Busy Days in Cairns
More than one week since the last blog entry. It’s been some busy days. I’m still doing the developer job and Andy was so happy with my work that he’s now paying me by the hour. Every couple of days I tell him what he owes me and he gives me cash on hand. And it really is cash on hand, no cheque, just bills. Not being used to carrying around a thick bunch of fiftys in my pocket the first stop after leaving the office is always the next Commonwealth Bank franchise.
So far I put in around 60 hours with 4-6 hours per day, including weekends. That’s not as bad as it sounds as I still get one or two days off during the week. Usually I take my days off when Hiroko has hers so I can either visit her or she can spend some time here in Cairns.
Fortunately the job is not as bad as I initially thought, although it’s still far away from being fun. I maintain several websites, all of them on different systems. There’s the home grown CMS, the HTML site with occasional PHP, the WordPress presence and so on. Most of the systems were build by students or other inexperienced programmers and lack best practices and maintainability in general. PITA.
What makes this job better than the one in Germany is for example that it’s up to me to decide how a certain task will be done and I don’t have to listen to superiors who still rely on their university knowledge from 10-20 years ago. Also having the freedom to decide when I start and end work really makes it more enjoyable.
It’s so enjoyable I got myself a second job in the field. The car rental I worked for got word of me doing websites and asked me to do some changes to their website. Looks like it’s only going to be a very small job but that’s what I thought about the other job as well.
In other news: We did a nice trip to the area north-west of Cairns on Saturday and since Sunday I’m doing a four day dive course. Heaps fun so far! Pics and text to follow.