You'll find me about 11,000 miles away.

Celebrating Christmas in other countries isn't a first for me, for example I once celebrated Christmas in China a few years ago. Celebrating Christmas in China felt strange, but not incredibly alien. Hardly anyone where I was living celebrated it, but at least it was cold, I had to have lots of extra blankets on my bed, I had to wear more clothes and Chinese New Year was relatively close to Christmas, so there were festivites and ample decorations. It's an even strange experience here in Australia though. Not a horrible, uncomfortable strange. Mainly because it's quite warm and sunny. Christmases have become synonymous with bitterly cold weather, grey semi frozen slush (commonly referred to as snow in parts of the UK...although this year from what I've been told it will be quite a white Christmas), warm houses, boilers breaking, breath condensation at all times of the day, almost permanent darkness, being mystified why the Tube is so hot in summer and yet so cold

This was on the news this morning and thought I'd share it, a website about a huge teenage warbling American talent (t.w.a.t for short).....;) http://lesbianswholooklikejustinbieber.tumblr.com/ Brilliant.

I met up with Sean on Sunday evening. We've known each other for a few years. Sean's been in Australia for a few months; travelling about, learning to scuba dive, shagging girls. General British tourist behaviour in Australia. So, we met up in Sydney city centre, mooched about, ate a few burgers, watched a thoroughly uninspiring, unenthuasiastic guy from the West Country perform a "circus trick" where he sat on a bmx on a maypole 10 ft above the ground and juggled a knife, a flaming percussion mallet and an apple (one of my friends, Adam, standing next to me also watching said "hahaha wow, look at that, he's just eating the fucking apple. What a load of shit!". In between my laughter all I could say was "yeah, he's probably hungry"). Bizarrely the performer also suggested to me, out loud, to jump in front of the little passenger train car that was going past, and he then had a go at a little boy for playing with a rope and posited t

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Since 1st November, I have been growing a 'tache. The 2 pictures on the right prove it. You can sponsor me here; h ttp://au.movember.com/mospace/1215106/ I have been thinking about what styles of moustache to grow. But my lack of ability to grow facial hair hampers my choice of styles. A lot. Maybe I could grow a handle bar moustache like the Australian icon Chopper. I could even go for maybe one like Bruce from Family Guy and each time I see my 'tache giggling to myself remembering this...... "Jeffery, Peter Griffin has a moustache.....No wayyyy.......Wayyyyy!" Or maybe just the pubescent boy look. My facial hair could probably just about manage that. Oh, I've also ot a few shouts out. Maximum respect to, etc. Pirate radio style. A shout out to the Jonni 5 Cru and to Chris and Geo locked on. Hold tight and keep it locked. And a shout out to Chi and Amy Twittering, watching The Apprentice, administering websites and making lovely things! ----------- A side note,

The final day of this challenge and it went pretty well. From the picture, you can see that I succeeded with more than 3 hours still left to go. Success! However, yesterday I mentioned that I would connect a PlayStation 3 via my phone to the PlayStation Network. Unfortunately I wasn't able to do this despite downloading some awesome software called Connectify . It enables Windows 7 OS computers to turn itself into a wireless router. I was quite impressed with the documentation on the software that was available and quite a few sites seem to have good things to say about it. I was quite pleased to actually find an application that does all the setup for you (previous Windows OSes didn't seem to have any software available). Anyway, it worked quite well (well, I was able to connect to the Network I created), but I was unable to connect to the PlayStation network. It failed with a selection of error messages; from a DNS error message to a message about the WPA key being incorrect.

Day 5 of The Phone Balance Challenge. A $7.97 decrease since yesterday. Not much phone credit got used yesterday or today. The last day tomorrow. I was wondering what I could do to mark this occasion. I might try and connect to the PlayStation Network. 384kbps should be ok for playing games.

My alarm on my phone woke me up this morning. I turned it off and noticed that I had a text message waiting. It was a message from 3 informing me that I need to top up as my phone balance was low. A good sign for the achievement of my challenge. As of 7:45am this morning I had loss of $232.44 from yesterday! This was much better than expected. The secret of my success…last night I connected my phone to my laptop, and used the phones 3G connection to power the Internet traffic on my computer. Genius. Last night the 3 network participated in some grid computing and also some “reciprocal” grid computing (aka Torrent sharing). But I got too carried away. It all happened while I was sleeping too. I had connected my phone to my computer, setup the grid software and let the phone provide me with some bandwidth (I was getting like 5k/sec though so whether I did anything useful is debatable), set up a few Torrents, and went to lie down. Before I did so though I checked my balance, and

This is my phone balance as of 7am this morning. At last, a decrease. $38.23 to be exact. Mainly due to streaming Bassdrive for most of the day. This did seem to be an efficient method to drain my balance, but not too great (it cost me maybe $24 for 6 hours of streaming i think). I also installed SymTorrent for my phone, and after many failed attempts at downloading and installing, it finally worked (note, if anyone has a Nokia e series phone, certificate signing is pretty strict, so you need to turn it off). But downloading torrents over 3g doesn't work...after getting my hopes up...maybe torrent sharing is blocked by 3, as I got it to work via wi-fi.... Anyway, I've had to settle for streaming. Anything. It sort of goes against the rules I set though. I don't actually get to keep what I stream. I tried recording what I was listening to but no joy.  And there's another limitation which is also pretty frustrating: battery life. I was downloading and streaming y

So I woke up this morning and checked my balance. Yesterday at 12:30pm I checked it and it was down to 267. W00t. A good start. Another 7 hours left today at least of phone credit spending. But another storm happened and 3G wouldn't work. Oh well I thought on the train home from work, $13 dollars isn't that bad. It could be worse. And this morning from the picture you can see that things are worse. I'm not sure how I managed it. An INCREASE of $1.82. An increase!! How?! It's a very kind and generous gesture of 3, but this isn't a game!

Good morning! A few weeks ago I bought a new phone from phone network 3. A Nokia e63 . It was on a prepay basis so I topped up with the second most highest available top up; $69. I didn't really know the timescales of this budget, so I chose to aim for the higher end of the phone credit scale. Better safe than sorry. But I didn't realise the full extent of what I had just purchased. I had not bought $69 of simple phone credit. I had bought a $69 phone package . It included money to spend in 3's mobile zone, an amount of money to spend on reduced-rate international calls, internet usage, SMS and the normal phone calls! This is awesome. Plus 3 's service is brilliant. I get great reception everywhere. Anyway, back to my original theme. The challenge. 3 had given me a massive 500 and something AUD to spend in one month. "Great, what I'll do is rinse out some YouTube (but only moderately, as there is that warning at the start that says 'may involve high dat

Breakfast on the Bridge festival Kris My aunt, cousins and I Sydney Opera House

I sometimes view other cultures with a cynical Nationialistic pride (every other country is retarded apart from the English....). Often quite incorrectly, but i still do it. It's a habit. One such occasion was this morning, while i was watching TV. I have to admit that the TV adverts that i've seen so far in Australia haven't been as unremittingly painful as the ones in the UK. There are a few amusing ones and most of the ads are simple, to the point and make sense. This advert came on for the new Panasonic Lumix TZ10. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4H_MXLWbbdE The tagline of the advert; "don't get your holidays mixed up". At the end there is selection of photos - Cancun, Mexico; Munich, Germany and Tokyo, Japan. This sort of makes sense as the setting is most likely Japanese, the couple are being serenaded by a Mecixican Mariachi band, while being served food by a lady wearing a Bavarian-stlyed clothes (the German part) and a group of coassack dancers are dan

A few days ago I was in a shopping centre near to Syndey Aquarium. I walked into a clothes shop there and started to look at the sunglasses they had on sale. A female member of sales staff walked past me, smiled and said the obligatory "hi, how are you. Want to try any sunnies on?". Standard reply of "oh,...no,...no thanks, I'm just looking thanks". Nothing unusual. I looked at the sunglasses a bit longer then slowly started to wander round the shop looking at other things. About 5 minutes had elapsed since I had entered the shop and spoken to the girl. I was now looking through their extensive collection of board shorts. Admiring the price, fabric, etc. This girl walked over and started folding clothes or doing something with clothes and hangers. I didn't pay any attention. Suddenly she exclaimed in an overfriendly way "what are you up to tonight?". I almost jumped with surprise, looked up at her, looked around to see if the question was directed

It's near to the end of my 2nd week in Australia. Unlike other countries I have visited recently, I had no problems entering Syndey at all. It was a bit strange at the airport to have my bags examined by a sniffer dog, on the way out, (every passenger leaving the terminal had to fill out a card of contact information and then leave their bags on the floor while a dog walks past them). I am currently in Sydney. I've been doing lots of tourist things recently; visiting museums and shopping, reading maps in the street, walking really slowly in the street, annoying people by counting change and deciphering currency denominations at the cash register, eating a range of vastly different food each day, drinking beer at any time of the day, paying for things with a UK credit card - it not working - then saying "but my bank told me this card would work anywhere in the world" (to be fair, this has only happend once in 3 months), walking against the crowd flow in packed train st

In a restaurant in Hong Kong.

Greetings everyone! You join me in Hong Kong for a few days. I haven't written for a while, but my updates should next week be more prevalent - I will be in Australia and hopefully have a more reliable Internet connection. The one I have now is in a hotel, so they're charging quite a lot + it's nearly 2am now and pretty tired + rushing to go to sleep + so I have only paid for 1 hour (of which I have 11 minutes left) I'm pretty sad to be leaving China and leaving Rain. I have had a really great time here, in spite of all the drawbacks. China is still a pretty awesome, beautifully-crazy country. It feels so annoymous being in China with hundreds of millions of other people. I have taken a few photos. Not that many, but I have now got my camera fixed. Friends who I went to the USA with know what fate befell my camera screen. It wasn't pretty. But I now have it fixed. 1 more photo of Hong Kong harbour from Hong Kong Island near to our hotel. Night night.

A KGB building in Moscow. Communism v Capitalism. This is Dima from a city called Yekaterinburg. He was on his way to Guangzhou in China for business. He sells clothes back in Russia. Mainly designer stuff he imports from China. He makes quite a lot of money. When I boarded the train from Irkutsk to Beijing, Dima was my roommate. He joked with me that I am a stereotypical Russian, as I drink and smoke. He doesn't. He hasn't for 15 years he said. He has quite a good sense of humour and isn't too afraid to speak English incorrectly. He has a a girlfriend of 21, and was also married (I found out in Guangzhou to a Russian girl who was 37. She didn't look 37 at all), but is now separated he says. He also has a daughter who is 21 in Guangzhou. He seems to work late at night. He chats on numerous phone calls and at the same time typing figures into his calculator and writing them down. We also joked about being Zabaikalsk mafia. He taught me to s