Finally at the suggestion of Mike decided to try and install the next version of Kubuntu: 7.10 (code name: gutsy gibbon).

Hallelujah it worked first time.

Dave also generously gave me some of his time to explore ways of formatting the hdd that had been mashed by all of my many installation attempts.

I'm still having some wacky grub issues... but through an interesting combination of things it will boot. Which is enough for the time being.

Now all I need to do is get the drivers working and install (and learn to use for the most part) all the tools that I need to use. Huh! 

Ant spent some quality time with our professional websites today, posting the latest 3D and animations he's been working so hard on. Check it:

The moon will eventually be put on a ~80" screen (to be 55.5cm in diameter) to be hung in Questacon. How cool is that!

See also:
Advertisting 3D: http://www.aewstudios.com/index.php?page=3d

It's so cool seeing as Ant has never ever done any animation before. I mean you gotta start somewhere and this isn't half bad a start...

Suspiciously not as hungover as expected. Hot chocolate is the order of the day - Ant for some reason didn't want tea nor coffee he wanted hot chocolate. I don't mind making it and as always wanted to get all technical and take it too far and use a hand whisk. Fortunately this recipe abounds with those sorts of opportunities.

We had this totally amazing hot chocolate in New Zealand - and without being near arrowtown ourselves I was aspiring for that.

My recipe is a mish-mash of all kinds of others but the ingredients are everthing (see the Chilli option at the end):

Chocolate that is Hot

For 2 mugs:

Simple version:
2 teaspoon Cocoa
3-4 teaspoon Sugar (preferably pure icing sugar - very fine powder)
~700ml Milk (slightly more than will fill the 2 mugs)
tiny bit of cinnamon
tiny pinch salt

Mix powders together and you have drinking chocolate like they sell in tins.

Put in warm milk, stir and voila.

Extravagant version:
2½ teaspoon cocoa
3 teaspoon pure icing sugar
½ teaspoon cinnamon
half a cinnamon stick
pinch salt
600ml milk
1 teaspoon honey
125ml cream
½ (half) cup dark chocolate pieces (the higher quality the better)
1 egg

Mix cocoa, sugar and salt together and put in a decently sized pan (for whisking later). Pour in a tiny bit of milk (say a shot glass) over a low heat and stir, it becomes this awesome thick chocolatey goo.

Carefully put in most of the milk and stir or whisk until hot but not boiling. Put in the chocolate bits and stir until melted - be careful the bits don't adhere to the bottom and burn.

Add the cinnamon stick. DO NOT BOIL.

If you're putting in chilli stuff, put it in now.

Beat the egg in a bowl separately. Get some of the chocolate mixture and beat it in with the egg, then add the egg mixture back in to the main chocolate.

Beat/whisk/mix the mixture, it gets awesomely thick and frothy. Add rest of the milk and honey to taste (it is very very rich by now and you might want to thin it out a little or make it a bit sweeter).

Whatever you do: DO NOT BOIL.

Pour in to mugs or continental drinking bowl-mugs and add a great giant gob of cream.

(This version owes a lot to this site that really cares a great deal - the have a full history of the beverage and everything. Suffice to say I don't go as far as they do - please don't tell them I put cocoa in mine.)

Chilli option:
1 small fresh red chilli (in a pinch can use dried chillis but not as good)
¾ (three-quarters) cup boiling water

Prepare this part before making your hot chocolate:
Boil the chilli and water in a small saucepan for about 15 minutes (until it looks like all the goodness has been leached out it).

Filter very carefully - I used some sheets of paper towel neatly pushed into a glass then poured the juice in and waited for all the chilli water to collect in the bottom of the glass.

Once your hot chocolate is pretty close (though before egg or cream) add the chilli water 1 teaspoon at a time until it tastes sufficiently hot for you. Be careful as I burnt my tongue quite badly on some melted chocolate at this point, and then couldn't taste heat-hot from chilli-hot, and had to get Ant to help.

Man it's it draining stuff!

So here is my problem and the solution that partially worked for me can be found on page 13 of this thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=415009

But can I mount drives and muck with boot options like a champion now.

To cut another story short I have encountered no less than 6 different issues that have needed to be surmounted, and surmounted them I have. So I can now boot from the liveCD and install the operating system, get to the boot loader but alas, have been stone-walled again.

I'm going to paint some more and go drink alcohol at Danielle, Dave and Elliott's house (happy birthday Danielle!).

I will get you Linux (but not today - I'm over it).

And as if it was going to be that easy.

As it turns out I couldn't even boot the liveCD.

So 20GB of downloads and 5 distributions later (to cut a very long and painful story undeservedly short) it turns out that a certain configuration of drives, where one is SATA cause a conflict within this particular version of the Linux kernel which is why none of the distros would work. In most cases this problem can be resolved by plugging the drives in a different order it this were a desktop this would already be done. Stupid laptop.

So I'm going back to Kubuntu (to pick a distro at random) and going to be "determined and patient".

It turns out Mike has also killed his installation today... but I believe that he's getting back on his feet. 

It is ubuntu installing season.

I am because I bought my raging new laptop without an operating system with every intention of using a Linux distro.

Initially I am ashamed to say that installing linux was a bit hard so I installed 64-bit windows XP. Which was not as hard to install, but in every other regard terrible. Most of the drivers didn't work. I desperately need the resources on the new pc, seeing as my old one (at 15 months old) is now nothing but a bucket of bolts. So bit the bullet and started bashing.

So having decided that the distro for me was Ubuntu (for their newb support basically), and that I was going to go with the KDE desktop (seeing as more than 60% of linux community do... and yes if they jumped off a cliff)... which means Kubuntu. And besides Dave (all round legend, and amongst many other fine skills and talents: Linux aficiondo) generally suggests (to people I respect and care about) that it is the one to use.

But I would like to state for the record that I am using Kubuntu for my own reasons not just because everyone else is. Ok maybe a bit because everyone else is but at least for my own reasons also.

In what can only be described as amazing coincidence (or co-ink-ki-doink as someone recently put it), on speaking to Mike today it turns out that while he was off-air all weekend he was also installing Kubuntu and is pretty excited about it. Being several days ahead of me keeps telling me how rad Linux is and that we should have all converted earlier.

I would like to also state for the record that seriously it is coincidence that Mike and I are installing GNU-Linux OS within days of eachother.

Yay! Snowboarding.

We're going to stay in Wanaka and have 6 whole days of any park in NZ goodness. 

Now all we need is some real life snow. Can anyone else here see the joke... about how Aus is having a bumper year and NZ is getting comparatively bugger all?

Nonetheless we're so amped to go, I'm sure it'll be great.

Firstly we're going to Sydney. 

It rained and it rained and then it rained some more...

David Salt asked for some words and I wrote something terribly syrupy that I was going to post here. On review it's too sickly sweet to put here so we're going to give it a miss.

On the other hand I will say that we did gamble on a couple of things going in our favour - which they didn't. Not the least of which was obviously the weather.

To see a few ARNAM07 photos click here 

So we're pretty disappointed. We had the back windscreen of our car smashed in with a rock. 

A rock at great speed I might add, seeing as it entered through the back window and dented the dashboard, in a long-wheel-base van (good shot though). Experienced shot we suspect.

 There are lots of crazy things though:
· we didn't really have any particular valuables in the car at the time (dumb luck).
· the things of greatest value in the car were untouched.
· they appear to have stolen only 2 things: Ant's homemade kite-surfing board, and his relatively new harness (worth about $150 brand-new).
· I was up working until 3am and didn't hear anything (dammit!), though the room I was working in was the nearest upstairs room to the car and virtually overlooks it, and I had the lights very much on (was quietly listening to music).
· Dion our light sleeping housemate whose room is right on the driveway also apparently didn't hear it, at least he didn't say anything.
· It was a horrible cold sleety windy night, so there was a lot of banging and crashing anyway and an awful night to be out.

Our theory is that they saw the Burton sticker on the back of the car and were specifically looking for new imported-to-australia-at-great-expense snowboards, which we don't even own, seeing as our gear's all old and beaten up, let alone keep in the car.

And beside even if we did have snowboarding gear in the car, it's a bitch to get out with all the doors open with 2 people on a good day: it's big awkward gear and it's a all klotski to keep it in the car under the bed. They apparently hadn't thought out that part of the plan too well.

Initially we thought it was just kids. Ant reckons it's probably the same people who stole our bins a few weeks back.

I reckon it seems more organised than that, and that if it were kids who had any idea about what they were looking for they would have taken the little accessory-like stuff which was out in plain view that's actually valuable if you know what you're looking for, rather than merely board-shaped stuff.

Besides you would have to have been mad-keen to be out last night - seems like it would have been bloody hard work to me.

It was a good board and it will be sadly missed. On the other hand Ant now has a water-tight reason to get that new board that he's being dying to get for about the last year and a half. 

Anyway, at the end of the morning it's just a hassle getting the window replaced seeing as my conference is this weekend and we gotta get it done before then. 

Joy, more stuff to feel insecure and resentful about to add to the collection. It's also a bit scary, but it's another lesson in "there's nothing you can do" and "be grateful it wasn't worse".

Being winter here we've been right into our mulled wine this year. I've always had a fascination with it, or at least persist in making it. 

This volume is good for about 7 very civilised people, 5 rowdy people, or 3 very sloshed people.

· 1½ - 2 litres of middle of the range red table wine
· 1 cup suger
· 1½ cups water
· Cloves (between 12 -18 to flavour)
· Cinnamon (4 sticks or 2-3 tablespoons of ground)
· 2 oranges
· 2 lemons
(either rinds only or sliced thinly)

 see notes about all the ingredients at the end

Stage 1 (at least 10 minutes, up to about half an hour depending on your patience)

Put in water, sugar, cloves and cinnamon.
Simmer gently, stirring often (particularly at the beginning to dissolve the sugar). Do not boil.

Stage 2 (at least half and hour, up to about 2 hours)

Add the wine. Add oranges and lemons.
Stir very often. DO NOT BOIL! If it boils you will ruin the flavour and burn off the alcohol.

Test for taste, if it's too astringent add more sugar a tiny bit at a time (don't add too much, remember you can always add more). Make sure the cinnamon and clove balance of flavours is nice, if one flavour is a little strong add a little bit of the other.

If one of the flavour gets to be really too much (eg too much sugar), the whole lot can be watered down a little. 

Stage 3 (the rest of the night)

Serve very hot, in mugs or glasses.
Keep warm and continue to serve all through the evening (preferably in front of an open fire with great company).

There are a couple of tricks with mulled wine and one of them is: never let it boil! Never, not at any stage.

I had the wonderful opportunity to talk to the illustrious Tim Wetherell about whom I think very highly and we were discussing the term "steampunk" amongst other things.

This in turn spawned a googling.

This guy made a typewriter style keyboard , I think it is very cool.

But there has been a lot of talk about keyboards this week.

I mean there is the laser keyboard from the future (which has been surprisingly difficult to describe to people in real life). The totally rearrangable keyboard (like fridge magents). Any number of gamer keyboards/keypads .

 But when I got to to thinking about it typing is one of the most valuable and useful skills I have. 

I mean human interface with computers is so important and so under-recognised by most of your average computer users.

I read this thing  by Jared Diamond years ago that has nagged at me since then about how our current typing system (qwerty) was actually designed specifically to slow us down (as typing too fast caused early typewriters to jam).

Ever since I've been one of those fruitcakes who goes is always keeping their eyes open for new and alternative typing methods - though I am a realist and still hone my qwerty skills, cause it's like msoffice (I've just got to show-off and reveal that I've been rated as a >10,000keys/ph - which was the top of the rating scale at the agency where I was tested, but my actual speed got rated up to 14,000. At different times in my life when I've been in a pinch, like when I was at uni, I've done typing as my version of hard-labour for cash).

There is also this blank keyboard, which also appeals in some fundamental way (yes I have considered scraping the letters from my keys). 

--- 

I also read this cool quote:

"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim."
– Edsger W. Dijkstra

(I think it's somehow related)  

Taken yesterday from sci-fi novel "Accelerando" by Charles Stross.

I haven't yet updated the site with my new photos and all of the amazing things that I've learnt and the results of the experimentation. I've got heaps more photos and want to rewrite it a bit, but my olives are really coming along!

But I have learnt some really basic things which I would definitely pass on (though I'm not sure if these guidelines apply to olives that are not green kalamatas, which is the only ones that I have used):

I've been losing my mind at Office 2007.

As it says in PCmag "Office is like the weather—you can't get away from it".

I've (against my will and better judgement) used the MS Office Suite just about every day since early 1996. All through the 2000's I've been brought in specifically to consult on the use of this suite of products (with many  many groups, eg Shell, a couple of different depts of the Australian Government).

And then they gave us Office 2007.

 So now I need to relearn a stack of stuff and some of the basic features which we used to enjoy are gone gone gone. 

To quote the CNET review : "We expect this new look to challenge longtime users with a steep learning curve." - Yeah, as if I want a steep learning curve with a microsoft product. If I want a steep learning curve I'll use linux thank you.

Now I've had the privilege to have been working office 2007 for about a week and it is so disruptive to me, I thought that it was my honour-bound duty to list some of the reason why, and problems that are driving me totally beserk.

 So my big number 1 gripe is: ...   Read more ... (It just  goes on for a bit so thought should extend it to another page)

NB: So you think there aren't alternatives... there are alternatives:
Exhibit A: "Comparison of Office Suites" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_office_suites)
Exhibit B: Google Docs & Spreadsheets (officially not competition to msoffice);  OpenOffice

  

Ta-da!

So I'm officially announcing the new and improved version of the Bob's Barrels website.

Spiffy new open source CMS and lots of other jazz.

Though rest assured there are (as always) lots of big ideas a-brewing.

-E 

• Wine/Whisky Barrels (cooperage)/Barrels, barrel equipment & barrel racks

• Rain Barrels

• Gun Barrels/Paintball Gun Barrels
  

Movies, Music, Pictures and Games

• Barrel images and videos

• Barrels used in music (did you know there is a Japanese pop band called the barrels)
• Barrel Organ

• Crates and Barrels in games

• Barrels featuring in movies
• "Orange Barrel" short series

• Barrels as decorative features
• Burn barrels (barrels using which you burn thing)
• Crash cushion systems

• Gift Barrels
• Waves barrelling in the ocean
  
• Bob's Barrels of Fun
• Interesting barrels occurring in research 
• Economic Barrels (mainly oil consumption)
• Racing horses around barrels
• Unusual cultural traditions  

How I am attempting to cure olives

This is something I've always wanted to do as certain olives contain my very preferred, aka favourite flavour. Finally finally I'm getting around to it with mixed success.

Fresh olives are hard and extremely bitter.

In order to make the fruit edible it need to be processed, to "leach out and break down" the unpalatable elements.

In order to make the fruit edible it need to be processed, to "leach out and break down" the unpalatable elements.

There are a variety of methods traditionally used to do this:

Fermentation (by soaking in water):
- in water only
- in salt and water
- with lye

Salting
- layering in salt (for months and months)

I was given instruction for the fermentation in salt and water method, this is not strict and I've found afew variations on the internet.

Man, have I got big plans. I'm currently working on something epic to go here...

So please please please ignore the state the place is in... It'll be totally sick soon... I promise.

In the mean time if you're bored for crap maybe check: http://elena.aewstudios.com/

NB: these big plans have now come to fruition - you're probably looking at it.