This is the blog of a Norwegian (Marianne, aka 'M') who moved to Australia in 2007 to be with Roger (aka R) and feels lucky to have escaped a comparatively communistic country with ridiculous weather!

It's the first day of spring! Yay:)

Over the last week it has become noticably warmer. The night time temperature has gone from a freezing 14 degrees to a comfy 19-21.

In winter when I got up and went to my office, the temp in the office would be about 18, which is freezing and I had to put the heater on, while wearing a thick jumper and ugg boots. The last week the temp in my office has been about 23. I haven't used the heater in over a week.

And when I got up I would have to hurry and put my thick Norwegian jumper on because it was so cold, and morning showers weren't very nice. Today I put on a thin shirt and I was in no hurry because it was nice and warm.

Winter only lasts about 6 weeks here, but it's a nice reminder of how lucky I am to live in a climate that agrees with me:)

Father's day is celebrated on the first Sunday of September here, so yesterday R and I went to the shopping centre to get R's dad a gift. We already knew what he wanted, so we were expecting it all to be nice and quick. Well, that didn't happen. Here's the story as told by R in an email to his dad:

Hi Well, here is an amusing story for you: I chose the Armani that I thought was best - it's called "Attitude" and is in a black square bottle with a silver flip top lid - 50ml. We waited 15 mins(!) to get it gift wrapped, (he had a few to do at the same time) then went to Post office, got a next day express bag, put it in, and addressed it, wrote the card, put that in and sealed the express satchel. Then where you have to sign it, to say there are no prohibited items or dangerous goods, I didn't sign because I don't know what the prohibited items are, (and I assume the "dangerous items" also fall under the category "prohibited" so why there is a differentiation, I don't know!) and it doesn't say anywhere on the satchel what the items are. So I took it all to the counter, and she said to sign it and I said, well I haven't yet because I don't know what the prohibited items are, so she said 'anything like batteries.... perfume....' So I said 'well it's aftershave' She said 'oh well you can't send that' So I said 'well I suppose you'll have to throw the bag away then', but  she said no, I had to pay for it. I told her that at Aspley when I chose the wrong type of express bag once, they just threw it away and got the right one so why can't they just throw this one away, if it's not going to be used? She said 'no, we can't do that'. I said 'why not?' She said "because we can't" which is similar to her reply to "why is perfume prohibited? - "Because it is" So I had to take it back to Myer and exchange it for the gift card of the same value which you will receive in it's place! Roger

I think I have mentioned previously how friendly store staff is here. Always greeting us when we walk into a store and wishing us a nice day when we leave. They are in fact so friendly, that when you encounter an unpleasant one it's something to write home about!

I downloaded Google's new web browser Chrome today. I'm not gonna go in detail of how it all works, you can read it all in the Wiki article, or at some other site of your choice.

My first impression was pretty average. Chrome looks a bit plain and has very limited options for personalisation. It works well enough for browsing web sites, but it's nothing special. Basically it's just another web browser in a market which didn't need another one.

I immediately found something annoying about it. It imported my favourites from IE, and I rely heavily on my favs, so I have heaps of folders and links in there. Chrome sorted them all alphabetically, which is to be expected, but when I was dragging the folders and links to where I wanted them it closed the favs each time I moved one of them. Rather inconvenient that.

Unlike IE there's nowhere to 'manage favourites' either, so dragging seems to be the only way to sort them.

Another thing is that it's not set to have a 'home' button by default, you have to go to the settings and tick the box for it, as if they expected people to not want to be able to have easy access to their home page.

Here's a screenshot of it where I was testing a keyword for a site I'm doing SEO for (click for bigger version):

For some reason it greys out part of the url. I fail to understand the purpose of it. Favourites are no longer called favourites, they are called 'other bookmarks' for some silly reason (top right corner).

There is one big issue with Chrome which is very annoying and inconvenient and I don't know what they were thinking. It imported all my usernames and passwords from IE, which I use in forums and for the admin area for this site. You know how in IE when you're asked to log in you can double click the text field and choose the username you want and it then puts in the correct pasword for it? Chrome doesn't do that. It doesn't fill in the username, you have to type it in, and when you've finished typing it it puts in the password.

This is a big issue as far as I'm concerned. Because I've been using IE for so long, I prolly haven't typed in any of my usernames for years, and I'm lucky to even remember what they are. Not to mention that it ruins my flow when where I would normally click twice and be logged in, I now have to stop to type in a username (which I may or may not remember) before I can log in.

Chrome also has a bit of a bug. R downloaded it as well to have a look at it, and he has 2 screens. Turns out Chrome doesn't maximise properly on the 2nd screen. It maximises to the size of the 1st screen:

R was testing how many tabs he could have open and that's why there's a ridiculous amount of tabs at the top.

Like Safari, Chrome checks spelling for everything you type, but unlike Safari you can right click the typo and it will suggest a word. It doesn't let you add words to its dictionary tho.

So all in all, I found Chrome plain, inconvenient and slightly annoying, and I will not be using it. To think I actually prefer IE7 over Chrome! I guess that means Google failed?

Thursday evening I decided to go to the shopping centre to buy Spore, the game. I only recently heard of it. I saw a poster for it at one of the gaming stores at the shopping centre, and got curious, so when I got home that evening I googled it and decided it looked like fun.

Hence why we went to get it on Thursday. The first 2 stores we tried were sold out and weren't expecting any more for another 2 weeks. We then continued on to the 3rd game store at the shopping centre, which is in a less crowded area, and R didn't even know it existed before I told him. And sure enough, they had the game, and for $20 less than the other 2 stores.

On the way out of the shopping centre we walked past a jewellery store and decided to have a look. That's when we found this adorable kitty.

And R decided to buy it for me. Awww:) I have placed it on my shelf above my computer screen, so I can see it all the time:)

My computer is a cheapy so I was interested to see how the game would work. At first it was fine, but as I progressed through the game there was more and more to keep track of, and it hardly moved at all at the end. So R had a play with my computer and whatever he did seemed to work. It was still struggling a bit tho so we decided to get 2 gigs of ram for it.

First we went to Harvey Norman, which is usually pretty cheap. They wanted $100 for the ram.

R had already decided he wanted to check at a store called the disc shop, to see if they would have a better deal. And they did. They only wanted $60 for the same thing.

And that gives me a total of 3 gigs of ram, which is said to be the maximum Vista can handle. And now everything runs smoothly:)

When we were walking around the shopping centre a couple weeks ago, R suddenly said 'I want to buy you a necklace' completely out of the blue. He's not really a jewellery kind of guy, and apart from a white gold diamond ring he got me after we first met over 2 years ago, he's never bought any jewellery for me. So I was pleasantly surprised:)

We checked out all the jewellery stores at the shopping centre, and I found about 3 necklaces that I kinda liked, but nothing I had to have. I decided to look online instead.

I looked around for about an hour, and finally found 2 that I really liked and wanted. I showed them both to R and he picked this one:



I'm so lucky:)

I am currently going through the fun process of trying to recover the password for my yahoo account. I signed up with them in 2000, so I have a lot of emails in there which would be fun to read, including 4-5 year old emails from R. There are also a lot of people I know who only have my Yahoo address and I only have their address in the Yahoo address book.

I've always used messenger to access my email account, because it remembered my password and I could access it with the click of a button.

When my laptop started dying in May and I got a new computer, I had to type in the password for Yahoo again, which I prolly hadn't done in years, because it always remembered it for me. I wasn't worried tho, because I only have about 5-6 passwords I regularly use, and I would have used one of them for my Yahoo account.

But no, none of the ones I tried worked, and I tried all the regular ones and several variations of each one. My old laptop had already been formatted so I couldn't get it from there.

The automatic password recovery wasn't much help, because like I said I signed up in 2000, and I had no idea what post code I put in, mostly because their system doesn't allow 4 digit post codes, so I had to put an extra 0 in there somewhere. I tried every variation of the post code but none of them worked.

I gave up and considered all my old emails and everything to be lost. But a couple days ago R asked me if I'd kept all the old emails from him, and I said they would all be in my yahoo account. So he decided to try to recover my password. After filling out the form with every variation of my old post code, he found a contact form where he asked them to reset it manually. He put in as many details as he could which they could use to identify me as the owner of the account.

Their first reply was that they couldn't match the alternate email address I'd put in the form. I explained that I couldn't even remember which one I gave when I signed up because it was so long ago, but gave them an old one that might be the right one.

They then said they couldn't match my date of birth in the form with the one in the account. And that's physically impossible, because I've never given a fake date of birth anywhere, ever, and told them so.

They then wrote back and said they can't match the post code I put in the contact form with the one for the account.

And this is getting frustrating now, because they never actually reply to the emails I send back to explain things, they just find something new that they think isn't right.

So I explained to them, as I did in the contact form, that I can't remember the post code, but gave them every variation of my 2 old ones that I could think of.

But I think I have to face that all of my old emails are lost forever. It sucks:(

The good thing about having lived a sheltered life in a small town in Norway for 24 years, is that there's so many new things to see and experience. If I'd grown up with all these things they would be nothing special.

The new thing I discovered a few days ago is the broccoflower:



And a closeup:



As the name suggests it is a hybrid between broccoli and cauliflower. They are closely related, so they interbreed quite easily - by hand pollination, so there's nothing spooky genetically manipulated about them.

I think it's wonderful that the broccoflower exists.

It's my little sister Camilla's 19th birthday today. She's an old lady now;p

Happy b-day sis:)

I don't think I mentioned it, but a couple months ago I stumbled across a blue mystery snail in a pet store and instantly decided I needed to buy it.

See, in Europe you can get snails in all the colours of the rainbow, and then some, but here in Australia I only ever see brown and golden ones. When asking in a forum if there are colourful ones to be found, they said no, and was I sure that the colourful ones were really mystery snails and not some other species?

So when I stumbled across a blue one I had to have it:



I have not seen any interestingly coloured mysery snails since then, so I see it as my duty to breed this one and spread some colour in the Australian mystery snail population.

I got lucky and it turned out to be a male, and that made things easy. I put him in the tank with my brown female, provided clean water and some good food, and before I knew it they were going at it like rabbits. The female laid her eggs 3 weeks ago, and they started hatching 3 days ago:



I was pleased to see that about 75% of the babies have dots. Dots are usually a sign of future stripes, and brown and golden snails don't have stripes, but their blue dad does. I was even more pleased after looking at macro shots of the babies and seeing that they have a hint of blue on them:

 
(These are about 2-3 mm long. Click for bigger version.)

So my little project worked:) I now have about 50 blue babies, and another clutch of eggs which will hatch in a few days, resulting in even more blue snails. I will keep some of them for myself, while I will sell the ones I don't have room for. That means the blue colour will spread around Australia.

And there's more good news. In the snail forum they said if I cross a blue snail with a golden one, I could get green babies. And about 25% of the babies are golden, so when they grow up and reach sexual maturity, I'll have heaps of golden snails to cross with the blue ones.

And baby snails are just the most adorable little things ever:) Especially with their blue little eyes and dots:)

In this article I read the following today:

Laws that ban low-slung pants are on the books in several US cities, including Delcambre, Louisiana, where offenders can be fined up to $US500 ($628) or jailed for up to six months. Dallas, Texas and Atlanta, Georgia are among the larger US cities considering similar measures.

How ridiculous! They actually made a law which says you can't show your underwear in public! How utterly retarded, and a massive waste of resources.

Is Usa the new communist country or something? That's the only regime where I would expect people to be told what they can wear. Next thing you know they'll ban ugly clothes, because the poor little weak minded Usatians find it 'offensive' to look at people with no sense of fashion.