My own piece of the Internet
 
Category: <span>Life hacking</span>

Category: Life hacking

Downtime

Before I had children, I didn’t realise how much downtime I had. Life was a celebration of the simple pleasures like reading, writing, doodling, dreaming, cooking, and the odd spot of sloth. Now any downtime between work, bathtime, playtime, and feeding time is spent staring vacantly at the wall mouth half open with some drool dribbling down my chin in a catatonic state of disbelief. Or that’s how it seems. How could I have wasted all that time? But maybe it wasn’t wasted. Creativity can be fostered through work but also demands quiet reflection. A walk through the bush can …

On the Braggle: work, life and dreams

Fatherhood is good preparation for launching an online business. The problem is that a job, infants and new websites do not play nicely together. I have been working on a little project called Braggler, which is a community site for hagglers, tightwads, and perpetual savers. Having become involved after the site had been semi-launched with the old partners, I quickly made a list of what needed to be done to make the site useful. The original founder and I agreed on priorities and got excited. This was gonna be great. And then my wife had a baby. The work stopped. …

The stuff that matters

I am a sucker for sentimentality. Like Clint Eastwood, the stuff that gets to me is the stuff that matters, the non-trivial, the stuff that comes from the heart, the stuff I am passionate about. Simon, my brother-in-law was reading a post I wrote on fabricatedbacon.com about fatherhood and he looked at me with a tear in his eye and said, “You made me cry you bastard. This is much better than all that negative stuff.” He was referring to fucktard, a blog I started out of anger at Stephen Conroy’s Internet filter policies. Simon’s comments rang true. I started …

Getting it done

One of the hardest things to do is get a project, a blog, a business or a wacky plan started when you have a job and a life. I have fallen in to the trap of creating great plans in my mind and then finding something else to do. Like watching So You Think You Can Dance, Lost or Mad Men. Or perhaps the footy game or cricket game just demands watching. Or there might be a drink at a nice bar with some friends calling your name. If you have dreams of being a player and work in a …