Personal, Technical & Opinionated
I love CSI, tape it when I can’t watch it, and love watching the reruns. A regular junky.
A friend of mine directed me to the following link - A 7-minute collection of Horatio Cane’s one liners. Some of them make me laugh - hysterical.
I wish I could be so cool!
I’m often acclaimed (and shamed) for my geekiness, and as ruler of my Geekdom, sometimes I will deign to share invaluable tips with noobs and other loyals subjects (kidding) 
I have to say it now, though - if you don’t have it already, install Firefox. I have had clients replace Internet Explorer with Firefox across their whole company and within days the incidents of virus, malware and spyware problems reduces DRASTICALLY (90-95%).
One of the best things about Firefox is that you can install add-ons. These are little programs that give additional functionality to your browser.
My top 3 favourites are:
My Productivity Find for this week is something that could potentially be abused and allow you to procrastinate too much, however hitmelater.com is like a snooze button for email. Get an email that you don’t want to deal with until Monday - that’s OK, just forward to monday@hitmelater.com. It will be sent to you on Monday. This may just work for me as my email is like a to do list, and at the moment it is at 100 active tasks, but not all of them are for today. hitmelater.com allows me to forward it to the email address for a specified day (or even for a number of hours - eg. 7@hitmelater.com will resend you the email in 7 hours.
I love the idea of rememberthemilk, however it just isn’t in my face enough like email is.
Hope you find this stuff useful.
My mother-in-law can turn anything into a fine meal, and we get spoiled every weekend when the kids are over. This is mee goreng (friend noodles) with some fried chicken.
Now when all my old friends reconnect with me on Facebook, I can now show them why I have put on weight compared to the stick figure I was back then.
Lately, due to work pressure, I have almost abandoned home cooking.
My latest recipe is:
1. Take S$3.50 from wallet (approx AU$2.70)
2. Walk downstairs and across courtyard approx 50 metres
3. Buy a bowl of noodles with green veges
4. Either eat it there, or take it home and give the prawns to the cats (cholesterol reducing move)
Well the last three days has seen me finishing work at 10pm or later, so can you blame me?
Dearest bought me an Eee PC to save my back and I have to admit this little machine is very good value. I have the 701, 4Gb Linux version, and it was a stea at $398. At 900+ grams it sure beats lugging around my Compaq (which is a great machine as well, just heavy).
I did find the Xandros operating system a little limiting, and the other desktop I have has Ubuntu on it, so I decided to go with the Ubuntu for the Eee PC instead. One of the key things was that the Asus installation of OpenOffice was an older version, and I needed v 2.4 for MS Office 2007 compatibility.
The picture shows what it looks like now:
This was not an easy thing to do, and it took me 3 tries to get it all as I like it, but here is what I did (all relevant to Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04, and get familiar with the command line - aka terminal):
Why did I choose Ubuntu?
For a few reasons - one was familiarity… I know the command line instructions on Ubuntu and looove apt-get. The Synaptic package manager drives me berko. Also becoz:
What I Might Do Moving Forward:
I Love My Eee PC!!
When you introduce a new animal into a home where there is already a cat (or two), there is always a period of ‘adjustment’ (aka destruction - where old and new animals fight for territory).
Our home is no different and the fur has been flying, accompanied by hissing and the ocasional piece of furniture falling over. The most notable thing in this period of adjustment is that Buster and Stamford have not been sleeping on the bed as usual, and that I don’t get woken up by them in the morning (they usually leave the bed at some point during the night, but return around 8am to stare at me until I wake up).
This morning, I was woken up by them… and I never thought I’d say this, but it was great that they were making me their sofa/mattress/recliner again! There is nothing like when a pet trusts you so much that they lie all over you and chill out with you.
I’ve missed you, boys!
Dropped DH off at the airport this morning (important business trip to KL)… bloody 7am flight. Yech, I used to hate those flights. You arrive in KL at 8.30am feeling all wrung out.
Anyway, I dropped Dearest off and came back to the following…
Most of the stuff on the floor belongs on top of the fridge (except for the magnets and bits of paper, which are from the front of the fridge - figure that out).
That was bad enough, and then I went into the toilet…
That bit of plastic piping on the floor connects the bottom of the sink to the drain (the way it’s often done here). How on earth did she dislodge that?
I think the boys were in on this one.
:/
Sometimes it’s difficult to find things to talk about with kids, especially being a step parent… I don’t get to see them every day, so when I’m with them and we’ve exhausted the usual ‘how’s-school-how’s-everything-else’ line of conversation, sometimes I’m lost as to what to talk about.
It’s not because I don’t want to talk more, but in the ages from 10-14 I’m finding that the eyes start to glaze over when I talk about adult stuff, or if I talk about things and I give my adult (aka boring) perspective. Or they clam up when I ask them questions about themselves… normal teen stuff.
So now I’ve discovered two things that seem to reach our pre-teens:
1. Board games. We have Star Wars Monopoly and Scrabble topping the list at the moment (although Chess goes in and out of favour as well), and conversations seem to happen easier when we’re focusing on a game instead of directly on our dear ones
2. Word games - particularly good if you’re in the car. Eg. List 10 ways that X is like Y (a dog is like a house, a glass of coke is like a day in school, etc), and ‘four things’ (eg. Four TV shows I watch over and over, Four people I talk on the phone to the most, Four colours I would paint my bedroom, etc). Everyone in the car (or in the vicinity) has to respond.
These often spark off conversations of their own, and helps them get to know us as people, not just us asking them a bunch of nosy questions
Lately we’ve been dealing with a lot financially and from a business perspective, and I’m trying to get rid of high interest debt and be more effective in a number of different places in my life so that I can really get started on a PhD.
I’ve been following a series on the Simple Mom blog called ‘How to be Disorganized and Unproductive‘ and Step number 3 has been ringing true with me both from a productive standpoint, as well as enlightening me on how frugality is something that is desirable.
Now this might seem a little odd coming from me. Mum, Dad - don’t laugh. If you click through to the article above the first picture looks something like my old bedroom (from childhood) and my study (from about six months ago). I’m a terrible mess and a bit of a hoarder. I love gadgets as well. Fortunately my budget doesn’t allow me to accumulate too many of them.
However I have started reducing the paper and possession mess for two reasons:
This is a series of before photos from our study:
Now it’s nowhere near perfect, but we have some decided improvements:
There is one corner that has a few piles of paper in it (which of course I’m not going to photograph til it’s cleared), but compared to the mess before, I’ve thrown so much out (and made use of a scanner to deal with the volumes of paper that I had on hand).
Feeling better already
There appears to be no end of interesting places where we find our new ‘visitor’. After almost throwing her out, twice, we may have actually found a use for her.
This morning I woke up without the kitten - she had wandered off somewhere (which was kind of a relief as you don’t get much sleep with a kitten pouncing on your toes during the night).
I got up and started going through my normal morning routine, and passed by the laundry section of our kitchen when a small meow drew my attention to the laundry basket.
[image cropped to cut out my bra - the one she was obviously playing with prior to the small good morning meow]
Now if she makes me coffee in the morning I’m definitely keeping her!
So after closing the door on an adorable kitten not only once, but twice, we arrived home about 10pm on Friday evening, and there was no kitten.
I looked over at DH and there was a funny look on his face.
I asked him “Are you disappointed?”
“A bit,” he replied.
“You go look around and if she’s close then let her in.”
We found her one floor up waiting outside their door. We think she got the floors mixed up. Everybody now… awwwwww (cute).
That was Friday evening.
This was on Sunday:
That’s the back of DH’s legs. She’ll sleep anywhere.
Does anyone want an adorable kitten that loves to cuddle up in your lap (or anywhere on you, for that matter)? She needs a good home, before she becomes a permanent addition to ours.
We’ll even have her neutered for you.
About MeI'm an Australian Lady (ozlady) who has many interests, which at some point I will probably refer to in this blog. I crashed my blog a couple of months ago, and have been organising and re-building it ever since. Hopefully this will be the final revision! More |
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