Today I travelled into the city (Melbourne) to catch up with a very old friend from school – Judd Neiman. Plus I got to meet a new friend I made on Whirlpool – Stephen.

Judd and I went to Willyama High School in Broken Hill. We also played guitar a bit together. Not that I was ever anywhere near as good as Judd – he is very talented. Plus we were both into computers and stuff at school when most others weren’t.

Haven’t heard from him for probably 20 years. Then the other day I got an email from another school friend, Christian Lowe, and he sent me Judd’s email as well.

Judd and I arranged to meet in the city near the Flinders St station. Well I managed to stuff up that simple task – the ticketing system in Melbourne is pretty simple once you understand it but I still needed help to get started. Probably the same everywhere.

But as the train got into town we pulled into Melbourne Central Station. Being an ex-Sydney boy I figured they had renamed their main station to Central 🙂 So I jumped off, headed outside and quickly worked out I was half-lost. And not where I was supposed to be. Actually I was exactly where I needed to be – but 3 hours later in the day when I was going to be meeting Stephen.

I jumped on a tram to head downtown and meet Judd at Macca’s like we had arranged.

Quick Note – you can’t log into a Macca’s / Telstra wireless hotspot using Firefox – you seem to need IE to get it started. Once logged in it was pretty good though. Very handy.

Judd and I went over to Southbank and had a couple of coffee’s over there and caught up. He is looking well. Bit pudgier as we all are 🙂 He is about to have his first kid in a few months which is great. He works for IPA as their IT Technical Manager. I think he enjoys it. Bit disappointed to have missed out on the reunion a few months ago in Broken Hill – maybe in another 10 years ? Actually we should have a 25 year one I think.

After seeing Judd I headed back to near Melbourne City Station and met up with a friend I have made at the Whirlpool website. Stephen and I got chatting online about TechTV and how to download it off the net – all good geeky stuff that I won’t go into here. It was great to meet him face to face. We headed out for some Greek food for lunch – love the restaurants in a big city. Mildura is great and has some top quality restaurants – but the variety is missing in a country town.

Stephen and I talked about all sorts of things – macs, sci-fi, podcasts, atkins diets, internet etc. Really nice guy and I look forward to catching up with him again.

Melbourne finally decided to rain on the one day it wasn’t supposed to. So I got a bit wet heading back to the train station. Couldn’t find another Macca’s to hook into a wireless hotspot to get the rest of my podcasts and email. Bugger it – figure I can survive till Saturday night.