Firstly, the fabled remakes of Pokemon Gold and Silver are out in the US today with the Australian and New Zealand release 10 days later. Of course this means it's busy time for me and the Psypoke staff Mike and Stephen. In the past few days, our HeartGold/SoulSilver section has had several guides added to it, including game maps, TM/HM locations, a walkthrough for 16 badges, and touched up a lot of naming changes to various pages around the place. It has been a very productive weekend!



Shatter, Sidhe's revolutionary brick-breaking game, is out on Steam, with my name making a brief cameo under the Special Thanks to the original Shatter team. Go and get it!



And finally, on Thursday, the long awaited Rugby League 3 is out for the Nintendo Wii. Featuring slick menus, awesome player and team customisation, and of course some classic rugby league action using the totally unembarassing Wii Remote controls, why WOULDN'T you want this game? (sorry Americans, this game is not for you)

Since the other website I secretly work on is down, I thought I should come crawling back to this thing and post some stuff. I have a lot of photos on my phone I need to upload as well...

Anyway, something is definitely up with IGN's webservers because it's been down for the past two days. We found some malicious scripts in two of the PHP files which I managed to remove, but who knows what else has been compromised. Sigh. In any case, I can still work on it I guess, it's just that there's nothing to show for it.

Let's see, in the past three weeks:

There was an awesome fireworks display over Wellington Harbour on Guy Fawkes' Day. It was damn cold and really windy, but we were sitting by the back end of Te Papa so it slightly sheltered. We got to lean back against the concrete wall and watch the spectacular pyrotechnics in the sky.

There was the All Whites Victory Celebration and the Santa Parade. It was boring. There were three things that interested me: Snoopy, Pikachu and the adorable corgis. Oh, and I'm really happy for the All Whites, but I don't care much for soccer sport in general, so meh.

Sidhe celebrated two shipped projects (Madagascar Kartz and Hot Wheels: Battle Force 5) and two submitted projects (Rugby League 3...and one I can't say but it's for iPhone and I worked on it) with yet another ethanol-filled night at Red Square. Lasers were included, as well as a generous bar tab, thanks to securing more work for us. Yay employment!

Got invited out for a wonderful lunch at this couple's house in Titahi Bay last Sunday. I totally miss home cooked food. The wife is a magnificent baker - the Tiffany cake is for royalty. Besides that, it was cool to listen to their stories. They've certainly had some fantastic experiences, including a three week voyage over the Pacific Ocean from Auckland to Miami (back in the days when air travel was super expensive). A few years ago, they even got a photo with the then junior senator of Illinois... Barack Obama!

After a big lunch, we went for a walk on the beach. The sand was so perfect and untouched, I felt the urge to write in it.



Of course, this led to discussion about parabolas, trignometry, differentiation...all part of a normal day's work.

Winter has pretty much arrived in Wellington, with some epic hail and thunderstorms to start off the season. On Wednesday morning around 6am, the four of us in the flat were woken by a heavy hailstorm, followed by some brilliant thunderclaps that were lagging behind the lightning by only about half a second, so the storm was pretty much overhead. We opened the door to find the following sights:

And when I left the house at 8am to go to work, this is what was left:

Upon arriving home after a long day on Wednesday, I was mortified to find my computer refused to boot. Later diagnosis by my awesome workmates revealed that the BIOS had screwed up somehow and a simple reset by taking out the internal battery fixed it all and now it's working fine again, just in time for the latest Psypoke project...

Psypoke Idol 2

Flash and code done by me! Go and vote for your favourite Pokemon!

In other news, I spent Saturday afternoon lazing in the sun at a friend's place in Wadestown instead of going to Karori Sanctuary, had dinner at Siem Reap again, overtime is scheduled for the coming week and it's also Mother's Day today. So I'm waiting for our cordless phone to charge so I can make a call.

I've been incredibly busy with lots and lots of things.

Firstly, my Pokemon website Psypoke got a huge overhaul with a completely new template and a new backend that hopefully futureproofs the site for Generation 5, if that exists. The Great Refactor was an idea I had in November that actually carried through, so the code is nice and tidy, and the template has been sitting there for six years or so, so it was nice to have a fresh new look for Pokemon Platinum's release.

Secondly, I've been doing a bit of overtime at work - two weeks ago, I did four days of overtime with both good and bad meals to compensate. Microwaved food is seriously disgusting. The meal I had was named "Delicious Chicken Breast" and it should have been called "It's A Trap". There's been a huge amount of indecisiveness over the way that the menus and the UI are designed, and the UI coders suffer as a result. We're getting so much work piled on us, we'll be doing three days of overtime next week and three more the week after.

Thirdly, last weekend, I went with some friends to the 'Naki where we stayed at someone's grandparents place, only to get up at 7am the next day and scale the steep heights of Mt Taranaki. And omg, it was one hell of a climb. I was so incredibly unfit, I was struggling each step of the way. What made it really bad was a section of the mountain was just scree (loose rocks) so you'd take a step and slide down. I kept complaining about negative progress and whatnot, but four and a half hours later I was standing on top of the mountain, over 2.5km above sea level. The view was shrouded by clouds but in the gaps there was the splendour of the New Zealand landscape, seeing as far east as Central Plateau itself. My annual exercise for the year can now be checked off and I can mark this as an achievement to be proud of.

We had some spare money in our flat account, so we hit the town and went to a classy restaurant on Cuba St called the Matterhorn, where I had an awesome steak and shared some Bordeaux wine with my flatmates. Steak is my hero, it makes me calm.

A few weeks ago, we also had the annual Newtown Fair, where I bought some delicious ginger fudge, that I still haven't touched because I feel bad for eating so much bad food :(

And finally, I am officially a New Zealand citizen. Take that Winston Peters!