John Blade’s Homepage

My fav American security guru has bloggified his cryptogram mail out, so now you can get the goodness of Bruce Schneier’s

I especially like Schneier’s view of the security world with his practical approach and especially his lack of ‘paranoidness’. I find most American’s paranoid beyond comprehension… maybe it’s because I have lived a sheltered life here down under where people don’t give a stuff.

With this in mind I’ll be reading more of Schneier’s comments on his weblog now, probably using Thunderbirds/Firefox’s RSS feeding!

For a while my crazy next door neighbours and I have been planning a trip to head off to Byron Bay (a popular coastal town about 2.5 hours away from Brisbane). I got off work early Friday and planned to head off at about 13:00 with Steve and Franger to meet up with Greg Troy and Timbo who had left the night before to set up camp. Didn’t leave as early as planned, ended up having a few games of Dawn of War with Franger before we headed off. Ahh what a great game.

Anyway, after fuelling up and picking up Steve we burned rubber to Byron Bay. Nice quite drive with lots of cops - probably since it’s school holiday’s. Arrived at the camp site at 18:00ish to find a very drunkard Greg having a merry old time. The camping grounds were packed, and the park itself was ‘restrictive’. I say restrictive because you needed a code for everything, a code for the toilets, a code to let your car in the park, even a code to let your car ‘out’ of the park.
We met up with the rest of the crew and had a good old yarn, when a park supervisor stepped in our camp site and promptly told us we were 1.5 meters out our boundaries and needed to move our camp site inside the boundaries. Now rules are fair enough, but it’s silly when we had talked to the camp site next to us who we we’re budging on to didn’t care about the space.

Timbo had it out with the park guy explaining that we weren’t causing any trouble and that our neighbours were moving the same day we were. Simply put it was moving us for rules alone.
Perhaps the negotiation tactics of Tim weren’t the most diplomatic, for a while the Park guy wanted us to pack up and head off. After arguing for a while we agreed to move our site within our boundaries (note that the site was first erected at 11pm on Thursday night when you couldn’t -see- the boundaries).
There were a few other incidents were we had to ask the park managers for simple things like more car spaces and alike, every encounter was hostile and ultimately fruitless. That’s why I rate ‘First Sun’ as Byron Bay’s most unfriendliest caravan park.

Vowing never to stay at the park again and to not let it affect the rest of the weekend we pushed on to head out to Cheeky Monkey’s. It’s a great little club with cheap meal deals on Friday nights. $2 for a full plate of hot steaming pasta is just what the doctor ordered and unparalleled value for money. Sure we more then compensated with the amount of beer we drunk during the night.
Steve was good value for money as I put a cube of ice in the last of his beer when he was looking the other way. He skulled the rest and started coughing after swallowing a cube whole, that’s when Greg told him it wasn’t an ice cube - it was an American quarter coin. Needless to say, Steve wasn’t a happy chappy and started to drink copious amounts to try and bring the quarter ‘up’ instead of ‘down’. Hopefully he’s realised by now there was never a quarter, but during the weekend he swore there was on.
Lot’s of bar games at Cheeky Monkey’s, with jugs of beer being given away in exchange for challenges like throwing balls in hoops or giving correct change.

After our fill we headed out to check out a few other bars and pubs. The main pub of Byron Bay had the best atmosphere, with a pretty cool live band. I found Sherye at the bar! Haven’t seen her since she broke up with Andy, and also added a little extra spice with Bob (as Bob caught Sherye getting down and dirty with her ex last new years eve) coming down. We had to make sure the two never met, otherwise it might have been a cat fight. I’m pretty sure Troy wanted to see who would win though.

I can see why Richard likes his new girlfriend Daniel so much, they seem like a perfect couple out on the dance floor.
Troy was pretty happy chucking down drinks during the night, lots of cheap drinks made for a good night.
Steve was a crazy maniac that kept running around and spinning - poor bastard kept being kicked out of clubs/pubs just by being himself.
I’m sure Franger had a good time on Friday night, he just seemed quite so-so.
Greg and Timbo headed off to the beach later on in the night to ‘fish’ the way that only pot heads know how to.

Getting back to the camp site we crashed and had a bit of sleep. Ended up freezing my arse off with my crappy thin sleeping bag in the wee hours of the morning. Then I had to remember what the toilet code was when I rushed there. Unlike my fellow campers, I like pissing in my own territory.

After cooking way to much food (everything meat in the Esky) we headed down to the cool blue sky’d beach. Man was it beautiful, nice waves and the sun beating down. Played around making sand castles for a little while and decided that I had to have a piece of the surf action. So I grabbed a boogie board and headed in the surf to meet Greg who was having a great time catching waves. We swapped boards and he passed me his flippers so I could try the ‘pro’ boogie board and get some serious waves. I felt a bit gumby with the big flippers though, couldn’t move my legs as much in the surf.
So after pushing forward for a bit I felt ready for a wave, and woah there was a big one coming my way… oh noes, a dude on a surfboard is heading my way. I dump the board and dive under water - somehow this guy managed to have a direct collision course with me. Made my body underneath the surf, but with my flippers I couldn’t quite get under… BANG.
The surfboard’s fin clipped my left foot, and in doing so ripped the flipper of my foot. I scrambled to find Greg’s flipper, found it and realised my foot was not really 100%. I passed the gear back to Greg and headed into the sand and hopped my way out of the surf and crashed on my back and slept for while with a throbbing foot.

After hopping my way back to the camp site (hard in sand you know) I ascertained the damage to my foot. It was swelling, but looked to be just bruising. Thanks to the flipper I was wearing the flipper didn’t cut me and maybe even helped my bones from breaking.

Really though, it wasn’t a good thing not being able to walk around. Troy bought me some funky hippy ‘anti-bruising’ cream and some bandages to apply pressure. I spent a few hours having ice on and off for 20mins at a time, it was a pain in the butt. The boys figured I needed some help to pick me up, so they fed me 4 Advil pills and a beer - I was well on my way to the land of happiness!

We had a few sun burning issues, since most of us can’t apply sunscreen everywhere. I got a bit pink on my stomach since I crashed on the beach after my foot incident. Franger was a good example of how to not apply sunscreen:

And it did become more red throughout the day.

Coming in the evening we headed out to a local Indian restaurant for some piping hot vindaloo. The foot was good, but cost way too much for the serving sizes. As Timbo said our tummies were satisfied in the end but I couldn’t help to feel a little bit gipped at payment. The icecream afterwards was a nice feeling, though it made it very hard to hop around with all that food and icecream in my stomach.

I piked on going out to the pub, realistically all I could do would sit down on a stool and drink which doesn’t suit my ‘bouncing around’ style. So instead I sat down at the camp site with Franger and Steve and played lots of card games. I think Franger was becoming increasingly frustrated with my lake of card game knowledge (for instance, first time I played poker) - though we did play a few games of Poker, Asshole, Spoons and lots and lots of Cheat. Man cheat was a great game, probably needed some more players as we sought of figured out each other pretty quickly.

The rest of the boys came home fairly early from their night out, probably because the human body can only take so much alcohol consumption after 50 hours+ of drinking. The only thing I can comment on was that when we were sleeping Greg felt he was cold so he brought into the tent a giant gas burner to heat up the place. It worked, it was just weird seeing a giant blue flame inside the tent.
Morning came and we had some bakery food and I managed to drop a bottle of strawberry flavoured milk on the tarp floor - ick. We packed up and cleaned up as best we could.
One of the many purchases Greg made for this trip was a wooden trestle table that kept flexing under all the cooking equipment it held. Sure it only just barely held up to the weekend, but it did have fond memories - and Greg had a great idea that we all signed it.

Note the burn mark, I guess that’s what happens when you test new gas burners.

Overall it was a great weekend, I’m still recovering from my foot and got a cold but it’s all good. Hopefully next time I won’t be so damaged!!!