Miles’ Blog » Personal

If you’ve wondered what has happened to me, and why I’m not online much, the above picture should give it away.

Our third child, Quinn Nathaniel Burke was born on Monday (30th June), making this blog post three days late (I did manage to update Twitter and Facebook though!). The photo above shows Quinn on his first day in this world, eyes shut and getting used to the sounds.

Mum, brother and sister are also doing well, and as you can imagine, we’re a very proud bunch!

Image: Quinn Nathaniel Burke, a few hours old.

You may all be interested to learn that Buddha has joined Twitter. OK, maybe not the real Buddha, but twice a day you can receive some of his teachings and inspirational quotes on your Twitter feed.

As a testbed for some ideas I have for using Twitter in business applications, we’ve created a ‘twitter bot’ which posts sayings of the Buddha or Buddhist verse and quotes twice a day onto twitter. If you have a twitter account already, you can follow thebuddha, and if you are in the USA, you can send a text which states ‘follow thebuddha’ to 40404, or to stop following (why would you?) send a txt to the same number with ‘off thebuddha’.

Let me know what you think (suggestions for quotes under 140 characters, and bug reports welcome!) below.

Enjoy!

Image: Screen grab of first tweet from thebuddha.

In one of those crazy meme trends that spread the blogosphere, two friends, Nick Cowie and Ben Winter-Giles, both ‘tagged’ me for the ‘8 things you didn’t know about me’ meme.

The rules of this meme are;

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules.
2. List EIGHT random facts about yourself.
3. Tag EIGHT people at the end of your post and list their names.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

So here are eight things you may or may not know about me;

1. I normally never do these memes.
2. This year I’m celebrating 25 years of being a (lacto-ovo) vegetarian.
3. I am going to be a father again! Our third child is due in early July.
4. As a result of the above, I also bought a new house a few weeks ago. We’re due to move houses at the end of next month.
5. I consider myself a follower of Buddhism. I’m known to attend temple at Dhammaloka, and am a member of BSWA.
6. My middle name is Andrew, named after my fathers first name. My son’s middle name is Miles, to continue the theme.
7. I spent many of my school years learning Jazz Ballet, and did a number of classes per week.
8. I have held jobs as a Nightclub DJ, Service Station worker, Radio Announcer, Pizza delivery driver and Retail Manager.

So, the eight people who I am ‘dobbing in’ to continue this meme are;

1. My beautiful wife, Meredith
2. Vy-Shane Sin-Fat, who last blogged in 2005!
3. Bad joke curator, Adam Braimbridge
4. Singstar competitor, Rosemary Lynch
5. He who knows all about coffee, Jordan Brock
6. Drinking buddy, Myles Eftos
7. Simon Wright, you blog slacker!
8. The ever energetic Lachlan Hardy

Image: Miles Burke, photo by Meredith Burke.

It’s with excitement that I hand over the reigns of wrongwrite.com to the team at 18a Productions in the United Kingdom, dedicated to carrying on the fight against spelling and grammatical catastrophes.

Recently, I posted here about my lack of time to dedicate to the blog I started last February, so it was great that I found someone to take over the blog (it was a gift to them) and keep it alive.

Lisa and Tom are passionate about the advancement of our language, and I wish them all the best of luck in managing the blog. I’ll be sure to send in the occasional contribution!

Image: Miss Print signage, taken at a local Chemist.

In recent news, I was honoured to be asked by the team behind SitePoint.com, the third most popular eBusiness site in the world, to join their star studded blogger lineup, to blog under the topic of Web Pro Business.

My first two posts, one posted last week, titled The Business of Building Web Sites and today’s latest post, Do you have the right personality for running your own business? are being well received, and I would love it if you wandered over there to have a read.

Please let me know what you think - and I promise to post more often here as well!

Image: Screengrab, SitePoint.com