I left SpeakerText last Friday. Over the next three months, the company that we spent thousands of hours building will be shuttered as gracefully as possible.

As first-time founders, we made many bad business decisions. But in the end, the thing that landed us in the deadpool was not a lack of funds or an unviable business model. SpeakerText had non-trivial revenues backed by sophisticated technology. Last month, we processed 250 hours of transcription with minimal human oversight, and we projected further growth.

No, what killed us was the inability of the founding team to agree on a path forward. As we worked together, it became increasingly apparent that each of us desired to build a very different type of company. The smart course of action would have been to have part of the team leave, and to continue growing the business with a singular focus. Unfortunately, we did not choose that path.

There are many lessons to be learned from this experience; perhaps I’ll share them at a later time.

As for me, I’m headed to Facebook starting in June. I hope that I will be able to augment the skills I’ve developed working on early-stage products with experience developing for a site that serves a trillion pages (literally) every month. I’m also looking forward to an environment with less chaos and more stability.

I’m disappointed that I had to let go of SpeakerText, but I am truly excited about learning new things and meeting new people. The other day, my fortune cookie read “There will be many surprises; unexpected gains are likely.” I can’t ask for anything more.

I thought about the question for a moment and was completely surprised when I realized that I hadn’t even thought about it in a long time.

I have to confess – I used to think about this a lot more. Before we set the wheels in motion for the pivot that became Humanoid, we had some interesting things going on with SpeakerText, but it never felt like the kind of company that could become truly huge or disrupt industries in a big way. Our technology could provide the cheapest audio transcription across the internet if we wanted to, and we could have spent years refining the product, optimizing conversion, growing the customer base. But when we ran the numbers, the potential returns didn’t justify it. Sure, it could have made money, but it would have been a local maxima, not a thunder lizard.

Stepping back even more, before these market realizations came about, I was having fun and loving what I did, but deep down I always felt like the motivation was the payday at the end, rather than the satisfaction of the work for its own sake. I’d constantly project figures in my head – “If we sold for ‘x’, how much would I make?”. Day-to-day we were enjoying ourselves, but I never felt a deep tie to what we were doing.

So why does this time around feel so much different? I wouldn’t say that we’re guaranteed success, but we’ve taken everything we’ve learned about ourselves, about building a product and creating an organization over the past year and used it to up our game with Humanoid. We’re taking a more customer-focused approach to build product, we’re attacking a much more nascent, potentially much bigger market, and we have real competitors to worry about this time around.

The stakes are higher, but we’re better at the game.

But the real reason why I don’t want to let go of Humanoid for a long time is that I’m personally more excited about the role I’m playing in this company than I ever have been before, and the work I do is an integral component of our product. This is probably the subject of another blog post entirely, but over the past six months or so I realized that being a co-founder doesn’t necessarily mean that I have to be a manager, or attend every meeting with investors. Personally, I’m contributing the most when I’m building things. Recently, I’ve even started to expand my design skills, as that’s an area that’s lacking in our organization, but an area which I’ve always cared about.

I’ve always considered myself an extremely fast learner, but the truth is that when I co-founded SpeakerText I had very little web dev experience. My skill set has grown immensely over the past year, in tandem with my confidence. I took it upon myself to come up with the front-end interface to Humanoid, built what was in my head, and have received extremely positive feedback so far. I’ve taken more responsibility for our product than ever before, and I’ve realized that my reason to exist in the company is to make sure customers have a good experience with our product

Bottom line: I’m happier than ever. I’m learning more than ever. I feel like I’m doing bigger things than I ever have before. I don’t want to stop.

I feel more like a ‘founder’ than I ever have before.

So…onwards, upwards, forwards. I haven’t bothered to speculate where this could end up, and it no longer drives what I do. I would be less happy on Monday if I had money in my pocket than if I could go back to the office and work on building awesome stuff. I finally understand why Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t yet sold Facebook, even though he received many outsized offers. Because his end game is to build a company. So is mine.

I’ve been wanting to offer up my own thoughts on the issue for a while now. When I was a senior in high school, I fared remarkably well in the game of college admissions. Out of eight schools I applied to, I was waitlisted at one (Olin College) and accepted at the other seven. I had a choice between Harvard, Duke, Tufts, RPI, UVM, Wash U, and the University of Rochester. I could have seen myself as a student at any of those schools; they’re all quality programs and each has its individual strengths.

If cost weren’t a factor, I would have chosen to go to Harvard. The prestige, the campus, the prestige, the location, the prestige, the quality of the faculty and the other students I would meet, the opportunities that I thought it would give me… I wanted to go to Harvard for the same reasons that anyone wants to go to Harvard: it is the most prestigious university in the world, and it’s a pretty good school too.

I didn’t go to Harvard. I went to the University of Rochester. In doing so, I saved approximately $140,000 over four years thanks to a full-tuition scholarship. I can’t compare Rochester to Harvard, because I only attended one of those schools. But I know that I received a great education, connected with a lot of really smart and down-to-earth peers, was able to do meaningful things during my time off from school, and partied as much as any other 20-year-old.

Most importantly, one year after I graduated, I’m getting paid to work on something kick-ass that I wake up excited for almost every day. Isn’t that the goal of every college student?

I may not have been able to formalize it back in 2005 when I graduated high school, but my decision was a conscious opinion that college is not worth $140,000 or going into serious debt for. My parents had saved up a serious amount of money for me to use on my education. They said to me, “The money is yours. You can either use to to pay for school, or use it to get your life started when you graduate.”

(Thanks, Mom and Dad!)

I could have graduated with a Harvard diploma and tens of thousands of dollars of student loans. Instead, I pocketed the money when I graduated and used it to buy food and pay rent when SpeakerText had less than a thousand dollars in the bank.

Not everyone has the incredible opportunity to receive a full-tuition scholarship to college. But almost everyone has higher education options. Most state schools are significantly less expensive than private schools. But many students go to the absolute “best” school that they get into, where best is measured by a dubious ranking system that rewards things like money spent per pupil and selectivity, rather than educational outcomes or affordability.

Here’s what I think is the cause of this: Students and parents have the foolishly misguided belief that going to a better school automatically guarantees a better job. This is utterly wrong. Certainly, having a more prestigious name at the top of your resume may color someone’s initial opinion of you.  But they will ultimately hire you based on how well-suited you are to the job, your experience, and whether it seems like you create opportunities for yourself or wait and let them come to you.

You aren’t entitled to a job as a reward for graduating.

Guess what? There are hundreds of thousands of others in your same situation. Having a college degree is not a differentiator, nor is the name on that degree. It’s what you do during and outside of your classes, it’s the experiences you have during your summers, it’s what you’ve learned and how you apply that knowledge that will make you stand out to a potential employer.

Consider: I started working at IBM before I graduated from high school, learning Python on the job.  My friends and I developed a device called the Watt Watcher that could monitor energy usage of any appliance.  I’ve filed for patents for work I did on wafer picking technology during another summer at IBM. I tutored elementary school students in Rochester public schools.  I spent a semester studying engineering in Australia.  It’s these experiences that helped make me an effective engineer, not the words on my diploma.

Yes, expensive schools may have more resources, such as larger libraries and more labs. And if you go to a more prestigious school, you might have more opportunities thrown directly in your face. But how much is that worth to you? In this age of the internet, where anyone can learn anything and get in touch with virtually anyone, do you need to pay for access? More importantly, the money that you spend in school won’t be available to you to be flexible when life-changing opportunities come up after you graduate.

College loans give you very little room to maneuver.

I’m a believer in the four-year university.  Most students aren’t ready to go straight from high school into the real world. College should be cheaper, yes, but it’s still incredibly valuable. It’s a great place to connect with smart, like-minded people, to learn how to approach ideas and think about problems, and often overlooked – it’s fun.

But you don’t have to go to Harvard, you don’t have to pay $50,000 a year, and you don’t need anyone’s permission or blessing to start thinking about and working on the problems that you one day hope to get paid to solve.

Brandon and I hiked the Berry Creek falls trail, about 11 miles round trip. It’s one of the longer hikes in my guidebook. A nice change from the previous hike, the scenery was almost completely wooded and dark. The three waterfalls were a treat in the middle of the hike.

Redwoods

Stairs to the Berry Creek Falls viewing platform

Berry Creek Falls. ISO 200, f/8, 1/6s exposure, handheld. Pretty pleased with how this came out.

Wiped-out after returning to the trailhead.

Mt. Diablo is east of San Francisco, on the other side of the Berkeley Hills. Brandon and I climbed to the summit (~3,800ft) from Rock City. A gorgeous sunny day, although it was a bit hazy. 8.5 miles round trip.

The Start of the Hike

Sentinel Rock

Steep stairs allowed climbing to the top of Sentinel Rock.

Local flora…

…and fauna!

At the top.

Best part of the day…seeing two paragliders take off and float around the valley.

A few more pictures on Flickr.

It also comes with a really nice front-end interface that allows you to see your queues and workers and retry jobs that have failed. This is packaged with the gem as a Sinatra app. In Rails 3, you can mount Rack apps as subdirectories, so ideally we’d like to have our Resque interface available at, say, http://myapp.com/resque. The way to do this has been covered already.

But what if you’d like to use something other than kludgey basic auth? We’re already using Authlogic and ActiveRecord in the rest of our app to authenticate users and track privileges, so we’d like to authenticate to the Resque interface using the same system. We won’t allow people to log in through the Resque interface, but we can certainly restrict access to logged-in users by sharing the session cookie between our Rails app and the Resque Server.

Here’s how to do it:

Make sure Authlogic works in your Rails 3 app. Unfortunately Authlogic looks to be sort of an abandoned project. The official 2.1.6 version of the gem doesn’t work for me and throws deprecation warnings, so I’m using the ‘rails3′ branch of odorcid’s fork on Github. The line in the Gemfile is:

gem 'authlogic', :git => 'git://github.com/odorcicd/authlogic.git',
  :branch => 'rails3'

In your routes file, place this line of code:

mount Resque::Server.new, :at => "/resque"

Then, in config/initializers/resque.rb, place these lines (jump down for explanation):

require 'resque/server'

begin
  # this will fail because it has some bad inclusion code
  require 'authlogic/controller_adapters/sinatra_adapter'
rescue NoMethodError
end

module Resque
  class Server

    configure do
      enable :sessions
    end

    use Rack::Session::Cookie,
      :key => 'MY_SESSION_KEY',
      :secret => 'MY_SESSION_SECRET'

    def current_user_session
      return @current_user_session if defined?(@current_user_session)
      @current_user_session = UserSession.find
    end
    def current_user
      return @current_user if defined?(@current_user)
      @current_user = current_user_session && current_user_session.record
    end

    before do
      controller = Authlogic::ControllerAdapters::SinatraAdapter::Controller.new(request, response)
      Authlogic::Session::Base.controller = Authlogic::ControllerAdapters::SinatraAdapter::Adapter.new(controller)

      redirect '/login' unless current_user && current_user.admin_privileges?
    end

  end
end

The first thing we need to do is require the Resque Server code and the Authlogic Sinatra bridge (Resque Server is a Sinatra app). Unfortunately, the Authlogic Sinatra bridge tries to add behavior to a method in the wrong class when it’s included, so we need to catch this and fail silently.

Next, we’ll reopen the Resque::Server class to add some functionality.

We configure the Resque Server app to use sessions. We then provide the same session key and secret as are specified in session_store.rb and secret_token.rb. In this case, we’re using a cookie-based session store.

Next, we add the current_user and current_user_session helper methods to our Resque Server class. Basically, this class serves the same purpose as ApplicationController in a Rails app. Next, we must make sure that Authlogic gets bridged with our Sinatra ‘controller.’ This is the code that should have been added automatically for us when we included the Sinatra bridge file.

Lastly, we add some logic in the before method to check that we have a logged-in user and that this user can access the Resque Server interface. The before method is similar to Rails’ before_filter in that it runs before any actions do. Thus, we can redirect the user to a login page (or somewhere else) if they do not have access privileges.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how to sum up my background and experience to these people in a few sentences. My standard intro used to be something like:

“Hi, I’m Tyler. I just graduated from the University of Rochester (in Rochester, NY) with a degree in Electrical and Computer engineering and a minor in Computer Science. I’m originally from Vermont, and I like to run, hike, and code. I met my co-founder Matt Mireles at a job fair at Columbia University last fall, started freelancing for SpeakerText soon after, and joined on as a co-founder when I graduated this past May.” Sometimes I add: “I had actually never done any web development before I joined SpeakerText, but I picked it up pretty quickly”

My co-founders do not think this makes me sound intelligent. Even worse, they think it reflects badly on our company. They argue that 1) Rochester is not a great brand, 2) Having only a minor in Computer Science does not inspire confidence in my programming skills, and 3) Saying that SpeakerText is my first foray into web development makes me sound like a no-talent n00b.

They’d rather I introduce myself with something like:

“Hi, I’m Tyler. I’ve been coding in one language or another since 4th grade. My first job was as a Python programmer for IBM while I was still in high school. I was accepted to Harvard, but turned it down in order to attend the University of Rochester on a full-tuition scholarship. During college, I studied Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. I completed two other internships at IBM and also did computer vision work for Lockheed Martin. I met Matt about a year ago, helped launch the first version of SpeakerText last January, and have been with SpeakerText full-time since I graduated in May.”

(As an aside, there are certain parts of the above paragraph I’d never say, such as the part about Harvard. Besides the fact that it sounds extremely self-serving, I don’t believe, five years later, that it is relevant or has any bearing on who I am today. But out here in the Valley, where the highest cachet comes from having dropped out of Harvard or MIT or Stanford at the age of 20, it probably makes people sit up and pay attention.)

Both introductions are true, and both describe me accurately. The first one showcases who I am; the second reads like a summary of my resume. The first is subtle, the second like hitting someone over the head with a metal pipe. I’d prefer to show off SpeakerText and let that serve as proof of our engineering skills.

But pedigree and past accomplishments are important. I know this because I look for them myself in the people I meet. I want to know about where they went to school and what kinds of things they worked on before their current gig.

So, why can’t I say these things about myself? I think there are two simple reasons.

1) I’ve never really had to self-promote. I got my first job because I had shown some promise in high school, but also because my dad worked in the department and was able to introduce me to his manager, and because I was cheap enough that they could afford to take a chance on me. I did so well at that job that my name spread throughout the site without me having to do anything. During subsequent summers, managers started emailing me to offer me their positions.

Also, most of the people I’ve met over the past few years have been peers. It’s fairly obvious that if you want to make a good friend, you won’t blab about yourself and your accomplishments until you know the person quite well.

2) There’s a difference between associating yourself with an impressive name, and doing cool stuff. So what if I worked at IBM? If all I did was sit around, it wouldn’t be very impressive. I’d rather tell people about the real-time wafer mapping system I helped build, or how much time our Python automation system saved engineers for each chip design processed. It sounds impressive that I did “computer vision work at Lockheed Martin,” but not as much when I explain that it was a tedious job that I grew to hate. The actual day-to-day tasks were repetetive and I did much less coding than I expected.

Taking this into account, I think my perfect introduction would read as such:

“Hi, I’m Tyler. I’ve loved computers from an early age and I’ve been coding in one form or another since the 4th grade. I’ve held a number of internships at IBM, where I helped develop an automation system written in Python, and a real-time wafer data mapping program written in Java and Python. During my senior year at the University of Rochester, I wrote a few thousand lines of C code for a personal A/C power meter that I built with three classmates. I’ve been working with Matt on SpeakerText for over a year, and I’m pretty proud of our latest version, which was built from scratch in three months by three developers.”

I think that gets across all the pertinent information without sounding obnoxious. I’ll probably give a less detailed version when we meet with people, but I’ll certainly try it out and tweak it as we continue to meet with people.

Expect a longer post soon, but in the meantime, feel free to check out some of the stuff I posted while I was in Australia two years ago. The writing is good and the pictures are even better!

I met Tom at the international arrivals terminal in Christchurch on a rainy Thursday afternoon in May. I withdrew some Kiwi dollars from the ATM; they are a similar plastic material to the Australian notes, but have more subdued colors and have pictures of wildlife instead of random British people on them. We caught a bus to Christchurch and walked to the Wicked van depot, where I got my first experience with driving on the left side of the road. It couldn’t have been in worse conditions: middle of a city, rainy and foggy, but I managed to pull it off, in no small part to Tom’s handy copilot map-reading skills.

Our first task was to load up on gas and food for the weekend: sandwich materials, cheese, eggs, pancake mix, juice, ginger beer, real beer, and a few other assorted items. The van had a kitchen and stove on it, so we knew that we would be able to cook some of our food. With these essentials accomplished, we decided to drive around searching for a place to park for the night – somewhere secluded, but not sketchy. It also had to be accessible later on during the night, which ruled out parking garages. We found a gravel parking area in the Botanical gardens, situated nicely next to public bathrooms. Score! The van lady had suggested to make up the bed while it was still light and we were still sober, so we heeded her advice (which we were grateful of later), and we were pleasantly surprised to find a fleece blanket and a comforter to keep us warm. As we were about to leave, we saw two men trying to break into the only other car in the lot, which caused us a bit of alarm. We loitered a bit, wondering if we were going to get back later that night and be unhappy with our choice of parking spot. We were pretty sure that they had just locked themselves out, because one of the dudes was quite old, but they were using a crowbar, which gave us cause for concern. Luckily, a locksmith van drove up, and we headed into the city much relieved.

Dinner was at the Bog, a bar that also has an outlet in Auckland which caused Tom to reccommend it. We were also drawn in by the fire near the door, as it was a cold, wet night. My steak was delicious, as was my first New Zealand beer. Filled up and warm, we headed out to see what kind of New Zealand nightlife we could find. Answer: not much. We canvassed the whole city multiple times, mostly finding small, intimate couples bars. We played billiards at a really dodgy place where gangs of teenagers kept walking in and out of the back door. The night took a decidedly upward turn, however, when we found the Grumpy Mole Saloon, an American Old West-style joint with a roaring fire, a talkative female bartender, and delicious lemony-honey beers on tap. We stayed there until the dance club next door got going, then moved over there to get our groove on. Tom loved the dancing, but I dragged him out of there because I wasn’t getting a good vibe from the mostly Kiwi crowd and I wanted to get on the road early the next morning.

Well, that didn’t really happen, but we did end up getting out of Christchurch by midday. We decided to head for Arthur’s Pass, where we hoped to find some good mountains to climb. As soon as we got out of the city, I felt immensely better. I’m sure Christchurch has its good moments, but the previous night was not one of them. Once we got out of the city, we noticed that the trees were changing color, the smell of fall was in the air, and eventually there were mountains on the horizon. Even in the fog, it was a beautiful sight, and we had to stop to take pictures.

On the way, we passed Castle Hill, an area where glaciers had left huge rocks scattered on the hillside. Tom had brought his climbing gear, but we decided to try and stop on the way back because we couldn’t find a parking spot, and it was already late in the day. You can see the rocks on the hill in the right side of the picture, and also some neat orange pines which provided a stunning contrast with the green ones. We stopped for sandwiches at a gorgeous mountain lake. The peanut-butter and jelly and cheese (yes, it’s good) sandwiches and ginger beer tasted incredible in such stunning beauty.

Back on the road, we finally made it to Arthur’s Pass. To honor an old Kieft family tradition, we stopped to take a picture by the entrance sign. It was incredible to us how few people we had seen on the road, and this held true for our entire vacation. We were on Rte. 73, one of the only roads to cross the south island from east to west, and we were passing less than 20 cars an hour. Besides making us feel like we had jumped into Lord of the Rings, it gave the weekend such a personal experience, not having to share it with billions of other tourists. And of course, it cemented my view that a camper van is the only way to see the south island properly. The road also had tons of long, one-lane bridges over dried-up river beds. Tom and I wondered if they were a lot more violent during the spring thaw, or maybe they were left from a few hundred years ago when New Zealand was experiencing large glacial melt.

We continued on into Arthur’s Pass Village, population of around 50, maybe less, and stopped at the visitor center to see if there were a few short hikes we could tackle. We headed out to the 300m Devil’s Punchbowl Falls, which was around 30 minutes round-trip, a good warmup. Then we hiked up to Temple Basin ski area, which took more than two hours and provided good views of the valley. We climbed a little past the ski lodge, up a scree slope of small rocks, and the effort was justly rewarded by getting to “ski” in our sneakers down the easily-eroded rock slope.

Feeling tired, we stopped back in town at Arthur’s Cafe and Restaurant and ordered two hot-chocolates, my brilliant idea. They were brought over to us while we collapsed on two fireside couches. I took one sip, and that was all that was needed to realize that I had just tasted the best hot chocolate of my life. It had a large, foamy head on it and it was of the perfect sweetness. We ordered dinner there as well, and since we didn’t want to leave and head back into the cold wilderness, we played a round of billiards and some cribbage as well. Tom probably hopes I forgot, but I skunked him in the first round of cribbage!

The next morning, we made the pancakes in the lodge near our campsite. We met a nice Israeli girl who was traveling around by herself for a few months in the southern hemisphere, and gave her one of our admittedly delicious pancakes, topped with raspberry jam. We had hoped to hike up Avalanche Peak that day, but the weather looked crummy, and it was even colder in the morning than it had been the previous night, so we decided to see what lay westward. We drove over a huge viaduct, and there was a lookout before the crossing showing the original, treacherous road carved in the side of the mountain that was traversed in the past by horses.

As soon as we got out of Arthur’s pass, the clouds broke, the sun shone through, and it was like we were in a different world. When we stopped and got out of the van, we realized that the temperature had risen about 30 degrees as well, a pleasant surprise. We drove through a number of tiny towns, reached the west coast and the Pacific ocean, and headed south towards glacier country.

We stopped at two glaciers that were about thirty minutes drive apart, the Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers. We did hikes to each, getting as close as we could. We saw climbers on the Franz Josef Glacier, but neither Tom nor I wanted to pay to climb on some ice, as there is plenty of that in Vermont and Montana. One of the coolest parts of seeing the glaciers was learning about how active they are. We passed signs on the access roads of each that denoted where the glacier faces were in 1750, and each was kilometers further out than it is today. Incredible!

That night, we drove back to Arthur’s Pass, still hoping to attempt Avalanche peak in the morning. Petrol had gotten more and more expensive as we had gotten further away from Christchurch, so we foolishly decided to hold off on purchasing some. End result: we ended up stranded in a small town where the petrol station was already closed, not to open again until Monday morning. We inquired at the local pub, where the bartender told us that we could find the owner of the petrol station in the house behind it. We had to pay him $20 to open it up for us, but a crisis was averted. Back in the village, we stopped at a pub to watch some rugby, and headed to bed.

We woke up the next morning, made oatmeal, again in the lodge, and went over to the visitor’s center with Avalanche Peak firmly fixed in our minds. Although it was cloudy, with morning snow showers, the weather report said it might clear by the afternoon, so we decided to attempt the hike, going up the less steep Scott’s track in case we had to turn back. After purchasing gloves (best $9 I’ve ever spent) we headed up the road with sandwiches, cameras, and plenty of extra clothes.

The track was difficult enough, and we were glad that we didn’t attempt the steep version. We were out of breath most of the way, as it was a 2800m climb that only took two hours one way. On the trail, we encountered the Endless Stair of rocks, and above the subalpine level we stopped to do the Fellowship of the Ring pose (above). Soon it got really cold, and by the top everything was covered with a centimeter of snow. There were gusting winds and snow showers. Visibility kept changing as the clouds moved overhead. A few times we debated going back, but since we could reliably see at least a few trail markers ahead, we decided to keep going. The last 200m of the hike were crazy. We were on a narrow, snow-covered ridge, and one slip may have sent either of us tumbling down the steep cliffs on either side. Taking much care, we made it across the Pass of Caradhras (alright, admittedly nerdy). Summiting felt really good, although we didn’t stay long because it was cold! You can tell by the picture that there wasn’t much of a view to enjoy either.

Visions of Arthur’s hot chocolate in our minds, we headed back down, stopping only to devour a sandwich in a wind-shielded spot. We made it intact, sporting no visible injuries, and feeling quite proud of ourselves, having done the entire hike in less than four hours. We got the aforementioned hot chocolates, which tasted just as good as the first time. On the way out, we knew we needed to commemorate the occasion with a picture. I caught a much-needed shower – $2 for 6 minutes, and we headed back to Christchurch. That night, since we were extremely tired and sick of cold weather, we decided to spend our time inside a nice, warm movie theatre watching the new Indiana Jones, a fitting movie for the end of an epic weekend.

I couldn’t have imagined that we’d do so much in such a short time, but we managed to create from scratch one of the best vacations I’ve ever been on. The combination of driving around with no aim in one of the most beautiful countries in the world, eating and sleeping in the back of a van, and a few killer hikes was unbeatable. I’ve got a few more pictures at Flickr, and if you want another, slightly more colorful account of the trip you can check out my friend Tom’s version.

Brisbane, although only an hour’s flight away, was noticeably warmer than Sydney, a welcome change. We rode the monorail into the city, and met up with the girl whose apartment we were planning to stay in. That night, we went out to a bar in the city where they had karaoke. I sang “Don’t Look Back in Anger” by Oasis, one of my top 5 favorite songs, and the ladies were swooning.

The next morning we woke up early to board a Greyhound for the Sunshine Coast, a coastal region north of Brisbane. Most people have heard of the Gold Coast, which is south of Brisbane, and has all the amusement parks and the town of Surfer’s Paradise. We ended up in Noosa, a quaint town that is a popular vacation destination for Australians. Our lodgings were at the Noosa North Shore resort, which was only reachable by ferry across a river. Interesting note: Richard Branson, owner of Virgin (Blue / Atlantic / Records / Mobile / Galactic) had just bought an island up the river for A$2.86 million and was currently in the process of building a free getaway for his employees on it.

Our accommodations were incredible; for $25 a night each we had our own unit with 2 bedrooms, a lounge with couch and TV, a kitchen, and a patio which opened up to a pool and fields where wild kangaroos grazed during the day. We walked down the road about 3K to the beach, which was deserted except for the occasional Jeep driving by, and relaxed for a while. Later that night we headed into town for dinner at a Thai restaurant and an alcohol run at Dan Murphy’s, which advertised the cheapest liquor prices in Australia. I think I’ll be forever remembered for drinking Gaymer’s hard cider.

The next morning we spent riding camels on the beach, which was an awesome experience. Camels are a semi-native animal in Australia, having been imported over a hundred years ago. They only come in the one-humped variety. The ones that we were riding were all males that had been caught in the outback. Camels like to smell your breath (that’s where the picture below comes from). They can also pee for up to 10 minutes straight. Enough with the camel facts, though. You mount and dismount a camel when it is sitting down, and then hold on tight while it gets up (or down). They move pretty fast, and the ride is comfortable although a bit bumpy.

We returned to Brisbane that afternoon, and took an easy night watching a movie. The next day we got a late start. The guys split from the girls, who wanted to check out the man-made beach. We rented bikes and explored the city, checking out the main bridge over the river which was a bit like the Sydney Harbor Bridge redux and the parks that ran alongside the river. Then we went rock climbing at Kangaroo Point Cliffs, a rock wall spanning a long section of the river. It was sunset, so there were lights illuminating the cliff, and after I got to the top I was able to enjoy the brightly-lit skyline of Brisbane. The climb was my first on a real rock wall, and it was much taller than any artificial wall I’ve ever climbed.

Unfortunately, we had to leave the next morning, but it was helped by the fact that I had missed all of my Monday classes by the time we got back to school. Be sure to check out Flickr for a picture of Sydney from the window of the plane and other camel shots!