Posts in Category: Just Plain Interesting
One less reason to go to Melbourne
Saw this on the new part of the Canberra Centre the other day! Hooray!
Koko Black is the best chocolate shop I have ever been to. Their hot chocolate was at least 100 times better than the next best hot chocolate I’ve had. I can’t imagine that a new one in Canberra will be as cool as the one in the Royal Arcade in Melbourne, but it will still be hard to avoid spending lots of time (and money) in there.
Moo!
The last few weeks (basically since arriving back at work after our WA holiday) has been the most stressful time at work I’ve ever experienced. Fortunately, now that the Fair Pay Comission has made its first decision, things are a bit quieter and my project is (finally) finishing up on Friday week. While it’s been a great job I’ve had over the last year, I’m now ready for a change and something a bit less stressful.
One bright point this week is that Tegan and I each received a box of Moo MiniCards. This is a cool little company that we discovered via flickr. Basically, they’re trying to reinvent the calling card concept, but make it fun and personal – not like a business card. We ordered our boxes a week or so back when they were offering free international shipping as an introductory offer (and the shipping was really fast, considering they came from London).
These cards are drawn from our Flickr accounts – and they look so cool! The ones in this photo are all mine, but Tegan got some nice ones as well. My cards turned out a bit better than Tegan’s – several of hers were a bit dark and we can’t quite tell iff it was specific to the print run for each of them, or just because I chose photos that were brighter or had more contrast. Regardless, we both think they’re cool and so do the people we’ve given them to!
So, please ask if you want us to give you one/some, or you might just find that we hand them out for various reasons at points in time. And we’re both already thinking about how we can improve on the ones we’ve got when we order the next batch…
If I were a superhero
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You Are Elektra |
 There’s really no superhero with more style than you. Because who could beat being sexy assasin ninja? |
Sharing interesting things when you don’t have time to write
I find nearly everything interesting.
It’s one of those things about me that I can become interested in all sorts of different things and I like to know a bit about everything. At some level I just want to know everything, but that’s a pretty unrealistic goal. I’ve had conversations recently along the lines that the ability to find something interesting in anything is kind of a geeky trait – or maybe just a mark of intelligence – but it’s a trait that I relish in myself. it also goes some way to explaining why, particularly in this Internet age, I’ve become a bit of a news junkie.
It’s great and it’s terrible; a blessing and curse. It’s great because I can satiate my thirst for knowledge and read breaking news, opinion, commentary and all sorts of tidbits just about whenever I want. I’ve got quick links on both home and work computers to sites such as the Sydney Morning Herald, digg (a great newer find), Slashdot, Whirlpool, Wikipedia and a few other news and reference services.
One of the things I tend to do from time to time is email links to interesting articles to Tegan or to other friends, and from time to time I quite enjoyed sharing them on this site and writing up some thoughts about them, for example in this post: http://www.johnsons.id.au/?p=32. However, I also don’t really like doing it. I feel that not many people really read this site, and those who do do so because they are friends or family, and less because they want to know what I’m interested in.
Enter del.icio.us
I got started with this service a little while ago, mainly as a way of bookmarking things at work and then being able to easily access them at home – in the past I used to send myself emails at home with links to pages I wanted to look into more or bookmark. Now with this service, I can easily bookmark them online, easily find them again and, thanks to a Quicksilver plugin on the Mac, they’re nicely integrated and searchable on my main home computer.
Another advantage is that they are easy to share with others. By visiting ‘my’ del.icio.us page at http://del.icio.us/mistertim, you can see any pages I’ve bookmarked. Tegan has started looking this up occasionally to find interesting things I’ve found, and I could even add an RSS feed of my bookmarks into Safari or Firefox for live updating, or I could add a feed of them to the sidebar on this site so that, say, the last 10 sites I’d bookmarked in del.icio.us would show up there.
My links are, obviously, heavily skewed towards my interests – politics, public service, good eating, technology, gadgets and religion. If you’re interested, have a look from time to time or subscribe to the RSS feed at http://del.icio.us/rss/mistertim. You might even find the service useful yourself.
Word of the Day: Spiflicate
http://www.answers.com/spiflicate
1. Destroy. 2. Beat (Australian Concise Oxford Ditionary)
Trounce, Do for (Concise Oxford Dictionary)
It’s a word my grandmother (on the English) side used to use, but I had forgotten about it until this morning when a colleague mentioned it as a nonsense word that her grandmother used to use. I had great delight in telling her that it wasn’t actually a nonsense word and we looked it up in a dictionary and lo and behold – there it was.
But we were in agreement that it’s definitely a grandmother word.