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.

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.

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. 🙂

Holiday!

The stop-over in Oberon ended up being unnecessary, as it was quite a bit closer to Bathurst than we realised. The place we stayed at was clean, but that’s about all that could be said about it. The bed was exceedingly uncomfortable, and poor kungfupolarbear ended up with a very sore back from it.

BUT! The farm stay more than made up for it. We got there a bit after two in the afternoon on Sunday, and the weather was absolutely perfect. The owner, Elaine, was really friendly, and we had free rein to go around and say hello to all the animals. They had horses, a pony, sheep, chickens, and alpacas, though we didn’t see the alpacas. There was also a very friendly border collie, who absolutely delighted in all the attention we gave her.

We fed the horses and the chickens, and kungfupolarbear got to feed the lamb and hold a chicken! I had relatives who had a farm when I was growing up, but kungfupolarbear has never had the farm experience before. It seriously should be something everyone gets the chance to do.

Tonight we went and saw UNKLE at the Sydney Opera House. Given they’re an electronic show, I was surprised at how much electric guitar and rocking there was. It was quite good though.

And now, it’s time to collapse into bed. Before I do, here’s a couple of my favourite photos from the farm stay. The full set is here.

Baaaaaaaa

Barcoo

I am going places

The stubbiest pony in the world!

Relaxing!

On Sunday afternoon/night we went up to Dreamwood International, which is a very fancy name for a little B&B about an hour’s drive away from us. It was so nice, though. The owners were really friendly, the place was absolutely spotless, and when we got there they had freshly-baked scones with fresh cream and home-made jam waiting for us!

They breed border collies, golden retrievers, and alpacas. We got to play with the border collies, and went for a walk with the owners as they were feeding the alpacas on Sunday night. They are such ridiculous-looking animals! kungfupolarbear got a few really good shots of them. My photos were mostly of the border collies.

We timed it very nicely, too… on Sunday the weather was nice and sunny, but yesterday when we woke up it was all wet and dreary. All in all it was a really nice and and relaxing weekend. We’ve had a five day weekend due to Easter Friday and Monday, and Anzac Day falling on the Monday as well (Anzac Day is a public holiday too, so the public holiday from Easter Monday got pushed over to Tuesday). \o/

Blargh

Naturally, naturally, right before a five day weekend I’m coming down with a horrendously sore throat. OF COURSE. I bought Betadine sore throat gargle and hopefully will be able to nip it in the bud before it turns really bad. :\

In happier news, since we have a bunch of photographer-type people at Atlassian, we organise semi-frequent walks to just go out and take a bunch of photos. We had one today at lunch where we wandered up to The Rocks, and I finally managed to break my photographical drought (the last photo I’d uploaded to Flickr was over a month ago)! \o/