marc.vic.max.elliot

The cab’s here and I’m outta here bound for Shangai.

Have a good week all

I discovered today how difficult it is to find Chinese currency!  None of the major banks carried Yuan 🙁 I finally tracked some down at Thomas Cook so I now have currency for both Hong Kong and Shanghai.

And one geekily cool thing happened today.  Due to a promotion at work I got a free 64MB USB watch!  It doesn’t look as bad as I thought and even found a review at the gadgeteer

At last Telecom got my broadband installed.  This happened on Thursday and I’m getting about 3.5Mb/s (vs 7Mb/s into the old house) Still faster than dial-up though They did however completely forget to transfer the business line until I rang them and they sent an engineer out – useless!

Still no pics as the house is still a mess (Vic’s orders) so I’m afraid you’ll have to wait a few more days yet Gina

We went to my Mum’s place last night for her annual midwinter Christmas dinner and had a great time.  Vic had more to drink that normal and had to go back to sleep when I bought Max down for his breakfast (a bowl of yoghurt and then a boiled egg and toast – the boiled egg was in the truly tacky Noddy egg-cup that I got as my “less than $2” gift last night )

Other than that there’s not a lot going on. We’re still settling in and I start back at work tomorrow after 10 days off (boooooo!)

Another far to short weekend over unfortunately 🙁

Highlights of the weekend?  Going to our friend Brent’s 40th birthday party on Saturday night.  There were five babies there with four of them being two sets of twins!  The great thing about the night was watching the All Blacks thrashing world champs England 36-3 in the Rugby. YES!!

Then on Sunday evening we got to see Shrek2. Funny, funny movie.  The thought and detail that went into some of the gags was amazing (keep an eye on the shop names in Far, Far away land!) If you get the chance, and enjoyed the first one, go and see it – it’s even better.

The cool thing is we got to see it in the private studio theatre at Weta Digital (the people that did LOTR) It’s a great little 120 seat theatre with the best sound I’ve heard (as you’d expect) and all the popcorn, soda and sweets were free

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I forgot to do an update earlier this week – lazy bugger!

? David and Claire came down from Auckland for the weekend and we had a fantastic time It was really nice to see them after being so close in the UK but we did nothing but eat all weekend!  I felt very bloated on Monday after eating out 4 times over the weekend!

? We also visited the house and they’ve done a few things.  The fencing is all done and looks pretty good for a cheap fence.  They’ve also done a lot of the painting upstairs and it’s very interesting to see the colours we’ve picked up on the walls.  Not bad and it’ll be even more interesting once our furniture is in – not long now! 

Vic partook in, and won, her first on-line auction today.  She was bidding on this used mountain buggy.

She seems happy enough with the deal and luckily we have someone who can pick it up from the seller in Auckland.  The really cool thing is that our very good friends David and Claire are coming down from Auckland to see us this weekend (much yayness!) and David works in the sellers suburb and will pick it up and bring it down

I’ve just finished my two days of jury service at the high court

I was called up for a possible two week stint and was a possible juror for two trials.  In the end I didn’t get picked for either and didn’t even make it past the random ballot stage which was good.

The trial that started yesterday was a murder trial and was expected to go for up to two weeks and I’m not sure what the one today was for.  Yesterday’s trial made the newspaper today and I have scanned in the details – they are found in the “click here..” section of this entry.  I’m glad I didn’t have to see pictures of that!

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I got back from Oz very early (01:00) yesterday morning in one piece and am very glad to be back.  This trip was extremely busy as I was told on Wednesday that one of my customers wanted a proposal by Friday morning!  The only night that I had planned as free time I ended up working in my hotel room from 5pm though to 11:30pm 🙁

Besides that the most interesting news was that my next trip (at the moment) will be in 3 months to Shanghai!  We will be having our tech-summit there with all the tech people from AJP (Australia, Pacific and Japan) attending – all 380’ish of them.  Should be fun

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