Japanese food, Arcade, and Walking

Walking. Lots and lots and lots of walking. But let me back up a bit.

Last week, it was brought to my attention that a certain person I know, normally residing in Bathurst, was in Sydney for the weekend, due to the uni he works for deciding arbitrarily that he doesn't know enough about iPhone programming, and so sent him to Sydney for a programming workshop, that lasted from Friday through to Sunday.

That's my theory anyway, why else would they send him to what seemed like a beginner's course on iOS programming?

Anyhoo, Sarah and I met up with Tiger for dinner and wandering around the city post-work Friday evening. We started by dropping by his hotel room so he could check in, and people could drop off things if required.

HOLY CRAP the room was HUGE. For one person, it was slightly overkill - a double bed (it accomodates two people max apparently), a huge loungeroom with a large TV (and lots of mirror's for seemingly no reason), a decently sized kitchen and bathroom. It even had a hat rack! Awesomesauce!

After that, we headed to the small Japanese 250 yen store, and the grocery store below it. I forget the name of the place. Anyway, Tiger spent copious amounts of money on random objects and foodstuffs (that he can't easily get hold of in Bathurst), while I was happy with a single bottle of Ramune, and a packet of random Ramune flavoured candies.

From there, we headed to Kinokuniya, where we looked at manga and just books in general until we were kicked out (it was around 6.30 by the time we got there, after all, and they close at 7pm). From there, on to Pepper Lunch! Foooooood!

Afterwards, we headed to Capitol Square to try some of the prize-winner games there. Noone managed to actually win anything off the claw machines, though I managed to lose about $3 without even having an attempt at it. The machines just kept eating my money, without letting me even try the claw thing.

Most likely the machine was scared I was going to win.

It turns out that the place also has pachinko machines there! Totally worth the $2 I spent to only half-understand what I was doing. I have the general idea of how Pachinko works, but I still kinda don't quite get it. I should read up on it at some point, I suppose.

After that, GALAXY WORLD! We walked up the street to the "proper" arcade, and played games. DDR, Guitar Freaks, a couple more prize winners, and DJ Max Technika 2. Oh God Yes Technika!

For those who don't know, Technika is a game where you pick a song, and you play it on a touch screen. It is kind of similar to Elite Beat Agents on the DS (or Osu! Tatakae! Ouendon), in that you tap circles on a touch screen in time with the song. However, in Technika, you have the top half of the screen moving left to right, and the bottom half going right to left, so you end up with a generally kind of circular motion of notes.

It also has some pretty good music, that will stick in your head forever if you give it half a chance.

Afterwards, we headed back to Tiger's hotel room, sat down for a bit (since we had walked all over the city between each destination by this point). Eventually, it was time to leave, and catch a cab home.

Fun night. Tiger, you better get yer ass up here to Sydney more often!

Country Coding - A Workday Bookended With Love - Tiger

Kalgar was, as you (his most loyal readers would know) having some problems coming up with topics for blogs, and so I (his trusted companion from a totally different town) took it upon myself to provide him with some...shall we say...inspiration. Okay, so I just suggested that we do a "blog swap", where we write a guest post for each other - the topic of which we decided should be our work days (I was just trying to be dramatic, jeeze...) What follows is that blog post - Tiger.

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I work as a programmer at Charles Sturt University in Bathurst, a small city surrounded by the country. I used to work at a kind of boutique software house called 'The Project Factory', where I wrote iPhone applications. That was until I was swiftly replaced by Kalgar (of course, I had expressed my intent to leave Sydney, and I thought it would be incredibly rude to dash off before I was replaced, so you know - huzzah for him, and all that.) At the university I pretty much make the applications that allow the admin staff to carry out their student crushing duties, as well as making sure that people have access to our online services and things like that. Interesting stuff!

I wake up in the morning sometime between 7am and 7:30am, depending on what time I got to bed the night before, and I usually start the day by cursing the fact that I stayed up so late playing D&D with my friends again. I then consider what I just thought, and berate myself for decrying the wonders that are out gaming nights. After this I shower, have breakfast, and generally get ready (a process which takes about half an hour) and by 8:00AM I am heading out the door to catch my public transport.

Public transportation in Bathurst is pretty sparse. If you wanted to get up to the university in time for work without enduring the 40 minute uphill walk then you are either limited to a taxi or a bus. The bus up to the uni costs $3.10 for a 10 journey that lasts roughly ten minutes - the prices are not proportional to the service offered, and the bus driver is often late leaving the stop. I would normally not complain about such a trivial matter, only the bus comes once per hour, at 25 minutes past 8. Catching a taxi is significantly more convenient, however a taxi up there would, in Bathurst, cost you $11 on average. I know this, because I have missed my bus on more than one occasion.

Pictured: unrelated, but much more awesome method of transport - Kalgar

Upon arriving at my destination (a full 25 minutes early for work...) I rock up to my cubicle and log into my machine. This is then followed by me banging my hands on they keyboard for three to four hours, in the hopes that the file I'm working on will magically become fixed if, mayhaps, I could just type the correct combination of characters. If I manage to get an easier job during this time, such as restoring someone's access to their uni homepage, or granting a manger request to a forum, then I am incredibly thankful - I am not a morning person. Cannot brain. Have the dumb.

At some time between midday and one in the afternoon, I start my hours lunch. This is, for me, the most glorious hour in the history of hours. Each day is a new culinary adventure based upon what I've prepared the night before. Today, for instance, I'm having leftover sushi that I prepared on the weekend. Sushi, miso soup, tuna, and some tea. That, my temporary readers, is the lunch of kings! Kings of bento!! I usually take my lunch downstairs to hang out in the gaming laboratory with the nerdlings, and watch them play something like HoN or TF2 or something. It's an awesome hour, and it really brings me to life as far as 'starting the day' goes.

After my affable hour of amazing awesomeness and alacrity, I return to work for the remainder of my day. This time, however, I spend until either 4:30 (if I only want to do 8 hours) or 5:00 (if I want to build up some flex time) churning out the most awesome SQR scripts that your being hath ever lain eyes upon. It is during this period that I have done things like stopped half the Distance Ed students from missing their exams because they couldn't change their exam centre - also I'm pretty sure I stopped all war and solved world hunger once.

When the work day is done I pack up my Bag of Holding (or backpack, depending on my mood when I got ready in the morning) and start the 30 minute, downhill walk home. Usually I will stop off at the shops on the way, in order to pick up some stuff that I'll need for my coming evening (including what I'll be using to prepare lunch for the following day) and then head off home to unwind by either watching copious amounts of television, or by playing some kind of tabletop RPG, before going to bed way too late for my own good.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

The moral of this story is that work should really consider letting me set my own hours. I mean, I'd still work 8 hours, but if I could maybe work some of them from home I might get a bit more done during the day. Alternatively, if I could work for a bit in the morning, and then return home for siesta or something, before coming back, that would also be quite cool of them. Actually, come to think of it, the uni should totally have rooms for staff members who need a bit of a nap during the day - it would let me try out polyphasic sleep, and finally perform that experiment on myself...

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The above post was written by my special guest, Tiger. Who is Tiger? The answer to that, and more of his words of wisdom are available on his blog. Read it, you know you want to.
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The Return

I now am back at work, and my computer is finally back in the land of the living, and so I can actually make posts again.

Miss me?

Didn't think so.

Anyhoo, the last couple of weeks were interesting... and quite relaxing. A fair bit of nothing went on, though I did do some things.

Christmas Day was the usual shindig at my place. Family members I rarely see appeared, presents were exchanged, and food was eaten. Lots of food. Like, heaps.
The difference is that this (last I spose) year, the food needed to be gluten free so that I would be able to consume it without my insides melting.
This didn't change much. In fact, it was only my portion that was made gluten-free. So once we reached dessert time (after 3 courses of random meats, pasta and more meats), the true difficulty of my condition hit home.

Plaits of wheaty, pastryish goodness covered in syrup. Cake - lots of it, and many brands of ice cream are inedible to me. Luckily pavlova is fine. As a result, I lived off the pav :P

Post-Christmas, I headed to my girlfriend's place for a few days, where we whiled the hours away playing videogames, and preparing for our next Pathfinder session, and just generally bumming around doing very little. And yes, we did get another Pathfinder session in - quite a long one too, covering the most of a night (10pm to about 4am) and much of the next day (10am to about 3pm).

New Year's Eve was a trip to the zoo. I have ridiculous amounts of photos of the tiger (it wasn't asleep for once! Did I mention tigers are my favourite animal actually-in-existence?), as well as numerous photos of the elephants (the baby one was really cute!)

The night portion of NYE was spent playing Final Fantasy VII. I didn't expect this, but we were both exhausted from wandering around the zoo for the most of the day and couldn't be bothered to go out - nor would we have really been able to, considering that there would have been something like 325682476286784275903862 people there...

After that, I was forced to return home, since my parents had gone on holidays, and they didn't trust my younger siblings to look after the house (and the cat - they took the dog with them) on their own. During that few days I managed to reach level 81 in WoW (Dwarf Hunter on Draenor named Kalgar), and caught up with a few mates who I used to work at Maccas with (playing Mario Kart 64, no less!)

Come the 5th of January, my lady and I headed to the south coast for a few days of escapism from family, and general existence. We didn't do much because the weather was utterly schizophrenic, but we did manage to play some putt-putt, and burn ourselves horrendously at the beach.

We returned, relaxed a day, and are now both back at work.

Oh, and somewhere in there, I managed to finish Castlevania: Lords of Shadow. Good game, will talk more about that tomorrow.