Over the weekend I bought a new film scanner, the Canon 8800f. It’s pretty awesome so far and to give it a test I dug through the cupboards at home and into my ‘archive’ of film negatives, slides, and medium format positives and negatives, and started scanning a bunch of stuff into Aperture.

I was pretty happy with the quality of the scan, specially considering that my ‘archive’ is just a cardboard box and most of the negs were just thrown into the box about 10 or so years ago. Bit by bit over the next few weeks I’m going to clean and scan the lot in an effort to digitise my library.

Here’s a couple of quickly thrown together photos from ‘back in the day’ that I’ve uploaded to my photography website Mathew Packer Photography.

Both photos were shot at Mona Vale on the northern beaches of Sydney, and the skater is Adam Luxford. Hopefully I’ll get more slides and what not scanned in tonight

Over the weekend I bought a new film scanner, the Canon 8800f. It’s pretty awesome so far and to give it a test I dug through the cupboards at home and into my ‘archive’ of film negatives, slides, and medium format positives and negatives, and started scanning a bunch of stuff into Aperture.

I was pretty happy with the quality of the scan, specially considering that my ‘archive’ is just a cardboard box and most of the negs were just thrown into the box about 10 or so years ago. Bit by bit over the next few weeks I’m going to clean and scan the lot in an effort to digitise my library.

Here’s a couple of quickly thrown together photos from ‘back in the day’ that I’ve uploaded to my photography website Mathew Packer Photography.

Both photos were shot at Mona Vale on the northern beaches of Sydney, and the skater is Adam Luxford. Hopefully I’ll get more slides and what not scanned in tonight

Well as of tonight, or tomorrow night if you’re reading this from anywhere in the US, the initial ‘land grab’ for the .asia domain’s will be done and dusted. Or at least the registration process, the billing will follow straight after I’m sure.

Seeing as I look after the domain registrations here at work I was well aware that there would be a major land grab for popular domains. Basically the process was that if you wanted any specific names you had to complete the pre-registration forms a few weeks ago, from there if you wanted the same name as another party then an auction would be held between the interested parties and once those were sorted out the domains would then be assigned on the 26th of March and that would be that. Pretty simple and straight forward.

With my work, and all my projects, I submitted a total list of 18 domain names for registration. At this point in time I’ve received verification emails letting me know that 15 of those names will be registered, the 3 that are outstanding don’t seem to be under challenge so I’m guessing there’s a mail server somewhere playing up.

Most of the domains I registered were either company or product names, there were a couple of fun ones thrown in like http://www.iwanttovisit.asia and http://www.iwasbornin.asia. Don’t ask me why I wanted those domain names, I just happened upon them when I was registering all the business ones.

Once we get all the final registration done and paid for I’ll write up a complete list of all the domains that I’ve registered, including all the .com and .com.au domains (I think I own about 60 or so domains in total). I’ll also explain my reasoning behind having all these domains, as it’s a little unusual to have so many.

Anyway, it’s Tuesday morning after a long weekend and I need to try and focus on getting some work done.

Catch you later, Matt

Well as of tonight, or tomorrow night if you’re reading this from anywhere in the US, the initial ‘land grab’ for the .asia domain’s will be done and dusted. Or at least the registration process, the billing will follow straight after I’m sure.

Seeing as I look after the domain registrations here at work I was well aware that there would be a major land grab for popular domains. Basically the process was that if you wanted any specific names you had to complete the pre-registration forms a few weeks ago, from there if you wanted the same name as another party then an auction would be held between the interested parties and once those were sorted out the domains would then be assigned on the 26th of March and that would be that. Pretty simple and straight forward.

With my work, and all my projects, I submitted a total list of 18 domain names for registration. At this point in time I’ve received verification emails letting me know that 15 of those names will be registered, the 3 that are outstanding don’t seem to be under challenge so I’m guessing there’s a mail server somewhere playing up.

Most of the domains I registered were either company or product names, there were a couple of fun ones thrown in like http://www.iwanttovisit.asia and http://www.iwasbornin.asia. Don’t ask me why I wanted those domain names, I just happened upon them when I was registering all the business ones.

Once we get all the final registration done and paid for I’ll write up a complete list of all the domains that I’ve registered, including all the .com and .com.au domains (I think I own about 60 or so domains in total). I’ll also explain my reasoning behind having all these domains, as it’s a little unusual to have so many.

Anyway, it’s Tuesday morning after a long weekend and I need to try and focus on getting some work done.

Catch you later, Matt

A week or so ago I mentioned that I was working on the logo / header for the new I’m With The Band website, well it’s finally completed (till I decide to tweak it again) and the only thing left to do now is to actually sort out the colour scheme.

The other thing I managed to finalise is the ability to subscribe to Reverb Street Press via email. Basically we setup a category on the IWTB website where each month we publish a downloadable PDF of that month’s Reverb and just by clicking on the cover you can download it. To make things even easier we published that particular category as an RSS feed and through the help of Feedburner we’ve now added a form on the front page of the IWTB website where all you need to do is enter your email address and voila, you get an email each month as soon as the new Reverb is published with a prompt to download it. It was tempting to setup an ‘auto-send’ email subscription however seeing as Reverb is around about 15mb it would break most people’s mail servers.

For now here’s what I came up with, along with the help of one of Reverb’s designer’s mates, for the header of the website.

I’m also finishing up a disco version, a dance club version, and more of a rock music version so that we can change them around every couple of months or so.

Time to finish up the rest of the colour scheme, I think I might also make the text larger and also customise each category header as well, oh and the Reverb signup form needs to look a bit different to the standard IWTB one so that people understand what they’re doing. Oh and I’ve also gotta lock in the advertising spaces so we can sell them off each month.

So yeh, almost complete!

And for those music fans out there, this month there’s interviews from Pete Townshend (The Who), Ian Brown (The Stone Roses), Coheed and Cambria, and not to mention Gnarls Barkley. Pretty damn tasty considering we’re a locally owned and produced press, and we’re not even based in Sydney!

A week or so ago I mentioned that I was working on the logo / header for the new I’m With The Band website, well it’s finally completed (till I decide to tweak it again) and the only thing left to do now is to actually sort out the colour scheme.

The other thing I managed to finalise is the ability to subscribe to Reverb Street Press via email. Basically we setup a category on the IWTB website where each month we publish a downloadable PDF of that month’s Reverb and just by clicking on the cover you can download it. To make things even easier we published that particular category as an RSS feed and through the help of Feedburner we’ve now added a form on the front page of the IWTB website where all you need to do is enter your email address and voila, you get an email each month as soon as the new Reverb is published with a prompt to download it. It was tempting to setup an ‘auto-send’ email subscription however seeing as Reverb is around about 15mb it would break most people’s mail servers.

For now here’s what I came up with, along with the help of one of Reverb’s designer’s mates, for the header of the website.

I’m also finishing up a disco version, a dance club version, and more of a rock music version so that we can change them around every couple of months or so.

Time to finish up the rest of the colour scheme, I think I might also make the text larger and also customise each category header as well, oh and the Reverb signup form needs to look a bit different to the standard IWTB one so that people understand what they’re doing. Oh and I’ve also gotta lock in the advertising spaces so we can sell them off each month.

So yeh, almost complete!

And for those music fans out there, this month there’s interviews from Pete Townshend (The Who), Ian Brown (The Stone Roses), Coheed and Cambria, and not to mention Gnarls Barkley. Pretty damn tasty considering we’re a locally owned and produced press, and we’re not even based in Sydney!

About a week ago I mentioned that I had gotten tattooed at Diabolik Tattoos in Newcastle, anyway I’ve finally had a few minutes spare to edit the couple of photos that were taken while I was getting tattooed (Cath took the photos).

Anyway, here’s the photos of the Koi on my right forearm and the diamond on my left forearm, at this stage the Koi is just an outline with the colour to come after Easter.

About a week ago I mentioned that I had gotten tattooed at Diabolik Tattoos in Newcastle, anyway I’ve finally had a few minutes spare to edit the couple of photos that were taken while I was getting tattooed (Cath took the photos).

Anyway, here’s the photos of the Koi on my right forearm and the diamond on my left forearm, at this stage the Koi is just an outline with the colour to come after Easter.

Well it’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve updated you about my progress on Lite n Easy, partially because there was a week or two where I didn’t lose any weight but I blame myself for that seeing as I was drinking a few beers.

Anyway I’m properly back on the Lite n Easy wagon now and with the weight I lost last week I’ve managed to lose 10kg so far, so that’s 10kg in 5 weeks..not bad at all really.

The good thing about losing weight this way is that it’s sustainable loss, ie. you don’t put it back on straight away unlike some other rapid weight loss diets where you usually have put it all back on within a week or two.

Week 6 is just about to start, in fact it should be being delivered in an hour or so….hrmmm I might grab a few photos, or a video, of the unpacking process as you’ll get a good idea of exactly what is involved with dieting with Lite n Easy.

So stay tuned for some photos or video, not sure if I’ll be able to upload them this morning as I’ve got to go to Sydney for a meeting, but I’ll try and get them uploaded later today when I’m back.

Take it easy, Matt

Well it’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve updated you about my progress on Lite n Easy, partially because there was a week or two where I didn’t lose any weight but I blame myself for that seeing as I was drinking a few beers.

Anyway I’m properly back on the Lite n Easy wagon now and with the weight I lost last week I’ve managed to lose 10kg so far, so that’s 10kg in 5 weeks..not bad at all really.

The good thing about losing weight this way is that it’s sustainable loss, ie. you don’t put it back on straight away unlike some other rapid weight loss diets where you usually have put it all back on within a week or two.

Week 6 is just about to start, in fact it should be being delivered in an hour or so….hrmmm I might grab a few photos, or a video, of the unpacking process as you’ll get a good idea of exactly what is involved with dieting with Lite n Easy.

So stay tuned for some photos or video, not sure if I’ll be able to upload them this morning as I’ve got to go to Sydney for a meeting, but I’ll try and get them uploaded later today when I’m back.

Take it easy, Matt

Yesterday I jumped right into the design for the new product website for the Pain Gone pen, Targeted Pain Relief. The list of things to get done was quite large, and there’s still a few bits and pieces that need to be completed, but I think I managed to make a big dent in the project.

Here’s what I got through;

• installed and configured wordpress
• installed and setup new theme purchased from Brian Gardner
• chose the colour palette (this was a big debate)
• customised the CSS to fit the new colour palette
• customised the navbar, background, footer, arrow, search, etc. images to fit the new CSS
• setup Google Webmaster account for TPR, submitted sitemap
• setup Google Analytics account for TPR, installed tracking urchin
• bought advertising on Google Adwords
• started loading up the content

And here’s what’s left to do;

• finish loading content, testimonials and product information
• install shopping cart and link to merchant bank account
• sit back and relax

Actually there is probably more than that to do but you get the idea that most of the work was completed yesterday. Big thanks to my mate up in Queensland, Greg, who helped me out with a bunch of problems at 10pm last night!

This morning I ran into a small problem with the Targeted Pain Relief website, it took ages to load! After a bit of checking around it turns out that Servage, my domain hosts, seem to be having load issues. Seeing as this is a business website, and needs to be up all the time and speedy. I’m going to start looking around at other hosting services. So far I’ve had a few suggestions, from the guys at Twitter, but none of them have been really what I’m looking for so I spoke to a mate who knows all about business hosting and he’s suggested Media Temple so I’m going to give them a go. At this stage I wont be moving it all till the weekend as I’m pretty stuck with other projects but I’ll let you know how I get on.

Anyway, I’ve gotta try and catch up with the work needed on the I’m With The Band website that I was supposed to complete yesterday….eeeep

Head on over to the Targeted Pain Relief website and have a look, let me know what you think… Oh and dont be too critical of the content, remember I’ve still got that to complete.

Cheers, Matt

Yesterday I jumped right into the design for the new product website for the Pain Gone pen, Targeted Pain Relief. The list of things to get done was quite large, and there’s still a few bits and pieces that need to be completed, but I think I managed to make a big dent in the project.

Here’s what I got through;

• installed and configured wordpress
• installed and setup new theme purchased from Brian Gardner
• chose the colour palette (this was a big debate)
• customised the CSS to fit the new colour palette
• customised the navbar, background, footer, arrow, search, etc. images to fit the new CSS
• setup Google Webmaster account for TPR, submitted sitemap
• setup Google Analytics account for TPR, installed tracking urchin
• bought advertising on Google Adwords
• started loading up the content

And here’s what’s left to do;

• finish loading content, testimonials and product information
• install shopping cart and link to merchant bank account
• sit back and relax

Actually there is probably more than that to do but you get the idea that most of the work was completed yesterday. Big thanks to my mate up in Queensland, Greg, who helped me out with a bunch of problems at 10pm last night!

This morning I ran into a small problem with the Targeted Pain Relief website, it took ages to load! After a bit of checking around it turns out that Servage, my domain hosts, seem to be having load issues. Seeing as this is a business website, and needs to be up all the time and speedy. I’m going to start looking around at other hosting services. So far I’ve had a few suggestions, from the guys at Twitter, but none of them have been really what I’m looking for so I spoke to a mate who knows all about business hosting and he’s suggested Media Temple so I’m going to give them a go. At this stage I wont be moving it all till the weekend as I’m pretty stuck with other projects but I’ll let you know how I get on.

Anyway, I’ve gotta try and catch up with the work needed on the I’m With The Band website that I was supposed to complete yesterday….eeeep

Head on over to the Targeted Pain Relief website and have a look, let me know what you think… Oh and dont be too critical of the content, remember I’ve still got that to complete.

Cheers, Matt

Last week I re-did the I’m With The Band theme as we just partnered up with the local street press Reverb and needed to setup an area on the front page where people could download the latest edition of Reverb. When I did this theme change I had to mockup a quick header logo until I had the time to sit down and make a new logo / header.

The other thing we want to change up the I’m With The Band website is the colour scheme and the background as well. I’ve spent several hours on the Colour Lovers website checking out various colour palettes to try and get some inspiration, so far I’ve narrowed it down to about 10 different schemes…..arrghh. I think once I have the header logo design completed it might be a little easier to lock the colour scheme down.

Here’s a few websites that I find invaluable when it comes to colour scheming, web designs, logos and headers;

> Colour Lovers – a big database of user submitted colour combinations

> Vecteezy – user submitted vectors, free to download

> Brusheezy – Vecteezy’s sister site for photoshop and illustrator brushes

> Faveup – a gallery of cool website designs, logo designs, and flash designs

> CSS Tux – similar to Faveup, but dedicated to CSS designed websites

> iStockPhoto – a stock photo, vector, flash, and video website where you can buy different elements to construct your design

Anyway, I better actually get to work on this header / logo design instead of just sitting here talking about it. I’ll keep you posted on the I’m With The Band project as it progresses.

Cheers, Matt

Last week I re-did the I’m With The Band theme as we just partnered up with the local street press Reverb and needed to setup an area on the front page where people could download the latest edition of Reverb. When I did this theme change I had to mockup a quick header logo until I had the time to sit down and make a new logo / header.

The other thing we want to change up the I’m With The Band website is the colour scheme and the background as well. I’ve spent several hours on the Colour Lovers website checking out various colour palettes to try and get some inspiration, so far I’ve narrowed it down to about 10 different schemes…..arrghh. I think once I have the header logo design completed it might be a little easier to lock the colour scheme down.

Here’s a few websites that I find invaluable when it comes to colour scheming, web designs, logos and headers;

> Colour Lovers – a big database of user submitted colour combinations

> Vecteezy – user submitted vectors, free to download

> Brusheezy – Vecteezy’s sister site for photoshop and illustrator brushes

> Faveup – a gallery of cool website designs, logo designs, and flash designs

> CSS Tux – similar to Faveup, but dedicated to CSS designed websites

> iStockPhoto – a stock photo, vector, flash, and video website where you can buy different elements to construct your design

Anyway, I better actually get to work on this header / logo design instead of just sitting here talking about it. I’ll keep you posted on the I’m With The Band project as it progresses.

Cheers, Matt

I swear that I’ll get back into the swing of blogging, it’s just that I’m so flatout at the moment with work, launching the new Pain Gone product, and doing the new website development for I’m With The Band.

I was actually planning on writing a few articles on Saturday, I got all my RSS subscriptions out of the way and caught up on a few pieces of work stuff that needed to be done and I sat down at my desk and just as I finished typing the first sentence my phone rang……it was my tattooist, Darren from Diabolik in Newcastle, and he told me he had a cancellation and did I want a session this afternoon. I said yes!

Most of Saturday afternoon I spent in Diabolik in the chair, under the needle. We started work on my right sleeve and got most of the outline out of the way, we also got the colour into the diamond on my left forearm. All in all I was in the shop for 6 hours, 3 of them were working on the design and 3 under the needle. I’ll post some photos later on when I get home.

Saturday night was a friends wedding party at the Prince of Wales in Merewether, Newcastle. There was a whole bunch of friends there that I hadn’t seen in years, it was good to catch up with everyone.

Sunday I was a bit tired from getting in late the previous night so I was off to a slow start to the day. Mid morning I decided to do the yard work, mowing and edging and that fun stuff. Sunday afternoon I actually fell asleep on the lounge..hah.

Anyway, it’s Monday morning now and I’m at work so I guess I should be working!

Catch you later on, Matt

PS. The first shipment of Pain Gone pens arrived this morning, we’ll be selling them via an online store at Targeted Pain Relief once we get the store online in a couple of days.

I swear that I’ll get back into the swing of blogging, it’s just that I’m so flatout at the moment with work, launching the new Pain Gone product, and doing the new website development for I’m With The Band.

I was actually planning on writing a few articles on Saturday, I got all my RSS subscriptions out of the way and caught up on a few pieces of work stuff that needed to be done and I sat down at my desk and just as I finished typing the first sentence my phone rang……it was my tattooist, Darren from Diabolik in Newcastle, and he told me he had a cancellation and did I want a session this afternoon. I said yes!

Most of Saturday afternoon I spent in Diabolik in the chair, under the needle. We started work on my right sleeve and got most of the outline out of the way, we also got the colour into the diamond on my left forearm. All in all I was in the shop for 6 hours, 3 of them were working on the design and 3 under the needle. I’ll post some photos later on when I get home.

Saturday night was a friends wedding party at the Prince of Wales in Merewether, Newcastle. There was a whole bunch of friends there that I hadn’t seen in years, it was good to catch up with everyone.

Sunday I was a bit tired from getting in late the previous night so I was off to a slow start to the day. Mid morning I decided to do the yard work, mowing and edging and that fun stuff. Sunday afternoon I actually fell asleep on the lounge..hah.

Anyway, it’s Monday morning now and I’m at work so I guess I should be working!

Catch you later on, Matt

PS. The first shipment of Pain Gone pens arrived this morning, we’ll be selling them via an online store at Targeted Pain Relief once we get the store online in a couple of days.

As of today you’ll find a number of changes happening here at Mathew Packer dot com.

The first thing you’ll notice is that I’m working on a new theme, and call me insane but I’m going to be working on it live! No one in their right mind would work on their website live while it was still getting hits, and normally I wouldn’t as I wouldn’t want to negatively effect the advertising click potential of the site, however I’m willing to work on it this was as I don’t care about the advertising clicks on here as I’m ditching the advertising!

So as you just read the second big change is getting rid of the advertising on this website. As of about 2 weeks ago my subscriber count has risen from 20 people per day up to 75 per day, this is a pretty huge increase but my click rate on the advertisements has not risen at all. This has lead me to the conclusion that people actually enjoy what I write enough to actually subscribe to the RSS so I figure I would do everyone a favour and serve the site sans advertising.

Over the Christmas period last year I was all about ‘making money online’. Pretty well every post was about some form of revenue generation and blah blah blah, it’s all a bunch of ‘me too’ content that was being said by every second blogger out there. Looking back now I can clearly see that I was just jumping aboard the copycat express with everyone other sucker out there.

A month or so ago I started supplementing my MMO articles with real life articles, the couple of recipes I’ve posted bring in more traffic than any other ‘insert big affiliate marketing website name here’ article that I was writing as has the Lite n Easy Diet progress articles that I’ve written. This is the direction I now want to take my blog in.

From here on out I’ll be writing various posts on things that are happening in my life, around home, around work, etc. I’ve got plenty going on with all the happenings at I’m With The Band, launching the new targeted pain relief device Pain Gone, getting my ‘how to start a business’ website together at A Business Is Born, the medical news website that I’m helping work out with Medical News, Stat! , and I’ve even had a few emails from people in the last week asking me if I could develop blog themes for their websites as they saw me advertising myself as Freelance Matt.

All these changes are effective immediately! As soon as I hit the ‘Publish’ button I’ll get started on the theme changes, it’s going to look a little different around here sometime in the next minute or so..

Oh and for those of you who are still interested in Making Money Online, and Making Money Blogging, I’ll still publish the odd article about how I’m doing this as I’m concentrating my advertising and what not on the other websites I own, I may even still publish income reports……

Cheers, Matt

As of today you’ll find a number of changes happening here at Mathew Packer dot com.

The first thing you’ll notice is that I’m working on a new theme, and call me insane but I’m going to be working on it live! No one in their right mind would work on their website live while it was still getting hits, and normally I wouldn’t as I wouldn’t want to negatively effect the advertising click potential of the site, however I’m willing to work on it this was as I don’t care about the advertising clicks on here as I’m ditching the advertising!

So as you just read the second big change is getting rid of the advertising on this website. As of about 2 weeks ago my subscriber count has risen from 20 people per day up to 75 per day, this is a pretty huge increase but my click rate on the advertisements has not risen at all. This has lead me to the conclusion that people actually enjoy what I write enough to actually subscribe to the RSS so I figure I would do everyone a favour and serve the site sans advertising.

Over the Christmas period last year I was all about ‘making money online’. Pretty well every post was about some form of revenue generation and blah blah blah, it’s all a bunch of ‘me too’ content that was being said by every second blogger out there. Looking back now I can clearly see that I was just jumping aboard the copycat express with everyone other sucker out there.

A month or so ago I started supplementing my MMO articles with real life articles, the couple of recipes I’ve posted bring in more traffic than any other ‘insert big affiliate marketing website name here’ article that I was writing as has the Lite n Easy Diet progress articles that I’ve written. This is the direction I now want to take my blog in.

From here on out I’ll be writing various posts on things that are happening in my life, around home, around work, etc. I’ve got plenty going on with all the happenings at I’m With The Band, launching the new targeted pain relief device Pain Gone, getting my ‘how to start a business’ website together at A Business Is Born, the medical news website that I’m helping work out with Medical News, Stat! , and I’ve even had a few emails from people in the last week asking me if I could develop blog themes for their websites as they saw me advertising myself as Freelance Matt.

All these changes are effective immediately! As soon as I hit the ‘Publish’ button I’ll get started on the theme changes, it’s going to look a little different around here sometime in the next minute or so..

Oh and for those of you who are still interested in Making Money Online, and Making Money Blogging, I’ll still publish the odd article about how I’m doing this as I’m concentrating my advertising and what not on the other websites I own, I may even still publish income reports……

Cheers, Matt

A little earlier today I briefly wrote about the little road trip that I went on this weekend just been, well I’ve managed to download and edit a few of the photos so I figured it was worth putting together a quick post with the photos.

There’s nothing too special here photo wise, mostly we didn’t have the time to stop to put the time into a great landscape shoot and we were also traveling through the middle of the day and with the sun so high overhead it’s a bit more difficult to really do the landscape justice.

So here you go, some photos from outback New South Wales.

The first photo is the main reason I went to Bourke, Splashe Cola! This stuff is seriously so addictive that it should be illegal, or at least prescribed. Fortunately for me, and my dentist, we only bought two bottles of the stuff but neither of them made it back to Newcastle.

This was what most of the scenery looked like once we got west of the Great Dividing Range, there were few areas that were different from this.. Man is that sun harsh!

140km fish eye!

Random dirt road somewhere outside of Bourke. I remember it being a little more red than this however with the sun so high and harsh it’s a bit more difficult to capture.

On the way back we came via Tamworth and the Oxley Highway. We were doing about 120km / hr when I saw the turn off to Aspley Falls, some how I managed to stop the car in time to make the turn into the parking area. After a bit of a hike down some stairs that hung out over the cliff face I managed to setup my camera over the side of the viewing platform to shoot this. It’s a long drop!

When I was a little kid I used to go fishing with my grandfather here, Queens Lake near Laurieton, NSW. The lake is exactly how I remembered it, though there is a little more bird poop on the end of the jetty than there was back then.

Anyway, that’s it for the road trip photos. We, Cath and I, shot a load more but mostly there too similar to this so I wont bother further boring you.

Catch you round, Matt

A little earlier today I briefly wrote about the little road trip that I went on this weekend just been, well I’ve managed to download and edit a few of the photos so I figured it was worth putting together a quick post with the photos.

There’s nothing too special here photo wise, mostly we didn’t have the time to stop to put the time into a great landscape shoot and we were also traveling through the middle of the day and with the sun so high overhead it’s a bit more difficult to really do the landscape justice.

So here you go, some photos from outback New South Wales.

The first photo is the main reason I went to Bourke, Splashe Cola! This stuff is seriously so addictive that it should be illegal, or at least prescribed. Fortunately for me, and my dentist, we only bought two bottles of the stuff but neither of them made it back to Newcastle.

This was what most of the scenery looked like once we got west of the Great Dividing Range, there were few areas that were different from this.. Man is that sun harsh!

140km fish eye!

Random dirt road somewhere outside of Bourke. I remember it being a little more red than this however with the sun so high and harsh it’s a bit more difficult to capture.

On the way back we came via Tamworth and the Oxley Highway. We were doing about 120km / hr when I saw the turn off to Aspley Falls, some how I managed to stop the car in time to make the turn into the parking area. After a bit of a hike down some stairs that hung out over the cliff face I managed to setup my camera over the side of the viewing platform to shoot this. It’s a long drop!

When I was a little kid I used to go fishing with my grandfather here, Queens Lake near Laurieton, NSW. The lake is exactly how I remembered it, though there is a little more bird poop on the end of the jetty than there was back then.

Anyway, that’s it for the road trip photos. We, Cath and I, shot a load more but mostly there too similar to this so I wont bother further boring you.

Catch you round, Matt