Easter in Donegal

Posted by kat on April 5, 2010 Comments Off

Happy Easter everyone. I hope your long weekend was well-stocked with chocolate goodies, plenty of relax time and some quiet moments to reflect on the reason behind the holiday.

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 :P

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:

Initial Review of Xero Personal

Posted by matt on March 29, 2010 Comments Off

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.

Changes

Posted by matt on March 18, 2010 Comments Off

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!

We own a house!

Posted by matt on December 20, 2009 Comments Off
Our House

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

Home sweet home

Posted by kat on November 13, 2009 Comments Off

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!

What we’ve been up to

Posted by matt on October 14, 2009 Comments Off

Almost two months since our last update, we’re getting lazy! In our defense it has been a busy few months.

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!

All’s quiet on the home front

Posted by kat on August 19, 2009 1 comment

Things are rather quiet here in Dublin at the moment. I made banana cake on the weekend, a maintenance guy came to repaint the bathroom ceiling today, I had a bagel for lunch… not too much to report really.

Of course it may seem quieter than normal right now because Matt is in San Francisco for work this week and next!

Nevertheless, there is still news to write about! Two weekends ago we were in the UK on a bank holiday road trip. We posted photos (1), (2) & (3) when we got back but now here’s a run down of what we got up to…

We flew into London Stansted at lunchtime on Saturday and drove a rental car to Oxford. We managed to find a lot of slow outer-London traffic on the motorways but eventually made it to Oxford late in the afternoon. We wandered around the town center admiring the old college buildings. Oxford really seems like a lovely place – gorgeous old architecture but also with the buzz of a student town and lots of nice looking cafes and bars around. We decided to see an outdoor performance of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night that evening which we both really enjoyed. There were some great comedic performances from the cast and it was very cool to see Shakepeare performed in a small, relaxed, outdoor arena. Perfect thing to do on a summer evening in Oxford!

On Sunday we left Oxford and drove down towards Bath with a detour to Stonehenge on the way. Stonehenge was a little disappointing – interesting enough but kind of expensive to see, not as big as I imagined it and surrounded by a throng of tourists. Anyway, we went, we saw, we crossed it off our list.

We spent the afternoon exploring Bath. We walked around the town for a while before making our way to the Roman Baths – the central attraction of the town. Bath is built on a thermal hot water source. Back in the day, the Romans built the impressive Bath houses here so people could come an enjoy the restorative waters.  Quite picturesque and interesting to see the remains of the whole series of pools that used to be in use there.

I was impressed with the food in Bath. At lunch we had some amazing woodfired pizzabread topped with pesto, garlic oil and chopped tomatoes. Then for dinner we ate at a restaurant called Gascoyne Place where I had beautifully cooked lamb with roasted vegetables and tomato pesto finished off with an apple and cinnamon crème brûlée for dessert. Making anyone hungry? hehe

Our Monday our plans fell apart on us. We intended to see the Banksy exhibit at the Bristol Museum but we’d somewhat underestimated the queues and when we got to Bristol mid-morning the wait time was about 2 1/2 hours. We decided to give it a miss! It was probably a good choice because Matt ended up feeling progressively worse as the day wore on and ended up with a flu that he spent the next week recovering from! We headed back past Oxford and to Luton airport to catch our flight home later in the evening.

Apart from a disappointing Bristol and the beginnings of a flu on Monday we had a really fun weekend.

Photos, Photos, Photos…

Posted by matt on July 30, 2009 Comments Off

We finally had time to sit down and sort through the 600 or so photos we generated over the past week. For your viewing pleasure we’ve cut them down to the following highlights:

We’re off to the UK this (long) weekend, so expect to see some photos of Stonehenge and the Banksy exhibit from Bristol Museum next week.

More on Zurich

Posted by kat on July 29, 2009 1 comment

Last week in Zurich was nice and relaxing. I enjoyed sleeping in and spending afternoons visiting different places in the city. I visited a Museum of Design one day and the Zurich zoo on another. I wandered around the old city and browsed the shops a lot.

Zurich seemed very orderly and very expensive. The people there were generally quite reserved. Nobody smiled on the tram and most people are quite unwilling to speak English. Despite this the city is nice to explore because everything is so clean and organised with great tram, train and boat services. The city really runs like clockwork.

I was able to meet Matt at the Google offices for dinner a couple of nights and I enjoyed getting the grand tour. Pictures of the Zurich offices have been much discussed and puzzled over online ever since the makeover last year. It was cool to see each of the zany ideas in reality. My favorite part was lying in a bathtub filled with foam and watching the fishes in the fish tank. A bit surreal really.

I wasn’t allowed to take any photos Mum, but I can tell you I did try out the twisty metal slide that goes down to the cafeteria and it was somewhat embarrassing :P

On the Saturday before we left we took a boat down the lake to a town called Rapperswil. The slow cruise gave us good views of the houses and vine yards along the lakeside, very pretty. We walked around Rapperswil a bit and then met some of Matt’s colleagues in the afternoon for a UK beer and cheese tasting event! It was a little ironic to be ordering a stout and a wedge of wensleydale while in Switzerland but it was an enjoyable afternoon and evening with good company and tasty food.

Early on Sunday we headed off to the airport. We shed all our remaining swiss francs at the airport plus a wee bit more when we stocked up on toblerone, lindt and some luxemburgerli yum yum!!!

The only thing I didn’t do while in Switzerland which I still want to try is a  fondue dinner. Warm summer evenings are not well suited to meals of melted cheese so I think we’ll have to plan a return visit to Zurich in winter when the city is cold and snowy.

Zurich and surrounds

Posted by matt on July 19, 2009 3 comments

We’re in Zurich this week, I’m here for work and Kat managed to get a week off work to relax and join me which certainly makes my traveling for work much more enjoyable.

We arrived yesterday (Saturday) in the late afternoon and found our hotel/apartment with no problems. After settling in I took Kat on a quick tour of the central city / lake area which I’d sort of explored on a previous visit last year. Our first impression, at around 6pm on a Saturday was how quiet and sparsely populated many of the streets in the center of town were, all the shops were closed and there weren’t really that many people around even at the lake front. We had dinner at a nice “Gratin” restaurant near the central train station, delicious food.

Today (Sunday) we took the train northwest out of Zurich to the town of Winterthur, Switzerland’s 6th largest city apparently. The town itself was absolutely deserted and quiet by normal standards, Sunday in Switzerland is definitely not a day for shopping or anything that requires interaction with a store of any kind. Luckily for us, the object of our visit was the Swiss Photomuseum which is open on a Sunday and we spent an enjoyable hour or two browsing an exhibition of Walker Evans’ work along with a couple of other exhibitions.

After a quick lunch at an Italian restaurant (delicious pizza baked in front of us) we hopped on another train, (Switzerland’s public transport is awesome, if a little pricey), and journeyed a bit further north to the Rhine Falls which are apparently the largest in Europe. They were impressive, but if that’s the best Europe has to offer it’s doing pretty badly. Huka Falls are at least competitive with the Rhine Falls in my opinion. We took a bunch of photos, and a boat ride to a rock right in the middle of the falls where we could see the water cascading down on either side and feel the spray making us and my camera somewhat wet…

We eventually headed back to the train via a nice riverside walk and returned to Zurich via a round-about route via some small rural train stations that a friendly ticket seller in Winterthur had arranged for us to minimise the cost of our overall trip!

I’m off to work tomorrow and Kat has a week of shopping (window only I hope) and relaxing planned for herself.