Friday the 8th of April 2010

We left Friday morning for Melbourne. On the drive, it didn’t stop raining for almost the whole 8 hour drive until half an hour from our stop at St Kilda in Melbourne. I remember at about 1:30pm on Friday, it [...]]]> Musings on the Tassie Trip, the good, the bad, and the annoying…

Friday the 8th of April 2010

We left Friday morning for Melbourne.
On the drive, it didn’t stop raining for almost the whole 8 hour drive until half an hour from our stop at St Kilda in Melbourne. I remember at about 1:30pm on Friday, it was supposed to be a sunny Friday afternoon but instead it was very dark and the clouds were ominous!

The GPS served us well the whole way to Melbourne up until there were three turn offs on the main highway and I think we took the wrong turn when we we about 7 minutes to St Kilda.
Thankfully the GPS adjusted itself and we managed to make it to our destination without much hassle.

We arrived at our flat of sorts and ended up getting a pizza to eat for dinner.
Again, the iphone came to the rescue and, AroundMe didn’t come through to I used Google Maps to find a pizza place about 400 Metres down the road.

Setting off the next morning, we departed for the port and found ourselves driving about 3KM in 1 hour because of the backlog of cars trying to get onto the Spirit of Tasmania, we left our flat at 7:30am and made it on to the boat somewhere around 9am, what should have taken about 10 minutes, took over 1 hour.

After the stress of trying to make it on the boat on time (after our plane trip disaster with Tiger Airways), there was jubilation when we were able to see the other cars and finally make it through the quarantine.

The boat trip was made all the easier because we had a cabin, this was nice and cosy.

The food on the boat was ok, not fantastic but if you expected plane food then you would be pleasantly surprised.

When we finally made the 8 hours, instead of getting off the boat at about 6pm, it was 8:30pm and like the driving trip, it was pouring with rain when we disembarked from the boat.

Getting to Forth. where we were staying, was quite easy and we managed to be there just before 10pm.

Sunday the 11th of April 2010

Today we had breakfast and headed off to Davenport and we went to a place called Penguin, they have a market there which is quite good, the service wasn’t fantastic but they had some good music and the food was palatable.

Unfortunately where we are in Fort, there is no mobile phone coverage, not for Telstra nor Vodafone! Unfortunate, but I think I could last a week.

Monday the 12th of April 2010

Tuesday the 13th of April 2010

Today was a bit of a disaster really.
After leaving for the days trip, we visited what I thought was a wasp sanctuary but was actually an animal sanctuary (Wings Wildlife Park). The service was pretty bad and it seemed that typical of Tasmania, people don’t trust their own seafood and use imitation squid and the like instead of real squid. What the menu says is “Squid” but what they mean to say is “Squid, but possibly something else, not related to squid and possibly not even tasting like squid”.
Quite puzzling about the Wildlife park was that our three year old son had to pay to get in, but our one year old didn’t, as if the three year old would somehow enjoy the outdoor wasp displays more than the one year old.

After that we went to the ‘caves’ which are caves in Tasmania discovered only last century and are the only publicly available caves of their type in Australia (whatever type that is). We gave up on that idea because we would have had to wait about 40 minutes to get in and the stairs looked ominous for a pram.
We then went to Burnie to a park which had the highest and biggest flight of steps and ramps I’ve ever seen anywhere, let alone a park. So big in fact, that a day after we went to the park, my calfs were hurting from walking so much. Thankfully the scenery in the park was amazing and there was a waterfall throughout the park which took my mind off the fact that my legs were burning and my child was screaming.

After getting my hair cut in Burnie, we went to “No. 25 Family Restaurant”.
I’m not sure if it was the number of times your family will throw up after eating the food, or the street number the restaurant was on. Either way, most of the food was awful, if this is what we have to pay for good service (and the service was exceptional) then they can keep their money.
Joy’s food had the consistency and smell of dog food. We could have cut out the middle man and just brought the “home brand” garlic bread for them from Coles, and the pasta was only loosely based on something they could have seen in a cook book.
The saving grace of that meal was the fact that we were alive the next day.
The glory of the morning sun confirmation that possibly our stomachs were prepared for whatever it was that hit them.

Wednesday the 14th of April 2010

After a bit of a disaster yesterday we just relaxed today at the house in Forth.
One of the disadvantages of this position if that there is absolutely no mobile phone coverage here. When I say none, I mean not even Telstra gets a look in here at Forth. Would be a good start before looking at the NBN to be getting proper mobile phone coverage!
I managed to find reception just down the hill from the house thankfully, about 100 metres away, to the surprise of Esther (Joy’s auntie) who long believed that you had to drive ‘up the hill’ (about 10 kilometres away) to get any coverage at all.
That’s where I can check my messages and email periodically.
Apart from that we had a great potato bake and crumbed chicken (from the farm) for dinner, courtesy of Joy.
They have a great TV here as well, High Def, two HDMI inputs, so I could plug my laptop in to it and watch a few shows.

Thursday the 15th of April 2010

Migrating from a Windows operating system to Mac.

The word Mac used to grit through my clenched teeth, I almost spat it out at the thought of using one. What has happened in the mean time has been interesting.

I like to muck around with computers and hardware and have [...]]]> It’s been a journey that many have taken.

Migrating from a Windows operating system to Mac.

The word Mac used to grit through my clenched teeth, I almost spat it out at the thought of using one. What has happened in the mean time has been interesting.

I like to muck around with computers and hardware and have done for many years, I like that side of computers, so to have something that I cannot open up and fiddle with seems quite the opposite of what I would want to do. With a PC you can fiddle to your hearts content and upgrade it whenever you please. Short of putting more RAM in, a Mac is not that easy to fiddle with. Then again, if it just worked, all the time, why would you want to?

It’s like this analogy.

Think of it as an old beat up car that you can open up and fiddle with, change the timing on a whim, replace the coolant by unplugging the rubber stopper, compared to a nice shiny new car that you cannot necessarily do that with, but why would you want to, because it just works. A shiny new car doesn’t have to be restarted while you are using it, just to be secure.

A Windows machine is just like the old beat up car. Gets you ‘from a to b’, it might do it slowly and it might break down along the way, but hey, it’s cheap, who cares!! And it gets you there eventually.

The Mac is like the new shiny car, plenty of speed from the get go, reliable and secure.

But it’s not all Microsoft’s fault, surely. They didn’t design every piece of the million hardware trinkets you can get with a PC, so the slowness, viruses and instability just isn’t their fault! That may very well be the case, but as a customer, that shouldn’t be your problem, you shouldn’t have to suffer!

Several features in using these two operating systems over the past few months have me sticking with Mac for the desktop for the foreseeable future.

Spotlight search

As much as Microsoft is slow in catching up with great ideas, even with Windows 7, they haven’t caught up.

Spotlight search is an instant search feature on the Mac, and when I say instant, it’s instant.

You can type anything in the search bar and it will search files, folders, emails, photos, music etc… for that name and display the results in an easy to use, categorised menu.

Even better than this, the search feature is available on every Open dialog box, so if you have to open a file, no more trawling through your file system trying to find it, just type the name in the search box, voila!

The mind boggles as to why Windows 7 still does not have this feature.

Integrated graphical subsystem

Where Windows 7 will need a good graphics card etc to display it’s fancy stuff on screen, the Mac OSX operating system uses vector’s to display graphics, which doesn’t take a hit on the CPU/GPU to display 3D effects, the Windows 7 version is the ‘poor mans graphic effects’ (think of your old car analogy here ), so the operating system speed doesn’t rely on graphics but only on how it’s designed.

Widgets

The widgets system is also very handy, if I have to write a note, do a calculation or check the latest dilbert, I can simply press F4 and it all appears on screen, very handy.

Move to trash application feature

In Windows, everyone knows you can never truly get rid of a program, it can leave files, Windows DLL’s, registry entries all behind, ready to turn your sloth into a turtle. The Mac operating system has a neat feature called packages, where all programs are stored in one logical package. So to ‘uninstall’ a program on a Mac, you just drag the thing to trash, and the whole application is gone, no going into a control panel, wait for the Add/Remove programs to load, etc etc….

Time Machine

Yet another mind boggler here.

The Mac OSX has something called Time Machine.

Every thought of what it would be like having a seamless, transparent, automatic backup solution that will, if need be, restore your entire machine from scratch including everything down to icon locations? Well, your thinking of Time Machine.

It’s as easy as plugging in a drive, clicking the icon to use the disk as a Time Machine backup, and your entire computer is backed up, it’s that easy and if you need to go to a previous version of a file, just browse to the directory and click the Time Machine icon.

Something that Windows 7 does not have still and is sorely needed. Having to reinstall a Windows machine from scratch is (as anyone who has done this knows) extremely painful, you’ve got to install virus checker/s, spyware, firefox, winrar, etc etc etc, the Time Machine feature on the Mac means you never have to do that again because it can restore a computer from scratch, with all your data there.

I’ll steal a quote about time machine from http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2354364,00.asp

“4) Time Machine is a core part of the OS, and doesn’t require an end user to shop around for a product that piggy-backs off an already unstable OS architecture (DLL’s, registry, apps with files all over the place, etc). It’s great that Windows users have hundreds/thousands of programs to choose from for backup, unfortunately when you have the best one on your Mac, none of the other choices really matter, not to mention that most ‘non-nerds’ don’t want to shop around for a product like this anyway, cause they got better things to do with their time.”

Support

Well, I’m not sure what I can say in this area, Apple are world class in support, just excellent.

Power usage and Form Factor

Ever wondered if it was really necessary to have a big clunky computer system under your desk, whirring away, and all those cables hanging about everywhere? Well, so did Steve and his team when they designed the iMac.

And on power usage, there isn’t much of a comparison, and similar specced PC would use more than double the power of a Mac.

When using my old Windows machine, it would run at 200 Watts load, the Mac (which is substantially more powerful) runs at just 110 Watts load, and always powers down if the screen saver is on or the screen is off. Windows will just keep thumping away, even if nothing is happening.

Speed and Security

As per my graphics post above, the Mac OS X is slick and fast, very very responsive, no waiting for the graphics card to recover from whatever fancy effect it was just trying to do.

And about security, what can I say, no installing a filesystem hogging virus checker on a Mac, it doesn’t need one! You also won’t come to your computer one day and find it’s been automatically restarted because of some critical security update (boy, does that irk me!!).

Those are my thoughts on moving from a Mac as my main machine to a PC. Mac’s are realiable, they are slick, they stay slick and all of your important files are backed up regularly automatically.

This market would be:

People not wanting a super speedy machine and want to save power.

People wanting a low power NAS.

My plan is to investigate the possibly of replacing it with my main TV Recording box and see how well it churns [...]]]> The Atom 330 is a Low power Dual Core/hyperthreading architecture destined for the Mini-ITX market.

This market would be:

People not wanting a super speedy machine and want to save power.

People wanting a low power NAS.

My plan is to investigate the possibly of replacing it with my main TV Recording box and see how well it churns through SD TV.

The machine itself is extremely small, being an Aywun MW-100 coming in at 70×185x245mm. It also comes with a 60W power supply. One thing interesting to note is that this machine at idle just reaches 30 Watts when running Windows Vista. Compare this to my current machine which at idle runs at 170 Watts and over 200 Watts when I’m using it.

The mainboard comes equipped with integrated graphics, 5.1 Channel support, SATA II support, 6xUSB 2 Ports and 1xPCI slot.

The machine quite easily records TV Shows from a USB Tuner, creaping up to 40 Watts in the process. Although it can play SD TV, getting it to do anything above this will cause stuttering etc… But playing off the machine (over a windows/samba share) is not a problem.

It’s been great to have this little machine to play with and I’ve ended up getting three to do various tasks.

Firstly I installed Windows Vista 32Bit (Home Premium) on this machine. It ran well but only had 1GB of DDR2 installed.

Testing how much power this uses was quite interesting, with Windows Vista Home Premium 32bit installed, it ran at 30 Watts Idle (40 Watts Load) which is quite good considering my main machine runs at about 170 Watts idle. This is a lot better than anything else I’ve got and is in fact less power than my Phillips 19″ alone draws (that runs at just over 40 Watts).

My conclusion with using this machine for a few days is that it is excellent for the purpose for which I bought it, web browsing and TV Recording and I’m very happy with it. It’s no graphics machine by any stretch of the imagination but does excel at everything else, with it’s small form factor a big plus for me. The machine has been as stable as a rock and a pleasure to work with. If you want a little machine that uses very little power to play with, then I recommend one of these.

If you want a graphics machine, there is now something called the ION which is also very low power but also allows you to play some games as well at reasonable speed.

Just search for Atom 330, on Staticice.

Your probably better off eating the box...

The McAngus burger is indeed a master deceiver of epic proportions.

When you eat it, it tastes fantastic, you are sure that’s it’s doing your body good. Instead, this burger filled with sugar, additives of the unnatural kind, flavours, fat (of the saturated [...]]]>

Your probably better off eating the box...

Introduction

The McAngus burger is indeed a master deceiver of epic proportions.

When you eat it, it tastes fantastic, you are sure that’s it’s doing your body good. Instead, this burger filled with sugar, additives of the unnatural kind, flavours, fat (of the saturated kind), and colours (over 100 ingredients in all), mark my works, will send you to an early grave.

In the following sections I will show you the how and why of this burger and why avoiding it will give you a longer, healthier life.

The how

For fear of sounding inflammatory (pardon the pun), let me explain myself:

I’ll give you some background first, with a quote from Rachel K. Johnson, Ph.D., M.P.H., R.D., associate Professor of Nutrition at the University of Vermont in Burlington, she says, “Sugar has no nutritional value other than to provide calories, consuming foods and beverages with excessive amounts of added sugars displaces more nutritious foods and beverages for many people.”

An independent expert report released by the World Health Organisation which gave guidelines on health and intake of food and nutritional, amongst other things, set out recommendations on Sugar, Salt and Fat intake.

Here is an Excerpt from that report, it says, “The Expert Report’s specific recommendations on diet include limiting fat to between 15 and 30 percent of total daily energy intake and saturated fats to less than 10 percent of this total.”

Carbohydrates, the report says, should provide the bulk of energy requirements – between 55 and 75 percent of daily intake and free sugars should remain beneath 10 percent. Protein should make up a further 10-15 percent of calorie intake and salt should be restricted to less than 5 grams a day. Intake of fruit and vegetables should be plumped up to reach at least 400 grams a day.”

The why

Ok, lets do the math on a typical Angus meal from our friendly Family Resturaunt, this is a medium meal with a coke and fries, don’t bother adding desert, you will see why:

With over 20 additives just in the burger, (plus the old Caramel IV rearing it’s ugly head).

These figures below are recommended intake according to the World Health Organisation.

Another thing to note is that these are gross caloric values and don’t take into consideration the usable calories from the body, I’m not sure if the WHO take this into condieration, so I’m not, but actual values may be 2 or 3% lower if this is taken into consideration.

And all of this with little real nutritional benefit to your body, you will still need to eat enough fruit and vegetables etc, to make up therest of the calories that are recommended without eating any more of anything that is over the 100% mark already. I guess the graph speaks for itself on what, and where, you should be eating.

Now, you may think this is a bit harsh, calling the Angus burger a heart attack in a box and saying that your better off eating the box than eating the burger. But lets say you do eat the box instead of the burger, how much less Saturated Fats, Sugar and Sodium are going to eat.

Conclusion

For someone to have a healthy day’s eating, you simply cannot eat a meal like this and stay within your recommended daily calorie limit (or any other limit, for that matter), unless you are already overweight. SO that begs the question, how or why could anyone justify eating such a meal, ever! And how if this is all people should eat in a whole day (or day and a half), with very little nutrition in the meal, would you justifiably be able to eat this as part of a ‘normal daily balanced lifestyle’!

I guess these are questions people need to ask themselves…

]]> http://wordpress.dj.id.au/?feed=rss2&p=75 1 http://wordpress.dj.id.au/?p=72 http://wordpress.dj.id.au/?p=72#comments Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:31:07 +0000 admin http://wordpress.dj.id.au/?p=72 10 of the most useless iphone apps which probably exist.

iGetUp – Can’t decide to get up in the morning or not? Let this app decide! iDrinkTooMuchCoffee – Put in every coffee you drink in the day to monitor your coffee usage. imTooFat – Think your Budda’s sibling? Before eating something, open this app up and it will [...]]]> 10 of the most useless iphone apps which probably exist.

iGetUp – Can’t decide to get up in the morning or not? Let this app decide!
iDrinkTooMuchCoffee – Put in every coffee you drink in the day to monitor your coffee usage.
imTooFat – Think your Budda’s sibling? Before eating something, open this app up and it will tell you your fat!
iBrick – Wreck your iphone with one simple press of your finger, not even DFU will save you!
iSipCalc – Ever wondered why work out how many sips in a litre? Neither have I! But with this app, you now can!
iClockNumber – Ever wondered how many numbers on a clock? Think it’s twelve? Think again, use this app to work it out!
iTreeCalc – Ever wondered how many trees it takes to make a pair of scissors?
iKeyboardTracker – With this cool app, when you start typing on a keyboard, open the app and you can see who else in the world is typing on a keyboard!
iMaxCoke – Trying to decide if you should buy a coke or pepsi for your drink? Let this app decide!
iLeafCounter – Take a photo of a tree and it will count the leaves for you! A must have for anyone who has a need to count leaves on a tree!

These are 10 things you do not want to see on food packaging, going with 10 to 1, in no particular order.

Ok, I found a few more to add in my demented brain, so it goes past 1 (and past 10, why, I don’t know, I told you my [...]]]> Ok, time for another 10 things .

These are 10 things you do not want to see on food packaging, going with 10 to 1, in no particular order.

Ok, I found a few more to add in my demented brain, so it goes past 1 (and past 10, why, I don’t know, I told you my brain was demented).

11. “You know it’s good for you because we told you so”.

10. “May contain traces of various food or food-like substances (so if you like, die or something while eating this, it’s really not our fault, really, it’s not)”

9. “Caution, we sell this product so it WILL burn your mouth if you consume straight away, so there, now we’ve warned you”

8. “May contain traces of food”.

7. “May not contain traces of food”.

6. “If you find something edible in here, we didn’t do it”.

5. “The chicken is not dry, it’s just well cooked”.

4. “Just because we are chinese, it’s doesn’t mean we can cook”.

3. “If this product improves your health, it’s not our fault”.

2. “May lead to premature death”.

1.  “Don’t say we didn’t yell you so”.

1. “Just because this looks like food….well….you know the rest”.

1. “‘Nutritional value: Nil’, is not a typo”.

1. “Directions for use: Close your eyes and swallow (think happy thoughts)”.

1. “Serving suggestion: Proceed with caution”.

1. “And you thought smoking was bad for you….”.

1. “When we say nuts, you know we don’t really mean nuts”.

1. “This meal is heart tick approved, no really, it is, why are you laughing, stop laughing”.

1. “Your guess is as good as ours…”

1. “We have lawyers because we care”.

1. “Product commonly eaten”.

1. “Just think, you could be eating cardboard”.

1. “If you can’t pronounce the ingredients list, don’t worry, neither can we”.

I decided, these days, there is enough difference amongst food’s to give a good competition, so we are tipping off against two muesli bar types, the Carman’s Apricot and Almond Muesli Bar and Uncle Toby’s Apricot Muesli Bar (”chewy”).

“But they are different!” I [...]]]> Ok, everyone loves a good competition, but, muesli bars, who would have thought?

I decided, these days, there is enough difference amongst food’s to give a good competition, so we are tipping off against two muesli bar types, the Carman’s Apricot and Almond Muesli Bar and Uncle Toby’s Apricot Muesli Bar (”chewy”).

“But they are different!” I hear you say. Well, that’s not my fault! Uncle  Toby does not make just a plain Muesli bar as Carman has, and the closest I’ve found to an Apricot bar in the Carmen range is the Apricot and Almond, so Apricot and Almond vs Apricot.

I’ll go through different points about the bars and at the end make a conclusion as to which one I think is the best, and why.

Price

Carmen’s came in at 270 Grams for $4.99, which comes to a grand total of 1.8 Cents per gram.

Uncle Toby’s was  185 Grams for $2.69, which comes to a grand total of 1.4 Cents per gram.

So…

Carmen = 1.8 Cents per gram

Uncle Toby’s = 1.4 Cents per gram

It should be noted that Carmen’s is GM Free, Uncle Toby’s makes no such guarantee, Carmen’s is also Australian Made and Owned.

Ingredients

Carmen’s

(All GM Free as noted)

Rolled Oats, Nuts (10%), Almonds (7%), Hazelnuts, Pecans, Apricots (7%), Sunflower Seeds, Honey, Canola (Rapeseed) Oil, Cinnamon, Glucose (Corn/Maize), Natural Vanilla.

That’s 12 Ingredients, no additives, no preservatives, no GM, not bad.

Uncle Toby’s

Rolled Oats (28%), Whole Wheat (10%), Glucose (Wheat), Sugar, Dried Apricot (9%), Vegetable Oil, Soy Lecithin, Antioxidants (304 – Ascorbyl Palmitate) (306 – Tocopherol Concentrate), Coconuts, Maize Starch, Humectants (420 – Sorbitol and Sorbitol Syrup) (422 – Glycerol), Dried Apple, Rice Flour, Oat Flower, Skim Milk Powder, Honey, Emulsefier (Soy Lecithin), Food Acid (citric), Natural Flavour, Preservatice (Sulphur Dioxide).

22 Ingredients, wow, that was an effort! With preservatives, additives and possible GM ingredients, almost twice the ingredients of the Carmen’s Muesli Bar, I don’t know what half those things are for or what they do.

It should also be noted that regarding the Uncle Toby’s additive 420, additivealert.com.au has this to say “Not suitable for diabetics, infants and young children, liver toxicity, gastrointestinal upsets. Prohibited in foods for infants and young children.”

Component(per 100 Grams)        Carmen’s     Uncle Tobys    (blue is better)

Energy                                              423 Calories          408 Calories

Protein                                              10.4 Grams            5.7 Grams

Fat – Total                                        18.2 Grams             13.4 Grams

-Saturated                                        1.8 Grams                4.5 Grams

-Trans                                                0 Grams                   NA

Carbohydrate                                 50.6 Grams             62.7 Grams

- Sugars                                               10.4 Grams            21.0 Grams

Dietary Fibre                                    7.4 Grams                6.6 Grams

Sodium                                                30 mg (0.03g)      15 mg (0.015g)

Some of the ingredients, it depends on what your talking about as to which is better, protien, Fibre and sugar here are the clear cut winners here for Carmen’s.

Taste!

Now, although they are the same type of product and you would think they would taste the same, nothing could have been further from the truth!

While the Carmen’s had a ‘traditional’ muesli bar taste and was a very nice mix of nuts and a good substance.

The Uncle Toby’s tasted like a synthetic sugary based product that left a sugary/gluey film type substance on my mouth, which could have been any one of the 22 Ingredients, or a combination.

The taste has to be tasted to be believed I guess you could say, as I’ve noted below, the Uncle Toby’s was SO BAD, that I literally threw the rest of the packet out, I couldn’t eat the rest, I didn’t even finish a whole bar and did end up with a film on the inside of my mouth, I had better expectations but I was disappointed. Then, if you look at the ingredients list, what can you expect?

The reality of the Carmen’s is that if your mum had made you a muesli bar, this is kind of what you would expect to eat, and it will fill you up till lunch, calling it a snack it’s really giving it justice because it’s more than that, it’s feeling as if you’ve eaten something which your body will love you for.

Market Targets

While the Carmen’s targets the GM Free, no preservatives line, as well as being wheat free, dairy free and high in fibe, healthy eating (a Kids Connect Approved product). They start the packet on the front with “We believe food should come from the kitchen, not the chemist”, which is just so true, in reading the ingredients list (above). Carmen’s also are mentioned as 100% Australian Made and Owned.

The Uncle Toby’s goes for the ‘Wholegrain goodness’ more than anything. In fact, in reading the packet of the Uncle Toby’s Muesli bar, the word ‘wholegrain’ or term ‘wholegrain goodness’ is mentioned no less than 9 times. This is a lot if you ask me, I would prefer to have something else to say as well, since wholegrain goodness is inherent in the fact that it’s a muesli bar, it’s no achievement of them because that’s the product they are selling, if it’s didn’t have ‘wholegrain goodness’ it wouldn’t be a muesli bar because it wouldn’t have wholegrain muesli in it.

Another interesting point is that they also mention ‘low gi’ except, the Glycemic Index is 54, just two points off being Medium GI, so close that it’s a bit of a stretch for me. A  ’source of fibre’ is also mentioned. Uncle Toby’s is owned by the Swiss company, Nestle.

Conclusion

When I started this comparison, I thought maybe it would be close, maybe one would edge in front of the other and it would be a nice close finish, what I found was a stark difference between the two Muesli Bars and I could not have been further from the truth.

While the Carman’s had whole grains only, no added sugar, no preservatives and mostly just seeds and oats, the Uncle Tobys was a plethora, a mixture of different preservatives/emulsefiers, additives and unpronouncable foodstuffs, with less dietary fibre and over double the sugar of the Carmen’s.

I also expected the taste to be at least slightly similar, but again I was proved wrong. As stated in the taste section, the Uncle Toby’s lost out big time in the taste department, it tasted nothing like what I would think a proper muesli bar would be but a light sugar filled ’snack’. Not only that but I cannot pronounce some of the things I’m eating in it.

I had to revert to my ‘Additives’ Application (thank you iphone!) to even work out what was in the Uncle Toby’s bar, and in an attempt to discover the possible source of this oily film now covering my mouth (alas, I couldn’t).

Suffice to say, in the end, the rest of the Uncle Toby’s Muesli Bars went in the bin, they were so bad. The Carmen’s however, I would buy again, an excellent product all round.

*Disclamer

I do not and have never worked either for Carmen’s Fine Foods Pty Ltd nor Nestlé S.A and I am in no way affiliated with any companies mentioned above.

Now that Vista is almost dead and the almighty Windows 7 is going to take over, we need some therapy to see it off. Here are some things your likely to hear about Vista over the next few months.

You laugh nervously when you see a computer tagged with ‘Windows Vista Ready’.

That faint groan you hear? [...]]]>  

Now that Vista is almost dead and the almighty Windows 7 is going to take over, we need some therapy to see it off. Here are some things your likely to hear about Vista over the next few months.

You laugh nervously when you see a computer tagged with ‘Windows Vista Ready’.

That faint groan you hear? Bill Gates using Vista.

Everytime someone starts up a Vista machine, a little child in Africa dies.

I don’t know what gives me more dread, the Blue Screen of Death or the Vista startup screen.

You know your running Vista when you would rather use carrier pidgeon.

Windows ME has been removed from the Guiness World records category for ‘The worst ever operating system’.

The usage of Windows Vista as a torture tool has been specifically banned under the Geneva Convention.

People who vote, comment to you that they “don’t know what’s wrong” with Windows Vista.

You imagine the Blue Screen of Death while your using Windows Vista to make the experience less painful.

Your doctor advises you against grinding your teeth while your awake.

Whilst editing and updating my facebook page, let me say, I just love the application, the way it works and how everything is integrated into a couple of actual pages, they take the Internet social networking scene to a new level.

Browsing [...]]]> Ok, I did try and find another name for it, but alas, I just couldn’t!

Whilst editing and updating my facebook page, let me say, I just love the application, the way it works and how everything is integrated into a couple of actual pages, they take the Internet social networking scene to a new level.

Browsing is today, I had this message come up, one which has been bugging me, let me illustrate it in a picture…

So, this, I thought, might have been legit??

So, this is the image which came up, ok, it’s on facebook, facebook doesn’t lie, right???

Well, going into the “IQ Test” <(quotes around that for good reason, more on that in a sec…) I found that there is a little disclaimer, conveniently places underneath the flash page, where you cannot see it, and one of those ones that I just don’t read, hey, I wanted OFF my friends dumb list, right?

SO I proceed into this 10 question “IQ Test” (see, told you I would tell ya ) and it’s nothing more that ten pretty simple questions, then, at the end, I get this box!

Ok, dodgy much?!

SO, I read the bottom, which is conveniently hidden, and doesn’t show up when I click the ‘privacy policy’ and of the many words, they say that I will be charged more than $50 per month for completing this test (let alone the $6.60 for giving you an “IQ Test”) and I have to OPT-OUT to not be charged. 

This is truly a scam and I hope facebook will remove this.

I have contacted them regarding this but have as yet received a reply, will eagerly await this message disappearing from my screen.