Blog
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Excavation underway
So demolition is nearly complete. Builders are now working on excavating down for the main slab where our new kitchen will be. Concrete apparently should be poured end of this week or early next week.
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Demolition seems almost complete
Holly and I popped in on Friday to see progress. The back half of the house is now pretty much gone. Also some photos from a bit earlier in the week when Holly and Tracy visited.
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That happened quickly!
Holly popped in on the house this afternoon and snapped these.
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Demolition starts today
After a rather frantic week of moving stuff around the house and clearing things out, we're ready for the build to start. Holly's been working like a trooper on this! Builder moves in today with all h…
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Our build is about to begin
For those I haven't mentioned it to, we're about to do a major renovation on the house. We've lived here nearly 8 years and done a couple of little changes over the time, opening up the dividing wall…
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Recruiter hilarity of the week
I get about five calls a week where a recruiter finds my name in LinkedIn and call our company reception number asking for me by name. I can see this on my phone so I'm always prepared for them to be…
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Nerd Dad does an experiment
On Saturday my nearly 5 year old asked me why the heat was going out of the room by him leaving the bathroom door open. He's not really ready for the Second Law of Thermodynamics just yet, so I though…
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Healthcare spending: worst of both worlds
A few years back The Economist had a great chart on health care spending showing the split between public and private spending. What's interesting is the huge proportion of government spending from th…
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Awesome Q
For Mother's Day I did some racks of ribs in the smoker. Mostly followed this recipe but used a commercial BBQ sauce for the final basting. They turned out amazing. Lip smacking good. No leftovers. Se…
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The three possible responses to Heartbleed
There really are three things you'll see from vendors about Heartbleed: We don't update our packages very often. (i.e., RUN AWAY RUN AWAY) We use a Microsoft stack for all our web stuff (i.e. RUN AWAY…
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Bunnings: the Soviet hardware store
One of the most frustrating things about living in London was the supermarkets' reliance on Just In Time goods delivery, which more often than not ended up being Just Too Late. Rocking up to the Tesco…
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2013 was the year I finally kicked print
I got a new Kindle for Xmas and I'm absolutely loving it. The backlighting is so smooth and subtle, I can read in the dark without disturbing the other half. It's a brilliant piece of technology conne…
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Exxopolis by Architects of Air
Yesterday we took the kids in to see Exxopolis, a giant inflatable scupture sitting out the front of the Sydney Opera House. The first photo is one I took on Tuesday while walking down for the Matmos…
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Security too weak
The password I was trying to use? Why, the common dictionary word "bBFFI$&Q^UAH". But if I add a 1 to the end, no problem!
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Tableau formula for email domains
As much as I love Tableau, its string functions are rubbish. No split, no regex, not a lot very useful. I find myself constantly searching back in old Tableau files for this, so it's time to publish i…
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Sydney Festival 2014
It's January in Sydney which means Sydney Festival time. That's when Sydney's centre is transformed for a pretty damn awesome art and culture festival. There's always a stack of awesome gigs, plus fre…
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Jawbone UP! and self quantification
In May last year I started wearing the annoyingly-capitalized Jawbone UP device. It's a wrist band that tracks your movements, syncing the data with an app on your phone. It's part of the whole Quanti…
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5:2: a diet for greedy people
I've never been a skinny guy. The fittest I've ever been, playing rugby in my mid-teens, I was still chunky bloke. Helped me avoid being bullied. As an adult, my weight has gradually crept up. Finally…
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Using a Gandi SSL certificate in AWS Elastic Beanstalk Load Balancer
Wow this was way more painful than it should've been. SSL is hard! So I followed the instructions from Gandi and ended up with a private key, a certificate signing request, a certificate and an interm…
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Standing desk: Day 1
I've had a few back problems of late, a herniated disk from lifting my daughter basically. My physio suggests that sitting all day is a big problem, so I've decided to experiment with a standing desk.…