More Weddings!
Congratulations to Dan and Tomoko, who are also engaged. I've been holding my tongue a little regarding this, hence my rather cryptic entry on the 28th April.
Mushrooming
On Saturday we went mushrooming with Dan and Tomoko out in Emerald (an outer "suburb" of Melbourne). Dan's family regularly goes out to a very scenic golf-course every year to pick mushrooms. There's an incredible variety of fungi growing on and around the course, although there were only two types that we were picking. We ended up taking home a huge box of them, and spent the evening preserving and cooking with them.
Dan only knew the mushrooms by their Russian names, although he provided us with English translations for our benefit. However, I was curious to learn more about these fungi which (except in the pantry of Dan's family) I had never seen before. It ends up that we were collecting
chanterelles and Slippery Jacks. I've been chomping down on the chanterelles both during the preserving activities, and now again today. I haven't yet tried the slippery jacks -- we don't have as many, and I'm leaving them in the jars longer to soak up some of the flavour of the spices and herbs we added.
Diplomacy
We actually succeeded in organising and running a 7-player Diplomacy game, with (most) players arriving on-time, (most) turns taking a fixed amount of time, and actually having the game run to completion (five-way draw, with Italy holding 17 centres). I was the first player to be eliminated, and Ross the second. Despite this, we were both instrumental in planning and holding a stalemate line to force the draw.
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No more flash ads!
I've loved
Mozilla for its ability to disable pop-ups, block ads, and generally be incredibly useful. However it's always bothered me that I can't block flash-ads in the same way that I can block normal images.
However, thanks to a helpful comment on slashdot today, I discovered there is a way to block flash ads! My web-browsing experience has now become a whole lot nicer. For instructions, you can visit Dion's stuff.
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Weddings!
Oh wow! My friends are all getting engaged. Congratulations to Ian and Sofie who got engaged last weekend! There's even more exciting news that I'm not allowed to say, so I won't say that here.
Chickens
The chook that was having problems with her vent appears to be much better after her adjustment, and has made a full recovery.
Alas, the chicken that lays broken eggs is still laying broken eggs.
Perl Courses
Our public courses are filling up. Hurrah.
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Chickens
One of our chooks (not the broken one) appeared to have the chicken equivalent of hemorrhoids today. I had the dubious experience of getting to push them back in. We'll need to check they pop back out again tomorrow. If they have, we'll probably need to use stronger medicine (eg, an axe).
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Audio-Visual Entertainment
After having a DVD drive installed in
cube (a tiny machine about the size of a shoebox) for a while, I actually used it to watch a movie. Jacinta received a copy of
Spirited Away for her birthday, and I was surprised at how easy it was to get everything running under Linux.
I spent about 15 minutes upgrading the drive's firmware, apt-get installed Ogle, dropped in the disk, and it played. Woo-hoo!
Having a open-source operting system with an open-source DVD player work "out of the box" was deeply satisfying. The only thing that didn't work was the TV output, but our 17" LCDs give a pretty nice picture, and are easily relocated to the lounge-room.
As it so happens, I remember getting the TV output working for a course I ran the other year where my only "projector" was a TV. I'd just forgotten I needed to run the appropriate utility. Oops.
In any case, I'm chuffed that our little shoebox performed its first test as an A/V machine admirably. Now if I can only replace the fan in the power-supply that sounds like a failing lawn-mower, we might use it more often for home entertainment.
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