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. .

Chinchilla Melon Festival

Family, Travel

The bi-inaugural Chinchilla Melon Festival was held this year between February 10th and February 18th. Chinchilla is a small and vibrant township located approximately 300Km West of Brisbane. Once upon a time it was a typically sleepy country town, however in the last few years Chinchilla has become a hive of activity with power stations and coal & gas exploration common place.

The Chinchilla Melon Festival celebrates all things melon including water melon, rock melon and honey dew. The week of the festival culminates on the Saturday with back to back events taking place from very early in the morning. Patrons are encouraged to take part and experience the whole event starting with a poets breakfast and finishing late in the evening with a free concert.

The Melon Festival is a family oriented event with lots of fun things for the kids to do, some of which include:

  • Pip spitting
  • Melon bungy
  • Melon skiing
  • Melon smashing

It is recommended that you bring an older set of clothes for your children if you intend to let them loose for the Chinchilla Melon Festival. Due to the nature of the event, a lot of the activities involve broken and smashing melons; which get quite sticky and makes a bit of a mess. You’re kids will love it, its a whole bunch of fun!

This year everyone was privileged to witness Australia reclaim a Guiness World Record for the most water melons smashed in sixty seconds. You’re probably thinking that you could smash a whole lot of water melons in sixty seconds; well you probably could with your hands but the record is for using your head! The record has been floating back and forward between a bunch of Italians and Australians for the last few years. Fortunately, this time our Australian competitor stamped his authority on the title – beating out the existing record by seven water melons. Amazingly, he was so far in front of the existing record that he actually ran out of water melons to bust on the competition table – so maybe he could have got a handful more in!

If you’re looking for something fun to do with the family in February 2009 (I know it seems like a long way off), you should consider the Chinchilla Melon Festival but remember to book your accommodation early; its a very popular event!

LinkedIn Profile Error

Websites

LinkedIn in error has added a previous job role to my list which I have never held.This evening I received a notification via LinkedIn about some contacts within my immediate reach which I didn’t know about. After sending out a couple of invitations which make sense to have within my network, I clicked into my profile to see the above item listed.

In the last approximately three years with BreakFree and subsequently Stella Resorts Group, my roles have been within the realm of development and business analysis. As you can imagine, I was a little shocked to see an incomplete previous position listed on my profile.

At a guess, this error must have happened in the last month or so; as I don’t remember it being there the last time I logged in. What is peculiar, is that the title of the position is for the right company and overlaps with my time with BreakFree and Stella Resorts Group. If it was going to error in this fashion, I would have expected a totally random job from an unrelated business or industry.

I don’t have a way of explaining it, so for the moment it has been removed and I’ll be keeping an eye on it in the future.

What’s In That Book?

General

I haven’t participated in a meme for a long time but Zac posted one I thought was kind of cool, so I’ll give it a lash.

  1. Grab the nearest book. (Don’t you dare dig for that cool or intellectual book in your closet) Or anything with words and enough pages to complete this task. You remember books, those thin strips of dead trees that have lots of words printed on them bound together down 1 side. People used to have them before eBooks and digital paper.
  2. Open the book to page 123.
  3. Find the fifth sentence.
  4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.

Constraints
There are legal constraints, regulatory constraints and constraints imposed by distribution systems. There may be constraints of time and constraints of price. The constraints may be constant or they may be changing.

The above came out of an Edward de Bono book named Thinking Course.

Blogging Is Meant To Be Personal

Blogging

Like most people, I read a lot of web sites and the majority of them I read because of their insight and personal opinion on any given topic. Of late, there have been a flurry of web sites that are automatically generating posts based of content on other web sites; such as del.icio.us.

I’m all for aggregation of content, its a really useful utility – however I don’t come to someone’s site to see a list of links to other web sites. I come to someones web site to read about a topic and if it happens to link out, well that is fine and dandy.

If you want to aggregate content, put the aggregated content into your side bar or in any location other than your primary content space. You should reserve your main content space for your own content or personal opinion on something – not for an aggregation.

Generating primary content automatically based on another web site, feed or service is just impersonal; don’t do it.