Yesterday I re-read my last blog post - the one written with half a bottle of white wine running through my veins - and I learned something about myself: my spelling and grammar go to shite when I'm drunk.

For the spelling, I don't know why it should be; there's a decent check-as-you-type spell-checker in my browser from which I write these posts that underlines every misspelled or suspicious word with squiggly red lines that grasp my attention more effectively than any sexually-suggestive advertisements on TV (or it seems any word not part of popular culture since before 2003 - case-in-point: in the paragraph above, the word 'blog' is underlined in red).

As for the grammar: no Firefox extension as yet exists for giving assistance to my inner grammar nazi, so I'm left to rely on my own proof-reading ability which apparently also takes a back seat when the communicative hemisphere of my brain is fuelled by fermented grapes instead of reason and H2O.

So as I was reading what I vaguely remember writing the other day, I laughed, I cried, I cringed, and then I cried some more. I was tempted more than once to hit the Edit button on that post, but I thought it best that I leave it as is, thus turning that post into a lesson for my present and future selves of what had transpired here.

Bah, drunk again. I don't mean to make this some sort of running theme of posting blogs while I'm inebriated, but at the moment it feels like the best ideas are coming to me when I'm not thinking straight.

Once again, the reason for my slight intoxication is because there's some leftover wines at my place. No, a friend didn't leave it behind like last time - I finished that one off pretty quickly. This time, I bought this one myself. Why? Because I was told white wine was an ingredient in a good pasta sauce htat I oh so enjoyed.

If you haven't already figured-out from my food-related blog posts, I strive to make a lot of Italian dishes because I like Italian food. Oh 'like' is too weak a word for it: I've been to the same Italian restaurant for my birthday since my 21st, and when I was making travel plans for Melbourne for a friend's wedding and was told about Lygon St - a street lined with restaurants serving all manner of Mediterranean cuisine - I almost kissed my travel agent right then and there (oh nevermind that Lygon St is now in the news because of all those gang killings; that can all happen in the background while I'm chowing-down on some epic gnocchi dish for all I care).

Nom

Much like with my documenting of Pizza 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2, I'm trying to do the same thing now with a white pasta sauce: create something which contains all the parts I love most about pastas based on white sauces. With Pizza 1.x, it was easy to list my goals because all of the things were based on very tangible parts With the pasta however, it's all a matter of taste.

I did however come across a pasta dish which approximated what I was after when I was at one of my favourite cafes one Friday lunch time, and so I asked one of the staff if they could maybe ask the chef to share with me the recipe so I could make something like that myself. She came back and relayed the words of the chef back to me: "...it's the same as your usual cream-and-bacon sauce, but with some white wine added."

Now I should've asked WHICH white wine they used, but because I'm not a wine connoisseur (holy crap I spelled that right while my head is swaying side-to-sode out of my rational control and in time to the music playing right now) and to my unsophisticated palette all white wine tastes like all other white wine and all red wine tastes like all other red wine - yet I can tell the difference between regular Coke, Diet Coke, and Coke Zero... go figure - because the next time I went shopping I was planted in the middle of the wine section surrounded by more bottles of wine than there are stars in the sky, and without a damn clue as to which one to buy. So I picked one and hoped for the best.

I didn't hope hard enough.

The next time I tried my pasta sauce, I added the wine and, while it did add that little something that my normal sauces had been missing, it didn't add the right flavour, so now I'm stuck with this bottle of wine which I am now drinking down like water (and if my guitar buddy read that part right now she'd tell me off because she's trying to get me to slow-down my drinking since I still drink anything, alcohol included, like I do my Coke). I should really throw it out of just give it to somebody else who might actually enjoy it more than I, but there's another overriding part of myself that really hates being wasteful and throwing things out. So, down the gullet instead of down the bin it goes.

I don't know where it came from, but I really hate throwing things out or being wasteful. Back at my family's house my dad keeps a compost that helps fuel the garden he keeps in the back yard - I really like the idea of having our food scraps being put to good use. Also, they participate in the city's recycling program. The apartment building I'm in however, doesn't even participate in the recycling program, so every time I throw a piece of recyclable paper/plastic/glass into the massive bin at the side of the building I feel like I might as well eat a new-born baby for all the good I'm doing the world. So you know what I do to absolve my soul? I actually save-up my paper (all my utility companies still love sending me paper bills no matter how many times I click the 'e-mail me my bill' option on their websites) and when the pile is large enough, put it in my bag and TAKE IT TO WORK where they have a some semblence of a recycling program.

(I haven't even verified if the sort of recycling my work does is actually good, or if all it does is collate our various piles of waste into neat bundles of similar material and then ship it off to some overseas developing nation's slum where they drop it on unsuspecting children. If that's the case, then I might as well just throw the rubbish out and eat a new-born baby to spare the transport company all those wasted travel miles - cut-out the middle man.)

Get in my belly, I'm a terrible person

I did come to some sort of conclusion in my white pasta sauce endeavours recently, and I made a variation of that recipe (one that didn't include the wine which is why I still have so much of it to waste on myself) for my family when I stayed with them for dinner last weekend. Hell the meal even included ciabatta bread with pesto on the side. It was the most Italian my family could ever get and I swear I was peeing olive oil the following morning.

(apologies if I don't seem my usual self through my prose or writing style or whatever it is that manages to reach through my blog posts and into your heads - I'm a bit tipsy right now. I need to stop letting people leave unfinished bottles of wine at my apartment for me to finish by myself)

Something I've written about before, although only in story e-mails, are the security keypads at my work. Using these keypads, there's a sensor in it somewhere that used to detect the presence of these company-issued security tags to let only authorized personnel enter a work area. What I loved about these things is that, when combined with the tag that I wore at waist height, I could feign all sorts of silly acts in my attempts to unlock the keypad. Acts like: pretending to rub my ass right up to the keypad when I wore the tag on a belt buckle closer to my back, or pretending to thrust my crotch at the keypad when I wore the tag on a belt buckle closer to my front - the possibilities were endless!

I only ever did these in-front of one workmate (who has since left) just because it was the sort of thing he'd do too.

Now, those last paragraphs were all in past tense because, as of last week, they changed the security system.

(no, the keypad at work didn't look anything like this, but I couldn't find any 'wagging ass at keypad' pictures)

The system is much like before: something you carry with you that, when put into proximity with these new sensors, will let you into areas of the building you are authorized to enter. The problem with the new sensors is that they are installed significantly above waist height. No, they're not way up at shoulder level or anything as high as that, but they're just high enough that I can't really get any rude part of me up to meet it without jumping. I only need to jump a little bit, but even a 1 centimetre rise above the ground is more effort than I'm willing to make for a small joke, thus my fun is ruined.

I know I said in my last post that I'd try not to let work get to me down/stressed as quickly as it used to, but when they start taking away the 'perks' of my job, it gets kinda hard to maintain my positive attitude.

2 days after my return from the ski holiday, my first day back at work today, and I'm surprised how easy it is to slip back into my old routine: I went to work buying breakfast from Wholly Bagels on the way since I hadn't re-stocked my pantry/fridge/freezer yet (something I usually do on a Friday when waking-up late), I cleared-out a billion e-mails sitting in my inbox (something I usually do on a Monday to start my week clean), I went to the library at lunch time and got too many books again, and when I had finally cleared-out my backlog of e-mail love I went straight into programming like I hadn't left at all.

Sure, there were changes - new people brought into the team at work, my apartment mailbox filled with mail not addressed to me, and there was a note from the property inspector thanking me for leaving my apartment in such a nice clean state - but it's like there was a gap in the city just waiting for me to come back and fill it in.

I know, I've only been gone a week (or 7 working days if you count the Friday/Monday I took off before/after the ski week) so I can't really expect a lot to happen in that time, but having to wake-up in the morning in what was effectively 5 different beds over one-and-a-bit weeks and then coming back all relaxed (albeit sore - I was limping around the city today) made me look at everything a little bit differently as I walked to work this morning.

I guess what I'm experiencing is a little bit of disappointment; although the city had let me go to recharge my batteries, the city itself didn't recharge one iota. It isn't helped by the fact that the weather is still exactly the same as I had left it: grey, gloomy, as wet as a fish and as inviting as putting your hand on a hot element. And while I wore a bit of a 'ahh, I've just been on vacation' smile, it only made me notice the lack of smiles on the faces of others as I walked by.

So while the city may have left an opening for me to return to, it isn't so much a gap made by open arms as it is a gap left by grabbing-hands as it tries to fit this cog back into the machine. But unlike the feeling of being a rusty gear when I left for my vacation, I've returned a well-oiled cog.

The daily grind will get to me again - it always does - but not for a while; I'm going to make sure of that.

It's that time of year again - mid-winter and the school holidays for primary/secondary students have just ended meaning less people to crowd the mountain - time for another ski week! :D

Just like mentioned in last year's blog I set my out-of-office reply to something not-entirely professional (can't remember the exact words, but it had something like "...I'll revel in your e-mail love when I return" in it.), but unlike last year's blog I'll have a bit more skiing practice under my belt when I hit the slopes from Monday (provided the weather is good). I really enjoyed last year's ski trip, and I hope to repeat that wonderful time I had with this year's one.

What I don't want a repeat of however:

• Having the bus I took to get there hit a cow on the way up (we had to stop for another bus to come get us while we sat there in the dark with a blood-spattered and smashed bus. Sure the cow was much worse for wear (it died) but it was an inconvenience I think the passengers, the driver, and the cow could have done without)
• breaking my tailbone when I was learning to snowboard and not knowing it was broken for a month after coming back from the trip

For my friends and family, I'll do like I did last year and post daily injury stats to Twitter/Facebook. That way they'll know whether to have an ambulance waiting for me when I return.

I was thinking that I'd continue the last blog post's theme by saying that not a lot has happened in the 'life' part of my currently-over-worked existence. The instant I thought that and started typing it out on my keyboard, I realized how false that was. A lot has actually happened. Is it all blog-worthy? Maybe, maybe not. Then why aren't you blogging about it? I hear some part of me asking myself.

For me, it's that time in this website's never-ending life cycle when I feel that the code/system running 'the MooCow' needs an update. It happens maybe every 18 months, the feeling that the site just needs some sort of modernization, and so I start dedicating my spare time towards the effort.

The last time this happened was the beginning of 2009 where I updated the look of the site from this, to what you see now. So that took about 2 months and was mainly a visual overhaul. This time it'll be a system/back-end overhaul, meaning you dear blog reader won't see any difference at all.

Once this is over it'll be, 'spot all 0 differences'

The motivator for the 2009 visual overhaul was that the look of the site was starting to feel a bit dated since it was also then that I really started to wade my way into the web design world and expose myself to a lot of stunning and beautiful-looking websites created by all those web designer types. As somebody who wanted to be a part of that world, it pushed me to update the look of the site, and so I did.

And the motivator for my current system overhaul? I just feel I've learned a lot more and improved as a programmer since the last system overhaul. So, in my constant struggle to feel relevant in the ever-shifting IT software development landscape and to keep my own skills sharp with some established technologies and practices that I don't already use in my job, I kicked the 2010 system overhaul about a month ago.

It's also these times that I find myself asking why I don't just pick some sort of CMS or blogging platform (eg: Wordpress), install that, and never have to worry about it again. Then I remember: I'm a programmer. We re-invent the wheel and fix things that aren't broken every day because it's how we learn, it's what we enjoy doing, and it's the only way the world is going to end-up with better wheels - lord knows the software industry could do with some better wheels.

I'm pretty much consumed with work at the moment: stories that I can bring to a social situation have dropped significantly - as evidenced by my plummeting blogging rate from roughly 1-post-per-week to some number that's lower than the morale of a Foxconn factory worker - and, barring that one dream in my last blog post where a wonderful Scottish accent turned into harsh pirate yarn, my most recent dreams have actually all been about work.

You know what's terrible about work dreams? The same thing that's terrible about those homework dreams you sometimes get during the high school and university years: you wake-up and, some time during the day, realize that your dream about completing the most awesome assignment that any teacher in the history of teachers is ever going to see - such that they will give you medals, prize money, and (for the guys, when your teacher happens to be hot, young, and female) offers to have your babies - never happened.

It's a terrible feeling of disappointment, and I felt that just 2 weeks ago when I had a dream I completed all my tasks in the most mind-blowing manner, then when I got to work and sat-down at my desk for the first time that morning, realized that none of it ever happened.

I sighed audibly, and nobody even looked my way.

The work I'm doing at the moment is the first big new-development project I have ever been on since joining this company straight out of university almost 5 years ago. Being the rookie when I came into work, I was always given the not-so-glamorous job of bug-fixing existing systems and attempting to undo messes made by the developers who came before me a long time ago. The worst cases were when the code was developed by a contractor or by somebody who obviously didn't care which college-grad-n00bie would be looking at their code in the future and submitting the detritus that they encountered to websites like TheDailyWTF.

It wasn't terrible work: I learned a lot, and the years since then have given me enough experience and grounding in my own programming habits to realize that I wouldn't have trusted that younger version of me to work on anything so important as what I am working on now. But it was very cushy work: never stressful, I always had spare time for my own projects and thoughts, and work never pervaded the life I lead after hours.

Now that's all changed.

One of the things I'm struggling with right now is JSF. (Here's where this post starts to get a bit techy)

For the uninitiated, JSF is one of many many frameworks out there whose objectives are, amongst other things, to make life easier for developers (like myself), particularly in creating very large Java web-based systems. That's the objective of pretty much any framework: to make software development easier by giving you a foundation to start with.

Somewhere along the way though, the creators of JSF omitted the 'make things easier' part from their objectives and instead created something that's more difficult to work with than Facebook's privacy settings. Not only that, but JSF creates completely new and unique problems that weren't there before. It's like I was told to dig a trench... and they gave me chopsticks. I would've preferred a spoon but JSF is supposed to be a better spoon, so not only am I now digging a trench with the wrong tool, but it's also giving me hand cramps.

Note to the people behind JSF: you can't program like this

The thing it's worst at, and my main issue with JSF, is creating web pages. You'd think for a technology that's supposed to be used for web development, it'd make the serving of web pages to a person's browser one of the things it'd be best at, but no! Instead, they created some ridiculous abstraction over (X)HTML components and ask you to use their own components which will generate HTML for you.

As an aside: one of the things I had been getting into during my spare time was web design and development best practices: clean HTML pages, proper uses of HTML markup, all the tricks of CSS, SEO, and using the powers of JavaScript only for good. I do my best to apply all these things to my own website, and while I'm no expert at web design, I can spot questionable practices when I see them.

I remember the first time I saw the HTML that came out of one of the JSF pages at work: the web designer in me died a little, and a threw-up a bit in my mouth.

To use a line from another JSF-bashing blog post, it generated HTML like it was 1999: tables, more tables, nested tables, and 1px images to space content.

Just the feeling that I've been put into a time machine and sent back to when web development was, to be honest, pretty shit, does not give me confidence in JSF at all.

Coding like it's 1999...

So in short, I'm getting a bit stressed about work, deadlines are looming while the amount I've been tasked with just keeps growing, and it's totally not helping when the technology we're using to create this system is giving me persistent headaches. (I actually went to the pharmacy last Thursday and bought a pack of 100 tablets of paracetamol. They normally only sell them in packs of 20. I went for the bulk deal. Thanks a lot JSF.)

While not my exact words, I pretty much said the title of this blog post to somebody yesterday.

The day before, that somebody and I were talking over Facebook chat about food, lots of it, and so the dream I had that night was basically a rerun of our conversation. However, instead of the 2 of us sitting behind our respective computers using the internet to talk to one another, we were sitting at a table together eating all of the food that we were talking about. I relayed these details to her the next time I caught her on Facebook chat, and her response was: "That's scary Em".

Reflecting on that line, I have a bit of trouble trying to understand what was so scary about my dream; it's not as if we were eating in the dark while a serial killer was lurking in the shadows. The thing is, this isn't the first time I've got that reaction out of people when telling them about the dreams I have.

I can trawl through some of my old e-mails from work and find one where I told a friend she was in dream of mine where she found herself lost in some weird dimension and had to be rescued by a crew that consisted of her husband, myself, and the rappers from what I believe were 50 Cent's G-Unit. Her reaction: she thought it was scary. (Re-reading that paragraph, I think that one qualifies as scary in the 'horror' sense of the word.)

I can also remember telling one of my mates about a dream of mine he was in (can't remember the dream unfortunately) to which he responded by telling me that that's pretty scary, before telling my my head's all fucked-up.

Dreamscape... whoa what the hell?

Thinking about those and other incidents, I'm not really sure what constitutes the 'scary' part of my dreams. Is it scary in the uncanny sense that I can recall my dreams or put people I know into such strange scenarios, or is it scary in the sense that I should be admitted into a mental hospital for what my mind is capable of coming-up with when I'm asleep?

Seeing as my dreams are often influenced by the things in my day I'm not too surprised to find my friends or others who make up my day in them. I've also always had a pretty good imagination, and after hanging-out with anybody long enough I can imagine them in any situation with almost any expression or emotion (I once had a school friend cry in my dream even though I had never seen them cry before). I mean, we all have that ability where, when we read some words from someone (either in a text or an e-mail), we put their voice to the words and imagine it as if they were reading to us. I'd like to think my dreams are just an extension of this ability.

This ability of mine does seem to fall short in one department however: Scottish accents.

I've always had trouble replicating the voices of Scottish actors/actresses in my head. This is particularly annoying when there's all those great Sean Connery movies and there's Scotty from Star Trek with all those great lines. I fail in this department because, when trying to recall their voices, they always end-up sounding more like pirates.

That's right. Pirates.

What's even worse is that now I've made a Scottish friend (previously dubbed 'laundry lass') whom I e-mail more often than I actually see in-person, and my imagination always makes their reading-to-me voice devolve into pirate 'arrs' and 'yarrs'. They even featured in a dream of mine several weeks ago; their voice, after a while, became too hilarious in my own dream that it caused me to wake-up in a fit of laughter.

Avast!

So much for nightmares forcing a person awake to escape a frightening situation; here's me being forced awake to escape a terribly imagined accent.

Maybe I am a scary individual after all.

Have you ever rung those toll-free phone numbers that food companies put somewhere on the packaging of their products so you can ask questions / give feedback / make complaints? Well, for the first time in my life, I actually rung one of those today: I rang Nestle/Maggi to find-out what happened to their Devilled Sausages Mix.

Devilled sausages have been a mainstay of the family dinner table for as long as I can remember: a meal enjoyed by all with its sweet sauce and soft apple slices, and a meal which I've taken to cooking for myself when I'm out of ideas yet still want to feel good about putting a little effort into preparing my own dinner. Using the sachets provided by Maggi (and yes, that specific brand after some time spent trying-out the others and not liking them so much), my family, and now I, have been able to churn-out a delicious meal within a short time and with almost minimal effort.

(OK, that last paragraph reads like something one of those advertising personalities that gives you meal ideas during the ads just before dinner time would say)

I thought I'd make devilled sausages for myself some weeks ago when I noticed some flavoured sausages at the back of my freezer that hadn't been touched for a looong time (let's just say the word 'months' is adequate to describe it; thank God for the refrigeration/freezing process!). Looking to the pantry, I couldn't find any devilled sausage mix, so added it to my shopping list and resolved to buy a few packets of the stuff the next day.

There wasn't any at the grocery either, and all I succeeded in doing was spending countless minutes standing like a statue before the section of the isle dedicated to all of those just-add-hot-water meals and sauces while I looked for something that just wasn't there. A trip to a larger grocery in the suburbs when I spent the next weekend with my family also proved fruitless, and when I relayed my story to my mum, we both started to worry that Maggi had discontinued the product.

Another pass at the local grocery gave me the same results, so I finally decided to ring-up the company and find-out what happened to one of my favourite meals:

"Unfortunately, the site we use to check stock availability is down at the moment, but I can ring-around, find-out if any stores in your area still have some." said the lady on the phone.
"OK, thanks." I replied.
"But don't worry, it hasn't been discontinued because it's one of our most popular products." she assured me.

I left my details with her and hoped for some good news.

Good news came in the form of a phone call the moment I returned to my desk after lunch.

"Hello." I said, answering the phone.
"Hi, is this Emanuel?" said the lady - the same Nestle/Maggi customer services lady who helped me earlier - on the line.
"Yup, that's me."
"Hi. I still can't check stock as the system is still down, but I checked our staff shop and we have some there which I can send to you to help you out in the meantime."

!!! I was excited! I gave her my address, thanked her at least twice, and put down the phone thinking ohmigod they're gonna send me free stuff!!!

I feel almost silly being so happy to receive a few packets of what is essentially powdered ingredients, but it's free stuff, and it's free stuff that I WANT. After all those weeks of trying to find this particular combination of powdered ingredients, and given my recent disappointments, it feels good to end on a high note for once.

I believe the sound I should be making at this very moment is *squee* :)

(Taking a short break from all those zombie book posts as of late, but I promise it won't be a long break; I still have plenty to say. Also, this is a continuation of Pizza 1.1 and Pizza 1.0.)

Holy smokes Batman! I've finally done it!

After Pizza 1.1, the only improvement I wanted to make was to bring-out more of the cheese flavour in the cheese-stuffed-crust (previously it was overwhelmed by the taste of the herb-infused base which was too thick around the crust), and with Pizza 1.2, which I made over this weekend, that cheese flavour really came out to play.

The first thing I did different this time was to make the bread around the crust thinner; that was easy since all I had to do was roll-out the edges until you could almost feed it to your printer. The next thing I did was a suggestion from amazing-baking girl: add to the mozzarella that would go into the crust, a more aromatic cheese like parmesan since mozzarella by itself is typically quite plain in taste.

Now, if you've been following the evolution of this experimental pizza from Pizza 1.0 up to now, this whole thing is turning-out to be less about making pizza and more of an exercise in buying cheese! I already use cheddar as a base for the toppings since it's the jack-of-all-trades cheese that I keep in the fridge for everything from toasted sandwiches to nachos. With Pizza 1.1 I added mozzarella to my arsenal since it has that elastic texture that I normally associate with cheesey-crust pizzas. With this latest incarnation, I went and bought a block of parmesan.

So that's 3 different cheeses, each of them about the same price for an increasingly smaller amount of cheese: the cheddar I get in 500g/1kg blocks, the mozarella came in a roughly 250g 'block' (it's more of a quantum sponge though, given its uncanny ability to change shape when you pick it up), and as for the parmesan, I don't even know how little of it I got, but it's roughly the same size/weight as my mp3 player which is neither large nor heavy.

This much cheese

Regardless, I made the pizza with all of those little improvements.

I scaled most of the recipe down this time so I could use the smaller circular pan. I say 'most' because I made the rookie mistake of not reducing the amount of flour I use in the base to match... whoops. When I placed the base in the pan and removed the excess (which I normally use to make something resembling a snow man), I found I had enough of it to give Pizza 1.2 a little brother: a small Hawaiian pizza.

"Say hello to my little friend!"

Both those pizzas went into the oven. When I checked-up on them the first time, the opening of the oven released that wonderful pizza smell that lingered in my apartment (since the initial chills indicative of the coming winter mean I keep many of my windows closed) and stuck to my clothes. They also fogged-up my glasses which I had on at the time, causing temporary blindness and swearing.

After more intermittent checking-up on the pizza and more loss of sight and shouting expletives at things I couldn't see, I finally got to sit-down and eat.

The result: everything I hoped for.

My brother was able to eat the leftovers when he came by later that night. He left the following comment to my latest pizza-related tweet / Facebook status:

This was a triumph.
I'm making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS.

It's hard to overstate my satisfaction :)

A couple of days after my last post in which I had a go at the world for inundating all of our favourite media with zombies in the hopes that a sprinkling of the undead would bring old ideas back to life, I got an e-mail from the author of one of the books I mentioned.

I was surprised! I mean, it's usually only friends or family who e-mail me after I write something, or post a quick comment when the post shows-up on my Facebook wall; I've never had anybody who I didn't know directly e-mail or comment on my stuff, let alone the author of a book I mentioned, who lives on the other side of the freaking world!

I was very surprised! And very excited! :D

Contrary to the belief of my friends who, upon learning about this piece of news through my tweet, suspected that I was being sued for some sort of illegality (if I got an e-mail from the publisher then maybe I'd be worried rather than excited. I'd still be surprised though), the e-mail was a very friendly one in which the author, Paul Freeman, was differentiating his work, Robin Hood and Friar Tuck: Zombie Killers - A Canterbury Tale, from the myriad of zombie/monster fiction out there.

Here's what he wrote:

Hi Emanuel

I'm the author of 'Robin Hood and Friar Tuck: Zombie Killers - A Canterbury Tale by Paul A. Freeman', and although your blog entry 'Too Many Zombies' may hold some truth, I'd like to be able to put my own book into context.

First and foremost, my novella is a Canterbury Tale, 'The Monk's Second Tale' to be exact, and is part of a much wider 'Canterbury Tales' project. So far I've written eight 'new' Canterbury Tales, all in different genres.

When Coscom Entertainment (a publisher of zombie fiction) asked me to write a narrative poem novella for them on the strength of a contemporary piece of narrative zombie poetry they published, I jumped at the chance. Chaucer never wrote about Robin Hood, so I decided to add this hero to my medieval-based zombie Tale.

Furthermore, unlike many of the monster mash-up novels, mine is not based on an already published book. The story of Robin Hood comes from a series of legend fragments, some of which I've incorporated into my narrative poem.

Anyhow, if any of your blog readers are interested, below is the link to my rather rudimentary website which explains my Canterbury Tales project, and a link to my book on my publisher's website - the Amazon and DrivethroughHorror links have a search inside facility of 4 and 6 pages respectively.

"I bid you now adieu and hope you'll speed
To Amazon and give my book a read."

Paul A. Freeman

---
Paul's website, 'Chaucerian inspirations':
http://paulfreeman.weebly.com/

Robin Hood and Friar Tuck: Zombie Killers - A Canterbury Tale:
Coscom (includes links to eBook versions), Amazon, Barnes & Noble

---
I'll admit: I had to Google 'chaucer' (which then led me to the original Canterbury Tales) to find-out who and what Paul was talking about. Once I found Chaucer's impressive resume though, I was surprised that I was never taught about him at school.

Taking a look at the book on Amazon, it's been received pretty favourably: 4 5-star reviews, and 1 1-star review (there's always one). Then again, the 1-star review talked about how it wasn't like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Given my opinion of Pride (I'm almost at the end of it now, and my indifference still holds), that review actually works in the book's favour.

Continuing again on the subject of books, but back to the one about zombies, I made the judgement that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was lacking in zombies. In my own mind I extended this opinion to the genre as a whole - the 'insert-zombies-here' genre - but I may have jumped the gun on that one. You see, while waiting for the doors to Kick-Ass to open (an awesome movie by the way; everyone who meets the age requirement should go see it), I stumbled across this while perusing the shelves at the nearby Whitcoulls:

Really?

If the image isn't clear enough for you to see, the title of that book is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls. Reading the blurb on the book reveals that it is a prequel to the events of the original parody, set several years before, when the zombie plague that seems to have taken hold of English society was just starting.

When I saw that book, I started to think that the publishers were really milking the whole idea - much like how the market seems to be flooded with vampire romance books a la the Twilight series. But then when I got home and tried to find the title on Amazon, I found that the Jane Austen + monsters 'genre' was far from alone.

The search results listed a book which re-wrote the Robin Hood tale to have him and Friar Tuck be zombie killers, another book gave Huckleberry Finn a zombie partner-in-crime, Jane Austen's Mansfield Park was given a good dose of mummies, and The Wizard of Oz became The Undead World of Oz.

Without having to be tied-down to any original text, Dawn has the potential to be funnier for me than Pride, but as soon as I saw those search results, I was hit with zombie fatigue.

I'm tired of everyone trying to insert zombies into things to try make a quick buck or extend the life of some long-dead idea. Adding the undead to something doesn't necessarily make it more alive! Sure I've only read 1 'insert-zombies-here' book, but the gamer side of me can give you a laundry list of zombie titles that I really don't think are worth the megabytes of storage on your disk drive or the DVDs they are printed on.

My pet peeve, Call of Duty: World at War, has Nazi zombies in them... NAZI ZOMBIES! It's bad enough that developers have been churning out WWII games longer than WWII itself has lasted, but then to insert zombies into them to get that little bit of post-mortem movement from a dead horse that's already been beaten more times than a drum is a kind of necromancy that should be as illegal as necrophilia.

On that note, if by some crazy circumstances the real zombie plague just happens to start because somebody was screwing over that horse (or any other idea-corpse) too hard because they already inserted zombies into everything, then they deserve to have their brains eaten-out by that exact same corpse when it turns into a zombie.

There'd be a certain irony to that.

Update: From the blog of sci-fi author, John Scalzi:

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Graphic Novel, by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith, adapted by Tony Lee, Illustrated by Cliff Richards (Del Rey)

Really? I mean, come on, now, guys. Really? Also: Really? Out May 4.

REALLY?!?!?

Continuing the story of my acquisition of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, it should be noted that I almost didn't buy those books. I was maybe 10 steps away from walking out of Borders without having made any purchase when my wandering eye just happened to catch Pride sitting on the table of special deal titles. I was really glad when I managed to find it, and Sense on that same table, that my frustration with Borders, and book stores / retail in general, didn't bubble-up to the surface where I could turn it into blog material.

Just this lunch time though, when I was wandering once again through Borders during one of my routine do-you-guys-have-this-book sessions, those frustrations resurfaced and I found myself asking: why aren't book stores organized like libraries?

The Dewey Decimal System: it works bitches!

I raised the question to my family, who quickly responded that it's because of the 'store' part of book store, and that retail stores make their money by making things as difficult as possible for their customers.

By 'difficult', I don't mean laying bear traps on the floor and having a swarm of angry bees attack you as you look around. No, stores make things difficult through their layouts which are planned in such a way that there is as much crap between the entrance and the item that you seek, and that the distance between those 2 is just long enough that it's right before the point in which you start tearing-out your hair in frustration before going home or going to a competitor's store where you'll likely subject yourself to the same frustrations, except against a different backdrop.

For browsing type shoppers, they're probably fine with this, but for hit-and-run type shoppers like myself who won't even enter a store unless there's something in there that I'm 105% looking to buy, this annoys me to no end. I mean, at the library, I can search through their catalogue ONLINE, find the EXACT title I'm looking for, and have their system tell me if it's available. If it is, I can go to the library and easily FIND the title in their building. This is all done for FREE.

By comparison, Borders' catalogue is only available to in-store shoppers, so I HAVE to go to their store. Then when I do a search, I'm presented with A METRIC CRAP-TONNE OF INEXACT MATCHES and the results tell me if the items I don't care about are in stock or not. If the item I'm looking for just happens to be in that list of results and it is available, I try look for it myself. As is often the case, a title can be found in SEVERAL DIFFERENT PLACES depending on whether or not it's on special. Even then I often find myself asking one of the store assistants if they can locate what their system says should exist somewhere on the shelves, and if they didn't get the memo that the title went on sale that very morning and so all copies of it were heaped amongst several non-related-but-also-on-special titles of the bargain tables, then I might as well have just asked a donkey if it could point me in the direction of Alaska. At the end of this complicated dance, I have to PAY for the book.

I sincerely hope that a large chunk of that money goes towards the author, because I came there to pay for the content of the book, not the annoying experience of having to find it in a store laid-out so inefficiently that it felt like I was in a labyrinth and feared running into a minotaur (or David Bowie).

You know what was terrible about the whole Pride and Sense purchase? I was leaving the store, not just because I couldn't find those books on the shelves, but because I couldn't find those books on the shelves AFTER their catalogue system told me that neither were in stock...

Fuck you Borders; you've killed my inner child.

With the gift of books from my family last Christmas, I've started thinking of building-up a book collection like proper fans of books do. You know: get a bookshelf, fill it with books you've actually bought. As opposed to what is, and has been, my habit of the last several years of going to the library and reading everything for free.

So a few weeks ago I went to Borders and made my most recent (and only, if you exclude text books or gifts for other people) purchase of books: the 2 books from the Jane Austen + monsters series thus far: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.

Matches made in heaven?

Firstly, I chose these books because it was just a few days before when I was discussing with laundry lass and her friends about this series in particular. I was able to tell the story of how I was introduced to these by an audio book of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies which was played during my New Years holiday when my mates and I were sitting under the sun: we lol'd while we lolled.

Secondly, I bought the books during a sale at Borders because when you go from getting your books for free (or a few dollars on the occasions that I had to reserve items or get them ordered in) to having to pay, ANY dollar amount above $10 per book for me feels like waaaay too much to pay for all those pieces of paper. Feeling like I do about book prices, maybe I should've bought an e-reader instead... if only they sold the good ones in New Zealand.

Anyway, I've been slowly reading through Pride these last couple of days, and while the twist of having the story set during some zombie plague is definitely interesting, the impression I'm getting so far is that the zombies feel less like a clever plot device and more like a small recurring joke weaved into the boring bits of the story.

I mean, zombies are mostly encountered during what I imagine in the original novel as uneventful trips between towns/estates, and/or are only given a few paragraphs in which they appear. Within those paragraphs the zombies quickly get dispatched by our heroine Miss Bennett, and then the story continues as if nothing happened.

Maybe it's just like this in the part I'm currently up to, somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 the way through the book, and I'm starting to think, Dammit, I'm not reading a zombie book, I'm reading Pride and Prejudice! The bastards have managed to get me to read Jane Austen!

If the publisher's ploy all along was to get someone like me to read Jane Austen, then kudos to them for succeeding, and a curse on them for their trickery.

I'll stick with it through to the end (I did buy it after all) and hope that the zombie thing really picks up and that it becomes more integral to the plot.

So it's the same "classic regency romance" with the addition of zombies. My only complaint: needs more zombies.

I said to expect an influx of blog posts last week. By 'influx', I did mean more than just the 2 posts that followed, but the break between was with good reason: I attended my friends' (both bride and groom are long-time friends, so is that the right apostrophe placement?) wedding over the weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it. Heck, I was even asked to share in reading a cute poem from Winnie the Pooh during the ceremony!

So while I was there, listening to the lines that bride and groom recited to each other about affirmations of their love to last until the end of time, or until a meteor strikes the Earth and exterminates all human life, I began to notice that my cheeks started tingling, and then aching. Ow, I thought, what's going on? It didn't take me long to realize that my cheeks were aching because I was smiling.

I'm not one of those stone-faced never-smiles types, but having my cheeks hurt because I'm smiling too much isn't an everyday thing for me. I did recognize the feeling though, and thought back to the other times that this happened:

• a wedding in Feb 2004
• a wedding in Feb 2008
• another wedding in Feb 2008

A very visible pattern starts to emerge.

So while some people cry at weddings, I just smile a lot more than usual; so much it hurts.

So while the rest of the country was out enjoying their holiday by being far away from their places of residence and causing traffic congestion on all the major highways, I spent Easter at home with family where we went out to watch Clash of the Titans and then order pizza for dinner. OK, that's pretty average-sounding, but our family doesn't watch movies together very often nowadays so the movie was a plus for us (we actually wanted to watch The Hurt Locker but it isn't in NZ cinemas yet. Clash made for a good substitute and we were thoroughly entertained by it).

On top of those activities, I used an afternoon to roll an egg down a hill.

Despite the Wikipedia article claiming the world-wide appeal of the tradition, I had never heard of egg rolling until about 2 weeks before Easter.

I was having lunch with a friend (the one who inspired me to write the Dirty Laundry story e-mail) and when we got to talking about what we were gonna do for Easter, she mentioned her home-country (Scotland) tradition of egg rolling. I responded with an inquiring look and the words "Egg rolling?!?" in a high pitch voice that you'd more likely find in a pre-teen child. She answered with basically what it says in the History section of the Wikipedia Egg Rolling article - that it was a symbol of the rolling away of the rock from Jesus's tomb - adding that it drew strange looks from her New Zealand friends when she did it last year.

Me being one to try new and silly things, I said I'd give it a go.

So fast-forward 2 weeks to Easter weekend. It was the afternoon and already I was screwing-up because I dropped my egg too hard into the pot of water causing a small crack to appear when it hit the bottom which let seep a little yolk. I kept telling myself that the crack added 'character' to the egg, making it look like it was battle-hardened and prepared for the challenges it was going to face.

When I had a cooled-down my battle-hardened egg, I took it outside with me and started surveying the neighbourhood for steep inclines.

I should have probably researched the topic a little more before I even began. When egg rolling was explained to me, the first assumption I made was that it was done using uncooked eggs that would splatter when they reached an obstacle or the bottom of the hill. My second assumption was that the rolling was unassisted and that you had to find a hill steep enough so that with an initial push, gravity and science would take care of the rest (Wikipedia article instead showing children pushing the egg along a non-steep lawn).

When I told her of my first assumption, 'laundry lass' said that you could use hard-boiled eggs and I felt a bit stupid at not having thought that. I didn't tell her of my second assumption because she probably already suspected I was lacking a few brain cells with my first assumption and I didn't want to give proof to her suspicions.

So while I couldn't find a nice steep grassy hill, my family's house was on a nice steep concrete road.

Steep roads - Wellington is full of 'em

Lesson learned: concrete wreaks hell on an egg shell. I pushed the thing once to send it on its way, and I could see the egg falling apart as it went down the road. The egg never made it all the way to the bottom, more often stopping by veering left or right and hitting the gutter, but when I picked it up to take back up the road to roll again the shell was badly cracked, even peeling in places. The initial crack that it received in the boiling process didn't seem so bad any more.

So I did this countless times on several streets around the neighbourhood and subject my poor egg to a lot of stress, resulting in what you see below.

"They see me rollin'..."

Like laundry lass, my actions drew several stares from people, namely strangers and passers-by: a group of girls just walking down the street, my neighbour washing his car, and the drivers and passengers of every car that narrowly missed my egg; pretty much everybody except my family who really didn't want to be associated or seen with me at that moment. It's not every day you see a guy taking photos of an egg and rolling it down a suburban street.

So, how did you spend your Easter?

(continued from Pizza 1.0)

To recap, Pizza 1.0 was an attempt to create a pizza that contained everything I ever wanted from a pizza:

• home-made base
• herbs in the dough
• thin base
• cheese-stuffed crust
• toppings all the way to the edge (or in this case, right up to the cheese-stuffed crust part)

Of those points, the cheese-stuffed crust one was going to be the challenge since I had never attempted it before creating Pizza 1.0. In my first attempt, while the rest of the pizza was absolutely delicious, the cheesy crust was very weak: I used the wrong cheese or not enough of it.

With Pizza 1.1, I aimed to improve on the cheesy crust aspect of it, which was to use the correct cheese. After several discussions about it with amazing-baking girl, I settled on mozzarella cheese (other options being pre-made cheese sticks/string) and went out to buy some.

I also planned the afternoon that I'd be making Pizza 1.1 so that I could invite others to eat the pizza with me. I asked what toppings people would like, and the list that came back pretty-much amounted to an apricot chicken pizza, so I went with that.

Nom? Nom.

There was one surprise that came out of making the pizza, and that was the use of canned apricots when in the oven caused the juices to ooze out all over the pizza, adding a subtle and lovely apricot taste to the base.

As for the cheesy crust, it was MUCH better than last time: the mozzarella didn't thin out when cooked so stayed thick enough in the crust for it to be actually tasted. When I tested it while it cooked by cutting into a section of the crust, it gushed out of the resulting hole just like it does in the ads. Mmmmm...

There is still room for improvement though: the bread of the crust itself was a bit too thick in places, weakening the overall cheese taste. That's a side-effect of the way I roll-out the dough however, so for Pizza 1.2 I'll have to figure-out a way to keep the edges thin.

Mid-March came along, and I started wondering if there would be a Blog Every Day April (BEDA) this year. In anticipation, I started stockpiling stories and topics to write about, which explains the 3-week gap since my last post. That, and I kinda directed my creative efforts into 2 story e-mails: one of which is the Dirty Laundry story mentioned in the last post, and the other which I'm holding-off from posting until the fallout it created has died-down significantly.

However, as April crept closer, the proponents of last year's BEDA movement (young-adult fiction author Maureen Johnson and a tonne of her fans of which I am one) made no mention of it, and Google doesn't seem to point to any bandwagon for us lost BEDA-2010-hopefuls to jump on.

And as March 31 became April 1st, and all I got was a bunch of sites doing the April Fools' thing, my hopes for BEDA faded, and a part of me breathed a sigh of relief while the rest of me made a sad face.

I really enjoyed BEDA last year: the challenge, the semi-rushed creative process, and the reading of blogs of other BEDA participants, particularly those of my BEDA Buddies - people grouped together to read and comment on one another's blogs in an effort to keep us all going for the whole month.

Then again, I also enjoy getting a good night's sleep and wasn't looking forward to updating the 'Blog Every Day April' category on the sidebar since modifying categories is still a bitch without the site updates I'm still working on.

So, without BEDA as an outlet for my stockpile of stories, expect an influx of blog posts over the following days as I work through the backlog in my brain and the photos I've collected on my phone.

Ad for a building, not your mum

I don't know, there's not much that can tempt me away from laundry. The joy of separating whites and colors, the sweet lullaby of the water and clothes spinning around and around, the sound of the machine beeping once its done, that fresh 'just washed' smell, the overpowering happiness you have once you see the stains are gone, and then the ecstasy of hanging them up to dry...*sigh* even just thinking about it make me happy :)

The above are words (not mine) from a back-and-forth e-mail conversation in which we got to talking about laundry. The subject matter was originally about meeting-up for a walk after work, but after saying something like 'sure I'll come along since the only thing waiting for me back home is the laundry', the sarcasm level in the conversation rose and the other person chose to respond with the above; effectively saying that she would've picked doing the laundry over any other activity any day.

Her words gave me an idea, and I responded in kind:

• Story E-mails - Dirty Laundry

In a previous blog post about a certain donut from my childhood, I made the following observation:

Everything is a lot larger back then compared to now (that's what she said?)

Last weekend, I managed to do something else that proved this claim: I walked through my old primary school.

My family moved around New Zealand a bunch when I was younger, so this primary school / grade school / whatever-the-hell-you-call-the-educational-institute-you've-been-enrolled-in-at-the-age-of-9, was the second-to-last primary school of mine before I moved on up to intermediate. Anyway, when I was there, I really liked the place: I made a lot of friends, the teachers were nice, and there was a lot more tree-climbing variety here than my previous school (which only had really tall trees and a policy of cutting-off the lower branches so that adventurous children like myself would be discouraged from trying to scale them). The neighbourhood and life in general around that time was really good too, so a lot of stuff from then, including the school, really stuck in my mind.

I also injured myself a lot on the school grounds that year (a remark from one of my teachers at the time in a student evaluation form: Emanuel needs to learn to control his movements more) and so made several trips to the sick/medical bay from wherever it was I happened to get injured. So I became very familiar with the distances that needed to be travelled from all corners of the school. Sometimes, a blood trail would be involved, and once I got patched-up, I would follow the the blood trail back to where it was I got hurt, familiarising myself with the distance I walked (or more likely rushed in a mild panic).

Good thing vampires didn't lurk in schools back then

So, on the way to a BBQ which was very close to my old school, I decided to take a small detour and visit the playgrounds, buildings, and trees that composed much of my life at 9 years of age.

The first hurdle was trying to actually get into the school as the entrance that I had used all those years before was now blocked-off by recent (whereby 'recent' I mean 'anywhere in the last 16 years') housing developments. After following the perimeter of the school fence some way while trying to not look like a dodgy guy who stalks schools, I found a new entrance into the main field, and from there started my exploration of memory lane.

Ah, there's the tree I fell out of, and there's where I got a bleeding nose... And after getting from the field to the netball/tennis courts: And there's where I grazed my elbow really badly. That left a good mark for several months.

It wasn't all reminiscing about injuries: I walked passed my old rooms, remembering how much bigger I thought they were when I was 9. One memory in particular was when we put a rain gauge on the outer wall of our class, having it secured to the building by means I couldn't remember. I remember placing it at what was then shoulder height and seeing how close it was to the ground. Now I stood there looking at the same spot, my mind creating a phantom of my younger self in-front of me, my shoulders now much further above the ground.

All the old buildings seemed smaller, and the distances between points were much shorter too as my longer stride let me cross what I used to believe were large concrete/grass expanses. I was a giant in a small person's memory; several sizes too small for me to fit in, yet I felt oddly at home.

I finally walked out of my old school through the teachers car park where my classmates and I once left thumb tacks behind the tyres of an unknown car on April Fool's Day, feeling like for the first time in years that I had really come a long way.

I got a webcam the other day - the Logitech Webcam Pro 9000! Now I can more-proudly consider myself a citizen of the digital age and join things that everyday technology-enabled people are a part of, like Skype!

I've been having a bit of fun with the webcam actually - taking photos, testing the face-tracking capability (I can happily report that Logitech webcams are not racist) and making a video or 2 - and I guess like most people out there, I'm really enjoying having this new piece of technology in my life.

"What are you doing, Dave?"

Much like when I got myself a new cellphone, particularly one with a camera that, unlike my last phone, takes pictures at sizes measured in megapixels, I think I might enjoy the video capabilities that are now at my disposal.

When I got my new cellphone, I picked it because of: a) the flip-top design, and b) having a camera that doesn't suck. I had the latter in my purchasing decision because I wanted to take photos that I could upload and use on my blog. Lo and behold, I've been using many of my own photos in my blog instead of trawling the internet for something that resembles the image I'm trying to portray. I've even used the cellphone camera to take pictures of inane things, like Windows XP error messages on supermarket monitors, or billboards I come across in my walks around the city.

So far I've only called my family on Skype with the webcam enabled. They don't have a webcam themselves, so while I couldn't see them, they were able to report that the video and sound feed of me weren't too bad, even when Skype was reporting to them that their internet connection was "slow".

I've started adding a few others who I know have Skype, but there's one overseas friend in particular with whom I can't wait to tell them that I'm not such a useless IT guy anymore :)

Maybe next I can start uploading to YouTube... lol, let's not get carried away here.

A couple of weekends ago, inquisitive guitar girl invited people to come along to one of her first art exhibits. It wasn't exclusively her exhibit (there'll be one, but that's not for a while); she was one of several local artists who brought their stuff to be a part of a larger Waitangi Day (New Zealand holiday) festival. The festival is quite a distance from where I am, but I was staying with family that weekend who live closer to where the festival was being held. So, I selected 'Attending' on the Facebook invite, and told her I'd show up for a bit.

The festival itself wasn't huge (neither is the city it was held in, even by New Zealand standards), but it doesn't take a huge festival to draw in the fast food stalls and carts. Even small events manage to rope them in - I'm reminded of a hot-air balloon festival I went to around Easter last year which was pretty small, but the food carts all made an appearance: hot dog stands, hot chip stands (basically anything you can add tomato sauce to), hot drink and coffee carts (or anything that's best served at high temperatures), cold drink and ice cream stalls (OK, so there are some exceptions to these rules), and lots of candy stalls. Basically, if it can be served within minutes and doesn't reside anywhere near the bottom/healthy sections of the food pyramid, you will find a cart/stall for it.

If these guys had a cart, they'd be there too

One cart at these events always catches my eye, and that's the Lil' Orbit donut cart.

In my search for decent images of these donut carts, I stumbled across their website which is, well... it's a bit shit. OK, it's quite shit. The Lil' Orbits site is very much stuck in the past with it's tiled background, animated images, and inconsistent use of several fonts. In these days of clean lines, smooth corners, and easy-on-the-eye colours, seeing the Lil' Orbits site with it's sharp edges and large red Times New Roman links of the late 90s is enough to make the web designer in me cry. Here, take a look and judge for yourself:

• www.lilorbits.com
• www.lilorbits.net

*shudder*

Image courtesy of my friend, NOT the Lil' Orbits website

The donut cart occupies a very positive part of my memory; the section of childhood memories that is always seen through rose-tinted glasses and can't be sullied by things like time and outdated websites.

A looong time ago, when my age could still be counted on one's fingers, shopping was one of the least-exciting activities you could subject me to. It meant being taken to several places for reasons I couldn't then understand, often resulting in not coming back with anything after hours of 'just looking'.

Subjecting a child to hours of nothing leads to restlessness and whining. If one of the stores we frequented during these trips didn't have a display model Gameboy with Tetris running on it, I couldn't be held responsible for what damage I might have caused. As a deterrent to bad behaviour from either my brother or I, my mum would reward us with donuts from the Lil' Orbit donut cart that was outside Deka (a department store chain in NZ that isn't around anymore) at the end of the shopping trips.

Those donuts are probably the sweetest, fluffiest little treats I have ever had, and the taste is something that has imprinted itself on my senses since those days. Nowadays, when I see a donut cart and am feeling the need to satisfy my sweet tooth, I always end-up buying a bag of donuts for old times' sake.

When I bought a bag at the Waitangi Day festival after finding my friend's art exhibit and doing another round of wandering, I realized several things about childhood memories:

1. Everything is a lot larger back then compared to now (that's what she said?)

The same sort of phenomena as believing that your dad was really tall, or that the walk to school was really long: your sense of scale was very different then. I remember those donuts being large enough to hold in my hand. Now, they're about a quarter the size of my palm.

2. You never cared what it was that made something sweet, sweet. You just cared that it was sweet.

Looking at the bag of donuts, I could see now why those things were so sweet: the donuts were thrown into a bag filled with brown sugar that clung to the donuts like a stubborn food stain on the crotch area of your pants. I found myself shaking some of the sugar off the donuts, just so I could tip the donut:sugar ratio in the donut's favour.

So what did I learn about my childhood memories? That they lied to me? Sort of. If anything, I lied to myself, but only because at that age I didn't know any better. Regardless, I still find myself drawn to the donut cart: no matter how bad the company website is, no matter how much smaller those donuts seem to get, and no matter how much I learn about health and nutrition, I am willing to put up with crappy site design, tiny donuts, and bags full of sugar, to sample a taste of childhood.

(continued from Strawberry Fare(well) - part 1)

So in part 1 of this story I explained that I was at Strawberry Fare for a goodbye dinner for an overseas friend I had met through dance classes, who was returning to their home country the following day. Actually, I lie - I spent most of last blog post explaining why the Strawberry Fare restaurant was such a big deal for me and the weird way in which my stomach finds new places to store food when it's overflowing - but that's where I left off, saying that it's the second overseas-friend-goodbye I've had to do in the span of a month.

The first goodbye had no fanfare surrounding it because a terrible rainstorm and hurricane-strength winds decided to defecate all over the plans we had for their last weekend in New Zealand with us. I had to settle instead for a very long conversation from my cellphone in which I must've spent 3-months worth of my normal cellphone credit just talking about pretty much everything while avoiding the saddening topic of their imminent departure.

For that person, the whole 'I miss you' feeling didn't really kick-in until they were back home (Belgium) and had a go at me over Facebook chat, berating me for not having Skype and a webcam/microphone like a good IT person should.

Now synonymous with my feelings regarding friends who don't live within a 20-mile radius of me

Of all the lessons I've learned as part of the 'growing-up' process, having to say goodbye to people is still the one that gets to me the most. Hell, the first time I learned it, it spawned my first space pic and started my whole foray into using the digital space art medium as an outlet for general angst.

Despite the years since then and the number of people I've had to say goodbye to, it never really got any easier.

So there I was, dinner at Strawberry Fare, already feeling a bit tired because I had been at work all day (and on a Saturday too FFS!), and being all selfish about how this farewell was going to impact me.

"My social calendar is gonna be empty now with you going away." I managed to say to the goodbye girl sometime during dinner when she sat beside me. "You're 1 of maybe only 2 people from dance class who ever invite me to anything!"
"Aww, you'll be alright Em." she said.

Will I? I wondered. The only reason I have anything on my calendar now is because I've signed-up to keyboard/piano classes to fill-up my free time. While relearning a long-rusted skill is particularly exciting, it's no substitute for general hanging-out with friends.

So, hugs were exchanged, a kiss on the forehead was made, and I tried ever so elegantly to walk out of the restaurant, after paying for my epic dinner/dessert of course, when said meal was sitting in my expanding stomach and causing me to waddle once again like a penguin.

It made for an awkward exit, made even worse by the fact that I walked into the door when I turned-around to leave.

Meh, close enough

Well, making people laugh isn't the worst last impression you could make right?

I went to Strawberry Fare last night! :D

OK, so I guess I should explain why that is such a big deal for me. It started a long time ago, back in high school...

*cue flashback sequence harp tune*

Back then, I had a friend (still have, although I don't see her much nowadays since she moved city, although I'll be attending her wedding come April!) who often went to Strawberry Fare. Now, her family didn't go there so often as to think that Strawberry Fare was all they ate every Saturday evening, but enough times to make you think that it was one of their favourite places.

Strawberry Fare is a dessert restaurant, specializing in gigantic meal-sized desserts - yes, you can swap-out your dinner for one of their desserts and feel full. Every time my friend would come back from this place she'd regale us with tales of how decadent the dessert was, or how sweet the cakes were, etc etc ad infinitum. The stories fed-upon my curiosity and my sweet tooth, building atop each other from high school through university, and eventually my mind painted a picture of a place bathed in glowing reviews and surrounded by an aura of good times to be had.

The details of the stories faded once my friend moved away, but the feeling they left inside me stayed for a long time, and were still with me when I would finally eat at Strawberry Fare in late 2008.

(Note: I have mentioned the Strawberry Fare story before in my post: Too. Much. Food. as part of Blog Every Day April 2009. If you've already read that one, then think of the following paragraphs as filling-in the gaps of that story)

I was with a bunch of people who I knew mostly through work. We had eaten dinner at a nearby restaurant already, and were actually pretty full (we ordered and shared food expecting 1 extra person who didn't turn up until near the end). That late guy though, having not eaten as much as us, said he'd stick around for dessert. Somebody came-up with the idea of going to Strawberry Fare for dessert, and all of my senses heightened (imagine a dog's ears going up in alert) and focussed on that suggestion.

"Yes!" I said, not heeding the fullness of my stomach. It's only dessert, I thought, it can't be that much, despite what everyone else has been telling me for last almost-decade.

So the group all headed for Strawberry Fare, anticipation building inside me like a child on the eve of Christmas.

The desserts all looked pretty expensive, so at first I thought this place was overcharging. I stuck with a pretty safe bet - a cheesecake, elegantly described in a blurb that contained more words than there were actual ingredients in your average cheesecake - and when I made my order the little cynic inside me started disbelieving that a cheesecake could cost so much.

The little cynic quickly shut up when I got served THAT MUCH cheesecake.

Not the cheesecake I got, but to help you with the scale of things, imagine each pixel up there is a centimetre in real life, and that the plate it's on is the size of the moon

I was full, but somehow that didn't matter anymore. I had to go on because a) I was finally at Strawberry Fare and was learning that all the legends were true, and b) I am going to have to pay for this at the till later.

So I ate. I got through half of the cheesecake before my stomach reached capacity and started calling-in favours from the nearby organs to use them to store any excess food.

*return from flashback*

So what was I doing there last night? I was there for a goodbye dinner/dessert for an overseas friend returning to their country of origin (USA); the second overseas friend I've had to say goodbye to within the span of a month...

(to be continued, because I really shouldn't be up this late when tomorrow is Monday and I gotta go to work; Monday is bad enough already without me adding sleep-deprivation to the mix)

Question: what the hell is FQ?

No-longer-on-dial-up girl's Facebook status made mention of her being exciting about it being out. FQ? I thought, WTF? Last time she did this, it was ANTM, which, thanks to Google, I was able to find-out meant America's Next Top Model.

So I started thinking that maybe it's another TV show, but nothing that came to mind had a 2-word title with the first word beginning with F and the last word beginning with Q. Google wasn't much help this time either, pointing me either to fashion publications, or letting me know that it's the SMS version of "fuck you".

So I just asked her what FQ could possibly mean, and she dodged the question by pointing-out one of my eccentricities instead.

There are just way too many acronyms for me to keep up with now. I don't know whether to blame computing (where almost every new technology or idea conceived can be shortened into a TLA (three-letter acronym) or XTLA (extended three-letter acronym)), or the trend towards laziness in our written language that I mentioned in my last blog post, for this over-abundance of acronyms.

There was a time when I used to refuse putting my written words into acronyms. This was when I was first introduced to the world of IM when a friend of mine suggested I install ICQ on my computer, circa 2000 AD. From then I was exposed to a new language; a language of LOLs, ROFLs, OMGs, and emoticons. For a long time I replaced LOLs and ROFLs with "hahah" and the like, and expanded every word I could because I thought I was 'above' degrading my English. (Looking back, I realize I was just being a pompous jackass in the same way some people say "I don't have a television; I read.")

I did eventually succumb to the use of acronyms in chat messages, texts, e-mails, and this blog. Hell, I even say LOL in real life. I did draw a line somewhere: I continue to refuse using those kinds of acronyms and smilies in more important communiques, like essays, reports, documentation, or other formal messages. And in all of this I continue to use proper punctuation and grammar, because nothing makes baby Jesus cry like reading a headline that says: Students failing because of Twitter, texting

lolcats definitely haven't helped the situation either...

Aside: the first acronym ever given to me over ICQ was ASL (age/sex/location), by some random Australian girl who found me just 1 day after I had installed ICQ. I had to ask her what it meant, because Google didn't exist then. She was the only random IM chat buddy I ever had.

So I still don't know what FQ means in the context of no-longer-on-dial-up girl's status update. Ideas?

Number of acronyms in this blog post: 23

My perceived age seems to be a running theme on my blog as the running-into and meeting several new people thanks to dance classes has my age coming into question time and time again. What about how old I am on the inside then? Well, according to a study that has recently come out about social media amongst young adults (which has been getting referenced a lot this past week from the sites and blogs I follow) I'm likely to be 30 or older.

According to the study, blogging amongst teens and young adults declined since 2007 (went up with the 30+ crowd over the same period) who have exchanged "macro-blogging" for micro-blogging with status updates. It's more likely the status updates are just confined to their online profiles on sites like Facebook, as the study also showed that a majority of young adults have a Facebook profile, but not a Twitter account.

So blogging and Twitter are both uncool and for the old folk. *sigh* Can't catch a break can I? And all of this on the back of a dream I had a few nights ago where I was getting gray hairs O_o

I guess being told you're old on the inside isn't as bad as being mistaken for young on the outside. It carries with it a lot of the better connotations associated with age, like wisdom and responsibility, and it kinda makes me feel good about myself, much like that feeling you get when you did reading tests at primary school and were told by your teacher you had a reading age beyond your years. Pride, I think it is - the sense of achievement kind, not the self-important seven-deadly-sins kind.

Back to the study, it's probably just showing the trends of today: Facebook is an easy way to share certain content with your friends, and status updates are an easy way to do what blogging does but with less characters; say what's on your mind to those who are willing to read/listen.

When I started this website in 2001, I was just following the trends of those days which was to get your own Geocities (or equivalent free-hosting) page and add whatever spastic animated image or annoying follow-your-mouse-cursor JavaScript to the site. The blog was the natural extension of the personal website and so that was added quite soon afterwards, although I didn't start calling it a blog or blogging until late 2005.

Little did we know that maintaining the thing takes actual effort, and so came the decline of the personal website / blog, paving the way for the multitude of social networks, each with their own little way of doing relatively effortless things like uploading photos from that drunken 21st, or telling your friends about what food you're ingesting AT THIS VERY INSTANT.

If the long-term trend though is to replace effort-requiring things with effort-less things, then I wonder what will be superseding the Facebooks and Twitters of today? It's bad enough that today's kids have forgotten what punctuation is for in their goal to say as much as they can with as few characters as possible.

What are we going to forget next? The ability to act appropriately in social situations because everything is done with non-face-to-face communication methods?

Oh wait...

I've said before that books, reading, and the local city library are a few of the things that rate very highly in my list of hobbies. Upon returning from my New Year's holiday, I went to the library and saw that 3 books I wanted to read were available, so I got them all, thinking that I could manage to read all 3 books within the 1 month borrowing period. It'd be like a reading challenge I told myself.

I wouldn't say I'm a slow reader, but the amount of time available to me for reading is the biggest hurdle to completing such a challenge: spare weekend afternoons being the largest chunk of available time, followed by before I go to bed at night, during my lunch break at work, and maybe even a few pages when I turn-on my work computer in the morning. (When I lived in the suburbs, I could add 'the train ride to/from work' to that list, which added about 40 minutes every weekday.)

1 month on, I did manage to read those 3 books, but for as long as I've been having this love-affair with the library, I've had this nasty little habit of borrowing another book whenever I return the one I've just read. It was never a problem before as it kept me with something to read, but now it's keeping me perpetually in 'reading challenge' mode which is starting to weigh on me. So I've still got 3 books to go, none of them the ones I originally borrowed after New Year's, and on top of those I also have the 2 books I was given as Christmas presents from my family (Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan and Michael Flynn's Eifelheim).

I'm trying to break the cycle - I don't want to feel eternally obligated to use my spare time reading books when I should redirect that spare time into other things like planning for Pizza 1.1, or practicing guitar now that I have someone to practice songs with - and with the last book I returned I did manage to leave the library without a replacement. However, something else has taken the place of my library habits, which is doing just as good a job of putting a new book in my hands: curiosity.

Cats aren't the only thing curiosity can kill...
(and 10 points if you saw this image and thought 'Schrodinger's lolcat!')

Ever started at a topic in Wikipedia, and then followed the 'see also' and other links, only to find yourself hours later at a totally unrelated topic? (What, no? Well, XKCD has it documented, so I know it's not just me that does it) Well, that happened to me last week, and while I can't remember what it is I started with, I do remember ending-up on the Wikipedia entry for Moby-Dick.

I've never read Moby-Dick before. With all the cultural references to Captain Ahab and his hunt for the elusive white whale, I thought I knew enough of the essential plot points that I didn't need to read Moby-Dick. As I was reading through the article and the parts about the background, themes, and the effects the book has had on us to this very day, the curiosity in me took hold and I started wanting to read the book to get an understanding on all of this stuff and to join the bandwagon that has been rolling since it was first published over 150 years ago.

With the prospect of a slow weekend ahead, and against my better judgement (knowing that I had 2 more library books on my plate), I went to the library's online catalogue to see if a copy of Moby-Dick was available.

They had 1 left.

The opening line of the book reads:

Call me Ishmael.

Well... that didn't take long. After discovering my website Chrome/Safari (WebKit) woes earlier this week (although only making that blog post last night), I fixed the menu bar rendering issues last night, and then fixed the Twitter script issues just now.

For those technical minded amongst you, the culprit was in the following lines of JavaScript which used script.aculo.us, a JavaScript library for cool effects/animations (like the sliding fade-in effect of the Twitter items on the right-hand side). I use script.aculo.us's Builder class which is handy for inserting HTML elements into a document, like the Twitter feed:

twitterdiv.appendChild(Builder.node('script', {
  src: 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/u1traq.json?' +
       'callback=twitter.callback&count=5',
  type: 'text/javascript'
}));

Chrome just didn't like the Builder.node() function in this case (I use it in a bunch of other places without issues), maybe because it was trying to insert a <script/> node, I dunno. But by replacing it with standard DOM functions, it did the trick:

scriptnode = document.createElement('script');
scriptnode.setAttribute('type', 'text/javascript');
scriptnode.setAttribute('src', 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/u1traq.json?' +
  'callback=twitter.callback&count=5');
twitterdiv.appendChild(scriptnode);

Now all those browsers are happy, and so am I.

It's a bright sunny day in my little corner of New Zealand. I'm looking out the window on this lovely Saturday morning and up above are blue skies and white fluffy clouds, the Metservice says it's 22.9 degrees Celsius, and my watch is telling me that now is a good time to go fishing (yeah, something to do with setting my longitudinal position and the phases of the moon, don't ask me to go into detail).

The only problem with this picture is that the window I am looking out of is not any of the ones at my apartment, but rather the ones at my work building. Yep, I'm at work today :(

While I'd rather be anywhere but here, I don't hate coming to work on a weekend. On the rare occasion that I do find myself walking to work, it's usually morning when the streets are pretty empty, and when I arrive at the building it's nice and quiet and there's usually nobody else around. I find that the quiet of the weekend and the feeling that this city's population has magically been cut in half help me sort-out my thoughts for a much more productive couple of hours than the busy office environment usually does.

The office may be empty, but today, and for the last couple of days, the streets are anything but.

There are a bunch of big events going on: 2 AC/DC concerts, a Them Crooked Vultures concert, Wellington Cup Day (horse racing, although the focus of such events is never on the horse racing), next week we play host to the Rugby Sevens, and to top it all off, docked at the harbour are some very VERY large cruise ships with LOTS of tourists.

So the streets are packed, it's hella busy outside, and when I walked around during my lunch break the other day my ears honed-in on several foreign accents, mainly American. Accents weren't the only odd thing that day; a massive line coming-out of the Wellington Cable Car was the other:

I don't think anybody in this line is from around here...

Long lines aren't a very common sight around here. When they do appear, they're usually leading towards an upper-middle-class retail/department store with some sort of epic store-wide sale going on. We don't often get 60 metre lines streaming-out from what is effectively a 7-minute tram ride between the CBD and this city's gardens.

But maybe I'm just being too cynical. Tourists aren't a bad thing - I even enjoyed being one the last time, despite being mistaken for a local and asked which way to the immigration offices - and my lack of enthusiasm towards The Cable Car is probably because for years I used it as one of my methods of transport to/from university, thus relegating one of this city's best attractions to the background of public transport vehicles that help this city function.

Maybe I've just lived here too long.

Earlier this week I finally got to see what my site looks like in Google Chrome. I was just showing someone (the same inquisitive someone who asked me what my mum is like), during our first guitar session/get-together, some of the older space pics I've done (well, they're all old ones since I haven't created anything new on that front since mid-2008) and noticed that something wasn't rendering correctly!

*gasp*

I had a mate of mine check it with Safari on his Mac (since Chrome and Safari both use something called WebKit to render web pages) and got the same result:

This makes me cry

That wasn't the only problem: the Twitter feed on the right-hand sidebar seems to be stuck on 'Loading...' in Chrome/Safari, but otherwise fine in Firefox and IE7/8.

So I downloaded and installed Chrome, attempted to fix these little issues, and only got so far as to fix the layout of the menu. As for the Twitter feed, I've taken it down in the interim.

Continuing the computer-ish theme for the week, earlier tonight I was asked to install Skype by a friend from overseas (the one I called the neck-licker in this old BEDA '09 post, who has unfortunately been sent back to their home country because they couldn't stay in New Zealand). I thought it a bit funny that, before this week, I had never touched Skype - not even with the electronic equivalent of a barge pole - but for the first time this Monday I was involved in a Skype call from inquisitive guitar girl's end, had my friend the hug nazi mention it because her netbook has a built-in webcam, and am now being asked to install it.

As I was downloading the program, at around the 50% mark a realization hit me: I don't have a webcam... or a microphone. I told the overseas neck-licker as much, and they replied in kind:

what kind of ASIAN COMPUTERSPECIALIST are you?

Good question.

As one of the IT guys in my group of friends, I don't even have some of what is now basic hardware that is so run-of-the-mill that many computers and devices come with these things attached or built-in. I have a million cables lying spare, more computer screws than you can shake a stick at, and even more twist ties from all those wires that I could create some sort of contemporary art piece and break a Guinness World Record in the process! But, a webcam and microphone are nowhere to be found.

At least I'm still more feature-complete than the iPad.

A friend of mine, upon learning that I live by myself, made the claim that I either had to: a) lose some part of my sanity, b) develop a coping mechanism, or c) find some strange hobby, in exchange for my solitary living situation. He was of the mind that only eccentrics live by themselves, and that by choosing to live by myself, somewhere along the way I have unwittingly sacrificed a part of my facade of 'normal behaviour'.

Of course I denied everything, distancing myself from his crazy theory, particularly option A, as hastily as I could. That of course left me with options B and C which, if you stretch it, aren't really that far removed from option A.

Thinking about it though and looking back on the things that have happened since moving out (the first time), it turns out that the guy wasn't completely wrong.

Coping mechanisms developed:

• talking to myself
• singing out loud
• blogging more often
• watching Home and Away
• joining, using, Twitter

Hobbies developed:

• baking
• giving-up on baking
• bringing baking back into my life, but in a very reduced capacity
• renewing my guitar playing
• making meals, and having some pride when doing so

So with that last bullet point, I didn't actually develop cooking skills after moving out, but before that moment cooking always felt like a chore. Now though, it feels more like something I need to perfect; a skill I need to improve and which I really enjoy doing so. The dinner I made for myself tonight is one such example.

Motivated by the idea that I could never get everything I always wanted out of a pizza, or that if I could I'd have to fork-out extravagant amounts of money for it (OK, so pizzas aren't expensive, but the combination of all of the things I liked would have made a pizza more than I would be willing to pay for it), I decided to combine all of my favourite parts about the pizzas I have ever eaten, into 1 epic pizza:

• home-made base
• herbs in the dough
• thin base
• cheese-stuffed crust
• toppings all the way to the edge (or in this case, right up to the cheese-stuffed crust part)

My epic pizza prototype: Pizza 1.0

Throughout the pizza-creation process, I read-aloud the pizza base instructions that I've pretty much already memorized, and sang-along to whatever music was playing through my TV/Xbox. And after putting the pizza into the oven, I was so excited about it that I told the world via Twitter.

(Unfortunately, in my haste to try-out my new creation, I forgot to take photos of it after it was cooked. Whoops.)

The verdict? I need to work on the cheese-stuffed crust part of it - I either didn't use enough cheese or the right kind of cheese because what I had inside the crusts melted and thinned-out, leaving a not-very-cheesy hollow crust - but everything else was exactly how I liked it.

A quick internet search has given me some ideas to try for Pizza 2.0 (use mozarella cheese, or cheese strings), but today has really illustrated just how right my friend was about what has happened to me since living on my own... and here I am blogging about it.

*sigh*

So a funny little something happened to me at work just a while ago: somebody sent an e-mail to a mailing list that I shouldn't belong to. Thinking nothing of it, I decided not to do anything.

Somebody else however, decided to do something and asked to be removed from the mailing list. But they didn't reply to the original sender, instead they replied to the mailing list, giving a whole bunch of people the idea that it is a Good Idea to do the exact same thing. And by exact same thing, that means repeating the mistake of the first responder of replying to the mailing list (must be some automatic reflex to click 'reply-to-all') instead of putting their request to the original sender.

This continued for the rest of the afternoon. My 'new e-mail' alert pop-up was going spastic, eventually stopping to give me the details of the incoming messages and instead just telling me that I had "...new items in your inbox." At first I was hoping that people notice the incoming flood and correct their responses, then I kept facepalming at every new message alert, and then I LOL'd.

Did I mention I work for a large corporation with offices all around the world? I was getting e-mails from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Australia, the US, Mexico, Brazil... Here's a timeline of events:

• 1:22pm - initial e-mail sent to a mailing list
• 2:12pm - first reply to be removed from the mailing list
• 2:15pm - more replies to be removed from the mailing list start coming
• 2:20pm - first replies to say 'please don't e-mail everybody', and first angry reply to ask people to stop, saying they 'have enough e-mail to read'
• 2:23pm - first 'stop e-mailing!' message to be sent in capital letters
• 2:26pm - somebody changes the e-mail subject to try get peoples' attention
• 2:52pm - original sender tries to recall initial e-mail
• 2:54pm - first sarcastic reply, saying they love getting to know all these new people
• 2:57pm - comment comparing this incident to 'please forward to X people' chain e-mails
• 3:02pm - I reply to everybody and the chain e-mail guy, saying we've reached 73 messages, mine is the 74th, and that 6 more have come in during me writing my response
• 3:05pm - the network goes down

(At this point I start worrying that the Mailing List Saga has brought down the network, particularly my message since it was the last thing to be sent before it all hit the fan. I'm probably being a bit egotistical there, thinking that I would have such influence on our company's network infrastructure, but it's not the first time I've been jokingly blamed by my workmates for network failures before.)

• 3:34pm - network restored for a moment, I receive 35 more messages (1 of which is an ACTUAL e-mail from a friend), someone decided to add exclamation marks to the e-mail subject, network goes down again
• 3:54pm - network restored, receive the last of the e-mails, including the one where somebody has talked to somebody with mailing list power to get the list fixed
• 4:10pm - straggler requests to be removed from the list

At this point in the Mailing List Saga (which is the moment before I shut this computer off to go home), I counted 121 e-mails - more e-mails than I receive in a normal week. This includes all the replies, several out-of-office messages, one 'inbox too full' message, and the one I sent myself.

I must say, it made my day :D Here are some of my favourite responses:

I have no idea what is it about.
Please do me a favor and take me out of the list i have enough email to read.

OK, enough with the reply all responses.

STOP THE REPLY TO ALL PLEASE......

Lovely teams, I'm glad to know everyone's name but can we stop this?

Its becoming like those "Send this to everyone you know and XXX will donate 1cent to ..."

Please include me in all future emails. My inbox feels loved

jejeje Hope I get all the 1cent soon :0)

And now we've got all these new in-box friends. :)

Update: Just came in to work this morning, and the hours between yesterday afternoon and now have given THE ENTIRE CONTINENT OF EUROPE a chance to respond. We're now up to 201 e-mails, and I got some new favourite replies:

aLL,
PLEASE STOP REPLYING TO DE GROUP MAILBOX.
i AM NOW OVERLOADED WITH "UNSUBSCRIBES".
stop, stop, stop

Does anybody know how's the best way to cook a turkey for next Christmas?

Aaa... it's simply. You need to take a turkey, cut the head, add some salt and pepper... and cook it until everybody send the reply with "remove me too"...

Hopefully this Turkey is almost cooked

Hope that this is the last email sending out . Pray hard.

Then next one pressing "send to all" qualifies him/herself for the next round of [Workforce Reductions].
Reason: having no understanding of IT technology..

Interesting, but It's difficult to find some of this spices here... Sounds tasty, though.

STOP REPLY AND EVERYTHING WILL BE STOP!! PLEASE

Every great super hero has their super power. And for any super villain to stand a chance against their opposite, said super hero or power must be able to be neutralized in some way: a weakness, an Achilles' Heel, their kryptonite, whatever you want to call it.

Now, I'm as far away from being a great super hero as you can possibly be, so I have only the mediocre power of being able to call more than 1 lift at a time. And because my super power is so lame, anything with the strength of a dung beetle might be able to thwart me. But you know what I discovered my kryptonite is?

Braille.

Yes, the alphabet of the blind has the ability to screw with my elevator super powers. It doesn't neutralize it, but rather make the use of said powers very painful.

Every time I manage to call more than 1 lift, a smirk spreads across my face and I my inner dialogue starts saying things like: Yeah, that's right, all elevators bow before me... When I'm in this I'm-the-king-of-the-elevators sort of mood, I press the elevator buttons a bit more forcefully than I need to. I don't usually use the end of my finger to press the buttons. Instead, it's more like a knocking-on-the-door action where I put my knuckles into it.

So how does Braille hurt me? Well take a look at the buttons being used in the lifts in my work building:

See the Braille sticking-out of the buttons? Now, imagine smashing your knuckles into those. Each tiny dot becomes the equivalent of a small spike when I throw my knuckles into them at the speed; fighting back with the bite of a rose thorn and killing my inner dialogue in the same way every time: with capital letters and exclamation points (eg: ...OWWWWW!!!!) while simultaneously wounding my pride.

Like martial arts, Braille has harnessed the power of science and learned to turn my own strength against me.

When I put it like that, I think I'd prefer it if my weakness were dung beetles - Braille can go anywhere, whereas dung beetles can't survive the New Zealand climate.

As holidays for relaxation go, the New Year's one I just came back from would probably top them all.

Relaxing views

Around late November 2009, I started complaining about a persistent headache. Now my headaches are usually of the hit-and-run nature; strike me down when I fail to take care of myself like not eat lunch or lack sleep. This this particular headache however stuck with me for about a week before I decided to do something about it.

Firstly, I crowdsourced some answers via Twitter/Facebook as to what medications people take in order to control their headaches. My first stop, a paracetamol-based product, didn't seem to be cutting it. Answers ranged from doubling the dosage to drinking margaritas. I tried the first couple of suggestions (doubling the dosage, using a codeine-based painkiller) before I went to the doctor to see what they would say about the headache.

Funnily enough, the doctor suggested everything my friends did, except margaritas, and also suggested I see an optometrist - since I wear glasses, although very rarely - to see if there's something eye-related that's been causing the pain.

There were no answers at the optometrists either, but some good news did come out of it: my eyesight doesn't suck as much as it used to, and I can get weaker-strength lenses... once I pick-out some new frames to go with them (have had the same frames for a long time, so it's time for an overhaul).

The headache has been trailing me all throughout December. While not a strong pain anymore, it nags at the back of my mind like the feeling you forgot something important to do.

So what has all this got to do with my New Year's holiday? Well, I didn't experience any headaches during it.

More headache-free views

What did I do during that holiday that might have solved my headache woes? Well, I didn't really do much of anything: afternoon naps under the sun were the norm, I read the book I had borrowed from the library, I went for swims in the inlet/ocean, I played my guitar, I went for long walks through NZ bush, I threw a frisbee, I caught a native bird, I slept-in every day save the last, and I just had plain old fun.

Nowhere in my itinerary was there mention of a computer or screen to stare at, or a deadline to meet. Meaning that either my headache is computer or 'staring-at-a-screen'-related (which if it is would absolutely suck because it's what I do for my job and for much of my non-vacation downtime) or just work/stress-related.

Now I'm back home and staring at computer/TV screens again, I think I may have caused a relapse, but it just doesn't feel the same as I remember it. Tomorrow, I head back to work (albeit only 3 weekdays in this working week), and if the headache makes a comeback either this or next week, then I might have some serious work/life balance choices to consider.

Wish me luck.

Finally back from my New Year's holiday, which included something of a technology blackout: no cellphone coverage, so no day-to-day Tweets of the day's happenings, so no receiving or sending of New Year's text messages, much to my chagrin because those on rival cellphone networks did get some modicum of reception and were still able to receive New Year's text message love :(

So, on to the blog post backlog I had in my mind. First-up on the list: my mum.

At a Christmas party a week before Christmas day of good ol' 2009, a certain someone - who I haven't yet mentioned in this blog before, and so doesn't have a witty nickname to which I can attach to them, to which I am surprised considering the contribution this person made to my 2009 which in turn made it so great - asked me a pretty tough question:

"What kind of person is your mum?"

How we got on to the topic of my mother, I can't remember - it might have something to do with a certain button badge I was given prior to this party - but when I was faced with that question my mind drew a blank. After what seemed like minutes of silence from me while my interrogator watched patiently at the cogs turning behind my eyes, all I could respond with was:

"I don't know how to answer that. Give me a day or 2 and I'll come-up with something."
"Good answer." she said, and walked away to leave me to contemplate the sorts of things I could say about my own mother.

One of the holiday season presents I received. I have never worn a badge so proudly in my life

So I gave the thought a day, which then became 2, which then stretched out from however many days there are between a week before Christmas and now...

When thinking about how I describe anybody, I usually look for that 1 trait that sets them apart from the rest; the thing that makes them unique to me. In the case of my mum, it would be that she is self-sacrificing for her children: everything she did, she did for my brother and I.

That trait encompasses many things: unconditional love, support, a level head whenever I asked her about the decisions I was facing (giving me the answer that would benefit me the most, even if the answer was not what I wanted to hear), and an almost embarrassing willingness to go out of her way to make sure my brother and I were as comfortable as we could be (eg: driving out from her work after school hours to take us home, giving us more than our share of food at the table, giving-up the window seat on a plane, etc).

That trait however is a bit of a double-edged sword; as well as being what makes my mum so great, it's also what has annoyed me the most: the unconditional love is often blind to what's going-on with others, the support would often make me think I was right when I was in the wrong, the honest answers might have carried me down the much safer path which could've given me valuable lessons or challenges to face, and the 'out-of-her-way'-ness often became too embarrassing, particularly when around my friends throughout those terrible teenage years.

Despite the good and bad nature of a child-centric focus, it's all the sorts of things I have grown to expect from a mother - and all the sorts of things that compose the yard stick by which I measure every mother I have known or will know.

And I wouldn't have it any other way.

"A mother is a person who, seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie."
- Tenneva Jordan

(http://www.quotegarden.com/mothers.html)