If that's Pig shit, I want some more!

Another load of waffle about cooking follows, so feel free to skip the rest of this entry if it doesn't interest you.

Sometime last week, I was having a discussion with "old Graham" the neighbour over the back fence about the pros and cons of various foods on the barbecue. Graham seems to cook dinner on his bbq most nights, so if I'm doing the same, we usually end up having a chat and a beer over the fence while we're cooking our respective meals.
Anyway as part of the discussion Graham mentioned some Maggi seasoning that he uses when cooking steak. We also got into a discussion about Bacon Chops, which I hadn't had for years, and which he advised we could source from a local butcher. For those of you that have never tried them, bacon chops are the same or similar to standard pork chops in terms of thickness, but they've of course been through the same curing process as bacon, so they're like eating a piece of bacon the size and thickness of a
T bone steak.
I was interested in trying both, so Graham said he would pick some up for me, which, a couple of days later he did. When he dropped everything over to us, (which I think was early Saturday evening, I asked him for the exact name of the seasoning so that I could buy more if we liked it. His response was "Aw I dunno exactly, Pig shit and something or other". I laughed, but didn't think too much more about it at the time.

This evening I decided to give both things a try, so I put the steak in a baking dish, and sprinkled the seasoning on each side, before leaving it to stand for an hour or so. As I was warming up the bbq and oiling the plate, graham appeared over the fence to ask if I was trying the bacon. I told him that I was, and that I was also trying some steak with his seasoning. He asked whether I was intending to use a high heat, which I normally do. He suggested that instead, I should turn the burners up to maximum until I'd heated everything up, then turn it down to just above half when I put the steak on to cook. He also recommended leaving the lid of the bbq down as much as possible to hold in both the heat and the flavour. Given that I was already trying something new, I decided to try his recommendations as well, after all, he reckons he's been cooking on the bbq every night for the last 35 years, so I figured he should know what he's talking about.
I cooked everything for about 5 minutes on each side, and only lifted the lid to turn things over.
The end result was even better than I'd hoped for, in fact, without wanting to gloat, I reckon this one was probably the best bbq I've cooked so far. The seasoning really gave the steak a nice flavour, and I think it helped to tenderize the meat, and the bacon chops were every bit as nice as I'd hoped they'd be.

When I asked Shon what she thought of the food, her response was "Well if that's pig shit, then I want some more."
I think I'll definitely be cooking things on the bbq this way from now on as it really turned out well.

Chickening out, buggering off, and bravely running away to clean the barbecue now but another post about the benefits of the new pots, pans, and knives will follow shortly..

The following arrived in my inbox this morning, and it made me smile so thought I'd post it here.


S.A.D. – Standard Apology Disclaimer:

This email contains humour (albeit as defined by the sender). It is sent without malice, ill-intent or with the intention of deliberately causing mental, physical or imagined anguish to any reader. Most jokes have an object, opinion or person that is the butt of that joke, this is the nature of jokes. Therefore, should you be very sensitive to issues which lend themselves to humour or be without a sense of humour or do not like to take the "mickey" out of anything animate or inanimate... PLEASE DO NOT CONTINUE READING.

I know, the SAD disclaimer kind of ruins the whole thing, but without it there will always be some “miserable sod” who whinges about something.

Dear Fellow Australians,

Due to the current global financial situation and the slowdown of the economy, the Federal Government has decided to implement a scheme to put workers of 45 years of age and above on early retirement. This scheme will be known as R.A.P.E. (Retire Aged People Early).

Persons selected to be RAPED can apply to Centrelink to be eligible for the S.H.A.F.T. scheme (Special Help After Forced Termination) .

Persons who have been RAPED and SHAFTED will be reviewed under the S.C.R.E.W. program (Scheme Covering Retired Early Workers).
A person may be RAPED once, SHAFTED twice and SCREWED as many times as the Government deems appropriate.

Persons who have been RAPED can only get A.I.D.S. (Additional Income for Dependants & Spouse) or H.E.R.P.E.S. (Half Earnings for Retired Personnel Early Severance).
Obviously persons who have AIDS or HERPES will not be SHAFTED or SCREWED any further by the Government.

Persons who are not RAPED and are staying on will receive as much S.H.I.T. (Special High Intensity Training) as possible. My government has always prided itself on the amount of SHIT it gives Australians.

Should you feel that you do not receive enough SHIT, please bring to the attention of your local Member of Parliament. They have been trained to give you all the SHIT you can handle.

Enjoy the Future!

Sincerely,

Kevin 747

this must be the record! two posts in two days?

Anyway I just wanted to post because I'm feeling all smug about the meal I just cooked.
I've done a few meals in the OZ pig, using a camp oven, but have always had some sighted help because I find it difficult to regulate the wood fire. I also have a bit of trouble adding wood half way through the cooking process without a pair of eyes handy. Last night I was discussing this with Nev when I called him to arrange for he and Brad to come round and mow the lawn before our inspection on Wednesday. I asked him if he thought it would work to put the camp oven on the gas bbq so that I could regulate the heat more effectively. Anyway to cut a long story short, he called me this morning and suggested that we could have a go at setting it up while he was here to mow the yard today, which we did.

For those of you that haven't seen or used one, a camp oven is a pot usually either oval or round in shape, made of a very heavy cast iron, which is normally designed to be placed in the hot coals of a wood or brickette fire. The meat, or whatever you're cooking goes inside the pot, and because it's cast iron, once it's hot, it tends to stay that way. Also because the cast iron absorbs the flavours of the oil and other things that have been cooked in it, it gives the food a particular and quite unique flavour. The camp oven has wire handles on the top, similar to those found on a standard bucket.
Anyway what we did was remove the two solid plates from the bbq, move the two grill plates into the middle, and place the camp oven on top of the grill plates. We set the two outer burners on the lowest setting and set the two middle ones on about half way. We put an aluminium foil tray into the bottom of the camp oven, and placed a fresh chicken inside that. The chikcken was sprayed with cooking oil, and sprinkled with sault and pepper. We cooked the chicken this way for about an hour, then lifted the lid of the camp oven, and added hole potatos, carrots, cut into thirds, and an onion. We then cooked everything for a further half hour before serving. In the mean time Shon made some gravey and cooked some peas in the Microwave to go with it.
The end result was one of the taisteiest roasts I've ever had, and I was able to control the temperature, and do the hole thing with only minimal guideance from Nev at the beginning when we were setting it up. Now that I know how to set the burners on the bbq, I'm pretty confident that I can do the same thing myself next time. I also discussed with Nev what to do to cook a pork roast, so am pretty keen to give that a try soon too.
For now though, think it's time I chickened out, buggered off, and bravely ran away.
TTFN.

Well, it's been a while since I've felt sufficiently inspired to write in this thing, but here goes with a quick update of sorts.
In general, not much exciting has happened, just the usual work stuff. I have recently acquired a couple of cool new toys though.
Back in October I acquired an old bass guitar off my old mate skippy, as I've always wanted to have a go at learning to play bass. I haven't done much with it though as I had no amp, so last week-end we decided to brave all the people that descended on the town for national Beef Week, and go shopping for a little practice amp. I chose a little 15 watt Ashdown unit, which I'm very happy with. They had a couple of other bass amps that were cheaper and slightly more powerful, but the speakres were smaller, and the sound was nowhere near as clean. Skippy gave me a quick lesson over Skipe last Saturday night, since he doesn't live locally, and since then I've spent a couple of nights this week trying without much success to get my fingers to do what I want them to do. Shon has also decided to learn with me, and has found a really useful website containing some lessons which we're both working our way through. I don't think I'll be much of a player for quite a while yet, but I'm having lots of fun with it which was always the basic idea.

In other toy related news I have in the last couple of weeks been evaluating some adaptive tech options and going through the process of workplace mods, which I'm surprised to say was pretty painless.
The end result of the exercise though is that I now have a Pacmate QX40. Basically the nature of my job has changed a bit over the last 12 months, in that I am having to do a lot more presentations to management etc, as well as producing and presenting reports containing lots of figures. Normally I'm used to doing things using speech, but when it comes to figures, or when I'm trying to talk to a lengthy and detailed powerpoint presentation I find that Braille is extremely useful and makes life much easier, so when the Bald-headed Boss indicated that he would support me looking at what tools might help me, and that he would fund them if necessary, I set about looking at my options.
I've never been much of a fan of the Pacmate or Braillenote type products in the past, because of the extremely high price and relative difficulty of upgrading, so I was initially thinking of a small netbook and a braille display. That was until I had to give a presentation to a bunch of senior execs, and borrowed Shon's braillenote so that I could sling it round my neck and have access to all my notes. At this point I decided that the idea of an all-in-one PDA with the ability to function as a braille display for the pc was probably the best solution. Given that the Braille sense doesn't have any support here in Aus, the choices came down to Pacmate or Braillenote. Unfortunately, or perhaps unfortunately depending on how you look at it, the work environment is very much based on Exchange and Ms Office, as well as a number of web based corporate apps, so the Braillenotes lack of exchange support was a bit of a pain. I also often get handed powerpoints, pdf documents, and excel spreadsheets, and the Pacmate had the best compatibility with all of those things. Also the Braillenote wouldn't talk to our wireless network, which uses WPA2 so there was another plus for the Pacmate. On the down side, the pacmate is a bit unstable like most Windows Mobile devices I've used, and compared to the Braillenote the connectivity options are fairly ordinary; no in-built wireless or bluetooth, and no sd card support, which surprises me considering those sorts of things are fairly standard these days. In the end though, I decided that the compatibility with our office environment was more important which is why I ended up with the Pacmate. I must say though that in general it's not too bad, despite having heard a number of complaints about frequent crashes. The other night I was listening to a stream from ABC local radio Queensland, with 2 word documents and a powerpoint presentation open as well as outlook and msn, and while it did slow down it didn't crash and was still quite useable, much to my surprise. I guess time will tell though.
On a completely unrelated and totally non-technological note, the other thing that I wanted to mention was the lovely meal that Shon cooked for me this evening. I've been having a lot of trouble sleeping the last few nights, so came home very tired, only to find that not only had Chantelle made a very nice beef and red wine caserole, but she also made a loaf of fresh multi-grain bread and a batch of my favourite banana muffins. Everything turned out perfectly, tasted absolutely fantastic, and I really appreciated the effort that went into all of it. The week-end looks like being a fairly quiet one, which hopefully means I'll be able to catch up on some sleep which will be nice, and I will have the usual Sunday morning spent with my daughter which is always fun. I think she wants to go to a play centre called "crazy Jokers" so I'll probably spend the morning taking her on all sorts of slides and climbing things, which will be good exercise if nothing else.
Anyway since I've probably broken the record for the longest post I've ever written and since the afore-mentioned lack of sleep is starting to catch up with me, I think it's definitely time I chickend out, buggered off, and bravely ran away.
TTFN.

Ok, so no point in providing a re-run of all of the events of yesterday, since Shon's already done that, except to say that in general it was a very productive day. I should, however, make a brief comment about the newly acquired nas drive.
Basically the trusty old ASUS S5000 laptop which has given good reliable service for over 5 years, but which has been getting progressively less reliable over the last couple of months finally decided to die completely. All of our music, movies, software etc we had on a couple of old USB external harddrives, so I was tempted to just get another low-end machine from somewhere and run up another server. However, I don't have a huge amount of faith in one of the drives, and we're running pretty low on disk space anyway, so I decided to go down the path of a 2TB nas drive instead. That way we get to double our capacity, it can sit on the bench next to the router without taking up a lot of space, and it still has ftp server capabilities and everything else that we were doing with the old ASUS anyway.
I have played with one of the DLink Nas units before because Don bought one a while ago, but wasn't particularly impressed with either it's interface, or it's performance, so more or less ruled that out. The only other offerings I could source locally were a netgear or a Western Digital, so decided to go for the WD unit. It's a 4 bay, so by adding a couple more 1 TB drives we can up its capacity to 4TB, it has a 1GB ethanet interface, and 3 USB ports, so it's possible to add external USB drives as well if we wanted to for whatever reason. The web interface is very nice to use, and it also has the ability to send out email alerts for things like over-temp, low diskspace, hdd failure etc which I thought was a nice feature. So far I'm also reasonably happy with it's speed, and it's nice and quiet which will I'm sure make for a happy kiwi considering that the only place I can connect it up is in the bedroom.

Now all I have to do is copy all the stuff from all the other drives we have, and get it into some sort of coherant order, so that looks like being the order of the week-end, along with some cooking, and maybe watching the odd 4wd dvd or two.

Chickening out, buggering off, and bravely running away.

Damian takes us through making some "good wholesome Aussie tucker" in this next installment of The Cooking Podcast. With a little background help from Shon, (as discrete egg maker,) he demonstrates how to create a tasty steak, oven fries and eggs dinner, complete with a simple (and spontaneous) maranade for the steak for those who feel adventurous.

We decided to deal with eggs in a totally separate podcast, but in this instance, we used an electric omelette maker to make fried eggs, though this isn't covered here. No oil, no mess and no huge clumps of egg burnt to a crisp on one side and sunny and runny on the other. You can't get a much safer appliance if you tried, and eggs come out perfect every time; whether you liked them fried, scrambled or in an omelette.

You can prepare the steak in the same way and serve it with things like mashed potato and steamed vegetables, a salad, or between two bits of bread for a tasty toasty! The possibilities are endless!

An excellent way to round off a hard day at work and sure to be a crowd pleaser.

Want to try? Cook along with us.

Any feedback is welcome, including suggestions for future podcasts, tips and tricks/recommendations of your own, recipes you'd like to try but don't know where to start, and certainly any questions or clarification you might need.

Leave a comment in Damian's journal,
or if you would rather,
Comment to TheCrazyKiwi.

Enjoy, and happy cooking!

In this episode of The Cooking Podcast, we join Shon as she attempts to make ham and cheese toasted sandwiches in the Breville Grill Press. She makes a toasted sandwich from scratch, including demonstrating techniques for buttering bread, and how to take things safely on and off the grill.

A nice, easy dish if you've not done much cooking before, or just want a quick and easy lunch, with loads of room for experimentation when you get sick of ham and cheese.

Find it here.

Any feedback is welcome, including suggestions for future podcasts, tips and tricks/recommendations of your own, recipes you'd like to try but don't know where to start, and certainly any questions or clarification you might need.

Leave a comment in Damian's journal,
or if you would rather,
Comment to TheCrazyKiwi.

Enjoy, and happy cooking!

You asked for it, and now it's here!

This is a Damo and Shon first attempt at a combined podcast, where we both take turns demonstrating different recipes, cooking techniques, tips and tricks for getting around a kitchen with a vision impairment. (However, I'm sure sighted folk will learn a few things along the way as well.) No frills, no added sugar, artificial colours or sweeteners.

In this first episode, we discuss the essential equipment required for a working kitchen, and some gadgets and appliances you might find useful as a "starting out" cook. Everything is here. From chopping boards and microwave dishes, to "Uv Gloves" and the famous Breville grill press. Plus a few other adaptive technology gadgets that make your cooking experience that much easier and more enjoyable. All in a no nonsense, dinner table discussion, complete with traffic noise and roudy neighbours. Because, that's the way we like it. Informal, but informative.

I would also like to add that we forgot to mention a Crock Pot; a slow cooker in which you can make things like soup, casserole, or even slow cook a roast chicken if you've got a pot big enough. Relatively inexpensive, and you can leave them virtually unattended for long periods of time.

Download our first episode here!

Any feedback is welcome, including suggestions for future podcasts, tips and tricks/recommendations of your own, recipes you'd like to try but don't know where to start, and certainly any questions or clarification you might need.

Leave a comment in Damian's journal,
or if you would rather,
Comment to TheCrazyKiwi.

Enjoy, and happy cooking!

Those of you who read thecrazykiwi's journal would know that we've started trying to do a podcast aimed at helping visually impaired people get started with basic cooking. A lot of people we know have not experimented much in this area, annd as it's something we both get a lot of enjoyment from, we thought we'd try to share a few tips to get people started.

Hope it's of benefit or interest to some of you.

Enjoy.

Chickening out, buggering off, and bravely running away now.

I don't think I have ever heard the word "Bloody" used so frequently as I did this morning from a lady cab driver on the 5 minute cab ride to work. The conversation went something like:
Cabby, "so will the bloody dog fit in the front bloody seat with ya?"
Damo, "Yeah he'll go on the floor in the front."
Cabby, "Are you sure? he's bloody big, and there's not much Bloody room there, it doesn't bloody worry me if you want to bloody put him in the bloody back seat."
and then:
Damo, (after we drive away from my house) "So how's your day going?
Cabby, (in a monotone voice) "Oh, bloody a bit of a bloody challenge, because I've been out since 2 bloody thirty and it's bloody raining, and bloody everybody's decided to drive their bloody cars, so there's bloody traffic everywhere and all that bloody shit, so it's just one bloody battle after a bloody nutther.
The conversation continued along similar lines for the next 5 minutes during which I was asked where exactly bloody building 19 at the bloody uni was and whether it was near the bloody top car bloody park etc etc. On arriving at work I was informed that the fair came to "bloody 4 dollars bloody 50" and that she was "bloody sorry that it was so bloody expensive." I wasn't worried about the cost, as this is pretty normal for a trip to work, so I'm not quite sure why she felt the need to appologize. I'm sure she was fairly well meaning, but I couldn't help laughing at the odd way in which she conducted a conversation. Was definitely an amusing start to the day anyway. And now, since it's somebody's bloody going away morning bloody tea, I think I'll go grab something to eat and bloody drink.

Chickening out, buggering off, and running a bloody way now.

Yesterday I finally received my long awaited Zoom H2 handy recorder. So far I'm very impressed with the audio quality and I think once I memorize the menu options I frequently use it should be relatively easy to drive. Only down sides I've found so far at the unit does feel a little less solid than I would like, and the buttons have a tendency to be a bit squishy at times. All in all though I'm pretty happy with it, and it's couple of minor annoyances are not enough to make me feel like I should have paid the extra $250 or so for an Edirol R09 which I've heard mixed reviews about anyway. The only other thing that confused me for a while was the fact that you have to go into the menus to enable the USB port each time you want to use it. For a while I thought either the device or the cable was faulty but a bit of experimentation with the USB menu cleared that one up. So, all in all, no complaints.
In other news Shaune the Sheep is back from his holidays next week, which is a good thing as it means I don't have to continue doing half of his job as well as all of my own, and, it's Friday, and it looks like Sunday could be a good day for fishing if the wind stays down. The Flat Salmon (or Steel backs)are "On the Chew at the moment" as they say round here, and they're one of my favourite local fish, so here's hoping.
Also have managed to track down a secondhand sway bar and some new shocks for my truck, so most of saturday is looking like being spent fitting those, so all in all it should be a reasonable week-end.
Thank god it's Friday and almost beer o'clock too.

Chickening out, buggering off, and bravely running away now.

Ok, well just to satisfy my curiosity and that of <
thecrazykiwi
I thought I'd fill this in as well.

You Are a Colon

You are very orderly and fact driven. You aren't concerned much with theories or dreams... only what's true or untrue. You are brilliant and incredibly learned. Anything you know is well researched. You like to make lists and sort through things step by step. You aren't subject to whim or emotions. Your friends see you as a constant source of knowledge and advice. (But they are a little sick of you being right all of the time!) You excel in: Leadership positions You get along best with: The Semi-Colon

Not sure I agree with that one, but anyway...
In other news for today, "Madam Recycling" the communications engineer who won't communicate decided in her wizdom that she would scale back our daily milk order this week and that 4 litres of milk would be sufficient to last a department of 95 people a full week. The result is that I and most of the rest of the department have to either exist on black coffee or no coffee until Monday, because we're not allowed to have any more milk until then. Obviously we're all being way too extravagant with it! and of course it doesn't worry Madam Recycling because she doesn't work Thursdays or Fridays.
It also seems the IP TV box that we were using to stream channel 7's coverage of the olympics appears to have died in the arse, so it's no olympics and no coffee for me today. I suppose though, on the up-side at least it means I don't have to listen to "you're a goose Bruce" Mcavanie, and Kerry Fat-arse, (oopse sorry I mean potarse) which is probably for the best really.

Chickening out, buggering off, and bravely running away now.

For the last couple of days, I've been waiting for a parsel from Humanware in Sydney. this morning while walking to work I got a call on my mobile from a guy whose first words to me were:
"G'day, This is Dave from the Central Stores at the Uni, um, who the hell are you exactly, and um, do you work for us?

It turns out that the only thing that was readable on my package was my mobile number, so he couldn't work out who it was for, or even which building it was supposed to go to, but I must say I thought it was a rather interesting way to start a conversation with somebody you don't know.
Oh well, at least my new toys are here.
Chickening out, buggering off, and bravely running away to lunch now.

Here goes, on another TPG related rant. As I am moving house in a couple of weeks, I thought I'd be proactive, and notify TPG that I wanted my internet connection moved. However, it seems that it isn't possible to arrange a relocation for some date in the future, and that they can't even put anything into the system until Telstra have relocated the phone line. To add to my frustration, the useless non-english speaking person that I spoke to couldn't understand why I'd want to pre-arrange this. When I initially explained what I wanted she kept saying "what you talking about, I sorry but I not understand." Then she told me "No, no, after your service move to new address then you can go on-line and get your service move but not before".
It obviously didn't occur to anybody at TPG that unless I have access to another internet connection somehow (which, luckily for me I do) I won't have an internet connection at the new address from which to organize the relocation. Useless bastards. If their VOIP rates weren't so good, I'd be looking around for a new ISP. As it happens, it looks like I'll be internetless for the first 5 days of being in the new place, unless I can find a similarly priced provider that's easier to deal with, but don't fancy my chances somehow. Recommendations anybody?

Chickening out, buggering off, and bravely running away now.

I survived my first week 1 of teaching while in charge of the Service Centre. It's been a fairly big one, with the Helpdesk taking over 200 calls every day, and the opps guys dealing with more theatre faults than I can poke a stick at, but even with all that, a few little temper tandrems on the part of Clarky and Nat, and Manual Daniel mistakenly thinking that full-time work meant that you could take 5 hours off every day and still get paid full pay for it, we still managed to get through the week without getting any negative atention from the bald-headed boss.

The highlights of the week have included a couple of very long and enjoyable chats with the
Craziest of Kiwis, and discovering that the route to work from my soon to be new house, is about 50 times easier than the one I'm doing now.

Today looks like being spent vacuum cleaner shopping, and starting to pack boxxes I think. I have so far managed to fix Don's laptop and my FTP site this morning, and I've only been up and about for a couple of hours, so may the productivity continue.

Chickening out, buggering off, and bbravely running away now.

NOAH

In the year 2008, the Lord came unto Noah, who was living in the United States, and said: Once again, the earth has become wicked and over-populated, and I see the end of all flesh before me.
Build another Ark and save 2 of every living thing along with a few good humans.

He gave Noah the blueprints, saying: You have 6 months to build the Ark before I will start the unending rain for 40 days and 40 nights.

Six months later, the Lord looked down and saw Noah weeping in his yard - but no Ark.

Noah! He roared, I'm about to start the rain! Where is the Ark?
Forgive me, Lord, begged Noah, 'but things have changed.


I needed a building permit.
I've been arguing with the inspector about the need for a sprinkler system.
My neighbors claim that I've violated the neighborhood zoning laws by building the Ark in my yard and exceeding the height limitations.
We had to go to the Development Appeal Board for a decision.
Then the Department of Transportation demanded a bond be posted for the future costs of moving power lines and other overhead obstructions, to clear the passage for the Ark's move to the sea. I told them that the sea would be coming to us, but they would hear nothing of it.
Getting the wood was another problem. There's a ban on cutting local trees in order to save the spotted owl.
I tried to convince the environmentalists that I needed the wood to save the owls - but no go!
When I started gathering the animals, an animal rights group sued me.
They insisted that I was confining wild animals against their will.
They argued the accommodations were too restrictive, and it was cruel and inhumane to put so many animals in a confined space.
Then the EPA ruled that I couldn't build the Ark until they'd conducted an environmental impact study on your proposed flood.
I'm still trying to resolve a complaint with the Human Rights Commission on how many minorities I'm supposed to hire for my building crew.
Immigration and Naturalization are checking the green-card status of most of the people who want to work.
The trades unions say I can't use my sons. They insist I have to hire only Union workers with Ark-building experience.
To make matters worse, the IRS seized all my assets, claiming I'm trying to leave the country illegally with endangered species.
So, forgive me, Lord, but it would take at least 10 years for me to finish this Ark.

Suddenly the skies cleared, the sun began to shine, and a rainbow stretched across the sky.
Noah looked up in wonder and asked,
'You mean you're not going to destroy the world?'
'No,' said the Lord.
'The government beat me to it.

Of all the things not to say while working on a helpdesk. We currently have a staff member on loan from our field services unit, who is helping out on the helpdesk. A little earlier today, he was assisting a female customer, and was trying to gain remote control of the client's computer over a fairly slow network link. Because it was taking a while to connect, he said to the customer "just keep talking while I get it up, it's taking a while." He actually didn't realize what he'd said, until the female helpdesk operator in the next cubical started laughing. Apparently the caller just sort of cleared her throat in an embarrassed sort of way, and poor Dave wasn't sure if he should appologize or just pretend he hadn't realized and say nothing. In the end, he went for the latter, probably the best course of action in the circumstances. This prompted a lively discussion around the office on some of the errors the operators have made over the years. Carina, one of our more experienced staff, apparently had a really bad cold one day and was having trouble talking. Consequently, her greeting came out as "I.T. service centre, this is Carina Spanking." Anyway, certainly brightened up an otherwise cold, dull Monday afternoon. Actually, it seems to be the time for silly goings on in the office at the moment. We had a couple of staff members leave last week, so as a going away present, one guy had his entire desk, chair, monitor, and all the loose items on the desktop covered with aluminium foil. His co-workers even came in on their day off to wrap everything up. Wish they were that dedicated to their work. They also snuck up on him at some stage during his last day, and stuck a sign on his back which read "Hi, my name is Rob, please tell me how handsome I look today." He didn't realize the sign was there, until somebody walked up to him in the toilet, tapped him on the shoulder and said "hi Handsome". Childish I know, but it certainly relieves the monotony of the working week, and makes the days go faster.
Anyway must be coffee time I think.

Back on the tilt train again for the run from Rocky to Brisbane. Shortly after leaving Rocky, came the usual announcements about the catering service on board. However, unlike the normally professional delivery that you tend to get on airlines, this particular individual decided to deliver her speech while chewing gum, or with a mouth full of food at any rate. Maybe the idea was to increase sales of the breakfast menu, but honestly people... maybe their training manual needs to be updated to specifically say "please remove all gum, lollies, an other food items from your mouth before picking up the microphone. Oh well, at least it provided a few brief moments of amusement to break the journey.

Well after a very enjoyable week-end, it's back to Shitsville tomorrow, and the Bald-headed boss, neither of which excites me very much. The week-end with the family has been great, spent yesterday with C, and last night with Skippy, all of which was very enjoyable. Other than that, just lots of family time. Got back in touch with N as well on Saturday, and it was really nice to talk to her after all these years. We are planning to catch up next time I visit.

Am looking forward to coming bac in a few weeks to help celebrate
caity_bookworm
birthday, so that'll be nice.
Now off to go think of some ways to upset checkpoint charlie at the airport tomorrow, in an attempt to soften the feelings associated with going bac home.

Maybe I need to practice whistling the national anthem for some middle eastern country or other. Yeah, that sounds like a good start.

I am writing this from my EPC connected to my NextG mobile, while travelling on the Tilt train to Brisbane. Why? Well because I've always wanted to try, because I've got 8 or so hours to kill, and really well just cos I can. But now that I know I can, there's not much more to be said, so I shall go do something even less productive. I must admit, this is kinda cool though.