This is my experimental monthly update on me as a “product” in development. Subscribe here or send it to someone who might be interested.
Well, it’s been quite a month.
Highlights and Insights
I moved to New Zealand; let’s not bury the lede. It’s been on the cards for a year but the borders were closed. On 6 April New Zealand announced the Trans-Tasman Bubble would open on 19 April. On 19 April we left the Blue Mountains and landed in New Zealand. So so oh so much had to happen in the intervening 13 days. Amidst so very much uncertainty, too. But we hustled, and got shit done, and got here.
While packing I discovered my coin jar. Remember cash? I paid the petrol station $55 in gold. The extra pieces went to nieces to practice arithmetices.
It’s been a mad scramble to get to situation normal. When we arrived, the house had no electricity (electric company let us down), gas (didn’t realise that gas bottles had to be ordered), water (broken pump) or septic (another broken pump). Mostly sorted now, but I’ve been doing laundry by draining the machine into a bucket and hauling it to the garden. (Did you know a load of washing uses ~100 litres of water?)
Hot tip: replace your toilet seat! I can’t believe we spent 12 years at our old place with stains on the toilet seat. It takes about 5 minutes to install a new one.
Dunedin is lovely. More on that next month. (Thanks Angus for all the foodie tips!)
One’s happiness is linked to the warmth of their feet. Slippers FTW.
In NZ it only takes 3 hours to transfer money to another bank account. WTF Australian banks?!?
Some great feedback from Giants-in-Residence mentoring sessions.
Fails
Missed opportunities: I had to turn down some amazing opportunities in the past month. But it gave me some clarity and confidence for the future. A massive shout out to Filipa who took over some face-to-face facilitation, allowing me to leave on the first flight out of Dodge.
I should have been more prepared to move. Like researching tax and employment implications. Plenty of time to do that, but because of all the uncertainty it was just never urgent. Until it was.
Book progress: fail. I started the chapter outline but then priorities shifted. I must make time for this again in May.
On Evergreen Blog Posts
A slight deviation from the usual format this month, to highlight an interesting data trend.
Last year I wrote an article on my experience Buying a House in NZ while Living in Australia. The number of views of the article is increasing each month — still small numbers, but maybe it shows some growing interest.
As a comparison, this is the popularity of the post before it: How Standup Comedy is Adapting to Lockdown. Early burst, long tail.
When I saw these stats I did some digging into my other blog posts to see if any others had a growth curve. A few other unlikely “evergreen” posts which have found a growing audience over time:
For some of those stories, 99% of views have been external to Medium -- i.e. I’ve been driving an audience to Medium, rather than Medium’s audience finding my posts. Unfortunately Medium’s payment model rewards views by existing subscribers — so in this situation, incentives are misaligned.
I guess now I can call myself an SEO expert and sell an expensive online course? Free ebook if you leave your email address in a comment on this linkedin post… ;)
Read / watch / listen
So say we all [watch]: Edward James Olmos talks about the first scene he filmed on Battlestar Galactica. An amazing demonstration of leadership and experience.
Human Behaviour [listen]: Björk’s debut album is still amazing.
Before he was the Doof Warrior [listen]: Some old classics from iOTA (whose titles tell a fun story). Change (it sure is!). Tumbledown (our house when we arrived). Don’t Come Back (it’s not just a holiday). Come Back for Me (but I’m sure I’ll visit for work etc). And although the title Melbourne Summer doesn’t have direct relevance, our new house number is 107 and I’m in the film clip at 1:07!
A more human approach to databases [read]. The “multiple filing cabinets” example used in this article is a great way to understand the benefits of databases. It also reminds me of my time at the university, managing the annual “teaching allocation” process and trying to solve too many problems using a single Excel sheet and pivot tables, to avoid having to update multiple spreadsheets.
“Publishing books is wild because you take this thing that lives in your head and put it out in the world and then it goes and crawls into other people's heads and lives there too and then they tell their friends about it so it has more heads to crawl into and live there and then” -- Nicole Kornher-Stace (@wirewalking)