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. .

We’ve Moved

After a lot of effort on Saturday, we’ve now moved all of our stuff into our new home. We hired a three tonne truck (largest you can drive on a standard car drivers license) on Saturday morning and it took three trips in total, however only the first and second had any significant amount of stuff in them.

A couple things didn’t go to plan during the move:

  • it appears that our iron has been damaged and is causing the power to trip
  • I think I’ve lost a little bunch of four screws, which we purposefully wrapped in tape so as not to separate them. As it turns out, it was in vain as it seems we’ve lost them anyway!
  • the antenna at the new place doesn’t seem to be working, so no TV at the moment. Hopefully, we just need a signal booster.

A big thank you to Brendan, Jacob and Andrew for all the help during the move as well.

Brogan & Ryan Real Estate, Gold Coast

This afternoon Claire and I raced up to Brogan & Ryan Real Estate at Robina to sign the lease for our new home. When we arrived, the real estate agent was polite and didn’t make us wait around at all. In fact, she was so organised I commented to her that she was the most organised real estate agent I had ever seen. We walked into an office and she had with her, all neatly organised and in a folder:

  • all of our paper work
  • the documents were marked for signing
  • the documents were stamped so everyone knew which copies they were taking home
  • a little bag full of keys
  • photocopies of all of the keys, so we both had records of what keys we actually did receive
  • a pet agreement, awesome!
  • the mandatory documentation by the Rental Tenancies Authority
  • contact information for contractors if we needed any repairs done

It might not seem all that mind blowing, however every other real estate agent we’ve dealt with in the past paled by comparison. I hope that any future deals we have with Brogan & Ryan are as smooth as this process was.

Australian Stock Exchange Dummy Spit

Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) web site suffering from a fatal error which is returning random text. Error captured at 9:00pm 5 June 2007.The Australian Stock Exchange is currently spitting the dummy and returning a whole bunch of gobblygook content.

I expect they were doing maintenance or deploying a new version of the Austrlalian Stock Exchange application and didn’t think anyone would notice. As it turns out, at least one person was checking their stock information after 9 o’clock at night. Fortunately, the error was resolved by approximately 9.30pm AEST.

Google Acquires Feedburner

Google have acquired the popular XML feed distribution and advertising platform Feedburner for approximately USD$100 million. There has been rife speculation about the Feedburner deal on various web sites over the last month and the cat is finally out of the bag.

When you look at the online advertising landscape now, its incredible to think that in just a few years there has been such a massive swing in one direction. Back in the year 2000, there wasn’t really any one player that totally dominated online advertising – however companies like DoubleClick were really gaining strength and Google Adwords was growing as well. Fast forward half a dozen years and now you have:

  • Adwords (Google)
  • Adsense (Google)
  • DoubleClick (Google)
  • Feedburner (Google)
  • TextLinkAds (Independent)
  • YSM (Yahoo!)
  • MSN (Microsoft)

Without the recent additions of DoubleClick and Feedburner, Google already controlled over 60% of the online paid advertising. Yahoo! and Microsoft must be having crisis talks every other month at the moment about the marketshare that they seem unable to recoup individually; no wonder Microsoft are in negotiations to purchase Yahoo! again.