Saturday, June 28, 2003

 
Tonight we are making Tortellini ... one of the few items I have yet to find in Fiji ... also the first time I ever made my own .. all from scratch, pasta dough, filling ... was fun .. we have yet to eat the stuff ..

The SPG opening ceremony is on and we are laughing about the amount of rain that is pouring down ...



Some hours later ... we survived the homemade pasta ... it was actually pretty good .. here are some links I used for inspiration .. but it is actually really easy .. just a lot of handy-work ..

This one shows how to get the shape somewhat right ...

and here a very basic recipe for pasta dough .. it is basically 2 cups of flour and 3 eggs ... maybe as an extra an extra egg yolk or some olive oil (i used my olive oil / basil mix) and / or some water ...

and then we have an inspiring idea for the filling ... though you can basically do what you want ... in this case I added some ham, sundried tomatoes, cheese .... lotsa cheese :)

I finished the whole thing up with a nice white wine, cream, blue-cheese, ham sauce .. and it was very tasty ..

soon we will try to make ravioli .. another pasta I have yet to find here ...

#posted by Peter 12:07 AM

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Thursday, June 26, 2003

 
I guess it is time to talk about the one thing that is going to annoy the heck out of us for the next 3 weeks: The South Pacific Games, basically the Olympics of the island countries down here ... and no, they do not in "coconut throwing", "palm tree climbing" and "kava drinking" ... Not sure, but it sounds like the usual sporty stuff with some island extras, like outrigger boating and such ...

Me being not a big fan of sport events is just dreading the city to be over crowded, our main supermarket is so close to the venue that it is rendered unreachable ... well .. the opening is tomorrow .. let's wait and see ... people here are very excited about it .. actually right now I can here the kids at the school close by practicing some war chants or whatnot ... maybe they are doing their own little games right now ...

It was fun to see what the city did to look pretty ... mainly redoing all the markings on the streets and in a last effort, they even repainted the Pacific Grand Hotel (look in the archives, I took some pics of it a while ago .. it has been deserted for years ... looks pretty much beyond repair ... but throwing on a coat of white paint makes it look ok and should hold for the 3 weeks)

#posted by Peter 3:24 PM

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Wednesday, June 25, 2003

 
Last night (and the last couple of days) have sure been interesting ... I had the chance to help a company here out doing a webcast of their birthday ... And since I am a lazy ass, I just post the newspaper article that I just scanned in, followed by some comments.



The computer in the picture is MINE .. the one I am typing on right now ... as for the list of equipment, 3 of those were my machines, including the older style clamshell, the Casio Exilim and the webcam (iBot) where mine too :)

The above is basically a rewrite of our strategy paper ... what we planned ... and we got actually most of that done fairly well, considering that the ISDN connection we had at the event crapped out on us every once in a while ... The chat indeed worked all the time, even if WE could not join some times ... the Chat interview was great too ... we got very lucky that we got online at exactly that time again ... The webcam worked fine while we were online ... we also took a bazillion (well, 164) pictures .. but the FTP upload was one of the things that made the line crash ... But we were able to make it look very good at the actual event site, people just loved the webcam and seeing themselves or the party in general projected on the screen.



There were some really nervwrecking moments, but all in all it was successful and lots of fun.



#posted by Peter 11:59 AM

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Monday, June 23, 2003

 
Sorry for the lack of updates .. but first of all that new interface on blogger.com needs some adjustment .. then I have been quite busy these days on something I cannot really talk about here so in public (and now that I know that people in Suva actually read the blog ... I had another run in with a coupel today who greeted me in a way as if i had known them for years .. but I am pretty sure I have never seen them before ... more blog readers ???)

Then we just had a cat emergancy ... that male cat that is stalking around the house, which we call "chickenshit" now, since he runs away as soon as he sees us, has come into the house and by the volume of the cats, they were trying to mate ... the sound of that is truly spine chilling ... I ran to the cats and must have yelled SO LOUD that 2 minutes later some person from across the street asked if everything is ok (could have been a burglar .. as i shouted "and YOU get out of here") ... are we bad cat parents ??? doesn't she deserve some fun ??? she is old enough I guess ... all those thoughts as a cat parent! .. creepy ..

Oh, I also had some successful tests with setting up a webcam .. this could be Fijis first ever webcam .. too bad there is nothing really I can capture from this place .. some busy street corner in the city would be better !!! But it is working ... I am planning to do another test tomorrow night .. that would be like 9 PM fiji time ... try to chime in .. try to get me on AIM, ICQ or MSN ...

#posted by Peter 4:01 AM

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