- Empires have an album called Howl that they have chosen to release as a free download on their website. I quite like it - I am bad with genres but it's kind of pop/rock, I suppose? It's a pity they don't have a donation link on their website or anything though, since it's not like I can get to Chicago and see a show.

- Did You Know, Ryland Blackington and Alex Suarez of Cobra Starship have a little band called This Is Ivy League who do the most adorable indiepop? (Don't worry, they sound nothing like Cobra Starship.) You can listen to their entire self-titled album on last.fm, but I didn't have much luck buying a legal copy (damn you only selling mp3s to people in the US, Amazon!)

- I am interested in hearing more by The Decemberists. Is there anything in particular I should be checking out?

A conversation with my mother over MSN this morning, paraphrased:
Mum: Elizabeth, you have to drive to work this morning!
Me: That's silly, it's only 10 minutes walk and parking is expensive! I have an umbrella.

3 hours later:
Weather: Rain! Thunder! Lightning! Strong winds!
BOM: So hey it might hail today! o/

In conclusion:
Your mother is always right.

I have a work lunch to go to up the road, hopefully someone around here has a car I can hitch a lift in.

Various things that have come up in conversation recently that I thought I'd link here just in case anybody was interested.

- http://www.subversity.net/reversing/hacking-minesweeper MINESWEEPER CHEATS!
Edit: Seems this has been updated from when I last read it and it isn't actually all that bad. But interesting, all the same.

- Band I Am Digging At The Moment: The Hush Sound. Well, this is a few months late. But still, they're awesome, I love them.

- If anyone else was at Peter Combe and missed the name of the opening act, it was de Grussa Spaceship. Also, Alex came home from Spices the other day with a Bubble-O-Bill. We are slowly defeating the man and his evil ice cream plan.

- My Last.fm profile. *coughs* Don't judge me.
Also I should really update my profile pic.

PS: Great party, tommmo! And happy birthday.

Because on Saturday pennae told me to post more recipes. This is one of the few recipes I've ever made up.

Ingredients:
- 200g mushrooms, sliced
- 2 sticks celery, chopped
- 1 leek, chopped
- 1 tsp Massel's 'chicken-style' stock powder*
- 1 cup water
- 1 tbsp cornflour
- pepper
- 2 sheets puff pastry

Method:
Preheat oven.
Saute the mushrooms, celery and leek until they soften. Dissolve the stock powder and cornflour in water, then pour into pan. Stir with mushroom mixture until the stock has thickened- 2 sheets puff pastry and you get bored vegies are softish. Add pepper to taste.
Line some kind of baking dish with puff pastry, pour in mushroom mixture, top pie with remaining puff pastry.
Cook until golden.
Serve with steamed vegetables.

Result:
The base of my pie was still soft when it was very gold on the top and sides, so I decided to just put up with a soft base. Any suggestions for avoiding this? Was the oven not hot enough?
It tasted good, anyway. Alex agreed!
I sprinked cinnamon and sugar on the pastry offcuts and baked them until golden. Delicious.


* I love this stuff, it's so tasty.

Our hot water heater is leaking, and from the kitchen window it looks like there is steam billowing up from the ground. It's kind of awesome.

... the plumber is supposed to come today.

Thought #1: Man, I miss eating katsudon.

Thought #2: We have those vegetarian schnitzels in the freezer that you can cook in the toaster.

Result: Fake katsudon, very tasty. I basically boiled onions in soy sauce, mirin and Massel's 'chicken' stock, cooked some beaten egg in the soup and then poured it over the sliced schnitzels and rice.

...
In other news, am not dead, despite not posting at all in the month of June. Am, however, a hermit.

At work I have been wrangled into programming in both VB.NET and whatever version of VB they use in classic ASP, which is somewhat less than cool.

Got my wedding dress, have given it to seamstress to make necessary modifications. Hopefully she will not set it on fire. Had great adventures with paperishcup trying to find shoes to wear before the fitting with the seamstress. In the end I bought some $10 silver shoes (marked down from $20! 50% saving!) from a discount shoe place just so I'd have something to wear for the fitting. Mum is experimenting with covering them with satin, so hey, maybe I'll actually end up wearing them. (Seamstress was somewhat less than happy, but oh well. It's not my fault nobody carries flat non-white pretty shoes in my size at a price I'm willing to pay.)

I've been on a Beatles kick. This is very nostalgic. Think I need to buy Yellow Submarine on DVD as theducks has never seen it. ("Hey, would you believe me if I told you I was being followed by a yellow submarine?")

TODO: Make LJ entries less vapid.

The problem with quitting WoW and then having to buy a new computer is that now I have no real way to squeal about how awesome my new computer is. It does everything in much the same way as the old one, despite being 2.5 years newer and Intel and dual-core.

I appear to have come down with a cold, which sucks. Today I was going to go to the Perth Science Fiction Club meeting but I feel so wretched I may just mope around home. And make soup for my new regime of lunch-taking.

Well, a new motherboard/processor/ram/hard drive, which is essentially the same thing.

A few more questions about Ubuntu:
- How the heck do I make it let me use the trash can on my FAT32-formatted drives? It's currently claiming it can only delete items permanently.
- Speaking of which, what's the best way to mount your FAT32 partitions? Currently it's seeing them as Removable Media, which strikes me as a little odd. Alex had a bit of a play with fstab but... I dunno. I'm confused. Is there a way to make them permanently appear in the Nautilus sidebar without mounting them in /media?
- Link me your favourite themes here!

I'd forgotten that FAT32 has a crazy low filesize limit. *wonders what to do with her large video files*

Biggest freak out so far using Ubuntu: being unable to right click and drag. Apparently it's middle click and drag, and it doesn't have the 'unarchive' functionality most Windows archival apps have. Also I couldn't drag and drop from the archive client to the location I wanted to unzip the files to. I had to use the menu. It was very traumatic!

It was also while using the archive utility when I had my first "zomg spaces in the file/folder name" failure. Heh.

I like the OS, I think, it's just at the moment I'm feeling like such a Windows user and trying to get my head around a completely new way of looking at my computer.

So since the UniClub has increased their prices and the government has removed salary packaging food, the Guild sucks, Broadway is crowded and has limited vegie options, I am contemplating *gasp* bringing my own lunch.

Only problem: I still hate sandwiches.

So, what are your favourite (vegetarian) lunches that do not involve bread products? I'm thinking of things I can freeze and reheat, like curries and casseroles and soups, or salads (although coming into winter maybe salads are inappropriate). At any rate, stuff I can make a few days in advance.

I made a very nice fennel, leek and mushroom barley pilaf last week. And apple crumble for dessert. Mmmmm. Only I now have lots of rolled oats to use up - suggestions for that also welcome.

It just stopped working, no warning, and when I hit the little button to shut down the machine the dock crashed and I had to do a hard reboot.

Conclusion: unhappy sound device, which is unfortunate because it's onboard sound.