Matt and Kat Brown

This post originally appeared on Matt’s Musings (Matt’s computer focussed blog).

I’ve been eagerly looking forward to the release of Xero Personal which has been heavily promoted by Xero 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.

The way Xero Personal works is by having you manually upload your bank statements (the automatic import functionality that is so useful in the business version of Xero has been restricted to BNZ MoneyMap customers only). For each transaction you are asked to provide two pieces of information. The first is a category which serves as a basic form of account to track expenses and income. For each category you can set a spending or saving goal which Xero will help you track progress towards. The second is a name to identify the other party in the transaction. Xero Personal comes pre-loaded with some fairly generic categories. Annoyingly you’re restricted to no more than 8 additional custom categories and the names associated with each transaction are are simple strings – you can’t link a transaction to another account or entity. To represent a transfer you need two separate transactions, one in each account, which you assign to the special category “Transfer” so that Xero knows to essentially ignore it. Nothing links the transactions together or ensures that the values balance.

In addition to the basic categorisation functionality the application also attempts to track your assets and liabilities (bank accounts and credit cards show up automatically) so that it can compute your net worth. Unfortunately as soon as you try and use this you hit the problem that there is no way to link transactions from your accounts back to your assets and liabilities. This means unless you regularly and manually update your assets and liabilities the “net worth” calculation only takes into account changes in your cash position and becomes blatantly incorrect.

As an example, take the common case of a household with a weekly mortgage (or other loan) repayment. You want the weekly payment to decrease the balance of your current account, increase the balance of your interest expense category and decrease the value of your mortgage liability. Your net worth should decrease by the value of the interest expense only, as the decrease in the value your mortgage liability offsets the remainder of the decrease in the value of your current account.

Xero Personal doesn’t come close to being able to handle this example today. The ability to split payments to different categories has also been left out (even though it’s present in Xero Business and therefore presumably in the underlying engine) so your only option is to categorise the entire payment as a mortgage or housing expense, decreasing your net worth by the full value of the payment. Even if you could split the payment between two categories, one for the interest and one for the principal the inability to link the category for the principal to the liability account means the net worth calculation will still be incorrect.

Maybe I’m being to hard on this newly released product? It is a SaaS application after all and Xero has an excellent history of releasing regular updates to the business version of Xero. The reason I’m so surprised and disappointed by this initial release is that it essentially lacks any double-entry accounting support – many of the missing features are core functionality that is already implemented in the accounting platform that supports the business version. Assuming that Xero Personal is built on the same platform (and that would be the obvious choice wouldn’t it?) the fact that Xero Personal has been released and is being heavily promoted without these features (compared to the initial version of Xero Business which was fully functional and obviously awesome even in beta) suggests to me that it’s a conscious decision to significantly limit the scope and usefulness of the application rather than simply a limit on what could be implemented before the initial release.

I sincerely hope that I’m wrong and that the coming months bring significant improvements to the functionality of Xero Personal, but until it can support common transactions like mortgage repayments correctly I won’t be using it or recommending it to anyone.

If you feel the need to comment, head over to the original post on Matt’s Musings.

Not wanting to risk life becoming even remotely boring, we’ve decided to change jobs, move countries (temporarily) and move apartments over the next 2 months. Change comes all at once!

The trigger for all this change was one small decision that I made to move from the team that I currently work in, to a new team (still at Google) where I’ll be helping to maintain the front-end web serving infrastructure that powers Google. Part of that transition means that I need to go to Mountain View for 6 weeks to get to know new team-mates and come up to speed on various bits and pieces.

The need for me to be away from Dublin for 6 weeks was the catalyst to trigger the other two changes which we’d been vaguely discussing for a while but which hadn’t quite reaching decision point yet.

First up Kat decided that it was the right time for her to move on from iQuate, so she’ll be finishing up there on the 9th of April and then coming to Mountain View as well.

Secondly, we’d been thinking for a while about moving out of the city center to somewhere with a bit less noise, cleaner air and maybe a sea view if we’re lucky! Rather than paying rent for our apartment to sit empty for 6 weeks while we’re in Mountain View we’ve given our notice for our current place and we’ll be looking for somewhere new to live, most likely to the south of the city after we get back to Dublin at the start of June. We’ll be putting all our stuff in storage here while we’re away.

So that’s our news for March!

On Thursday last week we became the proud owners of a three bedroom house in Claudelands, Hamilton, ticking off the second major task on our todo list for our visit back to NZ.

We had been looking at property in Hamilton since before we left Dublin thanks all the listings available online. Our original thoughts were that we’d like to find somewhere that needed some work but was still in a reasonable condition such that we could rent it to good tenants until we return to NZ at some point in the future. Once we got here and actually started looking in person it became fairly clear that there wasn’t a huge amount of new properties coming on to the market at the moment, and what was available didn’t really fit into that category. In the end we purchased a nice house that was built in 1947 but had been heavily renovated in 2006 and really shouldn’t need much work at all when we return.

The house was sold via an auction, as pretty much every property is being sold at the moment, which provided some tense moments as we were competing with three other bidders! Obviously we were happy with the final outcome though, and in hindsight I actually really enjoyed the thrill of a bit of competition for the house we wanted. If we needed any further reminders that Hamilton really is a small place we got them at the start of the auction when the auctioneer started the bidding by mentioning that he used to live in the house!

So, the important details:

• 3 bedroom, 190m2 weatherboard house
• small office in addition to the bedrooms
• double internal access garage
• lots and lots of cupboards
• 30m2 external garage/workshop

We’re currently looking for tenants to look after the house until we get back to NZ, so if you know anyone looking to rent a three bedroom house in Claudelands, then let us know and we’ll pass them on to the property manager!

Photos below

We’re back in NZ right now and will be here till the end of the year. It’s wonderful to be home and spend some quality time with family, see old friends and enjoy cafes and places we haven’t been in ages. We arrived into NZ on Oct 27th – nearly 3 weeks ago already and we’ve been pretty busy since then with family and friends to see, a wedding to help with and some house hunting too.

Last weekend was Andrew and Sarah’s wedding. It was a beautiful ceremony and a fun day with both Matt and I in the bridal party. Seeing Andy and Sarah together over the last few weeks it’s been obvious how in love and committed they are – a long and happy marriage lies ahead for those two! And as an added bonus I’m delighted to be welcoming another Mrs Brown to the family

Speaking of weddings, today is the 5th anniversary of the day Matt and I tied the knot! It’s been an amazing 5 years when I consider how much we’ve been blessed with and all the fun memories. I wonder what the next 5 years holds?… We’re heading off to the Hawkes Bay area this weekend to celebrate.

The next 5 weeks promise to be busy. We’re looking for a house to buy in Hamilton at the moment – something we can rent out with the possibility that we may live in it at some yet-to-be-determined time in the future when we return to NZ. Buying a house is a complicated business really and made more difficult because most properties seem to be going up for auction right now. It’s frustrating to be unsure of the exact sale price of a house and the high pressure of buying unconditionally at auction is a bit unnerving to me!

Also coming up soon: 1 week in Sydney (Matt working at the Google office, me checking out the city) & Christmas!!!

We’d love to catch up with everyone while we’re home but we’re fairly disorganised at contacting people and arranging our schedule so if you haven’t seen us yet and you’d like to, please flick us an email so we can arrange a catch up!

This post originally appeared on Matt’s Musings (Matt’s computer focussed blog).

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.

If you feel the need to comment, head over to the original post on Matt’s Musings.

Ever since we booked our cruise holiday in January I’ve been eagerly awaiting May 29th, excited to flee the grey cold weather of Dublin and cruise the Caribbean in style with our fabulous friends Kieron, Lucy, Joey and Robbie.

There was so much packed into our holiday last week that I don’t know where to begin in describing it. Lets just say it was 9 days of fabulousness! Memories of our tropical sunny holiday will keep me warm through the Irish ’summer’

We arrived in Miami on the afternoon of Friday 29th. We spent that evening soaking in the ambiance of South Beach, people-watching and sipping cocktails. On Saturday we boarded the ‘Liberty of the Seas’ and settled into our home for the week. Sunday we cruised towards Haiti and Monday we relaxed on the private beach of Labadee. Tuesday we rafted down a jungle river in Jamaica. Wednesday we snorkeled and swum with stingrays in Grand Cayman. Thursday we snorkeled in Mexico and Friday we cruised back towards Miami and bid a grudging farewell to the Caribbean.  On Saturday we left the ship early and managed to squeeze in some speed-shopping at Aventura in Miami before our flight home.

That is our holiday in brief. I can’t really do justice to all that we saw and did or to the fun times we had but here are a few memories in no particular order :

• The Liberty of the Seas – The cruise ship itself was truly impressive. Like a small city floating around the Caribbean. Liberty of the Seas is complete with mini-golf, movie theatre, ice skating rink, climbing wall, shops and restaurants, water desalination plant, tv production studio, you name it!
• Swimming in the sea – The water was so clear and calm. I’ve never swum in such warm ocean before! I’m quite a wimp when it comes to even slightly cold water but the sea in the Caribbean is perfect, like swimming in bathwater! The blue sky and the brilliant blues and greens of the water are beautiful. Sigh. Perfection.
• Stingrays – in Grand Cayman we took a tour out to Stingray bay, a sand bar where huge stingrays will swim around you and let you hold them! It was scary stepping into the clear blue water and seeing the black shapes gliding around under the surface. It freaked me out completely to feel the stingrays brushing past my legs as they swam between us. But it was fun haha
• Formal Dress – I loved dressing up for the 2 formal nights on the boat. We girls got to glam it up in our cocktail dresses and the boys held up their side too looking very dashing in their tuxedos.
• Shopping – Well, this is more of a highlight for me than for Matt but I had a great time shopping with Lucy and Robbie in Miami. Forever 21 is my new favourite store. If only they would open a store a little closer to here…
• Sunsets – We saw some gorgeous sunsets while on holiday. The first one in Miami and then a few nights onbaord the ship. I love how a sunset never looks exactly the same as the night before.
• The little things – It was the small things that made the cruise feel luxurious, like the origami towel animals left on our bed each night by the room attendant and the attentive waiters at dinner each night who placed your napkin on your lap and brushed the crumbs off the table before dessert with their little table combs hehe.
• Food – The food, oh my, the food. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten so much in one week. A cruise holiday is all inclusive meaning you can eat all you want and it doesn’t cost you anything more… Expansive breakfast buffets, all day snacks and 3 course dinners. We took full advantage of all of it mmmm yum! The calories don’t count when you’re on holiday don’t ya know
• Lightning storm – On our last night on board the weather turned dark and stormy. We looked out to sea and watched the storm.  It was awesome to see the bolts of lightning flash across the night sky.
• Fabulous Friends – Holidays are infinitely better when you have good company to enjoy them with!!! Thanks for the amazing holiday guys

Check out all the holiday photos in our gallery here.

Happy Easter everyone! We had a fabulous easter weekend, enjoying the company of Susanna and Daniel and showing them around some of Irelands sights. It was great to see old friends again and fun to get out of Dublin and enjoy the sunny weather.

Susanna and Daniel arrived early on Good Friday after a long train + ferry trip from London. Matt whipped up another batch of hot cross buns for breakfast (very impressive) and then mid morning we went out to walk around the city center stopping at all the main sights around the place. I was very grateful for the sunny afternoon, Dublin is always more charming on a sunny day!

On Saturday we hired a car and drove west through Limerick and on further to the Burren and the Cliffs of Moher (otherwise known as the ‘Cliffs of Insanity’ to Princess Bride fans). Views from the cliffs were great and we enjoyed chilling out on the grass, eating icecreams and taking some fun photos. We also visited the Burren, stopping to look at an ancient dolmen tomb and to take in the great grey expanses of rock.  A second sunny day which was fantastic!!!

We spent Saturday night in Lisdoonvarna which is the self proclaimed home to Europe’s Largest Matchmaking festival every September. In April it was eerily quiet but we did find a little pub to sit in after dinner for a pint or two and some traditional Irish music. Charming apart from the rowdy group of lads in the back who decided to start a singing competition – I don’t think anyone won

On Sunday I was delighted to wake up to yet another sunny day. We took a ferry out to Inis Oirr, the smallest of the Aran Islands. The island is crisscrossed with a maze of dry stone fences that divide up every area into small green plots. We followed a path across the island and took a turn that eventually tapered out and led us into a little off road excursion through fields and over fences. It was perfect sunny weather for exploring the island and by the end of the day we were all a little surnburnt. That’s a first for us in Ireland! When we left Inis Oirr the boat took us on a short cruise past the Cliffs of Moher before returning to port at Doolin. From there we drove back to Dublin, arriving just in time for dinner and a good nights sleep.

A fun weekend and possibly the best run of weather we’ve had for a weekend in Ireland so far. Thanks to Susanna and Daniel for the good company, the opportunity for a road trip, and the whitlocks and squiggle tops

This post originally appeared on Matt’s Musings (Matt’s computer focussed blog).

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.

The reason I’m not breaking out the champagne yet is that we’ve only achieved a temporary reprieve in the commencement of the law. While those present at the press conference seem somewhat confident that John Key didn’t like what he found in the law and would have repealed it if given the chance, all that has actually been done is delay it in the hopes of an agreement between the TCF and the “rights holders” (aka big media companies) on how to implement the still fundamentally broken law. The Government has given until late March for that to occur.

To put this into a more global context. My happiness as I took the bus to work after reading about the decision to delay the law was short lived as the front page of the local paper declared that Eircom (Ireland’s equivalent of Telecom) has “voluntarily” agreed to block sites such as The Pirate Bay upon request by the media companies (this comes a week after they also announced an agreement to, again “voluntarily”, implement a 3-strikes S92A style policy). Now, with the biggest ISP in their pocket (so to speak), the media companies have sent threatening letters to the remaining ISPs in the country demanding they implement the same procedure.

To me, this illustrates one of the fundamental problems with S92. The concept that an ISP is liable for the conduct of its users, or for policing where on the Internet users should and shouldn’t be able to connect to does not belong in our laws. Most ISPs already have provision to disconnect customers for illegal activity in their terms and conditions. If an end-user is doing something illegal, that is an issue between the rights holder and the end-user to take up in the courts just like every other sector of society must do when wronged, at which point the existing ISP terms and conditions can be invoked and access terminated.

The big media companies, having decided that it is too expensive/hard/inconvenient to follow standard legal procedures to resolve their grievances are launching multi-pronged attacks to shift the playing field in their favour. In countries like New Zealand, where our politicians yearn for a Free Trade Agreement with America, they use their lobbyists to ensure that S92 style laws are part of the conditions. In other jurisdictions, like Ireland, they use strong-arm, divide and conquer style bully tactics outside of the political and legal process.

I don’t support copyright infringement. I rely on copyright to protect much of the work I place on the Internet, I want strong laws that protect me when my rights have been infringed. I don’t believe that such laws should come at the expense of due process, our legal tradition and the basic principle of fairness! I don’t believe that copyright infringement is such a heinous crime that it demands punishments stronger than those we deliver to paedophiles, stalkers or any other class of criminal who uses the Internet to enable their crimes.

To me, today’s (yesterday’s – depending on your timezone) decision is only the first step in clawing New Zealand back from the dangerous path that the big media companies have been leading our law makers down. From here we need to press on and demonstrate to the Government over the next month that even if the TCF and rights holders are able to come up with some sort of workable code of practice, the law is still fundamentally flawed. It is based on premise that we are guilty by accusation.

Even if guilt were to be proved by a competent legal body (eg. court or copyright tribunal) we don’t need laws placing further liabilites onto ISPs (and remember the definition of ISP under this amendment act includes businesses who provide Internet access to staff, libraries, schools and hospitals) when their existing terms and conditions already prohibit illegal activity.

Finally, and most importantly of all, we need to remember that laws exist to serve all sectors of society. Yes, copyright infringement is against the law and rights holders are reasonable in expecting the law to protect their content and allow them to make a fair profit. On the other side of the fence, average New Zealanders are not being unreasonable in their desire to have media available electronically, on demand and non-inhibited by DRM following a legal purchase. The failure of the media businesses to adequately cater to this change in market demand and usage of technology is obviously a contributing factor to the widespread copyright problems that they are facing today.

Obviously, I’m not condoning copyright infringement simply because the media companies are failing to address demand. Even stupid laws must be obeyed (and the concept of copyright is far from stupid). What I want to see is the Government acknowledging that the problem is not solely with consumers infringing copyright for malicious purposes, and therefore that the solutions do not lie solely in increasing the enforcement and punishments available.

Copyright has always been a balancing act between the rights of content producers and consumers. S92 and the act it is contained within are taking us far too far down the road of catering to big business and their outdated business models with far too little concern for the rights of the individual consumer.

Despite the many submissions made on this act last year when it was first passing through parliament, there was no comprehensive debate on what copyright means and how it should balance the rights of content producers and consumers in our digital century where copying is a zero-cost, zero-thought activity. Without such a debate we’re doomed to continue wasting time arguing over the symptoms of the problem, like S92.

So, I’m saving my champagne for the day when we as a country address these issues and come up with a fair and workable interpretation of what copyright means today.

If you feel the need to comment, head over to the original post on Matt’s Musings.

This post originally appeared on Matt’s Musings (Matt’s computer focussed blog).

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.

Opposition to the law is not an attack on copyright, or a statement that we should be free to download all the movies and music that we desire. Those sorts of activities are clearly wrong, and I don’t have any issue with copyright holders wanting to enforce their rights when their content is illegally copied. However, disconnecting people upon accusation, with no proof or formal legal process to prove guilt is not the right way to go about it.

The fact that the law does not require proof of guilt is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of problems with it. For further background on the problems it causes for ISPs by placing them as the middle-man in copyright disputes you should refer to the following posts:

• Russel Brown of Public Address, points out that among other faults the law “stipulates a penalty that no court would impose in adjudicating a copyright complaint“
• David Farrar of Kiwiblog, has a guest post at the NZ Center for Political Research explaining how the law affects businesses
• Creative Freedom Foundation Background on S92

Finally, I think it is worth pointing out that S92A was removed from the proposed Amendment at the select committee stage, but was later reintroduced by Judith Tizard during the final reading of the bill. Mark Harris has an excellent post on the history of the amendment which includes facts such as the official report on the amendment also recommended removing S92A as it was unecessary given existing ISP terms and conditions which forbid illegal activity. The fact that the select committee (based on public submissions) recognised the problems with S92A and removed it, only to have it added back in again at the last stage when we no longer had any say on it really hacks me off and I cant’ help but feel the influence of the “big money” American media companies pressuring our politicians to pass a law that they don’t really understand the full consequences of.

So what is to be done? The Blacked Out campaign, being run by the Creative Freedom Foundation is gathering steam and international attention. Peter Dunne of United Future (who originally voted for the amendment) has declared that the amendment is wrong, and doesn’t do what they thought they were voting to do, we need to convince National and the rest of the house of the same. Time is running out for this to happen before the amendment comes into effect on Feb 28th, but there is still time to write to your local MP and sign the petition against S92A “Guilt Upon Accusation”. The Creative Freedom Foundation site has a nice easy list of what you can do to register your protest.

If you feel the need to comment, head over to the original post on Matt’s Musings.

Another year is nearly at an end. It’s been a good year for us (and a busy one) with plenty of highlights and very few lowlights!

We’ll be enjoying a quiet Christmas day this year, making phone calls back home, eating some good food and packing for our flight on the 26th when we’re off to Scotland. We’re taking a week to see the sights and enjoy the celebrations in Edinburgh on New Years Eve. It’s going to be cold, very very cold – or so we hear from everyone we’ve mentioned the trip to! We’re hoping for a few days of fine weather – especially for the fireworks on New Years and so Matt can get in a few good photo shoots with his new tripod and the digital SLR camera.

We sent out our Christmas newsletter this week. If you haven’t received a copy already we’re sorry and it’s not intentional. Most likely we just don’t have your correct email address in our list. If  you’d like to receive (very) sporadic email updates from us then just send us an email to say ‘hi’ – then we’ll have your address and we can add you to the list

We’ll keep you posted with more news of our travels in the New Year. Sending out Christmas goodwill to everyone and hoping you all have an enjoyable and not too stressful Christmas break.

Nolliag Shona Duit (Merry Christmas) !