Nosh

31 07 2008

Kristy’s birthday was on Sunday, so over the weekend we had a good excuse to sample a variety of Newtown/Erko eateries. If you’re in the area looking for a bite, here are some goodies:

 

Twelve is a slightly-upmarket (relatively speaking) restaurant on King St, Newtown. It’s got big glass windows for that fishbowl/watch-the-world-go-by effect. For the first time I can remember for ages, all 5 of us at dinner (my family came along too) had no complaints or regrets in our meals. Beautiful food, well made & presented, good service, and a dessert menu that’s worth going back for alone. 

Particularly the sticky toffee pudding.

 

Burgerlicious was Sunday lunch. Fresh, tasty, and just like your traditional local burger-shop, only a step up in quality. 

 

Shenkin was a real winner. This little cafe in Erskineville (Erko rd, up towards the Newtown end) is run by a family from somewhere in Eastern Europe I suspect, although I don’t know where. They do decent coffee, have a decent menu, and make simply fantastic chocolate croissants. Often when I’ve had them before, particularly from French bakeries, I’ve been very disappointed in the little hard pellet-like chocolate filling. These, however, were the real deal. The chocolate seems to be an integral (load-bearing) pastry ingredient. Excellent gear.

 

Finally, although this wasn’t birthday fare, The Bank near Newtown station has a brilliant Thai restaurant underneath it, Sumalee Thai. For Newtown it’s definately pricey, but absolutely wipes the floor with every other thai place, including Pothong Thai. Up in the pub, however, from 6pm on a weekday night you can get a beer plus a thai curry for $10. Delicious bargain.

 

Any other favourite dining places?





No to Pope?

17 07 2008

I spotted a sign wrapped around a telephone pole on the way home the other day, advertising a rally on the 19th of July [pdf link]. The organisation is called the “NoToPope Coalition”, and apparently stand against the Catholic Church on a number of things, including the right to (at Saturday’s rally):

 

 

  • Defend the right to protest 
  • Say “No!” to homophobia 
  • “No!” to anti-condom policies 
  • Defend reproductive rights 

 

 

The last one is a little curious. I assume that what they mean by that is ‘the right to choose not to reproduce’, but it’s certainly a strange way of putting it. I’ve never before heard of anyone charging the Roman Catholic Church with denying their reproductive freedom. There’s a reason, after all, for all those large Catholic families.





Political coffee

14 07 2008

 

Campos Coffee

The politics of coffee isn’t just about free trade. My newest bean supply is from Campos Coffee, possibly the best coffee around. I bought a bag of the Obama Blend. The description runs like this:

 

“Great depth of character, strong, and eloquent. This very appealing blend unites coffees from Africa and the Americas to produce a cup which has gotten us excited. Formidable middle palate flavors, syrupy with an uplifting finish.
Excellent drink for going forward.”

As it turns out, it’s very good. I’m all for change.

The good news is I made a cup this morning in my machine at home, and it tasted just like one bought from the store. Needless to say, I’m pretty chuffed.





Pong

12 07 2008

Ping pong.

Bible college pastime, ministry aid, tool of international diplomacy.

Penny Arcade reports: parts one/two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

Gold.





Paradigmatic 0.6.1

7 07 2008

Slight update:

I’ve upgraded the Sparkle updater system, to fix a couple of things. Firstly there were a few bugs that could cause crashes if it couldn’t find the update information feed properly, but secondly there was a change in how .zip files were extracted in between the last couple of updates. 

This means that the auto-updater might not work exactly as you think it should this time around. It may well download, then crash out of the updater, complaining of an error in extracting the file.

This sucks slightly, but it’s easy to get around. Just download the file yourself, extract it, and you’re up and running again. Ideally, this will be an isolated occurrence.

The only other thing I’ve changed with Paradigmatic is altering the web links within the program (under the ‘Help’ menu, for example).

 

To get the new version, download it (0.6.1, 2.3 MB zipped .app file), or hit ‘Check for updates’ in the Paradigmatic menu bar. If you like, see the full notes, or read the FAQ.

To keep updated about any posts related to Paradigmatic, subscribe to the following RSS feed:

 http://feeds.feedburner.com/paradigmatic





Changeover

7 07 2008

OK, we’re back.

In case you missed it, I’ve changed bits and pieces of info regarding my freney.org domain name. This was for all sorts of technical and personal-usability reasons that don’t really affect you, but going and changing the names of things on the internet often means pages get lost, stuff breaks, and people get frustrated.

So, here’s a list of what’s new:

  • This blog is now at a fishpiper.freney.org
    (the old address was freney.org)
    Most old blog links should redirect, including the bare domain name, but I might have missed some. Sorry if that breaks things.
     
  • Info regarding my Hebrew verb software, Paradigmatic, is at paradigmatic.freney.org (fittingly, I think).
     
  • The News Feed, if you read stuff that way, has a link over to the right in the sidebar.
     
  • My email address, if you know it already, is still the same.

We should be up and running as per usual as of now.

Hopefully.

- Sam.





Changes

5 07 2008

I’m about to do some mucking around with my domain name.

Apologies if this mucks up the web addresses for this blog so that you can’t find stuff no more.

What I’m trying to do is to reconfigure my domain name, so I’ve got more useful subdomains. That means that this blog will move from freney.org/blog to blog.freney.org. It will also let me assign my mail login to mail.freney.org, paradigmatic pages to paradigmatic.freney.org, and so on.

 

What I’m just a little unsure about is whether I can sanely redirect all the urls that currently point to this blog to the new domain name.

So if in a day or two’s time you come to check this site, and get an error, try the following two addresses:

http://freney.org (no www)
http://blog.freney.org

 

If you subscribe using a feed reader, make sure your feed is the following address, which will be relatively stable in regard to changes that I make:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/FishPiper

Oh well.
Here goes…





Paradigmatic 0.6.0

2 07 2008

New version: I’ve done some more work on various sections of Paradigmatic.

The first thing you’ll notice as you fire it up is that I’ve changed the main window to look a little nicer:

Note I’ve removed the greyed-out ‘Tester’ option, as I’ve not written it yet. It will return when there’s something to connect the button to.

The new ‘Grammar Aids’ option is a collection of grammar tables, including noun declension patterns, segholate patterns, pronominal suffixes, the strong verb ‘ant magic’ table, and a summary of irregular verb prefixes. Below is the noun patterns table to give you an idea of what I’m talking about.

These tables are all static (i.e. they’re for reference, not interaction), but will hopefully be handy in certain cases. The ‘ant magic’ is something that I never really got into, but a bunch of others in my 1st year Hebrew class found really handy for working out vowel changes in different stems. It got the name from the similarity of the page to a bunch of ants wandering around some Hebrew consonants… that, and the fact that the author’s name is Anthony Kerr.

I’ve also put in a decent help book, that will at least answer some very basic questions on how to use this program.

I’ve changed the Sparkle updater over to the most recent version, which corrects a couple of bugs with updating, particularly related to not having an internet connection.

Finally, one minor database update of note is that I’ve corrected the Hollow שׁים Yiqtol 2fp/3fp forms.

 

 

To get the new version, download it (0.6.0, 2.3 MB zipped .app file), or hit ‘Check for updates’ in the Paradigmatic menu bar. If you like, see the full notes, or read the FAQ.

To keep updated about any posts related to Paradigmatic, subscribe to the following RSS feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/paradigmatic