vege garden cont.......chilli fruit and limes

The small chilli fruit has grown in size and is starting to turn purple. Many new flowers have developed and more small fruit are starting to show where previous flowers have dropped their petals.


I was also very happy to see new growth on my kaffir lime. It is developing new leaves and flowers as well.


More to come......

fishing in Brisbane....I think I need a boat

Well I went fishing again the other day just to get out of the house for a while into the fresh air and sunshine and possibly catch something on the side.

Unfortunately I did not even get a bite.

This trip I decided to try the waters behind the Manly Boat Harbour, accessed via a side road that takes you to an area with a strip of sandy beach with a rock wall at one end and a very small rock outcrop near the end of the roadway. The rock wall has been signed as 'prohibited to public access' because of the unsteady nature of the rocks, so I decided to not bother with that location, not knowing the danger factor or even if it was just an advisory sign or a finable offence.

Google Earth images of fishing spot


So I tried the rocks on the other end near the end of the roadway.
Despite the lack of bites or nibbles it was still nice to be out there in the sunshine as this trip was less about fishing and more about getting outdoors.

the small rocky outcrop


view01

view02

view03


where are you fishies?


I am running out of options, it seems, for fishing off the shoreline at a location that is close and not a long drive away, something I am trying to avoid, especially with the fuel prices these days.

I still have a few places left to try but I am starting to wonder if anyone has any luck in any of these areas or are they just going to 'get out of the house' for a while and not expecting to catch anything at all.

vege garden cont....... spring onions, leeks, coriander and pak choi

The spring onions are growing so slowly that sometimes I wonder if they are even moving. The same can be said for the leeks. I am wondering if I have bought a variety of leeks that are aware that they will be eaten when large enough and therefore simply refuse to grow for self preservation. I will be a shoo-in for winner at any produce fair if they have a category for Smartest Plant.

Slowly but surely?...I hope so


I am waiting patiently for the coriander seeds to turn brown and ready to pick. It will be a good harvest when the time comes. Very large and nice looking seeds.

coriander seeds


The newly planted rows of pak choi are growing nicely after the soil revamping I gave the garden. This should lead to a great supply of pak choi in a few weeks time. I can see some delicious stir fries coming in the future and the possibility of creating a new recipe with a pak choi basis.

little pak choi

vege garden cont....... chilli update

A quick update on the chillies.

The flower petals have dropped off the first flower and now the first fruit is starting to show.

It is green at the moment but the colour will change over time into a nice shade of purple as the chilli grows. I can't wait to try the first chilli.

I will be keeping an eye on it as it grows.

Chilli Fruit

vege garden cont....... almost a salad?

Well it seems I am finally getting some results in the garden. The cos lettuce is ready to harvest!! Today I enjoyed my first pickings on a sandwich for lunch. I have to tell you that the satisfaction of having grown them from seed and the struggle to get them to grow seem to make them taste even better.

The buttercrunch lettuce is also getting larger finally. It will be time to enjoy one of those soon as well. Now that it seems I have overcome the problems in the garden, that previously held up the growth, it will be much more enjoyable and successful to plant seeds in the future.

Now I know it's not quite a salad but one day........one day

Cos Lettuce finally big enough to pick


Buttercrunch almost ready

vege garden cont....... the chilli flower has opened!!

I posted some photos of the chilli flower bud which I knew could open at any time. Well it seems that time is right now! I checked the garden this afternoon and there it was, a nice purple open chilli flower.

Purple Tiger Chilli flower

I noticed some other goings on in the garden as well. The recent rain has made the Cos Lettuce leap into action and the Buttercrunch is getting bigger as well.

Cos Lettuce

Buttercrunch Lettuce

On a stranger and rather unfortunate note, the Pak Choi, although still too small to really bother picking, has decided to go to seed already. I guess it is not happy in it's current location and has decided it's life is done and it's time to flower and spread it's seeds. I feel it is only suitable to give it an honorable death and eat it for lunch.


Pak Choi starting to flower and seed

I also noticed some lawn mushrooms growing. I will NOT eat them of course because I do not know what they are and don't particularly want to die but I thought they were attractive enough to take a photo of and display it here.

purple mushrooms

vege garden cont........ good things in small packages

This is just a quick update due to some new developments in the garden.

A very long time ago I took a cutting from a Kaffir Lime tree and grafted it onto an old Mandarin tree to see if it would 'take'. It has been about a year since that experiment began and the graft slowly took on some life of it's own.

I have noticed over that period of time that new leaves were starting to show, which I took as a good indication that the graft would survive and hopefully thrive.

Well just a few days ago I saw something I had missed. It was so obvious I can't believe I didn't notice it earlier. A very tiny lime fruit is developing on the grafted branch of the lime. It is very exciting and I really hope this means a bright future for the lime cutting. I know Kaffir Limes are not the juiciest limes on earth, but the zest would be nice to have. If it grows successfully I will grate the zest and see how well it freezes for future use.


Small lime fruit

My Purple Tiger Chillies are still quite small but to my surprise are so keen to be seen that they are producing flowers already. The flowers are a lovely purple shade and have just started to appear on the plant. I am looking forward to them opening and taking some photos to show them in bloom.


Chilli flower bulb. Very nice shade of purple

The last of my updates is the coriander with some lovely fat seeds. In a couple of weeks they should be ready to pick and help repopulate my coriander seed stores.


Nice big coriander seeds

My educational DVD for kids

I thought I would share some of the journey of creating my first Educational DVD for children aged 18 months and over.

It started with an idea about 2 years ago. I was thinking about how I used to teach my nephews and nieces new information by making the lessons more fun and games then serious 'sit down and listen' and it worked well. They learned and enjoyed it because it didn't seem like a task, it was just fun.

I thought to myself why not try my hand at making fun and educational DVD Videos for kids to help them learn using animation. It would take a long time to create but at the same time it would be enjoyable, when I am not tearing my hair out.

The first step was to think of a topic to base the DVD on. I thought teaching very young children to recognize different colours and shapes would be a good start, as it is something some children struggle with. This way they would have a friendly face on the TV teaching them and they would learn it without even realizing they are learning it.

Step two, characters......I needed two hosts for the video. I thought perhaps simple is the best approach, so I played with a few ideas and came up with Casey and Stacey, basically just two friendly faces to talk to the young children.

Casey


Stacey

They soon became brother and sister Aliens who had a fondness for teaching. Now the voice for Casey came right away, it just popped in my head when I saw his little face. Stacey on the other hand was not as easy. What can I do to come up with a 'girl' voice for Stacey. Well the solution came in the most likely of thought tanks...the shower. That's right...washing my hair, thinking about the characters and in popped the idea. As simple as anything. Start with myself doing a high pitched voice and raise the pitch further using Audio Editing software....I added a slight accent to change the voice a little, although I not really sure where the accent is from. I guess since they are aliens the accent is from her home planet. That my excuse and I am sticking to it.

Now I have my hosts, how will I present the content?

I figured the best way to display colours was to use a big splotch of paint. I decided that a large paint brush painting across the screen would look nice and provide a large area of colour for the children to look at. Now I just had to figure out how to get what was in my head into the animation software and onto the screen. The only technique that looked right, as in looked the way I saw it in my head, was to use a very time consuming animation method to produce the 'paint' look using 'particles'. I figured it would be worth it in the end because otherwise I would end up with something I was not satisfied with. So I resigned myself to the fact that it would be very long Render times for the paint animations. To explain Render - it is basically when the computer is drawing each individual frame of the animation. How long was the Render time for each paint animation you ask? Well each colour from start to finish took about 20hrs.

Casey introduces a colour


picture showing paint 'particles'


picture showing what paint looks like when 'particles' have been Rendered.

When thinking about drawing the shapes section of the DVD, I imagined an outline of the shape first and then a solid shape appearing. So I decided on a big white board style marker pen to draw the outlines of each shape.

marker drawing Circle

So now I had a paint brush for paint colours, a marker pen for shape outlines.....but what to do next....I needed something for the next section of the DVD which combines various colours and shapes to let the children see that there can be different shapes of different colours in the world around them. Well the answer was so obvious I almost kicked myself that I had not thought of it earlier. Casey and Stacey are aliens......so lets give them Space Ships with lasers they can use in the next section to outline the shape before it becomes colour.

Casey's Space Ship


drawing the shape with the laser - 'particles'


laser 'particles' Rendered

So I had the learning sections mapped out in my head and starting creating all the things I would need in the animations.

I thought it would be great to add a quiz at the end as well. I knew that the kids could not read it but an older brother or sister or mum and dad could help them with that part. The idea was to test what they had learned and have a 'reward' video for a correct answer and a 'try again' video for an incorrect answer. After they got all the questions correct there is a bonus video at the end as well.

The last thing on my list of contents was a DVD Extra. Basically this consists of an Activity Book you can access via computer DVD drive and print out colour in pictures and activities.

So the journey began about two years ago and now the DVD is finished and on sale.
It is available for sale from my website JellyFirm Animation

I have included the demo video for anyone who would like to watch it.


It has been a long journey with good days and bad days, but in the end it was all worth it because I feel very proud and happy when I think of the positive feedback I am getting from parents who have bought it and tell me that their children not only love it but are learning from it.

That's what it's all about, that's a real feeling of success knowing that something you created has affected someone's life.

Do any humans actually work at PayPal?

I have been using PayPal for a while now as an easy payment option for customers. One word of advice, don't ever need to ask a question or get a problem solved, as you will be left scratching your head, wondering if your email was even read or simply replied to via auto-responder.

On two separate occasions now I have needed problems solved that were screwing up the sales area of my site. The first was a postage rates problem, the second was an issue faced by many people regarding the PayPal Buy Now buttons and Internet Explorer. This second issue is well documented Online as many people are experiencing this very same problem.

I sent an email regarding the first issue, the postage rates issue and explained that I had followed all the instructions on the site about how to change the postage rates for multiple purchases based on final price and then saved that to my profile so I could use it and the fact that even after following all of the steps and saving, it simply did not take effect when I created the Buy Now button. I was left with postage rates that did not increase based on final price and could they please explain how and why their online procedure was not saving to my profile. A simple enough question really.

I received a response that did not address my particular problem at all. I was simply given the instructions, from the web site, about changing postage rates on your profile, the very procedure I had just stated that I followed to the letter and it was not working. I was left with the feeling that the 'person' had not even bothered to show me the courtesy of reading my query properly. I even responded to that effect and told them to not bother as I found a work around on my own, which means I created a separate Buy Now button for each price range so I could actually sell my items. Then I received a customer service survey about how happy I was with the response to my problem, which I was only too glad to fill out with how happy I WASN'T.

The second incident, as I mentioned earlier, was the Internet Explorer issue. It seems users of Internet Explorer, when trying to use the Buy Now buttons are taken to an error page that asks them to try again and when they click to try again, they get the same error page in an endless loop.

So I contacted them again about this problem. I included my website address in the first line of the query so they could take a look and see the problem in action for themselves and perhaps suggest a work around. I received a response from them and almost fell off my chair in laughter. The response asked if I could give them the website address.....hmmmm......I seem to recall that being in the FIRST LINE OF THE QUERY MORON.

So once again I am stuck dealing with either an auto-responder or a half-wit, neither of which will solve the problem any time soon. Upon further investigation I discovered how common this problem is with Internet Explorer and that the solution is simply within Internet Explorer's own Privacy Setting. If you move the setting to 'Low' temporarily, you can use the Buy Now buttons no trouble at all and get on with your day. So now my site has an 'apology' on it for users of Internet Explorer and an explanation of how to change the settings in order to purchase with PayPal.

I am wondering, if this problem is so common, as it seems to be and also widely discussed, why does it seem PayPal are unaware of it? One would think by now they would have been in touch with Microsoft and said "hey some of our customers are having trouble accessing our site with your Browser, can we together, work out some kind of patch or update they can apply to their browsers to make them PayPal friendly?"

But then that would take a phone call and all those buttons must be very confusing. I mean 'there are numbers AND letters all on the same keys, what the hell do I do?'

So tired of lack of service these days.

vege garden cont.....episode IV.....a new hope

Well it's been an interesting few weeks in the garden.

The old compost soil had conveniently decided to turn to mud, so the small plants didn't have much of a chance. I removed any little seedlings that did fight their way through, dug out some of the muddy compost and replaced it nice loose compost soil from a different source. I then replanted the battle ravaged seedlings into this softer soil and crossed my fingers, hoping they would fight on and make it. Well.... they seem to be doing just that.
A couple of the old pak choi plants seem to have made it as well and are still growing. I also planted a new lot of pak choi seeds in the new soil and I am starting to see new life springing up in the garden. It is a good sign of things to come.

The previously struggling lettuce are growing in height finally and I have an entire row of new little pak choi seedlings. The spring onions are struggling on, slowly but surely and the chillies in the pots seem to be doing well. In fact they are starting to show some of the purple/green colour in the leaves that they are meant to have.

The coriander (cilantro) is flowering well, much better than expected after my harsh pruning and harvesting. I should get a good lot of seeds from it to help replenish my coriander seed stocks.

So from a complete disaster to a feeling of hope for things to come....not a bad turn around.
I am looking forward to eating that first fresh lettuce straight from my own garden.

lettuce getting bigger....


chillies going well.....


old pak choi that survived...


new pak choi emerging.....


spring onions struggling on.....


coriander flowering well....