Ingredients

Connee’s Curry served into bowls for fridge storage

• 500g premium mince (or vegan equiv)
• 5 large brown onions
• Veges to boil down to mush
  • Original recipe (and instructions below) uses:
    • 6 medium potatoes
    • 1/2 medium butternut pumpkin
  • or replace with equivalent proportions to taste. Can also use
    • sweet potato
    • carrots
    • etc
• 500g baby frozen peas
• Keen’s Traditional Curry powder (orange tin)
• cornflour
• olive oil
• salt

Utensils

• 1 large frying pan with lid (electric frypan ideal)
• stirring spoon
• cutting board
• knives and measuring spoons. etc

Method

(3+ hours cooking time)

Approx 30 minutes into cooking Connee’s Curry

Start:

• Dice 5 large brown onions into small pieces.

0:20:

• Put 8 dessertspoons olive oil (or 4 tablespoons) into a pan on medium heat and add 5 diced onions.
• Cook 10 Min on medium heat, 10 Min on low heat turning all the time- until onions are ‘clear’and a light brown. Push onions to outer edges of pan – leaving the centre clear.

0:40:

• Add 500g premium mince to centre of pan and break up mince turning all the time. Juice will come out of mince and provide moisture.
• Cook for 10 minutes on low heat turning MINCE in centre of pan all the time – no pink bits.

0:50:

• Mix onions and mince together. Cook for 5 Min on low heat turning all the time.

0:55:

• Sprinkle 4 heaped dessertspoons Keen’s Traditional Curry (orange tin) on top of mince and onions.
• Cook for 5 Min on low heat turning all the time.

1:00:

• Add 1 litre water or enough to just cover mince and onions – turn curry to mix well.
• Cook on Medium Heat until mince starts to simmer then turn down to low heat and put lid on.
• Prepare 6 medium potatoes (cut in to quarters vertically / then 3 cuts horizontally – chunky pieces.

1:10:

• Add and mix 6 chunky potatoes. Turn up heat to medium and keep turning curry so it wont settle on the bottom. Push the potatoes down so they are under water. (Only add 1/2 cup water if absolutely necessary if it is catching on the bottom because it is to dry.
• When curry starts to simmer – turn down to low heat and put lid on.
• Cook for 30 Min turning every 5 Min so it wont catch on the bottom.
• Whilst potatoes are cooking prepare half butternut pumpkin – peel and cut into chunky bits like potatoes.

1.40:

• Add pumpkin chunks and turn so they are all mixed in.
• Turn up heat to medium heat until simmering, turning all the time. Push pumpkin down with back of spoon into the curry to cover. (Only add a little water if necessary). Turn down to low and put lid on when simmering Cook for 55 Min.
• Keep turning the curry every 5 minutes (from the bottom) so it wont stick on the bottom of the pan.
• Push vegetables down into the mix. Be careful it does not stick – Turn mix from the bottom.

2.35:

• Add a bag of frozen 500g BABY peas. Turn into curry – make sure you are going along the bottom of the pan when turning the mix. Turn up to med heat and when it starts to simmer turn down to low heat and put lid on. Cook for 25 Min keeping the mix turned at least every five minutes – check it is on low.

Connee’s Curry – The finished product

• Mix 3 dessertspoons cornflour (or plain flour) in 4 dessertspoons (about a 1/4 of a cup) of water. Just enough to make a running paste with no lumps. Add 1 level teaspoon salt. Simmer on low heat.

3.10:

• Turn off

Additional Notes

The above was cooked on a gas stove. Gas is faster to heat up and can be slowed down immediately.

Electric stoves hold heat longer – slower to heat up and slower to cool down – so the cooking time may vary. Also the curry might catch more and might need to be stirred more often. The schedule may need to be varied – the first time it is cooked keep and eye on it.

Serving suggestions

Growing up we ate this served on a shallow plate, often with toast to heap it onto, and a squeeze of fresh lemon for a little added zest. These days I usually eat it as a dip for corn chips, with sour cream, or with rice. The recipe above would provide for 4-10 meals, depending on extras.

Freezes fine and reheats in microwave easily.

Credit:

I got this from my mother Connee-Colleen (1941- ) who probably got it from HER mother Jess (1912-1986). The Method and Additional Notes sections above are Connee’s own words and emphasis.

Elizabeth.

There have been so many words, so much grief, and so much love expressed in your memory these last days. Everyone wants to share their story. How you touched their life. How you were wonderful. I have not been immune to this.

The grief is strong. I suspect I am not alone in being the only one for whom you are the first close friend – a peer – to die.

You were one of the most genuine, forthright, honest people I have known. You were one of the most accepting people I have known, but also you had a very strong sense of justice, and would not tolerate that which was wrong.

I wrote in a comment that you affected people, and I think that defines well your interactions with the world. You knew people, and people knew you. You were affected by people because of your great empathy, but you affected people because of simply who you were.

There is an Elizabeth shaped hole in so many hearts, and my head-Lizbeth appreciates the love from us all, but also tells us to stop being so daft and get on with our lives.

And we will. I promise. We will.

But maybe not just yet.

There are a few more tears to shed, memories to share, and hearts that are still raw

Time heals wounds – because as time passes, events in history appear smaller. Right now the grief at your loss looms large on our collective horizon of history, and in time it will become part of the tableau of life. But memories of you will remain strong, of that I am sure. You wont be forgotten. Your affect on people wont be forgotten. Memories of you will join with other events over the years, but you will remain bright.

The world is a better place that you were in it, and a sadder place now you are gone.

• Elizabeth’s blog – sky between branches
• Elizabeth’s short-run webcomic – _underscore_

• 1901: declared ourselves a country, own constitution, etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federation_of_Australia
• 1910: Australia got it’s own pound http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_pound (it was locked to the Pound Sterling by Australian policy till 1929, and replaced by the decimal dollar in 1966)
• 1927: dominions have equal status to the UK (ie, created the commonwealth) (1926 Imperial Conference, Balfour Declaration 1926 and Royal and Parliamentary Titles Act 1927) – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sue_v_Hill
• 1942: Australian laws could contradict UK laws (previously, any contradiction meant the AU law was invalid) – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Westminster_Adoption_Act_1942
• 1949: the concept of “citizen of Australia” came about (but still said “british subject”) – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_nationality_law
• 1953: legally recognising the “Australian flag” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Australia
• 1984 (April): Australia gets its own National Anthem.
• 1984 (November): Australian citizens no longer also “british subject”) (see Australian_nationality_law again)
• 1986: removed ability of UK to alter Australian constitution, or overrule Australian courts – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_Act_1986

Soon afterwards, however, in Shaw (2003),[19] the whole Court (including Kirby) took a more comprehensive view: that the Australia Act in its two versions, together with the State request and consent legislation, amounted to establishing Australian independence at the date when the Australia Act (Cth) came into operation, 3 March 1986.

The three main steps to independence were 1901 – formation and recognition of a country. 1942 – Ability to contradict UK laws. And 1986 – UK unable to override Australian courts.

Well, mostly.

Images were not backed up – though the originals I uploaded are likely to be findable. I just have to go and find them. Not yet done… but anyway, the important thing is… it’s back!

…

…

…tumbleweeds…

I eschewed that in favour of pure size comparisons. (there is no other kind of dick waving contest, right? And created multiple images to handle multiple scales smoothly (something that many modern implementations of this idea, which whilst better in every other way, often fail to handle well).

My project faltered, in part from interest waning, and in part from difficulty in sourcing images and information in the 2001 internet.

However, I’ve dug up what I did, and presenting it for the first time in years…

Sci-Fi “Grids”

http://sta.sh/21qzlqpf2j29

(A story I watched while pursuing my epic attempt to watch all Doctor Who during 2013.  (follow along on twitter: https://twitter.com/WatchingDrWho =)

Within the story, Barbara identifies the body of the ancient high priest Yetaxa as having died around 1430, as all the tomb bling around him is from the Aztec “early period” (Aztec empire formed from an aliance in 1427). She confirms that Aztecs were a specialty of hers – which presumably is why she immediately robs the grave for a shiny new bracelet!

Apart from that though, the story is undated.
http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/15th_century – list the Doctor and Companion’s visit as “Unknown date”.

The novelisation, for what it’s worth, dates it to 1507.

But I was wondering… can we date the episode more accurately than that, from other plot elements?

I think so…

Since the story climax revolves(sic) around a total solar eclipse, can we use that? Well, yes, but only if we know when eclipses occured over the Aztec empire. This, it turns out, is relatively easy.

The Aztec empire at its maximum extent is shown here – 1519 being the year that the Spaniards landed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aztec_Empire_1519_map-fr.svg

This version mostly agrees on the outline, and also provides a bit of info about when each area fell under Aztec jurisdiction.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aztecexpansion.png

So, what about eclipses that crossed that area of the planet, between 1430 and 1519?

Luckily, NASA has an eclipse page with lots of historical eclipses calculated.
http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse.html

So, here are the ones around the end of the empire – from 1501 to 1520:
http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEatlas/SEatlas2/SEatlas1501.GIF
…that’s a bust.

What about earlier? Here’s the 15th century…
http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEatlas/SEatlas2/SEatlas1481.GIF
http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEatlas/SEatlas2/SEatlas1461.GIF
http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEatlas/SEatlas2/SEatlas1441.GIF
http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEatlas/SEatlas2/SEatlas1421.GIF
http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEatlas/SEatlas2/SEatlas1401.GIF

Solar Eclipses for the Aztec Empire

Examining those and comparing, it looks like there were eclipses in 1452, 1477 and 1496 which may fit the bill. So with a bit of screen shooting, gimp and inkscaping, we get an amalgam of map, empire growth, and eclipses…

I’ve included the 1405 eclipse here as it was likely influential to early Aztec culture, but otherwise can be ignored for our purposes. The next one, chronologically, is 1452 – which spanned areas which didn’t fall under Aztec influence until 1486 at the earliest. Similarly,  1477′s eclipse covered area which didn’t become Aztec till 1502. Perhaps these could be argued by someone with more knowledge of the culture of the time (and how it matches known Aztec culture, and what we saw in the episode), but if we trust Barbara’s analysis and stick to a strict “it was actually Aztec” (rather than “soon-to-be-Aztec”) basis here, then that leaves only 1496 – an eclipse which ran across the northern edge of what was, at that time, Aztec controlled land. Indeed, some of which having been Aztec for almost 30 years.

So, 8 August 1496.

Does that settle it then?

Almost… the other factor which should be identifiable and was seen in The Aztecs was the architecture – the pyramid complex itself. And sadly, in my meager searching, I can’t find any sites which had anything like that, in that area…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_pyramids

This would perhaps be the most likely location within that eclipse path, if not for the timing – El Tajín fell in the 13th century:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Taj%C3%ADn

So in conclusion? It looks like there really was only one total solar eclipse which fell on the Aztec empire, and that was 1496. The lack of modern knowledge of the city itself can be retconned quite easily, either through natural jungle processes, or by more fictional means (eg: city was razed between then and now by some other alien or supernatural entity).

Otoh, if an appropriate pyramid site can be found within the paths of the 1452 or 1477 eclipses, then that would present a strong argument there – with the retcon required being Barbara being mistaken about her accuracy of location…

Some external links:
http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/The_Aztecs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Aztecs_(Doctor_Who)
http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/The_Aztecs_(novelisation)
http://www.drwhoguide.com/who_f.htm
http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEcat5/SE1401-1500.html

So getting straight to it: in nautilus, all the metadata about files as they appear in the GUI (so: icon position, size, emblems, etc) exist in a series of files in $HOME/.local/share/gvfs-metadata
(each file in there related to a filesystem)

caja, on the other hand, uses the SAME FILES – but sometimes different metadata.

So, when I moved from gnome2/nautilus to mate/caja, I found that my desktop icons retained their same sizes, emblems… but not location.

Why is this so?

So if you try running this:

bounty:~ $ gvfs-info -a "metadata::*" ~Desktop

You should get a bunch of output, something like:

attributes:
metadata::annotation:
metadata::emblems: [certified, desktop, system]
metadata::icon-scale: 1
metadata::nautilus-default-view: OAFIID:Nautilus_File_Manager_List_View
metadata::nautilus-icon-position: 1432,-3
metadata::nautilus-icon-position-timestamp: 1226057199
metadata::nautilus-icon-view-auto-layout: true
metadata::nautilus-icon-view-sort-by: name
metadata::nautilus-icon-view-tighter-layout: false
metadata::nautilus-icon-view-zoom-level: 1
metadata::nautilus-list-view-sort-column: date_modified
metadata::nautilus-list-view-sort-reversed: true
metadata::nautilus-list-view-zoom-level: 1
metadata::nautilus-window-geometry: 857x761+2017+96
metadata::nautilus-window-scroll-position: file:///home/nemo/Desktop/sunpath

If you’ve been playing with caja already, you’ll have some “metadata::caja-*” attributes too.

So in a nutshell, metadata::emblems and metadata::icon-scale naturally enough are seen by caja as easily as nautilus, but metadata::nautilus-icon-position is invisible to caja, which expects to see metadata::caja-icon-position.

Converting from one to the other is almost trivial. Lookup the value with gvfs-info, then set the value with gvfs-set-attribute.

Right?

Not quite.

I did that, and while the relative positions of my desktop icons were correct, they were too far apart (and so: some were off the screen)

For reasons I do not know (and for all I know, are specific to some quirk in my personal setup), I had to scale all the geometry values down by approx a third. (for the record, that means my caja-icon-position seems to be based off my screen resolution, whilst nautilus’ were not?

Anyway, my final solution was this short script (I named it gvfs2matevfs)

#!/bin/bash

iconpos=$(gvfs-info -a "metadata::nautilus-icon-position" "$@" | grep nautilus-icon-position | awk -F: '{print $4}')

# so by my estimate, caja-icon-position is about 2/3 the value of nautilus-icon-position
if [ -n "$iconpos" ] ; then
  ex=$(( ${iconpos%,*} * 67/100))
  wy=$(( ${iconpos#*,} * 67/100))
  gvfs-set-attribute -t string "$@" "metadata::caja-icon-position" $ex,$wy
  echo "$* $iconpos : $ex,$wy"
fi

I then ran this this thusly (note: from the Desktop)

bounty:~/Desktop $ find . -maxdepth 1 -print0 | xargs -0 -n 1 ~/bin/gvfs2matevfs

And (after refreshing the desktop icons by moving to an empty workspace and hitting F5) viola, there they are, where I want them!

(oh, and you’ll have to run all the above from within a running mate/caja environment, otherwise gvfs isn’t visible)

Look no further than $HOME/.local/share/gvfs-metadata/home*

I assume Mate (being a fork of Gnome2) has somewhere similar. GNOME3? No idea.

Then I logged in and…

…wait, what’s that? XDG Base Directories?

OK, so, we all know and love (hate?) our ~/Desktop, ~/Downloads, ~/Templates, ~/Public, ~/Documents, ~/Music, ~/Pictures, ~/Videos directories, right? Well, they’re defined as a freedesktop standard (see here: http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html ), and are configured locally at: ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs

So prior to logging in to X, I had three of those eight already, since they had actual content from my backups – ie, were worth restoring already. They were: ~/Desktop, ~/Public,  and ~/Videos

After logging in, I naturally gained the other 5.

But what else got pushed into $HOME? Luckily for posterity, I saved a file list both before and after. So, for no more than a simple login to X, and run a few apps (discounting internal configuration tools, I think I’ve really only run gnome-terminal, firefox, thunderbird, chromium and libreoffice so far), I have these files/directories extra…

• .adobe
• .config
• .dbus
• .dmrc
• .esd_auth
• .face
• .gconfd
• .gksu.lock
• .gnome2
• .gnome2_private
• .gstreamer-0.10
• .gvfs
• .ICEauthority
• .icons
• .libreoffice
• .linuxmint
• .local
• .macromedia
• .mozilla
• .nautilus
• .pekwm
• .pki
• .themes
• .thumbnails
• .thunderbird
• .Xauthority
• .xsession-errors

So, there is a list I only expect to grow (but not to track) over time, and it’s entirely possible I’ve missed some (I’ve certainly skipped a few I know I added manually (.fonts, .fontconfig) since I don’t know if they’d have been automatically added or not.

Anyway, the upshot of all this? Hello cruft!

0. get pekwm (package, compile from source, whatever). duh.

1. tell gnome2 to use it. ie, set ‘pekwm’ in /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager via gconf-editor or equivalent.

2. Discover that gnome2 still doesn’t pick it up, and get an error in .xsession-errors like this:

gnome-session[2010]: WARNING: Unable to find provider 'pekwm' of required component 'windowmanager'

Solve by creating $HOME/.config/autostart/pekwm.desktop with the following (or similar)…

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=/usr/local/bin/pekwm
Hidden=false
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true
Name[en_AU]=Window Manager
Name=Window Manager
Comment[en_AU]=our windowmanager
Comment=our windowmanager

3. Make sure your own pekwm configuration is in $HOME/.pekwm too

note: at work I have this setup, but against ‘mate’. Thus: /desktop/mate/session/required_components/windowmanager, and /usr/share/applications/pekwm.desktop with content of:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=pekwm
Exec=pekwm
NoDisplay=true
# name of loadable control center module
X-MATE-WMSettingsModule=pekwm
# name we put on the WM spec check window
X-MATE-WMName=Pekwm
# back compat only
X-MateWMSettingsLibrary=pekwm
X-MATE-Autostart-Phase=WindowManager
X-MATE-Provides=windowmanager
X-MATE-Autostart-Notify=true

No, I don’t know how I got either of those pekwm.desktop files. I think with mate, I copied a different one, and tuned to pekwm. With my newer (oddly) gnome2 setup, it magiced in somehow when I was testing with a test account…