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It was YB's birthday on Tuesday and, to celebrate, we went to Luna Park on Saturday. As it is her last year in her twenties, she decided it was fitting to go to an amusement park and act like kids, going on silly rides and stuff. I'm not one for rides but Luna Park is such a good opportunity for pictures.

The highlight of the trip was Coney Island; DB pondered that we were old skool... but how can you beat silly mirrors and slippery slides. As we entered the building I raced ahead to take happy snaps of the girls on the various rides and a random guy came up to me, thinking the girls were some kind of celebrities or something, and asked me if I was a professional photographer. No I'm not and no the girls were just having fun. DB and I decided to try out the big kids slide, which is crazy high, as we were about to slide down we questioned what the hell we were doing up there but, after the first go we were immediately back up the stairs for a second go. Fun. Later a group of us tried the Wheel of Joy, where you sat on top of a spinning cone and tried to stay on the longest. I slid off fairly early but DB was challenging for a win when she stacked it and did a full forward roll over her tiara and got a couple of bruises. Awesome!

None of the other rides at Luna Park quite matched Coney Island, except maybe the Dodge 'ems, which is classic. YB decided it was more fun to try to avoid being bumped, which only just made her even more of an appealing target! We also tried some of the games. The first was a sort-of race where you tried to roll balls into holes, each hole makes your chariot fish go a certain distance. Three Bangarra dancers had a go and we got third-last, second-last and last positions. We have shamed our company. Later on JS and I tried the Clowns; I initially thought that high scores are good and felt dejected half way through when I was only on four when we found out that we should actually aim to get a LOW score. Consequently I did pretty well and got a Cat In The Hat, which I gave to JPB. He loved it...

This is the other thing that has been taking up my spare time. It's fucking awesome. I got the PS3 a few weeks ago now and, besides a few old PS2 games that required a PS3 system upgrade to be playable, I haven't really had a true PS3 game until the weekend when I finally decided to fork out the dosh (and, even with the 15% discount, is still a heck of alot of bread). It looked awesome in the shop and, fuck, it looks awesome at home. 'cept that I don't have a high def TV. Which is now high on the wish list!

It's gritty and violent. Racing around improbable circuits, the immediate highlight of the experience is actually stacking it, which happens quite often to begin with. Engines explode, wheels fly off in all directions, and your driver violently slams into the rock face or plunges down the mountain to his or her doom, all in dramatic slow motion. It's wrong but it's oh so cool!

Anyway, I'm still pretty crap at it, JPB is doing better than me but I managed to win a race around the top of a devilish mesa before JPB. I guess by the time I get back from Melbourne he'll be awesome at it.

I haven't previously had much time for the behemoth "Social Networking" site that is MySpace. What's the point when you have your own blog site??? MySpace seemed so limited in it's ability to be customised, unlike a drupal site like this one that is endless in it's scope. A profile box, a list of favourite music and film and stuff, a bunch of friends... it was easy to be quite cynical about it.

Until I found out about div overlays. It's brutal, like hammering a nail with a sledgehammer, but it frees you up to get quite creative. Although in executing it you can run the risk of creating a page that doesn't look anything like a MySpace page, which could confuse your average MySpacer. Retaining some kind of resemblance to a plain ol' MySpace page is still necessary.

So I've gone and customised my MySpace page, which is why I've neglected this site for a while, and now it looks pretty. I used a design that I had previously planned to implement on this site, the mirrorballs, except that considering I haven't been clubbing for a while now it doesn't seem all that appropriate. I may change it to a dance sort of picture perhaps... Anyway, the possibilities with div overlays are endless! I've also done a couple of others: Science of Sleep (the prototype...) and True Stories. The last one I only finished on the weekend and it's real pretty; not hard to do when there's already a design format to follow, I basically didn't stray too far from the existing publicity material. There's been the usual cross-browser problems (don't get me started talking about Mac Internet Explorer 5.x, I don't think it knows what to do with a negative margin, I'm just hoping nobody actually uses that browser anymore especially since MacOSX comes with Safari) but on the whole, I'm happy with it.

Take a look, add yourself as a friend, go nuts in the comment box! Come to the show! And don't forget to drop by mine as well...

I was at the Lord Roberts for a bit of a Lamb Burger when I checked my phone. There's a message from my sister up in Darwin asking me if I was going to be on Dancing With The Stars next week. Almost immediately it dawned on me: DB and WB, the poster children are going to be on DWTS. When the rehearsal director pulled the couple aside just before lunch we all joked that they were in trouble (that they had to go to the Principal's office because they were naughty children, or something like that) and, because they were the poster children, they were simply required to do another publicity thing for True Stories. Nothing special.

I thought that maybe I just missed the announcement that they had this gig, I try not to think too much about work things during lunch, I rang to confirm. Maybe WB was to do Moth with DB; boy there would have been hell to pay if that was the case. But, no, they're going to be doing new choreography, which is far more appropriate considering that we're opening in Melbourne pretty soon.

Anyway, it's pretty exciting for them. And the rest of us have been fielding enquiries from friends and relatives for the last couple of days: "no, we're not all going to be on the show, just the poster children". But we'll all be down at the local pub eagerly watching twist and tangle into the various headstands, lifts and one-arm-cartwheels-on-partner's-bended-leg movements.

Oh, and why on Earth is Tim not in the final??? Him and Nat are easily the best couple in the entire series, there is no justice in the world.

Does anyone know why the harbour has just exploded? I love random fireworks. We had just finished work and were sitting in the office checking emails and stuff when suddenly it sounded like the pier was being bombarded. Racing outside we found the sky ablaze, which lasted for the next half an hour.

Sydney loves a good fireworks display and, besides New Years, this was pretty special. We just don't know what for? It would have been nice to have had some warning so I could have brought decent equipment to work to take pictures.

Well THAT was a fantastic Easter Weekend, wasn't it? I mean, it started out slow (experimenting with customising MySpace pages over Good Friday) but there's nothing like a seventeen hour party to get the festivities going. Actually, after that effort I was pretty much a wreck for the rest of the party season but I had a good time. And its only now that I feel like I've recovered. Easter Tuesday and I'm sweating out all the fun of the weekend and ohmigod I spent the morning standing on my head way to get over it all.

The last couple of weeks I've been suffering from a persistent cold. From uncontrollable sneezing to aches and fatigue, it was hard to get over it after doing full days of rehearsals and by pre-Easter Monday I just had to take the sickie that I should have taken at the start of the whole ordeal. Wasn't really inspired to blog about anything. But thank God I was feeling much better by the weekend, and I guess the alcohol did its thing and killed off the bugs. JPB still has a nagging cough that keeps you up all night though...

I haven't written much about the love of my life lately but everything is going well. It's just a bit too personal to talk too much about us. But he's been absolutely adorable and we've been having a great time. Well past the eighteen month point and still going strong.