None of us can thrive in a nation divided between a small number of people receiving an ever larger share of the nation’s income and wealth, and everyone else receiving a declining share. The lopsidedness not only diminishes economic growth but also tears at the social fabric of our society. The most fortunate among us who have reached the pinnacles of economic power and success depend on a stable economic and political system. That stability rests on the public’s trust that the system operates in the interest of us all. Any loss of such trust threatens the well-being of everyone. We will choose reform, I believe, because we are a sensible nation, and reform is the only sensible option we have.

Robert B. Reich gives a great perspective on America’s new recession in a well thought-out article.

Those aspirations had always been in the back of my mind, while I worked on my Bachelor of Engineering, and worked at Canary. After an initial application attempt to Microsoft in 2008 that was thwarted by the recession, I decided to prepare my CV once again at the end of last year (2009). Without much further thought, I submitted it to Microsoft. Then about a month ago, I received an email that I was to be having an interview over the phone. As far as I could tell, this phone interview went atrociously, but contrary to my expectations I received an email a week later detailing plans to fly me over to Sydney to interview in person with a few recruiters. I arrived back from said flight this morning.

Long story short, I will be moving to Microsoft’s Redmond HQ in Seattle, USA. This will be taking place in late September.

This is pretty much a dream come true, and I’m stoked to actually be seeing those aspirations from so long ago become reality. I have long said that I would not be looking for another job in New Zealand, and I have truly enjoyed my time working at Canary. However, the opportunity to be able to work in another country and see some more of the world was simply too great to pass up. I believe that I will also find more room for personal growth and career advancement in a larger company. By the way, quick plug for our job ad, if you’re a software developer in Auckland.

This change is not without its drawbacks, and I will miss much about my life in New Zealand, not the least of which being proximity to family, and the friends that I have grown close to in Auckland over these last few years. I will miss you all like crazy. I hope to have a blast with my last few months in New Zealand (let’s hit the snow!), and no doubt I’ll be spending the majority of my annual leave here (New Year’s anyone?).

Keep an eye out for some sort of leaving party!

Cheers.

Can’t wait.

In other miscellaneous news, summer is wrapping up, which means that in about 3 months the ski season will be starting again – can’t wait! This year a few of us are planning a week-long South Island trip, which should be totally epic!

Click through to see full size.

Addendum to key: PHOTOSHOP – 2 HOURS.

Hopefully in a few months it will be big enough to get some leaves from it and have a go at making some tea. I’ve read (apparently un-exaggerated) accounts from people who have tried it that say it is the most bitter thing they have ever tasted, and that they struggled to get through a cup. This could be interesting. Will post an update when the time comes.

Much of my writing is technical, be it discussing or ranting on some technique or technology. Additionally though, I think that as my understanding of the language has increased, so has my interest in being able to express my thoughts to others in a comprehensible and succinct manner. They say that practice makes perfect, and so I find myself using my writing as a test bench for exploring expression of thoughts and feelings just as much as a means of communicating technical information.

Along the same lines, I have found that writing can often help me break down a situation and make sense of my emotions. Occasionally something will happen in my life that turns me into a giant ball of untamed and incomprehensible emotion. By attempting to put my feelings into words in a way that is understandable, I can come to terms with said emotions, and work out their root cause. In this way, writing has become quite an important tool that I can put to use on a personal level.

My writing is still very much a work in progress, and hopefully through this blog and other outlets, it’s something that I will continue to work on and improve throughout my lifetime.

From a very young age, my family has owned computers. There is a photo of me at about 2-3 years of age grasping a joystick and playing Jet Set Willy on an AMSTRAD CPC 6128. While I don’t have the actual photo, here’s what such an AMSTRAD looks like:

This particular AMSTRAD came with a few floppy disks with programs and games on them, and a book. The computer was programmed using a stripped down version of BASIC, and the book contained a bunch of example programs, often many pages long. I learnt to type pretty quickly with two fingers, as I would laboriously type out these big long programs. Often one mistake would result in them not working properly (or not at all), but there was always a certain sense of satisfaction (and fascination) when the computer would spring into life and actually do something based on what I had just typed in. My interest was piqued.

After a few years, the old AMSTRAD gave up and died, and we got a 386DX PC as a replacement (loaded up with the shiny new Windows 3.11). After a frustrating few days trying to enter BASIC commands from the AMSTRAD book at a DOS command prompt, I decided to talk to my uncle, who was in the PC business (and built the 386 for us). He installed QBASIC for me and showed me how to use it. I quickly discovered that the AMSTRAD programs didn’t work so well in QBASIC, and so a visit to the library later, I was teaching myself QBASIC. My first programs were pretty basic, doing things involving displaying text output and taking text input. I can recall a “math quiz” program that generated random math problems and tested for the correct result.

QBASIC was my staple programming language for the better part of 5 years (I would estimate from the ages of 7-12), and after a while I got fairly proficient at it, creating applications with “rich” (at the time) graphics and sound. However, I was inevitably getting a bit sick of it, and my interest in creating QBASIC applications was quickly tailing off. It was about this time that we got a flash new computer – a Pentium 200MHz with Windows 95.

It was at the age of 12 that I then discovered Visual Basic on one of the computers at school. Here was a language that let me apply my BASIC knowledge to creating pretty rich Windows applications in an astonishingly straightforward way. A bit of begging and pleading later, I managed to score myself Visual Basic 6 on my 13th birthday (sad, I know). My interest was once again piqued.

What followed was a raft of fairly complex (if I may say so myself) applications, such as a timesheet application that I used to record my lawnmowing/carwashing/chores hours to charge my parents, an MP3 file renamer, a digital camera synchronisation tool, and a prime number finder. I even made a nifty little application for my Dad that would recognise when ArchiCAD (drafting software he used for work) was running and in focus, and record for how long. He used this for a couple of years to record his working hours when working from home.

Of course, with my ear to the ground, it didn’t take me long to work out that Visual Basic wasn’t the be all and end all of programming languages (in fact, quite the opposite – it’s in many ways the ugly cousin of “true” languages). I kept hearing about this amazing language known as C++. And so when I was about 15 (I think it was for my birthday again), I became the proud owner of a pretty thick book about C++, covering everything from the basics, to pointers and multiple inheritance. For a time I was a little discouraged, as C++ lacked the “glitz and glam” of VB6 (the book only covered writing console applications and the features of the language – in retrospect the right way to learn), as even after 6 months or so I was still writing applications that made text output and took text input. In some ways it was like going back to QBASIC.

After a time I discovered the Win32 API, and how to create a window and make a message queue and so on. After a couple days visiting a local game development studio, I was inspired to create some little graphical applications, such as a 2D particle system and a “starfield” animation, using C++ and Win32. I never totally got into it, though. I hadn’t discovered MFC at the time, and Win32 was a major pain in the ass to write. The peak of my C++ coding was a little 3D game that I made after discovering the DirectX Software Development Kit (SDK). The language always struck me as pretty ugly (especially with the horrendous Hungarian naming that all the Win32 libraries used), and I longed to return to a language that had sensible naming and no preprocessor directives. In my reading about the DirectX SDK, I discovered a newly emerging language: VB.NET. I was about 17 at the time.

I set about translating my C++ 3D game into VB.NET. By the time I had it working (a surprisingly simple process), I was sold. .NET let me take the good bits of VB6 (simple window creation, sensible naming, etc), and combine them with a fast, robust, non-scripted language. Naturally, it wasn’t long before I moved in turn to C#, which continues to be my preferred language to date.

From about the age of 15, I knew that I wanted to turn my interest into a job. It made sense – I enjoyed doing it, why not get paid to do it? And so I decided to go into a Software Engineering degree after high school. At university, the first language we were taught was Java (where my C++/C# knowledge meant that I already knew everything I needed to know). I went drinking the night before the final exam, finished the 3-hour exam after an hour, was first to leave, and still managed to get an A+. Score. After that, we were taught a variety of other languages, including C (again, C++ came in handy), Tcl/Tk, and Lisp. Fortunately things got a little more challenging in 3rd and 4th year, and I was actually learning things about programming again.

I’m not really sure how to finish this post (as my interest is very much an ongoing thing), so to sum it up: I’ve been cultivating a passion for computers and programming from a young age, and I now get paid to do what I love; Code.

Since then, I’ve gone through lots of dance music listening phases, usually centering round one particular genre at a time. In roughly chronological order, there has been:

• Hard trance
• Hardcore
• Happy hardcore
• Trance/progressive
• Electro house
• Drum and bass
• Breakbeat
• Dubstep

(Among others…) In each case, there is a period where I listen to nothing but that genre, and then eventually get a bit bored/tired of it and stray back into my wider collection for a while. Dubstep has been the latest genre to re-ignite my interest in dance music. It’s a fast developing genre, that is really starting to come into its own. It reminds me of when I originally got into drum and bass, with a similar sound that is somehow still fresh and interesting.

I think my passion for dance music largely centres around its ability to take me to another place for a while. It provides me a sort of escapism, if you will. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of turning up the volume on a stomping tune and closing your eyes for a minute or two to let it wash over you and push everything else out. Pure, unadulterated music indulgence. Love it.