I rather like phat si-io, but it's very
difficult to get right. But the real thing is the sauce. How about cheating? Today I made
a couple of changes: a carrot (65 g) instead of cabbage (because that's what I had), normal
rice noodles instead of kway teow, and no attempt at searing. The result:
Various emails, contradictory as ever, from eBay today about the scales that I ordered on Monday. And then SMS from
the courier company delivering them. They're really coming today! More SMS. Different
time, 17:00-19:00 PM. More SMS. Different time, 18:41 to 20:41 PM, later
than I would have liked. More SMS. Different time, 16:06 to 18:06 PM. That's
(marginally) better. And then an email from eBay, dated Thu, 16 Jul 2026 20:46:33 -0700
(MST). Your item has been delivered.
Believe that who may. What time was that, anyway? The message arrived at 13:46:51, so that
would be the time. Out to look in front of the front door. Nothing, of course. But then I
saw:
What's it doing there? Clearly the courier was too lazy to bring it to the door, but he put
it at the wrong end of the gate. He could only have dropped it there: the pedestrian
entrance is on the left. And yes, he confirmed that he put it there with an MMS:
For good measure, he put it there upside-down. What a delivery! What if it had rained? Is
that allowed? Checking AusPost (not the courier), I read:
Safe Drop is only available for locations not in public view, not exposed to the weather
and which we regard as safe.
And that's clearly not the case. It was in public view and exposed to the weather. As it
happened, the weather was clear and I found it only 5 minutes after drop-off.
That's the battery cover, and it's clearly damaged. That's a mixed blessing: the listing
doesn't mention the battery, but it's there, and it works, though I need to check the
condition: I can't change the cover again. On the other hand, it can't be the result of the
package being dropped: to close it I first need to remove the screws. So it's very likely
that the item was manufactured like that.
How do I assemble it? By guesswork, mainly: the instructions were an above-average
catastrophe: a single sheet of A4 paper. There were two sets of plastic spacers. One was
clearly for the feet, and the others (5 items) to hold the tray into position. But the tray
only has four pins to attach them, and the spacers don't fit into the hole in the beam:
And is it accurate? Found a 100 g weight, rather less than I needed, and compared all three
scales that I have. The 1000 × 0.1 g scales read 100.2, then reconsidered and went to 100.
The old, inaccurate scales (10 kg × 1 g) showed 100 g. And the new one showed 100 g. The
real test will be at higher load levels, but so far, modulo adjustments, all seems well.
Can I find any better instructions? The device had a model number on the top. What do
the twins have to say? No instructions
themselves, but some interesting details, in
particular about hidden codes (including how to change from metric to archaic units), and
more interestingly about calibration. So there is hope that they'll be more accurate than
the ones they're replacing.
For some time now Yvonne has been suffering from trigger finger, where a finger
tightens up and won't let go. It seems to have been getting worse, and she's planning to
see Paul Smith, our GP, on Wednesday.
But today it tightened up so much that she couldn't loosen it. It came “good” after about
10 minutes. And she had this idea of putting on a “splint”:
Yvonne off to town today to visit the UFS Urgent Care Clinic about her
trigger finger. Things
weren't as good as when I was there last year, and she was quite upset by the perceived incompetence of the staff. In
the end she left and bought a sheath at the chemists:
This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have
a horror of reverse chronological documents, so
all my diary entries are chronological. This page normally contains the last two days,
but if I fall behind it may contain more. You can find older entries in
the archive. Note that I often update a diary entry
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