seriocomic

If I was a new visitor/immigrant to New Zealand I would already be connected to some form of broadband by now. I would be paying less for that broadband, I wouldn't have to wait for two different technicians from the same company to connect a phone line then the broadband. I wouldn't have to wait for the connection to be in place before the company sent me a modem/router a week later, and two weeks after I began the application.

You get my point.

For all the competition (methinks it's really pseudo-competition) in the IT market, Australian pricing and service is a JOKE. I can't believe that consumers don't demand more, and better more - there's certainly enough of them...

And don't get me started on Mobile connections!

So, in the meantime, instead of whining about things I will have to go the circuitous route when it comes to posting (and getting other things done online).

Rant over - do I feel better? - hmmm, probably.

...for the 1st of the month.

Ah yes, April Fool's day no less.

But this is no April Fool's joke, no...this is the first opportunity I have had to sit down and follow-up on the dream job (SEO Analyst - a job I applied for before I left even though I didn't get accepted till after I was already here), and tomorrow I pick up the keys to the dream apartment (photos and more to come I can assure)!

I knew around November last year that I was doing the right thing when I started thinking about moving to Melbourne. It just felt right. After only a short visit in 2004, I fell in love with the place. Since being here I am absolutely blown away by the beauty and diversity of Melbourne and Victoria - a large statement given the renowned beauty that New Zealand and Taupo are known for.

40 minutes in just about any direction can take you from high-rise city, to lush green woods, to rolling farmlands, to beaches to snowy mountains (in the winter). The juxtapositions between old and new, quiet and rowdy, country and city are very in-your-face and marvelous to behold.

The sad point to note is that there have been very few opportunities (so far) to take any quality photos, or those opportunities that have arisen have yielded less than great quality. The current two to two-and-a-half hour (!) transit each way to and from work hasn't aided that, so hopefully with my new pad located in the CBD I should get a lot more time to explore and take some shots.

City life certainly has been a nice wake-up for someone who has been pretty much a country hermit for the last dozen years. I hope that this new leash of life will give the same to this website!

Finally, if you're in Melbourne and wanna meet and hangout over a latte or VB, then drop me a note!

In November last year I turned 36...yes I am that old. This arbitrary threshold-crossing gave me cause to reflect on where I was in my life, and it wasn't exactly the greatest scorecard - still single, renting, in a job that was going downhill, stuck out in the wops with only the cat and dog to talk to yadda yadda boo hoo etc.

Not only that, but I had lost inspiration and motivation for taking photos, which for me was a real litmus-test. So several sleepless nights went by with me wondering how I could re-inject some stimulus into my 36 going on 76 lifestyle.

In one word: Melbourne. Complete upheaval of my life seemed about as good idea as any, and where better to upheave myself to that one of the most beautiful cities in the world than Melbourne. Why there in particular you may ask? Well, I have family there (Hi mum!), the quality of living is excellent, I loved it when I was there a few years ago, it's I.T. central for Australia so jobs wouldn't be an issue and it offers a complete juxtaposition of my current lifestyle, with more things to take a photo of that I could possibly want.

So after some procrastinating, online surfing, job hunting and other nonsense, I handed in my notice at work at the end of last month, started selling up everything ("The things you own - own you") and just the other day cemented it by purchasing a one-way ticket on the 1st of March.

So three weeks to go, and finally the anxiety has been replaced by the excitement. There is so much unknown - but that both excites me and frightens me. All I can hope for is to finally get back to posting daily photos that don't start looking like more of the same...

You know when you have nothing better to do (or want to avoid the things you need to do) when you spend all your time watching the coverage (including the "Fair and Balanced" Fox News) of the U.S. Presidential race, especially when you don't even live in the country!

Being in the field that I am I thought I would look at the websites of the front-running candidates. I took a loose group of parameters that I usually look at when analyzing websites and measured each candidate's site against those parameters. Continue reading »

Well, it would be fair to say that the re-introduction of the Rhetoric Blog into this site has been less than smooth. If you have been looking at the site over the last week, you will have noticed that the focus has gone back to the photoblog, at least for the main page. This is a conscious decision based both aesthetic and structural factors.

Probably the biggest hurdle that has hindered me from focusing on form over function is that WordPress has no system or plugin (at least that I could find) for offering a full-page option to a multi-page post. This caused issues both with creating a full feed and providing a usability feature on the paginated articles themselves. After overcoming this I will be looking into packaging my solution into a plugin to assist others (add it to the list).

Having decided to use the added functionality offered by Feedburner with regards to handling syndication caused it's own issues, both as part of the above situation, but also as part of a conflict with existing plugins. I had to rely on several different methods to try and view un-cached and unfiltered views of the current XML (somewhat having to rely on both Opera and IE7).

The one thing that cancels out the frustration that came with the inability of bending some aspects of my templates (Note: MY templates - not WP itself) was that it forced me to learn new techniques and up-skill myself. That being said - there's a lot of work required to update the WordPress Codex (documentation repository) as it hasn't kept up effectively with some of the more major recent updates. Given that the documentation is done mostly by volunteers this is hardly and indictment.

So where does that leave this website? Well if you're interested, keep an eye on the 'to-do' list at the bottom of the about page, my tweets on the rhetoric main page. I still won't be focusing on design until I can get the templates functioning as I wish. Even then the design will mostly consist of some minor rebranding and look'n'feel - the current layout suits - the color scheme doesn't...