No Nose Smiley :)

My first uber experience as a passenger I finally caved.  And used my 'free' uber ride from one end of Sydney city to the other.  And it was OK, but not revolutionary.  To be clear it was an uberX trip.  Which is the ride sharing version.  Where every day people can sign up and become an uber driver and effectively start up a business providing rides.  Think of it as a rickshaw service with GPS location and air conditioning. Oh and an app.  It's all about the app. I covered the uber app user experience for onboarding a little while back. I think it's great.  A great use of the squillions of dollars they have raised too to invest in user experience.  But the user experience extends to the experience in the car.  And more importantly the experience waiting for a car. When starting the app it automatically picks up your location (turn on location services on your phone peeps!  yes they are tracking us but the benefit is huge......

Just a series of photos with commentary of what I was doing and why during January 2016. I had a birthday again...  Family members (not us) went on a cruise...  Bought myself some fake flowers that look great!  Proving that fruit trees aren't great in the first year...  Inspired by this we'll be doing something similar for a library at home...  Rug Doctor is a lot better than the Britex machine.  Did our place, my mum's and mother in law's!  Home theatre gets some storage  Work can take you into some gorgeous buildings (44 Martin Place)  Progress in the yard...

This blog is hosted using Blogger... just because it's simple and I don't need to worry about it. It's fairly invisible as I don't really blog much but it provides a platform for me to 'share' without having to resort to social media.  Anyway I thought I'd have a look at where traffic was hitting the blog and this is what I saw: Yeach.  Really ugly.  What the heck are these sites?  Please don't send me traffic.  I don't care if no one reads it. Most of my traffic seems to come from the Ukraine?!

OK while I can't guarantee you a win, here are 9 winning strategies to being shortlisted when submitting an application online. This post applies for job applications too but I thought I'd share my thoughts on the 'reviewer' side of an online application.  I'm currently about 1/3 of the way through an initial review of some online applications.  In this case it was for a competition type thing at work (I work at TfNSW in the Digital team and we're processing the Open Data registrations of interest ) but the process it the same.  I've also been reviewing some 'job' applications for one of my latest startup ventures so these tips do cross over into that realm too. I've filled in a number of these types of forms in the past and for whatever reason didn't appreciate what effort should go into responding!  So to help you avoid the same issue I thought I'd share some tips about what you can do to help your online form based ap...

I saw an ad on Petrescue for a lovely "Schnauzer Cross"... and a second one too! So I popped my name down as we are looking for a friend for Sprocket still after we didn't manage to adopt a cute Beagle cross called Bronco: Bronco the beagle cross in our backyard So after putting in an EOI for both the Schnauzer Cross dogs I got the call that I was the first to put in for the first doggie, the brindle female dog. Here are some adorable photos of this doggie from Petrescue: On Saturday I went out to meet her with Sprocket. She was a timid old thing.  And didn't warm up to anyone.  But looked a lot more confident after a couple of hours - esp compared to the photos above. And I really don't like having my photo on the interwebs but can't resist adding this photo of me and the two doggies.  Sprocket was also an ex-pound dog and from the same facility.  The Blacktown Animal Holding Facility . The issue is...

My mother has been talking up Jeunesse products for the last few months.  And been sending me lots of YouTube videos and other information about it.  Mainly because she has seen the benefits of it on her friends when she went back to Canada.  What happened was she met up with some friends whom she hadn't seen in a little while and she found that they looked younger and much healthier.  As a cancer survivor who has done well but wants to get back to 100% she of course wanted to find out what the secret was. They told her it was Jeunesse.  And got her to try the very expensive products over the next few weeks. I was then told how this was great and how she got her energy up and how she wanted me to do the business.  Uh oh.  Not one of those!  Yep a network marketing opportunity (think Amway).  And I don't tend to really have that bad a reaction to them.  I've tried a number of these businesses mainly because I liked the product but didn'...

Mocoro - fuzzy blue (or pink, yellow or green) gadget that cleans your floor and is fun.  It's marketed as a robotic floor cleaner.   This guy is hilarious. Unboxed this guy after purchasing it online month's ago.  It's not the genuine Mocoro as the instructions don't quite work against the actual thing but it doesn't matter.  He's a cool Cookie Monster blue (and comes with different 'covers') and rolls around the floor.  The really cool thing is that he (it?) rolls around in inconsistent ways and often just 'rolls off' to do it's own thing.  It's quite hilarious (strange sense of humour I have maybe?)  It often goes against a wall and just um... becomes fairly affectionate against the wall... Initial thoughts about the 'useful' part of Mocoro: The zipper makes a bit of a disconcerting noise against the floor and maybe a bit of concern about scratching the floor...  Takes 2 AA batteries (despite saying only 1 ba...