Cover to Return of Bruce Wayne #3 via DCU Blog.

The original plan was to, at the end of the month, write a blog post about one experience or event that happened in the past 30 odd days. I thought it was an interesting idea, but when one of the things I want to focus on in 2010 is improving my writing (both in volume and quality), then once a month just isn’t going to cut it. In my notes I’ve only managed to scrounge up 9 events anyway, so I’d already failed before I began.

Getting back to the New Years Resolutions, it seemed like last year I’d just thought up a bunch of things to pass the time without putting any thought into the why. Why was I doing each resolution? What would I get out of them?

I guess this was the other problem I had with ‘the grand plan’.

Then there’s the infamous Things To Do Before I Die list. Realistically is should be a list of things I can only do at certain points in my life. Like punching an octogenarian in the solar plexus without feeling shame. I think I might retire it, or at least take it down from this website.

What to do with this blog then?

I should always be updating it. Whether it’s a link dump, image or a 500 word micro-epic about the joys of CSS3 (and there are many joys to behold). Doesn’t matter as long as the site is  kept pumping.

The comic reviews were always popular, so my site statistics say,but I just couldn’t keep churning them out. Not when I wasn’t putting anything back out there for review myself. It just didn’t seem right. Why should I publicly criticise other people’s hard work  when I wasn’t willing to bare my own work to the world?

I really don’t like the look of the site and I think thats one reason I’ve stayed away. The design was dated back when it launched and just looks eye-bleedingly horrible now. I’m going to redesign the site with an aim of making it infinitely easier to read. I’ve been immersed in the User Experience field for the last 2 years, so there’s no excuse for why this site still looks and behaves like it does.

I know I keep making promises that I don’t return to for weeks at a time, but this is really important to me. Having said that you probably won’t hear back about the redesign for a few weeks, but rest assured that I’ll keep updating this site regardless.

Seen in a recent episode of The Big Bang Theory*. $395 from DC Direct.

*Starring every late model Generation Xer’s preteen crush Danica McKellar.

I set seven resolutions for 2009 and forgot half of them just a few weeks later.

1. Learn how to make bread. Be able to make sour­dough and whole­meal high tin loaf.

Pass.

Call it laziness or fear of the unknown or that I work best under pressure, but I didn’t attempt to make bread until just a few days before the year ended.

I’d been told that making bread without using a machine to knead the dough would be extremely difficult, but I had no problems with that or any part of the process. In a nutshell throw flour, sugar and salt into a bowl, then  add a cup of beaten eggs, lukewarm water and yeast. Follow that up with two session of kneading sessions alternating with two rest sessions. Bung it in the oven for 30 minutes and you’ve got one crusty white bread loaf. Too easy.

2. Go on a mush­room pick­ing tour.

Fail.

I remembered I had this down as a resolution about two days after mushrooming season finished. Whoops.

3. Con­vince the Ital­ian com­mu­nity to let me get involved in mak­ing sausages.

Pass.

I was all psyched up to make sausages this year, but then my contacts decided they’d much rather go on a holiday.

To make up for that I took a sausage making class through CAE back in October, so I at least had something of sausage making experience.

4. Sub­mit fic­tion to at least two short story competitions.

Fail.

Another resolution I completely forgot about.

I did attempt NaNoWriMo in November and managed to write just over 19,000 words. So this year wasn’t a complete bust in terms of my writing.

5. Fin­ish a 100 page script for Script Frenzy in April.

Fail.

I started Script Frenzy. I finished Script Frenzy.

Did I write 100 page? No.

6. Par­tic­i­pate in Dry July.

Fail.

Another resolution I completely forgot about. (Are you sensing a theme yet?)

7. Loose 10 kilograms.

Fail.

I became a full member of my work gym at the start of 2009. I had my first program written up for me in mid-Jan with new iterations every 6–8 weeks.

From 14th Jan to 21st Dec I went from 93.3kg to 90.8kg and my body fat percentage dropped from 26.6% to 25.5%. So I only ended up losing 2.5kg in weight. BUT, I lost centimetres off my legs as bi-weekly sessions on the spin cycle began to tighten up my leg and hip muscles. On top of that I’m lifting over twice the weight was  was when I first started there. Moving to the “big boy” free weights was probably the highlight of my gym year.

In Conclusion

Two Passes, five Fails.

It’s become very clear that New Year Resolutions and I do not mix well. So there will be no resolutions this year. They’re too easy to make and too easy to break.

I have a better idea for 2010. One that I’m really excited about and has the benefit of not needing year long management like New Year goddamn Resolutions. But I’ll save that for another post.

Despite the setback of not having a functioning vegetable garden I was able to meet the Pasta Primavera challenge, as the photo above will attest.

I had a rough, several hundred word post in my head on my adventures in vegetable outsourcing, how I made my own pasta from scratch and only discovered the chosen Primavera recipe a day before I was due to cook it.

But this photo says it all really. I did it.

There’s even a Blue Beanie Day Photo Pool for those who enjoy taking photos of themselves.

Bugs and failure

The propagation tray was a dead end. Only about a third of the trays sprouted and the few that did were snipped of their delicate leaves before I moved them to the garden. Once in the garden it took about two days before I noticed that the zucchini was being slowly annihilated every night. The next night I went out to inspect the garden and saw a family of earwigs tag-teaming the plants. Not having any spray or bugdust handy I picked them off one-by-one and flicked them over the fence. Before I could stock up on repellents the garden was attacked again and the  garden was left looking like a barren wasteland.

Sorry, Try Again

I wasn’t looking forward to replanting the entire garden from scratch. I eschewed the propagation tray and just dropped the seeds into the garden to see what would happen. The plants only took around half as long to sprout this time, which was great!

The garden is looking really healthy now. The earwigs and other insects moved on once the original plants had died, so everything there has been able to grow in peace. (I still haven’t bought anything to protect the garden.)

Watermelon and eggplant are coming along well and the potted tomato plant is firing off a lot of flowers.

Today I added Stephan’s iceburg lettuce, a small pot of chives I’d grown from a packet bought at Coles and a small cherry tomato plant from one of my coworkers (Who apparently can’t get rid of the damn things quick enough).  Provided we don’t have any more scorching days for the next week or so they should settle nicely.

Home stretch

With only one week to go I won’t be finishing Project Primavera with any of my own vegetables (or fruit if you’re being picky).  Luckily Abbotsford Convent is holding a Farmer’s Market next Saturday the 28th. The same day the project is coming to a head.

The plan is to wake up crazy-early that morning, head to Abbotsford for supplies, cook the sauce and then head to Mike’s house with a steaming Tupperware container and maybe even some beer. It won’t be a dish grown by me, but it’ll still be my primavera.

After just one day of blue skies and sunlight the watermelon finally sprouted. Eggplant followed a couple of days later and now I even have some oregano and basil shoots showing.

Saturday was the big day. I raked out the excess pea straw from the garden and knocked down the few clumps of manure to smooth things out. Wetting the soil down proved to be a bit of a problem. I dumped around 20 litres of water into the garden n preparation for the seedlings, but it only managed to soak down around 3cm or so. I ended up digging holes for the seedlings with a trowel, then pouring another 10 litres of water into them just to prevent the roots from drying out.

Something else I didn’t do with last year’s garden was properly space out the plants. The garden is now a uniform 5x3 grid.  Five zucchini plants run along the entire right hand side, three eggplants sit in the front left quadrant and three watermelon plants are up the back.

The zucchini placement is an experiment. I still don’t know how much sun is too much when it comes to them, so each plant gets a different level of sunlight depending on placement. The one up the very back stops getting sunlight around 2pm each day, the rest follow as the sun dips below the fence line. The eggplant thrived up the front of the garden in full sun last time so there was no question about where they’d be. The watermelon died off fairly quickly once the summer heat started blazing, so I’m hoping that keeping them shaded for half the day will keep them alive long enough to get some fruit this year.

I should note that the garden still smells terrible. Three weeks on and it smells like a petting zoo. My Dad says: “The worse it smells the more plants love it.”  If that’s true then this garden will be amazing once it’s fully grown.

Two weeks after setting it up, my propagation tray isn’t doing as well as I’d hoped. In fact the only thing that’s growing is the zucchini plants. Every other section is still barren dirt.

The crappy weather we’ve been having certainly hasn’t helped. With the first two weeks of October being composed of alternating rain, hail, thunder and lightning. So much for it being the middle of Spring.

I was hoping to plant them all out this weekend just gone, but I’ll give them a few more days. The local weather service is suggesting we’re in for good weather, so maybe, just maybe the seedlings might see fit to make an appearance. Fingers crossed.

Originally the garden was planted with eggplant, zucchini, watermelon and carrots. Everything was doing OK in the garden Well everything was green — which I took to be a good sign. But then Melbourne had that infamous string of days where the temperature soared of over 40 degrees celsius. I couldn’t get water into the garden quick enough, so every except the eggplant whithered and died. It wasn’t a total loss as the eggplant thrived in the heat and I ended up with bumper crop.

Once the risk of the self immolation passed I transferred a few tomato plants out of the crowded pot I had them in and into the back right corner of the garden. I thought they love the additional room to spread and grow, but I was wrong. It wasn’t long before the went to that big compost bin in the sky.

Being the stubborn hardy plants they are the eggplants survived the winter frost. But back in August, soon after trimming back the dead stuff, we had another cold weather front blow in and kill off the freshly exposed ends. After that I left them alone. Not willing to risk losing another few centimetres from the branches.

Last Saturday they lost a lot more than that when I decided to tear everything out of the garden bed and start from scratch. After removing the eggplants I mulched the bed (uncovering a handful of carrots in the process). To that I added three bags of manure, half a bag of Blood and Bone and a handful of pea straw and mulched again.

The new garden will be made up of oregano, sweet basil, thyme and zucchini seeds.  Along with watermelon and eggplant for “personal use”. I know the eggplant does really well in that garden bed so it was a no-brainer . As for the watermelon? Well I’m a glutton for punishment.

I eschewed the haphazard planting techniques of the previous year by  planting the seeds out in propagation trays with an intent to shifting the seedlings to the garden bed once they’ve germinated.

Germination should occur by next Saturday. By that point the garden bed will have settled in, with a nice layer of rotting detritus right where the roots are going to end up once the plants have matured. If I’ve done this right it should give the plants a turbo charge of nutrients right when they hit the “growing fruit or vegetables stage”.

I got my reason when Mike threw down the gauntlet. Challenging Stephan and I to make Pasta Primevera from scratch. I threw all caution to the wind and accepted detailed be damned.

Of course, as they say, the devil is in the details. I had no idea what Pasta Primavera was. There’s no reference to it in any of Ange’s syack of Italio-centric cookbooks. A quick visit to Wikipedia and the Taste website and I had my answer:

Pasta with vegetables? Hell, I could do that.

We’ve got until the end of November to get the dish finalised, so the first step was to figure out what ingredients I could grow and what would need to be be purchased further down the track.

I’m only using the Taste recipe as a basic guide. Cream with vegetables seems a little too weird for my palette. Primavera may be an Italian-American dish, with an emphasis on the American, but I want to put more focus on the Italian side. That means squash and snow peas are most definitely out. Nobody likes squash anyway, and snow peas are a predominately Asian flavour, not Italian.

Off the top of my head I can think of six ingredients I want in my Primavera:  zucchini,  asparagus, chilli, garlic, basil and sage. The “rules” stipulate that all ingredients, sauce and pasta alike, must be sourced from places in this order of importance: Grown > Farmer’s Market > Organic Store > Supermarket. The Gardenate calendar suggests I’ve got just enough time to plant zucchini and basil. Chilli plants I have. Asparagus takes over two years to grow and sage doesn’t even make an appearance on the calendar.

So already I have a fair idea of what I’m going to do. First thing is to hit Bunnings for supplies (today seeds, manure, potting mix) then I’ve got a long productive afternoon tilling soil and planting the seeds of this project.

After finishing Bioshock I thought there was a huge amount of backstory that had been hinted at, but remained untapped. To my incredible delight, the developers agreed and set about making a sequel set some 10 years after the first game.

As if that wasn’t good enough Take 2 have announced that they’re releasing the game on my birthday. I’m excited as hell, as you should be too.

Here’s last year’s list for comparison.

In compiling this year’s list I’ve found a few shows that I’d omitted from the previous year. Consider them added.

What stays

• 30 Rock - One of the few televisions shows I can watch with Ange.
  
• Californication - It’ll be interesting to see how Hank handles being a single father, especially with a daughter who is so close in personality and mannerisms.
• Dollhouse - I come into the second season being the only person in the world who hasn’t seen Epitaph One (the “missing” 13th episode).
• Entourage - Everyone watches this for Jeremy Piven’s Ari Gold. And the show runners are well aware of this.
• Robot Chicken - Bite-sized comedy. I don’t mind the look of their new show, Titan Maximum either.
• South Park - Consistently good.
• Supernatural - I’m loving the steady growth of mythology in Supernatural.
• The Daily Show - Not sure what this wasn’t on last year’s list. The Daily Show has been a dear friend to me for many years now.
• The Simpsons - Well into it’s twilight years now and not nearly as funny as it used to be. But it’s better than most television.
• True Blood - I was late to the party on this one. But I still managed to The second season finished last week, but I’d be remiss including it on the list.

What’s In

• Flash Forward - I saw a preview for this show a while back, but the concept really stuck with me. Everyone in the world suddenly flashes forward six months in the future for 2 minutes. Then they deal with that info dump. Sounds promising.
• V - I remember watching the original and being freaked out by the lizards in human skin. Admittedly I was five or six years old at the time.

What’s Out

• Battlestar Galactica — The only show in this list that got to bow out gracefully. And what an ending!
  
• Heroes - I was ready to give up on Heroes after the second-to-last arc,Villains. But like an idiot I stuck through Fugitives hoping for a glimmer of the greatness that was season one. It was not to be. Fare thee well, Heroes.
• House - It’s not that I hate House,  I’ve  simply fallen too far behind to watch it on a regular basis. One for the off-season I think.
• My Name is Earl - Lost track of the show’s “goal”. Got canceled for it.
• Prison Break - Put on hiatus, then canceled. With story gaps filled by an insulting two hour long mini.
• Reaper - Taken before it’s time.
• Smallville - See Heroes above. If I have to force myself to watch television then it’s not worth it.
• Ugly Betty - Same as House. Ange seems to be enjoying it though.

A final tally of 11 shows ( plus one that has already finished it’s season). Even though I’ve trimmed the list this still seems to be a hell of a lot of television. Chalk that up to shifting priorities.

Found at the LEGO Shop.

I have to say it’s one of the better “down for maintenance” messages I’ve seen. It’s not the generic 401/501 error page. Threadless had gone to the trouble of using existing site elements (the checkout trolley and typeface) to build this page. This  showed me that the problem wasn’t overly critical (the server infrastructure wasn’t on fire) and that it was something they could recover from.

The message is honest and apologetic. It reads like it was written by an actual human being.

While they worked on the problems, Threadless also kept their Twitter followers up to date with informative, yet humorous messages.

If all companies were like that I think the world would be a far better place.

The Mechwarrior/Battletech franchise seemed to fade out right around the time Microsoft bought out FASA , so it’s nice to see it get look in by a new mob.

Whats peeked my interest  is that the movie above is being touted as in-game footage. If it is, it means I’ll be upgrading/buying a new computer before the launch date for sure. I’ll be damned if I’m playing a Mechwarrior game on console. Steel Battalion not withstanding, console controllers are far too simplistic to accurately simulate driving giant mechanical robots across bomb strewen landscape.

Blackest Night #1

In this, the first issue of Blackest Night, Carol Ferris shoots a robot in the crotch with the power of love.

Ok, so a lot more happens either side of that one scene. Some good, some bad. But overall this is a pretty solid start to DC’s 2009 event.

Tales of the Corps #1

I understand what they’re trying to do with this 3 issue miniseries. Using it to shine a light on lesser characters that don’t get a whole lot of backstory in the regular titles. But two out three of the stories here just aren’t that interesting. First up is an origin for Saint Walker, that doesn’t add that much more to his character. Yes he went through many, many horrible events one after the other before finally realising his destiny, but so what. Name one saint that hadn’t endured a long shitty existence before getting their halo?

The second story isn’t all that exciting either. It spins a tale of  Mongul’s childhood during one magical summer where he was the ruler of some aliens who had crash landed on his plant. But who cares because that kid grows up into an asshole tyrant who uses a magic ring to control his severed arm and who also ripped another alien’s tongue out just so that alien wouldn’t talk back to him anymore.

Luckily, the third and final story shows some merit. Full points for having the nomadic Indigo Lanterns sound like characters from The Gods Must Be Crazy.

Dark Avengers #7

I discovered I enjoy reading Dark Avengers written by Matt Fraction a lot more than when it’s written by Brian Michael Bendis.

Complete List

Blackest Night #1 (of 8)
Blackest Night Tales of the Corps #1 (of 3)
Wednesday Comics #2 (of 12)
Agents Of Atlas #8
Dark Avengers #7
Incognito #5
Mighty Avengers #27
X-Factor #46

Real working Nightvision Goggles? Yes, please!

(via Engadget)

UPDATE: JB HiFi seem to be taking preorders now. $199 seems like a reasonable enough price, considering it’s goign for US$149 in America.