Rancho De La Hore (Royalla dot net)

Our old 3 burner beast is about to give up the ghost after 15 years of faithful service. It’s had some issues in the past which I’ve overlooked, the flame tamers don’t, there’s rust/other gross stuff where there shouldn’t be, it look generally old and tired and the auto lighter thingo hasn’t worked on two of the burners for years.

The other night the middle burner wouldn’t light so I tried doing it with a match..nothing…I could hear gas coming from somewhere so I just left the match there a couple of second and WOOOF, the section near the dial lit up like Christmas and started happily flaming away, nowhere near where the flame actually needed to be to cook anything unfortunately. Then last night Kristie went to do the same thing on another previously working burner and the same thing happened…this time enough gas has built up to give her arms a little scorch so we decided it’s time to put the old thing out to pasture and look around for a new one.

I’m kind of partial to the new Webber kinda-compact ones like this

Webber Q 300

…but Kristie wants one with a cabinet underneath to hide all the usual BBQ junk in….so something like the …

BEEFMASTER 4

This is good because it has an awesome name.

So, anyone gone through this same exercise recently and have any advice to offer?

EDIT: I think I found a winner, I like the idea of the enamel hotplates (rather than cast iron):

Cordon Bleu 4

…despite the utterly gay name.

Here’s a few cool things I’ve found recently:

Aeon skin for XBMC

This is almost certainly the best looking skin i’ve ever seen for any media centre app, the added bonus for people who don’t give a crap about actually installing XBMC/Aeon is the large collection of movie, music, game and tv show related backdrops all in glorious 1920×1080. For example:

Wallpaper in 1920x1080 example from http://www.aeonproject.com/backdrops.php?cat=bg_movies

browershots.org

Skip over this one if you don’t care about creating cross-browser web applications, if are and like me have never heard of this web based tool, time to hit the link above. It’s a web based tool which makes screenshots of any web design loaded in pretty much every browser which has ever existed, it’s not very useful for actually debugging rendering issues since it just gives you a static screenshot but as quick reference to see how your site appears in over 70 different browser versions, it’s fantastic!

and finally …

Kidlandia

Create and customise your own fantasy based map for kids (and you know you’re going to put your name on there too!), they offer a printing service (on rolled or hard canvas) but it’s pretty expensive and the preview mode gives you an image good enough for use as a nice wallpaper. Here’s the one I created:

Alexland from http://www.kidlandia.com/Share.aspx?MAPID=12775

Thanks (again) to Geekdad for posting another great geeky thing which looks like a lot of fun. Brickquest is essentially a HeroQuest-like game where a group of players traverse a 3D tabletop dungeon in search of monsters to kill and rob. I wasn’t fully sold on the idea until I saw some of the photos of the boards which the designer has created from his awesome collection of LEGO, for example:

I doubt the average LEGO collection would go nowhere near having enough pieces to come close to something as cool as that, I even think my efforts using the LEGO I kept from when I was a kid may just be able to emulate a floorplan like that but it would look like some kind of clown explosion of mixed blocks and colours. Still, it looks like a great idea and best of all, it’s free! (download the PDF game manual here)

More info here: http://gunth.com/brickquest/

My mistake, oh well, here are the pictures I was trying to upload yesterday.

In other news:

She doesn’t really look like someone who would keep birds, but whatever. For the record “tits” is not an abstract noun, it’s a concrete noun. Examples of abstract nouns are: Bravery, Relaxation, Dedication and Trust, not Tits.

If this is the most Evil thing which people can manage to find on Google Street View then I’d say the people responsible for vetting the images have been doing a damn good job up until now.

As you follow the street view scene down Five Points Road in Rush, NY, you can see the deer run out in front of the car, get hit and then see it on the side of the road before the car pulls over. And that’s the end of the Street View data for Five Points Road.

This article (also see it for images, wordpress wont let me upload images at the moment for some reason) mentions the Google motto is “Do No Evil” and I’m sure animal rights hippies are all crying in their organic shaved wheatgrass tea but millions of animals are killed every day on the roads. So, I don’t understand the outrage over these images, it’s not like the driver actually swerved to hit the stupid deer. Google removing the images was more likely a mechanism of their privacy policy than any sort of hippie love bullshit.

Of course, no mention of the good which has come from Street View. The fact that the images for that road stopped immediately after the deer was hit means the driver actually stopped to render assistance, not the act of an evil empire, I think.

Over the years Kristie and I have tried to make some cool cakes, from Space shuttles to Gingerbread Houses but this one really takes the…no, I wont say it.

From: http://gizmopolis.net/?p=168

I attended my 20 year school reunion for Marist last night and it wasn’t the horror show I was kind of anticipating.

The greatest fear at all reunions I would guess is that everyone except you has kept in touch so you walk in to a room full of guys who know each other after 20 years and you don’t know most of them from posts of wood. Luckily for me, this competely irrational fear was unfounded and it seemed that the norm was the nobody kept in touch, even the guys who still (or have since) live very close to each other. Most of the guys I spoke to hadn’t seen each other since the 10 year reunion, in fact, I can’t remember speaking to anyone who’s kept in close contact with anyone else, awesome (I suppose)! (and, phew!)

I also had a problem which was common among the most I spoke to in that I could recognise a face but often couldn’t attach it to a name, I got some right first time (maybe 4-5) and some guys had changed so radically that I had no hope but the rest looked familiar (of course, duh), I either didn’t have much to do with them at school (which is likely) or my memory just failed me. There were a couple with amazing memories, I take my hat off to the guy (Hi, Matt) that remembered that I lived in WA before moving to Canberra and starting at Marist in year 9, I have trouble remembering that stuff!

Overall everyone I spoke to were pretty good guys, I assume the wankers all just stayed home (or I didn’t talk to them).

Here are some interesting statistics I gathered:

• I spoke to about less then 30% of the guys who attended (104 all up)
• about 80% of the guys I spoke to are now working in IT, some were hard core geeks, just like me (although, good thing or not I think I outgeeked them all, as if this list isn’t proof enough)
• about 95% are married with kids
• a lot are late starters, most I spoke to have kids under 6
• 10 out of our class of 150ish are now deceased, nobody seemed to have many details on how/when/what happened to most of the 10
• I think I overheard 6 are in jail, currently or previously

I didn’t get a chance to talk to some guys as much as I now realise I would have liked but I grabbed a few email addresses and I’ll catch up via email with the ones I can, and the rest, well, there’s always the 30 year reunion!

I’ve started manually assigning all the old posts a category because it seems like Wordpress doesn’t like how I imported them and if the category isn’t assigned the post will show up and the comments wont.

There are also some other small problems which I’ll probably never get around to fixing:

1. If you make a comment, your reward is a blank screen. Don’t panic, the comment is still being stored but I think because I haven’t configured the mail server yet the code is breaking when it tries to send me an email about the comment. IT WORKS! Thanks to the brilliant Swift SMTP plug-in.
2. It looks like the old comments were truncated when I imported them so any extra long comments are cut short, I’ll probably not bother fixing this, maybe.  Also fixed thanks to the brilliant brain in my head! I think I lost a few comments along the way but the ones which were previously attached to actual posts came over in full. Now I can sleep.
3. The theme I’m using (Mandigo) has a default width of 800 pixels, this means that any images I have set up on the old site (which had a much wider canvas) may break the layout. I’m working on fixing these but there are 300+ posts in total so it could take some time. I’ve stuck with 800 wide mostly so the site looks ok on the eee PC  (it automagically formats for handhelds regardless of the width)

There are probably other problems but these ones are the most obvious.

In other news and to prove I’m not as boring as posting about bugs in my blogging software two days in a row, an ancient friend of a friend of mine has just completed two days of extras work on the new Wolverine movie, he wrote about his experiences, here’s a snippet:

I was recently on the set of ‘Wolverine’. I was nobody special, just an extra. But the experience was an incredible amount of fun and I wanted to pass some of that on. I’m not a part of the cast other than the small role I played as an extra.

and then

For the final scene of the shoot the special effect guys went all out – and didn’t tell us what they were doing. We figured it was just another charge up the beach. We had picked our spots to dive, take cover and die according to the lie of the land. On the call of ‘action’ we set off and the world went to hell! The effects guys had basically rigged the entire beach to simulate mortar explosions and machine-gun fire – and to a much greater degree than ever before. Sand and smoke and noise obscured everyone’s view. No-one could see and hear a thing. People dropped and took cover, on instinct as much as on training. Time slowed. (Everyone said this afterwards – when the explosions went off, everything moved into slow-motion. Not that it mattered. People were still confused and disorientated, and no-one could see or hear a thing beyond a few feet.) I recalled the words of one of the lieutenants from the Omaha Beach landings: “there are two types of people staying on this beach – dead guys and guys who are going to die”. I couldn’t see a damned thing - I had sand in my eyes and my ears were ringing – but I was supposed to be leading. I had a job to do. I charged forward anyway, hoping I wouldn’t run head-first into one of the barricade that were scattered across the beach. As I went forward I found blokes on their guts, taking cover from the explosions. I grabbed them and screamed at them to get moving up the beach. I even kicked a few. I took what shots I could with my M1 rifle, but mainly I just kept moving and pushing the blokes along up the beach and away from the killing zone. When they moved they just did as they had trained to do – took a few steps, took cover, fired if they could and them moved again. When the director yelled CUT we all just kind of stumbled around and tried to blink the sand and smoke from our eyes.

He wrote more (four pages, in fact) and I’ll link to it when he gets around to posting it somewhere.

I haven’t been to fire training or been to a fire in over a year thanks to my ankle which is still giving me trouble, but I figured I’d post these pictures taken at the Tumut around the 12th-15th of this month, it seems the fuel loads are about as bad as they were in 2003. It’s lucky there’s nothing left to burn in Canberra.

(click for a bigger version)