The kiss of the cold
Barely a faint memory
The very air melts

It was amusing to be assigned to write a haiku about winter when I live in a place without This creative writing unit is shaping up to be a lot of fun.

As per arotulon’s request, here are some more pictures from “up north”

amy said this is the truck she wants for the zombie apocalypse, matthias said the truck looks small standing next to amy

the pilbara "red dog"

The red dog is a Pilbara legend, it is safe to google “red dog” (I just checked, you never know). There is an Australian movie in the works about this story that I’m looking foward to seeing.

http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?groupid=3517&HistoryID=ab33&gtrack=pthc

“A” appears to be the only commonly represented vowel in most ancient alphabets. This reminds me of shorthand, in which only consonants are recorded because the note taker knows the English language so intimately they can transcribe full words from the abbreviated form. These ancient alphabets assumed the reader’s intimate knowledge of the spoken language.

This raises the question of why “A” is represented. How often did it represent 1 as it does in English? Was it often considered the beginning of the alphabet, if these alphabets had a formal order at all? Was it often synonymous with first, as alpha is?

My recent food for thought in interlanguage communication has come from the Stargate television series. When a person from another planet asks a central character where they are from, the word “Earth” is not understood. The symbol Å, the stargate representation for our planet, is understood. The stargates distributed throughout the universe act as a rosetta stone to communicate place. However, the most advanced races used the periodic table elements to communicate formally when complex information needed to be understood.

This consideration of visual representation choices leads to the conclusion that communication must be in a form that can be understood by the reciever of the information. Simple  representations effectively communicate simple information in a way understood by a large number of people. The more specialised a topic is, the more specialised the communication becomes and the potential audience shrinks.

As a fan of cheeses and smallgoods, sausage making caught my eye as it seemed the less complicated of the two. I could start with simple fresh sausages then work my way through famous Eurpoean styles like bratwurst, chorizo and finally on to cured salamis if I was game.

In my mind is where the simplicity ended.

SAUSAGE MAKING ADVICE I WISH I HAD FOUND ON THE INTERNET

1. An old fashioned meat grinder with a sausage attachment is a good place to start. Mostly it’s a cheap place to start. All of the websites I found regarding sausage making tools either had machines for hundreds of dollars or were trying to sell their own contraptions. I found my hand crank one for $25 new on ebay.

2. Butchers don’t like to sell sausage casings,  expect a sneer of disdain or a territorial display if you ask. I found two Australian online suppliers http://www.countrybrewer.com.au/category6_1.htm and http://www.bakeandbrew.com.au/category35_1.htm

3. Just because it says it is a sausage stuffing attachment does mean the sausage casings fit over it! I had to think “what would MacGuyver do?” and ended up getting a silicone sealant tip from Mitre 10 Karratha. I mention the name because the owner gave me two differnt sizes to experiment with for free, something only found in independent hardware stores.

Too wide and not long enough!

4. You need more than two hands to make sausages. It is difficult to push meat into the machine, crank the handle, control the fill rate and support the heavy sausage in fragile skin all at once.

But it was all worth the effort in the end. We had eight fresh beef and thyme sausages for our dinner

not equally sized, but equally delicious

]]> http://thinklaterally23.wordpress.com/2010/02/27/learning-to-make-sausages/feed/ 2 thinklaterally23 005 004 http://thinklaterally23.wordpress.com/2010/02/05/im-back/ http://thinklaterally23.wordpress.com/2010/02/05/im-back/#comments Fri, 05 Feb 2010 06:10:28 +0000 thinklaterally23 http://thinklaterally23.wordpress.com/?p=38 ]]> Well, it’s been 7 months since my last post but the statistics are still showing visits to this blog so I shall keep going with it.

My ambitous reading list fell by the wayside with a move to Karratha, Western Australia. This is the real Outback; red dirt, flies and blistering heat. Amazing geological stuctures, mangroves and tidal flats characterise the coastline while the inland is so vast and flat you can see the curvature of the Earth.

Last weekend we found the rock art on the Burrup Penninsula which has been features in the news recently.

I experimented with the scanning of an ISBN barcode on my work computer and it worked when I was searching in amazon. I wonder how much a scanner for home would cost…

I have previously had a little flutter of interest, perhaps two years ago, and added it to my Facebook account. The Facebook application is called “My LibraryThing” and states that:
”This is an unofficial app and is not built or maintained by LibraryThing.
This application will allow you to import lists of books from your LibraryThing account and display them on your facebook profile page. If you do not yet have a LibraryThing account, you may do so by visiting LibraryThing.com.
Once you have entered your LibraryThing username into the corresponding text box above, you may then also enter a list of tags that you have assigned to your books. These tags should be a simple comma-separated value list, such as:
now reading,unread,quantum mechanics
You may then head over to the settings page where you can give your tags more meaningful descriptions for your profile. “

I am finding that the My LibraryThing Facebook application is not responding well. It is having difficulty downloading the pages for me to edit my settings. Perhaps that’s just IE, will try Firefox and Chrome at home.

Like Paisley, I too was confused about the items I was instructed to install. After running into several brick walls and finally giving up, I went on to the next page of instructions.

They asked me to upload my bookmarks as a bulk file! Now I don’t know about you, but my work bookmarks mainly consist of Library- and Universtiy-specific sites, which are either irrelevant or inaccessible to the outside world. My home bookmarks mainly consist of  banking and social networking sites.

I don’t want to show the world my bookmarks!

I had never considered what “postmodernism” is, nor many other labels for that matter, choosing instead to place value on works according to what they gave to me personally. I read for entertainment, liking some information about places, times or events I would never see. Accuracy was not a priority, I freely granted artistic license and gladly suspended my disbelief in the name of fun. Thus cocooned in a happy innocence I developed a love of reading.

Now I embark on the next step of the journey, developing an understanding of reading. I was previously not critical, but judgemental, abandoning any book which bored me. To reverse that, I must not be judgemental, but consider why a book bores me and to appreciate its subtleties. I must also be critical, stepping back and taking the overview of the book, the author and the zeitgeist. The next section of The Well-Educated Mind is about how to read a novel, which will hopefully tell me more about what to read for. It’s all a little vague because I don’t know what I don’t know because I don’t know it!

I have subscribed to all of your blogs (do brownie points result in brownies? Yum!) and also Library Mofo (strong language warning), which comforts me by knowing that others feel the same pain I do. Failblog, lolcats and loldogs will afford me little moments of levity, as well as SOX fodder, throughout the day.

Frivolity aside, I am looking forward to reading Chloe’s Garden. She has fantastic gardens and is very observant. She also includes lots of photos, which are helping me learn plant identification. I discovered her blog using the feedmil site shown to us in the workshop.

I wasn’t sure I wanted yet another account to add to my Facebook, MySpace, msn, 2 email accounts and several online footy tipping competitions, not to mention all of the passwords I need to remember for work!

However, being an Intrepid Cyberspace Adventurer, I boldly allocated the last of my memory capacity to yet another username and password. This is when my disenchantment ended.

I don’t have to delete messages to make room for new ones! I can mark messages with a star (something I do with important things in Real Life)! I can have a pretty picture in the background! I can chat with my friends through all pages, even when reading email! I have a search gadget on all pages! I don’t even have to login to check my mail, it’s in an iGoogle gadget!

So, suitably impressed, I venture on into the Land of Blog (I guess we could now call this metablogging). I chose WordPress because Bookbuster promised bells and whistles. I like bells and whistles, but will only venture as much as I have time for. I like the Themes. Without them, it would take a lot longer to make things pretty. However, I do wish I could alter them just a little. The one I really liked needed a wider column for the text.

I find blogging itself quite time-consuming, but no more so than keeping a paper journal. To save time, I have taken to writing in a Word document kept on my Desktop and then pasting it into the blog post. As I can only find snippets of a few minutes here and there, I don’t want to waste them logging into WordPress.

If any of you would like to join me in any of the readings, I would love to hear what you have to say.

Having read the introductory section, which compares self-directed learning with tertiary education and discusses good learning habits, I have decided to undertake the reading list called “Reading Through History With the Novel”.

1. MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
   Don Quixote, 1605
2. JOHN BUNYAN
   The Pilgrim’s Progress, 1679
3. JOHNATHAN SWIFT
   Gulliver’s Travels, 1726
4. JANE AUSTEN
   Pride and Prejudice, 1815
5. CHARLES DICKENS
   Oliver Twist, 1838
6. CHARLOTTE BRONTE
   Jane Eyre, 1847
7. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
   The Scarlet Letter, 1850
8. HERMAN MELVILLE
   Moby-Dick, 1851
9. HARRIET BEECHER STOWE
   Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1851
10. GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
    Madame Bovary, 1857
11. FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY
    Crime and Punishment, 1866
12. LEO TOLSTOY
    Anna Karenina, 1877
13. THOMAS HARDY
    The Return of the Native, 1878
14. HENRY JAMES
    Portrait of a Lady, 1881
15. MARK TWAIN
    Huckleberry Finn, 1884
16. STEPHEN CRANE
    The Red Badge of Courage, 1895
17. JOSEPH CONRAD
    Heart of Darkness, 1902
18. EDITH WHARTON
    The House of Mirth, 1905
19. F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
    The Great Gatsby, 1925
20. VIRGINIA WOOLF
    Mrs. Dalloway, 1925
21. FRANZ KAFKA
    The Trial, 1925
22. RICHARD WRIGHT
    Native Son, 1940
23. ALBERT CAMUS
    The Stranger, 1942
24. GEORGE ORWELL
    1984, 1949
25. RALPH ELLISON
    Invisible Man, 1952
26. SAUL BELLOW
    Seize the Day, 1956
27. GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
    One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967
28. ITALO CALVINO
    If on a winter’s night a traveller, 1972
29. TONI MORRISON
    Song of Solomon, 1977
30. DON DELILLO
    White Noise, 1985
31. A.S. BYATT
    Possession, 1990

This is a somewhat daunting list, made less so by the fact that there is neither time limit nor any grades to be achieved.

Through this task, I hope to gain a deeper understanding of humanity. To hear the voices of those long gone and those I will never meet.

Some of these books I have already read, others I know of and some are completely unfamiliar to me. I have prejudices about some, which will be interesting to confront on my path.