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Archives for June 2007

Bits and blog bobs – 12 June

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Over in my sidebar I’ve got my blog favourites but because I keep adding to it the links disappear over time. While it is possible to view all of them I thought I’d add some link love here too with justification.

  • Rebecca Blood recently started The (Organic) Thrifty Food Plan Challenge. She’d, ‘…like to see if I can feed the two of us for one month on a "Thrifty Food Plan" budget using organic food. My budget: 74.00/week or 320.80/month, the USDA "Thrifty" standard for a family of 2 adults, aged 20-50 years.’ See how she’s going.
  • Crafty stuff. Michelle from Scribbit blog seems to do crafts with her kids more than me and blogs about it too. See how to make castles out of cardboard.
    My excuse for not crafting so much is getting organised to do it. I’d have to buy stuff especially, follow instructions to do it because my imagination isn’t that great, and then keep it around for a bit before I secretly throw it out. We’ve still got the dinosaur we made back in January. In true Aussie let’s make do style we used things that I had on hand rather than exactly what was in the instructions and decided on this after looking at loads of other stuff that we didn’t make because I would have had to buy things.
  • While I’ve just recently started using a feed reader to catchup on blogs, Laura is giving her feed reader the flick. Find out why.
  • I think I’ve said before I’d love to get paid to do this blogging thing and it is possible if you put yourself out there. I’m not great at doing that, but it is possible and Freelance Switch tell us how. Once you get over there, you’ll probably be reading for hours. It’s a great new blog.
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Full Frontal revisited

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Nearly 20 years I started watching an Australian sketch comedy show called Fast Forward. It introduced me to comedians like Jane Turner and Gina Riley who are now famous for Kath and Kim. When Fast Forward finished, Full Frontal took over with a similar format. One of its, now more well known, comedians was Eric Bana. The show was hilarious, and must see viewing for me and many peers.

Whenever I see a newer Australian sketch comedy I think fondly back to those days because the new shows have a lot to live up to and generally don’t.

The other night I was relaxing in front of the television and my nephew passed through the lounge and told me that he’s been watching Full Frontal sketches on YouTube. He said that I probably used to watch it on television.

It made me realise that because of applications like YouTube, a whole new world has been opened up to people who weren’t around or didn’t have access to rediscover shows like Full Frontal.

This one is Eric Bana doing a parody of a current affairs presenter here at the time called Ray Martin. There’s even a bit of ‘Fabio’ in here.

What was your favourite sketch comedy?

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A couple of movies

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Over the last week I’ve seen the movie Derailed on DVD and Shrek 3 at the movies. I shouldn’t have hired Derailed but I’d read the book and really enjoyed it. That alone should have been enough for me not to get the movie because they left out important chunks of it.

They had the twist at the end but not much of the leadup at all so when I saw the final scenes and then the movie finished I rewound it because I thought I’d missed quite a bit. I was very disappointed. My advice: don’t worry about the movie, just read the book.

Shrek the Third on the other hand was delightful. Even though it’s number three it’s the premise, to me and my son anyway, isn’t tired. We still laughed out loud at the fart jokes. Apparently Shrek is based on a book, but now they’re up to movie number three I’m sure it’s just the character Shrek and not too many storylines. You can tell I’ve never seen the book.

JJ had a non-school day yesterday so that’s why we went to see the movie. I have a card that entitles me to get two for the price of one movie tickets at a cinema chain. I’d rung up the cinema the day before to make sure I could use it because the website said no complimentary tickets. They’d assured me I could but when I produced my card yesterday I was told I couldn’t. I explained that I’d been told I could and she grudgingly put it through so I could get two for the price of one. It saved me $10.

I’ll tack two housekeeping things here. One. I’m still having trouble commenting on Typepad posts but my computer’s IP address is in the process of being whitelisted so I can comment again. I must be on a blacklist for some reason.

I will be offline for a couple of days. It’s a long weekend here and I have two nights away from home catching up with different friends down south.

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Is Big Brother real?

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‘Is Big Brother real mum?’

‘Mmmm. Well sort of. They are real people who all live in a house together. But it’s an unreal type of situation.’

‘So is it make believe?’

‘Yes, kind of. While they’re not acting as such, they don’t really know each other yet they live together. And Big Brother makes them do things, like these Friday Night Games, so we can watch it on telly.’

‘Oh.’

‘So I wouldn’t take it too seriously. Apart from the Games, all they really do is talk about each other because there’s not much else to do and that’s not how people normally carry on when they live together.’

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Check your RSS feed actually works

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Since I’ve started using Google Reader to check my favourite blogs I’ve noticed that some blog RSS feeds don’t always update.

A couple of my favourite blogs went off my Google Reader radar over the recent months and I thought to myself that it was a bit odd they hadn’t written anything for a while. Bloggers are usually a pretty polite bunch, especially those who have any audience, so if there’s going to be an absence, they usually let their readers know.

After realising I’d not read anything from them, I checked their actual blog. Seeing recent blog posts made me realise that their RSS feed wasn’t working to notify me of updates.

Resubscribing to the blog seems to do the trick of getting them back into Google Reader with updated posts. I usually only have the ‘updated’ view on, rather than the whole list.

Waiterrant recently had problems with someone hacking into the site which affected the RSS feeds. It wasn’t until I realised that I hadn’t read an update from this site for a while that I checked the actual website and resubscribed to the RSS feed.

I’m not sure what caused other feeds not to update but from memory they were both the standard Typepad .rdf feeds.

I subscribe to my own RSS feed so I can see that it updates in my reader. If it didn’t, I would fairly immediately be alerted to a problem and try to fix it.

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Computer free time

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The last couple of weekends I’ve made a conscious effort to not have the laptop or the modem turned on. If it’s on I tend to just sit down and check my feed reader and my email to see what’s happening out there rather than, say, spend more time with my son.

It’s amazing how much I’ve got done without having it there on the kitchen table all ready to go. I’ve played a few games of Trouble with JJ for a start. If I’d had the computer on I would have been distracted by it and not spent this time with him. He’s pretty good at Trouble now. He knows all the numbers, can count really well and I even see hints of some strategy in his game.

So my computer free time has been worth it just for this.

In addition to this, I cooked nachos, soup, roast chicken, chocolate/sultana cookies. We went for a huge walk and filled up our shopping trolley with pine cones for the fire. And despite the crap weather I’ve done, and nearly dried, heaps of washing (including sheets) without a dryer. We’ve had the fire going to help the drying process so my lounge looks a bit like a Chinese laundry. I pruned a tree I’ve got that needs harsh pruning every year otherwise it would take over the neighbourhood.

These are just some of the things we did this weekend without the computer.

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