Life is so good, it gets better every day

Creativity

I know, I know it’s a brand…and as wonderful as the base operating system is, I feel we’re lacking a bit of creativity on this one.

Weekend Updates

Had a reasonably busy time this weekend – there always seems to be so much on, and by the time you get to Sunday night, you wonder what happened to the weekend.

Everyone knows the weekend starts on Thursday, and this one was no exeception. There is a pile of restaurants on Oxford Terrace, known as ‘The Strip’ to most. Headed down to the Tap Room for 6pm, for an hours worth of free beer, and to meet one of Carolyn’s friends, Tama, visiting Christchurch touring with his arts group. We stock piled steadily for the first 60 minutes, and then spent the next hour finishing off the pile of some 15 beers. We were supposed to dinner afterwards, and did in fact manage to stumble into a cheap Japanese place, and staggered out of Maccers some hours later.

On Friday night, after another close touch rugby match, Carolyn and I went to the Mythai Monkey Bar. It’s listed in a bunch of guides as being a recommended place, with good food. But we found quite the opposite – lousy Thai food, and poor service. All very disappointing for our first ‘official’ date.

Saturday was another big day. Big because I became the first recorded Irishman to take a wicket for Weedons cricket club, playing for their social B team. I bowled one over, normally 6 balls, but managed to bowl about 12 I’d imagine with the various wides and noballs. Think I need some time in the net, and feel sorry for the poor bugger who hurled his bat and mistimed a shot to be caught in the cover. In the evening, while Carolyn headed off to Carey’s hen night, I found myself at my first Kiwi stag’s night, for Dean. Mostly similar to an Irish stag, fortunately, and ended up watching Canterbury beat Bay of Plenty, watching some rather crude and dirty girls in Atami, and stumbling around some random pubs, somewhere in Christchurch.

Sunday was hangover day, with a brunch with Kirsten/JP/Emily/Nic/Jeremy and Eggs Benedict being a reasonably good cure, and a few videos. I’m off beer for at least a day or two I think.

Ubuntu’s Soft Porn Look

I’ve been following Ubuntu recently – for many reasons; the fact they’re shipping GNOME on the day of its release, they’re taking Debian and showing how well it works as a desktop based distribution, they share the same ‘Just Works’ principles, and the fact that I have some friends working for Canonical.

I’ve been pretty impressed with what they’ve done so far, and while I raised an eyebrow when Jeff showed me some preview artwork of their current branding reflecting the humanity aspect [Ubuntu], it’s just wonderful to see them pushing the boundaries. I love the images. I love the distribution, and hope that it will encourage all distributions to do something similar.

Java Web Start and Bugster

So we moved our monolithic bug tracking tool into Java Web Start and called it ‘Bugster’. No longer can you open up a new bug – you now open up a ‘change request’. So, the new app feels better, and it’s certainly a lot faster than the old interface, but a couple of things still bug the crap out of me.

• Why doesn’t the main JWS window dissappear when I launch Bugster or, better still, minimize to a notification icon?
• Why is the commenting mechanism still so ultra confusing to track on change requests – both within the JWS app, on the online web interface and the notifications by email? Bugzilla is so easy in that respect, and that makes a huge difference when you’re parsing many bugs.

Still, progress, albeit slow. Roll on Bugtraq 3.0…cough.

City of God

Finished watching City of God last night. Superb film. Hard to imagine growing up in that sort of environment, and feeling really fortunate about how easy my life is in comparison.

The iBook Story Continues

So my iBook died again – apparently it crashed and couldn’t reboot itself again. Droped it into MagnumMac for them to tell me the disk is screwed and they recommended that I buy a replacement 60Gb drive, and while they could give me a quote for that, they couldn’t tell me how much effort was required to get the data off the old one. To top that off, I decided to buy Panther because all my system disk were back in Dublin, and getting them sent over would be quite a lot of pain – explaining to my parents what I wanted sent over, finding which box in the attic they might be, popping them in the post and waiting X amount of days for delivery. So my once triple booting iBook [OSX, OS9 and Debian Linux] and gone to single boot with Panther. I wonder how long I can survive without Debian on it – hell, it might make me discover neato free applications to install on it. Expensive times.

In other news, we have our second game of touch rugby on Friday. Last week we, the ‘Dodgy Marks’, narrowly lost 4-3 and I mashed my hand tripping over. My hand feels a lot better today, so hopefully it will be fine for Friday. On Saturday, it looks like I’ll play my first cricket game for Weedons, followed by Dean’s stag night. Patrick has a bbq party tonight, and with the best weather we’ve seen this season, it looks like a cracking event.

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.