Monthly Archives: November 2005

Natcoll and the land of PSP

After an incredibly short interview process I’m now employed as a tutor at Natcoll Wellington until the end of the year. They have me taking practical labs in Macromedia Director 4 days a week and a theory class once a week. The work is pretty fun, and the class I’m taking are neat. My fellow tutors are good value, and seem to be really switched on with their specialties, and enjoy a lot of the random internet entertainment I do.

Everyone in my department (apart from the course co-ordinator) owns a PSP. So I figured I should make the most of it and bite the bullet myself. Mind you, it wasn’t cheap :/ Anyway, I got the PSP value pack, a USB cable, a 1GB Memory Stick Duo and the game Mercury, and I have GTA Liberty City Stories preordered.

I also bought a UMD Movie of Steamboy, which is a great anime film — you should see it if you get the chance. But I don’t think that the PSP is a great delivery platform for a two-hour movie, unless you’re stuck on a plane and are sick of playing video games.

Also, hooray for Homebrew! After upgrading from 1.52 to 2.0 and then downgrading to 1.50, I got a Genesis/Megadrive emulator running on there!

And OMG PHEAR LUMINES. That game, once you get into it, is intense. You go into it all relaxed and you come out of it all tense and powered up. I love that game.

Friends Games Hardware Life Movies Work 4 comments

Baby’s first Redundancy

Yup. I was made “redundant” yesterday. My three-month contract has expired and soon I’ll no longer be able to call myself a current employee of 3months.com. So it wasn’t really a redundancy.

So on Monday, while I was still an employee, our client the Department of Labour launched New Zealand Now, a website aimed at New Zealand expats to bring them back to the mothership that is New Zealand. It’s damn sweet if you ask me. The team did an excellent job of getting it together in about 9 weeks. We worked with Shift who did an awesome job on the design and HTML+CSS+Flash — seriously superb!

So then on Tuesday I was told that the contract I’d been given was coming to an end. I’d been hoping that they’d give me more work after that, but it turns out they didn’t.

Talk about your mountain-top experiences. Talk about your dark tea-times of the soul.

That night, I was going to go Orienteering for the first time since about 1997. I wasn’t gonna let a little thing like having to find a new job get in the way. Even though I walked most of it. 44 minutes for a yellow course on the Petone foreshore — lets just say that’s not my best time. I enjoyed it though, and I’m looking forward to the rest of the series over the next five weeks.

And today, to cheer me up, a Thinkgeek package I ordered about a week ago shows up! Nothing like schwag to take the edge off of a redundancy. Hooray for Domo-kun shirt!

. . .

Oh well, I’m over it. A door closes, another door opens. I start the job hunt tomorrow with updating the CV. But if you could do with anyone who can ninja up some (X)HTML+CSS along with a healthy dose of PHP and Javascript, maybe even some AJAX if you want it, then please, for my sake, contact me!!! I’m no graphic designer, but I do have a good eye for interfaces, and I’d like to get into interaction design and HCI work.

And now, for a megabyte of expletives. Nah, just kidding. But I do feel like it.

UPDATE: Changed to make things a bit more accurate.

Life Work 7 comments