Autumn Zebra

Since the last fortnight was Fair Trade fortnight, Trade Aid plus Forest & Bird were showing films at the Academy Cinema for $5 incl. free coffee/tea/hot chocolate and chocolate (fair trade of course; a product show case of sorts). We saw the one today where the feature ( The Greening of Southie ) was about trying to build a "gold" standard ( LEED certification ) building ( the MacAllen Building ) two years ago in South Boston. It was quite interesting: they used bamboo for the floors, a kind of mdf made from wheat straw, etc. Apparently, no one in the USA had really heard of dual-flush toilets - you know the ones with two buttons, for more or less water? Yeah, they really made a big deal of that aspect - partly because toilets are funny I guess, but given that this type is practically normal, it seemed really weird to talk about them at all. They sort of made all the labourers, cement workers, etc look/sound like morons, which was a shame, although they also appeared...

I have just realised that the order these posts show up is in the order I write them and save them as drafts, rather than the order I actually publish them. This is a bit of a problem because I often write them earlier than I post them. In fact, I have a couple a long time ago that I didn't finish yet that if I posted now would show up months ago and no one would see them. And, currently, as I write this not as you read it, the one I posted a few days ago is first on the list, and not the ones I have posted since, because I wrote them earlier - so then, people come to my blog and see it is the same post first, but really more have been added!! Oh no! This may have happened numerous times, with people missing out on my precious entries :( And it also looks like I posted them all on the same day, whereas really they are across several days, and are supposed to be one a day :| How annoying, I think that is a stupid method they have implemented there. So, make sure you scroll down the ...

Finally, my modem and instructions arrived from ihug. After being marked undeliverable by the courier company because ihug didn't provide room for me to fill in the company name and the floor of the building in their delivery address, I rang and provided them with the information and they delivered it on Friday afternoon. You have to get the modem signed for, and it is delivered during normal work hours, so if you work you have to have it delivered to your workplace pretty much. But that worked out fine in the end. When we tried to set it up, neither that modem nor the one I borrowed off Dad would connect to the internet. Why is that? Not sure, but we think there is a filter/splitter already in the wall or something, so using the filter we were sent by plugging that in as you are supposed to and then plugging the modem into that presumably meant the signal was being double split and stuffing things up. We had to test the connection by plugging the modem into the wall directly and s...