Flock

I'm testing out this new browser called Flock. It is currently in beta stage. The browser features uses Mozilla and integrates features like access to your Flickr account, blog account, and search and news.

The interface is quite refreshing. Reminds me of Firefox and IE7 combined (or is that IE7 copying Flock?)

You have the usual menu system, and have theme and extension abilities just like Firefox. The main differences are the easy access to uploading photos (Flickr and Photobucket) and blog entries (Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, Movable Type, LiveJournal, and Drupal). Have I mentioned that it supports multiple blog accounts? Oh and there is Favorites Sharing (in case you want to share your adult sites)

Overall I think it is quite good. I welcome you to try it. If you can read this then obviously the publish button works :)

Blogged with Flock

Brrrrr cold...

It was a bit cold this morning

It was the first time this year that my car had this much ice on it! So i grabbed a couple of empty sipper bottles that i keep in my boot for occasions such as this (no i'm not lazy, i really do keep things like that in my boot)...

So I wombled on back to the kitchen to fill up the bottles with hot water and went back to the car and began to liberally spray the windows to melt the ice... used up one bottle and thought, cool i can keep the other bottle for some other time... but upon sitting down and looking through the windscreen, i realised my mistake as half of the windscreen was still covered in semi-translucent ice...

So out we went again with the second sipper bottle of (now) warm water and emptied that on it... Doesn't the roof of my car look pretty :-)

Haha...power cut

Yesterday was a weird day. First the traffic was really bad going to work. Waves were breaking over the causeway on SH16 going into the city. I didn't ride my bike yesterday due to plans for later in the evening. When we got to the causeway, it wasn't even that bad. The water splashes don't even pass the bus lane!!! The only reason traffic was bad was because everyone was rubber necking.

Anyway around the time we reached Western Springs, the radio died, then it came back on, then it died again. All the stations were dead. Odd I thought. Exited on Newton and the lights were not working. Got to work and the lights are still not working. Took me a while to cross the Fanshawe st pedestrian crossing because the cars would not stop.

Got to work and the emergency lights were on. THERE IS NO POWER! So we waited a while and was told that a generator is due to arrive around 10am. 11am still no generator. Later found out that it is now due around 2pm. So we were sent home. I decided to stay.

Went to lunch and on my way home, some of the lights were working so I decided to go back to the office. Got there and power's back on so I stayed on and did some work.

All-in-all it was an interesting non-routine day. And it was all due to Transpower not doing their job...nah actually the weather was to blame. A power line snapped and landed on a "feeder". This affected a lot of businesses. Today we received an apology from Transpower.

Bahay Kubo

I'm on holiday right now, the majority of which I'll be spending ouside of the country in Sydney. Arrived here on Saturday early evening. The first thing that my girlfriend's sister asked was if we wanted filo (short for filipino) food for dinner. Personally, I'll eat most anything really as I
like to keep my mind open to new experiences & taste sensations. My girlfriend just loves filo food to death, probably even more so since we don't really cook it at home. So she immediately said yes and started to think about what she would order (she's been to Bahay Kubo - the name of the filo restaurant, which also had a karaoke stage - several times before as she used to live in Sydney)...

So after taking an innumerable number of turns and frantic lane-changing (did I mention that I think that Sydney-siders are crazy drivers? However that is a subject for another blog) we reached our destination 40 minutes later.

Bahay Kubo was a cozy place in Lidcombe (south sydney) that had about a dozen tables that could sit 4-6 people... and they were all either currently occupied or had been reserved already. While confirming with that waitress that we in fact did NOT have a reservation, a kind lady overheard us and helpfully pointed out that she was just waiting for a takeaway order
and so we could take her table after.

Now let me tell you what we had for dinner at Bahay Kubo:
crispy pata (very nice)
pansit palabok (the best I've ever tasted)
pork chop (ok, nothing to write home about)
longanisa (wasn't too shabby)
prawn sinigang (not too bad either)

The servings were a very good size for the price & very yummy... in fact, I'd have to say that the palabok was the best that I've ever tasted... seriously...

There were dishes on the menu that I had never heard of before (not that hard seeing as the menu was in tagalog and the filipino dialect that I grew up learning was bisaya... and the only reason(s) that we had for not having them was either due to them having sold out on that dish
already (it was only 7pm at that point) or that the dish would take nearly an hour to prepare (which we couldn't really be arsed waiting for)...

We were just so stuffed at the end of it, what initial plans of having halo-halo for dessert were reluctantly discarded... So since filo food has been ticked on my checklist of things to eat while
in Sydney, I've got filo ice cream next, or more specifically ube macapuno ice cream... oh, and there's this place that does the best thai dry chilli chicken that I've ever tasted which I ALWAYS go to when in Sydney... musn't forget to have dinner in Darling Harbour as well... oh and the spanish quarter definitely... mmmm...

I'll keep you all posted.

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Sent from my Treo

R.I.P. Yvonne Tan

Some of you may know her and some may recognise her from her TV work. She's an actress. Back in '99 she was a patient in Shortland Street. She also did a couple of episodes in Xena in 2000. She did a commercial last year (I think) as the foreign exchange student who stayed with a rugby fanatic family drinking Maggi Soup. Last year she filmed an episode for Orange Roughies as the Madamme Crystal Yo. This showed about 2 weeks ago.

It was about one year ago when Yvonne discovered she had cancer. She fought it, had several treatments, but ultimately the cancer won. This cancer was quite potent. One cluster dies off but another one pops up.

The doctor initially said she only had a couple of months to live - this was around October last year. But Yvonne managed to fight and hold on. Eventually her body couldn't take the treatments any longer and her energy dropped. She ended up bedridden a little more than a month ago. She could still talk and smile but it got worse some days and she drifted in and out of sleep.

A few weeks ago she was admitted into a hospice. A few days ago, around thursday, she slipped into a coma and finally today she passed away.

R.I.P Yvonne