All done

The last couple of days in San Francisco was pretty cool. I had a chance to ride along the waterfront again, this time taking some photos, which I will upload soon enough. The flight was relatively smooth - I even managed to get some sleep. The only problem I had was after the flight, when I found out that the baggage handlers had left my skateboard at SFO. I had to wait until the next day to get it back, and it had some chips on the side. Fortunately, there wasn't any structural damage so it still performed the same.

I've also finished my NaNo novel since getting back. I managed to finish pass the 50,000 word mark just before midnight on November 20, and I finished the story after midnight. This means that I reached the target in two thirds of the allotted time, which is pretty satisfying. I'm thinking about setting a higher word count target for next year to keep things challenging but for the time being, I shall bask in my winnery goodness.

Writing Dangerously

I just had the best day I've had this month, perhaps even this year.

But I'd like to fill in a few gaps.

I slowly got better and better as LISA went on, but I never fully recovered, and by the end of the conference I was resigned to my fate of being sick upon landing in San Francisco.

Despite that, I did have a great time at the conference. It was a huge learning experience hearing from experts in my particular profession, and I've taken a lot out of it. It was also good to meet different people in similar positions.

I arrived in San Francisco late on Friday and was picked up from the airport by my cousin Mike. After having some awesome chicken wings that I had experienced the pleasure of tasting the last time I was in San Francisco, we went out and partied all night.

I didn't sleep until 4am, which was not ideal for...

The Night of Writing Dangerously

It started off with a huge headache at 8am, woken up by the roadworks outside. I knew that things could only get better. (And they did.)

The day was unusually warm for this time of year. San Francisco must have known that I was coming. I decided to take advantage of this fact by skateboarding along the waterfront with my new longboard from San Diego. I made it all the way to the Bay Bridge before turning back. It was sweet.

After I got home, I prepared for the impending write-a-thon and then began the short (ok, 20 minutes, so not that short) walk over to the SomArts Center where the event was being held.

I was immediately impressed by the fact that Chris Baty, the man responsible for starting all of this insanity, greeted everybody at the door as they entered. I was a bit starstruck and fumbled my words, but managed to say a quick hi before grabbing my raffle tickets for the night.

The tables started filling (I had one person on my table with over 73000 words already) and the liquids (some alcoholic) started flowing, and people began writing.

Eventually it came time for Chris's speech about the history of NaNoWriMo and how it had come so far from being a small project between friends to being an international phenomenon. I did my hardest to hold back the tears. I'm such a softie when it comes to emotional or inspiration speeches, and this was both. Chris Baty is one of my heroes.

After Chris was done with his speech, everybody got back to writing. Prizes were drawn and photos were taken (mine were particularly awesome), and eventually it was time for the event to draw to a close. It was a sad moment because it was one of those things I felt I could have enjoyed had it gone for the whole day. Alas, it was not to be.

We all packed up and said our goodbyes to the new friends that we met, and I went and talked to Chris to say thanks to him for being crazy enough to start NaNoWriMo. He was a bit amazed that I was from Australia, but probably not as amazed as I was at being there.

That was it for the Night of Writing Dangerously. It was my first, and I sure hope it's not my last. I doubt I'll be able to go every year, but it's something that I'd love to do again some time in the future.

In terms of word count, I passed the 40k mark during the write-a-thon, which was a nice milestone to reach during such a cool event.

Time to put this thing on cruise control until the finish line. 50k is so close that I can taste it.

Still jetlagged

So I'm in San Diego, and I still haven't entirely shaken off the jetlag from the flight. I wasn't able to get as much sleep as I usually do on international flights, and I got to LAX feeling pretty lousy. The flight to San Diego was in a small EMB120 plane, and it was loud; the engines could be heard above everything else. It was so loud, in fact, that they should provide anybody who flies in them with earmuffs for OHS reasons.

Much of my first half-day in San Diego was spent checking out the nearby Mission Valley shopping centre. I forgot how massive American malls are. They're more or less department stores the size of Australian malls spread out across a stretch of land. You almost want a car to get in between shops. Despite that, I didn't find anything I was looking for, and ended up going back to my hotel room and working on my NaNoWriMo novel (currently over 26,000 words!).

Sleep was very interrupted, and I woke up at 3:30 in the morning, surrendering to jetlag. I wrote some more shaky prose then had a greasy breakfast and some coffee before setting off on the day's adventures.

My first full day involved getting lost, much like my first day in most foreign cities. I started off with a very short stop of Old Town, which I found boring. I immediately went back to the light rail station and caught a connecting service to downtown San Diego, which seemed pretty dead for a Saturday. It was nowhere near as busy as the Sydney CBD would be late on a Saturday morning. I caught another connecting eastbound train and, after getting off at two stations I didn't mean to get off at, I ended up deciding to find a bus. I grossly underestimated the scale of transit maps I had briefly looked at, and ended up walking a long way until I eventually found one that would take me to North Park, where there was meant to be a couple of skate shops.

The first shop dealt mostly in standard skateboards and fashion, but I finally got around to purchasing a longboard at the second shop, Route 44. The guy there was really helpful and even gave me a discount because I bought a complete board as well as new shoes. It ended up costing me just over US$185 for both, which I thought was a pretty sweet deal. I tried it out later in the night and it seemed to go pretty smoothly. I still need to get used to the act of skateboarding, though.

A series of miscommunications regarding the billing of the room ended up spoiling my mood, but I'm hoping to have all of that resolved momentarily.

The first day of the conference was a struggle. The tutorial session itself was very interesting - it was about computer forensics - but I wasn't feeling the best, which wasn't helped by a lack of sleep the previous night. I skipped any attempt at socialising that night and decided to write a bit then go to sleep.

Right now I'm sitting in a workshop still feeling sick because the closest pharmacy is two train stops away. Yay!

Financial crisis of infinite Earths

Dammit dammit dammit.

I'm fairly clueless about the economy, but I'm even more clueless about exchange rates. Today the Australian dollar dropped to about 72 US cents, and it looks like it may drop even more. Apparently this has to do with Australia and commodities or something like that. All I know is that it's not looking good for my two trips.

In the red corner (ok, they're not really competing with each other, so it's a terrible analogy, but I digress): USA trip for the LISA conference. I wanted to buy some things that would be cheaper to buy in the USA. While it may still be cheaper now (and when I get there), I kind of regret not ordering a few weeks ago when the dollar was a bit more reasonable. Could have saved a good 50-100 dollars (depending on how many things I end up getting). Oh well. The hard decision now is whether to cut my losses and order things now, or wait it out and hope the dollar improves closer to my travel date.

And in the blue corner: Japan. Should I have started booking hotels a lot earlier? Probably. Did I? No. Sapporo ended up being rather expensive, and now that the Aussie dollar is dropping, the others may end up hurting us more than we would have liked too.

The good news is that the USA trip is all booked, and flights to Japan were dirt cheap. I guess it could be worse.

(EDIT: And yes, I did make a mistake in that initial post. I said "less clueless". I should've said "more clueless". This is now corrected. The universe is safe once more.)

Is that when you confer with other people?

So, thanks to a variety of favourable factors, I've found myself making arrangements to attend a conference called LISA '08. It's the short name for the 22nd Large Installation System Administration Conference, which sounds more geeky than impressive, but there's a lot of interesting stuff going on, and it's in the USA, which is always cool to visit. I also get to put this on my blog which is incredibly geeky.

Anyway, I'm off to the conference (and hence the USA) on the 7th of November, and I land in San Diego (via LAX) about 2 hours before I leave, which is pretty sweet. The down side, of course, is that it takes a day and a half to get back to Sydney. Oh well. I'll be doing two or so days in San Francisco after the conference before flying back, which should be nice. I'm hoping to get some cheap shopping done because, despite the recent drop in the Australian dollar, it is still cheaper to get many things there than here.

Turning Japanese

Speaking of travel plans, it's looking like I'll also be going to Japan early next year. There are rough plans for doing a couple of weeks in Japan, and I'm hoping leave arrangements work in my favour to give me as much days off as I can get. However, I'd be more than happy with two weeks - a week and a bit snowboarding, and the rest sightseeing. More as it develops.

A weekend at the (somewhat) Snowy Mountains

So, I caved and went to the snow again. I couldn't help it.

It was a weekend trip down to the NSW slopes with Phil and her friend, and Dave B and it was quite possibly the best time I've had in the snow in Australia. Sure, the snow wasn't as good compared to a couple of powder days in the past, but it just happened to be the first time I had spent in the snow when I could actually do blacks and off-piste with a moderate amount of competency. This meant that the whole mountain is opened up instead of just a select few runs. In fact, I think I rode mostly runs that I hadn't been to before, which was a definite plus.

It began late on Friday night when Phil picked me up and we embarked on a long journey (picking up more people on the way) to Berridale. The trip was (thankfully) incident-free, and we ended up getting to the room at around 1:30 in the morning. Sadly, the remote was missing from the room and so we couldn't get the snowboard DVDs that Dave had recently bought to play on the DVD player. We ended up watching a bit of the Olympics then sleeping.

We got to Thredbo a bit late the next day because we stopped at Jindabyne for breakfast and ended up being stuck in slow traffic going past a mobile RBT. The snow seemed very good at the start of the day (due to some overnight falls) but I didn't get a chance to ride anything new until after lunch since Dave's bindings broke and he had to buy some new ones. After lunch, we all went over to the top of Karel's and headed towards the Golf Course Bowl, where much fun was had. It was the first time I rode pretty comfortably along trees, possibly because it was pretty flat (but still lots of fun). What was not fun was the traverse out, complete with stumps sticking out from the ground. We went through some more trees at the end of the day before meeting up with Dave (who we lost during one of the runs) and heading back to the apartment.

The most notable thing about that night was that we had Bits & Pizzas. I love that place.

The second day we spent at Perisher Blue where the snow was significantly less nice than the previous day. The weather was really warm, so I rode without a jacket all day and ended up getting minor sunburn on my neck. It was, however, a very enjoyable day. The first thing we figured out was that anything off-piste was not worth doing in the morning, so we did some groomers and had lunch while waiting for the snow to melt a bit. We then proceeded to have an awesome time (or a bad one if you went with Phil) at the double-black area of the mountain called Double Trouble. It wasn't as menacing as it sounded, and was really only a hard blue or a black. It was probably made a double black due to the amount of trees that was in there, but I didn't have any trouble navigating my way through the area (I can't say the same for my friends). We followed that up with some more off-piste in Guthega, where we accidentally ended up out of bounds and headed towards the road. We had to walk back to Guthega at the end of it, but a good time was had by all (even David, who ended up further down the road than any of us). Sadly, the long way back to Smiggins (where we parked) meant that we didn't have time to do much else at the end of the day.

The drive back to Sydney was eventful, and involved stops at KFC and McDonald's, as well as some interesting overtaking, and a kangaroo in the middle of the road. I somehow managed to lose my phone (left it with Dave) AND my bag (left it with Phil) in the process, which was quite impressive, even by my standards.

Next snow trip: Japan (I hope)

Up in the sky

Skydiving didn't eventuate. Dave and Luke were far too tired to bother with any type of exciting activity on the morning of our flight, and it was too cloudy (and slightly rainy) to do anything anyway. We ended up playing some giant chess at Cathedral Square. I was giving Dave some bad advice and his black side lost quite spectacularly to Luke's red side.

Afterwards, we caught the free bus around town because we had nothing else to do. Dave and I stopped at a sushi train for a quick lunch before heading to the airport. To my delight, there was a Timezone in the airport with some really old arcade machines. Dave and I played Sega Rally and I won a couple of times before we boarded our flight.

It was cloudy all the way to Sydney, and the weather conditions were almost as bad as the in-flight movie (21) when we approached the airport for landing. Being the thrill-seekers that we were, we were really excited when we went below the clouds and the plane was still shaky as it approached the ground. Some of the other passengers looked a bit worried, but despite everything the plane landed safely with the help of the reverse thrusters. It was really cool.

Sydney was warm compared to NZ, and it was nice to be able to complain about temperatures above 10 Celsius as being cold again.

New Zealand overview

Days spent: 9
Temperature: Cold
Days on the ski hill: 5
Crashes that would have looked very amusing to other people (but really hurt): 2

The long white cloud, continued

So yes, the Internet cafes in Queenstown wasn't that great. It was 1 NZD per 15 minutes and damn slow, so I wasn't inclined to spend a lot of time on it. Back to the story...

The rest of the week brought some more bad visibility. We all woke up late on Thursday – on Wednesday night Dave and Luke went out on a pub crawl, while I stayed up to watch the final big mountain stage of Le Tour de France – so we caught the late bus to the Remarkables on Thursday. It was more or less the same experience as the previous day.

In contrast, we woke up really early on Friday so that we could catch the bus heading to Treble Cone. The day got off to an interesting start when we ended up at different places due to Dave and Luke taking the wrong fork (the resort's runs weren't clearly marked at all). We eventually all met up again at the cafe when visibility went down to almost zero (the worst we experienced all week). It was interesting getting back down when you were a few feet from a ledge and couldn't see more than a foot in front of you. Anyway, it eventually cleared up later in the day and we had a great time boarding for a few hours before heading back to the hotel.

Our last day on the snow was Saturday and we decided to catch the early bus once more. It was back to the Remarkables, in time for the opening of the new board park called the Burton Stash. I actually managed to get in there before it was officially open by accident. It was a very nicely set up park, but I wasn't game enough to try any of the features. The powder in between sections was nice, though not long enough to really count. I think we all managed to hurt ourselves, too. For me it was the old bailing out of a funbox routine. I tried to slow down too late and caught an edge on the box then fell off at the end landing on my back on the moderately hard landing. The only thing bruised was my ego (and my back). The weather eventually turned bad again and we ended up heading back to the hotel early.

Dave and I bought a book each for the 8-hour bus trip to Christchurch the next day (I had finished American Gods the previous day – one of the best books I have ever read) then we all had some dinner and watched the Bledisloe Cup match at a bar. We headed home at halftime and slowly packed for the trip the next day. I stayed up to watch the penultimate stage of Le Tour de France and was slightly disappointed that Cadel Evans couldn't get the Yellow Jersey back.

The bus we paid for to get from Queenstown to Christchurch today was cheap, and we got what we paid for. It was rickety at best, and Dave didn't have any room to move his legs. Luckily, it was a mostly empty bus, and we were able to take up as much room as we needed. I started reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and I lent Dave American Gods to read, but most of the trip was taken up by us trying to catch up on some sleep.

We're now in Christchurch on our last night in New Zealand. I've decided to stay in while the boys are going to try to have a big night out. Our plans for tomorrow still aren't clear. Our flight leaves at 3:40pm, so we have time to do some sort of adventure activity, but we have yet to decide what to do. We're contemplating some skydiving, or perhaps some paragliding.

My best guess is that the next update will come from back home.

Christchurch / Queenstown

It was a long two days leading up to and leaving for my New Zealand trip. The night before involved Dave B haggling up a bouncer, as well as paying ludicrous amounts of money for cab rides (thanks, World Youth Day organizers!). Not having gotten much sleep that night, I groggily stuffed all my things into my snowboard bag and managed to get to the airport pretty early, though it was soon after the pope's speech at Randwick Racecourse so there were lots of people at the airport lining up to leave the country (and you could tell that they were there for World Youth Day because of their bags with the horrendous bright orange and yellow colour scheme. Anyway, we spent a lot of time lounging around in the airport waiting for our flight (which was slightly late).

After what was the shortest I have ever been on (and which had the best airline meal ever), we arrived in Christchurch late on Sunday night and managed to steal some sleep at the Base Backpackers hostel in the middle of town before heading back to the airport once more to fly to Queenstown. I was still half asleep during the flight but managed to catch the great landing, which was where the plane went through a narrow mountain range and put on the brakes really hard to land it in the short amount of runway.

Our first day in Queenstown was spent sorting out rentals for Dave and Luke, and buying our lift tickets. We finished a bit early, had a famous Fergburger, then went off to do our own separate adventure tourism activity. Luke did a bungy jump and Dave did a canyon swing, while I chose to do something a little less voluntary and went on the Shotover Jet - a high speed speedboat tour of the Shotover Canyon. I had a grin on my face the whole way through, partly because it was a hell of a lot of fun, and partly because the wind blowing on my face kind of forced it. My face only defrosted at around the time I made it back to town.

The long white cloud

Either we chose a bad time to come to Queenstown, or it's always really cloud here, because our first two days on the snow involved very poor visibility. The first day, at Coronet Peak, had fog at the top of the mountain and ice at the bottom. We eventually found the groomed runs after the fog cleared slightly, but even then it wasn't that exciting repeating that over and over again. After biting the ice a few times, Dave decided he needed to buy a helmet. Almost concurrently, I lost my gloves, and I had been meaning to buy a new pair anyway (my previous pair were horribly torn up) so Dave and I went shopping later that afternoon. Ironically enough, Dave managed to somehow injure his wrist the next day.

We were disappointed with Coronet Peak so we decided to check out The Remarkables for our second day, and for a moment, we thought we may have had a chance to get some decent runs in. Unfortunately, the sun disappeared above the clouds, which quickly came in a few hours after lifts opened. Flat light made runs very not-fun-at-all, and after Dave injured his wrist, we checked out the snow tubing - going down a short run with massive rubber doughnuts. That was enjoyable enough, but didn't provide enough entertainment, so Luke and I checked out the beginner terrain park while Dave nursed his injury.

(I would like to note that more things have happened since, but is being bogged down by slow and expensive Internet. I will attempt to update once more when we get back to Christchurch.)

Filmfest diary 3.0: Condensed edition

The Sydney Film Festival has come and gone, and I haven't even gotten around to posting about it (I've noticed that I've only been updating once a month this year, but I digress), so consider this the obligatory film festival report.

Much to my disappointment, I was told that the Sydney Film Festival was not as huge as the other festivals I've been to in the past (namely Berlin, Toronto, and Vancouver), and didn't have the usual Q&A fare at the end of each session (with the exception of some of the competition movies as well as the gala movies). However, this did not take away from the quality (or lack thereof) of the films. I saw nine, and my reviews of the films can be read here.

My pick of the ones that I saw was The Square, which, to my surprise, was actually a red carpet world premiere. Anyway, it was a thoroughly enjoyable Australian noir that I could find very little wrong with. There was also the added bonus of having the cast and crew on hand to answer questions.

Apart from the film festival, not a whole lot has happened, though I suppose being at work full-time gives that perception whether there were things to do or not. Off the top of my head, I can remember that there was a party at David B's house where I caught up with a few people, I went and saw Mixmaster Mike, who has inhuman mixing/scratching skills, and I saw Holly Throsby and her band at the Factory theatre, where I was just as impressed with her stage presence as I was with her music.

I guess that's it for now. The next update will probably be a post-New Zealand report. All the details are finally sorted out, so now all I have to do is wait, and pray for snow.

Arbitrary May update

Hmm, been a while since the last update, so I suppose I'll do a post.

What has been happening, you ask? Well "not much" always seems to come to mind. Apart from not much, here's a quick summary of things that has happened since last update:

• Dave from England came to Sydney and we got perhaps a little too intoxicated for his birthday.
• Saw Salmonella Dub at the Metro. Was good.
• Saw Iron Man on opening day. A damn fine movie, in the same league as Batman Begins as far as superhero movies go.
• I completed a (pretty bad) script for Script Frenzy.
• Bought some hardbacks and got a lot of free stuff from Kings Comics on Free Comic Book Day.
• I got The Absolute Sandman vol. 1 signed by Neil Gaiman, complete with a sketch of Morpheus.

(Somewhere in there, I also managed to get a better grip on my accuracy at the driving range. I still suck, but considerably less so now.)

Oh, and a ski trip to New Zealand is a go. Gonna be in Queenstown from July 21 to 28. Still gotta book the car, but apart from that it should be a blast.

Laughter: best medicine or elaborate placebo?

A few weeks ago, during the Easter long weekend, I headed over to Melbourne to attend some gigs at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival as well as catch up with a few friends. Little did I know that when I left I was carrying the seeds of a potentially deadly illness. The sniffles that annoyed fellow passengers on the plane to Melbourne soon turned into a raging flu that put me out of action for much of the first couple of days of my stay. After trying various remedies for cold and flu, I eventually turned to laughter, the so-called "best medicine". So, how did I fare?

My first dose of laughter came in the form of Heath Franklin as Chopper Read. In Making Deadshits History, the satirical alter-ego of Chopper Read outlined in hilarious fashion what made people stupid and how we could eliminate these people from the world. I laughed hard, but I also coughed a whole lot, so this laughter technique didn't seem to be working.

I was feeling marginally better on day two, and after meeting some friends and consulting with a few Guitar Heroes, I continued with this potentially volatile experiment. That night we saw Arj Barker serve up some humour as only he could. I still wasn't feeling the best after the gig, but I was a bit more optimistic when I went to bed trying to cough my lungs out.

I looked less like a zombie the next morning and felt that this day may be the turning point in this illness. Perhaps the laughter was working after all. Kristen Schaal provided some incredibly awkward laughs and a ludicrously catchy tune, and it began to purge the sickness from my body. However, it was not enough. I needed just one more laugh-filled show.

This came in the form of comedy troupe called The Hound of the Baskervilles presenting Every Film Ever Made. It was easily the best show I saw in the entire festival, and was notable not only for the fact that it was consistently funny throughout the whole show, in which the trio performed famous scenes from as many films as they could think of, but also for the fact that there was a woman in the crowd who was laughing so hard you could swear she was on the brink of having a seizure. After the show, I felt revitalised. So much so that I decided to stay out and check out some comedians at the Hi-Fi Bar.

Sadly, most of the acts that went on stage were average to poor any my illness threatened to fight its way back. It was saved by the very last act, Canada's Glenn Wool, who made some clever quips about alcohol and religion. We also met some cool comedians who were just hanging around.

You would generally want to keep treating illnesses like this for a while after it has gone away to avoid it recurring, so I decided to continue my doses of laughter for the rest of my stay. On Easter Monday, we saw Mark Butler do a gig about Body Language, which was as entertaining as it was informative (infotainment, so to speak), and on my last day we saw Jason Byrne, who was worth seeing for the fact that he made fun of one of our friends.

All in all, I can report that I am now feeling (mostly) fine, and the flu has not come back to cause any further annoyance since the experimental treatment. However, is laughter the best medicine? Probably not, but it sure seemed to work for me.


Disclaimer: The author of this article does not endorse trying to use laughter as a cure for anything other than being emo. He especially does not recommend trying laughter to cure the following - AIDS, pancreatic cancer, heart disease, and Tom Cruise.

29 days of February (and a little bit of March)

Random notes about Feburary:

• I went to Tropfest. It rained. But it didn't get rained out like it did in 2005.
• I saw Stars, Broken Social Scene, and Feist in the same week. They were incredible.
• I had a game of golf. I shot a 74. From 9 holes. On a par 3. (I suck.)
• February generally moved along pretty quickly.
• Leap years are cool.

Coming up in March:

• Session 1 at UNSW gets under way tomorrow.
• I go to Melbourne for the Easter long weekend for the Comedy Festival and to meet up with some friends. (This is during the mid-session break, which happens after just two weeks of classes, which is very odd.)
• At work, one person is leaving and two people are going part-time, which should generate more work for me.

Stuff that happened in January

I suppose I should do a bit of a status update...

Two weeks after that last post, I began work at UNSW (again, albeit full-time and for a different faculty). I had actually gotten another job offer just before the offer from UNSW came in, and was stressed out or a couple of days while waiting for the UNSW job offer to become official so that I could reject the other one.

Work itself has been interesting enough. I've been reintroduced to Linux, and have been slowly learning the ropes of doing tech support for the network of computers and its users.

I went to four concerts in January, all of which were fantastic. The first was Sufjan Stevens and the Illinoisemakers during the Sydney Festival, then Arcade Fire (twice), and finally Joanna Newsom at the Sydney Opera House's Concert Hall. Joanna Newsom was easily the best of the lot. The first part of the set was performed with the help of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, followed by a more low-key session with some of her older songs as well as a few new ones. It was the first time I had seen anything at the Opera House, and the acoustics were, simply put, perfect. It helped that I was near the middle of the room, which was the "sweet spot" in terms of sound. The entire night was beautiful.

Outside of that, there hasn't really been anything exciting that has happened since the last update. Things have started to stabilize and hopefully will stay like that for a while.

2007 year in review

Okay, not really... but I will address the issue of why there hasn't been an update in the past month and a half.

But first and foremost, I hope that everybody enjoyed their holiday period, and I wish everybody a good 2008.

Number 27: Write a novel

When last I updated, I was (not quite) halfway through a month-long project to cram in as many stupid or cheesy ideas that I could into one 50,000-word long novel. The title of the novel in question was Greatest Hits, it was being written for the month-long event called National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo for short), and it proved to be a lot tougher than anticipated.

Going into the thing, I was full of energy and excitement over writing a novel, and I thought I had it all planned out. Not so. While I had a pretty clear beginning and ending in mind, what I completely neglected was the tough task of writing the middle of the story. In my last update, I was only 16,000 words in when I was halfway through the month, and things were looking grim.

Because of my lack of ideas for how I was to get from point A to point B, the story took on a life of its own. The characters began to do things that I didn't expect, which started to create some interesting plot points. The general theme of the story changed fairly significantly from my initial intent, and made for some great moments as a result.

Eventually, when my slow progress was threatening to end the NaNoWriMo attempt in failure, I decided to simply keep writing and writing whenever I had any free time. Near the end, there were days when I would do in excess of 5,000 words in a single day. It wasn't pretty, but it did the job. Quantity was definitely the objective.

My almost exponential advancement in word count was displayed on my progress chart, which had a pretty healthy start but otherwise petered off with very slight increases until the last ten or so days, when it skyrocketed towards success. With three days to spare, I typed those final words of the story, several hundred words above the target of 50,000, and rejoiced in what I had just accomplished.

With that, I marked off the 27th item in a list entitled "30 things to do before you turn 30", making it the fourth goal that I had achieved since writing up the list on one sleepless night in May.

Work and play

Much of the rest of the next month consisted of me doing one of two things (not counting eating and sleeping): Going to work, or; playing a little MMORPG called Tabula Rasa. I also vaguely remember buying an Xbox 360 at a sale, but it has sadly been largely neglected due to the addictive nature of Tabula Rasa. I've clocked many hours on it so far.

Other things also transpired, such as endless amounts of Christmas parties, an engagement party, karaoke with the family, and a fun new year's eve at Dave's place in Stanwell Park.

Looking forward, looking back

And now it's 2008.

2007 was, simply put, the best year that I've ever had in my life, and I wouldn't take any of it back. But it's time for me to look forward to the year ahead. It'll be a year that will see me looking for a permanent job and trying to get fit, and no doubt will bring a bucket-load of surprises before the calendar ticks over to 2009. I'm excited to find out what this year will bring.

So, happy new year, everybody!

(Editor's note: Thus far in 2008, Adrian has recovered from two hangovers, attended two days of the cricket at the SCG, and has gotten an impressive t-shirt tan.)