Fun with bacon

Like everyone (1) I love bacon, mostly I have it fried for breakfast, sometimes with maple syrup ’cause that whole sweet/salty thing is just fab.

So you can imagine how delighted I was to discover a recipe for candied bacon - yup, that’s bacon with a hard toffee coating…

I know what I’ll be doing this weekend.

(1) everyone except those who don’t like bacon obviously.

Science – it works bitches!

Made me laugh

And here’s the link in case the movie doesn’t load

Taming the leopards

I have a very nice new Macbook which I use at work – through a combination of vmware and entourage. I’ve used it every day for about a year and never had any problems with it. In fact most of my work colleagues find my smugness about the stability and power of my machine, compared to their cruddy pcs somewhat irritating.

Well, they sort of got their revenge. I upgraded to Snow Leopard and I got complacent, I didn’t do all the general housekeeping things that are good practice when upgrading MacOSx. with the inevitable result. The once beautifully stable machine crashed roughly every 2-3 hours. (often enough to be irritating, but not so often it was unworkable).

I tried a couple of repair type things to see if I could fix it without having to rebuild – but to no avail.

So, yesterday I rebuilt the machine.

I’m back to being super smug about how much better the Mac is – I don’t know anyone who has rebuilt a PC and within a matter of hours has a fully functioning machine with all the applications you use regularly installed and working, networking connected, and all the data back where it belong. It was a seriously easy and stress free process. (thank you Time Machine)

On the whole, I’d rather have not had to do the rebuild – but it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared, and it seems to have done the trick.

Moving on…

I’ve been at my current job for about 2 and half years now. I’m not sure if I’ve ever blogged in detail about what I do here – but basically, I write ASX announcements, pretty-up investor presentations and provide general communications support to a boutique investor relations firm called Radar.

It’s been an interesting time, not without its moments of irritation, and its moments of delight, but recently I’d started to lose my enthusiam for the job.

(it turns out there’s only so many times you can write something that says “I know we said we’d be profitable by now, but we’re not, it’s not our fault and please will you give us more money.” Sadly it’s turned out for some of our former clients there’s only so many times the market will say “OK – here’s some more cash.”)

Anyway  – I’ve just been offered and accepted, a new job at a company called Nuix, where I’ll be their new Marketing Manager. They’re a small software developer who make some seriously cool e-discovery software. It’s a great product, a great team, and the business is heading into a seriously exciting growth phase.

I’m enormously excited about starting there. So fingers crossed it works out even half as well as I’m hoping.

We’re at war?

The group Anonymous has declared war on the the Australian Government over their internet censorship plans.

As a future lawyer I completely condemn any and all illegal activity that may be perpetrated as part of this operation.

As a former anarchist/direct action campaigner… well… it makes me happy.

New Media, Marketing and Public Relations

Where I work we have a bit of a tendency to chase new shiny things – it’s a common failing in the world of consultancies/pr/marketing types – we just have very short attention spans.

Anyway as the resident über-geek it usually falls to me to explain why corporate blogs/email marketing campaigns/digital goat sharing* still need us to create good content and do our jobs properly. Fancy technology can’t make a shit product/company or campaign any better.

The latest one is twitter – we have clients who want to use twitter to announce they’ve announced something.

(These are the same companies who won’t get rss working on their sites because it’s ‘complicated’)

So, since I’m now looking at how we can effectively leverage Twitter for our clients I was really glad to come across this website which really gives some great advice about using Twitter for marketing and PR.

http://www.howtousetwitterformarketingandpr.com/

You should really check it out if you’re considering taking your company or brand onto Twitter.

All a -twitter

A recent study by some mob called “Pear Analytics” has determined(1) that roughly 40% of twitter traffic is “pointless babble”

Unsurprisingly, they have something to sell you based on this startling factoid(2). Gotta love these new “online social marketing experts”.

I’m not going to respond because as always Stephen Fry says it best.

(1) the study is really shonky – I’d have been embarrassed to hand it in as an undergraduate. Stephen Dann has the best analysis – and if you read through the comments you can find one of the researchers trying to defend it, which is pretty funny.

(2) a made up fact – commonly believed to be true because it sounds plausible.

Why knitting is good for those with OCD

I’m at home sick today. (stupid cold, stupid sinuses) The only bright spot is that it’s given me time to re-oganise my stash.  I was in the middle of taking the photos of the yarn, that are linked to the spreadsheet showing what I have, how much of it there is, and where it’s kept when I realised why I love my stash so much.

It’s the perfect play-thing for my OCD.

I can catalogue it in spreadsheets, I can reorganise it based on

• prospective project (all the jumper yarn over there, all the hat yarn here)
• colour (spectrum order, obviously,)
• weight, (cobweb through to Aran) and
• quantity.

And the whole time I’m doing that, I can think about what I’m going to make with it all, and therefore which organisation schema makes the most sense.

Of course, because I’m more of a visual person, no matter which schema makes sense, I always end up with it organised by colour. It just looks better that way.

But that explains why all my recent flickr photos are of yarn.

God I hate Microsoft…

I’m working on a client website.

They’ve agreed to give me direct access to their CMS <Good>

Their CMS is Microsoft Content Management Server <Bad>

Microsoft stopped supporting CMS years ago <Worse>

They no longer provide any documentation on how the damn thing works <Worser>

Oh yeah, and although it “works over the internet so you only need a web browser to use it” it relies entirely on ActiveX controls that only function in Internet Explorer. Which means I (a Mac) have to run a virtual machine to run IE just to deal with this ancient crap product.

I freakin hate Microsoft.

Dealing with the stash

I have recently acquired the first of Yarn Harlot’s books.

I thought it would make me laugh – I was right

I didn’t think it would teach me useful tricks – I was wrong….

See the problem that faces every knitter who lives with a non-knitter is how to deal with the stash. Stash is the yarn you keep at home. Non-knitters assume that the point of stash is to turn it into knitted garments, so they get very, very confused by the fact that knitters continue to acquire stash far faster than it can reasonably be knit.

That’s because they’re wrong. The point of stash is not to be turned into garments – the point of stash is just to be; just to sit their being soft, and warm and prettily coloured, gently inspiring the knitter into dreams of things that *could* be made out of the stash, but won’t, because then the stash could no longer create those dreams…

I love my stash

Anyway, as a relatively new knitter my stash is still comparatively small, but I am already encountering the raised eyebrow when I bring home yet another skien of sock-yarn. So eventually I will have to start to conceal it in places other than the designated yarn-storage bucket.

And this is where the Yarn Harlot was so useful – thanks to her book I now have a long list if hidey-holes where yarn can be stored.

No, I’m not going to share them. My husband reads this blog and I don’t want him to find out…

Perhaps a trip to my LYS this lunch might be on the cards – they’ve got some lovely silk/wool sock yarn I’ve been eyeing off and now I’ve got places I can hide it…