Payrise!
We had our salary reviews yesterday, and I got a 5% payrise! Even better, it’s backdated to the 1st of January. \o/ So payday next Wednesday, I’ll get a bunch of extra money.
Woot!
Wow
I went to the Factory Theatre in Marrickville last night to see Devin Townsend and Meshuggah, neither of which I’d seen live before.
Meshuggah was the headlining show, and they were excellent, but Devin Townsend stole the show IMO. He had so much interaction with the crowd and you could completely tell he utterly loved being up there. I was right at the very front on the right side of the stage, and he made a point to come over to both sides of the stage and amp up the crowd. At one point he was individually looking at and acknowledging people and saying “Thank you”.
The songs were absolutely epic, and I was headbanging as hard as I’ve ever done before. It was absolutely one of the best shows I’ve been to. It ran a bit later than I expected, and so I ended up running more than half-way from the venue to Sydenham train station to catch the last train of the night (11:52pm), and I didn’t get home until a bit after 1am. I was definitely stiff today and I suspect will be even more so tomorrow!
Also, kungfupolarbear is the best wife in the world. I came home to this on the kitchen counter. 😀
My semi-regular two-month update.
An update! Mostly brought to you by velvetrhapsody updating, then me realising it’s been ages since I updated mine. 😛
Work is mostly the same, but far busier. We updated about 8000 customers to JIRA 5 last week, and it’s not so much that there were massive bugs but the sheer number of people raising support cases about either minor bugs or just questions about functionality… argh. I’ve been absolutely non-stop flat out the entirety of last week, and this week doesn’t seem to be slowing down any.
I’ve had to get an ergonomic keyboard at work, because my left wrist has starting feeling… weird. It’s that feeling in the muscles on the underside of the arm towards the wrist that you get after an evening of ten-pin bowling, where you feel like you’ve been using muscles you don’t normally use. I don’t know why it’s suddenly come on, but the new keyboard seems to be helping. (It’s a Microsoft Natural 4000 if anyone is interested).
On Saturday I went for a flight in a 1950s de Havilland Chipmunk! I took some photos prior to the flight. It was actually rather nerve-wracking because I was flying it for most of the flight! I’m not sure I want to do it again, to be honest… I spent it mostly concentrating on keeping the plane level and so didn’t get a chance to do much sight-seeing.
Lily has started school this year, which is crazy. I have no idea where that time went! Apparently her teacher is nice.
New Year’s Eve was excellent, kungfupolarbear and I went to a co-worker’s place in Kirribilli, and the view was insane. Witness:
The full set is here.
Speaking of photos, I’ve been on quite the black and white kick lately.
We’re going back to Boston in August for kungfupolarbear‘s 30th birthday, which is very exciting! I loved Boston, and it’ll be great to go again now that we actually have a decent camera. \o/ OH THE PHOTOS WE WILL TAKE
…and I think that’s mostly about it!
Merry Christmas all!
Christmas was quite good. Lily didn’t wake me up at arse o’clock in the morning, which was lovely! We went over to mum and dad’s for Christmas lunch, as we do every year. It was delicious, all the presents were given, and it was generally very nice.
Mum and dad bought me (at my request) this guitar input so I can plug my guitar into my computer and iPhone, and hopefully it’ll encourage me to actually get around to learning how to play the damn thing. I also got some gift cards, and the Halo 1 anniversary edition.
\o/
Oops
Nearly two months without an update! D’oh. I’ve completely forgotten to even look at my friends page for the past few weeks. 🙁
Work has been going very well. At the end of October we launched a whole new platform for our hosted offerings, called OnDemand, and it’s been very well received by everyone. There’s been a massive uptake of it, but our support load hasn’t exploded.
The three of us in Hosted Support are currently sitting next to the other two hosted platform teams, which is really nice. We can just turn around and ask questions, or we know immediately if something’s going funny.
Speaking of work, we had an awesome Melbourne Cup Day lunch last month. Everyone dressed up and we left work at 11am and went to this really nice venue on the harbour. We had absolutely delicious food, plenty of beer and wine, and it was all paid for by work! I brought the camera and gave it a good workout, and got a bunch of great photos. In fact, this particular one was used as a presentation slide by one of the CEOs in the last all-hands meeting we had! 😀 (It was the “Questions?” screen, so nothing major, but I was pretty chuffed).
We’re currently twelve days away from moving house. We were wanting to stay in our current place until we saved up enough money to buy a unit, but it turns out the owners want to move back in. They had a baby and had just moved closer to the city while she was pregnant, but the douchebag real estate agent neglected to mention any of this when we signed the lease originally, and assured us that it’d be fine to renew the lease when the time came.
The new place is in Turramurra, about ten minutes closer to the city than where we are now. It’s a bit bigger than our current place, and it’s actually an investment property. The owners wanted to make sure we were going to be staying a goodly while before they agreed to get flyscreens installed (there aren’t any right now), so that’s a good sign.
We’ve done a reasonable amount of packing already, and not having to de-mould every goddamn thing in the place is making it so much faster.
I completely forgot to mention that we went down to Melbourne for the weekend on the 9th/10th/11th of September, and it was great! We stayed in a really nice hotel on St Kilda Rd so were able to just wander up to Flinders St and get to wherever. And oh, the food! Man, both kungfupolarbear and I would be SO FAT if we lived in Melbourne.
I’d been there once before to visit Xenex but that was many years ago now, and I don’t even recall what we did. 😛 It was so different to Sydney and I can’t wait to go back. Naturally, I took heap of photos. 😉
A friend of Kristina’s came over from the US and stayed with us for a week. The ENTIRE TIME, the weather was absolute rubbish. 🙁 We went up to the Blue Mountains and literally couldn’t see anything. I’ve never seen fog anything like it.
The shitty weather has pretty much continued since then, and it’s feeling more like we’re going from autumn into winter, rather than already being in summer. Supposedly it’s meant to be a cool wet summer, so I’m not holding out any hope of the weather improving. 🙁
Lily starts school in about two months! 😮 And she’s turning five in May. Holy shit. I have no idea where that time went, it’s crazy. She’s doing really well with her letters, she knows the whole alphabet, and I set her up with WriteRoom and my old iBook G4, so she can spell words from her books and see them right on the screen. She actually asks me if she can “do letters”, which is good! I just looked, and my Lily set on Flickr has 226 photos in it. 😀 It’s fun looking through all the old photos and seeing her getting steadily older.
/salute
I just shut my Power Mac G5 down for what will likely be the last time, after nearly six years of flawless operation.
I realise it’s just a computer, but I’m a bit wistful at the moment. I ordered it the day the quad-core machines were announced, and it arrived on the 17th of November in 2005. It’s been my computer through rather a lot of changes in my life… from the mundane like Apple moving from Frenchs Forest to the city, to Lily being born (and all the drama and psycho-ness from her mother, ugh), to the best thing that’s ever happened to me: falling madly in love with my beautiful kungfupolarbear, proposing, and getting married. 🙂
I used the hell out of the computer through that whole time, and never once did it skip a beat. Farewell, G5.
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.
New shiny!
I bought a ring flash from DIY Lighting Kits, which arrived on Friday. I put it together yesterday, and am very pleased with the results!
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).
