Wikipedia on wild edible plants
Wikipedia is an excellent resource, but seems to perform poorly in the field of wild edible plants. I'm slowly correcting that, with today's entry being a short article on sowthistles. For such a common plant I'm surprised that there was no article already.

As usual, I need a better photo. All the sowthistles of reasonable size in our garden tend to get eaten.

Magic — the reunion
What do you do when a bunch of friends from University haven't seen each other in a couple of weeks, and happen to all have a free weekend? Why, you reach into the dusty attics, pull out long-forgotten boxes of cards, and mumble something about how we foolishly traded away our mox gems in our youth.

Yes, we had a day of getting together and playing Magic — The Gathering, what was commonly known as 'cardboard crack' back in my University days. We even chuckled and laughed at the 'new' cards that one of our players had brought along, until we realised that those new cards were printed seven years ago. Then we all felt just a little bit older.

The day was lots of fun, although being the first time many of us had played in almost a decade, there was considerable time spent reorganising decks. We never ended up having a five-player prismatic game in the end, but that provides us with a good excuse to get together next time.

189th Fastest Jetman
It's official. I am now the 189th fastest Jetman in the world!

Jetpak - Solar Crisis is an extremely well polished, fun, and very British game. A great way to soak up a few hours on a Saturday afternoon.

Domain name scams
Every once in a while some business sends out a bunch of (dead-tree) mails trying to get Australian domain holders to renew their domain (which isn't expiring) or register a new domain (which is similar or a typo of their old domain), usually at ridiculous prices. It's usually the same people running these scams, but they just register a new company every time.

AuDA, the Australian Domain name Authority, likes to send out consumer alerts about these sorts of things. Unfortunately, they're not real good about limiting their e-mails to one per customer. If one happens to have registered a lot of domains, then one can awake discovering an inbox filled with warnings from AuDA. Thanks AuDA...

Disputes
The dispute that we were having with one of our vendors is now cleared. Actually, it cleared pretty much the day after it started, with the vendor calling me, putting forward some rubbish story about how pressing one button constitutes $180 worth of work, and then breaking down and offering me exactly the same deal I was about to propose (and had already written into a letter and was about to fax). I like it when people are sensible enough to save both their time and mine.

Dentist
Going to visit the dentist today, she's going to put some minor fillings in my teeth, and in return I'm going to give her a deposit on her new sportscar.

Surprisingly I feel rather pleased with this state of affairs, as I get to keep all my wisdom teeth. Three of them have come through perfectly, and while the last is on a slightly strange angle, it's not causing any problems.

I don't know why, but the fact that my wisdom teeth are fine seems to cause no end of worry for my dentist. "Yes, they're perfectly fine, but if you do decide that you want them taken out, just book an appointment."

What happens if I don't get them taken out? Well, because they're right up the back they're harder to brush, and I may get a cavity. Somehow I'm much more comfortable with giving my dentist a car-deposit for a filling, rather than a house-deposit to go under general anesthetic and have my back teeth pulled out with pliers and commercial cutting equipment.

Book Review
Looks like I'm going to be reviewing a book. That's nothing to write home about, everyone has to review books in high-school. However this book hasn't been published yet, so that makes it special. In addition, it's a book that I've been really looking forward to reading, and from an author I really like. That makes it doubly special.