My brother managed to stumble across a joke that went something like this:

How do you know if someone has an iPad?
Because they'll tell you.

Oh yeah, I got an iPad 2 for Christmas :D

Unlike all the spoiled kids tweeting that they got a car from mom/dad instead of an iPhone/iPad, I bought the iPad as a Christmas present for myself which surprised me a little when I got the idea because I don't often buy flashy or expensive things like this. I mean, the last purchase I made (which I still think is very cool) is a mandoline. It slices vegetables very thinly. That's all it does.

I've also mentioned a few times that as a computer programmer, ie: one you'd expect to be enamoured and surrounded with cool electronic stuff, I'm still very much behind the tech curve when it comes to owning said stuff. I'm waaay behind the late majority and laggards, and so late that I'm practically pregnant.

"Food baby? No, that's just some tech from 5 years ago accumulating in my belly."

Also, the last time I spent such a large amount of money in one go I got a call from the bank to confirm that yes it was me that spent that money and no please don't block the transaction because otherwise my friends won't have a holiday house to spend New Year's in.

I'm pretty alien to big purchases and have managed to give my bank absolutely no reasons to increase my credit limit. So when I went to the store and the price of the purchase was repeated back to me by the nice young lady behind the counter, I very slowly forked over my credit card, all the while holding a face that I imagine looked like something you'd get if you crossed pain with a nervous smile.

I bought it on December 5, gave it straight to my mum to wrap and put under the family Christmas tree, and didn't open it until December 25. It was a very long 20 days.

My 'spending money' face

For my first ever Apple device, I'm very impressed. I've never really been an Apple fanboy, although I often find myself defending the company against my mainly Windows/Unix/Android group of developer/tech friends simply because nobody else will. What fun is an argument if everybody is on the same side?

(It usually goes that they pick on Apple for some thing they've done, like the comparison between Apple's walled-garden of an App Store vs the openness of the Android Marketplace: my friends will often attack it for being so developer unfriendly and I'd play devil's advocate, saying something like how Apple is ready to throw its developers under the bus for the benefit and safety of its customers. As a customer, this makes me feel a lot safer when perusing the app store; as a developer, I probably wouldn't want to develop an iOS app any time soon.)

Using the iPad has been a dream with pretty much no hiccups or complaints to speak of. As a customer, this makes me feel supremely satisfied; as a developer, this makes me ask why so many of the technologies I use at work and at home aren't this easy to use? I'm routinely surrounded by examples of difficult to use/understand software/websites/devices that it makes me wonder if we developers did this to ourselves on purpose.

It doesn't have to be this difficult! I'd find myself thinking as I wrestle with another annoying system I have to use as part of my work.

I think it all started with that user interfaces course I took at university where we were taught to focus on the user, test interfaces with actual users, find out what users actually need and other general things to think about so as not to annoy your users. (Pretty much everything that this guy talks about.) Ever since then I've been very user-centric and trying to include that in my own work and to have it show that I do in-fact care about the person who has to use whatever I'm developing.

An offshoot of this is that I really believe that every computer-related frustration a person has ever had is avoidable and a reflection of something missed during development.

It doesn't have to be this difficult! I would often think or say when debating user interface design in my head or with a co-worker.

Now I find myself wondering: Why can't everything be as easy as the stuff my iPad?

I've never been an Apple fanboy, but now I've had a taste of things on this side of the fence and it's pretty sweet over here. In this post-Steve Jobs Apple world, I really hope their user focus continues for years to come, because I am sooo very tired of wrestling with computers to make them do what I want. (I'm looking at you Linux...)

Merry Christmas everybody!

Most of the country of New Zealand has been lucky enough to not be working today or for the next 2 weeks, unfortunately 'most of NZ' does not include me.

It felt like I was the only person going to work this morning: the streets were empty of people and there were only a handful of cars driving around what are normally packed-to-the-breaking-point / we-should-fire-our-city-planner roads.

Now I'm at work and I'm the only one on this floor. Every time I hear somebody's desk phone going off, I say to myself 'They're not here, stop trying...', and at one point I even said that out loud. I'm playing music from my work laptop without headphones so it's coming out of the disgustingly tinny built-in speakers, and there isn't a single soul around to tell me to turn it off :D

Oh it's great: the only ambient noise is the howling wind outside and the whole emptiness of the city makes me feel selfishly like the entire place, all the bricks and steel and glass, were put together just for me.

*insert your own tumbleweed sounds here*

It'll be like this for the next week or 2 as my work has a mandatory closure period between now and early Jan, and most people have decided to add their own leave on top of it to extend their holidays. 'Why aren't I away with them?' I hear myself wondering. Well, without any Christmas / New Year's plans this time, the chances of me drawing the short straw to watch over one of our systems during the break shot through the roof, ie: I was the only choice.

But it's Christmas, and in a few hours my own relatively short Christmas break will begin.

I spent much of December trying to find or come up with things that would work well as presents for some friends and family that I actually forgot about what I'd like for myself until earlier this week. When I did start to give that some thought, one idea quickly came to mind: to fix my malfunctioning website.

I don't know if you've seen it, but ever since I had this site migrated to a more up-to-date plan with my current host (interAdvantage) in October, the stability of the site has been... a bit shit. Every couple of days I would get a message from someone that my site is throwing them the error page: e-mails from parents, Facebook comments from friends, and at one time a browser screenshot from my brother. I tried various things to fix it, but all I've managed to do is delay the problem from happening.

With my current web hosting plan, I don't have access to the logs or anything to really find-out what's going on, so I can't effectively diagnose why my site enjoys puking its internals out every couple of days. I mean, I never have had access to the logs, even with the older plan; I've just been flicking switches here and there in my site code to see what works within the constraints of the web hosting package.

So, finally fed-up with this situation, I decided to buy my own slice of cloud/internet real estate and got a Virtual Private Server (VPS) from OpenHost (these are the guys who I actually register and maintain this domain with, but I didn't do hosting with them because it was expensive at the time). That all got sorted yesterday, and I created a temporary sub-domain to start work on the migration: http://new.ultraq.net.nz/ (UPDATE: site is now migrated - you're looking at it - and the temp URL is gone)

So a big thanks to interAdvantage for the last several years - you guys have been nothing but good to me and I picked you out from all the other hosts because you had a good price on basic Java web hosting. But now that I've started doing some more complicated things with this site (which is probably why it's breaking in the first place), it's time for me to move on and to be in full control for the first time since... forever.

VPS = all of the power, but all of the responsibility. If this place continues to break when the migration is completed, then I'll only have myself to blame, but at least I'll have the things I need to be able to figure it out.

Finally back from my New Year's holiday, which included something of a technology blackout: no cellphone coverage, so no day-to-day Tweets of the day's happenings, so no receiving or sending of New Year's text messages, much to my chagrin because those on rival cellphone networks did get some modicum of reception and were still able to receive New Year's text message love :(

So, on to the blog post backlog I had in my mind. First-up on the list: my mum.

At a Christmas party a week before Christmas day of good ol' 2009, a certain someone - who I haven't yet mentioned in this blog before, and so doesn't have a witty nickname to which I can attach to them, to which I am surprised considering the contribution this person made to my 2009 which in turn made it so great - asked me a pretty tough question:

"What kind of person is your mum?"

How we got on to the topic of my mother, I can't remember - it might have something to do with a certain button badge I was given prior to this party - but when I was faced with that question my mind drew a blank. After what seemed like minutes of silence from me while my interrogator watched patiently at the cogs turning behind my eyes, all I could respond with was:

"I don't know how to answer that. Give me a day or 2 and I'll come-up with something."
"Good answer." she said, and walked away to leave me to contemplate the sorts of things I could say about my own mother.

One of the holiday season presents I received. I have never worn a badge so proudly in my life

So I gave the thought a day, which then became 2, which then stretched out from however many days there are between a week before Christmas and now...

When thinking about how I describe anybody, I usually look for that 1 trait that sets them apart from the rest; the thing that makes them unique to me. In the case of my mum, it would be that she is self-sacrificing for her children: everything she did, she did for my brother and I.

That trait encompasses many things: unconditional love, support, a level head whenever I asked her about the decisions I was facing (giving me the answer that would benefit me the most, even if the answer was not what I wanted to hear), and an almost embarrassing willingness to go out of her way to make sure my brother and I were as comfortable as we could be (eg: driving out from her work after school hours to take us home, giving us more than our share of food at the table, giving-up the window seat on a plane, etc).

That trait however is a bit of a double-edged sword; as well as being what makes my mum so great, it's also what has annoyed me the most: the unconditional love is often blind to what's going-on with others, the support would often make me think I was right when I was in the wrong, the honest answers might have carried me down the much safer path which could've given me valuable lessons or challenges to face, and the 'out-of-her-way'-ness often became too embarrassing, particularly when around my friends throughout those terrible teenage years.

Despite the good and bad nature of a child-centric focus, it's all the sorts of things I have grown to expect from a mother - and all the sorts of things that compose the yard stick by which I measure every mother I have known or will know.

And I wouldn't have it any other way.

"A mother is a person who, seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie."
- Tenneva Jordan

(http://www.quotegarden.com/mothers.html)

(queue obligatory Christmas blog post)

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYBODY!

I planned to write more, but the days have been packed with lots of Christmas and New Year's stuff that kept distracting me from my blog. I should have a bunch of new material, especially now that I've got a phone that takes decent pics that I can transfer to my computer without having to pay cellphone data usage to e-mail it to myself at a resolution so low that it doesn't get measured in megapixels...

I've had a very good year, and I hope the same can be said of y'all. I'll share more of my Christmas and my 2009 once the holiday season has calmed-down some.

Merry Christmas from the cuddly toys living under my family's tree (pic taken with my new phone!)

Either the approach of Christmas has been very subdued this year, or I've learned to relegate gigantic red and green decorations, ads, and posters, as part of the usual background noise that you're just meant to expect for this season. None of the retail stores I've been in recently are blasting Christmas tunes over their PA or speaker systems, so maybe without the auditory cues to aid the visual ones, the whole Christmas vibe just hasn't hit me yet, so maybe it is too early to think about it.

What it isn't too early for me to be doing though, is to start thinking about Christmas presents, and going about my yearly before-Christmas tradition: snow globe hunting.

Snow globe hunting is something I've done every year since I had some money to spend (ie: after I got my first job). It's pretty self-explanatory: I go out shopping for snow globes. I always start with Kirkcaldies - the city's most prestigious department store, which just happens to have a dedicated Christmas shop - and then work my way to other department stores, then smaller retail and souvenir/gift shops from there.

The success rate is mixed. Actually, I lie; the success rate is depressingly low. In all my years of snow globe hunting, I've only managed to find 1 snow globe that fit all of my criteria for what a snow globe should be... and it became a Christmas present for my mum. I have 2 other snow globes, but I didn't find them - they were presents from my friend the hug nazi.

When you're in a country which goes through Christmas during the summer months - where the typical Christmas scene is a barbecue outdoors wearing sunglasses and shorts, rather than making snowmen in thick jackets, gloves, scarves, and a beanie - snow globes aren't exactly a gift item you'll find on store shelves. The ones that I do manage to find are either really tiny novelty items, or epic large several-hundred-dollar pieces of art that deserve prime position on your mantlepiece. I don't have a mantlepiece, nor am I willing to spend that kind of money on a snow globe. It also doesn't help that my idea of what a snow globe should be has been shaped by the Christmases you often see in American TV and movies.

My definition of the perfect snow globe? The globe part itself should fit in your hands, it should depict a white northern-hemisphere-winter Christmas scene, the base shouldn't be larger than roughly a third the size of the globe itself, and extras such as a music box, electric lights, or a motor that pushes the snow around for you, are not required.

They're not hard to find on the internet. Heck, even the Wikipedia entry for snow globe shows a picture of the sort of thing I'm looking for:

*jealousy towards this little girl who has the kind of snow globe I've spent years looking for*

But in this country, you're better-off searching for a cheap pair of socks! (socks for some reason are very expensive in New Zealand, but that's another blog topic altogether)

Given that I search for presents for friends on the internet, I should probably do the same and extend my snow globe hunt to the online realm. That, or if you're someone I know who just happens to be looking for a Christmas present for me, I've just given you an epic hint.

*wink wink* ;)

2008 has been a pretty good and eventful year for me. Amongst other things: I visited the extended family in the Philippines, I've moved into my own place, I attended the weddings of 3 dear friends (one of which required I fly to Australia to attend), and I've befriended a good bunch of (former-)workmates who invite me to a whole host of events, and of that group one of them is this wonderful girl who bakes the most amazing food. In light of everything good that has made my year, I decided to get some sort of Christmas present for the people who have made it so.

Very little of my shopping was actually done at physical retail stores; much of what I got for others had to be shipped from around the country or from overseas. And you know what having things shipped means? Lots of packaging material, especially bubble wrap.
Everybody loves bubble wrap.

Bubble wrap

I was out last night delivering Christmas presents to the flat of (former-)workmates, when amazing-baking-girl started watching WALL-E. Wanting to avoid the chores that awaited me back at my place, I stayed and watched WALL-E.
WALL-E's story is told primarily through sounds and body language, and so lots of universally-understood devices or references are used so viewers know what's going on. At one point, WALL-E is showing EVE some of the stuff he has, including this sheet of bubble wrap. He demonstrates popping it, to which EVE follows by manically popping as much of the sheet as fast as she can.
Everybody loves popping bubble wrap.

This dog likes popping bubble wrap too

This scene reminded me of all the bubble wrap I had accumulated from the presents I had shipped-in, and how when I first received an order which had one of those huge bubbles, I spent several minutes popping the thing before getting to the actual work of wrapping the present. And you know what I did after that? I popped more bubble wrap.

So right up there with the universal language of smiles and laughs, we have bubble wrap. I think I'll try to include a small patch of the stuff with my Christmas cards next year :P

Merry Christmas everybody.

As a belated Christmas present, my brother got me Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, Game Of The Year Edition, which includes both the original game (The Longest Journey) and the more recent sequel Dreamfall, as well as the soundtrack to Dreamfall.

I've never owned a point-and-click adventure game before, so this was rather new for me. That's probably one of the reasons it's so fun; the original game may be technically outdated (1999, 640x480 screen res), but most of the themes and the story still hold-up pretty well: saving the world, meeting a magical race, killing the evil witch, all clichés that I've never had the time to completely appreciate, until now.

I'm now onto Dreamfall, and the more modern game is a welcome sequel and step-up from it's predecessor. However, I can't seem to get passed how stiff the character models are during some of the talking scenes. I mean, for an Xbox 360 and PC game released in 2006, I was kinda hoping for more natural movements. Didn't all those developers get that right after the Half-Life 2 / Doom 3 era?

Oh well, just a small blemish in an otherwise enjoyable adventure thus far.