All posts by Alistair Lattimore

About Alistair Lattimore

My name is Alistair Lattimore, I'm in my very early 30's and live on the sunny Gold Coast in Australia. I married my high school sweet heart & we've been together for longer than I can remember. Claire and I started our family in September 2008 when Hugo was born and added a gorgeous little girl named Evie in May 2010. You can find me online in the typical hangouts, Google+, Twitter & facebook. . View all posts by Alistair Lattimore →

Fuel Price

February 12, 2011GeneralAlistair Lattimore

I don’t understand how fuel is priced.

Last week I took a drive up to Toowoomba and before I left I grabbed some fuel on the Gold Coast at $1.42 for standard unleaded. As I drove towards Brisbane, the price remained fairly similar.

As soon as I got to the western side of the Logan Motorway, less than 100Km from the Gold Coast – the fuel price started to fluctuate by 2-3c per litre.

By the time I made my way into the Gatton area, the fuel price had dropped by a further 2-3c per litre. As I neared the bottom of the range at Toowoomba, the price continued to fall and when returning home I picked up fuel for $1.28 per litre, a whole $0.14 per litre cheaper than I paid on the Gold Coast a few hours earlier.

Now I’d assume that there is a cost to the fuel companies to distribute their fuel around the country. I also assume, though I could be completely wrong, that the fuel processing takes place in or near capital cities. As such, it would see logical to me that the price to distribute a litre of fuel to the Gold Coast would be less than trucking it approximately 200Km west to Toowoomba and climbing over 1000m mountain.

Today I got fuel at a BP service centre, one of the big ones that sits off to the side of a motorway. On a Saturday, surely one of their highest load days of the week – every tank and bowser was conveniently out of unleaded. The difference between 91RON and 95RON, a handy 14c per litre.

Just try and convince me that the oil companies aren’t gouging the Australian public for every dollar.

How To Kill Paper Wasps

January 24, 2011Humour, LifeAlistair Lattimore

Over the last couple of years, I’ve had several encounters with paper wasps and had varying levels of success in attempting to kill paper wasps as well.

In the last couple of weeks, there have been four different sets of paper wasp nests forming around the house. Two of the four were in really inconvenient places, such as above the back sliding door near the laundry and in the joint of our clothes line.

On the weekend, it seems like as good a time as any to try my hand at killing the paper wasps again. Last time I attempted it, I was armed with a can of Mortein and I can assure you, when I sprayed their nests – they were very unhappy.

Wanting to see if I could one up the paper wasps this time, I was armed with a can of Baygon Surface Spray and WK-40. You’re probably wondering what WK-40 is; well it is your garden variety WD-40, the spray lubricant with a thousand uses with an awesome new label provided by Andrew for my 27th birthday. The WK-40 was the key in avoiding getting bitten this time, as with the thin nozzle connected you can spray a tight stream of WK-40 for over 2 metres – great for distancing yourself from angry as hell paper wasps!

With a can in either hand & feeling a little like Peter Venkman from Ghostbusters, I walked up as close to their nests as I dared and coated them & promptly ran away as the wasps swarmed the area looking for something to string! As it turns out, WK-40 and Baygon Surface Spray is a lethal concoction with great knockdown power.

In each of the four paper wasp nests, I came out on top without getting bitten once. I’m sure WD-40 didn’t have killing paper wasps on their list of 1000+ things that their fantastic lubricant is good for!

2010 Traffic Statistics

January 6, 2011Blogging, WebsitesAlistair Lattimore

Following on from my 2009 web statistics, below is a summary of what traffic the site took in 2009.

In 2009 the site took 106,930 visitors over the entire year which resulted in 136,525 pageviews. During 2010, the site generated 97,509 visits and 132,068 pageviews. That figure is down from my two biggest years of approximately 145,000 and 135,000 during 2007 and 2008 when I was posting less frequently but the posts were of a more technical nature and also pop culture related such as Australian Idol. It’ll come as no surprise that from a traffic driving potential, a lot fewer people are interested in reading about my personal ramblings compared to technical style posts that I used to post.

During 2008 and 2009, I wrote a couple of posts each year that grabbed a moderate amount of traffic and were clear standouts with respect to the number of pageviews. During 2010, none of my posts really caught the attention of the internet; which per above can be attributed to the topics that I’m writing about.

The traffic breakdown by source shows a considerable decrease in the reliance of search engines, with their traffic percentage falling from around 85% in 2008-2009 down to only 74% in 2010. Within the search engine space, Google are completely dominating with 94% of the search engine traffic. During 2009, Yahoo! were the first non-Google search engine with about 2.5% & Microsoft Bing was the new kid on the block. Fast forward a year and the tides have turned with Bing now accounting for 2.6% and Yahoo! 2.4% of the search engine traffic.

The most popular posts for the year were nearly identical to 2009, with four of five remaining and one newcomer:

Removing those posts from the top of the list since they clearly dominate:

It is probably worth noting that nine out of ten of the highest traffic web pages on my site are not about anything to do with myself or our family but are in fact to do with helping others. This makes a lot of sense, especially when you see the meteoric traffic growth question and answer sites Stack Overflow and Quora have seen in the last two years.

That being said, still nothing from 2010 were showing up in the list. Isolating the posts written in 2010 and the landscape is vastly different:

Onward and upward for 2011!

2010 Blogging Statistics

January 6, 2011BloggingAlistair Lattimore

At the end of last year, I posted the 2009 blogging statistics for my site including the previous years. In keeping with that trend, below is the amended table which now includes 2010 as well.

	POSTS	AVG. POST LENGTH	TOTAL POST LENGTH	COMMENTS	AVG. COMMENTS
2004	1	478	487	0	0.0
2005	82	1949	159835	511	12.7
2006	103	1837	189259	865	4.5
2007	127	1977	251150	229	1.0
2008	68	1597	108623	78	0.6
2009	77	2114	162804	104	0.8
2010	81	2147	173969	105	1.0

I still didn’t manage to reach my peak of 2007 in the total number of posts, I’m happy that I’ve managed to increase it slightly over last year. In 2009, I said I was going to try and post between 7-8 times per month but I only managed a shade under 7. I’m going up the ante slightly, 8 or more per month and try and break through the 100 per year barrier again. To do that, I think I’ll be writing about a different topics and throwing up cute photos of the kids more regularly.

For those that are interested in doing the same, I’ve made the blogging statistics SQL script available for you to use.

30th Birthday

December 30, 2010Family, LifeAlistair Lattimore

Like sands through the hour glass, err what was I thinking – I’m now officially 30!

The day kicked off by Claire, Hugo & Evie waking me up – which is always good fun. Hugo enjoys waking me up in the morning I think, he knows how to say ‘wake up’ and knows that if my eyes are shut that he should say it and I get a big smile from him when he succeeds and I open my eyes.

Claire loves presents and can’t wait & I obliged when she whipped out a couple of presents and sat them on the bed. Of course, at this stage I’m still bleary eyed and have the cognitive capacity of a well fed gnat but lets not get into that! I was completely spoiled for gifts and received:

Two new Nintendo Wii games
Season 3 and Season 4 of Heroes
Gift voucher to go tandem parasailing!
Samsung 40″ Full HD 100Hz LCD television

The new LCD TV in the list was my ‘big’ present this year and it was absolutely worth it. I can’t believe we’ve, and I’ll use this word loosely, suffered with an old 45cm CRT television we’ve had for at least the last six years but probably closer to eight! You don’t realise how poor something is until you replace it and then get the ‘wow’ kind of moment. We’ve now had that and I’m definitely never going back!

After presents were dealt with, standard morning things ensued. For breakfast, Hugo and I popped out to the local McDonald’s get to get some pancakes – which he loves.

As a bit of a tradition, we’d normally head to Hogs Breath for lunch however this year we decided to break that tradition as the traffic to get into Sea World or Marina Mirage is typically bonkers at this time of year due to school holidays, which was going to be compounded by today being the first sunny day in quite a while.

In lieu of Hogs Breath for lunch, we grabbed a couple of sausage rolls from Brumbies – which are always delicious. The remainder of the morning and lunch were spent organising for the afternoon when we were having a few family over for afternoon tea and an early dinner.

Everyone arrived nearly at the same time which was fantastic, so we ended up with:

Sterle, Lorraine & Jean
Anita & Lucy
Andrew, Belinda & Ben
George & Jude

Hugo and Ben spent quite a bit of time playing in a new outdoor water toy that Hugo received for Christmas. Water went everywhere, they both got wet & had a great time doing it. We snacked on a variety of things for afternoon tea, ate a little pizza for an early dinner and attempted to put a dint in a completely evil chocolate cake from the Cheese Cake Shop – I failed miserably!

I’d just like to thank everyone for driving up this afternoon, it works out to be nearly a neat hours drive for everyone. Its great to be with family and friends on your birthday and it means a lot of me to have you all here, especially since my birthday falls on the back of Christmas festivities & madness.

Next up, 31 – look out!