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. .

Sydney

Photos, Travel

Sydney Opera House, viewed from The Rocks
I was in Sydney between 21-23 April, where I attended my first ‘marketing’ conference since moving from the Mantra Group IT Department at the beginning of 2009. The conference in question is called Search Marketing Expo or SMX for short and is held in numerous locations around the world, where the top minds in their respective fields are invited to present on their chosen specialty.

I packed my bag the night before and was up at sparrow fart on Wednesday morning. On my way down to Coolangatta Airport, I made a detour into Southport to pick up Stephen. The drive to the airport was hassle free, however I couldn’t believe how many cars were in the long term parking – it was all but overflowing with cars parked up on the edges of grass. The flight down to Sydney was delayed for some reason but it was good to hear regular updates over the speaker of the progress of the delay. Stephen has recently returned from a few weeks in Japan and has been regaling everyone of his fantastic time over there. A few things that have come to light in his travels, which have subsequently become crystal clear to me – we do a spectacularly poor job of catering for non-English language people.

After arriving in Sydney, we took a cab to Sydney city. Being used to Brisbane and Gold Coast airports being quite a distance away from the central business district, I was expecting a lengthy drive and a cab fare to match but was really surprised by the close proximity of the airport to the city. Stephen & I spent what time was available on Wednesday inspecting a couple of the Mantra Group hotels. It’s always nice to be able to walk around a hotel, find out what it is near from the point of view of a guest – it highlights a lot of things that you don’t get a sense of until you’ve actually been there. From an employee or company stand point, it was also great to see how well we’re doing with consistency of presentation and services at the hotels – yet another thing that is hard to judge until you’ve been there in person.

Stephen & I stayed at one of our Sydney hotels, Mantra on Kent which is located on Kent Street and is only a block away from Darling Harbour. Not because we’d organised it, however we ended up in 1 Bedroom Deluxe apartments on the 27th floor. There was plenty of room, the bed was comfortable, had a flat screen TV, a great bathroom with good views over the Sydney city. We enjoyed a full buffet breakfast each morning as well, which was really delicious.

Sydney Harbour Bridge viewed from The RocksAfter inspecting a couple hotels, we walked down George Street towards Circular Quay and The Rocks. Of course, having not been to Sydney before – I had no idea where I was going and was relying and Stephen and the magic that is Google Maps on an iPhone. As we approached Circular Quay, we came across a large grassed area with a heap of people just relaxing, chatting and eating their lunch. I wasn’t expecting it at but was great to see people taking advantage of such a great space. A few moments later and suddenly I could see the tips of the Sydney Opera House. I think every Australian has seen the Sydney Opera House countless times on TV but seeing it in person, even at a distance was remarkable. Another five minutes of walking and we were down at The Rocks and the Sydney Harbour Bridge was our back drop. While I’d always known that the Sydney Harbour Bridge was big, seeing it on TV or engulfed in fireworks really doesn’t give you any appreciation for just how large and visually spectacular it is – it really is impressive.

I managed to sample a couple different foods and restaurants while in Sydney, all in the city centre. The first was a Mexican take away restaurant named Guzman Y Gomez and it was possibly the single tastiest take away food I’ve ever eaten – I really wish we had one on the Gold Coast. For dinner, Kingsleys Australian Steakhouse was on the agenda as Stephen had eaten there before. When I read the menu, I actually joked with Stephen whether or not it was pretty much going to be a great piece of meat and potato and he confirmed my suspicions – that was fine by me! The second evening, we were taken out to a restaurant sitting behind a nightclub, though I can’t remember the name. The food was great and for dessert I had my first chocolate fondant – that was something I could eat regularly! We were our really late that night, not that we realised at the time – I don’t think we really finished eating until around 11PM and didn’t make it to bed until circa 2AM.

The Sydney CBD is a really nice area, lots of great looking buildings – plenty of older classically styled, mixed with new modern design. Probably the most surprising thing for me was, the apparent lack of people within Sydney city. For some reason, I had it in my mind that the city centre was going to be absolutely abuzz with activity – however it wasn’t any busier than Brisbane – in fact I think it was probably less busy. On our way back to the airport, we left early to make sure we could find taxi rank and actually make it to the airport on time. That turned out the be the best decision we’d made, as it turned out there was traffic pandimonium on the Friday evening leading into a long weekend. The taxi driver we had was great, an absolute ninja behind the wheel and was tearing through the traffic and he highlighted numerous times that he is intimately aware of the spacial requirements for that car to fit between other objects – wow.

Overall, I’m really impressed with what I saw of Sydney. While horribly brief from a sight seeing standpoint, its certainly somewhere I want to visit again with Claire & Hugo at a less frantic pace so we can get out of the city centre and really take in the beauty that is Sydney.

Google Chrome, Faster Than A Speeding Potato

Software, Videos

Over the years, my taste or preference for web browsers has changed as different software companies have released bigger better versions of their browser. In the last 15 years I’ve used more than half a dozen different web browsers and countless versions therein, flip flopping from one to another as they improved but settling on Firefox as my goto guy for the majority of that time.

Like the majority of internet users, my web browser journey started with Internet Explorer from Microsoft in mid 1990’s when it was back at version 4. At the time, I wasn’t aware there were competing products and used it because it came pre-packaged with Windows. My disdain for Internet Explorer began at university, where I began learning about web development and soon realised that its lack of compatibility for web standards was the bain of the internet. Couple an ever growing frustration for needing to apply ‘hacks’ to the web development process with a history of security issues which have plagued the product even to this day and it was enough to begin looking else where.

Else where came in the form of Mozilla, which I have used nearly exclusively since it was released. It offered a better user experience, tabbed browsing, was far more stable than Internet Explorer, web standards compliant and came with a killer feature – a plugin architecture that third party developers could build upon. That plugin architecture for Mozilla and Firefox has been the single greatest thing about it, especially looking at it from a power user and technical users point of view. As Firefox continued to add more and more features to its stable though, the browser began to use more and more memory, was beginning to be slightly less stable and wasn’t as responsive as many users had become acustomed to.

Enter Google Chrome, built from the ground up with performance, low memory consumption, security and fault tolerance in mind – it has rapidly become a favourite among the switchers. Since the beta releases of Google Chrome, the performance of it has been like a drug – once you get a taste for it, it is hard to stop. Like any good addict, I haven’t – and have been using Chrome as my primary browser, falling back to Firefox for certain tasks and very seldom do I bother or need to open Internet Explorer.

To showcase just how fast Google Chrome is, Google have just released a Rube Goldberg inspired video:

It might not be obvious what is going on in that video at full speed, watch the making of Google Chrome Speed Test to get a full appreciation of what I mean when I say fast.

If you haven’t used Google Chrome before, I urge you to give it a try – you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Gremlins

Hardware

Toward the end of February I mentioned that we replaced our Mazda 323 SP20 with a 2004 Ford Falcon XR6 in preparation for the arrival of our next child in May. When we first took ownership of the vehicle, the car was in immaculate condition inside and out.

Since that time, we’ve managed to find a few little gremlins within the vehicle that needed to be addressed, some more severe than others:

  1. Accelerator Stopped Working
    Claire, Hugo & Lucy were driving along on the M1 motorway when the accelerator stopped working. The majority of people aren’t aware but the Ford Falcon was one of the first cars to offer drive by wire throttle or in plain terms, an electronic accelerator with no direct connection to the throttle body on the car.
  2. Rattle
    When you start the car and it is either idling or at low RPM, there was a periodic rattle that sounded as though it was coming from the engine bay somewhere. You didn’t hear it when you were driving, either because it wasn’t there or was masked by road and wind noise.
  3. Break Shudder
    For the first couple weeks we had the car, the breaks were working as you’d expect. However after taking a trip out to Chinchilla we noticed a severe break shudder on the way home while driving down the Toowoomba Range.
  4. CD Player
    When I took the car for a test drive, I had the radio on for part of the drive just for something to do. I didn’t have a CD with me, who does that really, so I didn’t think to check and assumed that the CD player was working.

I dropped the car into Hinterland Toyota Nerang at 7:30AM on Thursday before the Easter long weekend and Jacob met me there to chauffeur me to work. Only about 10 minutes after we arrived at work, I got a call from Nerang Hinterland Toyota to inform me that while they can service my car, they were unable to do the repairs under a statutory warranty claim as it needs to go back to the place of purchase – which was Hinterland Toyota Burleigh Heads. I told them that was horribly inconvenient and to see if there was anything they could do for me and they arranged to handle the warranty work on behalf of the Burleigh Heads dealershsip which was great.

The afternoon rolled around and I had expected to get a call to pick up my car, however instead the call informed me that they had taken the disc rotors off the car and had them machined to resolve the shudder but it hadn’t fixed it. I needed the car for the long weekend, so picked it up anyway and the shudder was in fact worse than when I took it in which I didn’t understand. On Tuesday after the long weekend I dropped it back in again and they again took the disc rotors off and inspected everything but didn’t find anything wrong, so put the brake discs back on the machine to recheck they were smooth and they were. After putting them back on, still a sever shudder when breaking at any speed and in the end they replaced the disc brake rotors and pads – no more shudder.

When I first arrived home with the XR6, Claire immediately noticed a burble in the exhaust and mentioned that she is now a bogan mother. Well it turns out the rattle at idle was in fact the catalytic converter, which should have been an easy replacement. However when the new catalytic converter arrived, it didn’t fit because the exhaust on the car isn’t standard – so they had to take it to an exhaust specialist to have it refitted – but now no more rattle.

The throttle stopping was weird and I’d never heard of that happening before. A combination of dash lights turned on when it happened, so it was a known fault in that respect – which is good. The strangest thing is though, after pulling over, turning the car off and back on – the start up checks all passed without any warnings and the accelerator was working again and we haven’t had the problem again. Nonetheless, Hinterland Nerang hooked up the equipment to the onboard computer but it wasn’t registering a fault at the time – so there was nothing for them to fix as far as they could tell. If it happens again, I’ll have to take it back down to them as soon as possible so they can investigate again.

The last remaining thing to get fixed was the CD player which appeared to have a CD stuck in it, though the display didn’t indicate that there was a disc in there at all. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get that repaired while it was in with Hinterland Nerang as it isn’t covered as part of the statutory warranty claim apparently but I’ll give the Burleigh Heads dealership a call and see what they can do about it.

While it took three days with Hinterland Nerang to resolve the brake shudder and the rattle, they were really helpful and kept me in the loop which was good. The only thing that was an inconvenience about it was that they weren’t able to supply a courtesy vehicle because they were booked out – so unfortunately Claire and Hugo were home bound for a couple of days.

Primary Hard Drive Failure

Hardware

After rebuilding my desktop computer in January 2008 to reestablish my geek-fu, I subsequently had a really bad run of luck with my CoolerMaster power supply and my Asus GeForce 8800GT video card. In August 2009, my 500Gb hard drive began to throw errors and I scampered out and bought a replacement just in time to get the data off it and not lose anything.

Over the weekend my super fast Western Digital 74Gb Raptor hard drive that Windows is installed on decided to give up the ghost. It passes the POST on boot up and attempts to load Windows but never succeeds and reboots on its own. I suppose I should be happy that I managed to get over two years out of that Western Digital hard drive, the Raptor series of hard drives spin much faster than a standard hard drive and provide superior performance but do tend to wear out sooner as a by product.

Now if only the cost of a solid state hard drive technology had come down far enough that I could afford it without feeling guilty, I’d never have to wait for something to load again!

Mantra Group Wins Circle on Cavill Trade Mark Court Case

Work

Mantra Group have been involved in a Federal Court case since September 2009 which involved the company taking action against Stephen Andrew Grant and Tailly Pty Ltd who were allegedly breaching the trade marks owned by Mantra Group for the popular Circle on Cavill building located in Surfers Paradise on the Gold Coast.

Mantra Group own the management rights to Circle on Cavill, which provides them exclusive access to the onsite letting business. While the management rights provides Mantra Group exclusive onsite letting, it does not prohibit an individual owner from renting their apartment on a short, long or permanent basis.

The accommodation business that Tailly were operating relied on individual owners providing their apartment to Tailly to manage for them or Tailly renting the apartment from a real estate agent and subsequently sub-letting the apartment to consumers. Tailly marketed, advertised and sold the private apartments using various names that were derivatives of the Circle on Cavill trade mark owned by Mantra Group.

Mantra Group claimed that the third parties in question, were deliberately infringing on the companies trade marks and set up elaborate networks of web sites specifically built, promoted and advertised to mislead and deceive consumers in an attempt to source bookings for the Tailly accommodation business.

On Friday 26th March, the Federal Court of Australia handed down a landmark judgement which relates to web sites misusing a companies trade marks. The court found that Stephen Andrew Grant and Tailly Pty Ltd had been infringing Mantra Group trade marks by owning domain names, which were identical or deceptively similar to the Circle on Cavill trade marks and by setting up web sites on those domain names to offer a service in the same category that the trade marks where registered in, was a clear violation.

John Swinson of Mallesons Stephen Jaques has provided a detailed synopsis of the ruling and its implications within the hotel and accommodation industry titled Federal Court decision enforces trade marks over internet marketing of strata-titled property.