Reshaping the Rabbit

Hunted high and low for a decent alternative to the official Twitter badge, which in my opinion is a little bland. I could probably have come up with something that stood out a little more with some CSS hackery but I'm not sure if I could have really made it any more prominent sitting all the way on the side.

In the hope that I'll be using Twitter more, I've made the bold move of placing my Twitter updates above the blog posts here. Given that they're really just small blog posts anyway I figured that would make sense. Any thoughts people?

I'll just have to remove it if the Twitter phase passes...

Duck and Cover

That's what I get for trying to foster an active lifestyle. Figured we'd cap off a sedentary day of (in my case) iPhone fiddling with a nice stroll around the neighborhood to get some fresh air and exercise. Ended up getting sniped in the back of the head by a demonic magpie in the park for my trouble.

Thankfully we managed to execute a tactical retreat from the military hand book of "Hand flailing and feminine squealing". Got a little bit of blood from my combat wound but I shrugged it off with barely a whimper.

I'd always met Alison's ornithophobia with a hint of amusement but now I can empathise. On the bright side, I got a legitimate excuse to Tweet about something with my iPhone out in the wild. Yes, the irony of tweeting about a bird attack was not lost on me...

iCaved

I've been joking a fair bit lately about heading out to pick up an iPhone but honestly never thought I'd actually do it. Rationally I figured I'd wait till the rumoured iPod refresh on the 9th of September to see what new toys would roll out of the lust factory in Cupertino... but impulse once again got the better of me.



We drove out to Carindale this morning to pick up a yummy white 16GB iPhone on the lowest Optus plan possible. It only gives me an anorexic 100MB per month but I'm hoping that I won't be using that much data to check email, a little surfing and using my iPhone apps. Alison forced me to pinky swear that I wouldn't be looking to upgrade my phone in the next 24 months for the duration of the contract...

So far it's been an absolutely gorgeous experience. Browsing with Safari is far better than anything I've tried with a PDA (and yes that's including using Opera Mini on Windows Mobile). The interface is responsive, good looking and most importantly makes sense for a hand held device (that means no freaking start menu Microsoft).

Apps that I've downloaded so far have been pretty impressive too. Twinkle has been an obvious stand out given my recent foray into the world of Twitter. Evernote of course is great which I've talked about before too. Then there's the mobile version of Net News Wire which even syncs with my News Gator account. NICE!

Downsides so far have been the usual smudging that seems to be prevalent with any Apple product these days (the white helps a little), though in truth the screen gets just as smudgy on my HTC Touch. The 16 gig may also feel somewhat claustrophobic as my culled 9 gig music collection takes up a fair bit of my space. Certainly glad that I didn't go for the 8 gig version.

Overall though it's pretty much what I expected. Chalk up one more happy Apple whore.

Tweet Tweet

I thought I'd never jump on this Web 2.0 bandwagon but I guess I've been wrong about things like this before. Looking to try something new, I've signed up for a Twitter account and finished setting things up so that my diminutive musings propagate through all corners of my online presence. If you cast your eyes over to the right you'll notice that a new gadget has been added to The Rabbit, perhaps distastefully titled "Skin the Bunny" in light of the short nature of Tweets.

So what is this thing? Twitter's basically a form of micro-blogging crossed with some social networking. The idea is that there are things that happen in life which don't warrant a full blog post or an email but may provide a passing interest to other people in your life. Trying an interesting recipe, reading a good book, going shopping for an iPhone (I wish)... essentially anything that would normally come up in small talk. Rather than catching up and asking all the usual questions you can just check your mate's Twitter feed and do away with inconsequential chit chat. Don't you love it when technology brings people closer? :)

I jest of course. Here's an entertaining youtube video which does a reasonable job of explaining the attraction of Twitter. For me, it's really a handy way to do a little blogging on the move through my phone or when I don't feel like typing out a full blog post. I'm sure that a better man would just leave his private life off the internet rather than contributing to the build up of shite content in cyberspace... but I'm such a geeky exhibitionist that I just can't help myself.

I've been told that you get to find out a lot more about your friends and family through this disconnected voyeurism which could certainly be interesting... if any of my friends or family actually used the darn thing. Expect the usual torrent of inane blah-blah until the novelty wears off for me. I'll try my very best not to keep things out of the gutter...

There's a sticker!

We had what we hope to be the last open house for the unit today. Only people that came through were the buyers and some real estate agents that were dragged along to give a rental appraisal. Building and Pest inspection was done yesterday and went off without a hitch apparently. In fact, our agent is so confident she's actually put a (somewhat tentatively phrased) "SOLD" sticker on the sign at the front.



Probably more for her benefit really but I must say it's a bit of a high to see that we're pretty much home and hosed. Just another week until the contract goes unconditional.

Braeburn just got a boost

Thought I'd use what little luxury money I had lying around to give myself a little treat and picked up some RAM for the MacBook. I've been toying around with XCode lately and have noticed Braeburn chugging along with all my normal apps open at the same time. Worse yet, if I don't close some of them down things just slow to a crawl when running Parallels for the odd Windows program that I still need to use.

Grabbed four gig of "Mac compatible" memory from UMart and have noticed an improvement in responsiveness already. Even now I've got pretty much everything I'd ever want open and my little Mac is handling it with nary a Page Out.



Ahhh... look at all that free space. Yes, Quicksilver is a memory hog but I just can't live without it anymore.

Speaking of apps that I can't do without, I've recently developed an unhealthy attachment to a nifty note taking program called Evernote. I started using it at work to take notes for jobs and processes but have since been using it at home and on the move for everything from receipts to project ideas for the new house. It has great support for tags and searching (it even searches for text inside photos!) which means that your notes are easily recalled when you need them.

The brilliant thing about the app is that it's cross platform and (get this) it syncs your notes between your computers! If installing an application on a computer isn't possible then there's also a web client available, though it's obviously not as responsive as a local installation. You do have to create an Evernote account to sync but this is a painless process and it's ABSOLUTELY FREE if you only need to sync 40MB worth of notes a month. They even have an iPhone version which would provide you with access to your notes regardless of wherever you are. Shame I don't have an iPhone yet... *grumble*

My "art" spreads to the iPhone

For a change, here's something that's not house related. I was asked a while back to contribute one of my food snaps to Schmap, an online guide that wanted something that represented Chinese New Year in Brisbane. Apparently they've just jumped on the Apple bandwagon and released a new iPhone application to view their guide online, and were kind enough to send me a link to see what it looks like.

Pretty nifty... now if only I had an iPhone to check it out for real. ;)

Going once, going twice... SOLD!

Things were bleak earlier on in the week. We got our first offer on Monday with a figure which was almost insulting, but at least it was something down on paper. The rest of the week was a gruelling back and forth between us and the potential buyers as we rejected each minute increase on their offer price, which even by the end was still close to 20,000 below what the unit was listed for.

With no firm contract, Saturday morning was once again filled with frantic cleaning for our third open house. We fully expected to have no one through on the day due to a major internet mix up but somehow four groups managed to find their way over to inspect the unit. A reasonable amount of interest but by then we were past getting excited with visits without offers.

John and Sheena were down for the weekend for a few errands today so we planned on heading out to dinner at the Blackforest Cafe, Brisbane's home of authentic German fare. We were looking forward to a nice quiet dinner out to take our minds off selling the unit, so imagine our surprise when the real estate agent called to say that another buyer was on the way into the office to put an offer in.

Dinner conversation obviously skirted around what the offer would be as we were expecting to see the agent after our meal, but we all tried to steer the discussion towards less stress-inducing topics. Most of the evening was just spent enjoying the ridiculously large portions we got served in between belting our folk songs with the resident musician.



Alison was sober enough to capture a touching moment on her camera phone.

Upon returning home and suffering a short wait, we finally received the agent who was obviously having a late night of work (Alison's plan to enter Real Estate one day have thoroughly vanished). The offer from the new buyers was a good one... but still not quite at a level where we would have been comfortable. Biting the bullet, we stood our ground and proposed a modest counter offer for the agent to bring back immediately... except the buyers weren't answering their phone at that time of night. *argh*

This morning we woke up and shambled around all day, fully resigned to the fact that in all likelihood we wouldn't be getting any closure till sometime on Monday. Then out of the blue we got a call to say that... after much deliberation... the buyers accepted our counter offer!

We now have a signed contract for the sale of our first property. Still not out of the woods yet obviously as it's still going to be 14 days till finance, building and pest inspections are done and the offer goes unconditional. For that reason we still have an ad in the paper and will be having (hopefully) our last open house this Saturday.

All in all though we're very happy with the result. It's a huge weight lifted off our shoulders which will put us in a great position to jump for joy in a fortnight when things are set in stone.

Still going...

Nothing came out of the open house last week but we had another one yesterday and nine groups of people came through to see the place. More inspections coming out of it lined up for the week and hopefully we're getting closer to a buyer putting something down on paper.

In the mean time we're trying to occupy ourselves with fun activities. We were treated to a lovely dinner at Kath and Andrew's while marvelling at the obscene amount of money that was spent on the Chinese Olympic opening ceremony, which was admittedly impressive. Saturday night had us chalking another mark on the social score board as we had a scrumptious evening BBQ at the Ko's place around the corner.

Emotionally recharged. Just got to pace ourselves as this selling game is likely to be an endurance race across the rocky Australian real estate landscape.

Promising start, still a ways to go

Not too much concrete news to report. About six groups of people came through today at the open house and we have three potentials that are expressing their interest. Still early days yet and nothing's certain but overall it's looking upbeat. Will post more as things progress. Very exciting!