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Holly and I saw The Grates last night. What an amazing live band! Full of energy and brilliant renditions of their infectious pop tunes.
The support band, The John Steel Singers were fun too. It's clear they share the ability to craft fun pop tunes with The Grates. The other support band, The Vasco Era, were lousy. Clearly they idolise dodgy, talentless junkie Pete Doherty and his overrated Libertines.
17 Oct 2008 10:42 [category: /music] #
Geo: -37.707143,148.454433
17 Aug 2008 15:29 [category: /travel] #
Geo: -37.054151,149.943536
17 Aug 2008 10:21 [category: /travel] #
Nick Davies gives an update on the police attack on 93 unarmed demonstrators at the Diaz Pertini school building at the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa, Italy. It seems despite clear evidence that the police indiscriminately bashed the crap out of people, none of them will be going to jail.
This kind of injustice, with violence meted out by jackbooted fascist thugs of the state, isn't uncommon. I've seen police start riots a number of times at otherwise peaceful demonstrations. They get off on it.
I wouldn't be surprised if the injustice here provokes some to take action themselves, given the state has been unable to deliver justice.
17 Jul 2008 13:18 [category: /politix] #
We've had a shiny new fence installed all around. It's been a few months in the making, getting quotes and agreement from three different sets of neighbours. Finally it's done. We now have a gate on our side passage, and the new fence is quite a bit higher. No more chatting over the fence to the neighbours, unfortunately.
Time to get some passionfruit going. It also means I can get cracking on the rest of the garden beds and plant my apple trees.
17 Jul 2008 09:42 [category: /house] #
We've had an infestation of whitefly on our herbs and lettuces. Absolutely smothering them. They've killed off the purslane, and they're retarding growth on all the rest. Little buggers.
I tried the brew described here of garlic, oil and soap. It seemed to work for a couple of days, but then they came back stronger than ever. Now I'm trying these yellow sticky traps. They certainly seem to be catching the bugs, but whether it'll make a dent I'm not sure. Might try combining the two techniques.
These sticky traps are really just glossy yellow cardboard with honey or some kind of sticky sugar syrup on them, so they wouldn't be hard to make. In fact, here's a howto for the project.
17 May 2008 12:49 [category: /house] #
Like most houses built before the 1970s, our house almost certainly has lead paint. Given the number of layers on the paint around the windows and door frames, I'd guarantee there's lead paint there. The rest of the house, well that's anyone's guess. So I've been researching how I can test for it, and then what you do with it.
My family have been remarkably cavalier about lead when renovating in the past. Reading more about it tells me this is insanity. Lead contamination is extremely dangerous and pernicious. It's also very hard to get rid of -- the procedures for DIY lead removal are intense, to say the least, and I imagine professional lead removal isn't cheap.
It seems the spot test kits aren't particularly reliable, and of course only tell you there is lead, not how much or how dangerous. The best method is a field-based X-ray fluorescence test, accompanied by soil and dust sampling. I'm trying to find a place that can do this assessment.
After identifying lead paint, the really hard decisions start. If all our skirting boards, window and door frames are contaminated, is it easier and cheaper to replace them? What about if it's on the walls? Ceiling cavity? This is why I'm going to engage some professionals to get advice on all these difficult decisions.
I guess at the end of the day it'll be peace of mind. We often have little kids around the place, crawling over the floors. And we intend to have our own kids some time. Lead is a really serious matter, so we'll have to take it seriously.
Anyone else got experience with old, contaminated houses?
17 Mar 2008 13:59 [category: /diy] #
Much of my job involves supporting a marketing department in web stuff. A lot of the time this means finding and explaining new ways to help them market. I've recently been looking at multivariate testing, which is a big word to mean testing multiple variations of a web page to see how effective they are.
To play with it, I've been using Google Website Optimizer on my own site. If you go to my home page, you'll be presented with one of four versions of the page. I count someone clicking on a blog post as a "conversion", which is kinda contrived and you would normally use something like a sale.
In case you're interested, the variants are:
It's all pretty contrived and I'm using a site that doesn't really matter, but it's shown me how useful this tool is. If your site has some kind of goal (sale, enquiry, some kind of interaction you want to encourage) it's really incredible the effect some changes can have.
If you're marketing to mere mortals rather than geeks, seemingly meaningless changes can have a huge impact. Making the buy button bigger and brighter, putting in little bullet points to overcome their objections, changing the location of things.
These multivariate testing tools allow you to test a bunch of variations on a page. They could be radical changes, or really simple ones. Different users will get different versions, and you can quite happily track what's happened. The tools contain all sorts of statistical crunching to allow you to see real patterns in the noise, once enough data has been collected.
The example I'm using is pretty simplistic too. I've only changed the front page, not the whole site. These tools allow you to track users throughout a visit, so you could make a site-wide change and be able to give the user a consistent experience throughout the visit, then log conversions.
The great thing about this kind of tool is that, when the marketroids come up with their latest "brilliant" idea, rather than having to shoot it down with your mere logic, you can just say "sure, let's test that out". I've always thought of marketing as the place where failed salespeople go, because a salesperson is very easily measured and marketing is traditionally quite hard to measure. Not any more!
So my task in the near future is to shop this idea around our marketing geniuses and start playing. I think it'll be actually quite fun, because you can throw seemingly wild ideas at it, and see how it goes with real people. The testable nature is actually quite liberating, and should free you to try out your wacky ideas.
I'm quite looking forward to unleashing it on a really busy site, and taking a crack at long lists of changes to try.
17 Jan 2008 19:58 [category: /geek] #
Stilgherrian has an excellent synopsis of why geeks get angry when politicans suggest filtering the Internet. The bit about the shiny suited salesman is brilliant.
