Is sweet wine time.
Heroes
Now, if you didn’t take my strong advice to start watching Heroes last friggin’ year, you’ve just lost any possible excuse you may have previously had – it starts playing on TV2 TV3 in a couple of weeks.
If you’ve seen the TV adverts, you will have thought it looked like rubbish, but that’s just because TVNZ TV3 (just like TVNZ, who have excelled themselves this season by acquiring the most craptacular show of 2006 – friggin’ Torchwood) is entirely populated by idiots and they appear to have not even bothered watching any episodes before they cut the adverts together.
They’ve managed to make what was quite possibly the best new TV show of last year look like crappy old crap.
Anyway, watch it. The first episode is weird, but stick with it.
No business is good business.
So I continue to turn work away from the business, and it feels good. (And a little like money is pouring between my outstretched finger tips, which might make me sad if it wasn’t being replaced with time to enjoy myself.)
My last big launch for now is the ASB Classic site, it all went off pretty well – considering I had to shift the site to a server I got in the States at the last minute. And they added a bunch of new features this year, including a podcast and live scoring.
Speaking of live scoring, I also had to install a wireless network to make the system work – the international umpires all use a custom app on wifi enabled PDAs which talk through the network to a reflector server I installed on site, which refeeds all of the match and scoring data to a third party server overseas.
(I used a sweet Senao radio, with POE, nice outdoor enclosure and a big antenna. I’ve never seen 802.11b/g with such good signal strength over such a large area.)
Happy new year.
It’s gone 7am, and our last house guests have just left. We went pretty large this time around, starting off in the city at Monsoon Poon for dinner and a lot of drinks, then on to… Some place. Deschlers? Then some other place next to the ol’ Occidental. And finally dragged some folk home to help us work on our hooch cupboard. We’re meant to be going boogie boarding in a few hours, that just isn’t happening. But we’ve made some rough plans to go out to Bethels this arvo. If we do it, it should be good.
Something’s got to live!
So it’s 12.30am, I’ve been working since I got home at 7.30pm, and of course I was at work at my day job from 9am until about 6.30pm. This evening I’ve had a single break – about 30 minutes for dinner. I’ve got work again in the morning. And I’ll be working all weekend. Just like last weekend. Now, the projects I’m working on right now are pretty cool, but I’m still going to be really glad when everything is done with and my evenings are my own again for a while.
The things we do for money, eh?
Super Hiro!
If you’ve been anywhere near me at any point in the last few weeks you will have already heard me talking about Heroes, a new TV show that’s jut started playing. The reason I’ve been talking about it so much, is really simple: it’s completely friggin’ awesome!
The premise is fairly simple, some people have mutations that give them super human powers – sort of like X-Men, only no laser vision yet. But these people aren’t spandex clad super heroes, straight out of Professor Xavier’s Academy, these guys are… a male nurse, a politician, a cheer leader, a Japanese office worker, and a webcam girl. (There are others as well, but they haven’t played very big parts yet.)
My favourite character has to be Hiro, who has developed the ability to bend time and space. Not bad for a Japanese salariman. (He’s a complete friggin’ dude, with his excited, high-pitched babbling and Star Trek references.) But it’s a close call between him and Cheerleader, with the power to… get smashed all to bits and live. Man she’s awesome. I knew I was going to like her from the first time I saw her pushing her broken ribs back into her chest.
I strongly encourage you to try Heroes out for yourself, it’s weird, and it’s cool. You have to give it at least 3 or 4 episodes, it gets better and better, and the first one might be more weird than awesome.
Armageddon outta here…
We took advantage of our Labour Day off to head on down to Armageddon, the pulp culture expo. Allow me to let you in on a little secret only known to a few industry insiders…
Armageddon friggin’ sucks.
It’s getting worse and worse every year.
It’s now at the stage where I wouldn’t even go if I had free tickets. I wouldn’t go if I had to pay for parking.
This year, I had free tickets, and free parking, and it took a total of approximately 30 minutes to see EVERYTHING.
They had a Wii stand there, but no Wii. They had a Playstation 3 stand there, but no Playstation 3.
They have NOTHING good.
I couldn’t even be bothered going into any of the panels, even though they had folk from one of the TV shows I like (Stargate Atlantis). It just wasn’t worth it if it meant hanging around in that useless hell hole of Look-At-Me Emo kids and fat girls with battleaxes.
Unimpressed.
Tonight we headed over to Adam & Sandra’s place and watched the new Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood with them, Karl & Louise, and a lot of curries. It was, amazingly enough, quite good. Swearing, sex, violence. Everything that Doctor Who always should have had.
Impressed.
A change is as good as a holiday. I hope.
I’ve been offered a really sweet role with Auckland University, and I’m starting tomorrow. I don’t yet know if there are any policies about talking about the workplace online, so at this stage I’m going to assume that I won’t be talking about the role here at all. This is fine, as I don’t feel entirely comfortable talking about work stuff online, it tends to smack of unprofessionalism.
I’m really excited about the whole thing, but let’s see how it all works out, eh?
(I was burned pretty bad by Ihug management behaviour, and I’m feeling a bit apprehensive – don’t forget, I haven’t been an ’employee’ in over 5 years. I’ve had a lot of reassurance that not everyone is as bad as the Woods grew to be, and the couple of stints of working in contract/consulting roles I’ve had have been pretty good. But you know, there’s a difference between knowing something rationally and… stopping… worrying.)
Anyway, I’ve been ramping my business down for the last few months, I have a handful of projects that I’m going to be finishing off over the next few weeks in whatever spare time I can scrape up, but I won’t be entirely winding the business up – I’ll just treat it the same way Claire has been for the last few years, a couple of hours here and there, and not seeking new clients.
By the way, following an accident* with my old Vodafone account, I’ve had to get a new number: ### ### ####. Please update your address book.
* Turns out that if you hardly ever use your phone to make calls, and don’t notice that you’ve gone over 12 months without buying any airtime, Vodafone disconnects your plan, and won’t do ANYTHING for you. Not even for a fee. Just between you and me, Vodafone have proven themselves to be utterly inept in almost every respect through this entire episode. I predict their brand will be increasingly tarnished in the near future by this kind of customer hostile behaviour. Just you wait and see.
The pause that refreshes.
I’ve just been reliably informed that Coca Cola will very shortly be releasing everyone’s favourite 1980s bevvy: Mellow Yello. So if you’re jonesing for a little bit of summery 80s refreshment reminiscing, you’ll join me in tipping up a few. It would be even more complete if enjoyed while lying on the grass at Pt Erin eating a tomato sauce englommed greasy battered and deep fried sausage on a stick, all the while getting a real good burn on ‘cos you’re slathered up with coconut smelling goop that has a negative SPF rating. A few quick turns on the big roundabout, then it would be time for some depth charges from the highdive board.
All these fruits are yours, except bananas. Attempt no eatings there-of.
Claire left her phone at home, so I went on a mercy mission to drop it off at her workplace (she has a desk with no phone, the company opting instead to use the mobile network wherever possible). Following that, George took me for a walk around the domain, and then the trouble started. On the way home from the park, he told me I should stop and get some fruit, so I did.
So far this afternoon I’ve eaten seven (7) oranges, three (3) mandarins, and two (2) kiwifruit. It would have been even worse, but the pears have a slight firmness that I’ll give them a day or two to recover from, and the bananas have a very slight tinge of green at the ends. So who knows what would have happened if everything had been ready for immediate gobbling? I don’t know. But it sure would have been delicious to find out.
Other food I’ve been enjoying recently, starting right up the very top, was One Tree Grill last Saturday night, when we celebrated our pretty (but dim) friend Sandra’s mumblingth birthday, I opted for the grilled venison (in a wonderful thyme’y crust) with frites and bearnaise sauce, and a rocket, parmesan & pear salad. It was really, really good. Super tender and delightful. Louise had the pork belly, which was great as well. Claire chose the tuna steak, which was ok, but disappointingly less great that those we make at home. I tried a little of Sandra’s calamari, and just between you and me, it was pretty awful. Very rubbery and a bit fishy. For dessert I chose the sticky prune & walnut pudding, with vanilla ice cream and a butterscotch sauce, it was very good. All in all, One Tree Grill was less stellar than other times we’ve visited.
On Sunday we visited my mother, then headed over to Shoreville to visit Dylan, Melanie, & little Harrison to eat pizza (it was very bad, their Domino’s makes very dry pizza compared to two orbiting around our suburb) and play a new board game Claire grabbed off TradeMe: Apples to Apples. A very simple to learn card based game, which I’m not going to go into detail to describe (if you’re interested you’ll google it), which was really good fun. And I’m not just saying that ‘cos I won both games. (I sacrificed my second win so we could play a couple more hands, giving Dylan a chance to catch up, preventing him from crying like a friggin’ baby, but he still didn’t manage it. Melanie took it out, just before Claire could.)
We’ve done many other things since I last wrote, but you know. Pfft.