This is what we thought up and constructed for dinner last night… it was divine. Thanks to Paul for suggesting the pancetta, it’s perfect for this dish.

Ingredients:

• one aubergine per person
  • one ball of fresh mozzarella per 2 persons
    • 60 g of pancetta per person (amazing italian bacon, you’ll have to get this from your deli)
      • chestnut mushrooms (I think this is what they’re called; in Dutch they’re called “kastanje champignons”) – obviously you can improvise if you can’t find these
        • onions
          • italian spices (oreganum, dried basil, etc), salt, freshly ground black pepper
            • basil pesto
              • rucola (aka rocket salad)
                • fresh tomatoes

                  • fresh focaccia or other rough bread
                    Recipe:

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Yes, boys and girls, this is the one and only official and authoritative Ninja website, Real Ultimate Power. This is a brilliant resource, chock-full of hard-hitting information such as the following:

1. Ninjas are mammals.

2. Ninjas fight ALL the time.

3. The purpose of the ninja is to flip out and kill people.

You can also buy the book through Amazon.

Don’t forget to read the hate-mail linked from Real Ultimate Power. The amount of utter stupidity on the internet is frighteningly evident when browsing these mails, all written by functionally hydro-encephalitic cretins.

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Hopefully this will help me to cut down on my WAB1 activities… an extremely groovy RSS/ATOM newsfeed aggregator plugin for Mozilla Firefox. See the screenshot here and download the extension, called Sage, here.

1 Work Avoidance Behaviour; you know, you’re supposed to start working, so first you clean up your desk, then clean up the room, then the house, then you take up gardening or perhaps embroidering… in my case, I spend far too much time reading nerdy web sites instead of finishing this little story I started writing.

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According to the UN HDR of 2004, the top five most developed countries in the world are: Norway, Sweden, Australia, Canada and the Netherlands (whoohoo!). Things have not changed much since the HDR of last year. South Africa is at position 119 (just above the UK – just joking!) and is classified as having “medium human development”.

The HDR is based on various factors, including literacy, education, average life expectancy, per capita GDP, etc. and makes for interesting reading. You can start here.

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I bought my Tungsten E last year (2003) in October. This is a perfect little gadget and is still serving me well… however, Graffiti 2 really, REALLY sucks. Maybe the years of Graffiti 1 on my previous Palm IIIx are holding me back, but I just couldn’t get used to the new multi-stroke characters. Yech.

Today I finally gave in and downgraded to Graffiti 1 according to the included instructions and with the PRCs in this zip-archive. Bliss!

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It seems Mozilla Thunderbird (GREAT mail client, BTW) seems to download and open the downloaded HTML file when you click on a URL in an email. This is usually not what I want… so:

1. Exit Thunderbird if it’s running.

2. Edit your prefs.js (usually in ~/.mozilla-thunderbird/default/random_characters/prefs.js

3. Add this line: user_pref(“network.protocol-handler.app.http”, “/usr/bin/mozilla-firefox”);

4. Save (DOH)

Obviously, if you don’t have an intelligent mozilla-firefox script in /usr/bin that is able to make use of a running instance of firefox, you might have to use the mozilla-firefox-xremote-client or somesuch. Perhaps you even prefer to use another browser… heaven forbid!

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Each year the Washington Post’s Style Invitational asks readers to pick a word from the dictionary, to add, remove or change a single letter and then to submit a suitable new definition. Below are this year’s winners. Brilliant!

Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realise it was your money to start with.

Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.

Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

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Go to <http: www.musicplasma.com=""></http:> and type in the name of your favourite band. Explore a bit!

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Yes, I am exceedingly happy with my laptop. More about this later.

In the meanwhile, read this for the low-down on the care and feeding of your Lithium-Ion batteries (in most modern laptops). In short: partial charging is better than fully discharging and recharging, although a full discharge-recharge cycle every once in a while is good for calibrating the digital fuel gauge. Lithium-Ion batteries hate high temperature, especially the temperature in your laptop. If you’re going to be running on wall power for a while, remove the battery. Ideally, store it in a cool place at between 30% and 50% charge.

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Once again, I’ve succumbed to my inner laptop-fanboy and ordered a new laptop. The previous one is now two years old and thoroughly out of date. Add to that its 3.7kg weight (on a good day) and its battery life which is somewhere between 1 and 1.5 hours (on that same good day), and it’s obvious that it’s time for a new one. Or so I rationalise, at least.

After months of searching and researching, I settled on the HP NC6000. See the ZDNet review and the Ars Technica review. It’s a goodie. Especially pay attention to the 5 hours and 42 minutes battery life under MobileMark 2002 productivity load (i.e. running Office, Mozilla, Virus scanner, Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Flash and doing stuff the whole time) and the more than luggable 2.3kg. To make it all that much sweeter, HP decided to equip it with an ATI Radeon Mobility 9600: that means I’ll be able to play around with those neato shader thingies.

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