It doesn't seem to matter much what I post about: someone is bound to have something or other to say about it. Obviously a lot of you actually read what I post. And I appreciate that. A lot.

But is there really no one who has anything to say about our BCX funraising action? I was bracing myself for a couple of 'you must be out of your mind and you're not getting a single [insert small coin of your preferred valuta] from me's, but I wouldn't have expected total silence.

*tumbleweeds, crickets*

...hello?

...or, in LOLcatspeak: Yes I can has discount!

I like luxury foodstuffs. Luxury prices, not so much. Luckily many of our supermarkets will put discount stickers on food that needs to be sold today or tomorrow. So I like hunting for those stickers when I go shopping for food.
Today was a good hunting day: everything I bought had one of those lovely stickers! Yay!
(Okay, so I did buy some of this stuff *because* it had the sticker.)

They make everything taste 35% better.

... in a romantic setting: out in the parking lot behind the building we currently call home.

Stoneshop is working on the car again. Don't ask. But dinner was nice.

I wish I had a 'pissed off' user icon. But I'm a Basic Account user so I have only six. No room for frivolities.
And the reason why I'm a Basic Account user is that I don't think I like and trust SUP (the owners of LJ) enough to give them my monies, and yet I want an addless journal.
This used to be possible: there were free Basic Accounts available untill March 2008. No frills, no Scrapbook, no Voice posts, six user icons. All fine with me, and a very nice service level for something that's unpaid. But.
In March 2008, this account level was made unavailable to new users. First we were told it was because three account levels were 'too confusing', then they said that 'empatically,. it's a business decision'. I'm not sure there was a whole lot of empathy involved, but sure, it's a business and they call the shots, right? And they said existing Basic Accounts would be 'grandfathered'.

Now this month, they told us they were 'bringing Basic back'. Sounds good, right? But there was a price to pay.
Ads.
What else?
Users were asked for their input how and where these ads would be implemented.

The choice that was decided upon (and many users actually said they could live with) was: show ads on Basic journals, to everyone who isn't logged in.

So here it is. I specifically logged out and cranked up IE (my SeaMonkey has Adblock) to see what my journal would now look like to others, more specifically my mother. Click the pic for full size. If you dare.

I'm Not Happy about this.
Hello Mom? I'll be over next week, installing Adblock on your FireFox.

Yesterday was tinkering time again. stoneshop had been busy fitting a new (or rather, newer and sans rust and holes) mudguard to the car.
My car is a Citroen C15 which we lovingly refer to as the Paint Can, because it's often used to transport paint, but it will also carry as many as ten banana boxes of books around with no problems.
It runs on LPG, which makes it one of the cheapest possible ways to get around. So, even though it's not as young as it used to be, the Paint Can is going to be around for as long as we can manage to keep it legal and safe.
Of course, this is an older car of a French make, which means that it's prone to rust.
There's this old joke of French car makers employing very, very skilled painters, who work together in pairs, spraying the paint at each other in opposite directions so it collides in mid-air, and thus build a car without actually needing any metal in between the two coats of paint. There is some truth in that.

Removing the old mudguard exposed some problems... or rather, some challenges.
We found some holes that allowed water into one of the hollow spaces of the car. Not good. I sprayed Tectyl inside, through the holes, and onto any rust that I could see; after letting it dry, I sealed off the holes with bitumen kit and pieces of plastic cut from the top of a Chinese takeaway food container. I couldn't help singing 'Fixing a hole, where the rain gets in' while working on this.

Stoneshop also discovered that the frame the left headlight unit hangs in was badly rusted, so that it had come loose on one side, giving it more freedom to move than it ought to have. This seemed undesirable and it would probably get worse. So we decided that liquid polyesther resin would be needed to repair that. Of course, it was Sunday so we could not buy any.

So yesterday I got some from the shop nearby, and got to work.
Now I love working with polyesther resin. You mix a bit of hardener in with the Golden Syrup-like liquid, and then you can make almost anything out of it. You can pour it into a mold, or brush it onto something. If you want it to be strong, you use the fibreglass mats that come in the package as reinforcement. Entire boats can be made this way.
I cut some parts so I'd have them handy, and mixed the resin.
First, I soaked all rust that I could see, so it would be sealed off from water and air, and thus stop rotting away.
Then, I applied the pieces of fibreglass, and liberally soaked them in resin too, so they turned transparent. I used up all of the resin I had mixed and glued everything together with it.

Then it was time for tea while the resin hardened. It took about 20 minutes to harden all in all.

I think that it turned out beautifully. Today I'm going to put the headlight unit back in and see if I can put the whole thing back together again. This part of the car is probably going to outlive the rest of it!

Oh, and the new mudguard looks très shiny. Too bad it makes the rest of the car look so matte and weathered  ;-)

From rockdg9  , who got it from miketroll  (not -stigen).

100 foods you should eat. Bold what you've eaten, italicize what you've eaten and hated, strikethrough those you're not willing to ever try. Underline ones you have no idea what they are.

Of course, this is heavily influenced by the fact that I don't eat meat. If you see meat dishes marked as 'eaten', I've had them before I quit meat.

Spite makes a wonderful pet.
Just feed it every now and then, and it'll keep you company for a lifetime.

(Inspired by this.)

It's the most expensive article of clothing that I ever bought. And I would never have considered buying it at the original price. Not because it's too expensive, but because it's too much money. (Not the same thing at all!)
But stoneshop had been singing the praises of this particular type of motorcycle jacket, in the most powerful way possible: by demonstrating how comfortable they are, how he never gets too hot, too cold or wet wearing them, and how they last him 200.000 kilometres.
(The durability of motorcycle gear is best measured in distance.)
Furthermore, there was some money coming in.
And to top it off I found one on the internets that was 50% off. So I decided we'd at least go and look at it in the shop, and try it on. I could always decide it didn't fit or that I didn't like it all that much after all. Or that I'd try and find a used one, now that I knew the right size.

So we went to the BMW store, as yes, this is BMW gear. We parked our scruffy looking Honda dirt bikes out in front.
The store looks very shiny, lots of glass, everything looks immaculately clean. You could eat your lunch off any of the bikes in the shop. There was nothing in there that I found desirable at all.
Except for the jacket.

Just so you know.
I haven't posted here in over a week; however, I have been posting in a community that I started.
There are no major changes in my life that I need to tell you about; rest assured that both me and stoneshop are alive and well, be it a bit sweaty (it's been an exceptionally hot and humid day).

If I forget to post about my new motorcycle jacket, please remind me. It's cost me enough to warrant a posting.

This one just arrived from Vistaprint.
I was wondering how their prints would look on black shirts, the answer is: not great. It's not a big deal because the shirt was cheap (one of those 'try one free' deals, where you have to pay for postage and handling and end up paying a reasonably low price, which does not equal 'free', but still equals 'reasonably low') but it's not something I would gladly have paid more for.
Still, I'm wearing it today.
The toothless tiger (nothing a bit of correction fluid couldn't fix) is one of their standard designs; the text was found in many places on the internets and goes: 'I can only please so many people a day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow doesn't look good, either.'

[Error: unknown template 'qotd']My body? Now, if the question said: mind, then I could sort of relate. Sort of, because the question would still be very badly phrased.
If my mind was inside an inanimate object, would it still be inanimate?
I think that instead of answering the question I will rephrase it.

"Imagine being an inanimate object. Choose one that already exists, or make one up. And then describe yourself."

There. All better now.

I found something odd in the boxes of books that I'd gotten for BookCrossing recently.
A book in Esperanto! I'd never seen one of those before.

...manages quite cleverly to make itself look bigger than it actually is.

Yesterday was the birthday of my favourite ex. He didn't feel like having a great big party but he wanted to come over and bring his minibike, so we could ride it on the parking lot. I'd never ridden one before!
Another friend showed up and brought his girlfriend, and one of the neigbours joined us, and the birthday boy had brought cake and beers and soft drinks. We ended up having a nice little parking lot party, in the rain. It was fun.
( Click to see a video! )

I bought my fire bellied newt (Cynops orientalis) a water hyacinth.
These are commonly sold as pond plants, they float and look rather exotic, don't you think?
I've seen them in the wild in the Niger river, too.
The newt lives in a tank with a low water level, so plants that rise above the water surface work well there. I've found that she likes to sit or hang in the roots of the plant.

Last year, stoneshop, gummihuhn and I went to Finowfurt, Germany, on a nerdy version of summer camp. (Some of you may remember that.)
Since we were volunteering to help running things (they called us Chaos Angels... doesn't that sound nice?) I made several cardboard signs, telling people not to climb the bunkers, not to step on the fiberoptic cables or not to let their dogs (which shouldn't have been there in the first place) roam the site and pee on people's tents.

Now all of a sudden this picture of one of the signs I made pops up on a 'funny stuff found all over the internets' site, and is spotted by someone who then posts it on a motorcycling forum I read.
I never intended this sign for the internet. it was simply a sign, made for practical reasons, and I tried to make it a bit silly so people would notice it more and not think we were nagging about the rules.
This must be how memes are born.

[Error: unknown template 'qotd']A boomerang.

Lights are back on since yesterday.
We seem to have lost a silver tipped tetra, and maybe an otocinclus, but everyone else seems fine. Mike the frog is in good shape, as Mikes tend to be.

The algae have certainly taken a beating. There are definitely less of them, and some of them now look brown and lifeless. The plants are unfazed and even seem to have grown a little while lights were off.

I just gave the tank a 10% water change, cleaned the filter sponge (by squeezing it a few times in the bucket of old water) and added the peat to the filter. The water is now being filtered over sponge, then peat pellets, then charcoal. Sounds rather scientific, doesn't it?

I've been told that the peat may turn the water tea-coloured (the charcoal may, however, lessen that side effect or eliminate it altogether) but no one told me whether to expect Earl Grey, Ceylon or Pu-Erh.
While I'm waiting to find out, I might as well have a cuppa!

...it is very, very dark.
I'm doing the 'four day blackout' to get rid of algae. A bit of algae is natural and can even be decorative, but too much is ugly and stunts the growth of the plants.

The tank was starting to look a bit grotty, so I decided to take a water sample to a good fish store with knowledgeable staff and ask them to analyse it for me.
They did, and the water quality was overall pretty much great. But I was told that a good way to slow down the growth of algae (after hitting them with the Four Days) would be to lower the ph of the water, in other words to make it slightly more acidic.
A good way to do so, quite naturally and gradually, is to add peat to the filter. This will give the water a slight orange-brown hue, but the carbon that's also in the filter should take care of that.

So the tank is now covered in cardboard, that's supposed to shut out the light completely, and the lights don't come on either. It's a bit scary because I can't see what's going on in there. But the method calls for no peeking and no feeding.
I cleaned the filter and changed a bucket of water yesterday, fed the fish and Mike the frog well, and told them goodbye for four days.
What will the tank look like on Friday? No one knows.

Koshari or kosheri is a very simple dish which is commonly eaten all over Egypt. You can buy it in specialised shops called Kosharias. It's a simple, tasty and filling dish, and quite inexpensive. If you want to eat it as a meal it's nice to serve it with a salad.

There are many variations but this is how I made it a couple of days ago:

• one small can or jar of cooked lentils (yes, I took a shortcut there)
• similar amounts of rice and pasta (preferably a small kind)
• one or two onions
• three or four tomatoes
• two cloves of garlic
• one red pepper, medium hot
• olive oil
• small can of tomato puree
• salt, pepper, cumin, coriander (all ground)
  

Cook both the pasta and the rice, making sure they'll be ready at about the same time.

Peel and cut the onions and the garlic, heat a few spoons of oil in a frying pan or skillet, and fry them.
Cut the red pepper in small bits and add those. Leave the seeds in if you like it hot.
Wash and dice the tomatoes and add those as well. Simmer for a while, and then add tomato puree and half a mug of water. Season to taste (salt, pepper, ground cumin seeds and ground coriander seeds spring to mind). Let it all simmer to form a sauce.

By now, the pasta and rice are probably done. Drain the pasta and add the rice (or add the pasta to the rice, depending on which is in the larger pot). Add the lentils, mix gently and heat on low heat.

Serve the lentil/rice/pasta mixture with the spicy tomato sauce on top.