Yeah, I watch the Hunger Games a few weeks back but didn’t bother to review it (the only thing I have to say about it is, what the hell was with the funeral in the middle of the game? No one would think to kill her while she was crying about that?), any way, I saw Dark Shadows last week, and thought I better post something as I haven’t posted anything for a while.

It is based on a 1960′s soap opera starring Johnny Depp, Eva Green, and Helena Bonham-Carter (is there a film she doesn’t do with Johnny Depp?). The main theme being that Angelique (Eva Green) is a witch and spurned lover of Barnabus Collins (Johhny Depp), and so she takes her revenge on him by killing his loved ones and turning him into a vampire. The film had that weird and wacky and colourful Tim Burton/Johnny Depp look and feel about it. The film to me, didn’t have much that stood out and followed a pretty predictable story line. The standard line of jokes from Johnny Depp’s character were ok, but nothing spectacular, mostly what you’d expect from someone that had been trapped in a time warp for 200 years. The ending was bizaare to say the least, but with this kind of film, who knows where else they could have gone. We also had to sit really close to the screen which didn’t help, but the film was pretty stock standard in the end.

Picture taken from wikipedia.

Not much to this post, over Easter went down to Port Melbourne for a quick wander, didn’t get to stay until after the sun set so no pier at night long exposure shots. Had a Mr. Whippy iced cream which is not as good as a Mcdonalds cone, I’m going to have to be honest there. Then last weekend we went down to the Mornington Peninsula National Park for a little walk, then down to Somers for a look around. These are the pictures that made the dtraCorp cut. Here’s a question, why don’t any sites/blogs/CMS’ provide animated gif thumbnails? The last picture I uploaded here is actually an animated gif but the thumbnail doesn’t show it. It’s not difficult, in fact, I implemented on my old site, and the classes are available on phpclasses.org, do a search cos I can’t remember what the class was called.

pleme

Good Friday was a warm day down here in Melbourne so we decided to use the day to go for another training walk around the Dandenong Ranges National Park. This week we went for the Olinda Falls and Cascade Track walk, it’s not a long walk by any stretch of the imagination, a bit less than 3km, but it does go through some bushy forest where the trail is quite narrow and the ferns and other plants encroach all over the path. There were even a couple of trees that fell down and blocked the path, the falls aren’t really a part of the trail, but that’s where the Cascade Track starts so we had a look at the falls as well as I’m always interested in taking photos of waterfalls.

Olinda Falls

The waterfalls themselves aren’t particularly big or spectacular but with a bit of work, any running water can be made to look quite beautiful. We spent about half an hour admiring the falls from both the upper and lower viewing platforms before venturing on to the trail. It’s probably only about 2km, half of it being downhill, but it’s not the friendliest trail I’ve ever walked on. I guess the threat of leeches was the main issue during our walk, and with two girls and one guy (the other one hah!) carrying on about the cockatoos screeching and the horrible leeches, it probably took a while longer than it needed to . I didn’t stop and take any photos of the dense bush that inhabits the trail but rest assured, the trail is not wide enough to walk two abreast (especially with the fear of leeches attaching to your body if you come into contact with any of the vegetation).  After you finish going down hill and leave the Cascade Trail, it’s a short up hill walk along the road back to the Olinda Falls Picnic Ground, the trail is pretty much exactly as described in the link above just follow Doughty’s Road when returning to the picnic grounds. With knowledge of the leeches it’s probably a good idea to wear pants when walking this trail, especially if it might be wet at all, we went when it was probably at it’s driest (without there being a drought) and saw a few tiny leeches, but the down hill trail and amount of vegetation would make me think that a very treacherous and slippery walk would be waiting after some rain.

So I’ve been waiting till the end of the season to get League Pass cos that’s when the Spurs play a lot of games and I was thinking of getting the playoff package too and finally got around to logging into the international league pass site (or nba.tv as it is now known). Little did I know that the package structure had changed, the last time I got ILP it was possible to get on a monthly option (you still had to manually opt out by sending an email to customer service, no way to do it in your account yourself) to see all games, the only option that I could see that seemed remotely close to that was the regular season and playoffs package.

San Antonio Spurs

But the wording is a bit confusing (if you are like me and remember having a monthly option any way), you can pay for the regular season and the playoffs either in one lump sum or four easy installments. I thought that might have been the one but it still didn’t seem right, considering it said four installments and the fact that there is only one month left in the season. So I checked out the Customer Service FAQ page, and apparently there is no option to pay even a pro-rated amount to just get the rest of the regular season. I didn’t even think that the monthly option was that great, I always thought that the model should have a pay-per-view option, or even pay for a specific day rather an having to commit for a whole month, but the NBA in all their wisdom went the other way and force you to subscribe to the whole season. Especially during this shortened, fatigue-riddled season of low quality basketball every second night, they force you to pay for a whole season that never was! Any way, I’m not paying for eight months worth of viewing that only lasts me for one month, I only want to watch the interesting part, the end of the season. Lame, Stern, lame, you need to quit and let someone else do a better job.

Picture taken from my.nba.com.

Having gone through the process of these two recently I thought I’d mention the likes and dislikes I had for each. Actually it will be pretty much just what I hated about both. I’ll start with Jetstar which has just a couple of things but both are to do with the all mighty dollar which automatically makes them high priority issues. First is to do with the earning of QANTAS frequent flyer points, it is very confusing to work out which flights actually earn these points, and then it says if you pay an extra amount on an airfare you can earn points, but if you read the conditions it says you can earn points on flights with flight numbers starting with JQ (and something else), but then why do you have to pay extra to earn these points, I couldn’t work it out, so I just paid the extra fee to make sure that the points were earned (they were a requirement for the person I was buying the airfares for). Stupid confusing pricing schemes, that’s why I’m giving up on QANTAS frequent flyers, I’ll use up my points when I get enough and then not bother trying to earn them any more. The second and more annoying issue was the booking fee, it’s not stated anywhere that there is a booking fee, and then at checkout time a magical little field pops up with a $30 booking fee (this was for a domestic flight, so it’s more for international), what this fee is for I have no idea, but it’s super annoying and just a plain rip off. I’ll avoid anything Jetstar or QANTAS from now on if I can.

Singapore A380

Now the world’s “best” airline (?), my girlfriend swears by them, I haven’t flown with them since 2006 (they were quite good from what I remember) mainly because they’re not a part of the QANTAS alliance, but that’s all going out the window now, I don’t give a shit about QANTAS. I’m excited for this trip we’re going on because I will get to go on an A380 (pictured) for the first time (despite all the issues), and also because if it sucks it’s my girlfriend’s fault . Their web site is very flash heavy which already makes it quite bad, so there’s a lot of loading and slow functionality on a normal computer (macbook 2008 core 2 duo 4GB ram), I wasn’t that impressed just selecting the origin, destination, and dates, but moved on. The way the price page is set up is quite good, they’re all a bit like that now, although my favourite is the one with the grid showing the different start and end dates with the prices. The thing I found annoying was that it was quite slow to choose seats and navigate between pages which eventually caused my session to time out, and I had to start over from the start (this was also affected by my indecision ), but there is a warning about session time out at payment time, but not while you’re selecting the seats. So what happened next? I managed to get through everything in a timely fashion, but the seats that I selected in the timed out session were now occupied so I had to choose different ones. I had a feeling that they were only occupied because of my previous session so I checked it again the next day and as I guessed (at least for one of my selections), the seats I originally wanted were now free. OK, rant over, there was no booking fee, everything was straightforward with Singapore (apart from the bit of slowness) and no confusing wording, I’ll give my two cents worth on any future flight bookings, top deck of A380, I’m looking forward to that!

Picture stolen from the singapore airlines site.

This place opened up in Thornbury sometime last year, it was really close to my old flat but since I’ve now moved, it would be on a very rare occasion that I get to try it out. I was in the area last Friday and looking for something to eat with a couple of hours to kill. Read about this place in the age so headed over to see if we could get a table (for two). Fortunately it was very early (before 6pm) and so the place was empty and we sneaked in a table before the place filled up. The cuisine is middle eastern (Lebanese I think) style pizza with modern flavours. There are two types of pizza, Pide and the other one I can’t remember, Pide is the traditional style round circular shape of pizza, while the other one is a canoe/boat style pizza which is a novelty, but I have to say, I prefer the normal shape because the base was nicer, crunchy and not too thick while the canoe pizza was too dough-y.

Emir Bashir II

We got the Bosphorous (canoe style) which has prawns on it among other things, it would have been nicer if it was on a normal pizza base I think, the base was just too soft and thick for my liking. The second pizza we got (because the first was not filling enough) was the Emir Bashir II, this one I really liked, very yummy and the base was just right, it had Turkish sausage, olives, tomato, parsley and hummus (cheese probably would have been better but I’m like that). We tried the cured beef for starters although it didn’t come out before the first pizza, it was nice but I didn’t think it was anything special. Definitely worth a try if you’re in the area, why are all the good pizza places in the north?!?!?

Well, having used the Vittoria Randonneurs for a few thousand kilometres in all sorts of conditions, I had quite high expectations for the Rubino Pros but I have to say that they have definitely failed to impress, and in fact I would say that they have definitely under whelmed. Within 1000 kilometres, I have now had two tyres fail on me, not normal puncture situations but a rip in the tyre causing a big tear in the tube. I don’t know how tyres are constructed especially not folding bead tyres, but it just looks like the seam has come apart or something. I discovered the latest tear today when I went to pump up the tyres and couldn’t believe it, I’d only ridden the bike once in the past few weeks and only for about ten kilometres. So I put a new tube in and tested pumping it up only to see a bulge in one section of the tyre, exactly the same thing that happened last time. So as good as the tyres look, it seems the durability of the tyres is terrible which is not a good thing because I already invested in several other sets, red and white ones for both my bikes . Let’s just hope that the previous bunch I got were from a bad batch or something and the latest ones I bought are okay, but certainly my expectations have been lowered significantly.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Watched this a few weeks ago now and finally now have gotten around to posting the review, been kinda hectic around here the past couple of weeks. No, I haven’t read the book, nor have I seen the Swedish version, so watching the film was basically all I had to go on (apart from knowing that the book was some sort of thriller which is why I stayed away from reading it). I’m going to step away from writing about the plot/story so much as I’ve been told that’s not what a review should be about, so instead I’ll comment on some aspects of the film I found interesting.

The start of the film was a bit of a blur, I couldn’t understand most of what was being said, so I wasn’t sure if I was watching the English version or not, Daniel Craig just seemed to be mumbling a lot in the first ten minutes or so, I honestly could not make out anything he was saying. And some more on the speech of the characters, I have often wondered this about movies that are set in foreign countries but where English is the language of the actual film, why do they speak with accents? In reality, the characters wouldn’t be speaking English, Daniel Craig wasn’t speaking with an accent, so why was Rooney Mara? I can understand it if it’s a film based in a foreign country and the language of the film is English, if someone speaks with an accent to signify that that character is from a different country or something, but in this film everyone is meant to be Swedish. So if everyone is Swedish, but everyone is speaking English, why bother having some with English accents, and some with Swedish accents? I don’t have the answers for those question, so I’ll move on.

There was quite a bit of sex in the film (I already said I haven’t read the book, and apparently there’s even more in the book, so I guess the film was toned down even), I just wonder if there was actually any point to it all, the fat government official guy, what was the point of that? Was that a bit of character build up or was that just the author’s fantasy? I don’t know, but it didn’t seem relevant to me, pretty much that whole side of the story didn’t seem particularly relevant (yeah, we know she’s been mistreated and hard done by for years, that’s why she is the way she is). Any way, also I’d like to make the point that it was a shame that the character Rooney Mara was playing looked the way she did, she looks a lot better in normal make up and dress, that’s all I’m saying .

To be honest, I think I had one other thing to comment on about the film, but it was a while ago and now I’ve forgotten, it might have had to do with the lovey dubby ending, but I can’t remember and that makes this review quite pathetic, but I haven’t posted anything here for a while so I thought I better post something before this blog is forgotten forever.

Picture from wikipedia.

So I got back on Monday after a flight delay that left us in Hong Kong and Shanghai for a forgettable day. Apparently Iceland received record snowfalls this Winter, so we didn’t get to see the best of an Icelandic Winter, oh well I was expecting snow any way, and we did get a couple of clear days to see around Reykjavik at least. I wouldn’t exactly call Reykjavik a city, it’s more like a town considering that you can walk from the suburbs to downtown in 25 minutes, but it has all the amenities, didn’t see the night life at all, but that’s not a big deal considering I’m currently sober . What I found a little amazing was that even in Patreksfjordur, population about 1000, they have proper 3g coverage and broadband internet, it’s about as remote as you can get in Europe I would think, and yet they pretty much have all the amenities. I did have a pretty scary ferry ride from the Westfjords to Snaefell before driving along some dark and dusty roads back to Reykjavik. I am thinking that I’ll go back in the future, probably in late Spring/early Summer time, although I would like to go again perhaps in the late Autumn/early Winter to give myself another chance to see the northern lights, in a better location with a clearer sky, that would still be ideal.

As for Paris, in the little time I spent there and without actually getting around the downtown area too much and especially not seeing the night life, I could tell that it was a place that I would definitely really like. It’s such a busy place and the people (especially the girls) are very good looking , they must be so vain, or just really lucky. There’s no shortage of anything it seems, although the Vietnamese food is certainly not as good as Melbourne from what I tried. The metro system is great, just like the one in Mexico City, and they have use-once tickets as well as the re-usable card, they know what they’re doing. Winter there was not as cold as I expected, there were a couple of cold days right around 1-2 degrees, but then the two days before we left were about 10 degrees and positively balmy! Any way, I bet it’s an especially magnificent city in the warmer weather.

And now the rant, bloody Air France, and bloody QANTAS, I can tell you, I will not be flying Air France again if I can help it, and I won’t be flying QANTAS unless they have super special deals that are so cheap as to be insane not to buy, also I have frequent flyer points that I will need to use rather than waste. Air France got all the passengers on to the plane on time, and then sat there waiting (for half an hour with no information), then drove out to the runway and waited again for half an hour before finally notifying passengers of a maintenance check that needed to be done, then finally after two hours we finally took off. Initially they were telling us on the plane that we would arrive only thirty minutes later than the initial arrival time, so passengers with connecting flights need not worry. After a bit of sleep, and checking the flight route and destination details, it became apparent that we were not going to arrive in time for our flight, and in fact we were arrived exactly two hours late, ten minutes after our particular connecting flight was due to leave, so they made up no time at all. On the plane, the cabin crew told us to go talk to the ground staff for further information, so a bunch of Aussies with connecting flights to Melbourne and Sydney were possibly expecting that we’d walk through and be lead to our boarding gates by someone only to find that our QANTAS flights had already left. So Air France, who were operating a flight for QANTAS from Paris to Hong Kong did not do anything to help those passengers that had connecting flights with QANTAS to get on their flights on time. Instead they provided us with $90HKD worth of food vouchers for the airport and half a night’s stay in the airport hotel. Air France obviously working with their partner airlines only, provided us with airfares to get back to Melbourne, but not until over 24 hours after we were meant to.

So we were stuck boarding a second rate plane with China Eastern Airlines to Shanghai bright and early in the morning and spending the whole day there until a flight in the evening back to Melbourne. OK, China Eastern Airlines didn’t actually seem so bad up until then, apart from the service being a little abrupt. They were running on time and everything, and with a whole day in town we decided to head out to see what Shanghai was about, I didn’t see anything that I would say will warrant a return visit. Any way, our flight was meant to leave Shanghai at 8.15pm, but it was eventually delayed by over and hour and we eventually took off, they also never gave us any indication of how long it would take or what time we would arrive in Melbourne. So QANTAS having bailed on us,is now pretty much on my boycott list, and Air France, I should have known, I guess we’re fortunate to be back in Melbourne in one piece.

But the rant is not over! For some reason, the airport in France (Terminal 2 at least) seem to think that it’s a good idea to only have one person working the departure desks (and arrival desks when we arrived) which makes for a lot of waiting before you can enter or leave the country by plane, get to the airport early! Maybe it has to do with the financial crisis and they are cutting costs. Now rant over, and we can look at some pretty pictures! I will hopefully start posting pictures on flickr this weekend.

So, another year over, another one just begun, I spent the past four days up in the Westfjords, which were very scenic although I didn’t get to see much of them because of the weather, also I was kind of working. So I was stuck inside most of the time, and didn’t get to go up the mountain roads and get some good views during the day, another time perhaps, the views I’m sure are spectacular. I was staying in Patreksfjordur with a lovely family working on a book about French sailors in Iceland to be published. Anyway, we’ve got three more days here in Reykjavik before heading back to Paris for a day, and then back home, the weather hasn’t been the greatest recently, but it’s Winter so there’s not much you can do. I’m not going to babble on here, just post some pictures of the craziness of Iceland.