What’s Up

You might have been wondering what’s going on with that settler Aleks and his wife Kate. Well, a lot.

A week ago our friends showed us the oceanic surf beach where we spent a lovely Saturday. My boogie board and I didn’t get out of water for at least 4 hours. Later, two and a half friends joined us and we all enjoyed a lovely conversation with a mellon, grapes and fresh pine-apple (that I cut right there on the beach). Wonderful day. If you wonder, the beach was Gunnamatta (Photos, Forecast).

Last month I was busy looking for a team to join locally, but haven’t found anything suitable yet. Some offices are inconveniently far and some looking for people with different skills (mainly Java which I don’t want to touch as a little kid who ate candy before dinner; my dinner is spoiled by Ruby). So I decided to take a break and keep my independent contractor chair warm for a little longer. These days however, I focus more on contributing to OSS and working with different projects just for the benefit of all Earthlings. During the last week I contributed a patch to Cucumber, worked days a nights on adapting Cucumber Rails generators to Rails 3, added a nice feature to pass custom tags into assets URL and path to Thoughtbot’s Paperclip, created and deployed Family Hut application for photo-sharing and discussions inside the family (yes, I know about Picasa, Flickr and alike which come all with their downsides; mainly in the form of pricing pages). As you can see, it was a very fun week and my life hasn’t stopped here at all. Quite to the contrary, I’m building up steam.

Also, I was thinking of starting another blog for purely coding topics on a different engine. Current best candidate is Enki but I haven’t reviewed it thoroughly enough. My main concerns with Wordpress are that (a) I still can’t make it show the source code beautifully, (b) I get a lot of spam, (c) I’m tired of PHP and (d) tired of WYSIWYG / plain HTML editor (where’s Textile or Markdown?).

That’s all, folks. If you have any comments / questions, welcome. I’ll let you know if I deploy another blog.

Our Toyota

Yee-hah, today we had our Toyota Yaris 5-door hatchback delivered! Here are just a couple of pictures of it in front of the house. (Click on the images to see a bigger version.)

Yokohama sport tires and the spare one from Dunlop. Dealers were awesome enough to replace old tires with this new set, even though they didn’t have to.

Here’s Kate behind the wheel.

And just another view from the front.

Love it!

By the way, the dealers were kind enough to replace the scratched mirror and paint up minor imperfections — everything on their own and free of charge. On top of that they filled the tank fully upon delivery. That’s what I call a New Year present! Thanks guys!

Updates on December 27

Christmas and Boxing Day went just fine. Yesterday we moved to our new house and purchased a ton of kitchen stuff (toaster, kettle, tableware …). Today new round is coming. We still need some essential furniture — a couple of bar stools, living room sofa, TV set table and a coffee table, folding chairs and a table for our veranda — don’t get me started.

On Thursday, we found a very nice place with quality and still affordable furniture (Snooze). Not only did we ordered a bed with all linen, but also the bedsides, a tallboy and a couple of stylish bedside lamps. Unfortunately they were able to deliver it in a week because of all the holidays, but after my explaining our situation with the move the manager generously offered a new queen-size luxury aerobed as a temporary solution free of charge. Now how’s that!?

In the house, we discovered that the window blinds aren’t yet installed. It’s Sunday today, so I’ll talk to our agent tomorrow. Here they fill the Condition Report on moving in to document all scratches, stains etc. If the condition is worse when we move out, the price of patching is subtracted from the bond (that’s usually one month’s payment being held by a third party).

Finally, we’ll start looking for a car next week. Originally we wanted something old and inexpensive, but slowly leaning towards newer models 2-3 year old or even brand new. Toyota Yaris 5-door hatchback, Mitsubishi Colt, Nissan Pulsar 5-door hatchback just to name a few. We need a compact (but not squashed), economical car for short-to-average distance trips. Since there’s no one around who could help inspecting older models, we aren’t sure we want to take risks purchasing them. Still considering options though …

OK folks, this is all news I had this morning. See you all soon!

First House

Just got the approval and signed all documents today to move into this great new house in Carrum, Melbourne. It’s 1 hour away (on Metro) from the City, but it doesn’t really matter since we don’t need to commute there regularly.

Inside the main living room. To the right is the dinning area, and right ahead is a fully equipped kitchen. Further into the house, is the master bedroom with the wardrobe and bathroom. The bathroom is a gem on its own with a shower cabin with spa (feet and body), radio and phone. No excuse for not taking that call, hah.

Upstairs is the guests room / study (deeper into the house) with the same bathroom and a free area for a dressing room or anything else. Above the kitchen is a retreat with a cool roof window. Not sure how to use this space yet, but will find it a good application.

That’s the outside view. Behind the back is the stylish steel fence with the door opened remotely and a video-phone. In the far left corner is the storage building and a gray water 2000 liter tank for toilets flushing.

The house is quipped with 4 split systems for greater comfort and energy saving (no need to make all the open spaces warm if you need just bedroom now). The only thing is that it comes unfurnished, so everything that you see in the pictures isn’t there today. We’ve purchased a decent bed with all bells and whistles today and plan some further shopping tomorrow. Hope to get nice fridge, washing machine, living room sofa and table etc. Plenty of expenses!

Oh yes, and it’s all 5 minutes away from the beautiful white sand beach.