Monthly Archives: June 2009

The Weekend That Was

★ Posted on at 09:49 pm ★

danish and escargots

Vyanne was adventurous last night and decided to make some danish and escargots. Heh, she’s really into the pastry stuff these days, churning out pretty delicious stuff.

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Heh, churning out a lot more posts these days. Getting into the habit of expressing my ideas, and as long as I put them on the blog quick enough, they materialise into words.

The new version of WordPress feels a little more snappy (it’s supposed to utilise less CPU power on the server side) and I hope that makes it easier for me to want to write stuff (because if it takes too long for stuff to load on the browser, my train of thought goes missing).

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Looked at a nice place in Flemington yesterday. It was a cozy little place, and pretty well kept, but at the asking price of half a million dollars odd, I could get a slightly larger place not too far off. I think I’m pretty set on the area I’d like to purchase a place at. Will be a little more dilligent picking places to visit and view. Melbourne can be a pretty large and daunting place to house hunt at.

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Been failing at keeping my place clean, but picked up a tip reading stuff online and decluttering starts with making sure everything you have has a home. That just means that an item should belong on a shelf, in a drawer, and not on your tabletop. It also helps if you can throw away stuff you don’t need anymore. I’ve been more than good with throwing old stuff away, and I do have random bits laying on my desk and I’ve packed those away, so I’m left with a little less clutter on my desk. The last problem really is space, as there’s only so much I can cram into my room, so I’m still trying to sort out if there is anything else I can get rid of.

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I’m still not very good at taking pictures that need external light. Sometimes the pictures just look wrong and I don’t quite know why. I’m keen on the idea to snap as many pictures as I can over the week and see if I can work out the problems slowly. Need to be able to setup light sources and take them down quickly. Definitely needing more practice over the next few months.

More Comfort Food

★ Posted on at 09:52 pm ★

yongtaufu

Finally got a picture of home made yong tau fu at home. Heh, the food usually gets eaten before I get a chance to photograph it. Here you see it still cooking in the pan, in a broth of fermented beans and garlic. The food made it into a pot, but again I couldn’t get a decent picture before Vyanne and I started to dig into the food.

It’s not the quickest meal one can prepare, with the need to prepare the fish paste as well as cutting up the vegetables, tofu to be filled with the paste. Doesn’t matter though, when it tastes this good, I’d happily spend the hour making it, and another five just chomping it down.

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Upgraded to WordPress 2.8 today. Fastest upgrade I’ve ever done for this. As much as I’m finding WordPress to become more and more bloated (the post revision feature is cool, but adds extra bulk to my database size), it does get some things done without needing to leave your browser. Managed to update WordPress straight to the website with just the click of a button, where before I had to download WordPress, and then copy the files to the website via an FTP client. That used to take a half hour at least, and today it was all done in under 5 minutes.

Only problems I’ve had so far are some broken plugins. That isn’t a deal breaker, but it does make posting pictures from Flickr take a few seconds longer.

Was fiddling around with the database and getting all the settings to work on my Windows 7 machine. Heh, took a while, but finally have a proper machine for developing websites again. Will have a go at churning out websites soon enough.

Bean Counter

★ Posted on at 12:13 am ★

I’ve nearly sat through an entire financial year at work, and going through the various processes, have a better understanding of how businesses operate. Heh, I knew deep down there was a bit of a bean counter in me when I was looking at share prices and saw the underlying financial statements on assets and liabilities of a company. For the first time, those numbers had more meaning to me than in my entire undergrad course at University.

Speaking of share prices, the index shares I’ve bought a month ago have so far have been of good value. It’s a basket of shares in different weights, so it takes care of the diversification part of investing and as I’m buying only one stock, there is only a one time transaction cost. It pays dividends, so on top of any capital gains, I do get a stream of income semi annually. It’s not a superstar stock, that tumbles 50% and surges 50%. Sure you can make bucket loads of money from that if you time it right, but I’m of the risk adverse kind and prefer to be the turtle and do it slow and steady. It’s time and effort to constantly watch the market and outsmart it. I have better things to do with my time.

It makes sense to plan for one’s financial future. I would prefer not to be working when I’m 60 (unless it’s something I really enjoy, which looking at the current trend of jobs, is just bordering on interesting enough) so I’m thinking that after finding a place to stay, to start looking for investment properties to supplement my current salary with a stream of side income.

I have a vague set of goals at the moment, heh, but better to have vague goals than no goals at all. It’s easier to plan if you have a clear idea on what you want to achieve by when, but I’ve never been good at planning things for the longer term. I’m not terribly good at scoping and anticipating future needs, as I prefer to fix things on the fly. It’s only when I start doing the same things a little more that I can pick up on potential problems more easily as I go along.

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It’s good to have the weekends come. I’m trying to cram more activities into it, but it does eat into my sleeping time. Heh, have other ideas on how to get the most productivity out of a day, and I think the Spanish have the right idea with siestas. Time to turn in anyway.