Swollen Pickles

For some reason this afternoon I started singing "Cities of Gold", my own interpretation of the "Mysterious Cities of Gold" theme song. Raise your hand if you watched Cities of Gold as a kid... Cities of Gold was one of my favorite cartoons from the 80's. It was set in the 1500's and followed the adventures of a little Spanish kid called Esteban. Esteban hooked up with a little group and joined the search for one of the Seven Cities of Gold in the hope that he'd find his father there.

The show was a little like Indiana Jones with a few science fiction elements thrown in for good measure. The series was produced in 1982-83 and ran for a total of 39 episodes.

Check out the opening theme. Watching it causes me to regress to a five year old version of myself.

When I was looking up Cities of Gold I found out that a movie version is potentially in the works. Apparently Movie Plus Group acquired the rights to the story from NHK in 2007 and announced that they would be producing a full length feature film based on the original story. , with the intention of looking at a sequel if the film proved successful. The film was supposedly going to enter production in 2008, but I'm not sure whether or not that eventuated. Further details can probably be found here, although I can't confirm that, as I don't speak French.

Three new seasons of 26 episodes each are also rumored to be in progress, with production supposedly beginning in late 2009, with the first season set to hit the screen in 2011.

Something I didn't realise until yesterday was that the people behind Cities of Gold are the same people that brought the world Ulysses 31. Ulysses 31 was another cartoon from the very early 1980's. It borrowed heavily from Homer's Odysseus, or basically just supplanted that story into the 31st century. The post-it not version of the plot goes something like this. Ulysses angers the gods by killing the giant Cyclops, which he did to save some kids. As punishment, Zeus freezes the crew of Ulysses ship, the Odyssey. The only way that Ulysses can save his crew and return home to Earth is by finding the Kingdom of Hades.

Ulysses 31 only ran for 26 episodes, but they were all quality! :p

Check out the Ulysses 31 opening theme...

Thank you for joining me on this trip down memory lane. If you want to check out more theme songs, go read up my "Top 10 TV show theme songs that will change your life: Part 1" and "Top 10 TV show theme songs that will change your life: Part 2".

I can't pick up a paper, turn on the TV or listen to the radio without having to hear about the Australian finale of Master Chef, and quite frankly I'm sick of it. As an Aussie I have far bigger issues to deal with, like the daylight robbery currently being committed against our cricket team in England.

The second Ashes test being played at Lords has been punctuated by one umpiring blunder after the other. While Michael Clarke and Brad Haddin have put Australia within striking distance going into the last day of play, England are just another dodgy umpiring decision away from taking the win.

When Clarke and Haddin got together the score was 5 for 128. Not a good looking score card, and even worse when you consider that 3 of those 5 wickets should never have been given out.

Exhibit A: Simon Katich

Simon Katich is given out off what is clearly a no ball. Andrew Flintoff clearly over stepped the mark, the umpire missed it, game over for Katich. In fairness it was probably a poor shot for Katich to have played, but still, there's no way he should have been given out.

Exhibit B: Phil Hughes

Phil Hughes edged a ball to slip, at which point England captain, Andrew Strauss claimed a "dubious" catch. By dubious, I think the commentators meant, "the ball hit the ground before it was picked up by Strauss". The replay really tells the story. Rather than refer the decision to the third umpire, as happened in England's innings, and after some argy bargry, the umpires decided they'd just send Hughes on his way. Bottom line, terrible decision and terribly inconsistent piece of umpiring.

Exhibit C: Mike Hussey

If there's ever a batsmen that needs a bit of luck to go his way it's Mike Hussey. I'm not sure that there is a batsman going around at the moment that can stake a claim to Hussey's title of "Batsman dismissed most due to umpire error".

In his latest stroke of bad luck, Hussey was given out caught behind even though he didn't touch the ball with his bat. Countless replays, using all the technology at hand, super slo-mo, "Hot spot" and "Snicko", showed the same thing. Hussey's bat hit the ground, while the ball skidded through without hitting anything.

Thankfully Clarke and Haddin made it through to the end of the day's play and gave the Aussies a fighting chance. I'll be tuning in tonight to watch the conclusion, but I hope that the outcome is decided by the players and not by dodgy umpiring decisions.

Here is a must see clip for any aspiring tight ass out there, featuring Hamish and Andy as seen on Rove Live. It's an educational little piece on the art of "Freeating". Freeeating is the ancient art of stealing left over food from kids, scrounging tasty morsels from rubbish dumpsters and stealing food samples.

So, if you can't be assed trying to make extra money, you can always try saving money...

As President of the United States, you'd expect Barack Obama to have an eye for detail. Over at the G8 summit, Barack Obama and France's President Nicolas Sarkozy were lining up for some photos with junior G8 delegates, when a press snapper caught this candid moment.

This photo makes me feel happy because it show that now matter who you are, where you grew up or what position you may hold in the world, when you boil it all down, the men of the world all share the same DNA.

Raise your hand if you remember the 1980's cartoon Silverhawks... Even though it wasn't the longest running series in history, it still occupies a special place in my heart. As a young fella, I wanted to be able to sprout metal wings and fly. Amateur psychologists can make of that what they will.

For those unfamiliar with Silverhawks first hit TV screens in 1986, and developed by Rankin/Bass as a "space" equivalent of the mega-hit ThunderCats. The series focused on a small band of space police called... SilverHawks. The SilverHawks were a group of part bionic, part human heroes fighting crime and the evil forces of space crime boss MonStar and a whole bunch of far out crazy creatures and bad guys.

(more...)

I'm currently investigating a number of options for setting up a basic e-commerce site. My first inclination was to try and push the limits of WordPress. There are a number of shopping cart plugins that I could use to make it happen, however, recently I've discovered another open source e-commerce solution, Magento.

The advantage that Magento appears to have over the WordPress option is that it has been designed specifically with e-commerce in mind. This is a good thing, however, it also means that setting it up, and configuring all the options correctly can take a lot of time.

Magento lets you set up various options for products, ordering options and tax rules.

If you're interested in Magento, you can download it here:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/download

I found this cool tutorial on setting up Magento from scratch which is a must read for anyone considering using it as a shop front CMS.

At the moment I'm leaning toward Magento for my project. My only reservation being, I'm not sure I can find the motivation to pick up yet another CMS...

Motivation is a funny thing. Some days I have it, some days I don't. I'm not even particularly sure what motivates me 97% of the time. One thing I'm starting to learn is that I can't do everything. I'm not Superman. There's clearly a correlation between time spent on working toward a goal and the amount of success I have toward achieving that goal. It's a balancing act. The more time I spend on one goal, the less time I have to spend on another, meaning that when one goal is going well, the others suffer. Take a look at the results for June 2009 and you may get a clearer picture of what I'm getting at.

Goal Number One: Develop Swollen Pickles into a website that can generate $350US per month.

The year has sucked big time this year in terms of revenue, with the site generating a modest $105.98 in June, down again from $137.54 in May.

Goal Number Two: Develop Swollen Pickles into a website that receives 35,000 unique visits per month.

Smashed the previous months visitor numbers, with 42,793 unique visits in June, compared to 39,084 unique visits in May. If only I could figure out a way to consistently translate those numbers into dollars.

Goal Number Three: Exercise a minimum of three times per week (30 plus minutes per session).

I was doing great until the last two weeks of June. I got the flu and was out of action for a week, and was then a little slow to ramp things up again. I maintained decent eating habits though, so it didn't have a huge impact on the overall weight loss...

Goal Number Four: Achieve a Body Mass Index (BMI) within the "Normal" range (from 18.5 to 25).

Good signs here as I inch closer to achieving this goal the next challenge will be maintaining it! I started the year with a hefty BMI of 29. At the end of June, my BMI was 26.5, down from 27.8 in May. As a micro goal, I'm hoping to be at or below 25.5 by the end of

Goal Number Five: Reduce my waist measurement to below 94cm.

I haven't brought myself to a trip to Spotlight for a measuring tape yet. Progress on this goal is difficult to report.