The last 3 months have been an exciting time for us… On August 27th we learned that I’m pregnant! We were both delighted and a little dazed and overwhelmed (even though it was planned) about the new adventure we had stepped in to. Now, at the end of the first trimester we’re still delighted of course, a little less dazed and very pleased now to be able to share our news with everyone else.
This post originally appeared on Matt’s Musings (Matt’s computer focussed blog).
I’ve been eagerly looking forward to the release of Xero Personal which has been heavily promoted b Xero and BNZ (as MoneyMap) for the last few months. Unfortunately my first impressions of the product today are extremely underwhelming. Xero Personal is definitely not worth anywhere close to $5/month for me at this point in time and I’m unlikely to even keep using the free trial.
Not wanting to risk life becoming even remotely boring, we’ve decided to change jobs, move countries (temporarily) and move apartments over the next 2 months. Change comes all at once!
The trigger for all this change was one small decision that I made to move from the team that I currently work in, to a new team (still at Google) where I’ll be helping to maintain the front-end web serving infrastructure that powers Google. Part of that transition means that I need to go to Mountain View for 6 weeks to get to know new team-mates and come up to speed on various bits and pieces.
On Thursday last week we became the proud owners of a three bedroom house in Claudelands, Hamilton, ticking off the second major task on our todo list for our visit back to NZ.
We had been looking at property in Hamilton since before we left Dublin thanks all the listings available online. Our original thoughts were that we’d like to find somewhere that needed some work but was still in a reasonable condition such that we could rent it to good tenants until we return to NZ at some point in the future. Once we got here and actually started looking in person it became fairly clear that there wasn’t a huge amount of new properties coming on to the market at the moment, and what was available didn’t really fit into that category. In the end we purchased a nice house that was built in 1947 but had been heavily renovated in 2006 and really shouldn’t need much work at all when we return.
We’re back in NZ right now and will be here till the end of the year. It’s wonderful to be home and spend some quality time with family, see old friends and enjoy cafes and places we haven’t been in ages. We arrived into NZ on Oct 27th – nearly 3 weeks ago already and we’ve been pretty busy since then with family and friends to see, a wedding to help with and some house hunting too.
This post originally appeared on Matt’s Musings (Matt’s computer focussed blog).
It’s been a while since I’ve taken any sort of quiz like this, so when David Farrar from Kiwblog posted his results today it prompted me to give it another go.
My Political Views I am a center-right moderate social libertarian Right: 1.33, Libertarian: 1.97 Political Spectrum Quiz
I completed the quiz pretty quickly and felt the need to answer ‘it depends on the specifics’ to many of the questions, so take the results with a grain of salt. I think it is a reasonably accurate description of me though.
Ever since we booked our cruise holiday in January I’ve been eagerly awaiting May 29th, excited to flee the grey cold weather of Dublin and cruise the Caribbean in style with our fabulous friends Kieron, Lucy, Joey and Robbie.
There was so much packed into our holiday last week that I don’t know where to begin in describing it. Lets just say it was 9 days of fabulousness! Memories of our tropical sunny holiday will keep me warm through the Irish ‘summer’ 😛
Happy Easter everyone! We had a fabulous easter weekend, enjoying the company of Susanna and Daniel and showing them around some of Irelands sights. It was great to see old friends again and fun to get out of Dublin and enjoy the sunny weather.
Susanna and Daniel arrived early on Good Friday after a long train + ferry trip from London. Matt whipped up another batch of hot cross buns for breakfast (very impressive) and then mid morning we went out to walk around the city center stopping at all the main sights around the place. I was very grateful for the sunny afternoon, Dublin is always more charming on a sunny day!
This post originally appeared on Matt’s Musings (Matt’s computer focussed blog).
I was very pleased to wake up this morning to the news that National has delayed the introduction of S92A via an order-in-council. It’s a nice short-term victory, but I’ll save the champagne until the law is fundamentally rewritten.
The most pleasing aspect of the decision is simply that it was made at all. Within two weeks, a small band of protesters were able to harness the power of the Internet to direct international attention and place enough pressure on a Government, whose Prime Minister admitted to not having read the bill prior, that he then took the time to understand the issues and personally announce the delay in implementation of the law. We owe much thanks to the Creative Freedom Foundation for all the effort they put into co-ordinating the protest and ensuring that a single coherent message was presented. Just a little bit of my cynicism and belief that politicians never listen to public opinion outside of election campaigns was chipped away today.
This post originally appeared on Matt’s Musings (Matt’s computer focussed blog).
If you’re reading this post via the website rather than a feed/planet then you will notice that the site has gone completely black in support of the Creative Freedom Foundation’s campaign against S92A of the NZ Copyright Amendment Act which is due to come into effect on 28th February 2009. I’ve also joined the wave of people blacking out their “avatar” on Facebook/Jabber/MSN, etc.