This was a triumph.
I’m making a note here:
HUGE SUCCESS.
It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction.
[from "Still Alive", Portal]
Given the date and content of the previous post, I thought the title of this one is somewhat appropriate…
Anyway, in the five months since that post, Joyce and I got married, went to New Zealand on our honeymoon, moved into our new place and have started to settle down at our new place.
For some photos from the wedding taken by Jenny, go to her website and follow these instructions:
- Click on either the FLASH or HTML portfolio link.
- Click on CLIENTS down the bottom.
- Enter as password: “wdkj090328″ (colour) or “wdkj090328bw” (black & whites)
For some photos from the honeymoon, I wouldn’t hold my breath because I haven’t really gotten around to going through them yet… requires more emotional and mental juice than I have spare at the moment. Hopefully they’ll be done in the next few weeks.
On another note, I’ve finally signed up for World of Warcraft. It’s great to while the hours away between the time when Joyce sleeps (she sleeps early) and when I actually feel sleepy. It requires virtually no mental activity (at least not at my n00b level anyway), and provides just enough stimulus to not be boring. Great for zonking out after a tiring day at work.
One thing that I’ve found interesting is that the Auction Houses in the game are a fairly close analogue to real life markets. At the end of the day, you’re faced with the big question “How much is this worth?” (pricing). I’ve had my account for about four weeks, and really only started paying attention to the AH for about a week or so. I’ve written an addon to mine the AH data for analysis and so far in the 3-4 days that I’ve been “trading”, I’ve made about 300g. Not bad for about 15 mins each day on the AH… could just be beginner’s luck 
Another thing I find amusing is the almost Pavlovian “ding! grats” response. For those who aren’t familiar, whenever someone gains a new level, they shout out “ding!” and almost always you’ll get a bunch of people who reply with “grats”. I think I’ll try an experiment where one weekend I’ll just march into an AH (where I believe it’s impossible to level up) and just yell out “ding!” just to see what responses I get…
Things have been pretty busy since the last post — wedding planning has stepped up a notch (i.e. we’re actually doing something now), and I’m still pretty much spending every Saturday popping into assorted open-house inspections.
Anyway, I never thought I’d come across one of these, but for one of the properties, I found this Special Condition in the contract:
The Vendor discloses that there may have occurred within or upon the property the most extreme human and/or other obscenities the Purchaser can imagine. Without limiting the scope and meaning of “obscenities”, they may include extreme acts in violation of the criminal and other law, acts of sacrilege, Satanism, hedonism, acts in abuse of culture or custom and acts calculated or likely to induce disgust, dread, horror, repugnance and/or revulsion on any scale in good men and women. The purchaser acknowledges that it is a matter for his due diligence to exercise his own imagination for the purpose of this Special Condition.
I wonder what happened…
Wow I haven’t written in such a long time. Wedding stuff is going well, it’s funny how photography was the first thing we discussed! We’ve got the deposit down for the venues (St. John’s Anglican Cathedral in Parramatta, Regal Restaurant), the ‘all-important’ wedding gown (Maggie Sotero, it was on sale! $898 :D), pre-marital retreat, and I’m looking to finalise flowers, bombonniere, invites, bridesmaid dresses this month! Not to mention getting the gift registry done. It was a huge relief to find out the other day that Myer has FINALLY got their act together with the gift registry such that you don’t have to write down every single barcode manually anymore! Phew…
There have also been other things to prepare for such as for a place to live in. Hopefully when Keith’s work releases their hold on him he will have time to look into getting us a loan. But most importantly, these past few months have been a good time to think about marriage itself, and not just the wedding. The wedding is just one day and sure, it’s an important day but I believe that one should also prepare adequately for the challenges of marriage.
From doing the pre-marital marriage inventory, Keith and I have found that our ‘growth areas’ aka weaknesses are conflict resolution, communication and something else I can’t remember. It’s been really helpful to sit down and formally think through things with an older, wiser and impartial third party. I’m thankful to God that Keith and I have many strengths together: marriage expectations, relationship roles, spiritual beliefs and leisure activities. It’s going to be interesting in our next session discussing the contribution of our family of origin into our relationship.
Please pray for us as we prepare not just for our wedding, but also for a lifetime together of commitment, love and service to one another and to our Lord. Over the months God has really hit it home that I can do nothing apart from the work of the Holy Spirit. So please pray that we would love and follow Jesus and allow the richness of that to overflow into our love for one another.
At around 9:30am this morning, a company-wide announcement was made regarding my departure from CiSRA. (Oh, you were thinking of something else being official? Sorry to disappoint…)
I mentioned in my previous post that one of my aims in 2008 is to “tie up loose ends, and finalise things”, so I’m now at a stage where I’m wrapping up my work here at CiSRA. It’s been a fun 3.5 years here — great working environment, great people, and I get to play with cool stuff 
However, I feel that it’s time for me to take on new challenges. As such, I’ve taken up an offer to work at another software company in the CBD.
In the spirit of tying up loose ends, I’ve also finally put up some photos that I took in 2007. You’ll find nine new albums all in the gallery.
*whoosh* … and there goes 2007.
Hope you all have had an enjoyable and productive year. If not, then at least you’ve got a whole new year ahead of you to make the most of. If you’re the type that likes to make resolutions for the new year, best of luck with those! According to a survey, less than a quarter of people actually manage to keep their NY resolutions, with 35% of people giving up by the end of January.
Anyway, Joyce and I would like to wish everyone a Happy ‘08, and all the best for the new year!
I’m sure there have been substantial amounts of time and money invested into the design of toilet cubicles. I mean, these things are ubiquitous and have been around for a good deal of time. There’s gotta be some sort of usability studies on this topic. Surely anybody in the building construction industry would have no problems coming up with a functional toilet cubicle that allows you to get your job done, without fuss, and away you go.
Well, apparently not.
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From the number of weddings, engagements, and people starting to go out in the past few months, it looks like cupid has been working overtime (which is sorta typical in this day and age… how sad).
Congratulations to Grace and Chris, as well as May-Sze and Ethan on your marriages. May God continue to grow you and bless you in your marriage.
And to preempt anybody asking me the question, I have one word for you all:
Patience.
It’s one of those things that you hear about, and dismiss as an unfortunate event. The probability of it affecting you is rather slim, and so there’s no need to be so worried about it. The only problem is that regardless of how unlikely something is to happen, there’s still a possibility that it can occur.
I had the somewhat unfortunate experience last night of a grab-and-run while I was waiting at a red light.
Fortunately for me, there was nothing on the passenger seat, and so the would-be thief took off empty-handed. I was also lucky enough that the assailant wasn’t armed or violent.
It all happened extremely quickly — the whole event lasted at most a second. Everything that followed was simply a reaction as there was just no time to think and respond. It’s only after I’ve replayed the entire event over and over again in my mind that I can now make some sort of sense as to what happened…
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It’s been a tad over three weeks since the last blog entry, and I’ve been pretty flat out with stuff. Part of my spare time was spent on RICE photos (I’ll post a few of them up in the gallery soon. You can also find them in my Facebook photos section – here, here, and here).
Joyce and I went to a restaurant called Feltons for my birthday. I’m sure she’ll will write up a review of the restaurant soon.
We also watched Die Hard 4. Joyce, being a fan of the Die Hard series, was somewhat disappointed that it didn’t really turn out like the previous movies. As for me, I’m pretty much in it for the special effects and action, so I wasn’t disappointed. Of course, the plot had more holes in it than Farrell’s apartment once the goons had finished with it, but what the heck – it’s an action movie.
At work, I’ve recently been (and am still) doing patent stuff. If you ignore the fact that the whole patent creation/filing process is just something that’s necessary for lawyers to earn a ludicrous amount of money translating your concise and succinct description of an invention into pages upon pages of mind-numbing, soul-destroying, undecipherable legal jargon, then patent work can be pretty fun…
