A fun video we took recently for a work team building exercise to show everyone how to make Crispy Skin Salmon in ten minutes at home.

Often when guests visit us in the US we are asked about tipping culture. For those not accustomed to it, the ‘rules’ can be considered arcane and arbitrary. While I’m sure my approach will not be without contention, it has served me well to feel comfortable and reflect good service.

The following is a list of some of our favorite restaurants in NYC.

It seems everyone has a story of being stung by an airline booking gone bad. In the age of travel aggregators and easier access to self-booking, I recommend the following rules to ensure you're not caught out.

Several months into the pandemic, we decided to not renew our lease, and find a silver lining by moving out west. Many days couped up in a studio apartment we dreamed of green hikes and snow. We moved to Portland for a 10 week period, but ended up coming back for another 10 weeks after Colorado, and ended our west coast adventure in Portland after a road trip to California - so 5 months in total.

As I work through development upgrades for the wow_auctions repository, I thought it would be a good idea to quickly reflect on the development status. This will discuss the shape of the project after the first sprint of development, the initial upgrade stage, and plans for the future.

I have always been a keen video game player. Since moving to a new country, and especially during COVID times, video games have become a choice way to spend free time. I enjoy complex games with a lot of opportunity to analyse and optimise - no great surprise that I made a career of these skills!

Bri and I have been living in the states six months now, and we are excited to have family and friends come visit in 2020. We’ve been growing a personal list of things we like doing or want to do while living in NYC. If you're planning on a visit, let us know if you like the look of any of these!

It’s fair to say that the first half of the year was a lot of fun. While not a problem according to BMI, I was starting to feel a little bit overweight. Over the years I have crept up to 94kg, since being around 82kg at 18 years old. I had developed some habits over the years such as having pizza after basketball and poor diet while studying for exams.

I finished the OMSCS program in May 2019. While the stress has faded, yet the memories are fresh, I wanted to take the time to write up some notes about the program that I hope others find useful. The main focus for the article will be on synergies between the classes. I’ll also talk more generally about what is good and bad about each class.

It’s been almost two months since Bri and I tied the knot. We’re on our final days of holiday and honeymoon at the moment as we prepare to enter the United States for work. While the experience is still fresh in my head I wanted to write an article about our wedding experience. Planning a wedding is a stressful experience, and I made lots of use of online lists and guides. This article is intended to be a guide to having a cheap or modest wedding in Melbourne, Australia. Most of the content will be relevant for anyone wanting to plan your own wedding day, but I’ll also discuss a bit more about the paperwork process in Melbourne, Australia for getting married. In a seperate post I’ll add our wedding day video and talk more personally about mine and my wife’s experience on the day. This article is more intended to be a practical guide to the planning and costs of the day.

If you’ve found yourself here, we may have had a discussion about an upcoming family holiday of yours to Australia, and you wanted to know how best to organise a trip to stay for a week. I have lived in Melbourne, Australia pretty much my whole life up until a few years ago. I have visited a few places but have generally preferred to travel overseas. I always figured I would leave the in-depth touring until later in life when travelling with kids. That being said, I discussed this topic with family and came up with some great suggestions of how to spend a week in Australia. This is particularly relevant to people coming here for two weekends worth of time.

My partner and I spent 6 weeks in Porto, Portugal in late 2018. During that time we were working remote, usually in the morning and late evenings, leaving us most of the day, evenings and weekend to explore Porto. We arrived in the colder, rainier month of November, and didn’t end up venturing outside the city at all. Along the way we found some great places to eat, have a drink and various things to do. The following is a list of what we found to be good.

Hobart has been a destination for some great weekend trips over the years. Very accessible from Melbourne, and with low cost airlines making it easy and cheap to visit, it’s likely a destination we’ll continue to visit every so often. I’ve been wanting to jot down some notes on ideas for people taking holidays there, so this article will list some top picks.

My partner Bri and I spent two months in Split as part of our six month trip in Europe. Although we spent most of that time working, studying or at the beach, we had a lot of fun in and around Split. Split boasts a historic castle old town, a great park for walks and cycling, a long coastline of pebble beaches, and small but growing communities of interest (tech, startup, expat, sport and coffee). Outside of Split the best way to enjoy Croatia is on a boat, either the common ferries to islands or Dubrovnik, or small boats for day trips to famous spots, or whole week cruises.

One of my top recommendations for anyone visiting Japan is to visit Koyasan. Koyasan is high in the mountains of the Wakayama prefecture. It is a historically relevant village, considered the centre of Shingon Buddism in Japan. It is here that you can experience a temple stay (Shukubo), many of which include vegetarian haite cuisine and onsen. Guests are welcome to attend early morning meditations. The town and its surrounds are perfect for walks, with the long graveyards nested in forests, large gates, and pilgrimage trails with great views.

A fun video we took to capture the key parts of our six months working and studing remote in Europe.

I've been wanting to put together my packing list for digital nomad life for some time. For a few reasons really, one is for my own purposes as a checklist to see if I have everything when I'm packing. Another is to have a reference link for anyone who sees and likes an item and wants more information or to buy it. I'm also a habitual list-writer, so this list may come in handy if I were to lose my luggage and needed to start over or file insurance.

I'm 8 classes in, and my couple of tidbits of advice specifically for Georgia Tech would be the following 5 tips.

A sneaky peak inside the suitcase of a digital nomad traveler. I work remote and like to stay agile for long periods of time, so I try to maintain 'carry-on' sizing for travel gear. Accompaniment to the article I wrote.

While baby boomers have their francophiles, more recent Australians have grown up with a different experience. Like many others, I was offered Japanese language and culture classes starting as early as grade 5. A fair chunk of my teenage years were spent with Nintendos, various anime and sushi. My first chance to visit Japan came in 2007 where I got my first big dose of culture shock. Since then I’ve holidayed twice more, once with family and once solo. The itch was never fully scratched, and I knew I wanted to try living there one day.

Because i'm looking to travel a lot over the next few years, I've been making special efforts to organise my stuff. For a very long time, digitising photos has been an item on the to do list. It took a whole afternoon, but I managed to digitise all of my physical photos from before the age of 21 or so. That task seems easy compared to sorting out digital media! I have come across so many directories of photos, and copies all over my computers.