Damian Brady’s Blog

I’ve been a bit slack with the posts lately. I could make excuses citing lack of time, but truthfully I haven’t found much that I’ve been motivated to write about.

While I honestly haven’t had a great deal of free time (self-inflicted, as always), I guess I’ve just been consumed with things happening around me rather than things I’ve read about or have heard about.

Perhaps the lack of motivation comes down to recent disappointing events. Last weekend my volleyball team lost two finals, knocking us out of contention for the flag despite finishing third after round games. St. Kilda, the AFL team I support, suffered a similar fate at the hands of the Melbourne Demons (and injury) and the Broncos (NRL) lost the first of their finals to the Dragons. On top of that, Australia lost two legends in Steve Irwin and Peter Brock.

So all in all, it’s been a fairly ordinary last week or so. I’m sure I’ll be motivated enough to put something decent up here soon.

Damo “Visa” Brady

Well I’m sure you’ve heard already but Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, has died while filming an underwater documentary off Port Douglas.

Steve did a lot for environmental causes and will surely be missed.

Damo

Steve Pavlina has written a post called 10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job. Apart from being slightly abrasive in parts (which I have to believe is intentional), it’s a really good read and makes you question the wisdom of what you do for 8 or so hours of each weekday.

I’ve heard most of these arguments before - mainly while studying at QUT’s Brisbane Graduate School of Business (BSGB). I distinctly remember listening to a lecture from the current Executive in Residence Anne McKevitt (fairly famous in the UK) where she raised many of these points herself.

The main idea is a simple one: why work for someone else, trading time for money, when you can earn passive income 24/7 by providing a service that runs itself? The advent of the Internet has made this a much more feasible prospect. If you can set up a web-based service that generates income without needing much maintenance, then you’re on your way. It’s been done countless times (think eBay, Amazon, del.icio.us, etc.), so you can’t say it’s not possible.

I remember reading about a teenager who set up a website called The Million Dollar Homepage. Really simple idea. The site consists of a single image, 1000×1000 pixels in size. You can put whatever you want in this image (within reason obviously), with links, and it’ll cost you $1 per pixel. It’s win-win: Businesses can advertise very cheaply, and this guy gets a million dollars. It was sold out when I looked a minute ago.

Of course, to make this passive-income thing work, you need an idea and sufficient commitment to see it through. Every time I hear about this kind of thing I think, “Yeah, awesome! I’m going to do that!”. And every time, it fades into obscurity. I’ve still got some ideas, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve never been excited enough to see them through. One day…

And no, I’m not telling you what my ideas are :).

Damo

A few things I found thanks to Simon…

Coding Horror: Separating Programming Sheep from Programming Goats: Talks about an article about some research done into why some people just can’t write code. I remember when I was doing IT at uni, there were people who would not have been able to write a strip of code to save their lives. It seems that you either get it or you don’t. My subconscious is telling me, “I knew that”…

Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments: This research basically gives legitimacy to the idea that stupid people think they’re smart, and smart people lack confidence. I love this article. My subconscious is now banging on the side of my head and asking why I never listen to it.

The Baby Name Wizard: NameVoyager: This is really interesting. Basically it just shows you the change in popularity of baby names. It’s a nice flash interface, and you can see some definite trends in names. Interesting ones to search for are Prince, Hillary, and Brandon. See if you can pick the reasons for the shape of those graphs…

Damo

Some of these are hard… Well, not the easy ones, but if you go to the very difficult section they get hard very quickly.

http://www.folj.com/folj.com/puzzles/

Damo

Welcome to damianbrady.com!

Obviously there’s not much on here at the moment, but hopefully there will be.

I had an attempt at keeping a blog up to date not that long ago, but for the few of you who actually read a post or two, you’ll realise that I got slack. The main reason is because I was using blogger, and then found WordPress and decided to upgrade. I really didn’t feel like continually updating a site that I was about to destroy…

Anyway, feel free to email me, post comments, and kinda do whatever. The email address for stuff related to this blog is blog@damianbrady.com.

Damo “Visa” Brady