On Thursday night we had a team dinner at Outback Jack's.  I'd seen a thing on their website about all you can eat wings and ribs for $30, so I had in my mind that's what I wanted.  But it turns out that's only Mon-Wed.  But that didn't stop me wanting them :) 

So I did..

Oh my!! It was enormous!!  I took one look at it and decided I'd need a doggy bag.  But the boys helped me with it and we managed to finish it.  Sooo good :)  But probably a dish best for two people not one!  Also so many yummy choices on the menu, we'll have to go back some time.

10-13.8.14

Sunday I headed up to Sydney in time for a reunion of the people we went to Turkey with.  Chatted with some peoples and got to see Heather's photo books of our Israel/Jordan and Egypt trips.  They were spectacular, would love to get around to making some photos books ... one day ...

Then for dinner Aunty Di and Graham and Chrissie and Zac and Dave and Yvonne and Ben all came over to Mum's for a birthday dinner of takeaway chinese.  

We showed Zac Bubble Butt, he kinda freaked out hehe

There's photos of me and a cake around somewhere, I really should find those :)

Monday was Peking Duck day with @StuartCRyan

Monday and Tuesday we continued the cleanup downstairs (and upstairs).

Anyone want any back issues of Silicon Chip or Electronics Australia?

Wednesday night I came home.

Half of my battle with blogging these days is the whole *effort* of downloading, selecting, resizing, stripping geodata and blogging photos.

I have several weeks of photos to blog.  Over fifty actually.  Eep!  Lots of birds, funnily enough. 

Also, during the week I have nothing much to say.

Because I only tend to blog about stuff I've done, and I don't tend to do anything much interesting during the week.

But I've been really impressed with my SIL blogging every day this month and I feel bad being so slack with this blog.  I really do love the archive of my life I keep here.  

So I'm going to try again to blog more often.

Today I had my Sadie cap on, and cut the rules down on one firewall from over two hundred to a little over one hundred.  Cleaning makes me happy :)  Mind you it's a lot easier to clean up other people's messes.  My own messes are harder because I'm lazy :)

Yesterday as a team building exercise, we ran around shooting each other... :)

So.  Much.  Fun.

:)

There were fifteen of us all up, so we split into three teams of five.

I did pretty badly the first game, being quite cautious and hiding in good places.  But the problem with that was there weren't too many people around to get, so I didn't get many points.  I came 14/15

The second game I did a lot better - walking around a lot more and getting more people.  This time I came 7/15 :)

Definitely something we're all interested in doing again (and hopefully it won't be in five and a half years - it's been that long since the last time I played it!)

Did you know phones have a thing on them called "APN", which stands for Access Point Name, and is a configuration set to make mobile data and MMS work?

I didn't.

Until it didn't work.

Backtracking a little.

On Monday night while watching Cities of the Underworld, I saw an ad for Optus that lets you get additional sims for $5 each that you can use on other devices using your main data plan.  And I thought *brilliant* !! With that I could play Ingress on Stu's old phone without having to setup a wifi hotspot on my iPhone (which has been destroying my battery).  (As a side note, as soon as I saw that ad and told Stu how cool it would be, he said, oh, Ingress for iPhone came out today.  I decided I'd rather destroy the old phone battery not mine).

So yesterday I went into Optus to get one.  I figured for $5 there'd be no service, they'd just give you a sim and tell you to go online to set it up.  But no, you actually sit down with them while they set it all up.  That must cost them a lot more than $5!  Whatevs.  Turns out you also need one of their new data plans, so had to switch over to that.  Anyway ten minutes later it was all going.

Except Stu's phone was still locked to Vodafone.

So popped up to the Vodafone store and asked what's the process for unlocking it, and they said you just go online, put in the IMEI, and get a code to unlock.  Simple.

Unlike doing it on an iPhone.

So did that when I got back to work and that worked fine.

The phone could now connect to Optus, except the mobile data wouldn't work.  I looked in the settings and found this:

"Connection failed due to incorrect APN setting"

I googled it and found plenty of other people having similar problems.  But none of the APN settings worked for me.  I got super frustrated with the whole thing, and was facing having to go back to Optus today to get it sorted out.

Then I was talking to @StuartCRyan and he's like "have you tried "connectme"?"

!!!

It actually connected!!

So here's my APN settings for Optus on a HTC One X:

Name: Doesn't matter, but I called mine Connect Me
APN: connectme
Authentication Type: Not set
APN type: default

Everything else was defaults or not set.

Thanks Stuart, you made my night!

During our Turkey trip, I started having focussing issues with my camera (actually dad's camera, but my old lens).  Especially in low light, and mostly at full wide angle.  I had a quite a few failures, and it was most frustrating in the basilica cistern to get any photos that would work.  If I persisted and changed the focal length it'd usually come good.  But quite disappointing.

When I got back I didn't use it all that much, as I mostly use my phone for photos.  But I took it to the poultry show and it was having even more issues.  A week later and it was pretty much dead, completely unable to focus.  Even in bright light, it would just chug the motor back and forth and simply not focus at all.  

I tried taking off the UV shield to have a look, but it was wedged on pretty good - one side had jumped a thread by the look of it.  I think it might have happened in Turkey when I was taking photos out the bus window.  We went over a pretty decent bump and the camera got shoved nose first into the window.  I think that might have been what damaged it.  

I've seen youtube videos of people pulling apart the lenses to replace the auto focus flex cable, but it might not even be that.  There's definitely something loose in there though, as it rattles a little when I tip it upside down and back.

So it's all very sad.  Can't decide what to do - either get it fixed, get a replacement, or go the L series 24-105 .. which has less range on it than my 18-135, which is why I've been reluctant to get it...

Yeah it's been that kind of couple of weeks.

On the Saturday of the long weekend, Stu made a Cantonese custard with pork mince.  It was yummy!  But quite a lot of effort.

Sunday morning we had brunch at the Coffee Club, although it was so late I had an early lunch.

Then we went to the poultry show at Epic.  We didn't think it was still on at first because there was hardly anyone around at Epic.  But as it turned out, it was on, just in a smaller pavilion.  Apparently there'd been a bit of a faction split of some kind, and a lot of people weren't there.  We saw a whole heap of Kath's chookens that had won prizes.  Hers are very friendly chickies that don't mind being patted.

Then did our food shopping and came home.

On the Sunday night we had "Effan C" over for dinner.  I did the boeuf bourguignon, and prior to that we had quite the little party of cheeses.  And afterwards we sampled quite a few of our whiskeys.  And there might have been singstar that went til 2am!

Monday was mostly just culling down Turkey photos for sending out to people.

In the evening we went to Stu's sensei's place for shabu shabu beef.  Yumm.

I actually thought about creating a whole new blog for this.  Well not this specifically, but for all the recipes in the Women's Weekly French Classics book I bought the other week.  Much like in Julie and Julia, but a lot less complicated!  But for now it can all stay in here.

The first recipe I made from the book was Boeuf Bourguignon.  We'd planned to make it on the June long weekend Monday night, but then we remembered we were already going out that night, so decided to do in Sunday night.  But this was while we were out shopping on Sunday afternoon and there wasn't going to be much time to slow cook it.  We decided to go ahead anyway, and invite people over to share it. 

The recipe is *huge*.  It called for 2kg meat!  So much food it wasn't going to all fit in the slow cooker.  So I decided to split the food into two.  One lot to be done in a big saucepan on the stove, and the rest in the slow cooker for leftovers.

So here's the starting ingredients.

Beef, mushroom, shallots (recipe called for small brown onions, this sufficed), bacon, garlic, parsely, thyme, bay leaves, butter, oil, wine, stock and flour.

Here's everything prepped (except the parsely).

So next we're cooking off the butter, onions, garlic, bacon and mushrooms.  The recipe said to cook until the onions browned, but there was so much stuff in this pot this wasn't happening.

Meanwhile, brown off all the chunks of meat.

Since the recipe wanted the onions browned, when all the meat was browned I fried up the onions a little as well.

So then you add some flour til it thickens, then the wine and stock.

At this point I split the meat and the onion/bacon/mushroom mix.  Half into the slow cooker and half into the saucepan.  The slow cooker half was looking a little empty of fluids, so I added the rest of the bottle of wine and a bit more stock.

So I cooked the stove version on as slow as the stove would go, which was still a pretty decent boil.  It was there for probably four hours.

And oh my!  It was amazing!

The onions had their bottoms kept on so they'd stay whole while cooking.  But that didn't quite work out.  The onions completely disintegrated, as did much of the meat.

The finished product, served with the parsely, and a some rice to soak up all the lovely gravy.  Doesn't look like much, but our dinner guests were pretty impressed :)

We left the slow cooker version on low overnight, but probably should have turned it off earlier.  It still tasted great, but the meat was a little dry.  I'd topped up the liquids too before leaving it overnight, but they didn't really boil away, so it was a lot more watery than the stove version.

I'd definitely make this again, but I'd halve the recipe and just do it in the slow cooker all one afternoon.

Been a bit of a boozy few days.

On Thursday, and dude from McLaren Vale came up to offer a wine tasting, mainly for the bar, but for others as well.  So a small group of us partook.  There were five whites, a muscato, a rose, four reds, a dessert wine, a tawny "port" and a "Delight" - which is much like a Baileys.  It was a fun night, had a taste of some lovely boutique wines, and I bought a mixed case of things.

Yesterday we went along to Whisky Live.  $99 for 100 whiskys in three and a half hours.  Stu and I shared tastes to start with, so we could try more things.  But then it got a bit complicated trying to have any working method of working the room, so I ended up wandering around by myself towards the end.  There was an ample supply of hot food (cheesy risotto balls!) as well which was great.  A fantastic event, I'd be interested in going again next year.

Afterwards we went over to F&C's (who were also at Whisky Live) for a yummy moussaka.  And I ate blue cheese for the first time since 1987 (I've had it a couple of times on pizza, but it's a bit different cooked).  Then we watched Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.  But I just didn't *get* it.  It was funny reading reviews on IMDB as well - people either loved it or hated it.  I'm on the hated it side heh.

Today was fairly quiet.  I finished geotagging my holiday photos, and have started culling them down.

Kit bought three more chickens and two ducks today ..

This afternoon I was craving a roast dinner, but we had nothing to roast, so I popped over to the markets to get something.

Sunday night: 2:30am
Monday night: 12:30am
Tuesday night: 3:00am

Yeah I'm pretty much a zombie at the moment.  Don't really understand what's going on with my sleeping, given that the first few days at home I was totally fine.

Been busy at work solving other people's problems (which are usually much easier than my own problems!)

And I got another three days photos geotagged tonight and a couple of episodes of tv caught up on.