As usual, my blog posts have been sporadic, and this is no different.
I don't even remember the last time I blogged, would have to check the dates last, but it doesn't really matter at all.
2014. Its been a stressful year already, and we're only 27 days in. Still working in retail, still looking for work. Life has been reasonably good however, and besides financial stress, things are moving along.
I've been rejected for a few job applications, but have another application in the hands of a HR department, perhaps if I'm lucky, I'll get another interview. I am now a co-owner of two mortgages, and thats the financial stress part. Come later in the year, if we're lucky, we might have a third mortgage. Of course, associated with that, it also includes that I'll be getting married later this year, which, is also another stress too.
But, stress makes us grow. So long as its not too much that it stunts our ability to develop and grow.
Started into the world of making soap now too. Along with 3D printing, so many projects on my plate.
Well, who knows when the next post will be, Happy 2014 everyone!
Monday 27 January 2014
Wednesday 4 January 2012
Homebrewing
So, it isn't illegal in Australia to homebrew, so long as you don't distil your brew. I started my 3rd attempt today. My first attempt was a kiwi based concoction, my second a mango and apple, and today, an apricot and apple.
Each batch has had its differences, besides the obvious differences in starting fruit base.
The kiwi was a 1:1 weight ratio of fruit to sugar. Bakers yeast. Small container, limited air interaction. 10 day ferment and rapid cooking off to kill any further ferment. Quite sweet, and after about a month, the flavours changed due to the yeast bodies still present. Hint of kiwi present, alcohol content unmeasured.
The mango apple was no white sugar, but only two tablespoons of honey as yeast food. A waterlock method to keep all air interactions out. Ferment until no further gas exchange occurred. 2 month aging, with a secondary ferment after some raw sugar was added for balance. The result was quite sharp, definitely not as palatable as the kiwi. Definitely no mango or apple flavours present. Measured at 2.5-3% alcohol by volume.
This latest is a 1:1:.75 apricot:apple:white sugar. Also with bakers yeast. I am currently fermenting using a vat which is more similar to traditional wine type making, so I will periodically stir the mash through until the ferment ceases, probably around 10-14 days. Then I will bottle into plastic bottles to age slightly before a filtration through a rough filter, then some further balance and ageing before a fine filtration. The sugar content was 1kg to 1.5kg total fruit weight, hopefully it won't be as sharp as there is plenty of sugar to digest without the yeast producing acids, but not so much to make it super sweet, like with the kiwi.
Only time will tell how it goes.
Monday 2 January 2012
Fresh for 2012, wrapping up 2011
So, 2011 was a rather interesting year for me, and now well into 2012, besides having to get used to writing dates with 2012 on it, I'm not quite sure what will befall me in the coming period of time.
2011 saw me do a lot of shooting. Probably not as much as I could have ultimately done in the last quarter of the year, but certainly I did more shooting in the year than I had ever imagined I would ever do. 2011 also saw me spend a significant chunk of my savings in going overseas for an earnest experience of international level archery. Certainly expensive, but well worth it.
Friendships developed and changed over the year also, and I am amazed at how I have been able to sustain, and even develop friendships between people that I didn't see on a regular basis at all.
Life goes on, and so do jobs also. My employment at the university is currently over, but a grant application has been submitted. While it originally seemed rather positive, some kind of miscommunication and misunderstanding of our concept means that it isn't anywhere as positive as we had originally though it would be, so its hard to say if the grant will be successful in the end or not. To that, I have applied for at least one position currently with the Australian Public Service.
I guess the only other major thing for the year of interest and note is me dabbling in watercolour art, having painted a few pieces now, I really do find it enjoyable but frustrating at times in terms of developing my technique and getting pieces to look how I wanted. I don't do too much of it at the moment due to space availability to set up painting, but we'll see how 2012 goes for that too. You can see my works on my deviantart profile (same ID tag as everything else).
So, happy new year, and perhaps I will be more active in blogging again.
Cheers~
Thursday 8 September 2011
Shanghai or shang-nay?
So, of late, I've been doing my shooting thing, working still at the university conducting research. However though, in a recent state of affairs, I went overseas for two months to train and compete at a variety of events in the USA and Canada.
Prior to me heading overseas, the same week of my departure, I was contacted by a research group leader from a division of Firmenich, one of the worlds largest fragrance and flavours companies in the world, with the person interested in my for a position in their company, located in Shanghai, China. Poor timing to be honest, and I told them that they'd have to wait for 2 months essentially since I would be away. No problems, send us your CV they told me, so I did.
In any case, when I returned, I sent off an email saying I was back, if they were still interested in talking to me after having had my CV for two months, and bam, same day response wishing to arrange a telephone conversation as soon as possible.
I had the phone conversation today with the fellow, lasted nearly an hour and twenty minutes. Quite an extensive discussion, mostly him with questions regarding my chemical engineering related matters, how I got to the PhD when I didn't have a Chem Eng background, what I did my project on, equipment used, my experiences at Lang Technology, research methodologies and so forth. It was so long I don't really remember it all.
I don't know what they were exactly after and I'm sure I probably am not realistically 100% what they thought I would be, but, they did have my CV for two months, so if they weren't sure about something, they wouldn't have taken the time to talk to me for so long, though he took extensive notes since he used speakerphone so he could write.
Now comes the waiting. One to two weeks, if I haven't heard from him, contact him to follow it up.
Though while I wait, I dug around the internet for information. Their company pays approximately $81k USD for positions of that nature in the US, whether it will be comparable in China (ie, payscale to US rates, or to Chinese rates, or heaven forbid, Swiss rates since they are a Swiss head company) or not is to be seen. If it is a direct translation across, then that comes to quite a 'well off' rate in China. My cousin lives and works in Shanghai and earns ~$42k Australian a year but his housing and meals are covered by his employers. In my situation, it would not be, so the package values would need different considerations.
My parents recently where in China in GuangZhou for my brothers wedding arrangement matters, so they said for that area, meals are cheap, around 5-6 RMB/meal, where you could eat like a rich man at 30 RMB/meal. Well, put that into perspective, the current exchange rates put $1 Australian at 6 RMB.... which, the US is also a 1:6 currently. However, housing is one big cost issue dependant upon locality, and can cost in the thousands of US/month as they are 'expat' buildings which communities of foreigners live in.
While I have no problems working overseas, my primary concerns for working in China be health ans safety. The pollution, quality of food (e.g. fake foods, poisoned foods/pesticides etc), and healthcare (health insurance? pay-through-the-nose medical bills?). There is also the great firewall of China, but I have been told that a adequately set up VPN will fix that problem fine and dandy.
Of course, all of this is idle speculation if they are not actually interested in making an offer, but if they do make an offer, I ponder what kind of package would I accept to make a very large leap to somewhere I had not really considered working prior to this situation.
Tuesday 26 April 2011
Delta Force Paintball - Appin
So, I went paintballing again for someones 21st yesterday at DeltaForce paintball, at their Appin location in NSW, just south of Campbelltown.
I must say, their facilities and course, along with the packages available, were pretty ordinary.
First impressions of the place was pretty mundane, a tin shed with loud obnoxious music blaring in the side of a light forest environment with zero signage on the main road leading in is pretty bad. Its very easy to shoot past the entrance road to the place from the main road, very lacking in clear signs and direction.
Once you head inside, the appearance of the place is also quite ordinary, just a counter bench with racks of masks and packs, a single fridge and some lockers, with a marshalling area. In the marshalling area are some picnic tables, and a small toilet block (for the male toilet it was 2 stalls, 1 urinal, 2 sinks, on tank water, personally I would say it was non-potable water).
You get overalls and a chest vest standard along with a waist velcro horizontal 4 pod pack (very old and crappy pack and crappy pods that were extremely hard to close and open, in terrible condition. The velcro on the packs had gone to crap also, and during gameplay several people and me inclusive had pods fall out due to the velcro not holding, so either lost paint from pods opening up on impact, or completely losing pods and not realising it. Lame.)and a fully enclosed mask (very dirty lenses, they 'wash' them every day is the claim for the reason why the straps are wet, but they are in terrible visual condition. I can accept that they would be scuffed up and scratched etc, but clean they were not. Especially if out on the field all they do is use a ratty towel to wipe with), along with an Inferno field Mk2 (http://www.arrow-precision.com/infernos.html) that has probably seen slightly better days (hoppers with bad lids, with chunks of plastic broken off lids, hinges that came off the hopper completely like mine did at one point when I was trying to field reload, and these markers jammed incredibly easy, not a single game went by that I didn't have to clear the chamber manually).
They supply paint to you either in pods filled (lots of 100) or bulk (in multiples of 500 as the boxes of 2000 are split as 4x 500 bags inside). Lockers are supplied at $5 with a $1 refund upon return of key, while gloves and cups are available for purchase also. For those who have glasses, they offer half-visor masks, but this was not told to me until the end of the day when I commented about spending the day without my glasses on.
Course-wise, the terrain maps were reasonable, nothing spectacular but most courses are like that. The maps used in our session was Speedball (old barrels and a big gas tank, set up like a tournament speedball with inflatables), London (old double-decker bus with phone pill boxes), Tomb Raider (timber and fibreglass pyramid with sphinxes), Graveyard (big sarcophagi that they called crypts, technically incorrect since you can't actually enter these if they were real, with big gravestones of wood that had cross-shaped spaces cut out of the middle) and Prison (timber huts with lookout towers you couldn't get into with mesh fencing and hay bales).
Game wise, we had speedball (team deathmatch), capture the flag (where you had to take the flag to the opposing team's base), domination (most players touching the sarcophagi at the end time), deathmatch (every person for themselves, they called it total annihilation but that was pretty lame actually), and tomb raider (4 blocks of 'gold' in the pyramid, 1 person is designated raider, only they can take the gold, must take gold back to base and you can raid opposing base, end of time most gold wins). The best one I felt was tomb raider, the worst was total annihilation.
Tomb raider worked pretty well as you could bunker down and cover for your raider, while at the same time allowed you to push around the map to contain and retrieve gold from the opposition if needed, very dynamic if your team was willing to do some teamwork since only the raider is allowed inside the pyramid.
Total annihilation was utter crap as it was a free-for-all melee with everyone on the day (i.e. people who weren't part of your group) and you only had 10 seconds to scatter in a TINY space (for the number of people involved, it was the London map) before the paint went flying. I personally got 2 before my marker jammed and I got nailed, but it was over very quickly for most people, before those remaining had a long standoff while everyone stood around and waited. It literally took about 10min for the game to be setup and start, about 20 seconds of play for 90% of people, then another 5 minutes of waiting before we headed back to the marshalling area to wait again before the next game. Worst game they did.
In terms of service, lunch was domino's pizza from the local pizza joint like 20 minutes away. It wasn't hot when it arrived since it was so far away to get to the paintball location, and had to be ordered at the start of the day or prior to the day, I don't know how much it cost but I ponder if the paintball place placed additional cost on the pizza for their commission/profit. The counter staff took ages to process (a good 3-4min to give me 50c change) a purchase of water ($3.50 for a 600mL bottle of spring water, $3.00 for 365mL Coca-cola varieties, $5.00 for 600mL powerade).
In terms of marshalling, the marshalls were terrible at it. You couldn't hear them (no whistles or signals, just their weak voices), unprofessional behaviours (dry-firing rapidfire bursts at people, threatening to shoot people in the neck, not knowing the rules to the games to be played and deciding then and there what to use as rules, forgetting game rules while explaining), and just in general didn't really make them well suited to the role. I felt that they were people who where just players standing around watching a game of paintball, rather than actual marshalls.
Overall, while it was an okay experience, I felt that this place could have done a lot better. Experience wise for those who have never played paintball, it's enough to know what paintball is, but isn't really a great experience to know what paintball could be like at its best. Some small changes and improvements could be done and they would probably be a much better venue.
I must say, their facilities and course, along with the packages available, were pretty ordinary.
First impressions of the place was pretty mundane, a tin shed with loud obnoxious music blaring in the side of a light forest environment with zero signage on the main road leading in is pretty bad. Its very easy to shoot past the entrance road to the place from the main road, very lacking in clear signs and direction.
Once you head inside, the appearance of the place is also quite ordinary, just a counter bench with racks of masks and packs, a single fridge and some lockers, with a marshalling area. In the marshalling area are some picnic tables, and a small toilet block (for the male toilet it was 2 stalls, 1 urinal, 2 sinks, on tank water, personally I would say it was non-potable water).
You get overalls and a chest vest standard along with a waist velcro horizontal 4 pod pack (very old and crappy pack and crappy pods that were extremely hard to close and open, in terrible condition. The velcro on the packs had gone to crap also, and during gameplay several people and me inclusive had pods fall out due to the velcro not holding, so either lost paint from pods opening up on impact, or completely losing pods and not realising it. Lame.)and a fully enclosed mask (very dirty lenses, they 'wash' them every day is the claim for the reason why the straps are wet, but they are in terrible visual condition. I can accept that they would be scuffed up and scratched etc, but clean they were not. Especially if out on the field all they do is use a ratty towel to wipe with), along with an Inferno field Mk2 (http://www.arrow-precision.com/infernos.html) that has probably seen slightly better days (hoppers with bad lids, with chunks of plastic broken off lids, hinges that came off the hopper completely like mine did at one point when I was trying to field reload, and these markers jammed incredibly easy, not a single game went by that I didn't have to clear the chamber manually).
They supply paint to you either in pods filled (lots of 100) or bulk (in multiples of 500 as the boxes of 2000 are split as 4x 500 bags inside). Lockers are supplied at $5 with a $1 refund upon return of key, while gloves and cups are available for purchase also. For those who have glasses, they offer half-visor masks, but this was not told to me until the end of the day when I commented about spending the day without my glasses on.
Course-wise, the terrain maps were reasonable, nothing spectacular but most courses are like that. The maps used in our session was Speedball (old barrels and a big gas tank, set up like a tournament speedball with inflatables), London (old double-decker bus with phone pill boxes), Tomb Raider (timber and fibreglass pyramid with sphinxes), Graveyard (big sarcophagi that they called crypts, technically incorrect since you can't actually enter these if they were real, with big gravestones of wood that had cross-shaped spaces cut out of the middle) and Prison (timber huts with lookout towers you couldn't get into with mesh fencing and hay bales).
Game wise, we had speedball (team deathmatch), capture the flag (where you had to take the flag to the opposing team's base), domination (most players touching the sarcophagi at the end time), deathmatch (every person for themselves, they called it total annihilation but that was pretty lame actually), and tomb raider (4 blocks of 'gold' in the pyramid, 1 person is designated raider, only they can take the gold, must take gold back to base and you can raid opposing base, end of time most gold wins). The best one I felt was tomb raider, the worst was total annihilation.
Tomb raider worked pretty well as you could bunker down and cover for your raider, while at the same time allowed you to push around the map to contain and retrieve gold from the opposition if needed, very dynamic if your team was willing to do some teamwork since only the raider is allowed inside the pyramid.
Total annihilation was utter crap as it was a free-for-all melee with everyone on the day (i.e. people who weren't part of your group) and you only had 10 seconds to scatter in a TINY space (for the number of people involved, it was the London map) before the paint went flying. I personally got 2 before my marker jammed and I got nailed, but it was over very quickly for most people, before those remaining had a long standoff while everyone stood around and waited. It literally took about 10min for the game to be setup and start, about 20 seconds of play for 90% of people, then another 5 minutes of waiting before we headed back to the marshalling area to wait again before the next game. Worst game they did.
In terms of service, lunch was domino's pizza from the local pizza joint like 20 minutes away. It wasn't hot when it arrived since it was so far away to get to the paintball location, and had to be ordered at the start of the day or prior to the day, I don't know how much it cost but I ponder if the paintball place placed additional cost on the pizza for their commission/profit. The counter staff took ages to process (a good 3-4min to give me 50c change) a purchase of water ($3.50 for a 600mL bottle of spring water, $3.00 for 365mL Coca-cola varieties, $5.00 for 600mL powerade).
In terms of marshalling, the marshalls were terrible at it. You couldn't hear them (no whistles or signals, just their weak voices), unprofessional behaviours (dry-firing rapidfire bursts at people, threatening to shoot people in the neck, not knowing the rules to the games to be played and deciding then and there what to use as rules, forgetting game rules while explaining), and just in general didn't really make them well suited to the role. I felt that they were people who where just players standing around watching a game of paintball, rather than actual marshalls.
Overall, while it was an okay experience, I felt that this place could have done a lot better. Experience wise for those who have never played paintball, it's enough to know what paintball is, but isn't really a great experience to know what paintball could be like at its best. Some small changes and improvements could be done and they would probably be a much better venue.
Tuesday 29 March 2011
Status update
So, my folks went off for a three week trip yesterday to Taiwan to take care of our ancestors graves. Taking along with them 20kg of presents in typical Asian fashion -_-; Hopefully they have a great trip and come back safe and sound.
In the meantime, I am being fairly home-bound for the purposes of anti-burglar protection, even though we have an alarm and neighbours who know my parents are away. We typically have someone at home almost always, so for piece of mind I guess I am consciously choosing to do so too when I can.
It's been a while since I've 'cooked' since I was away in New York, not counting occasions at parties etc. I made a simple tomato rice tonight, standard rice in rice cooker with a dash of salt, and a few chopped up tomatoes (chopped quite fine) and set into the cooker. I put in extra water so it would be a little spongey since if the rice was really dry, the tomato flavour wouldn't really have any opportunity to seep and infuse through the rice.
The rest of the meal was fairly ordinary since it is leftovers from yesterday though I did make my brother's lunch, which includes sweet scrambled eggs (Japanese style) with some shredded fresh carrot marinated in chilli oil (I made the oil in 2006, so it's steeped a really good portion of the chilli flavours) along with the tomato rice so hopefully he finds it relatively edible lol.
I got some potato, pumpkin, eggplant and zucchi today at the supermarket and the checkout lady told me I was really healthy as everyone else is just buying junk food and chocolate, and I should keep it up XD...
Hmm, besides my errant shooting, and the usual watching of television shows, nothing else is particularly new that I have to discuss except that, as it is, life is good, nothing to complain about though financially I'm in a slowly sinking hole, but thats just how it is when your income isn't as fast as your expenditure. But, I have a little while before I'm in trouble thankfully. Then I guess I'll have to really look for work proper instead of my shooting dreams.
I guess thats it for now. Though, I had a thought, I entered the 2012 Diversity Lottery last year... it's not May yet... so... if I get a letter from the US State Department.... uhhhh what will happen to my short term situation >_< Well, no point thinking bout it til it happens anyway :)
Over n out~
In the meantime, I am being fairly home-bound for the purposes of anti-burglar protection, even though we have an alarm and neighbours who know my parents are away. We typically have someone at home almost always, so for piece of mind I guess I am consciously choosing to do so too when I can.
It's been a while since I've 'cooked' since I was away in New York, not counting occasions at parties etc. I made a simple tomato rice tonight, standard rice in rice cooker with a dash of salt, and a few chopped up tomatoes (chopped quite fine) and set into the cooker. I put in extra water so it would be a little spongey since if the rice was really dry, the tomato flavour wouldn't really have any opportunity to seep and infuse through the rice.
The rest of the meal was fairly ordinary since it is leftovers from yesterday though I did make my brother's lunch, which includes sweet scrambled eggs (Japanese style) with some shredded fresh carrot marinated in chilli oil (I made the oil in 2006, so it's steeped a really good portion of the chilli flavours) along with the tomato rice so hopefully he finds it relatively edible lol.
I got some potato, pumpkin, eggplant and zucchi today at the supermarket and the checkout lady told me I was really healthy as everyone else is just buying junk food and chocolate, and I should keep it up XD...
Hmm, besides my errant shooting, and the usual watching of television shows, nothing else is particularly new that I have to discuss except that, as it is, life is good, nothing to complain about though financially I'm in a slowly sinking hole, but thats just how it is when your income isn't as fast as your expenditure. But, I have a little while before I'm in trouble thankfully. Then I guess I'll have to really look for work proper instead of my shooting dreams.
I guess thats it for now. Though, I had a thought, I entered the 2012 Diversity Lottery last year... it's not May yet... so... if I get a letter from the US State Department.... uhhhh what will happen to my short term situation >_< Well, no point thinking bout it til it happens anyway :)
Over n out~
Tuesday 15 February 2011
Colgate 360° Acti-flex
Its yet another review~!
Today, we have the Colgate 360° Acti-flex toothbrush. The claim is that the bristles on the central portion of the toothbrush swivels and flexes side to side, providing a better angular clean.
Initial impression from holding it is that the handle is as bad as all the other ones from Colgate of late, I think I still far prefer the design of the Reach toothbrush, nice and simple but effective. The swept back arch is too curved for my liking and the grip pad of soft-gel material is pretty useless in my hand.
The brush head is bristle only, no rubber bits for polishing or nubs to do goodness knows what else, but that suits me fine. Medium stiffness (as by choice). The swivel part is really a unsupported base of the bristles that is connected by a thin bridge of plastic on the edge of the base that allows it to wiggle. I wouldn't so much call it a swivel but really a wiggle. The rigid plastic behaviour returns the segment back to the central neutral position if force isn't applied, though I wonder if prolognued use will fatigue and soften this so that it ends up not returning to the middle.
As for brushing sensation, it's actually quite nice. The bristles are firm and provide what feels to be a good clean. I can't physically tell any difference in how the head flex changes anything to the brushing sensation, and brushing while looking in the mirror also doesn't really show much difference in bristle action since the angular change of the bristles is I'd say maybe 15° in either direction at best.
I wonder if by providing angled bristles would provide a similar affect upon the teeth and gaps being brushed, without the swivel base.
That said, I bought it on special anyway, so it wasn't a big deal though, I would say its not the best brush that I've experienced on first impressions.
Today, we have the Colgate 360° Acti-flex toothbrush. The claim is that the bristles on the central portion of the toothbrush swivels and flexes side to side, providing a better angular clean.
Initial impression from holding it is that the handle is as bad as all the other ones from Colgate of late, I think I still far prefer the design of the Reach toothbrush, nice and simple but effective. The swept back arch is too curved for my liking and the grip pad of soft-gel material is pretty useless in my hand.
The brush head is bristle only, no rubber bits for polishing or nubs to do goodness knows what else, but that suits me fine. Medium stiffness (as by choice). The swivel part is really a unsupported base of the bristles that is connected by a thin bridge of plastic on the edge of the base that allows it to wiggle. I wouldn't so much call it a swivel but really a wiggle. The rigid plastic behaviour returns the segment back to the central neutral position if force isn't applied, though I wonder if prolognued use will fatigue and soften this so that it ends up not returning to the middle.
As for brushing sensation, it's actually quite nice. The bristles are firm and provide what feels to be a good clean. I can't physically tell any difference in how the head flex changes anything to the brushing sensation, and brushing while looking in the mirror also doesn't really show much difference in bristle action since the angular change of the bristles is I'd say maybe 15° in either direction at best.
I wonder if by providing angled bristles would provide a similar affect upon the teeth and gaps being brushed, without the swivel base.
That said, I bought it on special anyway, so it wasn't a big deal though, I would say its not the best brush that I've experienced on first impressions.
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