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The rarely updated blog of Joel Dixon

Viewing blogs posted in 2006

Saturday, April 29, 2006

Happy Happy Feijoa Joy!

# Posted by Joel Dixon at 29/04/2006 00:55:00

I like guava! I like the taste, I like the colour, and I like the texture. My love of guava started late when I was about 10 years old - primarily because of Mildura's Apple and Guava juice (which I found out many years later, is not juice - but a "fruit drink" full of sugar). Whenever I find a nice looking guava related product I'm always happied - and still buy some of the old "fruit drink" from time to time.

Belinda's favourite fruit is pineapple - which I can't say I particularity endorse, but whatever.

Anywho, just a few days ago Belinda discovered that the house we had recently bought has a Feijoa tree. The Feijoa tree, funnily enough, produces Feijoa fruit - otherwise known as the Pineapple Guava. Belinda and I both love the fruit - and have picked about 50 of them these last two days.

It tastes a little bit like a fruit salad, with a strong passionfruit / kiwi flavour. It's also been described as having a pineapple / guava / banana / strawberry taste - but I wouldn't go that far. I took some to work today - and almost noone had tried one before (except the resident New Zealander) - and everyone liked them.

Bell's also been looking into various Feijoa-based recipes. So I can expect a Feijoa based curry, muffins and gratin soon!

I thought it was pretty cool that our first house together has a magical plant which combines our two favourite fruits. Now I've just got to find out where the rare species of Tiger-Penguin is hiding in our backyard (he's probably surviving on feijoas).

# Posted in the General section

Sunday, April 23, 2006

Travel Log - Day 7 (Wet Wet Wet)

# Posted by Joel Dixon at 23/04/2006 23:45:00

We decided that the Niagara Falls part of our holiday was going to be the romantic / honeymooney part, so we kicked off Day 7 with breakfast in bed - delivered by a Canadian! While I organised our delightful breakfasts - Bell asked the hotel dude for the closest hockey store to the hotel. It just so happened that there was a store just up the road that was having their huge, yearly sale. Unfortunately, their yearly sale had already been going for over two months, and there was very little left. Bell picked up a pair of skates, and I got some cool hockey gloves that are apparently quite hard to get (from a small company).

Somewhat romantic, this is the view of the waterfall we had from our bed

It was pissing down all day, and the taxis weren't as heavily populated so we ended up walking around a lot. That wouldn't have been too bad at all (I had a good jacket with a hood, beanie, scarf etc) if it wasn't for the hole in my shoe. I had been waiting until Pittsburgh to buy a new pair of shoes - turns out my gamble didn't pay off.

One thing that surprised me about Niagara Falls was how much it resembled an amusement park. On the small strip near our hotel there were about 10 huge statues of various characters (Frankenstein, Dracula, The Hulk, etc) and quite a few questionable museums (Ripley's Believe it or Not Museum, Guinness Records Museums etc). I was going to post a few photos of these stores - until I realised that all the photos we took in Niagara Falls were of a waterfall (you can visit their website however).

After lunch we decided to get up close to the waterfalls, and get a little wetter. Excuse me for the copious amount of water photos that follows this paragraph:

The American Falls and the Bridal Falls (also visible from America)

Another view of the American and Bridal Falls (the Bridal Falls is the tiny block of water on the far right - it really doesn't deserve it's own name!)

One half of the Horseshoe Falls

The other half - all the mist in the middle made it appear to be raining where we were standing

I thought this looked kinda cool - this was when we were right up close to the falls

The closest we got to the edge

I don't think anyone else understood my interest in themed Coke machines

You could go down to behind the fall - see a wall of water!

I thought this was pretty cool - if this trend continues I can only assume that the whole of America will be eroded away one day (lucky we visited when we did!)

Shot from below / beside the falls

Thursday, April 20, 2006

Heeeeeeere Fishy, Fishy, Fishy, Fishy!

# Posted by Joel Dixon at 20/04/2006 22:41:00

The Dixon family now has some new additions! While most people eat lots of fish on Good Friday, we saved some from certain toilet-related death. We've had two large vases that Bell had always thought could be converted into fish tanks - and last Friday she went down to the pet store and bought six. We've finally decided on names (earlier suggestions such as Fluffy Apples, Gratch and Spot were left by the wayside), so I thought I'd formally introduce them.

They're kind of divided into two groups (as they're in two separate tanks) - my group is known as "The Carpet Munchers" as they took so long to swim to the top of the vase and eat their dinner. Allow me to introduce them formally, and fill you in on their secret skills (well, name origin):

Eric Cairns

Eric is the biggest fish we have, so I thought he'd be a good enforcer for the star in his vase. A good mate and myself had been following the career of a NHL enforcer named Eric Cairns partly because his surname can also refer to a female body part, but mainly because of his attitude to hockey (hockey fighting in particular).
Oh eck! Eric is Bananaman - a cartoon I used to watch a lot in my youth. I only just discovered now - that the whole show (male parts anyway) was voiced by The Goodies.
Eric's got no pull (see The Jerky Boys 4).
When we used to have chickens at our house - one was called Eric (named after my grandfather).

Crosby Scores

Due to the yellow, black and silver colouring - I chose to name this fish after the youngest player to score 100 points in the NHL - Sidney Crosby.
Even though he has more assists than goals in his rookie year - Bell thought "Scores" would be a good surname for Sid the Fish.
Although I put Eric in the vase with Crosby to protect him - turns out Crosby's a bit of a nutter. He keeps taking runs at his roommates - and sometimes swims straight into the glass walls.

Buster Rhymes

The final Carpet Muncher was called Buster as he was the smallest of all 6 fish. Although he's small - he's always at the top of the bowl when it's dinner time. Bell and I aren't necessarily huge fans of Busta Rhymes - but thought the surname fit.

Fins McGill

Bell thought of Fins as a good name for a fish - and decided to bestow this name on the fish with the white fins.

Tiger Fish

Bell's a big fan of Tigers, so when we decided Fluffy Apples was a stupid name, we went with Tiger Fish.

Lara Croft

Those who know Bell know of her Lara Croft obsession - so it was fair enough that one fish was named after the Tomb Raider.
Lara seems to be the smartest of the fish - as she was the first one game enough to eat the food we put in their bowls.
Lara was originally called Spot - until Belinda decided that the fish was definitely female.

Although not entirely related to our fish - I did get a boat load of Easter Eggs this year! Having a wife has benefits!

# Posted in the General section and tagged as: Pets

Thursday, April 13, 2006

Travel Log - Day 6 (Niagara Falls, eh?)

# Posted by Joel Dixon at 13/04/2006 19:52:00
Updated by Joel Dixon at 29/09/2007 15:55:10

Still haven't got Blogger working through our router - so I'm blogging this one through a Citrix client

After spending 5 enjoyable and enlightening days in New York, day 6 saw our first change of location. So far we had given some thanks, gone "down the park" and hung out with the K-Man. Out plan was to then spend a few days near Niagara Falls to fulfil the relaxing and romatic quota of the honeymoon.

The stopover in Niagara Falls was not even going to be about Canada at all - we had originally planned to visit the American side of the Falls, but was advised that the Canadian side was much nicer. I'm hoping to one day do Canada properly (watch a hockey game and check out the hockey hall of fame in Toronto, ski Whistler and ride a skidoo), so we kept this first visit to Nigara Falls.

We thought it might be a little cheaper to catch a train up, instead of flying - and it was. It was also a 9 hour trip, without the crapy movies that flying provides. Still, we kept ourselves entertained by looking out the window and pointing at pretty cool landscapes. The outskirts of New York State are quite nice to look at - and we also saw our first evidence of snow (no falls though).

Travelling to the Canadian side of the Falls also meant that we got an extra stamp on our passports, which sounded pretty cool. It also meant that we had to go through another "border check", which always made me extremely nervous. It's wierd, I know I'm not carrying weapons of mass destruction (only a weapon of mass seduction ... in my PANTS - ha, ha, ha - hilarious), I'm was pretty sure my passport / travel docs were in order - but I still got shit scared. Probably similar to the feeling of worry I have every time I swipe my credit card, just waiting for it to come back with "rejected" (even though it never has).

So after "bribing" the mounties (see afore mentioned pant-weapon) we were taken to our hotel, Sheraton on the Falls (as opposed to Sheraton Fallsview Hotel). When we were checking in, the guy on the counter said that we didn't have a view of the Falls, and we could upgrade to one for "this much" - and typed a figure into his calculator before showing it to me. When I told him we were on our honeymoon he suggested that we get a corner room and again let the calculator negotiate the price with me. Even with the upgrades, each night was cheaper in Niagara Falls than either of our New York hotels so I took the upgrade. Smart move!

The room was huge! Some hotels we stayed in had trouble fitting on all of our bags (as well as fitting in my trouser munitions - ok, last joke) - but this room had girth (*cough*)! The main part of the room was pretty damn big (heaps of room around a king-sized bed) and then there was a seperate couch area with fireplace, small sink / coffee area, large bathroom with jaccuzzi and a balcony.

Our room complete with fake fireplace (I guess the fireplace was real - but the fire was illusional)

The sink and coffee machine we never used

The bathroom with double jacuzzi and television (not pictured). The shower was also pretty cool, with a normal shower head as well as two horizontal jets

I called this part of our room "The Conservatory", and hid the candle stick and lead pipe I brought with us

After checking out the internal features of the room - I checked out the balcony. It was raining, so it wasn't incredibly cozy - but the view was pretty cool. Being close to Christmas, the surrounding park areas had lots of fairy lights covering the trees. The pictures we took don't really do them justice - it was very pretty.

Pretty lights, the yellow ones in the middle are hanging off a relvolving restaurant

More pretty lights, and you can just see Wendy's in the right

Not very clear - but you can just make out the Falls at night

Monday, April 03, 2006

Quite Quiet

# Posted by Joel Dixon at 03/04/2006 23:14:00

I've been trying to publish my newest day of the Travel Log goodness, but Blogger's not playing ball.

For some reason, whenever I login to Blogger to start posting, it takes frickin ages. Sometimes it eventually does load the create a post screen - but then I don't have my toolbar to upload pictures etc.

So in the mean time I've downloaded Lynx to provide my web browsing needs. It's actually quite good for a text browser, and easy to use. Extremely secure as well - with the small disadvantage of no images.

This is the real Web 2.0!

# Posted in the General section and tagged as: Web

Sunday, March 19, 2006

Blogging from the lounge room

# Posted by Joel Dixon at 19/03/2006 23:11:00

The 4 month anniversary of moving in to the new house was celebrated by two events: our house-warming party (which was great fun) and the installation of a wireless network. Not only am I never going to be stuck on dial-up again, but I am now blogging on my new Fujitsu Lifebook from the living room while watching "Australia's Brainiest Musician" (I guess I just assumed that Human Nature had broken up years ago).

I never really considered it before - but having Wikipedia handy while watching television is quite useful. I can also watch some gems like this during the ads.

One problem the laptop had given me was that I had wanted to start reading blogs whilst sitting around the house. I originally used Sharp Reader as my RSS aggregator (feed-reader) but I think I stopped using because it was crashing frequently. I have since used Sauce Reader (even after it was up for sale and stopped updating) and been very happy. But now I need to switch to a web-based feed-reader to synch my "read" blogs between my two computers. It was around this time that I discovered that Google had released Google Reader.

Easy to use (it allowed me to import the OPML from my current bloglist), nice keyboard shortcuts (good for laptops) and Google - suits me sir. And I've just now read an entry about C# jobs in New York - hmmm, I guess it's close to Pittsburgh!

# Posted in the General section and tagged as: Web

Monday, March 13, 2006

Travel Log - Day 5 (J-Dix on the six)

# Posted by Joel Dixon at 13/03/2006 00:22:00
Updated by Joel Dixon at 08/02/2008 12:38:43

The travel notes I took while on our trip tell me that we slept in again on Day 5 - and I'm not about to dispute it. A few weeks before our wedding I had planned on mapping out every day of our trip in detail. I didn't want to do a whole movie dad thing and map out every single minute of a "vacation", but I thought that, while we didn't have to stick to our plan - we'd have a good starting point. Of course, I never got around to finishing it - so we ended up waiting for a bus to Bronx for an hour before giving up and catching an (expensive) train (but it took us through Grand Central Station, which was nice).

Arriving in Bronx, the first thing we noticed was the complete lack of taxi cabs. Coming from the crazy taxi cab archon-board that is New York it was odd to not see any of the hacks around - and meant we had to walk about 2 kilometers to the entrance of Bronx Zoo.

Bronx Zoo - you can barely make out the ad for the "Holiday Lights" display on the left - man, that was as lame as the sign suggests

The zoo was ok - but definitely had an off-season feel to it (I couldn't go on my first monorail - D'oh!). We saw lots of animals but of course, I was more interested in enjoying my chocolate taco (whoever thought of making a chocolate / ice cream taco is a genius!).

He looks sad, but I assume it's just because he is thirsty

He thinks he's people

Contenders ... READY!!!

Gladiators ... READY!!!

Tapirs are the animal world's equivalent of James Carville

Feeding time for the giraffe's (yes, they're licking the walls)

Here kitty, kitty

I think I had three of these, and they weren't really that good. I was probably just impressed that I was eating an ice cream taco (there was a period I started to eat my broccoli when a brother suggested they looked a little like trees)

One thing that Belinda got a pretty good shot of was a tormented lion. They had a lion in one cage, and some prey (I don't know animals, I assume they're gazelle or impala) in the adjoining area - separated by a wooden fence. The lion was just stalking the fence trying to figure out how to get into the other cell - kind of sad really.

Monday, February 27, 2006

Travel Log - Day 4 (What is the deal with "New" York anyway?)

# Posted by Joel Dixon at 27/02/2006 22:37:00

... it's almost 400 years old (yes, I butchered a Family Guy joke)

Thankfully day 4 wasn't quite as cold as the day before, but it still wasn't toasty. On our way to the Internet Cafe (single dirtiest mouse I've ever touched) we got our first taste of American star-spotting. We actually saw one of my favourite actors - Samuel L. Jackson. He was just standing out the front of Madame Tussauds - but wasn't overly animated. I guess the stars are different in real-life then they are in the movies.

Sam Jackson - didn't seem too impressed when I offered him some triple-thick milkshake though

After picking up our tickets for the Phantom of the Opera for later that night we started "Kramer's Reality Tour". For those that don't know the story, Kenny Kramer lived across the hall from Larry David, co-creator of Seinfeld. When Jerry Seinfeld was offered a pilot for NBC he and David came up with "The Seinfeld Chronicles", named Seinfeld when picked up. One of the characters was based on Larry's neighbour Kenny Kramer, and he was actually hesitant to use Kramer's real name because he figured Kenny would try to profit off it. Sure enough, Kenny oragnised a bus tour around New York pointing out the real sites that were shown in Seinfeld (which was later parodied on the show with the J. Peterman Reality Tour).

It's chocolate, it's peppermint -- it's delicious!

The tour was definitely watered down, as a lot of the sites were things like "although this is a hotel now, it used to be ..." - but it was still great. The best bit about it, in my opinion, was the 20 minute introduction that Kenny did, which was mainly describing Larry David and his "brand" of comedy. I found it all quite amusing - and I think I might give Curb Your Enthusiam another shot (saw 1 episode and didn't really like it).

Some of the highlights of the actual tour were Monk's Restaurant (or Tom's), old footage of Larry David's standup, and The Soup Kitchen. Kramer showed some footage on the bus of him informally interviewing the "Soup Guy" (he doesn't like the whole Nazi thing) which was very funny. He said that Seinfeld ruined his life, and now only idiots came to his soup store. Didn't seem to ruin it too much - as he's now starting to franchise.

No witty photo comment for you!

Bell did some nice cropping for the full Seinfeld effect

Over half of the people on the tour were Australians - quite a few from Melbourne

"His struggle is man's struggle...he's a loathsome, offensive, brute, yet I can't look away." - and I bought the T-shirt!

After the tour we had dinner in an "authentic diner" in the middle of Times Square. It was actually quite good, but I was almost getting sick of cheese (almost). The cherry soda with chocolate icecream was very nice - and I've just realised that most of this Travel Log is just around what I was eating. Anyway...

A bit of a compromise for my (our) hockey tickets was that we would see a Broadway show. While I could be interested in a few different options, Belinda wanted to see The Phantom of the Opera. I was a little surprised - but I loved it. I especially liked the way they changed the sets "on the fly" and the music wasn't that bad.

Believe me, I didn't pick out that hat for Bell!

The Majestic from when we picked up the tickets

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Travel Log - Day 3 (I can't believe it got colder)

# Posted by Joel Dixon at 15/02/2006 21:33:00

While it had been cold for the first two days that we were in New York, it was kicked up a notch on the third day. On our way to the Statue of Liberty, we found a pothole that would usually be filled with water - completely frozen. The trash that was encased in a frozen, sludgey prison was a nice touch.

Watch out for that first step, it's a doozy! (Bing)

I was going to make a joke about the squirrel freezing it's nuts off - but thought better of it

When we got to the ferry bound for the statue we noticed that it was extremely busy (and still only about 8am). It looked like all of the volunteers from the parade were using their long weekend to "catch the statch" (I'm sure New Yorkians use that colloquialism all the time). So we got a hot chocolate instead!

After the hot chocolate warmed us up a bit - we went to the world's biggest Disney Store (3 levels of Disney goodness - though hardly any of Walt's Nazi Paraphernalia). Bell bought some Winnie the Pooh crap - and flush from my celebrity spotting, I bought some Muppets.

Never did meet Santa Goofy unfortunately

I took the Muppets from Manhattan

After the Disney store Bell and I went to Central Park, which was ok, though generally anti-climatic (turned out it was just a park). Saw lots of trees, lots of squirrels and went ice skating (that was pretty cool).

I only just realised this now, but what's that kid doing to Balto?

The memorial for John Lennon...

... and the hotel he was shot outside of

Joel Dixon - rock conqueror!

Wolfman Rink - the one we skated on

Bird's eye of the park - looked pretty cool

Thursday, February 09, 2006

Travel Log - Day 2 (Thanksgiving)

# Posted by Joel Dixon at 09/02/2006 00:49:00
Updated by Joel Dixon at 19/08/2007 16:42:50

We went to bed early(ish) on day 1 because we wanted to get up early for the Thanksgiving Day Parade. We got to New York about 4 / 5 days earlier than originally planned so that we could catch this event (we figured we'd probably never be in New York around November for a while). I'm really glad we did - because, while corny, the parade was lots of fun. Oh, and I had sausage burritos from Maccas for breakfast - very nice!

The crowd was getting bored when nothing was happening. They were even cheering a policeman walking past at one point

Macy's was determined to ensure you remembered who's parade it was

The mascot is always the first balloon. I think Scooby smelt my left over burrito - because he's coming straight for us!

I was a little surprised at how excited I was by seeing the Sesame Street float...

... but there was something really cool about seeing the actual puppets...

... passing by in all their glory (even though they were probably operated by any old hacks)

I was happy Bell was quick enough to snap up Oscar

Sponge Bob was a crowd favourite...

... but couldn't compare with the action that Chicken Little demanded

I thought this was a pretty cool blast from the past

Super Grover is the man!

Now I know this dude is after my burrito!

Mr. Potato Head looked pretty happy...

... considering he left his spare nose behind

Garfield was one of Bell's favourites

The balloon that injured two of the crowds-people

Red knows that he screwed up!

While Santa officially ended the parade, I think this guy's classy mix of facial hair and rosy cheeks finished it for me

Afterwards we had some Wendy's (not too bad - but odd slogans on their packaging) and went into an American grocery store. The store was pretty cool - beer in the fridge, but no fresh fruit.

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