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. .

O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree

Family, Life

Since 2002, Claire and I have been decorating a five foot Christmas tree with much delight when the festive season comes around. For the last couple of years, we’ve been wanting to replace our Christmas tree with something a little newer as the old one was showing its age.

Last week while kicking around in Myer, we happened to go into the Christmas section and they conveniently had 25% off sale on. While we were there, we picked out a new seven foot Christmas tree and placed our order. We were a little nervous at first, as the sales man had just informed us that the last tree of that type was sold to the person on the opposite counter. Fortunately, he was able to track one down from a Myer in Brisbane and had it shipped down to the Gold Coast.

Someone from Myer called on Wednesday to let me know that it had arrived and on Thursday afternoon I decided I’d go down and pick it up. I was expecting it to be an enormous hassle to collect the fancy pants Christmas tree, however I was pleasently surprised that it took all of about 3 minutes and no I’m not kidding!

Decorating the Christmas tree this year is going to be a bunch of fun, we’ll no doubt pick up a swag of new decorations for it too – can’t wait!

Multiple Personalities

Blogging, Life, Websites

I’ve been blogging on this domain since 2004 on various topics ranging from technical to personal and everything in between. For quite some time now, I’ve been thinking that I’m not really meeting anyones reading needs, as the content on the site flip flops between technical and personal so often; such that people that only want technical are forced to filter out the personal fluff and visa versa.

To solve that problem, I had a couple of different options available:

  • separate the current site in halves using a category, such as personal and technical
  • move the technical content onto a subdomain, such as http://technical.lattimore.id.au
  • move the technical content onto a completely different domain

I currently make fairly extensive use of categories within the site to organise my posts. I could have gone through and uncategorised the current posts and placed each post back into one of the two new categories or sections. To help with searching or stepping through the site, tagging all of the existing posts would have aided in that area. While it would have worked, it didn’t feel right to inject ‘useless’ categories into the mix to solve the problem.

Option number two would require multiple WordPress installations. There is nothing wrong with that and it’ll obviously work just fine on a technical level but without a little bit of upfront work, seemed as though it’d end in tears some point down the road.

In the end, I chose door number three and set about finding a new domain name that fit the bill. I wanted something that had a clearly technical inclination and after using a handy domain utility, couldn’t believe my luck when I found that ifdebug.com was available.

At the moment, I’m undecided as to what I’ll do with the existing content on the site. I’m inclined to just leave it here as it’s the simplest option, however there are benefits to moving it over to if debug; we’ll see how it pans out.

In the meantime, expect a steady stream of personal content to be published through this site and the technical goodies to land on ifdebug.com.

ARIA Awards 2007

Music

The 2007 Australian Record Industry Association awards were held last night, which are always great. I’m always impressed with the diversity of music produced by Australian artists and the 2007 ARIA awards night really highlighted that fact with acts like:

  • Silverchair
  • Operator Please
  • Damien Leith
  • Sarah Blasko
  • Sneaky Sound System
  • Hilltop Hoods
  • John Butler Trio
  • Gotye
  • Kate Miller-Heidke

Of interest out of that list where Operator Please, which are a young band with an average age of 16 who won their way through via a battle of the bands. The Hilltop Hoods hail from Adelaide and offer a unique R&B sound. Gotye, largely a one man band provide electric, synthesised music blended with traditional sounds. Kate Miller-Heidke, well – she was just strange, querky and different but excellent none the less.

The highlight of the night for me though was watching John Butler Trio supported by Kieth Urban perform. While it wasn’t quite the same as a typical live performance from the John Butler Trio, there were hints of the brilliance which the audience realy appreciated.

Simple Man

Life

Mark Pilgrim once said that the number of keys on his keyring was a measure of the complexity of his life and that longed for the day that he no longer had a requirement to have any keys.

This week my life got a little tiny bit simpler as I removed yet another key from my keyring – I now have three to go:

  1. Front door
  2. My car
  3. Claire’s car

I know some people who have key rings that have so many keys on them that you nearly need a wheelbarrow to carry them around. I grapple with that whole concept, a little while ago I even separated my ‘must have’ keys from my ‘lesser have’ keys to keep it a little simpler but that was an effort as well. I’ve now got it down to three, which I think isn’t too bad – how many do you have on your keyring?

Microsoft Invests USD$240 Million In Facebook

Advertising, Internet, News, Websites

After a lot of rumours flying around the internet about Facebook looking for investors or buyers and the rumour being continually shot down; today sees an announcement that Microsoft have invested USD$240 million dollars in Facebook. The $240 million dollars is nothing short of a minority stake in Facebook, which has now been officially valued at USD$15 billion dollars, yes you read that correctly billion dollars.

While everything was still on the rumourmill, it was expected that both Google and Microsoft would have been bidding for a stake in Facebook. What has surprised the industry to some extent, is that Microsoft actually won the deal. Of course, this investment has now extended the marketing agreement between Microsoft and Facebook, which now sees Microsoft as the supplier of user centric advertising on the Facebook platform globally, where as it was previously limited to the United States. Of course, Facebook haven’t closed the door on further investment opportunities – we might see at least one other deep pocketed company come to the table yet.

While I appreciate how important this investment was for Microsoft, in a vain attempt to keep themselves in the online marketing game – I haven’t yet joined the dots on how it is going to work. As most savvy internet users will attest, the Microsoft search platform via MSN and its successor Live is some what limited. To add insult to injury, the advertising platform that Microsoft have been building seems so lacking compared to Google, that Microsoft are only recently realising just how far behind they are.

None the less, it’s good for everyone to see some healthy competition in the online advertising space. I expect there will be a lot of people watching this space to see how it develops over the coming months; for all we know this might be the starting point for Microsoft to launch a full frontal assault against Google.