Why on earth can I NOT search for partial strings in gmail??? Are google not the kings of search? It’s ridiculous!! For example, searching for “clean” will not find “cleaners”… this has caused me grief trying to find emails several times already. I’ve requested partial string searches as a feature. I even read the help section:
Keep in mind that Google Mail search will not recognise matches to partial strings or matches that are ’similar’ to your query, including plurals and misspellings. If you search for travel, Google Mail returns messages containing instances of travel, but does not return messages including travels or travles.
I’m thinking of officially changing my weekend from being Sat & Sun to being Sun & Mon, or maybe Sun & Wed? Can’t decide. I do know that having a day off per week when everybody else has a day off is great, but having a day off when everybody else DOES NOT have a day off is possibly even better. So clearly, I want both, but do I want two days together, or to break the week up some more? The main push for this is that working on the weekend is so very productive (no distractions, its amazing how much gets done), but for reasons of sanity and variety it is very important not to miss the weekend entirely.
Today’s Indulgence section of The Dominion Post Weekend newspaper has a double page spread about my parents’ house, Toad Hall in Otaki. Although it is a great article with a lot of good photos, it highlights once again that you never can tell what is actually going to end up in print, even after talking to the journo and the photographer and hearing their enthusiasm etc. The angle of the article often changes. Photos you were hoping to see don’t make it. Some of the facts are pulled right out of the thin air, and some of the photo captions are clearly invented upon basic inspection of the photo itself. All in all though, a nice article with very good coverage of Susan Claire, my mother’s quilting and country patchwork patterns business, and a mention of my father’s hi-fi and audio equipment business, Mayfield Audio.
Unrelated to the article, but nearby to the house.. a few weeks ago Tim and I went canoeing down the Otaki River for 4 hours. Left me absolutely exhausted, but what great afternoon. Nearly drowned about 15 minutes into it, but after that I had a great time. I really like rivers, beaches too, but rivers more.
Yesterday my little (taller) brother Matthew started his own freelance graphics and photography company. He rang me to find out what to put on an invoice. The invoice is the first thing he did (well, other than study photography for years, compile a portfolio and contemplate setting himself up multiple times). Of course, sending an invoice is every company’s core business really. Its pretty much the one thing that all service businesses have in common.
Anyways, Matthew is very talented in design and photography so I can’t wait to see more of his work. Here’s an old image I just found.
For a long time now I have treated Sunday as Project Day. A lot of people do this actually, its the day around home that you embark on some project, most times you won’t finish it, and quite often its not a very big project. Putting up a new shelf in the kitchen, planting some herbs, building a lego robot, doing a painting… all qualify as long as they aren’t your normal work.
I have been thinking that I’d like to build a web application to manage and prioritise my list of Sunday Projects. Then, naturally I thought it could track anybody’s list of projects, and people could sign up and provide advice or feedback on others’ ideas; like “don’t use [blah] brand of [blah] to fix that [blah] because its no good.” or “make sure you put your herbs in a sunny spot that doesn’t get much wind or the dirt will dry out too quickly.” or whatever. And then I thought it might be cool if people could volunteer to help each other out on their Sunday Projects. Might be a fun way to meet people AND get stuff done.
So some day, some Sunday, maybe I’ll sit down and make my wonderful web application.
Started a new enterprise with two acquaintances last night, brewme.co.nz. It involves beer, branding and technology. Great. It is also based on a very interesting business model, 49% customer ownership at all times (yet to sort out the legal mumbo jumbo). Each customer will be promised a share point of that 49% each time they buy. Its going to be great fun. So we bought the domain name, set up some Google infrastructure for online international collaboration, and started a blog. We’re off. If you have a scalable small brewery and are keen to work with a new and exciting distribution model, get in touch.
I wrote and illustrated a story book in an evening a little while ago. It was actually a lot of fun, I enjoyed the creativity. The style of the story is inspired by my memory of a short story book I read several years ago in Unity Books. I can’t remember who wrote it or what it was called, but I really liked the simplicity of the story and the way it drew you in with a combination of enticing wee sentences and intriguing illustrations. I hope you like my adaptation to my own scenario.
It’s actually a true story believe it or not…
This morning I joined Tim, Tim and Tom on their morning swim at Oriental Bay. What a great way to start the day, I’m still energised. Sitting here drinking my delicious earl grey blue flower tea while the daily buzz goes on around me, I’ve been getting through my massive list of very-important-things-to-do at what seems like an astonishing pace. Or maybe it was the wheatgrass shot that we had afterwards?