Clearing the Garage

There are a heap of small jobs to do in preparation before the builder starts work, so this weekend we got into tackling the mess in our garage. A collection of suitcases, gardening tools and boxes of forgotten trinkets lined the back of the room, largely untouched since they were dumped there all those months ago. They would have likely remained there too if we weren't forced to make way for the upcoming conversion of this room into a new store/utility area.


Sorting out the junk didn't take too long though I did have to suppress my hoarding reflex. Some items that made the cull have been lying around "just-in-case" for close to ten years, including my rollerblades from college, a chin up bar that Alison has been trying to throw out since we met and my good old playstation 2. Perhaps this is a fine excuse to get a playstation 3...


What we decided to keep stuffed into boxes and stored in the lockup area under the house. We no longer have easy access to the bicycles or the lawn mower though I'm sure that won't be a problem given the current state of the garden.


Speaking of our back yard, the holes and pipes have all been backfilled now. It still looks rather bleak and the ground is alarmingly soft in some areas but at least we don't have to worry about falling into a pit of poo. Only bummer is that they didn't setup our washing line again as they said they would, though I suppose it might be best delayed until the ground is levelled off. Not like we can hang clothes out in our dust bowl anyway.

With much a plumb

It's been a very exciting week. After what feels like an eternity of planning and careful negotiations, we finally break ground with our renovations with some necessary plumbing work.

The previous owners made some pretty dodgy additions to the pipes around the house, resulting in a bunch of outlets that just spilt out onto concrete or bare dirt. That's if the water didn't just overflow from clogged gutters. It's a great feeling to know that these problems will be fixed along with the addition of pipes for the new toilet and outdoor sink.


Monday morning started with a big digger just squeezing by our garage to dig up our backyard, absolutely destroying one of the lilly pillies on the way past. The workers had to do a little archeological exploration to find the sewage line as this was no where near the mark on the council plans. They ended up going through a few layers of building history, eventually digging up the old septic tank, grease trap and terracotta pipe work.


By the end of the first day we had a wrecked backyard and a good start on the pipes laid down. It was all good until we realised that the old pipes from the toilet were broken and left open for all the world to see.


After briefly considering checking into a motel, we decided to test our luck and impose on Kath and Andrew for emergency lodgings (and amenities of course). Our hosts were very hospitable and we got our share of licks during the visit, mostly from their adorable dog Frankie.

Everything was fixed up the day after thankfully and I'm developing an appreciation for what plumbers do. The work is certainly messy but I have a feeling that this is just the tip of the iceberg with our renovation.


The inspector came by this morning and gave the work a green light so we're good to go for the next stage. At least we would be if we had our engineering plans which are taking a little longer to get through than we expected. The builder thinks we should have our plans back by next week and then it's just another three days or so to get building approval before work can begin in earnest. In the mean time, we just have the return of the digger tomorrow to look forward to as those big holes need to be covered up before the weekend. Especially this one...


Things are going quick, we'll be pretty busy moving things out of the garage and picking paint colours over the next week. Better buckle up for the ride.

Searching for Snow White

I was so into the idea of geocaching back when we first started that I even added a tag on the blog for all the treasure hunting posts that would no doubt follow. It's now almost two years later and we haven't cracked out the GPS in search of caches since that initial foray.

Holding my breath to see if this is going to keep, but we went on another walk today to find caches. Well, I did anyway... Alison just came along for the stroll and to humour me. It all started when I downloaded the official geocaching application for the iPhone. Pretty snazzy app actually. Amazing that I can get away with one device while I had to lug out our Garmin GPS, a camera and a notepad when we first tried geocaching.

As part of my cunning plan to keep us going with this fascinating hobby, I picked two caches to hunt for that are actually part of a set of seven (or eight depending on how you look at it). The people that maintain these caches have themed it after the Seven Dwarfs (yes, I'm normally one to use the "Dwarves" plural form but I'm being faithful given the context) with each cache providing a clue to find the final cache, Snow White.

The first cache we found was Sneezy, hidden in the rock wall beside a shaded path around a duck pond in the Edenbrooke estate nearby. With all my appreciation for convergence of technology, my phone was useless when it came to writing in the supplied log book as we forgot to bring a pen along. Doh.



At least we got the clue though and the ducks were cute. Jumping on the opportunity to do another nearby cache, we headed north in search of Grumpy. This one took a little longer and a touch more courage as I was sticking my hand into fallen tree stumps, hoping to find a plastic container rather than a redback. The iPhone GPS isn't all that accurate either which certainly didn't help but I managed to get there in the end.



Two down, five more to go. Here's hoping I can stick to it this time.

Ocakbasi, I've found you

There are lots of things I miss about the UK, though people usually give me a peculiar look when I mention that it's often the food that I pine for the most. Given that I did a fair bit of growing up there I'd say a big part of my junk food palate was defined by my adolescent binges, initially at boarding school in Exeter, then at university as a starving undergrad. While I've had some success in locating comfort snacks of the prepackaged variety, I haven't had as much luck with take away food. One kebab shop in particular.

It was a combination of factors that resulted in the rise of Ocakbasi, a non-descript kebab place in Canterbury, to become the defining establishment of my uncouth culinary experience. For one, they delivered at all hours which no doubt appealed to the English drinking public and lazy students. They were also one of the few halal restaurants, so my predominantly Malaysian muslim friends could gorge themselves guilt-free. The key point however was a magical mixture of the British willingness to serve chips with anything, topped with a curious assortment of available sauces. Thus was born the Ocakbasi chicken doner meat and chips, with burger sauce, garlic sauce and mayonnaise.



Oh yeah, it looks disgusting and you'd wake up feeling like a grease truck the morning after, but we kept going back for more.

Initially when I came to Australia I didn't find as much love for the spud in Aussie culture. Few of the kebab shops here served chips, and even if they did none were willing to honour my reasonable request to slop some kebab meat on a bed of chips. I even went as far as to buy a kebab from one store, chips from another and smack them together. It just wasn't the same though... no where near. It seemed like such a simple thing but my hankering for kebab and chips went unsatisfied for six long years.

Then it all changed. Alison and I popped by Mt Ommaney to pick up Beatles Rockband on Friday, which was when I did a double take on a menu item at Ali Baba's in the food court. They called it an "Aussie Pack" but I knew it for what it truly was... my chance to relive the Ocak. The stars must have been in alignment. They didn't have burger sauce but they did have a "grill sauce". They didn't have a garlic sauce, but even better they had a garlic mayonnaise.



The servings aren't quite as indulgent as Ocakbasi but by golly the taste was there. Now I just hope this isn't some special offer only available for a limited time. Make room in Fat City 'cos here comes Shazza!

Rabbit Redesigned

Voila! Welcome to the newly designed Skin the Rabbit, the fruit of over three weeks of labour. If you're reading this on Facebook or an RSS feed then I'd ask that you visit the main site here. Otherwise this post isn't going to make much sense.

Part of my new role at work involves clueing up a lot more on Web technology than I have in the past. With all the my research and studying I slowly developed a drive to put some effort into the design of this blog. The old girl hasn't had a face lift in the five years I've been posting here, so I guess it was about time to give this old format a make over.



The first thing I wanted to address was the layout of the blog itself. Sites with the two column format (posts and widgets) or three columns (posts, widgets and ads) still seem very much in vogue, but I've found myself growing tired of the look. While I think the model works well for printed media where the eye can flick around columns quickly, I'd started to think that it didn't quite fit what I want on a weblog. My argument is that having extra periphery content on the side while the reader is trying to read a post vertically becomes a distraction. Potentially a welcome one if I these were revenue generating ads, but in my case I simply had an assortment of widgets with no real purpose. At best this restricted the horizontal real estate, at worst it forced the reader to scroll back up to review sidebar content.

What I've gone for here, as you can see, is more of a sandwich approach. Images and tweets along with a menu bar are at the top but quickly give way to full width posts. The old archives and tags are in their own section at the bottom, with shortcuts in the title menu to jump down and shortcuts at the end of each post to bounce back up to the title. My hope is that this new format will give me the flexibility to play around with new post layouts and include larger images or embedded movies in future posts.

I wasn't just content with shuffling things around to widen the post area though. It's a convention in web development to design sites with a minimum resolution in mind, padding out the rest of the site with filler (note the stylish dark grey bars on the left and right). The previous layout for Skin the Rabbit was just as guilty of this, though a little less noticeable with the white on white. The old "minimum resolution" was set at 800 pixels, which was all well and good for 2005, but in the year 2009 I think I can safely bump this up to accommodate 1024x768 as a minimum resolution with a modest 990 pixels. I'm sure this will just keep going up as the years go by.

When I sat down with pen and paper to design the new look I had a pretty solid concept in my head.



My problem was that I've never really been a decent artist. No false modesty there, I just can't seem to draw or paint free hand on account of some cross-wired signals between the image I have in my head and my shaking hand. Maybe it was the stark and clean iPod commercial look I knew I wanted, but I thought I'd give vector based drawing a try with Inkscape and I'm rather chuffed with the results. I think it's something about being able to tweak a bezier curve for minutes until I'm satisfied that it bears some resemblance to what I'm going for. I have no illusions about quitting my day job to draw portraits on the street, but at least I can say that all the art on this site is original (aside from logos), something I'd never thought I could do.

Just as strong as my vision of the style was how interactive the site would be. I've always been a sucker for Flash based websites with funky slideouts and transitions. Unfortunately I've never really taken to ActionScript or Flash in general, not to mention there's the whole issue of Flash containers and plugins which annoy me. Thankfully I didn't have to go down that path thanks to advances in Javascript (particularly in modern web browsers) and particularly jQuery.

Oh I could gush on and on about the wonders of jQuery. Most of the things that made me decide not to go down the Web Development route originally in my career have been neatly put aside thanks to this miraculous plugin. It makes programming behaviour and manipulating the DOM an absolute joy. Even more so when you combine it with jQuery plugins! The photo slideshow you see at the top is made with Cycle. The funky scroll effect you get when you click the Archive/Tag or the Top link at the end of this post comes courtesy of ScrollTo. Then there's ThickBox, just click on one of the images in this post (or any other post for that matter) to have a look at that.

Right next to jQuery on my list of wonderful web technology is CSS. I never really got how powerful this was before but I can definitely say I'm a fan now. I was still a little naughty here and made use of some inline styles towards the end as my stamina flagged, though I'm sure I'll come back later to clean it up.

Other parts of the design that I'm quite happy with are the expanded photo section (click the carrot) and the archive section, both done with just jQuery and Javascript. The archives were tricky as I wanted to be able to navigate through all old posts while keeping a sense of quantity of content, all in a fixed amount of space. Hopefully the bar denoting post ratio gets this across. The expanded photos came out pretty sweet I think. Kinda wish I could link directly to the photos hosted on Flickr, but that change is going to require a little more research into the Flickr API.



Of course to make an omelette you often find that you have to break a few eggs. Getting the new layout to work across multiple browsers was definitely a challenge. One big casualty in this big redesign has been support for Internet Explorer (at least those prior to the current version 8). Much has been said on the net about the horrors of Internet Explorer 6 but I think this article here sums it up pretty nicely. To quote:

Since there were no universally accepted web standards in the early days, Microsoft created a browser that attempted to force the web to behave like any other Microsoft product. Nearly 15 years later, in spite of the development of widely accepted web standards, Microsoft has still not entirely abandoned this approach. Even today, Internet Explorer is to web standards what Ebonics is to standard English.

You can try the latest web browser acid test here. Chances are if you're using a non-Microsoft browser then you're going to get a decent score. To avoid all the extra work involved in getting a site working well with IE6 and IE7, I've just decided to drop support entirely. There are many free standards compliant browsers out there, which you'll see if you try and visit this site with an Internet Explorer version older than 8.



I'm sure I'll be tweaking things a little over the next few weeks. There are a few bugs still that I know about but figure they're minor enough to ignore for now. Do drop me a line if you notice the site breaking though as I've only tested this with the latest versions of most browsers (the usual four; Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera).

Hope you all like the design. I normally don't solicit comments but do let me know what you think if you have the time. I never thought when I first started a blog that I'd have the discipline to keep going this long. Here's to another five years of banal accounts of my life. *clink*

Edit: Grrr... looks like I failed to sacrifice some sacred cow for a smooth release or something. Lots of things seem to be broken including ThickBox on Blogspot images, Archives prior to July 2008 and who knows what else. Will have to fix these up through the week. Curses.

Father's Day Purchases

There was a bit of excitement in the Liley household this Father's Day. Granted, most of the clapping giggles came from Alison and myself (though I detected a hint of enthusiasm from the parents) but I think to whooping was justified. I'm proud to say... that we've dragged John and Sheena kicking and screaming into the Audio/Visual 21st Century.



Gone is the behemoth of a TV that blemished their living room and enter a modestly sized Sharp 32" Aquos. Not only can we watch TV in Toowoomba without cringing at the cropped widescreen programming, but as the "family tech support guy" I no longer have to wrestle with a boulder when I need to plug in new equipment. Even though my joy is mired by a parthian shot from the old CRT, as I've pulled my left arm helping John carry it to the garage, it was so worth it. The event would have been even sweeter if we'd picked up a DVR to complete the package but I guess there's always next time.

While Alison and I hadn't explicitly planned on coercing John into buying AV equipment, we did predict potential for growth in electronics and remote controls in the lounge eventually. With the knowledge of John's distaste for clutter we picked up a Logitech Harmony 515 universal remote for him for Father's Day. I've been using one of these for a while now and it's amazing how easy it is to program compared to universal remotes of old.



Unfortunately I did run into a few issues getting input switching to work on the Aquos (how ironic). Unlike most TVs I've worked with, the Sharp doesn't have specific IR commands for each input source, rather relying on OSD menu navigation to change between them. Given that state isn't available to the remote, this meant that changing from TV to DVD was only possible with dirty hacks (ie, switching channels to force TV input followed by moving down input sources a known and static number of notches before hitting enter). Not quite the straight forward experience I had when working with our Hitachi, but I got there in the end.

Now armed with universal remote and decent TV I'm sure that John and Sheena will be able to enjoy their TV watching with gusto. At least once we get rid of the four (yes count 'em, FOUR) VCR players they have with the aforementioned DVR. The struggle continues.

As an aside, we've had some success with our little fruit and vegies we planted. The strawberry plant had a few flowers which were chomped repeatedly by some garden pest, though we now have a growing and thus far uneaten strawberry! The assumption is that our fruit stealing nemesis has either given up or merely biding time while the berry ripens under our care. Our real success story however is the lettuce.



Look at the bunches (what's the collective noun for lettuce anyway?)! They're practically overflowing out of the barrel so I think it'll be another week before we start clipping off the young leaves for a little salad. Thoroughly satisfying for amateur green thumbs.

Our other achievement was finding the right succulent for our rusty watering can turned planting pot. We've been hunting high and low for something I'd seen in a magazine once. Finally found them at a nearby nursery and learned they're called Burro's Tail (sedum morganianum). We punctured the bottom of the can and filled it with potting mix and the crassulaceae (isn't Wikipedia wonderful?).



As we packed the mix pretty high in the can I employed what I thought was a delightfully ingenious method of watering while avoiding overflow. I put the spout of the can under the tap and let 'er rip with the can tilted on an angle. The role reversal amused me to no end. Seemed to do the trick though I've reverted to more traditional methods since.

I've been working on a something special for this little blog for the past few weeks, though it's taking a lot longer than I thought it would. Hoping to reveal the results sometime in the next week or so. Watch this space!