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Apparently guerilla gardening has come to Marrickville, with people taking over the grass verges in their streets. There's no grass verge on our street but I've noticed a few people have planted ornamentals around the trees. In our old street there was sage and rosemary around some of the trees.
I'd actually been thinking recently about planting nasturtiums around the tree out the front of our place, because it's a very hardy, attractive plant and both the leaves and flowers make a good addition to salads. I'm also intrigued by the recipe for nasturtium seed "capers" that I found in the River Cottage Preserves book.
Now if the nasturtium seeds I've had sown for a couple of weeks would just sprout already!
07 Oct 2008 17:12 [category: /weird] #
I love Metacritic's summaries of reviews. This one summarises reviews of an album by The Little Ones. As usual, NME is incoherently raving. For the NME, a band is either the greatest band ever, or an overhyped pile of crap (which is what their great band ever bands often are).
The funny review comes from The Guardian:
By the end of the album, your face will hurt and you'll be desperate for some Napalm Death.
This sounds like previously unaccomplished levels of saccharine! I'll have to check them out.
On a related note, I've always thought that if you worked in a new age shop, with all that whale fart ambient music playing all day, surely you'd have to have some death metal or speed thrash once you got home. To help you relax.
07 Oct 2008 15:31 [category: /music] #
So the ACCC has launched the new "GroceryWatch" site, GroceryChoice, which gives comparisons of a basket of goods between supermarkets. I wonder how hard it would be to game this system, if you could work out what was in each basket? Dropping the price of a single item could have a big impact.
UK retailers do this with what they call "known value items", such as milk, bread, eggs and bananas. Customers know how much these normally cost, so by dropping the prices on just those items, customers get the illusion of cheap prices and get stung on the prices of goods they can't so easily compare.
The best news from the supermarket inquiry is that the government will bring in mandatory unit pricing reporting. I wrote to the NSW fair trading minister about this a few years ago, with the response that there wasn't demand or need. Unit pricing means the supermarket shelves will tell you the price per standard unit, for example price per 100ml or 100g. Next time you're in a supermarket, compare the prices of 400g and 800g cans of tomatoes. The 800g cans cost more than double the price of a 400g can.
The site itself seems fairly well designed, though the colour scheme isn't ideal. Yellow-on-green isn't really ideal. There's a "latest news" and "subscribe" option but no RSS feeds?
The papers managed to find someone prepared to moan about the site, because he has vision and mobility problems. Sorry Mr Kerr, it's not the web designer's job to show you how to turn on the disability options of your software. They've done everything that they should (though the colour choice isn't helpful) to make it easy for you. Learn where the options for a user-defined stylesheet and minimum font-size are, and use them. Better yet, I bet you're using Internet Exploder. Try Firefox and see the zoom option -- it rocks! (Ctrl + and Ctrl - or Ctrl and the mouse wheel). If you still need more help, there are other tools that will help.
07 Aug 2008 13:29 [category: /geek] #
Is it just me or does marching thousands of rabid Catholics through the heart of gay Sydney seem somewhat similar to Nationalist Protestants marching through Catholic areas of Belfast?
I suppose the poofs of Sydney probably aren't as well armed as the Catholics of Belfast. A shame really.
07 Jul 2008 15:51 [category: /politix] #
The amazing people in and around the mySociety have a new project in test. PlanningAlerts.com allows you to enter an email address, a UK postcode and a region that you want to watch. Any planning applications in that area will end up being emailed to you, as they're updated. When I lived in the Borough of Lambeth, they had a similar service, which also gave community events and the like. The issue with a council-run service is if you live near the boundary of the council, you might miss something across the border.
With most councils not really playing ball, they've taken the approach of screen scraping the data off council web sites. This way they can give a genuinely geographic alert, once they have all the councils covered.
One problem with this is that there's no real qualification of the types of development being planned and alerted. For example, I'd want to know if my neighbour plans to chop down one of the trees in their garden, but I'm not particularly interested in someone chopping down trees a few blocks away. But if someone was planning a huge shopping centre anywhere in my suburb, I'd want to know about it. I can only hope the clever clogs behind this find a way.
Now we need an Australian version. I've long been planning to scrape the Marrickville Council list of development applications and geocode them. Now I think I'll have a go, and the PlanningAlerts.com guys have supplied a reasonable output format, though in Australia we don't have the advantage of such a detailed postcode system.
07 Jul 2008 10:47 [category: /politix] #
While it would be a nice euphemism, Bug Girl attempted to order pubic lice over the Internet. Unsuccessfully, I might add.
From the comments:
However heinous it is to make a living selling pubic vermin over the internet, it is somehow even more despicable to take people's money and then NOT send them pubic lice.
07 May 2008 10:23 [category: /weird] #
It's starting to get cold in Sydney, so we're starting to think about heating and improving the house a bit. The front door has enormous gaps all around, and there's space between much of the skirting boards. This weekend I'm gonna fix the front door with some kind of automatic weather strip, as well as the squishy stuff around the sides and top edges.
I'll also look at caulking some of the skirting boards to stop any draughts. I might also consider blocking up some of the air vents, which were only ever required for gas lighting ventilation. Holly won't be keen on the idea, but we might have to look at curtains with pelmets to stop heat loss out the windows. With the right curtains, it should also reduce noise from the planes.
Speaking of gas, we're gonna get our fireplace fitted with a fan-forced, flued gas heater. These things aren't cheap, but they're very efficient and I reckon one should be able to warm the whole house enough for our needs.
07 Apr 2008 12:06 [category: /diy] #
My GP has moved practices and is now based in Drummoyne, which is too difficult travel-wise for my tastes. So after being very happy with her, I'll have to change doctors. I'm sure the only industry whose union is also its regulatory body wouldn't allow league tables with qualitative measurements, so I'll have to rely on recommendations.
RateMDs has some reviews, but they're anonymous, don't have many ratings and aren't particularly authoritative. I'd rather solicit reviews where I can at least find out who's giving the review.
So can anyone recommend a GP in the Inner West of Sydney? I want one who gives good advice, is thorough and conveniently located. Not charging the earth would be nice, but I guess if they're particularly good I can afford it.
