Firstly tonight, hello to bloggers in Adelaide. The Adelaide blogging community is having its end of year get together tonight.

China defines internet addiction
China is set to register “internet addiction” as an official condition with the World Health Organisation in 2009. It follows research by Chinese psychologists, and will put the “disorder” on the same standing as compulsive gambling or alcoholism.
China even has hundreds of internet addiction clinics to treat the “disease”.
Here are some of the pertinent facts:

• China has the world’s largest online population at 253 million people
• An addict spends 6.13 hours online each day
• Research shows 42 per cent of Chinese youngsters feel addicted to the internet (18 per cent in the USA)
• About 10 per cent of young Chinese users suffer from addiction and of those about 70 per cent are male
• Symptoms include yearning to get back online, mental or physical distress, irritation and difficulty concentrating or sleeping

This Times Online article covers most of the details. It doesn’t say whether patients can book appointments online!
The article does point out other dubious conditions, such as:

• Tanorexia - an unhealthy dependence on tanning
• Shopaholism - compulsive shopping with an uncontrollable urge to buy items that are never used, sometimes never even removed from the bag
• Nomophobia - the fear of being without a mobile phone (about 53 per cent of us apparently)
• Cosmetic surgery addiction - 40 per cent of patients using Botox have a compulsive urge for further treatment.

You can read this great article at Times Online.

Top ten most annoying phrases
Oxford University boffins have defined the most annoying phrases cluttering the English language. Here they are:
1 - At the end of the day
2 - Fairly unique
3 - I personally
4 - At this moment in time
5 - With all due respect
6 - Absolutely
7 - It’s a nightmare
8 - Shouldn’t of
9 - 24/7
10 - It’s not rocket science
The list appears in a new book, Damp Squid: The English Language Laid Bare, by Jeremy Butterfield. And the link I have provided is to Wired magazine’s coverage of the story and the expansive list of comments readers submitted to the post. Ironically, one reader dropped a clanger while venting with some of their own hated phrases by saying, “For all intensive purposes this sort of list …” The saying should be, “for all intents and purposes.”
The comments also collect other jewels, such as:

• “pun intended”
• “the fact of the matter is”
• “think outside the box”
• “literally”

Frugalous
Frugalous is a site designed to combine “frugal” and “fabulous”. It has been around since June 2008 but I expect it to see a boost in traffic during these times of gloom (caused by some financial woes and exacerbated by panic-peddling mass media).
The author of the blog is Merlene Paynter who explains the origins of the blog thus:
“After 19 years of marriage, and being a stay-home mother to two kids, I’m ready to make some changes in my life. I’m tired of carrying debt. I’m tired of worrying about bills. I’m tired of living a big life. So I’ve ended my marriage and am selling the house - a hard choice. I really love my house, my neighbours, etc. - paying off all of the debts and moving into a 2 bedroom apartment which will neatly cut my living expenses in half.”
When I read that piece in her biography I almost didn’t promote this site because if she really did just toss away her marriage like a dirty towel, it says to me she is careless, thoughtless and selfish, and not somebody you want to model. However, I expect that the decision was not just an act of flippancy but rather she has framed it that way in an attempt to sound hip and happening. But I digress, this is not a relationship counselling blog …
Thankfully, there are some wonderful recipes on this site and some helpful tips to guide us in being frugal not only with money but also with our time. Some of my favourites include:

• Wrapping gifts when you buy them. This way, you only need to add a card when it is time to give the gift and not frantically dash around looking for paper while under time pressure - my wife and I have been known to wrap presents in our car while parked outside a birthday party or wedding reception!
• Chocolate Carrot Cake - this sounds delicious with carrots, cocoa, walnuts, coconut, orange juice, and cinnamon. Merlene says even people who don’t like carrot cake like this one. She also suggests substituting 1 cup of unsweetened apple sauce for the cup of oil to keep the cake moist while cutting the fat content considerably.
• Egg salad sandwich recipes - a childhood favourite of mine was always egg salad sandwiches, nowadays I don’t trust them from delis because I just don’t know how well the egg mixture has been refrigerated. There are a dozen variations on this site but I like the sound of Merlene’s basic mixture - eggs, mayo, a dash of dijon mustard, finely diced celery and finely sliced green onion with a dash of pepper. Variations include using pesto, hummus, sundried tomatoes, and carrot and sunflower seeds. All sound great!
• Pulling the plug on cable tv - in a major coup, Merlene was able to convince her teenage son they could do without cable tv at $150 a month by upping their broadband internet connection to an ultra fast connection so that he could watch video online. This cost an extra $20 per month, but left a net saving of $130 per month. Nice move.

You can read this blog at http://frugalous.com/.

James Bond Baddie
You can be a Bond baddie at http://www.beabondbaddie.com/, which gives you the chance to upload a picture of yourself, merge it with a sinister looking character (male or female) and then email it to friends, add it to your Facebook profile or save the link.
Your character also gets to choose from a number of sayings - I chose “allow me to introduce you to my little friend”. Quite a happy, innocent sentence, except when spoken in a deep, gravely, pseudo-European accent.
You can see and hear me as the notorious Bond baddie, Sir Stavros davos Blofeldenberger, here.

No Clean Feed
Australia’s federal Labour government, championed through Senator Stephen Conroy, is hellbent on one of the most stupid, cynical exercises known to humankind. Under that vote-winning and indisputable catchcry of “stamping out child pornography” (which every sane human would support), Conroy and his cronies are marching ahead with plans to force mandatory filtering of Australia’s internet feed. In the short term, this will choke the speed of internet connections in Australia, it will still let through some material meant to be banned, and it will block material that does not need to be banned. In the long term it means governments will have all the tools they need to stamp out voices of dissent. Thankfully, the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, speaks Mandarin, because it means that in fluent dialect, he will be able to swap notes with his Chinese counterparts on how the censorship of Australia’s internet compares to China’s censorship of its. Machiavelli and Goebbels would be very proud of the way Conroy’s cronies are exploiting the child pornography hot button to set up the systems for later governments to take censorship further to block anything deemed “offensive”. Yes, they have missed 1984 by a couple of decades, but they are about to catch up with aplomb.

Please visit the No Clean Feed website - http://nocleanfeed.com/action.html - to get contact details for Stephen Conroy to let him know you are not happy. The website has been created by Electronic Frontiers Australia. The EFA has found that recent tests of six filtering systems by ACMA achieved:

• One filter caused a 22% drop in speed even when it was *not* performing filtering;
• Only one of the six filters had an acceptable level of performance (a drop of 2% in a laboratory trial), the others causing drops in speed of between 21% and 86%;
• The most accurate filters were often the slowest;
• All filters tested had problems with under-blocking, allowing access to between 2% and 13% of material that they should have blocked; and
• All filters tested had serious problems with over-blocking, wrongly blocking access to between 1.3% and 7.8% of the websites tested.

Despite this report highlighting the inaccuracy of these filters and the loss of performance caused by their use, Senator Conroy announced the government will press ahead with a real-world pilot program in furtherance of Labor’s pre-election commitment to force all Australian ISP’s to filter their customers’ Internet access.

This whole development is made doubly disappointing by the fact that the Rudd government happily used social media channels like MySpace to garner public support to get into government, and now that they are in, they are going to sabotage the social side of the net (remember, everything is going to get caught up in this deceitful move) to ensure nobody else can do what they did with the same ease and freedom of speech!

To borrow from a catchcry once used by the Liberal party against the great Labour stalwart, Gough Whitlam, “Shame Conroy, Shame!”

Television Themes and Intros
On the Box Office Mojo website, there has been a competition running to vote for the best television theme song or opening sequence of all time. Admittedly, this is not a conclusive contest but it is a good excuse to relive some memories. The bonus is that the show names in the list of tv shows are all hyperlinks across to each show’s opening sequence on YouTube. (Some have been removed but most I looked at were there). So, forgetting the competition, use this as an excuse for reminiscing with show openings for:

• The Dick Van Dyke Show
• Star Trek: The Original Series
• The Addams Family
• Twilight Zone
• The Beverly Hillbillies
• The Flintstones
• Happy Days
• M*A*S*H
• Hawaii Five-O
• The Sopranos
• Gilligan’s Island
• Green Acres
• The Brady Bunch
• Popeye
• WKRP in Cincinnati

The full list is at Box Office Mojo.

How do different wines taste?
Carl Tashian has created a novel website as part of doing a course, Visualising the Five Senses, at NYU. This website gives you the flavours of wines as a visual representation. Through it, we get to see which flavours are most dominant in the major wine varieties. I can imagine this tool will help people who want some help figuring out the wine styles they are most likely to enjoy.

What Carl has done is collectdescriptive flavour words from over 5,000 published wine tasting notes written between 1995-2000 in a major Australian wine magazine. This makes this tool especially useful for Australian wine lovers because it means taste references aren’t skewed towards Zinfandel!

There are terms like oak, sweet, berry, rich, acid, tannin, strawberry, cherry, plum, spicy, citrus, chocolate, rockmelon, etc, all spread evenly around a circle. Then you can work down a list of wine styles and see which elements are more common in each style - the more dominant, the thicker the line that arches to the element in question.

The catch all findings for “all reds” show oak, tannin and berry as the dominant features, while for whites  we see oak, acid, complex and rich.

To compare reds, shiraz is more oak, pepper, berry and sweet, while cabernet sauvignon is oak, tannin, berry, and rich.

To compare whites, chardonnay features peach, melon and butter, while sauvignon blanc features acid, herb and crisp.

It makes for some fascinating reading, all the better while sipping at the same time! You can find the graph at http://tashian.com/wine-flavors/.

Print What You Like
I met a guy, Richard Pascoe, at an event recently and he told me about a helpful site that helps make printing web pages easier and more environmentally friendly. It is called, Print What You Like.

The website says it will:

• Format any web page for printing in seconds - no more pasting into Word
• Save money and the environment by reducing your paper and ink usage
• Make printed web pages more readable by removing ads, widgets and other distractions
• Fix broken pages that don’t print correctly

I have had a little play with it and believe that once you get used to it, it will become a very handy tool to have around. I think it is worth bookmarking printwhatyoulike.com for further reference.

Yearbook Yourself

This site is a blast. If you ever wanted to know how you would have looked through the recent decades of fashion and trends, then you need to Yearbook Yourself.

You upload a photo of yourself - one where you are looking directly at the camera. You are guided to position the photo and then, voila, you can see yourself through the ages.

I think some eras are handled better than others. I loved 1952, 1970, 1978, and 1996. I haven’t done it with a woman’s photo yet. I am sure it would be a hoot.

I’ll post my four favourite photos below (1952, 1970, 1978, 1996), meanwhile, join the fun at www.yearbookyourself.com.

Sexpelled

Anticipating success with their feature film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, producers Mark Mathis, Logan Craft and Walt Ruloff have already leaked a teaser trailer for the film’s sequel.

According to the blurb, “Their “teach the controversy” slogan seemed to work well in getting the general public to believe that Intelligent Design is a viable alternative scientific theory to evolution, so the team has moved on to promoting other theories that they feel are being suppressed by the scientific community. Sexpelled: No Intercourse Allowed tells of how Sex Theory has thrived unchallenged in the ivory towers of academia, as the explanation for how new babies are created. Proponents of Stork Theory claim that “Big Sex” has been suppressing their claim that babies are delivered by storks. Furthermore, Stork Theory proponents warn of the serious moral dangers posed by teaching children that sex has a function. They point out that evil dictators such as Hitler, Stalin and Mao all believed in Sex Theory, and they may have even had sex themselves.”

This site and its approach rivals the great “Flying Spaghetti Monster” site I talked about a few years ago, which posited the theory that the theory that we were created by a flying spaghetti monster had just as much right to be considered in the classroom if equal time was also given to creation in six days.

This trailer is quite good satire, especially the way is brings in an alternate theory called Avian Transportation Theory. The site explains, “unlike the original Stork Theory, the modern, sophisticated “Avian Transportation Theory” (ATT) merely points out that there are gaps in the orthodox Sex Theory. Moreover ATT does not specify that babies are necessarily brought by storks but by “large birds unspecified” (although many individual ATT theorists PRIVATELY believe it is a stork).

You can visit the site and trailer at Sexpelled

Wordle

Wordle is a simple little site that creates “word clouds” from text. The site explains it as, “the clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.”

In keeping with the previous site, I thought I would see what the Genesis word cloud looks like compared to Darwin’s Origin of the Species.

The main differences were Genesis leading with Father, God, and Land, and Darwin leading with Species, Natural, Selection, and Many.

The most prominent words shared by both sites are”may”, “one”, “two”, and “now”.

You can enter text at www.wordle.com.

Improv Everywhere

You might remember the giant leech we talked about last time, well the lady behind that, Janet from the Adelaide Hills, has shared another site that is a lot of fun.

Janet has told me about Improveverywhere.com. It is a theatre improvisation group and she says her sister has been involved in some of their improvisations in Canada. They specialise is large, coordinated, public theatre pieces, just like Candid Camera en masse!

Some of the things these people do, all around the world, are:

• go to a children’s ball game in hoards and cheer as if it they are at a major league final
• turn up at a designated spot and freeze in strange, previously organized poses
• go to Grand Central station wearing no pants as if another day going to work
• stage spontaneous musicals in shopping malls
• stage mobile phone symphonies
• install a restroom attendant in a fast food restaurant’s toilet.

Janet’s sister went to one in Toronto where she and all the other performers turned on their ipods at exactly the same time and listened to the same tune.

I have some links here to some of my favourite videos:

• Food court musical - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkYZ6rbPU2M
• Go slow Home Depot - You must watch the sped up version - http://improveverywhere.com/2006/08/19/slo-mo-home-depot/
• Best game ever - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Nbkbss7i5s

You can visit the main website at www.improveverywhere.com.

Can a giant leech be art?
I have been running some marketing workshops in the Adelaide Hills recently and met a colourful and somewhat zany character, Janet Campbell. Janet is working on ways to promote local artists, particularly from the Hills region, on the wider stage.

What she doesn’t know is that I have stumbled upon her arts blog and one of her posts caught my attention: Can a giant plastic leech be art?

You’ve got to see the photo of the leech in question. It is one Janet helped the kids of Macclesfield make during the 2008 Fringe. Just seeing it makes you want to burst out laughing - it must have been excellent fun. And the fun would have been exacerbated by the fact that on the day the leech was paraded through the main street, it was hot and windy, meaning at any time there was the risk of a giant leech taking off and flying through the streets of an otherwise quiet country town.

But is it art? Not sure I have an answer either. I guess they have replicated or represented nature, which is an artistic device. It also prompts one to wonder what life would be like if the insects were our size and we were their size, and whether or not that would change the way we relate to them, ie, would we respect them more?

I would love to know your thoughts on this too!

(NB I was just called upon by my wife to kill a spider lurking in Alexandra’s jolly jumper device - how ironic given what I was just writing!).

Twitter Moms
This is a mini site for micro-blogging. Make sense? Well, micro-blogging is a subset of the blogging phenomenon in which bloggers restrict themselves to SMS-length posts and use services such as Twitter to facilitate quick posting. Twitter Moms is a group within the micro-blogosphere where mums who use Twitter can actually find one another and take part in discussions in the one place.

There are forums on “being moms” and special forums for mums of “twins”. All in all, the latest figures show about 5,000 mums use the site daily.

Here are some of the thoughtful topics that must be quite fun for mums to take part in as they snatch a few minutes from their chaotic days to bond with other women:

• What did you want to be when you grew up and what are you now?
• Do You Cook On Saturdays?
• What are your kids going to be for halloween
• Story behind your Twitter name?
• Work from home ideas?

You can visit the site to sign up at twittermoms.com.

It’s A Wonderful Internet
This is a little flash presentation that is cheesy in parts but does underline how ubiquitous the internet has become.

It is done in the version of “Twas the night before Christmas” and Dr Suess, and tells the story of a man who wishes the internet would disappear, and then suffers the consequences.

Firstly, he loses contact with his large pool of online friends, he goes out for some entertainment but has no idea how to navigate around town because that all happened with online maps before, he even gets evicted because he had become so use to paying his bills online!

You can listen to the story - and interact with it - at www.itsawonderfulinternet.com.

Men Who Look Like Kenny Rogers
This site is an oldy but a goody. It is a collection of photos of men you think look like Kenny Rogers. As far as website ideas go, they don’t get much simpler than this (apart from cats that look like Hitler, but that’s a site for another day). I thought I would dig this one out because the silver haired country star is in Adelaide on October 26, 2008.

On this site there are photo galleries, hall of fame, Kenny of the month, corn muffin recipe, look like Kenny tips, and Kenny spotting tips.

• Look like Kenny tips: grow hair longer than is fashionable, if it is not white or grey make it so, sweep it back like there is a constant breeze, make sure it grows longer at the back over the collar, trim your beard severely and keep it white, drape a jumper over your shoulders or go the whole hog with a black leather vest over a white shirt, and cultivate a “country cool” attitude that says “I’d rather be fishing”.
• Kenny spotting tips: state fairs, airports, construction sites, drag races, secondhand shops, bars with sawdust floors, and church.
• Corn muffin recipe: The cornbread recipe (or muffins) is supposedly the secret recipe used in Kenny’s own chain of fire-roasted chicken restaurants. Having tasted “down south” corn bread in restaurants before, this sounds worth a try!

You can find the recipe and photo gallery at http://www.menwholooklikekennyrogers.com/. I am looking forward to some Adelaide additions after the concert!

Before I start with the websites, I have to give eBay a blast tonight for allowing pompous, over-spun, conceited, corporate speak on their site. eBay is pretty good at saying things like “our fees are going up and it will help you as a seller”, that sort of thing, but now they have started running ads on their US website, using ads from the Yahoo network. This alone is an unsound move in my opinion, however, they have the gall to say it will help improve our eBay experience. What utter piffle. What I am about to read you is a direct quote from the ebay.com website and has been written by a smug little corporate word-mangler, or some old, cynical, burnt out, disengaged corporate hack. How could anyone with an ounce of customer insight or marketing knowhow, come up with this explanation for the new “AdChoice” feature on eBay? Here we go:

“We may use information we have about you to make sure that the ads you see, on the eBay site or elsewhere, are as relevant to you as we can make them. We think these relevant AdChoice ads will personalize and improve your eBay experience.”

OMG!

How to Detect Lies and Become a Lie Detector
At the Blifaloo website, I have found an introduction on how to tell if somebody is lying to you. The techniques covered on this page are reportedly similar to those used by police, and security experts. There is an interesting disclaimer or warning on the page that says:

“Sometimes Ignorance is bliss; after gaining this knowledge, you may be hurt when it is obvious that someone is lying to you.”

Some of the signs of deception start with the smile. If someone smiles and it mainly involves their mouth, they are likely to be faking it. Real smiles involve cheeks, foreheads and particularly eyes. In fact, this tutorial suggests that the eyes give it away because few people can squint their eyes while doing a fake smile.

Looking at the rest of the body, liars will make quite stiff limb movements and hold most limbs close to their body and are unlikely to place an open hand on their heart or chest. They will probably touch their face, throat or mouth, behind their ear or scratches their nose. But the tutorial also makes a blunder. It says liars will typically avoid eye contact. At this point, they should single out different cultural groups because from the few cross cultural workshops I have done, particularly with aboriginal culture, eye contact is typically avoided and is often seen as an aggressive stance.  So use this tutorial with care.

When it comes to verbal context and content, there are a couple of intriguing points:

1 - liars will often avoid lying by NOT making indirect statements, they will imply answers rather than deny things directly. Just reflect on this point, next time you watch an interview with a politician or company spokesperson. Or listen to Leon Byner - you hear this sort of thing all the time.

2 - if you suspect someone is lying, change the subject quickly and watch if the person changes quickly too, and becomes relieved and relaxed. A liar will be grateful to have moved on. Someone who had been telling the truth will typically be confused by the change and will often try to bring the subject back so it can be dealt with.

Use with care - here is the link - http://www.blifaloo.com/info/lies.php.

EcoImpact Carbon Footprint Calculator
Everything has an eco-footprint. By that, I mean everything has an impact on the environment through its production, use and disposal. This handy widget-based calculator, made by EcoSynergy, a software company that has made a platform for making carbon footprint calculations, helps focus our attention on just how much the tiniest things in our lives affect the environment.

This calculator covers a range of aspects of live, from food to the office, from building to the household. Here are some examples:

Food

450g of white rice has a 1.3kg carbon footprint, while the same amount of pasta is only 953g of CO2.

450g of beef has an 11kg carbon footprint, yikes! Whereas smoked ham has a 4.5kg footprint, as do eggs.

Office

Photocopiers, printers and toner are among the worst culprits when it comes to carbon emissions. So when documents say “think before printing” you now know how important that is. Projectors and whiteboards are also large emitters of CO2.

What struck me was that even your humble box of 1000 staples, emits the same CO2 as driving a sedan about 17km or using a laptop computer for 300 hours.

Household

That set of 4 drinking glasses at home, caused about 12kg of CO2 emissions, and three bath towels cost about 18kg.

And the big one is the television. Just a 32 inch tv has a 257kg carbon footprint, equivalent to driving a sedan about 1200km, or using a laptop for 22,000 hours. And given the amount of rubbish on television, either driving or communicating via the laptop would be much better for you!

You can play with the free calculator at http://www.ecosynergyinc.com/share/widgets/.

Food Craving Chart
On this page by Dr Colleen Huber, a naturopath, you will find some ideas about what is lurking behind the various food cravings you might be experiencing. Here are some I found most helpful:

If you crave chocolate, you are really after magnesium which you can find in raw nuts and seeds, legumes and fruit.

If you crave lollies, you could be after chromium which you can find in broccoli, grapes, cheese and chicken.

If you crave lollies, you could also be after carbon which you can find in fresh fruits.

If you crave bread or toast, you are really after nitrogen which you can find in high protein foods such as fish, meat, nuts and beans.

If you crave oily snacks or fatty foods, you are really after calcium which you can find in foods like mustard greens, broccoli, cheese and sesame. Actually, sesame pops up a lot in Colleen’s writing. I am thinking I should find a source for sesame in my diet.

If you crave coffee or tea, you could be after phosphorous, sulphur, salt or iron which you can find in a whole range of foods from eggs to capsicum, to liver, to seaweed, to meat, and to black cherries.

If you crave solids to liquids, it means you are so badly dehydrated you have lost your sense of thirst, so you need to drink water ASAP, perhaps flavoured with lemon or lime. Curiously, if you seek liquids over solids, the prescription is the same - more water, about 8-10 glasses a day.

The list goes on with recreation drugs, tobacco, overeating, burnt food, chewing ice, etc.

You can read the list yourself at http://www.naturopathyworks.com/pages/cravings.php.

Top 40 Requested Bridal Waltzes
Adelaide company, Entertaining Events, has a list of the top 40 requested bridal waltzes as reported by their DJs. And I must say, people have mixed taste!

Love is all around by Wet Wet Wet comes in at number 5, I Swear by All-4-One at number 4, Hero by Enrique Iglesias at number 3, There You’ll Be by Faith Hill at number 2, and Beautiful In My Eyes by Joshua Kadison at number 1.

There are some other standards there I would expect, such as Have I told you lately by Van Morrison, Can’t help falling in love by Elvis, When you say nothing at all by Ronan Keating, Sea of love by the Honey Drippers, and Unchained melody by the Righteous Brothers.

There are some shockers in there too, such as You are so beautiful by Joe Cocker (this is a great song, but how could you possibly dance to it); Waiting for a girl like you by Foreigner (it is just moody and mopey); and the worst entry is Cruisin by Gwyneth Paltrow and Huey Lewis (this really is a classic B-side nothing commercial time filler that should never have been picked up by radio, let alone played as the song to launch your marriage).

You can check out the list at http://www.entertainingevents.com.au/wed40.html.

Road Kill Cook Book
I was in the Riverland at Berri, South Australia, this past week, running workshops on online marketing, eBay and the various web2.0 technologies applicable to small business, and met Cathy from Emaroo Cottages. They run some holiday accommodation in Broken Hill and Mildura. She mentioned that their website boasted a Road Kill Cook Book, so I had to find out more. Sure enough, this free eBook is available from the website and contains these highlights:

Tender Pot Roast Rump of Emu: This recipe includes an interesting fact that an emu’s eyeball is bigger than its brain, making them high speed, clueless feather dusters on legs. It also includes such immortal recipe directions as - Take the selected rump of emu, remove imbedded bitumen, feathers, and any unwanted additives. Allow to stand for a few days while you search for a pot large enough to cater for the rump. And, rounds off with the unusual, serves 50-60.

Ribbon of Rabbit: The recipe notes that most large truck tyres will have already pulverized the piece into a nice flat ribbon. Soak rabbit overnight to help remove fur, tyre tread patterns and remnants of rubber. Moisten rabbit with garlic, olive oil and oregano and place over hot coals.

Silver City Snake Slithers in Batter: Great advice in this recipe - Ensure the creature is actually deceased, there’s no greater surprise than delivering this little trophy to She of the Kitchen than finding it mostly alive and more than a little grumpy with its ill treatment.

Goat au Gratin: Simply can’t go past this advice – clip its horns and wipe its ass, goat is best served rare.

You can find this book at http://www.emaroocottages.com.au/.

Zamzar
I cannot speak more highly of any online tool available. Zamzar is an absolute godsend. This handy utitlity can convert files from one format to another, and even grab YouTube videos for you to download and watch later.

I find it particularly handy for converting Microsoft’s ridiculous .***x extensions to .***. Of particular note, is the ability to convert these new extensions not only into the old Microsoft extension format but also into the Open Office format.

A variety of other formats are also supported, enabling you to convert your pptx files into whatever format is most useful for the program that you happen to be working in. The full list of supported formats is below:

• html - Hypertext Markup Language
• odp - OpenDocument presentation
• pdf - Portable Document Format
• png - Portable Network Graphic
• ppt - Microsoft Powerpoint Presentation
• ps - Postscript document
• swf - Macromedia Flash Format File

One of my favourite aspects is the saving of YouTube videos. I often find material I want to share with others when we are not online. So saving videos to share offline is a great advantage of this tool.

The whole service is free for basic conversions, with a variable turnaround time. If you want faster conversions and online storage, then you can pay between US$7 and US$49 per month. Visit www.zamzar.com.

Sendables – JibJab
This is an hilarious site from the US, where you can access sendable ecards and fun clips.

There is a focus on the upcoming US election with a fun rendition of The Times They Are A-Changin’, morphed into Time For Some Campaignin’. There are some classic lines that pull no punches in satirising all the main players, eg, Hilary Clinton sings about failing to quell Obama’s rising star, to which Bill Clinton says, alas you got close, but no cigar. You can see the video here: http://sendables.jibjab.com/sendables/1191/time_for_some_campaignin.

However, one of my favourite videos on the site (by the way, you find the videos under the JibJab Originals tab/button) is What We Call The News. This is biting satire on the state of mass media news coverage. It highlights the shift from real news coverage to the crap news channels need to concoct or scrape out of the barrel to fill their voracious content demands and maintain titillation for extended periods. You can see this video here: http://www.jibjab.com/originals/what_we_call_the_news.

Kids Around Town
Found an interesting website about a book that is being launched this month (September 2008) called Kids Around Town. It is for parents in Adelaide and unlike other voucher books, is totally family-friendly.

The book will have around 230 vouchers offering freebies, 2 for 1 offers, and 10%-25% off offers. They add up to about $5,000 in savings and there are some competitions in the book too.

Interestingly, the book is not just vouchers. It also contains articles from Mem Fox and Dorinda Haffner, along with listings of favourite playgrounds, markets, parenting rooms and local libraries.

The lady behind this is Sheree Hyde, who created the business so she can work from home, and also so she could raise money for her daughter’s school.

Kids Around Town has been divided into seven sections including BUMPS & BUBS; HEALTHY & HAPPY; EATS & TREATS; WATCH, LEARN & PLAY; GIFTS, TOYS & MORE; LET’S PARTY!; and GETAWAYS.

From mid to late September 2008, the book can be purchased online and at selected retailers for only $28. It will also be available through many schools. Visit http://www.kidsaroundtown.com.au.

Gary Sauer-Thompson
Here is an Adelaide man who is producing and interesting blog, rich with interesting words and pictures. Gary describes himself as someone for whom “Adelaide is home. Work is often in Canberra. Relaxation is in Victor Harbor.” He says he is a “frustrated photographer & philosopher who has lost his way in life. I used to be a policy wonk. Now, as a knowledge worker I have trouble learning to live in a complex digital world. Personal expression is the way I critically cope in a technological mode of being.”
His blog, which I am linking to, has four main sections – conversations, public opinion, philosophy and junk for code. It is the junk for code part I will link you to so that you can watch his pictorial essay on the River Murray unfold. At the time of linking to this section of his site, there is a prominent story on his recent trip to the Milang Jetty. He weaves in political comment, regarding Brendan Nelson’s recent visit as part of the Mayo by-election campaign for Jamie Briggs, along with a wonderful picture of the jetty. If you scroll further down the page, you will see more dramatic pictures of our River Murray in all its resplendent distress. The colour and detail that Gary achieves in his photographs is stunning, and he is doing an important job of keeping the river in our consciousness while we dodge occasional rain showers and run our hot water taps without fail every morning. You can see this blog stream at http://www.sauer-thompson.com/junkforcode/.
Make sure you scroll down to the Mundoo Channel photograph near the Murray Mouth just south of the barrages. Surrounding the photograph, Gary reminds us “the barrages were constructed seven decades ago to pool freshwater behind them, providing drinking and irrigation supplies to farms and towns … the situation is one whereby the levels of the freshwater lakes continue to drop behind barrages that currently keep out the sea. Scientists warn they could within months turn acidic, irretrievably damaging them.”.

Food facts
Now this is an interesting site on many levels. Firstly, it is funded by Meat and Livestock Australia so straight away we know we need to be on guard for “spin”. We know that only research that supports the consumption of red meat will be included. We know that censorship by omission will be the key to keeping the funding body happy. That being said, I am a meat eater and they are selecting research from authoritative bodies, so it is a site that will be in harmony with my expectations and understanding of the world.Secondly, I don’t know how such a nicely designed site can be created and NOT be compatible with Mozilla Firefox. It is incredible. This site totally breaks in Firefox, the second most popular browser used today. I would be having a few words with my web designer if I was the funding body.
Thirdly, there are some interesting comments in the “facts” that would make juicy conversation pieces for your next dinner party (as you eat your red meat, of course), here are just a few:

• It is important to eat a wide variety of fruits from apples to citrus to berries and bananas, “from fresh to stewed to canned varieties”. Now I know that canned and stewed fruits are not totally bad for you, and can be handy back ups when fresh fruit is out of season, but who has ever heard of making sure we mix canned and stewed fruit into our diets? That would be similar to saying you must eat red meat but must also include jerky in your diet. Bizarre.
• It mentions we need to include cheese in our diets and then on the next point it says we need to reduce consumption of cheese and other foods with saturated fats.
• Interestingly, it does point out the down side of dairy food, sugars, oils, and alcohol, but when it talks about meat it gives a glowing reference apart from lightly mentioning we should trim fat from our meat. I am sure there must be other points of concern and it would have lent more credibility to the page if they were included in the way pros and cons were included for other food types.

On the Weight Management page, it states that we need, for our evening meal, 4 servings per week of 200g of red meat, 2 servings per week of 200g of fish, and 1 serving of chicken without fat or more meat. For lunch we MUST eat 100g of lean protein – beef, lamb, chicken, turkey, etc. It says we need just 40g of high fibre cereal, 2 and a half cups of non-starchy vegetables, one serve of fruit and dairy, and a dribble of vegetable oil.There is advice on eating less, namely, setting times for eating, not eating in front of tv, chewing more, and washing your plate straight after eating (that also helps marital bliss). The other classic piece of advice is to choose smaller plates and bowls. I must say, I think the jury is out on that one. Having to go back for a second plate all the time would be annoying, leading to frustration, leading to depression, leading to more consumption of comfort food.
Overall, this is an interesting site that will easily keep you interested for a few hours. Just don’t sit down with a bowl of snack food next to you as you explore it! Using Internet Explorer, you can visit the site at http://www.foodfacts.com.au/.

Ugly Dresses
Oh my! Just what do girls do to each other? You must see this collection of ugly dresses, mainly bridesmaid dresses that charming brides have foisted upon their best friends.
There are some interesting categories of pictures from bad shape and bad colours to the must see categories of bad shoes, ugly weddings and tattoos and skanks. Some highlights are:

• Ugly weddings - Was this made in the parking lot of a Dunkin Donuts, Deodorant Application.
• Ugly shoes - Bridal Sneakers Complete With The Ankle Tattoo, and Minivan, Sneekers, Man-Calves.
• Tattoos and skanks - Tat, Beer, Cig, and a Casino, and Wedding Tattoo Rule #3. Actually, I have to paraphrase tattoo rule number three which features a girl with some pseudo eastern tattoo on her left shoulder blade, fully exposed by her low cut wedding dress. The advice is: Don’t let a $50 tattoo ruin a $20,000 wedding. If you still think that your tattoo is meaningful and that everyone else actually gives a rat’s about what it signifies you are wrong. The only people who actually pretended to listen to that crap were guys who were trying to “get to know you better” in your past, and guess what? You are married now.”

Actually, the most razor sharp commentary was also saved for the tattoo section. It is the picture entitled “shark tattoo and a million other things”. The commentary goes: “Ivory Dress & White Bra. Bleached blond hair and leathery skin. Black plastic watch and crappy tribal shark tattoo. Also, someone should slap the Maid of Honor for screwing up the pearl buttons.” Unleash the sarcasm within and visit http://uglydress.com/index.html.

Fast talking Fred
I was alerted to Fast Talking Fred by an article in The Age, in which it highlights that Fred’s creator, Lucas Cruikshank, is already a minor celebrity at the age of 14, still two years away from being legally able to drive, vote or get married. On YouTube, Lucas’s character, Fred, is attracting hundreds of thousands of subscribers, leading to sponsorship deals and talk of television shows.Fred is “a six-year-old with anger management issues who lives with his alcoholic mother and whose absentee father is doing time in jail.” The attraction comes from Lucas’ baby face, the timeworn comic device of having someone older play someone younger, and the “chipmunking” of his voice.
Fred’s weekly videos began in May and four of the episodes have had more than one million viewings. You can see his YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/Fred.

Adelaide Green Porridge Forum
I have found an amusing blog written by a fellow Adelaidean, Colin Campbell. Colin describes himself as a “Transplanted Scot, with an Australian partner, a seven year old would be Computer Game Junky/Cricketer/Yugioh Duellist/Pirate.., nine year old all Singing and Dancing/Mobile Phone Video Artist.., Spotty the annoying but friendly dog, Ben and Daisy, the rabbits, 7 budgies , the memory of Mr Quail, 2 goldfish and a few worms (they suspend life in the hot weather). I spend most of my time tending to the needs of my employer and my flock, ferrying, cooking, child taming, washing the dishes, cleaning, dusting…you get the picture. We just bought a house, so I am gainfully employed with my wife’s long list of projects *sigh*.”

His blog is a delightful collection of thoughts and humorous observations on life. I particularly like his post on July 17, 2008, about speed cameras. The state government is about to spend 3.5 million on new speed and traffic light cameras but Colin gives this a eerie twist with an image of a speed camera fitted with a machine gun. His story says there is likely to be a spike in the road toll at first, but then the cameras will start saving lives!

I also like his entry from earlier that week about the Sheffield Shield name returning to state cricket. Here’s his intro, “The Intra State Australian Cricket Competition and major loss leader for Cricket Australia in their quest for world dominance in the land of the Silly Mid Off, Point and Square Leg has had a face lift and is set for new life as the Sheffield Shield again. Many Australian traditionalists have been unhappy with the retirement of the shield and its replacement by Pura, a milk brand.”

Make an amusing appointment with his blog at http://adelaidegreenporridgecafe.blogspot.com/.

Charge Your Glasses
This site begins with a reassuring introduction – “Worried about your wedding speech? Charge Your Glasses is here to give you content and confidence. Whether you are the father of the bride, groom or best man, we provide everything you need for a brilliant, smooth-flowing speech. And yes, it is all free. The catch? There isn’t one.”

The site helps you work through the speech creation process methodically, breaking speeches down to the following components:

1. Opening
2. Introducing yourself
3. Relief
4. Physical
5. His early years
6. School Days
7. College / University
8. Job
9. Hobbies
10. Drink
11. His home
12. Girls
13. Meeting his wife
14. The happy couple
15. How she’s changed him
16. His wife
17. Our friendship
18. Summing him up
19. Toast

To get going, you just click on a section of the speech at a time and then on a relevant angle, By choosing the topic of “girls” and then “his first time”, I got this delightfully saucy piece:

I bumped into a familiar looking girl in the pub last week.

After I’d stared at her for a few minutes she came over and introduced herself …

… as the woman who had taken away Lawrence’s innocence many years ago.

I was shocked.

Because she made the story last for an hour and a half.

Which, from my understanding …

… was approximately an eighty nine minutes longer than the original incident!

But working backwards, there is a brilliant opening ploy called “I’m going to shock you”.

Never before, in the history of weddings, has a best man been under more pressure.

People kept whispering about what I should and shouldn’t say.

And then I heard that Anna had approached my wife to find out what was my speech contained.

So I’m sure you’d all like to know that this

(pause and hold two pieces of paper in the air)

is the official, authorised, family-friendly version of my speech.

(Pause. Rip it up in front of them.)

Well, for those of you who remember Blue Peter … here’s one I prepared earlier!

(Produce another speech from pocket)

This is an excellent site and great for excellent ideas. You will have to register to use it, but it is all free, and can be found at http://www.chargeyourglasses.com/.

The Mother Of All Excuses Place
If you have ever wanted to find a tactful way to get out of a commitment, this site is for you. The guys behind this site have collected excuses from the workplace and take submissions to be added to the website.

The excuses are grouped into themes, such as, missing school and homework, police or accident, kids, getting out of family events and holiday functions, breaking dates, doctors and doctors note, missing church, wedding, diet, why I ate that, debt, tax, not paying the rent, getting out of home repairs, unwanted house guest, jury duty, not voting, no sex, and miscellaneous.

Some of my favourites include:

Church Excuses

• Well…I could not come to the church last Sunday… because there was a sermon in the radio.
• (Real Mysterious Sounding) “I just had this feeling I shouldn’t be there.”

Work excuses

• My car ran out of gas on the way to work. I was pushing it to a gas station and I got a stomach hernia and I have to go to the doctors.
• A graphic artist I once knew told me of a person who called in and said his house had burned overnight. He was caught in the lie when word got out because co-workers took up a collection and the guy had to come clean when they gave it to him. He said it’s just so much easier to say you’ve got diarrhea. They can’t argue with that.
• Constipation has made me a walking time bomb.

Breaking a date

• This is how to break a date: (if you live with your parents) when the other person calls you, and asks you what they want to do, say “Just a second, let me ask my mom” then you go to your mom and scream “MOM! F— YOU!!” almost any mother would then ground you….Case solved, instead of being with the loser….quality time with yourself.”

You can find these excuses, and more, at http://madtbone.tripod.com.

The Cool Hunter
This mainly pictorial site is an eye opener. If you want to see “cool”, amazing, and sometimes awful and eccentric architecture, this site needs to be in your bookmarks.

Of particular note, is the feature on the private, seaside estate being created in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates. Apartments will sell for about 40 million dollars each – so oil sheiks will be needing to keep the price of oil high to pay for them. I think you need to see these sleek buildings which sit on stilts in the sea. Staggering. My link takes you to this pictorial, to continue looking at the site, just click on the menu item, Architecture, towards the top of the page. See the site at http://www.thecoolhunter.com.au/architecture/Exclusive-Private-Residential-Estate-Abu-Dhabi/.

Then, if you want to see some amazing bars and clubs, click on the bars/clubs menu item and make sure you see the weird, jetsons-like setting of the Blue Frog Lounge in Mumbai.

Stuart’s Hell
Michael Giacometti is an Alice Springs man on a mission, drawing close to to finishing his gruelling challenge of dragging a 180kg cart over 1000 sand dunes in Australia’s Simpson Desert, from east to west, unassisted and away from roads and tracks.
In September 1845, after 18 months in central Australia searching for the inland sea, Captain Charles Sturt wrote to his wife about the dramatic, red sand dunes that marked the end of his journey:
Ascending one of the sand ridges I saw a numberless succession of these terrific objects rising above each other to the east and west. Northwards they ran before me for more than fifteen miles… The scene was awfully fearful, dear Charlotte. A kind of dread came over me as I gazed upon it. It looked like the entrance into Hell. Mr Browne stood horrified. ‘Did man’, he exclaimed, ‘ever see such a place?!’
Michael is walking from Bedourie (Qld) to Mt Dare (SA), covering 485km in 24 days.
This has never been done before, crossing east to west, because it means Michael will be hitting high sand dunes face on, at the steepest point.
He says he is doing this to immerse himself in the desert and raise awareness of man’s impact on the earth. We should also think of Michael when we grizzle about not being able to water our lawns because he will be surviving in treachorous conditions for three weeks on just 100 litres of water - that’s 4 litres a day, which is the same as a one half-flush of a toilet per day. In fact, his complete water consumption for such a gruelling journey will be the same amount of water you and I use in one average day!
You can follow Michael’s story at http://www.michaelgiacometti.org and progress updates at http://www.michaelgiacometti.org/progress.html

Broadband Choice
Whirlpool is a very popular, Australian-based forum for IT and Telco geeks. They have a handy page that helps you cut through the garbled marketing messages regarding broadband plans and mobile plans, etc. Part of this service is a page set up for you to enter your telephone number into, and it advises you on how ready your exchange is for ADSL2 and other technologies.
And there is one great spin off this function. If you are looking to hire a tradesperson and all you have is a landline number, you can plop their number into this service and it tells you which exchange they are connected to. I used it this week, when searching for an electrician.
The great thing about this site is that although it is written by and run by geeks, it takes the time to explain things in detail AND it points out the traps such as noting whether your broadband connection counts just the data coming to your machine or whether it also counts data you are sending out (or upstream). If the latter, your usage rates can jump 10-50%
You can find the service at http://bc.whirlpool.net.au

St Kilda Film Festival
This week sees the St Kilda Film Festival travelling show roll through South Australia. The event is 25 years old and this year’s competition attracted 700 short films. Unfortunately the festival’s website is boring. It just has the basic information about the event and the films, but there are no snippets to watch. This really needs to be addressed. However, you can see one of the films that is travelling, on the Tropfest website, because the film was entered in both competitions. The film is Beggar’s Belief, and it is quite a funny, quirky story, that just gets ironically weird. You can link to that from the Tropfest site here - http://www.tropfest.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=380367. While on this page, you will also see the winning film from Tropfest, Marry Me, which, if you have not caught up with it yet, is a beautiful story of unrequited love and BMX bicycles. If you click on any of the movies, other than Marry Me, you will have to watch a 30 second commercial before the main event - you don’t need to start clicking madly, thinking you have gone to the wrong place. (Tropfest has been running since 1993 and is now the world’s largest short film festival.
Back to St Kilda Film Festival, and the touring show will be in Mt Gambier, Tuesday, at the Sir Robert Helpman Theatre; here in Adelaide Wednesday, at the Palace Nova; Renmark Thursday, at the Chaffey Theatre; Port Pirie Friday, at the Northern Festival Centre, and Whyalla Sunday, at the Middleback Theatre. It’s actually doing the opposite of our health system - the film festival is going out to meet the people in regional areas, instead of forcing them to travel to the big city! The festival’s official site is http://stkildafilmfestival.vic.gov.au.
A friend of a friend of a friend knows you’re on vacation
As you know, I am a passionate advocate of social networking sites. But someone does need to pay the piper. In the case of sites like these, the trade off is giving away personal information to the site provider. So, you get membership to a warm, fuzzy, online community where you can rekindle old friendships, make new ones, and take part in global conversations, in return for the site operators being able to aggregate user information, sell it to advertisers, who in turn use it to target advertising. I think that is a win-win. But, as the Canadian Office of the Privacy Commissioner rightly points out, there are some downsides to not thinking about how much personal information and media you share on these sites. You need to remember you are giving full rights to your words and pictures and information to these companies.
Some of the downsides can be:

• increased marketing coming at you (although, it is likely to be targetted)
• lower types of people learning when you are on holiday and seizing the opportunity to rob you (or learning when you are having a large party that they could gatecrash)
• getting curly questions from potential employers who have researched you online
• giving away your date of birth (I always use a fake, but memorable one)

This link will take you to a video that asks, “what would you want a friend of a friend of a friend to know about you?” As the commissioner points out, joining a social network is our personal choice, “but we would hope that people would take a minute to think about their choices - and how much information they end up handing over to corporations, advertisers and marketing companies.” Fair call. The video is here.

Evernote
We can now have an external brain to keep track of all the tiny bits of information we encounter every day, through a service called Evernote. The service is in Beta at the moment and I am a few days away from taking part in the early trials. The technology is breathtaking. The basic idea is that Evernote will capture and remember everything you send to it and then it will index text including text from images so that you can search for bit of information you need, whenever you need it.

There are three prongs to this service:

• The website, where you register your Evernote account
• Your desktop, where you install the software
• Your mobile phone, where you install a client for capturing and sending information to your Evernote account.

There is a very good introductory video about this service on the front page of the website.

Some of the features I am looking forward to using include the ability to send a phone picture of a wine label or business card to Evernote, copying sections of text and images from interesting websites without needing to save the whole page which will make bargain hunting easier, and the ability to capture my handwritten notes into the system with my webcam.

You can sign up for a Beta invitation at www.evernote.com.

Libra
Here is another site to help you organise your “stuff”. It is library software to help you capture books and other media into a single database, with the ability to export lists to spreadsheets or webpages.

There are some very cool aspects to this software, including:

• Your webcam can become a barcode scanner for reading your book barcodes
• You can set it up to track people who borrow your books and media
• You can export your collection to a page on your website, so that you and your friends can peruse your collection – might come in handy when you need to make an insurance claim.

Before you wonder how long this will take, the process for loading information is made quite fast and simple because Libra taps in to the Amazon database. This means when you scan or type in an ISBN number, your collection gets information imported about the author, publisher, story, etc, in an instant. CDs, DVDs and games sometimes need to be searched by titles, but it sure beats typing everything out longhand.

When you look at your collection, simply clicking on the media title will display the title’s information. You can start getting organised today at www.getlibra.com.

Mr Dad
I have been amazed at how many parent-focussed sites there are on web, since becoming a parent. One I found, called Mr Dad, is a site set up by a US-based Parenting Expert, Armin Brott. Although the site tries to sell you his books and DVDs, there is a blog on the site of his Q and A column, in which he answers questions from dads. Here are a couple of interesting ones:

Sharing. A dad wrote in to seek solutions to his two-year-old’s grabbing and non-sharing habits. Armin replies by sharing “The Toddler’s Rules of Ownership” which included such gems as If I like it, it’s mine, If it’s in my hands, it’s mine, If I can take it from you, it’s mine, and If it’s your and I steal it, it’s mine.

He makes the point that “he toddler who shares easily is a pretty rare bird. In fact, toddlers are supposed to be self-centred at this age.” In fact, allowing your children to see the reactions from people who they grab toys from, is part of the lesson about how to share. Here are a few ways Armin says we can prepare for play dates, to keep your child’s developing sense of sharing moving in the right direction:

1. Prepare by reminding your child that more than one friend might want the same toy at the same time.

2. Put away or don’t take the “unsharables”.

3. Practice sharing by asking your child to share a toy with you from time to time, then make a big deal of saying thank you when you return it.

4. Enforce a no-grabbing policy by returning toys to children if your child has grabbed them.

Curiosity. Armin has some great suggestions for harbouring a sense of wonder and curiosity in your children. Did you know that between 2 and 5 years old, children ask 400,000 questions? And that how you answer them plays a big part in their development, more so than the 13 years of schooling that follow? Armin says the best answer is another question, such as “what do you think”? The goal is to encourage the search for answers, not just dish out questions like the Bigpond dad!

Read through the questions and answers at www.mrdad.com/ask.

Chillmasterflex
This site is meant to be a “counterweight” to the hustle and bustle of your typical website. There is new age music in the background and a choice of images – sunset, lakes and woodfire. I chose the woodfire. It fills your screen and you can just stare into it in a darkened room, and relax! Note: let images load before you choose “fullscreen”. Also, I had difficulty getting the lakes and sunset to load. The fire, though, was lovely. www.chillmasterflex.com