Too much clutter

Our house has too much clutter.  Want to know how  I know this?

Last night, I was sorting through my wife's pile of paperwork that she appears to take great delight in ignoring.  I had had enough (as happens on an irregular basis) so while we watched some Season 4 Scrubs (a Christmas 2007 present) I began going through it.

Apart from a large number of empty envelopes, out of date coupons, old newsletters and important notices, I found a bunch of Christmas cards from 2006.  Inside one of those cards was $50.

When your clutter is costing you money, you know that the time has come for some change.

Isn't that right, dear?

Representation

I have been eligible to vote since 1996. I find it interesting that for the very first time in my voting life, I will be represented at a national level by a government that I actually voted for. For the first time in my adult life I can safely say that the majority of my fellow Australians feel the same way that I do on the issues that matter to me.

I have spent 11 years in the wilderness, out of touch with society. It's nice to be back :)

Back amongst the living again

It's been a while, and so much has happened yet nothing changes.

In the last couple of months we met Tori Amos, I was involved in a minor car accident, the car was repaired (and looks better than it did before the accident), my knee continues to recover well (I have permission to start running again. Yay!) and Elijah continues to grow and amaze us all.

University sucked up every spare moment that wasn't spent either at work, choring domestically or playing with the boy. I discovered yesterday that the effort was worthwhile as my final assignment mark was returned to me, just squeezing me up in to the High Distinction category, maintaining my perfect record (6 HDs from 6 subjects studied so far). There is still a long way to go as my current pace of 1 subject a semester will see me graduate at the end of 2010 {sigh}. With a bit of luck, the IT skills shortage will rage on unabated until then.

Work has been spotty and at times lacking in stimulation. The new year will bring some personal reflection and evaluation of where I want to be and where we want to be as a family. Interesting times might well be ahead.

Chicks really do dig pink

At least, according to this article on The Economist (Sex, shopping and thinking pink).

Puts those brochures below into perspective I guess.

Boys versus Girls

Two identical pieces of advertising copy. One of these was addressed to me and one of these was addressed to my wife. Guess which one is which?

Getting it right

I'm not a perfect husband by any means. I'm often tired and grumpy, I can be impatient and I have a nasty habit of being sarcastic, glib and dismissive (all at the same time, mind you).

Last week the local paper had a competition to win an opportunity to meet Tori Amos and receive front row tickets to her Canberra concert. Anyone who knows my wife knows she is a huge (obsessive?) Tori fan and we have had tickets to this concert for many weeks already. I knew H. would be busy the day of the competition so I entered it on her behalf. A chance to meet your hero doesn't come along very often after all.

As a consequence of my entry, we now have two spare tickets to the concert, my wife has enjoyed a week of excited anticipation as she waits to meet her musical hero this weekend and, for just a short period of time, I have been proclaimed The Best Husband in the Universe.

See, sometimes I do get it right.

Alive and well

I've received a number of notes from people checking to see how I'm going as the nasty looking photos of my knee are the latest bits of information I have up.

Briefly, surgery went well, recovery/rehab is going even better and I'm making daily improvements.

Life is good (but a bit achy at times).

Feeling kneeded. Again.

I'm out of hospital and feeling okay (painkillers help, although they are a little strong). The worse-case scenario didn't materialise and I am thankful I didn't need my ACL reconstructed. In the end my meniscus was repaired (by cutting lots of it away) and the doctor punched a hole in the cyst that had also grown on my knee. Hopefully that will start draining away, too.

For the not so squeamish, here's the before and after...

Before

After

Slice and dice

It's official - I'm going to be operated on and I'm booked in for Tuesday.

I knew when I injured my knee playing football four weeks ago that it was going to be bad news for me. Straight away I felt something go and I thought "This could be it for the year." Turns out I was right.

The verdict from external examinations is that I've got a very badly torn lateral meniscus in my left knee, a large cyst (the result of significant trauma apparently) and an even-odds chance that I've sustained damage to my anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), which is kind of like the foundation ligament inside the knee joint that is very important for stability of the joint.

At best, I'll have a very large chunk of my meniscus removed (what is left of it anyway - I had a piece removed 11 years ago) and the cyst will be drained of the fluid and left to settle on its own. A medium outcome is that the cyst will have to be surgically removed (which is surgeon's preferred option at the moment) through an incision on the side of the joint. Worst case scenario is all of that mixed in with a knee reconstruction where a piece of my hamstring tendon is removed and used to reinforce the ACL. Across the options recovery to full fitness varies from up to 6 weeks to up to (and beyond) 6 months.

Urgh.

The whole thing is going to cost thousands, too. That's after rebates from Medicare and my health insurance, mind you.

Lots of funky (but ouch, my god, they are going to do what?) video and animations at Orthosports.

Braiiiins

Braiiiins
Originally uploaded by smperris

In Case of Zombies.

Threadless t-shirt birthday present number 2.

30 days later...

This is definitely a late post. I am aware of that.

I have been absorbing the lessons from my disastrous attempt to spend 30 days actually doing something...well, anything, really.

1. Have a plan. Knowing what it is you want to do has to be more successful than thinking "Right. It's Monday. What do I want to do now?", because that sucked big time as a method of achieving stuff.
2. Related to the above, spend some time working out where it is you want to improve. Fumbling and bumbling and guessing and hoping it will come to you is probably not going to work. It didn't for me at any rate.
3. Failing is okay. Not being able to get it together has shown me the deficiencies in my "plan".

That's it. It took a week to sort out, but that's it. Distilled knowledge, people. Lap it up.

In the short term I'm reacquainting myself with GTD. I had my GTD mojo at the start of the year but it slowly ebbed away as I get a little cocky that I was on top of things. I let my whole system fall apart. Time to rebuild it.

One of the unexpected side-benefits of this process is that my wife has started to get really down with all the clutter we have in our life and our house. We're slowly working on reducing the amount of useless crap we have accumulated. We have both greatly reduced the amount of paperwork we have lying around the house. The shredder has been getting a really good work out. I have also started to be a bit ruthless about what books I will keep and which ones I will get move on. It's been liberating, in a way.

All up, an interesting experience, and one worth trying again after a little bit of preparation.

"Mind like water".

That is the state I want to reach.

Days 27 - 29: It's a trap!

This 30 Days experiment has revealed to me a part of myself that I was only dimly aware of previously - there's a part of my self that likes to set me up and try and make me fail. It attempts to trap me and keep me down. I don't know why it does this but I am aware of it more than ever. It tries to lure me in with promises of change and success and excitement but then tries to keep me in the same old rut, doing the same old tired things. I need to change this. I also have to want to change this. I think the want is nearly there as well.

The last three days have been mildly productive. I did some study (that's going to be a common theme for the next three months); we both finally filled out those forms I have been blathering about for weeks; I fiddled with our broken camera and narrowed down the problem to the zoom lens in some capacity; I finished backing up the home videos on DVD; I checked out some second hand filing cabinets with a view to picking up a couple for the study/studio/computer room; I took the boy out of the house for a couple of hours to give his mother some much-needed peace and creativity time; and at work I individually numbered 200+ pages in my new files, in amongst the day to day activities that keep the machinery of government working.

Like I said, mildly productive. You can make even the laziest of days seem productive if you go to the effort of listing everything that you have done.

I might not have achieved all that much over the last 29 days, but I am learning a lot about myself and how I work. Trying to make substantial changes to the way I do things without a game plan is like leading my self-confidence to the slaughter. I hope to repeat something like this soon(ish). I intend to be better prepared.

Meal worm in venus fly trap originally uploaded to Flickr by blmurch. Used under a Creative Commons BY-SA 2.0 licence.

Merlin Mann: Inbox Zero

Merlin Mann is one of my favourite people I have never met but know a lot about. He's a productivity guru who is the creator of the productivity site 43 Folders and is also my favourite regular contributor to the MacBreak Weekly podcast (I don't own a Mac, but want to).

Recently Merlin gave a presentation as part of Google's regular Tech Talks series on one of his favourites - Inbox Zero. Inbox Zero is about how to efficiently process large volumes of email to keep things under control and your own sanity in check. Inbox Zero borrows heavily (and unashamedly) from David Allen's Getting Things Done process.

If you find you're buried under email and other things and you have a spare hour, it might be worth your while to check this out. It's really interesting.

Day 25 & 26: The train wreck continues

Soon you will be able to look away as this train wreck is nearly over.

Once again work has been up and down. This time I have been waiting for some file covers to arrive from Records Management as I've filled up the files I had. One of them arrived today so I'm in the process of filling that one up. A number of briefings and pieces of correspondence have also started their epic journey upstream through the clearance process. It can be a slow and torturous path at times.

Meanwhile, the metaphorical list of things I need to do around the house continues to grow and grow. I am going to have to turn it into an actual list if I hope to get anything done. While I'm going to do a full review of the 30 day experiment when the time has passed, the number one thing I have learnt out of all of this is that if I don't have a physical list of actions, they are not going to get done.

The second thing I have learnt is that even if I only fill half of my 10 book allocation on the Safari Online library, the potential for time wasting is enormous. Right now I'm splitting my time between the Windows Vista Missing Manual and Ebay Hacks 2nd Edition.

Tonight I need to do some introductory reading on XML for my XML Technologies subject. I also think I'm being lined up to do a bit of video editing and uploading as the boy has been acting all cute again, apparently.

Train Wreck was originally uploaded to Flickr by zimpenfish and is used under a Creative Commons By Attribution Sharealike 2.0 licence.

Day 24: Slowly on the move

I was going to provide an update via email sent from my phone but I pushed a wrong button and canceled it completely. This much shorter message is Take 2.

I ticked off some chores (I now have an appointment with a specialist next week to have my knee looked at) but my work is still all process and no endgame. It is my own fault and this experiment is showing me I need to take greater control of my own destiny.

Very little will get done at home tonight. I'm still on the bus coming home from uni. It has been a long day already and I have no desire to make it any longer.

I wonder how you apply labels to a post submitted via email?

Edited 24/07/07 21:40 to fix punctuation and formatting and to add a label. Emailing isn't perfect, it would seem, but it's probably cool for short updates.

Day 23: In review

It's only Day 23 (technically yesterday was Day 23) but I've already decided that this experiment has not worked as planned. My day job is getting done, albeit at a slow and disappointing pace. Things are flat at the office and while there's work to be done, no one really feels inclined to power on through it. I think it's a function of what we do, in that when Parliament sits we're at the beck and call of our political masters and when it doesn't, we hit a slump as the urgency fades away and the adrenaline wears off.


On the upside, I have far less filing to complete compared to Day 1, so there have been some benefits.


It's the tasks around the house that have left me the most despondent with my progress. I started off with some great mental motivation but that didn't last long. There are many tasks floating around in the back of my mind that I have left uncompleted and there are probably some that are even unacknowledged. The only substantial thing I did achieve was to clean up my desk in our study. However, that was a couple of weeks ago and I've fed off that achievement for far too long.


Ideas are starting to coalesce in my mind about where I went wrong. My immediate thoughts are that I lacked structure and planning. I also don't think I was fully committed to it, although I thought I was. Being sick for a week in the middle of it didn't help either.


As for what I actually achieved on Day 23, there's not much to say. My day to day work moved along with nothing getting finished but at least with nothing left behind or ignored. Filing, briefings, general paperwork - all in motion. At home, I began backing up a couple of DVD home videos of the boy so that we can reuse the DVDs in the camera. That took far longer than I expected and thinking about it right now, I think it was because I forgot to reset the power settings of the laptop from Power Saver to Full Power. D'oh.

Feeling Kneeded

The physio has confirmed my fears after hurting my knee on the weekend playing football.

The cartilage is very likely torn and I've been referred to a specialist for an official opinion.

Damn.

There's still 6 games left in the season, plus finals. If I need surgery, even a minor arthroscopy, I can kiss the rest of the season and finals football goodbye.

Damn.

The Communist Party

My wife bought me a bunch of t-shirts from Threadless [1].

Here's the first one, "The Communist Party", in hoodie form.

[1] Disclaimer: that's a Street Team link, meaning if you buy anything after following the link, I get credit towards more t-shirts. And I really want more Threadless t-shirts.

Days 19-22: Fading Fast

I'm failing and I know it. I'm starting to sink at an ever increasing rate and it's somewhat concerning to me that after only three weeks, whole days are once more passing without anything substantial being achieved at all.

Old habits are indeed hard to to break.

Friday saw another pointless day of printing, filing and discarding. This is time consuming and dull but necessary. I should be thankful that at the moment there is sufficient time at work to undertake this activity or my filing would be in even worse shape than it already is.

The weekend saw me sacrifice my own productivity to help boost my wife's. I took the boy out with me for a couple of hours Saturday afternoon to watch our first division team play (and get spanked again - they are not having a good season - of course, we took our own beating earlier in the afternoon so it's a club wide misery at the moment). He got to sit around, eat cold Vegemite toast and yell at the players, which means he had a good afternoon. H. was able to get some singing practice done. Sunday morning I took Elijah shopping with me as I spent some of my birthday money on CDs. He got antsy after a while so I didn't get to check out the bookshop and as a consequence, we were only gone for about 90 minutes. H. was able to get more stuff done around the house that had been bothering her, so I guess it wasn't in vain.

Today has been a mixed bag. I've finally finished the printing and collating the filing for my major work project. All I need to do now is to throw it in its file and folio it (ie manually and sequentially number each page - fun. Woo. Hold me back...). Hopefully tonight I can finish off some financial documents that we've been trying to fill out for weeks (various motivational crises have struck this particular issue). I also hope to try and back up some of the home DVDs of Bugs.

I've got to get this back on track, I'm just not sure how right now.

Oh, I forgot that since my wife gave me a bunch of t-shirts for my birthday, I had to make room for them. As a consequence, I have a pile of old and/or holey t-shirts in the bedroom waiting for me to either throw out or donate next weekend (the nearest charity bin requires me to drive there, so it can wait for the weekend).

Day 18: Fuzzy

Today has been another one of those strange days. I printed off a bunch of stuff that will eventually be placed on my most important file. I need to finish off the printing tomorrow and then do the whole date order thing before I do the big hole punching deal, and top it off with some "folioing" (which means I have to manually number each page). I achieved something, that much is clear. Whether it's all I could have achieved is another thing altogether.

I think my work is expanding to fill the available time, which is becoming frustrating. I can't wait for Parliament to sit again. Then the crunch will be back on.

I now have another copy of the financial forms we need to fill out. That's on the list for tomorrow. Tonight, I need to go to bed.

When we say 'too,' we're really saying 'no.' But it doesn't feel like a 'no' if we don't say 'no.' So we say 'too.'

It may make us feel better, but it doesn't make a difference, and it doesn't get us any closer to remarkable. If you find yourself saying 'too' a lot, press on anyway. Often times, we close doors that were wide open just because we're nervous about what's on the other side.

'Too' is the new 'No' - Coolpeoplecare.org

Day 17: Tax-o-rama

The less said about work the better. Things are moving along, but slowly. Filing is getting done, gradually. It could be done faster, and therein lies my issues with my own motivation. I'm slipping back into old habits and inefficient work practices again. I think I will need to re-evaluate how I'm going about this in the workplace. Hmmm, should be fun.

Tonight, however, I've started doing something that most people hate, but I love to do as early as I can and get over and done with. I have begun my taxes. Woo! Sadly, the main reason I love doing my taxes is that I use the eTax system.

Yes, I enjoy doing my taxes because I can geek it up while doing it.

Tax Time originally posted to Flickr by Scot. Used under a Creative Commons BY-SA 2.0 license.

Day 16: The Slump

I've hit a motivation crisis a little sooner than I was hoping. Actually, I figured I could keep myself motivated for a measly 30 days. Apparently, not so much.

Work is patchy at the moment. I have found from experience that if work is busy, it is easier for me to keep motivated and organised. When work comes in spurts, it is all too easy to drift along and get sidetracked on unimportant things.

Today I futzed around far too much. I'm not happy and I'm not impressed. I started a bunch of things and upon reflection, I don't think I actually finished anything at all. Bother. That makes this day something of a failure. Again.

Football training got called off tonight due to wet weather. This is a good thing which means I get to sit at home and spend time with my lovely wife (the computer gets turned off very soon).

Probably not much will get done tonight given it's my birthday. Yay. Here's a picture of the orange and poppy seed cake I baked for my birthday and took to work.

My workplace has the tradition where if it is your birthday, you bring a cake. This way, you are not constantly chipping in for birthday cakes for other people. It works out easiest for everyone and is something that makes perfect sense to me.

Maybe I'll do some more shredding tonight. That seems to be my fall back, when all else fails option.

Day 15: Weird accomplishments

After being home sick for a week, today was catch up day. I only had about 50 emails to work through, although I did need to action or think about almost all of them. This took the bulk of the day to work through. I also knocked off a handful of errands in my lunch hour and early afternoon. A busy day productively spent, although I don't know that I really achieved anything. Like I said, weird accomplishments.

Some shredding will be in order tonight, the perfect task for ad breaks.

Tonight I'm baking a cake. Ask me why tomorrow.

Day 13 & 14 - Success!

Success in the scheme of things at any rate. More work needs to be done, but after the lethargy and loss of momentum from the last week, I feel good that I've achieved something again.

Before

The messy and almost unusable desk in the study. The monitor on the left (which takes up a lot of space) is actually attached to the rarely used Mac G4 that sits just out of picture.

After

The Aftermath

A big ol' bag o' trash. It's mostly old print-outs, scraps of peripherals and empty boxes I should have flung out the door a long time ago.

Day 11 & 12: Big Fat Zero

It had to come, I guess. I got nothing done for Day 11. In fact, I got so little done that I'm not even blogging this until Day 12. The only thing of any note is that I finally installed GNUCash, an open source personal accounting software package. No, I didn't think that counted as much of an achievement either.

Time slipped away from me and I noticed that I had dropped back into my old time wasting habits. Day 12 isn't going much better, although I have got the car in for a service today, so that's something I guess.

Here's to hoping that the weekend ahead provides a little more joy.

Day 10: A new hope

This is the new shredder. I plan to give it a trial workout during the ads while watching House tonight.

Shredding something is better than doing nothing at all.

Day 9: More bleh

I am now officially under doctor's orders to do nothing for the rest of the week. This is a good thing, I guess, as it means I can rest and sleep and get healthy. It does make it difficult to stay productive when you have no energy and no pressure to keep moving.

I'm sure I'll survive.

I'm halfway through the CD sorting I was going to do yesterday but didn't (I went to bed early instead and slept solidly for nearly 10 hours - woo!). If it turns out I haven't seen the Gilmore Girls episode currently on the TV, I will do some more garden research.

Oh, and we now have a new shredder, bought while I spent 2.5 hours in the waiting room at the doctors. I love my wife.


Down with the sickness originally posted to Flickr by Mayr. Used under a Creative Commons BY 2.0 licence.

Day 8: Bleh

I've been sick all day. I've achieved exactly nothing. Bleh.

Maybe I'll reorganise some CDs later or something. Something's better than nothing I guess.

Day 6 & 7 - The Shredinator

Saturdays are generally a write-off. Helen teaches in the morning and I play football in the afternoon. This Saturday was even worse as we went to a wedding instead. The wedding was beautiful and the reception was a lot of fun, but as a consequence nothing got done around the home.

On Sunday I gathered together all my loose paperwork and sorted it. The bits I needed I put in my decrepit cardboard accordion file. Those bits I didn't need were also "filed" appropriately.

Unfortunately, I also broke the shredder. I'm on the hunt for a new one now.

I have also begun sorting through all my old magazines. I don't need them and I never go back and read them so why am I keeping them?

Day 5: Filemaster

Until a week ago, I hadn't filed a single thing since I started in this job over 6 months ago. This week I have become a filing demon. Actually, not so much a demon as a minor imp, but filing imp doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

I'm not finished my filing by a long shot, but I am getting into a healthy filing groove which in turn is helping me feel a lot better about my work. I have been able to maintain a clean desk all this time (I work under an official "clean desk policy" security regime) but my desk drawers were becoming very crowded indeed. My filing blitz is helping me clear out the deadwood, which in turn is helping to clear my mind.

Parliament sits again in a couple of weeks. I'm going to hit the ground running mentally recharged. All this filing has been dragging me, more than I thought possible.

Nothing else tonight. At least not yet, at any rate. The night is still young(ish).


filing cabinets originally posted to Flickr by redjar. Used under a Creative Commons By Attribution Share-alike licence.

Day 4: I'll keep this quick

I'm trying to keep my online time to the bare minimum tonight so I'm keeping this short and sweet.

I've done twice as much filing today as I did yesterday. The more I do, the easier it gets. It helps that we're a bit light on for work (although as usual, something comes in late in the day so I can't get away early) so I can spend some time on this. I also updated a couple of documents for clearance once Parliament sits again in a few weeks time. Finally, my little mapping project is now in maintenance mode ie I only need to update it when new information comes to hand. Yay! Friday is a traditionally slow time so with a bit of luck, I could knock over the bulk of the rest and still knock off a wee bit early.

I won't be achieving anything else today, unless cuddle time counts as an achievement. In fact, I've now decided it does.

Day 3. Urgh.

This is proving to be as difficult as I thought it would be, which is a bit pathetic when you think about it. Surely it shouldn't be too difficult to achieve one thing a day.

The interesting thing is that the more I think "What am I going to get done today?", the more I notice things that really need to be done, and done much sooner rather than the later that I have become accustomed to.

Today I sorted out the electronic archival/filing system once and for all and was able to clear one entire file document backlog. It might not seem like much, but proper record keeping is an important thing.

I've spent most of these evening battling with technical difficulties while conversing with Ebay Live Help through their web-based chat. That took hours (their server kept bumping me) which meant that I didn't achieve much of anything else. Urgh.

I have got to get more organised or this is going to be an embarrassing 30 days.

Small steps

I guess (and hope) that by cranking out some of the smaller things, the bigger things will start to fall in to place. Day 2 has not exactly been an inspirational success.

I managed to push through a document for clearance a day ahead of schedule.

I sorted and collated a batch of emails ready for electronic filing and archival. It fell over at the last hurdle as I'm incorrectly assigned in the system so I can't actually file them until records management fix it. Of course, I couldn't get the right people on the phone at all today. *sigh*

On the other hand, I started a new project using "My Maps" on Google Maps, although I am not in a position to give any further details on that one.

At home I started filling out a few bank forms but I don't think I have all the information I need at hand. I thought I might get this one finished tonight but now I don't think so.

The garden planning continues. Slowly.

Like I said, small steps. Very small steps.

Drifting

Lately I've been drifting a little, both at work and at home. I've been keeping things ticking over, but I don't think I have been moving forward. There have been periods where days go by and I don't feel like I have achieved anything at all. Not one thing. New month, new financial year, and a time to try something a little bit different.

I hope to try and achieve at least one thing every day and if possible, two things - one at home and one at work. I'm going to try and move it forward for 30 days and see what happens.

Anyway...

Daily Achievement

Work
I've started getting my filing at work in order. Since I started working here in November, I haven't done any proper filing. I feel bad about this because I started my career in the public service in a records management position. Today I worked out how to order new files (I've been doing some filing on existing files). It's a small step but it's one I've been avoiding for a while.

Home
I worked out how to use Secondbrain. It might look suspiciously like futzing instead of doing work, but I plan to use Secondbrain to organise my research for planning our garden, which has lain fallow for long enough. We've talked about planning and actually planting a garden for almost 2 years. It's time some planning actually got underway.

batting about the driftwood originally posted to Flickr by striatic. Used under a Creative Commons By Attribution - Share Alike 2.0 licence.

Edit 3/7/07 8:15am to correctly attribute Flickr photo.

Timekeeper

For the first time in over a year, I have started wearing a watch again.

I got tired of using my mobile phone as a surrogate watch, which isn't a useful solution in situations where my phone is switched off (which happens more often than I first thought it would).

I own three watches and up until yesterday morning, all three of them needed new batteries. Now only two need new batteries (they also need new watchbands, but one step at a time). I didn't have to spend any time at all deciding which watch I was going to resurrect first. The watch above was given to me on my 21st birthday by a group of my university friends so it has great sentimental value to me.

After all this time, wearing a watch feels weird. I'm still not used to the extra weight on my wrist or the scraping noise it makes when it hits the desk while I'm typing. I have lost a bit of weight since I last wore it so it is still a bit loose on my arm. I am sure I will adapt.

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.

Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

Herbert Simon, Recipient of Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics
and the A.M. Turing Award, the “Nobel Prize of Computer Science”

Life how it used to be lived. The return of Main St?

I used to love the idea of urban sprawl with everyone having their own slice of land. These days, I wish there was more urban infill. I feel like so much community is missing in my personal interactions and I wish I could create opportunity for me.



Superkul is a Canadian architectural firm that turned a run down residence and returned it to its original shopfront/residence glory and added a third floor into the bargain. There are some great pictures of the setup on Treehugger.

Bring it on, I say. Main Streets rock.

The hammock district.

Even though Canberra is now firmly in the grasp of Winter's icy tendrils, every now and then Mother Nature throws up a gorgeous day like today. No breeze, moderate temperature (max 14C) and barely a cloud in the sky.

It shouldn't take a genius to work out why I decided to read the paper and take a brief nap in the hammock this morning. I fed the boy lunch to give my wife a chance to do the same. Her nap was, shall we say, not so brief. I had to wake her an hour later! Still, it has done her a world of good and we're both much better for our hammock adventures today.

If only all Canberra winter days looked as gorgeous as this one!

One of these ones is not like the others

I spotted this ad in this morning's Canberra Times newspaper. I just had to laugh..

It's a bit difficult to read but it says:

• In store signing with Australian adult movie stars
  
• Pole dancing and lingerie shows
  
• Penthouse and Hustler showbags worth $120 for only $25
  
• 24 booth adult movie arcade
  
• Sausage sizzle
  

Brrrr!

I thought it was cold this morning when Elijah woke up at 5am and wouldn't settle so we brought him back to our bed. He then woke me up 10 minutes later playing "The Nose Game" [1] before he settled back to sleep.

I thought it was cold when I dragged myself out of bed at 5:45am to start getting ready for work. I have to get up this early a couple of times a week to get the early bus so I can leave work early. It was cold. My shower was extra hot to compensate and I stepped out of the shower a satisfying shade of lobster read.

I thought it was cold when, while walking at a vigorous pace to the bus stop at 6:55am, I spied this poor frosted flowering plant in someone's front yard.

I thought it was cold when I walked past the York Park Conservation Site between the bus stop and work and it was sheathed with fog and looking rather spooky (it's normally a dry, empty looking patch of endangered native grassland)

I knew it was cold when I got in to work to check the Bureau of Meteorology site for the temperature to find out it was -5 C (about 23F).

Winter is well and truly here, and this is just the start of it.

[1] "The Nose Game" was started by me, and Elijah loves it. I poke him on the nose and say "Beep" or make another appropriate fun noise. Elijah worked this out pretty quickly, and started poking our noses as well. Of course, we would "Beep!", much to his delight. Unfortunately, he does this a lot, in any situation. He sometimes would also grab my hand and drag it to his nose, whereupon I was expected to "Beep!" or suffer the consequences. "The Nose Game" is cute at 4:30pm when playing with blocks in the lounge room. At 5 in the morning with freezing fingers? Not so much...

Power toolage

I don't often get a chance to crack out the ol' power drill and do something constructive. The last time I did this was when I put up the guitar hoooks a couple of months back.

At the moment we've been keeping the boy's toys and associated stuff in his portacot which lives in the lounge room. The downside is that it means he can't actually use his portacot, and every now and then he seems to like pretending he's been imprisoned (that and he likes to peek over the top and giggle at us - entertainment is sooo cheap at this age). We bought some stackable wooden boxes to solve this problem, with the added bonus that we can now quickly pull down the portacot and put it away when we are not using it.

The boxes came in a heavy box and were flat pack. I was worried they would be held together with nails (hammering is not my strong point - to much hand-eye co-ordination involved) but thankfully, it was a screw-based construction.

There were three boxes in all. The first one looked like this after I ripped it out of the box and laid it out, ready to go:

It turned out to be surprisingly easy to put together, and I was once again reunited with the joy that is power tools.

The final, very handy and useful product below:

It was a good day for power tools, actually. One of the presents we gave Elijah for his birthday in April was a wooden trolley with wooden blocks. Unfortunately, the guide holes for the screws in the side of the trolley bore no relation to where the screws would actually need to go if the handle was to be attached. After an extended period of forgetfulness, I finally got around to drilling some new guide holes and attaching the handle, giving Elijah a "brand new toy" to play with.

And we join together today ...

One of my friends recently announced his engagement, which is good and exciting news which makes both me and my wife quite happy to hear.

If you're reading this, Dave, I reckon you need a pair of these for the wedding...

8 prong connector originally uploaded to Flickr by janabrevick.

Counting with fingers

Apparently, boys with the longest ring fingers relative to their index fingers tend to excel in maths, at least according to Science.

Not sure what this says about my hand, but I did fail Maths in Grade 12. My ring finger looks pretty long to me. I can't say I'm convinced...

Found via /. [permalink]

Quick! Or the bunny gets it!

Fred's about to experience some serious problems. You've got 60 seconds to perform life-saving surgery.

Your time starts.....NOW!

http://www.10mg.nl/ (requires Flash)

Found via Boing Boing [permalink]

What I did on a sunny Sunday morning

This morning was some of the most beautiful, glorious hammock weather I have seen in Canberra in months. It could possibly be the last such day until the end of winter (some time in September!).

How did I spend such a magnificent morning?

Reading this. Inside at the kitchen table, coffee in one hand, pencil in the other.



12 job applications for some positions within my Division at work. I got sucked in to being on the selection panel because I didn't have any good reason to say no (much like jury duty, I guess). I gave my manager the opportunity to pull me out of this by saying that I could only do it pending his approval.

His response? "I guess we all have to be good citizens and do our corporate duty" (once again, much like jury duty).

Go corporate citizenry. Woo.

Sandman

Guess what arrived in the mail late last week?

*drool*

The photo doesn't even begin to do justice to the gorgeous quality of this massive (and very heavy) hardcover collection of the first 20 episodes of The Sandman, written by one of my favourite authors Neil Gaiman.

I haven't actually read it yet (or opened it beyond taking the photo). I want to be able to sit down and dedicate some time to this one.

Oooh, the anticipation...

First World Problem

My wrist is so tired today. I played so much squash last night that when I got home I couldn't double click my mouse....

One of my co-workers this afternoon, unwittingly describing to me a classic First World Problem.

Simple can be best...

This site just made me smile the whole way through (it doesn't take long).

Found via Signal vs. Noise [permalink]

Brush with fame (well, almost)

I was flying back home after a quick day trip down to Melbourne for work. Who did I see clowning around in economy class (well, not really clowning so much as sitting quietly and minding their own business)?



Gomez

I love these guys and have been big fans since their first album Bring it on was released. I had the perfect opportunity to say "Hi", maybe say how much I liked their work and wish them good luck for their Canberra show tonight (and maybe get a happy snap with my camera phone).

Instead, I chose to leave the guys alone. I'm sure they would have been cool with a fan coming up and having a few quiet words before moving along, but I elected to give them their space. Odds were they were going straight from the plane to soundcheck and are probably flying back out again tomorrow. It's only fair they be given a chance to chill out before the show that I couldn't manage to make it to (nearly 1 year old boy, lack of money - the excuses are long).

Hope the boys have a good show.

In the end, I walked away a little wistful, doing a little bit of "maybe, could have, what if..." but ultimately, no regrets.

(photo pinched from Wikipedia. I know, I'm a bad boy but Gomez don't have any press photos on their site)

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The me that you know is now made up of wires...

The holter monitor in all its glory. I have to wear it for 24 hours.

It started itching like crazy after one.

No news is good news?

The blood tests showed that everything seems to be normal, which is good news I guess, although it doesn't bring me much closer to finding out what's the deal with my heart, or weight loss, or lethargy either.

Onwards to the Holter monitor.

The heart of the matter

My wife's been complaining that I have an irregular heart beat and I've been getting palpitations of increasing frequency over the last week and a bit (some palpitations so violent that you can actually see my whole chest moving in time to my heart beat).

A visit to my doctor on Thursday had him concerned enough that I've had blood tests and an ECG (apparently my resting heart rate is a little slow) to get an idea of what my base heart beat and rate is like. It is not so much the heart itself that is the concern but the the associated symptoms that, until recently, I thought were completely unlinked:

• massive weight loss without any real change in diet - in the last year I've lost 10kgs and only put 2kgs back on - at 68kgs it's obvious I didn't have that spare weight to lose!
  
• extreme tiredness - I often battle to stay awake mid-morning and mid afternoon. Case in point - this morning I got up at 7:30 and was back in bed for an hour long nap at 9:45 (it's a public holiday). I got 8 hours sleep the night before.
  

While the Doc won't speculate ("it could be so many things, so these blood tests are just a fishing expedition"), my suspicion is over active thyroid which is easily treatable with medication. Absolute worst case (according to Google :> ) is my slow heart rate needs to be corrected with a pacemaker to make sure it fires regularly and at the right speed (my doctor didn't tell me this one, probably because it would be from a very rare condition and highly unlikely, but Diagnosis-by-Google is so much fun!).

Right now I'm not worried. If the blood tests come back without any answers, then I might start to think about it a bit more...


"iron-heart-stone-bench" originally uploaded to Flickr by A.M Griffin. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Addicted to glove..

One of my favourite pastimes is interchanging the words "love" and "glove", particularly in relation to pop songs. It's fun. You know you want to try it...

This headline really made my day on Saturday.

It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information

- Oscar Wilde

I guess some times the more things change, well, the more things change.

A better mousetrap?

For the last few days, we've been plagued by a rodent of some description. My wife saw some movement beside the oven early last week, although when I went to check with a torch, whatever had been there was gone.

On Thursday, I got a phone call at work that explained to me in no uncertain tones that there was indeed a mouse (too small to be a rat) in the house and was currently taking residence under the refrigerator. A large number of nocturnal bumping and knocking noises could be heard in the region of the fridge for the next two nights.

Yesterday, while grocery shopping, I picked up one of the little bad boys like in the out-of-focus camera phone picture above. Apparently the mouse trap was designed for those who want to kill a mouse but have no desire to see the end result. While my main concern was in fact prying little fingers, it was a point of view I had some sympathy with.

The trap has a little self-adhesive label on the underside which can be peeled back to allow you to place your bait (in this instance, I whacked some peanut butter in). Once you have done that, you twist the whole thing clockwise which opens up an entrance into which the rodent crawls in. When the trap is triggered, the whole thing apparently turns at speed, trapping the creature inside.

After I set the trap, we heard a few sounds like banging plastic, so we had a fair idea that the mouse was interested. As I prepared for bed (and tried to re-settle Bugalugs), my wife went in to the kitchen to get a drink of water. She arrived in time to see the mouse creep out from behind the fridge and slowly sneak in to the trap. It stayed mostly in for a while with just its tail poking out. It must have decided that the peanut butter was worth over riding natural caution because the tail disappeared. That last step was just enough to trigger the trap which snapped around into position.

I heard a few signs of life within the trap over the next half hour before all movement ceased. When I re-read the packaging, I noticed that they had gone to great lengths to not mention just what happens to the mouse or rat once it is inside the trap. I guess anyone who is too squeamish to look at a dead rat probably doesn't want to know about the nasty death that most rat poisons cause. I think in future I might just use a basic trap. I think a quickly snapped neck might be a better passing.

Of course, tonight I heard some more knocking noises from the fridge region. Mouse traps are already on the shopping list.

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society.

- Mark Twain

Ouch. It hurts.

Yesterday I managed to jam a sharp piece of plastic deep under my left thumb nail. This morning it hurt so much I had to battle to do the buttons on my shirt up using only one (some how, and I'm not sure how, I seem to use my left thumb quite heavily in the button-doing-up process, which doesn't make much sense when I think about but there you are).

I have now developed a deeper appreciation for using slivers of bamboo under the fingernails for "information gathering". It really hurts and leaves behind very little splatter to clean off the walls.

Starry Starry Bamboo Mandala Originally uploaded by brainsik. Used under a Creative Commons license.

So it is true after all

Germinating apple seed_1
Originally uploaded by smperris.

Ever since I was told as a little kid that if I ate an apple core, an apple tree would grow inside of me, I've eaten the cores of green apples (the cores of red apples are black on the inside - taste fine but look ick).

Yesterday, while I was munching away on a tasty granny smith apple, I happened to see this little seed.

I didn't eat it. Perhaps I should have. A tree in me would have been pretty cool.

OMG KITTIES WTFLOL!!!1

I know, I know, it's not very mature or constructive or even a good way to pass the time. However, I'm still wiping tears from eyes 15 minutes later.

http://www.icanhascheezburger.com/

I'm not responsible for any time you may choose to waste there (and depending on web filters, it's possible it's NSFW).

Still handy

The trilogy is complete.

I've finally installed the third of my guitar hooks, keeping all my musical goodness out of reach of a marauding Bugalugs. For now.

Happy Birthday Gorgeous

You know who you are :)


Birthday-cake in Hamburg used under a Creative Commons licence. Originally uploaded to Flickr by robinoo.

If you say so.

The brand? Holeproof.

Just. Do. It.

I have had a collection of three wall-mounted guitar hooks for almost as long as we have lived in this house (we moved in August 05 - you do the maths, I'm too lazy). I've put off installing them for quite a while because, as previously mentioned, I'm somewhat lazy. It didn't help that when I was finally motivated to put them up, I discovered that my stud finder[1] worked less effectively when used slowly and carefully (it screws up its sensitively and it falsely reports when it has found the edge of the stud) and therefore I was drilling screws into plain old plaster, which wouldn't even support the weight of the hooks, yet alone the weight of a guitar as well.

When I changed jobs late last year, I finally started to get my act together and began adopting a Getting Things Done attitude, somewhat inspired by the 43 Folders/Lifehacker aesthetic. Part of the GTD method is break your big picture things down into "next actions" - that is, "what do I have to do next?" - the theory being, it's easier to go ahead and do something if the task is small and easily achievable, rather than some monolithic project hanging above your head like some sort of Sword of Damocles.[2]

Part of my @Home list (which doesn't get whittled down very quickly, but I am working on it) involved getting these guitar hooks up. A couple of weekends ago I went out and bought some nylon plaster plugs which allow me to hang up to 10kgs without needing any support behind the plaster. Over the last couple of weekends I have installed two of the hooks with one more to go (which will actually have a djembe and a ukulele hanging off it rather than a guitar or bass, but it still gets junk off the floor of the study/computer/music room).

I may not be much of a handyman, but every now and then I manage to do something vaguely DIY. Enjoy the before and after shots.

The wall before (well, technically, it's the opposite wall because I didn't think to take a photo until it was too late. However, it looked exactly the same. Trust me.)
















And here is the after shot (which is of the actual wall. Trust me.)













[1] a phrase that still makes my wife giggle uncontrollably - for extra fun, I like to tell her I bought my stud finder in Bangkok. You'd never guess that I'm the immature one in this marriage

[2] Of course, GTD is more than that. One of my favourite parts of GTD is the idea that most people are stressed because they carry around everything they need to do in their head, instead of recorded somewhere. Because it's all stored in their head, it's much easier to forget things and you tend to spend a lot of your time stressed because either (a) you just know you've forgotten something important but can't think what it is or (b) you're frantically doing damage control around some disaster, caused by you forgetting soemthing important. One of the strengths of GTD is that if you can develop a system of recording your next actions that you can trust completely, the mere act of recording stuff you need to do reduces your stress almost exponentially becuause you don't need to carry it around in your head anymore. I didn't really believe it until I tried. GTD and my trusty DIY Hipster PDA has meant that I forget nowhere near as many things as I used to, and I no longer find myself lying awake at night, my mind racing (or remembering stuff just before I go to sleep and forgetting it when I wake up and not remember it again until too late). In turn, I feel much more organised and relaxed although my wife has said she hasn't noticed any difference. I feel it though, and that makes a difference to me.

In search of a comet

It will come as no surprise to people that know me that I'm a little bit on the geeky side. So, when I found out that the brightest comet in over 40 years was clearly visible to the naked eye, I thought "this is something I've got to see...". The comet in question is the McNaught Comet.

I live very near Tuggeranong Hill, which I had heard afforded fantastic views of the surrounding area. While called a hill, it is technically a mountain so I figured I was pretty safe. If I could scale the fire trail that leads to the top of the Hill, I reckoned I could get a pretty good view of this streaming ball of cosmic ice.

The journey would be difficult for two reasons:

1. the comet was best seen at dusk, which is also not long after we normally put Elijah to sleep; and
2. being up the top of the hill at dusk would mean walking back down a fire trail in the dark, because, in hindsight, I have no brain and it never occurred to me to take a torch.

Elijah went to sleep quite easily in the end and I left for the hill, imaginary leave pass from my wife imaginarily clutched in my sweaty little hand. Now, I'm not unfit, but I'm definitely not fit either and the 20 minute walk up the hill was hard work. It was made harder by the fact that the fire trail is not the most stable of surfaces and was showing signs of erosion after the hard core storms that swept through the area over Christmas/New Year. Still, there was plenty of light although the sun was setting and I reached the top without incident.

I have always wanted to climb up to the top of Tuggeranong Hill and the view from the east did not disappoint.


I quite liked the view to the south as well.


The view to the west (where, apparently, the comet would reveal itself) was none too shabby either.


Since I had some time, I also checked out the TV broadcast signal repeater (appropriately adorned with a cheesy slogan - considering it's a hell of a walk, some people really are dedicated to their vandalism)...


... and then there was some sort of doodad dealy up there too (I have nfc what this is at all, but you can see the broadcast repeater tower in the background).


The sad thing about all this is, I waited for over an hour in the rising breeze, getting colder and colder as I regretted climbing a small mountain in t-shirt and shorts and shoes without socks. I got cold, it got increasingly dark and in the end, I had to head home disappointed, lest I break my neck on the descent.

Sometimes geekiness has a price that must be paid, a toll that must be extracted.

No comet for me.

Go here for a photo on Wikipedia of what the comet would have looked like in Canberra if I had been able to actually spot in the dusky sky.

Edit 1/2/07 21:57 to remove an orphan link. Oops.