Friendly(er) spam

I used to think comment spam was the scourge of the earth, however i'm starting to change my mind.  Have a look at this comment received today on one of my old posts:

"Easily, the article is really the best on this laudable topic. I concur with your conclusions and will thirstily look forward to your forthcoming updates. Saying thanks will not just be enough, for the extraordinary lucidity in your writing. I will directly grab your rss feed to stay informed of any updates. De lightful work and much success in your business efforts!"

Total nonsense, but makes me laugh and frankly a refreshing change from the spam in my inbox informing me off non-existent mortgage applications, or that my knob is too small.

Ia Orana

 

If you ever make it to Tahiti, i'd recommend making takng the extra step and getting the ferry to Moorea, the smaller island to the east. Stayed at a resort called Linereva, formerly a dive centre and run by a friendly French couple. You have a coral reef on your doorstep, kayaks available and bikes to use, and well decked out beach huts. I spent countless hours swimming in / around the reef, plenty of rays, reef sharks and turtles. The pic above was taken standing on the jetty which leads out to the reef.

 

Moving to Sydney and looking to rent?

Here are a painful lessons i've learnt in the last 4 days..

1. Get used to the whole house/apartment public inspection, only in a blue moon will an agent give you a private viewing for a place.  Makes you wonder what they actually do at all.
2. Chances are you won't have employment yet, on your application make it clear you are prepared to pay atleast 3 months + bond upfront, of not the whole tennancy.  We had a couple of applications rejected even though we offered to pay 6 months for a 6 month contract upfront simply because having arrived a few days ago we weren't employed.  Makes no sense whatsoever, but it is just like that.  
3. Use the fact that you aren't working to your advantage, any inspections after 5pm on a weekday or on a Saturday anytime will be popular (alot of places we viewed must have had over 20 people there), so unless it is breath taking concentrate on those showing 10:00 - 16:00 Mon-Fri, then apply straight away.  
4. Hand deliver rather than fax applications, found applications got much further if i had a chance to speak with the real estate agent face to face, also led to them telling me about upcoming apartments.
5. Each applicant needs 100 points of proof, i was carrying my passport, copy of bank statement, copy of credit cards around with me the whole time, means i could quickly make new applications if an agent showed/suggested a new property.
6. I created a google docs spreadsheet aggregating all the properties i wanted to view for the day.  Could access all the details i needed for properties from the published page on my pda, saved so much time when travelling to and from viewings.  Retrieving property infomation, agent contact details using domain.com.au or realestate.com.au mobile search is very slow and frustrating. 
7. Don't bother visiting real estate agency offices unless you are dropping off an application, all the properties they have will be on domain or realestate. I found using realestate's OpenInspection tool most fruitful.
8. Phone up an agent before going to an inspection, a couple of times no one turned up and i wasted time and money getting there. If i had my way, those agents would have be hung drawn an quartered.

In the 5 years I lived in Sydney prior to returning i never remember the rental market being so fierce, like a pack of wolves chasing down a small rabbit.  Saw people viewing a property for the first time for barely 10 seconds before handing a prefilled application form to the real estate agent. I wonder what buying a place is actually going to be like?

In other news, here are some of the New Zealand pictures, what an amazing country.

Publishing a Google Document and losing fixed width?

Two undocumented querystring parameters in the Google Doc API may help :  

pageview - setting this to 1 will maintain the fixed width view you see whist creating the document after publishing (defaults to 100% width)

hgd : set to 1 to exclude google footer

 

Open for Inspection

Found a handy tool for any fellow frustrated apartment seekers in Sydney; Open For Inspection from realestate.com.au. You can quickly see all the inspections aggregated by date for a suburb/city/state, and apply any filters such as price. It would be handy if you could actually see the results on a map, or retrieve it through RSS.. but maybe those features are coming as the product is still Beta. The only way I managed to duplicate this functionality previously, was to search on domain.com.au for all Sydney suburbs, then filter by inpsection time for next 7 days, then sort those by inspection time. Apart from being frustratingly slow, this tended to be error prone as places without any inspection date/time set default to today or some undeterminable point in the future. It is also very easy to access this open for inspection page from a PDA, up till now i've been hacking around with my own google doc spreadsheet which screenscrapes data from domain/realestate.com.au, filters then sorts it, allowing me to quickly get at easy whilst mobile.

In the UK I used the all powerful globrix which already has already been running these features for sometime, great to see the Aussie sites building them too.

Here's the fun i've got lined up for today. If only the agents would actually turn up for the inspection now (2 didn't yesterday).

 

 

Diesel, for successful living

Diesel, for successful living
Originally uploaded by Matt Goodman

A random sign on the way to Vegas caught my eye as we were racing along the Interstate 15. Not to far from Barstow.

General Sherman

General Sherman Originally uploaded by Matt Goodman

Spent a couple of days in the Sequoia National Park, south of the Yosemite. The tree pictured here is called "General Sherman", and believed to be between 2300 - 2700 years old. The tree is truly enormous, holding the title for largest in the world. Although somewhat of a mission to get to it, well worth the effort. The national park is stunning at this time of year (end of feb) and free from armies of motorhomes/campers, so had many trails to ourselves.

More pictures here. Now, off to Vegas..

Plum of Elephant Seals

Elephant Seals, near San Simeon
Originally uploaded by Matt Goodman

A totally unexpected find; halfway along the coast between San Francisco and LA near a town called San Simeon, came across a plum of Elephant Seals in the wild. Lots of grunting snorting and wallowing around, I felt right at home.

Red Rock Island

The only privately owned island in the San Francisco Bay area, yours for only $22,000,000. That works out at around $3.5m per acre.

Returning to Sydney

Back on 25th March by way of New York, San Fransisco, Tahiti and New Zealand.

Deep Zooming

Here’s my first effort with DeepZoom (it’ll prompt you to install Silverlight if you don’t already have this). 

 

Here is the same image set using HDView from Microsoft Research.

Next on the shopping list is the GigaPan Epic 100 and a Tokina 11-16mm UltraWide Lens.

Goldman

Mayfair to Chiswick world record

Started running home from work some evenings.  Today i did it (6.8 miles) in 48 minutes.  I’m a machine!

 

See the route [gmapspedometer.com]  

Turnham Green

 

I sit on this platform every morning waiting for District Line trains, and this is the frustrating view of ones on the Picadilly line flying by without stopping. Perhaps time to join the STOP campaign?

Not impressed

Iced off

Was supposed to be going to the Fulham football match against Blackburn Rovers today but it has been cancelled to to a frozen pitch.  They only realised this 90 minutes before the match was about to start. Infact i had walked all the way to the tube, been shivering on a platform for 20 mins before i found out. 

Recently traded in my Nikkon D80 for the new D90 model.  So far i’m really liking it; i was sceptical of the new HD video feature, but am finding i use it more and more.  Having an HD video camera (720p) which you can attach different lenses to is a great bonus.  Celebrated the new camera by buying a Sigma Macro 105mm F2.8 lens.  Here’s a picture of some snow, and the sphere of Drammen

Maybe i’ll enter this year’s Tropfest, the theme is a spring..?

Time for a go on wii fit.

The last 5 months

Anyone would think i'm dead, the last post was on 1st May 2008.  It is now 5th December 2008 and i've finally gotten round to typing something.

So what have i been up to?

June

• Ingunn and i got married in Norway.  About 45 people came to the wedding and it was certainly the happiest day of my life to date. After the wedding we took a 1 week honey moon to Biarritz in South Western France.
  
• Started working at a hedge fund in London.  The role is a front office developer.   Busy busy.
  

July  - December.  Had a few long weekend trips which include Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Rome.  These have been interspersed with long periods of work and head colds.

Only

7 weeks to go till the wedding, with one or two things still to organise.  We are doing the ceremony outside so there are a ton of things that can and will go wrong. Rains is pretty much guaranteed, snow? It is in Norway after all.

Enjoying life back in London for now though, we've got an apartment in what i originally thought was stuffy district of Chiswick, but turns out is quite upbeat.  Do still long for the sun and surf of Sydney, but being closer to family and old friends again is fantastic.  London itself has changed too, seems cleaner and more of a buzz compared to 6 years ago.  More continental even.  Listening to all the new/old radio stations, I even found myself enjoying any answers last weekend!

Spring here now, bluebells a-plenty..  This one was taken in my parents garden recently

 

I love fonejacker, hilarious. Just finished reading Persuasion, the art of influencing people.  Great book, watch out!

 

Hopefully next week will be less hectic.

Spring-erland

A walk through the woods at Newlands Corner.

Feels like spring is just about starting, another month and there'll be green everywhere.

Spring-erland

A walk through the woods at Newlands Corner.

Feels like spring is just about starting, another month and there'll be green everywhere.