Still a roleplayer
Went to visit some friends yesterday. Had a lovely BBQ, played dancing games later on during the evening, and drooled over some very nice maps and miniatures. You know your friends are into roleplaying when you find a plushy-cthulu doll with their child's toys.

However the moment of true enlightenment came when it was realised that not only were we discussing accounting practices, but we were discussing accounting practices so we could write a bot to automatically calculate ledger balances in a wiki for a roleplaying game.

The bot works pretty well, too. WWW::Mechanize is a wonderful thing.

Wetsuits
The business that shipped me the wrong wetsuit have been very polite and up-front about their mistake, and are very willing to fix it. I can keep my existing suit for a partial refund (tempting, since it's a really comfortable suit, and I want to go diving next weekend), or I can return it at their expense for a replacement, which unfortunately will take 2-3 weeks to arrive.

I'm choosing to return the suit, as it means I won't need to worry about finding a buyer for the old suit, and I also get relief from import duties as the second suit will be a replacement, not a new import.

In the meantime it looks like I'll be wrestling my way into tight and rigid hire suits, while Jacinta lounges around in her custom-fitted semi-dry.

New Wetsuit
Diving is an equipment-intensive sport. Having your own equipment rather than using hire-gear has a number of advantages, including both comfort and financial.

For anyone putting together a kit of diving equipment in Australia one thing rapidly becomes clear. The cost of equipment overseas is significantly cheaper than purchasing it locally. This isn't restricted to just diving equipment, books, electronics, software, and other products are often significantly cheaper overseas.

Purchasing items from overseas has obvious economic benefits, but carries some risks and disadvantages as well. Obviously postage is longer and more expensive, and there are import duties and taxes. These are easy to quantify.

Some risks are more difficult to determine. Obviously when purchasing anything to wear, the possibility of a mis-fit is high. So when I examined the possibilities of importing a wetsuit, I put considerable thought into sizing and what to do in case something goes wrong.

Eventually it comes down to a matter of risk-vs-reward. I'm very comfortable with risk, and can happily say that I've benefited from taking calculated risks on a regular basis.

Today the wetsuit arrived, and sure enough it fits — perfectly. It's extremely comfortable, very flexible, but most important of all, it's the wrong suit.

Without going into too much detail, I had ordered what's called a semi-dry that has seals around the neck, wrists, and ankles. The suit that had arrived was conspiciously missing these.

I've opened negotiations to work towards a resolution, but given the distances and timezones involved, I imagine that may take some time.

The worst case scenario is that I return the suit for a refund, and wear the costs of postage (potentially including duties and taxes). However I'm hoping this won't be the case.

This does put a bit of a hole in our diving weekend that's coming up.

Images available on the pjf.id.au version of this journal.

The most time-consuming desert
I've long had an interest in edible plants. Most fruit and vegetables that are eaten in modern times require easy harvesting and good shelf-life. Most westernized consumers don't see anything beside these commercial crops. There are plenty of wonderful things out there that can be cultivated, or simply found growing wild if you know where to look for them.

I regularly use some of the more tasty of wild plants in my cooking. Fat-hen (Chenopodium album) is regularly cooked in omlettes; Nasturtium (Tropaeolum majus), chickweed (Stellaria media) and pigweed (Portulaca oleracea) are fantastic in salads. There's even some wild artichoke thistles (Cynara cardunculus) growing in the area — these are delicious, although gloves are required for harvesting and preparation.

One of the most widespread of edible plants is blackberry nightshade (Solanum nigrum). The leaves are edible when cooked, but most importantly the tiny black berries are sweet, and can be happily eaten raw. Blackberry nightshade has almost a worldwide distribution, and a long history as a food plant.

Many people consider the berries of S. nigrum to be poisonous, probably because the plant shares some similar physical characteristics with deadly nightshade (Atropa belladonna), a plant which is thankfully not found in Australia. This caution is quite sensible: belladonna is very poisonous plant indeed.

This weekend Jacinta and I decided to try our hand at making blackberry nightshade mousse. This calls for a cupful of blackberry nightshade berries, and it should be noted that these things are tiny. Finding sufficient numbers was easy (our garden has a number of plants), but harvesting and preparation was an incredible amount of work.

I think that Jacinta and I easily spent over an hour just removing the stalks from the berries, just to get a single cup. I've come to believe that there must be a better way of doing this, possibly by using a coarse-grained seive.

Once the berries were prepared, making the mousse was really very simple and fast in comparison. Overall the result was definitely worthwhile; the mousse has a sweet and delicious fruity-berry flavour, and one cup of berries makes quite a lot of mousse.

Photographs are included on the pjf.id.au hosted version of this journal.

Snorkling
Went snorkling under Rye pier, looked at wetsuits and made friends with the lovely lovely staff at Aquatic Adventures, who were generous enough to let us use their changerooms. Would have loved to explore more of the pier than we did, but a forest of fishing lines made that too dangerous.

We had plenty of people on the pier interested on what was underneath, and we chatted somewhat about the local wildlife. Given that all one really needs is a mask and snorkle, I'm surprised more people don't go exploring their piers.

Trams
Discovered that Melbourne's tram stop displays run on Linux, as we caught one rebooting on the way home. Jacinta was fast enough to catch a photograph of an upside down Tux before the display clearly started-up Xwindows.

As an interesting aside, the rail displays in Sydney run on Windows, as we caught one after a blue screen of death the last time we were up there.

I have no idea why my presence causes public transport IT infrastructure to malfunction.