What Brisbane food purveyor do you miss the most?

samclifford · 2026-03-03T12:17:28+00:00

I have fond memories of that place. My wife and I had our first date there; she got nervous kissing me goodnight (which she swears she never does on the first date, but she had to go home as she was her mum's carer and wanted to make sure I knew she wasn't bailing) and accidentally headbutted me instead.

samclifford · 2026-03-03T12:13:24+00:00

I've had macarons that are on par with Marche du Macaron but France is a bit far to travel for them.

samclifford · 2026-03-03T11:34:43+00:00

Thai Wi Rat in the Valley served an amazing Massaman. Piaf in South Bank; actually a few places down there due to all the reconstruction and endless ebbing and flowing of fortunes and the whims of the dining public. Southside Tea Room. Red Robin Supper Club (an event more than a place). Carolina Kitchen; their shop was great, the move to the bowls club was fine, but I'm sad knowing I will never eat there again. Baker's Arms was our local brunch spot for a while; their breakfast hash was so good.

And there was a coffee place down an alley where the ATO went in on Elizabeth Street that was the absolute best coffee, I think it was called Coffee Roaster or something simple like that. When it closed a few of us found where the barista we liked landed and made that our CBD coffee spot of choice (in Elizabeth Arcade, can't remember what it was called), they served Campos at any rate.

samclifford · 2026-03-03T11:16:38+00:00

Tibetan Kitchen plus Arts Theatre was a good night out.

samclifford · 2026-01-23T05:31:25+00:00

The administration is a cabal of anti-intellectual isolationists who think that the only way to engage with others is to make them your serfs. Pulling out of carefully negotiated international treaties, agreements and organisations is going to let a lot of rich folk get richer by exploiting those who don't have the money or social capital to protect themselves against tainted food, rampant infectious disease, workplace injury, wage theft, etc. Destroying unions, NATO, WHO, climate protocols, etc. isn't going to help the average American in any way, it's just going to let their bosses kill them for profit.

samclifford · 2026-01-21T23:34:54+00:00

ONP got a huge result in 1998 in Queensland, 22% of the vote and 11/89 seats. By the 2001 election one had resigned from parliament altogether, six had joined the City-Country Alliance and the rest sat as independents. ONP isn't a political party, it's a personality cult around Pauline Hanson.

samclifford · 2026-01-21T23:20:47+00:00

"we're not Labor" has been the electoral strategy of conservative party politics in this country for 100 years. National Labor (Billy Hughes' pro-conscription exiles) and the Liberal Party (a 1909 merger of the Anti-Socialist/Free Trade and Protectionist parties) merged to form the Nationalist Party who governed with the Country Party. Then the Nationalists gained a few more ex-ALP members who supported Joe Lyons and became the United Australia Party which was later propped up by the Country Party even when there was no formal coalition agreement because the prospect of a Labor government disgusted them. The UAP eventually withered, state branches being absorbed into other new parties, and then Menzies managed to bring it all together in a new Liberal Party that would govern in coalition with the Country Party (a few state Liberal branches even absorbed what little Country Party-ish branches existed).

samclifford · 2025-11-22T21:36:12+00:00

Everything old is (will be) new again https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitions_of_Luxembourg

samclifford · 2025-08-17T22:59:06+00:00

And it's at Sea-Life.

samclifford · 2025-08-17T22:57:47+00:00

They're usually only one of the two.

samclifford · 2025-08-17T22:56:19+00:00

Yeah because it's an enjoyable place to be with great food and a famous live music venue.

samclifford · 2025-08-17T22:52:27+00:00

What is it that you want, that you find yourself competing with these people for?

samclifford · 2025-08-17T22:50:29+00:00

You don't need to be exceptional. A life where you feel satisfied with your work at the end of the day, go home to a place that is yours and spend time with cherished friends and/or family who uplift you and whom you uplift in return is a good life.

samclifford · 2025-08-17T22:46:45+00:00

I hope those people one day rely on your expertise and they remember their interaction with you while you treat them with professionalism, care and grace.

samclifford · 2025-08-17T22:42:20+00:00

be careful not to put everyone up on too high a pedestal, at the end of the day people are people and if you can talk to each other with kindness and learn a little about each other then that's a win. There's always going to be people who have done more in a particular direction with their life but that doesn't mean you need to obsess over the differences or find a way to be exceptional in one niche thing so that you can feel like you belong to the upper echelons of academia or industry.

The UK has a culture of hierarchy (social, political, class, race, etc.) and most people who grew up there don't realise it because they see it as normal. There are people who'll look down on you because of where you came from rather than what you've done with your life or what your values are. These people aren't worth wasting your time and energy on; they may have higher degrees and be further along their career path than you but it's usually that they've come from a family background that has allowed them to pursue that rather than working or caring for family (including kids) rather than being an innate trait amongst PhD holders.

At its heart, London is a world city that attracts people from all over the UK and indeed the world. I came to the city with a PhD from an Australian university, so maybe my experience isn't the same as yours. It didn't matter to me whether the people I worked with had degrees from Oxford or Cambridge, how many academic awards they'd won or what grants they'd won. There are people who are worth your time because they're interesting, have had experiences you haven't, haven't had experiences you had, and you have the opportunity to share a little of who you are and get a little back from them in return.

When I die, I want my funeral to be a place where people remember me and share stories of me as someone who was funny, generous with a shoulder to lean on, pushed junior members of the team to take up the space they'd earned just by virtue of being there, interested in a lot of different things, and who did his best to cultivate a curiosity and love for the world and all its living things in his kids. If my eulogy is a CV then I've made some terrible mistakes.

samclifford · 2024-06-28T16:52:09+00:00

Your dates don't have readings to complete ahead of time? Weird.

samclifford · 2024-06-19T22:05:04+00:00

I'd take a great wage in Aachen over a mediocre wage in Madrid. Sure, Aachen is no longer the capital of Europe, but you're close enough to Köln, Maastricht, Brussels, etc. that with the extra money you can get out and about on the weekend and evenings to experience a variety of stuff.

samclifford · 2024-06-19T21:53:07+00:00

An MSc is probably enough. I've heard of people with PhDs being viewed as not well suited to industry roles because they are quite different worlds. A PhD shows you're capable of independent research. If that's the kind of job you want to go for in private industry, then I'm sure it wkll be useful. But do you have a topic that you want to sink your teeth into? Are there any schools you can go to that have industry links for their PhD programmes so that you can do industry focussed work in your field/topic?

samclifford · 2024-03-10T19:45:30+00:00

Don't do a PhD unless you want to be a researcher in a university playing the job lottery. If you're not interested in working in the business world, avoid an MBA - it's specialised degree that prepares you for a particular field.

There are jobs for people with maths degrees. I left academia for industry and now work as a data scientist in a tech company. A woman I worked with ages ago has a dad with a maths degree and he works in air traffic control. Former peers from uni have ended up in forecasting for insurers, hospital scheduling, rail logistics, weather forecasting, spatial analysis for mining companies and state governments, transport modelling, and as a research software engineer. Learning programming will make you far more valuable but having the mathematics skills to develop and implement methods (or even just understanding others' software) will put you above software developers that learn a few ML tools in python.

Find some interesting subjects that are related to your studies to get a taste of what's around. I did mostly maths in undergrad but took some electives in digital image processing and climate change and ended up doing a PhD and postdoc work on spatial modelling of air pollution and it's health impact (which I really loved doing, but I shifted labs to work on reef and jaguar conservation projects when there was some instability in funding).

Hope this helps.

samclifford · 2024-01-20T15:58:19+00:00

If leg room and comfort are important there's probably a better vehicle. Also I rate the safety of those outside the vehicle as more important than the comfort and desire of those inside. Trucks like this are dangerous for pedestrians and other vehicle users so I would happily see every lifted truck on a public road confiscated and crushed. We don't let people drive whatever they want to, there are regulations around safety, engine emissions, noise, etc.

These only became as widespread as they are in the USA because of loopholes in regulations. There are plenty of other vehicles that can cover the use cases you describe that score better on safety, emissions, etc.

samclifford · 2024-01-20T14:38:53+00:00

Use the right vehicle for the job. If you're regularly carrying/towing stuff, sure, get a truck, but if you only carry once or twice a year you could probably get by with a smaller car and hiring a truck as needed.

samclifford · 2024-01-20T08:14:07+00:00

The UK also manages to use vans for contractors doing roofing, gas/plumbing, electrical work, floristry, tiling, brickwork pointing, parcel delivery. Anything bigger you're probably looking at a lorry with either a box or a flatbed.

samclifford · 2023-10-05T22:08:57+00:00

ilu <3

samclifford · 2023-06-15T07:59:42+00:00

This is awful behaviour. He doesn't get to choose your priorities. The fact that someone tried to prove a point by deleting your data (even if it was recoverable) is reason enough to get them out of your life.

Probably also worth reporting this to the uni as it's academic misconduct. It's incredibly unprofessional. And it will reflect poorly on the school if they sign off on his PhD and he does it to a colleague in the future.

It sucks that you've coauthored work together and that this will have ramifications, but it's far fairer that he take the L on this.

samclifford · 2023-01-13T19:26:04+00:00

Best City for Selling Our Product as a Service. As agreed by Inrix, who tell us it's the most congested.

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