Completely unrelated to the local and global economies, over the last 12 months we’ve also had some of the heaviest storms and rainfall that has happened in nearly 20 years and to top it all off we’ve even had a couple of burglaries that unfortunately targeted ours, and the surrounding, suburbs. But what was even more troublesome than the break-ins was the painful process of sorting-out the insurance claims that followed.

Fortunately we used this as a learning experience and improved the security on our home and purchased a fearless guard dog – George. Ok, perhaps he’s not entirely fearless… or more accurately he gets scared by most things that move (including his own reflection). And given the fact that he’s not much bigger than a Rugby ball with legs, he wouldn’t intimidate someone suffering from acute paranoia. But all that aside, bringing him into our family was one of the best things we’ve ever done.

So in our first year of home ownership a lot of crazy stuff has happened, but to be honest, I wouldn’t change a thing. With each financial, environmental and personal challenge (and everything in between) we’ve learnt some really valuable things and everything has always worked-out well in the end.

Now that I’ve gotten that heartfelt story off my chest, let’s move onto a bunch of meaningless links and other random internet finds…

The New Scientist has launched the first ever Scientific Twitter Experiment to determine if random users from around the world can accurately guess a location using nothing but mind power. The concept sounds a little crazy, but also quite fascinating, so it’ll be interesting seeing the results once the study is complete.

Last year a street-art project was launched where miniature hand-painted people were placed in various locations around London and then left to fend for themselves. The project, titled Little People is very cute and cool and the collection of photographs collected from the experiment have been collated into a book, you can purchase prints or go and view the photographs (and possibly even some installations) at the Andipa Gallery in London.

If you work in an office environment it’s difficult to make it through a day without being inundated with countless facts and figures, reports, spreadsheets, graphs or other (seemingly) important data. Now I don’t know about you, but I always find data a lot more appealing when it’s presented in an aesthetically pleasing way, like these 50 Great Examples of Data Visualization.

And on that note, I’m going to check my email, web-stats and have a quick skim through the latest updates on Twitter and Facebook, then I’m off to bed.

In the ‘big update‘ I did a little over a month ago, I mentioned a few good things and a few bad.  One of the bad things was that our house was broken into.  Well it happened again.  They still didn’t get anything large, but they did manage to get some cash and a few of our geekier portable items like a little DVD player of Caleb’s, laptops etc.

So the last few weeks we’ve been going through the insurance claim process which is always more painful than it should be.  Work has also been really busy but some stuff is happening that’s helping the company grow and move in the right direction and we’ve got some big plans to push on ahead in 2009 (well, perhaps not big for some, but big for us).

I don’t have time to do a full update of everything at the moment, which will happen over the next week or so, but I do want to share with you something that brightened my day.  Lyndal (my sister-in-law) emailed me the follow video clip and I thought it was awesome (as is she for sharing this)… in fact, if you’re reading this and take the time to watch the video, you’re also up there with the best of them!  To everyone – you’re GREAT!

Before I dive into it, I’d just like to do two quick things. Firstly a warning – if you aren’t particularly interested in long, waffle-filed, stories about me, then turn away now as this post will be both long and full of a lot of pointless information.

Secondly, I’d also like to acknowledge the inspiration that encouraged me to get off my butt and write this post instead of going to bed (which is what I’d much rather be doing as my sleeping patterns are all screwed at the moment… more about that later).

I was going to write this post yesterday, only to discover that I had broken my internet connection by trying to upgrade the firmware on my modem in an effort to get my voIP phone to work with my router’s firewall setup (in retrospect, I should have realised that when I try and do technical things as advantageous as this, it never ends-up well). As I couldn’t seem to roll-back the firmware upgrade, I went-out and purchased a new router only to find that due to a conflict with my wireless network card driver, it crashed my laptop with a blue screen of death. It took me most of Saturday just to discover that the problem was a driver conflict as the machine would either get stuck in a reboot cycle crashing as soon as windows would start or if it did manage to boot in safe mode, it’d end-up crashing after a non-specified amount of time (but inevitably always before I could check my error logs to help diagnose why the errors were happening in the first place). Anyways, I digress…

The motivation for this long-winded update really came down to two people – my Dad and Con.

When I dad lunch with my folks a coupe of days ago, Dad said he wrote his first blog post (Mum argues that it wasn’t a proper blog platform that he was posting to… not to mention the fact that I’m astounded Mum could make this observation) but the simple fact that he’s giving it a go is truly admirable. To be honest everything my parents do (and have done over the years), is a shiny beacon of inspiration and without it, I doubt I (or my family) would be where we are today.

The second piece of inspiration came from my best mate Con, who is also quite inspiring in his own special kinda way, although unlike my parents, his most motivational words are usually preceded by copious amounts of alcohol.

He called me on Saturday morning and although I can’t remember a bulk of the conversation as I was still half-asleep, I felt pretty bad as I’ve been incredibly slack with keeping in touch. A blog post certainly doesn’t make-up for personalised one-on-one contact with friends, but at least it is still a way of sharing stories and events which at the time may have been quite entertaining, but are often forgotten a few weeks later when you’re on the phone and are asked “so… what’s been happening lately”.

Heh, there goes just over 550 words and I haven’t even started talking about what’s been going on… this IS going to be a long post.

A few weeks ago Mel and Joe had their engagement party. It was great to catch-up with Mel’s family and some old familiar friends that I got to know when Mel and I were flatmates. I didn’t know any of Joe’s friends, but let’s just say that some of them were quite interesting (and I don’t mean that in a bad way… I just can’t think of adequate words to describe a couple of them… one of which was offering me beard and moustache advice while policing the entrance to the function room so well that invited guests weren’t even sure if they were allowed in).

On top of the privilege of sharing such a milestone in Mel and Joe’s relationship, highlights of the evening included meeting some really great people, with impressive cocktails (none of which I can remember the names of, but the headache the following day confirmed they must have been good at the time), some not so impressive, but rather effective shots, beer and scotch, all helping to lubricate the conversations and mingling which we often don’t do much at parties.

On top of dealing with a hang-over the following morning, we also discovered that while we were sleeping, our house had been broken into. One of the back, kitchen windows was forced open causing the glass to break (enough to cause damage and require the glass to be replaced… but not quite enough to wake us… although the big night prior probably dulled our senses a little more than usual too).

They didn’t stick around long, nor did they target any larger items. Just grabbed Kristy’s handbag and purse off the dinning room table and then they were gone again. Kristy thought she heard some footsteps, but figured that it was most likely my Dad as he has keys to our house and its not uncommon for him to come over to mow the lawn or do odd-jobs.

We were about to call the police when they pulled-up next-door and it turns-out that a number of houses in the street were burgled and the school a few blocks down the road was vandalised. It was reassuring to know that we weren’t the only ones that were hit, plus our insurance covered the costs of replacing the window and reimbursed Kristy for some of her personal possessions from the handbag… but none of this makes-up for the inconvenience of having to cancel credit cards, update bank account details, get a new drivers license etc. etc.

Not to mention that once you know that a stranger has been able to gain entry to your house (and although unlikely, could re-enter at any time), every time the house creaks or you hear an unfamiliar sound, you start wondering if someone is trying to get in. It’s really quite an unsettling feeling which I’m sure will pass as time goes on, not to mention that we are now a lot more mindful of home security and are looking at getting better locks and screens on the windows when our budget permits.

The following weekend, Kristy and Caleb went to see a local performance of the musical ‘Cats’. I wasn’t particularly interested which turned-out well because there was a trivia night at my parents life-style village. Our team consisted of Mum, Dad, my brother Brett and the last-minute addition of sister Leanne and her husband Bob.

I didn’t hold high-hopes for our team (the Knew Some’s) because even though I love trivia, I’m pretty crap at it. Fortunately I paid attention to Voltron at an early age, so with our powers combined… we ended-up surprising ourselves and came second out of all the teams (along with winning some other lucky door prizes throughout the evening).

The next weekend, it was Vicky’s ‘Girls Night In‘ which I was hoping to catch-up with some of the guys, but due to my poor organisational skills leaving things to the last minute, everyone else had plans.

Normally I would have been a little saddened by this, but as I recently purchased Guitar Hero III on the PS3 I had the house to myself where I cranked the volume, dropped the dacks and rocked-out harder than Tom Cruise in Risky Business.

This brings me to the week and weekend just gone which is really the biggest news. Let me introduce you to George – He’s an 8-week old Maltese cross Shih Tzu puppy.

He’s the cutest little ball of fluff and since he’s still so young, we’ve been staying with him all day (both Kristy and I have worked from home a couple of days and since I effectively work by myself most of the time, I’m able to bring him to work with me).

He’s slowly getting used to going to the toilet outside (but will still require more training and patience) and over the last couple of nights he’s slept right through without waking us for a toilet break at 2am. He’s still been awake at 5am each morning, so I’ve been a bit cranky as I’m not a morning person… but, I can’t really complain too much because Kristy’s been going through the same treatment and is dealing with it a lot better than I am.

The newness of having a little puppy and not knowing what to do has had me reading every online article, forum, blog and any other source of doggy information I can find. So when you combine my lack of knowledge with an information overload, topped off with very little sleep for the last week, you end-up with me freaking-out a lot. I’ve been following George around Googling everything he does… “is he supposed to be doing that?”… “what does it mean when they do this?” etc. etc.

In a few weeks he’ll be starting Puppy Preschool which covers basic obedience training plus the opportunity for him to mingle with other puppies which is also crucial to their development and hopefully by then I will have had some sleep and settled-down a bit.

In the meantime, here are a few pics :

The group consisted mainly of family and a few close friends which worked-out well because there was a reasonable amount of mingling (we feared that by having an event that includes both friends and family, there would be an instant divide between the two groups) but all went far better than expected.

Everyone seemed to like the house, which is good because we really like it and due to a 6-figure debt, we’re not going to be moving anytime soon… although for most people, the highlight of the evening was the food.

Kristy decided that the traditional Australian BBQ was a little boring, so instead we had Indian curry.  My involvement in the preparation was minimal and simply involved chopping ingredients, stirring and taste testing… that last bit wasn’t a requirement, but I was happy to volunteer my taste buds… so full credit goes to Kristy for all the proper work which was done the evening before the gathering where we prepared the butter chicken and lamb rogan josh.

The afternoon before everyone arrived, we started re-heating the curries in a couple of large slow-cookers and setup a couple of rice cookers to take care of the saffron rice.

When the sun went down we handed-out the bowls and invited everyone to serve themselves and the response from EVERYONE (which is unusual, because there’s usually at least one person in every group that you simply can never seem to please) was that the food was awesome.

Kristy and I couldn’t have been happier with the evening!

The following day (Sunday May 25) was International Towel Day in memory of the late Douglas Adams.  Why a towel?  Well to quote one of Adams’ most famous books, The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy:

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical
value – you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you – daft as a bush, but very, very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

So there you have it.

The other piece of interesting news that many people found-out for the first time at our house warming is that we now have a new addition to our little family – a cat named Tiger!

We inherited him from Kristy’s mum who saved him from being put-down by a work colleague who was moving overseas.  Kristy’s mum has never been a big ‘pet’ person, so she did it out of sympathy and not because she really wanted a pet… so when we got the house and could finally have a pet, we asked if we could take him off her hands as we thought it would be good for Caleb.

Now for those who know me well would be amazed by that last comment because I’ve never liked cats.  I’ve had friends with cats and I’ve tolerated them, but have always been a ‘dog’ person.  Cats have always seemed incredibly arrogant, but the unconditional love, the stupidity and general playfulness of dogs have always attracted me to them (this probably says a lot about my personality).

Tiger also fits into the arrogant category, but I now understand that it’s not as bad as it initially seems.  He comes and goes as he pleases, he’ll hang around with you when you’re doing stuff like watching TV or cooking dinner and other than feeding him and cleaning-out the litter box, he pretty-much doesn’t require much ‘looking after’ at all.

So, I’m not saying I’m turning into a crazy cat person and that I want to get dozens more… but this guy isn’t too bad.  Here are some Tiger pics.

I know this post has gone on long enough, so I’ll quickly wrap-up what we got up-to this weekend (the one that happened over the last 48 hours)… on Friday night we went over to Scotty’s place for a poker night.  It was just Scotty, Skye, Kristy and I, and this was Kristy’s first time playing Texas Holdems’

Skye won, Scotty was close behind her… then me (much further behind) and even further still was Kristy.  Even though I sucked, the night of gambling, drinking and talking shit was really fun.

To give you an indication of the confidence we have when it comes to tools and home-handy-man work… on the first day we moved into the new house, we discovered that there was hot water in the bathroom basin and laundry tubs, but the hot water didn’t appear to work in the kitchen or the shower.

So after checking the hot water system and pipes to the various taps etc. I gave my folks a call to see if they had any pearls of wisdom. Mum answered the phone, so I explained the situation and asked to speak with Dad (at which point she started laughing) and proceeded to joke that I may not have picked the best person to call when it comes to these sorts of things.

As it turns-out, the taps were just back-to-front and hot water labels were on the cold taps by mistake. Easily fixed and I felt pretty stupid for not thinking to check something as simple as that… but my feeling of stupidity was far outweighed by relief that we didn’t need to get a plumber over to fix something on the very first day we arrived.

Anyways… I digress.

A couple of weeks ago, Kristy and I purchased a cloths hoist as the new house didn’t have one, and neither of us had any idea of how we were going to mount it. So I called my Dad… and he concurred – none of us had any idea of how we would put this thing up. In fact, the conversation went a little like this:

Me: “Hi Dad… we just bought a cloths hoist but it’s currently in the box and we’ll need to assemble it and put it up”
Dad: “Really? Do you know anyone who can do that sort of thing?”
Me: “That’s what I was hoping you could help us with”
Dad: “Um… err… sure… I’m sure we’ll be able to figure it out”

And we did!!!

After a couple of trips to the hardware store to get the nuts, bolts, screws and a few planks of wood to help re-enforce the structure and a few hours worth of measuring, sawing, drilling and screwing… it was complete:

It may not look like much, but considering I don’t really own any proper tools and prior to this project the only thing I’ve constructed is Ikea furniture… it’s not a bad effort.

Let me leaving you with these parting words of wisdom that I heard recently – “When all you have is a hammer… all your problems start to look like nails”

In this time, Kristy and I have booked an overseas holiday to go and visit Con, Gerard and Chris in the UK (as well as spending some time sight-seeing in France and Italy).

We hired a new staff member for my web hosting company which was exciting until it got to the point where she had made so many little mistakes that, when combined caused some fairly significant accounting issues that we really had no choice but to let her go. Part of me wishes I could have said “Step into my office… because you’re f*cking fired” (to quote the crazy hitch-hiker from There’s something about Mary), but no… it is actually quite painful firing someone when you know they’ve tried their hardest, but unfortunately didn’t quite manage to get it right time and time again.

Kristy also tore the ligaments in her knee at dancing and has spent the last 6 weeks hobbling around and going to physio to repair the damage. It’s mending nicely, but she’s been in quite a bit of pain and has shown a tremendous amount of perseverance, determination and will-power to do as much as she has with everything else that’s been going on at the same time – truly admirable stuff!

In the middle of all this (and what’s to follow), I had to go down to Sydney for a few days for a search engine optimisation conference/expo which was brilliant and I’ll talk about that a bit more on my SEO Blog.

But the biggest news is that Kristy and I bought a house… our very first home sweet home! We took some pics of the new house prior to moving-in, but they don’t really do the place justice – the rooms are a lot bigger than they look in the photos.

Buying a house was a lot harder and far more stressful than we ever anticipated.

It all began when we were out-and-about one day and saw a sign saying there was an ‘open house’ around the corner from where we were renting. We thought that we’d check it out for shits-and-giggles and as it turns-out the place was really nice. It was (roughly) an 80-year-old workers cottage that had been substantially renovated and refurbished by an owner-builder. It had new wiring, new carpet, new paint job, new guttering, new light fittings and ceiling fans, polished-wood floors throughout the main living areas, a nice-sized refurbished kitchen, two large main bedrooms with two smaller bedrooms towards the front of the house (one of which we’re using as an office and the other as a spare room), new plumbing and a nice sized back yard (not too big to maintain, but not tiny either).

The place was perfect because everything was done for us. This was especially good for me because let’s face it – I wouldn’t know which end of a hammer you use to hit a nail with (not to mention the endless damage I would cause if I actually owned a proper set of tools).

So we thought about it and then had a chat with Kristy’s friend Trish who works at a bank for advice on whether she thought we’d qualify for a home loan… and we decided we’d put an offer in. After all, we thought if we made the offer subject to finance, building and pest inspection, then if anything didn’t check-out we’d walk away.

Well, it wasn’t quite as simple as that.

I won’t go into all the nasty details or mention names, but the person organising our finance was simply useless. She misquoted information, advised things were done when they weren’t which meant we needed to request our contract be extended and ultimately instilled absolutely no sense of confidence in us throughout the whole process. Needless to say, this caused far more stress than we would have liked when making the largest purchase of our lives.

Despite the stress, it all worked-out in the end… which then started the next roller-coaster ride of moving and cleaning-out our old place. This spanned a couple of weeks and ended-up being painful, riddled with little issues and far more costly costly than expected, but like everything else, it’s (just about) all sorted now and everything is slowly getting back to normal. Sure I’m sore and constantly tired from arranging furniture, putting together Ikea wardrobes and book cases and unpacking a never-ending pile of boxes, but it really is well worth it in the end – I couldn’t be more excited and proud to be a home owner and honestly didn’t expect this to have happened as quickly as it did.

So that’s my long-winded excuse for why I haven’t blogged for the last few weeks.

But I’m baaaccckk … and you can start to expect some more frequent updates from now on.