Not that hard DAMNIT

Spell my name right! Especially if you are sending an email asking for a favor or information. It's only 4 freaking letters, how can you manage to miss it?

Easy steps to freaking yourself out

1. Go to local rainforest township to clear some plant debris from property
2. Develop a small itchy bite mark a day after step one
3. Remember that rainforests can have paralysis ticks
1. a paralysis tick nearly killed one of our dogs
2. tick bites itch like crazy
4. Now worry about is that bite a paralysis tick and did any travel home with us? Will one of the dogs get a tick?

Yasi did a lot of damage to trees to the Paluma property. And the house? One screen got damaged, a lamp shade fell to bits but that might have been ready to happen anyway.

My favourite cute news feeds

I love lots of these things

http://stuff.icanhascheezburger.com - general cute stuff
http://noms.icanhascheezburger.com - cute food

http://failblog.org/ Fail blog

most painful spam ever

 "blow up your penis now & see results in as little as 7 weeks Guaranteed"

Hmm, shouldn't that be blow up your penis now and feel the results instantly?

If penis enhancement drugs worked as advertised, men should need a third 'leg' along the front. :)

Cyclone Yasi

Was very big and quite nasty. But the eye didn't pass over town, and at the last I heard, no fatalities due to the storm. Lot's of damage. Power is out over a great deal of north Queensland at the moment. I have an iPad which I charged up just before the power failed. So I can stay in contact for awhile at least. But the main computer must wait for power to be restored over town. Our house had minor damage from the storm. Ross wants to check the roof. But it must mostly be ok or there would be more water around.

I am scared

There is a major cyclone building up off the coast of Queensland.
They anticipate it will be *very* large and *very* dangerous.

And the predictions have the eye going right over my city.

http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDQ65002.shtml

I can talk the talk

but fail at walk the walk.

I know that blogging is one of those things you mainly have to do for love. But I've gotten so accustomed to having comments on blog posts in my story blogs that I'm really nearly ready to abandon the lot of them.

After I cry about the whole thing that is. Sad, I know.

Definitely no fun

Living in north Queensland, we regularly have alerts about cyclones.

Currently there is one for Cyclone Anthony, still a fairly long way away but predicted to hit the coast almost directly over town.

Another good Mimi and Eunice comic

 I'm also really fond of several of the offerings from http://icanhascheezburger.com/

This includes LOLCats, LOLDogs, Very Demotivational, and failblog. They add up to at least one smile a day.

Cartoon for the day

Mimi and Eunice - definitely worth a read

Cute thing going around Facebook lately

The instructions

1 - Go to wikipedia and hit random. The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band. 2 - Go to quotationspage.com and hit random. The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album. 3 - Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”. Third picture no matter what it is, will be your album cover. 4 - Use photoshop or similar (picnik.com is a free online photo editor) to put it all together. 5 - Post it with this text and tag the friends you want to join in.

Mine was
Band name - Secret Rendezvous
Title of the album - Marry your equal

And my first album would look like

That worked well.

Compelling reading

A friend told me about PostSecret years ago now. The secrets are sometimes sad, sometimes scary, sometimes too much information. Some are very simple postcards, others are elaborate pieces of art.

Telling those secrets must be heartbreaking sometimes and incredibly freeing at others. You may laugh, you may cry but you are likely to read every card from start to end.

Now that ticks me off

Spam is the bane of email existence and I am pretty good at just ignoring it. But the latest spam is particularly disgusting. Someone is using the Animal Protection Society logo and info to get you to donate - to their pockets and NOT the ASPCA.

It bothers me because someone very naive soul may actually attempt to make a donation to a worthy cause. Mind you, you do have to be naive, the link is to some site that doesn't contain aspca or any near equivalent in the link.

Don't be naive about links and do donate to worthy causes.

Visiting Rome

Visiting Rome really was amazing. So much history everywhere.

I would not want to drive around the city. The traffic is insane. Lot's of vehicles, moving quite fast and the drivers there must know the width of their vehicle to a couple of millemetres. Fortunately, you can walk or take public transport to all the important sites.

We also did one of the all-day on and off buses. Those are good for getting a feel for a place and not walking your feet off.

Our holiday

I've been posting the pics of our 2010 holiday over at flickr.com. The most surreal part was the day we visited Vatican City, the pope was holding the wed audience out in St Peter's Square.

So I have pictures of the pope.

And the reason we were in Vatican city? We wanted to visit the Sistine Chapel. As it turns out, you don't go through St. Peter's at all, you go down a road for a bit and eventually end up at an entrance to the Vatican Museum and Sistine Chapel. The number of tour groups that day was large, I'd hate to be there in peak season.

They have got to be kidding

The place I work for has a new program "Swipe to Give". Costs nothing to join, present a card at a participating shop and some money from your purchase goes to the University.

Problems?

A) How much money
B) What does the University intend on doing with it?

Especially point B - why should I make more money available to the University when you aren't given the smallest clue what it's intended for. It's likely to all be swallowed by admin costs anyway.

A new version of bait and switch

After seeing the ads for Uncle Toby's rolled oats, two questions come to mind

1) is it bait and switch when someone advertises that they produce oats like only this company can and so forth. When you find the product on the shelf, it's surrounded by other oat products by the same company - pre-flavoured and no heart foundation tick of approval. With all the various oat products, it can be hard to find the genuine plain rolled oats.

2) Does anyone fall for their line about how they produce real oats. Honestly, there are several companies that sell rolled oats. You take oat grains and crush them which makes cooking easier.

Cooking: physics vs chemistry vs alchemy

Cooking physics - simple - apply heat to item to make it hotter.

Cooking chemistry - combine ingredients x y and z.  Mix in a certain way to create a batter that is different then the sum of parts.

Cooking alchemy - when ingredients combine to something vastly more than you'd expect from the simple list of ingredients.

I indulged in alchemy tonight.  I made basic bread dressing to go with a turkey breast I was cooking.  The ingredient list is really simple - onion, celery, bread (cheap white bread will do fine), a bit of seasoning and either chicken stock (which I never have on hand) or chicken bouillon cube and water and an egg.  That's it.  Somehow, they combine to make a side dish that I always love.

The Worley Gig » Blog Archive » New York City Gets Two Feet Of Snow!

The Worley Gig » Blog Archive » New York City Gets Two Feet Of Snow!

What tv has taught me - part 2 Cop shows

The hero can shoot with amazing accuracy and will only ever need one shot.
The backup squad may or may not hit anything but can make do with revolvers or rifles.
The villains cannot hit anything even with sub-machine guns - unless the group includes one of the 'cannon fodder' cop groups.

What tv has taught me - part 1 Cop shows

Cops shows teach you that in a cop's career, there are 4 particularly vunerable stages

4 - Rookie cop - first week on the job
3 - Veteran cop - last week on the job
2 - Newly married or about to be

and the single most dangerous is

1 - Cop who is expecting first child within one month.

If some cop is going to die, these will be the first to go.

New Variation on a classic scam - David Rhodes

Once upon a Time - you'd get the occasional piece of mail purportedly from David Rhodes. It was a classic pyramid scheme - send money in the post to some people and get money in return later.

And the new updated version is a PayPal scam.

Can I pay you *$39 by paypal ?

Have you ever wondered, what if at least 1000 registered
users of paypal purchases the outstanding "The Fortune"
gallery from you for *$39 each ?

It goes on with details and a URL but I won't trouble you with that. The main thing is that it's just a classic pyramid scheme - you'd be sending x people $39 hoping the lots more than x people send you $39 in return.

Finding treasures

Well, from my point of view, it is a treasure

This is a picture that my mom painted on a wall in our house in Maryland when I was but a pup. When we left that house, I didn't really expect to see any version of this picture again. I can't say if the painting is a test version before she did the one on the wall or a copy when she knew we were leaving the house. But the basic arrangement of deer, pine trees and cabin are the same.

This particular picture hasn't stood the test of time that well, the paper has yellowed badly, the edges have broken and the oils have leached a bit. And yet, I love this little painting, so cool it was around.

Shopping

There's one thing I hate about shopping in the US. You have to make allowances for sales tax.
In Australia, if you pick up an item priced at 19.90, you pay 19.90. In Florida, you pick up something labeled 19.90 and then the sales tax pushes the final price over 20.50. The difference is "Can I hand them a 20?" In one case yes, and you get change. In the other case no. They will be waiting for more money.

Time to resurrect the blog

It's time to get back here.

Why?

Therapy. Mom died on the 5th and I'm still trying to cope with this new hole in my life. It will take time, and perhaps a bit more than mere time. The hardest thing in the world is to say "Yes, remove the respirator". My sister, my niece and I all knew it was time but it was still very hard to do.

Bad moments, emptying her closet. We are giving her clothes to Goodwill, she was just so much smaller then any of us. Visiting Barnes and Noble, I have to remind myself that she would hate it if I didn't go just for her sake.

Depression, those lovely self-fulfilling dreads

Been feeling a bit depressed for about two weeks. Now getting to the really bad stage where you do really silly things like

• weight gains are depressing - eat more to compensate
• don't want to socialise - get depressed when no one talks to you
• easily distracted at work - get depressed because work isn't going well

All of which leads to lovely self-fulfilling things. The mood is due to break soon, I hope it does.

New Must Have CD

Just heard a new group on Classic FM last night and I must buy their CD. The group is known as The Spooky Men's Chorale. An a capella group from the Blue Mountains.

The song played last night was The Spooky Men's Theme song. I was laughing so hard while listening...I have to have it.

Estimating time for a technical project

On occasion, though you should try to avoid this, you will be asked to estimate how long it will take to complete a complex project. This guide should help you estimate time frames more accurately.

1. Take a good look at the project.


2. Break the project down into a series of tasks.


3. Estimate how long each task is likely to take.


4. Pad the estimates by about 10%. This takes into account small interruptions.


5. Now for each task, take the padded estimate and double that time. Almost every large project runs into some unexpected difficulties.


6. Now for the whole project, add about another 50% to the overall time. This is the estimate that you give your boss or the client.

You can, and should, try to keep to your first time estimate. However, the estimate you tell others will give you a lot of time to have things go wrong and still get everything done on time.

If you can get things done between your initial time estimate and the final one, everyone will think you're brilliant since your project is done on time.

Google's April Fool joke

TiSP a toilet based high speed internet connection.

Curled frond

Curled frond
Originally uploaded by Nicarra.

I thought this was a pretty nice close up. Lot's of symmetric detail.