nastybun

I think I feel a flu coming on… either that or I’m just extra tired at the moment. I think it’s the former…

I was going to wait until my new PC was up and running before I posted next, but it’s taking too long. I’m waiting on my copy of Vista, basically. For the curious, here are the stats:

Intel Q6600 (2.4ghz quad core processor)
Gigabyte EP45-DS3P motherboard
4GB DDR2-800 RAM (Corsair something or other)
Gigabyte Radeon HD4870X2 2GB graphics card
2 x 500GB in RAID 0 for system, 2 x 1TB (JBOD) for storage
Vista Ultimate 64-bit

Should be good.. should be a lot better than the poor excuse for a boat anchor I’m running at the moment anyway. It’ll run things properly, for one.. I hope. I’d ask you if you want my current machine, but I’m pretty sure I like you, my devoted reader. I wouldn’t want you to know the suffering that this thing causes…

Another thing I should gush about is the spam controlling measure I installed on here a while ago. It’s been 100% successful at killing the spam I was dealing with every day. Of course, it may have just prevented commenting totally.. do me a favour and submit one, will ya? The plugin is called WP-Spamfree, anyway. If you have a wordpress blog and some spam issues, give it a crack. It’s a lot nicer than CAPTCHA stuff anyway…

All porcupines float in water.

There you go, if ever you find yourself drowning, simply shove a couple of porcupines down your pants!

Brilliant.

more music charts

It should be legal to kick in fog lamps when people have them on in anything over than 5 metres of visibility… and that goes for rear foglamps too…

I have functional plumbing again! In fact, it’s even better than it used to be! And all it took was having no cold tap in the kitchen for a couple of days… To confabulate on that a little, what used to happen with the cold tap is that I’d have to turn it on about half a dozen turns, then when the water was gushing I’d have to turn it back five turns to get it to a reasonable flow rate. It also dripped incessantly, so I’d have to turn it off really tightly. It also had a second outlet and stopcock that could have a dishwasher or washing machine attached to it.. not that a dishwasher or washing machine would fit in my kitchen. Especially not where the sink is. On Monday, I was turning it off after.. something.. and due to my prodigeous strength, the inside of the handle basically disintegrated, leaving it mostly closed.. it had a fast drip happening. A few weeks ago the handle for the hot tap came off, but I bodged that back in place. Now that the cold tap was utterly munted, I figured it was a good time to call the rental blokes and get them to send a plumber out… so I did. I’d have tried it myself, but I’d probably have made it worse.. I didn’t know where to turn the water mains off, for one thing. Anyhoo, he came, he fixed, he left.. and now I have two new taps in the kitchen, a new shower rose and (hopefully) no more juddering/screaming shower pipes. Those I will test out later…

In other kitchen related news, I have been gushing to everyone about the wonderful culinary prowess I posess lately. Mainly cos I made chicken breast, grilled capsicum, pesto and parmesan puff pasty parcels for my dinner for the past few nights. They were super tasty. In case the reader has not have been gushed at, here’s how you can follow along at home:

Cook half a chicken breast any way you like. I kept it simple.. frypan, olive oil and a splash of soy sauce. Combine over heat for a while.
Half half a sheet of puff pasty thawed and ready to go. Place upon it the chook, some grilled capsicum, a slathering of pesto and parmesan to taste.
Seal pasty and paint/drizzle with beaten egg.
Bake at about 200C for 15-20 minutes, until it’s puffed and tasty looking.
Consume with desired amount of gusto.

The reason that it’s paint or drizzle with egg is that the damned den of disappointment down the road (or the local woolworths, if you prefer the latin) has been out of stock of pasty brushes for the past while or so. I’m pretty sure that every time I go there with something specific mind, they don’t have what I need so I need to compromise. It’s a lot like a Bunnings store in that regard. Somehow they can have a vast amount of stuff, but not have the item you need. They’ll have every possible related item, everything else that the vendor makes, an alternative item that’s not ideal but could be made to work… but not what you actually need. It gets a little irritating after a while…

Evil Fable 2 run is going well.. most citizens will run away if I look at them now. It seems that many aspects of the game would be easier if you’re being generally nice to people, but you stand to make more cash if you’re being nasty to people. Apparently the first game basically directed you along the being nice path, but there’s really none of that here.. you can be as nasty as you like with relatively few consequenses, if you’re careful.

In other game related news, Audiosurf is currently on sale for two and a half american buckaroos, so there’s no excuses for you lot not to check it out. You’ll need to have Steam installed so you can purchase and play it, but that’s both free and painless. It’s also a great way to purchase PC games, as it means you can easily avoid going outside and facing both bears and burning. I gushed about Audiosurf in the first post of the site actually.. it’s basically an interactive way to listen to music. Hard to explain adequately, simple to pick up and play. If you enjoy music, you have some on your PC and you like enjoying yourself, it’s for you. Is simple.

Sunbeams that shine down through the clouds are called crepuscular rays.

For some reason, the term ‘crepuscular’ just sounds like it’s to do with bottoms. Then again, it’d explain the whole ‘he thinks the sun shines out from his arse’ thing.

I bought some of those disposable bug baits recently. They have some sort of honey and soy mix in them. This is vaguely concerning.. it seems they’re using a marinade to kill the bugs. I’m not sure if Mortein know something the rest of us don’t, but it makes me concerned about the next time I visit someone for a barbeque. You’ve got to consider the fact that someone in the R&D department got ill after Australia day one year and traced it back to that marinated steak he had. Maybe he was the only one not drinking and everyone else thought they just had a hangover or something, but this guy extracted a sample of it from the t-shirt he was wearing and ran some test. At that point he would have gone to the board of directors, who would have been told about the issue.. but then because they are the board of directors of a big company, they’d probably have had him killed off so he wouldn’t talk. Now they had an easy and cheap way of creating bug death without having to deal with harmful chemicals, they could undercut the rest of the market and make squillions. The genius of it is that they can hide the ingredients off as merely what’s attracting the bugs to stave off investigation and just make up something scientific sounding for what’s actually doing the work.

You heard it here first…

A while ago when I was house sitting for the bossman and the flower I went up to our favoured coffee joint, a place called Bertoni’s, for a nice cup of joe and some lunch. As often as we visit this place, it was the first time I’ve had lunch from there (other than when they had that special thing going on.. but that’s another story). The lunch was a ham and cheese toasted panini.. it was nothing special, but better than the ham and cheese toasted sandwich I had for lunch today. The bagel joint was closed unfortunately, so I tried a nearby cafe for a speculative lunch and coffee. I’ve had still worse, but I’d probably go elsewhere next time I’m wandering about in search of nurishment. This is all neither here nor there though, as this post isn’t about food. Continue if you will to the next paragraph, where my indeterminate rambling continues.

On leaving Bertoni’s with my fare and wandering down the hill towards my temporary living space, I was joined by a wandering dog; I believe a blue healer crossed with something. Possibly alsatian. He (I’m assuming the gender based on nothing more than a hunch) happened to be sniffing about a corner around which I turned, following the usual route one would take to my destination. He looked up and me, acknowleged my existance the way that dogs do when they’re out and about exploring new turf and we wandered down the hill. To the casual observer he would have appeared to be my dog.. as it was, he simply chose to tag along with me for the time being. He would trotted the footpath in front of me sniffing at this and that, looking back at me perodically to make sure I was still there. At one point I turned a corner behind him. I made no noise, but as soon as I reached the side street I was turning down, he looked back and saw me.. so he wandered back and continued on as before in front of me. We reached the dog park on the harbour and his exploration became a bit more wide spread as he had more space to investigate and several more dogs to check out. I was curious at this point as to how this would end. My destination was only across the park.. would I have to ask him to leave? Would he find someone else to hang out with in the park? I decided that I’d just keep walking and try not to encourage him. He had a collar on, so he obviously had a family somewhere and he seemed to know the area enough to indicate he could make his way back home. As it was I lost sight of him just before we ran out of park… he found a few dogs to hang out with over on that side and decided to go check them out. I arrived at my destination, ate my lunch and pondered the fate of my erstwhile companion. He must have made it back home, as there’s been no ‘lost dog’ posters matching his description but I find myself keeping an eye out for him when I’m wandering the ‘burb nowadays…

The wind cracked a bowl of mine today. Well, I choose to blame the wind anyway.. it was a bit of a rube goldberg thing really. While I was cooking my dinner, the wind gusted up enough to cause a pressure difference requiring me to pop my ears. This caused me to shove the window closed… unfortunately, the lock on it knocked a jar full of water (its contents having been soaking off it) off the sill, and it landed on the rim of the bowl that was in the sink awaiting my sumptuous noodley fare. At that point, the window pane escaped its channels.. but not for long. I don’t put up with that kind of disrespect. Alas, the bowl is cracked.. all was not lost however, my approximation of char kwey teow was deposited into a backup bowl I keep in case of emergencies such as these and from thence consumed… but it’s still a little irritating. My bowls are so old, they’re from a time when cheap crockery was still being made in Japan. I daren’t put them in the microwave for longer than 33 seconds.. I’m sure they’d not survive the experience. My mum found them in the house she bought some years ago that’s just finished being renovated.. so they were bequeathed to me upon the commencement of my cross-country jaunt. To go with the 13 bowls (now 11.. three normal size, 8 small deserty ones.. one didn’t survive frozen pasta sauce being prised from it ), there’s also some rather small plates (6), and a wonderful platter featuring cuts of meat around the edge and a stylised picture of a chef poking a raging bull with a large cooking fork. I call it my vegetarian platter. I should take a pictograph of it at some point, it’s really rather brilliant.

The correct response to the Irish greeting, ‘top of the morning to you’ is ‘and the rest of the day to yourself’.

Hello! Remember me? I was that guy that said I’d try and keep this thing updated… well, I never said I’d try all that hard..

Result! I got my tax return (thanks tax people for not requesting the receipt for my laptop… I can’t find it…) and have gotten my credit card to ZERO! Huzzah! It’s a nice feeling.. especially because it was something I aimed to be doing since I got it… I’d have been ok if it wasn’t for you kids my car. Speaking of that.. it’s with the mechanics until they can find the root cause of the intermittant dodgyness. It pissed me off to the point that I just told them to keep the damn thing until it’s proper fixed. Innit. It’s not like anyone is calling me to buy it anyway.. maybe I should just give it away in a big box of cornflakes..

I finally got around to replacing my glass saucepan that didn’t bounce. I was in town yesterday and a homewares place had some at 70% off, so I picked up a frypan as well. It cooks pasta and noodles, so it ticks all the boxes I need from a saucepan. Not sure with the frypan, but at least now I can find someone in a bar and ask her how she likes her eggs.. if I buy some eggs..

I seem to be working my way through a relapse of pilgrim flu, only without the flu part.. just the nausea.. that coffee seems to drastically worsen. I spent the weekend feeling vaguely nauseus just from eating or drinking anything.. which seems to translate to motion sickness far too effectively. Makes bus trips fairly unbearable.. I was going to head into the CBD, but instead spent my time on the couch. Still, I was in yesterday as mentioned, so it wasn’t so bad. I also had some long overdue media intake at JB’s and finally got to Chinatown for some more tea. It’s been tough, but I can see the kettle at the end of the tunnel now. Maybe that’s been the problem… Hmm…

On a dewy morning, if you look at your shadow in the grass, the dewdrops shine light back to your eye creating a halo called a heilgenschein (German for halo).

So it’s a halo called a halo… I wonder if having the official name for that effect was part of the terms of surrender at the end of WW2…

tower of power

I call it the nastybun approved tower of morning pleasentness.