Recently bought quite a few New Zealand based artists and some closer to home to fill my iPod – it’s almost getting usable now with ‘Eight – Moving’, ‘Paddy Casey – Living’, ‘Ryan Adams – Love is Hell pt 1’ and ‘Steriogram – Schmack!’. Radiohorse are definitely the favourite at the moment though – really liking their melodies.
Sayamindu did an absolutely awesome job of the GNOME 2.6 Preview. Thank you dude, you rock.
So Jody pointed me to this article about Sun’s recent junk status. In the 3 years of working for Sun, I guess I’ve seen the very worst of times – I more or less completely missed out on the dotCOM boom. But things seem to be on the up. Sun is really, really rocking at the moment, at least in the desktop space – we’re rarely out of the news at the moment, with per citizen pricing, the possibility of opening up Java even more, Looking Glass, let alone the string of customer wins we’re getting with Staroffice and now JDS. Okay, so these are all desktop space, where there is little impact on the share price it seems. But in terms of investor confidence, I can’t see how this doesn’t give you a warm fuzzy. It sure gives me one.
‘Did you have a happy birthday son?’ – Uh, no, I had a hangover from hell for the entire day. It was a pretty wild night, and cancelled all plans for the day and evening – beer, bourbon and coke, long island iced tea, tequila and some slightly greenish shot which almost had me down. There’s not often times in your life where you can’t remember things of the previous night. I left town to walk home at about 3am or 4am. I reached home just before 8am. Have pretty vague memories of walking, okay staggering, around Hagley park and leaping between the sleepers of some railway tracks. Quite what I did with the rest of the time, I have no clue.
A pretty quiet weekend, all in all. It feels like it was the weekend from Thursday night, when Patrick cooked a nice lamb roast dinner for us. Coupled with some brie, camembert, a bottle of pinot noir and some baileys it turned into a very pleasant evening indeed.
So, there was nothing left to do but head out with Maeve up to the Port Hills on a remarkably windy day, and head out towards Godley head towards Sumner. It’s a really pretty place, with a bunch of mountain bike trails. I’m totally going to spend at least 1 day up there with the bike next weekend. Sounds like a bunch of fun. Then a large chance of having a big session on Saturday.
Having a bunch of fun playing with the new camera. I still haven’t quite figured out all the various settings, but I’m learning much more than I ever did with any of my previous cameras. I’m also finding Capture One a rocking piece of software, after 5 days of a 30 day trial. It would be awesome if I could use it under Linux, but for now I guess I’ll have to consider getting the Mac version, even though they provide a cheaper Windows version for the Rebel [sigh].
Although I only had a vague recollection that he was leaving to live somewhere else, I got a great email from Owen the other day about his adventures in Addis. It seems Lu and himself are settling well into life in Ethiopia. It’s amazing to think I have friends completely scattered around the world now, all able to communicate within seconds. Hrm, I guess I should figure out where next year will bring me – for the first time today I started thinking about a year around San Francisco. I think it might not be the best option to stay in New Zealand, as it’s infinitely harder to meet people if you’re working away from an office environment. Who knows, perhaps I’ll end up in Dublin afterall.
Okay, so Christian wanted more climber girls in bikinis. Dude, while I have a few photos I’d get totally lynched for putting them online.
I booked my flights for GUADEC yesterday. I arrive in Stavanger on Thursday 24th June, and leave on Friday 2nd July. Looking forward to the conference, although realize it’s quite a long way away still. Two other interesting things to note – it’s a return back to New Zealand and I have 8 days in Dublin after the conference. I’m pretty psyched.
As it turns out I didn’t have to stay in Singapore for a week, which was quite possibly the biggest relief I’ve had for a while. The people at the Quantas information desk were wonderful, and got me on the first set of flights out of Singapore and home to New Zealand. When I was asked to turn left into Business Class by the stewards it was hard to disguise the grin on my face. I’ve never traveled business class before, and at that stage it was greatly welcomed. 50+ hours after I woke up cursing that I had missed my flight, I arrived home…and man, it was good to be home.
I had to spend the day in Singapore. My first impressions of the place were improved, but I can’t imagine what it would have been like to spend a week there. It’s a nice place, but it’s getting hugely expensive and at times feels over crowded. I decided to bite the bullet and bought a Canon 300D Rebel – it’s hard to know if I was being ripped off, but I seemed to have gotten a good enough deal [compared to Irish prices in any case]. It’s a nice camera, although the software that comes with it isn’t so hot. It’ll take me a few weeks to figure everything out, but I’m glad to be back with an SLR again.
After a small water fight, Maeve, Sam and myself headed up to Canterbury University for their orientation week set of bands. Goldenhorse were playing as a supporting act to LMNOP [who truly sucked], and they played some new songs – I’m really looking forward to their new album. Yesterday we headed to Castle Hill, and I had my best session out there so far, climbing a few V3’s, V2’s, V1’s and V0’s. The top outs still scare the crap out of me, feeling harder than any of the Font ones, but I guess confidence will come with time. Much slapping power is needed.
Back to work this week, and huge amounts of stuff to get through. It will be hard keeping on top of it all.
It’s hard to not use the term ‘fucking idiot’ when you describe me. Just realised that I missed my flight out of Bangalore. It was supposed to be on ‘Monday 16th Feb 0005’, which of course means Sunday night in my book. This is why they don’t let me code in Sun. Anyway, after some phone calls I’ve managed to get another set of flights organized, flying out tonight, but this time I get to stop over in Singapore for a week, unless I can organize to be on some sort of waiting list [which seems unlikely at this stage]. It goes to show, the more travel you do, the more chance you are likely to fuck up.
