Auckland is off the menu (for now)

Jeese, but it was close.

I was offered a very good perm role in Auckland and the agent was telling me that they needed a decision pretty damn quick! Apparently they were going to meet with the company that very day, and wanted a yea or nay before COB the following day ("Close Of Business", just in case that's a stupid TLA - "Three Letter Acronym").

So, I was very pleased when I got word that a local company here in Wellington were interested in talking to me about a 6 month contract. The interview was arranged for the following morning.

The interview went well: brief but covered most of the things you'd expect. Nothing too technical but enough to weed out the stoopids.

I think I did well enough, because they told me I was the "preferred candidate". After some panic regarding getting by references sorted, the offer was made. I called the agent in Auckland, and she was very gracious.

I started a few weeks back (hence the lack of updates recently) and must say it's a nice place to work. Quiet, not much stress and friendly people. Score !!

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All work and no play makes Dan a dull boy

Well, it's all been very busy at work these days. I'm helping the very nice folks at NZQA to build their new website, and this weekend, after months of coding & hacking, it finally went live. You can check it out (if you like) at http://www.nzqa.govt.nz . There may still be bugs, missing pages and perhaps catastrophic crashes, but it certainly looks better and is apparently easier to use. I did the "dynamic" pages - this is a fancy way of saying that I re-skinned the legacy pages to make them look like the rest of the site :) There are several nice &/or interesting technologies in use back there : Silverstripe is used for CMS, and it's been interesting to see how to integrate something complex like a professional CMS with a set of legacy pages. Anyway, mostly done now.

Slow Cooked Pork with Potatoes & Gravy

Well Jacqui's away back to Mexico for a bit. The teenagers were here and it all went very well. They're nice kids, and we had a GREAT TIME :) I also have some opinions about the state of modern Mexico that I'm dying to write about, but it's a bit to heavy for a sunday afternoon, so instead I'm gonna tell how to make something delicious. So, lets say you've got one of those slow cookers, and you've tried a few things but it always ends up kinda-tasting-the-same. Well, I know exactly how you feel. I've tried several things, and usually they're OK, tasty enough, but lacking in whatever it would take to make the 6-8 hours worth it. Until I discovered a secret. I didn't find this anywhere on the web, but I have inferred it. The secret with slow cooking is simplicity. Each ingredient just adds to the mess of flavours and makes it's easier to get wrong. It's like mixing paint. The more colours you add, the more likely you are to ...

And the piñata continues to develop...

I must say jacqui's making excellent progress with the piñata. The colours look great, and it's really starting to come together! She carefully cuts the tissue paper, and uses a spoon to make it curly. The coloured tissue paper gets glued to the base. And more colour gets added... I reckon it's looking great. It's a bit of a shame that it's going to get smashed to bits come Saturday ;)

mexirish...nz

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