Fried in Brisbane

So here I am in Brisbane for Christmas.

The first thing I noticed about Brisbane at this time of year is how GOD DAMN HOT the place is. I mean DAMN, this place is freaking stinking hot. I’m sitting here with my shirt unbuttoned, shoeless and sporting my three-quarter shorts, at 8pm at night!

The second thing I noticed about this place is the different bird sounds you hear. They have some pretty random bird sounds here in Australia, and some really weird birds to go along with them. The Ibis, for example.

My Mum lives in South Bank, which is a really nice place. They have the right idea too: to combat the heat, they have countless New Zealand Natural ice cream booths along the promenade along the river. And if that doesn’t do enough to cool you off, there’s a pool near the riverside which is done up like a beach, along with real sand. We popped down there around 3-4pm today and the water was really really warm — like a good bath — but it was still the coolest I’d been that whole day.

At dusk, the fruit bats come out to move around or something — Mum’s apartment is on the 3rd floor, and the bats swoop past the balcony about 10m away! It’s crazy seeing real bats flying around in an urban area!

I haven’t seen much of Brisbane yet, but it’s a really nice place. I’m here for 5 more days. Christmas Day tomorrow – so Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.

Family Life Outside Comments are closed

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

Sirens, Wifi and incompetent landlords

It’s 3am and I’m sitting outside cash converters on cuba street, shoeless, with laptop in lap. The fire alarm in the apartment building has been going solidly for the last 2 hours. The fire department couldn’t turn it off, so they ‘rang it in’ and left as quickly as they came. Half the apartment complex is out on the street with me. Some drunk couple walked past me and mentioned to some of the flatties up the street that “that guy back down there has no shoes but a laptop – he must be homeless but earnt a lot of money busking” ROFLMAO…

But seriously, 3am and I want to go to sleep already, dammit. There are security guards here trying their best to get the sirens turned off. Whats New, our landlords, haven’t exactly been helpful in any of this. Oh, and would they fix our elevator for once and for all? -_-; Incompetent.

I’m listening to the Katamari Damacy soundtrack I nabbed off of Macweeny yesterday. It’s quite relaxing, even though the drone of the beeping is still quite loud, even street-side. But it is quieter down here than in my room. And at least I’ve got Cafenet coverage here 🙂

If a guy holding a white iBook is found lying down on the street this morning, it’s me. Please don’t steal my laptop.

Oh, and happy birthday, SmileyChris 🙂 Hopefully I’ll see you later today, if I’m not freezing my toes off.

Funny Life Outside Rant Comments are closed

Web Surrentials ’05

Sitting here at home now thinking back about the last 5 days, It’s just sinking in. It’s surreal that I was in a lecture theatre full of my industry peers and leaders learning about the latest and greatest in web standards, and that I got to socialise with them many of them.

I mean, taking Eric Meyer for example, hearing the world expert on CSS talk about his field in the morning, meeting him and having a conversation with him after lunch, getting two books he wrote signed by him that night, hearing him talk again the next day, and then go out drinking with him and our new-found buddies and some of us end up at a nightclub in Kings Cross… THIS STUFF JUST DOESN’T HAPPEN! And it wasn’t just Eric either, it was Molly, Tantek, Doug Bowman, John Allsopp, Jeffrey Veen, Derek Featherstone, and so many more! It was so much more than an honour to meet these people; hanging out was a mindjob.

What’s weird at first is that the “big stars” are approchable and friendly in real life, they want to know who you are, because they know you know who they are. This is in comparison to many people in the lime light in other more fame-focused industries (music, movies, but not microcode) who are less likely to give you time of day than have a conversation with you.

As much as this will sound like I’m blowing my own horn or that I’m kissing up, the most humbling thing to discover at the conference was that some of these “big stars” had heard about “the guy who was fundraising through his blog to get to we05” and that when those individuals and I met, they had a suspicsion that I was that person — I didn’t have to tell them. These people knew kinda who I was!

So when I get home and discover that Molly and Tantek have left such generous comments that I have a grin from ear-to-ear, how am I supposed to react?

Really, it all comes down to respect: I could have an unhealthy respect for them bordering on holding them as idols, but one has to remember that they are just regular people. As the famous Bruce Dickenson once said “Easy, guys… I put my pants on just like the rest of you: one leg at a time. Except, once my pants are on, I make gold records.”

And when I think about it, and as hard as it is for me to get to grips with it right now, in reality, they are my friends and colleagues in this industry. Now to keep those friendships alive! Hey Tantek, I’d be keen to see the photos you took on your Matrix tour…

Mind you, he also said “I got a fever! And the only prescription… is more cowbell!”, so I won’t push that metaphor 😉

UPDATE: I guess the other side of the equation can happen too: molly.com » Moments of Doubt and Glory

Friends Life Outside Rant Web Essentials 05 4 comments