Little Things

I mentioned in an earlier post that I planned on celebrating the little accomplishments.  I’ve neglected to do that the last few days.  So, in no certain order, are some little things I choose to celebrate.

• I took the bus downtown again today, and went to the Countdown grocery store, and got a few non-food items I’ve been needing.  Then I took the bus back home, carrying my 2 bags with me. 
•  Discovered I could take a bus directly from near my apartment to right outside a really nice mall.  I was able to get more stuff for the apartment there, and transport it back home via bus. 
• Thanks to the weekend purchases, I am no longer living out of my suitcase. 
• And even though this isn’t really an accomplishment of mine, I celebrate the fact that if I want milk or other small groceries, there are 2 small stores just a 5 minute walk away.

Not everything went according to plan.  For one, I STILL don’t have TV.  But I have no doubt that will be a little accomplishment to celebrate later on.

My Weekend

I’ve had a pretty nice weekend.  It started out Friday afternoon with the end-of-week drinks at the office.  After that, I dropped my stuff off at my apartment and took the City Link bus (which is free for holders of the Auckland Transit HOP card) downtown to get an HDMI cable for the TV in my apartment.  I’ve been without TV since I’ve been here, and keep wanting to get it working.  Our building (I’m told) automatically has FreeTV in each unit, and all I needed was a cable.  Well the HDMI cable didn’t do anything, so next try is a standard coax cable to THAT wall connection.

Saturday was the best day.  After a failed attempt at getting a City Hop car (this will be discussed in a separate post),  I again took the City Link bus downtown to the Auckland Anniversary Day festival.  It is the 175^th anniversary of the city.  There was lots of stuff to do and see.  I took a self guided tour of the NZ warship Otago, watched the hipster white boy music duo perform, including a couple of Michael Jackson songs, went through “Shed 10” where they had a few displays, short films, and oral Maori history performances.  And had a hot dog – what we Yanks would call a corn dog.  Regardless of the name, it was still tasty.  I walked down to the end of the pier to see the beautiful bay water with the sunlight sparkling on it.

After leaving there, I hit the downtown Warehouse discount store.  Still working on getting the apartment set up.  Picked up several things – cooking utensils, laundry detergent, trash cans.  I can only do small loads each trip.  I’m currently getting around via bus and train and foot, so I have to be a little conservative with whatever I’m lugging around.

Today, I slept in til after 11:30.  I had a pretty bad case of insomnia last night, which lasted until I took a benedryl around 4:00 am.  This afternoon, I went to the local bike shop to start looking at and pricing bikes.  Biking will be yet one more way of getting around.  Plus it will be a good way of shedding some of these ugly unwanted pounds.  I expect when I start I’ll be doing a lot of walking the bike uphill in order to ride it on relatively flat areas and downhill.  But eventually I’ll be able to build up to riding up most of the streets around here.  Did I mention that the entire area is basically extinct volcanoes?  After the bike shop, I caught a different bus to the Westfield St. Lukes mall.  Yay – a bus that goes directly from right outside my apartment to right outside a mall.  And that mall has a Kmart, a Farmers department store, a Countdown grocery store, a food court, a movie theatre, and lots of specialty shops.  At the Kmart and Farmers I got, you guessed it, MORE stuff for the apartment.  But the list is getting shorter.  Oh – I got a coax cable at Kmart.  But the type of cable it is fit great on the TV port but not the wall port.  The wall port requires the screw on kind, and the cable I have is the slip on kind.  So I still need to get an adapter – or ANOTHER cable.  I WILL have TV!

From there, I took a different bus to the Target Furniture Hypermarket to browse a bit.  I definitely need a desk chair, but I’m also considering getting a two-seater sofa and a night stand, if I can find things that will fit in the space I have (the bed frame is affixed to the wall, so there’s no moving it). 

I got home, and after a quick nap, reheated leftovers from some take-away I had for dinner a couple of nights ago.  And then took a long walk.  I probably walked between 45 minutes and an hour.  I want to keep doing that, at least 3 or 4 times a week.

Now tonight, I’m just sitting in my apartment, waiting for the fireworks that will be fired from the Sky Tower, of which I have a direct view from my balcony.  And tomorrow is a holiday!

Week One Down

I made it through my first week as a Kiwi employee!  To restate, I am working as a developer at Vista Entertainment Solutions, who produces software used by cinemas around the world.  Vista is truly a global player.  I am in a team of developers, a business analyst, testers, and a scrum master.  And my team is itself pretty global – 2 from India, 2 from the UK, 2 from South Africa, one from Zimbabwe, one from the US (me), and one, yes one, from New Zealand.  This group has been so completely welcoming of me, and has been more than willing to help me get adjusted to the group and the products I will be supporting.

The week started with the typical first day stuff – the brief orientation, followed by the site tour, then being taken around my team lead to meet a lot of people, then finally settling in to start getting oriented by reading a whole slew of development documentation that guides the coding standards and processes used at Vista.  I’ve also been part of 3 training sessions (more to come).  Vista seems really good about using training sessions to orient new employees.  I’ve also been part of a code share, where one of my teammates reviewed her work with me and two other developers.  I even contributed a couple of suggestions – yay me!  Thursday was all sorts of meetings – sprint review, where the development work that was completed in that two week sprint was demoed; sprint retrospective, where my team gets together and discusses what was good and bad during the sprint, with suggestions for improvements; and the sprint planning session, where we planned out the work for the next two weeks.  And I have 2 or 3 feature changes to work on.  Today (Friday) I made my first code change, to correct a fairly simple bug.  I say fairly simple, but my approach to correcting bugs is reproducing the bug, figuring out how it is supposed to work, finding other examples in the code that work as needed, and then implementing similar changes.  For this bug, that whole process probably took between 3 and 4 hours.  I expect that as I become more familiar with the code base, those times will come down.

On Wednesday, Murray Holdaway, the CEO of the company, stopped by my workstation to welcome me.  When I interviewed at Vista in August, Murray was one of the people I met with.  He is one of the nicest people you could ever meet.  We chatted for 5 to 10 minutes, and it never felt like it was something he thought he was supposed to do; it was something he wanted to do.

Finally, today (Friday) my team had a group lunch at a great Indian restaurant.  It was really nice to be able to connect with some of my teammates (those sitting close to me) on a more personal level.  I learned that Liz is a vegetarian, Alice is from Zimbabwe, Dan is from the UK and currently lives in the Swanson neighborhood of Auckland, Conrad is kind of engaged and has a border collie who does in fact herd him and his partner (Kiwis refer to their significant others as “partner” regardless of gender).  Then, at the end of the day, I got to join folks for Friday end of day drinks in the large breakroom.  One of the refrigerators is stocked with beer, wine, cider, and non-alcoholic beverages.  Cricket was playing on the TV too.  I was there with my teammates Ashley and Dan, and Murray (see above) joined us.  Murray took great delight in teaching me some of the finer points of cricket – and I now finally understand it a bit more.  I also learned that Murray’s 2 sons love American hockey!  One of them loves LA, the other loves the Bruins.

So – one week down.  I have to say it was a pretty darn good week.  And I have Monday off for Auckland Anniversary Day (take that my Columbus friends who had Jan. 19^th off).

The First Day

Yay!  I survived my first day at my new job!

Some of you have wondered what my job is.  I am now a Developer at Vista Entertainment Solutions, Ltd., in Auckland.  Vista develops software used by movie theatres for scheduling showings, selling tickets, etc.  I'm starting off working on the products used in the back office of the cinemas or the head office of theatre chains.

Today was a typical first day of information overload.  I had a brief overview of policies, got a tour of the building, including the evacuation zone.  Then I was turned over to my team lead, and all of the introductions started.  Too many names to remember of course.  After that, I started working on getting my work station set up.  After lunch, continued the setup until 2:00, when I attended a brief training session on report development.  It wasn't just for me, but for all devs who MAY at some point have to make changes to reports.  After that, it was back to getting software set up, and I'll be continuing that tomorrow morning.

After work, I had to drive to the office of the real estate company that manages my apartment so that I could complete all of the advance payments on my studio.  I am supposed to get possession tomorrow, but the carpet is being cleaned tomorrow so we'll see if it really happens.  I sure hope so - I'm ready to get into my own place.

My accomplishments for today:

• getting all of my advance payments made for my apartment
• surviving my first day on the new job
• and most importantly - learning how to use the espresso machine (with milk frother) in the kitchen at work!

What a Week

Hard to believe that I arrived in New Zealand only 1 week ago.  In some respects, it seems like forever.  I guess stressful times are like that.  But most of the stress was over little things - opening a bank account, applying for my IRD number, getting a NZ mobile phone.  The big stress was the apartment hunt.  I never imagined it would be as difficult as it was.  The problem is that this is apparently the busiest time of the year to find a place, as university students are also back in force looking for places to live.  If I have been here even one month earlier, it would have probably been easier.  But month earlier would have meant missing Christmas at home with family.  So the stress here was worth the time there.
And now I have an apartment, of which I take possession on Tuesday.  I'm still having some issues with that.  I have to pay 1 week's rent in advance, 3 weeks' rent as bond, plus a "letting fee" of 1 week's rent plus GST, before I get the keys.  And I've had a difficult time getting money from my US accounts into my NZ account.  Citi bank was barely any help at all - I tried to do a cash advance deposit, but the amount they told me on the phone that I would be able to do wasn't the amount that the teller was actually able to do - only have the amount.  The other issue is the hours that the banks are open - not terribly convenient for a bloke from the US who is attempting to get a lot done in a few days time.  I'm sure it will all work out.
And I start my job tomorrow.  I'm feeling a bit nervous, a bit anxious, a bit excited...  new people, new office, new work - and hopefully new accomplishments ahead.
What did I learn this week?  Some of this might be helpful info if any of my friends consider the ex-pat life.

• banking - I was able to open a checking account with my passport and proof of address.  The proof of address was the tricky one.  I had not traveled with any bills or anything official with my name and address.  Luckily, thanks to the magic of the internet, I was able to pull down my latest bank statement to my phone and mail it to the personal banker working with me.  I didn't even need to make an initial deposit.
  The difficult part of the banking is getting money from my US accounts to my NZ account.  My bank in the States, 5/3, does not permit setting up transfers of funds via the internet banking.  That requires a visit to a 5/3 branch to request a wire transfer.  Which is kind of difficult to do when I'm here.  Luckily, I set up a certain individual with Power of Attorney, so that when his work schedule permits he will be able to do that for me.  In the meantime, it requires me to withdraw cash at an ATM and then walk to a teller to deposit it.
  - Lessons learned: research requirements for opening a bank account in the destination city, and also research the capabilities with your US bank to transfer funds.
• mobile phone - this was fairly easy.  I walked into a Vodafone store, and say "I just moved here and I need a phone."  The sales folks are more than happy to assist.  For my NZ phone, I decided to initially go with a pre-pay plan.  I bought the phone and then pay a set amount for a set number of minutes and/or data usage.  I went with the $19 plan, which gives me 500 mb and so many minutes of talk, but I hate talking on the phone, so I think the data will be the limiting factor.  I'll see how long 500 mb takes me, and may opt for the 1 gb plan for $29.
• IRD number - the Inland Revenue Department number is a personal ID similar to the SSN in the US and is required for anyone earning income.  The biggest hurdle here was the fact that the application form requires a residential address - which at the time of application I did not have.  Luckily, my home-stay host offered to allow me to use his, which I gladly took him up on.  Normal turnaround was 8 - 10 days, but for $10 I was able to get expedited service.  And that resulted in receiving a phone call the very next day with my new IRD number.  Other than that, the cost to apply was free.
  Lessons learned: research the requirements for obtaining a tax ID.  Download the form and see what information you currently do not have.  If you have any questions, call the respective department.  That's what I did with the residential address requirement.
• Apartment - this is one of the trickiest parts, because unless you've repeatedly visiting your new city, or even lived there before, you can't have any idea where you may want to live.  You can have high-level thoughts like "near a bus or train line" or "furnished" or "2 bedrooms" or a price point, but until you're there and see what's available when you're there you won't be able to find a place.  I think it was extra hard for me, coming from living in my own home.  It's been 18 years since I rented.  And housing is expensive here.  Very expensive.  And it is definitely a seller's market here.  Agents won't even work with you on an individual level.  "Look on our website" is a very common refrain.  But again, I happened to arrive at the worst time of the year in which to find a place.
  Lessons learned: research what web sites might be available for rental listings in your destination city.  Determine if there is a major university in the area.  Do you best to avoid looking in that area, and also do your very best to avoid arriving within a month of classes beginning.  Also, unless you feel very confident, plan two weeks of up front accommodations while you look, even before you start a job if possible.  I scheduled one week, and while I found a place, I still had to schedule an extra two nights accommodations until I can take possession.  You really can benefit from the extra free time during the day to set up viewings and looking at places.

And one more lesson.  I think what will help me a lot is to figure out one accomplishment each day and celebrate it.  Everything I did during the past week, regardless of size, I celebrated.  Opening my bank account.  Applying for my IRD number.  Finding my way to a destination on my own without using any sort of Google navigation assistance.  It's the little things that sometimes drive us to distraction, and likewise the little things can make us feel really good.  So I will try my best to set time aside each evening and find the little - or sometimes big - thing or things to celebrate.