Reinaldo's Blog

If you’ve ever lived in Canberra, ACT, Australia for a substantial period of time, you’d be familiar with the Canberra Centre. It’s Canberra’s biggest shopping mall. Today, I will rant about how I got overpriced at the Canberra Centre carpark on Boxing Day, December 26, 2009.

Upon entering the Canberra Centre car park today, Saturday 26 of December 2009, I paid close attention to the Centre’s rates.  It shows the prices for normal shopping days and then at the bottom, prices for non-normal shopping days.

It clearly states that for Sundays or Public Holidays, there is flate rate of $2.

I was surprised and disappointed when upon paying for my stay today, the machine charged $5.60 for about 3 hours of parking. Now I know today is not Sunday but I’m pretty sure the 26th of December – otherwise known as Boxing Day – is a public holiday! Read the rest of this entry »

Hello and welcome.

This is a personal blog maintained by me, Reinaldo Bravo. You can add comments to any post or reach me through the contact page. Feel free to subscribe or check out my other online profiles. You can also add  me on twitter to remain updated on blog posts. Enjoy.

Once upon a time I thought that the more toppings a pizza had, the better it was. I still enjoy most of the toppings that go in a supreme pizza but now I’d rather have a good simple pizza than an all-you-can-eat meal on an average quality dough.

I used to pack a pizza with mushrooms, capsicum, tomato, ham, salami, cheese, tomato pizza sauce, onion, olives, and pineapple (if available). Since then I’ve learned that in Italy (Naples specifically), authentic pizzas can only have dough, tomato sauce, cheese and basil leaves.

I think many of us in the Western countries have been side-tracked about what’s important in a pizza. I think it’s the dough. The Naples regulations require the dough to be cooked in a woodfire oven for 60-90 seconds. While the toppings are very important also, the make-or-brake aspect of the pizza is definitely in the dough. Many consumers of average grade pizzas will probably make the mistake of thinking that more toppings equals more value for money and that quantity of ingredients adds to the taste.

A similar thing happens to Italy’s espresso style coffee. While we should be more concerned with the espresso shot, we get distracted by all the things we can disguise the taste of the espresso with. The short black, ristretto, double ristretto is the essence of what coffee is however, we add milk to this, sugar, and some people go as far as creating a peppermint mocha (heaven knows what goes into that).

In summary, we should go back to basics with cooking and hot beverages. Find out where they came from, how they evolved and try to capture the integrity with which these meals first came into creation. If there’s no appreciation for the food’s history, preparation and original authenticity then how can you really enjoy it?

I’ve changed the wordpress theme as I felt it needed a new look and feel. The photo on the front of the page is of Valparaiso, my birthplace.

It’s been 8 months since I’ve started using wordpress and my only regret is not having used it earlier. I never thought a web page could be done so nicely without the use of Adobe Dreamweaver. I originally doubted using blogging software to manage a website but it has been so useful.

With wordpress, the software doesn’t get in the way of the blogging. I just have to focus on my writing and wordpress practically takes care of itself.

If you are thinking about starting a blog for personal use or groupwork, then you should try out a free blog from wordpress.com
If you need something more scalable and the ability to customise, then you should register a domain name and pay for web hosting. You then download the wordpress.org software and install it into your database on your website. From then on all you need is your username and password and an internet connection to be able to publish from anywhere in the world.

It’s as easy as writing an email to a friend.

More content coming soon.