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A few of us managed to make it to an event tonight that hadn’t been really heavily advertised. I had stumbled across a poster on a bus stop on my way home from work and was captivated by the mystery of an event touting the latest in Asian Art, Music and Film. Sponsored and promoted by Tiger Beer, the website Discover Tiger Beer had plenty of opportunity for people to apply for an invite to Brisbane’s “Transit” event.

Strangely enough (or maybe not so), the invite to “Transit” said to be at Platform 3 at Roma Street Station (a major Brisbane train station) at 7:30pm. Those of us who attended could not form any preconceptions because of the lack of detail on the invite - Were they really going to close a platform? Were we going to catch a train somewhere? Or would the event actually be held on a train?

I think we were all positively blown away by the evening that ensued. Transit was literally held on Platform 3 @ Roma Street Station, with the number of walls constructed turning the area into an art gallery. Live house music pumped throughout the night, accompanied by clips of modern Asian films and a combination of live performance and static art pieces. Free (Tiger) Beer, Wine and Water, as well as freshly cooked Asian dishes served in those little boxes you see mainly on American TV were also readily available through the entire night.

The crowd was a strange mix of different groups of Brisbanites, some dressing up (in suits), with others dressing down (t-short and shorts), but all with the consistent theme of being there to have a good time. Overall it was a very entertaining event for a Thursday night and was a definitely good way of breaking up the week with something different.

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I ended up having dinner at the new Wagamama restaurant at the Emporium in the Valley tonight (courtesy of Suz and Al and a very entertaining evening with a friend of their’s, Josh- thanks guys!). I had heard good things about the other members of this chain (mainly centred in Sydney and Melbourne for Australia, but with many other numerous locations around the world), but was sad to leave the Brisbane one with a lot of my expectations shattered. (more…)

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Last time Marie and I had finally managed to sync up our schedules for another dinner, I had to unfortunately postpone the event due to the travelling that I was supposed to be doing at the start of this month. With a big promise to Sarah that we’d have her along at our next get together, and armed with the recently acquired knowledge that she would be heading to Sydney (pretty much permanently) over Easter, it looked like tonight was our only night to have one last feast together (at least at my place).

The pressure was on (yet again), with each dinner getting more difficult to prepare something different and memorable, so another three-course meal was planned, conjured, consumed and enjoyed by all. The menu for tonight consisted of:

• Entree: Bruschetta
• Main: Peri-Peri Roast Chicken served with Tex-Mex Potatoes, Roast Sweet Potatoes and Garlic, and a refreshing Salad (with cucumber, capsicum, corn, carrot, spanish onions, roasted pine nuts and dressed with a coriander, mint and lime yogurt dressing)
• Dessert:A White Chocolate Hazelnut Mousse served a top a Chocolate Meringue Base and accompanied by fresh sponge soaked in a Hazelnut Syrup and fresh berries.

Despite a little bit of last minute panicking and preparation, I think the night went well, especially considering it was a school night with not much time for real preparation. It was definitely fun having Michael, Marie and Sarah around for one last feast before Sarah heads off down south. We even tried out the game my sister had brought back from London. I was convinced that its literally “shocking” value would scare off any guests, but we all had a good laugh and managed get through a few rounds (at least on low power).

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The last two weeks have been rather chaotic with the introduction of a whole set of new environments (one for User Acceptance testing, one for Performance testing, and one for our new Oracle database). We’ve had a number of issues moving to each of these environments, highlighted by both our own set of test suites and by our testing team.

Although all the new environments were supposed to be replicas of production, there were still many not-so-subtle and definitely unintentional and unnecessary differences (such as basic Oracle configuration of the NLS_DATE_FORMAT and NLS_TIMESTAMP_FORMAT values). Working with my, it-doesn’t-work-until-it’s-proven (with a test) attitude, has now lead to a whole new suite of “Environment Acceptance” tests that we can now run against each of these environments to further narrow our scope of debugging to just our code.

It is of great relief to have feedback should these things go awry again, but I’m now concerned that a whole other part of IT (operations management including people like systems and database administrators) may be lacking the discipline (or is it the awareness and importance?) of continuous integration and testing.

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This weekend I managed to make it down to the see some of the surfing action at the Quicksilver and Roxy Pro. Once again, the beautiful beaches of Snapper Rocks at Coolangatta played host and would have drawn a crowd of (my guess) at least a thousand or more throughout the day.

I managed to catch the final showdown for the Roxy Pro, which was won out by local 17 year old wildcard surfer, Stephanie Gilmore over Hawaiian Megan Abubo. The competition continues til next weekend, so there will be plenty more action to come. My highlight of the day (after all the awesome surfing) was when I found myself standing right next to the former World Champ, Sofia Mulanovich whilst I was taking pictures of the newly crowned one. Oh, and did I mention I saw the huge surfboard that everyone rode to set a new world record?

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The last two weeks have just flown by with so much happening that I really haven’t had a chance to update the blog. Last week we were fortunate enough to have Martin Fowler (known best for his collection of books such as Refactoring, UML Distilled, and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture) down under participating in a number of conference/seminar events. Since I work for the same company he works in, we were even more fortunate when he found space in his busy schedule to spend time with us at a client site on one of our projects. I definitely took advantage of the numerous opportunities to dine and chat with the man, enjoying the time we spent discussing a wide variety of topics.

I also returned to Aikido for the first time since my accident, training with caution so that I avoided aggravating my leg. Upon entering the dojo, I was reminded of its great community spirit when everyone showed their concern by asking where I’d been for the last month. Last week also marked the last day of employment for another mate, Aaron (AKA DJ Anarchy) at my old workplace, which, of course, demanded some sort of celebration late into Thursday night/Friday morning.

Last Friday then saw to the start of my employer’s first “Team Hug” events for 2005. My company creates these conference-like events so that everyone in the country can share their experiences and knowledge with each other. For us working in Brisbane, it is also one of the rare occasions where we actually get to meet all of our fellow employees down south in person. Saturday is reserved for the internal conference (which I’m told tends to be much better in content and format than most other conferences) whilst Sunday is seen as the chance to relax, and get to know everyone else in a much more social atmosphere. This Team Hug was held at the Australia Noosa Lakes Resort and was a perfect location to do work related stuff without feeling like it was work related stuff. It was also my first time to present at one of these events, and despite the nerves, felt like it was well-received. Thanks to Andy for pairing with me on the entire presentation.

This week I was invited (thanks Michael and Sarah) to a pre-release screening of the movie, Ong Bak. Although it’s not going to win any academy awards, as far as action and martial arts films go, this is definitely one to go and see. I never released some of the things that you could pull off with Muay Thai kickboxing and the star of this movie manages to demonstrate them all. Although the storyline is not going to make you think very hard, the fairly decent length (for an action movie)is filled with enough humour, drama and lots and lots of action to keep you entertained throughout.

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Sorry if I broke anyone subscribing to the RSS feeds, but tonight I just upgraded TheKua to Wordpress 1.5! Upgrading was relatively painless, with only a few teething issues since I had been using Wordpress 1.3-alpha.3 and had to ensure some of my own *tweaks* didn’t break anything. It looks like my RSS is back to being everything as well for the time being. One of the nifty features of this new version is the ability to ensure RSS feeds get all of the text from the posts (which after this weekend, I know some people prefer).

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