Just got back from seeing Cloverfield. Make no mistake about it people - what you are seeing is movie *greatness*. I'm no expert in these matters of course, but I know what I like, and this I absolutely loved. It was close to the perfect science-fiction movie - I've never seen anything so immersive, with such consistently good narrative. Don't get me wrong, it's an incredibly harrowing movie, and not for the faint hearted, but it's worth it. OK, there's some cliched devices in there, and it's really going to polarise people, but in my opinion you're not going to see better in this genre. It's true that video games went to the next level (so to speak) when they started borrowing from the narrative techniques of the movie industry, and this movie really feels like video games giving something back. Where I Am Legend was creepy until the reveal, and then you felt cheated by the CGI, this movie feels like you're right there, in the nightmare, and you come out of the cinema ready to run at any moment. Oh, and if you're in Brisbane, do yourself a favour and see it at the Southbank enormous screen ...

... and make sure you pay close attention to the last scene !!

The Big Brazil Update

( It's behind a cut - you know you don't want to read it all ! )

I turn my back on the country for a few weeks and you let Steve Irwin die !!! And from a stingray no less. It's like a Formula 1 driver dying in scooter accident ...

Yikes - looks like it's now two months between posts for me ! Now that I have an apartment with the intynet though, it should be more regular. I hope ...

Anyway, the project's still crazy, and I'm still living in Rio. Moved from my littlw hotel room in Copacabana to a very nice neighbourhood in Ipanema - the cafe where they wrote *that* song is just two blocks down the road. Shall write more soon ...

love
Eric

Forgive me father, it has been over 30 days since my last post ...

Actually, things have been a little hectic ... you see, I live in Rio now. Well, for the next 3 months anyway. Long story, work situation, the usual kind of thing. Net result, I'm writing this from one of the most amazing cities in the world. OK, sure, it's dangerous as hell, and not being able to understand anything anybody says poses a few problems, but I have to say it's worth it. Brazillian people are just so beautiful; they have this amazing passion for life, and they're just so happy. The scenery is the most breathtaking I have ever seen, and ... well, I could go on an on, but I won't. Detailed stories soon, I promise. Oh, and I owe a lot of people replies to various posts - I haven't forgotten, promise !

Abrazos !

Don't suppose anyone can recommend a good PSP game ? I want to buy something for the plane home ...

A maid just came by to turn down the bed. This whole not-speaking-Spanish thing gets pretty tricky, particularly when someone turns up in your hotel room and starts gesturing wildly at your bed. I return geastured about needing an iron and an ironing board ... although given my dodgy mime skills, it's just as likely that someone will be turning up to give me a massage ...

It's intimidating coming back to LJ, like that first phone call to a friend you know you should have caught up with long ago. It adds an unecessary gravitas that makes it hard to start; Do I need to cover everything ? Where do I start ?

I'm going to go with bullet points:

* I'm back in Chile for a couple of weeks, doing some stand-in project management to get an overrunning project across the line. Week before I was in Adelaide for a series of meetings completing a Mincom takeover of a very fine development company down there. My travel schedule has just been crazy lately ...

* It's always interesting coming back to a place a second time, and how much your understanding changes. My first trip here I found the place incredibly frustrating, their lack of urgency about things, the way they're always chatting and seemingly oblivious to deadlines. Now I'm beginning to wonder if it isn't just that my attitude to work is screwed up, that maybe their approach to employment is better here; almost job creation schemes where there's many more people than necessary doing particular jobs, so that they can spend a large part of their day just gassbagging. Instead, we work longer hours, stress out about deadlines, and generally dread our time at work ...

* One of the things I love most about travel is going grocery shopping. It's particularly fun in countries where you don't speak the language, and have no idea what a lot of the stuff you're buying is. It's a really interesting change of perspective being the ignorant foreigner - like this morning, I lined up in the queue, and the lady at the register rattled off something at me. I must have looked puzzled, because various other people in the line started trying to tell me things too, and gesticulating wildly indicating I should go away ... OMG, Think Man !! Have I got too many items for this lane ? Is there a No Whites Allowed policy for this shop ? Is my fly undone ?. Finally I realised she was closing the till and I had to use another line (not something they cover off in Spanish 101 incidentally!).

* They have a fruit here that comes from Cactuses !

* Had a birthday somewhere there in the month, just a little laid-back affair with family ...

I'm sure there was more I was going to tell you ... it'll come back to me !

Is it just me, or does anyone else find that Suncorp-Metway add for insurance where they show that guys life progressing by scenes of him at various ages dropping onto the couch disturbing ? I mean, having his wife die during childbirth ? Not nice ...

Edit: I refer of course to the fact that there's the scene where he meets her, scenes of them running around, making out, getting married, making out and then Bam, she's gone, baby is there instead. Chilling in the innocuous way they just slide it in ...

It's my last work-day in Chile - tomorrow I'll be running around doing last minute shopping, and going to a family reunion for one of the guys who works

for me in Oz who co-incidentally turned out to be on the same flight home as me tomorrow night as he returns to Australia from an assignment in Canada. I

know, small world ! Particularly in IT multinationals - you wouldn't believe how many international airports I've been in where you just happen to bump

into someone you. Anyway, he just popped by and gave me a big hug. Latin Americans are just so passionate ! Like any woman you get introduced to, it's a

kiss on the cheek, first time. If you know a bloke well enough to call him mate, it's a hug. Same with your email greetings - a typical business exchange literally will be:

Hi Eric

Thanks for sending me that report so quickly.

Hugs

Ramirez


I just got an email from one of the Managers I met in Rio, and when I translated his closing line to me from Portugeuse, it was literally:

"A great one I hug"


=) There should be a lot more of that in business !

Despite the passion for life, one thing about women in Chile though (and I think this is why the men here always think of the Brazillain women as friendly) is that they never look at you. They walk purposefully down the street with their gaze downcast. Then again, I've seen and heard guys *actually wolfwhistle* at pretty women over here! My god, that's so 70's! In Brazil they're far more refined - the men just openly ogle. Countless times I've noticed a man tracking a woman as she walks past, he'll look back, I catch his gaze and grin and he'll do that nod-and-raise-the-eyebrows-with-lips-pursed-in-approval (and in a couple of instances, a quick raise of the thumb). Ahhh lechery, the universal language.

Anyway, back in Chile now. This morning I was sitting in the restaurant on top of the hotel, watching the sun come up over the Andes. It's a very humbling experience being at the foot of them ... at first you're convinced it's just a cloudbank piling up in the sky behind the hills you can see ... then all of a sudden your head wraps itself around the scale and you realise "Holy Crap that huge mass towering up into the heavens is all mountains !!"

I'm really going to miss this place ... the people, the food, the scenery; so much variety, so much to do and I've only just scratched the surface of South America. Hasta la vista baby - I'll be back ...

Rio is just plain off-the-chart amazing. I've been to a few cities that supposedly "don't close down", but I've got to tell you, Rio is the one that tucks them into bed when they've had enough, or holds their hair while they're barfing in the toilet, and then goes back to the club to party some more. Take copacabana beach for example; there's floodlights, so if you feel like playing soccer or beach volleyball at 3am you can. And people do. Oh, and Brazil has a reputation for having the most beautiful and friendly women in the world. I am here to tell you they were being too modest with that statement. The bell curve here is well and truly skewed in the "extraordinary" range; supermodels walk the streets, and the dress standard is pretty much that special amount of clothing that is actually more alluring than none at all.

I've had some amazing experiences here - I just hope I can remember enough about them to accurately recall them for you. Like Saturday night - some of the Chileans on the project had kindly shown me around for the day, and when we were returning from the shops the taxi driver was telling them about a Samba practice for Carnival that was on that night. His instructions were basically along the lines of "turn up at this place from 11pm. Leave your wallet, your watch, don't wear anything too good, and carry some small notes about your person for entry and drinks. It was right on the outskirts of one of the favellas (basically their slums) .. the Chileans were actually more nervous than me, because I never know what the hell is going on here *all the time*. If we happen to be in a crowd that's muttering about killing the outsiders, I'm still grinning like an idiot. Anyhow, we get there, and there's just little gangs of fairly scary people wandering around, and we're thinking "uh oh". Then we get closer and there's more and more people, and markets, and then we're at the stadium. We walk up the stairs where they're handing out these little cardboard fans with the Samba groups colours and their song printed on the back. Through the doors and we're into a space about the size of the lyric theatre, and it's absolutely packed to the rafters. There's a cacophany of noise, huge fans with water squirters spray the crowd and there's people sambaing *everywhere*. There's a mezzanine level that runs the whole way around the top. One part has been taken over with around a hundred people all armed with various drums and other percussion instruments, and the rest of the mezzanine level has various singers and other groups of people. The bottom part is all full of us, sambaing away. On one part of the mezzanine there's this little guy MCing the whole thing, talking loudly on and on in these rich Portugeuse tones. Then he introduces someone who proceeds to sing (and what an assortment there was, ranging from a kid who looked about 10 but sang like 40 to one of the largest africans I have ever seen). Soon the whole crowd is singing as well, and whistling, and it's so damn hot, but you don't notice because you're so busy sambaing and looking at these amazing women whose hips swivel in a dozen different places and everyone's just so happy and then all of a suddent out of nowhere the drums start, just one little riff, from about half of them; "DRUM DA DRUM" (Remember that soccer song from a while back ? Well, you get the drift), and you get that tingle and your heart beats faster and there's a great roar from the crowd and they're lifting their arms and fans and you're yelling too and then suddenly there's a hundred drummers all going crazy and you're lifted up on this beat and it just keeps going ....

This morning, running along Impenana beach watching the sun come up over the ocean and wishing my time here would never end ...

Sorry to be an LJ wh0re, but can I just say, Thank God for unsecured wireless networks. When I fired up my laptop from my little suite in South America it picked up 12 different wireless networks, three of them unsecured and one of which is letting me get this message out.

It's a bizarre trip from Santiago airport to town - there's just nothing out there, like those desert highways in America. Then gradually you start hitting shanty-town style housing (amazingly, a large number of them with horse-drawn carts travelling the streets), then all of a sudden you're in this amazing mixture of beautiful old buildings and super-modern skyscrapers.

Anyway, more to tell tomorrow - meantime, night all !

It's happened kind of suddenly, but I'm in Chile. A big sorry to everyone I was going to catch up with, looks like I'm here for a couple of weeks of meetings and maybe a side-trip to Brazil. On the plus side, I've finally collected that last continent (I thought I had with South Africa, but seems I was premature). Anyway, amazing place, and more on that later.

Fairly long flight over, and for the whole Sydney-Auckland leg I was seated next to a lovely older chap whose main hobbies were gliding (you would not believe how much I know about gliding now) and great air disasters. He'd get excited about turbulence (wow, great up-lift in that one !!) and then tell me about a flight where the cabin lost oxygen and everyone on board passed out, with the plane on autopilot finally running out of fuel and plunging its cargo of corpses into the ocean. He said spotter planes got close enough to see the captain slumped over the console. "This probably isn't the time for such stories" he'd exclaim in a thick Swiss accent, then proceed to tell me about how a single line of rivets doomed a Japanese flight to a fiery end. I kept thinking of e_princess every time he'd tell me a story ...

I've seen two amazing movies in the last week (trying to make the most of my AFI membership). Being a Japanophile, I'd been really looking forward to Memoirs of a Geisha and while there's no questioning its beauty as a film, you didn't leave it feeling like you'd just seen a wonderful movie. Maybe it was the fact that the leading women weren't japanese ... it was very much hollywood japan. I did quite enjoy the Geisha battle-with-words though. As Lainey would say, 6/10.

Last night, Brokeback Mountain. I went into this one with some trepidation, not sure what Ang Lee could do with what I perceived to be a one-trick pony. My God, what an amazingly powerful movie. I came away from it with that satisfied feeling that you've seen something truly great. Heath Ledger for once wasn't just being Heath Ledger, and the accent he does is amazing. One of the best love stories I've ever watched. Maybe it was just because my expectations were so low, but 8/10.

Shamelessly stolen from e_princess !!

In other news, my parents house was broken into the other day, along with two others in their street. At first they thought nothing was stolen, but yesterday Mum realised every single piece of her jewellry was gone. Some of it was pieces that her parents back when they were in Germany had hidden from the Russians, and then later from the Americans, and now some southside lowlife is hocking it off for a few measly bucks. I really despair for people sometimes. My father is absolutely furious (although it has convinced him that, rather than hoard his hard earned money so some @sshole can steal it, he's splashing out and spending $10K to take a four week trip he's always wanted to do travelling the Trans-Siberian Railway. Hong Kong to St Petersburg - it's going to be amazing for him !

I'm kind of concerned though - when Dad found out possums were getting into his garden and stealing his vegetables, he built an electrified "floor" around the garden; apparently they didn't do it again after that. There's probably one or two missing cats in the neighbourhood too knowing his approach to moderation when it comes to high voltage and ampage. I can just imagine what kind of "home defence" solution he comes up with. Suffice to say, I'm not going to be turning up at the parents house unannounced anymore ...



Tell me some stuff about you...

1. Name:
2. Date of birth:
3. Where you live:
4. What makes you happy:
5. Currently listening/the last thing you listened to:
6. Do you read my journal?:
7. If yes, what makes it especially good or bad?:
8. An interesting fact about you:
9. Are you in love/do you have a crush at the moment?:
10. Favourite place to spend time:
11. Favourite lyric:
12. The best time of the year:

RECOMMEND
1. A film:
2. A book:
3. A band, a song, or album:

PLUS
1. One thing you like about me:
2. Two things you like about yourself:
3. Look at my friends-list and tell what you like about one of our mutual friends:
4. Put this in your journal so that I can tell you what I like about you

It's Saturday, Anita is off bush-walking, and by lunch-time I'd swept, swiffed, mopped, vacuumed, cleaned the budgie, watered the plants, washed up and taken in the washing. It's so much easier to get things done when they're not around the house =)

In other breaking news, I got one of those more-responsibility-no-more-pay type promotions - I'm now the development manager for one of our product lines. In a few weeks I'm off to Chile to catch up with some of my team, so I'll finally have set foot on South America. It's going to be a hell of a year !!

Oh yeah, and about those goals, let's start the clock so I've got something to say at the start of Feb:


Financial: 0 and 0
Physical: I've been a bit crook this week, so no gym. But I'm starting the weight count at 82Kg, 22% fat.
Career: Um - I've hired a couple of people, does that count for anything ?
Education: Haven't even re-enrolled ...
Spiritual: Well, you're reading this, so the journal update is going a little better. Also, I may have convinced work to give me a mobile !! That'll help reconnect with people !

It's been a while ...

So let's see, right after Christmas we jumped on a plane down to Melbourne, hired a car and drove about 4 hours up the Hume into the Victorian Alps, along a one-laned mountain-hugging dirt road to a little "bush shack" where we spent four wonderful days with some friends of Anitas whose aforementioned shack it was. Absolutely gorgeous spot in a beautiful bush setting, little mountain river running through the bottom of the property where in the afternoons we'd laze in the icy water. At night we'd sit around the campfire and gaze up at sky so filled with stars it positively glowed. I managed to get back in touch with my inner man; trout fishing, chopping wood, pumping water to the tank that fed the house, four-wheel driving. It's lingered with me once we returned home; I spent last week-end retiling some of the bathroom. Anyway, we rushed home in time for a New Years dinner at a friends place in Paddington; they had an amazing view of the city, and the boys are gourmet cooks so they spent the whole evening bringing out plate after plate of delicious food.

And now, back at work, and some dramatic changes and a possible change in responsibility - more on that later !

I must say, we've never been so organised. It was a frequent complaint of my wonderful partner last year that neither of us were planners, so we're constantly all over the place. So, this year I determined to fight my natural laziness and get us organised - we spent New Years day (well, the day after - baby steps) working out where we were heading, what we wanted to achieve both individually and together, resulting in our calendar sporting large post-it notes outlining goals for each month and year. I publish our meal plan a fortnight in advance, and each evening I'm home by 6:30 putting on the washing and cooking dinner. Of course, now Anita's worried that her life is too regimented, but at least we're getting things done =)

Every year my family spends Christmas night at a friend of the families. He's the classic self-made multi-millionaire entrepeneur; started out as a refridgeration mechanic who, frustrated with the poor quality of the controls he was forced to use, decided there was an opportinity to make his own. He would have been in his early 30's back then - knew a bit about electronics, decided to do a TAFE course to learn the rest, ended up hiring the lecturer to do his design work for him. Kids, this is how it works - you don't have to know everything, but you do have to know how to find and utilise the people who do. Anyway, one thing led to another, and here he is a couple of dozen years down the track with three companies turning over 10's of millions of dollars a year. He's finally built himself the house of his dreams, and I saw it for the first time last night.

Wow.

It's in Raby Bay, on a canal of course so there's somewhere to park the discreetly large boat. One of the things he invented was the next generation of PLCs, digital controllers. The house has its own nervous system of these things, controlling everything from the lighting on the infinity-edge pool fountain through to the airconditioning (7 individual plants so each zone of the house can have individual temperatures). You can control them from any of the 7 plasma/lcd TVs dotted throughout the mansion, just as you can access the central multi-media machine from them (there's currently a terrabyte of storage, holding 250+ movies and probably almost that many albums). Naturally there's a media room (still being finished off - he's having dilemnas about what sort of seating, and will velvet red curtains be tacky ?), and an underground wine cellar about the size of my apartment. All in all, it makes me realise that while I'll certainly be comfortable working my ass off for other people, I just wish I had some idea and enough initiative not to ...

Happy Christmas Everyone ! Hope you're having a wonderful day, whatever you're doing !