First post since we’ve crossed the ocean to come and live and work in London. The timing was pretty dreadful - recession headlines everywhere, companies going bankrupt left right and centre and thousands of workers being laid off. All of this just added to the usual stresses associated with moving countries like finding an apartment, setting up bank accounts (arguably more difficult than finding a job in the current climate) and generally getting used to the new locality (I am still overwhelmed by how crowded London and Europe are).

The last few months have been tough and stressful - the move itself, getting used to London, getting used to how crowded Europe and London are, the job hunt, finding an apartment, getting a bank account, etc. No matter how many times you’ve been through it all it’s still a pain in the b..

It looks like we’re slowly settling in though. We have an apartment, we both landed great jobs and we’ve even had our first holiday over on the continent - snowboarding in Italy’s South Tyrol.

Bring on the New Year!

• Aggie finally managed to post the first set of our Cuba photos. *Sigh* why are holidays always over so quickly?
• The singularity is near! Or so claims Ray Kurzweil in this article from the New York Times. I’d love this to be true but I have a feeling that we were born one generation too early.. maybe our children will have the opportunity to become one with the machine…Oh and on that note - how is this for BIONIC!
• The Paranoid Americans are making it more difficult to travel - not just for New Zealanders but visitors from any country will require pre-registration when wanting to visit the USA from next year onwards. Check out the news item from the NZ Herald. We’ll most probably be off the American continent by then but it sucks anyway.
• Google Finance now started providing real time prices on some of their stock quotes! I track my stocks using Google Finance but only 40% of the ones I track are real-time - the rest still have a 20 minutes delay but it’s a great start nevertheless. Hopefully they can soon offer discount brokerage services
• Only 3 more weeks of work left!!!

No time for a proper weekly update today. It occured to me that going on holiday means that I won’t have time next week to finish all the stuff at work that I’d d said I’ll finish so I’ve been flat out over the last few days trying to squeeze in next weeks deliverables…going on holiday is a lot of work…

• Last weekend spent in Seattle was awesome. I thought the city has a really cool vibe - a bit like Melbourne and Montreal. We really liked how Seattle (unlike Vancouver) was able to protect it’s heritage buildings - giving the city a very unique feel. Looking down from the Space Needle reminded us both of Auckland and Aggie got a bit homesick There will be pictures of the trip up on her website after we come back for sure.
• On Tuesday we went to see Cake in concert. Read about it on Aggie’s blog.
• No technical or other interesting stuff today .. sorry, no time!
• Cuba - Here we come!

Found a nice article talking about a number of points the guys at Blizzard’s World of Warcraft believe helped them to become the most successful online game business ever.

Most of the lessons can apply to any online venture and overlap quite a bit with my favourite - Bob Parson’s 16 Truths - I like to read them every Monday morning as a chance to refocus for the start of the week - those hot biker chicks at the top of the page have nothing to do with it, I swear. (Note to self: include female form in website logo design)

In line with WoW’s “#8 Statistics bolster experience” and Bob Parson’s “#9 Measure everything of significance” - I have added a statscounter to my blog - see the “currently” low number at the bottom of the page. The guys at statscounter made life easy by providing a plug-in for Wordpress. Am curious to see whether anybody else reads any of this stuff .. ever..

Having spent some years living in South Africa I try to keep up to date with what is on the go in that beautiful country. I am quite disappointed though to see what is happening there politically and worried about Jacob Zuma becoming president in the near future…

But the latest set of news about the power crisis is quite stunning although probably not surprising. With South Africa being the largest producer (closely followed by China) of gold in the world this is going to have quite an impact on the price of the shiny stuff as Mines are shut as Eskom, the state-owned electricity provider, tries to ration out the power to those most in need. Gold production falls, prices will rise.

Today it is US $924.05 / ounce. I wonder whether it will reach US$1000. I wonder whether gold stocks will go up as well.. And what did I do with my stash of Krugerrands?