Água Doce

Last night we went for the third time to Água Doce (in english "sweet water"), a Brazilian chain restaurant (in Brazil only unfortunately). They clasify themselves as a Cachaçaria which translates to be a "Sugar Cane Rum Bar", but it's much more.

What can I say? Impressive!!!!!!!

Below is an extract from their web site.

"No cardápio amplo e variado da casa são oferecidos mais de 600 itens que subdividem-se em 150 coquetéis com vinho e cachaça natural, cervejas, vodkas, whiskys e também uma infinidade de sucos, e coquetéis sem álcool para crianças"

Now that translates to be:

"Our more than ample menu offers more that 600 items divided into 150 cocktails with wine and sugar cane rum, beers, vodkas, whiskeys and also an infinite amount of juice, and non-alcoholic coktails for the kids."

But also the food is great.

I think they have about 85 franchaises and another four on the way.

Back to last night; there were four of us, we arrived at 8:00pm or a bit later, left at 12:30 and thought it was about 10.

Great food, drinks and atmosphere................................................

Wengo VoIP Service

I was just reading up about Wengo, an Open Source VoIP provider based in France.

Very Impressive!!!!!!!! And generally cheaper than Skype.

Unfortunately it does not benefit me so much but if I was calling to US, UK or Western Europe then they would be for me.

Maybe I'll give it a try, rates to Australian and Brazilian mobiles are cheaper than Skype.

Another Blog

I'm trying out Wordpress so check out Stuff In A Blog there. I'll keep both going until I find what I'm happiest with.

Australian VoIP Services

A friend of mine in Australia asked me what VoIP provider I used and went on to say that he was looking at either Engin or Firefly. So I thought that I better check these other 2 out and compare them to the service I use which is Skype.

So, the following tables are what I found (prices are per minute unless otherwise stated).

Service	Skype Euro	Skype AUD	Engin	Engin
Monthly Fee	Free	Free	$9.950	$29.950
PC to PC worldwide	Free	Free	Free	Free
Local Calls Aust	$0.017	$0.027	$0.100	$0.100
Capital Cities Aust.	$0.017	$0.027	$0.100	$0.100
Mobiles Aust	$0.165	$0.266	$0.270	$0.270
13/1300 Aust.	$0.017	$0.027	N/S	N/S
1 800 Aust	N/A	N/A	N/S	N/S
US	$0.017	$0.027	$0.035	$0.035
UK	$0.017	$0.027	$0.035	$0.035
NZ	$0.017	$0.027	$0.035	$0.035
NZ Mobile	$0.252	$0.406	$0.590	$0.590
Brazil	$0.044	$0.071	$0.140	$0.140
Brazil Mobile	$0.173	$0.279	$0.290	$0.290

Service	Skype Euro	Skype AUD	Firefly	Firefly Sub
Monthly Fee	Free	Free	Free	$5.950
PC to PC worldwide	Free	Free	Free	Free
Local Calls Aust	$0.017	$0.027	$0.069	$0.049
Capital Cities Aust.	$0.017	$0.027	$0.069	$0.100
Mobiles Aust	$0.165	$0.266	$0.300	$0.290
13/1300 Aust.	$0.017	$0.027	$0.069	$0.100
1 800 Aust	N/A	N/A	Free	Free
US	$0.017	$0.027	$0.069	$0.039
UK	$0.017	$0.027	$0.069	$0.039
NZ	$0.017	$0.027	$0.069	$0.049
NZ Mobile	$0.252	$0.406	$0.500	$0.500
Brazil	$0.044	$0.071	$0.145	$0.145
Brazil Mobile	$0.173	$0.279	$0.305	$0.305

Green text - service to service e.g. Engin to Engin
Blue text - $25 worth of calls included in monthly fee
Yellow text - untimed call
N/S - not sure
N/A - not available
Euro to AUD X-rate 1.6116 (as of 16 Feb 2006)

Further Info

If you were to use $9.95 worth (i.e. Engin) of Skype you would have 363.176 minutes (6.053 hours) to fixed lines in Australia and most parts of the world or 37.418 minutes (0.624 hours) to mobiles in Australia.

If you were to use $29.95 worth (i.e. Engin) of Skype you would have 1,093.177 minutes (18.22 hours) to fixed lines in Australia and most parts of the world or 112.63 minutes (1.877 hours) to mobiles in Australia.

Skype has no monthly fees; you only pay for what you use.

With Skype and Firefly you must have your PC turned on. They are both softphones.

Skype wins hands down on the international front.

Skype currently offer what is called "SkypeIn" in 12 different countries, unfortunately not yet in Australia but I believe that it will become available in the next 12 months. This is a service where you get a number in your country but for sure it will be one of the capital cities Engin will not be intersted in this because they use your existing land line and Firefly are still quite a small outfit.

I can't see how with any of these services that you can yet do away with your existing line so that you can still receive calls but the time will come some day soon.

For Australian customers Skype has the disadvantage that the servers are located in Europe meaning that if your are in Sydney and call your neighbour then your voice will travel to Europe and back as will the voice of your neighbour. You may experience some latency (delay) but in saying that I llive mainly in Brazil and call my parents 1-2 times per week to their land line and I would say that generally it is better quality than land line to land line.

I have saved a minimum of AU$3,000 in the last 16 months. I call more frequently and for longer to family and friends around the world.

Conclusion

I will definitely stick with Skype.

Blog Face Lift

Previous visitors will notice a bit of a facelift to this blog.

The most significant changes were:

1. Blogger.Com Template :
Was "Rounders 3"
Now "Minima Black"

2. Name :
Was "Stuff!!"
Now "Stuff In A Blog!!"

3. Address :
Was "http://albyxx.blogspot.com/"
Now "http://www.stuffinablog.blogspot.com/"

4. RSS Feed:
Was "feed://albyxx.blogspot.com/atom.xml"
Now "feed://stuffinablog.blogspot.com/atom.xml"

The old site still exists but you will have to click on the link to get to the new one. All content from the old blog has been transfered to here.

You will need to update your RSS feed link.

If there is something else that is broken then please let me know.

Australian's In Exile

OK, now that I have your attention I am a part of the Australian diaspora. I mainly live in Brazil and here we don't have a great deal of Australian TV content as you can imagine, actually zero.So I want to share something that I discovered yesterday.

ABC (Asia Pacific) TV online and LIVE!!

I was in Indonesia a couple of months ago and was getting this service in my hotel room and it was great, live rugby and rugby league and the best of all Australian television from the comercial operators such as All Saints, Blue Healers and Water Rats. I also caught the Australian football (soccer) team qualify for the world cup with a win over Uruguay.

And for those that are not Australian but are diaspora of elsewhere then do yourself a favor and check out this link to online TV around the world.

Enjoy!!!

German viewers may find Strip News quite entertaining.

Edit:
28 March 2006.
Well, the ABC Aisa Pacific service came to a halt a couple ofweeks back. When it dissapeared from service I contacted them about it and found out that it was a third party illegal stream.
Unfortunately they do not intend to make an internet stream of the service.

Browser Stats

A bit of trivial information:

Browser totals for this blog:

Mozilla/Gecko Core 53.69% (Firefox 1-30.20% Firefox 1.5-23.15%)
MSIE Core 40.27%
Opera 5.03%
Other Browsers 1.01%

Operating systems:

Windows 97.65%
Linux/Unix 1.34%
Apple 1.01%

Mozilla can hold it's head high.

It's a shame that Linux can't take off.

Homosexuality

Hmmmmmm...................

Well...............................

Difficult...........................

Okay, firstly I will say that I am a happily married straight guy with absolutely no homosexual tendencies.

So, what about gays? Well, we usually don't want to know about them but when the subject arises or we see them we are generally very opinionated. We straights generally talk or think about homosexuality as being an un-natural thing. I've been wrestling with the rights and/or wrongs in my mind for a long time and I experienced something that I had seen many times before, but it just did not sink in, that firmed up my views.

I was sitting on the verandah one afternoon a few weeks ago at my parents place having a few beers with my father. He has a grand total of two fully grown chickens that lay an egg each almost every day. Every afternoon they come past the verandah to scatch around in the garden but on the way one of them, and always the same one, agressively tries to ride the other, just as if she was a rooster, and it is always the same one doing the "riding". She is gay!!!!!!! No, her little brain is telling her that she's a rooster.

Conclusion: That chicken has never read a news paper or seen a pornographic movie or even gone to an all girls boarding school in her life. So, for that chicken homosexuality is a very natural thing. Homosexuality can be normal for those that are homosexual without being influenced by others.

Gay marriage? Well, I'll have to think about that one just a bit longer.

RSS Readers

I've been using RSS more and more as a form of receiving the information that I want to read about directly to my computer rather than wading through "Bookmarks" (Firefox and Opera) or "Favorites" (dear old IE).

I've played with quite a few ranging from the Online types, for example Yahoo and Google, to the Desktop varieties such as Thunderbird, principally an e-mail client, and Opera, a Browser that tries to do it all and then SharpReader and FeedDemon which are just readers. Oh, I also tried Firefoxes "Live Bookmarks". For one reason or another I just got fed up with them all.

The best was Thunderbird but it was buggy and also quite bandwidth hungry.

Then I discovered GreatNews. All I can say is that it is impressive even if it is still in Beta and still free!!!!

Bottom line is that an e-mail client is an e-mail client, a browser is a browser and a reader is a reader.

If you use Firefox then you need to get the extension Feed You Reader to make subscribing a breeze.

P.S. This is the first blog entry using Performancing so lets see how it goes.

P.P.S. Performancing is lovely..................... worked a treat. This is the future of blogging.

Nuclear Power - The Future?

What the hell is the fossil fuel alternative?

I've been thinking about this for some time and I believe that Nuclear Power is the way to go but there are some serious issues. I believe that they are not so serious anymore.

I've been running this by a few friends lately and they agree.

What are the issues?

1. Another Chernobyl. Technology has come a long way since then and, lets face it, the old Russian technology and methodology was never really up to sratch. There are many sucessful power plants around the world.

2. Nuclear waste. That is just soooo easy to solve. Firstly realize that the amount of waste per year per power plant is just so small. I have read figures of one plant producing less than a shoe box of waste per year. Let's say we have 10 x 200 litre drums of waste per year in the world. Why can't we just put it put it all into a rocket and point it to the sun. It will simply burn out long before it gets anywhere near it's destination and dissipate at tiny concentration levels into the universe.

3. Terrorists. Sure the plants are a target but put them out of harms way. Bury them into the ground or a hillside. Bombs don't penetrate very deep at all if they just hit the surface of the ground. They really need something serious like a nuclear bomb to penetrate much more than 6 metres deep. If they have a nuclear bomb then why waste it on a nuclear power station, better to just go straight for down town New York.

Am I wrong? What am I missing? Please comment.

Below is an article from a recent "The Bulletin with Newsweek". It seems that Australia is getting keen on the idea also.