no comfort in being right…

I have mentioned before now that I’m a bit of a weather nerd – like to think I know what’s going on. So when I asked the question earlier last year about our changing weather patterns, I was already pretty sure I knew the answer. Things have changed.

Sadly, it seems that I am not alone in noticing this, and other much more careful and methodical observers have been crunching the numbers to come up with much firmer and more credible answers… according to the report in The Age today, the CSIRO have confirmed that “the subtropical ridge has become more intense. It is getting bigger and stronger and that is pushing the rainstorms further south”.

This sobering news comes only a few weeks after ANU released An Atlas of the Global Water Cycle, a publication intended to give the lay person access to the detailed and complex information that global climate scientists have gathered and projected through computer modeling. It may well be intended for relatively easy consumption, but it’s till a complex and detailed document, and I’m afraid I glazed over a bit, but from the hundreds of charts and projections, there was one undisputed outcome – the south of Australia is going to continue to get drier and the far north will get wetter.

If I was to allow myself one more pessimistic observation, it would be that the Victorian Government will not heed this latest research and will push ahead with its breathtakingly stupid ‘North – South Pipeline’ which plans to divert water from the Goulburn River to Melbourne’s catchments. As if anyone could ignore the demise of Lake Eildon – the pollies should be forced to view that famous historical documentary, “The Castle” and observe that once upon a time Bonnie Doon was a place where you could launch a boat and catch a fish. Alas, like Bud Tingwell (the lawyer, Lawrence Hammill), Bonnie Doon’s waterfront is no longer with us. Miles and miles of grassy plain now stretch out from the disused boat ramp, and skiiers on their way to the (similarly vanishing) snowfields of Mount Buller wonder why there needs to be such a high bridge over a tiny, dry creek bed. The serenity, the whiff of 2-stroke, and the hope of a break in the drought, have long since gone.

We urgently need to use our water smarter. I don’t really blame the government for panicking and opting for the unimaginative quick fix of a desal plant – as flawed as it is, they have a responsibility to keep the city’s supply from drying up and with storages at around 25% you need to start looking at worst case scenarios. However, it’s pretty clear that better conservation, stormwater harvesting, and water recycling are the only long-term solutions. It’s time to move on this.

bingo bingo bingo!!!

OK, been away for a little while – had a WONDERFUL holiday – sorry to anyone who expected me to blog while I was away… that was just not going to happen! Still, now I’m back and there’s no excuse, so here’s the first installment of a few retrospective travel posts – hope you enjoy them!

We were very worried about Swine Flu. Not catching it, but being forcibly quarantined because of suspected contact with it. We already knew it was a mild flu, because our daughter had, a fortnight earlier, had a confirmed case and had recovered within days. No, paranoia was definitely our biggest fear, especially during our two night stopover in Hong Kong.

This fear snapped into sharp reality almost as soon as we arrived… we were walking up one of the labyrinthine ramps in Hong Kong airport, somewhere between disembarking and baggage collection when we found ourselves being checked on an heat-sensitive camera. Imagine my horror when the girl watching the screen leaps up, gesturing to her offsider, and shouting “bingo bingo bingo!!!”, and she was pointing… at ME! Yes, I was stopped mid stream and taken aside because apparently I was giving off more heat than everyone else. I’m sure they thought they’d caught a live one. Hard to say, but I choose to believe she was crestfallen when an in-ear thermometer check revealed the heat went no more than skin deep. Survived round one!

Next hurdle, the taxi from the station to our hotel. Very friendly and happy local with only a very little english. Seemed quite animated when we told him we were heading for the Metropark Wanchai, a lot of misunderstanding before we finally realise what he’s trying to tell us. The Metropark had just reopened after being sealed off with all guests in quarantine for a week! What can you say? We just hoped Swine Flu was a bit like lightning in never striking twice in the same spot. Sure enough, the hotel was adorned with photos and newspaper articles describing the events of the prior week. Looks like they made the best of a bad situation. Glad we weren’t there!

masking the problemBy this time, we were quite used to face masks. I’d say about a third of the people on the street were wearing them. Even the hosties on the plane were wearing them! It was all a bit disconcerting. In true Hong Kong fashion though, this was not seen as a downside, but a business opportunity – they were for sale everywhere – in bulk!

The other side effect of the war on Swine Flu was an almost religious cleaning regime. Hong Kong people seem to be very civic minded already – cleaning up after their dogs – holding handrails – keeping clear of the edge… there are reminders everywhere, but hygiene was the new fashion. There were public advertisements, television spots. The one we really liked though was the notices in many public places to the effect of “This button (door handle|toilet seat|etc.) is disinfected four times daily”, accompanied by an army of helpful and motivated hygiene enforcers. It was great!

this weekend we ate!

Every weekend it seems we end up eating… rather a lot. This weekend was longer than usual and so we’ve eaten rather more than usual! Here’s a few highlights.

Sunday breakfast: superb batch of blueberry muffins – buttermilk makes them so moist and soft!

Rachel's sticky date puddSunday evening: Moussaka – haven’t made it for years, but it was a beauty. The eggplants at La Manna were smooth, dark and glossy, so I just did it simple and straight. Will definitely revisit that before the winter is out. After loosening my belt a stop we had dessert – Rachel was inspired by Masterchef and turned out a sticky date pudding that would have had the other contestants running home weeping!

Monday brunch with friends at GingerLee, I had poached eggs with field mushriim, avocado and coriander… excellent! All perfectly cooked and delicious, but the real highlight was the coffee: smooth, rich and full of flavour without a hint of bitterness.

It was a wickedly wintry day, but we braved the elements for a good long walk along the Maribyrnong river – ending up, mostly out of curiosity, at Gary Mehigan’s Boathouse for a coffee. I was surprised how much of a ‘family’ restaurant it was… chippies and pizza on many tables. Still, we placed our orders for tea and coffee and settled down to watch the weather pound the windows while we waited… and waited, and waited! Actually, my coffee came quite promptly, but it took 20+ minutes for the tea to arrive. Tea bag + hot water – obviously a difficult dish to get to the table. Meantime, I had just about choked on my coffee which tasted like it had been beaten with a burnt stick. I didn’t expect it to live up to GingerLee’s delicious brew, but this was burnt and over extracted – undrinkable! I don’t like to complain, but when I mentioned this to the waitress, she was simply charming and immediately offered another coffee, which, when it came was a huge improvement. Just goes to show, even the judges aren’t immune to slip ups in the kitchen, but their staff certainly know how to deal with them.

watching my bandwidth…

Like most people who have broadband, my account doesn’t have excess charges, just ‘shaping’ – dropping back to crawling ‘dial-up’ speeds until the end of the billing period. It is just horrible and I really do my very best to avoid it.

Obviously the best way to avoid it is to keep a close eye on your usage. Easier said than done, my ISP usage page is behind a login and they don’t have an easy way of keeping an eye on it, so short of visiting a really boring page on a regular basis, there’s no easy way of keeping track. Enter the wonderful NetUsage Firefox plugin, which has helped me ration my bandwidth down to the last day on a couple of occasions.

So, when I changed my plan and NetUsage encountered some sort of error, I was a little disappointed. A week or so of checking the ISP page convinced me that this was a situation that had to be resolved. I checked the documentation for NetUsage – tried (I really did!) to understand how it worked – then gave up and emailed the author… this was a Sunday afternoon.

A couple of emails to and fro and by Sunday evening, the author has emailed me a patched version of the plugin which worked perfectly – amazing reponse. I am delighted to once again be able to monitor my usage at a glance – actually, mostly my daughter’s usage – streaming trashy US soaps!!

OVI store – a competitor?

Nokia today launched it’s OVI store, an attempt by the company to jump on the tidal wave of success that is the Apple Store (along with about a half a dozen other imitators). Many industry pundits are touting it as some sort of competitor, but I’m afraid that’s an uphill battle, and one they’re never going to win – not by a long shot!

This is not necessarily a bad thing, and the success of OVI store should not be judged against Apple’s App Store, instead the success of OVI store should be judged on how well it serves the market that is Nokia mobile phones… a group of hardware far more diverse than anything Apple has to deal with!

Being a Nokia owner myself (can’t afford an iPhone and detest the G1 hardware!), I hopped onto this new store for a look around. Nice simple interface, quickly got me browsing apps that suit my hardware – applause for the use of html/css instead of flash – obviously this is driven by the need to work on the browser in their phones, but a nice touch anyway.

$16 for a twitter client? Unfortunately, it all fell apart when I saw the prices! Who are they kidding? A game like Touch Physics on the iPhone costs $3.99 and gives hours of gorgeous, fluid gameplay. Games on my Nokia feel pathetic by comparison, yet on OVI store I’m being asked to fork over between $6.60 and $12 for crummy games that bore me after 5 minutes! Then there’s some ‘City Guide’ travel apps which are (probably not) selling for over $30! They want $16 for a twitter client?!? You have got to be joking!! Who is making these pricing decisions?

Lonely Planet city guides at least represent fair value at $8. Weirdly, this compares favourably to the same guide on the App Store, which can be had for $18.99. Perhaps this is an acknowledgement of the distinctly poorer user experience offered by Nokia’s hardware… who knows?

commbank goes mobile

netbank mobile homeI don’t know exactly when they released this, but the Commonwealth bank have just gone mobile with both a mobile and an iPhone app. I’ve just had a poke around the site on my nokia 6120 and it’s excellent. Does everything I need smoothly and easily – they deserve a big thumbs up. If there are problems, I haven’t spotted them yet.

Updated…

OK – in the office now, and have had a shot on the iPod Touch. There’s good and bad, first the bad.

A link on the commbank home page points to: Netbank via your mobile, which is an entirely flash driven page. If you have an iPhone/iPod, this is a complete dead end. There is no way around it. EPIC FAIL!

If you are lucky, you will realise that there is a direct route at: http://www.netbank.com.au/mobile/, which seems to be a ‘sniffer’ that redirects you to the appropriate mobile version. If you are on an iPod or iPhone, the site is excellent – smooth and seamless, however no more functionality than the mobile phone version, just the gloss you expect from an ‘i’ site.

a meal to remember

It’s evening now, but I’m still slightly stunned by the lunch I ate today.

We received an impromptu invitation to a first brithday ‘celebration’ lunch for Shanghai Ling’s new premises – it was a set menu, but we were told not to expect anything we’d seen on the menu before. Sure enough, there was a menu, but no-one took an order, so we wondered if that huge list of dishes was coming to our table… well, they did!

I can’t remember all of them, but this was a degustation menu with a difference:

  • Starting with a Melon, Dried Shrimp, Egg and Char Grilled Pork soup. Light, tasty and delicious… a perfect start to the meal.
  • Chinese toast: a slightly sweet dough lightly fried – it looked like a tiny loaf of bread.

Then there were the mains:

  • Scallops wrapped in Nori, served with a tangy light mornay sauce and tender flowerets of Broccoli and Cherry Tomatoes. This sounds like a weird melange of flavours, but it was sensational! My favourite.
  • Prawns marinated in LongJing tea. These looked so simple on the plate, no visible sauce at all, but the flavour explosion of the tea had everyone on the table exclaiming as they tasted them.
  • Steamed Chicken with Caramelised Onions: just a superb combination.
  • Mushrooms with Bok Choi: a blend of the fresh and crisp green with dark, saucy, sumptuous chinese mushrooms.
  • Mushroom caps stuffed with prawn and fish paste, smothered in a silky ginger sauce.
  • Quail egg and Chinese sausage wrapped in a rice noodle.
  • Braised pork spare rib. A favourite, but perfectly executed.
  • Blue Grenadier in a grape bunch shape. A crisp fried fish, this was probably my least favourite, but still good nonetheless.
  • Stir fried Amaranth with garlic. This is one fragrant vegetable!
  • Sea Cucumber, Mushroom and Char Grilled Pork in a claypot. A real suprise: the sauce accompanying this was amazing. Bear in mind what we had just eaten, this was the last dish, you’d expect it to be hard to make an impression… oh, how sublime!

Finished off with a fruit platter – phew!

Well, we’ve known Ling for years and enjoyed the food cooked by her husband Mi Kun Wen on many occasions, but this one will stand out for a while to come.

you meet aldi best people…

‘scuse the awful pun, but the other day, I was alerted (by treadly) to the fact that Aldi had an upcoming sale which included some cycling gear. I am a keen commuter cyclist – that is, I cycle to work – on the weekends, I do occasionally do a bit of urban cruising, but I am not a ‘serious’ cyclist in the lycra sense. The Aldi catalogue displayed a number of items which promised to make my cycling warmer and drier, so at 8:50am I was waiting outside the store with a dozen or so others to try and grab my bargain.

Take note of that – a dozen or so others – this was no ‘door buster’ crowd. Brunswick folk don’t go in for that stuff anyway and judging by the body language I wasn’t the only one for whom this was a novel experience. The doors opened and there was no rush or rudeness, just an orderly stroll to the aisle with the goods. Unfortunately, that was where the rudeness began…

I’m not familiar with this type of thing, but a couple who obviously were, had pushed their trolley on an angle into the short, narrow aisle – deliberately blocking access to others from one end, while they occupied the other end and simply grabbed armfuls of garments and loaded them into the trolley. Frustratingly, they didn’t seem that interested in the rack of garments I was after, but they blocked me out nonetheless. I was able to get what I wanted by reaching through the rack from the other side of the shelving, but plenty of other folk were frustrated.

Anyway – I got a few things – about $30 worth. They all seem to be quite good quality, each one of them would normally cost more than $30 alone, so I can’t complain about the value.

As I was walking out I passed the couple with the trolley – they’d finally finished their ‘frenzy’ and were taking stock. One said to the other: “What are these?”, to which the other replied “I dunno – you put them in!”. Yep, that’s right, they didn’t even know what they were getting off the racks! – all they were interested in was stacking as much into the trolley as they could – they were now picking over it to decide whether they really wanted it… just amazing. Not that there is any law against it – you might take a couple of sizes of trousers to the fitting rooms, just to make sure you get the one you want – these people were simply taking that process to it’s extreme.

No point lowering myself to their level and getting pushy about it, but maybe, if there’s a next time, and I find myself blocked by these two shopping guerillas… I might just pull out the phone and take a video, so you can all enjoy the fun!

Flame wars…

It has been a tragic week in Victoria. Tears well up and my throat tightens when I listen to, or read of the trauma that people have been through. It’s heartening to see so many people pull together in times of greatest need. If you haven’t already – do get over to the Red Cross website and make a donation.

Of course, even before the fires have even been extinguished and the cleanup begins, the recriminations have started. The finger will be pointed at government, authorities, even the CFA – there are no winners. It must be disheartening for those involved to see the energies wasted in bickering.

For totally unmatched levels of pathetic, warped, lunacy though, it’s hard to go past the proclamation by the leader of a fundamentalist church that this was the work of Satan, in retribution for Victoria’s passing of progressive abortion laws.

I don’t believe in god, but I do know many believers are good, well-meaning people. Pastor Nalliah and his views are another thing entirely. Curious that, as a vehement anti Islamist, his tirade brings to mind the recent publicity surrounding a radical Muslim cleric’s comments. Both are completely out of touch with society, sensibility and, needless to say, the basic teachings of their religions.

Most muslims backed quickly away from Samir Abu Hamza’s comments. Peter Costello and John Howard have, in the past been enthusiastic supporters of Pastor Nalliah – I see reports that Peter is disowning his former friend. I wonder what excuse Johnny would have come up with if we’d still cared about anything he said?