Blog Marco

Here's the recipe I use for making a pizza base. This quantity makes about 4 x 30cm diameter pizzas. Put whatever topping you want with Tomato sauce, basil, and cheese (mozarella).

Here's the recipe for a perfect pizza base: Mix 400g Strong Flour with 350mL warm water + 7g Sachet of Yeast + Brown Sugar to feed the yeast fungi. Mix it up the dough and clump it together. Then cover your mixing bowl with a tea towel or glad wrap and place in a warm place. (I put it on top of my computer or a warm window sill) After an hour, preheat the oven at about 240 degrees centigrade and get 200g of soft flour, a pinch of salt, a dash of olive oil (experiment with the amount) and mix together and knead the dough for about 5 to 10 minutes with your hands. We use a pizza stone to bake the pizza - I sprinkle the stone with bran to stop the pizza sticking to the stone. Put your toppings on. The oven is now preheated some 15 - 20 minutes. Place your pizza in the oven. Time to cook should be 8 to 15 minutes depending if your over is fan forced or not. Just be careful you don't burn your crust or your cheese. When cheese becomes "sunburnt" it doesn't taste as good and is really chewy instead of gooey.

Ever wondered how fish sauce is made? Fish sauce is an Asian dipping condiment and also an essential ingredient to many dishes in Vietnamese, Thai, Lao, Cambodian, and Filipino cuisine and is used in other Southeast Asian countries.

Different fish sauces have different ingredients: Some fish sauces (extracts) are made from raw fish, others from dried fish; some from only a single species, others from whatever is dredged up in the net, including some shellfish; some from whole fish, others from only the blood or viscera. Some fish sauces contain only fish and salt, others add a variety of herbs and spices. Fish sauce that has been only briefly fermented has a pronounced fishy taste, while extended fermentation reduces this and gives the product a nuttier, cheesier flavor.

In other words - fish sauce = rotten fish. But it tastes good. More info here: How fish sauce is made

Viewers know that Doomsday is coming to Smallville in the next few episodes and KNOWING that Superman has to die if the writers and producers want to stick to the myth (created by DC Comics). Which brings me to the question - is Clark Kent aka Superman immortal?

It's known that kryptonite weakens Superman (Although he does eventually become immune to it) and magic can also influence him. Also extreme energy usage as in the fight with Doomsday also weakens Superman to the point where he dies from his wounds. And also, because of the yellow Sun (where he receives his superpowers) the more exposure he has to it the more "immortal" or "Super" Superman becomes - but still mortal as he ages slower (the rate of decay of his body's cells are slower).

A great condiment to have with steak is Worcestershire sauce... Worcestershire... its one of those mysterious English words with weird pronunciation. How do you say Worcestershire (Sauce) anyway? It's that obscure word which a lot of people are afraid to say. Wikipedia says it pronounced this way: /ˈwʊstəˌʃɪər/ But who has time to decipher that code?

Some websites claim Worcestershire is said like: "Woos-tur-shur". Or "wer-chis-ter"... or even try Wurs-ster-sheer or Wurs-ster-shire or Wurs-ster-shur or Woos-ster-shur.

With all the news about the swine flu virus ravaging over the world plastered everywhere, I wonder what the difference is between an endemic, epidemic and a pandemic. (By the way, the photo has a random influenza virus illustrated in brown and the cilia from your lungs in blue)

An endemic is an infectious communicable disease (such as colds, influenza, measles, mumps, tuberculosis, pneumonia, smallpox) that exists permanently in a particular region or population. An epidemic occurs when this disease attack "a lot of" people at about the same time and may spread through one or several communities. A pandemic occurs when an epidemic spreads across the world.

The World Health Organisation has raised the pandemic alert level from phase four to phase five, signalling that a pandemic is "imminent". Here are the six different "pandemic influenza phases" defined by the WHO:

Phase 1: A virus circulates among animals but with no cases reported of infections in humans.

Phase 2: An animal flu virus is known to have caused infection in humans, and therefore considered a potential pandemic threat.

This website died for a few hours. Hopefully this information will help someone else with the same fail conditions. Some garbled error messages came up:

MySQL Error: Can't open file: somefile.MYD (errno: 145)
MySQL Error: Can't open file: node.MYD (errno: 145)

...along with random mysql queries and other fail or fatal error messages. After scrambling for an answer browsing through help pages and forums I found that this error is a result of two things:
1) Database crashed and is corrupt. Solution: Use phpMyAdmin to repair tables.
2) Full disk, MySQL will crash if your disk is full. Solution delete stuff, geta bigger hard drive.

So my host expanded my site space temporarily and I cleared my host hard drive space so MYSQL has more wiggle room. FIXED!