Exasperated Calculator

Hi everyone (all four of you by this point),

As you’ve noticed, there haven’t been a lot of posts here lately. Between one thing and the other, things have just been a little too hectic. Work is very busy, and there’s a lot to do at home as well.

Hence the last thing I need is another distraction, such as a blog. So I’ve decided that I’m going to take a more substantial break - probably until early August. If anything really strikes me between now and then I’ll post it, but otherwise expect very little.

In August I’ll probably come back with a new format for the blog too, tweaked to make it a bit easier to keep up with things.

So I’ll be back in August. Unless I get some really good idea I just have to blog about, that is.

I haven’t had a very clean period on the blog since the start of the year - sorry everything’s been erratic. Initially I was going to plead ‘not enough time’, but that’s not really true.

It’s really about time management. And a lack of proper capital use.

In particular, it’s about a very silly bit of my IT setup at home.

As those who’ve met me know, I’m a little ‘over extended’ in the gadget front. In particular, I tend to watch TV/movies streamed from my computer. Or, to be more specific, streamed from the external hard drive attached to my laptop.

Those following along can probably already see the problem - the best bit of down time each evening, the opportunity to write a blog post or two (or just catch up on other blogs) is while I’m watching TV, but my laptop is tethered to my office setup and is unavailable…

Silly, really.

Anyway, I make no promises about blogging more often. But I’ve now switched the setup over to stream TV and movies from my other computer, and so now I’ve got a laptop to use while I’m watching TV.

(I also could buy myself a nice new laptop I suppose).

Go throw something on a barbie, play some backyard cricket, or complain about the politicians. You know, something Australian.

I’ll be back on Tuesday. Everyone have a great long weekend.

And if you don’t get the long weekend because you’re not in Australia: Why not fix that?

Happy 2008 everyone.

I hope everyone reading this had a fantastic finish to 2007, and is all set for a great year ahead.

2007 was an odd year for me - a lot of disruption (albeit very positive) in the things that I work on professionally kept me busy. My only real hope for this year is to try and be a bit more in control of things that are going on.

So here I am for another tilt at the blogging thing. I fully expect that this will last only a month or so until my buffer dries up, but we’ll see how I go.

I plan to post a lot more reviews of the books, movies, TV shows and computer games that I see. I’ll be starting with three of the films I saw over Christmas, which could be summarised as the great, the bad and the brilliant. Plus there will be the normal assortment of random links I find on the Internet.

So let’s get going with the year, already.

Hi All.

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. I decided to go on hiatus until the new year, but forgot to put up anything letting you know…

I’m busily preparing a nice buffer of posts, so expect to see lots of stuff come January 1.

Was sick for a fair chunk of last week. Just now getting up to date with the blog.

No more interruptions between now and election day, I promise.

I’ve backfilled to where I dropped off last week.

The new design for the site has just gone live. Hopefully it’s a little bit cleaner than the old design.

I’ve mainly tried to simplify the overall design - leave only the main elements that are needed. In particular I’ve removed the whole sidebar, and replaced it with a single archives page link at the top.

Another thing is that I’ve taken the comments out of the blog. There wasn’t much use of the comments, and it was causing me a lot of overhead in website design. Spam was the bigger issue, with only about one in one hundred comments I deal with being actually real. If you have a comment you’d like to make on a post, use the email address on the Contact page.

I haven’t had a chance to test it properly in every browser yet, so please let me know if there are any problems.

Sorry for the lack of posts the past couple of days. I just couldn’t find any inspiration for something to blog about…

So I’ve decided that I should take a month off ‘real’ blogging. I’ll keep popping up the little tidbits that I find on the Internet for people to see, so there’s something new every day (actually, every 2 hours or so during the workday…). And if I think of something really interesting to say, I’ll say it. But otherwise, don’t expect to see much commentary, reviews or economics here until September.

Just a quick reminder (given that I can’t think of anything to write tonight…) that there’s more to be seen if you haven’t visited the actual site of the blog in a while.

(Thanks to good old RSS, I suspect a few readers of this site don’t ever come to the page).

Thanks to Google Reader, you can see some of the posts that I’ve recently read that I thought were neat, interesting or otherwise cool. You can find it on the left hand column of the blog, or you can click here.

If you’d like to get slightly more meta, you can subscribe to the RSS feed for the posts I share with Reader.

And if you are actually reading this page directly, rather than using an RSS reader: maybe you should get one? They’re a very efficient way to keep track of a lot of sites at once. According to my stats, I subscribe to 110 websites, and have read 19,873 items in the past 30 days. An RSS reader is like performance enhancing drugs for web surfing…

Quick question for people - should I bother posting stuff on the weekends, or should I just stick to Monday-Friday? Please answer, I need the feedback!

It’s pretty embarrassing exactly how long it takes me to collapsed on my periodic insistence that I’ll begin to post to this weblog properly…

So, sorry everyone (if there is indeed anyone left)! The excuses are many and varied, mainly due to a recent increase in the quantity and tempo of work. I’m going to not offer any further promises about actually updating this site regularly.

But all this just bought home to me how difficult it is to fit everything into your day…

To start with, I like about 9 hours sleep a day. That’s probably a little more than I need, but it makes me a happier person so I go with it. I suspect that if I got my fitness a little higher I would be able to make do with a little less. Then there’s work (10 hours a day on average, including lunch), commuting (about an hour, counting walks to/from the car park), dressing/showering/etc (maybe half an hour?) and dinner (about 30-45 mins depending on what I’m cooking). So that’s 21 hours of my day gone. That leaves me just three hours for everything else.

The list of ‘everything else’ includes spending time with my lovely wife, watching TV, getting exercise, posting to the blog, designing websites, playing with my kitten, cleaning the house, and reading books. Just as a start. I’m normally lucky if I can get more than a couple of those done on any given night.

Weekends aren’t a lot better either…

So what I really need is another 4-5 hours a day. That should just about give me time to fit everything in. The only block of time which that can really come from is the sleep. So this brings me to the question: if someone could design a safe, legal, side effect free pill that would allow you to have only 4 hours sleep a night, would you take it? And how much would you pay for it?

I think I would. And I think I’d pay a fair bit. And I might even actually update this thing more than once a month…

Yes, I know I’ve been a bad, bad blogger.

I’m going to be trying to post things a bit more often now. Been a bit busy, plus I’ve been trying to fix up a bunch of other problems with my various websites.

I’m also going to be trying to get back on to the diet. Been a hard couple of weeks to be dieting.

Sorry for the extended absence, but most of my spare hours normally devoted to this blog got used instead for the redesign that I’ve just put on. I’m still working on it, so it’s likely that a few bugs will show up. Let me know if you see any by leaving me a comment.

I have a couple more features in mind, yet, and still haven’t fixed the styling up for a couple of things. But I hope it works better than the old one!

Following the 500 words lost incident earlier today I’ve upgraded the tools that I use for posting to this weblog a little. I now use TextMate, a fabulous text editor that I use for all my coding. I found out it had a blogging interface, and away I went…

To make that work a little better, I’ve also installed Markdown support. Markdown is a very nice way of putting codes like links and italic and bold into the posts¹.

All in all this makes posting a lot easier, and it also handles pictures much more quickly, so I have fewer excuses for my lack of posts than ever!

I just typed about 500 words (which was only about halfway into the post) and then a ‘user malfunction’ caused it all to disappear. I wish this program had autosave!

(I’ll try and get back to my fascinating post about mid-1970s exchange rate policy soon, but I don’t think I can stand doing it today…)

Sorry about the lack of posts for the last little while, I’ve been caught up with one thing (fairly frantic period at work right up until Christmas), another thing (Christmas) or something else (been pretty sick the last couple of days).

With good luck in this new year I’ll be able to post a lot more regulalry - my objective is at least once a day.

Strange thing: right this moment, I’m the top result in Google for ‘promoted to EL2‘.

Update: Ooh, and I’m 6th for ‘treasury EL2‘.

Just got an email from my ISP (the fabulous Internode) to tell me that my upgrade to ADSL2 will be happening sometime next week. Should pretty much quadruple my internet connection speed, which will be very nice indeed.

Sorry, all, for the long time between posts.

No real excuse: just a busy period at work, combined with a semi-nasty bike crash that put a temporary halt to my exercise dreams.

Anyway, I should be back at this a bit more frequently now. With any luck I’ll be able to post some good news I got recently, too, just as soon as it gets properly announced.

Sorry for the lack of content this past week - I’ve been sick. I’ll be trying to do better, so look for more stuff from tomorrow.