Squee!
kungfupolarbear and I have been married for a year! I have no idea where that time went, but all of it has been awesome. 🙂 Best wife ever.
♥
Author: virtualwolf
Updates!
Work’s been going great, we ordered a shiny new Core i7 MacBook Pro which shipped today, and Lily turned 3 on Tuesday! I can’t get over how quickly that’s gone by.
This weekend has been atrocious though, because Lily has this horrendous chesty cough. It sounds loose and she seems to be coughing stuff up at least. She’s not all grumpy during the day thankfully, but at night she just can’t get a proper sleep as she keeps waking herself up with her coughing. She sometimes coughs so hard she almost gags. 🙁 I got probably four hours sleep at the most on Friday and Saturday nights. I’m dropping her off at her mother’s place at about 4pm today for Mother’s Day, so I’ll at least get a single good night before going back to work tomorrow.
kungfupolarbear will have been married for an entire year in exactly one month! Craziness. No idea where that time went either. The weekend after our anniversary is a long weekend, and one where we don’t have Lily, so we’ve used the Wotif.com voucher I got when I started at Atlassian and have booked two nights at the River Oak Lodge in Kangaroo Valley. The voucher was for $500, and even after the two nights we’re left with just under $200 on it. Woo!
And of course, I’ve been continuing to take lots of photos of everything, heheh.
Workiness
Phew! Man, this week has gone by in an absolute flash. It’s amazing how quickly time passes when you’re actively busy the entire day.
The other guy from Apple, Chris, and I are going to be supporting JIRA, Atlassian’s bug tracking software. We’ve been spending the whole week working through a bunch of documentation and learning how it all works and how to use it. We’ve been left to our own devices to work through it all, they’re not constantly looking over our shoulders seeing what we’re doing.
The general atmosphere is very similar to Apple, all laid-back. There’s no formal breaks or schedule either, which is fantastic. And we get an hour for lunch, instead of half an hour. They’ve got a kitchen area downstairs that’s totally stocked with food and drinks and snacks, all free to eat as you please! And there’s an entire large fridge dedicated to storing beer and general booze! No Bundy, but my manager said I could speak to someone about getting some in. 😀
So yeah. It’s going extremely well!
And of course, considering we now have a shiny new camera, it just wouldn’t be proper to not include some photos!
Shiny!
We are now the proud owners of a Canon EOS 7D!
…we just don’t have a lens yet, hah. Mum and dad have gotten me our first lens, a Canon EF 35mm f/2, for my birthday, and we’ll be getting that tomorrow when we go up to theirs for birthday lunch.
This is the last weekend of my unemployment too! I start work at Atlassian on Monday. Very exciting! kungfupolarbear‘s new job is going extremely well as well, everyone there is nice and and she’s actively getting to exercise her brain a bunch.
Boom!
We’re back from the Blue Mountains! Longer entry later, but for now, photos!
I am posting from a hotel!
…which is surprisingly not at all awful. It’s pretty much exactly what we were expecting considering the price. No idea what the hell the reviews were complaining about, everything’s clean and tidy.
The Zig Zag Railway was fun, and very sooty! I ended up with a bunch of black ash in my hair, which looked disturbingly like dandruff. After that we drove to Katoomba and stopped off at the viewing platform. There’ll be some rather spectacular photos coming on Monday or Tuesday! The clouds were all puffy and angry-looking, which made for much more interesting photos than what just blue sky would have.
We checked into the hotel about 5, and were pleasantly surprised as mentioned above. Dinner was at Savoy on Katoomba St, which was a wonderfully 50s-feeling cozy place. The food was absolutely fantastic. After that we went for a wander and stopped into a couple of antique-type places. The first one was bizarre… everything was just average crap, but so overpriced it was insane! They had a set of four “vintage country” wooden chairs for $320!
By the time we were leaving it was properly night time and all the angry clouds had come over, followed by a bunch of fog that was on the way. It was very creepy! Probably also because of the lack of people around in Katoomba at night.
Tomorrow the only solid plan is the Jenolan Caves, and we’ll see what else looks interesting!
Going Awayness
kungfupolarbear and I are going up to the Blue Mountains this weekend! We’re leaving Saturday morning, and staying Saturday and Sunday nights, then coming back on Monday at some point. I borrowed a book from the local library that has a bunch of good places to see and things to do. I’m looking forward to going on the Zig Zag Railway again, which I haven’t done since I was a kid! And the Jenolan Caves are apparently fantastic, and I’ve never been. There’s a bunch of other stuff as well.
We kind of forgot to check the reviews for the hotel we’re staying at before booking the tickets though, and they’re kind of awful. :\ Several people did make the point that for that price ($150/night), it’s not going to be a five star hotel or anything. We’re planning on being out and about for most of the weekend anyway.
Very exciting! And of course, there will be lots of photos. 😀
YAY!
I GOT THE JOB!
At Atlassian, that is! And holy crap, the pay is significantly better than at Apple. AND they’re giving me a voucher for kungfupolarbear and I to stay in a snazzy hotel for a few nights before I start! And I don’t start until April 12!
I also got a call last night from the Catholic school asking me to come in for a second interview, and an email this morning from the place in Artarmon asking me to come in for a face-to-face interview! Man.
But YAY! I haz a job! One of my co-workers from Apple also got a job there too, which is awesome, so there’ll be a familiar face there to begin with. WHEE!!
When it rains, it POURS
So, I had the interview at the Catholic school yesterday, which went pretty well. They said they have pretty much no proper Mac experienced people there and they’re rolling out MacBooks to the whole of Year 11, followed soon thereafter by the entire 1100 students at the school, so it’d be pretty hectic. I’d also need to be training up the staff as well, in weekly sessions.
The Atlassian interview went really well, they mostly asked me technical questions, which I knew all of the answers to. The only they asked about that I didn’t have any experience with was Java, and one of the interviewers laughed and said “Willing to learn?” to which I replied “Absolutely!”.
I sent the interviewer a follow-up email basically saying thanks for interviewing me, and kungfupolarbear suggested adding a line about MyMac probably going to make me an offer soon, which I did. I got a call yesterday evening from one of the HR ladies there asking if I could come in today for a second interview!
I had the phone interview with the place in Artarmon this morning at 10, they’re looking for a jack-of-all-trades sort of person with both hardware and software troubleshooting. Then I had the second interview at Atlassian at 11:30, which was via video conference to one of the support managers who was in San Francisco at the time, which also went very well, followed up by a quick session with one of the other HR people. They said they’d get back to me by the end of the week.
I got a missed call on my phone from some random number while I was on the bus on the way home, checked my voicemail and it was a friend who used to work at Apple who had left, and it turned out one of the jobs I’d applied for was with the company he’s at! He was just calling me to let me know it was a relatively junior role and to check what sort of money I’d be after, and to make sure I was interested before he put my résumé forward. I asked about promotion prospects, and he said that he’s actually going to be moving over to the UK at the end of this year, which nobody else knows about, and that whoever was in the role that I applied for would end up taking over his position. And the money he’s getting at the moment is quite a lot better than the initial position. I told him I was definitely interested.
And THEN at about 5:30 I got a call from a guy at the University of New South Wales about a job I’d applied for back at the start of this month, saying he was very keen to get me in for an interview and that I’m their number one candidate for the job at the moment!
And I’m still waiting to hear back from MyMac as well.
Holy crap.
Job annoyance
Well, that’s annoying. I had an informal interview today with a recruiter, but it was only $25/hour and a contract that was only until the end of the year, so I said I wasn’t interested in that particular role. It was a pain to get to as well… it shouldn’t have been, but there’s been a bunch of construction on the way to the area, which meant Google Maps was totally wrong. Urgh.
And I was meant to get a call for that job that’s ten minutes away from home, but didn’t. Emailed the lady that originally contacted me, no reply. Called her, and her voice message was “I’m not available, please send me an email”. Useful!
On the bright side, I’ve got two interviews tomorrow, the one at Atlassian that I mentioned previously, and one at Monte Sant Angelo Mercy College in North Sydney. Which is a Catholic girls high school. If I got that job, I could say, “At work I’m surrounded by Catholic schoolgirls!” and it’d be true. Hah.