The usual: these silly US American measures, and in this case also missing salt in the
ingredients, and also a requirement for “garish masala”, which proved to be a typo for
garam masala. And how many
portions? I adapted it for the quantities I had, which made roughly 2 portions:
quantity
ingredient
step
238 g
potato
1
10 g
ghee
2
3.4 g
cumminseed
2
0.3 g
asafœtida
2
10 g
ginger
3
1–2
green chillies, slit lengthways
3
3 g
turmeric
4
2 g
red chilli powder
4
3 g
coriander powder
4
20 g
ghee
5
360 g
cabbage
5
50 g
peas
6
3.5 g
garam masala
7
2 g
amchur (dry mango powder) or a splash of lemon juice
7
Preparation
Cut the potatoes into small cubes.
Fry the cumminseeds and asafœtida in ghee until fragrant. Add the potato cubes and cook
uncovered for 5-6 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the edges are golden and the
potatoes are about 70% cooked through.
Add ginger and green chilies, stir 1 minute until fragrant.
Lower heat, add turmeric, coriander and red chili powder, avoid burning.
Add the rest of the ghee, fry cabbage for 7 to 8 minutes under cover.
Add peas and salt, mix well and warm.
Remove lid, add garam masala and dry mango powder or lemon juice. Increase heat, fry
uncovered for 2-3 minutes until drier and cabbage is slightly charred.
To my surprise, I didn't have any chili powder! I used 9.4 g chili oil instead, which
proved to be too much. And there weren't enough other spices. I should probably double or
triple them.
Census
Topic: rant, general, language, technology, opinion
Today was census day, which for some time now we have been doing online. Once again fun
with logging in: they provide an identification and password clearly delimited with spaces,
but it seems that you must not enter those spaces when logging in. And while the
questions were reasonable enough, somehow the bureaucrats have difficulty with normal
English.
First, of course, I needed to set up a temporary password. Followed all their rules, but
the came up with another one:
I still can't understand why people make this restriction. But there are more important
issues: where did I spend the night of 11 August? When was the night of 11 August?
All I got was:
We will ask who will stay at this address and who will be away on Tuesday 11 August 2026, to make
sure that we count everyone.
Who will spend the night of Tuesday 11 August 2026 at 29 Stones Road?
From midnight to 7:00 (7 hours) or 19:00 to 24:00 (5 hours)? I presume that they meant the
latter, but they didn't say anywhere. And what if I hadn't returned home until after
midnight? Then it would have been 12 August.
Once I guessed at their intention, I had the next problem:
It took me some time to understand that they wanted me to click on “+ List person 1” to continue.
And then there were questions about comprehension or grammar. What is my gender? This
question refers to how Greg currently identifies or expresses their gender...
OK, gender is a property. Describe with an adjective. I'm male. But they weren't prepared for that. I apparently belong to a Man gender:
That's a syntax
error: “man” is a noun, and they should be looking for an adjective. But there's not just
syntax: they're also semantics. OK, let's assume that English is my second
language. I speak it well, but some things are
confusing, and there are plenty of people who don't speak English that well, but who are
required to fill out the census
How does Greg describe their sexual orientation. “Their” is an adjective referring
to a group of people. Who is this group? How do they relate to me?
Am I straight or bent? Gay or morose? What does that have to do with
sexuality? Yes, the terms are colloquially used to imply heterosexual and homosexual, but
how can the ABS assume that everybody they ask understands their ambiguous usage? Why not
spell it out? Like most people, I'm heterosexual. Why not give me the choice to say so?
On the positive side, I was able to enter Yvonne's country of
birth correctly: “German Reich”. Five years ago I tried (and failed) to enter “Thüringen”. That was her nationality
at birth, but she was born in the (last gasps of) the German Reich. That looks like my failure.
Ah, a good rant makes me feel better. But the criticisms are justified: there are people
who don't understand the questions. The ABS should make it easier for them by using
standard English.
And of course I gave them negative feedback for ease of completion:
It took me 7 attempts to log in and create a password. Why no spaces?
Why do you use terms that are not in standard English, like "straight" for sexual
orientation? The correct word is "heterosexual". People who don't speak English well
won't understand that, and other things like plural pronouns to refer to individuals.
Yvonne back from shopping today. The $500 iChoose card
didn't work at all. Contacting them took me a long time to discover that the card
had been cancelled, and that they would issue a new one. What a pain these people are!
Another grid power failure today at 10:08. And of course lagune failed, despite being behind a UPS.
Why does this always stress me so much? I can't do much about it except turn off heavy
power consumers like the air conditioner. Powercor doesn't help by giving
contradictory claims about power restoration:
Finally the power came back at 14:17:15, after 4 hours and 9 minutes, just as they had
changed their minds and set the restoration time to 16:00, and I had started to wonder what
to do if it weren't restored by sunset:
Fortunately the sun came out enough to charge the batteries, so we managed to hit 100%
before the power came back, helped by the excessive duration. A good thing that it came
back then: the sun went in, and the battery charge diminished quickly:
As if the power failure wasn't bad enough, my Internet link died at 12:56:27. Clearly
something external: the ODU LED on the NTD showed orange.
But what could it be? Power to the ODU? I think that goes via the network cable. ODU
failure? Who can tell? It seemed to be worth raising a fault with Aussie Broadband, not helped by the fact that it
had temporarily forgotten my secret thumbprint and then claimed that my link was up. But in
less than 10 minutes, during which I had been required to run the connectivity test three
times, it finally accepted it. Fault 38813366. Will be “looked at” within 5 working hours,
which could mean tomorrow morning.
But what if it's a consequence of the power failure? Power had been out at the radiation
tower too, for 2 hours, 48 minutes. Maybe the National Broadband Network didn't envisage any longer power outage, and the batteries
in the tower had run out.
That guess seems to have been correct. Power was restored at 14:17:15, the network at
14:29:45. So it seems that the radiation tower needed 12½ minutes to boot.
In the middle of the outage pain, Paul Donaghy showed up to complete the bird netting in the
dog run. As if to prove the necessity, found a small bird in there when we went out. In 3
hours Paul was done. There are still a couple of places where birds can get through, and
Yvonne tells me that she has seen both a Crimson rosella and a red-browed finch in there. The
rosella was perplexed that it couldn't easily get out again. Maybe they'll stop coming;
otherwise there's patching to be done.
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