Random Rants

Mount Mee

Matt & I just went for a drive/ride to Mount Mee State Forest. Great place to go to go for a drive and find some mud. Also not a bad place to test out the new air horns without driving the neighbours mad.

Click here to watch Dixie in the mud

Click here to watch Matt In The Mud

God I love that car.

Back in Aus

Well I am now back in Brisbane and working in the office again for PFE. Currently looking for a rental house and discovering that in the two years I have been out of the country that rental prices have gone up 50%. Yay!

Noodle Bus

Here is a video taken from the mine site in china of the lunch time bus come to pick everyone up from site and drive them to the mess hall. If you miss the bus it is a 1 hour walk to lunch so you want to make sure you get on the bus.

Noodle Bus

Golf Balls

Repost of the exploding golf balls video.

Click Here to Watch

or right click and save as this link to download video.

Robitch

Hey Rob! Happy 22nd Birthday! Sit back, relax, have a beer and enjoy your day with friends. See you next week! Lots of love Trin and Mike and Lilly xxx

Itay vs Australia

5 second replay of the Italy v Australia soccer game.

Italian Training Video

Here is the video of the Italian team training before their game against Australia. More true now then before.

Italian Soccer

The Stupid Game

I don’t care what you say, soccer (not football) is a stupid game.

I have never seen a game so rife with acting and whining. If a player falls on the ground perhaps it was because he tripped over his own two feet. The number of times I saw players, on every team, fall the ground when they were never touched and then proceed to clutch their …(insert random body part here)… and roll around on the ground until the myopic umpire awards a penalty only to then get up and run away seemingly unscathed.

The game looks as though a few lawyers have taken torts law to its extreme. Any accident, no matter how self induced, must have a protagonist and a corresponding penalty awarded. For f**ks sake. These guys fall over when they get hit with a rain drop. God help them if they ever tried to play a proper football like Rugby or AFL. Hell, these guys wouldn’t even last 10 minutes playing netball before the entire team was on the sideline with soft tissue injuries.

I have heard the argument that soccer players fall over more because they are more nimble footed than rugby players and therefore are more susceptible to tripping/falling over. Bollocks! If a gymnast fell over in the Olympics you wouldn’t let him go again. Mountain goats are nimble footed. Soccer players just fall down a lot.

If you think I am just bitter and twisted because an Italian thespian fell over and scored the winning goal knocking Australia out of the world cup you may be right. I argue though that I was bitter and twisted long before the world cup began. It’s just that now I have every second person telling me how fantastic a game soccer is and that somehow because everyone else plays it in the world it must be good.

Maldives

Just got back from a short 1 week break in the Maldives. Great great place. Stayed on Meeru Island which was really good. The diving was really good with heaps of soft corals. We did 3 dives along with an enriched air course which was good except having to study on holdiays was a bit of a drag. 8 days without shoes was such a nice break from china. We could even see stars. There are some pics up in the gallery from the trip. Back in Nanchang now for another month or so and will be back in Aus late July for a week.

OH&S China Style

Problem: Broken Air con on the 13th floor.

Solution: Climb out onto the aircon in light rain while wearing thongs with no safety harness.

Green Pea Icecream

You have to wonder what they were thinking when they made this ice cream. It tastes like it should (or shouldn’t) too.

Windows ATM

Where are the last places you would like to see a copy of M$ Windows insatalled?

1. Your life support system at hospital.
2. The space shuttle
3. The cockpit of a 747
4. Your computer
5. An ATM.

Bank of China outside the office has installed another ATM and as you can see in the photo it’s one of the newest ones available.

For 3 minutes it sat there half way through a reboot. Needless to say I didn’t use it.

Happy Birthday Doug

Happy 24th Birthday Doug!

Hope you have a great day today on your birthday - as you said “It is Friday afterall!”. Hope to catcch up with you shortly. Although we can’t be there to celebrate with you, we’ll be thinking of you and will have a drink for you tonight!

Have a good one.

Love Trin and Mike.

Motor Bike Safety

News bulletin on motor bike safety courtesy of a gold coast motor cycle enthusiast. Note that he is riding the new MV.

Motor Bike Safety

2 MV’s

Here is a photo of mum’s new MV Brutale and dads old (must be atleast 2 months old by now) MV.

3 Gorges Dam

Some photos from our trip down the 3 Gorges dam are in the gallery. A fair few of the photos are hard to see things in due to the ‘haze’. From what I can tell most of China is covered in this so called fog. You do get used to it after a while and are quite surprised when you can see the sun/blue sky.

New Screen Shot

Here is an updated screen shot of my game.

Mac Book Pro

I have been looking at buying one of the new MacBook Pro Intel based laptops and have been comparing prices around the world. It would seem that the prices are not the same around the world and where you live makes a big factor in how much you pay for the exact same machine.

Below are prices for a 2.13GHz Macbook Pro with 2Gig or RAM and 120Gig HDD as taken from the apple websites. All prices have been converted to Australian Dollars.

US $4371 + tax
Canada $4400 + tax
Hong Kong $4463
Japan $4537
Singapore $4892
Australia $5073
UK $5350
Germany/Spain $5400

I don’t know what the tax rates are in the US/Canada but here in Aus it’s 10% and the UK is 17.5% but it is included in the price in both countries. If sales tax is 10% in the US then there is very little difference in pre-tax prices. Hong Kong is the winner then due to it’s low low tax rate.

Hot Springs

On Sunday we all went to the Hot Springs about 2 hours out of Nanchang. Some photos are now on the Gallery. It was a great day and the highlight would have to have been the 108 kwai (about AUS$16) 1 hour massage.

Lunch Time

We have never really known what we have been eating for lunch in Nanchang. Now I wish I didn’t. We got the menu translated for us. They just bring out random things for lunch so you get about 8 different dishes for lunch. Here are some highlights from the menu (All spellings are as per the translation).

- Pig Tail
- Stewed Turtle
- Bean Burnt Meat
- Fragant Pig’s Feet
- Baked Intestine
- Dry Smolder Meat
- Cooked Stoumack
- Cooked Catsup
- Kidney with Hibernate
- Celery with cow stoumack
- Native place meat
- Fry three slices
- Cukumber with beacon bowel
- Mixed meat manually
- Hot Pepper mushroom with kidney slices
- Wood beand meat
- Preserved vegetable with stomack slices
- Celey with lily
- Local small fry meat
and last but not least
- Tasteful old dregs

There are about the same amount again of ‘normal’ sounding dishes that I left of this list so you have a 50/50 chance of getting one of the meals listed.