I spent a couple of days wrestling with my real estate agent regarding their failure to inform me of a rental increase. They had sent out a letter back in April as required by s.45 of the Residential Tenancies Act 1987 but that had failed to arrive in my mail box. But whatever, mail occasionally, if infrequently, goes missing. The dumb part was that I continued to pay my old rent rate as I had no idea of the increase, and for 5 months they failed to informed me that I was under paying. Finally, in November, when I was in Vietnam, they SMSed me because they claimed I had fallen 1 week in arrears. Anyway after much to-ing and fro-ing (including one call where the agent put me on hold for 50 minutes, then when I hung up & rang back because I couldn't tell whether the line had dropped out as there was no hold music, she claimed that she'd put me on hold for only 15 minutes and that I had hung up!) I ended up contacting the owner directly as it was clear the agent I was dealing with was of less than average IQ, and we, like reasonable human adults, agreed to settle on a 50/50 split of the difference. The sad part was that the agent appears not to be penalised despite the mistake being theirs, though I am happy that I was able to inform the owner of their competency.

For the most part I've been watching TV, cooking, running, swimming, surfing, reading, and playing lots of games. Life is pretty much what I think it should be - stress free and filled with stuff I actually enjoy doing. In fact, Steam says I've played 34.1 hours of Team Fortress 2 in the past 2 weeks. It actually got as high at 38 hours but I was out yesterday so the rolling total dropped. That's pretty much equivalent to 1 week of full time work. :D If anyone's interested its only $10 on Steam.

When I'm not gaming I'm mostly reading stuff related to the sekret company Stephen & I are starting. Its been fun looking at all the services I largely ignored whilst working at Yahoo! - simple things like a decent bookmarking service and setting up a shared, hosted Wiki took us about 2 days of trialling various services. We eventually settled on ma.gnolia and pbwiki.

I was surprised to find very limited support for proper group behaviour amongst the milion bookmarking services out there. ma.gnolia was one of only two services we found that allows group members to add/edit/moderate bookmarks belonging to a group - everyone else makes a user own every bookmark, and thus if I add a bookmark to our group, Stephen can't edit it, and vice versa. Pretty dumb for collaborative bookmarking.

On the wiki front Yahoo! used TWiki, and it was pretty much the only wiki I had any real experience with. Thus I was pleasantly surprised by how easy pbwiki was to use in comparison, though I have to caveat that by saying our current wiki needs are very limited compared to Yahoo!. Still, I wonder if Yahoo! could save itself a lot of pain by using something more user friendly.

Away from the tools we're reading lots about small business, how to run companies and all that kind of stuff. I've been pleasantly surprised at the very good resources various government departments have put together for small business. I was going to link to the ATO which also has a good "starting a company" section but I got this:

I think their IT department needs to look up "decoupling", and "redundancy". (Despite this sad display I do think the ATO generally does provide good services. I've read a lot of the ATO website over the years, and I find their processes & systems are generally reliable.) However, it does remind me of a ^brilliant idea I had many moons ago - that websites should have fixed opening hours from 9-5pm, just like all the retail stores.

Anyway to wrap this up - everyone's been asking what our company will be doing and the short answer is that we're not 100% sure. Many of the entrepreneurial stories we've read suggest that folks often start off in one direction only to end up pursuing another (possibly related) track so we're still discussing various approaches. The other reason for being somewhat secretive is that vapourware hype is lame. When I joined Yahoo! back in 2001 one of the golden rules of PR was that we would never announce anything until it was live - the rationale being that when users hear about a service they should be able to jump on the service immediately and not have to wait weeks or months for it to be released. I still firmly believe in that.

Nerdlepoint thanks to sooperkuh

As QR codes have only recently appeared in Australia I wonder if they're needed at all. This isn't a cricitism of QR codes as a technology since they were invented in 1994 and have obviously been useful.

A quick search turned up this article about an OCR app for Nokia phones. Why not replace the QR app with something like this, that would rip out URLs?

The benefit is you have URLs that everyone can read, remember or write down, as well as a URL that can be easily OCRed -- assuming people use reasonable font & point sizes, which is a reasonable assumption if they also want people to read them.

It was a fun trip and I'll be uploading some of the 900 photos to Flickr over time. I prefer to add descriptions to most of my Flickr uploads as its more interesting for viewers, or a title at the very least.

Soong Kee

Malaysia was much the same as last year. One thing I noticed though is the rapid Americanisation of Kuala Lumpur. There's more and more mega-malls popping up, containing many well known international brands. Alongside that the hawker stores are also being modernised - Soong Kee has been air-conditioned for some time, and some malls have food courts with stores selling traditional hawker food alongside the McDonalds and KFCs of the world. There are also standalone mega-hawker-centres.

Vietnam is a really interesting place to visit. I vaguely recall reading that the average salary is between US$1-2 a day which is amazingly low. During my visit one USD was equivalent to 16,000 or 17,000 Vietnamese Dong (VND) depending on whether you were buying or selling. A bowl of Pho on the street seems to cost a minimum of 10,000 VND which is cheap for visitors but quite expensive if you're only earning a buck or two a day. I'm hoping there is local pricing which I didn't have access to. :)

I found the Vietnamese diet to be quiet healthy, if the lack of any obese people is to be any evidence. In the 11 days I was there I only saw one fat person, which I'm going to assume is/was an ex-pat. The vast majority of Vietnamese are lean and I saw not one McDonalds or Starbucks. One of our tour guides explained that Vietnamese people simply don't like to eat hamburgers. Good on 'em.

I'd also say that Vietnamese are generally hard working, and a cheerful, respectful people. On the latter point the road traffic is visibly chaotic, with horns blaring non-stop between 7am and 11pm every day, and no one observes road rules. The horn is used less as a "fuck you" as in most of the world, but more as a friendly "watch out, I'm here" toot. As the lane markings are typically ignored you would for instance toot when you are approaching someone's blind spot to make sure they know you're there. You might, as one of our taxi drivers did, also toot repeatedly if you are about to U-turn right through 5 lanes of traffic flowing in both directions. This sort of behaviour is completely acceptable - people don't seem to get agro, they just wait patiently as you manouevre.

Crossing the road is similarly nuts. The traffic, at least in the tourist areas, never stops. In Ho Chi Minh City there are 6.5 million people and 4.5 million motorbikes. You are expected to walk through the traffic which seems like a crazy thing to do but in reality its quite safe. As long as you walk steadily the sea of motorbikes will part and flow around you like water. I think in general this level of chaos and the traffic density (meaning generally slower speeds) means that drivers & riders are a lot more vigilant than drivers anywhere else. I honestly believe I have a higher chance of getting run over at a pedestrian crossing in Sydney than I would crossing any busy road in Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi.

We started off in Ho Chi Minh City and had no troubles there getting around. Taxis are cheap - 12-15k VND for the first kilometre, then 11,000 VND per kilometre thereafter. The tourist attractions are all within a few kilometres so most fares should not exceed 30-50k VND. This wasn't a problem in HCMC but Hanoi was a different story where 3 out of 6 cabs that we caught were running dodgy meters. The first guy was unbelievably greedy. His meter already ran at 3x the regular rate (its quite noticeable as traffic moves slowly in Hanoi's Old Quarter) but the fool decided to also take us the longest way possible. Having a reasonable sense of direction both dad & I noticed this so when we finally arrived at our destination and his meter said 80k VND instead of the expected 25-30k VND, we gave him 50k and walked away (I didn't have anything smaller). The next two fellas weren't so greedy - they took the most direct route but both guys started bargaining with me when again we paid 50k of a 30k fare, asking for another 10k just for the hell of it. We told one driver that we knew his meter was dodgy even as we were driving as I saw the bloody thing jump up several times within a second as we were waiting at a traffic light. He must've thought we were distracted because we were making some idle chit chat. He apologised and slowed the meter thereafter(!) but still tried to get the full meter reading out of us.

Now Vietnam isn't all about traffic and taxis, more to come as I find time to upload the accompanying photos. :)

Halloween Hack Day

Friday I went back to the office to pickup my stuff. After almost 8 years I had a literal car boot full of stuff on my desk, crammed into drawers and on the *two* returns I needed to display all my toys. :D Played a game of soccer up at KGV as we had entered a lunchtime indoor soccer tourney there prior, and then spent the afternoon distracting folks from Hack Day.

The weekend was the same as any weekend. I had to go to Ikea to buy a shelf to store all the crap that was previously at work. :) Mum & dad suggested we visit Vietnam & Malaysia since I now have some free time and dad has long service leave. The tickets are now booked and I went to the Vietnamese Consulate today to get my tourist visa.

Monday saw me back in the office to hand in the various redundancy forms & legalese, a few goodbyes then it was up to the pub and dinner with my fellow unemployed bums. :)

This morning I went into Donington, the start of a series of sessions paid for by Yahoo! aimed to help staff transition to whatever they choose to do in future. Its pretty cool - using a few strength/weakness like/dislike exercises they try to help you clarify what you might like to do next but they don't actually find a job for you. I think this separation is good, avoiding potential conflicts of interest and it allows for a lot of flexibility in terms of folks wanting to do their own thing etc.

Sydney Harbour Bridge

After that I popped into Paxtons as I needed a passport photo for the tourist visa mentioned earlier. Paxtons do passport photos for $15 with a one hour turnaround. I couldn't understand why it cost so much, nor the slow turnaround, so I pulled out my digital camera (which is always in my backpack), took a photo of myself in front of their handy white screen, and used the Kodak kiosk to create my own "mini-prints". I printed 9 passport sized photos for $1.50 (the minimum cost for a "mini-print", printed instantly), and it took all of 15 minutes. For whatever reason the "proper" way of printing takes an hour but doing it myself with the kiosk allows instant printing. I did call the Consulate to check if this was ok and I highly recommend this method if its suitable for your needs (passport photo requirements can be notoriously picky so beware).

Although a complete shock I have to say I haven't felt too sad about it. There were certainly some aspects of the company that I found incredibly frustrating - I won't go into details suffice to say that its your typical big company stuff. I get the feeling that some folks are surprised that I'm not more bitter about what happened and I think its worth explaining that I worked pretty hard over the 7 years, 9 months and 3 weeks to help build the company to what it is today. It would be simply childish to "undo" all that effort by rubbishing the company over a simple parting of ways. I obviously still have many friends at Yahoo! and I think I will forever be a yahoo at heart so I wish everyone the best. :)

Sunrise @ Freshie

In fact, one of the most pleasant things about the past few days has been the overwhelming support extended to me by yahoos all over the world. I can't thank everyone enough for the general well wishes through to the offers to provide recommendations to, and contacts in other organisations as well as other parts of Yahoo! :D

Yahoo! was my first "real" job which I started before I finished Uni. It caused my 3 year undergrad degree to be dragged out over 7 years. :) I was digging through various Yahoo! paperwork earlier tonight and came across my original offer letter and even reading it today it still gives me a little buzz as I remember how excited I was to receive it all the way back in October 2000. I am really proud to have been a yahoo.

I'd describe my mood as hesitantly excited right now. Opportunities abound but for now I'm going to take a few weeks/months off to toy with some ideas I've had for a while and generally reflect on what I might do next. And yeah, I'll be surfing. :)

There are two things I'm aware of that sort of do this today:

1. Callback - some call centres allow you to leave a number so they can call you back when an operator is free, rather than have you wait on the line. This is a great feature and I'm not sure why more places don't do this.


2. Gethuman - a listing of many IVRs, mainly in the US/Canada and what sequence of buttons you should press to get a human; note that it isn't so helpful for IVRs that require voice input

On Hold thanks to FLC

Building a system to fully automate this would not be so hard. You could work off a prioritised list of the most frequently used call centres - e.g. big banks, utilities, subscription services (PayTV etc), telcos, ISPs and so forth - experience shows its mainly larger companies that bother with IVRs, and implement them in the most annoying way possible so there's not that large a list. Work down each company working out the shortest path to a human, whether that's through voice input or PSTN tones, then simply record those.

Now the customer calls you (this needs some thought), you log their number using caller ID or through manual input from them and the call ends. Your service dials the customer support line, plays back your recorded sequence, and upon detecting a human voice you play a "excuse me the kettle's boiling" and dial the customer back, connecting them to the customer service rep.

I don't have a super elegant solution for the initial customer contact. One option is to outsource that to your own overseas callcentre who understand enough to know that the customer wants to contact "Bigpond" or "Telstra", or "NAB" or "Commonwealth Bank". Alternatively you could have a different phone number for each and move the mapping problem to the end user, or, (oh the shame), your own IVR with a selectable list. :)

The business model for this would basically be user pays. Given that automating this is entirely feasible I think a flat fee model is simple and works best. Maybe use a premium in-bound 1900 or SMS which bills the user $2-5 or something equally small - given the basically zero marginal cost of service I think going for a smaller price makes sense - it makes it cheap enough for anyone who becomes aware of the service to give it a try since its not much to lose, and a helluva lot better than sitting on hold for 20 minutes.

I was walking home along Harbord Road and I see a girl pause at the crossing waiting for the oncoming car to slow down - which it did, it stopped. So she starts walking across, breaking into a run, I guess she's thinking at this point that everyone's going to stop. Oncoming car in the other direction slams into her - I barely heard the screech of brakes - and she bounces off the windscreen onto the road. Given that a car on the other side of the road had already stopped for this girl, how the hell did the driver coming in the other direction not notice that traffic was stopped and a girl wearing a bright red top is crossing?

Its really such a sad thing to see for all involved. The driver was shocked as hell as you would be, and needlessly so. Slow down, pay attention, you're steering over a tonne of metal on the road - it does bad things when you hit squishy bodied people. Fortunately, the girl appeared to be as ok as one can be after being hit by a car - fully conscious and no visible injuries though she was sore. I called an ambulance which arrived after about 5 minutes and they stretchered her off.

One of my biggest bugbears about Sydney life lately is the failure of drivers to stop at pedestrian crossings. As a pedestrian I've stopped at the side of the road and looked oncoming drivers in the eye thinking they would stop, only to have them drive straight through and in some cases speed up! I've been trying to think of a way to penalise these drivers without causing a major accident but so far have not come up with anything workable. The latter point is really critical - sure I could throw shit at their car but if that causes them to swerve to avoid being hit it may well result in a much larger accident, something I have no desire to cause. I wish there was a way to report the license plates of such cars but the flipside is how would you stop people abusing such a system to report drivers they dislike for any reason?

Probably the most gratifying Creative Commons related experiences I've had were from various authors asking permission to use my photos. One of them has been published in the 50+1 Malaysia Book.

I was also contacted by a girl in Italy who was looking to publish a book about France, and wanted to use my photo of Tripe alamode de Caen. Unfortunately this project didn't pan out but it turns out that the same photo has been used in Wikipedia in the article about Sidoine Benoît, a Benedictine monk of the 14th Century. Had I not licensed this photo under the cc-by-sa license I would never have realised the history behind this dish.

I also had a strange experience with a marketing guy in Malaysia wanting to buy two photos of hawkers for use on a micro-finance brochure. This presented me a personal dilemma as both photos clearly showed the hawkers' faces and I wasn't sure if they'd necessarily want to be associated with whatever bank was running these ads. I read some stuff about model clearances and decided that ultimately if it was me in those photos I probably wouldn't want to be associated with no bank. So I replied suggesting that if marketing guy could find those hawkers (which wouldn't be difficult as they have a regular location) and get their approval I'd be happy for my photos to be used. I never heard from marketing guy again.

Looking through my Flickr stats it turns out a number of my other photos have also been added to Wikipedia - in articles about Pisang Goreng (a type of banana fritter common in Malaysia and Indonesia), Baked Alaska (a fancy looking dessert), Almond meal, and everyone's favourite fruit - the Durian.

By literally doing nothing more than just a few small clicks to use the Creative Commons licenses I'm contributing to the world's knowledge, how cool is that!? You should do your part. :)

We'd been down the mini-park next to the big kickers a couple of times and had lots of fun so I'd setup by the second jump to get some happy snaps. From memory its about 1.5 to 2m tall. Like any good jump its downhill on the landing. Unfortunately for Kat it wasn't downhill for very long and with her speed it meant she landed from a height of over 3m onto flat ground. Oomph.

I yelled "niiiiice" as she flew past and saw her spin around a bit on the ground before focusing my gaze back up the hill as Joz & Phil were still to come. It didn't strike me as a particularly hard fall until Joz and Phil had both passed a couple of minutes later and Kat was still lying still on the run.

She tried to move but couldn't for the pain and many skiers & boarders passed by offering to get the ski patrol, an offer we took up. I have to say it is really cool how concerned people are about the well being of others on the snow. Even the well meaning lady who suggested we move her off the run, which we did not do since we didn't know if it might've been a spinal injury. Ski patrol turned up on their ski-doo within 10 minutes of us sending someone down with their little siren blaring and put Kat in a funky deflatable beanbag stretcher thing. It was really nifty as it held its shape perfectly to keep her dead still on the way down. I think it was only when we had to lift Kat to put her on the stretcher and she cried that it struck me how seriously she might've hurt herself.

After an hour or so in the on-mountain clinic Kat was taken down to the Lakes District hospital in Frankton (10 minutes from Queenstown), by ambulance. Initially we weren't sure what the damage was. Kat was obviously in a lot pain if she tried to sit up but it wasn't obvious whether it was muscular or something more serious until an x-ray confirmed that she had fractured parts of her spine. Even then we weren't sure if the fractures were unstable which may require surgery. It was a pretty scary night.

The following morning she was taken down by ambulance to Southland Hospital in Invercargill for CT scans which confirmed that she had a stable wedge fracture in her lower spine. That was good news as it did not require surgery. She's now sporting a spiffy brace which stops her from bending her torso, and moves around at "5 metres per hour" as Joz likes to put it. :) She's not actually that slow but moves around a bit like Frankenstein since she can't bend. I say that with all the love in the world, and content in the knowledge that Joz is looking after her well - apparently he suggested today that she might want to pass the time at home by stripping the ads from movies they've recorded...

Oh, and Kat has a nice deep cut in her chin which we still aren't sure of the cause of. It needed 3 internal stitches and 5 outside so its going to leave a respectable scar.

shattered hard disk thanks to Anigwei

I started off with a simple backup strategy - create a 80GB TrueCrypt drive, and using Cygwin and rsync I'd mirror my important data to this drive once a week. The problem then was finding an offsite location to store this sucker.

I used DreamHost's almost unlimited storage for some time before they informed me that storing backups on their service was not allowed. They're not the only ones of course - I looked at HostGator, Bluehost and a bunch of other budget hosts who offer ridiculous amounts of disk space only to find that all of them disallow storage of backups. I find this really lame and scam-like - basically they say "you have all this diskspace but don't you dare try to use it". If I were less scrupulous I might just take my 80GB file, chunk them into 128kB JPGs and say good luck to them in proving that they aren't legitimate web content.

Anyway I went searching for alternative webhosts and settled on a Budget VPS Hosting. I've got a VPS running CentOS with 100Mhz of CPU, 100MB of RAM, and 80GB of disk for $12/month. The CPU & RAM may seem slow/small by today's standards but I recall that just 13-14 years ago I would have been running Linux on a 386DX40, and then on a Pentium 90 which was more than capable of running XWindows. So really, 100Mhz of CPU on some quad core host is more than adequate for a bit of rsync.

As I'm a tightarse I continued thinking of cheaper solutions. One idea that sprang to mind was to use USENET. The larger USENET premium providers today have retention rates of 100-200 days. I wonder if its feasible to post my encrypted backup files to USENET every 30 days, and rely on their 100-200 day retention as an offsite backup mechanism. The gating factor here is upstream bandwidth - I only have 1Mbps upload from home so it would take me roughly 10 days to upload 80GB. This may not save any money since the typical USENET provider costs about $15/month but if you're on an ISP like Internode which provides free premium USENET, or already have a USENET subscription for intense discussion of Linux ISOs then the marginal cost of doing this is zero.

11:15 <@CaT[tm]> so when are the games ending?
11:18 < conio[au]> officially tonight, but we wont know because of channel 7 repeats

GG Seven Network.

14.4k modem thanks to djukami

I used said modem to get on the interwebs in 1995 via Macquarie University, thanks to my cousin who was a student there at the time. I didn't really understand what the internet was about at the time, viewing it as the world's largest BBS, where I could type in 'ftp', 'o ftp.wustl.edu' or 'o ftp.cdrom.com' to grab as much share/freeware as I possibly could. I say type because everything then was done over a serial terminal commanding shells on SunOS machines (hardy and laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au; I wonder what they're running today?).

My cousin introduced me to IRC as well, and there I discovered the warez scene. The XDCC that is still used by some today existed 13 years ago! Warez & porn has always driven the hunger for bandwidth and I remember at the time that cracking machines on T1s, T3s, and OC3s were all the rage. That's 1.5Mbps, 45Mbps, and 155Mbps respectively and T1 was considered monster at the time given that most end users had just 14.4k or 28.8k dialup connections. I never imagined that I would have 1.5Mbps to my home, ever.

Fast forward to today - I have a DSL2+ link at home syncing at 21Mbps downstream. That's more than 10x the "monster" T1 connection 13 years ago, albeit with a more limited 1Mbps upstream. And with my recent 3G modem purchase I can get between 3.6 and 7.2Mbps on the move.

On a recent trip to the snow I tested this out and sitting stationary in Jindabyne I was able to get about 30kB/sec (roughly 250kbps) up and down. Moving at 90km/h coming out of Queanbeyan it was still syncing at 7.2Mbps and possible to surf the web - that's how I learnt of Hackett's silver in the 1500m, and of Usain Bolt's 9.69s world record in the 100m sprint. It soon dropped to UMTS 3.6Mbps, and then to GPRS 56k.

GPRS is slow by today's standards but it struck me how far we've come when I'm able to get 5kB/sec moving at over 100km/h in country NSW, the same 5kB/sec that was the top speed achievable by most internet users 10 years ago.

Why does it kick so much arse?

For starters, LIVE STREAMS of almost everything. Now they are restricted to residents of the US who have a cable service but I'll come back to satisfying that requirement later. The only two sporting genres that I care about that aren't available are the Athletics and Swimming. I can understand that given the popularity of those events but despite that I still feel NBC has made a good compromise - everything else from Judo to Handball to Kayaking and hell even Synchronised Swimming is available.

But the fun doesn't stop there! Their player is Silverlight based and frankly, awesome. The default player screen is about the same size as your typical YouTube video but much higher quality, and you have the option of enlarging it to a 90+kB/sec stream (that's over 700kbps). Its superb for live streaming.

Standard Player: (cropped, click for full screencap)

Enlarged Player: (cropped, click for full screencap)

But I know you want more. They also have picture-in-picture! You have the option of viewing one stream in the regular large window, as well as having a smaller window within that watching a second stream. Or you can use a split pane view which lets you watch 1 main stream and 3 other streams in smaller windows. And, being the interwebs, there's nothing stopping you from popping up multiple windows each with their own full size player if you have the bandwidth. Its pretty handy if there's just one freaky athlete you want to watch out for in the women's weightlifting.

4 stream player: (cropped, click for full screencap)

Last night I checked out the live stream schedule and noticed that when a match is in play they update their schedule so instead of just saying "Water Polo - AUS v CAN" their equivalent of the TV guide for live streams says "Water Polo - AUS v CAN, Australia leads 3-0". So you don't even have to go into the stream to figure out whether it may or may not be interesting. This might not seem like such a big deal but to me it signals a real desire to make the site as useful as they possibly can.

Now the restriction on NBC's streams is that you need to provide them your ZIP code and the name of your cable provider. Once you're past that form the live streams are also restricted to US IPs. Now I don't want to suggest you lie to them but in the spirit of "for educational purposes only" made popular by warez and security groups throughout the world you may want to consider using the internationally acclaimed ZIP code for Beverly Hills - 90210. I heard DIRECTV services Los Angeles. As for the IP restriction, again, for educational purposes only, you may want to consider buying yourself an account on a shared webhost that provides SSH access. It might be in the US. You wouldn't want to pay more than $5/month for this.

Then grab yourself a copy of PuTTY (its free, and absolutely awesome), setup a Dynamic tunnel in its preferences, then ssh into your new webhost. Start Firefox (again, free, and awesome), point its SOCKS proxy setting at localhost:1080, and off you go to the wonderous land of live Olympics streaming. $5 for all the Olympics streaming you can handle. This is all just theoretical of course, you wouldn't want to violate NBC's Terms of Use.

So tonight instead of watching Seven's replays of Aussie medals through the day, using the above method, I might have opted to go to NBCOlympics.com to watch the women's 63kg & men's 81kg Judo. Where I might have seen some amazing throws by a French lady, and an equally amazing trip by a Brazilian dude. Citius, Fortius, Altius and all that. It would have been a nice change from the political & patriotic crap on Seven's coverage. But I would not have want of violating the great NBC's streaming rights so this whole post is just me dreaming. Even the screenshots I got off some random guy on IRC who listened to me lamenting Seven's shitty coverage.

I couldn't think of any unique way to make a broccoli cake appealing so I thought I'd stick with a basic carrot cake recipe but substitute broccoli for the carrot. It seemed like a reasonable idea since broccoli is mildly sweet.

125g butter
1/2 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tablespoon honey
1 cup self raising flour
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 cup grated broccoli

Since the grated broccoli stems was quite light coloured and I wanted to make sure that people noticed the broccoli I shaved the dark green tops off the broccoli and added that to the mix. :)

Baked for 30 minutes @ 200 C.

The result:

I can only describe the flavour as weird. There is a strong scent of broccoli, much stronger than I expected. That's serving to deeply confuse my mind as the taste of the cake is typically sweet but then there is broccoli. It does not make sense.