Month: June 2009

Bangers and mash

We all know a good mashed potato needs just the right amount of seasoning. Which becomes easier if you can manage your dosage in caliber form… with these awesome salt’n’pepper pistols.

So Peter Piper now packs his pick of “pinch” or pepper… that was poor.

Found here.

Self filtering

You’ll be happy to know (particularly those following the whole blog off thing) that I generally only post about 40% of my ideas. Which means a 60% increase in posts shouldn’t be a problem.

A bunch of links – June 2, 2009

Geek Tattoo

This is the geekiest tattoo I’ve ever seen

I hope for his sake that the tags aren’t closed.

YouTube Toosday: Con job?

Young Cons – the Young Conservatives (unless it’s a parody) have some issues separating America from the “Kingdom of God”… but this is pretty funny.

“The more money we spend the more mine is worth jack, the Bible says we’re a nation under God…”

Umm, that’s probably the Pledge of Allegiance you’re confused with…

YouTube Tuesday: Entertainering

Giant Pianos are the new black (and white), or at the very least the new Dance, Dance, Revolution.

Sadly, there are heaps more where that came from.

Soap Invaders

These soaps are obviously designed to lure geeks into the shower. And it just might work… but grapefruit scented? What were they thinking.

Found at Gizmodo.

Friend + Friend + Swiss Ball = Awesome

Somersaulting on one exercise ball is awesome – but two guys somersaulting on one exercise ball is doubly so. From here.

Pick your battles

This SolaPanel post comes at a particularly relevant moment what with all my inner-argumentative-angst navel gazing and debates about what issues are worth fighting for.

  1. Fight for what is right. (truth)
  2. Argue for what will work. (tactics)
  3. And keep quiet about everything else. (preference)

Fight for the God-given Biblical principles, argue for how to put them into practice and just leave all the personality or preference issues up to each person to work out for themselves.  I can hesitate on preference, in a meeting I can even back down on my view of tactics, but I must never back down on truth.

Me, I fight on all three, but care about 1 and 2 almost equally (and interchangeably – the media is the message afterall… Or something like that).

Posts at dawn

Simone, Ben, myself and others have entered into some sort of blog off. The rules have already been rigged so that I can’t win. But I plan to anyway.

Here’s how they’re sticking it to the man (me) with the rules… but feel free to enter…

  1. Nathan’s first 50 posts don’t count. Sorry they just don’t. We need a little head start. So Nathan starts at -50. For the rest of us, we start at zero. Blogger with the most posts at 11.59pm on the 30th of June wins.
  2. Any post that clearly has no point isn’t counted. To judge a no-pointer, we look to the blogger’s blogging history. If they wouldn’t have posted it last month, it doesn’t count this month. (luckily this doesn’t really rule out anything for me…)
  3. You (I) can only count posts in your main column!

Thankfully, I can’t see this actually harming the quality of the things I post.

Things I don’t Care About: The fuel subsidy

Premier Bligh has decided to scrap the 8c a litre fuel subsidy. I don’t really care. Anything the government is subsidising is being paid for by us (the tax payer) anyway. So it seems that I’ll get taxed less and have more money to spend on the things that go up in price. Balance. Plus, there have been a number of price hikes in recent years to cover increased fuel costs – and I haven’t noticed decreases to cover the drop in fuel prices since. So it should all just work itself out.

That’s what I think anyway. I wonder why all the lobby groups in the world are up in arms about increased costs when we’re still about 22c ahead of where we were six months ago. I tried to make our line on the issue consistent with my thinking – but keeping the customers (the tourism industry wants the subsidy) satisfied won the day. Oh well. More fool them.

Air lines

One of my favourite things about Lifehacker is that it will often provide a little gem of information amidst a bigger piece of information.

Lifehacker Australia’s editor Angus Kidman has been trying to live out of just one bag for a couple of weeks – because airlines are now taxing checked luggage – which has been an interesting experiment in and of itself. This post is a list of small things he learned on the way

And this is my favourite…

“Qantas never has enough ginger beer on its domestic flights. If you like ginger beer, you’ll need a seat near the front.”

I’d never considered picking a seat on a plane based on having the full range of menu items available (or in fact being close to the front so that you get off quicker)… I’m much more concerned about trying to snatch an exit row seat.

Any flying tips you’d care to share?

Also, my other favourite tidbit of info that the writer picked up was this one:

Far too many hotels still think it’s acceptable to offer International Roast coffee.

Things I hate #43 – CC’ing

You know what I hate, people who write emails to me an carbon copy (CC) other people in on them. Not group discussions – just emails asking me to do stuff and showing everybody else that they’ve asked. That means when I refuse to do said stuff I need to provide my rationale to a wider range of people than would otherwise be the case.

I particularly hate it when someone CC’s my manager into something as though that is a tacit endorsement from my manager of the task this individual is asking me to do. It’s not. And I won’t do it on principle. Then I have to go to my manager and say – “disregard that email, the person is a twit”, or find out that I should in fact do the task for said twit. It would be easier to just send an email to me asking if I’ll do something, or send an email to my manager asking to get me to do something. It saves us all unwanted hassle and stress.

That is all.

Mini(fig)-Me

Amy pointed me to this most fantastic site for creating your own lego minifig.

I created me. Welcome back to the comments Amy.

Modern Ned Kelly

Remember that story about the stupid Australian guys who robbed a bank wearing name tags? It’s only tangentially related to this post. A man in Nebraska held up a convenience store wearing a beer carton on his head… he must be Australian right?

From Boing Boing