Category: General

Fergus (on the right) is a little tubbier than Chloe and his legs don’t hold up his manly torso for as long when defending our house. So, he’s improvised a solution which always makes me laugh.

I can’t resist beers with great artwork. Especially Victorian ones.

As a long term drinker of “anything new”, not a week goes by without me delighting in a new beer label – even from established big breweries like Little Creatures. Today’s purchase was this little ripper, showing just how far beer label design has come. Simple pastoral scenes make me want to sit outside and drink – perhaps not in July though.

Did you notice how I positioned myself to showoff my new veggie garden corrugated tank? We’re only weeks away from filling those (got 2) with good soil and hopefully tomatoes will flourish.

Water restrictions are just a fact of life around these parts. We talk about it all the time; we even have websites and Iphone apps dedicated to it. Three years ago we had to abandon most of our vegie garden because we couldn’t keep the asian greens, carrots, tomatoes, rocket or basil alive in spring/summer. We ended up putting in tough stuff like oregano, rosemary and (my favourite) sage, which have thrived, but there’s nothing like salad ingredients in the hot months. Hence our new rainwater tank.

It is surprising how expensive a setup like this is. We were warned that it would cost around $1000 per 1000 litres once we  factored in the tank, pump, concrete pad, copper piping, installing electricity into the garden, and the various attachments. Four tradesmen and 4000 litres worth later, we have a 2m x 2m x 1.1m work of art in our sideway – completely hidden from the street.

The best thing about it so far is that I only have to turn the tap for the pump to automatically kick in and it is exactly like mains pressure. I can water anytime I like now (instead of the impossible 6am Sat till 8am Sat., which after a late Friday evening of WoW raiding was like torture, or the 6am Tuesday before work, which I always forgot).

Worst thing? After they jackhammered up my bricks and 4 inches of concrete footings to dig the trench for the power and piping, I now have to re-level and re-mortar about 40 bricks back in myself. Several of which are going to need precise cutting. Oh joy. Luckily a friendly African guy nearby sold me 50 red used ones today for 60 cents each, so at least I have the materials now. Just not the inclination.

I am happy to have broken out of a reading funk on my hols, finishing some mags, the daily paper and the good, but throw-away “Love Machine” by Clinton Caward (yes I was captivated by the front cover like every other male) and maybe foolishly beginning a monster of a work that is described as “a novel of stupefying ambition” which I will not name here for fear of looking silly if I don’t make it to page 898.

I also finished the awesome Plants vs. Zombies game on my Ipod Touch, which let me say is a lot better and faster than the PC version (if you are considering it – and you darn well should). The game trailer (below) has been whizzing around my head for days now. I liken it to the Napoleon Dynamite dance-scene, or the (spoiler) unexpected song at the end of Portal. I had a big grin on my face throughout.

As per all holidays where lounging is the main activity, I found myself making mental lists of things to either do, or plan for when I got home. And it has become a little overwhelming.

Games: Finish Pixeljunk Shooter, Bayonetta :), and play the Batman Archam Asylum and MLB 2010 demos. Try and borrow a Nintendo DS to play some Pokemon or buy one on Ebay.

WoW: Try and get to 8000 achievement points on Grenache. Start thinking about which Alt I would like to play in Cataclysm, when 10/25 mans raids are considered a single raid lockout, meaning I would need 2 characters if I wanted to do both 10 and 25 man.

House: We need some water tanks for the garden and it’s about time I got things started. More pruning to be done. Kick my sister up the arse for not watering and causing plant torture whilst we were away for 11 days.

More books:  The pile of shame is getting bigger. It’s not in my wife’s league just yet, but I’m into double digits now.

Before I get started about phones and my niggles with them, let me blurt a little about the overuse of the prefix “smart” nowdays. It’s a clever advertising ploy because you can’t pin “smart” down to anything. But smart is sexy right? Because you’re clever and ahead of the pack with a “smart”-anything.

There is only loose agreement on what defines a smart device – something with a fully fledged operating system or with email capability, and it gets hazy from there. When we buyers get bored of “smart” – where do advertisers take us next to convince us of their product coolness? hmm..”eco” and “i” have already been used. I’m tipping “Me” or “Mi” to be the next frontrunner. Oh damn, Myspace grabbed that ages ago.

Last night I decided that the Samsung S800 phone I carry like a small lead-weight missile in my front right trouser pocket was not smart. I recently had a data plan activated on it so I could browse websites on the train, which works reasonably well, but I seem to be unable to upload a photo to Facebook or WordPress with it. I get mystery error messages that no Google search will identify. I am trying my hardest to not succumb to a truly clever phone and buy one with an Android OS until the battery life on these monsters goes beyond a day or two. I might be waiting awhile though. But maybe that’s smart also.

I’m generally a believer in the “build it and they will come” concept. And therefore I believe Apple’s IPad (and no I haven’t registered to pre-pay for one) will do screamingly well. And so it’s surprising that I’ve waited this long (9 months?) since buying a Digital TV before realising that my old VCR no longer records, and that, well…I know I don’t really watch much TV, and well, it might occasionally be handy to tape something, and well – maybe I should do something about that.

So, Kim and I finally snapped last weekend (nothing to do with the Winter Olympics or the AFL pre-season btw), and true to form, did 6 months worth of online and magazine research in 12 hours, and bought a TiVo unit at the first place we walked into. And a wireless router.

Part of me wanted the whole internet-flexibility of playing Youtube vids, streaming downloaded TV series from my PC, and be able to attach a huge USB drive thing. Another part of me just wanted a simple device to tape shows on, and be reliable, and have no ongoing costs. Kim agreed with the second – hence the TiVo.

It’s a matter of great embarrassment to Aussie tech-heads that concepts like TiVo took 9 years to hit Australia (July 2008) after the U.S, but that’s just life in the provinces I suppose. The new unit is madly recording like a fiend every time I look in its direction (it seems to just tape things it thinks you’ll like – Two and a Half Men, anyone?). Yikes. We’re loving it so far.

Did I mention that we finished the BattleStar Galactica series last week and that it was a lot of fun? At some point I stopped wondering about the 13th Tribe, or how Sam’s skin didn’t get all wrinkled in the bath. Other questions that came to mind afterwards were:

* Why would Adama want to build a cottage on the edge of that lonely plateau.
* Gais becoming a farmer with that “city girl 8” in tow? Preposterous!
* How stupid to drive all your interplanatary vehicles into the sun. What if those local aboriginals proved hostile and you wanted to escape again?

On the whole, I enjoyed the series, and I’ve been told by Ash that BSG is WAY superior to all other Sci-Fi out there, but I couldn’t help but gag regularly on the platitudes and the overacting.

I was so so happy that Kara and Lee didn’t get together in the end; I was even pleased that Adama didn’t want him to hang around either. Lee was easily the most irritating character in the show, followed by Gais and the Chief. It was fitting he was left alone in the end.

We’re onto Flight of the Conchords season 2 next.