So you’re wondering where I’ve been since the end of August? Probably not, but I like to think you miss me when I’m away.

As I mentioned in my last post, I was in Australia for almost all of September. I’d like to take this opportunity to welcome my two nephews into the world; Kevin Arthur (born on the 24th of August) and Joshua Peter (born 15 days later on the 8th of September). They’re both unbelievably cute and I’m so glad I could be there to meet them.

The other reason for my lack of posts is that as soon as I got back from Australia I started my new job as a project manager in the Unix team at Opera Software.

If you don’t know who Opera are, have a look here: http://my.opera.com/chooseopera/blog/

If you don’t know what a browser is, I’ll explain it to you later. Don’t worry, you’re not alone.

So this brings me to why I am still at work at 9pm on a Friday night in my third week in the new job. The first project I have been assigned to is the tail end of something the Opera team have been working on for some time; namely a browser for the soon-to-be-released Nintendo DSi. Yes, super-cool. I get to work with Nintendo.

The DSi is due to be released in Japan on the 1st of November, and Opera is to be amongst the first free downloads for the device on their new DSi shopping channel. So we’ve been working around the clock getting our product ready for the release. It’s all pretty exciting stuff.

And personally, I’d rather be at work this late on a Friday in support of a project and product I’m really interested in that schlepping to and from work 9-5 on some boring thing I couldn’t care less about.

Thinki I’m sucking up to my new company? You can think that if you want. But considering when I landed this job I’d been trying to get an interview with Opera for two years (basically since I arrived in Norway) so I don’t think there’s anything brown-nosey about being happy in this job.

Before I get back to it, I just wanted to add a couple of quick updates in response to some comments on other posts:

About the pine nuts - I haven’t eaten a single pine nut since “the episode” even though I know they’re ok if toasted and/or not from China. I was glad to see the bit on Wikipedia was put back up because this is important information.

About the Wii Fit - to be honest I haven’t used it for a while. We rearranged our lounge room and I was too lazy to move the coffee table every time I wanted to use it. However, we’ve moved it back to where it was before and with winter approaching, the idea of indoor exercise is appealing to me once again. I’ll keep you posted when I get back on track.