feliz navidad~
This Christmas part of me wishes to be with the rest in Melbourne probably having a less-than-sane house gathering at mentor's place (KK + food? I want! =P) and so I hope they have a great time~
Plenty of things have been happening since my last post, though I haven't had the mood (time is no excuse now that I can leave at 6:30PM on the dot) to do so.
To-Report List
Melbourne Graduation Trip
Melbourne Graduation Trip
Switching Jobs (yep you read that right, keep reading below)
Which I will revert once I have the time. The graduation trip has a fair amount of photos, and heaps to tell.
_________________
Aaanyway.
Things that really warmed my cold little heart this season:
The wonderful performance (December Dazzlers) by the MPYO on the 23rd.
This was wonderful for so many many many reasons I tell you! For one, they had several cute violinists upfront (yea we got front row seats, literally =P)Also, their repertoire for the evening was fabulous! I haven't heard the complete Nutcracker Suite in a long while, so that was nice! Haha it was noticeable though when people nodded when they heard familiar bits. The very cute arrangement for Jingle Bells with a jazzy upbeat chorus which rocked the house was absolutely fantastic. I would have preferred a faster version of "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" though. The complete piece of "Blue Danube" was quite good too. Kevin Field was a good conductor, quite entertaining. And the cutout snowflakes at the stage were quite detailed indeed, I wonder who did them.
Sherlock Holmes (just got home from the 9:40PM screening)
My goodness, this film. Was. GOOD! Hats off to Robert Downey Jr. for doing an excellent job on Holmes, and Watson was a good partner. (As he's always been, of course) I must admit the casting for Irene Adler could have been better, but nevertheless Rachel MacAdams was alright. Such a difference from the last movie I watched with her in it, which must've been "The Time Traveler's Wife". The plot was alright, but what really did it for me was the characters, and their little quirks. Their involvement in the case(s) (I'll leave this to your interpretation but I think it should be referred to as one case) was important, as was the settings and the findings that Holmes made at the various scenes. The love interest bit I suppose had to happen (after all in the book there were suggestions of it, but thankfully it didn't blow up into disastrous proportions in the film) but it was so cute seeing Miss Adler in boys' clothing. Oh, but her red dress was nice! I wanna dress like that too! Anyway, that's not the point. The buildup of the case was gradual and all the remarks that Holmes made about the Scotland Yard were precious!
Lestrade: We're in the process of retrieving the coffin.
Holmes: *sees officers standing around* At what stage of the process? Conception?
I love this show *fangirls!
_________________
On my To-Watch list:
All the darker stuff. Yummy. *licks lips*
_________________
On Switching Jobs:
My new job started on Monday (yea, since I just got back on the previous Sunday, abit too soon to get into the mood to work =P) which has been so far.. alright I guess. I'm not too hyped up about it. Feels like the first few weeks of college, where I felt like I was the odd one out because something in me prevented myself from speaking up and making an arse of myself. Maybe I was in the observing mood, to see how to behave with this group of people. They've been nice though, but it's more civil. Maybe I just can't handle big groups at once (it's like 8 of us to lunch most of the time). Plus it's more of a Mandarin and/or Cantonese-speaking environment so I feel that bit more awkward since I'm not very fluent in either. There are some Malay guys too and they're prolly an OK lot too, haven't had much chance to interact with them.
Part of the challenge was getting used to a Linux environment (fine, it's Fedora but still! It's not Windows - I suppose I have to grow out of it eventually, which is a good thing actually) and learning all sorts of frameworks still pretty new and alien to me. No experience in AJAX, so I've to learn that up. Been exposed so far to Smarty, PrototypeJS and FPDF, I dunno what else that they can hurl at me - but bring it on! I've only seen the tip of the iceberg. Have had to also polish up on PHP again (man the last time I did this was in 2nd year).
There's a really cute girl (kinda reminds me of Bobby) haha! And one of the guys remind me of kenken simply because... I dunno, certain similar characteristics. Then there's the senior-er girl who passes me stuff to do, this lanky girl who has a mellow tone of voice. There's an Indon Chinese guy too, he's quite amicable compared to his counterpart (who's abit more of an ahbeng zhai, I'm guessing they joined at the same time). Most people here know their fair share of photography and the technicalities of it (the gear specs and tricks, picture quality and stuff) so I wouldn't be surprised if half of them own at least on DSLR.
The first meeting I went to was more like a catchup session, ticking off completed tasks and discussing issues with the current systems, and security issues in the payment systems and fraud detection (on a high level at least). Interesting to listen to, I'll be dealing with some of them once I pick up more details.
Tasks I've done so far are relatively light tasks, I suppose this is so that I've got time to learn up how things work, where and how the languages are used, the places on the network to trawl to do stuff on the various sites that we support/host/develop. Having only FF and Chrome to test on makes me feel abit insecure, I know they're good browsers but there's a majority of the population still stuck with IE and I haven't gotten it to work on my machine yet. Meh, I can save that for later.
The terminal is a *very* useful tool. *nodnods!* No Linux/UNIX user can live without it - and I can see why. It's like the magic wand! Provided you know what to tell it to do, it *can* and *will* do it. (this includes performing miracles, both good and bad)
_________________
This Christmas season, as much as Malaysians see it as a reason to shop (and I'm suddenly reminded of the madness of the Boxing Day Sale in Sydney that'll be happening within the next 24 hours) it's also one of the seasons that has the loveliest music that really touches my heart. It just does. There's just some kind of magic about it really. I believe the service at churches regarding Christmas is very insightful, and even at dinners I've been to on its eve and on the actual day, or days after, makes me think of what the day actually represents and how and what people appreciate about it. It's about family, friends, God, and bringing joy in your own way. For most here, it's a mix of the presents and the presence of good company. =)
With that, Merry Christmas to everyone!
