December 2008 Archives

Summer of Goo

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Its been almost 2 months since I was made redundant. Two weeks after The Day I flew off to Malaysia & Vietnam for almost 3 weeks and since then I've been bumming around at home.

I spent a couple of days wrestling with my real estate agent regarding their failure to inform me of a rental increase. They had sent out a letter back in April as required by s.45 of the Residential Tenancies Act 1987 but that had failed to arrive in my mail box. But whatever, mail occasionally, if infrequently, goes missing. The dumb part was that I continued to pay my old rent rate as I had no idea of the increase, and for 5 months they failed to informed me that I was under paying. Finally, in November, when I was in Vietnam, they SMSed me because they claimed I had fallen 1 week in arrears. Anyway after much to-ing and fro-ing (including one call where the agent put me on hold for 50 minutes, then when I hung up & rang back because I couldn't tell whether the line had dropped out as there was no hold music, she claimed that she'd put me on hold for only 15 minutes and that I had hung up!) I ended up contacting the owner directly as it was clear the agent I was dealing with was of less than average IQ, and we, like reasonable human adults, agreed to settle on a 50/50 split of the difference. The sad part was that the agent appears not to be penalised despite the mistake being theirs, though I am happy that I was able to inform the owner of their competency.

34.1 hrs of Team Fortress in 2 weeks

For the most part I've been watching TV, cooking, running, swimming, surfing, reading, and playing lots of games. Life is pretty much what I think it should be - stress free and filled with stuff I actually enjoy doing. In fact, Steam says I've played 34.1 hours of Team Fortress 2 in the past 2 weeks. It actually got as high at 38 hours but I was out yesterday so the rolling total dropped. That's pretty much equivalent to 1 week of full time work. :D If anyone's interested its only $10 on Steam.

When I'm not gaming I'm mostly reading stuff related to the sekret company Stephen & I are starting. Its been fun looking at all the services I largely ignored whilst working at Yahoo! - simple things like a decent bookmarking service and setting up a shared, hosted Wiki took us about 2 days of trialling various services. We eventually settled on ma.gnolia and pbwiki.

I was surprised to find very limited support for proper group behaviour amongst the milion bookmarking services out there. ma.gnolia was one of only two services we found that allows group members to add/edit/moderate bookmarks belonging to a group - everyone else makes a user own every bookmark, and thus if I add a bookmark to our group, Stephen can't edit it, and vice versa. Pretty dumb for collaborative bookmarking.

On the wiki front Yahoo! used TWiki, and it was pretty much the only wiki I had any real experience with. Thus I was pleasantly surprised by how easy pbwiki was to use in comparison, though I have to caveat that by saying our current wiki needs are very limited compared to Yahoo!. Still, I wonder if Yahoo! could save itself a lot of pain by using something more user friendly.

Away from the tools we're reading lots about small business, how to run companies and all that kind of stuff. I've been pleasantly surprised at the very good resources various government departments have put together for small business. I was going to link to the ATO which also has a good "starting a company" section but I got this:

All Tax Office systems and services, including our website, will be unavailable from 4pm AEDST on Wednesday 24 December 2008 until Monday 5 January 2009 while we complete essential maintenance at our data centres.

I think their IT department needs to look up "decoupling", and "redundancy". (Despite this sad display I do think the ATO generally does provide good services. I've read a lot of the ATO website over the years, and I find their processes & systems are generally reliable.) However, it does remind me of a ^brilliant idea I had many moons ago - that websites should have fixed opening hours from 9-5pm, just like all the retail stores.

Anyway to wrap this up - everyone's been asking what our company will be doing and the short answer is that we're not 100% sure. Many of the entrepreneurial stories we've read suggest that folks often start off in one direction only to end up pursuing another (possibly related) track so we're still discussing various approaches. The other reason for being somewhat secretive is that vapourware hype is lame. When I joined Yahoo! back in 2001 one of the golden rules of PR was that we would never announce anything until it was live - the rationale being that when users hear about a service they should be able to jump on the service immediately and not have to wait weeks or months for it to be released. I still firmly believe in that.

QR codes & marketing

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I just read about a trial the Powerhouse Museum did with QR codes. One of the apparent issues was the printing of the code at a size too small for all but the most current mobile phone cameras.

As QR codes have only recently appeared in Australia I wonder if they're needed at all. This isn't a cricitism of QR codes as a technology since they were invented in 1994 and have obviously been useful.

A quick search turned up this article about an OCR app for Nokia phones. Why not replace the QR app with something like this, that would rip out URLs?

The benefit is you have URLs that everyone can read, remember or write down, as well as a URL that can be easily OCRed -- assuming people use reasonable font & point sizes, which is a reasonable assumption if they also want people to read them.

A little over a year ago I closed my credit card account with Westpac as I'd found a better deal with Citibank.

Last week, in BPaying my Citibank credit card bill via internet banking, I mistakenly selected the Westpac BPay details instead of Citibank. I ended up paying just shy of $3k into my defunct Westpac credit card. I didn't realise this mistake until I logged into my Citibank account today to check my current credit card balance and its hyper-inflated value, as well as interest charges. As I always pay my credit card bills on time the interest charges are highly unusual.

Realising my mistake I called up my credit union who informed me that they could do an electronic trace for $25 but recommended that I try Westpac as they may be able to reverse the charge for free. I found the credit cards service number on westpac.com.au, called em up and was, once again, amazed at the helpfulness of the Westpac cards service guy. He confirmed my details and went about reversing the BPay transaction, and despite the stupidity of my mistake he kept apologising for how long it would take to reverse the transaction due to the holiday season.

In an ideal world two things would have stopped this from occurring:


  1. BPay receivers shouldn't accept monies for non-existent accounts / reference numbers, and

  2. as the Westpac guy suggested it would be good if my credit union's internet banking system automatically dropped BPay payers' details out of the system if there hadn't been any payments for 6 months. I called my credit union and the ability to delete past payers is coming in February.

Anyways, if anyone is considering a Westpac credit card, I'm quite happy to vouch for their excellent customer service. I might re-consider them in March as Qantas is shaking up the frequent flyer program.

Back in Oz

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In case anyone's wondering I've been away in Malaysia & Vietnam for the past 3 weeks. I didn't really want to announce when I was going away, and for how long, because I'm still paranoid. ;)

It was a fun trip and I'll be uploading some of the 900 photos to Flickr over time. I prefer to add descriptions to most of my Flickr uploads as its more interesting for viewers, or a title at the very least.

Soong Kee
Soong Kee

Malaysia was much the same as last year. One thing I noticed though is the rapid Americanisation of Kuala Lumpur. There's more and more mega-malls popping up, containing many well known international brands. Alongside that the hawker stores are also being modernised - Soong Kee has been air-conditioned for some time, and some malls have food courts with stores selling traditional hawker food alongside the McDonalds and KFCs of the world. There are also standalone mega-hawker-centres.

Vietnam is a really interesting place to visit. I vaguely recall reading that the average salary is between US$1-2 a day which is amazingly low. During my visit one USD was equivalent to 16,000 or 17,000 Vietnamese Dong (VND) depending on whether you were buying or selling. A bowl of Pho on the street seems to cost a minimum of 10,000 VND which is cheap for visitors but quite expensive if you're only earning a buck or two a day. I'm hoping there is local pricing which I didn't have access to. :)

I found the Vietnamese diet to be quiet healthy, if the lack of any obese people is to be any evidence. In the 11 days I was there I only saw one fat person, which I'm going to assume is/was an ex-pat. The vast majority of Vietnamese are lean and I saw not one McDonalds or Starbucks. One of our tour guides explained that Vietnamese people simply don't like to eat hamburgers. Good on 'em.

I'd also say that Vietnamese are generally hard working, and a cheerful, respectful people. On the latter point the road traffic is visibly chaotic, with horns blaring non-stop between 7am and 11pm every day, and no one observes road rules. The horn is used less as a "fuck you" as in most of the world, but more as a friendly "watch out, I'm here" toot. As the lane markings are typically ignored you would for instance toot when you are approaching someone's blind spot to make sure they know you're there. You might, as one of our taxi drivers did, also toot repeatedly if you are about to U-turn right through 5 lanes of traffic flowing in both directions. This sort of behaviour is completely acceptable - people don't seem to get agro, they just wait patiently as you manouevre.

Crossing the road is similarly nuts. The traffic, at least in the tourist areas, never stops. In Ho Chi Minh City there are 6.5 million people and 4.5 million motorbikes. You are expected to walk through the traffic which seems like a crazy thing to do but in reality its quite safe. As long as you walk steadily the sea of motorbikes will part and flow around you like water. I think in general this level of chaos and the traffic density (meaning generally slower speeds) means that drivers & riders are a lot more vigilant than drivers anywhere else. I honestly believe I have a higher chance of getting run over at a pedestrian crossing in Sydney than I would crossing any busy road in Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi.

We started off in Ho Chi Minh City and had no troubles there getting around. Taxis are cheap - 12-15k VND for the first kilometre, then 11,000 VND per kilometre thereafter. The tourist attractions are all within a few kilometres so most fares should not exceed 30-50k VND. This wasn't a problem in HCMC but Hanoi was a different story where 3 out of 6 cabs that we caught were running dodgy meters. The first guy was unbelievably greedy. His meter already ran at 3x the regular rate (its quite noticeable as traffic moves slowly in Hanoi's Old Quarter) but the fool decided to also take us the longest way possible. Having a reasonable sense of direction both dad & I noticed this so when we finally arrived at our destination and his meter said 80k VND instead of the expected 25-30k VND, we gave him 50k and walked away (I didn't have anything smaller). The next two fellas weren't so greedy - they took the most direct route but both guys started bargaining with me when again we paid 50k of a 30k fare, asking for another 10k just for the hell of it. We told one driver that we knew his meter was dodgy even as we were driving as I saw the bloody thing jump up several times within a second as we were waiting at a traffic light. He must've thought we were distracted because we were making some idle chit chat. He apologised and slowed the meter thereafter(!) but still tried to get the full meter reading out of us.

Now Vietnam isn't all about traffic and taxis, more to come as I find time to upload the accompanying photos. :)



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