You'll find me about 11,000 miles away.

I finally got an Instagram account. Follow me @r4v3yk Some pictures....graffiti, sunsets, scenery and quirkiness of life - all with an "insta" prefix, of course, and the odd hashtag. No selfies if I can help it.

In many European languages, the months of the year are mainly based on the Roman name for the month, for example "octo" is the number 8 in Latin. October was originally the 8th month of the year in the Roman calendar and retained its "octo" name when it was moved to become the 10th month post 46BC. The Julian calendar was introduced in 46BC and this lead to some interesting changes. For instance, there was a whole month dedicated to leap year, called Mercedonius. This month occurred every few years, but was abolished by Julius Ceasar when he introduced the Julian calendar. But not before he and others had abused the month by adding it earlier or later, or just "forgetting" to add it at all. So each month has a history of how it came about. An interesting history. Recently, I've started to notice that the months are again being renamed, but in a far less interesting way. It started with Movember. A time of month just before Christmas where you can g...

I saw this scene on Friday night in Sydney. I was standing at an intersection, a really busy intersection near China Town, waiting to meet some friends,...but they were late. So I had lots of time to stand around and wait for a break in the stream of pedestrians to take this picture. It still came out a little blurry, but I can describe it. On the left, a table of water bottles with a metal tin and a sign saying that the water bottles are $1, and then another sign saying it is unattended and that you should be honest and pay if you take a bottle. On the right of the picture is a guy kneeling on the pavement, possibly homeless, with a sign asking for money. Almost immediately this struck me as some sort of strange social experiment. Embrace your inner philanthropist by giving money to a homeless guy, buy yourself water for $1 and give no money to the homeless guy, steal a bottle of water, steal a bottle of water and give it to the homeless guy, or even buy a bottle for $1 and ...

A few weeks ago I came back from a trip to China, and I've mentioned previously about how incredibly pleasing it is to see that China retains its craziness. I'll explain. I first visited China 9 years ago. At this time there were motorbike taxis, everywhere. Really cheap, convenient and quick, but really, really dangerous. Having big legs and being generally bigger and fatter than most Chinese, each time I tried to get a motorbike taxi I would be sized up and you could see an instant of doubtful mirth flash across the eyes of the rider of the bike.  Most times you would wear no helmet and have to literally cling onto any crevice deeper than your finger nail would fit (if you were lucky, there would be a small luggage rack at the back of the bike). The driver would then proceed to hurtle in between cars and along highways and undertake huge buses and drive the wrong way across a busy intersection into oncoming traffic. And the adventure wasn't over when you reached your...

Yesterday, I received an email from what I guess is Füri's Australian distributor,  McPherson's Consumer Products Ltd . They said they were sorry to hear about what happened they kindly offered to send out a replacement or closest possible replacement product for the knife. I hope they send me out a paring knife that cuts vegetables. You can read the full story here .

In one of my old jobs I somehow was given the position of Fire Warden for the building floor that my office was on. This wasn't a posting that I had any particular interest in, but no one else volunteered, there weren't too many responsibilities, it would mean I get out of the office for Fire Warden training and I thought I would get some sort of qualification.  Only 2 of those 4 were true in the end. Fire? Fire! FIRE!!.....RUN A few meetings for Fire Warden Training were scheduled over the next few months, unfortunately on our level too, so I didn't get to go anywhere. After the first meeting had begun, it became clear that there wasn't going to be any qualification (like a First Aider qualification which is slightly more useful). Just some pretty obvious fire safety and organisation procedures to remember, and some droll training meetings. These were made slightly more bearable by the fact that a few of the other prospective Fire Wardens were quite hot (haha.....

Around a year ago I bought a knife set made by an American company called Füri. They were nice knives I thought. Notice the "were". They're no longer nice knives. Below is an email that I wrote to them a few weeks ago. An email that they as yet, haven't answered. So I thought I'd post my letter online. The email was entitled "Füri-ous at knife breaking". I hope they understood the pun of their company's name. Hi Füri, Just over a year ago (March or April 2012), I purchased a 9cm (3.5 inch) Pairing knife. It was in a set along with an 20cm Cook's Knife. I decided to buy Füri brand knives as I was looking for some good quality kitchen knives; knives that enhance my enjoyment of cooking. However, last week I was cutting through a potato (chopping it into cubes for a soup) with the 9cm Pairing Knife, when the knife just snapped! I've attached some pictures. A clean break in the knife - no twisting or bending. A clean bre...