After a number of years using WordPress as my blog engine of choice, it’s time for it to wander off into the sunset. I’ve been working a lot with Drupal lately, and it’s a very nice platform to develop information-rich websites with. Rather than try to support two different platforms, I’m going to be consolidating (somehow) everything into one. I’ve also not really been keeping this site up lately, as I’ve been busy posting in other places.

Ultimately, I’m looking to bring all my online output together in one place, and Drupal looks like a good platform to do that with. Hopefully, I’ll be able to import all this WordPress stuff. Not really sure how that’s going to work though.

I used to own dozens of Internet domain names. I can’t even remember them all. When I moved to Australia, I let several of them lapse. While I let some others go just a few months ago, I still have a handful, kept around for a variety of reasons.

My friend @praxxis put me on to domai.nr, which is a terrible horrible nasty thing to show an addict. I nearly bought another 4 or 5 domains, spending way too much money. I managed to hold back though – barely. I’m still sorta considering one though. It’s awfully expensive, but so cool…

The applause reaches a creshendo, Lou Reed walks on stage, says “Hello”, and starts playing the signature chords of one of his most famous songs, Sweet Jane. The crowd goes nuts. Suddenly, he stops.

“So I thought I would explain to you how you make a career out of three chords.”

Laughter.

“I know a lot of you have been wondering that, and you younger bands, pay attention to this one: So you thought it was three, it’s really four. Watch.”

He plays the famous chord sequence. Bah, bahbah bah bah.

“Three. But what’s really happening…”

Bah bahbah bah bah BAH BAH. He plays the familiar chords again, just once; this time, highlighting the extra chord at the end – the one you normally don’t notice or remember – that joins them together when the whole thing is repeated. The crowd goes nuts.

“As in most things in life, it’s that little hop at the end…”
—
I was reminded of this the other night as I was having dinner at Balthazar, one of Perth’s finer eateries. That little hop at the end that separates goodness from greatness, that little extra bit that makes a place unique and special and different. And memorable.

That little hop might be the way the signature dish is presented, or the way the service is invisible. It could be the attention to detail, or the way the owners have decided to focus on only one thing, but do it exceptionally well.

I started the meal with some oysters with a pleasant rosewater and cucumber jelly sauce. The sauce itself was very good, but ended up overpowering the sea taste of the oysters. It might have been better matched with a middle-Eastern inspired lamb dish.

Balthazar is known for its wine list and its aged steak. Guess what I had for a main? The steak was served on a bed of aubergine mush (I’m sure it was described better in the menu, but it was just tasty mush) with some celeriac on top. The meat was cooked perfectly, as rare as I like it. Nicely aged too, as far as I could tell.

I had a couple of glasses of some cool climate cabernet blend from Denmark WA. It was properly poured for a by-the-glass: that is, at the table (I noticed other diners also got their beers poured at the table. Nice). The wine wasn’t bad, but it didn’t make me want to stand on the table and hoot like an owl. The by-the-glass selection was well-chosen, with a couple of local wines, some European ones, and the obligatory Barossa Shiraz.

I had some cheese after the meal – a very nice hard milky number, rolled in rosemary. Great if you like rosemary, which I do. It was matched with a sweet Riesling from Tasmania that I’d not heard of before. The waitress seemed quite knowledgeable about the wine selection.

Before I wrap this up, I want to have a whinge: A restaurant is not a place to show the world what cool taste in music you have. If you want to do that, become a DJ, get a radio show, or blog about it. Do not open a fine dining establishment and play your music so loudly that people need to shout to be heard. Ambient music. Ambient music that blends into the surroundings, like the chairs.
—
I’ve been in Perth for the better part of a week so far, and I’m still trying to figure it out. People have said it’s like a big country town that kept growing, a bit like Brisbane. I’m not so sure. There’s something else going on here, but I haven’t yet been able to put my finger on exactly what it is.

The city seems bitsy, as if it’s still discovering what exactly it is, and still learning how to be a city. There are bursts of unplanned development, and things seem to be layered on top of each other for no apparent reason. Nothing really seems to connect with each other, and things are put in places mostly because that’s where there’s enough room for them. There doesn’t seem to be a plan, or even a style; things don’t quite seem to hang together properly.

Balthazar is a microcosm of this feeling I get from Perth in general. It doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be, so it ends up trying to be everything. A bit like a first film from a new director, it’s kind of all over the place. The staff shout orders at each other from across the floor, but at the same time, they try to be invisible to the diners. The room has an industrial ambience when looking up at the ceiling; the floor is right out of an Italian delicatessen or market, and the middle seems all about generic café or Ikea. It’s “modern anonymous”. No style – or perhaps too many different styles.

It wants to be too much, I think. It’s trying to be three or four different restaurants. While it’s managing to pull this off quite well, in order to be great, it needs to have more focus; it needs to figure out what sets it apart from other restaurants. Am I being too picky? Maybe. I was told this is a great place, so I went in expecting greatness. Turns out it was only very good.

Balthazar, good as it was, did not hop at the end.

Riges Younan recently Twittered about an interesting article by Eric Ries entitled What does a startup CTO actually do? Having been the CTO at a handful of startups – and it’s what I’m doing now – I can say the list is pretty much spot on, with just one exception: etc. Et cetera is all the other stuff that needs to be done, but no one’s been hired to do it yet.

Usually a startup has one or two people (including the “CTO”) in the technical department. As tasks get too big or too complicated for the CTO to do by themselves, they need go and find someone to do them. Hopefully, this search is planned for, and there’s budget for it. Having a CTO that does too much “etc”, makes for an unhappy and unproductive CTO, and the company as a whole suffers because of it.

Fifty-six slides, packed with a huge amount of information about the economy – mostly negative. The message is, essentially, “batten down the hatches”. Spend less, keep as much money in the bank as possible. Basically, if you’re not cashflow positive yet, you’re VC-funded, and you have less than a year’s worth of cash in the bank, you’re screwed.

This is not a good time to go to investors for money, no matter how good your financials are, no matter how many companies are lining up to buy your product. If I was an investor with a few million dollars in my pocket, I wouldn’t be putting too much money in speculative investments right now – they would have to be very very sure things. That means real customers; real cashflow and real products.

I’ve seen this happen before, on a smaller scale. The last time around, it was just pretend Internet money, and the damage was mostly contained to the technology sector (and AOL bought Time-Warner. That still makes me laugh). This time around, it’s pretend mortgage money, and the damage is much more widespread.

The thing about Sequoia is they were on the front lines of the last bust – arguably, they helped create it. One would hope they’ve learnt from it, and this advice they’re giving this time around is sound advice, based on what they learnt last time around.

I farted, and it got me thinking about names.

Names used to have meaning, over and above the person to whom they were given. Several North American native tribes had a concept called “spirit name”, which is given to a tribe member later on in life. You might have one name growing up, but at a coming of age ceremony, you’d get another name, carefully selected by tribal elders. It might reflect your nascent personality, or perhaps give you an ideal to work towards – hopefully both. If your name was “flying eagle”, you’d better set your sights high – you need to live up to your name.

In European traditions, one was often given the name of someone in the family. The original idea here was twofold: one was to honour the ancestor for some reason, and the other, I believe, was to give the young child someone to look up to, someone of quality character to aspire to be. This really only worked well if the family was close, and the kid with the name got to know and respect the ancestor like the parents obviously did.

With society getting more and more self-centered over the past few generations, those ideas are getting lost. Names are pleasant-sounding, fashionable labels – a way to differentiate yourself in a group of other humans. Names used to serve as a connection to something outside of yourself, something bigger, something to aspire to.

I farted, and it got me thinking about names. Mine would be “Farts Pungently”.

Yesterday, we bought 10 bottles of wine for 45¢. Felt a bit like shoplifting, really.

Safeway has a newish program called “Everyday Rewards”, where shoppers get an orange card, and we swipe it to get cents per litre off at the fuel pump. Apparently, every time we swiped it, we were also entered into a store-wide draw for a $150 voucher, redeemable anywhere owned by Woolworth’s (not just Safeway). We found out about this weekly draw when we won it, and got a letter in the mail with a $150 voucher in it. Very nice. Rather than spending it on dull, everyday, useful, grownup stuff like groceries or Diesel, we decided to go on a small shopping spree at Dan Murphy’s – owned by Woolworths.

Here’s what we got:

From left to right, in descending order of cost:

• Pepperjack 2003 Cabernet Sauvignon. We’ve had this one before, and Dan’s were nice enough to cellar these already, so it’s probably fine to drink right about now.
• 2x Chortle’s Edge 2006 Shiraz. This is the second label from Blackjack Wines, a Bendigo-based winery that can do no wrong. We’ve never tried this one, but being that it’s from Blackjack, it can’t be horrible.
• 9th Island 2007 Pinot Noir. We had the 2006 or maybe 2005 version of this a little while back, and enjoyed it.
• Penley Estate Phoenix 2006 Cabernet Sauvignon. Not really sure why we picked this one.
• Ingoldby 2003 Shiraz. Again, not sure why we picked this one, aside from the fact it was pre-cellared.
• Whitebox 2005 Shiraz. This was a total punt. Some guy walking past us at Dan’s recommended the one next to it, but it got us reading labels. We already opened it – not bad really.
• Grand Saint-André 2006 Rosé. Because we wanted a rosé.
• Paul Mas 2007 Sauvignon Blanc. Dan’s used to have a delightfully average French white (vin de pays d’ocs) as a cleanskin – we couldn’t find it. It’s handy to have some average white wine around, especially now that summer approacheth.
• Maddens Lane 2006 Sangiovese. We bought it because it was $5. Morbid curiosity, perhaps? It was horrible. Luckily, our cask of red cooking wine is almost empty, so we now have an understudy.

Add to this the case of Blackjack’s 2006 release that arrived a few days ago, and we’re set for a while now.

I’m on a roll with the quiz thing. The Age has a monthly glossy magazine called (imaginatively enough) The Age (melbourne) Magazine, and at the back, they interview some local quasi-celebrity using largely the same questions. I’m going to pretend I’m a famous Melburnian and answer them here. Melbn people, feel free to grab and repeat.

1. My first memory of Melbourne is
   I’d just left Hobart, it was really bloody hot, and the plane was landing into Tullamarine (one of the most euphoniously-named named airports in the world, along with “Tagel” in Berlin and “Charles de Gaulle” – say it with a French accent – in Paris). I looked out the window and saw only flat browny yellow ground. Where’s the city? I couldn’t see it anywhere.
2. What would you put on a Melbourne postcard?
   The Sydney Opera House. It would be a pretty good joke for overseas vistors.
3. What do you always show to overseas visitors?
   The Sydney Opera House. No, I’m joking. Depending on what they like, I usually find some little restaurant. I also like taking people up to the Dandenongs to feed the cockatoos.
4. Where do you get your coffee?
   I don’t drink coffee. Maybe that’s why I don’t fit in around here.
5. What’s the worst thing you can say to a Melburnian?
   “Sydney’s pretter,” without following it up with some qualifying statement about it being more expensive, the people being not-as-nice, or how horrid their western suburbs are.
6. Melbourne’s most underrated suburb is
   Balaclava. Great restaurants and shops. Second place tie: Ripponlea, Windsor and Elsternwick. North? Where’s that?
7. Best meal I’ve had in Melbourne
   Circa, The Prince. A few years ago, when Andrew McConnell was still there. I still remember the smoked eel carpaccio, decorated with tiny nuggets of fruit and edible flowers. I love Andrew’s work – it’s inventive, tasty and playful. Second place is a tie between his Three, One, Two, and a lovely wild boar stew at Café Di Stasio.
8. Worst meal I’ve had in Melbourne
   I try not to remember them, but there have been a few. Vue de Monde is a contender here, as is 100 Mile Café (sorry, Paul).
9. Melbourne’s streets are paved with
   Old Melways.
10. What’s over-rated about Melbourne?
    Itself. Melbourne, generally, is far too up itself. Get over yourselves, stop trying to prove you’re “more worldly” than Sydney. It’s an inferiority complex, and it’s annoying and unbecoming.
11. If I didn’t live in Melbourne, I’d live in…
    Maybe Perth. I’m investigating the possibility. Maybe the middle east (and I don’t mean Knox), or even a small villa in Spain.
12. Which Melbourne person would you most like to sit next to on the tram?
    Aside from the people I’ve mentioned in this entry already, I can’t really think of one person over anyone else. Julia Zemiro would be cool, but then again, Dame Edna or Dave Hughes (really) would be interesting too. Problem is, we wouldn’t be allowed to speak. Strangers are not allowed to speak with each other on public transport. So maybe I’d just pick someone cute I could perve on all the way home.
13. Which Melbourne person would you least like to sit next to on the tram?
    Dave Hughes. He might try to talk, and his voice makes my hair stand on end. But he seems like an interesting guy, so I’m torn.
14. Who should be Lord Mayor of Melbourne?
    Me. No, actually that would be horrible, I’d try to pass all kinds of insane laws. But at least I’d probably manage to make smelly people illegal on trams.
15. What do you actually do all day at your job?
    Think about things. Sit and type at my laptop. Push bits around from place to place. Look at the pretty fish screen saver to my left.
16. What makes someone a Melburnian?
    A residential address with a postcode in the low 3000s.
17. Describe Melbourne in three words.
    Defined by comparison.

It has been said that the Palmerston Hotel in South Melbourne has the best chicken parmagana in Melbourne. For a city so mad about food – and parmas – that’s saying a lot. I’ve been wanting to try the parma there for a very very long time. Tonight, I finally got the chance.

The parma I was served is there, to the right. And yes, it is good. It’s actually very very good. The chicken is real chicken, not processed chicken-bits. The sauce is perfect, with just a hint of herbs. It’s actually breaded and fried. I ordered mine with chips and salad, as is traditional. One can tell a lot about a place by the side salad served with a parma. Too many places just throw whatever onto the plate, old wilted lettuce and all. This salad was crisp and fresh, not buried in a horrible dressing either. The chips were fairly standard, but they were only a side attraction, after all.

But it was not the best parma I’ve had in Melbn. That honour goes to Hobson’s By The Bay in Sandringham. One day, about two years ago, I had a pot-of-gold-at-the-end-of-the-frikkin-rainbow parma there. At the time, I remember thinking “I will never eat another one this good again”. Sadly, I was correct. When we went back there a second time, the ownership had changed, the service had taken a dive, and the parma was eminently forgettable. I still hold it in my mind, the unattainable, the Epicure 20/20, the perfect score, the once-in-a-lifetime parma, the food of gods.

From @snarkattack ’s website.

1. What time did you get up this morning?
   I was up at 5:55, as usual. I like nice numbers like that. If you’re going to pick a number, make it a good one.
2. Diamonds or pearls?
   Neither, thanks. I’m not fond of the look of pearls, and the DeBeers thing just so completely turns me off diamonds.
3. What was the last film you saw at the cinema?
   WALL-E. It was bloody brilliant.
4. What is your favourite TV show?
   I don’t really have a favourite. Right now, I’m watching “Double the Fist” on my iPhone in the tram, but it’s not great.
5. What do you usually have for breakfast?
   Müslix and yogourt with tea and pulpy orange juice during the week, and usually something eggy on the weekends.
6. What is your middle name?
   I’ve got two. Be more specific, generic survey-writer.
7. What food do you dislike?
   Brussels sprouts.
8. What is your favourite CD at the moment?
   There are lots. Right now, I’m in love with Willie Nelson & Wynton Marsalis’s “Two Men With The Blues”. A beautiful release.
9. What kind of car do you drive?
   Vokswagen Golf TDI.
10. Favourite sandwich?
    Butter, peanut butter, honey, cheddar cheese.
11. What characteristic do you despise?
    Wankerism.
12. Favourite item of clothing?
    Nothing.
13. If you could go anywhere in the world on vacation, where would you go?
    Africa or South America would be cool.
14. Where would you retire to?
    Luzern, Switzerland.
15. What was your most recent memorable birthday?
    Not telling.
16. When is your birthday?
    December 12. Like Hank Williams III, Robert Lapage, Bob Barker, Frank Sinatra.
17. Morning person or a night person?
    Night person. I get more done at night.
18. Pets:Yes, one cat.
19. Any new and exciting news you’d like to share?
    Nope. I’m not the sharing type. Not with strangers, anwyay.
20. What did you want to be when you were little?
    Game show host! Still hope for that.
21. How are you today?
    A bit jittery.
22. What is your favourite flower?
    I prefer herbs. Does rosemary flower?
23. What are you listening to right now?
    Oooh this is embarassing. Alanis Morissette “Versions of Violence”.
24. What was the last thing you ate?
    Lebkuchen.
25. Do you wish on stars?
    Probably have, but I haven’t seen many stars lately.
26. If you were a crayon, what color would you be?
    Burnt umber. Love the name.
27. How is the weather right now?
    Warmish and slightly cloudy. No rain though.
28. Last person you spoke to on the phone?
    David, my Chairman.
29. Favourite soft drink?
    I don’t really like soft drinks.
30. Favourite restaurant?
    Oooh. Loaded question. There are so many. Ultimate favourite would have to be Tojos in Vancouver, but I haven’t been there in years. Three, One, Two here in Melbourne is brilliant, but closed. It’ll reopen soon, I’m told. Jacques Reymond is well-deserving of its crown of “best restaurant in Melbourne”. I had an excellent meal at Di Stazio as well. Locally, I’m really lucky to have a brilliant Nepalese/Indian place just around the corner from my house.
31. Hair color?
    Blond.
32. Summer or winter?
    They’re both fine. I don’t like the inbetweens. Melbourne can’t do winter well though.
33. Chocolate or Vanilla?
    If the chocolate is good, I’d take that. Else, vanilla’s fine.
34. Coffee or tea?
    Tea. Tea rules. Tea taught me patience. Tea and Guinness.
35. What did you do last night?
    Slept.
36. What are you afraid of?
    Losing myself.
37. Salty or sweet?
    More specific please.
38. How many keys on your key ring?
    Seven.
39. How many years at your current job?
    Six or seven.
40. Favourite day of the week?
    Friday, because I know there are two more days coming up without work.
41. Do you make friends easily?
    No. I don’t really want to make friends easily either.
42. How many people will you send this to?
    None.
43. Do you like finding out all this stuff about your friends?
    Yeah, these things are ace.