Two things have occurred to me; it is now 2008, and I’ve been writing on a blog for nearly 5 years (a year of which I’ve only got text backups of what I wrote, the rest is sitting over here.) It was around this time two years ago that I bought my domains and hosting and started to write on this blog aswell. I remember going through four or five layouts before finding one i liked. I stuck with that the year after high school, and it was only this year that I decided to redesign my site yet again. Not many people saw these images, but I was throwing around ideas like this one and this one, both I’m glad I never bothered to convert to HTML and use that as my layout. Thinking of things like that made me go through old photos I’ve taken (whether random photos or of things), and I found this photo of my desk. That is a really, really old photo. Taken late 2004 when I had just moved into my room, I had that much sitting on my desk. Absolutely fuck nothing. In the span of three years, I’ve managed to collect this much crap. Any wonder why the temperature in my room is always a lot more than what it is outside in the hall.

I’ll stop going down memory lane for a bit and think about what I did before Christmas. Seeing as Nick returned for the Christmas holidays, it was about time that a Nick-party was thrown. Unlike most parties held at his house, there was no warning that it was happening, just the day before message type of thing. I don’t think it was going to matter that there weren’t going to be many people, there was enough. The usual crew turned up, and honestly it felt like there wasn’t a giant 12-month gap from when we last had a party there. No one had changed a bit, and we were all still sitting around dribbling the same shit we had the last time we were sitting around getting drunk. It’s incredible. You can spend 12 months not doing one thing, and the moment the opportunity arises to do that one thing, it’s like you hadn’t stopped doing it. I dunno. I think we all managed to clear out by 3am sometime, and we definitely weren’t at the stage we used to be, but it was still an awesome fun night. One thing we didn’t miss though, was the abundance of gatecrashers we normally find at a Nick-party. I suppose it doesn’t help that not many people were there, but it was still nice not having those random people coming in to drink alcohol, although we did still have random people coming, they just had friends who knew Nick.

What I was most looking forward to after Nick’s party though, was the fact that I had bought my new computer. Previously, I had been spending most of my time doing most of my photo editing and stuff like that on my Mac, plugged into my monitor and keyboard and that. The computer I was using (keyword, was!) would have been 3 years old (judging by the photo I posted further up, probably a lot longer than that.) I had decided, fuck it, I need a brand new computer. I’ve done this before though, decided to buy a new computer, get the parts ready to order and then have pre-buyers remorse. Possibly the worst thing I could get. But no, I stuck with it this time (because my old computer decided it was going to reboot every week or so, biggest pain in my ass.) After umming and ahhing, I put in a quote at Scorptec (and saved like $60, yay freight!) and bought it. Originally I was a little worried though, because I had decided to buy it 2 weeks before Christmas and that I was waiting on a couple of parts to become ‘available’, it wasn’t helping my cause. Eventually it was shipped out the Wednesday before Christmas. Oh god, I was praying that it would arrive by Friday, or the very latest Monday. After the longest weekend possible, Monday comes and I head off to work. I come home from lunch time to find that my parcel was ‘on board’ with the delivery guy. Fuck yeah! My only slice of bad luck was that my parents were home. Needless to say, the time between when I got back to work to when it was time to go home was the longest ever. I got home and there it was, sitting in the driveway. Fuck yeah! I then proceeded to spend the whole afternoon (even while suppose to be going to the Warp Brothers that night) putting together my monstrosity. When I ordered my parts though, I kind of knew my case that I had bought was going to be huge (it holds 12 hard drives, that should be a pretty clear indication you’d think.) What I didn’t expect though, was that it was going to only just fit under my desk. I’ve maybe got 2 inches of clearance between the case and my desk. But honestly, best money spent ever.

It is now Christmas Eve. For another year. Seriously, 2007 went past so quick (just as I was getting used to writing the date so good too.) Much like anything though, Christmas Eve meant that people would stop stupid-Christmas shopping and I’d have a couple of days off. Yay! After getting my computer all sorted and running, Daryl and I headed out into town into Discovery to see the Warp Brothers. Being international DJs and everything, it definitely was worth heading in. We got there and ended up meeting with Nick and Terry. Halfway through their set though, I did look up randomly at the DJ’s and laughed when I saw one of them drinking Vodka straight from the bottle. Definitely made me laugh. Not only that, but they had started off slow (for something that’s fast paced anyway) and by the end of their set, they were playing hard-dance, and I was liking it. It made my feet move. Fast. We didn’t end up leaving until something like 4am, but it was still worth it. What was cool though, was while I was standing around waiting to leave, I got a shot of one of the DJ’s doing something, and another local DJ (Adrian Zac) got my attention and brought me up to the stage behind the DJs and I got some photos there, which was pretty awesome. I’ve got some more to say about that, but not yet!

Christmas day rolls by without any hitch, apart from me getting home a few hours before my parents decided they wanted to get up. We were having lunch around our place, which is unusual. Normally what happens is we head to our neighbours for lunch and end up spending the whole day there drinking and eating food all day. Generally an awesome day to spend. This year, it was at our place, which wasn’t so bad. I mean, in between getting bored of sitting around, I’d come upstairs and do random shit on my computer. Either way, by the time we had finished (it was around 6pm when I come back to my room), I was sitting in my room fiddling with my new computer. When I mean fiddling, I mean trying my hardest to not fall asleep while I was waiting for drivers to install. This was at 8pm. It was pathetic. I eventually gave up what I was doing, flicked my monitors off an passed out on my bed only to wake up 3 hours later incredibly hungry. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t get back to sleep until 3am that morning either, so I didn’t win either way.

The following days after Christmas were boring, just me wasting time in front of my computer, rather boring either way. New Year’s Eve suddenly come about, and it was Monday afternoon and I had no idea what I was going to be doing that night. I knew I was going to be welcoming 2008, but fucked if I knew where or how. After work, I went around to Nick’s place to pick up my thongs, initially Daryl and I were going to head over to Boyd’s place, stay there for a while and head into town to meet Nick and that. Well, what ended up happening was completely missing Boyd’s house, going to Michael’s because that’s where everyone was and not leaving there until around 9:30 to ‘beat the swarm of people’ in the lineups. Well, we got into town and it was quiet as fuck. What I did do though, is I went and parked in Daryl’s government spot in the Mitchell Center (the tallest building we’ve got) as I wanted to take some photos of down the street on New Year’s Eve. After that, we wandered down to Discovery and slowly made our way in (there was a line-up of maybe 15 people.) We got inside and just inside the door there, I saw Guy (who I had met last night, who is one of the manager’s at Discovery.) After a quick conversation, I walked into Disco taking photos for them. Woo! Apparently they didn’t have a photographer, so I was asked to take photos for that night. There were so many people there that night too, it was insane. Mind you, at some times it felt like every other Saturday night, but it was still incredibly busy. What I didn’t notice though, was people kept complaining about last year having to wait around an hour to get to the bar and a drink. Every time I went up to the bar I managed to get served straight away. Maybe it’s just my good looks and boyish charms (…Ha.) There were two DJs on for New Year’s Eve, the first to play was DJ Lenno, who was a pretty cool bloke. The other DJ was Alan Thompson. I had seen DJ Lenno before, but I’d never seen Alan Thompson before, it wasn’t a bad set either, so it wasn’t money wasted. After his set though, I was sitting down changing my lens at the back of the DJ stand thing and he come up and asked about where my photos were going to be. I ended up having a good ‘ole chat with the guy. All in all, it was a pretty good night. Definitely glad I went out.

Don’t think I’ve finished flooding you with images. I’m far from that. Before I get to more images though, the past week or so we’ve had rain all week long, and not just pansy little rain like we’re used to. No, we’ve moved up to constant downpours. Apparently we had a cyclone forming just near us, and it had decided to hit us on Friday of last week. Yay cyclone you think, no, this cyclone was a pansy-bitch. It was only just a category 2 (which, for people who don’t know the categories, that’s fairly low, only ~100Km/h winds) and of all times to hit, it was after midnight on the Friday night. The most that it had done? It knocked a whole buttload of trees down around the place. That’s about it, oh, and it made a fuckin’ mess of leaves on our lawn. Great. To celebrate the ending of the cyclone though, Daryl and I went out the Saturday night (Vandalism were on.) We ended up meeting Nick, and Hayley and most people later on in the night, but only to lose them later. It wasn’t too bad though, I mean, it was different (they had two DJs mixing at the same time, and a singer.) It probably would have been better if I had slept the night before, but I hadn’t, so oh well!

There. I’ve finished. I don’t think I’ve missed out on anything completely important. I wanted to include a whole bunch of shots I liked the most in here, but I think I was starting to go a little overboard on the images. It will be best to check the rest of the galleries out though. I implore you.

• Nick’s Christmas Return
• Warp Brothers
• New Year’s Eve: Alan Thompson and DJ Lenno
• Vandalism