You can guess what he’s famous for…

Well, where do I start. I went to Parachute and had an awesome time. Let’s start with the weather. All sun and very hot, perfect for lazing around during the day. I took my digital camera, but was too busy having fun to take any photos of the goings on… I did take a few photos, a couple of which you will see. I think I’m going to have to go with telling chronologically so I don’t miss stuff out, so hopefully it won’t be too boring.

Friday morning I left home at 7:30 with Dad (he had work), Tony and David. Around 9am we went round to my old school because Tony had to check some problems with his subjects (which turned out to be a printing error). The receptionist remembered my name which was cool. The subject checking was at the careers centre, so I thought I would check out the UOC display. The thing that stood out most was the amount of info on Speech and Language Therapy, considering it is an all boys school and there are very few guys (if any in some years) who actually do it, and the ones that do generally drop out.

Then I got dropped off at Parachute and waited for the gates to open and then the long walk down the hill. While we were waiting for the gates I recognised a few people from Christchurch - Breo and Jess and a couple of others, who I had never really met before. I ended up setting my tent up in a circle with theirs.

I caught up with Eoin and we decided to sleep in the same tent so he didn’t have to set his up. Then we went and by a very circuitous route met up with Megan - She couldn’t be bothered meeting us at our tent and then we went to the H2Go mist tent in the village and stood in the mist for a while and then went and sat down somewhere else just before she got there and finally found her at her tent.

After that Merodie finally started replying to her txts and we ended up shifting my tent all the way throught the village to where they were camped (one person on each corner and someone else carrying the chilly bin.)

I forgot to mention before that on the way to parachute I bought some jandals at the Warehouse. I put them on after I set up my tent, walked to the village to get ice and back and the strap on the left one broke, so I was walking gammy for the rest of the weekend.

Friday night I saw Mumsdollar, Wash, Detour 180 and Grits (basically just hanging out at the mainstage). Then hung out in the cafe for ages eating mini donuts, and eventually went to bed. Just before 6:30 I was rudely awoken by banging and crashing and reversing beepers. Check out this picture I eventually got up and took out the door of my tent:

This went on for about an hour, which was followed by discussions at breakfast about how we were going to get up and tell them to go away if it happened again the following morning - The truck ended up coming at 8 the next morning, so we thought they had been informed to come later, but the following morning it was there at 6 :{

Saturday morning we went to the morning meeting where the president of World Vision in the US was talking about “The 7 Steps to Poverty”, which was trying to help us imagine what it is like to be truly poor, by taking things away step by step (To give you an idea, the first was all your clothes but the ones you were wearing) Others (in no particular order) were water, food, electricity, healthcare, house and the final and most important one was hope. Then we went and met Jo and Helen at the gate - great to see them again, and helped set up a tent for them and then went to a seminar about HIV/AIDS in Africa by the same guy who did the morning talk, except he was followed by an African lady with AIDS telling her story.

Then we had lunch and went to some Ceroc dancing lessons, followed by about 9 of us going to my family’s place for a swim, which was fantastic. Unfortunately Jamie left his cellphone and wallet on the roof of his car when we left and lost his cellphone. (He heard the wallet fall off about 1km down the road). Then Spaghetti Bolognaise for tea (I took a few random photos of my fellow campers at this point - not very good ones, but here are a couple)

Then back to the mainstage for The Lads (I think we made it in time for them - I’m referring to my program),Rapture Ruckus, Day of Fire, Audio Adrenaline and Brooke Fraser, followed by the cafe again for more donuts and then sleep.

Well, it appears to be bedtime, so tune in again tomorrow for the rest of my parachute roundup. I enjoyed Grits the most on Friday and Saturday would be a toss-up between Rapture Ruckus and Brooke Fraser, with a few good songs by Audio Adrenaline. Brooke Fraser is really funny on stage with some really random comments between songs. (While saying something deep about worrying about death) “Don’t worry, you won’t die just yet, unless you drink and drive, which is stupid”. Probably the main down for Audio Adrenaline was that they have been playing/touring for 15 years and the lead singers voice is pretty much shot.

Carrying on where I left off. The speaker on Sunday morning was Wayne Alcorn from Brisbane City church, who was speaking about knowing who we are and who Jesus is and what place he takes in our life.

Then we went to a political forum hosted by the Maxim institute featuring politicians from most major parties (Notably Bill English and Nandor Tanczos) The first half of it was between most of the major parties (Labour, National, Greens, Act and NZfirst) on a number of issues like The Civil Unions Bill, Education (Discussing government’s decision to turn down UN doha declaration (google it) section on education about parents having the right to choose how their children are educated - focusing on funding for integrated schools) and 1 or 2 other issues. I thought the most interesting thing said in the whole debate was Nandor mentioning that the issues being discussed were issues important to the maxim institute, which is quite right wing and conservative and that that wasn’t the way Jesus was. (Food for thought, which I did agree with to an extent)

The second half was with 4 “emerging parties” (United Future, Christian Heritage Party, Destiny NZ and the Maori party.) All except United Future did a good job of losing my vote (not that they had it in the first place). That common sense thing is still good for the worm (You may have to be a kiwi to get that reference). The Maori party guy was just a clown (trying to be funny and really had nothing to say), and the other 2 were too anti the current government. While I have to agree that some of the policies implemented by the current government are not exactly what one would call Christian policies, they have been doing pretty well in most other areas. Most of the policies in question have come down to a conscience vote anyway. Destiny NZ appear to be campaigning quite strongly to decrease the seperation between church and state, which is not something I agree with.

Anyway, enough politics (might start some discussion)… Next was lunch and a relaxing afternoon of not doing a whole lot that I can remember.

5pm we went to the Parachute band live recording for a couple of hours and then had tea. I went to the hip hop showcase at the Palladium at about 8:20 and saw EPR and Rapture Ruckus again, who had some B-boys and B-girls up on stage doing some impressive breakdancing. Then went from there to the mainstage and caught most of Jeff Deyo. Next up was Third Day - one of my favourite bands. One notable happening was someone on stage yelling “Are you ready to… (can’t remember)” and a random girl behind me saying “Ready like a fox” - kind of made my day. Most of you probably won’t get that, but it is a bit of a running joke at work. (Everything is like a fox and all the way to the bank). Following Third Day was Shawn Mcdonald, who I hadn’t heard before and also really liked - I ended up buying his CD.

Then more hanging out in the village, donuts and chips and trying to eat biscuits off our foreheads - which I think I have mastered.

Monday Christine Caine spoke, then we packed, shopped and saw a bit more of Grits. Then we went back to my place for another swim and then Tony dropped me off at the airport and I flew back to Christchurch.

The first leg (Hamiltron to Wellington) most of the people were from Parachute (including one of the guys from Rapture Ruckus, although the plane was only about half full. I kind of missed takeoff - fell asleep right after the safety demonstration and woke up in the air. (This was after drinking a 600ml coke at the airport.) The lady next to me said she was quite impressed and was wondering if she should have woken me up in case I was embarassed about snoring in public. The second leg I had a row of 3 seats to myself and fell asleep while we still had to have the seat backss in the upright position and woke up in time to recline it, stretch out across the seats and be told that I had to put it back up again because we were about to land.

Emily picked me up and then we talked lots about our respective weekends. Then bed because I was tired, which was why there was no update Monday night.

I’ll skip a day now and jump to the present, where I am posting this using our freshly connected bitstream internet connection. Sweet sweet broadband.

That’s all for this post.

Spent most of the evening watching TV while downloading Gentoo updates. Caught the second half of Joey, Scrubs and Lost. Lost looks like it could be a good one… Although, this comic “accurately” describes the lack of information and suspense building etc. I’m lost

Cooked tea, another random concoction. I liken my cooking to Jazz - creativity through improvisation. Big dramas about plans for the weekend, more info later (wrong people might read it). Currently listening to lifefm via internet radio, which is pretty cool. Steam is all updated (except for halflife source) and I think I killed my X in linux upgrading everything (Xorg instead of Xfree). I will get around to fixing it eventually… Probably Saturday night or Sunday. Garage sale is going to be delayed a week. May even start posting stuff on trademe.

Well, the secret weekend planning can now be revealed as mission has been accomplished. After work yesterday Merodie, Emily and Me drove up to Nelson for Mike’s (our other flatmate) 21st, arriving at about 9:30pm. The party finished at about 12, and then a bunch of us sat in the spa at his place till about 3 in the morning. I’m not sure if I should discuss the Truth/Dare games played… Suffice to say that sometimes it’s much easier to say truth, especially when the dare involves moving an unwilling goat a long distance. Then we stayed the night at Emily’s family’s place. I got up at about 10:15, and just after 11 we headed back towards Christchurch, as Merodie had another 21st to go to at 5pm. Picked up a hitchhiker on the way too.

The drama mentioned in the previous post had to do with the fact that we thought it was on Saturday until Thursday night… All came together in the end though, and there’s still a whole day of weekend to go!

Just noticed that the Gmail invite mechanism has changed again, and along with the change I have been given 50 invites. p.s. If I don’t know you, you may have to convince me you’re not a dirty spammer Not sure about the best way to do this, as commenting won’t give me your email address, unless you post it, in which case it will become vulnerable to spam. Probably the best way is to post your email address, I will send you the invite and then delete the comment. (Of course none of this is really going to happen, because surely everybody who wants gmail has it by now).

Quick post and then to bed. Lazy but productive day today. I was very sleepy, but managed to pull down the ivy on the fence that our neighbour didn’t like, do 3 loads of washing, clean the toilet, do the dishes and install Ubuntu linux on my computer. I decided the X problems weren’t worth the hassle, so went through a completely trouble free installation. No more compiling! Then went round to the new castle undies flat for tea and The Brewerton/Moffatt team managed to beat the Cotter/Paulussen team twice in a row at Pictionary, with both games coming down to the last square. Last night I also discovered the world of online gaming, claiming 3 kills in MOHAA before I was shot myself (beginner’s luck I’m sure).

I possibly should change the title of my last post to MOHAA time… I accidently clicked on MOHAA after posting and it kept going for an hour. For the non-gamers among you who are wondering what this “MOHAA” is, click here.

Also, I’ve noticed that sometimes, even though stuff happens, my posts are dead boring, because I just list the events - This is usually worse when I’m posting tired. I will endeavour to make things more interesting.

At work today we were talking about different kinds of faith and Simeon posted a quote talking about 2 types of faith. The first was faith based on “proof” or facts - deciding to believe in something because of the evidence you can see and being willing to change your beliefs on the introduction and acceptance of new evidence. The second was faith based on emotional feelings, which is afraid of anything which might contradict it and unwilling to accept that others may believe differently. (I will possibly update this when I have the quote in front of me again - there was more to it.

Anyway, I mentioned that I thought there was a third type, based on experience. i.e. experiencing God directly or through answers to prayer or miracles etc. Much of the faith of the people in the bible is based on this. Some examples would be the plagues of Egypt, Elijah’s faceoff with the Baal prophets, Everyone seeing Jesus’ Miracles, Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus. (just a small sample)

I think that experience is a very powerful thing, and is something it is very difficult to argue with or take away from somebody. That being said, it is possible to look at the world in different ways depending on what you believe. I thought I would share a story from my life. Some of you may write it off as a series of coincidences, but to me it was very real example of God at work.

We are going to head back to the year 2002 to March the 20th in fact, so almost 3 years ago. (I know this because I just looked it up). I was at the time (and still am) involved with the navs group at uni (link on sidebar) and we were looking (quite aptly for this post) at a study on faith - available off the navs website in both word and pdf formats. In our small group we were discussing ways of seeing God at work in our everyday lives, so I guess I was suitably primed to be looking for stuff. Ok, preamble over, on to the story.

At that time I used to ride around on a bike with rather dodgy brakes. I had replaced the brake cables a couple of months earlier, but the breaks had gone out of adjustment again and only the front ones kind of worked properly. Anyway, I was biking along and had to hit the brakes reasonably suddenly for some reason and the front brake cable snapped. As we were busy looking for God in our everyday life, I thought to myself - where is God in this - brand new brake cable, snaps, not really very safe etc. Anyway, I walked my bike off the road and walked into the bike shop that just happened to be right there next to the intersection (church corner cycles) and bought myself a new brake cable. Then I headed home and installed it and thought I might as well adjust the back brakes at the same time, so I got all my brakes adjusted perfectly - instant stoppage, and thought no more about God being involved.
The next day, I was biking along again, going reasonably quickly because I was late for uni, and a car turned across into a driveway right in front of me. I slammed on the brakes, slid a few metres and stopped just short of plowing into the car. If my brakes hadn’t have been fixed, I would have plowed straight into the side of the car, or possibly have even been hit by the car as it turned. It was very clear to me at that point that God had been involved when my brake cable snapped right outside the bike shop the previous day… It felt like God was showing me that he was involved, and also teaching me a lesson that the things that go wrong today may well have a future purpose.

To sum up, was I looking for God - yes, did I see him at work - yes, if I hadn’t have been looking for him would I have noticed - probably not. Was it all just a coincidence? I don’t believe it was, but I can see how others would interpret it that way. Some people are possibly overly eager to believe everything they see, but I think others are overly skeptical to the point of missing what is there.

I’ll leave you with this quote by Aldous Huxley:
“I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. The supporters of this system claimed that it embodied the meaning - the Christian meaning, they insisted - of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and justifying ourselves in our erotic revolt: we would deny that the world had any meaning whatever.”
Aldous Huxley, “Ends and Means” (1937).

N.B. It took me a while to find (hopefully) the actual quote, as it is misquoted around the place. See this link for further discussion.

****edit****
Here is Simeon’s original quote (from somewhere else) - obviously I munted it with my “paraphrase”
In regards to books being ‘dangerous’…
It seems to me that there might be a couple different types of believers. One group might have faith because they are logical, they believe they have proof for their belief and they can accept or discard any new ideas based on their continually expanding knowledge of the world around them.
Another type might have more of an emotional-based belief; they have strong faith for faith’s sake and it feels right for them. They don’t know - and don’t care to know- all of the ins and outs of why this particular set of beliefs has landed on their doorstep. People they trust tell them that this is the truth, and they accept it.
It is this second group that might be affected by information (lies or not) that contradicts what they believe. The first group is in no danger; they might even learn more about what other groups of people are declaring and by invalidating those ideas logically, their own belief becomes even more well-rounded.
Unfortunately it seems to me that there are only a couple of solutions in terms of protecting that second group.
The first is to shut off sources of information unapproved by some trusted authority. This to me smacks of fascism and I think most learned and civilized people would recognize this.
The second is to recognize what drives your own faith, and if you don’t want to research the history and details of the sources of that faith, then accept that it then must be your responsibility to censor your own exposure to ideas and literature which contain new ideas or opposing viewpoints.

Not much to post about last night. I did however make the biggest single purchase I’d ever made. I now have the plane tickets for my trip to Europe. Merodie has finally started shifting her stuff in. Had a meeting about mentoring and then just after 10:30 I started playing MOHAA as pre-arranged with Mark and went to bed just before 12. Somewhat gratifyingly, I shot Mark (AKA [Dregg] Shojun) 3 times before he shot me. It was fairly even from that point though. I even managed to avoid some of the grenades he always drops on himself.

I thought I’d set up my other computer as a websurfing/instant messaging/word processing machine to reduce possible demand for my main computer in the flat. I am almost there after a relatively painless journey. The only pain was caused by the onboard network card not working and not being able to find any spares lying around. Luckily Mark has heaps and a quick trip to his place rectified the situation. While there, I also met his flatmates Adam and Nick (who I had met before and does not look like David) and lost a game of chess to Mark.

I now have the machine up and running the Debian sarge linux distro, with firefox, gaim and openoffice.org on icewm. - It’s a PII 400 with 128Mb of Ram, so I’m trying to keep the strain to a minimum. All that remains is to configure icewm to my satisfaction with relevant programs on the taskbar etc. I’m currently writing this post on it, so I can’t be doing too badly Firefox is however taking up 25% of the memory… (and the rest)

Also watched the next (taped) episode of lost, avoiding the “Next week on lost” section at the end. Interesting developments, although I couldn’t believe Jack didn’t want to know what Kate did and that the dumb guy didn’t shoot the dying guy in the head. Also “Dude” is going to be an excellent quote (really can’t reproduce the pronunciation in text form).

Saturday morning we had our garage sale, which was a moderate success, with a reasonable amount of stuff being sold. The lounge suite didn’t sell, so I put it by the side of the road with a free sign on it and soon after helped someone carry the couch to an old mans house around the corner and the chairs disappeared all by themselves a short time later. Friday night was mainly spent getting stuff ready for the garage sale. Merodie also moved in on Friday, so now we’re up to 3 with one to go.

Saturday evening I went to Northlands pizza hut for tea, where my youth group was farewelling me as a leader. Much pizza was eaten. I may yet be convinced to come back for Easter Camp.

After that I headed out to Kaiapoi for our first Navs camp of the year and was out there all day today as well. The camp goes until Tuesday, so I will be heading out there tomorrow night after work too.

This is carrying on a bit from my previous experience/emotions/proof post and also about today at the navs camp. This morning Logan was speaking. Logan is a guy with a lot of life experience (somewhat older than us) from Auckland. The first thing he said really got my attention because it captured perfectly the way I’ve been thinking recently and really dragged in my focus for the camp (I was a little zoned out before he started)

He was talking about sitting in his office looking out toward little Barrier and thinking about his life. He has staked his life on an ancient book and the stories of like-minded people that have influenced his life and who’s life he has influenced with his own stories. So he has spent his life trying to live for God and advance his kingdom. Sometimes he looks at his friends who have strived for different things and have gone down different paths, and he wonders if he has wasted his life and if the whole thing is true (the big question). Then, the same way that I feel, he looks back at his life and sees how God has been at work in his life, and he know’s that God is real.

That for me is what faith is all about. Staking your life on God, putting all your trust in him and living as if advancing his purposes is the most important thing in my life. I don’t think I’m completely there yet, or that I will ever be completely there, but that is what I want to give my life to and to strive towards. To become more like Jesus, the perfect example and guide we have been given of how God’s love is supposed to be worked out in the world. Living in the knowledge that nothing can seperate me from God’s love. (Romans 8:37-39)

There’s a song by Third day called “Creed” which I really like, especially one line. A creed is a “A formal statement of religious belief; a confession of faith.” I grew up in the Catholic church, where we would say the creed every Sunday. One version was the apostles creed
, which is what the song is based on - lyrics. The one line that really sticks out to me from the song is the first line of the chorus: “And I believe what I believe in is what makes me what I am.”

The reason it stuck out the first time that I heard the song was that it isn’t in the creed that we said every Sunday at church when I was growing up, but it is really the crux of the whole thing. If what you believe doesn’t translate into who you are and the way you live your life, do you really believe it? I’m still trying to work out exactly what giving my life to living out what I believe looks like practically, but I know it’s what I want to strive towards.

Last night I went back out to the navs camp again after work. Glen was speaking about “Everyday faith transforming every day life” which is kind of the nav motto. Beyond the slogan, he was talking about what living out our faith practically in the world looks like - quite a good follow on from the previous talk really. It’s kind of hard to summarize a fairly chunky talk down to a few lines in a blog, but basically what it comes down to is that it’s all about love.
A follower of Jesus should stand out because of the way they love the people around them. Not just the people they know and like, but everybody they encounter. He used the examples of the good samaritan and also John 13. John 13 is where Jesus is having his last meal with his closest friends, and the message of how we are supposed to love comes through very strongly. Firstly, Jesus knows that one of his friends is going to betray him and one of the others is going to deny that he even knows him. Knowing all this, he proceeds to demonstrate his love for all his friends by washing their feet, a job that even the Jewish slaves didn’t have to do. (The job was left to the gentile slaves.)

Then he said to them “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

So, to summarize, being a Christian is not about praying lots, or memorizing bible verses, or going to church on Sunday, it is about loving everybody we encounter, not walking past someone in need etc.

Glen then went on to talk about how easy it is to lose focus on that goal with all the advertising we have fired at us about what is important and our own selfish nature. For example in the US, in whatever year his statistics came from, about $2000 is spent per person per year on advertising.

Anyway, I’ve rambled long enough. Hopefully there is something useful or interesting in there somewhere.

Quite busy at work at the moment, we have a project that needs lots of work done by tomorrow morning. Last night I was at work till 6:30, then went home and took most of the evening off, with a bit of tea, groceries, scrubs and Lost action. Then I popped back into work for about half an hour to change over some tests, came home and went to bed.

Lost is shaping up. I’m sure I was dreaming about it last night, coming up with lots of crazy theories about what’s going to happen next. I’m wondering if Lock actually did used to be in the army. Very impressed by his killing of a boar after being paralyzed for four years. And what’s with the guy in the black suit… If you know, you aren’t allowed to say anything. We’re only up to episode 3 here. Also wondering if Lock did actually see the monster and if they will find the other half of the plane. So many mysteries. I think the backstories are very well done. Like when they reshowed the footage of Lock, it suddenly all had so much more meaning.

Anyway, break while tests are running is at an end.

So much for daily update goodness. Was very busy at work Wednesday and Thursday with a couple of trips back in the evenings, but it all paid off with the testing I had to do being all finished by Friday morning, when it was supposed to be. Friday afternoon I went shopping for presents and came back with a couple of shirts for myself and no presents…

Anyway, Saturday night was Merodie’s 21st party up at the sign of the Kiwi, which was a fantastic time of food, speeches, video, and dancing. Jo came down from Whangarei for the occasion - We picked her up at 8:10 on Saturday morning and dropped her off at the airport again at 6am Sunday morning. So I was in bed by 6:30… Got up again about 11. I spent Saturday cleaning all our junk out of Mike’s room, shopping for presents (slightly more successfully) and helping sort out the sound gear for the party (my stereo). Also helped Mike shift his stuff when he arrived at 4pm.

For lunch today, we tried out Merodie’s new waffle maker. Mike and me prepared the mixture and did the cooking. Unbeknownst to the girls, we polished off about half a dozen waffles before we told them that we had started cooking them (For taste testing purposes of course). They were quite surprised that we were full before they were.

This afternoon, I walked back into the flat to find everyone else covered in mud. When I tried to photograph Mike, he strongly resisted/ran and hid, and then said I could take a photo if I had mud on my face too. Meh… I got my photo. I may be falling off the bed.

***addition***
I just realised that I completely forgot to mention the fantastic bbq/flatwarming I went to on Friday night at “The Castle” - Thanks Adam and co.

Although you may think from the title that I am planning a fantastic day of gaming (unless you just don’t understand what I’m talking about at all), that is not actually the case. I just finished running the adsl and network cables tidily around the house and we now have a local area network (LAN). To those of you wondering (at work) , my AR410 is currently operating as a layer 2 switch of all things, with the ADSL router plugged into one of the VLAN ports. I probably will move it to the eth port eventually, but the hour is late and I just wanted to get all the computers connected to the net as fast as possible.

Other than that, we had a seemingly endless stream of visitors popping in throughout the evening (feel free to visit any time if you know us) and had our first flat meeting to work out everything for the year such as cooking, cleaning, money etc. A large portion of it was sorted out during the ad breaks in game of two halves.

I also saw the dreaded words “Cool Web Search” come up in ad-aware on Mike’s computer, but I think it may be one of the easy to kill variants. Will have another look tomorrow.

Time for bed…

When I got home last night after work, I suddenly just got really tired to the point where I was thinking about not going to the first navs night for the year, but in the end I decided I would and we had an awesome time. Lots of new people, catching up and there was dessert too.

We also discussed the need for a name for our flat and have settled (if it sticks) with “Grand Central”. Partially due to the grandness of it - no that wasn’t it… because of it’s central location to everything (shops, uni, work etc) and it’s similarity to a train station - lots of visitors streaming through regularly. Other possibilities we discussed were anagrams of the first letters of our names (pickings so slim as to be non-existent (melm)) or anagrams of art deco - coderat, race dot, were some I thought of, but there are a few more…

The other thing of note that happened last night was that I said “like a fox” about something to Hannah at navs, and she replied with “All the way to the bank”. Muahahahaha - it’s spreading. I think she read it in my blog

Had a car rally with navs tonight. Not the one where you drive really fast down gravel roads though. The idea was to drive around in cars and take random photos in various locations around Christchurch. The idea of it was to show people new to Christchurch a little bit of the town. I will post some photos once they get emailed to me if there are good photos. The photos aren’t on my camera, so I can’t post them straight away.

Incidentally, you can now send me email at likeafoxatpoboxdotcom, although all the addresses you know already will still work, apart from luuk.paulussen@paradise.net.nz which is now gone and will bounce. Why? Because I can.

You know you’re a gaming geek when you see the Ubisoft logo on the back of someone’s t-shirt and you chase them to find out what game it’s for… (Happened at work, wasn’t a complete stranger)

Installed Skype this evening. Haven’t talked to anyone except Mrs Echo Test Service though… Kind of an unfortunate name. This is a photo of me all set up to talk to people. Note the second headset. - You need that 5.1 surround sound when you’re talking on the phone…

I think I may have to change my posting regime to a weekday thing, because it never seems to happen in the weekends. That being said, if I decide not to post in the weekend, it might not happen more often, so I’ll stay with the daily plan without feeling bad if I don’t post for a couple of days in the weekend.

The only downside about that is that I have to think back to what I did. Friday night was fairly quiet. Saturday was a great relaxing day which included some room tidying, driving around finding materials for Mike’s shelves, Hassling Mark for having an ICQ status of “occupied” on a Saturday (he was at work), watching the cricket on TV for many hours with Luke and Adam and eating waffles. Then in the evening we went to the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, aka Rich Bramley’s 21st, which was a great night with many interesting theme outfits - I’ll post photos if I get any. Also some interesting, if somewhat embellished stories and lots of food.

Sunday I went to church, came back and made some actual progress on tidying my room, so I may actually get around to posting photos of it some time - not quite tidy yet. Then watched Crocodile Dundee II with Mike, followed by picking up Merodie from the airport and my first “early” night for ages.