Plodding along as always. Last week one of my team members left and a new guy started up. He has about 10 years more experience than I do, and is probably being paid a fair bit more, but I'm still in charge. I haven't been in that situation before, but it's going smoothly so far.

Money

Recently I have been getting a bit annoyed about salary issues. I'm not posting details because people from work read this. But where previously I was unhappy with my salary, I'm now quite content. Also, a new incentives scheme is starting up to try to make us work harder. The monetary aspect of it is quite generous, assuming we meet all our milestones. Unfortunately that's a fairly big if. And naturally, the goal-posts are not fixed.

During my time of discontent I had an interview at another company for a C++ position. The interview went well, but in the end they hired a Java monkey and filled the C++ position internally. Unfortunate, but that's the way it goes.

Sea trials

Our software engineering manager has been trying to trick a few of us into going on sea trials again. I know from experience that this means spending days on a ship without any contact with the outside world, spending most of the time vomiting and lying down trying not to vomit. Unsurprisingly, there is a notable absence of volunteers.

Homebrew

It's all going very nicely indeed. I'm currently drinking an excellent batch of Newcastle Brown. A few weeks ago some mates and I put on three more batches to share between four of us... so now I have Caffrey's, Little Creatures Pale Ale and James Squire's Porter in bottles waiting to mature a bit.

I was talking about homebrew with my aforementioned software engineering manager in Sydney a couple of weeks ago, and he offered to bankroll an experimental batch of Hoegaarden. He's paid for the ingredients, it's in the fermenter now, and when it's done he'll take half and I'll keep the other half. That sounds like a good deal to me.

Garden

While I have no intention of turning this into yet another look at my ornamental cabbage type thing, here are some before and after photos of the garden.

Before

After