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.
bluebeary: clinical psychologist; likes good food and music.
droiby: software engineer; likes photography and
classical music.
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I’m still in the process of clearing my backlog of photos — there’s now roughly about a month’s worth of photos left to sift through. I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for them though… I come home from work and all I feel like doing is to just zombie out and recharge.
Maybe I’ll do something mindless that doesn’t require much thinking, like watching a movie, or just even staring into space…
Anyway, I’ve updated the gallery. Click here and here to go to the two new albums directly.
I’ve noticed that recently I’ve done a lot of experiments with clients that included facing their fears. It’s actually not that difficult technically to do it, but emotionally it is quite scary for clients. Many times it is the anticipatory anxiety that is the worst, rather than the actual experience of the feared thing itself. I’m going to write a bit about how to face your fears below for you all so that you can tackle any fears that you may have 
Just a heads up that I’ve changed to a new web host, and so there might be some teething issues as things get migrated over.
It’s now on a US-based server and that means a whopping amount of bandwidth (3 TB per month, up from 6 GB) as well as a generous amount of disk space (300 GB, up from 1 GB). Oh, and it’s also half the price of my old one, which is always good…
Mmmm… off-site storage with backup — time for a bit of rsyncing.
Anyway, as it is plainly obvious, this blog is also sporting a new look. Joyce said she felt the previous look was kinda dark and pretty plain. Now, it’s bright and pretty plain. I happen to like simple layouts — less clutter and the focus is on content as opposed to eye-candy. What do you readers think of the new look? Drop a comment below.
Also, in upgrading Wordpress, there’s been some issues with UTF-8 encoded characters (something to do with the new Wordpress database format) and hence my old posts that contain Chinese characters in it are somewhat corrupted. There was a script to fix things, but it looks like it didn’t fix all of them.
Bah.
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…
I’ve snuck up a few albums in our photo gallery now that I’ve finally stopped procrastinating and started processing my backlog of photos…
Still got some more photos coming from recent shoots… stay tuned.
I flew back to Hong Kong to celebrate my grandma’s 90th birthday. So, it is a given that I miss her a lot. That week, I managed to catch up with my relos living in HK, as well as my uncle from the US. Now that I’m back in Australia, I don’t get to see them for a while (though they really should get with the times and learn to use Skype or something…) and so I guess I miss them too.
Anyway, Hong Kong is substantially different from Sydney, or Australia for that matter. Spending just a tad over a week there made me realise how much I miss about some things. Whilst I must say that living in Sydney isn’t really that bad, there are some seriously great stuff that I’m missing out on not living in HK. In no particular order, here’s my list of top things that I miss about HK:
I wrote this about a month ago, and forgot to post it. I welcome people’s thoughts about this…
Over the last 2 months, Keith and I have been thinking about social groups at church. Those that you might hang out with outside of church time just for social reasons (not planned socials, or for meetings). It seems to me that having a bunch of friends like this can be pretty hard sometimes if you don’t live close by…
As you can see, I’m unclogging my drafts of food reviews at the moment!
A couple of months ago, I went with Keith’s family and Susie’s boyfriend to an Italian seafood restaurant in Leichardt called ‘At Fernando’s’. Yes, it was in the entertainment book and that’s why we went! It was further down Norton Street, not towards the Parramatta Road side. Go and try it if you can, because I think all of us really enjoyed our food!
We went to try out this restaurant about 3 months ago. I think it was in ‘celebration’ of our 2 years of being together. We were looking for restaurants around Darling Harbour when I saw that there was a new place in the 2007-2008 entertainment book called Ice Cube. After some hesitation (reading some of those eatability reviews) we decided to go ahead and try it. Very very filling if you ask me…