Australia Entry #8 - July 8th - August 31st, 2024

Two Months of Stuff

Hey everyone! I’ll be the first to admit that it’s been a while since my last post and that didn’t align with my hope to write one of these every two weeks. Throughout this time period, I passed my longest time living outside of the US in one trip. I had taken a few trips to Poland over some summers and internships abroad, but none of those lasted more than 13 weeks. Yesterday officially marked 20 full weeks living in Australia.

Part of the reason why it took so long to write this was because life just got busy. Initially, I was planning to write a new entry a week after my last one, specifically talking about only my trip out to Sydney for work, but those two weeks ended up being a lot busier than I expected. The other reason was that I started to thing about how to make this website work in a more sophisticated way. A google docs entry every couple of weeks was a perfectly fine start, but I wanted to have more flexibility and I also wanted to present the information in a more unique way. Initially, because of some other work I had done during my trip to Sydney, I planned to move the whole system I had going for me to AWS and host all my images and documents in the cloud, however, in my initial pushes I realized that the price of that would add up just for the videos and photos that I would be uploading. I’m still open to figuring out a way to save my photos and have some data protection around them so I don’t lose them in the future, but simply for price I’m happy to continue to post my longer videos to youtube and the rest of my photos to google photos. Google gives you 15 GB of storage for free and so far just my Australia photos for this project have taken up 8.2 GB.

Travelling to Sydney

On July 8th I flew out to Sydney to help our Australian customer NSW Health install their non-production system. This was my first solo non-production install trip, but I think it went pretty smooth and we were able to get a lot more done than I initially thought, even though we ended up with a lot of follow up tasks to do in the following weeks. While I was super excited to go and explore a new city and I had written up a bunch of places I wanted to go to see, I actually ended up spending a lot of my time in my hotel room, continuing to research and prepare my own notes for the following days to go smoothly. Because it felt like every day we weren’t keeping up with the checklists we had laid out to do, I spent most of my time post 5 PM work continuing to optimize what we could do when we were back together the next day to catch back up. Because of that, I didn’t get to explore any of the city, outside of walking to the Opera House and viewing it for a few minutes prior to the first day’s tasks. Weirdly, though, I don’t regret my decision as I know we’ll have more trips to Sydney as we continue to work together on the project so I’ll have more opportunities to have some fun.

The Week After

Most of the rest of the week following the trip out to Sydney was spent working to catch back up to where I wanted to be following our build trip and getting back into doing the work I missed with Singapore now that I was back. Brian was expected to go out to Sydney two weeks after our trip so I also knew that I had some backup duties in the office coming up. A bunch of other implementation folks were also planning to fly out to Sydney to start working with their analysts in the non-production environments we built out so I wanted to make sure they were fully ready for them on their trip.

Another office mate, Whitney, was also planning to be out of the office around that time for a trip to Thailand so I ended up cat sitting Merlin during the weekend. The same weekend, though was one where I went on a hike and as I don’t have a car I needed to get up early to go and walk over to Whitney’s apartment before then walking to a train to get to the city to then jump into a carpool and get to the hiking spot. I ended up waking at 4:30 AM, so I could leave the house at 5:00 AM and started hiking at 9:00 AM. On the hike we saw a baby lamb and got rained on but the spirits were high and it was a super fun day. After the hike, I was absolutely soaked, but I needed to stop by Whitney’s apartment before going to mine to make sure Merlin was still alright.

A Couple Weeks to Slow Down

With the non-production build trip behind me now, work had pushed towards me now having two customers to work on from now until the distant future, so there was a bit of time I needed to spend to reorganize myself and future proof myself from being overworked. Singapore still continues to have a lot of projects that have been taking place and upcoming, but we’ve gotten to the point that we are proactively preparing for them ahead of time, instead of jumping on a call and having to solve or talk through projects that need to occur the same day. Upcoming this weekend (September 8th) there is a production upgrade that we have done a bunch of work to prepare for. I’ll be working after hours that weekend to make sure things go smoothly, but I’m strongly confident that things will go well.

Because of the last few weekends being heavily into hiking and work being busy, I spent a few weekends more relaxed than the others. The Happy Hikers group that I hike with continued to do hikes each weekend but I decided to not join a few of them. Instead I took a few weekends away from hiking to instead do some other things. The last weekend of July I went on my own walk around the Yarra River and found an industrial bridge that was fun to walk across and I spent some time reading some books out in some parks. Over the last two months, I finished reading Orconomics by Zachary Pike, listened to Fluke by Brian Klaas, and finished One Up on Wall Street by Peter Lynch.

The following weekend, I joined Cameron, Josh, Risa, and Cory from my office to play some volleyball because the weather was really nice out in St. Kilda. Afterwards I also found a spot on the beach to continue reading some of those books I listed above. The next day I joined a few locals and went to the NGV (National Gallery of Victoria) to enjoy a Pharaoh exhibit that was brought over from Britain to Melbourne for their winter collection. I enjoyed a weekend that wasn’t filled entirely with prepping lunch and packing for a hike to then hike all day and come back exhausted for the next day, but honestly realized that I enjoy the thrill of the outdoors more than the thrill of the city.

More Hiking and Planning for a Future Trip

While I wasn’t hiking for a few weeks, I did still end up spending some time with Nandi, one of the members of the hiking group who is of Sri Lankan ethnicity. We ended up playing a few games of snooker over the last two months and he added me to his own exclusive Grade 5 Hikers group, planning to be part of people from the main group that wanted to do some more challenging hikes. The first one that we did was Srath Creek Falls in which we started at the top of the waterfall, and descended down into the valley to follow the river and end with a grueling scramble up from the valley back to the top to end the hike. Strath Creek Falls funnily enough is next to Mt. Dissapointment, but the day strayed away from that name, haha.

I also committed some time out in November to buy some plane tickets and accomodation for a flight down to Tasmania in November with the hiking group and do Cradle Mountain. The first week in November has an extended weekend with a horse race that counts as a holiday happening on Tuesday so I’m taking Monday off as my first day off from work since arriving to have a longer weekend in Tasmania. Expect plenty of pictures and videos from that when it happens! It’ll also act as a good break from work as the weekend prior I’ll be flying out to Singapore to help with a disaster recovery exercise so the end of October + start of November will be full of personal and business travel.

A Few Changed Commitments

Back in Post #5, I listed a few commitments I wanted to make to myself while I was out here in Australia, and while a lot of them I still want to stick to in the grand scheme of things, the original ones have changed slightly.

Here are the changes:

I had wanted to travel out to New Zealand for a few days to meet my old coworkers and drive around the west coast of the Southern Island. I want to still do this, but I am planning to make this into a family trip near the end of 2027 so I can turn it into a two week trip and so everyone can bank the necessary days ahead of time.
I previously wanted to explore some Southeast Asian countries along my travels to Singapore. Planning around my vacation days I don’t think I’ll have enough days to be able to do this anymore, but if I’m crazy I might fly out on a random weekend to only spend one or two days in said countries. I would want to spend the time in nature.
I wanted to get more comfortable with overnight hiking and renting out a car in Australia to do longer weekend activities. In Post #7 I said that I would do a few of these things by the end of August but that just wasn’t realistic. I also noticed that the hiking group was planning to do some of the Wilson Prom’s hiking early next year so it makes it easier to tack on with them. I want to still rent out a car and figure out the logistics of that before the end of this year and spend a day doing the George Bass Coastal Walk. I also want to commit that at one point I will specifically do the Three Capes Track in Tasmania. I may commit to buying the ticket for this if I enjoy my time doing Cradle Mountain in November. I did buy a lightweight collapseable chair and Osprey Talon Velocity 30L hiking backpack to start my commitments.