We had an enjoyable weekend in Oslo, although when they say that Norway is one of the more expensive euro countries to travel to they’re not joking! The city was a bit smaller and quieter than I was expecting for a national capital but very tidy and it seems very well equipped with public transport and all the other amenities that make life as a tourist pleasant. One quirk was an over abundance of street mimes, you couldn’t walk 100m in the central city without one of them standing there… weird.

We went to the art gallery and saw some Munch paintings, walked right past The Scream the first time and had to go back and find it just before leaving. Lots of other interesting paintings though. The highlight of the city for both of us however was Vigeland Sculpture Park, a public park – including a public swimming pool – off to one side of the city that is full of hundreds of statues and sculptures all by one Gustav Vigeland who donated the park to the city. Most of the statues are of human figures and are absolutely fantastic in their realism and the sense of animation and life that they portray. Definitely well worth a visit.

Monday dawned bright and clear so we hopped on the ferry for the day and spent some time exploring the islands just out from the Oslo waterfront. The first island we visited seemed to be mostly holiday homes and maybe a few permanent dwellings, very very small houses but very quiet and relaxed only 15mins from the city center by ferry. The second island was pretty much unpopulated, but had the ruins of an old monastery and a fairly popular beach with lots of mothers and families enjoying the sun and the water. We finished off the day with a trip up the hill to see the city from above at the site of a big ski jump they’re rebuilding for the Nordic Ski Championships. The jump is mammoth in size and close to vertical. You would have to be mad to launch yourself off that thing. Definitely an awesome view over Oslo just before you die however.

We took Tuesday pretty slowly, strolling round the city center while Kat did a bit of shopping before heading back to Dublin where we’re continuing to have a surprisingly good summer by Dublin standards!

We’ve got a friends wedding to attend on Wednesday this week and then we’re looking forward to having the Mackenzie’s drop in for a quick visit next week in between the phases of their epic European jaunt, so we’re keeping busy!

PS. We’ve booked flights home to NZ (via Singapore/Malaysia) for the end of the year, so we’re looking forward to seeing everyone again before too long.

How it works:

• Start a recipe collection simply by logging in and adding your first recipe.
• Add lots of recipes, all your favourites. And add photos for each recipe to remind yourself how delicious it was and how fabulous you were to make it!
• Choose to share the recipes with others by making them public, or keep them private for just your own record.
• Generate a PDF of any recipe so you can print it out nicely.
• Search for recipes. You can search through your own recipes and also the public recipes of anyone else with an Omnom recipe collection. Search by category, with keywords, or using tags.
• Plus lots more soon… There are lots of ideas and possibilities kicking around in my head so expect to see added functionality over time.

If you have a foodie inclination like myself, please feel free to check out omnomrecipes.com and even add some recipes of your own.
The application grew purely out of my own need for an online recipe collection but if it can be useful to others that would make it even better!

Omnom is still taking baby steps so if you find anything that doesn’t work as you expected or you think there’s an awesome feature I should add please please please send me a message and let me know. I appreciate the feedback

Our new place is in Dalkey, a small village / suburb beside the sea south of Dublin. Dalkey is home to some lovely cafes and restaurants, 2 little fishing harbours and a handful of famous names like author Maeve Binchy and “The Edge” from U2.

I feel like we’ve been incredibly blessed to find such a peaceful spot. Our apartment complex is right beside the sea with an uninterrupted view of nothing but grass and sea and sky. We can see yachts, ferries and kayaks going by and a couple of light houses blinking in the distance. BLISS.

The apartment is 2 bedrooms and quite spacious and light. As always, we have a spare room and an open invite to our friends and family to come visit on this side of the globe – we’re looking forward to having the Macs visit August

For those who can’t make it quite so far to say hello, here is a brief virtual tour of Casa Brown:

Photos on picasa:
http://picasaweb.google.com/mattbrown.nz/OurApartmentInDalkey

Over the 3 weekends we’ve had here so far we’ve done quite a bit of sightseeing:

1) Our first weekend we took a drive along part of the Pacific Highway. I enjoyed walking through the amusement park on the boardwalk at Santa Cruz, it was bright and noisy like a flashback from the 80’s – haha. Of particular note, one of the rides is a wooden roller coaster built in 1924!!! In contrast, Carmel-by-the-sea was a quiet little town with some nice art galleries and lots of refined, old-style buildings. We stayed awhile there enjoying the sun and white sand and watching the many people out walking their dogs on the beach. Our nice day exploring the coast was only marred by some bad traffic getting back to Mountain View in the evening.

2) Our second weekend we spent a day in San Francisco. This was my favourite trip so far!
We started our day in Chinatown, sampling some dim sum and buying some fortune cookies (these snacks were invented in San Francisco). Chinatown here was bigger than I’d been expecting and quite fun to explore.
Next we went on the cable cars. The old cable cars that run up and down the steep streets of the city are a very popular tourist attraction but I think the experience was only improved by having to squish onto the standing platforms and hang off the side for the ride. Good fun and some great views of the sea and Alcatraz as we zoomed down the hill towards Fisherman’s Wharf.
We strolled Fisherman’s Wharf and watched the dozens and dozens of sealions sunbathing on the pontoons at pier 39 – they looked so lazy and relaxed! Using our day pass we took a bus out to the edge of Golden Gate park next. Unfortunately the beautiful beach was very blustery and a bit cold so we walked in the park a bit and then headed over and up to see the ‘painted ladies’, a row of beautiful old wooden villas lined up gracefully with the city skyline behind them. San Francisco seems to be full of steep streets and charming painted wooden villas. I really loved the styles of architecture. After a quick coffee in Duboce we went back into the city center for another round on the cable cars and then dinner at a great place just under the Bay Bridge called Gordon Biersch.

3) This weekend we took another drive out of Mountain View to see Big Basin which is a State Park containing lots of Redwood trees. It was great to walk along the trails and marvel at the big old Redwood trees. We drove home via the Pacific Highway again this time driving up towards Half Moon Bay. Some nice views along the coast there and pit stops for fresh cherries then cookies and donuts along the way! Tomorrow I think we’ll be taking it easy, visiting the farmers market again in the morning and then relaxing poolside for the afternoon. Ahhh such a tough life huh! ;P

Some photos of our weekend adventures:

Matt and I spent this Easter visiting Donegal, in the north-west of Ireland. It was great to get out of the city, see some beautiful natural landscapes and breath in the fresh country air. We stayed at Coxtown Manor near Donegal town, a charming place nestled in the country amid spring daffodils and frolicking lambs. It felt very much like spring in Donegal except for the bone-chilling wind and the tell-tale frosting that remains on the tops of the hills. Like the rest of Ireland, the warmer weather has yet to hit Donegal. Nevertheless, we had a great time driving around the area and were impressed with the landscapes – white sand beaches, mountains and valleys, lakes and cliffs.

On the way to Donegal we stopped at Bundoran beach which was stunning. If it had only been warmer it would have been very inviting to linger awhile, walk along the stretches of white sand and dip my toes in the surf. Instead we took some pictures from above the beach, marveled at the dedicated surfers down below and then headed on our way.

On Sunday we drove along the coast from Donegal. The first stop was Killybegs, a small town with a big fishing port. I was amused to note that the tourist brochure boasts that Killybegs is a “gourmet capital of the northwest” now with a staggering total of 9 restaurants catering to all tastes including Irish, Chinese and Italian! We didn’t eat there so I can’t say for sure if the claims are justified. I can however say the food in Donegal town was decidedly average so it’s quite possible Killybegs does indeed stand out as a gourmet capital by comparison

From Killybegs we continued along the coast taking some very rural winding roads to get to the Slieve League cliffs. These are Europe’s 6th largest cliffs. The walk to the cliffs offered some beautiful views over the ocean and across the rocky hills and outcrops. From here we drove onwards to Glencolmcille, up to Adara and then back to Donegal over the Bluestack Mountains.

On Monday after a quiet morning enjoying the rural aspect and our cozy country room at Coxtown Manor we headed homewards. Coming home after a trip away is always sad but at least we have a short week ahead now! For myself, this means only 4 days left at my web design job with iQuate. With mixed sadness and excitement I’ll be moving on very soon to something new. Exactly what I’ll be moving on to once we get back from Mountain View in June is as yet undecided but I’m looking forward to new opportunities and challenges…

Photos of our weekend in Donegal:

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.

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

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!

After getting back from a long weekend in the UK and spending a week recovering from the flu (normal not Swine) I was off to San Francisco for the last 2 weeks of August. This was my annual trip to Google HQ in Mountain View to catch up with my colleagues there and meet some of the new people that I’ve started working with over the last year. As usual it was a very productive couple of weeks, being in the same timezone has that effect. I was there for two full weekends in between the work, so for the first weekend I drove southwards along the Pacific Coast Highway, unfortunately it was a very smokey/hazy day, so my photos didn’t turn out as well as I’d hoped. The second weekend I spent in San Francisco itself, admiring the cable cars, and enjoying a cruise across the bay to Suasalito. Click the links in the previous sentences for the photos.

After one day back in Dublin to catch up with Kat, I was off to Barcelona again for 3 days with the rest of my team from Dublin and Zurich. We had a wonderful time sitting on the beach drinking Mojitos and shooting each other with small plastic pellets while playing airsoft. Excellent team building. It seemed like half the team had SLR cameras so I did my bit to provide my share of Barcelona Photos too.

I love travelling and seeing new places, but after pretty much three full weeks away from home it was nice to spend the rest of September in Dublin enjoying a surprisingly nice end of summer weather wise.

We’re over this side of the world to make the most of travel though, so last week we were off again to Portugal to catch the last of the summer sun with 6 friends. We rented a villa in Monte Gordo, right down the bottom of the country on the Algarve, next to the border with Spain. We had an excellent week playing in the Villa’s pool, floating in the sea and visiting small Portuguese villages. The highlight for me (other than the sun) was visiting Sevilla in Spain for the day. Of everywhere we’ve been in Europe so far, Spain is pretty much at the top of my list thanks to the attractions of Barcelona and Seville. And of course we took plenty of Photos on this trip too.

We both got back to Dublin on Saturday night sporting fairly reasonable tans, although while we were away Dublin seems to have slipped firmly into Autumn and the temperature has dropped more than a few degrees.

Not to worry though, in 12 days we’re flying out bound for NZ where we’ll be staying until the end of the year, catching up with family and friends, and most importantly celebrating Andrew and Sarah’s wedding in early November!

Hopefully we’ll see many of you before too long!