CherryPopper

Every now and then I'll "borrow" a paper from the pile that gets delivered to my building every morning and read through some of the articles as some never make it to the Internet. I recently came across this article, "Warlike family fun" written by Wendy Harmer (The older gamers will know of her).

The gist of the article is Wendy's son plays WoW and Wendy plays along with him. Her son is only 8yrs old, so he's starting on WoW crack young. But Wendy is taking an interest in her sons life instead of just using gaming as a "get out of my hair" tactic she is actually being a parent and playing with him, which most of the articles I've read in the mainstream press never touch on.

I see gaming as just another activity like sports, its something you would want to do with them and their friends.

Its good to see gaming articles written to encourage parents to take a little responsibility and not just blame games for their kids learning how to swear at gold farmers in Chinese.

My pain in the ass sisters were planning to go to Sound Relief and asked if I wanted to come along, having nothing better to do I thought why not.... man am I glad I did.

I rocked up just as Paul Kelly started playing my theme song, "I've done all the dumb things". I found my sisters in the stands and sat down to enjoy the rest of Paul Kelly's hits with the crowd already being very voicetress.

I'd missed the earlier bands of Kings of Leon & Jet which are both "meh" bands in my opinion, plus I had the miss fortune of meeting them at Falls Festival a few years back, total dickheads. So no real loss there.

The weather was good so far too with it being sunny and around 25 degrees. A few other bands came & went with no one really paying much attention since they were boring and the crowd started to entertain themselves.

The first thing we saw was the "Cup Tower". A bunch of guys were getting all the plastic cups they give the drinks in and making a vertical tower, they got so high that they had to stand on another persons shoulder but they just fell over, crushing the tower in the process.

Being the bright sparks they were they decided to make a "Cup Snake" instead. They held the cups above their head and started to join them up, people and cups where coming in thick and fast for a while it was like watching ants as some guys were carrying huge collections of cups towards the ever expanding "Cup Snake". It grew to around 50m before they had the even more brilliant idea of joining the ends!!!

Slowly the ends of the "Cup Snake" worked their way closer & closer together until the much celebrated joining of the ends occurred and the crowd in the near by stands erupted in applause (totally confusing Liam Finn's band playing at the time as it was mid song & they were shit) and as the snake people rejoiced at what they had accomplished they eventually realised they were all standing there holding cups... at that point the cups started flying in the air, for 20 mins they kept throwing cups in the air too.

Once Lian Finn was done murdering the guitar he jumped on the drums as the rest of crowed house came on stage to a VERY happy crowd. So many great songs and the crowed loved it and sung along with every one. Spine chilling stuff as I love it when the crowd and performers are all hitting it off as it makes a concert into much more than just something you'd watch on TV.

Just as Wolfmother was about to come on the rain came in a big way with black clouds quickly creeping in over head to dump a huge amount of rain on us and dropping the temp down to 16 degrees... it was cold & wet for the people on the ground who ran for some sort of cover or under their ponchos.

When Wolfmother came on there was a very excited drunk guy dancing his butt of in the stand beside us. Everyone in my stand started to watch this guy go nuts as Wolfmother played their hit songs and just laughed at how stupid his dancing actually was. His mates were laughing at him just as much as we were and noticed that everyone in the stand beside him was watching and laughing at him. They pointed this little fact out to him at which point he turned and through up his arms at us and we all gave him a round of applause for his comic relief.

In between the bands in Melbourne they would play an act from Sydney and this particular act & song caused the stadium to go nuts. People were running from under cover out onto the ground, leaving drinks at bars just to join in and watch this act from Sydney on the big screens around the stadium. I've never seen 80,000+ people singing to a TV screen but wow what awe inspiring feeling it was to see it live. Check out the video from Sydney is all I will say, oh and turn it up loud!!!

The final act I really enjoyed was the main act I had come along to see... Hunters and Collectors. The entire crowd loved these guys almost as much as the John Farnham surprise. The crowd was singing along & during the song "throw your arms around me" there were so many group hugs around the stadium it was really amazing to see everyone linking arms like that, or just try to go the grope hot chick standing beside you!!! Either way it was a great set of some very iconic songs from Hunters & Collectors.

The rest of the bands were pretty meh... Midnight oil were great and seeing Peter Garrett attempt to dance was even better in real life.

Over all this concert will be remember by many including me as an awesome day even with the crappy weather taking a dump on us when we would have liked to of had it a few weeks before hand.

After being made redundant from Dimension Data I ended up finding myself a new job through word of mouth. The new job is at Fujitsu Australia as a Technical Architect. Basically instead of building the systems I now just design them and get someone else to build them so its a step up the food chain. It actually ended up being quite good that Dimension Data were so short sighted to get rid of me as I would have left them to join Fujitsu for this role, but this way I ended up with a bonus. I'm still a hooker for hire but this time I'm worth more an hour as I have the skills to thrill

So I've been back at work for a week now and its been a big change in a number of ways. First I have to wear a suit everyday which is something I've tried to avoid as much as possible in every other job I've worked at, but I've drawn the line at no tie!!

Second is the project I've been thrown into with Telstra. The project is already running and the current Technical Architect is leaving for some holidays this week so I've had just 1 week to come up to speed on what I only now realise is a total mess. So basically its a normal Telstra project. So its time for me to either sink into the Telstra project and be drowned in forms or swim through all the crap and actually delivery something that is useable for Telstra... which if it is will end up being thrown away after a month as Telstra isn't allowed to have anything useful in their products.

Lastly its been the working hours, now while its only 9-5 I've had the privilege of kinda setting my own day up for meetings, etc in my previous jobs but I'm yet to put my stamp on this project and get it under control so until that happens I actually have to work 9-5 everyday which is just crazy!!!

The other bonus is that I get my mobile paid for again as I was only out of work for 3 weeks and in that time i racked up a $330 phone bill on a plan with $230 worth of free calls!!! So I'm glad to be back at work as being a bum is expensive.

Over the past few years I've been working at a company called Dimension Data as a Systems Engineer/Technical Consultant. In my time at Dimension Data I've been doing mainly Sun hardware & Sun Solaris related stuff on lots of customers sites in government, banks, universities, telcos and pretty much every other top 100 company in Australia.

Its been a lot of fun most of the time and I've been lucky enough to travel to every capitol city in Australia except Hobart but everyone knows they don't have computers down there. I've even had the chance to travel to Samoa which was great fun.

But sadly it all came to an end on Thursday as I was told my services were no longer needed. But it wasn't as bad as I expected with Dimension Data being quite good in more ways than one. They gave us 6 weeks pay for every year we had been there instead of the normal 4 or even 2 if they feel like screwing you as well as paying us for the next 4 weeks while not wanting us to work so we can use the time to find a new job. They also arranged for some outplacement agency to help us find a job. So I walked out of there with a very nice pay out and an interview with the outplacement agency.

As word spread that I (and others) had been made redundant I started to get phone calls of offers of help finding a new job from both within Dimension Data and outside with some of the contacts I had made over the years. I was very humbled by all this as I had never thought as myself as that talented to warrant such attention.

One of the things about my job recently is that I haven't really been enjoying it that much so I had already started to look on the side for a new job. I had actually knocked back a job earlier that week just due to the contract rate not being enough over my current pay to make the contract risk worth it but now with no job what do I have to lose. I've even had an offer from the MonsterLAN community

So after being on the phone all Thursday afternoon I ended up with 3 interviews this week one for a nice contract role that pays significantly more than my job at Dimension Data and is a step up to a Solution Architect for a very large and evil Telco.

So here's hoping it all pans out well and I can put all that pay out money on red at crown casino!