Archive for May, 2008
The NSW Government introduced the First Home Buyer’s Grant Scheme back in the year 2000. The $7000 cash bonus is nice, but it is the stamp duty concession that really helps out. The stamp duty calculator shows that the duty on a $500k home drops from $18,170 to a tiny $180 if you are a first [...]
You thought buying a car was complicated! For anyone wanting a checklist (who doesn’t love a checklist) here is basically mine so far: Open inspection Family inspection / Attempted building inspection Check public transport timetables and/or traffic Pest inspection Building inspection Quotes on repairs and alterations Check heritage listing Check zoning for the area and [...]
We recently purchased a Netgear ReadyNAS unit (formerly made by Infrant Technologies). It is a nice compact little unit, 1RU with 4 hard drives across the front. It runs an onboard Debian install with some custom software to support X-RAID, the front panel buttons and a nice web interface. We have run into some issues lately in [...]
Highway Onramp Spiral I managed to get a test drive of a Ferrari 360 Spider today. With a 0-100 km/h figure of 4.5s it is certainly no slouch. It is kind of awe inspiring to drive a car that has been reviewed on Top Gear, a show which I worship. When you are going under [...]
This came up all of a sudden after I decided to test my SEO by googling my name. That took me to this page on Submissions to the National Broadband Expert Panel. Among them is a submission that I emailed in to the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (hell of a title, [...]
You will have noticed and will continue to notice a few changes to my blog over the next few weeks. I have moved to friendly URL’s (thanks Binary Fortress and the WordPress guide), added a few of my favourite feeds to my blogroll, cleaned up some images, added a Feedburner feed, increased the number of [...]
One of the spending cuts in last nights Federal Budget 2008 was the Commercial Ready program. Thankfully the R&D Tax Concession is still available, but this relies on the inventor having the capital upfront. The axing of this program will stifle innovation in Australia, particularly when our venture capital system is so underdeveloped relative to [...]
The video interview that I did for Microsoft TechEd 2008 is now online: http://www.microsoft.com.au/teched/default.aspx I am the third person speaking, in front of the orange “Explore” banner.
I was referred to this article by Seth Yates, and the bullet points covering the priorities of management execution struck me as being a nice focused summary: Do enough, no more (at least for this release!) Get it right, quickly – not necessarily the first time Build a firm foundation for growth Be able to [...]
My blog has been overhauled. This time I have gone for a WordPress back end and a brand new theme, albeit still headed by that beautiful Aston Martin. Let me know what you think! I am still loading content into the new site, so please be patient (there are 4 years worth of blogging articles).