Tag Archives: sydney

Sydney Harbour Bridge Walk

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One of my biggest annoyances about living in Auckland is that the only way to cross the Auckland Harbour Bridge was via car or bus –  so whilst my apartment would have been within feasible walking distance to the city, it was utter impossible to walk it.

Sydney has at least got this right and their famous harbour bridge is crossed by car, train, cycle and foot, which offers an excellent chance to see the bridge up close and get some amazing views over the city and harbour.

Views don’t get much more iconic than this. Amazingly hot dude and some building thingy in the background.

It’s an easy walk to get to if you’re a tourist – you just need to take the Northern Rail line Central, Wynward or Town Hall train stations and depart at the Milsons Point railway station on the North Shore, which is right where the bridge crossing starts for both pedestrians and cyclists.

Both the train and driving across the bridge offer views, but it’s nowhere near as excellent as checking it out on foot – and of course driving across will incur you some lovely tolls.

It’s hard to get a sense of scale – for reference there are two rail lines running through the right side tower, each capable of fitting a double decker train though it – or in the case of the left side, a road lane and a pedestrian path.

If I find my current 1 bedroom CBD apartment rent painful, I’d hate to think how much these places would be costing…

Sydney Opera House!

There’s one metric fuckload of steel in this.

It’s also really high!

Circular Quay, the international passenger terminal for cruise ships and the rocks.

I love these apartments at the city end of the bridge for being a neat varying stack of towers and roof gardens, but at the same time hate it’s blocky concreteness.

Interspersed concrete and greenary awaits at the end of the crossing – descend the steps to end up in “The Rocks”, the heritage part of Sydney

The crossing is well worth doing, it’s a real shame that Auckland hasn’t added a walk and cycleway of their own – not only is it a great recreational addition, but it also makes the lifestyle choice of walking or cycling to work from the North Shore feasible.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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As part of my daily walk to work in Pyrmont, I pass the impressive Australian National Maritime Museum – considering they have both a Destroyer and a submarine parked in the harbor outside, I could hardly resist a visit for long. :-)

The museum has the usual range of maritime artifacts, exhibits about life at see, immigration, ship guns and steam engines, as well as a few neat items such as a maritime helicopter and small yachts and motor boats suspended inside.

Weird helicopter – kind of looks like some weird bug when viewed from underneath.

Of course for me, the real attraction was what was parked outside…

Above or below, either way we have your warfare needs sorted. :-)

Nowhere near as large as the cruise ships that now dock at Sydney, but still impressive when looking at them up close.

The best part is that yes, you can board both the destroyer and the submarine and explore them for yourselves! Unfortunately the day that I was there the submarine was closed, but I’m sure I’ll be back at some point and able to go inside it to explore more.

I had a good wander around the HMAS Vampire, a 1956 darling class destroyer built in Australia, and the last generation of warships before weapon systems moved from traditional cannons/big guns to missile based systems.

If you filmed a porno here, the title would be “one shade of gray”.

Military budgets don’t seem to extend towards having normal height ceilings.

Bit obsolete in the age of the drones and smart bombs, but nothing is quite as impressive as some big cannons.

I love the sci-fi look to these AA cannons.

Pyrmont Bridge with the wooden boat festival in the foreground.

Fuck your NBN and your UFB, fibre to the warship is where it’s at!

Server rooms have come a long way since. :-)

More computer users need to keep this in mind.

Early generation Nagios outage notification device?

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

I can’t resist some good thick chains…. ;-)

Sir, we have a firing solution for the Apple store from the front turret!

I love warning signs like these “this shit be bad bro, try not to hang around here”

The rounds fired by these machine guns must be massive… probably tear a small boat apart.

Standing on the deck of the weapon of the 20th century looking out at the new weapons of the 21st century…. mega corporations.

If your target is too quick to move, there’s also the smaller patrol boats you can use to chase them down. They can’t have been too comfortable to spend time on, even sitting at the dock on a calm day the boat had a noticeable rocking to it.

The little offspring of the destroyer?

Whilst I couldn’t get inside on this trip, I got some great pictures of the HMAS Oberon diseal-electric submarine parked up alongside the destroyer. Whilst it’s not hard to find warships at maritime museums around the world, near-operational submarines are a little less common.

Long, hard, black… however now devoid of any seamen.

The little access hut looks a bit out of place compared with the sleek design of the rest of the machine.

Various snorkels and periscopes.

If you’re looking for some less recent history, the museum also has two large wooden ships –  replica of the endeavor as well as a restored tallship.

A clone of the ship HMS Endevour, used by James Cook for Britain’s “discovery” of New Zealand, Australia and other pacific locations.

I might have found something even more uncomfortable than economy class for traveling around the world on…

Some excellent views of Darling Harbor

Pyrmont bridge and Darling Harbor

If you have several hours to spare in Sydney, the museum is well worth a visit, especially if you love complex machines such as warships.

Commuting in Sydney

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I’ve now been in Sydney for 5 weeks, settling into a new job, a new lifestyle and an entirely new city. Still very much in the tourist phase, there’s heaps we still need to see and do and only just starting to get settled really.

Sydney opera house!

The first two weeks here were spent staying with some of Lisa’s relatives out in Hornsby Heights – nice suburban area, but it takes a bus and a train in order to get into the CBD, which is a 1.5 hour per-way trip – 3 hours a day, or even more depressingly 15 hours a week just to get to and from work.

Because of this commute we haven’t really done much in the first two weeks whilst here, most of my time was either traveling or looking for a place to live with Lisa.

Sydney residents seem to complain about the train service, but it’s actually one of the best I’ve used, really the only thing that lets it down is the lack of a smart card system like Melbourne’s Myki

Instead it uses magnetic stripe tickets which are purchased via ticket machines at every station. These tickets can be for single trips, returns, weekly, monthly or even yearly – I had enough trouble keeping the paper ticket in one piece for a week, so unsure how well monthly or yearly tickets are going to last. :-/

Buttons! All the buttons!

The trains do vary in quality, some of the ones being run are a bit beat up and graffitied, but they always seem to be on time and pretty reliable.

It’s the first city I’ve been in which runs double decker trains – Sydney tends to run them as two pairs of locomotives, each with 4 carriages – effectively 8 carriages, or 16 if you count the fact that they’re double decker and probably fit about twice of the average carriage.

Inside one of the newer trains – note the upper and lower levels!

The suburban train network has the best views, most city training tends to be underground into subway stations, which do tend to be quite hot and cramped – thankfully Sydney has seemed to learn to build big, the newer stations in some suburbs are massive spacious underground caverns.

Unfortunately this large station entrance is an exception to the rule…

Of course you don’t necessarily have to take the underground rail….

MONORAIL!!! I get to walk past it every day on the way to work, so cool.

There’s an active cycling scene in Sydney, particularly around where I live and work, although I’m not sure how anyone survives cycling in hot Sydney days which are pretty horrific survival experiences at times. :-/

Whilst there are cycle lanes, they can be a bit scary as a pedestrian as a lot of cyclists seem to consider themselves immune to the cyclist traffic lights and will sometimes ride right at you against the red light whilst pedestrians are crossing…. There’s also a few wonderful design failures such as shared pedestrian/cyclist zones that are no larger than 1 bike each way at a time leading to people riding a bit too close for comfort.

Thankfully we have now found a place and we’ve finally settled in somewhat – now living in an apartment on Clarence St, right in the middle of the CBD which makes my job in Pyrmont only a short 20minute walk, meaning I can actually spend time enjoying my evenings.

Tree lined home street!

There’s a few pretty awesome perks to my commute, which takes me over Darling Harbour via Pyrmont Bridge and offers some pretty neat views.

Pyrmont bridge in the evening – note the monorail track which goes over it.

Harbor view – just off to the left is the rear end of a warship and a submarine at the maritime museum – but I’ll post more about these later on….

Generally things are going pretty well here, quite a culture shock compared to NZ, but we are getting out and about learning new places and things to see.

Blessed is the DSL

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As all you loyal readers should have noticed by now is that my blog has been a little quiet since I moved to Sydney. I can assure you it’s not from a lack of interest, but rather a lack of time and essential living resources such as DSL conspiring to prevent me from posting.

I’ve been in Sydney for just over 4 weeks now and have a few blog posts to write, so will complete these over the next few days. :-)

We managed to find a flat and moved into it 2 weeks ago, right in the middle of the CBD with only a 25min walk to my work office – sadly DSL took a little longer to get sorted (thanks Telstra @#$%^&*U) but I now have a nice shiny DSL connection with the good people at Internode.

It’s been an interesting experiment using 3G as my primary internet connection these last few days – as first it’s OK, but it becomes noticeable at how bad performing it is after only a few days. Slow bandwidth making downloads of small files a noticeable factor, latency making SSH connections laggy and non-responsive.

Even simple stuff like listening to music is hard – I have all my music on my server in NZ and simply play it directly off the samba share across my VPN and use cachefilesd to cache recently accessed files on my laptop – this works great on fixed line connections, but fails horribly on 3G which is generally fast enough most of the time for 256k MP3, but has nowhere near enough of a data cap and the connection drops really mess with playback.

The poor 3G performance is not helped by the fact that AU city 3G networks are generally poor – combination of factors, bad coverage, buildings and huge volumes of users, I actually found that NZ’s mobile network was generally better performing all round.

On the other hand, the new LTE networks (“4G”) here are stunningly impressive – colleague is frequently getting 24mbit (and as much as 32mbit) download on his 4G Samsung S3, which is even faster than my CBD ADSL2+ line. Of course this means you’ll chomp though your 1GB monthly plan in about 4.2 minutes… :-/

It was an interesting experience, but I’m now very happy to have a real connection back. Not having a home server is a bit of an adjustment, I’m down to just a DSL modem plugged into my Mikrotik RB493G…

I may look at putting in a larger file server cache locally here at some point, currently looking at the best option for pulling large content from NZ to AU and holding it in cache for the optimal time, almost need a cache that I can instruct to pre-seed on demand – eg  “cache all recent accesses from my NZ file server, but also cache the following 4GB file I’ve just requested so that I can watch it when I get home tonight”.

As I write this, we’ve only had DSL for 5 hours and have already pulled 2GB with just casual browsing…. I think the 200GB cap will be enough for us, but one of the perks of living in AU is that I could get up to a 1.2TB cap if I really wanted. ;-)

Whirlwind Month

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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.

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. :-)