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The broad beans came out today. We've had an enormous amount of beans from a very small space. They were lovely! However, they've been taking up a lot of space and providing a haven for snails and cabbage moth caterpillars that are munching the brocolli and sprouts. Tonight we'll eat the last beans in a risotto with some leftover salami from pizzas made earlier in the week. Yummy! I'll definitely be planting a lot of broad beans next winter. They've been an excellent crop.
In their place I've planted a bunch of tomatoes and a few lettuces. I've got a Digger's Russian Tomato mix and another 5-colour mix in there. They should come along nicely! I also planted out some peas and more beans.
Holly and I had a bit of a seed-a-thon this afternoon, planting loads of new seeds. I've had some going a week or two: tomatoes, cucumber, more beans. I bought some of those jiffy pellets to try too, since I've not been having much luck with chillis. They apparently work well in these little pellets that swell when you water them.
As well there's more radishes, more basil, more chives, more lettuces. The summer crops which we'll need to keep going.
08 Nov 2008 18:34 [category: /diy] #
I've wanted to see the Tank Stream, Sydney's first water source, for a long time. While it provided clean water to the original white settlers, it quickly became polluted and these days is little more than a sewer. It was replaced by Busby's Bore in 1830 following Sydney's first major engineering project cost and time blowout, a tradition followed today by all major engineering projects in the state.
Anyway, in February this year I found a form on the Historic Houses Trust site that claimed I would be notified when the next ballot for tours of the Tank Stream were being announced. Except they didn't tell me that there's there'll be tours next month as part of the Sydney Open 08 thing, which sees a bunch of properties open for tours.
Fortunately I spotted it and put today into my calendar. I now have tickets to do the tour on 2nd November. If you want to see the Tank Stream, get in now. We're doing the 15:45 tour.
08 Oct 2008 10:51 [category: /grumble] #
Something is eating my garlic. Little black bugs. What's that all about then? From what I've been reading, garlic is something that repels garden pests, and that you can use to get rid of garden pests. Yet everything else in the garden is doing fine.
In other garden news, my potatoes have shot up and the fruit trees have started growing leaves.
08 Sep 2008 20:05 [category: /diy] #
News.com.au describes Russ Meyer's Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill as an "arthouse classic" in this article about a putative Tarantino remake. That's hilarious!
Though if anyone was to remake Meyer films, I hope it's Tarantino. But Britney's gonna need a much bigger boob job to do it justce.
08 Aug 2008 13:12 [category: /weird] #
Channel 7 holds the rights to broadcast the Olympics, but clearly doesn't get the possibilities that digital television brings.
Last night was the first football match, with Australia's mens team playing Serbia. The game started at 19:00 Sydney time, but Seven delayed coverage until 21:00. What's more, they interrupted coverage to cut to the announcement of the flag carrier for the opening ceremony. Then they broke for an ad at the forty minute mark, in other words with only about five minutes to half time.
This kind of thing is completely avoidable with digital television. They could have very easily used spare bandwidth on their transmitter to show the football match live, while keeping their main-channel programming.
The DVB standard, used for digital terrestrial television in Australia and most of the world outside North America, allows for all kinds of dynamic reconfiguration of channels and bandwidth. In Australia the mandate for high definition television reduces the available bandwidth, there are alternatives.
For example, the bandwidth on the high def channel could be reduced during the Olympics. Or Channel 7 could lease spare bandwidth from some of the other broadcasters, perhaps with some revenue sharing -- DVB receivers are very flexible with where the programming comes from.
This kind of setup would be useful throughout the Olympics. There's loads of concurrent stuff going on, so why not show more of it? If the broadcasters want to push the digital switchover, using the technology to its full capacity during such a high-profile event would surely help.
Another alternative would have been to allow SBS, the "complementary" broadcaster for the Olympics, to carry all the football. SBS are the acknowledged home of football in Australia, and we would have ended up with good live coverage and knowledgable presenters. I'm not the only one to suggest this, of course.
As an aside, aren't the Chinese spectators subdued? I've seen more lively funerals than last night's football match!
08 Aug 2008 11:05 [category: /geek] #
Wow, can't imagine why people might download music illegally when the legal avenues are just so easy. I just tried to buy Gotye's first album Boardface from Creative Vibes. First, their system charged me twice somehow, so I've ended up US$19.80 when it should have been US$9.90. Next, to download the files they send an email with a link for each file in the album, rather than something that's a convenient single download. The downloads also all seem to cut off around the 1'30" mark. Then they're tagged as the artist being "Creative Vibes". Ferfuxxake, the quality of experience is vastly superior with torrents!
I won't be buying from Creative Vibes online store again. And I'll now need to try and get a refund.
08 Jul 2008 13:46 [category: /grumble] #
The government of Tasmania (that'd be the Lennon government, not Gunns in case you're confused) do things differently in Tasmania. They paid for a big DC power link from the island to the mainland, which was switched on just in the nick of time as Tasmania ran out of water to run its hydro dams. Apparently the link, built to export electricity to the mainland, has flowed almost exclusively in the other direction since it was built.
Anyway, when you're running cables it's very easy to stick a few fibres in the cable run, and that's what they did. Basslink includes a fibre connection to the mainland, which would be a boon to telecommunications services in the state. Currently the only active fibre is owned by the corporate gorilla Telstra, and as monopolies tend to do, they charge like there's no tomorrow. ISP Internode, which recently stopped selling residential ADSL2+ and 8 megabit ADSL1 plans, claims Telstra charges 6 times more for the Hobart-Melbourne route than they pay to ship data between Melbourne and the US.
This would, of course, all be solved if the fibre attached to Basslink were switched on. It's been sitting there since 2003, unused. Now it emerged that the company that Tasmania contracted to operate the fibre gets paid $2 million a year regardless of whether it's operating or not. So the company would need to guarantee at least $2 million in profit a year to do better than the alternative of letting the fibre sit on the bottom of the sea, dark.
This is the thing about privatisation which always ends up burning governments. The commercial world they're trying to entice holds all the cards, and has many other investment opportunities open to them. They have expensive and clever merchant bankers and lawyers, just waiting to negotiate the vendor (the government, that is, us) up against the wall. We see it time and again when previously "commercial in confidence" contracts between the private sector and governments are leaked or opened up: governments sell the family silver, but continue to take all the risks.
When negotiating these deals, the private sector always seems to manage to put in risk-avoiding clauses that leave the public sector carrying the can if it doesn't work out. With little risk, the private sector ends up just as bloated and inefficient (often even worse) as the public sector they replaced.
So if you're looking at the private sector to be more efficient, under the types of contracts that get signed, they're not. It costs more for private companies to raise money in the bond markets, so it's more expensive. And then they need a profit margin added on top. All up meaning it costs more, while tying the hands of governments for decades to come.
If you're a Tasmanian, check out Digital Tasmania and lobby your MPs to get this sorted. It's really very simple to fix. Just turn on the fibre!
08 May 2008 09:55 [category: /politix] #
I've ordered something online and been given a tracking number from the company supplying it. Here's what I just saw when I looked up the tracking number.
I can tell you three things: One, I haven't taken delivery of the device. Two, I wasn't at home at 09:09 this morning. Three, that's not my signature. So whose signature is it?
I can only hope they've delivered it to my neighbour or something, otherwise the courier has committed fraud. Moral of the story: don't use Fastway!
08 Apr 2008 11:08 [category: /grumble] #
Finally, Internet filtering that works, able to block anything that could possibly offend Fundies First. But block it for everyone, not just Fundies.
