Weekly notes 34/2024

Thumbnail image: The Victoria Cross Sydney Metro has finally opened.

What’s been happening #

• We’re now near end of August and can feel the winter cold going away. It’s been progressively getting more warmer by the day and won’t be long before I start wearing shorts again.

• After a two week delay, the new Sydney Metro line finally opened up earlier in the week. The Metro adds to Sydney’s existing public transport infrastructure of ferry, bus, train, and light rail. The new Metro trains are driverless, run quite fast (up to 100 Kph) and at a higher frequency than the trains. An additional advantage for me is that the Metro station is about a 5 minute walk from our current house and Martin Place station, which is where I get off exits right infront of our office. This means that I reach office from home roughly at the same time that it would have taken me to walk to the North Sydney train station. The Metro opened on a Monday (as opposed to the previous start date of a Sunday) and Jo & I did a Metro date run the evening that it started, taking the Metro till Barangaroo and did a small walk along the harbour.

  

  Victoria Cross Metro Station
  
  
  

  The Metro Date
  

  The Metro Date
  

  The Metro Date
  

  The Metro Date
  

  The Metro Date
  

  The Metro Date
  

  Martin Place Metro Station
  

  Martin Place Metro Station
  • On a related note, we’re now at a 3/3 rate for having a Metro started to areas we moved to - when we moved to our house in J. P. Nagar, the Yelachinahalli Metro line started a few months later. The same happened when I moved to Bucharest, and now it’s Sydney. So, which other city needs a new Metro to be opened up? 😆

• It’s Gamescom week and two of the games that I play/follow had some nice reveals

  • Blizzard showcased what’s coming up in the new expansion - Mercenaries, a collaborative PvE mode called the Dark Citadel and some much needed features that are not exclusive to the expansion including a Party Finder and hints of a new progression system. I look forward to finding out more in the upcoming weeks.
  • Firaxis games released some new details about the Civilization VII - a gameplay reveal trailer and a narrator reveal trailer. The new game will feature not only leaders of states as the new heroes and will feature a new “age mechanic” where you’ll be able to choose a different leader for every age. Civilization has never seen this style before and will be interesting to see how it plays out. Civilization VII won’t be out till February 2025 and we’ll know more details as we get closer to the release date.

• I finally got to read we3 - a graphic novel that I had borrowed from the library. Here’s my review that I wrote on Goodreads.

  we3 tells the story of three pets (a dog, a cat, and a rabbit) who’ve been mecha-engineered to be part of a prototype animal weapon, and have been decided to be decommissioned. Along the way the chief doctor decides to de them free and thus starts the story of their escape and survival. We3 has some terrific artwork, and gratuitous violence. It is also pretty hard to keep track of what’s happening in many places. I had to go back and re-read couple of times to make sense of it all. The animals have implants that allow them to talk in limited words but that just makes it hard to figure out. The story kind of ends on an upbeat fashion (if you exclude the many, many deaths) and has a feel good ending. With the Vertigo paperback version you get all three chapters in one plus some artist notes on what and why some things were done that way and that’s a nice touch. Docking two stars for the above mentioned hard to keep track part, poor delivery and lacklustre plot.

  

  We3
  
  
  

  We3

• I’m rebuilding Jo’s desktop computer. She has a relatively old computer and while we’ve replaced many of the external components as part of our Romania and Australia moves, the core still remains the same. I ordered the components from mwave and CenterCom as part of the Afterpay sale. The components ordered from CenterCom have been delivered and I was hoping mwave would have delivered them before the weekend but alas it was not to be. I’ll have a longer post on her computer once I’ve received all the components and have built it up.

What we ate #

The new Metro station is right next to Saravana Bhavan. While returning from our Metro date, we decided to stop by and have dinner. The last time Jo visited there, she tried the Bhel Puri and said it was good, so we ordered that along with vegetable Uttapam. The Uttapam was huge! Saravana Bhavan has good food and the many times we’ve been there, we’ve never been disappointed.

I’ve got some colleagues visiting from the US this week and decided to meet Jason over dinner yesterday and since he likes seafood, went to Garfish, a seafood restaurant. I was a little disappointed by the mains - I ordered the Yellowfin Kingfish which was nice but nothing great. The staff completely forgot to get our drinks and we had to remind them twice - though must admit they did accept the miss and said they’d offer drinks on the house due to the miss. For dessert, I ordered the cheesecake - again decent, but nothing great. Maybe I had high expectations. I think it’s worth another visit just as you temper your expectations.

This morning, Jo wanted to go for a walk and stop by a cafe for breakfast. Our suburb has many coffee shops and we decided to try out Sotto On West. We ordered our usual coffees - a cappuccino for me and oat latte for Jo and for food a cheesy scrambled egg croissant and bacon egg roll with hashbrown. My coffee was good but was too hot, while I didn’t like Jo’s oat latte at all. The food was kinda ok. Not sure if we’ll be back since there’s Eighty Ate on the opposite side which had better coffee and food.

Music of the Week #

I came across Outlaws' Green Grass and High Tides song when listening to Jo’s “Great Guitars” playlist and it truly is worth the tag. I found a 23-minute live version from 1978 on YouTube and it is glorious.

Link of the week #

I’ve been a big fan of Top Gear and The Grand Tour and absolutely loved the previous special, The Sand Job. It was mentioned the next special would be their final adventure and the teaser trailer for that is here - titled One For the Road is here. Due to release on September 13, I am sure it will be all that I hoped for and more.

DadLAN, the charitable organization organizing the LAN gaming event I attended last week is in the news, with ABC talking having an article about it. Catch me in one of the pictures too :D

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