Whew! After several weeks worth of coding and debugging, it’s finally finished!

So here it is folks! Presenting DesktopTweet v1.0!! 😀

Sorry about the wait there; the last version of DesktopTweet  I released was back in July of last year. With work and other higher priority commitments, it’s taken this long to finally push out a new version. ^_^;
But I’m hoping it’ll be worth the wait. 🙂

I had a lot of great suggestions on how to improve DesktopTweet over last time, and I did my best to try and add as many new features as I could. 🙂

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Way back in ye 2007 after I arrived back in Perth from Japan, I did some looking around for a job. One place I got an interview with was Perth’s ‘flagship’ game development studio Interzone games. The position was a junior programmer and the pay rate was going to be an epic 13 bucks an hour. Slightly small I know, but it being games programming, I didn’t care.
While the guys were all cool and they were impressed with my demo of RPG-X, they told me that without being awesome at Python scripting, there’s not a lot I could really do for the company. They said I could come back later after I’ve learnt Python and try again, but the very next day, I got a job at Tourism WA (which paid a LOT more) so I let it rest.

Turns out I dodged a major bullet there. ^_^;

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This is a little follow-up to my hospital escapade. After this, I’ll let it rest. Honest. 🙂
It’s something I was thinking about in my last day in hospital and I thought I’d share it with you.

So, as much as I’d like to sugarcoat it and pimp it out, I really can’t;

Being in hospital is boring as hell. 😛

Aside from watching daytime TV (*shudder*) or staring at the ceiling, there’s not much else you can really do in there. 🙁

To that end, I am very, VERY happy that I made sure to take my Nintendo DS along with me, and I can probably justify the integrity of my current sanity to the fact I was able to play on it during that time.  XD

On the last day of my stay, I had a thought. How many other people younger than me were in hospital, going through the exact same thing as me, but didn’t have access to anything like I had? How many other people were in hospital for reasons beyond their control, and were just silently tolerating it without any fun at all…?

So my mind started to wander towards Child’s Play (@CPCharity) and I thought, the stuff these guys are doing are a blessing to all people in hospital. They must be bringing so much happiness to so many people who started off with very little. Video games are a great thing to kick back with and enjoy, and their relative immersion factor usually means you can even forget about your predicament for a few hours, and just, have fun.

So if you haven’t already donated to Child’s Play, I urge you to please do. A couple of DSs and maybe a Wii in a hospital can definitely bring more joy than most people realise. 🙂

I’m also hoping that one day (or if I can even help it along), we can get a Child’s Play branch here in Perth as well. 🙂

I did a lot of thinking on whether I should write a blog post about this, but after the behest of several friends, I figured what the hey. ^_^;

After the cryptic statements in my Twitter, Facebook and MSN, some people are slightly aware that I spent a week in hospital in December last year. It’s a pretty long story, so I haven’t really elaborated on it at all beyond those comments. But since quite a few people have sent me messages asking WTF happened, I’ve decided to come clean and write the whole shebang here.

Just for the record, if you’re squeamish about surgery and blood and graphic detail and all that, you may want to skip this one. I’m not holding anything back here, and some parts might be a bit icky.  XD

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Well, after months of rumor and speculation, it finally got announced last night… Apple’s iPad.

But right from the get-go, sadly, I’ve found the whole thing totally underwhelming. I was expecting this thing to be totally awesome and to totally blow my world apart like the iPhone did… but sadly not so much.

Firstly is the name. I was really disappointed that they called it iPad. It is just too close to iPod. Period.With so many people out there, all with different and unique accents, I can so see myself having to clarify iPod and iPad at least once. 🙁

In addition, as per the Twitter feed, I’ve noticed a lot of people think it sounds very much like a tampon name as well, which definitely isn’t helping (Possibly the Wii all over again XD)
I’m not sure what the branding marketing strategy was behind that, but it failed. Epically. The rumored name that was floating around ‘iSlate’ sounded so much cooler, and definitely did not suffer any of the above problems. XD

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Whew… would you believe I’ve been so busy that this is the earliest I could get around to doing this was now…? XD

Anyway, the second day of Wai-Con was really interesting too. A lot more panels were being held on Sunday, and I think for this reason, the place seemed slightly more crowded than before. I spent most of the morning keeping watch in the game room, venturing out every now and then to just wander around and see what was happening. 🙂

Come the afternoon, it was time for the Japanese 101 panel. @jetha, @deathwombat, and myself had volunteered to be the panelists with @sonictail hosting it. The point of the panel was to introduce some facets of studying Japanese as well as some points of Japan itself, and answering any questions. Overall, I think the panel was a resounding success. We were going head-to-head with the Eminence panel so I was reeally expecting the room to be empty. ^_^; But that was not the case, with a very impressive turnout. Overall reaction to the panel seemed quite positive with a few people coming up afterwards and telling us what they thought.

To follow up on the panel for anyone who still had questions or for people who missed it, I also created this continuation thread on the Wai-Con forums:
http://www.panic-wa.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=3803

Finally, at the end of the day, as we were all packing up, I was pretty sad to see all of it go hehe. I caught the last few minutes of the closing ceremony and it was really cool to see all of the main committee members get recognition for all of their hard work.

After everything was finished, all of the volunteers and committee members went and had dinner together. It was all a great deal of fun, and I was even lucky to get a photo together with Yasunori Mitsuda from the Eminence table. He was a really cool guy and he said he was loving Perth very much. ^_^

So overall, Wai-Con was great fun. It takes a ridiculous amount of passion and dedication to pull off an event this huge and it was definitely cool to help out in some small way.
In the aftermath, I made a few new friends on Facebook, a few new friends on Twitter and have been having fun hanging out on the Wai-Con forums.

Can’t wait until next time. 😀