I was recently invited (for the third year in a row) to be filmed in a promotional testimonial for Microsoft TechEd Australia 2008. It was recently put online on the TechEd testimonials page, but I have uploaded a YouTube version to save everyone downloading Silverlight. Let me know what you think!

I emailed the Expert at Renovate.realestate.com.au the other day, hoping to get some advice about a property that I was interested in. I never expected to get a reply, but I got one within the week! I thought that was the end of it, but I found today by chance that it has been posted on their website.

I decided not to take the chance on the property, which was a gutting decision to make. It came back to me this week, when the offer I had had accepted was also accepted with another party. Back to the drawing board, although at least the market is not getting any better.

Finally, Top Gear is back! The first episode lived up to my expectations, some absolutely stunning cars and stunningly stupid stunts. Isn’t that what Top Gear is all about? Unfortunately the season will finish just when I get used to an episode every Monday (AEST), it is only 6 episodes short. As good as I think Jeremy is, he must be getting a pretty ridiculous hourly rate. Fingers crossed SBS can get the Australian version of Top Gear up and running so I don’t have to suffer withdrawls between seasons again. Top Gear have done an interview with the chosen hosts, so things are looking a bit more official and promising. Keep your fingers very tightly crossed that it doesn’t end up being “ambitious but rubbish”.

I purchased an audiobook today through Audible.com, which incidentally was the first time I have used the site or purchased an ebook. The process was simple enough, but the whole DRM thing annoys me (thankfully Tunebite helped with that).

Getting to the point, the audiobook I purchased was Barack Obama’s “The Audacity of Hope”. Why? Well the main reason for buying the audiobook was that I think he is one of the greatest orators I have heard in a long time. Rupert was right, he does have a level of rock star appeal.

On a more serious level he fascinates me for a number of reasons. The main reason is that he is such a mixture of backgrounds, some say a “a neutral persona on whom people can project their personal histories and aspirations”. This is partially because his background is so diverse that almost anyone can find something in common; a Kenyan father, an American mother, born in Honolulu, grew up in Jakarta, Hussein as a middle name and a first name based on the Hebrew word baruch (blessed).

The more critical factor is that people claim that he just ‘clicks’ with them, and for some reason he clicks with me too. How is it possible to do this across such a wide audience? Will connecting with everyone mean that eventually some people are going to feel betrayed? Quite possibly. I guess he just has to walk the rock star line and keep performing to the people in the hope that he eventually hits number 1.

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 home buyer, a huge saving of $17,990. This saving deteriorates pro-rata however as the price of the home approaches $600k, at which point it becomes unavailable. Means testing by this method is all well and good, as long as the means test is indexed. Back in 2000 property prices were significantly lower than they are today, as shown by the Reserve Bank’s own property price index graph from the May 2008 Regional Economic Performance Report:

This graph clearly shows that property prices have at least doubled in every state in the last 8 years, the same time period the grant scheme has been running. For 8 years of rapid growth the threshold has remained unchanged. NSW is actually the worst state for this, with an Age article citing:

Mortgage repayments account for 29.1% of total first home-buyer income, a one percentage point increase over the December (2007) quarter.

Adding to the cost of housing are taxes and charges, which added $110,000-$115,000 to the typical house and land package in Sydney, Mr Lamont said. In Victoria, that figure is about $57,000.

Surely the NSW Government should be keeping more of a finger on the pulse rather than making huge profits from Stamp Duty. The Federal Government is a little closer with their savings accounts, but $5000 a year is not going to get you a decent deposit anytime soon.

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 surrounds
• Council check for previous development applications* (see below)
• Council check for proposed development applications
• Check council codes to see if any planned modifications will have a chance of approval
• Survey inspection and verification (if there is even one post-1881)
• Sewerage and other utility diagrams and connections (and possibly easements)
• Solicitor contract inspection
• Prepare a solicitor/conveyancer to do the conveyancing
• Alteration of contract terms (land tax, mistakes, settlement time)
• Talk to mortgage providers to get pre-approval and negotiate rates
• Understand and compare loan rates, structures, flexibility and features
• Decide whether rates are going up or down over the next 30 years
• Decide whether house prices in the city, suburb and street are going up or down over the next 10 years
• Organising a cheque to pay the deposit on the day of the auction

Exhausting and risk-laden probably sums it up the best. I don’t know how some people move house every year or two!

* On another note Burwood Council (and most impressively most councils) has an online DA system. There is a very simple little hack to get development applications from further back in time. That highly disguised “num_days” parameter can be changed to whatever you like. Maybe 1800 works well?

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 posts on my front page to 10 and cleaned up some of my content. I still have plenty of work to do to bring across more of my old content and resources. If there is anything else you can suggest please feel free to comment. I would love to implement everything that Wordpress suggest related to SEO, but it seems blogging has driven SEO to a whole new level. Maybe a topic for another post?

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).

Ok I don’t want to sound like an MS Fanboi, but there are actually a few cool things Microsoft related happening with me at the moment.

Skydrive

Skydrive is a very cool new file storage service from Microsoft. Really simple, you get 5GB of storage space and can upload any file smaller than 50MB. Sounds perfect for a “My Docs” backup system? The only catch is that there is no shell extension or decent folder upload tool yet. They do however have a nice drag+drop multi-file upload tool, which I guess will do for now. I would love to see a more integrated tool that actually backed your “My Docs” up for you, but my guess that is hidden somewhere in the greater Windows Live skunkworks for now.

Windows Server 2008 + Exchange 2007

Yes, I am migrating my servers at home to the latest and greatest MS enterprise offerings. This also means going to Windows 2008 x64, which is fine since I have been an AMD fanboi for some time, but it would have been nice of them to make the migration a little easier! I know hardware is cheaper than software these days, but it would be nice to be able to easily upgrade Exchange from 2003 to 2007 without having to have a spare x64 machine lying around. Anyway it is all underway, so keep an eye on my Netcraft page.

Mrs Sneddon’s 50th, originally uploaded by generalsmirnov.

Last Saturday night was Mrs Sneddon’s 50th birthday party at Banjo Pattersons restaurant at Gladesville. It was a great night with a jazz band and great food!

This is actually my first test of the BlackBerry email system I will use (through Flickr) to upload photos and notes about my upcoming Europe trip! I have only 2 days left to go, but please tell me what you think!

Sent from my BlackBerry® from Optus