Highlights:

• Meeting new people (namely Twitter friends)
• surviving my first MTUB
• Meeting the ever elusive @gryphn_ and having a whale of a good time (and then he pissed off back to Adelaide and off Twitter – awwwww)
• Seeing Mr Ferry Corsten do his DJ thang at the Metro and learning that DJs with a hefty pair of manboobs are actually very very talented (bring on Trent McDermott at Sensation!!)
• Gaining a new boss at work
• Work’s major Christmas party (complete with karaoke!!)
• Guitar Hero 5 for the Xbox 360

Lowlights

• Losing my bestie
• Dealing with way too much drama and almost leaving the Internet permanently
• Feeling like I’m not going anywhere workwise at the moment
• Christmas

To all the people who have stopped by this website (that’s everyone, innit??), had a quick read and then ran away in horror, I would like to wish you all an awesome 2010. Here’s hoping the year ahead absolutely RAWKS.

Something pretty alright is coming soon.

- @melbournegirl

Lo and behold, I had a total of twenty three, yus, 23 moderated requests from random people across the intertubes asking me for a Google Wave invitation.

PLEASE READ THIS NEXT SENTENCE CAREFULLY BEFORE LEAVING A COMMENT.

I don’t have any Google Wave invitations to give away. Please don’t ask. If I do acquire one, I will happily help people out.

Please don’t make me feel sadder or even more left out than I do at the moment. I have no bananas or Google Wave love to give.

Thanks.

Instead the one hundred and forty characters get stretched to over one thousand. Every Web 2.0 entrepreneurial type, podcaster, former postman and social media coke snorter is waiting for a paragraph about how AWESOME Google Wave is.

Well, uhhh, sorry to disappoint you but I HAVEN’T GOT A BLOODY GOOGLE WAVE INVITE YET. So nyerr. (that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t love one)

I spent time trying to make a mixtape last night. You remember mixtapes, right? TDK D90 audio cassette in a twenty year old double deck cassette recorder hooked up to an equally ancient amp fed into the Macbook.

Real girls use cassettes to make crazy mixtapes for blokes they reckon are “pretty bloody alright, yaknowhattumsayin’”.

Trying to figure out whether the bloke has a cassette player himself is a different kettle of barramundi altogether.

There’s something quite special about making mixtapes and then listening to the final product. I was brought up on wow and flutter, jumpy vinyl, half chewed cassettes recovered from a feral National Panasonic ghetto blaster from 1985.

Sadly mixtape making has been a bit of a cursed affair as well. I’ve had blokes throw my cassettes on the ground and step on them. Crushed the magnetic ribbon, crushed the creativity and crushed my heart to pieces. TDK didn’t get the chance to do amazing things to any of their systems.

Is this why all the cool kids now make mp3 mixtapes instead? Uncrushable just deletable.

So, fellas, tell me, if some chick made a mixtape for you as a way of saying “you’re an alright sort of guy, let’s hang out sometime”, would you dig that or find it to be childish?

Hit me up with a comment. I’m curious to know what you think.

Have you lost tweets as well? Has your tweet count gone from WOAH to OH NOES? Here’s hoping that Twitter pick up on the issue and do something about it.

Look at all the sheeple running for YET ANOTHER smelly Hitachi train. Yet another piece of rubbish looking train station architecture.

[Hat-tip: @andrewsayer] [original Twitpic can be found here]

Dreams are pretty awesome, no? I very rarely have such vivid ones that make me wake up feeling good about life.

…and then something or someone cuts the chord. Yes, “chord” as in a musical chord or Ian Pooley’s stonker of a tune “Chord Memory”.

Acceptance is the first step in realising that you have to cut the chord. Bailing the fuck out of an awkward situation is the final step to cutting the chord or having the damn thing severed for you. Sorry, kids, we don’t do in-betweens when @melbournegirl is feeling like the world’s biggest dumbarse all of a sudden.

What is left? A miniscule shard of pride. A tiny ounce of sanity and self preservation. Bucketloads of respect, understanding and tears.

There is elation but there’s also that one thing that’ll always bite you on the bum for the umpteenth time – failure.

I’ve got a lot to think about.

Back in high school, it seemed to be so easy to let a guy know that I liked him. I spent many a lunchtime in the library with my pencils, sketchbook and pens drawing pictures, comics and creating other bits of silly looking “artwork” that punctuated the thought “I’m that weirdo chick with the pigtails in 9D that listens to all that freaky sounding stuff on her walkman, usually gets detention for wearing her faded band tshirts over her uniform and sucks at Maths. Oh yeah, by the way, I really like you “

Most of the time going to all that effort succeeded in getting a hello out of them or even a round of four square or Kanga cricket. Other times, the pictures would end up in the bin and I’d spend months upon end being laughed at for being “the stupid girl in 9D who draws pictures of dragons and castles” (trust the stupid girl in 9D to be a sci fi/fantasy nut from such a young age)

I was never any good at letting a guy know I liked him. A simple “Hi. I like you.” is about as difficult for me to wrap my lips around as it is to pronounce the surnames of the Turkmenistan swimming team. It’s a different story after a few vodkas but that’s besides the point.

I like someone and I suppose, have liked them for a while now. Every time I want to somehow show this person that I like them, I seem to just either quietly freak out and mess things up or just trip over my words to the point where I’m typing a fluent combination of Lithuanian and Swahili.

I just wish it was as simple as drawing a picture and sending it to them.

Hi. I like you.
With love from me and my Derwent pencils

…and I wonder, do guys dig that sort of thing…….or am I just thinking like the silly girl I used to be back in 1992?

Thank you for your concern.

• Microsoft Windows 7 Release Candidate – I decided to take the plunge and install the latest Release Candidate version of Microsoft Windows 7 on my trusty dusty craptop after having read numerous writeups about it over at Lifehacker. Eyecandy wise, it gets the big thumbs up. Performance wise, it runs a lot smoother than Windows Vista. Multimedia wise, my USB TV Tuner dongle actually works straight out of the box without any pissfarting around with other software. Overall, Windows 7 is a HUGE improvement over Vista (which was an operating system debacle). It’s nice of Microsoft to allow the regular Joe or Joanne Geek to be able to test-drive the latest addition to the Windows family in the real world. It is, however, a bit of a shame that Microsoft did nothing more than slightly tart up what has always been a dog of an operating system, IMNSHO.

• Hiatus – I’m taking some much needed time off from Twitter. With all that has happened over the last couple of weeks, a month off will no doubt be enough time to sit back on the sidelines and watch the world go by…one tweet at a time. To be honest, Twitter stopped being fun for me and if it’s no longer fun, I’ll just walk away. Perhaps I’ve just missed the point or something but hey, it’s only a social network, fer Pete’s sake. I’m not entirely sure if I’ll be attending the next @MTUB event. I have an uncanny fear that I’ll end up sitting on my own, in a corner for a while because I’m lousy at mingling and heck, I’m, well, you know…..@melbournegirl. I’ll be returning to Twitter some time in June. Feel free to follow me on Friendfeed or send an email my way. I don’t bite…

• Everything else - In between the madness that is the beloved dayjob, I’ve been following Angus Kidman’s rather awesome Hand Luggage Only adventures. One piece of carry-on luggage and a smattering of Australian locations to be visited. Hardcore geek roadtrip to the max! In the coming days/weeks, melbournegirl.net will be going under the knife. The blogroll will be gutted, the theme will be chopped to bits and all the other rubbish will be archived. You have been warned!

On a final and very personal note, a big thanks has to go out to a couple of very special people out there (who will remain anonymous out of respect) who have helped me through the last few days. Here’s to yet another HUGE eff-off weekend of actually living that thing called LIFE!