One of my favorite song at the moment, "Into the Night" by Santana and Nickelback.
(link)

Steve, super-villain, tell us all about it!
http://ubergeek.tv/article.php?pid=54

PS (Pre Scriptum): Most picture are links to bigger picture, I thought it a good idea, tell me what you think!
Also, towards the end, I got lazy and just used the build in image editing / resizing feature of Live Writer, comment welcome too!

Recently I met Caroline in Alice Springs for a 3 days tour around Uluru (aka Ayer Rock) with a tour aptly named the Rock Tour. It cost us AU$ 295 for 3 days, 2 (cold) night out in a swag and food (plus the touring around as well, of course). It's cold in June, although the worst is August I have been told. That is, the worse cold, it's unbearably hot in summer.

First it should be known that Uluru is not the only "mountainous" formation sprouting in the middle of the desert. There are many of them, such as the Olgas or King's Canyon (maybe around here). We visited all three of them with this tour.

Plus Alice Springs itself is in a beautiful valley like settings with narrow high ridges all around.

I was to met Caroline and 2 of her friend Aurelie (Coming from France) and Charlene (coming from France as well, but she met Caroline in the Gold Coast where she was having long holiday) in Alice Springs, I was coming from Darwin, they from Melbourne, here they are:

Charlene left, Caroline top right and Aurelie bottom right. Before this trip I only knew Caroline, who I met while I was living in Brisbane. By the way this is a picture from Kings Canyon

The first picture I have of Alice Spring is ...

An elephant!

Ok, I confess, it is not really from Alice, it was Charlene's or Aurelie's pic from their previous excursion in some zoo down south, but I thought it would be a nice surprise!

First thing people should be warn of the winter in Alice Spring is cold. It was near zero, sure thing!

Anyway tour started at 6AM, followed by a long drive so we could finish our night. There was some surprise along the road, like those wild horses!

or some tamed "local chicken", best known as Emu.

First stop was King's Canyon, so named after a famous explorer's brother in law (or something like that, can't remember the particular, save that was a family story, nothing to do with the royal family, and that the famous explorer had no death in all his expeditions, quite a feat in his time).

So here we go some pictures of King's Canyon

From the start	Somewhere in the middle	Going down...

In our tour's group there wasn't much group spirit...
There was the following subgroups: us (me and the 3 French girls), 3 funny young German guy, 2 cute young German girls, a funny German couple, a single German guy (lots of German hey!), a nice Chinese woman who is also a lawyer currently working in Sydney, a Dutch girl (who was in the same class as Caroline!) and 6 Canadian people.

I (slowly) established some good contact with the Chinese woman, the cute German girls (BTW it's Kat(harina) with the shiny blonde hair on the right in right picture above) and the funny German couple.

Our first night (out, sleeping in a swag) was not really under the star, more like under the rain (ok, it rained only 5 minutes, but I had to complain! ) and it was quite cold... everybody was like a mummy hiding deep inside the swag..

Next day we visited the Olgas and walk at the bottom of Uluru.

Here is my first shot at Uluru (as you can see it's a big rock in the middle of the desert)

Here some picture of the Olgas:
 

From left to right Laura (the other cute German girl), the valley of the wind, "Pauline" (the Chinese woman) inside the Olgas. It's greened inside because of the shade and also because these mountainous formation capture whatever little cloud and humidity there is to capture.

Here a nice panorama from inside:

Then we drove back to Uluru

where our guide talked at length about Australia, the Northern Territory and the aboriginal way of life. Here is a map of the aboriginal tribe of Australia with our guide on the left and a Canadian girl on the right.

Here is a picture of our whole group in front of Uluru, you could find out most of the Germans, they are the one with a can of beer!

Then we went to our camp site, light a fire and cooked a beautiful kangaroo bolognese!

And slept under the pristine stars. The air was so pure (and cold), the milky way was so clear, I couldn't resist taking this beautiful shot

Ahum, ho well, the camera is not as good as the eye!

The last day, early rise to see the sun rise on Uluru, arguably the rock takes on nice color as the sun rise (or set).

From left to right, a bus full of enthusiastic early riser, the sun rise, the funny German couple doing batman, Kat and Sanne (the Dutch girl), me...

Then I was one of the few climbing Uluru!! yeah... err... well almost... I was also one of the few to chicken out halfway (I know, shame on me, boo )

1st: not even half-way! and then the olgas from Uluru.

Going down I took this soon to be famous Uluru panorama, now you're talking!

And then we went back, just a last stop to do some Camel riding...

That was it for the tour, although we had a nice evening with our new friend (the 2 cute German girls and the funny German couple)

Here we are, in the 21rst century, GPS, phone conversation eaves dropping, black helicopter, you name it! Everyday our freedom is loosing ground to an increasingly widespread and potentially misused technology.

Scary.

The latest disempowerment gadget I found out about, and anyone can do it of course, in the sake of materialism all you have to do might be to click some add to use it... "track your partner" as they call themselves, check it out, http://www.trackapartner.com/

You are watching the living proof!!

Last Week I tried Windows Live Writer, and 5 minutes later I was live on live!
Hey how easy is that? And to know what I was frustrated not to have a blog for a couple of years already, just because I don’t like Web application (i.e. in this case the web editing experience), this desktop publishing application make it all so nice!

Then I decided “nice, but I want a blog on My Web site”, I looked on ASP.NET community projects and found out about  the .NET Blog Engine.

It all turned out to be quite easy (although it required some help desk support as I’m closed to clueless level regarding Web development, but hey, it’s .NET!) and here you are, reading it!!!

Hurra for .NET!!

I learned about it when reading "The night of the Jabberwock" by "Fritz Leiber" and now I just found it while perusing the web at leisure (how about that hey?).

So here we go, let's share some high poetry by Lewis Carol:

More on that in Wikipedia

The story of my life wouldn’t be completely told if I didn’t mention this health problem which plagued my life for the last 15 years. So it’s going to be a bit grim, but it needs to be written.

It started innocuously and slowly worsened over the year. It started with reduced sexual drive, then excessive sweating without cause, then dandruff, then heat flushes, then burning painful red limbs, then headache. And it evolved from casual to permanent.

That was bad. And I had no clues as to what’s going on. Neither had the numerous doctor I visited.

At the time when I was in Paris (France) it became too hard to maintain a normal life, and I was hopping to just die alone. To go along with this plan I decided to go in Australia. OK, it sounds far fetched, but hey, I was born there and it turns out I had an Australian passport waiting for me and this is as far from my known world of the time (France) as possible. Plus my sister was there, so I was not really that adventurous…

Good that I did! To make a long story short, going to Australia started a chain of events which brought some valuable understanding about my problem (it took about 3 years to sort it out with reasonable certitude).
Plus I also met many cool people and saw many part of the World (Japan, Indonesia, Vietnam, Singapore, New Caledonia and, in Australia, Sydney, Brisbane and Darwin).

It turns out that something with car pollution is inflicting on me some sort of painful reaction. I suspect it is petrol fumes that caused it although, some bleak time, I fear it might just be tiny rubber peace (from the tires)(It’s bleak because electric won’t save me then). Anyway, busy road, big town, cities, all harm me rather quickly, like if they inflict me some wounds. But if I stay in the wild for a big while I recover. Over time I became really too ultra over sensitive and I really have to go in some really small village to feel well now.
Although… I also found some relaxation techniques which improve my condition a little.
And when I’m very well (after 1 month in the bush for example) I can cope with city life without trouble for a few days.
And water sport helps as well, I should thanks Australia for its surfing culture then!

Also there are some extra aggravating factor like temperature, exercise, video games (yes, you read that well, I found that strange too, but it’s unfortunately experimentally true, maybe because of Adrenaline), etc…

Anyway, as I haven’t told yet, despite that, I managed to have a rather successful career as a computer programmer. Slowly evolving my career toward a specialization in the latest and greatest .NET technologies by Microsoft. Mostly doing desktop application development (as opposed to web development).
By the way, it might be a good time to digress even more, and mention I didn’t study IT, but physics, almost got a PhD.

So with all these element to think of, I was trying to find an IT job in some small village on the Australian coast. Without much success and great sadness I was about to go to Ireland, which seemed to be a good move for my career and health, but a rather sad one (well it’s cold and rainy over there, you know! plus there isn’t all those cute Australian girls with their multiple racial origin).

Fortunately for me, at the last moment (well, 1 week before the last moment) I found an interesting looking job in Darwin. There is about 100.000 people in Darwin.
Unfortunately this was not good enough, health is still not good (although that depends, some days it is, in fact it’s on the edge of good and not good). But this was a very interesting experience nonetheless.

As it was still not good (but much more bearable) I kept looking patiently and one day I found it: the perfect job in the perfect location!
It’s in Billinudgel, not far from Byron Bay, 1h30 south of Brisbane (where I have many friends). It’s in a small village (unfortunately along the highway, ha, I suppose It will be ok). And it’s an interesting .NET job, the employees are all ex scientist, the application features many mind boggling logistics algorithms and actually do save the livelihood of some people (Sugar cane farmers for the moment). It’s going to be good!….

Now on a latest note, despite the grim picture of my life as shown above, I managed to have many great fun friends in Brisbane (and Darwin as well for that matter), it’s going to be party time! And there are few cool girls that I like who seems to like me too as well, I found that amazing sometimes but hey, if that pleases them, I will capture one this time!
Time will tell if I manage to import one in Billinudgel!… but now at least I could try that’s a great and pleasant improvement I’m looking forward to!

Another cool thing happening right now (relating to my health), is the ever increasing petrol prices. Which is a big push towards the soon to be mass marketed hybrid / electric cars (in 2010, or so they say), so I hope that in a few year the doors of the world would be once again open to me. Car makers sure looks like working on it like crazy!
Speaking of which, if everything goes well, I plan to buy a GM Volt car around 2012.

Here you go, my first post, on my first blog!
Well I have another one on http://super-lloyd.spaces.live.com/ but this is on my web page!

And here some picture (let see if it works).

A camel:

And a nice panorama of Uluru

And video of Nirvana (or, is it?) (<= link)