Sephy’s Platzish

Or: 3 stories, 1 post

Bernie to USA, Aust, NZ: I don’t care about you

That’s essentially what he’s saying in his pronouncement that the future of the Australian GP is in doubt unless they go to a night race. Considering that they have already dropped the US round of the championship, it should be no surprise that they don’t want to stick around Australia unless they have to (or unless Premier Brumbie ponies up a ton more of the Victorian taxpayers’ money to put lights up in Albert Park).

What’s the reason for the complaint about the time of the race?

TV rights. Sure, Europe is the biggest audience for F1, but that doesn’t mean that there are dedicated F1 fans in the Western hemisphere; Brazil and Canada still have rounds of the championship - and as far as I know, they’re as well-attended as rounds in Europe (in fact, they probably have better attendance than European rounds). Those races are safe in Bernie Ecclestone’s eyes because they (along with the old USGP) air in Europe at around 6PM - smack dab in the middle of peak viewing time.  All the European rounds (along with Turkey and Bahrain) start somewhere between noon and 3pm on the continent.

What time is the Australian GP on in Europe? Generally around 4-5am, or late evening in the US.

It would seem to me that if we have to deal with getting up at 6.30am all summer long, and have to stay up all night for the other races (aside from Australia, Canada and Brazil), they should be stuck with some of these “inconveniently timed” races. It’s only fair for a truly worldwide sport.

If this isn’t a scam, I’ll run around naked

One of the more annoying commercials on the radio lately is one that features a guy acting as a show host going into a commercial break. He is talking about this “amazing” product that makes you earn money on the Internet using sites like eBay. Now, it wouldn’t be too bad except for the fact that he goes on to say that you will be selling products that you don’t have to see, ship, or even pay for.

Uh, excuse me? Selling stuff you don’t pay for? There’s a term for that in my region - selling stolen goods, anybody?

The system is called Internet Speedway, and has been out there for quite a long time. And, if you’re curious why I’d be willing to run around naked if this isn’t a scam, check out this thread on scam.com. Need I say more?

However, it’s not so much what they’re pitching that makes the ad annoying, it’s how they pitch it. This voice-over artist reads his script, and when he gets to the part where he has to read off the number, he says “uh, it’s here, it’s 1-whatever”. Now, that fits into the idea of this being a supposedly “live” read, but when he goes to reread the number, he says “um” again. It’s that second “um” that really makes the ad annoying to me.

Oh well, that’s why they have a dial on the radio, eh?

Superbowl XLII - it’s all about the ads

Provided I actually care to watch (which I probably will since there isn’t that much on TV other than marathons) the show, all I am really interested in seeing are the ads, which I haven’t heard a lot of hype about, but they’re available out there to watch already.  You would think that these companies would get bothered about their $2.7-million commercials being leaked onto the internet, but they’ll land here anyways, so I guess they don’t care all that much.

As far as the game itself, this is one of those games where you want both teams to lose. I want the Giants to lose because of beating the Packers. I want the Patriots to lose to stop the perfect season. That being said, I think that the Patriots will win the game because they just have been that dominant force all season long.

As far as a score, I’d tip 34-21 to los Pats, as they were called on Spanish language TV (one guy on there said that he was expecting the upset of the century going the Giants way; nobody else was convinced of his prediction).

Something that probably nobody over here knows (or really cares) about is the fact that last Saturday was Australia Day (and Republic Day in India). I did some searching for what a “traditional” Australia Day menu was, but all I could figure out was that it was just a day for a barbecue - just like July 4th is for us here.

However, I was curious, and posed the question to the folks at the Aussie Bloggers Forum - and I have to say that I did Sam Kekovich proud. While I didn’t make the lamb on the 26th, it was made in what he would term “Australia Week” - heck, they already had G’day USA going on, so why not? As I mentioned in the thread, I found a recipe that sounded perfect for what we had gotten - lamb shank - Garlic Lovers shank.

By the way, I didn’t buy Australian Lamb, but got locally-sourced product, as you can see on the packaging.

The first step was to remove the fat - there was quite a bit of it - and then cut slits into the meat for garlic to be stuck literally into the meat. Then, you doused it in olive oil and put it under the broiler to brown. The next two shots are before and after - before with just the oil and garlic, and then after, seasoned with pepper, salt, oregano, mint and some red wine in the bottom of the dish for good measure (and to use it up; I opted for the Yellow Tail if you’re curious).

Then it was into the oven for a couple of hours (though I really should have done it for slightly less time since it was only one shank, it was slightly dry after cooking) wrapped under aluminium foil, during which time I prepared the side dish. It’s one that long-time readers might remember from my chicken adventures in May. Ironically, this Greek Salad is featured in an Australia Day menu, so all was somewhat right with the world again.

I did do it slightly different this time - taking out the seeds from the tomatoes, also slicing the onions smaller and adding in some green capsicums (peppers for my fellow Americans ). However, I wasn’t impressed with the vinaigrette again - I think it’s just too bitter for my tastes; I did find out that Kraft Zesty Italian dressing works well with it the next day though.

By the time I had the salad done, the meat was ready to come out of the oven and sit for a few minutes. Here are a couple of shots of how it looked right after coming out of the oven; one of which you may have seen already

The last thing was to move it onto a platter, remove the meat from the bone and tuck in to my first lamb meal since 2004 when I visited an awesome restaurant called Fogo de Chão - where they have Gauchos from Brazil go around with large sticks of meat and serve you just about anything you might want - chicken breast, sausages, pork roast, filet mignon (bacon wrapped), lamb shank. They have a salad bar as well, but I only grabbed a piece of smoked salmon and a couple of asparagus spears; didn’t want to fill up on the sides now, did I?

Here’s what it looked like on the platter; one shank comfortably served two.

It is definitely a meal that I’d like to try again, when shank is on sale. We got it for $3.98 per pound ($8.95/kg or so), so really it isn’t that expensive of a meat at all. Plus, I’m sure that Sam Kekovich would be quite proud.

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.

One of the indicators that the summer has really arrived is the first issuance of a severe weather watch or warning. In fact, in my state, we’ve had tornadoes in every month except February, and have had severe weather (thunderstorms, not snowstorms) in every month. I can still remember one February afternoon when we had a really strong thunderstorm - I was in school and we were practising for an event that was coming up in the next couple of weeks. The next thing we know, there’s thunder and lightning outside. In the middle of February.

Anyway, when we get an alert for severe weather, it almost always starts with the issuance of a watch - either a Severe Thunderstorm Watch or a Tornado Watch, depending on the severity of the storms that are expected over the affected area. Generally, this will be for a large swath of land, covering hundreds or thousands of square miles - sometimes even including the better part of a state. Then, as the weather develops, warnings are issued for specific storms. In fact, as of October 1st, the National Weather Service is only issuing warnings for specific storms, instead of for whole counties. Typically, the warnings are issued for an area of about 100-200 square miles (I might be underestimating that, since a township is considered to be 36 square miles).

In this case, we’re afforded the opportunity to have (at least in my opinion) some of the best forecasting of severe weather in the world, despite the media going all out crazy when there’s a warning issued (if you read the HDTV forums for this area, you can read about people getting annoyed at stations for crunching the widescreen picture into a 4:3 picture to put the warnings on the screen - they do the same thing for the snow closings as well).

Now, let’s do a bit of compare and contrast. First off is a current radar image from the National Weather Service office in Shreveport, LA - the only office in the nation that has severe warnings out for their Forecast area. The yellow squares are the boundaries of the severe thunderstorm warning, issued for some parts of Texas.

Contrast that with this picture, from the Bureau of Meteorology in Australia, who have issued a severe thunderstorm warning for parts of Victoria. Again, the warned area is in yellow. Note that the warning covers about 2/3 of the state.

What is baffling to me is this sounds very much like a watch - because they issue these warnings for hours at a time, and for such a large area. Interestingly, they do have a page intended to guide you as to the conditions for a severe thunderstorm warning, but there isn’t much in the way of specifics. Also, they say that these warnings have very little lead time for their issue - To try and issue warnings with a greater lead-time would lead to a flood of false alarms, thus rendering the service ineffective.

Interestingly, if you look at the Melbourne Radar loop, you can see that communities that are part of this warning appear to not have received any rain at all, for example, Colac. Of course, that doesn’t mean that they haven’t gotten storms already or won’t get them in the near future, but to have them under a warning seems to, especially if they don’t get any storms, be counterproductive to their statement of avoiding false warnings.

Our warnings aren’t perfect either - we have quite a few tornado warnings that are issued for the possibility of a tornado - however, those are not over issued, so they are still taken very seriously; I’m surprised that those warnings aren’t a source of further controversy actually. I think part of that is that a tornado is one weather event you do not want to take a chance with - even a weak tornado has the ability to kill people, especially in a mobile home park.

If you are curious, the guidelines for issuing a severe thunderstorm warning are if a storm has a measured or estimated wind speed of 50 knots (58mph, 93km/h), or hail in excess of a certain diameter. It has nothing to do with a lot of lightning or heavy rain. There are a dedicated group of people who volunteer to watch for storms and report on their progress to back up data that is gathered on a radar image - they are the storm spotters and I know that I’ve listened to them many times when it’s been stormy out; in fact, if you read local storm reports during severe weather, you will see a lot of entries from amateurs - that means amateur radio operators who have gone and submitted a report via the radio which is relayed to the forecast office on a separate channel.

Aussies, I’d like your opinion - would you like to keep having warnings issued as they are now, for large swaths of states for long periods of time (like our watches), or separate the warnings into watches and warnings, with watches being the current warning product, and warnings being issued for specific areas of states?

One of the things that I absolutely love about my computer is the fact that I can record the “mix” stream from the computer - in other words, I can rerecord audio streams for my personal use (or possibly sharing with one or two people).

It all started with recording calls that I and some of my fellow scambaiters would make to scammers - though the first calls I recorded were calls that I did myself, in an interesting process where I did a stereo recording and I had my microphone in one channel and the scammer in the other channel.  I didn’t post too many of my own calls to the web, but quite a bit of my recording work is out there for everyone to enjoy.

I’ve also used this method to record a couple of songs from MySpace (until a site with all the songs available for download in MP3 format was found), and to even record some radio programs.

However, the program that I use, Audacity, has added a new feature where you can actually schedule a recording. I’ve used this feature to great advantage to record the ABC cricket broadcasts which, since they’re in Australia, can go as late as (as was the case the other day for the Twenty20 match at the WACA) 6:30AM my time.  One day matches also have a tendency to run into the early morning hours when they’re day-night affairs (for example, the match at Adelaide today is starting just as I write this - for some reason the ABC stream is still in standby mode, but the Radio Sport stream is working, just with commercials - and will run until around 5:00 tomorrow morning).

I’ve also been doing the same thing with the test matches that were held a few weeks ago in Brisbane and Hobart against Sri Lanka. I’d set the timer to record from about 10 minutes before the start of a session and go for about 15 minutes after the session. If I wasn’t going to be around, I’d set the recording to go from the beginning of, say, the second session to the end of the day. I’d then go back and edit the file to remove (on weekdays) the lunch break and sometimes the tea break, and to chop off the end of the file after the day’s play had ended.

After recording a session, I export it to an mp3 file at 32kbps - which gives me a file size of around 30 MB for a full 2-hour session of test cricket.

Then, I will listen to it on my walks with my mp3 player (it’s actually an iPod nano - got it as a gift, and it will be leaving me for a week soon, as it will be on its intended itinerary). It’s something different to music and I like listening along and having a laugh with the commentators - I don’t know what it is, but if you want some good commentary, listen to cricket or baseball commentators on the radio, heck even football (gridiron) commentators get up to a good time. They even talk about the game from time to time.

At about an hour or so a day, and with some days where I’ll listen to the match on the computer as well, I got through the first test just in time for the second test to start. However, the second test took me quite a while to complete - I started it straight from the first day, but I didn’t get done with it until Monday afternoon, almost a full two weeks after the match had actually finished.

I’m almost done listening to the Twenty20; in fact, I’m listening to that right now, with the Black Caps on 8-79, with the end of the match coming quickly; I’ve managed to not see the result of the match - however, that doesn’t mean I can’t get spoilt for other things while listening to the cricket - I heard the results from some of the V8 action at Symmons Plains, and was getting mildly annoyed, but I could understand so it wasn’t a big deal. Anyway the actual racing was much better than just hearing the results.

By the way, if you want to do something like this, you just need to see if you can record the Mixer stream. It’s found in your sound control - in Windows, that’s at Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> Entertainment -> Volume Control. This is what it will look like when you start the program; you’ll have different things in your control panel -

To access the recording settings, go to Options -> Properties, which will bring up this window -

Then, in the mixer device line, you will want to look for something like “Recording control” or, in my case Realtek HD Audio rear input, then click OK. The Master Volume window will change to the Recording Control window, which will look something like this (as with the Master Volume, I have the advanced settings option turned on) -

If you have something like “Stereo Mix” in your set of controls, then you can go ahead and do the same thing as I can, and possibly even have your own two-week-long test match.

Coming up tomorrow - how to upload these files to an FTP server (not really, but I will show you how to use an FTP program )