We decided to go our separate ways today, so it was nice not having to stop every so often so Tony and Jimmy could have a smoke (although I bet they relished not having to go into every damn candy store they saw). I headed into town at 10am and took a bus to the Golden Gate Park. It's a really serene place, kinda like a huge version of Western Springs.

I wanted to go see the penguins at the California Academy of Sciences, but admission was a whopping $30, so I flagged that. The area around the entrance, known as the Music Concourse, was scenic and had three fountains in line with the main stage at one end of the park. I got an American Hot Dog for lunch and went to the Japanese Tea Garden afterwards. Admission there was $7 and I can't say it was really worth it but I was definitely glad that I went. A lot of the ornamental features reminded me of the trinkets you find in Zen Puzzle Garden, which is fantastic, and certainly a job well done. I also saw some squirrels running around. Yay squirrels!

Further west, there was Swan Lake where a lot of waterfowl had gathered around the lake's edge. There were also some paddle boats that people had hired to explore the area. It's spring so there were quite a few new adorable ducklings and cygnets waddling around. I continued further west, following a little brook running beside the footpath, until finally I reached the bison paddock. Disappointing.

I bussed back to town and did some shopping around Westfield and Macy's. On the top floor of the Macy's building, there's a cheesecake shop with the most delectable selection of cheesecakes like a Reese's Peanut Butter Cheesecake, Pina Colada Cheesecake, Strawberry and Cream Cheesecake... I settled for the Mango and Key Lime Cheesecake and it was soooooo gooooooood.

I wandered around the area for a while, stopping by the Yerba Buena Gardens where there was a memorial to Martin Luther King. There was a water feature with a waterfall that you could walk behind, and inscribed on several plaques at the back were excerpts from MLK's famous speech. I ended up walking to Chinatown for dinner where I had salt and pepper spicy prawns. Together with the cheesecake, I'm pretty sure I undid all the walking from today.

Last day tomorrow :( I'm not ready to leave!

The Sidhe Christmas function this year was a two part extravaganza, the first part being Tron: Legacy and the second part being at the Ballroom, a pool lounge.

I went into Tron expecting "terrible" and I got "average". I was anticipating lying in my seat, writhing in agony but it wasn't actually the case. It was a mildly entertaining film with pretty graphics (bar Jeff Bridges in CGI) and an enjoyable soundtrack. Final verdict: not the worst two hours of my life. I have to say, though, movies aren't very social events. You're all focused on the screen and can't talk with anyone, so if we could avoid yet another movie for next year's Christmas do, that would be great. (Last year, they had 500 Days of Summer, but I was unable to attend that due to my flight to Malaysia ":(")

Following the movie, we had about an hour to kill and Surya really wanted to go to Strawberry Fare, so we gathered a small group and went. I was astounded at the number of new desserts I hadn't tried... there was a strawberries and cream one, a gooseberry dessert of some sort, the key lime pie was back, and there was a cranberry and white chocolate cheesecake, which I ordered. Absolutely fantastic.

The rest of the night was good. I played two games of pool with Jordan against Damon and Rob C, in which we were owned, twice. The remainder of my time there was catching up with various people, drinking, scoffing some pizza, just chilling and relaxing really. Being a Thursday night, there was some self-control to be exercised so most people started drifting away around 10pm so we could at least turn up to work the next day...

The last day of work was pretty uneventful, and I was just cleaning up my scripts and committing my code to the repository. We submitted the Zen Puzzle Garden update to Apple, so hopefully it'll go through review soon. We said goodbye to four of our artists by having dinner at Harem, and we learned of some surprising resignations for next year. Gasp.

The past week has been pretty hectic in terms of finding a flat to live in. After turning down the Mt Victoria property that I mentioned in my last post, we were kinda desperate to really wrap up the flat hunting situation before the end of the week. It so happened that we found another place at the bottom of Brooklyn Hill that Charlotte and I loved, and it also turned out that the landlord really wanted to get the tenancy sorted before the end of the week as well. So all in all, things aligned perfectly and now we have a really nice flat about 20 minutes walk from work and we are paying the same amount of money for it as the Mt Vic property.

Thank God for that.

PikPok's latest game exclusively for the iPad is Zen Puzzle Garden, a game originally done for PC by Joseph White of Lexaloffle. The idea of the game is to rake the sand in the garden, but there are three rules to adhere to:

• You will keep raking in a straight line until you hit an obstacle or the other side of the sand
• You cannot rake over previously-raked areas
• You must be able to rake all the sand and step off the garden at the end

I've thoroughly enjoyed working on this game, despite the various challenges that the iPad's touch screen poses to developers and game designers (maybe I'll elaborate on this another time). I've learned an immense amount from watching people play-test the game and found it interesting to compare people's natural intuitions when trying to complete the gardens.

Again, the small project team size meant I was able to have my hand in several different game domains; I was responsible for input, UI, level editing and serialisation and game logic. You can even find some hot A Star action in there somewhere. Definitely one of the highlights of my year.