Kirk Jackson's Page of Words - Personal

Wow! I won!

Kirk Jackson — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 22:49:07 GMT

I've just been awarded Cobol Developer of the year for 2009!

It has been a great ride at Xero, from releasing our first beta little more than 2 years ago, to racking up our 6000th customer this week.

Some people doubted us for picking a VSE/ESA environment and the IBM compiler, but the support for 31 bit addressing and dynamic calls really accelerated our development of a Web 2.0 software product.

I'd like to thank all the other forward thinking members of our team for choosing and building on a great platform, and encouraging me to achieve this award.

Kirk

Now that's a fuel voucher!

Kirk Jackson — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 08:00:24 GMT

I'm always underwhelmed by the 4 cent per litre discount vouchers offered by the supermarkets.

On our fill up yesterday, we saved the whopping total of $2.04 on our $100.94 petrol purchase, thanks to a supermarket voucher.

Dick Smiths have gone a bit higher with their discount - 49 cents per litre:

I've been using Fuelly for the past few months to track our fuel spending. I don't know that it's providing a lot of value, but it is cathartic to process my receipts as if it's somehow helping :)

Kirk

Apologies, dear reader

Kirk Jackson — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 23:33:41 GMT

My blog server didn't come up after the power was cut to our house yesterday. I didn't notice till the wee hours of the morning, and then found out that the graphics card was fried (they don't make 10 year old graphics cards like they used to!)

My mission is to provide an uninterrupted level of service, complying with my personal ISO 9002 committments.

Of course, running your blog on a 10 year old PC in your basement hooked up to a UPS with 5 minutes charge isn't exactly complying with ISO standards :)

A long weekend is...

Kirk Jackson — Sun, 04 May 2008 23:00:11 GMT

... a nice way to end the school holidays :)

Coming back to work is the hard part:

Being power-noid - centameter

Kirk Jackson — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 21:16:32 GMT

No, not PowerShell.
I have been having fun measuring how much electricity our house uses, and which appliances are the worst offenders (Oil column heaters = bad, heat pump = good).
The tool I have been using is a Centameter, which is a clever little gadget that you clip onto your mains feed into your house (www.centameter.co.nz). You can also get one for a single power point from Jaycar.
A good idea if you want to reduce the impact your consumption has on the world (and your wallet!)

Kirk

Redheads have more fun

Kirk Jackson — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 09:42:05 GMT

From the slightly bizarre files:

...over 50 redheads rode the subway together and protested a Manhattan Wendy’s for their “racist logo.”

It sounds like they had fun... I like the idea of riding a train and suddenly realising that everyone else on board has red hair.

Ruchira Michelle Prasansanee Perera

Kirk Jackson — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 03:05:22 GMT

Test message

Children's book authors

Kirk Jackson — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 11:23:30 GMT

37Signals posted a list of their favourite childrens books when growing up.

I read a lot as a kid, and my earliest book memories are of the Munch Bunch and Mr Men. Hargreave's Mr Men seems to have lasted better than the Munch Bunch, and I often see Little Miss characters on t-shirts around town.

It was a lot of fun to read the circa-1980 books with my children when they were younger. A favourite character of mine and the kids is Billy Blackberry:

He's always getting up to mischief. Writing this, I'm wondering if this book is the reason why blackberry jam is my favourite -- although upon analysis, why I'd want to eat my favourite first book character disturbs me.

Kalani and Kalista both absolutely love the Spotty Can't Sleep book that I used to read to them when they were small:

One of my favourite parts of being a parent is story time in the evenings. You can't beat a good kids book!

Acceptable TV?

Kirk Jackson — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 09:09:41 GMT

I'm enjoying Acceptable TV, the user-contribution, voting, not-reality but borrowing some concepts TV programme for the attention-deficit generation. Each 'episode' is 2.5 minutes.

The exec producer is Jack Black, and the basic premise is that "some stuff is better than other stuff". It's a good blend of modern TV techniques (i.e. low production values, and voting off survivor island), and web 2.0 content generation / sharing concepts.

Some of my favourites are:

Homeless James Bond (and part 2)
Operation Kitten Calendar (with companion website)
And of course, Mr Sprinkles (parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)

Not necessarily politically correct, but what is these days?

I'm baaaack!

Kirk Jackson — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 07:28:57 GMT

This will be my fifth attempt at blogging -- my first in 2000ish (though not programming related), with several subsequent efforts that have languished since then. Each time there has been some reason to get started blogging again (usually an event of some sort), and then life has caught up with me...

So, thanks to the encouragement of Ivan Porto Carrero, I have a new fandangily blog up here at pageofwords.com (RSS / atom)

Who am I?

Software developer living in Wellington, NZ
Working for Xero
Organise the Wellington .NET Users Group, which meets monthly to discuss the latest .NET technologies
Help to organise Code Camps around the place (next one in Auckland, just before TechEd)
Microsoft MVP
Possess an unhealthy interest in the banal details of the Common Language Runtime
Two gorgeous kids and a beautiful wife

Who aren't I?

I'm not religious, neither in the traditional sense, or the Linux vs Windows / C# vs Java sense
I don't dance
I don't sing
I don’t drink coffee or cola
I don't drink, smoke, or ingest any mind altering substances
I don't play poker, chess nor go
I don't read nearly as many books as I used to
I don't read all my email (but I do practice Zero Blog Bounce, for some reason)
I'm not That Guy

But I'm not boring. Honest!

I look forward to posting all of those "I wish I had a blog" things once again...