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Archives for March 2008

Party food and suspension from school

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Chocolate crackles

Party food, ie chocolate crackles, and a suspension from school? Let’s see if I can do a neat segue.

My friend’s son had a 5th birthday party yesterday afternoon. The night prior my friend rang to ask me for a chocolate crackles recipe. It so happened that I had all the necessary ingredients as this is something I promised to do with JJ. In a moment of weakness I offered to make them and bring them along with me.

It’s the first time I’ve made them and it was dead easy. The recipe is on the side of the Rice Bubbles packet.

You will need:

  • 4 cups Rice Bubbles
  • 1 cup icing sugar
  • 1 cup desiccated coconut
  • 250g Copha
  • 3 tbsp cocoa

In a large bowl mix the Rice Bubbles, icing sugar, coconat and cocoa.

S lowly melt the copha in a saucepan over low heat and allow to cool slightly. Add to the rice bubbles mixture, stirring well until combined.

Spoon the mixture into paper patty pans and refrigerate until firm.This will make about 24.

So I made these just before I went to school to pick JJ up. I was sitting outside his classroom when he came back with two other boys and the deputy principal and an envelope in his hand. The other boy said ‘we’ve been suspended’. Apparently there was an incident at lunchtime that involved kicking. I still haven’t got the full story but will find out at the suspension conference early this week.

JJ has had some detentions this year and it seems to boil down to mixing with this kid who gets him into trouble and not knowing how to behave in the playground. He also has trouble making friends at school.

I felt like I was rewarding him by taking him to the party but because it was a good friend’s birthday and we’d promised to go, we went. JJ is without tv and computer for one week and this will be reviewed after a week.

Just when I thought I’d achieved something with JJ’s behaviour this goes and happens. He’s fine (mostly) with me, and friends that had him for a couple of days over Easter noted that he was really good for them. So school, and this other kid, are the common denominator. The school wants to work with us to resolve this so this time I’ll be making sure that this happens.

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Significant risk to Google – me?

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I run Google Adsense on my other blog – that safarisuit.com one to try and cover the cost of hosting. There’s been some changes with Adsense lately, one of them being that I have to tie that account to a Google account. Fair enough I thought, I’ve got a Google account, I’ll match them up. Except I can’t.

The message I received when trying to combine was not very helpful, ie “A user with the email you specified already exists
Please select a different Google Account login to access this account.”

After a bit of digging I found out that my existing Google account had been banned from running Adsense. I vaguely remember running Adsense on this blog briefly and I took it off. I’m a good girl though and never clicked on my own ads – a no-no in Google’s eyes. This is part of the email they sent me with the news:

Thank you for providing us with additional information. However, after thoroughly reviewing your account data and taking your feedback into consideration, we have re-confirmed that your account poses a significant risk to our advertisers. For this reason, we are unable to reinstate your account. Thank you for your understanding.

Actually I do not understand. What’s a significant risk? I run a personal blog. How’s this a risk? Surely some more information would not go astray, but Google wiggle out of this by saying they cannot let publishers know any information because of their proprietary system.

I’m not alone on this. The exact same thing happened to Ronni Bennett of Time Goes By recently and I’m sure we’re not alone.

Methinks it’s time to look around for advertisers who do not have such ambiguous emails and actually want to help their customers.

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Fiddling with Photoshop

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One of my new favourite websites is PSDTUTS.com (PSDTUTS is short for Photoshop Tutorials – the PSD is the Photoshop file extension). It’s laid out really well for the novice by showing step-by-step instructions on how to do stuff in Photoshop from scratch, and with existing photos. I was having a play around with this tutorial and thought I’d adapt it for my own website banner.

You may have to refresh the page to see the new banner, or here’s a thumbnail.

Semantically driven banner

If you’ve clicked over to look at the tutorial you’ll note that mine is very very different from it. I took the principals of the tutorial and went quite off track – really off track. Instead of using a gradient I used a pattern which explains the texture, although there still is a gradient or two included. I also used some brushes because I love brushes. I already had some brushes I’d downloaded previously but I found some more at Obsidian Dawn. Did I say I love brushes?

I don’t begin to use half of the features in Photoshop but I want to make it my mission to learn to do so.

This was my old web banner.

Semantically driven banner (click to view larger image).

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Damn Facebook spam

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I think I’ve said on this blog before that Facebook is a virus and I only really use it to play Scrabulous. Today I logged into Facebook to clear some of my requests and thought I’d do the ‘their, there, they’re’ test but it won’t let me unlock the results until I spam all my friends with it too. Sod that. I know I got 100%.

And it seems that any application I may choose to install wants me to spam all my friends also. I can’t add a Lil Green Patch request without first sending more off to my friends. I’ll do that in my own time thanks, or not because I don’t like being TOLD what to do.

And those Funwall messages aren’t just for me, they’re for everyone they were sent to. Surely there’s an application that’s user friendly that doesn’t expect me to spam all my friends? Even my Flickr Gallery was giving me grief and not letting me update.

Come on you Facebook application writers – do something not so spammy. Think of the users! If it’s good it will spread anyway.

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The early hours

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After three days of feeling like death warmed up I’m lying in bed trying to sleep and can’t, so I get up to get the red kidney beans soaking so we can have nachos for dinner tonight. This will be the one night that JJ doesn’t wake me up with his coughing, or he will as soon as I can finally get to sleep.

Anyway, it’s just after midnight, the beans are soaking, I’ll go and read yet a bit more of The Bonesetter’s Daughter before I try for the third time to get some sleep. How I wish I’d had the energy to put clean sheets on my bed today as I’m sure that would have made a huge difference, but it took me two days to put clean sheets on JJ’s bed – he’s had to make do.

When I finally do get to sleep tonight I hope my dreams aren’t as vivid and totally weird as they have been the last two nights.

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Enforced blogging break

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I haven’t looked at any computer for nearly four days now because I’ve been in bed ill. It started with a headache which I still sort of have and there’s been vomiting. There’s also been hardly any eating. I’m having some breakfast now. I haven’t felt so shite for a long time. Luckily a good friend had JJ for a couple of days and a night but he was back in time for Easter bunny to have been last night and noted that it was really easy to find all the eggs!
Hopefully I’ll be able to do a bit more today, like eat and do some tidying up around this messy house. So much for my gardening plans over Easter!

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Time to go for some reality tv?

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The likes of Big Brother and the various Idols have been around for a few years now and every year as I sit down to watch them I remember what I didn’t like about them. Usually they follow the same old format even while promising something you’ve never seen before. Big Brother Australia has got two new hosts this year from radio which I don’t think will help revive it at all and they keep putting the same types of people into the house which does not add any interest whatsoever.

Australian Idol’s losing its popularity and there’s only so many singers available in Australia to make it any good so they’re expanding their search for Australians in Los Angeles and London, which I wrote about over on the Aussie Bloggers blog.

No doubt I’ll watch some of these shows, but not fanatically. I reserve my fanaticism for The Amazing Race.

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