Black Cox vs Jamie's Heroes

After Round the Bays, I went to a stag party held at Riverhead forest. The activity on the agenda was Paintball.

Two teams were formed: Jamie's Heroes, headed by the groom Jamie and The Black Cox headed by yours truly.

It seemed that the Black Cox were too strong and too strategically savvy for the wannabe heroes. We formed an impentrable line across the playing field, which the heroes had a hard time trying to bust through the blockade. When we took out each person in the opposition, we would advance up closer to the enemy flag, taking over the position that the opposition had occupied before. It worked very well, and we managed to capture the flag twice, while the heroes somehow managed to break through our blockade to get our flag once.

5 minutes from the end, most of the players on my team had run out of ammo and decided to sit out the game. It was a 7 against 2 game where myself and one of the groomsmen were solidly defending our flag at the base. The funny thing was that the groomsman had no ammo and fired blanks to ward of the opposition. I had about 30 rounds left and backed him up, I had no interest in capturing their flag and held out the heroes until the time ran out. The heroes were on the fringes of our base, but made a feeble attempt to raid it. Who knows, they probably ran out of ammo as well. Maybe I should have just walked to the enemy base and grabbed their flag while they helplessly fired blanks at me. Now that would have been classic.

After the hard game we had a BBQ and drinks. Good times.

Round the Bays 2006

The annual tradition of fun-running that is Round the Bays reared itself today for the 34th time. I got to the start of the line 2 hours prior to the race.

While I waited I saw Gabriel, a supervisor who works at my gym. We exchanged pleasantries and I learned that he resigned from the gym and is leaving the country tomorrow to head back to Brazil.

2 hours later the run started. I had a good start but somehow faded later on. At the end, my unofficial time was something like 40 minutes 40 seconds, although I'll have to wait for the official time to be posted. Even though I improved on last year's time by a matter of seconds, I didn't run the perfect run. I felt that I tired too easily in the latter stages of the run, which is something I'll work on for next year. If only I managed to sustain the effort for longer I would have probably cracked the 40 minute barrier, which was my original goal from the start. Maybe I should alter my training a bit?

Oh well, that's something I'll have to work on later. Running is now something I'll take up semi-seriously in future. If only my poor left ankle is in better shape; I sprained it a fortnight ago and it's still tender when I give it a little stretch.

New present

I have purchased a new digital camera, a Nikon Coolpix S3. This is for my trip overseas to Malaysia and other places next week.

Key features are its compact slim body, 6.0 megapixels shots, nice LCD monitor, and 3X optical zoom. And it only cost me $469

Overall, a very sexy product to have............

Toastmasters

Sometimes I get a little flustered when I have to speak off-the-cuff on topics that I am not familiar with. Sometimes when I prepare a good speech I happen to ruin it on the day because my delivery wasn't good. And often I tend to repeat myself because I catch myself speaking too softly or too incoherently.

Not any longer, because Orion has started its first Toastmasters club!

I went to the first Toastmasters meeting tonight after work, which was held by some Toastmaster members who basically demonstrated what is involed at a Toastmasters meeting. Around 40 employees turned up to listen and observe. What followed was a very impressive display of public speaking, something I wish I was good at doing. Basically everyone who attends has to speak on something, which will slowly encourage you to speak more. It will also teach you to listen carefully and run meetings. Long term you'll develop communication and leadership qualities, which are essential life skills.

One of the challenges that I laid out for this year was to become a better communicator. What better way to achieve this than to become one of Orion's first toastmasters!

Why I'm proud to be a part of Orion

.....Because it got a mention in the NZ Herald on the subject of Trade Me being sold to foreign ownership.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/search/story.cfm?storyid=00015C39-7F0E-1413-BA2683027AF10414

And if the article happens to go offline, here's the full text of the article pasted below for your reading pleasure. I've put the reference to Orion in bold.

From NZ Herald:

The news of Trade Me's staggering $700 million sale to newspaper group Fairfax lingered like a mist as I made by way from bank to barber to post office in central Wellington last week.

Everyone seemed to be talking in bemused tones about the big sell-out. There was lots of talk of new Ferraris and round-the-world trips. But the words were shot through with surprised awe.

Internet companies in New Zealand don't go for that sort of money, people seemed to be thinking. Especially not internet companies run out of scruffy little buildings in Wellington.

From the few conversations I've had with mid-sized internet business owners in the past week, the Trade Me deal has generated a lot of giddy excitement. They've been doing the math, poring over the new figures disclosed in the Fairfax deal, comparing Trade Me's measurables to their own. They're trying to figure out how much their own virtual empire might be worth in light of the deal of the decade.

The reality is that the Trade Me deal is a one-off. No other websites, bar XtraMSN, Stuff and the Herald Online, have nearly the same audience share or revenue-generating potential as Trade Me. It will now take a major strategic blunder by the online auction king to change that.

The Trade Me sale is the epitome of the old saying: "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em."

The media companies would love to have squashed Trade Me on their own terms.

It was Trade Me founder Sam Morgan's certainty that online classified adverts were the future, his demolition of the insipid local arm of eBay and the desire to keep the Trade Me user experience simple, that led Fairfax to his door.

He could always roll off some formidable figures, culled from the Nielsen Netrating figures, to show what a powerful hold Trade Me had on the internet. He viewed would-be competitors with disdain. He's had buy-out offers before, but the numbers were never realistic.

Hopefully Fairfax won't start charging for listings or mess with something that's all but perfect. And while it's always a bit disheartening to see New Zealand companies pass into foreign ownership, I'm less sorry to see Trade Me go than some of the other tech companies put on the block in recent years. The Trade Me sale is sort of like if Stephen Tindall had flicked off his chain of Red Sheds to the Aussies instead of taking The Warehouse public. Trade Me is a national institution, but it's not making the world's smallest GPS chip like Rakon is. It's not putting Kiwi-made software into hospitals around the world like Orion is.

Trade Me took a proven internet concept and made it work in New Zealand - no mean feat. In Morgan's case the whole process took a mere seven years.

It's not with great sadness that I see Trade Me flung into the arms of the media barons. Instead, it's with admiration for the Trade Me shareholders who stuck to their guns and believed in the worth of their venture. They could easily have flicked it off at $100 million or $300 million and our jaws would still have dropped. I think history will show their timing to have been impeccable.

New Team

My development team has underwent a bit of a face lift recently. Starting from last week, the Soprano team has now become the Forms team. This is in response to the new and exciting Soprano 8 architecture.

Basically the different products in the Soprano suite will be replaced with Soprano components, which can be plugged together to form a solution. It's all quite fascinating and I haven't really understood the entire architecture, but they say that this thing is going to earn us heaps of money!

The old Soprano team has split in two, with three developers going to another team to work on another Soprano component, and the other three (myself included) working on Soprano Forms.

Soprano Forms looks to be a new beast altogether. I'll have to upskill myself on new things that I haven't worked with before, things such as XForms, XSLT and heaps of XHTML and JavaScript. Eeep........

But still, it's pretty cool.........Good times for the company ahead, I hope!