One of the best things about working on our little street in Newstead has been the Pipi Designs Espresso Store. Not only did it mean that delicious coffee was only a short stroll away, but the two proprietors – David and Carol – are the friendliest baristas that I’ve ever met! From 6:30 AM every weekday, they were always there to help brighten up the mornings with a coffee and a chat – and needless to say, they knew everyone by name, and their regular coffee order!

Sadly for us, they’ve decided that the time has come to move on! Their business has been sold to someone else (who I’m yet to meet/judge), but of course it will never be the same without them. And so, we all said “farewell” to them on Friday, as they made us all our last ever Pipi Designs coffee. Well, actually, I managed to convince them to let me make my own coffee – after all, I’ve always wanted to be a full-time barista!

(Thanks to Ben for the photo)

David and Carol will definitely be missed around Newstead, but hopefully they’ll find happiness in whatever ventures they take on next!

After months of hard work building the software for SmartClinics, Kristy and I enjoyed a well deserved night out on Saturday, along with Ben and Michelle, and Lou and Steve. It was great! Whilst the kids all had sleep-overs with various grandparents, we all stayed at the Sofitel in the city, which – under its previous ownership as the Sheraton – was the same hotel that Kristy and I stayed in the night we were married. Jason tells me that Sofitel is a French hotel chain, which explains why all the staff greet you with “Bonjour”; though when rendered with the delicate tone of the Australian accent, sounds more like “Bon-jawah?”.

Our rooms were on “Club Level” floors, which meant they came with backstage passes to Club Sofitel up on level 30. There, we enjoyed some pre-dinner canapas and drinks on Saturday night, as well as a champagne buffet breakfast on Sunday morning – not to mention some lovely views out over Brisbane city!

Our dinner at Thyme² was a big highlight since it was an all-you-can-eat seafood buffet, and they had both of my seafood favourites on the menu: Moreton Bay bugs, and oysters. As it turns out, “all-you-can-eat” in terms of oysters tops out somewhere around the 30 mark for me, and yes I know that sounds gluttonous, but given that they’re the only oysters that I can recall having all year, it actually averages out to only three per month. And I’m ok with that.

A few drinks at the hotel bar afterwards meant we were all ready for bed shortly before midnight, which all-in-all is a pretty tops effort after weeks (months?) of waking up around 5 AM.

Sadly, all of that 5 AM wake-up practice meant that even without our regular little alarm clock, I still woke up at 5 AM. And, much as I tried to get myself back to sleep, it just wasn’t going to happen – but it was still refreshing just to lie in bed peacefully with my eyes closed.

After our buffet breakfast, we enjoyed some coffee at Bellissimo with our friends before we all parted ways. We picked up Oscar from Mia and Pa’s house, where he reportedly had a “very good night” on his very first sleepover! Success! That means we can do it all again, hopefully in the not too distant future!

Well, after many long days and nights for a lot of people, SmartClinics opened today! The cog that we contributed to the machine is the form of software – we wrote the booking website, as well as an iPad web-app for the concierges and a web-app for the clinicians. It’s been a really interesting and challenging project, so it was great to be there in person to see the store open, and see all of our software running on the machines throughout the clinic!

There’s still a long way to go – we have a lot more software to write! – but this has been a really great milestone for us all. There were a few little bugs and issues that raised their heads on launch day today, but for the most part the software did its job really well – I couldn’t be happier!

Finally, I think it’s time to go and catch up on some of that sleep…

It’s been pretty quiet over the last few weeks. Work has been crazy hectic for me, with the product that we’ve been working on all year going live on Monday week. It’s very exciting to see all our hard work coming to fruition, but at the same time a bit nerve-wracking knowing that the software has never been properly tested “in the wild”. Fingers crossed all goes smoothly when it launches!

On the home front, things have been fairly routine, though we’ve had a couple of weeks of fairly restless nights with Oscar managing to pick up back-to-back colds. I think he is now on his third. His head gets so full of mucus that you wonder how on earth he still manages to breath – at night it seems he wonders the same thing, and getting him back to sleep after he wakes up in a fit can be quite tricky. But on the upside, he’s been eating like an absolute champion since his jaunt to the ER, so hopefully that will continue and the worst of his non-eating stays behind us!

We had a delightful celebration of fatherhood last weekend for Father’s Day #1. Both of our Dad (and Mums), and Jason and Susan all came around for a huge BBQ lunch. Oscar picked up some awesome gifts for me too – a bottle of Lagavulin Single Malt, as well as a “Pint” shirt (with matching “Half Pint” shirt for him). His “Half Pint” shirt is a little on the big side though – he’s really more of a Quarter Pint at this stage!

Anyway – our week ahead looks pretty much like the one just gone, but hopefully things will calm down after our product launch on the 19th. I’m looking forward to a vacation!

There are only a handful of developer conferences that I’d be interested in attending, and of those, the annual Mix conference would be number one on the list. Firstly because it covers everything that’s spanking and new to do with web development using Microsoft technologies (i.e. what I do every day); and secondly, because it’s in Vegas, baby!

I totally missed the boat with Mix this year – though truth be told I’ve missed the boat every year, so this was no exception. After all, with airfares, accommodation, and you know – expenses – it can’t be a cheap trip. But each year in Australia, there’s a poor-man’s version of the conference which takes place a few months after the original. It’s called Remix, and this year it was held in Sydney. Our company was nice enough to sponsor a jaunt down there for Ben, Rob and myself, so off we trolleyed on Wednesday last week.

I suppose that Remix should inherit the “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” principle from Mix, but mainly this is because most of you would probably find my summary of the event rather boring. Also, I took barely any photos from the trip, as we had barely any free time, and photos of people giving presentations are generally pretty pants. Of the few photos that I did take, this one is the clear winner:

Yep, it’s Rob, and he’s on the phone. Good times.

On the plus side, we all thought that the conference was a total win – and, we each scored a trendy new Internet Explorer 9 shirt (though I still prefer Chrome). But my guess is that Remix probably doesn’t hold a candle to Mix, so I’ve got my fingers crossed for a sponsored trip next year!

I’m going to go out on a limb here and presume that you’ve already heard about the flooding in Brisbane. Kristy and I are thankful that we live far enough away from the Brisbane river (and at the top of a hill to boot!) such that the rising waters didn’t affect our home at all. Unfortunately, my workplace is somewhat of a different story.

We put sandbags and plastic sheeting out the front of our office to try and stop the inevitable flooding of the street from damaging the building. We had no idea how high the water would rise, and we had no idea if the sandbags and plastic sheeting would actually do anything to help.

We also pulled out as much of our electrical equipment and furniture as we could. What we couldn’t fit in storage, we tried to put up as high as possible. We were all sad that the ping-pong table had to be left to the mercy of the water!

(Disclaimer: This isn’t my photo, I think it was from news.com.au originally.)

This is the building directly to the left of ours, but I’m not sure when it was taken in relation to the peak height of the water on our street. I’d say this is pretty close to as high as it came – pretty much right to the top of the plastic sheeting.

This was the first view I got of the office this morning when I got in. From the marks on the wall, it looks like the water came up about a metre inside. All the wooden furniture and desks that were left on the ground soaked up water like a sponge, and consequently had to be thrown out. We tried to clean the squares of carpet with a high-pressured hose, but it just wasn’t working, and we ended up having to throw them out too. It’s amazing how heavy they are when they’re full of water.

The place scrubbed up fairly quickly once all the carpet tiles were up, and we took to the floor with the hose. It will be a while before we get the furniture and carpet replaced, but the first priority is to get the power back on. We luckily have another office we can work from just around the corner in the Valley, which fared much better than ours did in the flood. We’ll all feel a bit displaced for a few weeks I’m sure, but overall I think we were lucky to come out as well as we did – there’s definitely a lot more places who are far worse off than we are.

More photos from the flood damage at work on Picasa.

Wow, it’s been a busy month! I can’t believe there’s already less than two weeks until Christmas! Thankfully, all of our Christmas shopping is sorted – or at least, everyone on the “nice” list; we’re still sourcing some coal for the people on the “naughty” list, and we’re gonna need a lot of coal.

To celebrate the silly season, our work sponsored a Christmas Party consisting of nine holes of golf at Victoria Park golf complex, followed by dinner and drinks at The Normanby. For Ben and I though, the day started early with a killer breakfast at Vagelis on Racecourse Road. We each opted for the meatlover’s variety of “Brisbane’s biggest omelette”, and both of us only made it about half way through before declaring ourselves beaten.

Golfing at Victoria Park was great fun, as we all had golf carts to drive around, which proved to be rather amusing in the wet. Even more amusing was the fact that they encourage you to drink while you’re playing, with a few buggies driving around the course selling beer and wine. And sure, the golf was good too, and I was impressed by my form given it must be about six years since I last played – but really, it was all about the driving. Of the golf carts that is, not of the golf balls.

We had a prix fixe menu offered to us for dinner, and not surprisingly, everyone went for the steak. I’ve always been impressed with steaks at the Normanby, and after our Christmas dinner there, I remain impressed. I was also quite pleased with the oysters they served as an entrée – not only were they delicious and fresh, but most people chose not to eat them, which meant all the more for me!

It was great to spend an afternoon/evening away from the desk with my work colleagues – I only wish Christmas came more than once a year so we could enjoy such an outing more often!

Check out some photos of the golfing action in the DinguBlue Christmas Party 2010 photo album.

Last night I joined some of my ex-work colleagues to farewell Charlie, who is headed home to Sydney! He’s been away for three years (I think?), and is feeling the call back to the home land. It was great to catch up with him, as well as lots of the other friendly faces that I used to work with!

One beer led to another, and before long we felt the call of ribs for dinner. We ended up going to the Chicago Rib Shack for what they claim to be “the best ribs in London”. Well, they certainly were ribs, but definitely not the best ribs I’ve ever had. Tip for next time (should we ever go again): stick with the Baby Backs; the St Louis ribs were nowhere near as good! Oh, and avoid the spicy wings; they aren’t kidding when they say, “They’re really hot”!!

Well, I’ve enjoyed two awesome months of downtime since leaving my previous job, but all of that comes to a close today! I’m starting on a web development contract for a bank in The City, and I even have to dress up for it! I can’t believe I accepted a job where jeans and a t-shirt aren’t the standard attire!

The downtime has really recharged my batteries, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed just taking care of things around the house. Of course, there’s also been a fair bit of PlayStation 3 time, and I managed to finish both DarkSiders, and Assassin’s Creed 2 (twice, to get all the trophies). I’ve also been hitting the gym like a drummer on red bull, and have lost about six kilos! Here’s hoping I don’t stack it all back on sitting behind a desk every day!

Those niggling tasks on the never-ending “to-do” list have taken a beating too, and a couple of them have been very blog focused. The first was to transfer all the old photo albums that I used to have onto Picasa Web. I still have a few to go, but I’m using a lot more of generous free storage allowance than what I was before! The second was to go through and fix up the formatting of all the old stories – back before I was too strict about writing well formatted HTML. This task is a mission, but at least I’ve started it now, and I’m trying to get through a month per day. At this rate it will take me about three months to finish!

As much as I’ve loved not working, it will be nice to get back into a routine again. And of course, no-one’s going to complain about getting paid .

On Thursday night – before cooking a midnight pasta, that is – I had been at my farewell drinks from CQS. It was a pretty amazing night – so many people came along to help celebrate! I felt a little bad that I didn’t get to talk to everyone there but I’m pretty sure everyone had a decent time regardless. Given that I didn’t get home until midnight, I know that I sure did.

Friday was my last day at work, so as you can guess it was extremely busy. Everyone had thrown in some money to get me an amazingly generous gift voucher for Amazon. I was very touched! I’ve resolved to spend it on something ridiculously impractical, like a pair of Ugg Boots for Men. Classy.

Saturday we were overdue for a sleep-in, and the rain outside was encouragement to do so. Thankfully, the weather cleared up in the afternoon as I was booked in to go ice-skating at the Natural History Museum with Nick, Suzie, Eva, and Alex, and at £16 for a one-hour session (yes, really!) we were going even if there was thunder and lightening.

Saturday night we enjoyed an amazing three course dinner at Pat’s house, where everything was home cooked and everything tasted amazing. As often happens, I got way too caught up in eating the food to take any photos, so check out Pat’s site for the full scoop.

Sunday we were given the best weather that we’ve seen in weeks – gorgeous blue skies and an amazingly warm seven degrees! Kristy made the most of it by coming down with a cold and lying under a doona on the couch; I, on the other hand, hit the driving range with Aubain and Oscar!

It was so refreshing to be outdoors without wearing 17 layers of clothing; fingers crossed that the weather keeps up like this!