photos, fly fishing, food, maps & cycling
As of last Tuesday’s Epicure liftout in The Age, everyone is discovering food blogs.
I’m a food lover – a bit of a cook – mostly an eater, who has long enjoyed the vicarious pleasure of food blogs. The epicure article was pretty good, highlighting a bunch of great blogs – some I’ve already seen, many I haven’t.
There are a couple I reckon they missed though,
The building I work in is beautiful. Very old, very grand, sorta gothic sandstone. My office has real windows we can open and there are lawns outside the window. Alas, old buildings are expensive to maintain, the sandstone parapets are broken in places and the facade is cracked and flaking – mortar and finishing are deteriorating all over.
So, I was pleased to see this morning that some workmen had blocked off my usual entry to the building and had erected some scaffold. Was this the start of renovations? The answer was appalling…
I admit it, I was wrong. Some time ago when I first ‘discovered’ social tagging I weighed up the pros and cons of the offerings. Well, there were really only two choices at the time – Connotea was far too highbrow for me – so, was I going to Furl or Del.icio.us?
Sorry, inexcusable pun – I would never make a sub-editor! On the other hand, if you like new toys, you should take a look at flock, a new mozilla based browser, with active hooks for posting to blogs (I’m writing this entry from within the browser) and sharing bookmarks. It integrates with delicious for bookmark management.
It’s very exciting to see the browser integrating seamlessly with a personal online presence – it’s all coming together nicely.
We have a ring road here in Melbourne, but it’s not much of a ring – more a half finished peanut shape, but it gets the job done I s’pose. Not like this one near Taranto in Italy, now this is what I call a ring road… it’s massive!
Actually, this whole area seems to be obsessed with circles and ellipses. There are circular lakes here, here, and a whole bunch of elliptical ones over here.
The circular road is some kind of a vehicle testing ground the Nardò, Proving Ground, (their site has a map explaining what each part of the facility does), but what’s the excuse for all the round lakes?
Being a big fan of Chinese Food (inserts plug for our favourite local restaurant), and living in a very ‘Italian’ area of Melbourne, I have followed with some interest the debate about who invented the noodle. The Italians insist that Marco Polo introduced it to China, the Chinese argue the reverse. Even the Arab countries in between get into the act, saying he picked it up on the way through. Well, wonder no more; according to this article from the BBC, some noodles have been uncovered in an archeological dig in China that are returning radio carbon dates of around 4,000 years ago.
I always suspected the Chinese had the edge 😉
This is viv, our cat, with his tail up in defiance despite being well out of his comfort zone. You see, we’d just gone down the park for a quick kick of the football and he followed us all the way. I tried to catch him to take him back to the house, but he’s quite good at staying out of reach.
Anyway, he ran around alternately looking fierce and terrrified – way too much excitement for a little boy. We headed back up the hill making sure he could see us and hoping therefore that he would follow.
At first, he stayed down among the trees, but in a stroke of good fortune a Crow decided he was either a bit of a threat or possibly an entree, and it swooped him with a loud caw. They were out of view just over the brow of the hill, but I think they actually engaged for a moment, before another crow came and Viv rocketed out of the trees and up the street toward us, straight under a parked car for shelter. He meekly followed us the rest of the way home – panting from either stress or tiredness. Naughty little boy!
I suppose I’d better give into it… everyone else has blogged about WEo5, so I’d better do my bit. Not that it’s a chore at all – quite the opposite – this was the most informative and inspirational conference I have been to in years. No, the problems are: 1. where to start, and 2. what to leave out.
Informative: Eric Meyer and his approach to prototyping css design, Tantek Çelik and his insight into the deep end of sematic XHTML, and Derek Featherstone taking forms accessibility to new levels.
Inspirational: Molly Holzschlag – is there anything she isn’t into?, Jeff Veen, simply inspirational!
There were others, of course, but I’ve gotta stop dribbling! Over the next week or so I’m going to be going through my notes and listening to the podcasts to try and pass on as much of this wisdom as possible to my work colleagues.
I was there! at WE05 when Tantek Çelic had just finished his session and was about to take his first question… the fire alarm started!
Here we are piling out onto Harris Street, Ultimo in front of UTS, and yes, that’s me in the yellow sleeved t-shirt next to the tree. Told you I was there 🙂
Originally uploaded by Web Essentials.