I got this recipe from a colleague....it tastes divine - just like those marinated eggplant slices you can get from the David Jones deli section.
Ingredients:
- eggplant
- salt, ground pepper, mixed herbs
- oil (olive, canola, vegetable...whatever you can find - although I think olive would be more traditional)
- garlic (fresh & diced)
- 1/2 red chilli (fresh & diced)
- vinegar (white. I used brown rice vinegar which is all I had on me & that worked fine)
Method:
Slice eggplant into 0.5 - 1cm slices. Score each side with criss cross pattern (careful not to cut all the way through). Sprinkle with salt. Set aside for a couple minutes. Drizzle bit of oil on each side. Cook eggplant in a pan until browned on each side & has good colour. Remove eggplant. Sprinkle diced garlic, chilli, more salt & pepper & vinegar). Eat straight away & have leftover cold the next day. I think you could one up this by rolling up some fetta spiked with herbs up in these marinated eggplant slices. If only I had some fetta on me now. Alas, I am currently writing this from South Korea and fancy cheese is existent but expensive & not at the local deli.
Juice of 1/2 lemon
1/3 cup of good olive oil
2 tbsp tahini paste
Salt to taste
2 heaped tsp minced garlic
Blend all above ingredient with whizz stick (Best kitchen utensil ever). Pour into container. Drizzle bit of olive oil on top. Sprinkle a bit of smokey paprika & lots of chilli & garlic salt (you can buy a pre-made grinder mix from the supermarket).
This is Mark's cousin, Crystal's recipe. She's got some killer cocktail recipes which she brings out at family gatherings. Another cocktail recipe she made this easter had I think diced lychees, mangoes, mint, vanilla vodka and soda water. We made the below cocktail for our engagement party last year to go with our purple dockers theme. It also made for a suitable "Royal Wedding Punch" when the group of the girls from work came over for a high tea party to watch the royal wedding this year.
Ingredients:
2L soda water
1/2 L vodka (omit if making a mocktail)
1/4 cup ribena syrup
diced strawberries
blueberries (frozen will do if can't find fresh)
shredded mint leaves
ice cubes
Serve in cocktail glasses. For an extra special touch you could rim the cocktail glasses by dipping the edge in water and then dipping in a bowl of caster sugar or jelly crystals.
This is an old toastmasters speech I did in 2009. I can't find the final version at the moment, this looks like a draft. I'll post it up anyway.
Side Note: Having spent the last couple months working in & out of a construction site (there's an awful lot going on in the yard I'm working in as I'm always have to keep out a look for welding, grinding, potential dropped objects, scaffolding, overhead crane movements, unpredicable korean motorcyclists...etc when walking through the HHI yard), I think that my situational awareness has improved and so it should help with my driving. I'm going to perhaps consider getting back on the wagon this time when I return back to Perth.
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Good afternoon everyone. I’ve decided to explain to everyone here why I no longer drive anymore. As with any good story, I should probably start from the beginning. And so the beginning of this story would be the beginning of my driving career which all began in 2003 – my first year of uni when I started to realize that no way did I want my way uncool dad to keep dropping me off at friend’s parties. So I started to practice driving. I decided to go for go for gold and go for my manual drivers licence. Unfortunately the only manual car dad had at home was are ramshackled old combi, complete with fluffy dice and cowprint seats. It didn’t have power steering, I had to sit on two big cushions to see over the steering wheel, the indicators wouldn’t hold down and the accelerator from time to time got stuck. Needless to say, this was not the ideal training vehicle and was a parallel parking nightmare, especially for someone of my vertical stature. Sometimes I’d try to go up steep hills like the cinema carpark to the carousel shopping centre and I’d have to hold my breath not knowing whether the car would be able to make it. I consider learning to drive on a combi as mistake number 1 in my short lived driving career.
Mistake number 2 would be getting my dad to teach my how to drive. My dad has a very short temper and his method of telling me I was doing something wrong, was to doink me on the head…while I was driving!! Not the most ideal way of positive reinforcement. Needless to say, I was quick to ask mum to get me a driving instructor instead. After about 50 hours of paid driving lessons, I went for my first driving test in East Perth. It lasted no longer than 2 minutes. I failed because I only slightly overshot the line at the stop sign and realizing my mistake slowly reversed back about a couple feet. This did not go unnoticed by my assessor and was an automatic fail. However, this didn’t get my confidence down, I’d heard that most people fail there first driving test so I just applied for the next available test which was in kelmscott. Can you believe it, I failed the 2nd time because a didn’t stop for a family of ducks crossing the road?!! My assessor had to hit the breaks immediately followed by a lecture on how we have to protect our wildlife. I tried rationing with her, “but I thought they would fly away…or umm you know, go in between the wheels - Not under the wheels ofcourse!” My assessor evidently did not agree with me. The third time I failed my test I forgot to look over my shoulder before starting the car up again after stopping for a train at a railway crossing. On my fourth try of the driving test I finally passed!!! And it was total joy & freedom.
I drove everywhere for the next two years, with only a couple bumps and scratches, followed by two unfortunate accidents of similar nature which occurred in 2005/6 where I rammed into the back of a car in front of me during peak hour stop/start traffic on two occasions. At the time I was driving a ford fairlane which has a very long front and so I think I kept underestimating how much distance I needed to stop the car. Dad decided to trade the fairlane in and we got a nice shiny deep red 1998 model Volvo with sports wheel & leather interior instead complete with one of those “Bloody Volvo driver stickers” on it. I loved it. In hindsight, I do think that those two accidents were early warning signs of what was to come. In March 2006, I was driving home from my boyfriend’s house late at night. I had a 12 o’clock sharp curfew at the time. I was tired, as I’d been both working and studying at uni late that whole week and so as I was approaching the second last set of traffic lights back to my house, I just for a second, must have micro slept and thought that the green arrow to turn right was instead a big fat green circle to proceed driving forward, which it was not. I drove my car straight into oncoming traffic, two cars rolled over to avoid me, I spun around the centre traffic light twice and catapulted into the corner house, narrowly avoiding a street light and a tree and smashing right into a brick wall. I could remember it all happening in slow motion..first a hit to the headlights, then into a tree, then the glass shattering and finally the air bag punching me in the face. I unfortunately collided through a brick wall and into a house. I remember seeing through an open window of the house I'd just crashed into, a group of asian students watching tv on their lounge staring out at me in total disbelief. I also remember that, that past week I'd been absolutely obsessed with the Limp Bizkit song, "Nookie" and had been playing it in the car on repeat all week. It had been playing at the time I had the accident. The thoughts (in order) while I was having the accident were: "Shit, I think dad's going to notice that" (when I hit the first set of traffic lights and smashed a headlight), then "Oh crap", then "Oh shit", then "oh man...I really liked that cd!" as the front of the car collided with the tree.
I didn’t drive for a year and a half later since that accident. After another 50hrs of driving lessons and practice with my dad I decided to get behind the wheel again, but I had not been driving for longer than a week before I had yet another accident the week before I officially joined the work force. It was at the exit of Carousel Shopping Centre on the Hungry Jacks side. As I'm quite small, I drive very close to the wheel and sit propped up on cushions. As I was exiting the parking lot onto the main road leading up to the nearest traffic junction, while I looked both ways - I was too short to see over some road side hedges and did not see an incoming car getting ready to enter the parking lot at the same time I was trying to exit it. I unfortunately head on collided with the car. There wasn't too much damage to either of our cars as we were both travelling at low speeds. However, all the damage came to me from the airbag going off in my face and giving me carpet burn, a red eye and neck backlash. My first day at work, I came to work with an eye patch. People kept joking that there was a pirate working on the offshore facility I was supporting. Fortunately I was back to normal after about 2 weeks, but I have decided that the safest thing to do for both myself and others on the road is to remove the risk entirely and not drive anymore. I haven't driven by myself on trips further than the local deli for the last 3.5 yrs ....and so that my friends is why I don't drive anymore.
The one kind of good thing that that did come out of my last car accident was the fact that while I was in hospital getting checked up on for post-accident injuries. I decided to finally tell my parents about my boyfriend who I'd been seeing for the last 3 yrs without their knowledge. I was always scared that my parents would kick me out of home & disown me if they found out I was going out with a white boy who didn't go to uni, so I always planned to tell them after I had secured my first pay check in a permanent job so that I had money to move out. Since the accident happened a week before I officially joined the workforce, this was slightly premature. The only reason I'd really wanted to drive was to be able to go out and see him. I told me parents while I was in the hospital emergency waiting room. They thought I was delirious and making it up, and said, "Yes darling, we'll talk about this later" but I guess the whole timing of me telling them put things into perspective and they love him and have him over for dinner once a week. I think the morale of this little side note story is that "timing can be everything" (as they have since told me that had I told them while I was still in uni they would have had a much harder time accepting it) and always make the most of a somewhat crappy situation to capitalise on an opportunity. Being a quick thinker definitely helped here (reference to next my "Self Reflection" blog post).
This is a an article I wrote in 2004 (I think) for the university newspaper. It didn't end up getting published, but the university young engineers committee decided to post it up on their bulletin board for several years.
A recent survey conducted by yours truly involving twelve former colleagues and friends, left me with the somewhat surprising revelation that only two of the twelve people questioned actually thought they knew what an engineer did. What was further disturbing was that of the twelve people questioned, eleven of them were in fact enrolled in engineering at UWA. So I have decided to try and help demystify this strange and mysterious topic for those of you out there whom are silently thankful that it was not you I decided to question.
Many of you out there may associate the word “engineer” with one of those yellow topped, loud and obnoxious, beer-drinking inhabitants of the Southern quadrant of the UWA grounds. However we are truly much much more than that... me thinks at least. In first year the formulaic response given to engineering students is that an engineer is someone who “combines the disciplines of mathematics, applied science and economics to help solve technical problems.” However, in layman terms an engineer is basically “someone who designs things that hopefully work”. There are several different disciplines of engineering; civil, mechanical, electrical and chemical are some of the more traditional streams. However in more recent years we have seen the emergence of new fields such as mechatronics, aeronautical, biomedical, mining, oil & gas, software and materials engineering. Here’s a rough guide as to what each profession does:
Mechanical: design cars, bicycles, equipment, machines, air conditioners...etc
Electrical: are involved in the design of televisions, mobile phones, computers, work in power stations…etc
Chemical: process raw materials such as petroleum, coal, aluminium and wood into refined products such as gasoline, pharmaceuticals, plastics and paper.
Mechatronics: combine the disciplines of mechanical and electrical engineering to make robots, control and automated sytems..etc
Biomedical: can design artificial limbs and organs, pace makers, hip replacements, hearing aids…etc
Materials: design and research the properties of existing and new materials, Nanotechnology is currently an area of growing interest in this area where people are looking into developing “smart materials” which can do clever things like having clothing that can adjust its temperature according to the weather
Mining: are involved in designing processes to help extract raw materials such as bauxite, iron ore, gold..etc
Oil &Gas: involved in designing processes to extract oil and natural gases, can work in petroleum industry
Software: design computer software, programs and simulations
So if you were an engineer what would a day in your life follow? Well it really depends on what type of engineering you do. However undeterred in my quest to discover what it was that an engineer did, I decided to follow one. (don’t worry, I had his permission) The victim in question was a 30 year old civil engineer from GHD, a reputable engineering firm for the technically unsavy among us. He arrived in the office at approximately and after making a cup of coffee he checked his email till about . He’d received roughly 50 emails over the night regarding various projects he’d been working on. There were no saucy emails in there or anything, much to my disappointment, except one involving a couple of dancing hamsters which was a disappointment in itself. He then started working on one of his design plans doing what looked like actual technical way-pro engineering work until about when he remembered that he had a meeting to go to. The weekly meeting was in fact with his boss and other fellow colleagues of the company where the boss checked where everyone was up to on their job, checked their progress and addressed any issues of concern. My engineer man then returned to his cubicle at 9:30am and continued with his technical work until about 10am when he had to attend a meeting with a client to discuss where he was with that and to clarify a couple of issues that had recently arisen. At 10:45am mister engineer then returned back to his cubicle and started making and receiving various phone calls between several people such as the architect who was trying to figure out why his amazing water feature was no longer on the design, a draftsman who wanted to know some information regarding paneling, an electrical engineer who was clarifying how the building would be wired up and various other contractors. At my engineering friend took a break from his vigorous telecommunications and decided to go for lunch. At he returned to his computer briefly for about 12 whole minutes before leaving to go on a site visit to check how his building was going. He returned to the office at about where he made and received a couple more phone calls and did bits of work in between till when it was time to go home.
The results of the day were kind of surprising, the whole day I don’t think I’d seen him touch his calculator once! Furthermore, when totaling up the guys allocation of time I noticed that less than 10% of this guys day had actually been spent doing hardcore engineering stuff! The guy had been basically chatting to people all day, granted they weren’t exactly what you’d call “social” chats but it was chatting all the same.
So you might ask why bother slaving your way through four or five years of your life in order to get a degree if you’re only going to use less that 10% of your knowledge? Well, it’s true you may only use about 10% of you knowledge the problem is you don’t know which 10% you’re going to have to use so you’re going to have to learn the whole lot and the same goes for any degree. We go to uni to learn HOW to learn, how to find solutions to our problems and to learn where to go or what kinds of people to consult for more information on a given topic.In order to interact with the other professionals, a sound engineering background is essential. Without it, your building could collapse. When you’re interacting with the other professionals you’re actually trying to obtain as much information as possible regarding the project in order to satisfy all parties concerned.
Engineers have a great responsibility to society where a doctors mistake could cost him a patient, an accident by an engineer can potentially kill thousands in a single shot if a bridge falls down or an aircraft malfunctions. In my humble opinion, engineers are the glue of civilization. Without them we’d have no tv’s, no phones, no computers, no houses, no car and even no clothes (because an engineer would have to have designed the sewing machines used). So the next time you feel tempted to target a verbal bashing towards one of these harmless folk, just remember that one day the bogan you tried pissing on in the eng. building could grow up to build you a refined lavatory of your very own.
Our next speaker up is Ash. Ash typically considers herself a fairly healthy young girl. However, having recently recovered from the flu, Ash is going to share with us her perspective on what she considers as acceptable social protocol when it comes to catching a cold. Please welcome Ash.
In today’s social climate where every time a person coughs or blows their nose, society is very quick to point their figure and go “Oh my god you’ve got swine flu, Get away from me!” Now I myself, am a very strong believer in that people regardless of whether they have swine flu or just a common cold or flu, should just stay at home! It has an impact on work place productivity, effects the lives of others and by not staying at home you are assistingthedisease in spreading further amongst our population. This applies in our work, personal and public lives.
I am aware that a lot of people, myself includedfeel guilty to take a sick day from work. Thoughts start running through our heads such as, “Oh how can I afford to take time off work…I have so much work to do….I have meetings I can’t miss…Who’s going to do my work for me…I’m going to start getting behind…my colleague might think I’m weak for chucking a sicky..I’m not that sick….I can suck it up and still go to work.”However, what we’re all failing to consider, is the knock-on effect that our decision has on others. While it may seem to be a little less productive to have one person home sick, it is far better than having whole entire work group home sick.
A prime example of this happened while I was offshore a couple months back. The offshore crew on the facility I work for work 3 weeks/3 weeks off. It was crew change day and one of the guys on the oncoming swing came to work with a mild sore throat. He thought it would go away and he felt pressured to come to work because he didn’t want to let his work team down by them either being a man down or having to find a replacement to come in his place under such shortnotice. As the days progressed he started coughing up green phlegm and was so crook that he couldn’t get out of bed. Unlikea normal office space, the offshore environment is verycontained, and when just one person is sick, the whole crewcan become sick. And surely enough this is what happened.Guys offshore were trying to do everything they could to avoid getting sick, like washing their handswithsoap between every meals, chewing on garlic, distributing out envelopes full of vitamin Ctablets, spraying eucalyptus through the air conditioning vents. But none of these measures were enough to stop the sick plague that ensued. People were dropping like flies. So insteadof potentially being one man short, the facility was 9 men short!! This had a severe impact on planned work activities for that week. The 9 sick men had to be quarantined in their bedrooms until they either recovered or the nexthelicopter came to take them off the facility. Things got so bad that un-sick passengers who were traveling back home on the same helicopter were having to wear breathing apparatus’s on the journey home. This example quite clearlydemonstrates theimpact of just one person being sick can have on the productivity of an entireworkforce.
I strongly believe that staying at home when one is sick should not only apply to our work lives but it should also apply to our personal lives. My bf, fell sick a couple weeks ago and as per usual he became very melodramatic. We’d made plans that Friday night to meet with one of my highschool friends for a movie night and he rang me up the day before explaining to me how sick he was. How he had a sore throat, killer migrane, runny nose…etc. After explaining to me in quite lengthy detail how sick he was, he then asked, “So are you going to come over to look after me?” I recalled the previous year when he’d gotten sick and he made me go over and look after him. And no matter how many vitamin C and Echinaceatablets I chewed, what followed next was not unlike a game of badmington where a week later I fell sick, just as he was recovering he got the cold back again from me, then as I was recovering I got the cold then I passed it onto my friend. This whole vicious cycle may have been avoided & nipped in the bud, if he’d just stayed home fromthe start.
FinallyI think people in a public forum have a duty to society, to where feasible, adoptsocial conscience and preventfurther propagation of sickness in our population. Did you know that when a person sneezes there is 9meters of sprayage! Did you also know that flu germs survive on cold surfaces for up to 2 weeks. Just think about that next time you go openadoor handle, grab onto a handrail or press the button of a lift.
Now you might be thinking that I sound like a bit of a germ nazi but I assureyou that I am not. I don’t go around carrying dettol wipes in my purse or weargloves and cover the phone with a plasticbag when a family member is sick (don’t laugh – my boyfriend’s mum does this!). I just think, that practicable measures should be taken where possible when one is sick. It is a sick person’s duty to do no further harm unto others. So next time you are sick, grab that cold or flu bull firmly by the horns, with both hands & proudly stand strong & claim, “Thou shalt go no further than here” andthen do us all a favour ….and stay at home!
Advertising has grown to be an industry worth many billions of dollars across the world. Advertising is a form of communication used in helping sell products and services. Typically it communicates a message including the name of the product or service and how that product or service could potentially benefit the consumer. However, advertising does typically attempt to persuade potential customers to purchase or to consume more of a particular brand of product or service.Whilst this helps companies sell their produces, and helps consumers to learn what is on offer, many believe that this huge amount of advertising can be harmful. It may make people want too much, or things that they cannothave, or it might make them feel inadequate when they don't have something. I’m going to explain to you all today how advertising is invasive, can have a negativepsychological impact and is driven by money instead of having consumers best interests at heart.
No, it's not your imagination. The amount of advertising and marketing Australians are exposed to daily has exploded over the past decade; studies show, that on average we see 3,000 ads per day.The levels of advertising are just too much these days. Almost allpublic spacehas some advertisements in sight and all forms of media, from newspapers to the internet, are also filled with adverts You cannot walk down the street, ride on a bus, watch television or read your email without seeing advertisements.Advertisements are embedded in television, radio, cinema, magazines, newspapers, sports events, video games, stationary billboards & posters, mobile billboards on cars & buses, catalogues, fliers and Internet marketing such as pop ups, spams..etc. Even outer space isn't safe from commercialization: the Russian space program launched a rocket bearing a 30-foot Pizza Hut logo, and some companies have investigated placing ads in space that will be visible from earth. People shouldn't have to have their lives attacked by a hugequantity of information they might not want. People cannot just choose to ignore advertising, because advertisers use many underhand methods to get their message across. Posters have attention grabbing words, or provocative pictures. Some adverts today are even being hidden in what seem like pieces or art or public information so people don't realise they are being marketed to. For example, in the old days, cigarettes, alcohol & fast food. More recently on Home & Away, the LA Ice bottles. By targeting people’s unconscious thoughts adverts are a form of brainwashing that take away people's freedoms to make choices.
Advertising leads to many people being overwhelmed by the endless need to decide between competing demands on their attention – this is known as overload. Recent research suggests that people are on average less happy than they were 30 years ago - despite being better off and having much more choice of things to spend their money on. The incredulous claims of adverts crowd in on people, raising expectations about a product and leading to inevitable disappointment after it is bought. For example, this product will reduce signs of wrinkles in 7 days, will leave you hair sleek & shiny after just 10 washes, is the best coffee in town. Shoppers feel that a poor purchase is their fault for not choosing more wisely, and regret not choosing something else instead. Some people are so overwhelmed that they cannot choose at all. Many adverts do more than justadvertising products. Some try to make people feel inferior if they don't have the product, or if they have something which the product would change. Perceptions of beauty and fashion in particular have been terribly distorted. Many young people have low-self esteem, and lead unhealthy lifestyles because they feel they should be thinner and more attractive like the models they see in adverts. This leads to serious problems like eating-disorders and self-harm.Advertising gives the impression, especially to children, that they can and should have everything they want. This makes people too interested in material things. People are becoming more selfish and obsessed with their possessions, and losing their values of patience, hard work, moderation and the importance of non-material things like family and friends. This harms their relationships and their personal development, which has serious effects for society as a whole.
Money spent on advertising has increased dramatically in recent years. In 2007, spending on advertising has been estimated at over $385 billion worldwide, and expectedto exceed to $450 billion by 2010.While advertising can be seen as necessary for economic growth, it is not without social costs.Advertisers don't have the good of society in mind when they do their work - they only care about making profit. This means that they regularlyadvertiseunhealthy or harmful things. Fast food adverts are a large part of the reason so many children are obese. The adverts just try to make children eat as much food as possible without any concern for the healthcosts. Advertising gives an unfair advantage to big businesses. Small companies might have much better products, but they cannot afford to advertise them as well and so people don't find out about them. This restricts the quality of products for consumers, and places a huge roadblock to the success of small businesses.
As you can see advertising today has grown into a beast of its own, it has become invasive upon our lives, it has contributed to negative psychological impact on society and it is driven by money instead of having consumers best interests at heart.While efforts have been made to increase regulation of the advertising industry with the introduction of Consumer Protection and Advertising Standards Australia, I strongly believe that more still needs to be done to regulate advertising by reducing how much is allowed to be bombarded on our lives, screening the content & ensuring that society’s best interests are kept at heart.I’ll leave you with a quote from Stuart Chase, an American economist of the late 1800s, that “Sanely applied advertising could remake the world.”
