February 2012
3 posts
3 tags
A day out of Newman
Yesterday I decided I’ve been in Newman long enough so I took my work car (with prior approval, naturally) out of town to do some exploring. I arose relatively early, fuelled up on a proper breakfast (egg, bacon, sausage, beans, mushroom, tomato, hash brown, and a glass of juice - see below) and got ready to go. My electric frying pan actually claims to be a Family Banquet Frypan, but...
4 tags
Back on my own saddle
I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned on here, but I’ve recently invested in a late Christmas present for myself - a 2011 Avanti Giro 4, and I’ve taken a photo of it which you can see below.
After waiting patiently for my helmet to arrive (stupid Australian helmet laws - don’t even get me started…) I’ve managed to ride it the past two days. I’m very...
January 2012
12 posts
“What? Like pancakes?”
– - Everyone whom I’ve told about my flapjacks from yesterday.
How have I gone my whole life without knowing that Americans (and hence Australians) call their pancakes ‘flapjacks’?! This completely changes the scene for me in Groundhog Day (what was the popular culture reference for...
1 tag
Sophie Dahl, your flapjack recipe does not work.
Yesterday I decided that a good way to use up some of my left over baking stuff would be to bake flapjacks and throw in a bunch of stuff. So I looked up recipes and decided on Sophie Dahl’s golden flapjacks recipe. Sophie Dahl - and I actually knew this - is Roald Dahl’s grand-daughter (although Dahl isn’t her real surname, but I imagine it’s better than whatever her...
“Well that would be ‘cherry’.”
– - One of my colleagues when I was explaining that the spelling “Sheree” is very Australian, whereas I’d spell that name “Cherie”.
They do it with lots of names though… “Sharnee”, “Shaani” (funnily enough pronounced the same), Shaynee,...
Casa de Dan!
I’ve been meaning to put these up for a while, so without further ado - below are photos I’ve just taken of the inside of my place here in Newman…
Complaining's the same in any language.
Earlier this week I took advantage of the 27 year high the Aussie Dollar’s experiencing against the Pound and transferred a significant amount of money back home. During the process I had some grief from my bank, being pushed from pillar to post with various issues transferring such a large amount of money - this was coupled with a lightning strike that’s taken my local branch out of...
In the next hour my apparent IQ will take a hit.
Within the next hour, the English language Wikipedia will be taken down for a 24 hour period as part of a protest. It’s worth reading the reasons for this on that link if you have the time because - apart from anything else - I thought it was quite interesting.
Nevertheless, I’m definitely going the way of the above XKCD comic strip for a day. That is unless I can very quickly...
"It's miserable weather outside..."
Over the past week, we’ve had rain in Newman. Like, a lot of rain. It’s been pretty non-stop, and so the creeks are all filling up, the roads are being flooded and closed and some of the minesites have been evacuated a few times this week.
According to the Australian Beareau of Meteorology, on Tuesday there was almost as much rain at Newman Airport as one would expect in October in...
Potential Gold Medal Winner
I read a cycling article on the Guardian this morning, and I was left a little confused by the following passage;
With sport cycling expected to do well at the Olympics – with a potential gold medal winner at the Games’ opening event, Mark Cavendish in the road race – 2012 could be the year when cycling goes “top of mind”
Surely every competitor in that race is a potential...
“Oh, that’s where that comes from.”
– - One of the people who complained that we still have Christmas decorations up in our office at work.
I’d explained to her that decorations should be kept up until the Twelfth Night (“…there are twelve days of Christmas. You must have heard the song?”). Apparently...
Back in Newman
After very busy, really great week back at home followed by an entirely uneventful journey back to Newman, I am now back at my house.
Thanks to the shortest queues I have ever seen at Heathrow’s security checks (I literally walked straight through to the front of the queue at the X-ray machine) I had plenty of time to sit and enjoy the last British pint I’ll have for several months...
December 2011
15 posts
55 hours after leaving my home in Newman...
… I am home in Wallington. That is all.
Qantas Club Lounge
Courtesy of the wonderful cabin crew I had yesterday I secured a couple of vouchers entitling me to entry into the Qantas Club lounge, so I am currently sitting in a lovely leather armchair in Singapore airport with a complimentary copy of The Times, a complimentary copy of The FT, a complimentary coffee and a complimentary beer using the complimentary wireless internet with a TV showing the...
Not, unfortunately, in London.
So many people may know that today I was flying to London. Currently I should be sitting in Singapore airport waiting for a connecting flight to Heathrow. This morning shortly after posting my blog post, I got a lift from a colleague to Newman airport. After checking in, passing through security and waiting in the departure lounge, the plane landed as expected half an hour before I was due to fly...
The xnerp.co.uk Jeweller of the Decade Award
It’s that time of year where some of the great awards announcements are made; including The BBC Sports Personality of the Year, The Christmas Number One and of course, the Foot in Mouth Awards. But today I make history by adding to this list of most illustrious awards by presenting the first (and probably final) decennial xnerp.co.uk Jeweller of the Decade Award.
After very careful...
1 tag
“A yellow [be aware] warning remains in place in some areas.”
– - Weather warning: Be prepared for snow - Met Office, the BBC.
Teehehe … nice to see they’re warning about the pressing issues with snow there.
“We’re just going to bring the bed over now, but do you have any rope?”
– - my old manager, who is leaving town and sold me a bed.
He sold most of his furniture to our new network guy, and they were transporting it with a trailer this afternoon. I don’t have any rope, but when they turned up I found they’d used a 10 metre Ethernet cable instead. We work with...
A punchline 8 months in the making.
In 2006 I had a long weekend holiday to Newquay with some friends to celebrate my 21st birthday, which that year fell on Good Friday. For whatever reason, we decided to have a night out in Chicago’s in Sutton on the Thursday night before driving overnight to Newquay, arriving on the Friday morning.
As it turned midnight, someone had requested the DJ play a Christmas song to celebrate my...
It must have been Scott...
Yesterday I popped into Newman Library in town on my way home from work, as I often do because it stays open later on Thursdays. When I gave my book back the lady behind the counter said to me “I’m sorry, I hadn’t recognised you in the weekend without your uniform”. She could obviously quickly tell by the vacant look on my face that she’d gotten me confused with...
“At 24, I came back to England and have been here ever since. The dullness and...”
– - Richard White, Hemel Hempstead, UK; Why we quit Australia for the UK, The BBC.
Wait… Perth? Dullness and isolation? Perth? … Seriously?! I wish I was somewhere like Perth. This guy should have moved to the Pilbara for a bit, grown some balls; no wonder we have a reputation for being...
Another clanger from the BBC....
I checked the BBC website this morning to notice that along with the two previous mistakes by the BBC (here and here) that I’ve spotted, they had another glaring mistake where they’ve reported that my local team (although actually quite tenuously at the moment) Crystal Palace beat Manchester United in some football game last night.
November 2011
21 posts
TV shows about Computers
Many of my readers will know that I regularly check the BBC website, and today I saw that the News Magazine section had a mini-quiz on computer programmes. I briefly wondered how many TV shows could possibly have been made about computers as I clicked the link, and I was greeted with the sight below;
As much as I hate to be a pedant (I really don’t - I quite enjoy it), they mean computer...
1 tag
A meal straight from its traditional home.
Last night I cooked myself a chicken tikka masala. I’m going to be up-front about this and say from the outset that I cheated; I used sauce from a jar and enjoyed it with packaged naan bread. But frying some capsicum (English: bell pepper) and onion, adding chicken and then throwing in a jar of sauce is a very easy meal, albeit as close to a ready meal as I’ll comfortably go.
After...
“You’ll make someone a wonderful wife one day.”
– - My colleague Karen earlier this week when I brought in the brownies I baked last weekend.
This probably says a lot about the perceived gender roles in Australia…
“Nice pink shirt, Dan! Are you going to blog about me again now?”
– - my friend Kelly.
Yes, yes I am.
Schapelle Corby is not a celebrity.
In Australia whenever there’s talk about prison sentences in Bali, especially concerning incidents involving drugs, Schapelle Corby’s case is always mentioned. Until this point I have ascertained from these news stories that Schapelle Corby is currently in prison in Bali for drug smuggling, and there was a very high profile court case at the time regarding this. She also crops up from...
1 tag
Macadamia and Raisin Chocolate Brownies
Today I was planning on doing some more gardening but due to heavy rain yesterday afternoon and last night I decided to wait until a time where the soil was drier and to do some baking instead. As I’ve cooked cookies several times before and I don’t have any cake tins, I decided to have a go at cooking some chocolate brownies.
After a quick search on the BBC’s recipes page I...
I have 15 friends. Apparently.
On the plus side though, I’m slightly ahead of the average Australian.
I heard this morning on the news that to calculate the number of real friends you have, you should simply divide your number of Facebook friends by 11. The article I’ve linked there actually refers to this as a formula, but I’m not sure x = y/11 really counts as much of a formula. But if you’re one of...
“I must emphasise it is never our intention to inconvenience our customers in any...”
– - Debenhams Customer Service (via email after my complaints).
They don’t intentionally inconvenience me (as much as seeing daily emails from them in my spam folder counts as an inconvenience), but they manage to do it quite relentlessly nonetheless. Even after repeated reassurances that...
Who on earth is Phil?
At the end of last month there was the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Perth; so the Queen did a quick tour of several parts of the country (not including, I believe, the Northern Territory - so she wasn’t given complimentary crocodile insurance). Several times before and during her visit, I heard on news shows reference to her arriving with a guy named Phil.
It was only...
Is this the worst graph ever?
Today I’ve logged into the Google Webmaster tools service to see how my blog’s doing on the internet - bascially for anyone who’s interested, I’m pretty sure it’s winning.
Unfortunately though when I clicked the “Site performance” tab, I can see that it’s actually possibly the slowest site on the internet. Or to phrase it how Google did;
On...
3 tags
3 tags
Doing the Gardening
I may have mentioned before that I’ve recently moved into a new house. One of the main things I’d like to get sorted in my new place is the garden; I have a decent sized outdoor patio and garden area, along with a passageway down the side of my place.
When I first moved in the grass was somewhat overgrown so I had to buy myself a strimmer (translation - Australian: whipper snipper;...
Why would they let me pick this?
Today I logged onto my Nationwide internet banking for the first time in a while and it seems they’ve made some changes since my last visit. Amongst other things, they let me pick a name for myself that they will call me around their site. I kinda wish they’d enforce this in their branches too…
I’m sure they’ll put it down as an anti-phishing measure and that...
“A surprise inspection in a prison in Mexico has revealed the presence of 19...”
– - Prostitutes found in Mexico jail, The BBC.
Wow. This made me laugh at my desk when I read this at work this morning. I can almost accept all of the contraband, but to find actual people who’d been smuggled into the prison is such an off-the-wall notion.
Literally decimated.
A few times in the past week I have ended up shouting at the TV because some moron has used the phrase “literally decimated”. The definition of this word seems to cause some confusion for people - decimating means reducing by one tenth, not reducing to practically nothing. So if Qantas only decimates the tourist industry in Australia then that’s not a bad result at all, all...
“Some sit-tight African leaders, who used to attend international summits with...”
– - A “source”, Australia bans importation of arms by Presidents’ security agents, The Nation.
Apparently, it was a surprise to this Nigerian newspaper that their president was not allowed to import weapons to Australia, that he couldn’t carry any liquids in bottles greater than...
