So we went clay shooting yesterday with Adam Tyler (an Athen’s Olympic Bronze medalist and two time Commonwealth Gold medalist) showing us how it’s done.

After playing Counter Strike with the guys at office it felt good too hold a real live Beretta shot gun. Got four of the first five shots in the first round.

Here’s one where I hit the clay.

The Melbourne Unique World team!

Although it’s very easy to forget how beautiful it is here. My favorite part of the daily commute is the ten minute walk through Fawkner Park (named after Melbourne’s co-founder).

Here’s a bird’s eye view of Fawkner park.

A few from today’s morning walk.

On sunny days we grab our lunch and head downstairs to have it at the park. It’s no wonder Melboune has consistently been at the top spot in the World’s Most Livable Cities list over the years.

I started blogging back in 2003 after being inspired by Scoble and Winer. The type of blogging I was doing back then is now coined a link blog with a few of my own reflections thrown in.

If you’ve been subscribing to blogs you tend to come across posts that tell you how to write good posts, what you should have in your post and what not to post. Subconsciously these posts made me raise the bar higher and higher on the type of stuff I should be posting about.

Not anymore, bah humbug to all of those posts that tell you how to blog. I’ve since realised that every small thing I learn each day is going to help some poor soul in the future. I was that poor soul when I was (am) learning SharePoint and boy did those short tips from others really help out.

So remember no post is too small or irrelevant in the eyes of the beholder who searches for it in Google.

So show some love to your abandoned blog today.

It turned out to be a wonderful coincidence that our second son Rafael decided to be born on our second wedding anniversary!

The little fella has a loud voice and wakes his older brother up at night, but we all love him so much.

Having a baby so many miles away from family and friends should have been a very difficult experience. On the contrary the midwives who delivered Rafael were so friendly and motherly that Imara, Joshua and I never felt any stress.

I’m even more impressed by the fact that the midwives visit our house to check on the mother and baby and the constant care given. The Australian medical system by far would have to be one of the best in the world.

Anyway’s my mother in law just flew in from Sri Lanka today so that’s going to make it a little more easier for Imara.

In the last couple of months I’ve worked in three very diverse teams, in three different offices and three different technology areas ranging from VB6 Interop + ASP.NET at Kelloggs, WinForms + EntLib + Oracle + Mainframe integration at Microsoft and now SharePoint (MOSS 2007) at Lend Lease.

The quantity & quality of things that you learn from interacting with such diverse people is mind blowing. For now, I’m going to sit back and enjoy the ride!

After getting to Australia, my first biggest challenge was to find a place to rent. The renting system in Australia is well organized but its extremely difficult for someone who doesn’t have a rental reference to get a place. I was lucky, on of my friend’s friend called Priyasha drove us around on our first weekend and we ended up being able to just look at one house. As luck would have it no one else applied for the house and we finally got it.

The second challenge was to buy a car. Since my first assignment is at Microsoft Australia’s SDC (Software Development Centre), I had to get a car since the public transport up there was not too good. Again Priyasha came to my rescue and we ended up buying the last car we saw that day. The car although old is in much better condition than the one I sold off in Sri Lanka and it cost me only $2,750.

We moved in the week before last and had to go around buying all the stuff for the house. I ended up getting just the minimal stuff like the fridge, washing machine, microwave. It’s quite a blur, considering that I spent over a year buying all the household items and that too after doing a lot of research on each item. But here it took us a couple of hours to pick all of the items from the Good Guys store.

Plus when you move into a new house you need to do whole lot of things like getting a telephone line, electricity line, gas line, but since I could do all that over the phone it was quite pain free. I’ve applied for a broadband line which should be hooked up by next week.

My new job is at Unique World and my first assignment will be on SharePoint. It’s going to be tough to move over to a new country, start a new job and in the process a new life. But I’m looking forward to the challenge.

So here goes, you will be seeing a lot of SharePoint stuff on this blog in the coming months so stay tuned!

At just $10 a year, we love you Google Apps!