Dragonfruit - Serious Flower Power

Woke up early this morning and opened the deck curtains to this stunning dragonfruit flower.

Pitaya - Yellow Dragon Fruit (Hylocereus megalanthus) (formerly Selenicereus megalanthus) .




The bud cup (or should the be bud bowl?) is 15cm (6inches) across
It will be anywhere from 4-8 weeks before we get to eat the delicious fruit.



There are 3 main types of dragon fruit. I also have the Red variety but no flowers yet.

Wii Fit too stupid to know seasons

Every now and again you find a bug and wonder how it got through.
In my case it is the fact that the Wii Fit knows which country I am in but doesn't know that the season is different in my hemisphere.

So when it is 40° Celcius here in our Summer, the Wii Fit is complaining about being worried about "frost in it's wiring" and "don't let the cold weather make me overeat".

Seriously, in Summer here I am more worried about bushfires and maybe the Wii Fit should worry that it will be thrown into the next one.

Joining the sparrows

I've succumbed to the tweets and have joined the twittering flock.
@rebolforces If you are inclined to follow.

Is Microsoft Vista a joke?

Well I guess it takes a comedian to recognise a joke, so Microsoft are launching an advertising campaign with Jerry Seinfeld. Basically it says to me, that MS would rather spend money on a comedian to distract us, than spend money on creating/fixing a secure operating system.

Hey Bill, in order to see a great Vista, you need to clean your dirty Windows.

MS - no soup for you.

When is a brand name misleading?

As I was waiting for the latest version of QuickBooks to load. I was pondering if a product name can be deemed misleading under the Australian trade practices act?

All I needed to do was fill out an entry in my timesheet, it was only a 15 minute entry, just to mark the time I have spent on the phone with a client. If I had used pen and paper this would have taken mere seconds to record, I dare say I could have tallied up all the entries and updated the weekly total in less than a minute too. Which leads me to the problem with the name QuickBooks, surely it should be reasonable to expect the some aspect of it is Quick, certainly quicker than the technology it replaces ie pen & paper.

But no. QuickBooks is not quick, not in anything I need to use if for... It took 5 minutes to finish loading to a point where I could enter my time information. 5 minutes ... ah the wise ones say, why don't you just leave it running all the time? Obviously not that wise are they?, it hogs so much memory and slows the system down ... again "SlowBooks" is more apt than "QuickBooks"

At the moment we have opted to run a second machine just so that QuickBooks (or SlowBeast) can be reasonably on-call as needed. Perhaps the Open Source community should target this market in the same way that OpenOffice did. or maybe Google? I'm ready to use GBooks now .. where do I sign up?

The Gardening Bug

It has been a few months since I came back from Japan, and I have been spending a lot of time in the garden. Our yard is pretty overgrown, a bush garden which is full of weeds that the local birds keep dropping in. Slowly reclaiming areas from the weeds. Have a pretty good area down the side of the house that gets good sun, and looks like an ideal candidate for the vege patch.

Currently establishing a few passion fruit plants (black and banana varieties), and the rhubarb is also doing well. Bought a bunch of dwarf citrus fruit trees and also some boysenberry plants from Daleys Fruit Nursery in Kyogle which has similar local conditions in my area.

I have a spot picked out for the boysenberries but not sure if it is too shady, I suspect they will get summer sun but mainly shade for winter. Well if they fail this year, I'll try elsewhere in the yard.

Meanwhile, until my home orchard is up and running, we are getting weekly fruit delivered at work from the thefruitbox.com.au , should be healthier than all those biscuits I usually eat.


Looking forward to some avacados in the garden next year, have a grafted "Reed" avocado, which we have nicknamed "Oliver" , I'll leave it to the reader to work out why. ;-)

Hiroshima - Day 2

Visited the dome. This has been on my to-do list for a while, was glad to finally get there. You can see what the building used to look like in the above photo.



Also visited Hiroshima Castle. This is a reconstruction, but the castle museum inside probably the best one I have seen so far, english text for most items, take the time to sit and listen to animated the story of the castle construction... amazingly it only took 2 years to build the castle to a habitable state.