Well, it’s been fun. At 10am tomorrow morning, when I stroll into my first lecture of my university life, it will have been exactly 472 days and 22 hours since I was last in an educational institution. That 15 months or so – far from being a forgotten and useless period of time have been incredible for me. Travelling the world, making a difference in Africa, almost dying numerous times, making and consolidating lifelong friendships and just generally taking a break from the rigours of structured life, this last year will forever be a memorable and treasured time for me. However, I do realise it’s time to end. It’s time, shall we say to grow up – to really become part of the adult world. Part of me is yearning to get out and study again, part of me just wants to lie in for just a little bit longer. I suppose this next twenty four hours will really serve as a long-overdue wakeup call. Welcome to the real world, buddy.

Pete

I’ve managed to suprise myself by getting off my arse and making a respectablish template. It looks quite good in firefox, and acceptable in IE, and that’s alright by me.

Anyway for those wondering, that IS me. I was fiddling with photoshop and ‘voila’ I had an idea to cease the banality of the default template. I thought it would be awesome and cool until I actually finished it – it’s a bit meh to be honest but oh well – it’ll do quite nicely for the moment.

Another addition to the blog is Gravatars. Basically it makes the comments looks nicer, and you can use them in any gravatar enabled blog you comment on. Anyway if you want to put your noggin next to your comments, go and signup right now. It’ll take a while for people to OK your picture at first, but after a day or so you’ll beable to be cool like me! Yay!

Anyway I better go and sleep, I would talk about uni today but I can’t be arsed.

Pete

Yes, I know I’ve changed the look of this bloody thing for the third time in about a month – I swear it is neither my fault nor my desire. Anyway for those interested, I’ve just upgraded this thing from WordPress 1.3 (which I swear I didn’t have for that long anyway..) to the new version: 1.5. Don’t ask me what happened to the versions in between…. I don’t know either.

Well, that’s that. I’m off to uni tomorrow to wish Tahli a happy 18th birthday and find out what the whole fuss over university is about. Toodles.

Pete

I know Jake is going to already want to kill me for forgetting – rather conveniently – to ring him until this evening, but now he’s going to have another reason, and it is that I’m going to do what he seems to hate most – label left and right as they are.

I don’t think anyone is going to deny that the ABC is fairly left wing – I mean most of the media is. It’s one of those facts of life. So taking that into account it came as a shock to me today to learn that on last night’s Lateline program, not only was there a report on the ultra-conservative view that the current CO2 emissions have little to no effect on the state of global warming, but the ‘expert’ that Tony Jones interviewed, that shared that particular view was a Russian. The ABC, lord of all things socialist interviewed a CONSERVATIVE Russian to discuss a controversial scientific viewpoint! Talk about a blue moon!

I must say I found the spot was actually very interesting, even when you get over the astonishing fact that the ABC has explored a view that was unconventional. Andrei Illarionov, one of Putin’s economic advisors was the minister interviewed via satellite, and basically he believes that the current rise in global temperatures has nothing to do whatsoever with the current rise in Carbon Dioxide levels in the atmosphere. He mentioned that in the history of earth, air temperature has fluctuated from about 15 degrees above current levels to 10 degrees cooler. Taking that into account, and also remembering that the earth is only just (500 years) out of a mini ice age, he argues that the 0.6° Celsius temperature change of the last 100 years is negligible.

He also put forward that the current fears of rising sea levels are unfounded and equally nothing to do with human activity. Supposedly the worst that can happen in the near future is a sea level rise of between 30 and 60 centimetres. Illarionov argued that within the last several thousand years, without any kind of anthropagenic activity, the sea levels were much higher than that, and so therefore current anthropagenic activity was likely to have a similarly negligible effect on sea levels. He also mentioned that even if that 60 centimetre rise was to happen, London, New York and Moscow would be safe. How lovely – it’s just the rest of us that drown.

But anyway, regardless of how right this Russian is, or how good or bad a point he makes, he has won my respect, and not for his controversial point of view (although that caught my interest), but for a rather clever response to one of Tony’s questions:

TONY JONES: But even George W. Bush, who’s hardly an enemy of the fossil fuel industry, said on September 4, “Greenhouse gases are causing global warming.”

ANDREI ILLARIONOV: I have not heard that Mr Bush is a part of scientific community.

Well, that and his not-quite fluent grasp on english. Russians rock.

Pete

If you have 5 minutes, or 5 hours to spare, try out this little game. You don’t need to install anything and it’s very simple – it’s all done through pictures displayed in your browser. The first two levels are a piece of piss, but then the difficulty hits the roof. I got up to stage 5 (which I’m quite proud of, thankyou very much) with no problems, then gave up with the intention of coming back to it some other time. See if you can do any better, you bunch of slackers.

Pete

Wilson’s Promontory must be one of the nicest places on earth. It’s been a couple of years since I last hiked down there but it’s still the same ol’ prom. Anyway when I agreed, or rather jumped on the chance to go down there it was on the foolish assumption that we’d bum at Tidal River, surf a few days and just generally lounge about on holiday. How wrong I was – some foolish person decided to talk us into going up Mount Oberon for sunset on the first night, yet because we were running late the 3.4km walk up the the summit turned into an almost jog-like struggle straight uphill, before a blind stumble down again in darkness.

What’s worse is that on Wednesday, while I was preparing a relaxing day on the beach, someone decided that it’d be a great idea to do the Oberon-Waterloo Bay-Refuge Bay-Sealer’s Bay-Oberon circuit in an afternoon. Granted it is the most spectacular hike I’ve done ANYWHERE before, and I’ve tried to incorporate at least part of that particular walk into whatever I’m doing each time I go to the prom, but the whole circuit is 37km. That’s usually an overnight hike, but we decided to do it IN AN AFTERNOON. Anyway let’s just say I’m almost incapacitated in soreness, and that’s taking into account that I piked, not doing the whole thing but rather only about 2/3 of the full hike.

It was still nice to be back at the prom – that little stretch of land is such a special place.

Pete

I’m off to Wilson’s Prom for a couple of days with friends and beer. I finally have a chance to test out my new tent, which is actually two years old, yet never been used by myself. Shame on me, I know.

Pete

For those wondering, the St Kilda Festival was quite good. Not that I really saw much – Brett, Marni and I spent most of the time in a Fitzroy St café waiting for a cheese platter – but it was enjoyable, and the organisers couldn’t have wished for better weather.

For those uncouth bastardos out there, the St Kilda Festival is an almost week long celebration of life and music. Culminating in Festival day on the Sunday, there are live bands, food, drink and parties galore all along Melbourne’s famous St Kilda beachfront. Just imagine this:

with 400,000 people smished into it and surrounding areas. It was quite packed Рexplaining the caf̩ stakeout.

Anyway Brett, Marni, Mads and I missed Cat Empire due to Samo leaving in a huff to join everyone else at the main stage, so instead we left our café for a more proper restaurant, before finally retiring to Ellen and Mae’s flat for drinks and silly stuff with the others afterwards. All told quite a day. Especially considering it was free. Ahh the simple joys of life.

Pete

If you’re easily sickened, or don’t like the sound of some idiot larrikan getting his face smacked by a parked car, then don’t click play. Otherwise, watch good ol’ karma have instantaneous effect on some wisearse.

Just click the play button to play. It’ll open in your preferred wmv player.

Stupid bugger. Did I say ouch?

Pete

I was particularly taken by today’s Word Of The Day from urbandictionary.com. So much so, that here it is.

casual sex
1. Sex that wears trousers and a nice looking polo shirt to work and parties.

Usually i dont care about these things, but casual sex was way under dressed at the reception on friday.

That casual sex…. such a prankster.

Pete