Mike’s Blog

Our beloved housemate Steve has moved to Melbourne. The weekend he moved down (January 30) was busy because:

• on Friday I helped Steve load his stuff into his rental truck,
• on Saturday I helped Nath move stuff from his old room to Steve’s old room, and
• on Sunday I helped Dyan move into Nath’s old room.

To top it off, I dropped Christine off at her dad’s so he could take her to the airport early Monday morning for her five week trip to Japan.

The moves all seemed to go quite well, although it was sad saying goodbye to Christine since she’ll be gone with her friends for ages. Before she left we launched her new cooking blog, which she has started to fill up quickly and will no doubt have loads of content to add when she returns. Maybe with the extra time I have I can make some improvements to my own site!

Well I can’t say I intend to make a habit out of this, but I have changed jobs again. This makes it the second job change and the third job I’ve had this year!

I had an amazing 6 months with Morgan Creative but after a partnering company unexpectedly withdrew their support, they weren’t able to keep me on. I was very sad to leave because I was working with awesome people on awesome stuff in an awesome location.

During my job search I was basically looking for three things:

• a larger company,
• a ‘cool’ office environment/culture, and
• a recognised name.

This led me to Atlassian, who have been growing fast. They’re a big name in software, especially for Sydney. The company is filled with really smart people and the culture is still very start-upish, which is awesome. I’ve been brought on as a Support Engineer for JIRA Studio, a hosted version of virtually all Atlassian products.

The whole process, from the interviewing stages to having just finished my second day, has been great. Everyone is very friendly and it’s clear that they really do care about people over processes. I think I’m going to like it here!

During the month of November I am growing a moustache. Not because it’s fashionable, but to raise money for prostate cancer research and men’s depression.

The Movember campaign has been running each year since 2004. Considering one in nine Australian men will develop prostate cancer in their lifetime, it’s a pretty worthy cause.

Movember 2009

If you’d like to donate to support the cause you can do so from my donation page. You can also rate my mo’ and see my progress to date.

Last year after moving out of my parents’ home I decided to ’splash out’ and get a queen-sized bed and a nice latex mattress. Since Ikea is nearby it made sense to give them a go.

I ended up purchasing a Ramberg bed, which was curiously discontinued not too long after I bought it. I was also going to buy the mattress from Ikea but they were out of stock, so I had to go somewhere else for it (and sleep on slats and a foam mattress for a week or so).

When purchasing certain beds from Ikea, they  have to be bought in pieces – the actual bed frame, the mid-beam and the slats. I bought the cheapest slats, called Sultan Lade, which were $50 each (I needed two sets since I had a queen-sized bed). Interestingly these are the only slats not covered by Ikea’s 25 year warranty.

One of the slats broke very soon after purchase and another one broke just recently, prompting me to go out and get all-new slats. I wasn’t sure which ones I could use (there’s quite a range), especially since my bed frame was discontinued, so it was hard to research. Eventually I went out and got some Sultan Lillåker curved slats for $100 (I only needed one set thankfully, as one set contains two ‘rolls’ of slats).

The slats fit into the bed frame without any problems, but within minutes I discovered that the slats would slip off the mid-beam very easily.

I tried stuffing some padding in between the outside of the frame and the slats to force them to stay on the mid-beam. All this accomplished was that the slats fell off the mid-beam instead! I tried getting some twine and tying the slats tightly around the mid beam. This appeared to work for a day but the slats did still eventually fall off the mid beam. I also tried tightening the frame as much as possible.

The only other thing I can think of trying is to get a thin, strong piece of wood to place on top of the mid beam to effectively widen it.  I’m not sure if this will work or not, but I will update this post with the result!

Edit: Due to some strange circumstances, I never got around to trying out the ‘plank of wood’ idea. It turned out that during the construction of the bed frame, we failed to put in the screws as per these instructions:Luckily I found the original screws (from over a year ago)! After pushing and holding the sides in while screwing these screws into the frame to stop it from sagging out, the slats no longer slip off

Today, along with some other people from church, I volunteered to help out with the water tables for the City2Surf.

We had to get up at 6am to get there around 7:30am (picking some people up on the way). It was quite cold but not too bad for August. It was a nice sunny day too, which made things more bearable.

At our designated station (about 5km from the finish) we set up tables and filled them with plastic cups. We filled up the cups with tap water using jugs dipped into lined garbage bins that were filled up with hoses. We then layered cardboard over the cups to make a second level of drinks. Some tables had three levels.

The police were running up and down the course ensuring that it was free from vehicles. It was just as well, because one car had managed to find its way onto the course after the race started. The police quickly found him and got him to turn around just in time before the first runner came down our street!

For the next two or three hours after the race started I was basically standing in one spot holding out cups of water to the runners. It was a bit of a strain on the shoulders and lower back (as we were leaning over the table) but it was fun seeing the runners that were dressed in crazy outfits.

Apparently there were 75,000 runners this year, making it the world’s largest running event. Pretty cool! As volunteers we also got a special t-shirt, which was cool too It was pretty fun but a lot of hard work.

Shortly after I started my new job I developed a bit of a cough. It was quite annoying and lasted about two weeks, although there were no other symptoms besides coughing. I was glad it didn’t develop into a full cold.

However, just as the cough started to subside, I began experiencing a sharp stabbing pain around my lower right rib cage whenever I coughed. This pain increased over time and it became painful to move that area of my body.

After a bit of research (mainly here) I discovered that I had pulled an Intercostal muscle.

I bought some cough syrup, which did ease my coughing a bit. Fortunately the cough subsided just as the pain was getting quite bad. I also found that pressing my hand up against the sore spot as I coughed would lessen the pain a little.

It took about two or three weeks for the muscle strain to go away completely. It really mucked up my running schedule because I stopped when the cough started and, because of the subsequent muscle strain, couldn’t start again for over a month!

In retrospect I should have bought the cough syrup earlier, as reducing the amount of coughing even by a little bit could have helped me avoid the muscle strain entirely.

My parents (of all people) got me on to this new Facebook application called Farm Town (made by SlashKey). Normally I don’t add these kinds of applications because they’re generally time wasters, but since my parents were spending so much time on it (and had roped in my sister) I gave in.

Ploughing fields with onions growing in the background.

You basically have your own farm where you can plough fields, plant crops, harvest crops, sell crops (the main source of income), plant fruit trees, sell fruit, buy animals, houses, barns, fences, paths and even increasing the size of your land.

It also keeps track of various achievements and awards trophies based on that, which can unlock new abilities. For example, if you get enough neighbours (other Facebook friends playing the game who agree to be your neighbour) you will be able to sell items you’ve purchased instead of just deleting them.

If you’re short on funds you can go to the Market Place to ask for work harvesting other people’s crops. People have incentive to hire people because it doesn’t actually cost anything and the resulting crops sell for more than if they did it themselves.

It’s quite addictive when you start out but now that I’ve hit level 24 it’s starting to lose its appeal. There’s simply too much land to deal with and it’s not challenging to get large sums of money with valuable crops like onions and pumpkins.

I don’t really know why I’m posting about this game. Maybe I just feel it desrves it because of how long it has kept me entertained for

As a big fan of both Steven Colbert and Harvey Birdman, I was pleasantly surprised to come across this striking similarity between Colbert and the character he voices. Check out these two screen grabs:

The resemblance is uncanny.

Apparently Phil Ken Sebben’s twin brother (Bill) looks just like Phil, except that he wore his patch on the other eye

Yesterday I finished up working at Interspire. It was sad because I have made a lot of friends there and I really enjoyed working with them. It’s a really good place to work with all sorts of perks and cool projects. I had spent the last year with them working on Email Marketer. I know it’s really busy and me leaving will really increase my team mates’ work load – sorry about that guys!

I’m taking the rest of this week off and then starting at Morgan Creative on Monday. This is a company started by a couple of friends of mine which has started to really take off. It’s similar kind of work but more contract-based with clients rather than product-based with customers. They head-hunted me around Easter and managed to make me an offer good enough to get me to join. It’s going to be great working with them again!

Since I’m finishing up at my current job I didn’t need my usual weekly train ticket. I figured it would be cheaper just to purchase a return ticket each day for the few days I had left.

One particular morning I handed over a $20 note and asked for one of these tickets (which costs about $7) and the man behind the counter gave me the ticket with $3 change. I mentioned this to him expecting him to remember what I gave him, but he said “Well I believe you gave me $10, so I’d have to do a full cash count”. It was a couple of minutes before the train came and there was a huge line behind me, so there was no way I was going to make a huge scene and inconvenience everyone because of this guy’s mistake. I just went down to the platform, fuming that my $7 ticket had cost $17.

I may have doubted what note I gave him except for the fact that I had recently been to an ATM and all the notes in my wallet were from that (which doesn’t dispense $10 notes). I was fuming

I went back that night on my way home where there was a different person staffing the booth. After explaining the situation she said they mentioned the till was $10 and to come back tomorrow morning.

I followed her advice and when I got to the ticket booth I mentioned to the (different) man what happened yesterday. He immediately recognised me and kept saying repeatedly “You were right mate,” and headed off to the safe at the back of the room. As he pulled some money out of the safe, the man responsible for giving me incorrect change popped his head into view from behind somewhere else and apologised profusely.

I used the $10 they returned to buy a return ticket for that day. I was happy to get the money back but the fact that I got an apology too was really great. While CityRail services and trains are quite horrible, I have generally found the staff to be good.