This is Anne climbing the Bicentennial Tree. The ladder goes all the way to a look-out point at the top. I made it about 10 rungs up before vertigo got the better of me.

See more photos taken on 21st May 2006, or all of my photos from Australia and Brunei.

Anne on the Tree Top Walk, near Walpole, Western Australia.

See more photos taken on 20th May 2006, or all of my photos from Australia and Brunei.

A seagull, hovering above Penguin Island, Western Australia. They were nesting and therefore very territorial. Quite scary at first, but I soon learned that you could just ignore them – they were only trying to scare us off.

See more photos taken on 19th May 2006, or all of my photos from Australia and Brunei.

Just a quick note to recommend Arirang. It’s a Korean BBQ restaurant on Barrack Street – complete with the barbecue in the middle of the table. They bring out the meat and you cook it yourself, before eating it out of a lettuce leaf (as if it were a tortilla). Not something you see everyday and as a bonus, the food’s really good aswell. The puddings get a special mention too – my “peach fantasia” was a replica peach made from chocolate, ice cream and a fererro rocher as the stone (I dare you to make the “really spoiling us” gag). Brilliant.

Yes, that means I’m in Perth, Australia and yes, I’m feeling smug. G’night mate.

Anne biking in the sunshine on Rottnest Island, near Fremantle, Western Australia.

See more photos taken on 18th May 2006, or all of my photos from Australia and Brunei.

That’s me sat in the sunshine on Fremantle Harbour, waiting for my waffles to be delivered. Mmmm… waffles.

See more photos taken on 17th May 2006, or all of my photos from Australia and Brunei.

Owen, relaxing in Kings Park, Perth, Australia.

See more photos taken on 16th May 2006, or all of my photos from Australia and Brunei.

Sony confuse me.

They appear to have two pieces of music management software competing for the same space. There’s SonicStage, which came with MiniDiscs and the HD series of players. It’s ugly and horrible to use but had the massive advantage of being fairly stable. Then they’ve got the new upstart, Connect Player, which comes with the new A-series Walkmans (Walkmen?). It’s both prettier and easier to use, but until recently was horribly slow and crashed every few seconds. I’ll ignore the third option, which I believe shipped with the PSP.

The thing is, they’ve finally got the Connect Player working as it should. It’s not perfect, but it works properly. Hooray! But now SonicStage is about to trump it again, adding support for the very Walkmans that Connect was designed to work with.

Come on Sony, make your minds up. What’s it to be? Connect Player or SonicStage? It was good to keep SonicStage around while you got Connect Player into a usable state, but surely now you should drop it? If you do keep developing it, it needs a major interface upgrade at the very least. It still looks and feels like some “scene” software from the heyday of the Amiga A500.

Maybe I’ve been spoilt by the likes of iTunes — software that makes it easy to look after thousands of songs — but then so has the rest of the world. I think Sony need to think long and hard, then cull one of these applications and bring the other one up to spec.

Update — It seems that the Connect Player is no more. Let’s hope SonicStage gets an interface upgrade in the next version, because even version 4.0 is miles behind the competition.