We lost a great man today

I was sitting at my desk at work, and saw a tweet that seriously caused my heart to skip a beat… “Apple says Steve Jobs has died”. And it was true. I know it sounds trite and ridiculous for someone who was the CEO of a multi-billion dollar international company, but I honestly teared up, and am still in disbelief.

It’s no exaggeration to say that my life would be totally different without Steve Jobs and Apple. We had a second-hand Apple ][e that my uncle gave us, and I spent many an hour playing Wavy Navy. My dad used to bring home his old SE/30 from work and I’d have great fun mucking around in MacPaint and just generally learning how to use it. We always bought Apple machines, even during the mid-90s when just about everyone else had abandoned them. I was the sole Mac user for pretty much the whole of my school career, and was frequently laughed at for it. Now I look around on the train on the way to work and just about everyone has an iPhone, and there’s plenty of Mac laptops as well. How things change.

I ended up getting a job at Apple in 2003, and worked there for six and a half years until our whole call centre was made redundant. I’m not at all bitter, because it worked out brilliantly, I love my current job and wouldn’t have gotten it without having had the job at Apple to begin with.

I can’t even imagine how life would have turned out if not for Steve and Apple.

RIP, Steve. We’ll miss you.

A slightly delayed post, but better late than never

Last weekend was (mostly) rather excellent!

Friday night we went to our regular favourite Chinese restaurant, New Shanghai, in Chatswood, with gypocalypse and his girlfriend, and another friend @wobster. The food was excellent as always, and afterwards we went up to San Churro. HOLY CRAP. I’ve never had hot chocolate quite like that. It was more like the consistency of pudding!

On Saturday night we went over to gypocalypse‘s for a bad movie night, which featured glorious 80s action cheese in the form of Commando and Escape from New York. Well, Commando was glorious, Escape from New York was just booooooring.

Sunday night, was mum and dad’s for dinner, and hanging out with them and my sister and her fiancé. That was lots of fun, as we get along really well, and my sister’s fiancé is a really nice, laid-back, funny guy. Her previous boyfriend was a pretty useless idiot, so we’re really happy she’s found someone nice.

And lastly, not that it’s part of the weekend, but last night we went to see Dylan Moran at the State Theatre. We’ve seen his standup before, and it’s brilliant, and the show last night absolutely did not disappoint in any way. My entire face hurt from laughing so much.

In less good news, right as we were sitting down to dinner on Friday I got a call from my dad saying that my grandma (the only grandparent I have left, and she’s turning 87 this year) had been admitted to hospital with blood pressure of 210/80. 🙁 Thankfully since then we’ve found out that she’s stabilised and is doing a lot better, and she might be getting fitted with a Pacemaker, depending on what the surgeons think.

And now, to bed! Phew.

The family. Also, photos.

We went over to my parents’ place last night for dinner, and my sister and her boyfriend and their adorable little girl were there. I certainly gave the new lens a good workout, and got some really good photos. It was really nice to hang out with the family (my sister lives down in Nowra, which is a good three hours drive away, so we don’t see her very often).

Me? I'm not doing anything. No sir.

Hmmmmmmm.

Smile!

I love my work

So due to the large amount of (free) drinks we get in at work, and the increasing time that it takes for the office organiser people to stock the fridges, we’ve gotten in vending machines and will have people come in and stock them for us. The drinks in the vending machines won’t cost us any money, it’s just saving time.

😀

The precious is here!

The new lens (35mm f/1.4L) arrived yesterday! And holy shit I can see why people rave about L-series lenses (for those not in the know, L-series lenses are Canon’s absolute top-of-the-line insanely high-quality lenses). It’s absolutely amazing.

kungfupolarbear and I met up for lunch yesterday, then wandered around the garden sitting area just across from my work and took some photos.

Seriously, just wow. It focuses extremely quickly and totally silently, and the bokeh is just stunning. I could go on for ages, but I’ll stop now. 😉 kungfupolarbear assisted with getting the cropping right on those three pics… she really has an amazing eye for what works and what doesn’t. I can look at a photo and see that the cropping doesn’t look good, but specifically why, and how to fix it, often eludes me. 🙂

Then I took another photo tonight, with the flashes.

Lifeless

So yes. LOVE. 😀

Monies!

At work, we get a company-wide bonus each year, and the better we do the more we get. It starts at 7.5%, and goes up to 9.5%. We got the full 9.5% this year! 😀 …so naturally I’m spending part of it on shiny new camera gear. 😉 I’ve ordered the Canon EF 35mm f/1.4L, and it ought to arrive early next week. \o/

Work is going quite well, we hired a new guy for Studio support and he started about three weeks ago, and he gets along really well with everyone. The queue hasn’t been horrible this week, so I’ve had a bit of time to relax.

kungfupolarbear‘s new job is going fantastically well, everyone there is nice, and people are sane!

All in all, things are excellent. 😀

Oops

I know I said I’d update this more often, but not too much update-worthy has been happening! Work has been crazy busy this week, as we had an update over the weekend so of course there’s random things not working and exciting to bugs to deal with.

With regards to this post, I bought a book on Objective-C and am attempting to learn it so I can get my iPhone programming on! We play a lot of Magic at work, so I’m going to try to write an app to keep track of life scores. Dead simple, I know, but it’s a project for me to sink my teeth into, and also shouldn’t be horrendously difficult. \o/ It might even end up on the App Store (if there’s not already several apps like this I’ll be shocked), but that’s a lesser priority.

…and that’s about it, really.

Squee!

Holy crap kungfupolarbear and I have been married for two years today! 😮 That is seriously crazy. Most awesome two years ever!

The poor thing is in exceedingly bad pain from her tonsillectomy though, so we’re not doing anything to celebrate (at least not yet anyway). Everyone should send her good vibes. 🙂