Lasagne made by an italian

KittyKat came around last night and made a lasagne from scratch. Now seeing how KittyKat is from Italian heritage, I asked her if there was going to be any Béchamel sauce on it. The reason I asked, was that I have been told repeatedly by qualified people in the hospitality industry that Béchamel sauce is a French invention, and only used on commercial or westernised versions of lasagne, and additionally that it ruined the taste and texture of a traditional Italian lasagne. I know different now - and from an Italian.

Dinner cooked by KittyKat

The good Senator Conroy is under threat...

Even the good Senator Conroy cannot escape being the target of legal action. According to an article in itwire.com, the good Senator Conroy or people representing his investigations into the leaks of the so called "fake" ACMA blacklist face prosecution if they continue to investigate the source of the information. The fact that wikileaks.org is hosted in Sweden is no coincidence, as this will allow it to receive the maximum protection of the law in that country.

Maybe the good Senator Conroy should not be so hasty in future to fire off draconion-like statements of how he will just persecute people for trying to access information he himself is trying to hide from the world that should be shared.

I hate how politicians hide information from the people they are supposed to be working for.

Why is an anti-abortion website on a blacklist?

I know I have not posted anything to this blog for a while, as I have been busy with the "day to day", but this one could not escape my attention.

According to an article on smh.com.au - Banned hyperlinks could cost you $11,000 a day, the government department that the good Senator Conroy is in charge of - ACMA, is attempting to tell a website to remove a link because it is banned, or face a financial penalty. The link is to an anti-abortion website.

What irritates me to no-end is that this is pure censorship based on religious grounds. I highly doubt there is any terrorist material or unacceptable pornographic material on this anti-abortion website.

Wikileaks.org has compiled a list of what it believes is on the ACMA blacklist. This will never be confirmed as the government is keeping it a secret what is on the blacklist and what is not - but think about this - if the link stops working, then start looking in google's caches. The list may still exist there!

To everyone reading this post, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT! To the good Senator Conroy, reverse all your decisions you have made about internet censorship - you are making Australia a joke in the eyes of rest of the world that values freedom of information.

Well done to the Victory!

Well done to the Melbourne Victory for their 2009 Grand Final win over the Adelaide United with the score of 1-0. In what looked like a very controversial game from a refereeing point of view, Tom Pondeljak in the 59th minute scored the winning goal.

GO VICTORY!!

The Big Merino

Went to Goulburn yesterday for lunch on recommendation of NutMeg. She suggested to try the Paragon Cafe in the main street. On the way into Goulburn, from Canberra, is the Big Merino. I've always had a fascination of everything "big" in Australia, and had to stop to take a few photos.

While taking photos, a car load of local guys rolled up to yell abuse at me for taking photos of the Big Merino. While this did not alarm me, as they were probably unintelligent and bored, this is something that should alarm the Big Merino operators, as well as the Goulburn tourist board. Scaring away visitors from a city that has been bypassed from the Hume should not be tolerated, as I'm sure Goulburn would want entice as many people as possible to stop and spend some money. Maybe I'm wrong, and Goulburn does not require any additional tourist money.

Big Merino

ric_man and Big Merino

Big Merino side shot

My teams are winning...

I was down in Melbourne for the Australia Day weekend. On the Friday night, I was fortunate enough to witness Melbourne Victory win 2-0 over the Wellington Phoenix, and secure the top spot of the A-League ladder for the 2008-09 season. To add to that, the Boston Celtics have started winning again after their 4 game loosing slump, which included a loss at home as well. And it was good to catch up with my bro4Life, Jay, who is now a Celtics follower!

Jay and ric_man

GO VICTORY!

GO CELTICS!

Fix for Firefox 3 in Gnome on Gentoo

A few days ago I blogged about a conflict problem I was having with Firefox 3 on my Gentoo box. I did some further searching on the internet and found a fix on one of the mailing lists that caters for Gentoo topics.

Essentially, to fix it, you need to alter the /etc/make.conf file and alter the USE flags so that it includes the following:

USE=".... -firefox xulrunner ..."

then:

$ emerge -DNuva --with-bdeps y world

and everything should be right. This will also recompile anything that was using Firefox 2.0.0.19 as a basis, and convert it over to Firefox 3.0.5. Apparently the package support was split out some time ago, and I missed the announcement.

Everything else is running smoothly...

Basketball sneakers...

People that have met me in person know I am not really into fashion. I dress poorly, but at least I am comfortable in what I am in. Unfortunately I do have a thing for shoes - basketball sneakers to be precise. I was just thinking of the shoes I have owned recently, and in this case, I was focussing on basketball sneakers. Here's what I have had (from memory):

1. Nike Air Jordan VIs (originals)
2. Converse Aero Jams (original Johnson's)
   
3. Converse Chuck Taylor All-Stars
4. Nike Air Max Sensations (original Webber's)
5. Reebok Original Pumps
6. Reebok BB4600
7. Nike Air Jordan "6 Rings"

Out of all the shoes there, I would consider the most comfortable to be the Air Jordan VIs. They also looked quite good for their time. The worse I would think were the Converse Aero Jams - as I usually wore shoes until the sole disintegrated, and this caused the gel fluid to leak out all over the place - much to the hatred of my parents who could not figure out why there was all this yellow gel fluid all over the carpets. The "6 Rings" are the current shoe I use. Quite new, they have design elements from many different Jordan shoes - 6 to be exact. When I saw them in store, I could help but notice that they looks like Jordan VIs, VIIs and VIIIs - which are, in my opinion, the best looking Air Jordan shoes Nike has ever made. Very comfortable too!

Nike Air Jordan 6 Rings (excuse the hair on the legs!)

Firefox 3, and kernels on Gentoo

Recently updated my Gentoo box, and found that a few new things were finally available. The first one being a new kernel, which I promptly compiled and installed, and is not up and running with:

evilric@lasek ~ $ uname -a
Linux lasek 2.6.27-gentoo-r7 #1 SMP PREEMPT Sun Jan 11 11:44:19 EST 2009 i686 Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

The second thing being the latest version of Mozilla Firefox. This has been a long time coming in the Gentoo distribution, as there has been some slotting or compilation issues due to the nature of the package management system used by Gentoo - being portage. Even now, when I update "world", I notice there is still some problems with Firefox 3.0.5 and Firefox 2.0.0.19 wanting to be installed on the machine at the same time, but I believe this is mainly due to me choosing to use the entire Gnome desktop, and hence some dependencies are there. Here is the emerge error message stating the error:

!!! Multiple package instances within a single package slot have been pulled
!!! into the dependency graph, resulting in a slot conflict:

www-client/mozilla-firefox:0

('ebuild', '/', 'www-client/mozilla-firefox-2.0.0.19', 'merge') pulled in by
=www-client/mozilla-firefox-2* required by ('ebuild', '/', 'www-client/epiphany-2.22.3-r1', 'merge')
=www-client/mozilla-firefox-2* required by ('ebuild', '/', 'gnome-extra/yelp-2.22.1-r2', 'merge')
(and 1 more)

('installed', '/', 'www-client/mozilla-firefox-3.0.5', 'nomerge') pulled in by
www-client/mozilla-firefox required by world


It may be possible to solve this problem by using package.mask to
prevent one of those packages from being selected. However, it is also
possible that conflicting dependencies exist such that they are
impossible to satisfy simultaneously. If such a conflict exists in the
dependencies of two different packages, then those packages can not be
installed simultaneously.

For more information, see MASKED PACKAGES section in the emerge man page
or refer to the Gentoo Handbook.

Still, it's a welcome to the new browser, and a good indication that the Gentoo project still keeps on ticking...

Gentoo's Mozilla Firefox's About Dialog Box

New Year celebrations in Sydney

I was up in Sydney's Star City Casino for New Year's celebrations. I have a before and after photo:

Before! Jay, pappaD, and ric_man

After! Jay and ric_man

No further captions offered.

Happy and safe 2009 to everyone!