Ah, Good Friday. It seems like ages since I’ve been able to sleep in, then laze about the house in my pyjamas. Shortly I’ll watch the vid of last night’s West Wing, then maybe, maybe I’ll consider having a shower and shave and getting dressed. But no rush. I’ve decided, by the way, that the ... [More]
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High-visibility jackets
It used to be just construction workers that wore high-visibility tops. Now they adorn police on traffic duty, tram/train customer service people, cyclists, truck drivers, builders, couriers, and so on. They do make a person more visible (spectacularly so at night), even if they do little else. Railway industry people wryly observe that some of ... [More]
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I’m going to be poor next month
I’m going to be poor next month. Such is the life of a contractor that you don’t get to claim for public holidays, and since I send in invoices monthly, April’s will be missing not only Good Friday, Easter Monday and ANZAC Day, but also today, as I’m at home convalescing. Yesterday I found myself ... [More]
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April is car maintenance month
April is car maintenance month for me. First thing will be new tyres. I don’t do a lot of driving (in the region of 10,000km per year, which is apparently about half the average), but the tyres date back to last century. The front-left deflates rather too fast, and they are failing the matchstick head ... [More]
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Saucy!
My kids love tomato sauce, so we often have it on the table during meals. There’s several brands available, the main ones being Masterfoods and Heinz (Big Red). They both taste the same to me. But the Masterfoods one comes in a bottle with recycle code 4, which is not recyclable in my area. Heinz ... [More]
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Should Daniel sell-out?
Daniel wears Glo-Weave shirts. He shops at Safeway. He loves Weetbix for breakfast, and always includes Leggo tomato paste in his spag bol. A while back I decided to play around with Google ads on a few pages: Here, here and on Geekrant.org. To my utter surprise, it’s now earning US$5-9 per month. Which is ... [More]
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Seeking Peter
Someone from a finance company in Sydney kept ringing for a Peter somebody, leaving messages on my answering machine. Despite me ringing back and leaving messages on theirs saying there was no Peter here, every few weeks there’d be another call. The last about a week ago sounded… well, a little ominous. Excerpt from answering ... [More]
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I love my central heating
The wintry weather appeared to show up right about when we went off summer time last weekend. Last night I turned on my central heating for the very first time. After a few minutes the chill was gone. Ditto this morning — it send the temperature from very cold to a pleasant 20 degrees. I’ve ... [More]
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Doctor Hugo
The Doctor Who stories “Dalek”, “Father’s Day” and “The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances” make up three of the seven nominees for this year’s Hugo Award for best dramatic presentation (short form). Oddly, the Wallace & Gromit movie got nominated in the long form section. The Hugos are for sci-fi and fantasy, which I suppose covers ... [More]
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Boys will be boys
In the misty-eyed view of my childhood, us neighbourhood kids got up to all sorts of mischief in the rear carparks and alleyways behind the flats where we lived. There was no DVD/VCR, there was no computer or XBox. In the early days there wasn’t even any Nintendo Game And Watch. There was Lego, but ... [More]
The other morning I woke about 6am to an unfamiliar sound: rustling, coming from somewhere to the left of my bed. I lay there in the darkness, trying to figure out what it could be. It wasn’t the kids getting up. It wasn’t outside (the window is on the right). Having caught a cockroach in ... [More]
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April Fool’s!
Google Romance — dating. HP had an advert for Scratch’n’sniff servers in The Age. The Age on Helen Demidenko taking up a career as a lawyer. Is this an April Fool’s Day story? BBC says airlines have banned a Swedish fish-flavoured drink. Any others? (Pranks last year. My 2004 prank.) PS. 4pm. Wikipedia has a ... [More]
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Just buy the CD, old man
Tickets for the Ben Harper concert have suffered from a similar fate as Belle & Sebastian: The concert is on a “school night” plus expensive at $79.95 plus booking fee equals Stuff it, just buy the CD, old man. (And wait to see if they schedule a second concert on a better night.)
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Personal branding
Speaking of branding, what about personal branding, eg your name? Perhaps in the western world it’s not really an issue for most men, though I was born Daniel Quinlem, changing to my mother’s maiden name, Bowen, when she divorced. I have the option of changing back, but don’t really want to, partly because it’s hard ... [More]
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Number one
For a while earlier this month one of the hot email memes going around was a Number One In History web site, though it’s been taken offline now. Happily there’s another site which is online, and even better, it can tell you the number one hits in Australia, the USA and the UK. Like many ... [More]
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The value of branding
I’m no marketing expert, but even I know that branding is a powerful and valuable thing. If you’ve got a well-established brand, you have to be careful if you tweak it or change it. As far as possible, you’d have to make the transition as smooth as possible, for your users/customers, including the once-a-year ones. ... [More]