Blog Marco

Nope, its not raining in Sydney now.. but the rains have increased our dams by 10.8 percent to 50 percent full (or is that 50 percent empty?) anyhow, the previous week of rains (and floods) have brought about 7 and half months worth of water to Sydney's drinking supply. The dams are now at their highest since May 2004 with about 180 millimetres of rain falling across the Warragamba catchment since June 7. "Over the past two weeks up to 320 millimetres of rain has fallen on Sydney's catchment areas, boosting the dams by 336 billion litres of water," said the Premier, Morris Iemma. "This is some of the best rain we've had in more than eight years."

I was at a seminar last weekend and they played this video on the screen to make the point that the world is changing all around us NOW. So what does the future hold for us? Well, the video is meant to make you think that if you don't CHOOSE to CHANGE as the world changes rapidly around you - YOU WILL BE LEFT BEHIND... something to ponder about as you go about your daily life... the video is entitled: "Did You Know? Shift Happens"

I feel so behind... the actual video was uploaded onto YouTube in January (2007), but the original concept was made last August by Carl Fisch, a teacher in the US. He made the video for a staff presentation. The sources, original powerpoint presentations are on his blog.

Someone out there actually kept record of the oldest domain names on the World Wide Web. It's interesting to note that some of the first companies that signed up to a domain name on the Internet large companies like AT&T, GE, IBM, XEROX, Bell Atlantic, Boeing and SIEMENS. What is also interesting to note is that Microsoft doesn't appear in this list of one hundred first dot com domains. They registered their web domain at a later date on May 2nd 1991.

Here's a new website for you guys to check out: Street Fashion BLVD. It's new, its hip and its all about STREET FASHION.

I'm having a craving for Thai Tea... having been introduced to it only a month ago in New Jersey, I can't believe I haven't come across this cold drink in Australia before! I love Thai food, I can claim that I have eaten Pad Thai (my favourite Thai dish) at least once in every Thai restaurant I've been to from Germany to USA and Australia...

Anyway, back to that Thai tea. I'm going to look into making myself... hopefully some Asian supermarket has the ingredients to make this truly refreshing iced tea. I've looked up a few websites, and just as I suspected, there are varying recipes: a few making it from scratch and other from pre-made syrups. According to the Wikipedia article about Thai Tea: the tea itself "is a drink made from strongly-brewed powdered black tea... Other ingredients in the powder vary, but may include added star anise, tamarind or red and yellow food coloring, and sometimes other spices as well. This tea is sweetened with sugar and condensed milk and served chilled. Evaporated or whole milk is generally poured over the tea and ice before serving--it is never mixed prior to serving--to add taste and creamy appearance.

This page is an importer of some syrup where you can make it on the spot... I'll try to see if they have this mix in some Asian shop here in Sydney.

Remember when Paris Hilton was in town during New Year's and she was promoting a Beer in Bondi? Well they made a *slightly* controversial advertisement playing on oral sex as well as drinking while swimming. The advert stars Koby Abberton, champion surfer and Bra Boy, and the Bondi Blonde is Jaime Wright. Here is that banned Bondi Blonde Beer advertisement video. Why is it banned? Well actually it hasn't been approved yet by the adjudication panel of the Alcohol Beverage Advertising Code (ABAC) on the grounds that beer was being drunk in water sports as well as the sexual connotations. Anyway, you can read all about the legalities of this case here and read about when the beer first came onto the limelight back in 2003.

I know, I've got an old mobile phone... nothing like those new phones coming out with great internet applications. I've got a Sony Ericsson K750i whose on-board camera is now screwy as it takes snowy photos (although if I open up the phone and tighten the connections, the photos come out great). Anyway, age and the crappy camera aside, its still a good phone. It allows me surf the internet - the phone I have has Java Virtual Machine which allows me to install and run certain games and other useful internet applications (for Australians) to trade local and international stockmarkets using the CMC Mobile Marketmaker platform. I surf the internet on my phone using this cool lite browser called Opera Mobile. You can surf the internet with Opera Mobile, it compresses webpages for you and removes images. Another useful Internet Application is Google Mobile which allows you to check emails (on your gmail account) as well as view attachments you receive in messages, including photos, Microsoft Word documents and PDF files. Finally, another (new) Internet Application specifically for Australians is this thing called

I was unable to save anything in Mozilla Firefox for a while so I went to find a solution for this mess. What I found funny was that even when I upgraded from version 1.5 to version 2, the problem still remained. So I figured, some config files that were common were still playing up.

See the problem is this, when you to Tools > Downloads: you would only see "All Files Downloaded to:" but nothing next to it... usually you would see the save folder you selected in options. Another part to identifying the problem is when you right click and "Save Link As" or go to File > "Save Page As": nothing would be saved as a result, and no error messages would pop up.

So whats the solution? The solution below worked for me... but you can find other solutions here or below:
Click "Tools -> Downloads -> Clean Up" in the Firefox menu. If this doesn't help (or if it causes Firefox to hang) do this:

1. Exit Firefox completely
2. Open the Firefox profile folder (read this for help finding it)
3. Delete the downloads.rdf file (it will be regenerated when needed).

You may be able to prevent this problem by setting Firefox not to save a download history (see this article for an alternate method):

Yesterday, my cousin was raving about how sexy was the "I Don't Need a Man" music video from the Pussycat Dolls. Personally I think the music video is quite tame compared to the videos I'm going to be posting. I'll be looking into the sexiest music videos of all time. Here's "I don't need a man" by Pussycat Dolls - sexy enough for my cousin's standards.

So what are the sexiest music videos? Out of no order in particular I found these videos to be of particular interest with regards to how much sex is oozing out of the girls in the videos... here they are... not in any particular order...

Narcotic Thrust - I Like It
Tim de Luxe - It Just Won't Do
Eric Prydz - Call On Me
Benny Benassi - Satisfaction
NERD - Lapdance
tATu - All the Things She Said
Madonna - Justify My Love
Kylie Minogue - Spinning Around
Christina Aguilera -Dirrty featuring Redman
Mariah Carey - Heartbreaker
Britney Spears - Toxic
Uniting Nations - Out Of Touch
Khia - My Neck, My Back

I Like It by Narcotic Thrust is a sexy dance music video with a cheerleader theme.

This package travelled right through airport security in Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) last Monday when I was travelling back to Sydney. All the tight security measures like this and like x-raying shoes and this small amount of liquid gets through... It contains a used toothpaste tube with about 10-15mL left, two containers containing moisturiser and gel, two sample packs of lotion about 5mL each and a 15mL lotion bottle as well as my toothbrush. I normally pack this in my checked baggage but I guess I forgot that I placed it in my hand carry temporarily so I could brush my teeth at the airport.

With new airport regulations you cannot bring many liquids into the aircraft with you. From memory, you can bring in a 1L clear plastic bag with small containers not exceeding 100mL but the containers cannot be half-empty. There are special conditions for baby foods, etc...

Back in February, when I travelled from Manila, Philippines back home I forgot to pack a liquid bottle of insect repellent in my checked baggage. They confiscated the bottle off me.

Who knows... they may have just let it pass because there wasn't much liquid left in the bottles? Or did they just not detect it?

Qantas in-flight service simply sucks. Well, its average to put it fairly compared to other international airlines. I wrote about the standard of service about a month ago here. And a survey by Choice magazine (as reported by SMH) of its 4000 subscribers corroborates that fact.

So why do I say Qantas service sucks? Well it doesn't really suck that much... but compared to other airlines, their service and the system they use in serving people is definitely lacking.

I really do hope someone from Qantas reads this blog entry. So that they can improve their services. But Qantas isn't at all bad - they really do have good crew - and you wouldn't have a soaring share price, high profitability and record numbers flying with the airline if it were that bad. All I'm saying Qantas needs improvement here and there.

Michael Mijatov, secretary of the Flight Attendants Association of Australian, International division, has said that "...we believe this is not due to poor service or poor attitude on behalf of the cabin crew but to inadequate numbers of cabin crew on the aircraft. The service procedures laid down by airlines are not matched by adequate crew numbers on the aircraft."

When I installed AVG free last month it removed a few viruses including a file called "copy.exe". So whenever I go to "My Computer" (WinKey+E) and double click on any of my hard drives, including external and flash drives I get an error stating that "Windows cannot find "copy.exe". The only way I could get into the hard drive was to right click and select open or to simply manually type in the hard drive label into the address bar like c:, d:, etc...

Well the solution to this copy.exe conundrum is to get rid of a file called autorun.inf in each of the infected hard drives. Here's the solution to the problem...

Make sure you or the virus scanner is run through the infected hard drives/flash drives to make sure the virus files is gone.

Now, some forums said you could just select "show hidden files" from the options and this would enable you to see the "autorun.inf" file. This wasn't the case for me.

Also, some entries in the "autorun.inf" may be legitimate. So to check the file (even when you can't see the file) do this: type in the infected hard drive label followed by autorun.inf For example: f:\autorun.inf

This will load the autorun.inf file and should display it as a text file in notepad. If the only entry is that incriminating copy.exe then this is what I did. I tried to overwrite the file by saving a blank text file with the same name as autorun.inf. That didn't work because that inf file was "read-only". so I saved that blank file on the desktop and simply cut and pasted it into the drive, then selecting the overwrite file option. That should stop that annoying Windows cannot find "copy.exe" message every time you double click into a drive.

Dance! More Dancing Videos to watch (for those who are interested)...

Here's a video Paolo M. suggested for a little late night viewing... It's a music video of Ayumi Lee singing Cutie Honey in Korean. Pop Music and Cute.

Here are three breakdancing films. The first is short and to the point.

Here's another breakdancing video from a championship battle:

And finally a breakdancing video... this time of a 2 year old... its a bit slow but wait for the last bit:

Last October I blogged about the Aaron McMillan story which was featured on the ABC TV show "Australian Story". It was truly an inspiring story, with a few sad as well as happy and successful moments. He passed away today at the age of 30 at the Sacred Heart Hospice in Sydney, his mother Gail at his bedside. RIP Aaron McMillan. Aaron McMillan was one of Australia's talented pianists who at 24 was the youngest concert pianist to have played in the Sydney Opera House. Before being diagnosed with cancer, McMillan had given more than 500 solo recitals and concert performances in Australia, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. News reports of the news of Aaron's passing from the Sydney Morning Herald: Talented Pianists Life Claimed By Cancer, The Pianist Who Will Not Go Quietly, With Some Help From His Friends.

There was Marco Polo (Then came the game). There is a Marco Island in Florida, USA. There is even a brand name called Marco's Rice Crackers. This blog is called "Blog Marco". My name is Marco.

But what is the meaning of the name Marco? Etymology is the study of the origin and history of words - and there are plenty of websites out there with varied meanings for many names. The consensus for many sites I visited was that Marco means warring or warlike. Possibly the root word was Mars, who wsa the God of War in Greek Mythology. There are a few forms of Marco, theres Marko, Mark and Marcus. About.com describes Marco's origin as derived from the Latin first name Martcus or Marticos, subsequently Marcus, meaning "sacred, dedicated to the god Mars," god of spring and of war. English translation or its equivalent is Mark. The name's so called "Name Day" is April 25th, which is the Feast Day of St. Mark and anniversary of his death in 68AD. (Yep, the same St. Mark who is believed to have written the Gospel of Mark) Marco Polo was a Venetian trader and explorer who was one of the first Westerners to travel the Silk Road to China and and visit the Great Khan of the Mongol Empire.