About Me

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I'm an Australian, based in the Washington, DC, area, with extensive experience in the US, UK/Europe and Australia. I have also lectured in IT and Law related topics at King's College, London, and at The Australian National University.

Saturday, September 20, 2008

Australia lacks government protection of bank deposits

I hear a lot about the FDIC in the US protecting up to US$100,000 of depositors' funds in US banks. For some reason, I had assumed the same was the case in Australia, but it seems not.

(Via Mikal)

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

BlackBerry a top priority at home

Apparently, 35 per cent of BlackBerry and PDA users would choose their device over their spouse.

I'm better than that, although, I do want an upgrade from my current BlackBerry model to the new BlackBerry Bold!

Saturday, September 06, 2008

National Capital Cat Show

Jasmine and I visited the National Capital Cat Show, just outside Washington, DC, today.

Jasmine bought a small gift for our foster cat, Ashley! It's from a stall run by Furwood Forest at the show. The picture below shows the small gift temporarily parked inside our front door when we got it home.

Charlotte Airport rocks

I had a layover in Charlotte, North Carolina, when flying home the other day. They had rocking chairs. Fantastic!

Other people think this is cool, too!

Tuesday, September 02, 2008

The Chevrolet Cobalt has killed chivalry

Jasmine and I recently hired a car in Kansas City, Missouri, to drive to Topeka, Kansas. We chose a sensible Chevrolet Cobalt to get us there.

The Cobalt has a definite feel of having been built to a price. It does the job, but the finish is a bit rough.

It is, however, impossible to be chivalrous in a Cobalt. When I learned to drive, I was taught that it is polite to open the door for your passenger before getting into the vehicle yourself. But in this Chevrolet, that is never going to happen: the car not only lacks remote central locking, but does not even have a key hole on the passenger side exterior.

I wonder what it would have cost General Motors to add a keyed lock to the passenger door.

Sunday, August 31, 2008

Pigeon Point, Northern California

Jasmine and I went for a drive with my brother to Pigeon Point late on Saturday. Pigeon Point is nice, but we were warned to be very careful (see below)!





It was a good end to an afternoon which had begun more ponderously when Alamo had taken 2.5 hours to issue the car we had booked, due to overbooking and assorted other inefficiencies!
It's not just lettuce that Ashley loves to eat

She loves eating other green things, too. Here she is with Jasmine's flowers earlier this month.

Friday, August 01, 2008

Our cat, Ashley, loves to eat lettuce!

It's true. It's one of her favourite foods! Here's proof:

Sunday, July 27, 2008

Girl drives Rubik's cube champ to new record

Jasmine pointed me at a news.com.au article today about the factor that helped the new Rubik's Cube world record-holder, Eric Akkersdijk, over the line with his time of 7.08 sec:

"I met a very nice girl there who worked at one of the stands at the tournament that sell puzzles, she was quite interested in the cubing tournament and I felt pretty attracted to her," he said. "We chatted the whole time.

"So instead of waiting nervously for your next solve and over-focussing, I was a bit distracted by something else. The result was no more nerves for the competition."
Moving my blog to Blogger

I'm in the process of moving my blog to Blogger after previously hosting it myself on a shared server, using Blosxom. The extra effort of managing server and Blosxom configuration were just getting to much, so software as a service seemed like a much better option.

There are a few cobwebs at the moment, as I slowly resurrect the long-abandoned blog and move content across.