2023 Writing Plan

Written on 03 Feb 2023, 7 min read.

To achieve my goal of publishing one high-quality piece of writing per week this year, I’ve put together a draft writing plan and a few organisational notes.

Please let me know what you think - what’s missing? what would you like to read more/less of from me?

I aim for each piece of writing to generate discussion, inspire further writing, and raise my visibility and profile with potential customers and peers. Some of the writing will be opinion, but I expect a majority of it will take a “learning by teaching” approach - aiming to explain and present useful information to the reader while helping me learn more!

Goals for 2023

Written on 27 Jan 2023, 6 min read.

This is the second of a two-part post covering my goals for 2023. See the first part to understand the vision, mission and strategy driving these goals.

I want to thank my friend Nat, and Will Larson whose annual reviews I’ve always enjoyed reading for inspiring me to write these posts.

I’ve found the process articulating my motivations and goals very useful to clarify my thoughts and create tangible next steps. I’m grateful for that in and of itself, but I also hope that by publishing this you too might find it interesting, and the additional public accountability it creates will be a positive encouragement to me.

Vision, Mission and Strategy

Written on 26 Jan 2023, 8 min read.

This is the first of a two-part post, covering high-level thoughts around my motivations and vision. Make sure to check out the second part for my specific goals for 2023.

A new year is upon us! My plan was to be 6 months into the journey of starting a business by this point.

I made some very tentative progress towards that goal in 2022, registering a company and starting some consulting work, but on the whole I’ve found it much harder than expected to gather the necessary energy to begin that journey in earnest.

Rebooting...

Written on 14 Jan 2023, 2 min read.

Hi!

After nearly 7 years of dormancy, I’m rebooting this website and have a goal to write regularly on a variety of topics going forward. More on that and my goals in a coming post…

For now, this is just a placeholder note to help double-check that everything on the new site is working as expected and the letters are flowing through the “pipes” in the right places.

Technical Details

I’ve migrated the site from Wordpress, to a fully static configuration using Hugo and TailwindCSS for help with styling.

GPG Key Transition

Written on 17 Aug 2014, 2 min read.

Firstly, thanks to all who responded to my previous rant. It turns out exactly what I wanted does exist in the form of a ID-000 format smartcard combined with a USB reader. Perfect. No idea why I couldn’t find that on my own prior to ranting, but very happy to have found it now.

Secondly, now that I’ve got my keys and management practices in order, it is time to begin transitioning to my new key.

Kindle Reading Stats

Written on 17 Mar 2012, 3 min read.

I’ve written before about my initial investigations into the Kindle, and I’ve learnt much more about the software and how it communicates with the Amazon servers since then, but it all requires detailed technical explanation which I can never seem to find the motivation to write down. Extracting reading data out of the system log files is however comparatively simple.

I’m a big fan of measurement and data so my motivation and goal for the Kindle log files was to see if I could extract some useful information about my Kindle use and reading patterns. In particular, I’m interested in tracking my pace of reading, and how much time I spend reading over time.

How I’m voting in 2011

Written on 24 Nov 2011, 3 min read.

It’s general election time again in New Zealand this year, with the added twist of an additional referendum on whether to keep MMP as our electoral system. If you’re not interested in New Zealand politics, then you should definitely skip the rest of this post.

I’ve never understood why some people consider their voting choices a matter of national security, so when via Andrew McMillan, I saw a good rationale for why you should share your opinion I found my excuse to write this post.

Initial Review of Xero Personal

Written on 29 Mar 2010, 5 min read.

I’ve been eagerly looking forward to the release of Xero Personal which has been heavily promoted by [Xero](]http://www.xero.com and BNZ (as MoneyMap) for the last few months. Unfortunately my first impressions of the product today are extremely underwhelming. Xero Personal is definitely not worth anywhere close to $5/month for me at this point in time and I’m unlikely to even keep using the free trial.

To set the context for that statement, Xero Business set the bar high. I first used the original version of Xero while it was still in beta and even then it was clear that it was an application that took accounting to a new level and would provide an order of magnitude improvement in how I maintained the accounts for our business. That promise held true once we started paying for it, even though the cost of Xero is more than 10% of our annual expenses, the time and hassle it saves makes it a worthwhile investment. By contrast today’s release of Xero Personal offers nothing new above existing personal finance websites or desktop packages and would take me extra time to use as it fails to handle many of the basic transactions that a normal household will encounter.

Political Compass

Written on 28 Jun 2009, 1 min read.

It’s been a while since I’ve taken any sort of quiz like this, so when David Farrar from Kiwblog posted his results today it prompted me to give it another go.

My Political Views
I am a center-right moderate social libertarian
Right: 1.33, Libertarian: 1.97

Political Spectrum Quiz

I completed the quiz pretty quickly and felt the need to answer ‘it depends on the specifics’ to many of the questions, so take the results with a grain of salt. I think it is a reasonably accurate description of me though.

The government listened!

Written on 24 Feb 2009, 6 min read.

I was very pleased to wake up this morning to the news that National has delayed the introduction of S92A via an order-in-council. It’s a nice short-term victory, but I’ll save the champagne until the law is fundamentally rewritten.

The most pleasing aspect of the decision is simply that it was made at all. Within two weeks, a small band of protesters were able to harness the power of the Internet to direct international attention and place enough pressure on a Government, whose Prime Minister admitted to not having read the bill prior, that he then took the time to understand the issues and personally announce the delay in implementation of the law. We owe much thanks to the Creative Freedom Foundation for all the effort they put into co-ordinating the protest and ensuring that a single coherent message was presented. Just a little bit of my cynicism and belief that politicians never listen to public opinion outside of election campaigns was chipped away today.

Blacked Out – no “Guilt Upon Accusation”

Written on 18 Feb 2009, 4 min read.

If you’re reading this post via the website rather than a feed/planet then you will notice that the site has gone completely black in support of the Creative Freedom Foundation’s campaign against S92A of the NZ Copyright Amendment Act which is due to come into effect on 28th February 2009. I’ve also joined the wave of people blacking out their “avatar” on Facebook/Jabber/MSN, etc.

S92A introduces “Guilt Upon Accusation” whereby if you are accused of copyright infringement (downloading music and movies, etc) “repeatedly” (likely 3 or more times) you are at risk of being disconnected from the Internet by your ISP. The law does not require any proof or substantiation of the accusations and the entire process would occur outside of the courts and the established legal system. Not only does it place every user at risk, the wording is very unclear on exactly what type of organisation is considered an ISP and there is significant concern that schools, businesses, libraries and hospitals will be placed in the difficult position of determining whether their users have broken the law and require disconnection.

New Gadgets

Written on 08 Sep 2008, 6 min read.

It’s been a while since I last acquired new gadgets but I think I’ve made up for lost time with my last weeks purchases.

You may remember that I’ve had my eye on the Openmoko phones since early 2007, but in between shifting across the world and starting a new job I never got around to purchasing one of the first versions. The second version, the “Freerunner”, was released in June this year and I placed an order with Pulster, a local distributor, shortly after. The phones have been in hot demand, so I only received my phone last week, a wait of of almost 2 months, and it turned up missing one of the cables that was meant to come with it. Still some distribution kinks to be worked out.

Travelling

Written on 30 Mar 2007, 1 min read.

In just a few hours, I’m hopping on Emirates flight EK433 from Auckland to Singpore, to start the first leg of my trip to Dublin. I’ll be travelling for pretty much the next month, so if you’re trying to get hold of me please don’t be offended if I take several days to reply.

Kat and I have setup another blog to detail our travels, and I’ll try and keep this blog free of too much personal stuff so as to not clutter the various planets that it is syndicated to. If you’re interested in our travels and what we are up to then head over to http://www.mattandkatbrown.com.