Fishing at Bayswater/Devonport floating platform

Text fishing??

You can have your own quarter at the fishing floating platform

What if a snapper pull my fishing rod into the water? Btw, behind is the northshore bridge which connect north shore with Auckland city centre. It has totally 8 lanes but it is still jam heavily during the rush hour.

Well, it is sunny and nice weather. Good day for fishing, ai? (ok, I am trying to start using kiwi accent :P ) We went to Devonport/Bayswater floating platform and hope to get a grouper or snapper there :D

If you don't know about Devonport, it is located at the north shore of Auckland and definitely a lovely place to stay (price is lovely too...).

In the end, we didn't get any fish though. It seems they don't like the squid as bait. Other fishermen can catch quite many but they use smelly tuna meat as bait.

After finishing the fishing, we went to Torbay and Albany to watch the area as I am thinking of moving there. Good primary school and second school there, but just a bit far away from city centre as the trend of Auckland usually setup the working place in the city centre. I gotta drive 52KM (return included) everyday to work if I stay in Torbay/BrownBay or Albany. However, this is the same distance from my home to my office when I was in KL.

FYI, you should bring a good sun block. Even it is partly cloudy and we started to fish at 3:30pm - 6pm, I got sun tanned (luckily not sun burnt yet ... I am paranoid to sun burn after my serious sunburn at Kotsamui Island many years ago)

New Immigration rules!! darn!

There is a new immigration rules announced which will affect anyone who get work permit after 30 Nov. (I saw this on newspaper) For those who can't earn more than 33700 per annum, the children have to pay international fee (Primary and secondary education included) instead of free education. This will increase the risk of new immigrants as they may want to start low in wages for the first job.

By the way, did I mention .NET developers and Microsoft experts have more job opportunities here? Many large banks use SQL instead of Oracle. Most Oracle DB job I saw are in Wellington (governments). Of course, there are always exception but so far, if I remember it correctly, I never see an Auckland Oracle database job before... Microsoft infra technology such as Exchange, ISA, AD are even more dominant in this area. Java is slightly less demand than .NET but it is still good enough.

House price is increasing after 1 year of slumping, houses are sold like hot cakes (this may explain why so many house agents own wonderful ships for weekend relaxganza). By 400k, you can get quite a nice landed house in a good area. 500k can be in high-end area already, but you will work your socks off to the bank here for sure... However, I don't think we can get a landed house in KL for 500k (dollars to dollars). Wages here is more than Malaysia. A Linux engineer can earn 5k per month (but tax is higher than KL, for my tax bracket is average 21% vs 30% here). Interest rate is about 6% in Malaysia, NZ is about 6.5% - 9%!!! (when economy is good, interest could be crazy to fight inflation)

Permanent Job offered.

I have gone thru quite a few interviews within this month and successfully land a permanent job! (Another headache started as I need to get a car now... BMW...CLK...some European sporties start flowing on top of my head but I shouldn't do this, my logical right brain told me to get a cheap and economic car until it is more stable.)

I have recently been offered as a Data analyst/developer doing the MS SQL and some development work in Java. This should be fine for me. An opportunity in KL which is quite a very senior role is in progress. The pay of this NZ job is quite low (if compare to my contract job but hey, it is permanent and the contracted company doesn't seem good since they still couldn't get hold the project and still owning my wages!!). Honestly, the position is opened for 2-3 years experience developer but I still go for it (and spend lots of work on the manager explaining over-qualify is beneficial to the team, not a bad omen). The wages should be able to support myself or another family member. Give it maximum of 3. However, the "Ken" family has a headcount of 4. My wife will need to find a job once she permanently start to station here. My plan is to get the rental in KL to support us while wife is looking for job.

At the same time, I am asked to sign a 1 year contract as the manager told me that I am "over-qualified" for the role and quite risky if I am using this as a stepping stone. I fully understand that because I will do the same if I am the manager. Hiring over-qualified staff is good but the royalty won't be there since their value is actually higher. The risk of losing over-qualified staff is usually high. I haven't signed yet, but I need to see how is the detail and how fair it is to me. We can negotiate here.

Nevertheless, the market unemployment rate is still high. Many people are struggle looking for job but this has little improvement if compare to 4 months ago.