a blog

It’s been a while

noreply@blogger.com (setek) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 04:59:00 +0000

I won’t go into too much detail, but I’ve been hunting for a new hosting provider. Thanks to a friend, I am now back up and running.

Several countries and photos later, I will update in a little bit with some of the favourites.

Cheers!

Google Chrome

noreply@blogger.com (setek) — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 02:31:00 +0000

Positives

It’s really fast
The UI is quite easy to use and comprehend
Tabs containing the address bar, navigation buttons et al, rather than the other way round, actually is more semantic and intuitive
It uses webkit, not a proprietary rendering engine
Finally, a browser with a decent font-size for the address bar
Did I mention it was really fast?

Negatives

For a browser that’s meant to be created for today’s users’ needs, it doesn’t have RSS support? Did I miss something?
What’s with the Vista-styled minimise, maximise and close buttons? Not to mention the IE 8-inspired address bar, how it dulls part of the line to put more emphasis on the domain…
Does anyone find “Help make Google Chrome better by automatically sending usage statistics and crash reports to Google” the least bit fishy?
Inability to see, at a glance, long page title text without hovering over the tab
IE 7- and 8-styled menu, tucked away in a button, makes it harder to get to, not to mention inconsistent with just about all other applications
Lack of page zoom, instead only having text zoom

That’s all for now… I’m mostly just glad I didn’t have to look to yet another browser to check for inconsistent page rendering. Looking forward to future versions, and what the Google giant are capable of.

Google Chrome

Anchor pseudoclass issues in Internet Explorer 6

noreply@blogger.com (setek) — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 03:26:00 +0000

I’ve never come across this problem in all my years as a developer, and needless to say, it frustrated me no end.

Everyone knows the LVHA rule, or LoVe HAte (if they don’t, they should know that :link comes first, :visited next, :hover next, and :active last. The order they come in matters, so don’t forget!)

Sometimes, I have to do complex buttons; this often means having a <span> element inside the anchor, with specific styling for it during hover etc.

This is where the issue comes in. In the following code:

a:link,
a:visited { background-color: #fff;
    color: #585858; }

a:link span,
a:visited span { zoom: 1.0; /* triggering hasLayout so in IE 6 the background colour actually shows */
    display: block;
    background-color: #4ff;
    cursor: pointer; }

a:focus span,
a:hover span,
a:active span { background-color: #33f;
    color: #fff; }

Shouldn’t be anything wrong with that code, right? :link are unvisited links, :visited are visited links, that covers all anchors. The special hovering is only for <span>s. Works in standards-compliant browsers.

In IE, though, the background colours don’t change. Not while the link is still unvisited. Once they’re visited, they work fine. Why? No idea. But if you add rules for :focus, :hover, and :active (to “underride” the ones defined for the <span>):

a:link,
a:visited { background-color: #fff;
    color: #585858; }

a:focus,
a:hover,
a:active { color: #595959; }

a:link span,
a:visited span { zoom: 1.0; /* triggering hasLayout so in IE 6 the background colour actually shows */
    display: block;
    background-color: #4ff;
    cursor: pointer; }

a:focus span,
a:hover span,
a:active span { background-color: #33f;
    color: #fff; }

The “underridden” rule must not be identical (must be different by some amount, and it doesn’t seem to matter which property, as long as it differs slightly.) I’ve changed the colour from #585858 to #595959 and suddenly, it works. Change them to the same colour value and it stops working.

I’ve been sick and have a headache so this post may sound incoherent, but I hope it makes sense. And is useful.

Things are happening

noreply@blogger.com (setek) — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 02:59:00 +0000

The main site over at mingteo.com has been fully refurbished, sporting a nice shiny new codebase and design. Soon, when I have the time to sort through it all, this blog will be updated with the same design (so it’s all nice and consistent, you know?) ‘Soon’ being the taunting variable in that sentence… cross your fingers because I’m crossing mine that it will get done, at some stage…

Other than that, we’ve been doing some fun cookery. First there was J and my very first attempt at hand-making gnocchi, we did it with a simple creamy gorgonzola cheese sauce:

Then we cranked the new pasta maker to hand-make parpadelle, which was accompanied by a chicken and white wine rosé sauce (it took more than three hours, but we thought it was worth it):

Last night, to commemorate the fixing of the stupid near-new oven that shouldn’t be broken (it’s a long title, I know,) I whipped up a filo filled with a lightly fried salmon steak and tahini yoghurt, with steamed asparagus spears dolloped with more yum tahini yoghurt:

Well, that’s about it. Still haven’t made any progress on that story… oh well, maybe better luck next time.

A List Apart’s Web Survey 2008

noreply@blogger.com (setek) — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 01:11:00 +0000

I took it:

New short

noreply@blogger.com (setek) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 06:01:00 +0000

Here’s my attempt at semi-regular postings :) A new short, the butter queen. The idea for this cropped up in the past week, and it flew. Unfortunately, another short that’s been around for much longer still hasn’t been finished yet… and, I seem to have lost my notes for it.

Anyway, enjoy :)

Announcement

noreply@blogger.com (setek) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 13:47:00 +0000

I forgot to mention one last thing: I have let the onegaishimasu.info domain expire, due to spam issues with *.info domains. I will continue everything as normal with the mingteo.com domain.

Marrying strangers in coffee shops, and Firefox 3

noreply@blogger.com (setek) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 12:41:00 +0000

Well, managed to find it. Marrying strangers in coffee shops. Hope you enjoy… whoever’s there.

By the way, Firefox 3 came out today. Go get it. It’s pretty cool.

I’m not really seeing this supposed “smaller memory footprint,” but it’s worth it for the amped up location bar, the nicer, more mac-integrated skin, the fact that the mac font anti-aliasing/weight problem is fixed, and my all time favourite, that when you switch to the window from another space, it actually becomes the active window (another mac problem—if you switched to the window, the toolbar would claim Firefox was the active window, but it was not. You could try to type, or scroll down, or use several keyboard shortcuts, but it would do nothing.)

Oh, and that there is no longer a 57 character limit on element titles (did that piss off any other developers? I guess it forced you to get to the point in a description title…)

Oh, and it now does zoom instead of just a text resize!

(… speaking of which, when did Firefox go from setting the bar, to merely catching up to it? Oh well, no matter, it’s still the best browser.)

I haven’t even looked at the list of new features, so I’ll wager I’ve missed out a great deal, but check it out for yourself and see.

What I haven’t been doing

noreply@blogger.com (setek) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 03:40:00 +0000

I haven’t been posting
I haven’t been writing stories
I haven’t been redesigning my site
I haven’t been updating the old one
I haven’t been saving money
I haven’t been watching what I eat
I haven’t been trying to solve the issue of expensive homes for rent and sale

Actually, the second one is a partial lie. I have a story I completed a month or so back, but I was going to double-release it with another that hasn’t finished yet. I think I’ll post it as soon as I find it. Hopefully the next will come at some stage.

Last meal

noreply@blogger.com (setek) — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 10:41:00 +0000

Well, perhaps not the last last meal, but I want to call it a milestone. I won’t have as much time to cook anymore, so it feels like a last meal. I’m glad it turned out.

It is a chicken breast stuffed with a Danish Fetta and Spinach, chilli crumbed and shallow fried, accompanied by an ‘avocado crush,’—avocado, lemon juice, horseradish mayonnaise, a hint of cream and finely diced Italian Parsley. It is garnished with fresh tomato cubes and pommes noisettes.

I like pommes noisettes :)

Spare time

noreply@blogger.com (setek) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 09:59:00 +0000

Well, as mentioned before I’ve found myself with a lot of spare time recently. I’ve been cooking whatever I feel like, whenever I feel like, and here are some of the results. To the right is my Filét Sauerkraut, something I made up during the day. It is: beef filét seeded with a crushed garlic clove, sitting on a bed of prosciutto, which is on a fried sauerkraut cake, which is resting on steamed asparagus. It is finished off with a sauerkraut, garlic and white wine cream sauce.

A week or so ago I tried my hand at Scaloppine Marsala. I could’ve made it with rice like suggested, but I prefer to wipe up the leftover sauce with chips :) It mostly turned out okay, but I want to do it again, and add more Marsala wine to give the sauce a sweeter edge next time.

I’ve also started writing again. First I wrote his and her circumstances, and while it isn’t particularly good (I was writing for the sake of getting back into writing, to end my dry spell,) there are bits here and there that I like.

Next was on the way to kushimoto, a body of work I’m more proud of, which is an edit of an unfinished piece from the end of 2006. The direction changed and the set up changed, so really all that was kept were a few descriptions of the area.

Well… that’s it. Until next time.

Cook-off :)

noreply@blogger.com (setek) — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 09:23:00 +0000

I’ve been cooking a fair amount more, with all the extra time on my hands. And since I haven’t been posting anything lately, I thought might as well put some pictures up :)

I made this a while back, it’s a big field mushroom pizza. Cut the stalk, add all your favourite pizza toppings (I made a Capriccosa, or what I could remember of the Capriccosa from our Rome trip.)

I guess I was feeling all Italy-inspired, because I made this next, a fried al-dente linguine tossed through with onions, bacon, garlic, sun-dried tomatoes, tomato pesto, with char-grilled beef chunks on top.

After that I made a three-hour beef shin stew, on a bed of potato mash, which turned out very well.

And today, I made pumpkin soup with ~~Stilton~~ Danish Blue bread (couldn’t find a Stilton cheese, so had to settle for a close relative :D) I made this so J would have something for lunch for the rest of the working week. And possibly a little left over.

Update

And tonight I made creamy garlic prawns :)

Lonely highways

noreply@blogger.com (setek) — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 11:55:00 +0000

This is a story about a cat.

Naked food

noreply@blogger.com (setek) — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 11:57:00 +0000

At the end of a tiresome, somewhat crappy (unfortunately the norm) day, I was faced with an interesting question. There was chicken out, defrosting in the lovely 35.9 degree heat of today. I gazed at it, like a wild animal curiously eyes a target, hoping it is prey but unsure of whether that prey is in the least bit edible.

I peered into the answer-yielding machine known as a fridge; nothing. Nothing came to me. I nearly gave up, almost deciding to buy some takeaway, and forget what would probably be known forevermore as “the chicken debacle.”

Then a thought occurred to me: why don’t I do it naked? Sure, I’ve seen some of the consequences—oil burns, bitten-off penises and the like—but I was willing to give it a shot. After all, Jamie did it. It must work.

A half hour later, I had the juicy… fists of meat in the oven. Armed with only ingredients I found in the kitchen, I wrapped the chicken around halved rashers of middle bacon, which in turn had been wrapped around a stick of fetta. Flour, egg, breadcrumbs. Then in the oven for you. Dolloped on top is a tomato relish with balsamic vinegar, lots of chilli and oregano.

No penises were bitten in the making of this meal. I leave you now with a penis joke.

Photos

noreply@blogger.com (setek) — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 10:03:00 +0000

I took these!

With a Canon EOS 400D!

From Jamie with love

noreply@blogger.com (setek) — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 04:59:00 +0000

Okay, so I can’t claim this as my own, this is out of the Cook with Jamie cookbook but it turned out well, and yes, I am Chinese, and yes, we love taking photos of food.

About the only thing we can claim as our original thought was when we hit the seafood sections far too late and nobody had the haddock or monkfish that was recommended in the book. We chose baby shark instead, hoping that it would be able to hold up just as well (added bonus of no bones!)

A piece of shark is rubbed down with chopped rosemary and lemon zest, seasoned to taste and wrapped in bacon. Fried for just a minute then thrown in the oven to get all crispy, it’s accompanied by steamed asparagus spears and a lemon mayonnaise.

Brilliant.

We paired it with a glass of Leaping Lizard 2006 Semillon Sauvignon Blanc.

The final short

noreply@blogger.com (setek) — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 00:08:00 +0000

This short completes the trilogy that I’ve been “working” on. For anybody interested, you should probably read those first. It goes like this:

Day of Boats
Life in American Typewriter
And then finally this last short, on smiles and love.

Hope you like it.

And as a bonus extra, there’s the short-about-a-short in the inventive style of Jeffrey Zeldman, which I shamelessly stole for my own purposes—then forgot to do anything with it for a while.

I called it this is how it went.

Enjoy :)

Yakiniku Ramen

noreply@blogger.com (setek) — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 11:33:00 +0000

I wanted to experiment a little with beef. Languishing in a yakiniku marinade sits 650gm of filét, lightly charred so it’s slightly crunchy (but not tasting of burnt, of course,) but still pinkish purple on the inside. I used garlic, chilli oil, chilli flakes (gives it a bit of zing, you know?) soya sauce, black sauce, a couple of squirts of lemon juice to cut it, plenty of steamed vegebibbles, ramen and, of course, some kewpie!

Older brother said it was really, really nice. So nice he had two servings. There’s still enough left for three. That means it serves six, took one-and-half hours for marinade and one hour prep and cook. 40$AU the lot.

And it was super yum.

Digital SLR

noreply@blogger.com (setek) — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 10:56:00 +0000

I was lucky enough to have a few things to help me in my decision not just whether or not to buy a Digital SLR camera, but also which.

One is the Internet. There’s a lot of useful information if you just go reading. Another is an old friend of mine, for whom photography runs in the blood. And lastly, and possibly holding the most weight, is that I had a three week trial.

My other half’s brother was nice enough to lend me his latest toy: a Canon EOS 400D. I used it whilst on holiday in Italy & Malaysia. He had bought a two-lens kit, which contains the Canon EF-S 18–55mm lens, as well as the Canon EF 70–300mm III telephoto lens.

After one day I was hooked.

Over the next couple of weeks, I had had enough. The photos the camera garnered even on the most basic of settings had me enthralled. The picture quality, the ability to capture helicopters in mid-flight where they looked as if they were dropping out of the sky, the zoom, oh the zoom.

Talking over the pros and cons with my friend, I decided to get my very own Canon EOS 400D. Ever since coming home, I’ve spent a long while looking at review sites and bugging him to find out what I should get.

At nearly the same time, I bought a compact digital camera for my parents’ trip, and, with extensive review-site trawling, settled on one. I decided to write a (albeit much smaller) list for that too.

I want a Digital SLR

If anybody agrees or disagrees with my list, or has a thought to put in, go ahead, write a comment :)

(All links either from Camerastore.com.au or the DigitalRev eBay store. Neither of these are sponsoring me to link to them; I simply have heard good things, and have purchased from both myself because of it.)

Canon EOS 400D body only (also known as the Rebel XTi): 857$AU; I picked this because it was a good entry-level DSLR, complete with a 10.1 megapixel sensor inside. It uses compact flash cards, which have faster write speeds than the SD cards that this camera’s main competition uses (Nikon D40, though I think more closely aligned is the newer model D40X.) The Nikon D40X has a 10.2 megapixel CCD sensor inside, whereas the D40 only has a 6.1 megapixel CCD sensor. Other than the card type, I think the Nikon D40X is pretty damned good, but I don’t have one so can’t really know for sure.
Sigma 17–70mm f/2.8–4.5 Macro Lens for Canon Mount: 414$AU; This lens, for the price, is a great. Not true Macro (1:1) but 1:2.3, it can still take some nice Macro shots, as well as landscapes, as well as doing most other things nicely. Good build quality. Some vignetting at the wide end, no worse (maybe even better) than its competition. This makes it a great walking around lens. Also recommended by my photo-friend, that gives it thumbs up for me :)
Sigma 70–300mm f/4–5.6 DG APO Macro Lens for Canon Mount: around 150$AU; This lens cops a little bit of criticism for not being that great, but it does come in handy when you want to take telephoto shots. Make sure it’s the APO version, as the cheaper non-APO version is very deserving of its bad review, whereas the APO version is pretty good, especially for the price. As far as I can see, something that would do the job distinguishably better would be the Canon EF 75–300 IS USM. I believe it weighs in at 900$AU. For something that you’ll only take the odd photo with, it’s not that worth it. If you can find good reasons to use a telephoto lens much more often, go for it.
Hoya Pro1D Super HMC UV Filter (72mm): around 32$AU; UV Filters are great to protect not only the sensor & lens from scratching and over-exposure to sunlight, they also make the photo look better. This one is for the Sigma 17–70mm.
Hoya Pro1D Super HMC UV Filter (58mm): around 30$AU; As above, but for the Sigma 70–300mm.
Hoya Pro1D Circular Polarizing Filter (72mm): around 65$AU; Polarising filters give richer blues and generally look better for nature-y sorts of stuff. This is for the Sigma 17–70mm, since that’s the one you’d be using to take the landscape shots.
Canon NB-2LH Battery: 99$AU; A spare battery is good. You never know when you’ll be out and wanting to take a photo, only to have your camera die on you.
Sandisk Extreme IV 4GB Compact Flash card: 158$AU; The Sandisk Extreme IV CF cards have a read and write speed of 40mb/s. A 4GB card should get you around 400 shots when shooting in RAW format. The fastest SD I’ve found manages 20mb/s.
Lowepro Nova 1 AW camera bag: 60$AU; Lowepro make good quality, very padded bags. If only they made one that didn’t look like it was full of expensive camera equipment, just waiting to be stolen.

Subtotal: 1865$AU
Shipping: eBay item (large) = 50$, eBay items (small) x 3 = 30$, Camerastore.com.au = 16$AU for all items
Total price: 1961$AU

I want something smaller

I just like the happysnaps, and don’t understand what you’re talking about when you say “f-stop” and “ISO speed.”

Canon IXUS 75: 334$AU; This is a great little camera for the price. It is a 7.1 megapixel mini camera, under 2cm thick and (with card & battery) under 150gm. This makes it super easy if you just wanted to chuck it in your pocket and go. The operating system I find is great—you can use it simply (on all its auto settings,) or just an unobtrusive click away you can start playing with all sorts of settings, to get the shot you want. It also takes video, for as long as you have available space on your SD card (not clipped at 30 seconds like some cameras do. Quality’s pretty good, too.) Has 3x optical zoom.
Canon NB-4L Battery: 75$AU; A spare battery is always good. You never know when you’ll be out and wanting to take a photo, only to have your camera die on you.
Sandisk Extreme III 2GB SD card: 59$AU; This is the fastest SD card I’ve found, with a read/write of 20mb/s. a 2GB card should garner you just over 1000 shots, at maximum quality setting.
Lowepro Rezo 15 camera bag: 13.95$AU; This camera bag is really small. Then again, so is the camera. It will fit a spare battery and extra memory card.
Or the Lowepro D-Pods 20 camera bag: 20$AU; As above.

Subtotal: 481.95$AU or 488$AU
Shipping: Camerastore.com.au = 16$AU for all items
Total price: 497.95$AU or 504$AU

Coming up on my personal list of things to spoil myself with: Joby Gorillapod SLR-Zoom flexible tripod, 65.95$AU, a Manfrotto 460 MG tripod head, 149$AU, and perhaps a nice set of Tripod legs (I’m undecided on that right now.)

No doubt there will be more to come :)

By the water’s edge—a short

noreply@blogger.com (setek) — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 05:23:00 +0000

By the water’s edge.

Worlds away

noreply@blogger.com (setek) — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 01:00:00 +0000

Roma

Studded by jewels that time forgot lies Rome. Amongst the hustle of apartments and restaurants (and every second one seems to be,) some of the greatest and oldest monuments are, at least to the casual eye, unaffected by the passage of time.

Rome is our favourite of the holiday stops. Everything from the friendliness of the people to the amusingly hazardous cobblestone. Piazza Navona does indeed have very tantalising food on offer, benchmarked (I believe) by Café Bernini (somewhat more expensive than others, but the food was wonderful.)

Walk a little east. There’s a little Pizzeria—of which the name we don’t even know—sandwiched between the entrance and exit of a ‘Supermercato.’ Yummy pizzas, and try the Arancini—at 1 euro each, these are definitely more than worth it.

Keep going and the alleyway (vicolo) opens up to a piazza where the Pantheon resides. Beautiful by day, beautiful by night—what more could you ask for? It is here where we found our favourite ristorante.

Zio Ciro overlooks the Pantheon. Every dish we tried here was fantastic. I’ll touch more on it later, so for now keep this in your mind: oh-my-god hot chocolate.

Other soundbites of greatness:

Capitol Hill provides a beautiful view of the old Roman Forum.
The Colosseum is an amazingly huge sight.
Vatican City, in particular the Sistine Chapel, is so mind-boggling it can hardly be described.

The Trevi Fountain, with the coin-throwing wish-making magnificence, ensures our return. We definitely want to.

Napoli and Pompeii

On one of our day-trip tours out of Rome, we took the three hour coach ride out to Napoli. Half regrettably, most of the tour was dedicated to Pompeii, so what little time we did spend in Napoli was mostly a bit of explanation with a slow lap coach ride. The one thing I did notice though, was that the city looks pretty dilapidated. Our guide told us the city was heavy-hit by the bombs in World War II.

Pompeii, in one word, is sad. Mount Vesuvius (stratovolcano extraordinaire) erupted in 79AD, extinguishing this city with ash fallout. The original placements of the ash-preserved skeletons no longer feature, though there are plastercasts of them (they were made by pouring plaster into the hollow shells of man) on display. The last three still have the original skeletons within.

Oh-my-god hot chocolate

It was on the home trip from this tour that we had a break at a truckstop, halfway between Napoli and Rome. Half expecting disappointing food—we had encountered it on the way towards Napoli at a different truckstop in the morning—we ordered two hot chocolates and a ham, mozzarella and lettuce panini.

Oh-my-god hot chocolate.

It felt like sludge. It was slightly creamy, this almost lava-like (lavaic?) crawl towards your tastebuds. I guessed it was made of just melted chocolate and a bit of cream or milk. Not like the watered-down hot chocolates of home.

This truckstop in the middle of nowhere would mark our quest… to search for the finest hot chocolates in Italy.

Zio Ciro makes one amazing hot chocolate (closest we found to the ‘original’ truckstop.) Pair it with its wonderful food, view, and ambience of al fresco dining—why wouldn’t it be our favourite?

Venice

Venezia was cold. Very cold. Farther north than Rome, something we didn’t even think about—until the very nice lady at that Pizzeria (along the alleyway towards the Pantheon) told us it would be cold. Very cold.

She was right. She told us we would need warmer than the light scarves we had.

Did we buy thicker scarves? We bought more Arancini. Yum.

… Anyway, I’m getting sidetracked. In a way, I was glad we were here at this colder time rather than during the warmer days: you could still smell a faint wiff of the less-than-fresh canal water.

Gondola rides, while severely pricey, are one of those tourist things you just have to do (and get photo evidence as proof!)

The glass-blowing artist island of Murano keeps their secrets close to the heart, rarely letting outsiders apprentice. It takes 25 years to become a master glass blower, but when we saw one sculpt (is that the right term?) a horse statue in under a minute, with nothing but the molten glass on a pole and a pair of tweezers, it’s with little wonder why they’d be protective of their skillset.

After the glass-blowing demonstration, viewing their gallery for sale reminds you that you shouldn’t bring children here. There are far too many very, very expensive things that are made of glass. We bought two statues to bring home, fearing every step of the way that they would break in transit.

Very sadly, this marked the end of our trip to Italy. As with all holidays, there “wasn’t enough time.”

It was lucky we weren’t done yet.

Malaysia

… is like a second home, really. I’ve been back so many times, though always staying in my dad’s slightly distanced hometown of Seremban (distanced from Kuala Lumpur, that is.)

What can I say about Malaysia… I’ll make it short since this is running long:

Cheap food
Cheap shopping (I bought my digital SLR camera here, a Canon EOS 400D)
It was fun seeing the old family again (not to mention being chauffeured around by my cousin Susan and her more silent, more reliable, less lost, Kane :D)

Unfortunately, we’re now back home

We didn’t want to come back—it always feels like that, doesn’t it?—but oh well, we can now plan for the next holiday :P

We were in Italy from the 25th of November to the 4th of December, and Malaysia until the 13th of December.

XMas Wagyu

noreply@blogger.com (setek) — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 05:29:00 +0000

Well, that’s it. 260gm of Grade 8/9 Wagyu tenderloin, delivered direct from the friendly people over at the Dorper Lamb farm out in Margaret River.

Medium-to-medium-rare, the beef sits on a bed of shallow-fried Haloumi (which had been rubbed down with bashed basil leaves.) It is simply accompanied with a garlic butter sauce, fried garlic chips, and drizzled with extra virgin olive oil.

It was a great hit, everyone loved it, so I’m proud of my work.

Merry Christmas to that :)

P.S.: because I can, I’m going to show you the before shot :P an entire tenderloin, for the bargain price of 250$AU:

Home

noreply@blogger.com (setek) — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 06:44:00 +0000

We’re back from holiday.

Sigh.

More to come soon :)

Are the spots worth it?

noreply@blogger.com (setek) — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 00:23:00 +0000

I personally like White Bengal Tigers better.

But, I suppose to be fair I should give it a go and make some kind of semi-objective judgement. I’ve had Leopard since a couple of days after it came out in Australia. I was decently excited when it first came, because I had high hopes of getting rid of the brushed theme, as well as a few other niggling things.

Front Row

I loved Front Row. It had good, simple functionality. As soon as you use Little Snitch to stop it from ever accessing anything (which stop the stupid Trailers section from downloading stuff, thus removing the lag when you first load Front Row up.) How did they improve it with Leopard? They changed the scheme, which is fine, nothing wrong with it. They improved the seeking functionality so you don’t have to hold down the button forever.

But no, none of these things makes up for the fact that they removed the resume playing functionality. No longer can I exit Front Row and fall asleep, and get back to where I was watching the next day. They improved the lag times of long videos showing up with the wet-floored preview (sometimes, simply scrolling down through a long list of hour-long episodes would lag.)

Let’s bow our heads in respect for the death of resume playing. It will be sorely missed.

Time Machine

… rocks. I don’t think I need to say anything else about it.

Spaces

Spaces is pretty cool for those of us who don’t have the money or the space to fit another actual monitor. It has a few problems—some apps don’t work so well with it (here’s looking at you, Adobe.) Being able to assign certain apps to be in every space (a good one to put Finder in) is great, though some (Mozilla Thunderbird and Firefox so far is what I’ve noticed) switch the space to where the app is in, update the Toolbar to reflect the active app, but the window itself isn’t registered as the active app. No keyboard combinations will work until you actually click inside the window.

Unified Theming

No more brushed!

Stacks

Reliable functionality, although you can click something behind the grid or stack if you don’t manage to hit the clickable area of the icon. Then again, the Desktop was always a bit like that anyway (you have to click the icon or the actual text, not the space in between the two, etc.)

Finder

I like the alternating row colours, it really helps in the Details or List view, whatever it’s called. I don’t like Quick Look that much—it lags depending on what you quick look, and it should really be considered a window and close when you hit Cmd + W, instead of closing the Finder window itself and leaving Quick Look open.

It has default view! No longer will every new window open up in Icon view when I want List view!

I like that displaying boxes to connect to (on the network) are easier now.

Spots or stripes?

Well, in the end the upgrade is worth it (assuming you have no problems upgrading—some have—I myself didn’t have any troubles) because of the cool new functionality. The firewall brouhaha was a bit of an oversight, and it removed my printers so I no longer have the Adobe PDF printer (I will probably have to uninstall and reinstall Adobe CS3 to get it back… I’m still trying to work up the effort.) That’s about it.

Today is a bad day

noreply@blogger.com (setek) — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 07:17:00 +0000

A fucking bad day.