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…
It’s kinda funny how time really flies when you’re having fun (or in my case, having a looming unmoveable deadline that’s quickly approaching). I just realised that the last post that I put up was in November last year, even though I can distinctly remember writing it not too long ago… so a very belated Happy New Year shout to all you readers out there.
Anyway, thanks to an inadvertent over-consumption of caffeine during the evening, it’s now almost 2am and I’m still sitting here unable to sleep, so I’m sorting out some wedding stuff. I’ve written some Perl/LaTeX bits and pieces to auto-generate the placecards, and the order-of-service contents. All that’s left now is to actually get the content finalised and then it’s off to the printers.
Five weeks left and counting…
Well, it looks like the date for the wedding is set — March 28th, 2009. I guess we should start making some efforts preparing for the big day, since there’s only eight-ish months left…
Anyway, Joyce and I recently met up with the minister who will be conducting the ceremony. He seems like a very nice guy, and full of wisdom — he reassured us that after being in the business of marrying people for 37 years, he can run the day with his eyes closed.
One of the things that he mentioned was regarding the part where he would ask the ceremony attendees “… if anybody has any legal reasons as to why these two should not be married, please speak now or forever hold your peace.”
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Tags: wedding
I wonder how much attention transit officers pay when examining tickets. I got approached by one this evening on my way home from work — he asked that I show him my ticket, and I gladly obliged. I pulled out my ticket and showed it to him, he looked at it for a few seconds, nodded, then proceeded on to the next guy.
Now, this all sounds pretty normal. However, the only problem was, I pulled out a ticket that expired a while ago by mistake. (I really should get rid of these old tickets from my wallet…)
If the whole purpose of a revenue protection officer is to protect revenue, then these guys arn’t exactly doing a very satisfactory job. I’ve seen plenty of times when people just walk through the barriers without a ticket, sometimes in the view of such officers and other station staff, who don’t seem to care much about it and continue chatting with their friends.
In a sense, I don’t blame them. Having read an article on SMH regarding the powers (or rather, the lack thereof) of transport officers, it must be somewhat difficult for them to do anything considering the offender has the right to walk away without being detained (and since I’m not a lawyer, I’ll just assume the article is factually correct).
Which then begs the question: why have revenue protection officers that don’t actually have the necessary powers to do their job?
Software patents — there’s plenty of debate as to whether they’re actually useful or not. For most people, they probably don’t care since it doesn’t affect them (well, not directly anyway). In fact, I’d hazard a guess that most people in my industry probably won’t give much of a thought about it, since it’s something that only a vocal minority group complains about.
Now, I’m not a lawyer (and trust me, intellectual property law is something that goes way over my head), but I’ve had my fair share of mucking around in this area since a chunk of my time at CiSRA was spent dealing with software patents (avoiding infringement, and drafting my own), so here are my thoughts on the whole debacle.
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Apparently, according to some people, I don’t blog enough.
I guess I just don’t have as much spare time as I used to — planning for the CCC music team 08, meeting up with people, spending time with Joyce, work-related matters, other stuff…
Anyway, I’m just going to dig up a half-baked blog entry that I started about six months ago but never got around to finishing. Since one of my aims in 2008 (as opposed to new year’s resolutions) is to tie up loose ends and finalise things, this is somewhat fitting.
Note: if you don’t get some of these comments, don’t worry. However, you photogs out there who read this will probably have a good laugh.
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Feels good to be writing again now that I have finished Uni. The topic I want to bring up today is engagements and marriage. I’m sure that most of you have noticed that there are so many people getting engaged lately! It almost seems like there is a new engagement a month, and at least one wedding to attend per month.
It’s exciting to attend these weddings, to see the joy in the couple’s faces, to hear them as they make promises to each other to love the other person as long as they shall live. But a question that has crossed my mind as I attend these weddings is, how do these couples know when it is the right time to take the next step? How do people (well, the boyfriends anyway) know when to pop the question? Continue Reading »
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.
[Now that Joyce's thesis is finished, and Grace and Chris' wedding is over, time for me to finish off said half-baked posts...]
She had everything to live for — a “beautiful and bubbly” girl that was described as “intelligent, successful, talented and popular”. However, her friends and family were stunned when Charmaine Dragun took her own life at The Gap.
Nobody saw it coming.
Despite her cheerful appearances, impressive social circles and other external factors, deep down she was really troubled. She effectively lived a life behind a mask of faux happiness, keeping up a positive image of herself, while deep down her hurts were slowly driving her over the edge.
A bit over a year ago, I had the unfortunate experience of being informed that Andrew, a co-worker who I was working closely with at the time, committed suicide. None of us saw it coming neither — he was similarly positive, good-natured and had a carefree attitude towards life. It would appear that not even some of his recent setbacks had affected him much.
Oh, how wrong we were.
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Tags: depression, suicide
About two years ago, Optus made an announcement to let the world know that they’re relocating 6500 employees to “a new, state-of-the-art, campus-style headquarters in North Ryde”. This relocation was scheduled to take place from July 2007.
Over the past two years, I’ve seen their new headquarters evolve from just a huge patch of dirt into the campus that exists today. I haven’t been inside the campus to have a look, but it’s meant to be pretty impressive — ponds, water features, gardens, restaurants, etc. It has even been described as a small city in itself.
And so, as of about two months ago, the new inhabitants of this North Ryde’s mini-metropolis started rocking up. Having an extra 6500 neighbours turn up in the space of 2-3 months changes things somewhat… and not all of it is good. The following is what I’ve noticed to have significantly changed over the last three months or so.
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