No Nose Smiley :)

In the past I have had a home which had a whole of house filter.  To filter out all the chlorine in the home and even the fluoride for drinking.  Since I've moved to an apartment things have to be a bit different as the water that comes into the apartment for hot water is already hot.  Which means any "whole" of apartment filter needs to be able to cope with hot water too.  It's not that there isn't such a thing just that it was too hard to get the right plumber in for the job who knew what they were doing. So I decided to just get an over the sink kitchen filter for drinking water (and cooking and cleaning fishtanks and watering plants) and for my shower I just got a shower filter.  And I worked out that I could buy special vitamin c tablets to dechlorinate my bath water.  I've been using the dechorination tablets for over a year (you get about 20 tablets per tube and I got 5 tubes) when my mum was telling me about how she's going to start having bath...

I've now moved to Hurstville into a 1 bedroom apartment... with 2 dogs ... from a house for a year.  And LOVE it. In this post I talk about some of the things I love about apartment living.  I also cover some of the gotchas and what I don't like about it. 1.  Security I love the secure feeling of living in this particular apartment block.  I know it's not universal with all apartments but one of the things I was seeking was a feeling of security (or rather a lack of not feeling safe.)  I live on a high floor which helps too.  If I had all the same features but was on the first or ground floor I don't think it would be the same at all. My apartment block has a swipe card/fob access for the lobby door and then a further swipe is required to get to any floor on the lift.  My apartment door then has a normal lock although I've seen other people install an additional lock I don't feel the need for this.  My floor only has a handful of apartments ...

One of my co-founders of CrowdQuests  / HackSauce  has rightly pointed out that my last post was saying I am only focusing on one Startup.  Well I was.  But then we did GovHack  2018... and started up a new startup CrowdQuests which is something I find we at Transport for NSW need and I'm sure other data hungry organisations also need.  We've often talked about getting data more accurate and crowdsourced to keep costs low.  So now there is such a company and app that does that.  CrowdQuests :) So CrowdQuests is the product and HackSauce is the organisation that has the four founders attached to it.  I say attached as we have it currently as a partnership with the 4 companies that each of the founders is a sole director of as partners.  I know confusing, right?  But it works for us and we are likely to incorporate HackSauce to make things a bit easier when submitting tenders and quotes and proposals. More about CrowdQuests and wh...

I wrote this in 2017 but never published it.  Not for any real reason but just because it wasn't finished and I forgot about it.  In August 2018 I'm resurrecting it and publishing it.  Just in case it helps someone.  A few weeks ago we shut down 99interns 😢 after a few years in the market and good market recognition.  I shut down oddswop a couple of years ago (well kinda shut down.  I still need to deregister the company and finalise all the tax stuff).  But I still had New Home Review which was setup relatively recently and BadgerMe which was a couple of years old.  But even those are being shut down.  The BadgerMe back end was closed out last week and New Home Review, I've advised Ciaran and other people working on things that I'm shutting it down as well.  Because... I'm going all in on one startup.  Yes ONE .  And it's not even mine.  Well it is mine but I won't be the Founder.  I'll be the co-founder. It'...

I spent about a month with minimal added sugar and wheat.  And this is what happened... I'm sure that sounds familiar.  Maybe some clickbait type headline?  I've been wanting to reduce my wheat and sugar intake a bit and do some experimentation.  But needed a good way to force or convince myself to do it.  A mind hack.  Mind Hacks I love a good mind hack.  To me it's something I setup as a quasi constraint (ie a constraint totally made up by me!) that helps me towards a goal or something I want to achieve.  It's like setting artificial deadlines.  Fasting One of my major mind hacks is fasting.  Some of you may know that I've been doing my version of 5:2 where I fast two days a week and eat normally on the other 5 days.  Usually a 5:2 diet will allow up to 500 calories on the fasting days.  On Tuesdays and Thursdays (or days starting with "t"), I fast.  This doesn't include any coffee or tea or hot chocolates even...

Somehow I stumbled on the Magic Mirror project and of course I wanted to build it.  Forget that I was in the middle of another mirror project (still not finished) but this one is now built! Here is the finished product (still a bit messy as I put a small console type table under the mirror):  The console table was added... as I needed to hide the power point from my dogs who like munching on power cables if too accessible.  Before I mounted it on the wall I had it propped up on a dining room chair...  There are plenty of resources on how to get the magic mirror tech side of things done.  The key resource is the Magic Mirror site: https://magicmirror.builders/   I've also used Google a lot and Jayen helped me a lot too on various bits and pieces.   The main thing that is different is the way I put the frame/mirror component together.  Here are the high level details (oxymoron?): 1. bought mirror tint from Ali...

I recently bought a car!  Yay me!  It's a second hand 2008 Honda Jazz VTi Manual. I bought the car via Carsales from a lovely lady based in Thornleigh.  And dragged Patrick from work along with me to test drive the car.  (Thanks Patrick... esp since we were stuck in traffic for such a long time!)  It's my first car in a long time as usually the car ends up in W's name and I don't actually enjoy driving so... it's really not my call as to what car to get.  But I was happy with my purchase.  It put me back $6200 (was listed at $6500).  I'm sure I could have probably gone down to $6000 but I don't like bargaining when it's for the sake of it. The car however didn't have things like reverse sensors or Bluetooth for hands free calling.  So I could get both of those things installed or go the whole hog and get something a bit fancy.  I had been spoiled as I was driving my mum's Mazda 2 with all the bells and whistles which had a heads up ...