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. .

Seiko Chronograph

General, Photos

Seiko alarm chronograph watch model SNA767P, square face, stainless steel construction and 100M water resistanceOn the same trip to Brisbane when I  overcame temptation, I put a new Seiko chronograph watch on lay by.

This Seiko watch is part of their Conceptual series, though you’ll have a hard time finding information about them on the Seiko web site. As an aside, having to stumble around their site to find information it really does drive home how important having a quality web site that is up to date with product information is. In the end, the only way I could find information about it was going through the advanced search page and applying the appropriate number of filters to whittle the results down.

As you’d expect, It comes with the standard set of features:

  • water resistant to 100m
  • date
  • 1/5s high precision stop watch
  • alarm

An alarm isn’t a revolutionary feature on its own, however it isn’t something that you normally see on an analogue watch. I don’t expect it is something I’ll use all that often, I use my mobile phone as my alarm clock but in the off chance I don’t have that with me – it might prove useful at some point.

I think it is a pretty snazzy looking watch myself, what do you think?

Super Shiny Sparkles

Photos, Wedding

White gold wedding rings on a wood tableIn 2005 when Claire and I were married, everything was shiny new – including our wedding rings. Over the last couple years, our wedding rings have become increasingly dull compared to their former glory.

While in Brisbane today, Claire dropped them in to get re-plated. I guess I’d become used to their appearance as they were, because when I put my wedding ring back on today – I couldn’t believe the luster the gold had after being re-plated, buffed and polished.

While the refreshed wedding bands really do shine now, they don’t compare against the diamonds in Claire’s engagement ring. As with the dull appearance of the gold, despite Claire cleaning the diamonds periodically – it appears that they were still very dirty. After coming back from the jeweler, the diamonds absolutely glisten! I’ll have to get a photo, just as a reminder so we don’t wait so long between getting our wedding rings serviced.

Housekeeping, Part 1

Websites

Friday evening I mentioned that I was going to perform some housekeeping on my site which was well overdue.

I had expected that it would only take an hour or two, however I significantly underestimated the number of posts and the time required per post to remove the unneeded categories and tag them appropriately. In the end, it took so long that I couldn’t complete it all on Friday night and I’ve had several smaller sessions over the course of the weekend to complete it.

While a little time consuming, the results are quite promising – I’ve gone from 50 categories down to 27 and I may whittle that down further yet.

Housekeeping

Websites

When I upgraded WordPress in February, I mentioned that I’d do a little housekeeping. The housekeeping in this instance was related to the original category functionality and the newly added tagging feature.

It took a little longer than expected for that to happen, so I’ve set aside an hour or two tonight to work on it. I think in the first pass through, I’m going to focus on collapsing down the current category list and in a second pass add in tags describing the content more richly.

Crap Crap Okay Winner

Movies

Over the weekend I thought that catching up on a few movies might be a nice thing to do, so went and rented out:

  • I Am Legend
  • Cloverfield
  • 27 Dresses

I Am Legend reminded me a lot of Cast Away with Tom Hanks, a lone actor taking ownership of the screen for nearly the entire film. It was probably worth a watch, though I don’t think I’ll ever rent it out on DVD again – so I suppose that is an indication of my overall impression.

Cloverfield, I don’t really know where to start. It had crazy amounts of hype pre-release, I’m pretty sure I recall seeing teaser advertising for it nearly an entire year before it hit the big screen. I haven’t bothered to read up about it online, however my review of it was that it was complete and utter shit. I appreciate that it was meant to be ‘from the eyes of the people on ground zero’ with the camera work – but the Blair Witch Project wore that out about three and a half minutes in. Given it was about an alien creature taking over a big city and tearing it to pieces, the special effects weren’t anything to write home about and there was very limited interaction with them. If it wasn’t for the fact that I got it on a rental guarantee from Video Ezy – it’d be the sort of movie that you wish you could unhire and get your money back.

27 Dresses was more enjoyable than the previous two combined and I didn’t think it was outstanding. There were a few points through the movie where I chucked, however if it was just a little funnier in general throughout, it was have been a really enjoyable movie – not just okay/good.

The upside of the weekend from a movie stand point, I picked up a boxed set of the Alien Quadrilogy on sale – huzzah!