Snow Dogs

Since both Shelley and I were off work today, we decided to take a trip up the hill with the dogs. Unfortunately, the wind and snow was pretty fierce above the snow line (around Pollock Pines) so we stopped short of Lake Tahoe. We made it to Kyburz, where the snow was blowing but Zeke was super happy.

Zeker in the Snow, originally uploaded by /k.

Laptop Woes

My laptop (Averatec 3270), which has been flaking out on me for while, finally turned the bend this week. After narrowly surviving my last two months of travel, it developed the annoying tick of turning off the screen backlighting just before christmas. This gradually got worse over the past few days so now it only goes for about 15 minutes before the screen turns black. I thought it was just a operating system setting or bug, but it's been happening whether I boot into Windows or Ubuntu so its got to be hardware. I attempted some open-heart surgery on the little bastard yesterday, but nothing seemed loose or burned. And when I put it back together, the same problem kept coming back.

And since I can't really be without a laptop due to my line of work, I ordered a Black MacBook (as you do). I'm just breaking it in, but it seems pretty good so far. I'm not sure I love MacOS X, but the built-in video camera is pretty cool.

Melbourne Downtown

I took advantage of my last full day in Melbourne (at least for this year) and hiked to the end of St Kilda's Pier. There's a nice little cafe with views of downtown Melbourne through the marina. Check out Flickr's cool geotag view for more photos from this same spot.

Bad Dog

I saw this t-shirt design over on Threadless and thought of Louiedog. Unfortunately, sold out for men.

Pub Crawl

While I was waiting to catch up with my friend Niall on Saturday, I had to scout out a pub for our meeting place. Luckily, Sydney actually publishes brochures on their pubs:We eventually ended up at the 3 Wise Monkeys, my favorite Irish ex-pat establishment.

Sydney Weekend

I made it up to Sydney for the weekend so that I could catch up with Niall and a few friends before my meetings on Monday and Tuesday. I won't bore you with yet another picture of the Sydney Opera House, but I did like the bridge today.If you look closely, you can see climbers up on the top of the span.

Melbourne via Hollywood

My first leg flying to Melbourne is almost always a short hop from Sacramento to Los Angeles. Since I usually fly on Saturday night, its a pretty quiet flight but usually weird. Sacramento is the closest big airport to Lake Tahoe and Napa so you get some strange people on the flights. So when I rocked up to the gate on Saturday seeing a 6'10" women standing at the counter didn't seem out of the ordinary. I'm sure she was a Sacramento Monarch or LA Spark. What was surreal was the motorcycle jacketed scruffy guy sitting next me. While I was sitting there, some guy comes up to him and says "I really like the show." He thanks him and kinda zones back out again. He sat a row or two in front of me on the flight. I pretty sure it was Patrick Dempsey from Grey's Anatomy. That's about as interesting as my travel gets.

P.S. For those wondering why he was sitting in Economy class -- this was a SkyWest flight on the CanAir small jet. There is no first class.