makumaro.net

Sustainability

Kind of a mosaic mural at the Times Square station on 42nd St. It was bright and caught my attention, hence a quick whip out of my camera, 3 snaps and some magic later, we have this picture here.

Click here to view larger.

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It’s been raining the whole of today. Heh, I think for people visiting NYC, it’s advisable that the first thing you buy here is an umbrella. It rains often and even when it doesn’t rain hard, the downpour is continuous and you will get wet pretty quick.

I’ve just been keeping myself busy doing stuff over the last few days. Need the activity to keep my mind from wandering off too far. I’m just very keen to get on the plane these days, and don’t really care if I have to sit through the 22 hour flight. Heck, I’m even looking forward to the plane food they serve from Sweden to KL, which is generally the better grub they serve on airlines. I will complain about how bad the ride is when I get back to KL.

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Been looking into turning the backyard at my Melbourne apartment into a small nursery for herbs. Want to start off initially with some potted basil, chives, mint and parsley. I have no green fingers, but I’m willing to give it a try. Heh, that’s what I realise about me. Not to be smug but I seem to be multi talented to people around me. The super jack of all trades who can cook a little, web design, program, build computers, play a few instruments (barely), take photos etc. The truth is, it boils down to being patient about something you feel you can be passionate about. I really enjoy the things I do at times and I never start of getting it right the first time. I get it wrong usually, and I get frustrated, but somehow I just keep trying until one day, you sit down and it clicks, and you start doing things like a painter would wave a brush at a canvas and things happen.

So why the sudden interest in growing stuff? It’s all about sustainability. Reading/listening to the news, there have been countries where governments have been overthrown lately due to the rising cost of food. Recent droughts have made food producing countries like Australia see a setback in production, while the demand for food continues to grow as countries such as China and India have an evergrowing middle class who can now afford to pay more to put better quality food on their plates. This is further aggravated by the US push for biofuels, producing crops that can produce ethanol at the expense of crops that could be eaten. This is caused by a need to reduce the dependence on oil but if you look at the trend of cars for the past 50 years, American cars are oil guzzlers and it was only very recently with the multiple fold increase of oil prices have they started to try to make them more efficient.

I am also not a very big fan of air travel, even if does make life more convenient as the carbon impact from flying jets is rather large. Sadly, if you want to go places, it’s the only solution at the moment, there isn’t really a more economical alternative (in regards to money spent vs time) . Feeling a little sheepish that I have flown quite a bit over the last 365 days.

Back to the herbs. Heh, would like to be able to learn how to get plants to grow then maybe I can produce a little more stuff in house for consumption. Unfortunately for me, there’s no undo button for plants and although it’s trial and error, I’d rather not kill off the plants too quickly. Heh, will give it a go once I have time back in Melbourne.

Version 6.0 Floral Jungle Edition

It’s been less than 10 months since my last redesign and it’s an alternating pattern now with a girl design and a floral design.

Got it done more quickly this time with a little more decisiveness and not being overly ambitious. I’ve been coding and trying new things over the past few months plus I’m familiar enough with HTML/CSS that I don’t go scratching my head on how to get a certain thing to display properly. Heh, this time around I’ve also stopped testing for Internet Explorer 6 and Opera. Tried this design on Firefox and Safari (which displays the date a little weird) and it generally looks fine.

For the design, I’m generally okay with it. I’ve always wanted this grunge look so it started from the background with brush streaks looking like rock. Then I added the left pink flower and worked from there. Added a little more foliage (all from a day shoot at Central Park) and did a centre column and that was pretty much it.

This site runs on only 3 picture files, and since it is already 2008 and everyone I know who reads this site uses broadband, I was just lazy and made one gigantic background to cover all the design elements. No need to splice images in Photoshop, even the rollover navigation bar is one entire image.

True to my style (and I don’t find it ideal here) is the need for bright colours splashed around. The text headers are all drenched in some summer pastel colour and it doesn’t quite fit with the overall design. The red was put in just out of poor stubbornness to abandon the colour, and orange is the trademark styling for the M logo.

Threw out the search bar as I wasn’t quite inclined to fix it at the moment. Yes, I finally fixed the missing ‘home’ button. Wanted to add some AJAX styling for showing recent posts and add back some links to other sites. Didn’t quite figure out how to get the Javascript to work, so I left it out. Very much into minimalistic design these days. Fixed up some of the comments styling and other little things that I did not bother about in the previous design.

Updated to WordPress 2.5.1. I like the new administration interface and they’ve cleaned it up quite a bit. It’s bloated up since I first started using it but WordPress is still by far the most intuitive of the bunch of blogging platforms I’ve tried for posting as well as for customising. The most recent I’ve tested is Chyrp which works like a twitter/tumblr style blog. It’s super lightweight and definitely something to try out if you want to run your own blog and don’t require too many bells and whistles. I couldn’t quite figure out how the styling worked so didn’t dwell into it further. Plus it’s also relatively new and the author is still changing how everything works under the hood.

Just needed to get this redesign out of my system so I can start putting my energy into my other hobbies. Wanted to keep this design as a work in progress, to add the above mentioned stuff, but will see how it goes. Heh.

Another one for the archives.

Counting Down

Yesterday’s night dinner. This was unagi (eel) that Vyanne and I bought at Chinatown while she was around. It took me well over a week before I decided to open it up and eat it. Heh, just a little hesitant on my end as I didn’t quite know what to do with it. It ended up being fairly simple as I just microwaved it and served it on rice.

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I am feeling sort of restless, with lots I want to do and not being able to decide what I want to do first. Ended up messing around with my website design as it’s been on my mind for the past month. Heh, strangely enough, the new design took only 3 days to go through. It’s a simpler design, recycling most of the existing code and me tidying things up. The idea for me now is to get whatever I want done and out of my system so I can move on to the next things. It’s not so much about being impatient, but I lose interest if the effort put in does not equate to the output I expect. Heh, the design will be up in a day or two.

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It’s been a quiet week, with me just pounding away at the computer at work programming stuff. Not much to discuss at work, as I can’t contribute to discussions on trading, as I don’t know enough of the basic dynamics to say much. It’s just an odd feeling, not being able to be contribute on a higher level. My programming work is not glamourous, it just helps with automating stuff so you don’t have to run through the same processes daily. However these things run in the background, and sometimes it goes unnoticed. Maybe I should speak up on my contributions, but I’m not sure what I’m expecting to get out of it. Heh, I want to be able to discuss my work with people, but programming isn’t the most interesting of topics to discuss. I want to be able to do more now, to make a difference.

On a side note, other ideas going through my mind. Want to test out fennel. I’ve used it before for soup and the fennel seeds for curries. I’ve even tried it as an Indian after dinner dessert. I’m just curious what I can do with this spice to make more interesting dishes. I am keen to get a keyboard (the musical kind) for the living room in Melbourne so I can practice some tunes. I’ve had the idea for a very long time now and I just want something to disappear into (with headphones of course) as a different way to relieve stress.

Heh, it’s less than a month away before I can start putting plans into motion. Still looking forward to it.