Greek Kevin

Yum! This Kevin was made by adding extra milk powder to his milk when he was fed, making an extra thick and creamy kevin!

Kevin in a loin cloth...

This is what Kevin produces when you put him in muslin over night - pee! Well, actually it's whey, but it does look like urine :P

He tasted very good, a cross between greek yoghurt and sour cream, but getting him to that state was a bit messy... Today i've added some milk powder to his mixture to see if that's a short cut to a thicker more creamy Kevin. Yum!

The arrival of Kevin

Kevin has ARRIVED!

We are going to feed Kevin, and look after him, and in return we will eat from him daily! It all sounds very True Blood like, but actually it isn't cause Kevin is a yoghurt culture...

I bought him from trademe last week, but he didn't arrive till this week as the seller doesn't like shipping over the weekend. You wouldn't want him to get stuck at the post office over the weekend after all!

He arrived in this jar, looking a bit sad! This pic was taken once the slight leakage problem had been cleared up, and once his essence had been placed into the large jar with milk...


Kevin is a Caspian Sea Yoghurt culture, named after the region where he's thought to have originated. Unlike lots of yoghurt cultures, Kevin will be happy do do his th'ang at room temperature, and produces a very nice creamy textured yoghurt that isn't sour at all. All thanks to his split personality; Lactococcus cremoris and Gluconobacter sp.

6 hours later - Da daaaa!
1l of yogurt for the price of 1l of milk! It's awesome!


However before enjoying Kevin it's important you replace his essence back into a separate (sterile) jar to wait in the fridge until we want to re-awaken him to produce more goodness for us! YUM :)









The next step is to try and turn Kevin into a Grecian. I'll try this tonight by straining him through a muslin to remove some of the whey... I'll let you know how it goes!!

PS, I've already had a few requests, but if anyone in Welly wants some of Kevin's seed, feel free to ask ;)

Spring is sprung

We had one of the hardest frosts of the year this morning. This is the frost on the frost cloth, there was also frost underneath it which I'm pretty sure isn't meant to happen!

Even so it's hard to think of anything but spring when the apple blossom is out!! :D

geeking out on Avatar

I still can't get over how awesome the 15min preview of Avatar was that I watched last week... To celebrate, here are a few screen captures from the HD teaser trailer (for those of you who have a crappy computer like me - I can't play the HD version cause it' too much for my computer to handle :P)

The world of Pandora is very cool at night - the forests are full of bio-luminescent plants and animals... Apparently inspired by James Cameron's love of deep sea life. This scene is the only one of that in the teaser, the ones in the preview were SOOOO much more intense, and according to Nick even that was nothing!!! This stuff looks so incredible in 3D!


He stands 3m tall, his bones are made from 'naturally occurring carbon fibre' and he's the Avatar (created using the DNA of the Na'vi - native species of Pandora) of Jake Sully. Needless to say he rocks!

As well as generally kicking ass, Jake goes all native and plays with face paints! ROAR!

Jake's lady-navi-friend Neytiri. She's pretty!

Avatar's first appearance

Over a year ago I remember spending a while trying to track down some info on Avatar... Back then it was all so hush hush that I couldn't even find an image!

Today however, I went to a preview screening of Avatar, James Cameron's first movie since Titanic.

It was at Readings, Wellington's only theatre which has a 3D screen (if you didn't know the movie is in 3D) and all we had to do to get in was queue for about an hour :) The queueing was made harder by the total nerds (in my book worse than geeks!) who were in the queue behind Nick and I, talking total crap. Thankfully I was able to pass some of the time playing my latest addiction on Nick's iphone; Flight Control!!

So back to Avatar - the preview was about 15 mins of 3D awesomeness, and I even spotted a friend of mine who was an extra in it - quite funny cause he's very tall and slim and not really what you'd expect a Marine to look like, did a good job though, nice one Ed! *thumbs up*

I also learned that James Cameron seems to refer to himself as "Jim"... FYI

After seeing the teaser trailer (which went online this morning) it was a great relief to see some decent content. The trailer is good at introducing a bit of the environment of the movie, but the preview really did give a good look at not only the visual awesomeness of Avatar but also a bit of an introduction to the main characters. VERY impressed :)

It was great to see it with Nick as he could show me which bits he'd worked on (as well as which bits he was still working on!) and after watching it I quickly took Nick back to work so he could finish making it :P

Roll on 18th of December!

District 9

Wow, what an AWESOME movie! Tonight i went to the preview screening of District 9 at the Embassy with Nick and Mat R. It's a great movie combining an awesome scifi story with morals and kick ass visuals! It's a must see, best movie I've seen in a long time :D

And it just proves yet again how great wellington is - where else in the world would Peter Jackson himself come along and give a pep talk at the start of a movie screening??!

Thanks again Matt D for the tickets, we got the best seats in the house!