIRAC since Melbourne Museum had moved it out of the main area to a separate public area.

CSIRAC! :-D

Lots and lots of wring in this thing

Diagram of the components of CSIRAC in horribly bad photography by yours truly

Sadly the Cray Supercomputer and Mainframe mentioned on their website are not available for public display :-( So I spent a couple hours looking around their general exhibits at the museum, which are quite interesting.

There’s a very large geology section with just about every imaginable rock type, if you’re a geology geek you’d probably have a lot of fun.

The pyscology and Melbourne history sections are also very interesting and it would be easy to spend a lot of time there.

After the museum, we headed off to the Monash University’s Museum of Computing History, a very impressive range of machines from early prototype era through to mainframes and through to the early microprocesser generation.

I took a lot of photos, here’s a few specific ones, but there’s a lot more to the collection:

Early digital calculator

Early IBM System 360 mainframe (this is just the console, actual thing would be about a room full of refigerator sized units)

VT100 console! We still refer to terminals as being "VT100 compatible" even now in the UNIX world.

Early microprocessors - recognise any famous models? :-)

Large early generation machine - memory bank visible

Delay Line Memory (I belive these are Nickel Relays)

A VAX, one of the early machines that UNIX was written on. Much fanboy squeee ensured.

Paper tapes. Yes, this did actually exist, it's not a tale to scare young geeks.

That’s some of the pics, I’ll upload others when I have more time one day – huge thank you to Monash university for putting this display together so professionally and making it open to the public, really made my day. :-)

Kind of a shame that the Melbourne Museum’s publicly assessable “Technology Collection” only consisted of CSIRAC, when there is so much more amazing technology they have in their collection.

After Monash, I headed back into the city for coffee before heading out to the airport on the skybus for my return to Wellington NZ – had a great time in Melbourne and many thanks to @MissNickiBee for the personal tour. :-)

Melbourne: Day 01

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Had a bit of a sleep in on my first full day in Melbourne, eventually @MissNickiBee came and looked at me disapprovingly till I got up off the floor.

Start off with coffee and breakfast in a cafe down some side street, before wandering into the city via the streets of Melbourne.

I love all the old buildings and how much historical feel that Melbourne has – despite being an uber geek, I appreciate the older architecture and tend to find that it’s more interesting than many modern constructions.

Large brick constructions - wouldn't survive in welly with all our quakes! ;-)

More detailed look

Ideally I’d like to buy something like a 1900ish villa for myself, and renovate so it has modern ethernet, power, bathroom, kitchen, etc inside, yet still retain the classic hard wooden feel.

Of course in Wellington this wouldn’t be cheap, so clearly I need to marry rich/moonlight as cougarbait/sell hacks to dodgy types/something to boost my salary to support the half a million price tag. Or stop buying computer kit for a bit :-/

Unfortunately I didn’t take any pictures of the cute Melbourne houses, but they look amazing with their iron trellises and cute picturesque gardens.

Of course, Melbourne has large modern towers as well :-)

Towering tower blocks of toweringness

Our first proper stop was the Melbourne Aquarium, @MissNickiBee had some discount tickets which helped.

Was an amazing visit, it’s far larger than Kelly Tartans (although they might have more penguins) and lots and lots of detail about different species.

I took a huge number of pics and videos that I’ll have to upload at some stage, for now here’s some penguins, since penguins are awesome:

squark squark! splash splash!

Aside from penguins, they had a huge number of different fish, sharks, jellyfish, stingrays and many other fishy critters – well worth the visit, kept us occupied for several hours.

After visiting the aquarium, I headed out to St Kilda with @MissNickiBee for drinks, cake and beach fun.

St Kilda

This is cake. It is most delicious.

One of the things I’ve noticed most about Melbourne is that everything is very compact – there’s a huge amount of people, traffic, trams, etc all trying to fit into tight streets – it’s not uncommon for people to be squeezing into trams, randomly joining you at your cafe table since there’s no free ones and for trams to be whizzing by closely through tight gaps.

I took a rather bad video when I was out in St Kilda of a tram going by the cake cafe where we were seated which shows just how close they sometimes get.

That’s pretty much my one complaint with Melbourne, there’s a lot less personal space and it can feel a bit dirty and chaotic at times, particularly some of the stations and streets. – especially compared to Brisbane with all it’s huge open spaces!

I guess it’s kind of the problem of trying to fit four million people into the limited space available. :-/ On the plus side, this population means there’s so much selection available for everyone.

After cake, we went wandering along the St Kilda waterfront, probably the only place I’ve seen in Melbourne that’s not squished with a million people running about – although there were certainly a few sunbathers around, even for a business day.

I turn my back on this burning sun!

I'm outside. Note my uncomfortable expression at the burning heat.

Melbourne CBD viewed from St Kilda beach.

Tour guide leading me out onto a pier, to what I suspect can only be her plan to dump my corpse off into the sea.

Boats and city!

To wrap up the St Kilda visit, we headed back into the city for dinner – sadly the vegetarian only pizza place was just closing when we arrived (around 21:45) but VegeBar (IIRC) was open and doing a roaring trade.

They managed to find us a table and much delicious vegetarian pizza was consumed – I’d have to go back, there’s a huge menu of awesome sounding vegetarian and vegan foods – they even have a menu for raw vegan diets O_o

Me attempting to photograph at night.

Melbourne: Day 00

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I arrived in Melbourne on Wednesday afternoon from Hobart – despite being full of coffee I managed to end up sleeping on the plane, but woke up in time to watch the plane fly over Melbourne on a very clear day, which is always awesome – seeing the CBD towers in the distance.

My delightful tour guide for Melbourne is MissNickiBee who meet me at Southern Cross Station and proceeded to take me back to her dungeon flat via tram.

Tour guide plotting my fate

Despite having been in Melbourne about three times before, this is the first time I’ve actually gone and caught a tram – was a pretty neat experience, they’re basically like thin trains but going down the middle of the street – much speedier and less annoying that Wellington’s buses since they don’t need to pull in and out every few minutes, they have mostly straight runs and primary right of way for all traffic.

One of the older trams, the newer ones are articulated into four sections and ride lower to the ground. If you're lucky, they have aircon and if you're very lucky, there's not too many people on it. :-)

After dropping off all my junk at her flat, we headed out for dinner at an awesome vegetarian only restaurant just block from her flat.

The thing I love most about Melbourne is it’s food – there’s a massive amount of selection, it’s like taking Cuba St and scaling it up by a factor of 20x whilst still retaining that small and cosy feel.

Whilst I was there, I must have passed about 4 different vegetarian only restaurants, including one particularly large one on the Thursday evening which was extremely popular and large enough to justify about 6 staff.

Didn’t get up to much as I was pretty worn out from Tasmania, so we had dinner, went along to a pub for a few drinks with a flatmate and then headed home to plan the next couple of days.