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Wednesday, November 3. 2010House Design Progress
The lack of blog updates on the house hasn't meant that we have been idle - on the contrary. It's just that we've been doing a lot of things behind the scenes, forking over sums of money for this and that to approach a set of plans we can submit to council.
These have been developed partially with a builder who specialises in strawbale and earth homes, which we have been to see a few of and walked away extremely impressed. Current clients of theirs too have independently been very positive about the experience, as have other people involved in the small strawbale building industry in Australia. We now have some finished (if they ever are!) plans for a single story "boomerang"-shaped house, with an upstairs rumpus room across the middle to capture the distant horizon views from our block. The builders have given us an initial quote to build this, and we understand what the bank will lend us - next challenge is to get these two figures a little closer to each other! One step we've been holding off on for a long time now but have finally decided to do is to put our Penshurst Street house on the market. We have kept hold of it ever since we moved out of Sydney to Picton, renting it out to the one lot of tenants who have been great. However we now need to sell to afford what we need for our family home and with just a touch of regret it is about to be up for sale. We inspected it a few weeks ago and it's still being kept well by the tenants, the renovations we did before moving out still looking fresh. Having been in situations with extremely short notice to leave a rental premises ourselves, we are giving our tenants plenty of notice in case the new owners choose to move in rather than use it as an investment themselves. It's been by far the most crazy and stressful period of our lives working through to this point with two young children in tow, and we wouldn't have got this far without the help of Margaret, Helen and Neil. Plus my amazing wife Liz dealing with a newborn, most of the housework and a daughter who certainly got the memo about expected behaviour during the "terrible twos". There's plenty more to come we understand, but by mid to late next year all going well we should be relaxing with a glass of wine on our land in the house we designed and even built some of. Sounds awesome. You have to set yourself challenges in life - they almost always pay off.
Posted by Alison Gould
in Build on Razorback, Family, Sydney
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19:53
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Tuesday, April 6. 2010Cash - Gone
Have a quick look at the image to the right. It's from a Liverpool Champion story about Liverpool Council heavy-handedly enforcing a 10m from an intersection parking rule, violation of which results in a $197 fine. Here, two cars would be fined for not being greater than 10m from the intersection.
Do you, as a member of society, think 10m is warranted? Look at the silver car in the picture - that's the approximate position I parked my car within Liverpool Council's boundaries, from where I cycle to Parramatta on occasion. I don't have a photo or proof, but I believe I would actually have been further from the corner, but I'm not claiming to have been more than 10m. For the same amount of financial penalty, I could have driven between 10 and 20km/h over the speed limit, an action which statistically impacts the safety of others. Unlike, say, parking 6m from an intersection. Sure, I'll pay - it's the law after all - however I won't bother to pick small parking spaces anymore for my biodiesel-powered tiny 5L/100km car (last tank 5.3L/100km, including towing 750kg mower/trailer combo at times and driving "with spirit" at others) to fit now so that others can have the larger ones for their land yacht fuel-guzzlers. There were plenty of huge open spaces away from an intersection I could have parked in. Bugger the rest of you people looking for parking spots, it seems. Tuesday, April 28. 2009New Job!
Well, sorta.
A year or so ago when the team I originally started with in 2001 was transferred to Parramatta office, I used the excuse to stay in town with a different team and also move to a Technical Lead role for the experience. Now things have changed a little - the team in town got moved across the bridge along with everyone else from that office, and also we have moved out to Picton. The combined two hours each-way commute was bearable for the transition period, but something had to give. Coupled with this the old team at Parramatta had some internal re-organisiation, and the Team Leader role became vacant. I was asked to step up, and as of Monday, that's what I'm doing. So yes, I'm now a manager and have the Crackberry to prove it. I view it as a challenge, but figure I wouldn't have been asked if people thought I wasn't capable. I haven't even had time to unpack my boxes, it's been go-go-go since I walked in the door, so there will be precious little rest time it seems. As I type this I'm cruising along in the train to Parramatta (using the rare-as-hen's-teeth Cumberland line trains), and out the window I can see where I cycled yesterday. There's a "rail trail" from Liverpool to Parramatta which is pretty good, but could do with the signs being replaced so I don't waste 30 minutes next time following the wrong railway line. But I guess that's what GPS is for. Liverpool station is also a poorly-designed bottle neck for an "interchange" with a cycleway. I'm still balancing the train times to arrive at the appropriate work-life balance - this took me a little while at North Sydney and some experimentation appears to still be required.
Posted by Alison Gould
in Cycling, Mobile Devices, Sydney, Work
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21:22
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Tuesday, September 9. 2008Thanks Rail Corp!
Dear Guy in the Railcorp Uniform I just sat next to on the way into town,
Perhaps next time you don't have to leg-spread so wide your mother would be ashamed, and then look with me in scorn as I attempt to squeeze myself into the gap. Or at least have the decency to move your legs so that I can fit in some non-yoga-position manner. If you decide to continue with your understanding of the amount of personal space required by each traveller on CityRail, perhaps you could approach your employer to re-instate first class? It's not like you're even paying for your ticket so you'll get the free upgrade I'm sure. Personally, I'd settle for just more trains so that maybe one of the two that shot through Penshurst without stopping before this one arrived would have taken on some passengers, giving each one of them more room. Oh yes, this was a train at 7 am, and this was the last available seat in the carriage. Otherwise your body odours would have put me off way too much. Thursday, June 12. 2008Southern Sydney Waterways Ride
I took advantage of the nice weather to head off on a aimless ride around the area today. If the forecast is to be believed, that might be all the riding I get in the next week or so.
Thursday, May 15. 2008Thanks City Rail
I guess you couldn't help the train in front of us "breaking down" while we were stopped at Sydenham this morning.
But then announcing we had to all walk to platform three was a bit annoying - isn't there any points outside the station to switch across to another track? So, along the platform, up the stairs and down to platform three me and a thousand or so other people go. Me with shaky knees and all. All on platform three, the first train there is full and we won't all fit. Probably not much could been done about that, but the announcement board says next train in two minutes so who really minds that. Along platform three we go. Then the announcement board says 26 minutes. We look across to platform 5 where we came from to see out train, empty, heading off towards the city. Thanks for not letting us know the "breakdown" no longer applied and we should go back to get our train. Up from three we go to the top, thanks for your staff's unhelpful attitude. Oh well, they hate their job, down platform five we go again. There's a train coming by now. Thanks for not holding that train for us as we all rush down to get it, even though it's nowhere near full. Thanks for the same platform guard who sent an entire train-load of people away not thinking that they might want to get back on the first possible train now that they are working again. Thanks to him for saying "I didn't close the doors" to our protests when we had all seen him holding up his flag (indicating to the on-train guard he could go). Thanks to him for trying to tell us our original train hadn't actually proceeded to the city, when several hundred of us had seen it had. Come on, bring it, we just love being treated like this. No wonder I enjoy cycling to work so much more. People who think riding is too stressful compared to ShittyRail have no idea. Can't wait for this super-busy week to be over and I've decided to cycle even more than my 1-2 day average recently. Thursday, February 21. 2008Aaah the blog...
It's a sign that life is busy when I don't post here for ages. It's been beyond busy recently. I stare at the front page now and then and note the stagnation, knowing only I can change it. And then something else comes and steals my attention.
No matter, life is going well! Miss Phoebe is for the most part much improved. She still has times when she has been awake for hours and is so tired that she won't sleep or feed. They're tough and she needs constant attention to sort her out. Liz is unfortunately copping most of this as I'm busy at work and still with bands. Several times of the years I've considered dropping back my band commitment, and each time we've discussed it and agreed it can continue. Now I'm not so sure, it's just not fair on Liz to make her do so much while I'm off having a good time elsewhere. As part of the process of spending more time at home, I purchased a shiny new bike. On the first ride into work on it I cut ten minutes or so of my fastest time on the old bike, so there should be less time spent commuting and more at home. I spent a long time researching options, considering a few compromises on eBay, but ended up getting exactly what I wanted. An expensive way to do it, but warranty and reliability are key on a commuter. It's what they call a Cyclocross bike, dedicated to the sport of Cyclocross, which pretty much nobody knows about. The formula is to take a fast road bike, make it more rugged, make it more comfortable, and add practical features. So it's a bit slower than a "real" road bike but as you can see above, it's still plenty fast! And at the other end of the commute - work - things are changing too. My team is being restructured out to the Parramatta office, and I'm was really not looking forward to the extra hour's train journey. The bike ride was far more direct and looked not to be too much longer than the ride to the city, but I can't ride every day, due mostly to weather and carrying instruments. From an organisational perspective it makes sense for that team to be with the rest of the people who do similar things, but from a personal perspective Parramatta has nothing at all to appeal to me, and eats into the time with my new family. Even if I don't go out in the city every day, I could if I wanted, whereas what little there is at Parramatta seems to shut down after business hours. So I got offered a position as technical lead in a different, but similar team, who are remaining in Surry Hills. I've decided to take it for six months, to see how the management thing suits me. If it doesn't very well then I can either revert to my old job out at Parramatta or look to the market for something different. Enough for now, I need coffee. Tuesday, October 9. 2007Cycling Safety in Sydney
So, after another successful and safe ride to work this morning (once I'd fixed a flat tire, grr), it's nice to see that the fact everyone seems to 'know' about how amazingly unsafe it is to cycle in Sydney are simply wrong (Original SMH article here).
The main take-away point is that despite a 50% increase in the number of cyclists in the last three years, the number of cyclists killed has halved in the last ten (7 down to 3), and the percentage injured has declined. So, since 50% of car trips in Sydney are under five kilometres, why not join me and the 3000 other people that ride into the CBD daily? I ride 21km each way, and I still feel so much more refreshed and ready to face the day after riding than being crammed into a CitySnail sardine-tin train. Don't even get me started on surrounding yourself with 1-3 tonnes of metal and burning up several litres of fossil fuels only to sit in traffic that plenty of others seem to think is a great idea. The truly crazy thing is that I'm much faster through the traffic than they are anyway! Tuesday, September 25. 2007Recent Photos
I've uploaded a few various photos to my Flickr account showing some of our recent wanderings around the place.
Tuesday, September 11. 2007Sydney Planning
Cycled up to The Rocks last night for a truly inspiring talk by Jan Gehl. This is the Danish guy who has turned global cities into places you might actually want to live, the closest success to home being inner-city Melbourne.
In a move with a change of making me respect a politician, Sydney's Lord Mayor Clover Moore has engaged Jan to provide his views on Sydney, which makes for amazing reading. (There will apparently be a podcast/vodcast of the talk available here - well worth your time). I think after our European travels, the main reason I want to live in places like Paris, Amsterdam, Munich or Copenhagen is that they are just great, friendly places to be. Cars have their place outside the center, but the right there in the middle is a place for people. To meet, to be entertained, to relax, and to watch. Sydney's CBD just is no use for that. The only public spaces worth talking about are disjoint, and at all times as a pedestrian you are less important than the car. Jan's work on other more visionary cities is but a dream here in Sydney. After the talk, I changed into my cycle gear and pedaled back to Kogarah. In the city traffic, making the best of what cycle 'lanes' are on offer. More nightmare than dream. Clover, I challenge you to step up to the plate and implement 100% of the recommendations when you get them later this year, as Melbourne did. Perhaps we will be less inclined to consider the Southern city a place to live, which we did much to our disgust after traveling there last year and being blown away by how good an Australian city could be.
Posted by Alison Gould
in Cycling, Environment, Sydney, Travel
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22:47
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Saturday, July 7. 2007Famous! (sorta)
The folks over at Schmap have quite a good travel resource that I have to admit I'd never heard of.
Until I got a mail from them a little while back asking if they could use one of my Creative Commons-licenced photos in the Sydney edition of their travel guide. You can see the results here - the great 3801 steaming up at Central. Saturday, March 3. 2007Catchup Blogging
OK, News time. It's been a while.
I've uploaded some photos to my Flickr account which have titles showing a pictorial version of what we've been doing recently. There's some from Adelaide (1 2 3 4), some from our recent weekend back up to the Hunter Valley to celebrate our wedding anniversary (yep, it's been over a year now...) (1 2), and even an ugly product of our veggie patch. Margaret's house has been on the market for a while and is now sold, she's looking for a place to buy and has a few in mind. She may be moving in with us during the change-over period. So we've re-organised the house a bit. We've now got a separate (small) room devoted to music. It's good to have everything out and in the one place, and I've been inspired to do some recording, helped out with a computer audio interface I found cheap on eBay. Still trying to decide what software I want to use with it though. The junk that used to be in that room has now sort-of migrated to the spare room, but it could be consolidated to make room for Margaret should the need arise. Around the house, I've been cleaning out gutters and getting things organised in preparation for the arrival of our water tanks. The fact that it's been raining a lot recently has been annoying us, thinking of the wastage. It looks like we'd have to vote capital-L Liberal to get the government to do something about water recycling, so becoming as detached as possible from it all is appealing. Put some of the wine from our Hunter trip (came back with three cases!) under the house in a sort-of cellar arrangement. The conditions are good but it's hard to get to. Should be good for medium-long-term storage though. We headed off to the Whiskey Experience again a few days ago - a great fun evening which we figure is just to raise brand awareness. Not that many people around us were aware of things around themselves by the end of proceedings! One of Liz's birthday celebrations this year was a trip to the Löwenbräu Keller, something I haven't done for years and an evening we thoroughly enjoyed. The band there seems to do the same show every night, but it's very entertaining. Plus we get to drink great beer and practice our German. ... Which is good, because Sebastian Schnelle (whom we stayed with at least three times in Europe 2002-3 and caught up with again early last year) is back in the country to do his PhD in Brisbane. He and his girlfriend Jana flew into Sydney last week and we caught up a few times. She's still in learn-English mode, so we had a few conversations with me speaking German and her English, and my lack of skill there seemed to give her more confidence. Oh, and I buggered my knee badly about a month ago, which is the worst it's ever been. I've had plenty of days working from home and far less cycling. I have a specialist appointment next week, so hopefully I can get something done about it. Another Jersey Kerb gig happened last Friday - the first with Jono playing keyboards and me back on bass after Ed left for England. We played pretty well I thought, but the crowd was both thin and lacking energy. I think we have a job for our manager to get us sorted in a new venue or with some more aggressive advertising. Still great fun though. Surely that's enough topic-hopping for now. Congratulations if you made it this far!
Posted by Alison Gould
in Cycling, Deutschland, Europe 2002-3, Europe 2006, Hardware, Jersey Kerb, Music, Real Life, Software, Sydney
at
07:46
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Tuesday, January 30. 2007Organic Food!
Just a quick post to say that we've been getting boxes of organic fruit, veg and other groceries delivered from OrganicFood.com.au for a few months now. Service is great, quality of the food is excellent, and the fact that it just appears at the door once a week is pretty nice with the crazy hours we end up working.
It's always fun to see what has arrived in the mixed box of fruit and veg - all sorts of odd seasonal things turn up such as real raw beetroot, corn on the cob and pineapple, all of which is nice and healthy to eat while a nice change from what we buy when we enter a fruit market. Look at their prices and then compare to what you actually spend on this sort of stuff and it actually works out pretty good value. We'll investigate the two separate local fruit and veg markets supposedly starting shortly too. Wednesday, January 10. 2007Ads selling desalination to cost $1.4m
From today's SMH. $1.4m just for advertising?
According to the propaganda trip we took in school to the electoral center in Canberra, I thought our government was supposed to work something roughly like this:
Where in the above did the elected representatives get to spend our tax money convincing us that their decisions are correct? In this case, they fairly blatantly aren't - recycling is a far better option that most of the rest of the world uses. Here it's been taken by ignorant people whose dam is almost totally empty as "recycled sewerage" that they just won't drink, instead forming groups called Citizens Against Drinking Sewage. Why? What better options do you think you have? Do you really think that every glass of water you get out of the tap is brand new, created by God just for you? Nope, we have a limited number of water atoms on this planet, and they go around and around in a big circle. Water recycling is just shortcutting that a bit. No matter, we had a friend of ours now in the water tank business over last night and are getting our plans in order to have a couple of tanks installed down the side of our house in a couple of months. Wednesday, November 29. 2006NSW to roll out free WiFi service
So our state government is attempting to get a clue about wifi then huh?
Go for it I say, but Telstra is a powerful adversary, and underdog Optus looks like it wants to get on your side, so it is undoubtedly going to be a lot more complicated than just plugging in some base stations around the place. Oh, and how do I ask for my local suburb to be listed as a "major centre" so we can have it out there too? And where are you going to get your IT staff to implement it all, since there aren't many left in Sydney now?
Posted by Alison Gould
in Mobile Devices, Sydney, Technology
at
22:44
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