Had the hot water replaced today. Moved from gas to heat pump. Hoping it will save us some dollarydoos and be better for the environment.

A bird just flew into the window in front of my desk and scared the hell out of me.

Finished reading: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (A Hunger Games Novel) by Suzanne Collins 📚

Not as good a story as the original trilogy, but I think maybe better written.

Now I’ve passed the halfway point in my listen through of the top 100 albums on Apple Music, I was reflecting on the types of music I like and why. I don’t like hip-hop. I never really have. And I think that’s because for me, good music captures emotion. That’s partially … read more

So now that Apple Music has finished announcing its top 100 albums, I just want to say how crap I think the list is.

No Foo Fighters Colour and the Shape. No Bon Jovi Slippery When Wet. No Pearl Jam Ten.

I’ll keep listening through them, but I think Apple’s methodology was massively broken.

I can tell when I’m going to like a new product for review when I get giddy showing it off to the wife and kids. Doesn’t happen too often though.

If you run a business that relies on search from Google search, I would be mashing the hell out of the panic button right now. Google has shown that it is going to do everything it can to avoid sending people to your website. Now is the time to be doing everything you can to build a strong, direct … read more

Ooh! Apple Music is running down its list of the best 100 albums. My mission is now to listen to all of them. Might even try and drop short reviews here as replies.

After years of trying to work out where we could fit it and whether it was a worthwhile investment, we finally bought a piano.

It’s a little cramped, but it’s beautiful. Sounds so much better than the keyboard we had previously.

Accepting that something you poured a lot of time and effort into isn’t going to work out is hard.

Today it was cold and miserable so we watched “Into the Woods”, and friends let me tell you it was a Bad Movie.

Walking through St James station today on my way to a meeting, it reminded me of the fact they filmed some of the train scenes of Matrix Revolutions here.

I decided to not flip over the turnstile like Trinity though…

Ed Zitron is brutal today in his newsletter, “The man who killed Google Search”

Yep, it’s definitely time to move away from Google, for personal and business. I’m old enough to remember when it valued not being evil. Now it doesn’t even pretend.

Absolute banger this week in Ed Zitron’s newsletter:

The core problem lies in the fact that these platforms don’t really create anything, and their only value exists in making an internet of billions of people small enough to comprehend. Like seemingly every problem with a capitalist society, the internet has become dominated by powerful forces that don’t contribute to the product that enriches them. As a result, they have either no concept of nor interest in “quality,” just “more,” making them extremely poor arbiters of what “good” looks like. This inevitably leads to products that suck more as they become more profitable, because the machine they’ve built is a profit excavator dressed as a service. I’d argue that this makes Google, and by extension executives like Sundar Pichai and Google Search lead Prabhakar Raghavan, some of the greatest villains in business history. While one can’t forget about the damage done by Meta and Mark Zuckerberg’s failure to maintain an honest platform, allowing Google Search to decay so severely for any reason — let alone a profit-centric one — is actively damaging to society, and was an entirely intentional act perpetrated by people like Raghavan, the former head of Google’s ads division who took over search not long after his predecessor sounded a “code yellow” about Google’s advertising encroaching on search results.

I reckon we saw almost 20 kangaroos and wallabies while walking around the Botanic Gardens today. Still such a thrill.

I’m beginning to think I’m going to break up with Google. Its March core update has highlighted to me how bad the search results actually are. Combine with the (crap) generative AI push, the constant shuttering of services and the nightmare that is GA4, I think it’s time to start looking for alternatives.

I need to think about it some more, but I’m going to need alternatives for both personal and business services…

I have to admit that the inspiration for this post is anger. Pure unadulterated rage. As many would know, last year I launched my own product review site, bttr.com.au. I’ve been working hard at trying to make it great, I’ve experimented with some things (including AI content), and have … read more

Finished reading: It by Stephen King 📚

It’s been At least 20 years since I read this last. Not as good as I remember it being, but I still enjoyed it.

What the hell are the people at LinkedIn smoking?