This saturday was another good long day, just like last week, starting out with me having dinner and watching "Big Fish" with Benedicte. The movie was really nice, a welcome change from all the action and horror movies I've seen lately, but still with a decent story and the classic happy ending, and of course the company was great :-)

Tommy has recently gotten in touch with some guys playing Indoor-Bandy(aka. Floorball) here in Brisbane, so today I joined him there to get some excercise and have some fun. This appears to be the only organized Indoor-Bandy group in Queensland, and they are just getting started so its all still on the friendly level without any of that unhealthy seriousness of competition. We are playing every Wednesday at 6:30 in the gym at All Hallows school, just across the road from Cathedral Place in the Valley. If you want to join us for a game it is just a matter of showing up in suitable clothing with $5 for the gym-rent, and you are set to play!

Yesterday was awesome!
Got up real early to catch high-tide at Tweed River with the PADI-course. Everything went smoothly with out two dives and the exam afterwards, so now I'm finally a certified open-water diver! We managed to squeeze in both dives at high-tide, so we could finish up early and get back to Brisbane which meant I just had a change of clothing and then went to the Swedish Society pool-party at Bunk! Not too many people had showed up, but with Geoff, Tommy and Rune around we had plenty of fun!

LucasArts have recently said that they were producing followups to several of the really big Adventure-game hits of the 1990's. A year ago the message came out that Full Throttle 2: Hell on Wheels had been cancelled. A few weeks ago we got the same message concering Sam & Max 2: Freelance Police right out of the blue. Gamers of the world unite! We can't let them get away with cancelling a widely anticipated game just months before its release when everything was going according to plan! Help Save Sam & Max!

If you take a look on the right-hand menu, you will see a new box named "Right Now". I've just written two PHP scripts that fetch current weather data and exchange rates from WeatherUnderground and the Norwegian National Bank and displays it on my site.

It will be nice to have all this info in a single place, and I hope you like it too. In time I will probably add some more live-updated features there as well. For an even cooler setup with graphs and more details, check out Nils Dahls homepage!

Today we did our two first Open Water dives, in Tweed River at the Gold-Coast just across the border to New-South Wales. Since the river is greatly affected by the tides, we could only dive right when the tides changed. Since the low-tide change occured at 8:30a.m we had to get up at 5a.m in the morning if we were to be ready when the tide turned, *yawn*.

We had to get in the water from some rocks at a molo, and of course I managed to cut several fingers when crawling down. I quickly decided that I needed to get me some divers-gloves, so when we were re-filling our air-tanks at a diveshop between the dives I bought a pair of Mirage Honeycomb gloves. Not only was the price really good to start with, but I even got 25% off since we were training with QUT-UWC!

The dives were nothing special, with the first one having lousy visibility as it was low-tide, but it really didn't matter as we only practiced some skills. The second one was a quite good adventure dive, but only lasted about 20 minutes. Nevertheless, diving is fun! and next saturday we'll do the two final dives needed to get certified! :-D

The second of the big parties held by the Norwegian Student Club, namely the Rivercruise, was held last night. About 300 guests boarded the party-boat at 7:30 getting ready for a 3 hour cruise on the brisbane river, with heaps of free food and drinks all the way. There was a band playing as well, but I don't think anyone paid much attention to them. People were much to busy eating and drinking and having fun together!

After landfall we got into some buses and were driven over to Fridays for a great afterparty. Once again, heaps of fun despite the drinks not beeing free anymore :) I think I ended up going home around 4a.m, but only after getting one of the amazing hot-dogs they sell from a small shack just outside Fridays, definatly the best in the city!

Now I've installed MT-Blacklist and upgraded my Movable Type installation, so hopefully there will be no more commentspam on my site for a while. I was getting a bit annoyed from having to delete a couple of spam-comments every day, but now all is peace and quiet again! Ahh...

Today I got together with Runar to make a traditional Norwegian dish: Fårikål, which translated to english is Mutton in cabbage. It's real easy to make, you just put lamb and cabbage in layers with flour salt and pepper in a big casserole, and cook it for 2-3 hours. Serve with cooked potates and enjoy! I really like it, but it turned out that Australia is a bit too hot for this kind of fatty and solid meals. Especially now with summer temperatures around 35 degrees, you really want to eat something a bit lighter then...

After dinner I went to the Network Services lecture which I really enjoyed last week, but of course the lecturer was a new one, and one that sucked. This of course means that I could just as well read the lecture notes at home, so I left and went to see 'Once upon a time in Mexico' instead. Great movie! Lots of fun and good action, but a bit too tightly cut so the story was somewhat hard to follow. Still a definate recommendation if you liked El Mariachi and Desperado.

The last couple of days have been really packed, starting with lots of lectures in the beginning of the week, then the scandinavian pub crawl, then Team Antonsen stand-up on friday with a short afterparty, before I yesterday morning had to get up at 7a.m to go diving. We were to have a training session in the Yeronga Swimming Pool, to acquire all the neccessary skills before going out in real open water. It was a lot of fun actually, but it took a long time so we ended up spending about 8 hours mostly in the water near the surface, doing lots of swimming and various skills. After such a day you are usually quite beat, but in addition it was really sunny so we also got a good sunburn that makes lieing on your back a -real- pleasure. Sunblock doesn't really work when you are in the water all the time, but I guess thats the price to pay for getting certified down here. At least I don't have any plans today except relaxing at home and maybe watching a movie with some friends later!

Last night the biannual Scandinavian Pub Crawl took place, and despite a record high of attendees last time there was even more partygoers this year!

As usual we all started out at the Port Office, had the first couple of drinks and was split into groups by our nametag colours. Each group then went on a pubcrawl to three different clubs, for me this included Pig'n'Whistle Riverside, Gilhooleys Riverside and Jorge, before everyone met up again at City Rovers for an awesome afterparty. The crawl itself was really great, but City Rovers wasn't quite big enough for that many people, which made it overcrowded and difficult to find people. A great night proven by my headache this morning o_O

But the parties are not over yet! Tonight a pair of famous norwegian comedians, the Team Antonsen, are going to have a stand-up show here in Brisbane as part of their Australian Tour. The show however is in norwegian, which some might find a bit strange for a show held in Australia, but despite this more than 300 advance tickets have been sold just in Brisbane, so they even had to schedule an extra sitting! I really hope this will be fun, but if not there always is the afterparty at Jorge :-D

Yesterday marked the start of Semester 1 - 2004, and for once it was a really good one. I originally belived that I did not have any lectures on monday, but upon closer inspection of my unit-details I located a lecture in Network Services from 7p.m - 9p.m. This meant new plans for the night, but for once that wasn't a bad thing!