So here’s a recap of my Christmas… I hope you are sitting down and have a nice cup of coffee handy cause this could take a while.

Ok, the intro to this post was a little unfair. In all honesty, I love each and every one of the families I’m involved with and it’s always good to catch-up with everyone. It just irks me that it all gets squished into a few days of back-to-back activities.

But before I get to that, the couple of weeks leading up to Christmas were really very exciting. We went to see Arj Barker perform at the Powerhouse. As expected, he was awesomely funny, but I didn’t expect that his warm-up act would be equally as funny. So, if you hear of a guy named Joel Osborne touring (and not the one who’s an internet marketer who’s obviously used his online marketing skills to outrank the comedian of the same name), go and see him cause he’s great too. After the show, we bought a couple of Arj’s DVDs which he personally autographed for us.

The following weekend (or maybe two… I’ve lost track now) we had the Kintek Christmas Party. For those of you who don’t know, my web hosting company works closely with a number of web development firms and one that we’ve done a lot of work with over the years (and in the process become close personal friends) is a mob called Kintek.

The party was held at one of our joint clients – a wine bar called Bar Barossa. The food was great, as was the wine and their selection of international beers. After a lot of great conversation (that I’m sure became progressively more entertaining as the night went-on) Kristy and I were honoured to accept an offer from another client of mine – Chester’s Boutique Hotel in the Valley.

I’ve done a lot of stuff with the owner and helped him get a number of his sites online and in return he said that if we were ever in the area and needed a place to stay, just let him know. So the week before the party, I asked if the offer was still available and he hooked us up.

The room was awesome – in fact, the whole place is spectacular. It was once the owners personal residence that he converted into a guest house and now it’s grown to be a fully licensed boutique hotel. It’s quaint with about a dozen rooms which gives it a very warm atmosphere, but at the same time is classier than most hotels I’ve stayed at. Despite our stay only being overnight and still being in the same city that we live, it felt like we were on holidays.

That was the build-up to Christmas… this is when it starts to get hectic.

On Christmas Eve we went to Church with my folks. This year Dad was in the choir and Mum tried to encourage my brother and I to join him. We both politely declined, but Dad did a great job with the singing and I must admit, I do enjoy the Christmas Church service.

Then we grabbed some Macca’s, went home cracked a beer and opened our presents. It was pretty cool – this year I got some Skeleton Keys, Ice Invaders, some new board-shorts, Prototype for the PS3, a cooling base-station thingie for the PS3 and a computer screw-driver set in a novelty grenade casing.

We had a few more drinks, watched some Christmas stuff on TV and went to bed.

Got up early the next morning and headed over to Kristy’s Mum’s place for breakfast. Had some food, chatted, exchanged presents then it was back home to quickly make a salad and grab some wine and then head down to the Gold Coast for lunch with my family (this year it was at my sister’s new place).

Lunch was good and my family are always a very entertaining group of people to be around. Dad jokes, Tom’s new dreadlocks and the Woodford Folk Festival. After eating a little too much and the kids opened their pressies, we headed back home again. More beer.

Next day we went over to Kristy’s Auntie Sue’s place for lunch and then afterwards we caught a bus into town for Kristy’s old school friend – Bexta’s birthday which she was having at The Exchange. They had a deal where you could buy two cocktails for the price of one up until 9pm, so we built a decent stock-pile of mojito’s. Bexta had a great turn-out of people and as it so happens (and I’d like to throw-in a joke how Ipswich being a reasonably small town, it can be a little incestuous… but given Ippy’s reputation, that comment most certainly would be taken the wrong way) I went to primary-school with some of Kristy’s old friends – so it was great catching-up with everyone. Kristy has some great old school mates. Caught a maxi-taxi home with a bunch of them and ended-up drinking some more at Andrea’s place and somewhere during that time I passed-out on her couch.

Kristy woke me at about 5:30ish and we caught a cab home. Had a few hours sleep and then it was off to Kristy’s other good friends (these ones from Dancing) – Trish and Dave’s. Had lunch with them and they gave me a great little book called Twitterature – basically classic literature, as it would possibly be told today using Twitter.

Before I go too much further, I just want to point-out that this simple gift really took me by surprise because (and this may only apply to me… I’m really not sure) but generally when you receive a gift from a friend of your partners, it is most often generic. Something that they think you might like, but often turns-out wrong – like buying a bottle of bourbon for someone that drinks scotch. There’s always good intentions, but they often fail to hit the mark. For this reason, I’m always thankful and grateful for the thought, but expect that I’ll never be able to use the gifts I receive in such instances. But in this case, it was perfect.

So back to lunch – which was good (although I wished I wasn’t quite so hung-over because I’m sure the afternoon would have been more enjoyable if that were the case). I then headed back to the shopping centre bus terminal near Auntie Sue’s where we left my car the day before to go into town for Bexta’s drinkies.

Grabbed the car and then headed straight over to Caleb’s grandparent’s place for dinner. Fortunately, by this stage, I was feeling less hung-over enough to make it through the evening.

Next day it was over to Kristy’s Dad’s for a BBQ. After we ate and the kids exchanged presents, I found a nice comfy spot on the couch and fell asleep. Kristy was out the back chatting with her Dad and the kids were well engrossed with the PlayStation and their new toys, so no one really noticed and it was great to actually have a break for an hour or so.

Went home, drank some more, played some Prototype and then went to bed. Next day was our first day off since Christmas Eve. Enjoyed it by doing absolutely nothing. I think I spent most of the day sleeping in our newly air-conditioned bedroom.

The following day Con came round and we caught-up before Kristy and I had to head over to my brother’s place for dinner. I say this every time we catch-up with my family – I don’t do it enough because we always have such a great time when we’re together, but I suppose the months between visits is part of the reason it’s always so good to catch-up again.

Then the following day was New Years. Kristy had some stabbing stomach pains and despite the fact I give her a hard time, she’s a pretty tough cookie, so when she said that she might need to go to the hospital, I knew it must have been pretty bad. After a short wait in the emergency ward (read: a couple of hours) and a few tests later, they determined that Kristy may have a tiny gallstone.

They couldn’t find it when the doc did the ultrasound, but based on the results from the blood-test and the symptoms, they were convinced that was the cause of the pain. It also made sense that the pain had subsided because it only hurts when the stones move and once settled, you can go for months or even years without them bothering you again. Just in case, he subscribed some pretty hard-core pain killers and suggested Kristy gets a proper stomach x-ray.

Despite feeling a lot better, Kristy wasn’t up to a big night, so Con came around and we spent the night catching-up, talking a lot of shit and drinking a lot. By the time mid-night rolled around, Con decided it was time for his proverbial drunken phone calls and for the first time ever it was fun to be on the sending end and not the receiving. Other highlights of the night included us trying to climb one of the trees in my backyard. Not sure why, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. Fortunately, we were too drunk to get anywhere (despite crafting a primitive pulley out of a rope that Caleb plays, and sometimes swings from the tree with).

So overall, was a quiet night with my closest and best friend filled with ample amounts of beer, moving onto lots of nice scotch, some PS3, failed tree climbing incidents and most likely a hefty phone bill. Which, in my books equates a pretty good way to see-in 2010.

Two days later it was back to work. While I wasn’t looking forward to working again, the backlog of Christmas / New Years work seemed like a quiet walk in the park when compared to the explosion of family and festivities over the previous week.

Since being back at work I’ve set a bunch of goals which include reading more, blogging more regularly (well, the blogging I meant when the goal was set related to work blogs, but if I’m work blogging more, I’ll inevitably blog more personally too) and generally doing more social media stuff.

To help the whole motivational process, I’ve decided to jump onboard with a photo blogging experiment called the 365 project where I have to take a photo every day for a year and upload it… so here goes…

So, that was my Christmas / New Years… how was yours?

It’s 9:15pm on a Monday night and I’m only just starting to feel human again after a huge weekend of drinking. Sometimes I make references to weekends where lots of drinking takes place, but this weekend the drinking began on Friday and didn’t stop until late Sunday night.

On Friday night we had our work Christmas party. This was pretty cool because prior to this Christmas I haven’t really had any staff (other than Glen, co-founder and business partner)… but this year, our team doubled in size and we now have two awesome employees – Brigit and Emily.

I was a little nervous when organising the gathering (which was just a small BBQ at the office) because we’ve all only worked together for a few months and despite the fact we all get along well during office hours, I wasn’t sure if there would be excessive awkward silences when trying to bring everyone (and their partners) together in a social situation.

Further to that, I discovered that there’s apparently some workplace legislation that states I have to demonstrate a certain duty of care when providing my staff with alcoholic beverages. How could I possibly do that AND be so drunk I can’t even remember my own name?

Fortunately, it all went really, really well – no one died of alcohol poisoning, there are no incriminating photos of me or any of my team floating around the internet (or at least not as a result of Friday night) and now we’re talking about the possibility of making this a semi-regular occurrence.

The next day I got-up early, helped Scotty get his broken washing machine on the back of his ute so he could get it repaired and then later that afternoon I headed over to Cameron’s place for more drinking. We were supposed to catch-up a few weeks back but due to unforeseen circumstances, that didn’t happen… and as it turns-out, Cameron’s partner (Erika) is in the process of starting her own photography business and wanted to talk about getting a website etc. (so technically, the visit was somewhat work related).

Time seemed to disappear as quickly as the beer did and before we knew it, it was the next day… so after a few hours sleep on their couch, I headed back home for a couple of hours of decent sleep in my own bed before heading back out again – this time to meet-up with some very smart and always entertaining local SEO blokes for (you guessed it) more beer.

When that finished, I remembered that an old friend – Scott, who I hadn’t seen in years sent me a message via Facebook saying he was doing some work at one of the backpacker bars (who also co-incidentally happens to be a client of mine) and that I should drop by and say hi.

So I did.

I was only going to catch-up for a chat and then head-off, but when Scott and alcohol is involved, it’s never ever just a quiet one. He had a bar tab which turned into a late night of drinking with him, his little brother (who isn’t so little any more) and a few other guys he works with.

Was an awesome night and I forgot how much fun Scott can be – likewise I forgot what it was like to have 3 solid days / nights of back-to-back drinking… so all day today I felt like a guy in a wheelchair competing in a hurdles race.

The last few weekends have also been pretty busy (hence the lack of posts), but I’ll fill you in on that when my head stops hurting.

Two of these things just happen to be gaming (of the computer or console variety) and trivia… and over the last couple of months, I’ve done a bit of both of these things.

A few weeks back, my folks retirement lifestyle village held their annual trivia night, so Kristy and I joined my brother Brett, his wife Lyndal and my Mum and Dad for a night of tricky questions. Last year our team was a little bigger and we came in second place, although there was only one point separating us from the winners and we later discovered that one of the questions was marked incorrectly, so technically we should have won… but this year, we didn’t do quite so well and came-in third place.

I am not brilliant at common knowledge stuff… I tend to say and do a lot of stupid things… my interests are centred around fairly niche topics (like computers, anything geeky, movies, music and comics) and you’re probably thinking “music” or “movies” is fairly broad, although the songs and flicks I find that I know most about usually fall slightly outside the mainstream stuff. But this all tends to be the stuff that makes for good trivia questions.

I also find myself able to pull answers out of my arse on things that I really shouldn’t know anything about – say, books for example – as I never read (unless it’s a blog or something online) I shouldn’t know the first thing about authors or best sellers etc. but strangely I was giving names of Bronte sisters and answering questions as to which ones were responsible for writing some of their classics. How do I know this? F*cked if I know… but I do. And it’s because of that, that I quite like trivia nights.

More recently we’ve had a nightmare few weeks with random, intermittent server issues which only seemed to affect a handful of select sites and even when those sites were being affected, the server loads and specs showed no signs of any problems – yet the sites were running slower than my grandmother on a treadmill. It took a solid couple of weeks of re-installing and upgrading server-side components, libraries, tweaking configuration variables and we finally discovered that due to a PHP update there were a couple of bugs and any sites using certain functions could have issues.

So, inbetween the issues, when the server was operational, I’d try and escape from life and forget about all the dramas via my PS3.

I played through Batman Arkham Asylum (which was really really fun), Assassin’s Creed (because I hadn’t played it yet, but Assassin’s Creed 2 looks pretty good and I wanted to get up-to-speed) and Infamous (which I’m still playing… much to Kristy’s dismay as I’ve been playing it a lot).

I was previously quite disappointed by current gaming trends as I’d be able to get through most games in a few days – and that’s saying something as I’m not a brilliant gamer, but I was pleasantly surprised that most of these games kept me interested for at least a week or two. Batman took a bit longer than usual cause I kept searching for all the extra hidden riddles and trying to complete every little task… and Infamous will require two complete play-throughs (one as a good guy and one as a bad guy) which will take a while because as it is, I’m only half-way through the game as a goodie.

Other than that, the only other thing worth reporting is that Skye and Scotty have joined our local gym and they’ve been trying to get me to go again. I went last Monday and it killed me. I couldn’t feel my arms or legs for 24 – 48 hours directly after the workout and I think I should have been happy about this because the 3 days that followed were agonising as my poor little (and I do mean little) muscles repaired themselves. And now they want me to go again tonight. I’m not keen, but I probably should.

So if you don’t see another blog post for a few weeks it could be because I feel like my arms have been pulled out of their sockets by Arnold Schwarzenegger thanks to my local gym… or work may have gotten in the way… but I’m really hoping to get back on top of things over the next few days.

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.

So a few weeks ago we decided it was time to look for a new staff member. We put an ad online and literally within an hour we had received a bunch of resumes. After a few days and about 50+ responses later, we started culling the applicants – and let me tell you, there was quite a cross-section of skills…

One guy was from India, which was fine, however he was still living in India at the time of applying and offered to work ‘remotely’ for us… another person didn’t have a strong grasp on the English language and said in their list of ‘skills’ that they had ‘extraordinary talents’… yet another applicant said they were willing to service us in any way we desired if they were selected for the role. I’m hoping that last statement was my dirty mind interpreting their email in ways that the applicant didn’t really mean, and either way, it would have made for a more interesting working environment, but unfortunately they didn’t make the short-list.

Even though the role was aimed at someone with admin/accounts skills, given I run an IT company, one of the desired traits was (at the very least), some knowledge/understanding of technology… so yet another applicant that didn’t quite make the cut claimed they were highly proficient in “The Microsoft Product”. Given they started the sentence with “The” and didn’t mention products plural, I can only assume they think Microsoft only released one application (I only wish that was the truth sometimes).

I was honestly amazed at the number of applications / resumes / CV’s that came through with misspellings and/or obvious errors. For instance, one person claimed they worked for a firm between the years 1897 and 2001… now that’s an impressive employment streak

Sadly, even after culling a lot of applications and speaking with a few potential employees over the phone to arrange an interview, it’s still possible to get a completely incorrect impression of someone.

When one seemingly ok person turned-up for the interview, she looked like she had stepped straight out of a Tim Burton claymation film, had a nervous twitch and over-accentuated random words for no apparent reason. While there are heaps of articles, books, websites and information for job seekers on how to prepare for an interview, there’s very little information for us employers on what to do when you discover someone who looked good on paper makes the lesbian love-child of Bjork, Amy Winehouse and Susan Boyle look like the perfect picture of sanity… actually, come to think of it, if that love-child did exist, she’d had a brilliant musical career… although not the ideal person for an admin assistant… but I digress.

Luckily, after a few interviews, we finally found someone who seemed perfect (and given the poor quality of the other applicants) we decided to hire her on the spot. Although a little brash, it seemed to make sense at the time and we really didn’t want to go through any more painful interviews.

Until the next morning when a second perfect applicant contacted us.

So, after much deliberation, a few emails, phone calls and an interview, we’ve decided to possibly hire her as well.

Luckily, the second applicant wasn’t ready to start work straight away and will probably come on-board in 6 weeks (which will hopefully give us the time to create enough work to justify hiring her). Besides, both new staff members only want to do part-time hours, so it should all work-out fine.

The first applicant has now been with us for a couple of weeks and is fitting-in really well.

That’s enough boring work stuff, the next couple of posts will be about the stuff that’s happened on weekends and in-between all these crazy work changes.

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.

So it’s been a week of surprises – my weekend in the mountains (without mobile phone or internet coverage) was really good. My sister, Karen introduced us to a game where you take a random object and pretend it’s something else. For instance, you take a shoe, hold it up to your ear and everyone has to guess that you’re pretending it’s a phone. Although simple, the game actually gets rather interesting once all the obvious scenarios are done.

Karen explained to us that the game was introduced as a study to identify how lateral a child’s mind is and to some extent, gain an indication of their overall quick-wittedness and intelligence. Sort-of like a word association game, but instead with objects. All I can say is that my family (and myself included) are rather inventive, quite funny but I’m not so sure about intellectual

Then on Monday night I did my first-ever public speaking gig which also, surprisingly, went really really well. I’d go as far as to say that it went so well that I’d happily do it again. If you’re interested in reading some of the geeky SEO things discussed, you can check it out at my work blog.

Then in other news this-morning I hear that Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett are both dead… not related and their deaths don’t really have any impact at all on me personally – sure I liked some of Jacko’s music and think his title of ‘King of Pop’ is justified considering his career… although he also is the King of Crazy amongst other things, but I won’t go into that and I’ll avoid making any jokes [for now] as I think that anyone who passes deserves at least a little respect for them and their loved ones (yes, even the crazy ones).

So in honour of his death, here’s a homage to MJ via Darth Vader:

While we’re on the topic of music (how was that for a segway?) PlayStation have just launched a new, free, music video service VidZone which looks pretty cool. Now if you’re as geeky as I am, you’re probably thinking that since PS3 has a web browser and supports media servers, why would you need a dedicated music service when there’s YouTube and other streaming options via your PC? Well, I agree, it isn’t necessary, but from a quick play lastnight the quality seems good and it’s easy to use, so it ticks all the right boxes… and I imagine that it’s targeted to people who probably don’t use their PS3s to stream YouTube so with that in mind, it looks like a good little service.

Last thing related to music… the following clip was sent to me via a Twitter buddy and I have to say I really like the song and the filmclip is awesome:

Moving away from music and onto photos… This is photo bomb – a website devoted to the delicate art of inserting ones self (or finding someone or something distracting) into other’s seemingly legitimate photos. Or if you’ve got family snaps like those found on this next site, you don’t even need photobombing: Awkward Family Photos.

And finally, last photo-related thing, I stumbled across a project started by Ze Frank called Youngme / Nowme. The site is dedicated to replicating old photos, so you get a photo of you riding your first bike, or sitting on the potty or something typical of kids, and then you try and replicate that photo by wearing a similar outfit and get a snap of you trying to ride a kids bike… it sounds a bit silly, but I love the concept and some of the photos are pretty funny.

Do you like coffee and robots? I certainly do, so if you’re like me, then check-out this super terrific Japanese coffee making robot thing (I think that’s the correct term for it if my translation skills are accurate):

And last, but certainly not least – I like obscure comics / cartoons and years and years ago I was a big fan of the short-lived series The Maxx. Much to my delight, I just found you can watch full episodes of the show at MTV’s Maxx website.

That’s it from me peoples – have a good weekend if I don’t post anything beforehand!

Last weekend I spent a lot of time playing PS3 with Caleb and one of the demo’s we downloaded was for a game called inFamous and it was awesome. So I was quite pleased when one of my fav game reviewers gave it a thumbs-up (or at least what could be best described as a thumbs-up since this guy would struggle to say something nice about his own mother)… here’s his review:

We’ve also had the coldest day this year and it hit zero degrees at my place. There was ice on my windscreen this-morning when I left for work. ICE! Now I’ve seen ice before, I’ve seen snow… I’ve even been snowboarding (or more correctly I had a snowboard strapped to my feet as I rolled down a ever so slight hill in the ‘childrens practice slopes’ a few years ago in Switzerland)… but here and now I’m in Queensland – a place affectionately referred to as the sunny state of Australia. The place where it’s beautiful one day and perfect the next… and I had ICE on my windscreen. This certainly isn’t perfect, it’s not even good… ICE!

Even now as I look out the window it looks like a beautiful warm day, yet it’s not… sure the sun is out, but it’s not hot, it’s not even warm. My fingers are like little frozen sausages as I try and type. Normally I bitch about the heat and how hot, humid and sweaty it gets in summer time and I’ve said more than once how much I like the colder weather, but ICE… in June… in Queensland? C’mon people… where’s the global warming now? I should start burning tyres using an lighter and as many aerosol cans as I can strap together (and as a side-note kiddies, I’m not condoning the raping of our environment just because I’m cold and I’m certainly not suggesting that anyone tries to create a mega flame-thrower by strapping a dozen aerosol’s together… but if you do, can you please upload the results to YouTube as I’m sure it’d be funny and definitely put you in the runnings for the next Darwin Awards).

Anyways, despite being cold and bored and not wanting to do work, I don’t really have anyone to delegate my daily tasks to and if I don’t get them done, I’ll have twice as much to do on Monday, so I better get off my ice-cold butt-cheeks and do something productive.

I’ll leave you with this one final thing I read about a few days ago which sounded pretty cool: The MP3 Experiment.

It all started a few weeks ago with Scotty’s 25th which was a themed James Bond Casino Royale party.

There were Russian Spy’s, suits, tuxes, bow ties, cocktail dresses and one very large golden gun (no pun intended – Scotty’s best mate Tucker turned-up with a Hellboy sized golden toy gun). Was an awesome night with cocktails freely flowing, poker playing, guitar heroing and as the night was drawing to a close, we thought it might be fun to continue partying-on with some uni students who were having a gathering a few houses down the road. Unfortunately our stealth efforts and smooth talking failed miserably and mission ‘uni student party crash’ was aborted very quickly.

The following weekend I had a (very) belated 30th party. Wanting to bring-out the geek in everyone, I themed my party around Internet Phenomena, which basically translates to anything that has gained mass popularity via the Internet.

I wasn’t sure how it would go, but it turned-out a lot better than I could have ever imagined. We had friends turn-up dressed as myspace, the “net”, lol cats, ask a ninja (me), home star runner (Kristy), hotmail, twitter, google, red tube, there were demotivational and other internet-related T-shirts. I was honestly surprised we didn’t get a ‘trent from punchy‘ or a ‘star wars kid‘ and very thankful we didn’t get anyone thinking they were Beyonce.

As the night got-on and after drinking a lot of beer (including a rather potent Quadrupel beer from the Netherlands which was given to me as a gift from the Kintek crew) we thought it’d be fun to have a go at this:

Kristy’s MacGyver skills quickly turned some fence paling’s, a piece of elastic, some string and a bag of marshmallow’s into our own back-yard version of the gameshow above. And these were the results:

A few days after the party, I headed down to Sydney for the Annual Search Marketing Expo / Conference – SMX Sydney. As far as search marketing conferences go, this is one of (if not THE) best and attracts some of the most knowledgeable guest speakers from all around the world.

I won’t bore you with all the search geekiness (if you want that sort-of stuff, you should read my work blog) but the minute that the last speaker finishes, all search marketers (regardless of where in the world you’re from) share another common interest – DRINKING!

Needless to say, it was a very big three days of learning and business networking, followed by three very big nights of partying. If you’re a friend of mine on Facebook, you can see the photos from the event on there or follow the many Twitter references to SMX.

This coming weekend is Easter and other than catching-up with my family for a BBQ, it should be a quiet one and I’m really looking forward to doing nothing!

I’ve been getting back into business networking and blogging (all for work purposes) and half work, half social – I’ve had some beers with some other local search marketers. Also met one of the guys responsible for the Best Job In The World campaign run by Tourism QLD and met a few other people who have done some notable stuff in the search space… so I’ve found it really interesting, but that’s because I really like what I do.

On the topic of work blogging, I moved my search marketing blog to a slightly new location (previously it was http://blog.sitemost.com.au but now you can find it at http://www.sitemost.com.au/blog )… I’ve also started guest-blogging – a post of mine should be going live next week on Search Engine People, and I’m trying to get back into commenting (and doing the odd guest post) on SEOmoz.

So while a bunch of stuff has been happening, it’s all pretty boring unless you’re me…