New job

I've started my new job, and after 2.5 weeks I'm much happier with the work I'm now doing. For the last 15months I've been working on enterprise level networking within a state utility company, which was initially interesting and new to me, but turned out to be slow going and became repetitive as time went on. Good bunch of guys there, though, which can make all the difference :)

The new job is back in the service provider industry, which is where my working roots are, and I'm immediately comfortable. I'm using skills that I spent years building up, and I have a more instinctive feel for the environment. I'm also building hands-on skills in areas I previously only had theoretical knowledge of. And there's a good bunch of guys here too :)

The flipside of the new job is that I'm not in a shiny glass-clad skyscraper overlooking the river anymore, I'm now in an ageing concrete block at the city end of Fortitude Valley. "The Valley" is well-known for it's thriving nightlife, the Chinatown area, and generally being grimy and alternative. Where I used to have a wide choice of options at lunchtime, I now have a wide choice of Chinese restaurants :) In London terms, it's something like having Soho, Shoreditch and Camden all rolled into one, but within 10 minutes walking distance of the river.

In other news - fatcat was off the air for a while, but is now back up and should stay up. I've just posted a couple of new albums on there of photos from my birthday, a weekend camping in Noosa last month, and our trip to Canberra in June.

http://fatcat.org/~benb/gallery

I've also registered with facebook, which is proving to be a bit of fun. It's nice to have another way of keeping in contact with friends.

We bought a new digital camcorder at the weekend (ignore the RRP, we paid way less than that!), and put it to good use making a video message for some friends in the UK. Really good fun to do the filming, and editing the film was relatively easy on the Mac too. Mind you, I dread to think how frustrating it would have been if we didn't have the Mac - the sofware is intuitive, and even though it's a laptop it has the grunt to handle the job. We should be able to get on the case with the home videos soon :)

...won't be long now until the new addition to the family arrives - it could happen any day now, or it might still be a few weeks.

Picasa web album has google earth built-in

fantastic. Not only do all the photos posted on this blog get automatically put into a web album for me, but I just discovered that the web album has google earth functionality built into it.... so I've just been and placed a few of the photos on the map - check it out:

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/ben.byer/TheByersInOz

I do have plenty of other news - including starting a new job - but don't have time right now to write about it all. Will update again soon!