G-n-L Ganesh and Lauren

Welcome to the personal blog of Ganesh and Lauren! Feel free to visit the contact section and drop us a line. Thanks for visiting and enjoy your time here.

3 weeks to a better life

Saturday, 26 September 2009

Apparently it only takes 3 weeks to change your habits and to be living a better life! With Ganesh away for three weeks and the big 'Around the Bay in a Day' trip the day before his return, it seems like the perfect opportunity for self improvement :-) Areas of focus will be health and fitness, ideas and business, household improvements and relationships...

A rough guide as follows:

Week 1

Daily trips to the gym or taekwondo (1 hour every day)
1 hour on the exercise bike each day
Follow the Kickstart diet all week
Have lunch in the lunch room (not at my desk!) everyday and be sociable - try to recruit greenies for the implementation of the sustainable ideas jar project
Recruit a programmer to finish Trash 2 Treasure coding
Get back to various people regarding their job offers and finish their web work!
Obtain recycled wood for bookshelves & workbench project
Clean up the entire house
Clean out the shed
Visit (after work): Mum & the boys, Grandma, Paul, Catherine, Grace
Organise mum's birthday present
Draw out the plan for the garden
Make a final decision on what to decorate the fridge with
Post a daily green card blog entry
Obtain books from the library to read
Create mood boards/project boards for each room of the house for constant inspiration
Make a decision on which photos to print for the photo wall & have them printed

Labels: home improvements, new years resolutions

Google's 10^100

Ganesh has gone off to Nepal for 3 weeks to see his family for dashain... This means that I am manning the fort alone for the immediate future. I wasn't absolutely thrilled to discover this occurring right at the same time the chooks have gone broody but my mood got a mega boost when I discovered that the project I suggested to Google's 10^100 was one of 16 chosen out of 150 000... apparently a few other people had the same idea, but my sentence made it to the project page:

Create an online educational platform that provides free training and education as part of a worldwide, officially accepted degree

If enough people vote for the idea it will be implemented!! Wow!! I'm really excited about the possibilities :-) Please vote here to ensure the project is a success!!

Vijaya Dashami everyone!

Labels: education, ganesh, google, ideas, nepal, travel

G's birthday!

Thursday, 17 September 2009

In honour of G's birthday I have mashed up all his favourite ads and clips from tv shows that he repeats non stop... Quite a random mix, but meaningful to him I'm hoping :-) Click to play.

Happy Birthday Ganesh! (And I won't mention the major milestone you've just achieved even though it's extremely exciting...)

As for the mashup well it's an absolute beginners first attempt... so I didn't get to the stage where I could string the clips together such that they made a funny sentence... or even that the transitions were smooth... but a work in progress I suppose! We'll wait for next year...

Here's the audio only if the shaky video is making you ill: G's birthday mp3.

Produced with thanks to the following clips:

Cadbury (kids eyebrows)
Homer Simpson's "y'ello"
Pauly from Autobarn
Telstra, I've been everywhere man
Victoria Bitter
Homer Simpson's "mmm... beer... drool"
Coke zero
Kevin Rudd's funny laugh
Budget car insurance
Telstra, Emperor Nasi Goreng
Frank Walker, National Tiles
Schmackos
Red meat (meat council)
Homer Simpson's "d'oh"
Kevin Rudd's "Fair shake of the sauce bottle mate"
Tivo, tv your way

Hope you like your presents! :-)

Labels: birthday, mashup

To market to market...

Sunday, 13 September 2009

It was with immense excitement that we headed out to the Thomastown market today... I had it on good authority from the car pool that fruit trees were available for a mere $10. After my previous excitement at finding $20 large mature fruit trees at the Pipeworks market I was all set to spend up big... Unfortunately it didn't work out as planned. While the chooks and ducks were very cheap, the trees seemed to be almost retail prices.

To console ourselves we headed off to Sustainable House Day to check out the green initiatives of the people of Melbourne. I was extremely impressed by the family in Montmorency who had created an impressive and cooling system with 40 000l of under house water bladders.. And the veggie garden in heidelberg was second to none!

Aside from that a very happy birthday to Lach... because it was your birthday I won't even rub in my massive bowling victory (5 strikes and a spare!)... Hope you enjoyed the pizza cakes (pizza boxes kindly donated by pizza hut)...

Labels: birthday, bowling, market, pizza cake, sustainable house day

Nepalese youth leading the way

Friday, 11 September 2009

Seeing Nepalese youth make it into the mainstream newspapers all over the world really gives me a warm fuzzy glow inside. In spite of all the adverse circumstances, an 18 year old Nepalese boy name Malin Karki has worked out how to replace silicon with human hair in solar panels, thus making renewable energy much more affordable - where it's needed most!

Malin and his friends managed to produce a prototype for a mere $38 that could charge a cell phone or a battery pack... Mass produced the sky is the limit and the hair, which is also a renewable resource, can be replaced - extending the life of the cells. It's absolutely inspiring what a single thoughtful person can do!

(Ganesh has placed bets that Malin attends the same school as his brother Ram!)...

Labels: nepal, renewable, solar

Geocaching

Saturday, 5 September 2009

It's quite possible that I've been extremely slow to jump on board with geocaching (everyone seems to know about it!), but I've only just discovered it! Geocaching is a a worldwide treasure hunt of sorts. Best done with a GPS, but it's certainly not required, people have hidden 'geocaches' all over the world - there are 50 or so in my local council area alone... and I was surprised to find some in Nepal, Iraq and Afghanistan as well!

You can access the coordinates via the website, www.geocaching.com, and take a look on google maps to get a rough idea of where you'll be heading. Decrypt the clues (or in some cases solve puzzles!) to get more details.

Ganesh, Grace and I headed to the 'Merri Creek by the Freeway' cache today... it was actually well hidden, spray painted black, under a pile of rocks at the base of a tree in the middle of a bush - but in a completely public area. It had been placed in 2005 and the log book was full of geocachers who had visited and swapped items in the box or just found it and put it back. It was quite a fun adventure because we discovered the Pipeworks Trash & Treasure market - also well worth a visit!

Labels: bike, geocaching