Curds, Cows, And Whey Whey Away.

I guess if you check TEdAMENU from time to time you'd have noticed that I've begun making soft style cheeses.  These are curdled using citric acid, lemon juice, or vinegar, each of which give their own flavour to the cheese, and which you'd know from the taste of soft cheeses like cottage cheese.

It makes for pretty small curds too, which leads to a crumblier and drier cheese.  So I'd love to source the enzyme rennet from some local stores.  What rennet does is to curdle the milk more slowly, leading to the whole milk setting into one large curd and a lot of liquid whey.  Then you can cut the curds into any size you want, controlling the smoothness and hardness of the finished cheese.

Wanting to be able to say I've sourced the rennet and the information locally, I went to Borello Cheese in Oakford and asked there if they obtained their rennet locally and if so, if their source sold hobbyist quantities.  The most unhelpful and frankly hostile shop assistant I've ever had to deal with, any thought I'd had of actually buying any of their product went out the window as she basically told me to rack off and she wouldn't pass my question on to anyone else who might be able to tell me, either.

I tried to phone the next day hoping to catch someone with slightly more manners and a damn sight more interpersonal skills and got the same cow again, so I've had zero luck so far.  I don't know what her problem is, but I tell you what, the company could do worse than sacking her with prejudice.  Did she think I'm going to start a rival creamery in a one bedroom cottage with an electric hotplate to cook on?  Pu-lleese!

This week I'll be asking a few of the friendlier local creameries, and Borello can basically go suck the whey off my curd knife.

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Scrappy V Leaves The Fold

Saturday, after a bit of inner struggle and some thinking, I finally sold Scrappy V, my little Vmoto scooter.  Well, the inner struggles happened a few weeks ago, with Saturday being the culmination.

Scrappy's gone to a nice owner, lovely person and I'm sure it will get a good life being someone else's shopping and get about town machine.  I know I had Scrappy for almost three years, and it served me well during that time, being my work transport, shopping transport, and getaway machine when I needed to get - well, away...

But since moving to "South Beyonderup" six months ago, I also know that I haven't been able to justify keeping that scooter. I was riding it only to keep the cobwebs off, and since I really am looking for other places in the country to live and maybe even permaculture farm, a little scooter with tiny wheels will maybe not be the best choice of transport.

Ciao to one of the most fun machines I've had the opportunity to own in a long time!

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These Are NOT The Best...

Have you checked out Second Life? By now, you either have, or perhaps aren't at all interested.  Whatever.  I had a few months of enjoying SL, then operated a sim for another few months, but finally, Linden Labs' creeping greed and unwillingness to fix useability issues in favour of adding ever more and more buggy features led me to give it up as a bad joke.

And not just me - many long term sim owners are just abandoning their holdings and walking away.  So it's surprising to hear LL talking about the "stable economy" in SL.  Because, of course, the place is driven by a constant flow of Real Life money, going from residents to sim owners to LL.  And we all know about the famous "cratering" RL economy don't we?  Many sim owners abandoned SL because of this reason.  Many more will do so before this year is over, I'll bet.  So the talk of a stable economy in SL is bullshit, sorry.

I also have some news for Linden Labs - if they halved their prices it would still not be worth it in the foreseeable future.  With lovely clustering and multiprocessing systems such as Hadoop running on Ubuntu linux it surely can't be long before someone realises that a "sim" is a useful unit of virtual real estate but the limitations on it are purely artificial, and by running several server clouds each performing some specific part of the VR process they could have a faster and more reliable system than LL does, for 1/10th the price.

Such virtual sites will become more common, and will outpace Linden Labs' efforts, inevitably.  They will become as common as websites were ten years ago, and many enterprises (as mentioned in some other articles of mine recently) will be run using such sites as their core.  As is already proven in SL, many will actually perform services in that virtual environment, some will sell RL items and services using the virtual environment much as we use a website today to sell everything from books to handcrafts, coffee cups to cars.

Having positioned themselves, LL will end up like AOL, large, top-heavy, and a dinosaur in under five years, extinct in, what was it, eight?  They should have taken a leaf from Obama and Rudd, and put incentives in place, both fiscal and technical.  Then a few more people might believe that SL is at least as good as Australia and China at insulating the effects of the financial crisis...

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We Are The Best!

Before you all shrug off Rudd as a dudd, please take a moment to let this sink in.  Of all the countries in the world, Australia is the one least affected by the Recession.  ANY amount of future debt is fine, provided it cushions the here and now.  There's not much point having money in the piggy bank for a ravaged country, better to do as we have done and go for it, and let tomorrow take care of itself.  For all we know, tomorrow there may be a whole different economic system in play, anyway...

Yes the recession has hit hard here, with mining jobs falling to the economic scythe, tourism dollars drying up, and the real estate and rental market in a mess.  But we're still managing to keep more going around and around than many - no, most - other countries of the world.  And that's not some lucky fluke, it's because we've been steered largely in the right direction.

I was on the point of giving up on our PM, I really was.  but maybe we need to give him a shot, and maybe ask the contrary few like Mr Turnbull to put it back in their pants and let K-Rudd do his job.  Who knows, we may be pleasantly surprised...

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Spaghetti Cabling

Compare and contrast.  Discuss it if you like.  is there a reason FSM and IT seem to go hand in noodle?

I've worked on contract in one of these sort of server rooms.  The only reason I'm not scarred for life is that I was able to tell myself that I only had to work there six weeks...

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Shot At A Knife Fight...

Austrian police (?) say an Indian Guru has died following gunshot wounds.  During a knife fight.  WTF?

Well, that was the JJJ report, anyway.  Turns out they were not reporting the whole truth.  Reading a report by an ironically more correct source than JJJ indicates that there was apparently also at least one gun involved.

The way this radio station reported it, you'd have had to assume that there was just a knife fight and therefore the fatal gunshot would have had to come from Austrian Polizei, which would (when you think about it) provoke an international religious incident.

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Some Bank Is Concerned For The Security Of My Banking Details

And of course, I'm touched by their concern and immediately compliant to their authority.

Dear Bank - I am in receipt of your email dated this instant, requesting me to "update and verify" my information, no doubt including my PIN and account numbers I suppose, but since it's you that's asking I guess that's all right:

Dear xxxxxxxxx Bank member,

For your protection, we have limited access to your account until additional security measures can be completed. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Please update and verify your information by checking the link below: http://headcasehats.com/users/sandra/.limited/account/index.html
*** if you can't open this secure link copy to your internet browser

We thank you for your prompt attention to this matter. Please understand that this is a security measure intended to help protect you and your account. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Sincerely,
xxxxxxxxx Bank Account Review Department
------------------------------------
Copyright © xxxxxxxxx Bank of Australia 2009 ABN 48 123 123 124

Oh okay.  I understand that this is just a security measure intended to stop anyone stealing my information by sending me to some website with some un-bank-related name, like, oh, say, headcasehats.com and of course I'll do whatever you say because after all, I don't even bank with you.  So I promise to supply you with the details of all my other bank accounts so that you can check them with the other banks...

Honestly - is there some unwritten rule out there that says every phishing email has to be written by phucking phuckwits who think everyone else is an idiot too?  Is there some law of nature that requires idiots to give clear and unambiguous warning that they are idiots who think you're an even bigger idiot?  Come on phishers - at least look like you're making an effort...

I can just imagine this particular silver tongued devil sitting back waiting to the billions to start pouring in from all those banking details.  "I don't get it, Clem.  I wrote it all purty with real lawyerese stuff in it, but it's almost like they're all sitting back laughin' at me!" and with that sits back with head in hands, shattered and disillusioned.

Psst! Boy!  I got a link here for you!  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect guaranteed to point out what your problem is!

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Having Just Seen Angels And Demons,

... the one thing that struck me was how many religious statues are holding sharp swords and spears...

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Job Ads No-one Checked

When you're looking for a job, which ad would attract you more?

#1
Job 1: Senior System Administrator, great renumeration, centrally located.
#2
Job 1: Senior System Administrator, great remuneration, centrally located.

I know I'd rather have great income than a bunch of great numbers...

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