Sephy’s Platzish

Since it’s the end of the year and all, let’s take a look back over the last year through the eyes of this blog. You can click on each month’s name to view the posts from that month, just so you know

January

The year got started off with me showing off one of the best recipes I’ve ever made - roast chicken baked in dough - a Jamie Oliver recipe. Later on in the month, I explored some possible ways for cricket to get a foothold in the USA. Not surprisingly, the planned series for New York didn’t happen. Might I suggest to the BCCI and CA that a possible location could be the international-class stadium in Florida?

February

This was the time when I started to get involved in other projects, thus the number of posts would be low for the next couple of month. However, I did put together a review of the Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. I also wondered about MySpace’s amazing networking abilities - the random profile I clicked on is no longer in my “Extended Network”. Maybe they got some sense…ah, who am I kidding? Lastly, I also flirted with salmonella. Luckily I didn’t get sick

March

March definitely came in like a lion, with my monitor breaking down, which led to LG sending me a replacement. For a while though, I thought it was lost, and for some reason it was sitting a mere 200 miles away from me for a whole weekend. Finally, I got the replacement, and it turned out to be a larger monitor that I am still using today - it’s an amazing piece of work. By the way, I did manage to get the base off of the 19″ monitor and shipped it back in original packaging. I also questioned the arrogance of my countrymen when the Bob Woolmer story broke.

April

By far, this was the slowest month for my blogging, as there were only two posts, including a discussion of YouTube’s control over what is posted there…thanks copyright holders…

May

This was a big month; first, I finally upgraded my Firefox to version 2.0 - after finding out that support for 1.5 was being discontinued. Then, I made the 200th post to the blog, and on the 23rd, I started the US Blogs Community on BumpZee. As of today, there are 243 members and 206 blogs in the community, and is the 8th most popular community on the site. Well done to everyone in the community! Also, I made the most awesome chicken recipe ever!

June

In June, I did my first guest post - How to NOT Make Money on the Internet - on Freshblogger, about various job scams that you will find out there. Also, on that front, I published a scambait I did with one Don Fabiano Jutolio Chichi, to show people what would happen if you take on these scammers. With the US Blogs Community, I introduced two elements - the US Blog badges, and the US Blogs community blogroll.

I talked about coming to accept the words that most TV networks bleep out, gave tips for getting a passport, and saw the Outback Steakhouse blimp. Then, I went and bought myself a domain name and started a little feature you may have seen - This was the Week that Was.

July

July was really the month where I started a big turn around. However, let’s get the business posts of the month out of the way

I did a bit of cooking during the month - Salmon with Bruschetta, a new microwave and also cooking on a new (to me) grill. Also, I published the first of my how-to posts - burning a feed with FeedBurner and integrating it with Blogger. I did a bit of controversial topics, including talking about Alexa and also MyBlogLog’s decision to enable spammers to use their service. Thankfully, both of these issues were resolved quite quickly - and good on them for doing it

Now, the personal stuff. I started the month talking about my last job, and the experience I had at the end of it. In the middle of the month, I said that I was lacking focus and trying to fix it. Then, I made the decision that it was time for a change. The first change was actually getting my license renewed - then, I announced that I was making a wholesale change in my life - including adding walks and doing other stuff to sort out my life. Essentially, I was letting go of a lot of things that have held me back. I also talked about the first experiences of finally walking out of the hole by way of a reply, which was posted both here and at Snoskred’s site, to this post of hers.

Out of this came the other weekly post - The Week in Walks, etc. - which can be found posted each Sunday, as a wrap-up of my walks from the week, and an update to my world in general.

August

The month didn’t start out the greatest - I found out that my laptop had died from being in the basement. However, I continued on, with reviews of the first two legs of the Indiana Jones trilogy - Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Temple of Doom. I also got the chance to spend some time at the mall, and sample some sausage; celebrated the first anniversary of the blog, and introduced another new feature - the Tuesday Think Tank, with All About RSS.

The controversy of the month was the revelation that people were being paid to comment on blogs that didn’t have nofollow turned on - simply put, they’re not allowed here. Also, at the end of the month, I talked about the hassles I had with trying to take advantage of a free hosting offer that was available. Strangely, they never replied to my comments - I guess they never did care about customer service anyway…

I had a bumper crop of how-tos - “Stealing” code, adding a Google search box, and adding co.mments and StumbleUpon to posts on Blogger.

September

The month started off with me getting another death threat from a scammer. Then, I received my really nice clothes from a website - no returns from any of it

I also talked about going to volunteer with a charity organization in the area, cooked a whole bunch of food - Zucchini bread, zucchini muffins, and fresh salmon from the lake. All amazing food if I say so myself.

Something that I did during the month was to showcase some of my favorite music - Ellington at Newport and Arturo’s Hot House.

October

This was the month of my big move over to WordPress. I could leave it there and say that it was the only thing that happened, but of course it wasn’t.

I asked a question that would become a major talking point over the next month - How much control do Google have over us? I also talked about more music - Lloyd Cole Knew My Father, Duke’s 3 Suites and the albums I found while digging through some boxes. Then, I took the role of Mr. Clueless and bought some wine, and showed you how to move your Blogger blog to your own domain.

November

November was NaBloPoMo, and I started the commenting challenge - I didn’t get as far as I did in 2006, but I did get a start on the list.

During the month, I talked about catching up with an old friend, as well as firing my phone company and about getting out there and into a car. As part of my impending driving test, I was putting a plan together just in case I wouldn’t pass.

I also showed you how to change your reader to either Bloglines or Thunderbird easily. In addition, I talked about my musical history and then, for the second year in a row, provided all the states of the turkey, this time with sides!

December

The month started out with me taking a crash course in driving - which led me to getting a compliment from my tester for my parallel parking skills after passing my driving test.

Later that week, I went car shopping (well, just signing and then driving), and talked about another set of cars which rock - the V8 Supercars.

As it turned out, this has been the second snowiest December since records have been kept in the area - the media have been going hog wild with coverage and I talked about that.

The how-tos continued to flow out of me - first it was resizing images, then it was uploading using FTP, and then using the Advanced TinyMCE Editor to position images.

I also doled out advice for the tollway - which I heeded this time, and had some to spare. Then, I made an alternative Christmas dinner - which made a good Plan B Chicken, and that brings us to the last day of the year, where I recapped the year with a really long post linking to a lot of my other posts.

2008

So, what will the next year bring us all? Based on the last few months of this year, I have to say that the future looks amazingly excellent.

I want to give a shout-out to the folks behind the newly-launched Aussie Bloggers forum, which is down right awesome. The brainchild of the project was Meg from Dipping into the Blogpond, who brought both Snoskred and Andrew Boyd along with a whole host of Aussie bloggers to build up the site. Of course, you don’t have to be an Aussie to join the forum, though I suspect that I hold the honor of being the first overseas person to join up, hehe

Happy New Year y’all; I’ll be back next week with the normal TW3.

It’s the last update of the walking for 2007. Let’s get to it!

Sunday, 23rd December

This was a day that wasn’t suitable for being outside for more than a few minutes at a time. I started to walk, got to the end of the driveway and decided that it’s best for my safety (winds were upwards of 60km/h during the day with the temperature being somewhere around -15°C) to just let it go for the day. It didn’t help either that I wound up having to unstick all the doors on both cars which were frozen.

Total distance - 1012 steps, 0.80km

Monday, 24th December

The snow had been melting over the weekend, and then as I was walking, I started to notice that the camera was getting coated with some of the ice and snow that was blowing around. Don’t worry cos I then went and protected it in my jacket

Total distance - 1767 steps, 1.41km

Tuesday, 25th December

The sun sets on a white Christmas. Need I say more?

Total distance - 1954 steps, 1.56km

Wednesday, 26th December

My friends, the turkeys, are grouping together, possibly looking for a bit of leftover Christmas dinner? Maybe not cos after I came along, they started to go into the forest that’s in the background.

Total distance - 2822 steps, 2.25km

Thursday, 27th December

There was a light dusting of snow overnight, which made a really nice look on the trees, however you’ll see a different look of the same thing soon Here, I’ve given y’all a shot of the sun in the southwestern sky.

Total distance - 2997 steps, 2.39km

Friday, 28th December

See what I mean about the coating of things? These are some bushes that have gotten a major coating of snow during the storm we had during the day - it was really heavy snow, and I did a lot of work outside to clean up the snow from around the cars, but I didn’t get too far in that venture, and decided to just walk down to the mailbox to get the mail and come back, trudging through what had to have been about 15-18cm of snow (that’s 6-7 inches).

Total distance - 2068 steps, 1.65km

Saturday, 29th December

After the snow was cleared, the trees still hold the snow on them, as you can see from this stand of pine trees in the field by the horse paddock. Also, the snowmobilers were out in force, and I am glad to say that every one that I saw had helmets on.

Total distance - 2354 steps, 2.88km

In other news, it was a quiet week around here, as I was by myself for the whole time. I did enjoy Christmas Eve with a family friend - we wound up having Chinese food as all the pizza joints closed up early for the holiday. Then I got to church just barely in time because I wasn’t 100% sure if it started at 7 or 7.30 pm - it was 7, and I got there just in the nick of time, for the very traditional program.Actually, I shouldn’t say it was totally quiet - I mean, since I was alone, I had the opportunity to have the speakers on at night, so I could listen to music without destroying my ears; of course on Christmas that changed to cricket to listen to during the night, which is always fun

This week, I go back into the routine of visiting the therapist again, and there are a few other issues that need to be mentioned, and then it’s back to the normal routine of the world.

And I have to say that, even though it’s been really nice to have the house all to myself (and the dog), it’ll be nice to have someone around again…

As you may know already if you’ve gone to your WP dashboard, there is a new version of WordPress available. As with all the x.x.x releases, it’s a security patch to a previous version, and it’s recommended that you upgrade to it as soon as possible.

I have to say that I’ve done an upgrade of WordPress once. It didn’t go too well because, at the time, the instructions weren’t well-written. Fortunately, they have amended the instructions to include a very important step to do before attempting to upgrade - turning off your plugins.

Before I launched the site on this domain, I had a test site, which was originally installed to 2.2; I had done some dabbling with it - not a lot though, and in the time between I had started it up and when I really started to play with it, version 2.3 was released. I figured I might as well guinea-pig an upgrade and see how it went. So, I go to the instructions, follow them as they were written, and then the worst thing happens - the whole site was completely white!

Not a single thing showed up - not even the upgrade page you’re supposed to go to after installing the upgrade. For a while I panicked because I knew something went wrong, so I had some checking done and I could restore a backup, fortunately, so I was back on 2.2.

Then, I checked out the extended upgrade instructions, and then right there in front of my face was the instruction that would have saved my hide the first time - 4. Deactivate ALL your Plugins. Needless to say, I was slightly annoyed at that - since I didn’t see it in the basic instructions; an item that you would think they’d have had jumping up and down at you.

So, I went ahead and did it by the book, and - as if some magic wand was waved - the upgrade worked perfectly and I was rolling along with 2.3. So, now it is time for me to do the upgrade again - first I’m going to do it on the test site (where I’m also doing some testing for a theme I’m working on editing to make look awesome), and then, if that goes well, I’ll do it over here sometime during the week.

Ever since we got our new phone system set up, one big change to how it works is the notification of a new voicemail. When someone leaves a message, the first way that you can tell there’s one waiting is that the light on the phone charger will flash. Also, when you turn turn the handset on, there will be a pulsing of the dial tone to act as an aural notification for you to check your messages.

So, yesterday, a call came through and they left a message - I didn’t listen to the whole message on the first time I rang up the voicemail number, hanging up halfway through it instead of selecting save, delete or replay. Apparently, this didn’t clear the message notification light - the dialtone notification did go off though.

Then I go ahead and listen to all the messages in the mailbox (there were a couple that I could clear out anyway as they were old), including the new one that triggered the light in the first place, and tell it to save the message. The light was still flashing. Even putting the phone back on the base and taking it off again didn’t help the situation.

About the only solution that I haven’t tried yet is to call the phone, drop a sample message and then see if that clears the situation - even pausing notifications didn’t work, and I have to say, after a day of the light flashing, it has gotten quite annoying. However, I have gotten better at just ignoring it and looking at the phone to see if I missed any calls while I may have been away from it.

YES! Lesson for modern phones like the one we have - if you have a stuck message light - simply drop a quick message from another phone (I used a clip of music - Sin Sin Sin to be particular as it was the song currently queued up in Winamp and the cricket stream has failed), listen to it, and delete it. Then the darned light will stop flashing incessantly. At least until you get another message…

So, on Monday, I mentioned making a special meal on Christmas. This meal was supposed to involve white wine and olive oil. Well, I did try to make the meal - and as I mentioned on Tuesday, kind of messed up the wine selection.

Instead of getting a white wine, I wound up getting Yellow Tail Shiraz - for some reason I thought it was a white wine - it looked clear in the store, but I’m not sure if that was just me wanting to get out of the nutty store as soon as possible on Christmas Eve, or me just proving that I’m Mr. Clueless when it comes to wine again.

Anyway, later on on Monday, I look at the bottle and see that it was, in fact, a red. Well, by this time, all of the shops were closed, and I knew that the bottle shop in town would be open on Tuesday - I checked in to see if, just on some off chance, they’d have a cheaper price on wine, but in fact, the grocery store’s prices were significantly cheaper - for Yellow Tail, the difference was about $4 per 750mL bottle!  Instead of going out and spending more money, I decided to go ahead with trying this dish with the wrong wine, just to see how it came out.

One thing that I didn’t realise with this particular brand of wine was that it was a standard bottle - with a cork in it. As you might guess, we didn’t have a corkscrew here, so I had to make an emergency run over to Walgreen’s (after checking their website to make sure they had them) so that I could pick up one.

I get home, and open the bottle - the scent wasn’t bad, so I decided to try some. Boy, oh boy is that stuff bitter! After one or two sips, I could take it no longer and left it go for cooking. After the experience I had with the chicken cacciatore (where the chicken had changed tints to an unattractive grayish-red color), I decided that I’d put in a buffer for the chicken.

The recipe goes like this - mix about 1 cup wine with 1/2 cup olive oil, a couple of cloves of garlic, along with herbs, juice from a lemon (and a lime if you like), plus salt and pepper. I mixed all that together in a bowl, then put it in a dish lined with aluminum foil - I didn’t want to stain the dish with the red wine. On the bottom of the pan, I had put a layer consisting of a sweet potato that I’d had for quite a while but was still good and a zucchini, diced into large chunks. Over that, I put the chicken and then covered the whole lot with another piece of aluminum foil, and put it in a 350°F oven for an hour.

As the hour came to a close, I went in to check on it, and it looked good - the wine/oil mixture was boiling away in the enclosure, and everything looked to be done.  I take it out of the oven, and the zucchini had soaked up quite a bit of the liquid - it had turned red from the wine. I then put it onto two plates, for separating the meal apart - I wound up being bad and having both breasts I cooked, but left some of the veggies because they were really tasting of the wine. Honestly, it wasn’t that good of a taste - one that I’d not want to repeat, at least without some adjustment.

So, tonight, I went for plan B. That involved taking the leftover veggies and roasting them with a couple more pieces of chicken (so that, this time, I’ll have some chicken for lunch tomorrow) in an open pan, again lined with aluminum foil because it is just that much easier to cook with. I also threw in a regular potato and roasted that using basically the same recipe as above, just minus the wine, and using exclusively lime juice.

That’s what it looked like in the oven - I have to say that the roasting didn’t really help out the veggies that were soaked in wine - it still had a very bitter taste, which I have to say was kind of a disappointment. The good news, however, was that the chicken was very moist and tasty and the white potatoes were very good, but could have used a bit more of a “roasted” taste.

I think for now I’ll stick to what I know - which is dry cooking, ok?