News and views

Things are happening in my world again. The last post was a bit of a random collection of not very much because not much was going on, but I have things to say now!

Small daughter has finished her first term of school (well, part of a term as she started part-way through) and has loved it. She's really happy at school and doing very well, and I must admit that it's really nice to have her reading me stories, as well as me reading stories to her! She had her first five-week evaluation a week ago and did extremely well overall - there are areas to work on (there always are!) but we were both very proud of her.

Work has also been interesting: I've been involved in developing some tools for a new service that we're launching (on quite a terrifying scale, with some of NZ's biggest companies!) and we had the first big meeting with all the prospective clients on Monday. It went extremely well and everyone was completely enthusiastic about it. It may mean some changes in my role with the company over time, which will be good.

I'm also really happy with work because they decided that my old "steam powered laptop" (as in takes ages to start up, goes with a hiss and a roar, and rapidly runs out of puff!) was a bit decrepit (I'd decided that long ago!) and upgraded me to a completely brand new one straight out of the box. Nice. I'm still figuring out what some of the functionality is for, and the change from WindowsXP OS to Windows 7 was a bit of a shock to the system! Fortunately I was using MS Office 2007 so Office 2010 is not such a jump. However, it's blindingly fast, it has wizzy toys, and it's got some great functionality in the programs that I know I'll find a use for so I'm super happy. Not to mention a battery life of longer than half an hour....

And I've seen Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt 2 and my Rugby World Cup tickets have arrived so I'm happy. I would have loved to go to an All Blacks match but wasn't prepared to fork out the several hundred dollars a ticket that it cost to go even to a pool game. At least these two could be reasonably well-matched - I followed Sphenodon's comments on the Six Nations before I made my pick of the minnows in the pool games and tried to get some that would be reasonably balanced.