Mum’s Tennis Friends
Over the weekend, Kristy and I went to see one of her old school friends’ husband play in a band. The band’s name is “Mum’s Tennis Friends”. Those last couple of sentences probably make perfect sense, however, if not structured in that way… or if some details are not made obvious, this simple concept can be quite confusing. Here’s what I mean…
Last week I came home from work and Kristy asks me if we have anything planned for Saturday night. I reply with “I don’t think so… why?”. She then proceeds to ask “In that case, do you want to go and see Mum’s Tennis Friends play?”.
Coincidentally, Kristy’s Mum does happen to play tennis and I had no idea a band called “Mum’s Tennis Friends” even existed, so I looked a little puzzled as to why we would want to go and watch Kristy’s Mum play tennis with a bunch of her friends on Saturday night… but I figured there must be a reason for the invite, so I respond “Um… ok… sure…. where are they playing?”
Kristy replies “At the Coronation Hotel”. Now I’m baffled. Not only am I confused as to why we’d want to spend our Saturday evening watching a bunch of old ladies play tennis, but now I have to process the fact that this whole crazy event would be taking place in a rough Ipswich pub that’s a few doors down from a gun shop and an adult store (which both scarily occupy adjoining premises… but hey, that’s Ipswich for you).
Then if my brain wasn’t broken enough by this stage, Kristy then throws in the comment “Madonna’s husband plays with them, so a few of my old school friends are going along and thought it might be fun to rock-out with them”.
This must have been the point that my head exploded and I was left dumbfounded with a permanent ‘brain freeze’ expression stuck on my face.
Kristy, noticing my mental agony, says “what’s wrong – don’t you want to go?”
So I try and explain that I have no idea of what’s going on – why on earth does the husband of one of Kristy’s old school friends play tennis in pubs with Kristy’s Mum and a bunch of her friends on Saturday nights and how has this mixed group of amateur athletes managed to gain a cult following of 30-year-old women who all went to school together?!?
The next 10 minutes was filled with Kristy explaining that they’re a band and after a couple of pain-killers and a lie-down, I’m back on track and finally understand what just transpired.
So, Saturday afternoon rolls around and we figure that since the band doesn’t start until 7pm and it’s local, we’d have a few drinks before the gig starts… rock-up fashionably late and party-on. So I have a couple of beers… play some PS3 while Kristy gets ready… have a shower… a few more beers… I get ready… another couple of beers and we leave. I’m feeling a bit pissy already and the night technically hasn’t begun.
We arrive thinking everyone would be there already – but no – it was just us and a dishevelled looking crowd. More beer is required.
Now, I should also probably point-out that, as a wimpy, weak, slightly pudgy geek who was picked-on a little through-out school and over the years has been mistaken for a homosexual on more than one occasion… I’ve developed this fairly unfounded and quite unnatural paranoia that whenever I’m in a large group of blokey blokes and I don’t have suitable “backup”, I fear that I’ll get into a fight… or more accurately, get bashed-up.
So given the surroundings, I was feeling a bit nervous. Fortunately, Kristy’s friends turn-up, we start chatting and all is good… Until one of the girls’ husbands starts spear tackling guys randomly. I’m nervous again… but then we start doing shots of tequila and the nerves disappear… as does the feeling in my legs. The pub is also too tough to stock salt or lemons, so we’re doing straight shots of tequila with nothing but the bitter flavour of beer to wash down the sharp after-taste.
By this stage, I’ve forgotten that I’m scared of anything – probably because even if someone did punch me, I probably wouldn’t feel it. But I’m also so drunk that remaining upright is a challenge and end-up deciding it’s probably best if I go home and leave the girls to finish the night without me. And after all that, I don’t even think I saw Mum’s Tennis Friends play.
On Sunday I woke-up and felt worse than I have done in ages. Kristy took Caleb to SeaWorld whereas I just slept, ate (when I could finally stomach food again at some point that afternoon) and then spent the rest of the day randomly watching the lights on the tv flicker at me and played some more PS3.
Despite the pain felt throughout Sunday (and even a little bit on Monday) and the fact that my Saturday night was a little anti-climatic since I didn’t even get to see the band play – it was actually quite a good weekend.
Read MoreA weekend of nothing and a recap on the Brisbane Twestival
It’s 2:30pm on a Saturday afternoon – I’ve only been awake for a few hours, just had a shower, ate a couple of slices of left-over pizza, checked my email, cranked some old-school Leftfield, George is asleep at my feet and now it’s time for a beer and a blog post.
This is the first weekend in ages that we haven’t had anything planned, so my legacy to do stuff has been going quite well – although I must admit, I’m pleased to have a weekend to kick back, eat pizza, drink beer and watch DVDs which was what most weekends used to consist of.
A few weeks back, we went to our first Brisbane Twestival. What is a Twestival? It’s basically a global series of events designed to bring Twitter users together in an off-line environment and in the process create global awareness (and raise money) for a charitable cause.
Twitter users from all around the world came together at the various local meet-ups (twestivals) organised between the dates of 10-13 September 2009.
Ok, ok, I know this may not sound like the most interesting or exciting event to go to given the geeky nature of it and the fact that a lot of people who are incredibly social online are quite the oposite when you take their keyboard away… not that I can talk – I’m much the same… and as a side-note, I feel a bit hypocritical when I preach about the values of social media lately as my blogging has been sporadic at best, and my tweeting, facebooking and even reading other blogs has been minimal of late.
But all that aside – social media is a very powerful tool and when used to raise money for a noble cause, it’s even better.
This particular Twestival was designed to raise money towards the prevention of youth suicide. To do this, they had live bands, comedy acts, some dancing (which was dubbed as burlesque… and although a little risque, I personally wouldn’t have considered what I saw as ‘burlesque’… but still entertaining) and an art auction.
The highlights of the night (other than catching-up with a few online buddies) were a couple of the bands – one being a very funny comedy act called The Complete First Season and the artwork we bought in the auction.
We generally don’t buy art – we’ve talked about it for years saying how it’d be cool to have some funky paintings around the house, and have even contemplated creating some of our own artwork but have never actually done anything about it… until now.
The auction started and we excitedly placed a bid – partially for novelty purposes as we don’t normally partake in auctions, partially because we knew all money was going towards a great cause, but primarily because the Andy Warde piece up for sale was very cool. To get an idea of his work, check-out some of his stuff from a recent exhibition Andy had a the Joshua Levi Gallery (incidentally the same place that facilitated the Twestival).
Then someone raised our bid, to which we responded… and as you would expect, this went on in true auction-style for a while… til it got the the point where the fun of bidding started to be replaced with the reality that we were about to actually spend two or three times more than our pre-planned drinking budget for the night on a painting. Given that we’re closet alcoholics… and that we hadn’t actually been drinking (much to our dismay, there was no alcohol at the event, but there were some very tasty cup-cakes and some tiny gourmet burgers that made you feel like a giant whilst eating them)… the auction was starting to get a little scary.
In the end, Kristy held strong, kept bidding and we won the piece… it cost us a few hundred dollars and when chatting with one of the organisers, he explained that the money raised from that one purchase would have been enough to save nearly 10 youths from popping themselves – so I felt pretty good about that.
Not to mention that we now had our first-ever, proper piece of artwork, which is now mounted on our lounge-room wall…. and what’s even better is that it isn’t just some snobby piece of work that we bought at posh exhibit with fancy pants people wearing monocles and throwing around words like ‘existentialism’… the piece has character, was purchased for a noble cause and comes with a great story attached – how many people do you know that have purchased artwork from a social media meetup?
Read MoreRoad Trips, Post-Wedding Parties, Windows 7, Google Wave, Viruses and um… anything else I can prattle-on about
How much has this blog sucked lately?!? I personally blame the author.
So I’m going to be doing three types of posts over the next few days/weeks/months in an effort to catch-up with everything (not that I expect it will work-out as planned) but this is what I have in mind…
- Current posts discussing the most recent stuff I’ve been up to
- Catch-up posts discussing what’s happened no-so recently
- Random links and other interesting stuff I’ve compiled but haven’t gotten around to posting
Let’s start-off with some of the most recent stuff – it’s been school holidays and Kristy took some time off work to do some holiday stuff with Caleb. One of the things they did was went on a road trip to the Dubbo Zoo and to see The Dish at Parkes.
Due to work commitments (and to be honest, a general lack of interest in driving 1000Km’s to go to a zoo) I opted to give this trip a miss, but after hearing some of the stories, it actually sounded like they had an awesome time.
Me on the other-hand, spent 3 nights working late, eating take-out, playing PS3 and drinking a little more red wine than I probably should mid-week. Also, in some random flicking through YouTube channels I stumbled across a funny little online show called The Guild which follows the lives of a group of people addicted to playing MMO RPGs. I won’t go into explaining it any further, but if you don’t know what MMO or RPG is an acronym for, you probably won’t like the show.
Over the weekend we caught-up with Skye and Scotty (which is becoming a much more regular occurrence now they live around the corner) for a few drinks and some DVDs. Went to a football break-up for one of Kristy’s step-brothers and then went to Janine’s post-wedding get-together.
Janine had her wedding somewhere in the Whitsundays and due to poor timing, planning, conflicts with other weddings and costs, we opted not to go up north for the celebration. As this also applied to a bunch of other people, Janine decided to have a celebration a week later for all those that didn’t attend.
Although Janine and I have a bit of a love-hate relationship (she shits me to tears sometimes… as do a lot of the dancing mums that she associates with as part of her Dancing Studio), it was actually a pretty good night.
On Sunday I offered to help Trish and her daughter Mariah with her laptop which had recently been infected by a virus and in the process, I figured I’d upgrade my laptop to Windows 7. So far (and I’ve only been using it for the last 48 hours), it seems pretty good – quicker than Vista, the install went reasonably smoothly and so far everything has just ‘worked’ which is rare for a Microsoft product.
Unfortunately the virus repair didn’t go quite so smoothly and I had to re-install Windows due to bluescreens and failed boot attempts.
While waiting for virus scans to complete and software to install, I finally got around to watching the loooong video talking about a new-ish project Google is rolling-out called Google Wave. To explain it in it’s most simple form – imagine if a company tried to take the concept of email, instant messaging, social media, cloud computing, online/offline group document collaboration and mash it all into one open-source tool – you’d have Wave.
Email technology has been broken for decades simply because the technology originally created to handle email was never designed to be used to the magnitude that it is today. MacGyver would be in awe of all the bubblegum, paperclips and band-aides that exist behind the scenes in order to fight spam, route emails through poorly configured servers, travel halfway around the world and magically allow messages to appear in the inbox of the person sitting two-feet away from your desk.
So the notion that Google are doing something about this to fundamentally change the way people view online communication and potentially create a whole new way of ‘emailing’ is very exciting for a geek like me. Given the money, brain-power and reputation that Google have, they might just be able to pull this off. Only time will tell and even when the product is officially launched, it’ll still probably spend the next 5 years in ‘beta’ and be invite only like Gmail was.
Well, that’s all I’ve got time for at the moment – I’ll try and squeeze-out another post or two soon with hopefully some more interesting stuff.
Read MoreGardening, powertools and an awesome work-related dinner
The weekend before last, I was incredibly useless when it came to helping Skye and Scotty with their gardening due to a nasty hang-over… not that I enjoy gardening at the best of times, but when hung-over, it only makes the already painful task unbearable.
But I made a promise that I would help, so Kristy went out for dinner with Vicky and I had an early night on Friday enabling me to rise early (which translates to ‘before lunch time’ when weekends are involved) to put-in a decent effort and make-up for the weekend before.
With army-green cargo’s, a black t-shirt and a hefty pair of boots – I looked like I had stepped back into the mid 90′s and was on my way to a Nirvana or Pearl Jam concert… until the addition of a big white floppy hat that made me look like a confused grunger who had just joined the Australian Cricket Team.
Normally the only highlight from a day that starts like this is beer at the end of it… but on this occasion, I had my first chance to play with a chainsaw – and it was AWESOME. For the first time in my life, I’ve come to appreciate how males can develop an unnatural obsession with powertools.
Hedges were obliterated, fence-lines cleared, lots of little scratches and gardening related battle scars (although fortunately… and much to my, and everyone else’s surprise… I didn’t end-up as an amputee from my chain sawing) and overall, quite a successful day.
This was followed by an awesome evening with my very good web development business partners and friends – Kintek.
Dinner was at a restaurant called Little Singapore which was BYO and Chris certainly did that – a carton of beer, a few bottles of wine and a couple of bottles of champaign… all of which were emptied before we left.
The food was great (despite me accidentally stabbing myself with a satay chicken skewer… yea, don’t ask) and I chose my meal like I choose my race-horses – by name and picture. Subsequenly I had Kung Po Chicken – go on, just try and say that without a faux-Asian accent and waving your hands in the air like you’re about to Karate chop something.
The dessert that sparked the most interest (once again, purely by name and description… not by how enticing it would be to eat) was a dish called “Ice Kacang” which consisted of shaved ice with 8 different kinds of beans. I couldn’t even name 8 different kinds of beans… actually, just saying that reminds me of the guy from the movie Best In Show who’d constantly name nuts.
So after bean-filled desserts and an ample supply of alcohol, we headed back to Lucy’s place which was around the corner for a few more drinks… which lead to a few more… which lead to yet another rather late and entertaining evening.
When Sunday rolled around, my head was sore from all the alcohol, my body was sore from all the yard work… all I could do was stare at the TV and watch music videos and a couple of DVDs. Then it was over to Kristy’s Dad’s place for a BBQ dinner.
Despite it now being Monday night, I’m still a little exhausted and a little sore from the weekend efforts, but overall, was yet another fine weekend.
Now, before heading-off to bed, I have to finish writing a position description for a new staff member for Ingenuity. While the concept of adding a new member to our team is quite exciting (not to mention all the additional stuff I’ll hopefully be able to get done with an extra pair of hands)… interviewing and picking the right person for the job is often far more painful than you’d expect.
Read MoreTweetup’s, bongo drums and dude, where’s my keys?
Last weekend I went to a local Twitter Meetup which wasn’t bad, although wasn’t brilliant either. The tricky thing with these types of gatherings is that other than a common interest in a social media site there’s very little that holds the group together. This was also the case with a blogging meetup group I used to attend.
You’d be talking to someone and ask what they blog about and they’d say something like candles, weight loss, personal development, cars, sports etc. etc. and after politely asking some of the more obvious questions, you’d quickly run out of things to talk about. Then I’d start talking about the rubbish I blog about (search optimisation, social media, random stuff I’d find on the internet and prattling-on about my mediocre life) and I’d have to wake them up at the end of the conversation.
It’s somewhat ironic, because you would expect a group inspired by a tool designed to create conversations online doesn’t always result in decent conversations in real life.
That being said, there were still quite a few people that I really did enjoyed meeting and it was also great to catch-up with some of the guys I know from previous groups. And as the beers were flowing, the night did get progressively better.
[update... just found a photo of me from the night... this was before the onslaught of too many beers]
So much so that when things were winding-down, I decided to head into the Valley for a few more drinks. Stopped along the way a couple of times to ensure I had the necessary nutrients [beer] to make it through the long and arduous journey [a quick citycat trip and a 10-15 min walk through town] which lead me to the Press Club.
A few drinks later, I made friends with (or maybe they made friends with me… things were getting a little hazy by this point) a gay couple who were very funny. Soon after, a guy turns-up with an electronic bongo drum kit thing to play along with the DJ that was spinning.
Once his gear was setup (right next to where the gay guys and I were sitting), he went off to grab a drink and chat with some of the staff… so in my infinite mischievous wisdom, I thought it’d be quite entertaining to have a go at the drums.
Banged away to a few songs, which I though was quite good but sadly, the drummer returned and he didn’t share the same enthusiasm for my playing… so I was kicked-out 
Had a few more drinks at a bar down the road……. and then I woke-up. It was about lunch-time on Saturday. I had somehow made it home, got inside, disrobed and went to sleep – but exactly how that all happened is a complete mystery to me.
Apparently I must have been concerned I wouldn’t be able to find my way out of the house as I left a trail of clothing from the end of the bed leading to the front door (Hansel and Gretel style) and after picking this up, I discovered I’d lost my house keys. I knew they must have been somewhere inside (since no doors/windows were broken and I wouldn’t be inside if I had lost them previously)… but couldn’t find them anywhere.
Then Kristy came home and informed me that we were going to go over to Skye and Scotty’s new house to help them clean-up their garden prior to them moving in.
I’m not overly useful when it comes to outdoor activities, manual labour, gardening or anything involving the slightest level of physical fitness… add to the fact that I still felt a little drunk from the evening before (that’s right, still intoxicated – hang-over hadn’t even officially begun), I wasn’t the most helpful member of the group. We’ll be helping again this weekend, so I’ll have to make-up for my uselessness then, plus, I might get a chance to play with a chainsaw… so if I don’t blog for a while after this it’s probably because I’ve become a multiple amputee.
Fortunately the rest of the weekend was pretty quiet which helped aid my sore head. On the Saturday night Kristy caught-up with a few old school friends and had a great time too, so it was a good weekend had by all.
This weekend, other than helping with some more outdoor work, I’ll be going out for dinner with the team at Kintek which I’m really looking forward to.
Read MorePete does stuff… no really, he does!
So, in that last post I said I wanted to start doing stuff… and well, it’s been fairly busy since making that decision.
So a few weekends ago my mate Cameron had a Guitar Hero World Tour party… and it rocked… as I did, like the bastard love-child of Van Halen, Freddie Mercury and Hendrix… yea that’s what Hendrix meant when he said “excuse me while I kiss this guy” (most people miss-hear that lyric and think he’s actually saying “scuse me while I kiss the sky”… but now you know better).
It turned-out to be a much bigger night than anticipated… lots of drinking… 4 incredibly geeky guys rocking-out with plastic instruments thinking for one night we genuinely were rock gods.. well, until we ran out of alcohol and then noticed the sun was coming-up.
The next weekend was filled with ferry-floss and rides. Well, I’m not a huge fan of either, but that didn’t detract from the weekend. One of my clients is responsible for organising an annual community festival (Centenary Rocks Festival) which featured lots of market stalls, live bands, international foods, rides etc. etc. So we spent the day on Saturday supporting that and then on Sunday it was Caleb’s school fete.
The weekend just gone, Kristy and I went to a Tirty-Tree and a Tird (aka thirty-three and a third) Irish-themed birthday party for one of Kristy’s old school friends. We donned our green gear and Guinness’ and partied like a Leprechaun who just discovered how to turn potatoes into gold. Highlight of the evening was an incredibly drunk, but amazingly entertaining engineer who helped get us into the mind-set of processed meat/chicken… before being processed. Not so-much the gruesome parts, but more-so the potential confusion and how that confusion would be communicated to the other animals (who were affectionately given Aussie slang nicknames). Spose you had to be there.
Then, slot-in the odd BBQ here and there and that sums-up the last few weekends… in between the weekends, I’ve also been doing a bit of work-related socialising / networking. Recently there was an event on the topic of Twitter, and since I like to consider myself a social media aficionado (actually, I’m not really, but I do like using the word aficionado), I was quite comfortable with the subject-matter making it a really enjoyable networking experience. They also had a projection screen behind the speakers with a live Twitter feed monitoring all the tweets pertaining to the event (which provided the perfect opportunity for me to make a few humorous, yet relevant one-liners about things being discussed… and got a few chuckles from the audience in the process).
Yesterday afternoon I caught-up with my good mate Gerard who’s back in town for a few weeks and as a means of promoting his new business venture (and also just to meet some of the local talent) we organised a SEO meetup. I’ve arranged and been to a handful of these in the past and they’ve never been huge, but always entertaining. This one was no different and I think all the guys enjoyed it.. well, all but one lady that had no idea about SEO and was trying to peddle some self-help multi-level online money making marketing product that she couldn’t share too much info about.
Strangely enough, she seemed horrified when we mentioned that SEO does have a technical aspect to it and it requires knowledge/time/effort/money etc. etc. I think she was hoping we’d tell her if you simply do XYZ you’ll rank #1… sorry love, it just doesn’t work like that 
Tomorrow night there’s a Brisbane Twitter User Brigade (BTUB) pub crawl that I’m planning on going along to as well. Yea, I know… this along with the last few events sounds pretty geeky, but hey – it’s all about getting out there, meeting new people and doing something a bit different. If that means using a social networking tool such as Twitter as an icebreaker, then so-be-it. Besides, some geeks DO know how to party… ok, ok, yea maybe we don’t… but any group of people become a lot more interesting when copious amounts of alcohol are involved.
Read More