Well that was fun.

Walked past one of the local EB games stores this afternoon and they had one of their usual 50% off (horribly overpriced items) sales on again. Picked up a copy of Dead or Alive 4 and Burnout Revenge for a tidy $22.95ea.

I'm a bit of a fan of the Burnout franchise and this title doesn't disappoint. Of course, it's been out for a while so when I hopped onto XBox Live with it, I wasn't expecting to see many games to join. How wrong I was. Hundreds of peeps from all around the world, just as big of fans of road rage as I am.

And so, after half a dozen spirited battles (placing 6th out of 6 in each!) I now have a world ranking to be 'proud' of. Ahem.

Uh oh!

After less than 2mins of flight time, the little helicopter seemed to slow and then fall to the ground. When I picked it up there was that distinctive acrid smell of electrical smoke coming from centre of it.

Following hot on the heels of exploding laptop and mobile batteries, now you can add the 7.4V 800mAh EK1-0181 to the list of bubbling and exploding power sources. Check out the deep scoring left by the main rotor when the battery expanded into its cavity space.

Experimental recipe

Time to make use of a couple of old-ish (over-ripe) bananas lying in the fruit basket. I must admit that I prefer good quaity commercial banana bread (especially "Mama Ka'z") over homemade stuff, but I'm always keen to have a go at baking the next best thing.

Unfortunately, we threw out our old loaf tins a little while back and never got around to replacing them. The round cake tin resulted in a somewhat "flat" loaf, but it's rather tasty all the same.

DJ's Banana and Coconut Bread
(Makes 1 big-ish loaf)

The stuff

1 3/4 cups self-raising flour (sifted)

1/2 cup shredded coconut

1/4 cup plain flour (sifted)

2/3 cup brown sugar

1/4 cup milk

3 drops vanilla essence

3 tablespoons vegetable oil

2 whisked eggs

50g melted butter
2 medium-large bananas (mashed)

How-to

Combined the flours in a large bowl and stir in the sugar. Combine the wet ingredients (milk, eggs, butter, vanilla essence, oil and banana) in a medium bowl. Add the wet mixture to the dry flour mixture and stir until just combined. Spoon the mixture into a large loaf tin. Shove into a preheated (180oC) oven for 40-45mins

The phoenix rises.

After last weekend's spectacular crash and burn effort, I figured I would invest (waste?) 20mins on my Saturday afternoon on some flight time. Patience and half a clue is starting to pay off with little more than a broken blade this session.

Having said that, I used the last of my spare 'B' blades last week which meant another trip to the hobby shop. While I was there I also picked up a replacement tail assembly, an extra canopy and a can of Tamiya PS-18 (metallic) spray paint.

VOILA! Purple Esky Lama V3. Simple enough task only tricky bit was masking off a panel so that the 4-in-1 gyro/ESC/servo controller can still be seen/checked.

Chaos

This place is tension central. The local Chinese laundry has lost the carbonated book for booking in dry cleaning jobs. And guess what I want to get done today? How many bloody piles of clothes are they going to have to dig through?

Chaos

This place is tension central. The local Chinese laundry has lost the carbonated book for booking in dry cleaning jobs. And guess what I want to get done today? How many bloody piles of clothes are they going to have to dig through?

Disappointment is....

....semi-destroying your near-new RC helicopter after less than 10 minutes of flying time.

It was caught by a gust of wind, soared into the air, clipped a palm tree and landed in the back yard of a neighbour two doors down - the property occupied by the token cranky old man in our street who hates everyone and everything. I honestly didn't expect to see it again.

But it was my lucky day. The old bloke's reclusive Asian mistress responded to the note I left at their front door. She spoke just enough English for me to work out that she was inviting me to the rear laneway entrance to their property "to look for toy".

I retrieved the helicopter and some of the separated parts which I could find. Damage list, according to my untrained eyes, is as follows:

• Broken-off tail stabilising 'wing'
• A snapped blade (now 1.5cm shorter than the other!)
• Partially crumpled canopy (cosmetic, I guess)

Bent stabilzer (and missing linkage gear)

Thankfully, the really expensive bits (gyro, battery, motors etc) are OK... I think. It must have plummeted from a height of ~20m, so I'm surprised there wasn't more wreckage.

Off to the local hobby shop to see what can be done about this horror scene.

Excitement is....

...getting a new toy like this ESky Lama 2 (v3) radio control helicopter. I've owned RC cars and boats in the past, but this is my first foray into the air. With any luck I might just be able to make it fly like this bloke (another video here and here)

Of course it rains here in the city.

The main catchment area for Sydney is 30km west of here and there's not a cloud in sight where it's actually needed.

Sunday kitchen.

It was a bad day to be ocimum basilicum in our garden today. Indeed, our only basil bush looks like it's had the haircut from hell. The plant sacrified its leaves for us to churn out three dishes....

....spinach and ricotta cannelloni (shown ready to mix the filling and pack the cannelloni tubes)....

....a big batch of fresh pesto (ingredients pictured ready to hit the blender)....

....and a vegetable and ham frittata (here you can see the chopped ham, onion, sweet potato, mushrooms, basil and zucchini - eggs and milk whisked in the bowl at the rear).