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It's been almost a year since I've been out here now, from five years in Tokyo and a host of unusual jobs to another one here in Sydney, but more on that later. Check out this dude on a gay nudist beach - forget Venice Beach, here comes Penis Beach! It's all sails to the wind with his mast at 50 degrees and if you look closely, seems he's got his car keys hanging off there too. This was my peeping tom photo that almost had me thrown off Face Book. They obviously hadn't seen the others...

As summer moved to winter, we also moved from the beach to the city taking residence in a suburb called Potts Point next to the infamous King's Cross. The former red light district, now party centre 'the Cross' is heaps of fun at night, but during the day it's a grim gathering ground for prostitutes, crack addicts and general weirdos. The strip of clubs and bars is in between two landmarks - the Coke sign and the fountain, and the fountain borders Potts Point which is where we're living now.

And since Sydney is one of the few cities lucky enough to have the most privacy invading technology since the cctv, here's where I live courtesy of Google Streetview!

Whilst it's right next door, Potts Point couldn't be socially further apart from the Cross. Its streets are lined with expensive boutiques and cafes and there's a general air of high society and the smell of freshly earnt Benjamin$.

We're living in a 4 star hotel, renting one of the rooms sold to an estate agent, presumably because it was so overpriced for what it is. Sure, the view is amazing but it's not much bigger than my one room place in Tokyo. This is a panoramic stitch of two photos taken at 7pm, and the one in the title is an HDR photo I took at 7am.

Winter here was much colder than expected, and when you take the beach of out the equation, Sydney becomes much like other small cities I've been to. Not long to go now before everything starts heating up again though...

Since Mai's been working on Saturdays, I've one more day off the leash, free to roam the town pissing on fire hydrants as I wish. A couple of months ago, I decided to go to the Sydney Auto Salon - basically a car show for rude boys, or Westies as they're called here. It's the kind of car show where instead of being advertised with a photo of a car, they use a girl's ass next to a pair of speakers. Needless to say I took my camera.

However, to my dismay, not only were the cars ugly and uninteresting, the birds were also minging and not worth any of my digital photo reel, which is mainly reserved for snapping naked men on beaches. BUT, I did manage to get some shots of a phenomenon previously unknown to me, that is the positive correlation of badly modified cars to badly modified mullets. Behold, the Sydney Auo Salon & Mullet Show 2008!

So, back to the subject of this post - how I am earning a living, and indeed, is it an honest living?! Well, for six months now I've been working at an Internet marketing company in Bondi Junction involved in none other than online casinos. 18 of them to be precise. I was hired as a content writer (on the strength of this blog actually, so that says a lot about their excellent sense of humour..!), which basically means I write newsletters, press releases, copy for the casino sites and other promotional material. The majority of what I write is SEO focussed, which means in a nut shell that I am writing content to help make our sites appear at the top of google searches for keywords such as free online blackjack, online casinos and so on. Also I need to write in such a contrived way such that our promotional material doesn't get mistakenly caught up in spam filters (disclaimer - we never have and never will spam. Any correspondence containing 'enl4rge y0ur p3n15!' is most probably my own). Typing the name of our company into google will return over 340,000 results - 50% of the written stuff there will have originated from yours truly, and 90% of that would be from other sites who've blatantly and unashamedly plagiarised my words - but what do I care as it's not exactly Booker Prize literature to say the least, and moreover, all those keywords are like gold-dust to an Internet marketer.

The online casino industry is something I'd never really even thought about before, let alone somewhere where I'd contemplated working, and if someone were to have ever brought the subject up in conversation, I'd have immediately dismissed it all as a scam. The garish banners, the promises of free bonuses, the bogus looking testimonials... it had 'sucker' written all over it.

Therefore, the fact that I now know that it's so real - the large office I work in, the honesty and integrity of the workers, the content (ofcourse!), the money, and most surprisingly for me at least, the W1NN3R5!!! The lucky gits are all over the place! Blackjack, roulette, slots... they're all raking it in! A few months back, we had our biggest winner ever. Klaus E from Finland, who managed to snap up a cool 5.5 milllion bucks off a tiny 50 cent bet on a progressive slot machine appropriately named Mega Moolah. So, we flew him and his fiance out to Sydney to collect his (quite literally) enormous cheque.

Five and a half MILLION dollars!! In 10 seconds!! Now that's one lucky Fin. Apparently, all Finnish people carry a pocket knife with them whereever they go. Every mofo has some form of knife on his person, at all times! With security like that, after this windfall he might be better off leaving his home country for a while...

Recently I've been getting more into the online marketing side of things, so if anyone wants to start a campaign up, get in touch. If you simply want to try your luck, click the link above or below and follow the instructions to download. There are over 280 games to choose from and the best bit is you don't even need to touch your wallet - the first hour is free and you can use the casino's $1500 to see how much you can win to keep and use in the real casino for BIG BUCK$!!

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