Fruit is cheaper

It got me thinking that for the same price as that tiny piece of ginger, I could have bought another 2kg bag of apples, grapes or mandarines. Crazy! And do I really need that ginger? Consider which of the two is the healthiest? For the money and nutritional value, of course it would have to be the fruit. Strangely, when I was in the store I almost also bought some coriander, but put it back due to it being $2 and not weighing anywhere near as much as the fruit.

I don’t know why, but I’ve never really given any of this much thought before. But I’m now comparing everything to that cheap fruit. The Ritter Sport chocolate I sometimes buy is $3 or more and is only 100g. Once again, for the same money that could have been another 1kg of grapes, apples, or mandarines, all of which are currently in season and taste delicious. When eating out at a cafe or cheap restaurant, a single meal could easily cost $15. In many cases more. For the same amount, that would be another 5 bags of fresh fruit! If my wife Lydia had a meal there too, for that same money we could buy 10 bags of fruit! And would those meals be anywhere near as healthy as the fruit? Of course not, and besides, we probably would have eaten those meals in less than half an hour and still felt hungry afterwards making them even less cost effective. As far as I know my wife buys a coffee every morning too. Considering most coffees are $3 or more, if she quit that addiction we could buy another 7 bags of fruit per week! Then if I no longer ate up to 3 chocolates per week myself, that would be another 3 bags of fruit that money could be spent on.

But is it organic?

No, none of that fruit I’ve talked about so far is organic. I’ve always looked at organic fruit and veggies as being too expensive due to them normally being around twice the price of  normal produce. Now, can you see how ridiculous this is beginning to sound? Organic fruit is too expensive, but cafe meals, restaurant meals and chocolates, all of which have no real nutritional value, are not too expensive? Yes, I’m beginning to see clearly all food and spending mistakes I’m making in my life right now.

Why do we need these traditions?

Eating out seems to be a common tradition in society. And fair enough. To get together with friends, share a meal and so on. But when I think of what I look forward to the most about eating out, none of those thoughts involve healthy food. The foods I crave at restaurants or cafes usually have no nutritional value at all. Meals with different sauces, curries, chai tea with soy milk, deep fried vegan dishes, stir fries etc. The healthiest I can think of would probably be some steamed vegetables that I sometimes buy at a local Thai restaurant with rice and peanut sauce. It’s ok, but to be honest I could easily prepare something better at home. And for $8.90, well yes, you guessed again, I could buy another 3 bags of fruit! Thinking about it, I would much rather eat $8.90 worth of grapes than one of those meals anyway.

So what else is it about eating out that makes this tradition so appealing? The social interaction perhaps? I don’t think that’s it either. You don’t need to eat out to catch up for a chat with friends. When I go out with my wife, we might talk for a while, but the rest of the time we’ll either be checking email on our phones, or in my case taking a photos of a vase with a flower in it as a way of preventing myself from becoming bored whilst waiting for the meal. Or maybe it’s just being out amongst other people that makes eating out appealing? Even then, that same experience could be achieved just by having a picnic somewhere, such as in a local park. And in a way, a picnic would be better too, as you’re not limited to a small menu, and don’t have to worry about tipping anyone either. Oh and speaking of tipping, if you’re tipping somewhere around 10% of the cost of the meal, yet again, that tip could easily cover the cost of another bag of fruit!

The Minimalist Approach

Minimalism is something that’s high on my list of priorities. It’s something that’s been a big part of anything I’ve been doing creatively for the past decade or so. Our house is another good example of this. You won’t find a single painting or print hanging on any of our walls. To me anything that hangs on a wall without any practical purpose is just clutter. Ornaments too. For the past few years we had a cake stand sitting on our dining room table. It looked ok, but since we only use it maybe once or twice a year, I decided it was clutter, and packed it away in a hard to reach spot in a kitchen cupboard. As a result, that table now has nothing on it which is so much better. Like having a clean canvas ready to paint.

So right now, this minimalistic approach is something I’ve decided I need to start applying to the food I’m eating too. Embracing a low fat raw vegan diet is still where I would most like to be. Eating nothing but raw fruit, leafy greens and the occasional nuts, seeds or avocado is about as close as you will get to a true minimalistic diet. It just makes perfect sense! Based on our physiology, humans are frugivores. Pick up a piece of ripe fruit and eat it. You can’t get any simpler than that! And of course it’s the healthiest food specifically designed for humans.

I’m beginning to see things this way too –  All these restaurant meals, junk food and cooked meals are nothing but clutter. Seriously! All they do is get in the way and prevent us from focusing on the food we should be eating. As simple as that It’s just the same as someone’s desk being covered in papers, empty food containers and other junk. That clutter will only prevent them from the most important task of getting their work done.

If you have anything to add here, leave me a comment below. I rarely post to this blog, but in this case just wanted to get these thoughts out of my head and written down. Almost as a I reminder of what I need to be doing.

A delicious chai tea recipe that’s healthier than most!

When discovering recently that Rooibos Tea is caffeine free, I decided I would give it a try and make my own caffeine free, sugar free, dairy free, gluten free & soy free Chai Tea recipe. The end result? Not too bad actually, and for a home made chai tea recipe, I honestly think it’s better than a few of the premixed chai tea recipes you can buy at stores.

Chai Tea Recipe Ingredients (for one person):

Rice milk
Water
1 tbsp Rooibos tea
1 tsp cloves
1 tsp all spice
1 tsp aniseed
1 cinnamon stick
1/2 tsp cardamom seeds
2 tsp finely chopped ginger
2 tsp pure maple syrup or agave syrup
Ground nutmeg and cinnamon

Chai Tea Recipe Method:

Firstly, choose the cup or mug you’ll be drinking from. Fill it to half way with rice milk, and the other half water. Doing this ensures you’re not making too much. Just double the quantity for two cups.

Next, put all ingredients except the maple or agave syrup, ground nutmeg and cinnamon in a small saucepan, and cook on low heat, or the smallest burner on your stove top. We don’t want it to boil. On my stove, the cooking time is just under 4 minutes. If it does boil, the rice milk will dissolve and become like water. So it is important to ensure it doesn’t boil! Tea shouldn’t be boiled anyway, whatever type of tea it is.

Pour the maple or agave syrup into your cup while the tea is heating. Once the chai tea is hot enough, pour through a small strainer into your cup. Then stir the mix. The maple or agave syrup will provide the sweetness. Lastly sprinkle the ground nut meg and cinnamon on top.

The mix can be kept for a number of days in the fridge and re-used multiple times. Although you may need to top up the ingredients after a day or two to keep the flavour strong.

If you give this chai tea recipe a try, let me know what you think! Personally, I’ve always liked Rooibos tea, and don’t miss the taste of regular black tea.

But first, why even bother with an app like this when you can blog via an email on any mobile phone with email, or browse to the actual blog and login? Well, there isn’t exactly a mobile WordPress web interface if you log into a blog from your phone. So this app is quite useful in that it essentially just gives you what  you need. Posting options, media attachments, editing etc. And yes, it works quite nicely as I’m posting on here now.

So what is missing? Well for a start you can’t upload themes and install them. The normal text and html options are comined for posting.

Anyway, I’ll keep this short. I basically just wanted to see how well this app worked allowing me to post from my Xperia X10. More on the way soon. I’m getting in the habit of posting to my blogs more often from now on.

Here’s what I have found. Finger painting using apps such as those I mentioned on my Xperia x10 is actually quite difficult. There’s definitely a skill involved! Painting strokes slowly generally results in a big wobbly line. So fast strokes seem to be the only way to get a nice clean line. I notice iPad and iPhone artists on YouTube working in much the same way, using quick strokes. It’s going to take me some time to get the hang of. I’m still waiting for some stylus pens I ordered one Bay to arrive. I’m not sure if one of those will make things easier,but it will be worth trying. There’s a lady on YouTube who uses a couple of different pens with her iPad, although she said that the iPad is still no match for a tablet PC or Wacom tablet due to the iPad’s lack of pressure sensitivity.

This afternoon I went back to a little painting on my old Windows Mobile phone with it’s 320×240 screen and stylus. I hate to admit it,but I’m seriously missing that phone. It’s little stylus is so much nicer to work with than my fingers. The software too. That Pocket Artist software which is at least 3 or 4 years old now, although it’sbeen around a lot longer, is still way ahead of anything you can put on an Android phone. From what I’ve seen of the all the iPhone apps out there, not too many of those I have seen would compete either. Sketchbook mobile looks great, but I believe it’s maximum resolution is only 1028×768. The last painting I did using Pocket Artist was1600x800. I remember reading that Pocket Artist essentially has all the features of an older version of Photoshop. V3.0 or 4.0 if I’m not mistaken.

Sadly these Windows Mobile stylus pen devices just don’t exist anymore. All the phones now use a touch surface. The stylus phones could also be used as touch phones. Then there’s the technology too. Voice dialing for example. With that old phone I would click a button on the side and say “Call Lydia on mobile”. A girl’s voice would answer back “Call Lydia mobile, is this correct”? I would reply “Yes”, the girl would then say “Dialing”. By that time the phone would already be dialing. It was brilliant! But these Android phones.. There’s voice dialing, but they don’t talk back. Makes you feel lonely without the AI answering you. You instead have to click something on the screen. I don’t know how it works on the iPhone, but nothing can beat that Windows Mobile voice dialing experience I remember one guy freaked out a few years ago when I told the phone to call someone and it spoke back to me.Microsoft were way ahead with that technology! You could tell it to play a song too. It would find the mp3, ask you if it was the correct song and play it.

Now I’m beginning to question whether or not I should have even bought this new Xperia X10 phone? The screen is amazing. I can watch Vimeo movies on there, YouTube, it has brilliant 8.1 megapixel camera. Not quite as good as using my Canon Ixy 510 still camera though. But with the camera software I have on the phone I can easily take a photo which is then processed using filters to give it a nice film look, and then I can immediately upload it via Ping.fm or Pixelpipe where it will be posted to a number my websites including Flickr, Facebook, my blog, Blogger and so on. That’s a nice. I can also play high quality 3D games,including one where you become a Japanese fighter pilot in WW2 and get to bomb Pearl Harbour! I’ve got a nice RSS reader on there, all my contacts (Facebook included) and the calendar are synced to Google(which I’ve read the iPhone isn’t even capable of?), I can browse websites and see a lot more than before, there’s an app I have installed that can translate multiple languages, a timelapse program for the camera, a guitar tuner, compass and a lot more.

But even with all the features the Xperia X10 has to offer, I am still missing the 3 year old dopod D810with it’s stylus, Pocket Artist and the voice dialing!! I am sure my AI friend on there is probably missing me too. So my dilemma, do I persist with the new technology and all it’s bells and whistles, or return/sell it and go back to the old dated technology that just did what it did very well? Of course I’ll stick with the Xperia X10, it will just take a while to get used to a different way of doing things.

But things have changed a lot over the past 6 years and it seems laptops have caught up and are now powerful enough to edit HD video on. Another factor to take into consideration is that Macs can now run Windows too. Considering all the key Programs I run including Vegas, Acid Pro etc are all strictly Windows only, then I most probably wouldn’t bother with OSX at all if I had a MacBook Pro with Boot Camp running on it. And I’ve actually heard of a few Windows video guys who edit on MacBook Pro’s running Windows. So that’s definitely an option, and a MacBook Pro is something I will be evaluating here.

Alright, so first up lets go to the Australian Apple website and see what they have on offer. I’m looking at machines priced under $3000 Australian. I see a 15″ MacBook Pro listed at $2999, so what does that offer? It has an older Intel 2.8ghz Core 2 Duo cpu. Fair enough, I’ve got a 2.4ghz Core 2 Duo desktop machine I can edit HD video on. It also has 4gb 1066mhz DDR3 ram which is ok too, a 500gb hard drive and a 1440×900 pixel LED display. Now I like the LED part, but 1440×900 resolution? Are they serious? It’s hard to believe Apple still haven’t increased their screen resolution after all these years. My 6 year old Dell has a 1600×1200 resolution screen, and to be honest, anything less would be a compromise.

So speaking of Dell, lets see what they have on offer in the same price range. After spending a few minutes browsing their site and seeing what’s on offer I’ve configured a machine for the price of $2849.80. Roughly $150 less than the Apple. The machine I’m looking at is the Studio 16 XPS, a classy looking computer that I’m sure I remember seeing ‘Chloe’ use on an episode of Smallville a month or so ago. The computer has an average user rating of 4.4 out of 5, so it can’t be that bad. Straight to the specs, here’s what the machine I configured comes with. Firstly it has an Intel® Core™ i7-820QM CPU. Now any geek who knows their CPU’s will agree this is a nice CPU to have in a laptop. Next up the display. I’ve configured it with an Ultrasharp 16″ 1080P (1920×1080) RGBLED display which is what increased the price to $2849.80. Perfect for editing HD video! With that display and CPU, the Dell is already a clear winner in my book. But it also has 8gb 1333mhz DDR3 ram, which is faster and double what the Apple comes with. The hard drive has a 640gb capacity which is more also, and even it’s video card has double the capacity of the MacBook Pro. Lastly the OS that ships with this Dell Studio is Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit, the current top of the range Windows operating system.

So there we have it, for less than $3000 Australian, the Dell Studio 16 XPS is clearly the winner for a laptop that can edit HD video. I’m sure many people will say Dell are rubbish, but I need look no further than my wife’s little Dell 2ghz Centrino which is nearly 5 years old. She uses that little computer daily for writing stories and takes it to work, the beach and everywhere inbetween. That thing is still very reliable, even with the amount of sand under the keys from the trips to the beach, the scratches and peeling paint around the corners. Many current Mac users will probably argue that they need a MacBook to run OSX. Well, that’s no longer the case either. I visited a website recently where they have this software I think, that will let you run OSX on a net book! And most other modern laptops actually. Sorry, I can’t remember what site it was, but the truth is that you can run OSX on most PC’s these days. A Google search may provide you with the info you’re looking for.

Today I created another blog, as well as fixing another that’s been up for a while and disappeared a day or two ago for some strange reason. That particualr blog has apparently been doing quite well which is why I checked it. The one I created today is actually based on a topic that’s popular on the other blog I just mentioned. For a number of different reasons though, I’d rather not reveal what it’s about! Definitely nothing related to anything I’m interested in or would even know anything about.

So I’m on a bit of a roll here and still have quite a few more blogs planned. I think tomorrow I’ll try and organise content for a couple of the others I created yesterday. Which I can reveal. I created an Akai MPC blog for users of Akai MPC samplers. The other is about 35mm adapters, like the SG Pro I use on my Canon HV20. To be honest I’m not sure what exactly I’ll be posting on either of these blogs. Well, there’ll be movies of course. I’m hoping to get some interviews also, which could be interesting.

One thing I should mention.. The fun part of seting up all these blogs is creating themes for them using Artisteer. The theme for this very site took possibly the shortest amount of time out of all those I’ve created so far. And to be honest, I’m quite happy with how it looks. Artisteer themes are normally pretty easy to spot though. The great thing is that when you create them yourself they end up being more original than themes peopledownload from a number of the theme websites. There are times when I’ve seen the same exact theme used on multiple websites. Of course, they usually look quite decent.

Well, that’s about it. Not much more I can say today. Rest assured I’ll try and keep future posts more interesting.

So here I am posting to a website with my real name in the url. To be honest, it does seem kind of strange, but I bought a .com domain for my wife Lydia last year of her full name, so thought I should get one for myself too.

Anyway, that’s about it for now. Thanks for visiting this site and hopefully you’ll be inclined to return! Feel free to leave any comments (click on the post title first). An email gets sent to me as soon as one is posted so that I can approve it asap.

Cheers,

Glenn