Uncle Travelling Matt .com — the personal site of Matt Gifford

It was a few months ago now. I awoke at the presence of a man standing at the end of my bed, I felt an initial shudder of fear as I lay there. He said nothing, I didn’t recognise his face but I realised it was my grandfather. He stood there briefly looking at me and then left. Next I am outside, it is summer, somewhere near the coast. The landscape is typical New Zealand, but not present day, like an old film. A car drives, I am looking in from outside, they are going to the beach. My granddad is sitting in the back with two others, he is young, they are happy, talking away, but i hear nothing. He looks at me and smiles, he is happy. My granddad died two years ago this month. I was on the other side of the world at time. I had lost other family members before, but that was the first time I ever really cried.

…as John Lennon said. While due to the complete lack of entries here you’d think I haven’t been up to much, quite the opposite is true. I have been a very busy beaver in recent weeks, far too busy to have time to write about it in fact!

Ok, let’s see, I’ve just gone through the banking spanish inquisition to get second credit card. I don’t actually need a second credit card, as the credit limit my on gold card is so high, I’d never be able to afford to pay it back if I actually ever used it all. No this card is my in lieu of an overseas bank account card, as getting a bank account in Italy is a huge pain in the arse, and their fees are really expensive too. It also happens to be from the one Visa card issuer in the country that doesn’t charge for overseas cash advances and their currency conversion rate is a mere 1.8% above interbank. So I can use it like a normal debit card and not have to worry about the Italian system at all.

Next, I have been working some crazy hours trying finally to get this Business Manager software my company is developing completed. This project has been in the works for some time, but has always taken second priority to client work and hence is way off schedule. This weekend I managed to get one of the main UI widgets, the list view to code complete stage—finishing all the behind the scenes plumbing that make it actually work.

It was also good to see recently a show on CNN called Global Office that covers current and future business trends in the workplace and technology. The episode covered interestingly from the point of view of my project, Microsoft’s technology labs showing a preview of what they’re planning 5-10 years out. It was good to see they had come up with some of same ideas I’m rolling into this project, and their take on them—a nice validation in a way.

Next, I have been spending countless hours working on learning Italian. Apart from the Monday night classes in Auckland, I have been working through a book of Verb Drills I got from Amazon and meeting with local Italian’s to practice the language. I’m also still reading the Harry Potter series in Italian. In all I’m spending least an hour per day on the language usually more.

I have also been learning to dance, which was initially quite outside my comfort zone. After the first lesson I wanted to quit, but I’ve stuck with it and it has turned out to be a lot of fun. The class is a diverse range of people in age from about 15 to 60, and you dance with several different people during each class. I’ve been making steady improvement and can now Cha Cha and Foxtrot with relative confidence!

In addition to all of this, I have still been doing some light training to kept up my fitness and flexibility level over the winter!