stuart test blog

I’m back from my trip to London and Amsterdam. I had planned to blog more while on holiday but I actually enjoyed the break from the computers too much. The holiday was awesome and it was great to see my Mum, Gran and brother, as well as all the friends still living it large in London!

I’ve uploaded most of the photos from the trip to Flickr but I’ve still got some more to go and not all of them have been named properly yet. You can check out my London and Amsterdam sets here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/amanzi/sets/

I met up with Chris today for lunch down at Canary Wharf. I had my first Pret a Manger sandwhich since getting here and loved it!

I then headed to the Tate Modern gallery which I hadn’t been to before. This is an amazing gallery with some famous paintings along with some odd sculptures. The highlight for me was Christian Marclay’s Video Quartet (2002) – a 13-minute, four-channel video / music collage comprised of nearly 600 found film clips, projected onto a 40-foot-long screen.

The rest of the day was spent walking around the sights of London and taking lots of tourist photos. You can see them all on my Flickr site here.

Sydney Airport – Wagamamas

Originally uploaded by amanzi.

I’m doing the wireless thing from Sydney airport at the moment. Had a great flight from Wellington – got to see Mt Ruapehu as we were still climbing out of Wellies.

Also had some of the best service I’ve had from a Qantas flight, even watched a great film “Match Point” on my own personal DVD player.

One of the things I’m looking forward to in London is Wagamamas so it’s nice to see that Sydney already has one. The duty free airport is like a huge shopping mall. I’ve bought an adapter so I can use my Etymotic Isolator earphones on the plane. They are great at blocking out the surrounding noise.

Next stop… Hong Kong.

I just found about this crazy game! Unfortunately I’ve already lost, and I expect to lose a whole bunch more!

News just in is that Microsoft have purchased Winternals and have made co-founder, Mark Russinovich a technical fellow. I hope that Microsoft aren’t planning on changing much at Winternals, or their community site, Sysinternals.

If you’ve worked on Windows networks, you’ve probably used one or more of the free utilitites provided bySysinternals, or you’ve come across Winternals’ flagship product, ERD Commander.

Read more here:

• Mark Russinovich’s blog
• Cnet coverage
• Technorati search

The second week of Rockstar: Supernova has just been on and I am LOVING it. The quality of talent seems so much better than last season and the band members are way more tougher!

Favourite so far has to be Dilana Robichaux, and not just because of her South African roots – she is by far the most talented of the bunch. She nailed Nirvana’s classic, Lithium, in her first performance, and then completely nailed an awesome rendition of the Johnny Cash song, Ring of Fire.

Downside is that the official website doesn’t support Firefox or Opera – none of the videos play! That’s pathetic.

I found this blog post on odork.com vi Seth Godin’s blog. It’s how to get beyond just boring small talk at parties. It’s a great read.

Breaking news just in…

Telecom have just announced that they will be voluntarily separating their retail and wholesale businesses. Telecom will be following the lead of BT in the UK and Telstra in Australia although they will still operate both businesses under the same Telecom brand.

Source: Computerworld

More thrilling football!! England beat Ecuador in not one of their best performances, but it still counts. David Beckham was the key – he scored another brilliant goal from a free-kick. Check out this link from the BBC site that displays a shockwave animation of the goal – you can change the camera angles and speed, very cool.

Also, Portugal are through after beating the Dutch in what has to be the dirtiest game in the World Cup so far. 16 yellow cards, 4 red cards, a Figo headbut, and several terrible challenges were the highlights (?) of this game. Portugal now meets England in the next round.

The time difference between NZ and Germany means that I’ve got a few early starts ahead of me for the week ahead. The first games in the knockout round were played this morning so that meant that I was up at 3am to watch Germany beat Sweden 2 – 0, and then watched the cracker of a match that was Argentina versus Mexico. The scores were level after 90 minutes meaning that it was the first game to head into extra time in this World Cup. It only took 8 minutes of extra time for Maxi Rodriguez to score one of the best goals of the tournament – equal (in my opinion) with Joe Cole’s beauty for England. Argentina then managed to hold on for a 2 – 1 victory. That means Argentia will play the hosts, Germany in what will probably be the best out of the quart-finals.

Over the next few days, we’ve got some great games lined up: England v Ecuador, Netherlands v Portugal, Italy v Australia, Brazil v Ghana… That means I’ll be up at 3am for the next few mornings to watch the game. Quite handy though becuase I’ve got my MCSE upgrade exam on Wednesday so I get an extra four hours in the mornings to study!

My essential tools for following the World Cup are:

• The official FIFA World Cup site
• The BBC Sport World Cup site
• The Microsoft World Cup Tracker for Excel
• And this iCal for adding to your Gmail Calendar (or any other iCal compatible software) – this is really cool, the author updates the scores as the games are completed too!