Life is so good, it gets better every day

Setting up an Office

I moved over to New Zealand a year ago, bringing with me 2 laptops and an external Lacie firewire drive. My office was a combination of the bedroom, the lounge and the dining room. With wireless you can do that, right? Although admitedly it’s probably not so good for your posture. A few months down the road, I bought a hacking chair. Today I made another few steps toward setting up a new office, a brand new Photosmart printer and a New York Style Smoothie Maker. I guess I need to work on a desk next.

The Roxx

I went into the local outdoor store today to pick up some climbing chalk and noticed some new business cards in there. Wahoo! It seemed that the new climbing center had opened up, aptly named the roxx, but disappointingly when we drove past there, it was still cluttered with scaffolding and large amounts of workers. Still, nice to see that it will open up on the 23rd October. I can’t wait – the YMCA is no substitute with bad routes, and greased up holds.

Carolyn got an invite to go to a presentation by Cherry Tree Consumer Club. I decided to tag along as well, if only for the free glass of white wine. Basically the idea seemed to revolve around getting items cheaply – bye-passing the retailers, and getting the products at wholesell, with 11% handling fee and the usual GST. It all sounded too good to be true, but was there a catch? With $1200 joining fee [reduced to only $700 that night if we joined] and an annual subscribtion of $100, you were then exposed to a product database of over 320,000 items. They had to make exceptions to that rule on some consumer products – mostly whiteware, computers and something they called ‘brownware’ [first I’ve heard of it, seemingly lower end electrical items]. We didn’t go for it in the end, mostly out of pure sketisism – why do all these things always sound too good to be true?

Dreamt about riding a whale in the pacific ocean last night – not whale sex, just what that little girl did in ‘Whale Rider’. I’m sure there is some eye opening dream translation for it, but it was pretty magical.

Moulin Rouge

I’ve never seen Moulin Rouge. I guess I was too afraid to rent it from the video shop, after seeing the terrible ‘Chicago’ on a trans-pacific flight a couple of months ago. So there’s really no comparison, and it has that ‘Big Fish’ type of magical feel to it, with wonderfully vivid colours. Definitely a worthwhile evening in front of the TV, and there’s not too many times you can say that anymore.

The One Where the Photojournal Returns

I don’t have much to say most of the time, and since I have a reasonably good camera that I’m not using enough, I decided to bring back my photojournal and start trying to take and publish a single photo each day. We’ll see how successful this proves to be.

Hard to believe that I’ve been here a year. Time to celebrate…again.

Thank You Sun

Today, after a long couple of weeks, I got my work visa and permit renewed to continue working in New Zealand for the next 2 years. It’s been an incredible relief and I’ve been drinking beer since noon. I guess sometimes you take the iWork program for granted a little bit. Today I have the best feeling in the world, knowing that I can continue to live in a country where I can see images like these on a daily basis. Thank you Sun. You rock. I feel special.

GNOME 2.10 Hack List

A long time ago, Jeff posted a list of things to improve in GNOME 2.8. If you’re looking for hacking projects, it’s a nice start for 2.10. Or you could help the captains, Alex and Dave, bug fixing on Nautilus. Either way, there’s lots to be done!

Zenity Applet

Jeff and Matthew ganged up on me to get me to implement a zenity applet, since apparently that’s the new fashionable name for them. Confusingly I called it a ‘notification icon’ in the commandline and user documentation.

  gman@slipstream:~> zenity --notification --window-icon=/home/gman/love.png --text="All you need is love\!"  

I also added save and directory-only selection in the file chooser, thanks to a patch by Lucas, and released a 2.9.0 tarball.

Musak

Finally got some time to catalog my CD collection. There’s a couple of skeletons in the cupboard there which are embarassing, but you grow older and wiser with every day.

Pathetic Excuse for a Blog

A few weekends ago, Carolyn and myself headed up to Arthur’s Pass for the weekend. It was a pretty cruisey weekend, all in all, with lots of food and drink, and a pretty awesome walk up Scott’s track toward Avalanche peak, with lots of snow and ice. It’s been nice escaping from Christchurch for the weekends, as nice as it is to have a lazy weekend. We recently just booked an extended weekend up in Wellington in early December which should bring us nicely up to Christmas time!

Work is going pretty well right now, although at times feeling a little bit sidelined from the rest of the team back in Ireland. I guess you’ll have good and bad days working remotely, but I have no regrets for wanting to stay in New Zealand for longer. Tearing my hair out trying to organize the visa in time, with the current one expiring on the 5th October. After getting official approval for the transfer, it’s now just a case of filling out some application forms and we’ve taken on an immigration consultant to make that process a little easier. Fingers crossed everything works out in time.

This week I’m in Sydney. It’s wonderful to be back here again, and I really love the place. I’m hanging out with Jeff and Pia for most of the week, although hoping to catch up with my Aunt, Uncle and cousins at the weekend. It was a pretty scary experience driving in Sydney traffic again. It was almost like the feeling I had in India. Gulp. Last night I got dragged along to a United Nations ‘Is it still relevant’ lecture/talk thing by Pia. She promised me a beer for every half hour I was bored. The first 2 speeches were actually quite interesting, but my levels waned as the evening progressed. Fortunately Pia’s pocket was saved by us not being able to drink at the talk. Was pretty glad to get away afterwards. Tonight we celebrate Craige’s b-day, somewhere that you can eat emus, kangaroos and crocodiles. Yum.

Mr.Picassohead

So rama pointed me to mrpicassohead.com which entertained me for a good half hour looking through some of the other heads. Much fun, thanks!