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 didn'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)