Month: February 2011

  • Shared today on Twitter

    Managed to FaceTime with my Mom on her new Verizon iPhone4! It totally weirded out everybody back home. Very futuristic and TOMORROW.


    @steven_noble Eating after, I think. Your muscles like to take up protein after a workout to repair, IIRC.


    Less than a week left to enter the web-goddess Oscar Contest! Black Swan sock monkeys could be yours… http://bit.ly/dvL5BE


    @chrisgander Blog post about a new health/social gaming site I’ve been using: http://bit.ly/gc63rA. Your type of thing!


    @DDsD The girl who sits about 3 meters from me does… What do you need to know?


    @DDsD Based on the bitching I hear about various states, I don’t think so. @Opheli8 knows as much as I do, really.


    Pondering the capability of the human brain to deal with an exponentially-increasing number of Skype chats, all with different questions…


    I was in a very mild earthquake in LA 2.5 years ago. For this Midwesterner, it was very weird & scary. Can’t imagine being in a big one.


    @jasony Read your blog post. I didn’t know a stylus worked so well with them! I’m very tempted now. Probably wait til 2nd gen though…


    After 9 hours of sleep and a good run, I feel like I could pull the ears off a gundark.


  • Shared today on Facebook

    Managed to FaceTime with my Mom on her new Verizon iPhone4! It totally weirded out everybody back home. Very futuristic and TOMORROW.


    Less than a week left to enter the web-goddess Oscar Contest! Black Swan sock monkeys could be yours… http://bit.ly/dvL5BE


    No tape, but foot was its best in ages! Did 4x400m speed intervals w/ jog recovery. Felt good!


    After 9 hours of sleep and a good run, I feel like I could pull the ears off a gundark.


  • Shared today on Google Reader

  • Health Month

    A few weeks ago I saw a MetaTalk post about forming a team for Health Month. I’d seen the site before when it was in private beta, but now anyone can sign up. I quickly joined the MetaFilter team. The site is all about promoting good habits and behaviours through social gaming. You create a number of rules (free accounts can have up to 3) that you then track each day. A rule might be “Eat leafy greens 3 times a week” or “Don’t smoke” or “Meditate for 10 minutes each day.” Then every day you visit the site and say whether you followed your rules or not. If you break enough rules, you lose a life point. If you follow enough rules, you earn fruit that can be used to heal yourself or others. There’s other fun stuff too, like random daily bonuses and check-ins with your “spirit animal” and stuff like that. I’ve been playing along for a couple weeks now, and I have to say, I think it’s working. The daily logging is quick enough and fun enough that I haven’t missed a day yet. Having simple, explicit rules means I don’t forget to follow them. And the best part is the social aspect happening on our Game Wall. Everyone has been great about posting comments and tips to support each other. More and more people in the health industry are realising that “most health solutions aren’t medical, they’re social.” Cool idea.

    Anyway, I’m enjoying the “game” so much that I ponied up $5 for March. (If you’re a paid subscriber, you can have unlimited rules. You also get “sponsorship chips” you can give to others as well.) If you’ve been thinking about making some personal changes, I’d suggest trying it out!

  • Thom Yorke dances to Single Ladies

    So there’s a new Radiohead album. There’s also a video for one of the songs that features Thom Yorke dancing in a warehouse. Somebody has set his dancing to Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies.” It made my day.

  • The benefits of ego-surfing

    The Snook discovered today that he’s a referenced author! Someone actually found a practical use for the results of his university chem thesis and patented it. He’s listed in the references and everything! Now we’re trying to figure out his Erdős-Bacon number.

  • Shared today on Twitter

    Our Jamie’s 30 Minute Meal #5: Oozy Mushroom Risotto, Spinach Salad, and Lemon & Raspberry Cheesecake. http://bit.ly/eEAg4p Best yet!


    How do savvy teams deliver successful projects? Brilliant infographic: http://bit.ly/gaYexc


    Our new food process has arrived, and it is a beautiful thing. NOW WHAT CAN I PULVERIZE?


    @twelveeyes Ooohhhh, now there’s an idea. I can be the Zumbo of Chippendale! 😛


    @venks79 And they pulled the bus GPS data feed down immediately after #apps4nsw, so no app to help you out either. 🙁 @Opheli8


    I’ve had a big increase in both Twitter and GMail spam in the past few days. Anybody else?


  • Shared today on Google Reader

  • A familiar neck

    Saturday was the apps4nsw development day, a “hack day” event where programmers were challenged to mash up government data in new useful ways. The Snook went along as part of the Yahoo team. (He tried to get me to go, but I felt like a day at home knitting was a bigger priority.) I followed along throughout the morning on the Twitter stream when I saw a bunch of people retweeting a Flickr photo. I clicked through and saw a very familiar neck…

    select * from internet

    Hey! That’s my Snookums! I immediately emailed to tell him he was Twitter-famous.

    The project he helped with didn’t win a prize, but I was proud of him just for taking part.

  • Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals #5: Oozy Mushroom Risotto

    This is our fifth official cooking/blogging experiment from Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals. Hey, we’ve made it through 10% of the book! I had plans to go to the Eveleigh Farmers’ Market on Saturday morning, so I figured we should find a recipe that uses ingredients I can get there. We settled on Oozy Mushroom Risotto, Spinach Salad, and Quick Raspberry & Lemon Cheesecake. For most of my life, mushrooms have been my most hated food, but I’ve been working to get over that in the past few years. I figured this would help. But I wasn’t going to use just any old crap button mushrooms from Coles. There’s always a stall at Eveleigh selling fancy mushrooms (“The Fun Guy”), so that was my first stop Saturday morning. Let me tell you: 500g of fresh exotic mushrooms is NOT cheap. Neither are dried porcini. I’m glad I suffered the expense though, as the resulting meal was well worth it.

    Oozy Mushroom Risotto, Spinach Salad, Quick Raspberry & Lemon Cheesecake

    Quick verdict: No substitutions on this one; we followed the recipe pretty much exactly. Elapsed time was 43:07, which wasn’t too bad. In terms of taste it was fantastic, and we both rated it 9.5/10. I would have never thought such a quick risotto would turn out so good! We did come up with a couple things we’d do differently next time though.

    (more…)