Coming Soon

Ok, so i really don’t use this place that much. But I really do want to write here more. So here’s a list of things that I want to really get stuck into:

• Setting up a proper blog [again] at studioprisoner.com
• Setting up a development blog at studioprisoner.com as well for my dablings in ROR
• Get some Ruby projects happening to widen my skills
• Play more Halo 3
• Read my bible more

And some cool things that have happened lately, I now have OSX 10.5 Leopard for my MacBookPro and I got my Big Day Out tickets in the mail. Well I got to get to work!!

Catch!

Love

Update

Ok, so it’s been quite a while since I’ve written anything in here, I guess I’ve been a bit lazy. Very lazy, I guess I’ve been watching to many DVD’s. But enough about my laziness, the plan is in this post is to split it into topics that are related to my life. Work, Church, Fun and Love.

Work

Well, I’m still working for Primus Telecom under Hotkey Solutions, been there for a about a year and 3-4 months. The position I now hold is Level 2/Assistant Team Leader. This is a more management position, I now have a team to take care of and make sure they do their job, quite exciting for me I think. And it’s certainly going to be a different and challenging experience, but I feel that I’m going to a great job. Still on the topic of work, I’m a project manager for a new product which Hotkey Solutions is offering through Google Apps. For me, it’s pretty exciting, developing the product through Google so we could market it to the target we’re after. So I’m hoping it will go well in the next few weeks as we just launched it a couple of days ago.

Neil Young/Student Focus

Today I was going to write an entry about Neil Young, I recently read a piece on him in a magazine from March 2005. It was a very good article, and it lead me to listen to his last album he released. So keep an eye out for that entry where I’ll be talking about Neil Young.

Instead today, I helped out my friend Rachel with the one of the high school programs that our church has. This one is called Student Focus, where we go into a school at lunchtime and have some games with the kids and then a short devotional about God. Most of the games are fun and involve chocolate as reward, which gets the kids in. It’s one of our outreach programs where we get most of the kids from our youth group to come. I think it’s been great this year, as we have had an awesome year in growth for the youth group [www.elevate-youth.com.au].

Tonight we will be venturing into the City tonight for a bit of a scavenger hunt in the city [Melbourne]. So should be a good night, although I think it’s going to be quite cold.

I don’t know about the title for this entry, couldn’t think of anything. So deal with it, hahahaha.

Season Premieres

Hey it’s blogging time! I’m sitting on my bed this afternoon and thought to myself, maybe i should write something down. Now something totally sweet just happened, i FINALLY got my iTunes library on my PC to share out to my MBP, which is totally sweet, so i can sit on this thing (MBP) anywhere in the house and play my music. Ok, enough of my feats of the day.

Well some things that have been going on recently in my life is really not that much really, I’ve just been working, sleeping and watching my TV shows. All the shows just started in America, so I’ve been downloading them as they screen over in the US. One show that I’m glad is back on is Lost, Season 3 premiered on the 4th of October over in the US, and who knows when it will start over here. I actually never watched it on TV over here. What is in-store for the Losties this season? Who knows, but I was happy with the premiere of the first episode, the creators finally shed some light on who the “others” are, well sort of.

Other shows that have started back up again that I watch is One Tree Hill, Desperate Housewives, Everybody Hates Chris, My Name is Earl and The Extras. Ricky Gervais is a genius, The Extras is a very funny show, maybe even better than his previous creation The Office, it’s close. What I love about The Extras is how well Ricky and Stephen Merchant write the characters for actual celebrity actors that come onto the show. My favourite guest appearances so far would have to be Patrick Stewart, Orlando Bloom and Daniel Radcliffe (that kid from Harry Potter).

New shows that I’ve started to watch is Jericho, The Nine and Prison Break (well it’s new to me, since I only just started watching it). I’m sure you all know about Jericho and Prison Break, since they have already been shown on TV over here. But The Nine is a show that has just started in America. It is based around 9 people who were all hostages in a bank robbery that turned into a 52 hour stand off with police. They were all strangers when they were all in the bank, well not all of them. And what they went through in that 52 hours has put them closer to each other, but what happened in that 52 hours? We’ll just have to watch the show to find out.

Ok, so enough about my addiction to TV shows.

Career, life?

I no longer work at Heathdale Christian College. I ceased to be an employee of the school from the 17th of May. I was there for 2 years, 2 great years might i add, that place will always be beside my heart and their vision I will always share. I attended that school for my later senior years of high school, and I will always hold it up high as a good education institution. Then 2 years after graduating from there I got a job there as an IT Technician, which was a great job and I had a lot of fun there. The people were great, the kids were great (well most of them) and ofcourse the hours were great too!

But one morning, I was bought into a meeting with my boss and the principal, there I was told, that as of the 17th of May we will not be continuing your contract of employment. To be frank, I was shocked, and pretty upset, as you can read above that working there was great for me. As I look back at it now, being roughly 2 months now since I left, I see that it was God’s will for me to finish my employment there and move onto bigger and more challenging things. Which has happened.

I now work for an internet service provider in the heart of the city of Melbourne, the mob I work for are Hotkey Internet. What I do there is pretty much answer the phone when it rings, and help the customer with whatever question they bring to me. Whether it be “fix my internet please” or “I wish to sign up to broadband, what do I need to do?”. Or the dreadful, “my e-mail is not working” to which most of the time, the solution is, “it is because no one has sent you any e-mail”. But I am enjoying it though, it is a very different experience to Heathdale, and the people are way more different.

So for now, this job is just a place holder until I figure out what I’m going to do next. I would love to get a job in a design or web design related firm, doing what I love. I would also love to have the flexibility in my job that I can do it from anywhere as well and that it would not interfere with my Christian walk. Eventually I would love to get into doing creative directing or something like that for the Church, and help steer the Church into a better direction when it comes to image and marketing. This has always been something that I would love to see the Church take on. We live in an multi-media age now, where having an online presence is important. And that is something I feel the Church can benefit in, and I want to help them take part in that.

So, that’s how I feel about that, hehe. Watch more on this space as I bring more discussions about this topic and how I start to take this issue on.

Semi-Permanent Sydney 2006

On the 1st weekend of July, I flew up to Sydney for Semi-Permanent 2006. It was another whirlwind visit into Sydney for me. I had a late flight into Sydney from Melbourne, which was quite fun actually, had my laptop handy for entertaining purposes, but there was no need for that, as there were 2 lovely girls who sat across from me who were very funny.

This trip was actually pretty good, usually I don’t like travelling around Sydney at all, I’m so used to getting around Melbourne. You see, Melbourne’s CDB is a grid, it is so easy to get around, AND we have trams, how awesome are trams. So whenever I go to Sydney I tend to get lost and have no idea what to do there, simply because I have no idea where anything is. Luckily this time I was with some great guys who knew where they were going, and i was able to enjoy myself a lot more.

We had a decent hotel in the heart of the city and was a mere 5 or so minute walk to the Sydney Convention Centre in Darling Harbour. Now, for those of you who do not know what Semi-Permanent is, it is a yearly conference that is put on by Design Is Kinky. They bring in the worlds top design companies and influential people in the design/art business to give presentations about what they do and how they do it. It was quite an inspirational journey, and sitting front row for every session wasn’t too bad either.

For a quick look at what went on just head over to the Flickr set that i have made.

Flickr Photo Set 1

Flickr Photo Set 2

My MacBook Pro

Hi, well I am now a certified Apple Mac owner. I have a MacBook Pro. And I must tell you, this thing is freakin’ sweet!!! I’ve had it for about a month now, and it has been really great. At home I have a wireless setup so one of the best advantages of this beast of a machine is being able to be online anywhere in the house. So the whole mobility is why I needed/wanted a laptop for, being able to take my work anywhere and the freedom of being able to do that anywhere is awesome.

Some applications that I now love and some that I’m looking forward to using, that came with the Mac are: iCal, Mail, iChat, iPhoto, Garage Band, iMovie and iDVD, iWeb and TextMate. iCal has been great, putting in all my schedules and events that take part in my life, and having them organised in such a easy way to understand and follow. Also, it’s great how most of the programs interact with each other.

Now to the technical side, time to unleash to you the specs of this baby!!!

15.4-inch widescreen display
1440×900 resolution
2.16GHz Intel Core Duo
2GB (single SO-DIMM) 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM
100GB Serial ATA hard drive
4x SuperDrive
ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 with 256MB GDDR3 memory
AirPort Extreme wireless networking (802.11b/g)

Not too bad ay?!

Some other cool features are Front Row, and the nice little remote that you get with it. This has proven to be a great little entertainment feature for my commute on the train to and from work. (Front Row)

64 Bit

Last night, I upgraded my OS to a 64bit version, which is Windows XP. And so far i'm pretty happy with the result. I've had this PC for 4 months now. For those interested, I have an AMD 64bit 3700+ processor, 1GB RAM, nVidia 6600GT 128MB Graphics Card. I forget the motherboard model, but its a Gigabyte, and it has the ability to run SLi (dual graphics cards). So this machine should last me a while, i've noticed lately that the PC technology hasn't really been moving that fast, with only some movement in the Graphics Card area and now, the dual core processors are making a foothold into the market in laptops.

I was quite suprised when i finished installing WinXP on my machine, most of my devices had been installed and I really didn't have to install any drivers on, with an exception for the on board sound. So tonight i'm going to give it a real test run with some work in Photoshop, but I doubt it will make THAT much of a difference, since it's still a 32bit program, but you never know.

Hopefully sometime this year I will be getting an Apple MacBook Pro, as I'm a huge fan of Apple, and it will be great to have a laptop so I can take my work anywhere I go. Also with wireless capabilities at home, it will make some work way more pleasant, and there are more possibities to do more at church aswell with a laptop, to start recording the messages for podcasting, once we have our church site up.

Well, this is all i'm going to discuss at the moment, stay tuned dudes!!! 

The Shed

Well, Saturday night was spent tearing it up on the concrete at a huge indoor skate park, in Cranbourne, which took us about an hour and a half to get to. I had fun riding around on my BMX and even had a few stacks, nothing too bad so don't worry. So check out these photo's, most of them are of this one guy who came with us, he was really awesome and was pulling off some really good tricks.