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Today I spent most of my development time trying to fix a problem in my code.  Normally bugs are relatively easy to fix once you put your mind to it, but today was different.  No matter what I tried I could not fix this particular bug, and in fact by the time it was time to leave for the restaurant I think I may have taken a few steps back.  I now think that the code is in a worse state than it was this morning.  I hate it when trying to fix things actually makes them worse.  I hope that I’ll be able to get things sorted out tomorrow, but it’s looking a bit bleak that I’ll get this app released before the new year.

On a positive note though, tonight was eating out night.  Next up on the schedule was Indonesian.  This was supposed to be last week’s food, but we ended up at a place that was more Malaysian than Indonesian, so since this week was supposed to be Malaysian, we swapped them around and this week became Indonesian.  We did research and asked around and there were many suggestions.  Last week we couldn’t figure out the difference between the regional varieties so we went with a restaurant that was in the middle.  This week we wanted to find a restaurant that was specifically Indonesian.  We were going to go to a place called Jimbaran in Randwick, but at the last moment we decided to rather go to Kingsford because there was a greater amount of Indonesian restaurants down Anzac Parade.  We figured that we’d have more choice and if we didn’t like the look of one place we could always move on to the next.

As it turns out the place we ended up going to, Ratu Sari, was very close to the bus stop.  We walked a little further to Ayam Goreng 99, which has some great reviews, but it was closed for the festive season and that kind of answered that and we went back to Ratu Sari.  I won’t go into it much because there’ll be a blog post specifically about that in the next few days, but let’s just say that the food there was awesome.  We’re very happy we chose that place.  In a way it’s a pity that there are so many restaurants around, because as nice as Ratu Sari was, it may be a long time before we get back there.  With the food blog we have a 27 or something week roster of different cuisines, which means that it’s going to take at least 27 weeks before Indonesian comes around again, and when it does I’d rather try another restaurant than waste blog eating time on somewhere that we’ve already been.  But that doesn’t stop us from going there again on a non-blog night!

Next week is pub food night.  There’s a pub next door, but what I really want is to go to the Austrian Schnitzelhaus in Gladesville.  Do you think that qualifies as pub food?  They do a schnitzel at the pub next door.  The schnitzelhaus serves beer.  I think that qualifies it as pub food!  What do you think?  Schnitzelhaus, or a good burger, pie, bangers & mash or steak sambo at the pub?

Either way I doubt it will happen on our usual Wednesday evening.  Wednesday is a common night for all the boozers to booze it up and smoke up a mushroom cloud of tobacco (and other) smoke, usually ended by some tosser pulling out the plants, or knocking over a sign in the garden of our building next door.  And I think it may be difficult to get to the Austrian Schitzelhaus by public transport on a weekday evening.  Well, ok, not getting there so much, but getting back.  I’ll have a look and see.

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Fortunately these days there isn’t much to do on the photo site, so I can dedicate some time to other things that are more important.  Or at least I should be.

We’ve been following Scott Pape’s Barefoot Blueprint, and learning about investing money in the stock market in a safe(r) way.  I’m eager to get started but don’t really know the first thing about how to trade yet, so I’m holding off.  I set up an account with E*TRADE, but I have to say that it scares the shit out of me!  It’s like trying to operate a jumbo jet, and I don’t have the first clue where to start!  Soon Padewan, soon…

In other news I finally installed a demo copy of Lightroom to see how it compares with Aperture.  I’ve been growing increasingly frustrated with Aperture for some time now.  Aperture is supposed to be the premier software for photography professionals, and at one stage it was a near-perfect piece of software, but these days it’s buggy and slow (and I mean REALLY) slow.  It’s so un-Apple like.  I’ve been sticking with it for a good while, but it’s finally got to the point where I can’t take it much longer and I’m starting to look for alternatives.  I’ve had a little play around with Lightroom and I must say it does look good.  I tried the original beta of Lightroom and was not at all impressed, but it seems to have grown up a bit.  On Thursday I’ll take it for a drive when I do blog posts and see how it goes.

I went out to Bondi Junction yesterday to pick out a pressie for a friend’s child, and to get lunch.  We were not successful with the present yet, and we went to Japan City to get some sushi.  Unfortunately it seems that people have now found Japan City and the eating area was full.  We instead when to Sagunja at Tiffany Plaza and had some great sushi.  They do make good sushi there, and cheap too at $2.90 per plate regardless of what the item is.  They also have ramune (ラムネ) (Japanese lemonade) which is wonderful stuff!  Now that’s sushi, not the expensive crap they were serving at Sushi Roll in Hornsby the other day.

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I may have to stop posting on days that are just plain boring.

I want to post every day, but I really don’t have much to say so what’s the point, right?

Today was a development day, not that much development got done.  I chatted to my parents in the morning on Skype, and various other things took up time that I have no idea where it goes.  I tried doing some dev in the evening while watching TV, but it just doesn’t work.  I’ll try again tomorrow.

Tomorrow is photo site day, but since I don’t have that much to do on that I can spend a little time doing dev, and I’ll be going to Bondi Junction for lunch with Caro.

Ok, that’s all.

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Not really a heck of a lot to report today.

We got up and saw that it was sunny, so we decided to go and do a few suburbs for our Project Spiral.  Unfortunately by the time we had arrived at the first suburb there were dark clouds looming, we rushed through that suburb arriving at our designated finishing spot just before the rain started to pelt down.  Fortunately the spot was a bus shelter where we would wait for the next bus to take us back to the station.  Once on the train we went to the next two suburbs but it was raining there too so we decided to abort and try again next weekend.

Afterwards we ended up in Hornsby looking for something to eat.  You don’t really have much hope though in Hornsby at close to 5pm on a Sunday, the place just shuts down.

We saw a sign for a place called Sushi Roll and went in there, which turned out to be a mistake.  Unfortunately they didn’t really make the cut.  The sushi was not the freshest, they didn’t get our initial order right and quite frankly they’re really expensive.  In Bondi Junction you can get excellent quality sushi for $3 per plate.  Here it was $3 upwards, which a lot of them it seems being in the $4 – $5.50 range.  We had a little bit and left feeling a bit ripped off.

In the end we came back to Gordon and had some great pizza at Gordon Pizza Bar.

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Today we were supposed to go out and do our Project Spiral, but it was really dark and cloudy in the morning and we thought it would rain.  So we decided to switch days and instead go and scope out a place that we think would be good to watch the new years eve fireworks, and then carry on to Darling Harbour for their monthly firework show that we’ve never been to see as yet.

There’s a piece of national park in Mosman called Bradley’s Head.  If you’ve been on the harbour and have seen the mast of HMAS Sydney, well that’s where it is.  It offers sweeping views of the city and harbour, and looks directly on to the opera house and the harbour bridge.  I was a little concerned that it was a bit far away, but when you’re there it looks closer than it seems in photos.  When we go for new years eve I’ll take the longer lenses so that we can get closer photos.

There’s an entry fee of $20 to get in on the day (normally it’s free), and people are freaking out about that as previous years it has been free, but I reckon they’re just trying to control numbers, pay for security etc, from what I’ve heard, other places can get quite busy and rowdy as the alcohol is consumed in excess.  This will be an alcohol free venue, and restricted to only 5,000 people (last year when free there were apparently double that amount there).

Here’s a pic from the site.

After we left there we headed to Darling Harbour to watch their monthly fireworks show.  I took a few shots on the proper camera, which I’ll show during this coming week, but it was really just to enjoy the show and see how well the shots came out.  At new years eve we’ll do a time lapse and long exposures and some freehand shots too.  This is what we saw at Darling Harbour (from Caroline’s phone).

There was also a total lunar eclipse last night which we would have been able to see if we weren’t so tired that we had to go to bed!

See ya!

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Today wasn’t a very productive day.

It started by getting our banking in order, which gets done every day (just to check balances), once a week on a Friday to add purchases to a spreadsheet, and once a month after pay day to figure out how much we’ve spent, how much we’ve gone over budget and reset all the totals for the coming month.  Today was one of those days, and for some reason today it took forever.

Meanwhile Caroline was floating around on the harbour at her company’s Christmas do, and she was scheduled to arrive at Double Bay at 16:30. We’d agreed to meet there to go into the city for dinner with friends.

By the time I had finished all the stuff to do at home and had lunch, it was time to leave otherwise I’d be late.  Never one to pass up a ferry trip I calculated how long it would take to get from Killara to Milsons Point, then either a ferry from there to Double Bay, or a ferry to Circular Quay and then a ferry to Double Bay.  It turns out that there are no ferries from Milsons Point to Double Bay, so I had to go to Circular Quay.  Unfortunately there was not enough time to get a ferry from Milsons Point to Circular Quay and still catch the ferry to Double Bay so I continued on the train to Wynyard, and then changed trains for Circular Quay.  Luckily the train to Circular Quay was one of the new Waratah trains, but unluckily it’s only one stop to Circular Quay.  I then boarded the ferry to Double Bay, enjoyed that trip and waited by the beach in Double Bay for Caro’s boat to come in.

Afterwards we walked up to the main road in Double Bay, and loved looking at all the places on the way.  Another suburb I could live in!  When we got to the main road we caught a bus into the city, and proceeded to Westfield Sydney for dinner.

We met friends D&L from Canberra and had a wonderful dinner at Spiedo, an modern Italian restaurant.  As the cliché goes, a good time was had by all.  But I won’t talk much about that as it will be posted on the food blog next week.  We walked back to Town Hall where we would catch our train home, but stopped to admire the town hall building which has been lit up in wonderful Christmas colours for the festive season.  We ended up getting home at 11ish which is way past our bed time at this time of the year!

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Seriously, nothing happened.

Caro was off sick, I wrote blog entries, that’s about it!

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Another boring work day.

We did go to Aseana Food Village in Randwick for dinner, which was nice.  Full details will be on the food blog a bit later.

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There are two topics today, the first one is banking.

Today I went and closed our ANZ Access account.  Before I go any further I should say that I have had nothing but good service from ANZ, and we still have savings and investment accounts with them.  The trouble with their transaction accounts is that, well, they charge for them.  Call me a miser, they only charge $5 per month for unlimited transactions, including withdrawals from ANZ ATMs, but with other banks starting to be fee free, and ANZ’s silly response that “people don’t mind paying $5″ (I don’t remember the source of that unfortunately), we have moved our transaction account to two banks, Citibank and Bankwest.  I should mention that $5 a month is very low for charges, and ANZ even has an account that only charges $2 per month, but then you get limited transactions.  As a comparison, in South Africa we paid R298 (AU$36) per month for capped transactions (thereafter at normal rates) with Standard Bank.

Citibank on the other hand charges no fees at all, including ATM charges at Citibank and Westpac ATMs and no international ATM charges.  Bankwest has no monthly fees either, and free ATM access at Bankwest and Commonwealth Bank ATMs.  In addition Bankwest actually pays a decent interest rate (currently 5%) on your transaction account balance up to $5000.  We use Bankwest as our main transactional account because of the interest on balance, and Citibank for online transactions and manual payments.

As far as savings accounts go, we decided to go with a few banks to split funds across, and whoever has the best interest rate at the time gets the bulk of the savings.  We have a savings plan with Bankwest that pays an amazing 7%, but is limited to a maximum of $500 saved per month, and is automatically cashed out after a year, but is a great alternative to term deposits and the money is still accessible if you’re willing to sacrifice interest for that month.  We also have another Bankwest savings account that is not as restrictive and still pays decent interest, and we have savings accounts at Citibank, Virgin Money and RaboDirect.  I’m also quite happy to open more savings accounts depending on who is paying the best interest at the time, and who has a great bonus rate for new customers.  The more the merrier!

We also decided to switch our credit card from Woolworths (with Qantas rewards, but an $89 per year fee), to a fee-free, and rewards free credit card.  As far as I am concerned, rewards are usually a huge rip off since generally the only cards that offer you rewards are those that charge a hefty fee for the privilege.  If you work out how much money you need to spend to gain sufficient rewards to counter the annual fee, you’ll quickly come to the conclusion that it just isn’t worth it.  Or at least that’s my opinion.  The interest rate on a credit card is not relevant to us since we really just use our credit card as a charge card, and pay it off fully at the end of the month.  This is a stark contrast to how we used to operate in South Africa by the way where we were in massive, though manageable debt.  We had a short list of fee free credit cards to choose from banks including American Express, Bankwest, Virgin Money and HSBC.  We had a slight preference for VISA over MasterCard, and required the card to have chip & pin technology, while contactless payment was a “nice to have” feature.  In the end we went with Bankwest’s Zero Credit Card (I’m noticing a trend towards Bankwest here) because the card is fee free, both chip & pin and contactless payment, and also other nice features such as insurance on payments (although this is an extra that we didn’t go for), and automatic travel insurance (which I’m aware is not much to get excited about, but it’s nice as a backup).  Citibank, who I would have liked to be able to consider do not have a fee-free card.  American Express do not have even chip & pin.  HSBC and Virgin Money would have been an option but were not contactless.  The Bankwest card is a MasterCard when we would have preferred VISA, but really it’s no biggie.

We also signed up to Scott Pape’s (the Barefoot Investor) new subscription service, the Barefoot Blueprint, and will hopefully follow his advice to come on other topics such as safer investments.  We’ve always been in the “shit scared of losing money” category when it comes to investment, and have been burned a few times with investments in South Africa, but hopefully, with Scott’s advice, we’ll be able to do some of this ourselves and have a bit more control over the funds that we invest in.

Ok, next up, the “Love Food, Hate Waste” talk that we attended last night hosted by Lane Cove Council (a suburb and local government area of Sydney).

Thanks to NSW Transport we were late for the talk, but not too late.  Coming from a country with VERY limited public transport, I am loathe to complain about the relatively brilliant public transport options that we have in Australia.  But I do want to know why there is always a delay when you have a specific time that you need to be somewhere, and in this case both the train and the bus were late.  Bygones.  Moving on…

The purpose of the collaboration between NSW Government and the municipalities of Lane Cove and Hunters Hill, was to highlight the fact that New South Wales households throw away more than $2.5 billion worth of edible food per year.  They recruited the help of food blogger and MasterChef Australia contestant Billy Law, to come and help show how food waste can be reduced by utilising leftovers to make meals for the following day.

We’ve know about and interacted with Billy through his and our food blogs and Twitter for quite some time, even before we knew that he was going to be on MasterChef, but this was the first time that we had actually met him in person.  Us food bloggers are a funny lot.  We all love food enough to write about it, but hardly ever actually get together with each other to enjoy these meals.  Well, I’m happy to say that Billy is as nice as we expected and we certainly must make a plan to get together some time in the future to enjoy some of the foods that we clearly all have a passion for.  Billy even went to the trouble of offering us a ride home after the event as we live along his route home – thanks Billy, much appreciated.

As we walked in we were handed a re-usable shopping bag filled with a brochure, a pad of paper pre-printed with a template for a weekly menu plan and shopping list so that you can decide what to eat ahead of time and only buy exactly what you need, therefore saving on waste.  We also received a back issue of G Magazine, the magazine that makes green living easy.  I was happy to see one of our respected chefs Kylie Kwong on the cover.

The evening started by welcoming Billy, and a short chat about his experiences in MasterChef, and what he’s been doing since.  Then it was announced that Billy would be doing a MasterChef style mystery box, filled with items that were commonly left over after Christmas.  The box contained ham, roasted veggies and Christmas cake.  I was wondering at the time what you could possibly make out of those ingredients.  Fortunately I forgot that he would still have a pantry to make use of, and in the end he made a breakfast pie from the ham, to which he used pastry from the pantry, and added bacon, eggs, cream and chives.  He also made a pizza from the leftover veggies, and Christmas rum balls (without the rum for the kids) out of the leftover Christmas cake.

Billy recruited the help of two young girls to help make the Christmas balls, and they looked like they were having the time of their lives!  Afterwards while we were chatting with Billy, the girls came up to get his autograph and had a long chat with him.  I think he’s gained some little friends for life there!  The Christmas balls were delicious, thanks girls (and Billy)!

We didn’t have a chance to taste the pizza or pie as it was gone by the time we got to the front, but we picked at the pie meat and crumbs left on the board, which tasted very good.

While Billy was cooking we also had a talk by Kim Morris of OzHarvest, an organisation that takes left over uncooked, and within the use before date food from restaurants and supermarkets, and uses it to make meals for the less fortunate of our communities.  You can read more about it at their website, but they do some great work and we for one will be making a donation to them to help them to help those in need.

Another thing we received before we left was a recipe sheet for the three dishes that Billy and the girls produced.  That must have been typed up and printed during the event.  Such passion!

We’d like to thank the NSW Government, and Lane Cove municipality, and of course Billy, for putting on this event.  We feel that these kind of events are very important to let people know of issues that they should be aware and taking note of.

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