Entries from September 2008 ↓

Now we can say “We’re going to New York NEXT MONTH!!!!”

Just saw a new police car on the way to work this morning. The new rack of lights on the roof is much much lower than the previous red, white and blue strip. It’s going to be a lot harder to spot their cars 1km in the distance – the old roof lights being higher give the cars quite a distinct shape from that distance making them quite easy to identify as police cars … usually about the same time the radar detector picks them up but they don’t always flick their radars on until they get a lot closer.

Yes it seems we’re addicted to pastry – when we’re not making pasta-based meals we’re creating little pies and tarts. Last night a variation on the tomato and ricotta tarts – this time the main ingredient being asparagus.

They were a real experiment – I put mayonnaise in the filling and cut the spear tips into halves to decorate the tops. All that at the end of a release day at work!

Wahoo! Big milestone – launched Xero in Australia today. Product release has just finished.

Massive couple of weeks for me updating the now enormous Help Centre so that it’s relevant for Australia – I want our Australian customers to see screenshots showing AUD not NZD or GBP and the correct GST rate for their country and addresses on invoices that look like they belong to Australia, as well as help for their specific GST filing requirements as they work in Xero. Over the last 3.5 weeks I’ve updated 120 help pages and created 250 images! Believe me, that’s a LOT of work.

I’ve also created a full demo organisation in Xero so people can take a look around how Xero would work for them – there’s loads of transactions, dummy Australian bank accounts fully reconciled and nicely printing invoices and statements complete with my own homemade Australian company logo … which suspiciously looks like the theme the design guys went with for the Xero Australia website homepage … I swear mine was first … I’ve been building the demo company for weeks.

If you ever want to see the free demo companies I create, just go to the Xero website (www.xero.com) and use the green ‘Try Xero’ button to sign up for a free trial.

Huh? Everywhere else lets me have this as a legitimate name (Google, email (work and play), YouTube, errr, Xero and … I’m sure I’ve signed up to other stuff but maybe not), so why not you Facebook? I really don’t want to use it (because I have this sense I am going to bombarded with more spam that I already get telling me my friends-using-Facebook are having a birthday, yet if I’ve never signed up to the damn thing how can it assume who my friends are … anyway …) but the only way I’m going to keep in touch with a couple of travelling friends is to sign up. Not everyone has a blog or personal website like I do.

What kind of discrimination is this anyway? Do they trawl through rafts of noise words in other languages to determine if someone is a colour or a gender instead of a ‘real’ name? I wonder what orange is in Russian …

Went to Sarah’s Pooh & Friends picnic party in 100 Acre Wood yesterday in celebration of her 4th birthday. I know Pooh’s friends are well documented but I took my own orange bear and joined in the screaming games and fairy bread from a distance.

Was lovely sitting in their sunny garden and interesting watching the personalities of all the kids develop as we’ve watched them grow over the years. The Mister got cornered in the garden by a little curly-haired chap who wanted to know if he was “actually invited to this party” … ah, the confusion of adults who go to a kid’s party without a kid of their own.

Very VERY sad news. Nikau is closing. And soon. Something to do with the gallery closing for a year for refurbishment and a lease and the timing and something. Either way it’s a shock for the owners, staff and regulars.

4.5 years of Sunday lunches and there’s now only 3 or 4 left. What a hole it’s going to leave in everyone’s lives involved with that place.

Well blow me down, Google’s been around for TEN YEARS! Did NOT realise it had been that long. Wow.

They’ve done a cool timeline of their history. Would love to have one of these on the go for Xero. We’ve kind of got one, but it was a pretty serious one for our first Annual Report.

Would be cool to have one like Google’s with little stories or definitions along the way of quirks or traits that make us who we are. Like when Rod was on the business show on TV the morning of our IPO – watched that on one of our old videos the other day. Cool.

We like shopping for our nieces (or other baby/kid friends) at Borders. They’re pretty helpful to people like us with nice big signs showing books for age ranges. If you’re not up with the play on the latest ‘reader series’ for a particular child or know their favourites it can be quite daunting trying to choose something age-appropriate.

Yesterday’s plan was to get a book for Sarah, who’s turning 4, that features a penguin. Well. There actually wasn’t a section for 4-8 year olds, and we figured that 4 is no longer a toddler, and board books are for babies so we were at a bit of a loss. We know that Pingu is on the right track so went to the ‘Characters’ section but couldn’t find Pingu anywhere amongst stories of Maisie, Miffy, Thomas and friends.

So we headed to the ‘picture books’ bit. It soon became apparent that there we books about every kind of animal except penguins! We even sectioned up the shelves and systematically scanned, calling out to each other the animals we found – at one stage I was crawling along the floor reading out the animals I came across in books along the bottom shelf (god only knows what the other shoppers thought of us) but honestly, no penguins? Dogs, cats, dinosours, gruffalos (what?), wombats, giraffes, bears (lots of bears), tigers, wild things, alligators, bunnies, possums, monkeys, fish, kiwi, ducklings, mice, elephants and a potty (!!). We did find one adventure story about a penguin at sea but it was a bit scary and then the Mister stumbled upon this fantastic book – which we read aloud to each other to test it out, yes in the store where everyone could hear.

How big is a million? We figure it’s got penguins in it AND is educational so hopefully can’t go wrong. And the poster in the back which supposedly has a million stars on it is actually amazing, even through an adult’s eyes.

I’m here, I’m here. My throat tickle became some kind of mild throat thing but due to the rigorous regime of Lemsip and vitamin C and water, I actually only ended up thick-headed and miserable for one morning. I just felt quite exhausted all week but still managed to work (kept away from the office because there’s nothing worse than sitting there with people coughing and blowing their noses around you), even though it was only at half speed. Am almost 100% again now.