Make time to have it

You can’t have breakfast if you don’t allow yourself time to prepare and consume it, so allow yourself some time before you leave the house. You probably have a morning routine, so just make it part of that. If it means getting out of bed 20 minutes earlier than you normally do, then do it! Breakfast is worth it.

Mix and match ingredients for a taste sensation

One thing that will stop you wanting to have breakfast every day is it always tastes the same. Stock up on various breakfast cereals and toppings. I’m in New Zealand, so some of this stuff won’t be familiar to my overseas readers, but here’s what I like to have around. Important factors in choosing stuff: Must be tasty by itself, but must be reasonably healthy. Anything with added sugar should be avoided in large quantities, but is nice once in a while.

Bowl: You need to have a bowl that has high edges to prevent spillages, large enough to hold three Weet-bix, standing up on their side and still be covered in milk.

Cereals: Lots of Weet-bix, and a box of Honey Puffs, Corn Flakes, Rice Bubbles, and a couple of Hubbards mueslis: one heavier oat-based muesli and one lighter corn-flake based muesli. In small amounts: Coco Pops

Toppings: Bananas, real-fruit yoghurt (buy in 1kg pottles), grapes, other kinds of fresh and dried fruit. Avoid fresh citrus fruit as it makes the milk curdle. In small amounts: Fruit-based ice-cream or plain yoghurt toppings (strawberry, kiwifruit, black forest, blackberry, but NOT chocolate, caramel). Avoid dairy food (the sweet creamy flavoured stuff that’s not yoghurt, e.g., Swiss Maid, Go-gurt, etc.)

Milk: Homogenised pasteurised Blue-top all the way. Why not low-fat or non-fat milks? Because it doesn’t taste as good. I’m all about the taste. And you do need some fat in your diet.

How to put these ingredients together:

Weet-bix (similar to Weetabix) is the staple of a bowl breakfast in New Zealand and Australia, so use this is a base. Two or three bricks. Because Weet-bix is quite absorbant, some people put hot water over these so they don’t use so much milk. It does result in a watered down taste, but this is an option. If you like large portions for breakfast, then just add more Weet-bix bricks. I put these in the bowl standing on their sides, not lying down or on their ends.

Choose one of your other, more flavourful cereals and ‘fill the gaps’ in your bowl with it. You could add two or even three different bits. Don’t over-do it though; the Weet-bix is the base, we’re adding the secondary cereals for flavour and texture because Weetbix, while lightly malted, isn’t the exactly the taste sensation we’re looking for.

Toppings: If you’re adding fruit today, put this on. If you’re doing yoghurt or another thicker-than-milk topping, add this. Then add the milk. You might not like watering down your yoghurt with milk, but trust me, it helps the flavourful yoghurt get into the Weet-bix. Don’t go overboard with any sugary ice-cream/yoghurt toppings — just add enough for flavour. If you don’t have yoghurt, fruit or toppings, and you’re desperate, you might put a teaspoon or two of sugar on the Weet-bix to make it a bit more interesting — but be aware, you may set yourself up for sugar-crashing easily before lunch time.

Now enjoy a flavourful and nutritious breakfast!

Parallax Backgrounds

Done using simple CSS and a nice bit of JavaScript, but nothing too advanced, and without any libraries!

Enjoy it!

1. I sucked at tag. Primary school was pretty hellish for me — I was unfit, I had no friends, and I could never catch anyone. It’s a part of my life that I like to forget. Because I had no-one who liked me or understood me (my parents admit to not really understanding me and my interests when I was young) I turned to reading books and learning. If I had to pick someone who I think understood me when I was young, I’d probably have to say my grandmother on my mother’s side, Lois, who unfortunately passed away while I was at Intermediate, or just starting, I can’t remember. She would buy books for me all the time, and it was her who I credit for getting me into computers and specifically programming. An Osbourne book on Basic for various computers like the Commodore 64 and the TRS-80, and the really simple game listings within it. I would spend hours staring at that code, trying to figure out what the game would do. I wouldn’t get any kind of computer until after she passed away, and then it was a 286 and no-one told me where GW-Basic was.

   Gosh, there’s a bit there. Does that count as only one?

2. I love computer games, but in reality, I’m not a hardcore gamer. I like the games that I can pick up, play for 15 minutes, and then put to one side. To this end, I rarely finish a game. A mild case of ADD? It’s certainly not AD&D I can count on one hand the games I’ve clocked without cheats:
   • Half-Life (PC)
   • Half-Life 2 (PC)
   • Half-Life 2: Episode 1 (PC) (but that barely counts)
   • Phoenix Wright (Nintendo DS) (but it’s mostly trial-and-error. Heh, trial, law game)
   • Doukutsu Monogatari (aka Cave Story) (PC)

   Yet recently I’ve bought so many DS and GBA games for my Nintendo DS Lite, and haven’t clocked any others

3. I’m not allergic to anything, but I have had cancer. I have a giant scar on my back from where they removed a melanoma (skin cancer). Luckily it came back from the labs that it hadn’t spread, but I can’t give blood anymore. If they’d let me, I’d go every six months. So if you’re reading this, and you are able to give blood, you should go do it — it helps so many people out there, and only inconveniences you for a few hours; heck, most workplaces will let you go give blood on work time!
4. When I want to chill out, the forest is my chill out space. I love to just go somewhere and listen, relax. Rivers are also very awesome. I was baby sitting a couple of my mum’s friend’s kids for the weekend one time in the middle of summer, and they had some really large inner tubes, so we took them out on the river out the back of their house, and had a ball and we all got so tired, we walked back, packed stuff away, and we all fell asleep in the lounge where we were sitting, totally unexpectedly. It was probably the quietest they ever were!
5. I like chiptunes. Music made on old retro hardware that sounds like it could have come out of an old GameBoy or C64. I especially like the stuff that comes out of 8bitpeoples
6. Bonus Fact: I don’t like peas. But that said, they are tolerable when mixed with other vegetables. But by themselves, blargh.

Bob Brown (Confessions of a Guru), Hamish MacEwan (self titled), Hillary (Kiwirose in Canada), Dan Milward (Mind of Mufasa) (fix your feeds, they’re broken), and Unbounded (self-titled), even though Unbounded is the kind of guy who would abhor this kinda meme; TAG – You’re it!

My workmates and their students created this short 3D animated film called Amiganaut, and got me to star in it. I’m the giant scottish mech suit guy, dubbed the HGU — Heavy Ginger Unit. Awesome eh?

there was a guy walking down the street and he went to the bathroom. he did his business then left for the movies. he bought some popcorn and then he sat down to watch the movie. but there was no movie. it was taking the banana too feelings it had never assumed before. games exploded from the mouth of the ghananise gorilla, while the bassoon played on the piano. my fingernails melted into blobs of golden chocolate. i took my green pepper and used it for a device to prevent hemmeroids in siamese gulls. the squeeze gun then put on a jersey and danced the gigalo. the guy drank a tall glass of tar and profusely vomited onto the floor of the patisserie. the mona lisa took her glasses off and ate the bottle from the water cooler. the colour aqua and the colour red made out. my bananas never stopped. a tv show character never blew a green goal. my wallet was full of bmws. people congregated around an intray. i believe you have my exploding duck’s complete collection of 1930s architectural dives. my head melted into a million shards of atomic cafes. propaganda of the green manilla folder made me a grand total of eighty five cents. a bowel of fruit was collected from the masses and lo, there was no aubergines that were yellow. a matte stapler attacked a child while they were swimming in the jungle’s largest pool of custard-flavoured tar babies while the jello men were sunbathing in the moonlight. my pillow of keymashed kumara licked off it’s eyebrows which were coated in a yellow substance which would shatter under pressure from either david hasslehoff or that guy who does the joy of painting. a loud number coloured blue explained in morbose detail the mating rituals of an enlarged jumbovision with a blue orangutang. my nipples flew out of george costanza and they took out fps doug, boom forehead shot. lol roffle lol i take it back it was really chuck norris. then a pair of macrovision encrypted sunglasses dropped out of the treasure chest and were crushed by the planet golufulava. my parents took out the trash and used a machete to renovate the viper. a snake coaxed out of me my secret location to my snozberry m&ms. my headphones transformed into warren bady. a haircut took my power supply and used it to get a real job, whilst my exploding duck unexploded. it was viewtiful. joe made shortbread and laughed at it’s lack of blueberry muffins. cakes i like the most, except for daniel. moses exploded and left behind a collection of little puce ducks. the ducks were made of marzipan. i ran to the store to buy some icing and i freed morgan freeman from the narration of some 3d game, maybe half-life 2. then prince albert emerged from his tupperware and i mixed us up a storm with my thumbprints on a lp record made from fudge. we danced but it wasn’t the best. i decided that we should take the exploding munters and use them for table tennis. i later regretted that i used a passionfruit to scrape the kiwi birds from under my nostrils. my wrists were relaxed from all the grabbing of explainitory signage i discovered in my armpits. my brain frazzled and decided that was long enough.

Here’s Glutbook, my 12″ iBook mac laptop sporting some new cult-of-mac jamming adhesives!

• Technorati sticker, obtained at WE05 Sydney (thanks Tantek!)
• “OBEY with caution – Blind Acceptance can be hazardous”, bought years ago in an Obey sticker pack I only just remembered I had
• Rad Rad Robotank from Strong Bad Email #139: Portrait, custom printed for NZD$15 at a sign printer here in Wellington called Asign. Supplied a EPS and it was printed and laser cut ready for sticking on in less than half a day! Awesome!

I know some mac-zealots (namely Kodiak) are gonna hate me for doing it. But that was part of the fun