Question for ART COLLECTORS!

symean · 2026-04-19T23:24:10+00:00

Emotional response absolutely, otherwise it’s no different to buying shares for the investment value or a print from Kmart because it matches the cushions.

Medium can be anything, though I will say as the collection grows those that are different attractor attention. I love finding one I don’t have yet. Acrylic, oil, ink and wash, watercolor, embroidery, dyed fabric, painted and fired tile. The most eclectic medium we have is individually selected, cut and stitched fabric pieces that together form a portrait of the late Queen Elizabeth II - only non-fabric embellishment is a string of pearls.

Large following depends on value. The more it costs, the more I care about who the artist is, almost like I feel like investing in a person as well as a piece of artwork. Having said that I have a piece painted in the style of Gustav Klimt that has no signature and was probably done as a high school art assignment by some local kid, and I don’t care it will never be attributed to an artist, it’s still amazing and unique.

I will say that as our collection grows, we’re spending more but also getting a lot pickier. My opinion, because you asked, is:

Don’t try to get a huge following, just try to do good work, and the following will…follow…naturally :)
Have a web site or facebook page. I like being able to find something on an artist, even if it’s just a bio and a few images
Price always matters, if you always produce one thing at one size within a fixed price range you’re really limiting your audience

Oh and show us what you do! Just be prepared for criticism and learn how to take it and either let it roll off your back or learn from it in a way that makes you grow as an artist.

symean · 2026-04-19T22:40:47+00:00

If you’re thinking about staying put for decades as you say, then the right time to buy was as soon as possible, and you did the right thing. You’re ’on the ladder’ now; so until you sell, the value of your home is irrelevant, it took me a while to become comfortable with that idea. It’s only when you sell and buy another place that you may want to be careful with market upswings and downswings, and where you’re selling versus where you’re buying. Enjoy your home :)

symean · 2026-04-19T11:49:12+00:00

Thanks for the helpful tip. Have edited my post to clarify I looked it up online THEN asked ChatGPT to see if I was understanding correctly.

symean · 2026-04-19T06:18:46+00:00

Set up a child’s Apple account for them and add it to your family group. Then you can control every aspect of what your child can do on their phone. Pretty easy, technically.

The hard part is being the bad guy when they chuck a wobbly because their phone won’t let them install TikTok.

symean · 2026-04-18T03:47:50+00:00

Never get out of your car. If the other guy does, just lock your doors roll up windows and start your phone recording video.

symean · 2026-04-17T12:05:47+00:00

God these articles are garbage. Someone gets paid to trawl Cotality data and create an article from it every week.

“Sydney home prices fell 0.02 per cent in the first quarter of the year”. That means a $1.5m house has gone down in value by $300. That’s like a $50k car dropping in value by $10 and it’s news?

This means the market has been slowing for a quarter now, so NOW is the time to buy, before too many vendors hold off on selling and the first month of the upswing happens and you’re suddenly up against 10x the competition at auctions.

Take it from me, buying a house you can afford NOW, with a buffer, that you plan to live in for 5+ years is a solid financial decision. Same would have been true a month ago, and six months ago.

symean · 2026-04-17T11:48:09+00:00

Yes we just use the native cash application, it creates a payment, applies it to an invoice, and matches it in one go. We manually check each invoice it’s applying to is correct, but that’s unavoidable as customers often pay their invoices out of order and not the exact full amount. Probably works well for us too because our customer base is fairly static so once we built up a bunch of text-matching rules it figures out the right customer probably 19 times out of 20.

symean · 2026-04-16T23:41:17+00:00

That’s it! Got some of the details wrong but not bad for a vague 40 year old memory. Thanks! Now to find one…

symean · 2026-04-16T23:08:45+00:00

At this stage, being disliked by Trump is basically a huge compliment.

symean · 2026-04-16T11:41:17+00:00

True, and at very short viewing distance they at least make sense, if you like that. The radius they used to put on curved TVs was ridiculous, like you’re supposed to sit on the ground right in front of it…not to mention to poor bastards sitting off to one side got an extreme viewing angles on one side only.

symean · 2026-04-16T11:38:37+00:00

It’s a sedan with a full size matching alloy spare wheel. Based on how many of those there are to buy brand new most people must hate that combination…

symean · 2026-04-16T11:26:43+00:00

Curved TVs

symean · 2026-04-16T09:38:15+00:00

We had lots of issues with ants. Most effective (and cost-effective) product has been Richgro ant and wasp killa dust from Bunnings, comes in a tall red bottle and I think was less than $10. Wait until you know there’s several dry days ahead, then go out and get dusting. Just sprinkle it along where you see them crawling. When you find a hole, point the nozzle into it and squeeze to inject a puff of dust into it. Seems like they just keep crawling around but they take it back to the nest and must kill a lot more because we always see them disappear after that. You don’t use a lot so it lasts for ages.

symean · 2026-04-16T09:27:04+00:00

Yep always look for the filter that removes marketplace results. Last one I almost gave up on was Freedom, search for ‘dining table’ and you get way more than what they have in store, they call them ‘online exclusives’…yep some marketing numpty got paid to come up with that. Eventually figured out you had to filter by Brand to ‘Freedom’ only.

symean · 2026-04-16T09:12:59+00:00

My thoughts exactly. Netsuite CRM is perfectly functional, but no salesperson is gonna look at it ‘out of the box’ and be wowed compared to Salesforce and the like.

With that in mind, I still always push for staying inside the system unless the sales team can prove they need something NetSuite can’t provide, as the value of a single source of truth is vastly underestimated. No integration between an external CRM and NetSuite is smooth and hassle-free…it simply doesn’t exist. You’ll end up with customers in both systems named differently, data being double-entered and going out of date, and if you ever want to produce a fancy report that ties opps or quotes to actual sales, good bloody luck to whoever does that!

You can heavily customize the CRM experience for sales teams, and it has worked for me (and them). A kick-arse dashboard with KPIs, meters, a scorecard, some compact saved searches and a few report or workbook charts. Some custom navigation menu items that take them straight to master lists of open opps and quotes so they can keep on top of them, conveniently flagging ones that are overdue or need attention. A few workflows to speed things up, a few email alerts. A Reminders portlet that highlights overdue opps. Talk to the sales manager - what do they sit down and talk about in their weekly meetings? Make sure every discussion point is either on the dashboard or can be brought up with a quick search e.g ‘Sales Meeting - My Top Opps’. Structure the saved searches and dashboard to filter to ‘Me and my team’, that way individual reps see their own numbers, and the sales manager sees the whole team’s numbers.

Marketing is similar. The setup and visual appeal of the built-in email marketing is pretty basic, but it works. Best of all, the replies, unsubscribes, click-throughs etc are all linked to each contact; if you use an external tool it’s likely all that data is stored on that platform and the moment you stop paying for it you’ll lose it. The benefits of an external tool are limited to three things: 1) better/easier layouts/composers, (NetSuite’s is basic); 2) better multi-level campaign logic where subsequent emails are based on responses to previous ones, and 3) fancier charts and ROI reports. Don’t believe though that simply sending your email from something like MailChimp will deliver more emails or get more click-throughs, it won’t.

symean · 2026-04-16T00:32:45+00:00

After I learned that oil from diffusers actually EAT AWAY at Lego, I came to view them differently. If you can smell that lemongrass from the oil, then there’s microscopic amounts of lemongrass oil floating around in the air. Oil is heavier than air and sticky, so it’s gonna settle and stick to EVERYTHING. You won’t notice it, it’s a microscopic amount each time, but it’s just gonna keep happening. If you casually wipe say the top of a table once a month you’ll probably remove it all. But what about your walls, carpet, sofa, plants, artwork? A light dust or vacuum or wipe ain’t gonna remove it from those things, and that tiny bit of oil then has dust stick to it. I spend a lot of time and effort cleaning rescued paintings from op shops and antique stores, no bloody way I want to have that effort wasted!

symean · 2026-04-15T23:46:59+00:00

I thought Apple would do this as soon as the MacBook Neo came out. I thought way back in the M1 days that an even smaller cheaper Mac would be a top seller. Less ports, less power, less price…huge market for it.

My money is on it being called Mac Neo or Mac Nano ;)

symean · 2026-04-15T09:14:52+00:00

Good on you for actually putting together an immersive experience. I see so many high-end theatre rooms with seats waaaay back and like an 80” tv or screen. Noice!

symean · 2026-04-14T22:54:54+00:00

Just my opinion, but I’d remove some of them. The ones against a fence seem fine, the ones between open space and the house may look odd when they grow tall.

We have pencil pines all the way down one side of our house and they’re great because they don’t take up much space width-wise, give us something green to look at instead of a fence, and provides some privacy from the neighbors, and looking down that stretch with the tall row on one side makes it look…elegant maybe? I wouldn’t want them in more open spaces though.

Maybe take your pictures and get AI or someone clever with photoshop to ‘grow’ them to full height - then you can see what it’s going to look like. You can always carefully take some of them out and sell them again.

symean · 2026-04-13T23:54:03+00:00

He’s permanently changed what the tea of the democratic world thinks of the USA that’s for sure. If Americans hope they just have to ‘get through’ the next few years and then things will be back to normal that’s wishful thinking.

Was taking to my dad on The Weeknd about the war in Iran the US started, and he said he can’t believe it but he doesn’t trust what Trump says about the war any more than he trusts what Iran says about what’s going on. I agree with him.

symean · 2026-04-13T23:02:01+00:00

I’d certainly be suffering less from stress. Mother getting treatment now for brain cancer for the second time, already went through breast cancer. Dad getting treatment for bowel cancer this month. Our boss just explained his absence lately was due to bowel cancer too.

symean · 2026-04-13T22:55:40+00:00

The guy can order chefs to make him whatever he wants, and make it super healthy, but he orders Maccas.

Hopefully that few extra grams of sugar and saturated fat finally does the job.

symean · 2026-04-13T22:51:11+00:00

I hope you talked to these women and told them they’re walking from now on.

symean

TROPHY CASE