In September-October last year, we undertook a 1500km road trip in our new Polestar 2 (Long Range). The night before we departed, I over-analysed the charging situation to try and make sure we not only had a plan, but we had a Plan B for when things were inevitably worse …
As I’ve done in the past ( 2016 , 2017 , 2018 , 2019 , 2020 , 2021 , 2022 , 2023 ) I have put together a rear-view-mirror view on my year in running. 2025 was my quietest running year in the decade I've been running. I ran a total of 1,237km with 24,549m of …
Last week I was listening to Ben Lee and Ione Skye's podcast, Weirder Together. They had a fun discussion about moving into the new year and what they wanted to see more of and less of in 2026 . Here's my personal take on a few things I'd like to see …
This sounds obvious, but when we get stuck in the daily grind it's easy to forget. Go and see bands and solo artists performing live. Over the past few months I've had some incredible live music experiences. Amusingly these have mostly been throwback tours, with artists playing albums from when …
For my entire career, I’ve been using Windows laptops in a professional context. This makes a lot of sense, given I am heavily embedded in the Microsoft Dynamics partner industry. I was due for a new work laptop earlier this year, and I opted for an Apple laptop. Whilst …
This isn't a movie I thought I was going to love, but I do - both because it's funny but also a great documentary with beautiful bird footage and some great characters. It’s perfectly shot and balances humour and interest nicely. I don't think further explanation will help me better …
I’ve recently been doing by some minor declutterring of my vinyl collection, hoping to sell some records on Discogs . As part of the process, I needed to link my PayPal account to my Discogs account. Simple enough, right? Not quite. I hit a roadblock when Discogs repeatedly threw an …
Let's get something out of the way first: Our planet is burning, driven especially hard by our reliance on fossil fuels. Where I live in Victoria, Australia, we have historically relied on burning black and brown coal to power our state electricity grid . This is certainly a Bad Thing TM …
On Thursday 20th March 2003, for reasons that have been lost to the sands of time, I registered the domain rossp.org and started to build a new personal website for myself. This wasn’t my first personal site, but it was the one where I shed my younger, grungier …
We listen to a fair bit of music in our household. Standing in the middle of my living room I can play almost any song ever released by just yelling into the open air, "Alexa, play me Queen's Greatest Hits" . The little black fabric cylinder on the side table starts …
As I’ve done in the past ( 2016 , 2017 , 2018 , 2019 , 2020 , 2021 , 2022 ) I have put together a rear-vision-mirror view on my year in running. In a nutshell, my running in 2023 was quieter than I had hoped or planned. I had a few great running blocks, ran a …
The time has come for me to shut down Djangosites.org. This will happen in late January, 2024. When I started Djangosites back in 2007, Django was still a relatively young platform (having been an open-source project for only a few years) and besides the Lawrence Journal-World there were few …
In the past couple of years I’ve made a conscious effort to read more books and it’s been rewarding. I set a modest goal of 10 books in 2023; I ended up reading 13. As a “non reader” I’m pretty happy with that! I’ve been using …
As I've done in the past ( 2016 , 2017 , 2018 , 2019 , 2020 , 2021 ) I have put together a rear-vision-mirror view on my year in running. I think, like many people, I was hoping that 2022 would be a bit of a refreshing year after two years of Covid-related lockdowns and general …
As I've done in the past few years ( 2016 , 2017 , 2018 , 2019 , 2020 ) I have put together a rear-vision-mirror view on my year in running. After the shitstorm that was 2020, 2021 wasn't that much better in a lot of ways. The one positive was that we started to get …
Because us consultants are often bought in as experts in our field, it's easy to fall into the trap of assuming we know early what solution we will be putting in place for a client. However it's just that: a trap. It's fine to make a decision quickly, but you …
If you’re going to help a client solve a problem, it’s not enough to be curious . In most cases you’ll need to understand the problem and have compassion for the person who faces that problem each day. Note: In this post I am referring to software consulting …
There are many attributes that make good consultants good , but one of my favourites is curiosity . A good consultant is genuinely curious about their client's business, and they to understand not only what is being done by the business but why . Note: In this post I am referring to software …
One of the unexpected joys of these Covid-induced lockdowns has been sitting down with my family each weekend to do The Saturday Quiz . Sometime during the long lockdowns here in Melbourne last year, a couple of unknown-to-me Melburnites put together a little weekly quiz. 25 questions, once a week, sent …
As I’ve done in the past few years ( 2016 , 2017 , 2018 , 2019 ) I have put together a rear-vision-mirror view on my year in running. There honestly isn’t that much to report from last year. Things were a little... messy. Although my friends and family weren’t directly impacted …
UPDATED MAY 2023 The code in this post is no longer usable , as we no longer personally use Amber and their API has since changed . Thank you to Brad Thomson, who got in touch with an updated Amber Electric widget that uses this new API. I can't vouch for how …
From Outside Magazine, Why Are Runners Obsessed with the Pain Cave? After years of subjecting myself to this masochism, my sense is that runners gravitate toward painful activities because they provide us with opportunities for knowledge. We think pain will reveal something, some evidence of value or commitment to self-improvement …
As I’ve done in the past few years ( 2016 , 2017 , 2018 ) I have put together a rear-vision-mirror view on my year in running. Overall I had a very successful year, but only if you end it in August. I ran a couple of Ultramarathons, set a 5k personal best …
This morning I wrote up a little series of tweets about volunteering my time to read at my 8-year-old son's school class. I've had some thoughts bubbling away about this for a while, so instead of yelling them into the void that is Twitter I thought I'd expand a little …
Just about every endurance runner has, at some time or another, been informed by a colleague that said colleague "doesn't even like to drive 30 kilometres, let alone run that far!" What's the threshold for the driving refrain being swapped out for, simply, "you're crazy!"? The threshold is, I think …
"Who is running the 45km course tomorrow?" asked Paul Ashton, Running Wild race director. From our dinner table in the corner of the Abom bistro our hands nervously went up. "It's a brutal course!" he continued agrin. Paul's mandatory gear lists are known for being overy thorough (or onerous, depending …
The first race I had on my 2019 running calendar was the Two Bays Trail Race, a 56km ultramarathon across the Mornington Peninsula in the peak of the Melbourne summer. In 2017 and 2018 I ran the 28km version of the race, from Dromana to Cape Schanck Lighthouse, and I'd …
As far as running goes, 2018 was my biggest and best year yet. Earlier this year I set myself some goals so now that we've survived another trip around the sun it's time to check in and see how I'm progressing. Just as in earlier years this post is really …
As the hot water hit my sweaty and salt-crusted hair, I started sobbing. I had no idea finishing my first 50k run would be so emotional, but as the warmth of the shower reached my neck, my back, and finally my tired legs, I realised I was no longer in …
To reduce the number of VMs I pay for each month I've shifted this blog over to Netlify , powered by Pelican and Netlify CMS . After getting a sample blog up and running using an existing template, I exported my existing posts as .md files with some frontmatter and commited it …
As is now customary, I'm reviewing last year by waiting until I'm a third of the way through this year. This time in 2017 I set myself some goals and it's worth revisiting the list and setting some new ones. 2017 was a really good year for my running. I …
During World War II, a Pan Am flying boat found itself stranded in Auckland, New Zealand, unable to return to San Francisco due to Pearl Harbour's bombing turning the Pacific into a theatre of war. From John Bull, The Lapsed Historian : After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, the crew …
#2016 in running bibs and bling. More trails than road - didn't see that coming a year ago. A couple 10k & 21.1k PBs amongst this lot, too. A post shared by Ross Poulton (@ross_poulton) on Dec 30, 2016 at 9:18pm PST At the start of 2016, I set …
Why I Hate Running by Brendan Leonard at Semi-Rad.com: I hate running, three to four times a week if I have time. I hated it yesterday for a little over an hour. Maybe the sickest thing about the whole idea of running is when you sign up for an …
Since starting to run a few years ago, nearly all of my mileage has been on paved roads. My local parkrun course is on concrete, and most big running races are on the road. A few months ago, on a whim, I ventured out to Plenty Gorge Park and had …
It doesn't seem that long ago that I wrote up my 2014 list - but it's obviously far enough in the past that I don't really remember what I was trying to achieve this year, but it's worth a review - even if we are already six weeks into the new year …
Half Marathon is a pretty stupid name for an event. Those in the know are suitably impressed at the ability of the athlete 1 to run for 21.1km (13.1 freedom kilometers 2 ), but everyone else wants to know why you're only running half a race. I started running …
This afternoon I tidied up my Dropbox account a little bit - I removed a folder with 80gb of photos I no longer needed stored there (they're backed up in a few other locations) and disconnected some old computers and phones that should no longer have access to my Dropbox. When …
From Episode 28 of the Song Exploder podcast - The Commander Thinks Aloud by The Long Winters : On February 1st, 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia broke apart while reentering the earth’s atmosphere. John Roderick, singer and songwriter of The Long Winters, wrote “The Commander Thinks Aloud” about that fateful moment …
I've been using the Moves app for a little while to have a bit of fun with recording where I visit, when, and how I get around. At this stage I don't know exactly what I'll do with the data, but I've just come accross the Hello-O-Scope , a project of …
The New York Times, on The Benefits of a Lunch Hour Walk : A new study finds that even gentle lunchtime strolls can perceptibly — and immediately — buoy people’s moods and ability to handle stress at work. [...] On the afternoons after a lunchtime stroll, walkers said they felt considerably more enthusiastic …
For quite a while I've had a public "Status" page online for WhisperGifts via Pingdom. It basically just shows uptime over the past few days, but given my site is relatively low-volume and not ovely critical to my customers, the $10/month for Pingdom was actually one of my largest …
I like to listen to podcasts. There's the big names I listen to such as This American Life, their spinoff Serial , and Radiolab - but I also like listening to ad-hoc pieces of audio that I come across without subscribing to a whole podcast feed. For a while now I've been …
What a year 2014 was. I know we're already a week into the new year, but there's a few things I wanted to list out - however terse some items are - so at least I can tell in the future what happened, when. I won't go into details for most of …
David Cramer, in Be a Problem Solver For me the best thing that happened to our generation was Google. Not necessarily Google itself, but the idea of search. The Internet is a sprawling amount of unstructured information, and products like Google Search empower people like myself to solve problems they …
I love listening to Serial , the podcast you've already heard about where This American Life journalist Sarah Koenig revisits the 15-year-old murder case of Hae Min Lee, uncovering details week by week. Today in The Guardian, Jon Ronson, published an exclusive interview with the family of Adnan Syed, the man …
Evan Miller, writing in Please Offer An Excel Export Option : Data is ultimately meant to be consumed by people. This may come as a shock, but most people are not computer programmers. They are not going to read your CSV with Python and process it with Pandas or Numpy. They …
Kano : Kano is a computer you build and code yourself. Lego simple, Raspberry Pi powerful, and hugely fun. US$149.99, free shipping worldwide. I really wish my kids were a bit older - this is exactly the sort of thing I cannot wait to use to introduce them to computers …
In the past couple of months I've done some fun and interesting stuff over at WhisperGifts , my side project that lets couples put their bridal gift registry online. It's all built with Django, so I thought I'd share a few neat things I've come across along the way. Bookmarket and …
I'm a tall guy. I don't have great fashion sense, but I'm aware that most mens clothes in most stores do not fit me at all. Over the years I have struggled to find clothes that fit me well, so I thought I'd chronicle some recent discoveries in the hope …