Nothing Dramatic

We are in the process of putting together our emergency survival kit - something every household should have. It is designed to keep us going for 3-4 days if we lose everything else. But in a civil emergency where we lose power but are best to stay put in the house, we would use the contents of the freezer first.

So far we have:
Containers - 2 x 25 litre lidded storage bins
4 cans of Irish stew
3 cans of corned beef
4 cans of spaghetti/baked beans
1 can of peas
1 can of corn
2 packets of dried mashed potato
1 packet of dried vegetables
5 packets of 2-minute noodles
1 packet of corn thins
1 kg of milk powder
1 can opener
4 rolls of toilet paper
9 litres (6 bottles) of water.
plastic utensils
Our mini butane stove plus spare canister.
Apparently we should have 36 litres of water for a family of four, but that's a lot of bulk to store. We will probably get another 6-pack of bottles plus some water purifying tablets (bleach will do at a pinch).
There's a balance between canned and dried food. The latter requires more water, but is much easier to carry should we have to evacuate on foot.

We still have to add:
* Candles, candle-holder and matches (in waterproof container), cigarette lighter
* Torch (ideally a hand-cranked one), AM/FM radio and batteries
* plastic bags (ziplock)
* small first aid kit, paracetamol. (and we'd remember to grab the big first aid kit from the car if we can)
* sachets of some vitamin-rich juice or energy drink.
* foil survival blankets
* face and dust masks (important here as our biggest threat is probably the volcano)
* antiseptic wipes (I figure it might be difficult to wash cooking gear well).

The shortest-lived food has a 9 month life, but most ia 18 months - 3 years (and longer for the cans). We will use and replace expiring stock every January and June.
If you think of anything else we should have, leave a comment.

Now, how's your kit??

A few months back, we had a death in the family. Our trusty can-opener of many years died. It was the old pressed-metal type - not very comfortable to own, but it did what it was supposed to do. Since the nylon bush which held everything in place split in half, fixing it seemed impossible, so we gave it a decent burial.

Enter the Mark II can opener. By no means the cheapest in the store. It had comfortable rounded grips and an easier-on-the fingers turny-bit (that's jargon). However, it soon turned out that our new utensil had flunked the kitchenware equivalent of university and bought a degree from a spammer. You punctured the lid and turned the turny-bit and nothing happened. The odd alarum and excursion (around the can without cutting), but it couldn't open cans. We eventually found that it could open cans in a sense - if you repeated the puncture action every 5mm around the circumference, but that is hardly efficient and left rather a jaggy edge.

Then we went away for a night, leaving my inlaws in charge our our two and their three. They must have encountered a can-opening crisis because on our return their was basic pressed-metal-can-opener mark II. Unfortunately these beasties are either good or pretty useless - maybe it's determined by the position of Jupiter's great red spot at the exact moment they are made? This particular one fell into the latter category. It will stay on track if you apply 3.5 tons of pressure to the handles, but this makes the turny-thing very hard to turn.

So, chanting "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more" I went to the professional catering equipment supplier in town and said "I want a can opener which actually opens cans". This eloquent plea struck a chord with the owner, and with a sympathetic eye he guided me to the Good Cook brand, which he claimed had surpassed the Victorinox ones in his estimation. It uses a horizontal cutting wheel. I had previously owned an opener with a horizontal wheel and it cut beneath the lip, leaving a nice blunt-edged lip but a deadly sharp can wall. The owner assured me this was not the case with the Good Cook opener, so I parted with my money.

Let the fact that I am blogging about it be testament to how happy I am with this opener. It needs minimal effort to operate, and cuts halfway up the lip leaving blunt edges on both lid and can (and a good enough fit between them that you could put the lid back on the can and keep the ants out). It even has a doodad for opening tear-top cans, thereby saving broken fingernails and bent teaspoons. Domestic utopia. And the good news, dear reader, is that it is designed in the US so probably widely available.

Most of the publicity here about food miles has been New Zealand defending against claims from British food producers that New Zealand produce was environmentally unsound because it is shipped across the world. However, New Zealand farming is so much more efficient (lower fertilizer use, more natural grazing and less artificial feed, animals not having to be housed in the winter) that even after transport it has a lower carbon footprint. And New Zealand farmers will be carbon-audited from 2010.

So, last week I bought some house-brand strawberry jam from the nearest supermarket. a 680gm jar (most brands are 500gm) at a good price. I was amazed when I later checked the label to see "Product of Poland". Now I had always thought New Zealand was self-sufficient in berryfruit - and that we even export some of it. If you can buy New Zealand jam in Britain, but we are eating Polish jam in New Zealand, then that seems like a lot of unnecessary transport.

Talking of amusing news headlines, a news story I heard on NZ's national radio a few years back was so funny I had to pull over to the side of the road to recover. I missed the start of the story, but it concluded "About 50 hand guns are stolen in New Zealand every year. Police are concerned that some may fall into the hands of criminals".

This new toy from playmobil is getting some interesting reviews on Amazon

74 and as a follow-up... 60 Interestingly I forgot various deprecated elements such as 83% Geek 83% It figures :-) Sunno why the third image is missing. It was supposed to say "83% Geek"

This has happened to me twice in the past week:

I receive an email from one of the rather small list of senders from whom I accept HTML email (because they don't have a text-only option and I can't find an alternative provider of what I want from them).
The email has some call to action, such as "Click here to get in to it" (the other one was much less specific about where to click, it simply made it clear that there was some place in the message that linked to their site.
But there is NO LINK VISIBLE. Why? Because the link is an image, and of course I have external images suppressed.

so,
1) It's incredibly stupid of the sender - they should know that many mail clients now default to disabling external images in emails (thank you, spammers!) and that many popular webmail systems also suppress external images.
2) Opera has a longstanding bug that if a suppressed image has alt text, the browser doesn't show it. So the multipart newsletters I had to create for my former employer had no branding in HTML view Opera because the alt text for the image in the h1 element was not displayed.
3) Fixing (2) is necessary before you can fix 3 - Don't suppress a link surrounding a suppressed image! (I wend hunting for it with keyboard navigation)

I wish to assure my readers (both of you) that it is pure coincidence that both the outbursts of activity on this blog have occurred in January. They are NOT the result of New Year's resolutions!

I have managed to keep my last New Year's resolution faithfully for seven years now. It was "I shall make no more New Year's resolutions" :-)

TV: 3 Network News (Al Quaeda trying to undermine the Iraqi election).

Today, Min finally got sick of her mouse treating every single-click as a double and we found one in better condition in the computer parts graveyard hidden behind the sofa. Shutting down her geriatric PC to install it, we noticed that the top of the PC was abnormally hot (too hot to hold your hand on for more than a second). A restart confirmed that 1) Her PSU fan had given up the fight and 2) I had inserted the mouse in the wrong socket.
After analysing options such as replace fan in PSU, replace PSU (both from a spare PC we inherited) or resort to spare machine.
Finding that the spare machine had a slightly faster CPU and was 100x cleaner than the current one internally, we decided to do a full transplant: Min's drives, video, network and sound cards into the spare box.

Drives included the 3.5 inch floppy. Sure, the spare machine had had a floppy, but it had been sitting at floor level beneath my desk for almost a year. The photo shows what a 3.5 inch floppy can contain when you have a two year old:

No room for disks? Well she used to put THOSE down a narrow slot behind the gas fire (often pausing first to rip the metal sliding guard off - she seems to have the makings of a safecracker!).

If this movie (1996, Australia) took Cannes by storm, it must have been a very bad year at Cannes.
Shot on a shoestring budget, its cast of unknowns cope well with their stilted dialogue. It has the feeling of being the work of a university film school student. One or two of the quirky little insert scenes work, most don't, and some reek of "in-joke". More plot and less coincidence would also have helped.
At least the soundtrack was interesting.
for effort
(My ratings are out of 10 because there's no half-star)

Music of the moment: Macy Gray (the Id) - there's no nonsense about Gimme all your lovin' or I will kill you :-)