Schooling In Maribyrnong

It has been quite a while since I stopped blogging, I just felt the urge to share something I read on The Age a few days ago. It's about Maribyrnong Secondary school and how the school is the most improved in Victoria in term of median VCE score between 2003-2012. I am writing this piece because one of the main questions that pop up in people's mind when they think about buying a house in Melbourne western suburbs is the quality of the public schools here.

 http://www.theage.com.au/national/education/at-maribyrnong-college-build-it-and-not-only-will-they-come-theyll-excel-20121219-2bnah.html

Sure we don't have a top performing (academically speaking) public high school this side of town yet (unless you are talking Parkville or Essendon, which are really North rather than West) but things are improving.

I have always been a believer that the inner west area is going through a gentrification process, and gentrification will naturally lift the standards of the local schools and it's good to see some concrete numbers to back that up. Of course, being a designated specialist sport school helps too.

The school has since become a strictly zoned school except for those who are accepted into the specialist sport academy. I am quite confident that the next ten to fifteen years will see Maribyrnong's academic achievement improve even more.

The article also has a VCE result table for 2012 for all Victorian schools. There are some rather interesting factual data there. The other one that caught my eye is how Footscray City College in the much maligned suburb of Footscray actually has the same VCE median score this year as Doncaster Secondary in the eastern suburb of Doncaster (an area very popular with Eastern Asian migrants). Make what you will of that.

Anyway, my son is only three so perhaps I shouldn't analyse too much into high schools at this stage. We should be thinking more of primary school for now. One of our nearby primary schools has a 'Play To Learn' program for preschool kids every Friday morning in their school library during school terms. Wenty and Rafa have gone to that a couple of times with a friend/neighbour whose kids are attending that school. It's probably a toss up between that primary school and a local catholic school for Rafa when he starts school in a couple of years time.

In the meantime, the kiddo has started child care part time at a nearby not for profit child care centre. He only started there in August and first two months were a nightmare in term of him getting sick frequently as it was the first time he had been exposed to all the germs that are shared around by the kids in child care and the weather was still quite cold. Thankfully, the last couple of months have been good as his immune system starts to get used to it and the weather gets warmer. Wenty has been impressed by the carers there too. She finds them very caring and engaged. We should really just enjoy his preschool years for now than think too far ahead.

That's it for this post, oh and this doesn't mean I am back to blog regularly. I just don't have the time and energy to do that any more. I may do a random post once in a blue month if there is something I really feel the urge to write about.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone out there in advance!

Thank You and Good Bye

It's time to draw the curtain on this blog. I simply don't have time to write for leisure anymore. With Wenty starting her wall sticker business and me starting a new job in less than three weeks and us wanting to spend lots of quality time with Rafa, time is becoming more and more precious.

Oh I just handed my resignation letter to my boss last week. After the last interview that didn't work out (that job required lots of traveling), I thought I would stay put for a while. May be at least until I become eligible for my long service leave as I only have less than 2 years to serve to get that.

However, a good opportunity came up and I was in between major projects at my current work and got stuck doing rather uninteresting work and not learning anything. Rather than continue doing something I don't enjoy for a few more months and waiting for the next major project to come along and hoping that I will score a significant role in that project, I took things in my own hand and grabbed this new opportunity with both hands.

The chance to work with a group of technically smart people working on cutting edge cloud and web based technologies are simply too good for me to pass up. I'll be busy keeping myself and my hands on technical skills up to date in my spare time. It's gonna be a very exciting year ahead for both myself and Wenty.

It'll be a bit sad saying good byes to my current workmates. I've spent over 5 years there and you don't spend 5 years at a place without developing some bonds. But hey life has to go forward and nobody expects to stay with the same employer forever these days.

Same with this blog, it's time to move on. I will keep it online as some old posts may be informational and useful to some people but I'll set some of the more personal posts to draft mode when time permits as I have shared way too much information in the past. Wenty's website comes with a blog so we will be posting there once in a blue moon if we have something interesting about her business journey to write about.

Good bye and thanks for reading my ramblings.

Introducing www.wentywallsticker.com.au

After months of hard work, Wenty has finally launched her fabric wall sticker business today. It's just the online presence for now. The website is available at http://www.wentywallsticker.com.au/ if anyone is looking for some high quality fabric wall stickers for their home.

Initially it's just the web presence for now. I am sure she'll be busy approaching the relevant stores to sell/stock her range and selling directly to customers in weekends craft or babies/kids markets very soon. It's a big milestone though just to get to this stage as it means she has figured out the correct calibration for her equipments and materials and produced the actual end products for each one of her initial set of designs (20+ of them) to our satisfaction.

That's her website homepage.

A few of the products on her catalog.

It's good to see Wenty put her background in interior design, her passion in quality kids' products and her vintage taste into good use.

I can claim some credits too as I have laboured alongside her creating her e-commerce website and providing moral and technical support when she has issues with the printing and cutting equipments.

Rather than code her site from scratch and reinvent the wheel, I went the open source way. We ended up using NopCommerce, an ASP.Net (4.0 with MVC 3.0 and SQL Server back end) based open source shopping cart software. It seems to be the best out of the Microsoft based solution and I prefer MS platform as it's the one I am most familiar with so I can support and customise it easily if required and I must say I am impressed with its depth of functionality and its ease of customisation. Integrating with paypal was a breeze too. It's definitely worth considering for anyone looking for an open source shopping cart out there.

Rafa can claim some credits too for posing along with the stickers for some product photo shoots and behaving himself well while mommy was busy working on her products.

He also 'assisted' Wenty in sticking and peeling the stickers on our walls for photos taking. Yeah design aside, the fact that a little boy like Rafa can peel and stick it on the wall multiple times without damaging the walls and the stickers is one of Wenty's selling points. The stickers are made of a re-positionable fabric material that doesn't leave residue/damage on your walls and is very resistant to rip and wrinkle.

We also set up a Facebook page for it at http://www.facebook.com/WeNTyWallStickers. The Facebook page is still rather bare at the moment and we'll add more to it in the next week or so. However, if you find her product range to your liking, please do like the Facebook page to give her new small business some visibility among your friends. Thanks.

That's Not Something You See Everyday

We were working late in the office on Tuesday night when one of my workmates pointed out that there were people in parachute jumping off the Rialto tower across our office. It provided a nice little distraction for us and it's definitely not something we see everyday.

Photo copied from The Age website.

We only found out the next day that they were adventure seeking base jumpers doing unauthorised jump off the 55th floor of Rialto. Well, that's one way to skip the bills at Vue De Monde.

Just a short entry and this blog is getting very neglected recently. We haven't done any interesting or new things lately to write about anyway. Just the usual work, and getting Wenty's products ready, and ocassional catch ups with friends and family, and keeping the little boy happy.

Getting Wenty's products ready is taking a lot of time and efforts. We hit an issue with the cutter but the guy who sold Wenty the machine came over and solved it for her. That's the benefit of buying through local reseller, we've got local support. I am also busy spending whatever free time I have left upgrading my programming skills.

When Did Melbourne Computer Swapmeets Become Pirate Markets?

We needed a piece of software for Wenty's new business and thought we might try to save some money by buying 2nd hand older (but genuine) versions. We thought we would try our luck at the computer swapmeet markets so we went to one in Collingwood recently.

I haven't been to one of these for many many years and boy I was surprised at how much things have changed. Almost half the vendors there were Asians and Indians selling pirated discs of software, games and movies openly. It felt more like a Malaysian pasar malam (night market in Malaysia where pirated discs are commonplace).

As this was for business use, we wanted to do it properly so pirated copy was not an option for us and we left empty handed. We ended up getting a brand new copy directly from the vendor's website. We got my brother in law to purchase it for us from Singapore though as it was $200 cheaper that way.

Their Singaporean site had it at S$900, their Australian site had it at A$900. Perhaps someone should tell the vendor A$1.00 is now worth about $S1.30 and they should adjust their local prices to reflect that. But then again, the US price was only around US$500 (and A$ is still slightly above parity now). Too bad we don't have a close family member in US to buy for us to save us another $200. But hey even paying $700 is better than paying $900 right?

Yeah it's very typical of these big US software vendors to price gouge their overseas consumers, and Australian customers tend to get screwed more than others in the region because the vendors know they can get away with it.

Anyway, enough rant about computer swap meet and price gauging in different countries. We got quite a bit more done for the business in my one month leave from work, especially after we came back from NZ. Wenty has finalised the initial set of designs that she plans to launch with, researched and purchased the necessary equipments to produce the end products, and researched about shipping options and costs. I did the E-Commerce site and looked after Rafa while she was busy. She just needs to modify her drawings to suit the equipments and calibrate the equipments and materials, and do a few trial productions.

Hopefully it can be officially launched in the next few weeks. Oh and for those who don't know, she is designing and making (with equipments from our own home in Melbourne) removable wall stickers/decals to decorate kids room. If you are interested in this kind of decoration product, watch this space over the next few weeks.