Personal

Sometimes I post things that are kind of personal, so I make sure to put them in this category. If there is a password on any of these posts, then the password will be my date of birth, in YYYY-MM-DD format. If you know me reasonably well, then you should know that (or just ask me and I’ll tell you).

Michael Phelps: Changing the façade of the Olympics

In the wake of Michael Phelps’ historic performance at the Beijing Olympics of 2008, the question on every-one’s mind is (or should be) “how far are we willing to go?” Beating out the Gladiatorially-named and carbon-fiber-spring-blade-loaded Oscar Pistorius as the first hyper-human athlete to compete in the so called “games”, Phelps officially marks the beginning of a spiral into artificially modified “humans” performing for crowds of unengineered, imperfect pure-bloods such as you and me. (more…)

The Australian Odyssey: SFO-AUK

We were hungry, but we were ready, so we decided to just go to the airport and eat there. Airplane food tends to be horrible, but airport food is normally at least bearable. On the train heading to SFO, an incredible example of a hipster geek presented itself. We counted the following “authority indicators” testifying to his most definite geekiness. The first 5 were immediately obvious, but then he just kept pulling things out during his 10-minute ride: (more…)

Back in Wagin

I grew up in a small town called Wagin, which is about 2.5 hours drive South of Perth (the capital of Western Australia). It’s a small rural town, and I lived on a mini-farm for the first 12 or so years of my life. During that time, I guess I had a very different childhood from most “city kids”. I moved to Perth and went to high school (years 10 -12) at Como Senior High School.

My friends in Como were always amazed (and perhaps appalled) at the stories I told of my childhood. Somewhere along the line someone suggested that I should write down some of those stories because they were so different. Thus Back in Wagin was born, a short auto-biographical compilation of stories from my childhood. I originally wrote the book when I was about 17, and printed it myself (on a computer printer) then spiral bound it. I still have the first original copy. Now things are very different, and I’m re-publishing a Second Edition at Lulu.com. The power that services like Lulu (and Blurb, and SharedBook, etc etc) give to people to be able to express themselves is amazing and inspiring.

I spent a number of weeks on and off adding stories that I’d previously missed, cleaning up my grammar and generally improving the book. It’s now rounded out to 90-ish pages, and I’m in the process of putting together a snazzy full-color cover for the book. It will be available from Lulu.com for about $12 in case anyone wants a copy.

Going through all those memories has been a great experience. I’m really glad I took the time to write them all down when I did. Even if you don’t go as far as me and get it printed (semi?)professionally, I’d recommend the process to anyone.

UPDATE: You can now buy a copy of Back in Wagin from Lulu.com. I even make a couple bucks off the sale price.

Comcast Flub

Thanks to some poor mail handling, Comcast was kind enough to inform me of the names of a few of their customers.

  • Ben Bochmann,
  • Steve Worthington and
  • Benjie Lasseu

Nice to meet you guys. Comcast sent me a very “snail-mail-spam” looking “Express Letter” envelope containing some new up-sell marketing junk today, and apparently they forgot to flick the paper and blow air in it before putting it in the printer or something 🙂

I received 3 copies of the same “letter”, all stuck together (it was glossy paper, which has a tendency to do that) inside the envelope.

Good job Comcast… keep up the great work.

MyBabyOurBaby is officially live!

As you may know, I’ve been working on a project for a while now, which has finally gone live, with open registrations. That project is My Baby Our Baby.

The idea of the site is to give parents and families a secure place online where they can compile a journal of memories for their children. We’re focusing primarily on photos right now, but hope to include video and audio as we progress. Here’s a couple of the things that I think make MyBaby unique or worth a look:

  • Unlimited uploads (backed by Amazon S3)
  • You choose to have your book open to the public (for reading), or completely invite-only.
  • Once they join your book via invitation, other people can add their own photos and stories to your book as well
  • We have some really beautiful book themes (and more coming) care of Ray Hernandez/Stoodio
  • We’ve created a forum on the site as well to allow people to interact across books (anyone who’s a member can post) and ask each other questions etc.
  • You can try it out for free!

Right now, people get 3 weeks to try it out for free, after that, if they like it, it’s $8 a month to continue using the service. This covers you for as much as you (and all the members of your book) want to upload. You can pay for more than a month at a time and get a discount as well. We’re trying out a slightly different method of payment where subscriptions aren’t actually available in a traditional set-your-details-and-forget way. What we’re doing is allowing anyone who’s a member of the book to contribute by paying for as much (or as little) as they like. We’re hoping that rather than the parent having to pay every month, other people in the family will chip in and cover the cost of keeping the book running if they see value in it.

Ray and I are really excited now that it’s live, and very nervous to see where it goes. We’ve spent a lot of time working on this and refining things, so it’s great to finally have some other people using it.

Now for the real work — keeping it up and running and constantly improving it for our new users!

Quote of the Day

From a very straight-laced colleague of mine who I really wouldn’t have expected this from, in reference to the general attire seen on Halloween in the US;

“Girls just wanna dress up as sluts, that’s the bottom line.”

I can’t wait.