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June 26, 2018

Day 2 – Alice Springs to Kings Canyon

John, Matt and myself jogged the 6km to Britz to pick up the camper vans. After a reasonably lengthy induction, we were driving our new homes for the next 2 weeks! Very easy to drive, bit rattly but there’s also no shortage of cupboards & other items that vibrate, particularly at speed.

We head to the hotel, pick up the girls and do some shopping then it’s on the open road!

Matt & Mandy were leading us out of Alice, and after our briefing that if we roll the camper vans, we’re not covered by insurance, Matt decides to take a last minute right-hand turn and tests out just how nimble the vans are. Turns out they’re pretty good!

Kings Canyon was our destination which is about half way to Uluru, but off the highway. After 5-ish hours, we made it to our accommodation which was the Kings Canyon Resort – a nice caravan park right in the gorge. We became acquainted with how to use our vans a bit more & set up for the night. Dinner was in the restaurant (which was essentially a big, open shed) where we enjoyed some rather good food and then watched Australia go down to France in the World Cup opener, 2-1.

After a lengthy day, we trudged back to our vans, climbed our ladder to get to the top bed and for new surroundings, slept pretty bloody well.

June 25, 2018

Alice Springs to Darwin (via Uluru)

As I approach 40, I was keen to visit more of Australia. Seen plenty of the rest of the world, but I’ve never been to the heart of Australia – the Northern Territory.

So what better time than now. Friends Matt & Mandy and Biddy & John were keen so we booked our camper vans from Britz and on June 15th 2018, we flew to Alice Springs to pick them up.

Day 1 – Alice Springs

Getting to Adelaide Airport, I was very surprised (and touched) that the team had organised personalised t-shirts for the trip! A silver fox on the front with a big “40” on the back along with our traveling hashtag, #thisonetimeatvancamp. Was awesome stuff!

The flight to Alice was pretty easy and as we arrived – the uniqueness of the NT was upon us as we had to use an old-school phone to call for a taxi. Quaint and cute at the same time.

We got a taxi into our hotel at Alice (the Mercure) which was very clean and nice and then on into Alice Springs town centre. Bit of a culture shock! It’s just not like anywhere I’ve been before and super interesting. We went past the world famous Sybil’s cafe in the Woolworths group; checked out a pub for lunch and then spent the afternoon drinking at a very cool bar called Monty’s. Highly recommended for the Pimms and lemonade.

We bought some, well, a lot of booze where we had to hand over our ID to get scanned. Lots of locals are banned from buying alcohol so they check everyone’s ID. A little worried we needed to carry cartons of beer back when it was dark for a kilometre back to our hotel. John enquired with the cop who was on duty @ the bottle shop to see how we’d go (can’t say we’re locals just yet!), and said we should be fine as it was still early. And this is for all races – there’s a lot of unsavoury characters around!

Ready for our first day on the road tomorrow where we hit the road!

January 10, 2018January 10, 2018

Passion Project – Day 1

Day 1 – Wednesday the 10th of January, 2018.

I rock up to 313 Halifax to use my share desk with minimal stuff – laptop (sans charger – great start); headphones & a few ideas
check crytpo holdings. My latest bigger investment is basically plagiarised from another project. That’s not going to end well… drops 60% in a day. OK – crypto trading is not for me, moving on…
busily sift through the ideas:
- “what was I thinking?”
- “huge”
- “should have done it 3 years ago”
- “.. might have legs?”
  - we have a winner!

Choosing a passion project is both fun and daunting I’ve found. I’ve suddenly got time to do this thing… but then decision paralysis kicks in. Is this the right project? Is one of the other ideas better? Are any of these ideas any good?

What I’ve quickly learnt is after 18 years of doing other peoples’ projects, where I’m there to help and improve upon their vision… suddenly it’s quite different when it’s your project. This is your time, your investment. There’s an onerous feeling of “I better make the most of this”, which if harnessed well, is quite motivating.

Everyone’s motivations for their passion projects will differ. Mine are reasonably simple: I want to improve my tech skills & I’d like to generate a bit of side income to prove/disprove to myself that it’s worthwhile. But primarily – I want to keep my skills sharp(ish).

Going through the list of ideas, the idea that might have legs, ticks the boxes outlined above.

And with that – I begin. The project is code-named CYLA – it’s an idea from a couple of years ago I casually pitched to a couple of clients, and was met with, “if we had the budget…” and “cool idea” but never went anywhere from there.

How I intend to go about this:

I’m going to have a week break between each day of work – as such, I need to plan this out well and keep good notes of where I’m up to to maintain momentum
My primary tools will be:
- Trello – I’ve created a Trello board with inspiration taken from this board
  - Trello is ideal for mind-mapping out the project but also to go into more detail as you need it
- Dropbox Paper – I haven’t used Paper before, but it appears to be an ideal method to keep the overall project outline in an easy to use. No frills note taking is basically what I’m after as well as tracking where I’m up to
- Fiverr – for all things graphical given my complete lack of talent in this area

As for my first day – my accomplishments have been:

Settled on “the idea” – ie CYLA
Outlined what the idea will try and accomplish & some early key tasks
Set up a Trello board with some mind-mapping
Registered a domain name
Submitted a request for a logo from Fiverr
Set what I need to get done next to proceed

Time spent: 7hrs

January 10, 2018

Passion Project – Introduction

I’ve been in the web game since creating my first paid-for website in 1999; and since completing my uni degree, there’s been countless more.

In all that time however, I’ve never really built much for me. It’s almost always either for my clients or for my business. I’ve run this Honzee blog as a way of keeping track of my travels & some home renovations, but not much more.

So, with it being a new year and the time for resolutions to either stick or not – I decided I’m going to follow through on something I’ve been thinking about for a while… giving myself a day a week to follow through on ideas that I’ve had on my mind either for a long time or more recent.

With that – Wednesdays for the foreseeable future are now known as “Side Project Wednesdays” as my friends @ 313 Halifax call them, where I’m renting a desk. My intent is to compartmentalise my side projects to just being on Wednesdays, within reason, however we’ll see how that goes. Main thing is – my primary business remains exactly that. Primary.

This blog now takes on a new role… keeping track of what I do on a daily basis. I want to keep myself accountable so I’m going to try and provide as much useful info to anyone who reads this as I can, almost as a diary but also as a way of potentially helping others with starting a new website/passion project.

October 10, 2017

USA – Day 3

After a much better sleep, we thought we’d celebrate with more time around the pool! Glen went for a jog to check out the suburb and see how people lived & took photos along the way.

In the afternoon, Soph was keen on doing a whole lot of nothing so Glen took the car out for a self-drive tour of some of Palm Springs’ best architecture. Much of it was from the 1950s & 60s including where Elvis & Priscilla Presley lived for a couple of years after they got married in the early 60s. 180 of their closest friends could stay with them if required, so as you can imagine, it’s a reasonably large house! Interestingly, it’s up for sale – asking price: as they say, if you have to ask…

For our last night in Palm Springs, we headed into town for a very nice meal followed by a walk down the Main Street which is blocked off for night markets. Plenty of trinkets on offer that local artisans hand make.