Year: 2002

Australia has six states and two mainland territories in addition to several island territories.

Of the states, Tasmania (home of Allan Moult) is known as the Down Under Down Under due to its location beneath the Australian mainland. Allan, is your home really as beautiful as the photos show? I am green with envy.

Jonathon, Garth, Victor, and zem all live in New South Wales home to Sydney, considered one of the most beautiful Bay cities in the world.

Victoria is in the southern part of the continent and is the home state for Melbourne, a sophisticated gateway to scenic ocean vistas, deserts, and mountains. Tom lives in Victoria.

The other states are Western Australia, South Australia, and Queensland.

I figured with this much to see, when I finally take my long desired trip to Australia, I’ll have to stay for at least three months (visa length). What a beautiful country.

I was just joking about Garth being a fan of Starbuck’s. As he has said in his weblog — he’s not overly fond of American coffee. Okay, Aussies — what exactly is wrong with American coffee? Too strong? Weak? Bitter?

Anyway, Garth is another techie who has reverse engineered and tinkered with the technology behind Radio. His Radio weblog tag line is “If Radio is a platform, it’s a platform on which typing ‘ps’ crashes the system entirely”. I’ll have to try this.

Garth is also getting married to a young woman named Zoe. It sounds as if they may be having a fairly significant wedding (details, Garth, details!)

A little Google snooping shows that Garth is into open source, FreeBSD, and EFF (I knew I liked him). In fact, I’m finding that Garth’s weblog is really the tip to this particular iceberg — to get to know Garth better, look for him in Google.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a photo. These shy webloggers.

Good Morning Garth! Have a cup of coffee on me!

Victor is fairly new to weblogging, having been pulled into getting a weblog by his longtime friend, Jonathon. He has a company, Stand Out Training, providing Macromedia training in Australia.

(That little Googlestack was for you, Victor.)

Victor is taking a brave new step into marketing with his company. Rather than using some of the more traditional marketing techniques such as advertising through publications, he’s promoting his company throught the web, only. In particular, Victor has researched the inner workings of Google in order to better understand how to position his company within the Google rankings. However, as we all know, Google’s a fickle creature. One day we’re loved, the next day — dirt.

In addition to his company, Victor is also a speaker and loving family man with five kids. What amazes me is the amount of energy this man has in addition to having five kids. For instance, this week he’s off to the University of New England attending Psychology classes.

Victor’s also a huge fan of Cluetrain — NOT!

Rageboy says Hi Victor 😉

Now if you think we’re going to have Australia Day without a discussion of Vegemite, you’re off your nut.

Ah, that glutinous, shimmery, black ooze of health. According to Vegemite Central, Vegemite is not like peanut butter; you don’t want to eat it with a spoon directly from the jar. However, you can make a vegemite milkshake.

Sick. Really sick.

The first person of the Australian Delegation I met is my weblogging tag team partner, Jonathon Delacour.

In case you’re curious about how I stumbled on to Jonathon — or he stumbled on to me — we were introduced by none other than Dave Winer.

After Radio 8.0 first released, and after spending hour after hour of reading Radio weblogs consisting only of “Hello World” and “test”, I was checking out _yet another_ new Radio weblog when I found the following:

Marius has accused me of doing a Dave i.e. editing weblog entries “after the damage is done”.

The phrase caught my fancy and I immortalized Do a Dave into the Blogicon after getting Jonathon’s permission to do so. That’s when I first discovered Jonathon’s weblog — a discovery that has been a rich and rewarding experience for me.

It’s surprising but this all happened in January. January! That’s just a few months ago!

But in those few months I’ve shared with Jonathon my driving adventures, travels, political viewpoints, technology, stories, laughter, and fears. In return he’s shared with me his eloquence, intelligence, his understanding and love of Japanese language, culture, and history, as well as his sense of humor and appreciation for a really good beer.

A few months — what’s that in weblogging years?

So take a moment and say hello to my good friend, Jonathon.