If you remember, when i went to Tassie with Vincent, we rented an old Mitsubishi Magna to tour around the island.
Well, i just bought a car , and it’s a Mitsubishi Magna as well ! This one is a station wagon, so i can put my surf or kitesurf gear in the boot, and i can even sleep in

It’s from 1993, in pretty good shape, and the odometer shows only 111000 kms. I am really happy to finaly have a car, because staying every weekend in Manly starts to be boring, especially when the weather is bad. Moreover i will be able to make surf trips around Sydney with some friends now !

Last week monday was a public holiday in NSW, so we decided with some friends to fly to Brisbane and visit the surroundings. After a quick stop in Surfer’s Paradise (shapeless and useless), we headed for Byron Bay, a nice little town, which is the most easterly point in mainland Australia, and well known as the surfer’s Mecca.
So as pilgrims we surfed, and the surf was good.

On the way back to Brisbane, we stopped at Dreamworld, one of the many fun parks on the gold coast.
Fast fearsome rollercoasters. Screams. I-did-it feeling. Awesome.
I especially loved the tower of terror, a straight horizontal to vertical ride at 150kph.

Then Brisbane. Nothing special to do here, it doesn’t have the appeal of Melbourne or Sydney. At least i can now tick it on my visited cities map !

Tonight was a geek night. I spent 3 hours on my Mac trying to install some new stuff, and i found interesting pieces of software i wanted to talk to you about :

• Quicksilver: i knew this one for a long time but i never tried it before. It’s a powerful and flexible application launcher. It supports plugins and skins, and you can really do a lot of thing with this gizmo. I instantly fell in love !
• Visor: this one is made by the same guy who made Quicksilver, it is a terminal console like the one found in quake. I don’t use the terminal so often but i really like the design of this one.
• Amua: I also discovered Last.fm tonight, so i tried the official clent for Mac. It is good to offer streaming directly without any need for a browser, but i don’t like to open the full Last.fm window to see what i am currently listening to. That’s where Amua comes handy. It’s a replacement player for Last.fm, it supports scrobbling and displays the current song when you hover the menu icon. But the really good point is that it plays music via iTunes, and that means Growl support, and the best of all : Subtle status display with the script i presented here some time ago !