Too Young To Be Grumpy

Have You Updated?

2006-01-02T17:54:00.000Z

Have you remembered to update your RSS feed?

Too Young to be Grumpy has moved!

URL:
http://david.dupplaw.me.uk/tooyoungtobegrumpy/

RSS:
http://david.dupplaw.me.uk/tooyoungtobegrumpy/?feed=rss2

Too Young To Be Grumpy is Moving!

2005-12-30T22:53:00.000Z

That's right! This blog is moving house!

The main reason for changing over is that I had originally thought of Grumpy as being a place I could rant on about stuff without worrying who I might offend. As it turns out I haven't ranted on much at all and still it's pretty easy to find out who I am, so I decided to go all out and come clean and move the blog to my own website where I have much more control than simplistic Blogger will allow me.

I have to say I'm mightily impressed with Wordpress - it's incredibly easy to set up and has tons of features that Blogger can only dream about. I will be leaving the old Blogger blog where it is, so all it's archives will still be available. It's a shame to have to leave that 7 months of my life all behind on another server, but 2006 beckons and it is wonderful to have so much more control.

Now I've come clean, I also hope to have more pics and videos. I love the videos PigSty does.

I hope those readers who have followed Grumpy will continue to do so at the new address which is:

http://david.dupplaw.me.uk/tooyoungtobegrumpy/

If you're using an RSS reader, update your RSS feed to this:
http://david.dupplaw.me.uk/tooyoungtobegrumpy/?feed=rss2

Hope to see you all in the new location!

Xmas is Over

2005-12-29T12:19:00.000Z

Hello to you all!

I hope you had a great Christmas, and thankyou for the messages. We got back from Wales on Tuesday evening and went up my parents' to have yet another Christmas morning, followed by a rather nice St.Stephens Pie made by my mother. This is a Ham, Turkey and white wine sauce pie with a nice topping of baked mash potato. Lovely.

Since then, Daisy and I have mostly stayed in and kept away from the chilly weather outside. However, I did have to nip down to Maplin to get a TV fly lead for my new TV card for my computer. I wish we hadn't, because the car parks at the retail park were choka-block with shoppers (the bastards!). It took us 45 minutes to get out of the car park!

Anyway, very little's going on - just huddled away - me in my new slippers and dressing gown, and Daisy's busy overcoming the post-Christmas crash with some online retail therapy.

We've been making a bunch of plans for next year. We've decided to get some chickens, and we really need to get out and get some horse poo into our vegetable patches. I've also got to get on and get my businesses going - because otherwise we're going to have nothing ready come next October when we want to move back to Wales.

Merry Christmas

2005-12-22T11:40:00.000Z

Our tree and pressies

Daisy and I are off to Wales tonight and we're up there for the Christmas period until the day after Boxing Day. So, I thought I ought to do this before I forget and wish you all:

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Summer's Coming!

2005-12-21T16:01:00.000Z

It's 4 o'clock and the light goes on because it's nearly too dark to see myself type. Today's the Winter Solstice and the shortest day. The Earth is at the furthest point in its orbit around the Sun and we're also pointing the other way. From here on in, the Earth gets closer and we can peer over the horizon and see the Sun getting higher into the sky - before we know it, it will be Summer.

We got back from Wales late Monday evening, having had a fairly relaxing weekend there, after a trip to Morriston Hospital for Mother-in-Law to have a cancerous growth to be removed from her face (which all went very well indeed). Because waiting hours are between 2 and 8pm at the hospital, Daisy and I scooted off Friday morning had a nice lunch and went to the beach. It meant I actually got a few photos taken! I have been fiddling about with making some panoramas because last week I found a very clever program called Autostitch which takes a bunch of photos and makes a panorama from them without any input at all. Here's some of the results:

This one is of the place where my Nan used to live in the hills around Bridgend. My Dad actually helped build both of these houses! This photo is a composite of 3 photos (these taken on a Canon S45):

Click to see larger!

This one is a spectacular view that you get from just down the road from the above houses. The weather was creating some really amazing views. This photo is a composite of 14 photos (!) (all other photos taken on a Nikon D70).

Click to see a bit bigger!

The pot of gold was clearly at this person's house (click to see bigger):

We also went over to Ogmore-by-Sea and had a short walk along the beach. Here's a couple of photos (click them to see them bigger):

All three of us did very little else all weekend - just lounged around, watching telly and reading magazines. I did manage to do a little big of Christmas shopping which means I've nearly finished now. Yay! There's still some things in the post, but I'm sure they'll arrive in time now :o)

We're back off up to Wales on Thursday, this time for the big day on Sunday. We'll be coming back on Tuesday and having another Christmas Day then with my parents who live not far from us.

Hope you have a happy day!

Oops

2005-12-14T23:04:00.000Z

Oh dear. Looks like Daisy and I have been incredibly negligent over the updating of this recently, haven't we? Apologies to all. It's the usual run up to Christmas that's causing it all.

I should've mentioned that we went to a craft fair at the Bournemouth International Centre (BIC) and met up with Daisy's Dad and his wife. We looked around the fair, which was a bit dull to be honest, and then headed to Harry Ramsden's for a nice lunch. Daisy and I walked along the beach and enjoyed the antics of the surfers trying to catch a wave or two.

I should've mentioned that the other day I had to have a new windscreen fitted into my car. On the way to work a stone jumped up from the back of a lorry I was overtaking. The bang gave me quite a fright, but there was no visible damage until a few days later when a creeping snake of a crack began to make its way up the window. Eventually it almost reached the top and with my MOT approaching I decided to get it changed. A nice man came along and put it in for me, relieving me of £100ish.

I should've mentioned that Daisy and I have been walking in the New Forest a few times too. It's mainly to provide fodder for my photoblog, although it also makes a nice change to sitting in front of the computer [or even having a lie in!]

I should've mentioned lots, but I didn't and now I've forgotten most of it.

Christmas is approaching fast or as Daisy just put it:

Christmas is coming
and we are getting fat
We eat too many takeaways
and we don't have a cat...

hmm... but I've managed to pack all the pressies I've got, although the online retailers I've used are being a bit cack this year. Amazon, in particular. I ordered some stuff on the 1st December, and it's estimated delivery date is 23rd December. As we're spending Christmas in Wales this year and I will have already left by then, those pressies will have to wait until afterwards :o( A belated Christmas party. Amazon aren't the only one's either. Dabs are estimating a ridiculous delivery date too.

Tomorrow is my last day at work. Tomorrow evening we're off up to Wales for the weekend, although we'll be back down as Daisy still has to work next week. I should hopefully get the last few things I want to get for Daisy then, and a week Friday we're back off up to Wales. Seems very busy! At least all this travelling will be even more fodder for my photoblog.

Holiday of a Lifetime (so far! :)

2005-12-01T21:58:00.000Z

Gawd, uploading photos to blogger is a pain in the bum. Anyway, this entry is a bit photo heavy. Hope you're not on dial-up! Just a few snaps from our wonderful holiday in Japan in November 2004.

Hiroshima Peace Memorial

Hiroshima Dome Bomb Memorial

Miyajima Island in the early morning mist (well, not that early. About 9 am)

Itsukushima Shrine Gate

Inside Itsukushima Shrine

A pagoda on the island (duh!)

It's a Japanese tradition to go out and admire the changing Autumn colours and it even has it's own name: Momijigari. The island was swarming with Japanese OAPs on day trips when I was there.

A tall pagoda this time.

A Japanese-y style bridge with more momijigari colours.

The following day we found this traditional little garden (thanks to the Lonely Planet Guidebook!) hidden away amongst all the city skyscrapers.

Keyboard and Sound

2005-11-30T17:58:00.000Z

I've just managed to get my computer keyboard working again. It stopped working because I put the lid back on my KVM (Keyboard,Video,Mouse) switch. When I started up my computer it said this to me:

NO KEYBOARD DETECTED! Press F1 to Resume

hrm..

This afternoon I got my music setup working again, and thank God for that. I hadn't realised but I was getting withdrawl symptoms from doing a bit of music recording. I am now using my Spirit Folio Notepad mixer as a preamp after my guitar pedals, as I think my old Zoom 504II pedal that I was using for my preamp is busted. Can't wait to try it out, but tonight is teaching night and I have a tutorial with my tutor tonight and she's going to tell me how crap my micro-teaching practice session was, I'm sure.

Old Man's Beard

2005-11-27T22:03:00.000Z

Old Man's Beard
Originally uploaded by Dayzee.

We went over to the New Forest again today for a walk and to take photos. We were aiming for the viewpoint at Castle Hill but as I'm such a useless navigator we ended up at Tuft Hill instead! There's not much at Tuft Hill besides the Forestry Commission car park and some wild ponies wandering around. It was freezing cold too so we just went for a tiny walk and headed off to try and find Castle Hill again. We did eventually get there but I only took this one photo of some Old Man's Beard growing in a hedge and that was at Knowlton Church on the way home! I really like the way this photo has turned out but I'm afraid that's more by luck than judgement as I tend to just point and shoot.

Ffagodau Cymreig

2005-11-27T20:51:00.000Z

For my birthday I received a cookbook called "Favourite Welsh Recipes". Some are a bit strange, but we decided to be a bit brave and make some faggots from scratch. Welsh Faggots (which is Ffagodau Cymreig in Welsh). The only meat in them is Pig's Liver which would turn most people's noses into a scrunch, including mine! It stinks, but it actually ends up making some yummy faggots. So, if you're interested, here's the recipe.

Ingredients for 12 faggots (Serves 6)

450g (1 pound) pig's liver
2 medium onions
75g (3oz) shredded suet
100g (4oz) fresh breadcrumbs
1 teaspoon of sage (3 teaspoons sage, 2 teaspoons of thyme)
Salt and pepper
230ml (1/2 pint) beef stock

Suet, breadcrumbs and sage ready to mix in

Set oven to 350^oF (180^oC, Gas Mark 4). Put the liver and onions into a food processor and process until it's been well mashed but not too smooth. In a bowl, stir together the liver mix, the suet, breadcrumbs and herbs. Form the mixture into 12 balls either using floured hands or using two spoons. Place in a well greased shallow ovenproof dish and pour over the stock. Cover and bake for 30 minutes. Then uncover and cook for a further 10 minutes which will help to brown the faggots. Remove the faggots and thicken the gravy using a cornflour mixture and/or bisto granules.

Faggots ready for stock, then baking

We served the faggots with roast potatoes and brussel sprouts and they were very yummy. Daisy said they were a bit too greasy, and they were pretty slippery. I think next time we will use less suet (and more breadcrumbs) and I don't think there really is any need to heavily grease the baking dish.

Ready to eat, with roasters and sprouts

Richard Burns

2005-11-27T17:03:00.000Z

What a shame it is to find out about the death of Richard Burns today (via Random Acts of Reality). Richard was World Rally Champion in 2001 and in 2003 was diagnosed with a brain tumour, for which he was undergoing treatment during the last 2 years. Although he seemed to get better during 2004, he declined again and passed away yesterday at the age of 34.

It really brings life into perspective when a young, fit and healthy, top sportsman is suddenly diagnosed with something uncurable and dies. I also think it's a shame that Richard's death will surely go unnoticed by those not following Rallying, because of George Best's death, who quite frankly brought it on himself.

I always supported Colin McRae during Colin and Richard's frequent battles on the rally stages. Colin is flamboyant and daring, Richard was thoughtful and decisive. However, I'm convinced that has Richard still been driving he and Sebastian Loeb would be fighting it out between them; Richard was clearly going places, despite his unhappy time at Peugeot, and I would have loved to see him race again. I was certainly hoping for his return to the rallying arena, and alas I will miss that possibility.

Salsa Lesson

2005-11-25T14:22:00.000Z

Oh, I forgot to even post about the Salsa lesson I taught. What a nightmare that turned out!!

I was in work that day for a meeting (sometimes I work from home), so I knew I had to leave early as I had to do the hour drive, get some stuff ready, then the 20 minute drive to the class, and be there by 6 to start the lesson at 6:15. So, I ended up rushing out of a meeting at about 4:30 - I was leaving it fine, I knew that, but all was going to be ok. Except, my boss asked me to take him to a hire-car place in Eastleigh, not far from the University and even closer to the motorway, so it shouldn't be a problem. But as I was driving past the miles of queuing traffic I knew there was going to be a problem.

I called Daisy to get my stuff ready while I was sitting stuck in this queue. Ugh. 5 o'clock came and went, 5:20 arrived and I was nearing the motorway. It was still an hour home from here... unless I drove fast. And that's what I tried, but the traffic was heaving.

I managed to get home about 6, and I pulled apart my computer to take the speakers in so I could play music. We then hurtled off towards Poole. It was 5 minutes down the road we realised we'd forgotten something. We turned back, got the plug then headed back into Poole, although this time somewhat slower as I realised there was no point in rushing as our teacher was bound to start the next person on first.

We arrived at 6:30. As we peered into the classroom, it all seemed quiet. The other learners were there, but no-one at the front. "We waited for you" my tutor said. Turns out, someone who was also due to do their teaching practice that day hadn't turned up, so they had some time to spare.

Next problem - my tutor had lost my resources form, so the laptop wasn't ready. We rushed about setting that up, and I think I started my lesson about 6:45. Better late than never.

The actual lesson went very well, though. Everyone seemed to enjoy it, and most people actually got the hang of it. Daisy told me I was a bit quiet in places, but it felt to me like I was bellowing my chest out. Oh well.

If you're interested, you can get the handouts for my lesson as a Powerpoint file: Salsa Handouts.

This week in teaching someone said to Daisy that they watched Strictly Come Dancing at the weekend (where they did a Salsa routine) and they recognised the steps, so at least I taught them something!!

Oops

2005-11-25T14:12:00.000Z

Wow, has it really been so long since I blogged.. Doesn't time fly!

After last post, it was decided that Daisy and I would leave going to ballroom classes until the new year - as we had too many things on. Since then, my framing class has finished, and there's only 2 weeks left of our teaching class. Time rushes on.

Last night I tried to make a Pwdin Reis Cymreig (and for those who don't read welsh - that's a Welsh Rice Pudding - see it now?). However, it all came to fruition while I was out of the room eating my tea (terrible timing) and boiled over everywhere. I still had to fold in some eggs and bake for 15 minutes, but I changed my mind and we had a simple rice pudding with nutmeg and bay. Very nice it was too. Not sure what to do with those separated eggs in the fridge now. I don't know if the saucepan has recovered yet :o(

Uh, I went on a photography trip last Saturday at Marwell Zoo, and that was very good indeed. Got lots of nice photos. Here's some for your perusal.

Anyway, I must try to do better at updating, or at least getting Daisy to update :o)

Yes, Chef

2005-11-13T22:30:00.000Z

I've just got back.... from the kitchen. I feel very impressed with my productivity today, which is all the more suprising considering I'm going to have a relatively busy week too.

This morning, I got up late - not an auspicious start. But after having a shower and considering the day, I decided that now was a good time to make a start on a mount for a photo of mine I printed a couple of days ago. As it's my last session on my picture framing course this Tuesday, our tutor is letting us have a free-for-all and just practice what we have learnt. I haven't yet had a go at making a frame from moulding, so I figured if I could get my mount made, I could have a proper go at putting a frame together, although I am going to have to wait for the glue to dry afterwards, of course. So, this morning I completed my mount and I'm very pleased how it turned out.

While I was making my mount, Daisy was putting together a "zero point" soup. It's a recipe from Weightwatcher's old introductory material that, in the eyes of Weightwatchers, has no bad stuff in it so you can eat as much of it as you like. Although we're not really doing Weightwatchers anymore, we have started to try and eat a bit better again having put back on nearly all the weight we lost last year. Daisy made it to freeze.

We then went up to my parents' house and I subjected them to a test run of the micro-teaching session I have to give on Wednesday. It's going to be about Salsa dancing, and I'm going to have to teach 16 of my fellow learners how to dance. I think I've got the plan and timing of the lesson ok, although I'm not sure whether anyone will actually go away from the lesson remembering it! I think it might be a bit of an "information burst".

We left there about 2:15pm, as they were having some people round to look through the wedding stuff my sister does and possibly hire them for a wedding. As an aside, I have been officially hired as a photographer at my friend's sister's wedding. I'm already nervous about that!

I watched the end of the World Rally Championship season, of which I'm quite an avid fan. The skill and bravery the rally drivers show is just incredible. In a different life I would have been a rally driver!

At 3pm, it was time for some cooking. Yesterday we went into town and did some shopping. We have decided that from now on we will try to support our local businesses and shop for organic "happy" chickens, vegetables and stuff. We have decided that we will get as little as we need from the big supermarket in town. We cycled in, and came back with my little cycle-trailer full of vegetables and things. We have also decided to try and eat a bit healthier, and so bought a fair amount of fruit (at least - a fair amount from what we're used to). However, all this fresh vegetables means that if we don't eat it all fairly quickly, it'll go off.

Fair enough, we just need to cook during the week. However, on Friday we were at the pub with our fellow salsa dancers and we ended up agreeing to go ballroom dancing in Boscombe. I'm really looking forward to it, but it does mean that for this week we have only got Thursday night free:

Monday: Ballroom
Tuesday: Framing
Wednesday: Teaching
Thursday:
Friday: Salsa
Saturday: Photography Trip

I'm gonna be knackered next Sunday!!! Anyway, it means we also won't have time to cook, so I made a decision that we should make up lots of stuff that will give us time to eat healthy, home-made food in the week, but not take time. So, 10:30 and we've just about finished. It means we've also managed to get rid of a nice big pumpkin that had been hanging around on our kitchen top for a while. This is what we made:

Zero Point Vegetable Soup - Courgettes, Carrots, Tomatoes, Onion
Pumpkin Soup - Pumpkin, Onion, Red Pepper, Chilli
2 batches of Thai Pumpkin Curry - Pumpkin, Onion, Mange Tout, Green Curry Paste, Garlic, Tomato
Cajun Sausagemeat Burgers - Sausagemeat, Sweet Potato, Cajun Spice, Chilli
Coriander Rice Naan Breads
Teacakes
Pumpkin Paste (for making other stuff later)

Hrm, doesn't sound so much written down, but it took us all day. We had some of the thai pumpkin curry, which was absolutely yummy, which is why we ended up making another batch to freeze. It is originally from the weightwatchers "Time To Eat" book, although due to a lack of foresight, we had to alter it a bit, but it still worked fine :o)

So, in a mo, I'm going to have to go and make some space in the freezer for a whole bunch of tupperware pots!

Tomorrow I have a meeting at 10, Wednesday another meeting at 2. Wednesday evening, then, I perform my teaching duties and dance the salsa. I'm glad I got all my powerpoint slides ready last week!!

Anyway, this was a long one. I've been a bit busy recently to keep this up-to-date, and with my photoblog also taking up precious evening time I'm not sure where I am sometimes!

I'll let you know how my lesson goes.

Teaching Spanish II

2005-11-13T22:21:00.000Z

Well, I made it through my mini teaching session! It only had to be 30 minutes long which was just as well as even preparing that much material is quite stressful when you're not sure what you're doing.

I was really nervous before we left to go to the lesson. I had a final run through with Mr. Factobrunt at home and ended up crying a bit because I was so nervous about it. I'd just had a really stressful day at work which didn't help. I was *thisclose* to just quitting the whole course there and then. Fortunately, I was able to calm myself down again enough to get there.

The actual lesson went ok, I think, although I was so nervous I can't really form any objective opinion! My presentation slides all worked as planned, and everyone joined in practising their Spanish phrases and asked a few questions at the end. The only advantage of being so nervous is that it does seem to speed up time and once I started teaching it all went by very quickly!

Before I started the course, I thought that despite being quite a shy person, I could learn good presentation and teaching skills and with time, overcome my nerves. I would not have said the same later on Wednesday night! Doing the mini teaching session really was tortuous for me, and unfortunately, the way this course is structured, I don't think I will get enough practice to reduce my nerves. That will probably only come if I take the plunge and go for a teaching job... but I still don't feel ready for that without some more practice. I feel stuck in a catch 22 situation at the moment.

Teaching Spanish

2005-11-08T22:44:00.000Z

Tomorrow night sees Daisy doing her 30 minute micro-teaching as part of our Wednesday evening class. She's got half an hour to teach the rest of the learners something interesting, and prove that the preceding 8 weeks have been worth something. She's just saving her Powerpoint slides out to a memory stick now, and it's all looking very nice. Her plan is to teach everyone the very basics of Español, like how to say "Hello", "Goodbye", "How are you", "My name is...", and a couple of more complicated ones like "I am married" and such. Should be interesting! :o) I think she's third on, so two other of our fellow learners will be buttering us up with how to line curtains and weird stuff like that. Then a week tomorrow I'm first on teaching the basics of the wonderful world of salsa dancing, and perhaps I'll say more about that as the time comes.

Remember Remember

2005-11-05T22:21:00.000Z

Remember Remember the 5th of November...

How could I forget? Every year the whole country lights up the sky with dazzling displays of pyromania simply to mark the day I was born, and this year they really did amazing. The banging, thumping, thudding and whistling went on solidly from 5pm to 9:30pm, when presumably everyone came in to see who was being knocked out of Strictly Come Dancing. Thank God it was Fiona, although you always feel a bit sorry for the professional dancer, even if they are Brendan.

I had a nice relaxing day, spent with my family, eating chocolate and curry and watching TV. I am very lucky and got some great pressies including a tripod for my camera, and a trip to Marwell Zoo to meet a giraffe and some lizards. It's part of the Wild Arena company, who run trips to places specifically aimed at photographers. I think it's a bit rich calling me a photographer, but I'm going to enjoy meeting all the wonderful animals.

So, it's just about over for another year, and I guess I need to make sure that in this next year I make sure that I get on and do something more interesting with my life than what I've managed so far.

Charity, Mate

2005-11-02T10:21:00.000Z

Yesterday saw me rather busy. After a building burnt down at work, and my building was closed as a precaution, I am having a few compulsary days off. It was lucky really because it meant I could spend all yesterday morning baking for the charity dance party.

Every year our dance teacher organises a party where people come and dance and stuff. It raises money for the British Heart Foundation. As my part, I planned to take along some food. The Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies I make were so popular at the last party, that I decided to make a double batch for this bigger party. I also made some punjabi spiced coriander breadsticks with a tandoori dip.

At lunchtime I did a bit of photography. I took some photos of smoke from an incense stick. Sounds dull, doesn't it? In fact, you can produce some lovely abstracts:

I'll be posting more on my photoblog in due course, if you're interested.

Come the evening, I had to go off early to my evening class, where I'm learning picture framing. Today our tutor talked out the types of mouldings that make the frame. He showed us briefly how to make a frame, although I then left and headed to the salsa party, where my Mum, Sister and Daisy had already arrived.

It was a good night, although the we didn't do a whole lot of dancing. Our teacher had control of the music machine too, and did have it up rather loud. I'm surprised some of the old people who had turned up to watch didn't have a heart attack. Our teacher's daughter is also a dance teacher and she gave us a quick hot-and-funky routine, which is the kind of stuff you see the dancers on top of the pops doing. I think I'm surprised I didn't have a heart attack after that.

We won a big box of Maltesers on the raffle, and Mum won a bottle of wine. I believe they raised over £150 on the raffle, and near £1000 for the whole evening.

Uh...

2005-10-30T21:47:00.000Z

The last week was half term here, which meant that our usual evening classes were off, although we both still had to go to work. This meant that in the evenings we were really busy slacking; this in turn meant we had nothing to blog about. Did sod all.

We still had our regular salsa class on Friday which was basically our dress-rehearsal for our "Come Dance With Me" party on Tuesday. This is a party our teacher runs for charity - the British Heart Foundation. On Saturday we drove up to Wales and I was hoping to do some photography, but the weather was against me. We stayed at Daisy's Mum's and ate far too much, as usual. I think she thinks our large reserves of blubber are due to malnutrition.

We headed off to Labels in Ross on Wye Saturday afternoon and I bought myself a snazzy shirt for the party. I actually did a tiny tiny amount of Christmas shopping too. I guess it will all add up, eventually... hopefully.

Got back earlier this evening and have just been catching up on the piles of blogs I subscribe to. Means I've been pretty slack with the commenting on them tonight.

Despite apparantly having an extra hour in bed last night, it means I'm effectively up later tonight, which means I'm tired earlier, so I might get another few extra hours of sleep by bogging off to bed early.

Dancing Farce

2005-10-22T22:19:00.000+01:00

Being a salsa 'dancer', I am watching the BBC show Strictly Come Dancing with interest. Some celebs dance with professional dancers and viewers phone in and vote for who they think is best. Each week the couple with the lowest vote count gets thrown out. Last week one of the celebs, called Fiona Phillips was absolutely awful last week (I thought she was going to fall over), and this week she wasn't great. The judges are very harsh, and said what they thought. However, she keeps getting voted in through sympathy voting by the viewers. It happened last year with Julian Clary. I think it's a shame that some of the other contestants, who are clearly better, are getting knocked out in favour of the stumbling Phillips. It just goes to show what a bunch of wankers some TV viewers are.

Lack of Japanese

2005-10-21T16:27:00.000+01:00

Today I had to do a software demonstration to an eminent Professor from the Tokyo Institute of Technology (TIT). I had been building up to it since I originally found out about it on Monday. I'd even searched through the old grey cells to remember my very basic Japanese - "Konichiwa", and "Arigato Gosaimasu". But of course, come the nerves of the actual demonstration, I completely forgot to say any of it. However, I did remember the Lonely Planet's guidance about how a business card in Japan is quite important. As when I visited Japan a year ago, Professor Sadaoki was very curteous, quiet and handed over his business card as though it was made of gold. I took it as though it was too, as I didn't want to offend anyone. It amused me that my supervisor jammed his in his shirt pocket.

Demo went off ok. I have apparantly got another one to do on Monday to some billionaire venture capitalist bloke. They chose me? Geez, I'm no salesman, that's for sure. Well, actually, that's probably it - they didn't choose me... I got lumbered with it because one of my bosses is on sabatical, and the other is in MIT. I think my supervisor has offered to come and help me out! He's a good bloke, is Paul.

Thanks for the comments on the last post. I guess I don't use my Doctor title very much, either. I don't really have any rules when I use it though - it depends how I'm feeling at the time - but it's not very often. However, Dr.Factor kinda makes me sound like one of the X-men, or something. "Saves the World With the Fack To Brunt Talking!"

Crikey

2005-10-18T13:44:00.000+01:00

Wow, is it the 18th October already? Just in case there is anyone who reads this thing, I think Daisy and I owe an apology for the lack of interesting updates recently. We haven't been having a baby, courting over the phone, getting new jobs, or about to move house, however, we have been busy doing a number of evening classes which take up much of the time we had left after work.

However, not all is lost, as we did get to have a nice walk at a local Dorset Wildlife Trust nature reserve at the weekend, which seemed like heaven after all the late nights.

Tonight I go to my picture framing course. I'm actually quite enjoying it, and we're already on week 3 of 6. Last week we practiced cutting mounts in mounting card, and although my first 7 were rubbish, the two I practiced today have come out ok once I grasped an idea that our teacher explained last week. My only problem now is that my ruler is WAY too short, and I can't do any mounts greater than about 20cm long!

Tomorrow evening, Daisy and I go to our teaching course. It's basically a course about how to do the paperwork associated with teaching. Paperwork is so important in adult teaching these days, simply for accountability. Last week our tutor was telling us how we must write down even small remarks that one learner might make to another if we think they may have been offended. Shortly afterwards exactly that happened, so I'm sure our tutor wrote that one down. This week we have to produce a scheme of work for a fictional course, which is basically a list of the lessons, with the resources and activities for each. We also have to produce 3 lesson plans, which, as it sounds, is a plan of a specific lesson. I spent most of Sunday afternoon on it, most of Monday evening, and I still have 2 lesson plans left to go! I won't be handing in a completed one this week. Daisy, of course, has tonight when I'm at picture framing.

We're both still going to our salsa lessons, and getting on really well. One of Daisy's friends sent an email to her yesterday suggesting we take up salsa. Uhm, we've been doing it for a year - I guess we are rather quiet people! Tsch.

Talking of which, as part of our teaching course we have to do a 30 minute teaching session to our fellow learners. As I have a PhD in computer science, have a web-design business, am setting up an internet retail business and have been working with bleeding edge of web-technologies for the past 3 years, I'm going to teach them the basics of salsa dancing!

Indeed, that idea of setting up an internet business is kind of on the back burner for the only reason that I haven't had much time to devote to it. I'm just glad my website design business hasn't taken off yet (I'm assuming it will of course!), although that all means I'm still stuck doing the same [insert expletive] job I've been for the last.. uhm.. too long.

Hmm... guess this was a bit of a rant. Sorry about that.

Total Pollocks

2005-10-08T22:11:00.000+01:00

This is a fun little website where you can create your own works of modern art :)

Took me ages, that did.

Stuff

2005-10-08T10:59:00.000+01:00

It's been another one of those weeks were I seem to have been busy, yet can't really remember why. I actually had to be in work most of this week, which always takes up more time, with the hour's commute each way - ugh. Anyway, our poor little blog has gotten a bit neglected.

On Tuesday night I started a new evenings class on how to frame pictures. It is run by a person who used to own a local picture framing company that he sold in 2000. He is going to teach us how to choose and cut mountings, how to cut the mouldings to make the frame itself, although he can't teach us how to cut the glass due to health and safety. It's only 6 week course, so it should be good. I've got to get myself a mount cutter this week, so we're off to Hobbycraft today to see if they have one. If not, I'll probably get on online from Longridge.

We are still going to our "delivering learning" evening class on Wednesday nights. I'm enjoying it more so now, even though we're having to do more presentations these days, and in a few weeks we are going to have to deliver a "micro-teaching" session, or 30 minutes, to our fellow learners. I think I will do it on internet security!

Thursday nights are still free, but Friday's are taken up with our salsa dance lessons, which are getting quite energetic these days. I'm really chuffed how my wife and I are getting on though, and really enjoy strutting our stuff (as long as no-one is watching!).

And so Saturday arrives, and I have a lie in, and now it's time to think about going out doing a bit of shopping. Maybe it would be good to take the camera. I emailled a company last night who are after amateur and professional photographers for photographs to make Christmas cards and such from. I'm quite excited about maybe having my photos in print, although I must make sure not to get my hopes up, as I am, after all, only using a Digital SLR, although that should be high enough resolution for postcards, at least. Don't forget to check out my latest photos at my photo blog :o)

Anyway, late as it is, it's time for a shower and to get dressed so I can make my way out into the wide world and buy a mount cutter. Such an exciting life :o)

Fletcher's Out

2005-10-04T11:40:00.000+01:00

What a shame it is to hear that Ronnie Barker has died. Unfashionable as it may be, I loved the two Ronnies and thought they were very funny, and it was Barker that wrote nearly all of their material. In fact, the bits I always found a bit dull (when I was younger admittedly) were Corbett's rants from his chair (always thought Ronnie Corbett looked like Penfold from Dangermouse). I guess this means the BBC will reply a load of their best bits, so I'm looking forward to that.

National Statistics

2005-09-30T23:34:00.000+01:00

Don't know if you've ever been to NationMaster. It's an interesting website with all sorts of random statistics about the countries in the world. You can even go and see the country league tables and find out what they're best at.

For example, according to the statistics (and statistics never lie), the UK is top in the world for the total agricultural yield of wheat and barley. How about that? Perhaps unsurprisingly we have the highest number of English language speakers per capita, although ironically, we also have the highest number of asylum seekers too. Perhaps surprisingly, it says we have the highest amount of obese men, although I don't think this data includes America - I mean, how could it? :o)

My most proud statistic has to be that the UK is the top tea consumer. Woo! Get the biscuits.

See here for the UK's other best bits.

Nobby's

2005-09-30T13:19:00.000+01:00

It's not often I feel compelled to write about the virtues of a packet of crisps, but today I had for the first time a packet of Nobby's Barbeque Rib flavour crisps and they were absolutely goregous. I'd had some Nobby's Balti Chicken crisps some time before, but they don't [quite] match up to the BBQ ones. I don't eat crisps often, but when I do I am almost definitely going to buy Nobby's again. I hadn't realised that they were made by Walkers Crisps (having no mention of the Walkers brand on the packet - even in the small print) and was going to say what a wonderful entrance into the market the people behind Nobby's have made, but as it turns out Walkers have alot of clout so it's not so surprising any longer. These crisps are, according to the Walkers site, apparantly aimed at "today's 17-34 year old males (28% of the population - about 16.5 million people!)" and are "a range of blokes snacks including ridged crips, nuts and coated nuts, all in real food flavours". After a month of being released they were bigger than McCoys Specials, which just goes to show how much effect marketing has, as the packets contain almost the same stuff.

23rd Post Meme

2005-09-26T15:48:00.000+01:00

Niki at Esurientes tagged all her readers for the 23rd post meme. It's just a silly little thing that might give you a strange giggle.

The rules are simple:

Delve into your blog archive.

Find your 23rd post (or closest to).

Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).

Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.

Tag five people to do the same.

The 5th line of my 23rd post makes my life sound so exciting. I must have kept very high company back then:

It was late at night and they were testing the new bat mobile and Wesley Snipes, who was the new Batman, was there.

As it turns out, I was describing a very strange dream I'd had the night before. You can read the whole thing here.

The last part of the instructions is to tag 5 others. I'm not sure I know 5 others, so I tag anyone who might read this - consider yourself tagged. What does your 23rd post's 5th line say about you? I think mine says I'm destined to become a movie star stunt coordinator....

Autumnal Equinox

2005-09-21T22:00:00.000+01:00

Well, it's that time of year again and Autumn has started for real, and the balmy days of summer are almost officially in the past. Today is the day when the day and night are the same length.

I had a really busy day today - in fact, I barely stopped. Meetings in the morning, phone calls, busy hacking away at web-page stuff for work, and then after driving home, half an hour of work again, it was out to evening class. Way too much. The stress made me snap a bit at Daisy, which I'm particularly sorry about, and my head's now thumping with a headache. Oh well, such is some days. Work from home tomorrow and hope that I can relax a little.

A Busy Weekend

2005-09-19T20:38:00.000+01:00

We've had a busy weekend going out and doing fun things for once, instead of just being busy doing normal, boring chores!

On Saturday we went to Slimbridge with an internet friend of ours but I'll let Mr Factobrunt tell you about that seeing as he took all the photos there.

On the Sunday we went to National Bird of Prey Centre in Newent for more feathery photographic opportunities. Mr Factobrunt took loads of photos with his expensive, fancy camera but I have to say, I got lucky and got the best photo by pointing and shooting :)

This is Grafton, a Magellanic Horned Owl, a species of Eagle Owl, showing off his flying skills.

The centre puts on three wonderful flying displays every day from February to October and is definitely worth a visit if you're ever in Gloucestershire.

Teaching

2005-09-14T23:00:00.000+01:00

Just got back from a new course that myself and Daisy have taken up. The course is basically an introduction to adult education teaching, although rather politically correctly has the mouthful name of City and Guilds 7302 Introduction to Delivering Learning. It's taught by a lady named Mrs.Lush (no kidding), and so far seems high on the paperwork, high on the "talk to someone you don't know" and high on the going-to-be-slightly-dull fronts. However, it does mean that, should I complete it, I will have a qualification that will allow me to start adult-ed teaching, should I need to, which could bring in some extra money once I finally get rid of the university that's attached to the ball and chain around my ankle.

Chocolate [Cakes and Trifles]

2005-09-13T11:42:00.000+01:00

I'm having some time off this week, so yesterday I spent a little bit of time doing some baking. I love cooking and baking; I find it gets me away from the computer, anyway.

A few weeks ago Niki at Esurienties posted a great looking cupcake recipe that looked pretty easy to make, so last time I went to the super-market I made sure I got some chocolate peanut butter. Our shop didn't have the Kraft Nuts About Chocolate, so I got some Nutella and some Snickers spread, and would decide later which to use. In the end I decided to use the Snickers spread, (after tearing my finger away from the jar!).

I think these cup cakes are big enough to be called muffins, over here, and they taste damn good too, although my swirly technique needs alot of practice!

When the muffins were in the oven, I decided to make some individual chocolate trifes - something I've been meaning to try for a while. I had an idea that I could replace the custard part of the trifle with chocolate angel delight and the fruit with something like Nutella.

So, that's what I did.

Chop 50g of plain or dark chocolate into very small pieces (I use the chopper tool on our hand blender)
Place one tablespoon of Nutella (or similar) into the bottom of each of two glasses (preferably desert glasses, but we didn't have any). I warmed the spread in the microwave for 10 seconds to make it settle better into the bottom of the glass.
Mix up 2 portions of chocolate Angel Delight (or similar - we used McDougalls), and as it begins to stiffen add in the chocolate bits.
Split the delight into the two glasses
Whisk up about 100ml of double cream until stiff
Split the cream into the two glasses and flatten.
Curl some chocolate onto the top

It's really easy to make, and exceedingly rich. Certainly not something to eat if you're on a diet, obviously. In fact, 2 portions of angel delight might be a little too much, and you might want to only do 1, and maybe a little less creme, but that above is what I did, and Daisy and myself enjoyed them very much! We're now a few kilos heavier though.

Wet Weekend

2005-09-11T22:15:00.000+01:00

Daisy's already explained about this weekend, but I thought I'd put in my two-penneth, also. Besides... I have pictures!

I'm not sure why, maybe it was my trip to Essex, but I've been madly tired the last few days. However, we managed to cycle into town on Saturday morning, after the Slimbridge idea was ruled out, and stocked up on food. We then promptly left all this lovely new food and headed Wales-ward.

There I was met with the task of putting up 3 flat-packed drawers from Ikea. Now, I'd always thought of Ikea furniture as the same sort of cheap flat-packed crud you get from Argos, B&Q and MFI. However, I was most surprised by the quality of this stuff. Although it uses all the same funny little interlocking screws and such, and, it's true, the basic underpinning of the furniture is chipboard, the outer veneer is actually real wood veneer - not fake printed stuff. Certain parts were also MDF, which increased the furniture strength and weight. For the price, I thought it was pretty good.

So, here are my efforts. Do you like them?

Sunday afternoon I just flaked out. Not sure what's up with me. I'm only 29, for Pete's sake (whoever Pete might be).

On the way home we stopped briefly at the lovely town of Tintern in the Wye Valley. I've driven through this pretty little abbey town loads of times during my days of courting Daisy, and since when visiting Mother-in-Law, but I'd never stopped to take photos. Having a photography blog to up-keep, I decided I would stop and take some. The light was getting bad - rain, and late evening - but I still managed to rattle some off prior to heading back home.

This one is Daisy's favourite:

I have to take the remainder of my holidays before the end of September (academic year and all that), so I'm taking Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday off next week. Unfortunately, I have to go in and do a software demonstration on Wednesday - one of the days the petrol people are considering their blockades... Typical!

Home Again

2005-09-11T21:38:00.000+01:00

Well, our run of take-away dinners finally came to end - but only because we went to stay at my Mum's on Saturday night :)

We had originally planned to meet a friend at Slimbridge before going on to my mum's for the evening but we didn't manage to get ourselves organised in time and missed out on going to Slimbridge.

We decided to go on up to Monmouth to visit my mum anyway, whereupon Mr. Factobrunt spent most of his time assembling flat packed furniture for my mum! Not the most fun way to spend a weekend but he said he enjoyed it. "It's like carpentry without the difficult bits", he said :)

Headache

2005-09-09T18:57:00.000+01:00

Ah, I see Daisy's not been keeping my blog upto date while I've been away then :)

Oh, well... I'll update you... There's been a bit of a gap because early this week I suddenly got some work to do (being an academic work comes along now and again), and so I had to rush to get it started. Then on Wednesday evening I headed over to Colchester (Essex University) on the train with one of my bosses (the nice one!). We met up with the organiser of the trip, who was a very nice German guy who clearly loved his drink. We drank at a lovely little pub called the Rose and Crown in Wivenhoe, and then headed back to his place where I entertained on a piano briefly. Not used to all this socialising, by the time we got to our hotel at about 11:25 I was shattered.

Thursday was spent in a small room listening to and giving presentations to a bunch of generally nice people. I usually hate these "networking" events that academics use as an excuse to go to nice places (Essex?), but in this case it was actually ok.

We headed back down south at about 4:20pm, and I got home not long before 8pm. The poem I quickly posted last night I wrote on my PDA somewhere around Winchester!

I've just back home from a usual day at the office - left me with a headache, a deep loathing of everything office-fied (which includes our computer science labs) and wanting nothing more than to sleep off the various travelling I've done.

However, after a 7 week break, our salsa lessons start up again. Daisy's talking on the phone to her mum at the moment, and mentioned that we might go and try beginners tap dancing too... sounds alot of hard work that I can't be arsed with at the moment - but maybe come Tuesday I'll feel more like it! Check out our dance teacher's website - slight plug there as I designed it :)

hmm.. still no food in the house today.... yet another take away on the horizon, perhaps?

Train Ride

2005-09-08T21:09:00.000+01:00

Clackity clack, clackity clack
Buildings rush by, people look back.

Across from me a man studies hard
The guard stumbles through, asks to see my card
The man to my left is typing instructions
For something called livelink - sounds a contraption

Another man, quiet and older
And another, one back, over his shoulder
Flick through the metro see the day's news
Rather than look out and enjoy the views

A hot air balloon flits past the window
Hope its ok it seemed quite low
A phone in the carriage cries out its ring
But no one else notices, despite the din.

So, I've come from london
I'm on the fast train
Only 10 minutes til I'm in a car again
Then 40 minutes and back home I will be
Where I'm going to hug my wife and kiss her times three!

Happy Birthday

2005-09-06T10:08:00.000+01:00

Happy Birthday to Catpee!

Great Dorset Steam Fair II

2005-09-04T21:35:00.000+01:00

Here's a panorama I put together of the site of the steam fair. We were parked right at the other end of this massive site!

(click for a larger view)

Great Dorset Steam Fair

2005-09-04T12:33:00.000+01:00

Yesterday we went to the Great Dorset Steam Fair so FactoBrunt could give his Nikon D70 a workout. We won't bore you with all 180 (!) pics he took, so here's just a few highlights.

Mr. FactoBrunt admiring the steam engines.

Lots and lots and lots of highly polished show engines.

Bazillions of people

Steam engine on the go

Mini steam engine

FactoBrunt took this photo in colour yesterday but converted into black & white it looks like it could have been taken at the turn of the last century!

Tractor pulling competion. Proper job!

Ploughing competion.

There were loads of music organs too.

There were lots of weird steam powered contraptions. Some of them didn't look all that practical, like this wood saw. It took ages to cut through the wood! Better than doing it all by hand, I suppose.

Steam powered brick crushing contraption

Half the 600 acre site seemed to be taken up with food and drink stalls, like this one. This sign still makes me giggle! Short and to the point, I guess :)

Where did we park again?

I think FactoBrunt loved the opportunity to take so many pics, but I have admit that my enthusiasm started flagging after the first three hours ("Oh look, another steam engine..."), plus it was a bit hot for me and my feet were aching with all the walking around the huge site. I was relieved to get home and promptly passed out on the sofa to recover :) Even I would say that the steam fair is definitely worth visiting at least once though.

South Dorset II

2005-09-03T22:20:00.000+01:00

....and this is what Daisy looks like:

I might actually get her to post on here one day.. hrmph...

South Dorset

2005-09-03T22:06:00.000+01:00

Having seen what Terminal Dysfunction (I don't actually know how to type those Japanese letters!) looks like as a South Park character, I thought I might as well try and see what I look like - and this is the result (when I'm wearing my 'cowboy hat', anyway). The South Park Studio is actually a pretty cool Flash thingy that can made some really funny looking characters. Go see what you look like!

Not Much To Report

2005-09-02T18:36:00.000+01:00

It's been one of those weeks really. Nothing much to report - just plodding along with things.

Daisy won a spice rack on Ebay recently and that arrived today so on Sunday I've got my work planned to screw the thing to the wall and relieve our larder of some of the extraneous herb jars we have got.

I bought a new 2Gb compact flash card for my camera earlier in the week, and I had a lovely cycle over to my parent's place to pick it up. The new card means I can take 358 photos (in RAW format) or, if I wanted to wear my finger out, over 2,100 in the lowest quality. This is great news, particularly as my wife and I have a trip planned tomorrow.

We're off to the Great Dorset Steam Fair tomorrow. It's going to be incredibly busy, as it's the only Saturday that the fair runs on, and I was hoping to cycle. But it's probably a 14 mile ride there, and the same back, and Daisy doesn't think she's up to it. So that means we'll be stuck in a traffic jam for a while trying to get in, I'm sure. We bought some tickets off one of Daisy's work collegues who was no-longer able to go. It means we also saved a whopping 5 quid on the entrance fee (which would have been £28 for the two of us!). We plan on going early and leaving early, having a rest, then going back in the evening when it turns into a big "fun-fair with steam engines and cider". As you can tell, I'm going to be super snap-happy, so I'll spend some time tonight cleaning my lenses and my camera! Those 358 photos might just be enough.

Swot or Not?

2005-09-01T22:06:00.000+01:00

Nearly Yuletide

2005-09-01T12:39:00.000+01:00

Can you believe it? We got our first Christmas card yesterday. Well, kinda - in fact, it was a Christmas card advertising Christmas goods for the RSPCA. Still....

My Wife Joins Me

2005-08-31T22:57:00.000+01:00

I've added my wife to my blog, so she can post about stuff too :o) Maybe it'll be more interesting than the rubbish I write :oP

Spicy Italian Tuna Steak

2005-08-31T15:40:00.000+01:00

Last night I went all cheffy again (even though I wasn't really feeling like it) having decided last week I was going to buy some tuna steaks and do something cheffy.

We had a bunch of tomatoes going off in the fridge from when Daisy's Mum was down to visit (about 3 weeks ago now) and so I decided to use these to make a tomato-based sauce to cover the tuna.

The sauce consisted of:

6 small tomatoes chopped and softened in the microwave (going off is not a necessity)

2 green chillis deseeded and finely chopped (fresh from our chilli plant) - use only 1 if you're not good with hotter food

1/2 an onion finely chopped

1/2 a red pepper finely chopped

1 large clove of garlic crushed

1/2 tablespoon of Chives (I used dried)

1 tablespoon of Thyme (again dried)

1 tablespoon of Basil (again dried)

Bung all the ingredients for the sauce into a masher of some sort and blend until its not too smooth.

I fried the tuna (for slightly too long in fact - but then I'm not really a chef, so I live and learn!) and then cooked the tuna in the sauce in the pan for 10-15 minutes.

I then served it up with some boiled baby new potatoes, and some garden peas (tinned unfortunately, but there you go!)

Where did the Long Summer Days go?

2005-08-31T15:30:00.000+01:00

I don't know where the time is going recently. Days are flying by in flits of er things... Blogs are getting unattended to!

On Monday we went up my parent's place to grab some of the plums they have on a tree in their garden. Daisy's going to make a plum pie apparantly, although its still yet to arrive :o) The tree is quite tall:

...so I ended up using a rake to "grab" the plums with the prongs and pull them off. Worked quite effectively. I think we stripped the tree of all the decent plums that the wasps hadn't already got.

Then when we left my folks we trundled up a country lane near by, parked up and began our bounty hunt. It's wonderful to think all this free food is out there. We will get some blackberries, but this time we were hunting hazelnuts. In fact, in the 30 minutes we were there, we managed to get a goodly amount:

They still need stripping of their outer shells and cups, so they'll be a bit smaller but it's probably saved us a few quid buying shop packaged ones. They might even taste nicer, and will be perfect for all those yummy cakes!

Chocolate, Hazelnut, Coffee Wheat-Free Cake

2005-08-29T20:21:00.000+01:00

Ok, Yesterday I took a brave plunge to do some recipe mixing and I wanted to make a wheat-free version of the Chocolate and Hazelnut Cake. I'd already made a couple of wheat-free Chocolate Orange Cakes, so I figured why can't I just do a bit of simple ingredient substitution and all will be well. So instead of using wholewheat flour, as the recipe stated, I used the "flour-substitute" from the chocolate orange cake, which was ground almonds and cocoa. Both of the original cakes were from Esurientes Blog.

I tried it and it worked! I made a cake! A super yummy chocolatey cake! It was a bit brittle and when I tried to move it from the cake tin base to the cake box it cracked in half, but it still worked.

Ingredients

250g Margarine
125g Light Brown Soft Sugar
125g Caster Sugar
4 Eggs
120ml of strong black coffee
200g ground almonds
50g Cocoa, seived
2 heaped teaspoons of baking powder
200g Hazelnuts coasely ground
250g plain chocolate

Method

Line springform cake tin with greaseproof

Preheat oven to 180^oC

Beat margarine, brown and caster sugar together

Add eggs one at a time beating after each is added

Add in the coffee (the mixture always curdles for me here, but that's ok)

Fold in the almonds, baking powder and three quarters of the chopped hazelnuts and chocolate (i.e. keep some back for the top)

Mix it all up until it looks like a cake mixture

Spoon into cake tin

Add remaining quarter of chopped hazelnuts and chocolate to the top

Cook for about 1 hour 30 minutes or until the top is springy and a skewer comes out cleanish

Leave to cool, but even then it is brittle and need to take care removing the paper.

It really is a yummy recipe, and we went around my folks to pick more plums off the tree today, and it was nearly all gone! It's much moister than the original hazelnut cake, and more chocolateier (because of the cocoa). Yum!

Tags:

Sunday

2005-08-29T10:29:00.000+01:00

Sorry about the dull title, but I couldn't think of anything more encompassing.

It's was an absolutely beautiful day down here in Dorset yesterday (looks like it again today!). The sun was shining, and the sky a deep blue without a cloud in sight. I got up pretty late, but my wife and I eventually set off on a 6 mile cycle ride down to a country house near Poole, called Upton Country House, owned by the local council.

Like alot of the big country houses around here on a bank holiday, they were holding a craft fair. As we'd been to the one held at Kingston Lacy House last year, we decided to look at the Upton one. However, I think everyone else, including the exhibitors, were at the Kingston Lacy one. It took us barely 3 minutes to go around the exhibits, which weren't really all that interesting, to be honest. At least it only cost 50p each to get in.

We wandered around the grounds for a bit, which really are lovely, then we had some lunch at the Peacock Tea Rooms. It was a bit expensive, but it had a unique selling point wandering around.

After having an ice cream, we headed back home and arrived about 3'oclock. I could've sat down in front of the 'puter and did some work on my various websites, but decided I wanted to do something more productive, so I headed into the kitchen and put some more beetroot on to cook.

While they were cooking, I boiled some eggs and made some pickled eggs:

I then went all cheffy and made a wheat-free cake, but a wheat-free cake I didn't have a recipe for. In fact, I combined two recipes. I decided that after yet another day fixing my car, my Dad required another treat. The beetroot that were cooking were going to be his (as we've already got some), but I thought a cake would also go down well.

So, I took the recipes from Esurientes Chocolate and Hazelnute Cake and flourless chocolate cake and made a new cake. I'll post the recipe in another post, to avoid making this post go on forever.

My wife made us a nice broccoli and cheese gratin for tea from the Weightwatchers book 'Time to Eat' (except we used nice cheese!).

We then rushed up Mum and Dads to give them their goodies and have a bit of the cake for afters!!!

We were all ready to go to bed when I was doing a bit of commenting on photo blogs and ended up helping to fix some bits and bobs on Tobias Reynolds photoblog. I'd never used PixelPost before, but it seems quite good (although the layout of the code needs alot to be desired!).

So I got to bed about 1:15am.. a late one for me. Don't think I've been up that late in about 8 years!

Tags:

I am Joe Normal

2005-08-29T00:36:00.000+01:00

34 % Nerd, 34% Geek, 47% Dork

For The Record:

A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.

A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one.

A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions.

You scored less than half in all three, earning you the title of: Joe Normal.

Take the test - What are you?

Pickled Beetroot

2005-08-27T17:29:00.000+01:00

This is the first time I've experienced the summer glut (although I always seem to experience a summer gut).

We've now got a whole load of beetroot outside ready to some in, as well as 4 broccoli flowers that will make around 8 meals. Our runner beans are beginning to make enough for a few meals and we've got over 30 chillis on our chilli plant.

So, last night I harvested a few of our beetroot. I wasn't sure really what to expect, but it turned out ok.

First I needed to steralise a jar, so I got an ex-Branston Pickle jar and washed it out thoroughly in warm soapy water and bunged it in the oven set to 120^oC for 5 minutes. In the meantime I went out and I picked some big looking beetroot:

Then I took them in, chopped off the stalks and the roots (leaving a small amount so they don't bleed out) and gave them a wipe.

I then wrapped them in foil and baked them in the oven at 190^oC for 3 hours. Yes, 3 hours. My cooking timer only does 99 minutes, so I had to do 90 minutes, and restart it when it beeped!

When they came out, and had cooled down a little, the skin was easy to pull off. So that's what I did:

When they were all red and naked, I chopped them up and put them into the jar I'd steralised. Some I sliced and others I diced. It gave me very pink fingertips!

I then poured in some Sarson's pickling vinegar (don't sniff this as it'll blow your head off!) and made sure the jar was full but all the beets were covered. The vinegar instantly turned red. I then put the cap on and bung it in the fridge.

I guess I should've labelled them with a date and stuff, but we're already eating them so I don't think there'll be a problem. Particularly as it's the only jar we have at the moment.

We had some for lunch and they were really pretty nice. Not too dissimilar to the shop-bought stuff I've had before, mind.

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Odds and Sods

2005-08-26T14:13:00.000+01:00

I've officially launched my secondary business that is part of my plan for removing myself from the clutches of a really dull office job. It's basically website design, with a selling point that the websites I design will be accessible (that is they'll be easier to use by blind or visually impaired people and people with learning difficulties). So if you want, or know someone who wants a website, I'm your man. The launch involved getting the website online, and that was it. So feel free to visit Helpful Design today!

Ok, plug over.

Just to let you know I've currently got some beets in the oven cooking themselves as I'm making a beetroot pickle this afternoon. Look out for the post soon.

My Dad phoned me up to tell me my car is fixed, which is "great" as it means I can go back to work.

Linda's Shitz

2005-08-23T13:08:00.000+01:00

What Classic Movie Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

One of those evenings

2005-08-22T20:23:00.000+01:00

Everything was going swimmingly until I decided to come home this afternoon. In fact, it went rather swimmingly after that too:

The Meeting

I always dread my Monday morning meetings. My boss is rather a high flier in the world of academia and likes to ensure all his minions are doing as they should. These meetings tend to be a bit "we're doing this" - "we need someone to go to that" - "What have you been upto X?"... fortunately Mr.Boss was away today (on holiday sailing around the English Channel I suspect), so we had a stand in. She's an even higher flier in the world of academia, although fortunately we aren't her minions so she was a little less bothered. However, unfortunately we still had the "What have you been upto X?" bit, which is generally the bit I hate. "I've been busy trying to setup businesses so I can get out of here" I hear my brain holding back.

The Car

Anyway, the rest of the day went ok. I actually did a fair amount of work even! On my way out of work I was given a lift around to the car park by a collegue in his wife's extremely posh MGF. That was nice. I set off home. My route home is approximately 66% motorway, followed by 33% roundabouts interspersed with short stretches of dual carriageway. As I approached the 66% mark, and the first roundabout, my oil light popped on (well, the car's oil light).

"That's strange" I thought to myself. "I only checked that the other day before the trip to Wales"

On accelerating out of the roundabout the car didn't feel quite right. It didn't want to go. I looked in my mirror and was horrified at the enormous plume of black smoke I was covering the car behind in.

"Oh dear. This doesn't look good."

The car was getting less happy. The next roundabout came, and as I changed down a gear the rev-ometer dropped and the car stuttered. EEKS! I began my toe-heel extravaganza that I learnt when I was a much less sensible driver that still had ambitions of becoming a rally driver. It worked for about 10 yards, but the car wasn't having it. Fortunately immediately after this roundabout there was a pull-in, and that's where my car expired.

Because of Saturday's videoing stuff I'd left my mobile in my bike bag -- back at home. So I headed to a nearby pub and the owners were kind enough to let me use their phone. I phoned Dad who duly dropped everything he was doing to come a get me. When I got back to my stranded car, I noticed a big puddle of oil under the front. I looked inside. The whole engine bay was spattered in oil. Eek.

Dad arrived and towed me to his place. He said an oil pipe had snapped off and I'd have to get a new one ordered. Tsk.

The Garden

For tea, Daisy was making a lovely thai green curry with the remains of last night's chicken while I went out and watered the veg and stuff. I don't know why I hadn't thought of it before, but tonight I found out where all the caterpillars that are eating my veg hide - in the broccoli flowers! There were piles of them in there. I had a massive squashing spree. I then got the hose all ready and as I started it up, it began spurting from the reel. Bugger. It was from the centre of the reel too. Double bugger. So I unwound the whole reel and found the pipe had come loose in the centre. I re-did the pipe and before I could get on with the actual watering tea was ready.

So after a superb dinner, I went back out. I watered our veg. As I was watering our Sunflowers I heard a noise. It started as a "psss". A second later it was a "pshhh", and before I had worked out what it was it became a "POOOOSHHHH". The hose split and pushed its way out of where the gun attaches. Water went everywhere. Sprayed in our sunlounge. Sprayed into the air. Covered me from head to toe. Grrrrrreat.

I turned off the water, snipped the end of the split hose, screwed it back in and continued watering.

I'm back inside now. Stripped off out of my wet clothes and feeling much better.

What an evening, though.

Best thing is that I don't have to go to work this week - legitimate reason too: no transport! 30 miles is a bit far to cycle.

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Cakes and Broccoli

2005-08-21T21:57:00.000+01:00

Today was an absolutely beautiful day. The sun was shining bright and the sky was crystal clear and a deep blue in the morning. We went up my folks to take them the pictures from yesterday, and then headed into town to do some essential shopping. Unfortunately we forgot some change, so didn't have any money for the car park (charging on a Sunday - the rotters!), so we had to park a little way away and walk in. I didn't mind too much, though, because it was such a lovely day.

When we got home we did a few chores and had lunch. Then I made a cake.

Chocolate, Hazelnut and Coffee Cake

I got the recipe from Esurientes blog, who is always posting absolutely gorgeous sounding recipes. If I had more time, I'd probably try all of Niki's dessert recipes. Anyway, you can find the recipe and method for making the cake here.

I only had chopped hazelnuts and considered whether to grind them up a bit, but in the end I didn't. Also I accidentally put all 250g of chocolate into the cake, and didn't leave any for the top, so I ended up putting about 320g of chocolate into ours. Oops!

Here's a couple of pics of the finished article, which is absolutely fandabeedozee.

Here's the full cake. It didn't stay full for long.

Sliced and just dying to jump in my mouth.

Roast Dinner

Earlier in the day, we'd decided that tonight we'd have a roast dinner and harvest the broccoli flowers from our veg patch. I really wasn't sure about what they were going to taste like. I mean, I've tasted broccoli before, but this is the first time I'd tasted something from my own veg patch. I don't like runner-beans, but Daisy was up for having a couple of huge ones that were dangling off our plant. I said I'd try them :)

We'd bought a lovely corn-fed chicken from Somerfield, and cooked it up. As it was getting dark, about 30 minutes before the chook was ready, I headed out to do my harvest bit.

There's the broccoli, prior to decapitation.

There's a big one you have Mr.Bean.

Mr.Broccoli has the chop.

Chopped into florets - a surprising amount from a single flower. Easily enough for two meals.

These are the little critters left hiding in the flower. I washed them all out, and here they are at the bottom of a bowl of water.

The bean all sliced and diced. Looks perfect -- if you like that sorta thing.

A yummy chicken roast.

I wasn't sure about the broccoli until I tasted it. It was absolutely yummy. Almost sweet. I don't think I would have believed you if you'd told me as a kid I'd be saying "yummy" about broccoli, but there you are. I guess I'd never had the fresh stuff before. I'm chuffed how far the single flower went too, because it means I've got quite a few more meals outside in the veg patch. I still didn't like the taste of runner beans, though - fresh or not. But even so, the fresh veg made the tinned peas and the frozen roasters taste really quite weird. Next time, I think we'll have to have real 'taters for the roasters.

Have to say that the corn-fed chicken was delicious too. It was rather pricey, and didn't have alot of meat on it, but it was a very tastey chicken, and it's nice to know it was probably a happy one.

Nothing like finishing off a roast with a nice piece of that cake again!

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Wedding Videography: After

2005-08-20T22:46:00.000+01:00

Well, I had a pretty good day today cycling around after the horse and carriage. The weather was lovely and there were lots of people out on Poole Quay and in Poole Park to wave our bride and groom on their way. I took 1 hour of video, which now needs to be edited down a little into a nice presentation which I can stick on a DVD and give to my sister to give to the groom. The groom is the blacksmith who does my sister's horses shoes. I didn't find the cycling as hard as I expected, actually. Either the horses are going slower than they used to, or I'm fitter ... hmm.. must be the horses going slower! Perhaps it was just because it was a nice flat course, down by the sea.

We had an Indian Takeaway round my folks, and then after we'd headed home, I put the pictures that Daisy took up the computer (see two examples above). Unfortunately, the CF card we're using in her camera seems well dodgy and has buggered up two of the photos. When I was copying these across, Windows XP died on me. When I restarted Digiguide lost all its settings, Thunderbird lost all my email and all the settings I had (and I had a load of email boxes). Fortunately after some scrambling I found all my email again - it was all still there, Thunderbird just forgot about it. Still required a load of fiddling though. Damn computers.

Some point soon, I've got to rekindle the fire under my old beast of a computer that sounds not unlike a jet engine. It has all the video editing capabilities, so it shall be used to make this wonderful presentation - ha! I shall endeavour to post a small video clip when I've finished, although I can't promise, as it might be prohibitively large.

Ahhh, oh for a lie in tomorrow morning!

Wedding Videography

2005-08-20T10:29:00.000+01:00

In 30 minutes I'm off into Poole to do some wedding videography. I'm not one of the wedding guests, and I'm not the official videographer, yet I'm still going to be videoing it.

Why? My sister runs a horse and carriage business for weddings, and when she was first starting up I did some videos of some of the weddings she did that she could use for her advertising. The videos were effectively a wedding from her point of view - all the getting ready, the before, during and after with the tidying up. This is what I'm doing again today. The reason I'm doing it is that the person getting married knows my sister and my sister wants to be able to give him this video as a present. I don't know if he'll have his own videographer, and if so I usually do my best to keep out of their way -- after all, they're there to do a job, and I'm only really there for "something nice". However, I will always get shots that the professional videographer won't, because I cycle along side the carriage on my bicycle doing some videoing. Even if the professional videographer does something similar with their car, they'll have the engine noise. I usually rush ahead, stop, video them going by, then rush ahead again; each time I rush ahead I video them as I overtake. It works quite well, although holding my breath so I hold the camera still and you can't here me puffing has to be the hardest bit.

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A Failed Experiment

2005-08-18T09:45:00.000+01:00

Daisy decided to conduct an experiment on herself this week, and on Tuesday evening boldly declared that she would not be using computers or watching television in the evening for one week, as they seemed to be sucking up her free time. And indeed they do.

However, come Wednesday evening, we both ended up watching this history of Question of Sport, or something. Then Daisy helped me out with some proofreading on a website I'm designing (actually, she ended up saying "let's start again"!) and she ended up spending more time at my computer than I did.

Oh well, it was a nice idea.

August Garden Update

2005-08-15T18:23:00.000+01:00

Time for an update on the garden.

All this nice weather in the past couple of weeks, with regular watering by my own fair hand, of course, has caused our vegetables to come alive. Fruits are now growing on every single one (well, only just in the case of the sprouts).

So, I'll take you on a little trip of my very own small holding:

Sunflowers

The sunflowers have now all flowered, and some have grown new heads like some strange alien thingy and flowered all over again. The tallest of them has only just come out into flower - a lovely dark red colour. It's 6'5" (198cm) tall from the top of the pot, which is not bad at all. It's certainly way taller than me.

Brussell Sprouts

The sprouts have had a hard time of it this last month, with attack upon attack from caterpillars of the cabbage white butterfly. The leaves are very holey, but a careful look at the stems and it's possible to see the buds beginning to sprout (no pun intended) where the sprouts will grow.

Broccoli

Like the spouts, the broccoli have also had it hard - in fact, probably even harder - but they're now all coming out into "flower". It's actually the flower you eat on the broccoli, and one of them has a nice big head, so I'm sure we'll be having some tasty organic broccoli this week for tea!

Beans

The beans were planted last minute, and probably haven't really had enough time to grow. However, there's a couple of small runners beginning to show their pods. Shame I'm not all that keen on runner beans.

Beetroot

I've been mightily impressed with our beets. They've just got on with it, done their growing and nearly every plant has a good sized beetroot underneath it. I'm going to have to start pulling them soon, otherwise they might go woody.

Pumpkin

I'm sure our pumpkins have a desire for world domination. They are growing furiously and have completely filled up the quarter of the vegetable patch I generously gave them. They're beginning to encroach on the other plants with their ribbon-like tendrils grappling onto stuff. However, they're doing great and as you can see in the photo, there's a pumpkin a size of my hand already growing, and it still looks like a juvenile. There are lots of flowers on the plants but no other pumpkins, so I haven't got to start pulling fruits off yet to make this pumpkin grow enormous.

Tomatoes

The tomatoes are going ok. They went rather wild a few months ago when I fertilized them, and with my lack of knowledge of how to grow the things properly, they've mainly bushed out rather than producing many fruits. However, there are at least 8 tomatoes growing, and quite a few more flowers that have yet to go over, so there's hope for a few more yet.

Chillis

The chillis are doing great in our "sun-lounge" - kind of a lean-to conservatory. They haven't really been effected as much as the peppers which they are growing next to, and as you can see in the photo, are generating a number of nice fruit. In fact, the chilli that is shown in that photo is currently being cooked into a curry by Daisy. There are at least 8 other fruit similar to that one on the plants.

Peppers

Our peppers have been under attack for some time now from aphids. I hadn't realised until recently that the strange curling up of the leaves was due to aphids, but having spotted the effect in my gardening bible, I realised and on closer inspection I could see the little critters. I took a photo for you (and believe me that was easier said that done because they are soooooo tiny tiny). I have looked up how to get rid of them (apparantly with a spray of diluted washing up liquid), so I might try that although I'm a little worried I'll make our peppers taste of "Fairy Lemon". The plant has some flower buds on it, but they seem to have stopped doing anything. I suspect this is because of the aphids. Let's hope they've not caused too much harm to the plant.

Right.. My curry's just about ready - time to taste that chilli!

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Monkey Man

2005-08-15T11:07:00.000+01:00

That's me that is - I am a monkey. A monkey in a big zoo. I come to work, I sit, I type, I go home. I don't enjoy. I've been examining the wonders that might exist outside this infinite loop I am stuck in, and they are, tautologically, wonderous. I have decided I need a plan. A plan of action. A 2 year plan. In two years I will be not only working for myself, but working in a nice environment. I've decided. Although I don't think I'll move to Fiji, I'm going to have to start calling myself Dave Lister as he always wanted a farm in Fiji. It gives me a headache just being here. If only money wasn't so important....

To Do List

2005-08-14T18:57:00.000+01:00

I have a list of things to do. The first of which is to apologise for lack of updates. This week has been hectic - both from a work perspective (yes, I know I'm supposed to be on holiday, but I've been putting in at least 4 hours work a day), and a social perspective (yes, I was only helping to entertain one person, but it's harder than I always imagine).

During the week, I've been busy working on some websites as part of a new venture into website design. I seem to be able to do it, and certainly have a good understanding of what makes a good design, so it has become a second venture alongside my internet retail enterprise, which has yet to start. I will probably start up a secondary blog where I can "talk web", and it may just be interesting. I found this blog of another web-designer, actually not far away, who seems to be doing ok. His sites seem ok, but he's making a good move in going CSS. It's far more accessible to those less able to view the web.

During the week I made another three cakes. I made the flourless chocolate orange cake again (originally from Esurienties Blog) - and I made it twice, one for me, and one for my Dad who's wheat intolerant. Last time I made a hash of the ganache, but this time I put it in the fridge for about 30 minutes prior to spreading it and it worked much better. Unfortunately, I'd missed a few pips and they were a little bitter when you came across one. Anyway, here's a picture of the better one:

Flourless Chocolate Orange Cake

On Friday my wife and I went out and lay on the sunloungers and tried to get a moon-tan. In fact, we were watching the Perseid meteor shower that happens every August. It happens because the earth passes through the trail that the Comet Swift-Tuttle has left in space. It's called the Perseid because the centre of the meteor shower (where all the meteors appear to originate) is in the constellation of Perseus. This is in fact the direction the Earth is travelling through space. We saw about 10 meteors and a similar number of satellites, including some that were spinning causing a flashing effect as the Sun glinted off them. I took some photos, but didn't catch any meteors. Here's a nice photo of Cassiopea (the W-shape top middle) and Perseus (the arc of stars underneath):

Anyway, we've just got back from convoying my Mother-in-law back to the Severn Bridge, from which point she is able to find her own way home to Monmouth. It was a very nice day today, so I took some photos. In fact, on my 256Mb card I can only take 44, and I took all 44. Here's some nice ones:

It's "Combine" season and there's alot of churned up fields around, which actually make nice photos.

The Severn Bridge was opened 8th September 1966, but has now been augmented by a lower, longer one. I still prefer the old one. It's like our very own version of the Golden Gate Bridge.

At the Severn Bridge, the new Moto services have been built in front of the old ones, that are now offices. The old spy-scopes are still there, but unusable.

There's my lovely missus watching over the lethal straits of the River Severn. The River Severn effectively ends here at the Severn Bridge and becomes the Bristol Channel.

On the northern side of Bath, there's a small town called Pennsylvania, and from there you get a great view over Dyrham Park and towards Wales. This is what the Severn Bridge looks like from there.
[incidentally, the mountains in the background are around the Trellech area and are approximate 24 miles from where I took the photo!]

Bath is a beautiful old Roman town, and I've driven around it so many times on my way to Wales. I'm glad I made the stop to take some photos of this lovely place.

Nearer home, there's more hay bales. I stopped and headed out into a field to get some other harvest shots. It's a shame all this harvesting gives me a fever!

There'll be more photo intensive posts on their way, as I've just been out getting photos of the current state of our gardening!

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Busy - This is a holiday?

2005-08-07T11:51:00.000+01:00

I've been really busy in the last couple of days getting this website I'm working on going, and I'm much happy with it. Unfortunately, of course, it means things like my blog have been rather neglected.

Unfortunately, I'm off to Wales for 2 days to collect mother-in-law, and as internet connectivity at mother-in-law's house is nae better than a sending a floppy disk by post, so it's back to being quiet here.

For those who don't know, I also have a photography blog where I post photos I've taken - although these are not your snappy "here's my veg patch" photo. Talking of which, when I get back I'll update on my veggies, as I'm pretty chuffed at what's happened so far. We've got broccoli, tomatoes, beans, beetroot and chilli all growing! Yay! The pumpkins are trying to take over the world.

Anyway, just cleared much of a pile of tree cuttings, with some early morning trips to the dump, tightened the fan belt on my car ready for its trip to Wales, and now we're almost ready. Just a spot of lunch, and then we're off.

Have a good Sunday and Monday.

Busman's Holiday

2005-08-05T10:28:00.000+01:00

It's been a bit of a busman's holiday for me, to be honest, but that's not to say I'm not enjoying every minute of it. At least I'm not under the pressure of "the boss". It's all for my own gain. I've been doing some web-design work for my Salsa teacher, and I'm quite please with how it's going. We cycled over to her house yesterday and she gave us the text to put on the website and some photos to scan in. It makes my job quite a bit easier.

At lunchtime there was a ring on the door, and I went to see who it was and all that was there was a brown parcel. I love brown parcels and I was doubly excited as I knew this was my new macro flash that I'd been waiting for for a couple weeks, and it was replacing my old broken one. Of course, I went straight out and did some photo taking, before returning to do some work on the web-design.

I suspect today is going to end up a very similar day, although Daisy and I might go into town and spend some WHSmith vouchers that I've had hanging around for far too long :o)

War of the Worlds

2005-08-02T13:56:00.000+01:00

Last night we went to the cinema for the first time in ages. We went to see Tom Cruise's new film, War of the Worlds. Well, it's not all that new anymore, but it's still his latest. The story is based on the The War of the Worlds classic novel my H.G.Wells. The premise of the original story was that martians (beings from Mars) were watching us and decided it was time to take over the Earth. They landed in big saucers that grew three legs and destroyed much of mankind. However, they then ended up being killed by bacteria that they were unable to see from space. It kind of ends up as an analogy of they way they were studying us and the way that we study bacteria.

Anyway, the film builds upon a previous film, The War Of The Worlds [1954], and the brilliant musical version by Jeff Wayne.

My first impressions of the film is that is wasn't as good as I hoped it was going to be. I think this is partly to do with the differences between the original story and the new one. But that's not to say it wasn't a good film.

I won't go into lots of detail about the differences because although they end up being a tad confusing for someone who knows the original story, they are basically asides to the new film. In fact, the new film is only very vaguely based on the original, in my opinion. There were some small plot errors (such as how some people were using video cameras and there was a working car when the alien's EMP apparantly stopped everything electrical working - broken or not), but the main plot was coherent, although much more of a "blast"-fest than many of Spielberg's usual heart-warming stories. The ending was typical Spielberg cheese, though.

I'm really interested to see how the Pendragon version that's nearing the end of its production will turn out. It's a very authentic version of the original story (set at the turn of the century for a start). However, that's not to say you shouldn't go to see this new movie. It's clearly well made and a good no-brainer. I particularly loved the beginning where the EMP storms arrived and everyone was watching. It evoked the feeling I get every time a thunderstorm is near me.

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Whale Rider

2005-07-30T19:03:00.000+01:00

Last week my wife came into work with me and went off into Southampton to spend her Virgin Megastore vouchers (there's no Virgin Megastores nearer than that!) that she'd been given for her birthday in January, I think it was. When she came back and I asked what she'd got I was a bit concerned that her selection of a box-set of 3 "world cinema" films might not be entirely my cup of tea. We watched one of these - Whale Rider (imdb.com) - on this wondefully lazy holiday afternoon.

It's been over 20 months since I last used my Dolby Digital amplifier, and it's one of the reasons I've not watched so many films in the last year. It irks me that the sound quality is poor when I listen only through the TV. So I bothered today to slack a few wires across to the speakers. I'd been waiting until we decorated the room to lay them in properly, but decided to just put them up for now.

This certainly increased my enjoyment of the film. However, the film itself was very impressive. I really enjoyed it. It was by no-means your usual Hollywood no-brainer affair. It was romantic, beautiful and heart-warming. The film revolves around the coming together of Maori values and traditions and the pressure of modern life. The lead character, Paikea, was played perfectly by the incredibly talented Keisha Castle-Hughes, backed up by a great perfomance by Rawiri Paratene as Koro the old traditional grand-father.

I think what I liked most about this film was it's lack of pace and subtle direction. It took me away to a wonderfully photographic part of the world and into another culture, although somehow grounded with modern living. I always wanted to visit New Zealand, and this film has just strengthened that wish. The DVD is good too, with lots of interesting extras, and in a box set of 3 for £14.99, it's even better value.

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At Last!

2005-07-29T17:54:00.000+01:00

At last - it's seems to have taken ages to come, and now it's here it'll rush by in an instant (sounds like sex?) - but I'm at last on holiday!

The talk I did went ok, mainly because no-one much turned up - it is Friday afternoon after all - so it was pretty relaxed. I could sit down, and didn't have to preach. It was rather off-putting that they were preparing our department's barbeque and storing the ready-made food in hot-trolley things in the same room. The smell was gorgeous. Perhaps I'd have gone if I'd remembered about it, particularly as we're not salsa-ing tonight, but there you go.

Ahhhhh.. bliss :o)

Hour to go

2005-07-29T12:37:00.000+01:00

Oh well.. only one hour to go to my presentation. After my presentation I think I'll slack off and then I'll be on holiday! Yay!
I hate presentations... the butterflies in my tummy are going.. oh well... think positive and all that...

Titchy

2005-07-28T12:09:00.000+01:00

Some more of my sunflowers have come out. One of them couldn't have been more pokey if it tried.

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sunflower

Presentation

2005-07-28T12:01:00.000+01:00

Tomorrow I've got to do a talk to some summer interns that have been working in my department. They're only there for about 6 weeks, some of which has already passed, so I'm giving a talk to give them an insight into how the small things they've been working on relate to the wider context of what we do. In fact, my talk's not quite as vague as that, as I've just got to talk about the project I worked on for 2 years - what it did, how it was designed and stuff. Still, it doesn't mean I'm looking forward to it. In fact, giving talks is one of the many things I hate about my job. I'm not good at it, and I don't like doing it. One good thing is that at least tomorrow is the last day before my 2 week holiday!

Salsa Party

2005-07-28T10:49:00.000+01:00

Had great fun at the salsa party on Tuesday evening. Turned up on time at 7:30 with all our goodies. As we got there a load of people we didn't recognise were dancing some strange dance. As it turned out it was our teacher's daughter and her dance group preparing a dance to show us all. We laid out our wares with much oohing and ahhing from the people who had turned up. The party quickly got started with our teacher making us salsa dancers do a demonstration to all the non-salsa people who seemed to have turned up. Unfortunately only half of our class has yet arrived, so it was rather embarrassing to be up there strutting our stuff on a nearly empty dancefloor. Various other dances were taught and danced, including a cha-cha-cha, a line dance, and even bollywood. I even got to go up the front with teacher and show off my indian head wobble that I studiously perfected when I was watching Jerry Springer immitating the "Speak to the hand girl coz the face ain't listening".

As promised here are a couple of pictures of people enjoying my biscuits and Dayzee's cakes (ooh err missus).

Much food and Wine - Actually everyone's ignoring our biscuits (just behind the cups) in this picture!

Pete - despite his face, he did enjoy them and now wants to move in with me.

Linda - one of our teachers taking her first bite of paradise.

After "da party" we headed down the pub for a quick pint before flopping into bed rather knackered!

Oh, just trying out a new plugin for the Firefox Greasemonkey plugin that lets me add Technorati tags.

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Biscuits and Cakes

2005-07-26T12:57:00.000+01:00

Well, last night my wife and I spent alot of the evening cooking. It was perhaps a little extreme but for tonight's salsa party, to signify the start of our teacher's 2 month holiday, I made some biscuits - as requested by Garry and Biscuits (of course) - and Dayzee made some fairy cakes topped with a creamy butter-icing.

The recipes for the biscuits I made are already online, so with a nod to Tim Berners-Lee I figured I should just link to them. Firstly I made Chocolate Chip Ginger Biscuits, from Delia Smith's Website. Everything Delia puts down as a recipe will work for Mr.Layman in Mr.Layman's kitchen, and these biscuits are yum-diddly. I've made them before, so I haven't yet tried any of the ones I made last night, despite the temptation to do so. I also made Chocolate Chip Peanut Butter Cookies which are much softer biscuits, and much richer. These are absolutely gorgeous and I've made these 5 times now, and can never get enough of them. Dayzee made Fairy Cakes, although unlike this recipe she coated them in a luxurious butter icing from Cakes & Cake Decorating by Angela Nilsen, Sarah Maxwell and Janice Murfitt (I should get commission on sales of this book!). Her visionary plan was to slice the tops off the cakes and place them upright in the icing, so they look like butterfly wings. However, they didn't rise quite enough and a brave attempt ended in us sharing the mangled masterpiece. The other cakes were content with their white, round toupé.

From left to right: Chocolate Chip Ginger Biscuits, Chocolate Chip Peanut Butter Cookies, Butter-Icing Fairy Cakes

We'll take them all to our party, tonight, and maybe there'll be some photos of people scoffing their faces tomorrow.

FactoBrunt again

2005-07-26T12:56:00.000+01:00

It's easily lunch time now, and I've only just noticed I've been wearing my jumper inside-out.

Clock Throwing

2005-07-25T15:04:00.000+01:00

Doesn't time fly when it's the weekend? Why don't the weekdays fly by in a whoosh of general relaxation too? I really do regret the way that the 5 days from Monday to Friday seems to take an eternity to pass me by, and Saturday and Sunday barely register during a blink.

I spent this weekend busily rewriting the code for the webpage that will be my business. I had written a generic front to it once before but came to my senses last week and realised it looked a bit shit. So, this weekend I went all out and made it look alot nicer. In particular I spent much effort ensuring that the HTML code was "semantic" - that is, the code is simple HTML and contains no more than is necessary to describe the information I'm trying to purvey, and all the "pretty-pretty" is done in the CSS stylesheets. The reason for this is that visually impaired people use thingies known as screen-readers (like JAWS) that will speak the webpage to them. Navigating a badly written page using a screen-reader is probably like trying to navigate the remnants of programs recorded on a VHS tape. I'm making sure my webpage is a DVD.

This was initially spurred on by the fact that I've eventually gone and smiled sweetly at various "professionals" at the post-office and bank branches, who have peered at my passport and certified that I am who I say I am. This should allow me to get my business bank account, which means I can get on to the next stage of getting an Internet Merchant Account. It also has the advantage that I can now go to Makro and get our household stuff at decent prices; particularly the gallon drums of ketchup I get through in no time. Actually, they're about 1/3rd of a gallon, but it wouldn't have sounded so good.

It's been a pretty crappy day at work so far, mainly because I'm rather too tired to actually think, and being as that's what I'm paid to do, being a researcher and all, it's been pretty unproductive. As I have a dwindling motivation for doing my work, I think I might muster up some interest in doing more to my webpage. The wonder of ADSL means I can work at home from work, as well as working at work from home.

I don't know what I'm going to do with myself tonight now the Tour De France has finished. I guess I need to make some cakes or biscuits for tomorrow night's salsa party.

Unfitness

2005-07-22T13:09:00.000+01:00

Damn, I'm unfit. Unfit for exercise, that is, rather than unfit for purpose, whatever my purpose might be.

I made my mate a birthday card this morning and decided to bike it round to his place, about 1.5 miles away. It's relatively flat, except for the sharp ascent right near their house. So I managed to power my way along to this hill but cracked about half way up it. It's not a long hill, either. I crawled my way up it in a pretty low gear, dropped off the card and headed back. It was great coming back down the hill, but hitting the flat again, I realised I had expended most of the energy I left with and I trundled along the main road at not much more than 10mph. Strangely I found the long hill heading towards my road easy. Still, I still felt particularly cumbersome and pathetic as I constantly compared myself to the great Lance Armstrong, who's about to win the Tour de France. Now I'm sitting at home attempting to recover, dizzy and with flickering vision. I think I overdid it.

Pumpkins and Butterflies

2005-07-22T11:27:00.000+01:00

Our pumpkins have come into flower, and I thought you might wanna see. They're pretty big now, and are covering a large area of ground. I'm really quite excited by it. I put my hand in the shot for a bit of scale.

I just been outside doing a patch of emergency gardening; I was outside and noticed that there was lots of holes in our brussell sprouts. They had looked good last night. When I looked I saw a snail nestling in the centre of one. I threw it out, but as I was getting it I noticed a strange patch on one of the leaves. It was a perfectly laid out grid of eggs! Not far from it was a caterpillar. I squashed tha caterpillar and rubbed the eggs off. When I turned over other leaves there were other patches. And on the broccoli! I rubbed them all off (at least, all the ones I could see) and squashed another 5 caterpillars. Must be the time of year for butterflies and moths to lay. Gotta keep an eye on that otherwise they'll eat the whole patch!!

Stumble Upon

2005-07-20T22:04:00.000+01:00

For anyone out there who doesn't use Firefox yet - you should. Go get it now. The reason? Well, apart from all the various security arguements that are circulating, Firefox has a most wonderful extension that adds a button to your toolbar. This button does one thing - it takes you to a random place on the internet. Well, almost random. A random place that other people have considered interesting.

And there's some funny places out there. Try these for a chuckle.

However, this is just a bit strange, if pretty clever.

And, when you're done...

Nikon D70 & Vivitar 283

2005-07-20T09:54:00.000+01:00

I've been meaning to do something for a long time, that I eventually got around to today. I read, with some horror, on some forum somewhere that the Vivitar 283 flashgun can fry the latest digital cameras if it is used with it. This scared the hell outta me thinking that I might've put the flash onto my camera not knowing such knowledge. Some of the older 283s can supply over 600volts at the flash contacts which the latest, delicate digital cameras just can't cope with. I know I only bought mine about 8 years ago so wasn't sure if it was going to fry my camera or not. The only way was to check it.

Using the information here I measured the trigger voltage on my flash. Thankfully it topped at about 12 volts which is apparantly very safe for the latest cameras (which I've heard can accept about 250v). With some trepidation still, I tried it out and thankfully it works a treat. That's one less thing to worry about. I guess I just need a shoe to pc sync adapter now, so that I can avoid red-eye when using it.

Dangerous Thoughts

2005-07-19T15:50:00.000+01:00

Sometimes dangerous thoughts start rushing through my mind; dangerous thoughts like the one I'm having now. In fact, I've had this one a few times before and it's less the idea of it, which is a common well-trodden path, but more the anger and rebellion is begins to build within me. My simple thought is this: Why do we spend so much of our lives working? Simple, but it builds in me a rebellion that almost tips me over to the "Fuck it! So I won't" field where that grass is always greener.

Some people like working, sure, and good luck to them. But why do so many of us shaft our lives apart with hours upon hours of the dullest and most tedious things we could possibly think of doing? Of course, money plays a role in this, and where would we be without it? Probably fitter and less crowded by motor vehicles - that's where. But, let's assume money's here to stay, then why don't we all just do a job we enjoy? Is it because there would be no refuse collectors, or sewage plant managers, or cashiers at my local supermarket?

I always end up going through this brain dump only to realise people seem to have to do shitty jobs. However, I am determined that one day I will be in, at least, a less-shitty job working for myself (where I can make it as shitty as I like). Time to dig into that suitcase of courage and press on the pedals to make it to the next summit on the climb up Mount Paradise.

Marbled Peanut Butter and Chocolate Cake & Wheat-free Chocolate Orange Cake

2005-07-17T10:43:00.000+01:00

Yesterday was a big baking day for me. I made 2 cakes in the afternoon. As my Dad had been so kind on Friday night, I decided we should bake him a nice cake - however, he's wheat intolerent, so it was with glee that I noticed Esurientes had posted a nice chocolate orange cake that didn't use flour. More about this after the marble cake recipe.

The flourless cake requires the boiling of 2 oranges for about 2 hours, so while that was happening I went ahead and made the peanut butter marble cake. Again, it's from Cakes & Cake Decorating by Angela Nilsen, Sarah Maxwell and Janice Murfitt. If that first picture whets your appetite for baking, then here's the method.

Ingredients

115g chocolate, chopped
225g butter or margarine
225g peanut butter (smooth or crunchy)
200g granulated sugar
200g light brown sugar
5 eggs
275g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
¹/₂ tsp salt
120ml milk
50g chocolate chips

For the glaze:

25g butter or margarine
25g smooth peanut butter
3 tbsp golden syrup
1 tsp vanilla essence
175g plain chocolate
1 tbsp water

Preheat the Oven to 180^oC and grease a ring mould. It's lucky I'd bought a big ring mould as this recipe makes alot of cake mix.

Melt the chocolate in a "double boiler" - that is in a bowl suspended above a saucepan of simmering water.

Place the butter (or marg.), peanut butter and sugars in the bowl of a food mixer, or in a large enough bowl to use a hand whisk, and beat until light and creamy (about 3 to 5 minutes). One at a time, add the eggs and beat each in well.

In another bowl, stir together the flour, baking powder and salt. Add the butter (or margarine) into the mixture alternately with the milk until just blended (don't over mix, as it will remove all the air from the mixture).

Split the cake mix into two and into one blend in the melted chocolate, and in another stir in the chocoalte chips.

Spoon the cake mixes into the cake tin one spoon at a time, running a knife through the mixture to create a marble effect. Don't let the knife scrape the sides or bottom of the cake tin, also don't over mix otherwise you'll lose the marble effect.

Bake the cake for 50 to 60 minutes until the top springs back when pressed lightly.

Cool in the tin for 10 minutes or so, then turn out onto a wire rack and leave to cool completely.

Once cool, make the glaze. Put all the ingredients into a saucepan and melt over a low heat, continuously stirring until well blended and smooth. Take off the heat and continue stirring. When slightly thickened pour over the cake allowing the glaze to run down the sides.

Here you can see the final marble effect in the cake. It was a very nice cake, and you can really taste the peanut butter, but not overpowering. The cake mix makes a huge amount which completely filled our rather large ring mould. However, I think we'll be definitely making this one again.

Once my marbled cake was finished I went ahead and make the flourless cake. It's very easy to make - basically just bung the cooled boiled-oranges into a food processor with some other ingredients and cook it. We had to go up my folks for tea, so I was hoping we could get it finished so Dad could have some. However, we didn't have time to make the topping, so we made that up my parent's house. I made one mistake though - and that's that I didn't leave the ganache (the topping) to cool quite enough before pouring it forth over the cake. It went everywhere. But it was still a lovely cake tasting very much like Terry's chocolate orange. I honestly don't think my Dad has had such a nice cake since he went wheat-free. The recipe is on Esurientes blog. Here's some pics of it:

Friday Night Blues

2005-07-16T18:07:00.000+01:00

Last night was our regular salsa night. Our teacher is going off on a 2 month holiday in a couple of weeks and before she goes she's throwing a little salsa party, so for this party she's trying to get us all doing a new routine. It turns out this new routine isn't a new routine made of old moves, but completely new moves. We must have learnt about 5 new moves last night, and it was all pretty quick fire. It was hot and humid in the room, but it was nevertheless good fun.

Quite often, after our salsa lessons, we go off to a pub called The Angel in Ferndown to cool down with some of the other guys from the class. And tonight was no exception. We chatted until it was throwing out time and we all dispersed into the carpark to head home. However, the fears I had as we left our salsa class were confirmed when my car wouldn't start.

It's been acting a little strange over the last week - the revometer stopped working and the charging light has been very subtley flickering at me, many a time forcing me to consider my own sanity at whether it was actually flickering or just a trick of the light. But as we left salsa the car grumbled a bit when it started.

"That's a bit odd", I said to Daisy. "I hope it will start after the pub."

Of course, it wouldn't. Completely dead. It was 11:40. I had no choice but to call my Dad, whose bedtime is never further into the night than 10pm. Like the selfless guy he is, he of course came out and collected us and my car would stay the night in the pub carpark.

Early this morning we collected some jump leads and headed back to the carpark where the car dutifully started first time while connected by the umbilical cord to my wife's car. I drove it to my parents, so tomorrow I guess I'll be helping my overworked (yet retired) Dad to find out what's wrong. Probably a knackered alternator.

Tenrils, Sunflowers and Dents

2005-07-13T22:20:00.000+01:00

I was out watering the plants the other night (which are coming along spiffing, incidentally) and I spotted that our pumpkin plants had begun to grown tendrils - just like Biscuits had.

Tendril things.

Not sure what they are for, as I know pumpkins aren't climbers but ground covering plants. That's why they needed 6ft of room to grow. Anyway, when I get around to looking them up in my wonderful Encyclopedia.

On a more positive note, one of my sunflowers has come into bloom! It's not anything like as big as it should be - all the others are still growing - but it seemed content with 5 foot and has come into flower. Very pretty it is too:

Golden Sunflower

Just for scale, you understand.

This evening, after watering our plants, my wife suggested I need to get rid of the mop that was growing all around my head (see previous photo). I am very glad to have my wife chop my hair for me - it saves a fortune! She uses a set of clipper things onto which you can attach combs that fix the cut length. She was merrily cutting away and thud the comb fell off. "Oops" I heard, and a hand was placed over the offending crime scene, as if to hide it from me. This is what she's done to my head... I've got a dent:

I'll have to rename myself Arthur.

New Monitor

2005-07-11T22:39:00.000+01:00

Oh my God, this has to be what the office workers in heaven use. It's awesome. I gotten my new monitor today (for half the retail price thanks to Ebay) and it's amazing. It's actually better than I thought it would be (strange thing to say, I know, but I've always found TFT monitors to be darker than CRTs, but this one certainly isn't). It's a 24" widescreen running at a resolution of 1920x1200, which gives arces of screen estate. Here's a pic:

Dell 2405FPW

You can see I've been going through some of my photos for various entries into the photo memes that run each week. I've entered the "Summer" competition at Pxite.com (pronounced pic-site) which was previously i-gizmo. I also entered a few others. I managed a joint-2nd in the most recent competition, "Fluffy", at Macroday.

Awww, shucks

2005-07-10T21:01:00.000+01:00

Just as I was getting into macro photography, and actually getting some use out of the ring flash that I bought quite a few years ago, it goes and gives up the bloody ghost. It cost £60, but, of course, the place I got them from don't sell them anymore... so... I need to get a new one and it'll probably be loads more expensive... perhaps I ought to just buy a better quality one. Bah

Hoverfly

2005-07-10T00:00:00.000+01:00

This morning I went up to my parents' place in the hope that my monitor would be delivered today - alas it wasn't... couriers tend not to work on Saturdays (or do B2B stuff only), so I was prepared for it not to arrive. However, I took the opportunity to take my camera up to my folks and snipe around their flowers for bugs to take pictures of. I was fortunate to see quite a few bugs I've not yet had the chance to take photos of previously.

In particular, I came across the stunning display of aviation by a hoverfly. These are a couple of the pictures I got (click the images to get a larger view).

Hoverfly sitting on a Marigold

Hoverfly in flight

I have set up another blog to which I post photos (almost daily). Due to a tendancy I have to sit with my feet curled over, this site is called CurlyToes Photography. Hope you'll drop in and leave me some comments on my attempts at photography.

Shopaholic

2005-07-07T22:16:00.000+01:00

I really must stop buying stuff. Well, maybe. I just bought myself a monitor. A rather nice monitor. It's a TFT and will replace my fine, but rather old, CRT. For an hour now I've been having the usual guilt attacks that spending so much money, basically unnessecarily because my old monitor is fine, is very bad. I could keep that money. Save it.

But what would I do with it then? Spend it, of course. So I might as well just spend it now, innit? It's not putting me in debt to buy this monitor. In fact, my account is still quite rosy. So, what's the problem?

Well, the problem is that my wife doesn't spend much money. She has almost no hobbies. I don't mind this, but it does make me feel bad that I spend so much money and she doesn't. I'm not sure if it's because I feel I should be saving (as it seems its something she believes in), or if it's because I know one day she'll have a big blow out, and I won't be able to help with it :o) I'm not sure I feel I'm spending our money, therefore using some of her share.

Anyway, whatever the reason for feeling bad, I've decided not to bother, as the deed is done. I should just enjoy the anticipation of receiving it.

Apple Crumble Cake

2005-07-05T23:06:00.000+01:00

This is a recipe from Cakes & Cake Decorating by Angela Nilsen, Sarah Maxwell and Janice Murfitt. I had bought a bunch of apples from the Co-op recently to make another Spiced Apple Cake, however, I spotted another recipe in the same book that I just had to try out.

Ingredients
For the Topping
75g self-raising flour
1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon
40g margarine
25g caster sugar

For the Base
50g margarine
75g caster sugar
1 egg
115 self-raising flour
2 apples; peeled, cored and sliced
50g sultanas

First things first - preheat the oven to 180 degrees and grease and line a cake tin (7"/18cm). I don't have a 7" cake tin so I used an 8" loose-bottomed one. It just meant that the cake was a little thinner and wider.

To make the topping sift the flour and cinnamon into a bowl and rub in the margarine until it resembles an ice sculpture of George Bush - or breadcrumbs if you prefer. Stir in the sugar. That's it.

Ice Sculpture of George Bush

To make the base, put the margarine, sugar, egg and flour into a machine and beat the hell outta it for a couple of minutes until it's smooth. That's it. Spoon it into the cake tin.

Get your apples and sultanas and mix them up a bit, and plonk them atop your cake base in your cake tin.

Sprinkle over the topping to cover the apples. That's it. That's really it. Just bung it in the oven for an hour.

When it comes out, leave it to cool in the tin for about 10-15 minutes before taking it out, and carefully removing the paper.

Just like mother's apple crumble, this cake is probably best served warm, and almost certainly best with oodles of hot custard!

Welsh Weekend

2005-07-04T19:51:00.000+01:00

This weekend we went back up to Wales to see my mother-in-law. A couple of months ago mother-in-law decided she was going to move down nearer us. She thought that to make her house more sellable she'd rip up the carpet and get some new furniture - which meant getting rid of the old stuff, of course.

However, 2 months later her house is still in that state, so visiting has come particularly uncomfortable. However, we did at least go and visit a number of sofa shops full of desperate salesmen hovering around the doors all trying to be first to pounce on the unsuspecting customers.

<welsh>"Hello, my name's Roger... come in, make yourself comfortable.. would you like a coffee?"</welsh>

We found some very nice sofas. I can certainly recommend the Alexander from DFS.

"Hi, how're you getting on? Our sofas come with a buy-now-pay later policy, and I'm sure we can do a deal for you."

Later, Mother-in-law would drag out of the poor salesman the actual deal they might be able to offer.

"Don't forget my name - it's Roger. I don't want you to forget because I gotta reach my targets."

Of course, Mother-in-law walked out of the shops leaving a trail of broken-hearted salesman behind. "I never intended to buy today - I like to do my research"

Anyway, we got back home just in time to see the men's final, and watch Andy Roddick get thouroughly Rogered. Not by a sofa salesman, though.

Wimbledon Watching

Yes, I had to watch it from the floor.

A Researchers Tale

2005-07-01T18:05:00.000+01:00

A researcher's work is never complete
being told what to do by academia's elite,
Sometimes its quiet with nothing to do,
the next its chaos with a deadline due.

When the end of a project is drawing near
paperwork looms, and it all ends up here,
I thrash at my keyboard 'til my hands ache
stopping only for an "Ebay search" break.

A late night ensues as the deadline nears
both the profs and the lab rats avoid their peers
Papers are written, documents made
code is published - hope it makes the grade.

The final report is due at noon
how has the deadline come so soon?
You'll chuck it together until it it shines like new,
and who gets first author? The prof - not you!

It's then back to "research" - drinking coffee, sitting around,
perhaps reading a paper, tweaking some code you've found
until the next deadline, the prof informs you
"It's noon tomorrow the main report is due."

Infestation

2005-06-29T14:42:00.000+01:00

This morning at breakfast Daisy spotted a tiny tiny little catepillar waddling across our dining table. I could barely see it, and had to move a bit closer.

"There's another", she said, pointing at the leaf of our rubber plant.

Sure enough, there was another one craning off the end of the leaf. As we watched, it leapt off and abseiled down towards our table. I was busy musing at the little thing lowering itself down, when Daisy shrieked.

On the ceiling there was a whole colony of them. It looked like a tiny dirt patch from normal level, but getting closer it was a swarm of around 100 of the things. There was another colony further over, and another.

Ewwwww

Under my microscope-like D70, you can see they're not at all nice. They were about 1-2mm long, and looked barely the width of a hair. We got rid of them with a good sucking of the Dyson.

The demise of the little rascals at the hose of the vacuum cleaner

Kingston Lacy

2005-06-28T20:19:00.000+01:00

I know it's Tuesday, but this happened Sunday. I thought I better catch up with some posts, as I'm getting a bit behind!

If you remember, I baked an apple cake and some biscuits and we headed off with all our picnic equipment to arrive at Kingston Lacy by noon. The morning looked like it might be a cool day, but by the afternoon the sun was beating down and it was hitting 25^oC again.

Kingston Lacy House

Kingston Lacy is a National Trust property that was once owned by the Bankes family whose previous home, Corfe Castle, had been ruined in a raid by the Parliamentary forces in 1646.

If you visit, you can look around the house, or just visit the gardens. I've been in the house many times and so with the consent of the friends we were meeting, it was decided we would just visit the gardens.

Awww, baby sheepy

We walked around a mile route that took us past the Japanese garden that they are introducing. Currently it is not a patch on a real japanese garden (like the ones we saw on our trip there last November), but it did look very pretty.

Was a hot day

We sat and ate our picnic (or at least, we ate some of it, as there was rather alot of it!) under the shade of a tree near the entrance to the formal gardens in which picnicing was prohibited.

Sundial in the grounds

We then took a longer walk through the woodlands to the south of the property, which was about 2 miles in length. It was a beautiful day for it, although I caught the sun on my [rather ample] forehead. My knee is almost back to normal now, although it's a little weak, so by the end my legs were aching.

It was a lovely day, though, and I can certainly recommend the gardens at Kingston Lacy for a nice wander around. They were pretty busy with people, and do cost £4 to get in (extra for the house), but they are great for photography :o)

I'll have an upset Carol

2005-06-28T20:05:00.000+01:00

I was rather upset to find out today that Richard Whiteley has died at the young age of 61. It seems he died of pneumonia having been admitted to hospital recently.

It's rather a shame that he died so young. Despite the fact that many people took the mickey out of him, it was clear he was a harmless guy with a funny aptitude for messing up puns. I saw myself in him. I reckon I am going to become what he was, maybe without the jackets, and probably not so successful.

It might be a bit unpopular, but I want to say I thought Richard was great. I think he would have been one of the nicer celebraties to have met.

MIT Survey

2005-06-28T18:18:00.000+01:00

Thanks to Biscuits I am now a statistic. I'm not sure what the survey's attempting to find out, but some of the questions are a bit badly worded. Particularly the bit where it chooses links off your webpage. Anyway, I'm a statistic. Take it yourself if you're a blogger and help some poor PhD candidate get his award!

Sage Fishcakes

2005-06-27T22:31:00.000+01:00

Well, in My last post I said I needed a sage recipe, so I made one. It's an alteration from a pretty standard cod and parsley fish cake recipe.

Ingredients

450g potatoes, peeled and diced
300g skinless fish fillet
Small lemon cut into slices
2 tbsp of dried sage
2 tsp of horseradish sauce
salt and pepper

For the coating:

plain flour
1 egg, beaten
75g breadcrumbs

Whizzing the bread (we made with the bread-machine) to make crumbs

First, cook the potatoes until they are soft. Put them in lightly salted water and boil them for 12-15 minutes. Drain them and mash them thoroughly.

Preheat the oven to 190^oC.

Put the fish into a saucepan and cover them with water. Put the lemon slices all over the fish to infuse them with lemon flavour. Bring the saucepan to the boil, reduce the heat and simmer for 5 minutes until the fish is cooked and tender. Drain well and flake the fish.

Add the fish, sage, horseradish sauce and seasoning to the mash and thoroughly mix it all together into a chunky paste.

Divide the mixture into 8.

The potato and fish mixture ready and divided

Line a baking tray with non-stick parchment paper.

Take each part of the fish paste and shape it into your favourite fishcake shape. Dust the cake with flour, dip it into the egg and roll in the breadcrumbs. This is easy to achieve if you have a small production line with the flour, egg and breadcrumbs in bowls next to each other, with the baking tray at the end.

Rolling the cakes in the breadcrumbs

Spray the cakes with low fat cooking spray (although we forgot and it just meant they didn't brown too much).

Ready for baking

Place in the oven and cook for 20 minutes.

Fish and Chips! Nothing better

Drying herbs

2005-06-27T18:57:00.000+01:00

When I was out the other day I was trimming our garden back so that it was actually possible to walk around some of the little grass paths. This involved cutting back a sage shrub that was getting a bit assertive in its bid to take over the garden. However, it seemed a shame just to chuck the bits I cut off, so I consulted the wonderful RHS Encyclopedia of Gardening and it told me how to dry the herbs for later use. They gave a number of options, but the quickest (and I'm always up for the quickest way to do chores) was to use the microwave.

First you wash the leaves and pat them down, so they're no longer wet. Lay them out on a sheet of kitchen paper.

Arrange the leaves on a sheet of kitchen paper

Bung them in the microwave for 2 to 3 minutes. Because of the way microwaves work, this will remove all the moisture from the leaves leaving them crispy and curled up. They will then easily crumble between the fingers.

Crumble the leaves

The book suggests you should keep them in a dark glass jar in a cool, dry place. I'm not sure what's with the dark-glass bit, but we have loads of really small tupperware-like tubs that are no good for anything else, so we're using one of those.

A pot of ready to use, dried sage

Now we just need a recipe that uses sage!

Spiced Apple Cake

2005-06-25T21:53:00.000+01:00

Spiced Apple Cake

Here's the cake I just made. The curry was also very nice :o)

Busy day

2005-06-25T20:50:00.000+01:00

It's supposed to be a Saturday - today's been busier than a regular work day.

Although I got up late (despite an early night) we got straight to work. We headed out to Wimborne to do some shopping. I was pleased that we decided to utilise the local green-grocers rather than to kowtow to the big supermarkets. However, we still needed to utilise Somerfield, as there was some stuff that we needed that only they do. We took a load of old clothes to the Help the Aged charity shop, and we bought our first Christmas present for my sister! Now that's forethought.

We headed home and scoffed the lunch we treated ourselved to and, after seeing the end of the Federer-Kiefe Wimbledon match, we headed back out to our local gardening supermarket, Haskins. There we bought a bird-seed dispenser that the squirrel won't be able to chew to bits, as well as buying some organic tomato feed and a hoe.

I used the hoe when we got back home to weed the veggie patch and it's awesome compared to the rake I was using before. And it only cost £10. I planted out some runner beans that have sprouted, and then cut the grass and trimmed alot of overgrown bushes and trees. Daisy was out helping to weed the lawn.

Tomorrow we are off to meet some people we know off the internet (IRC pals). We're off to Kingston Lacy house, a National Trust property nearby. We have planned a picnic, although I don't think the other guys know yet. So when we came in Daisy made some sugar-puff chocolate crunch things, and I started on dinner. Tonight we're having a chicken and vegetable curry from the Weightwatchers Time To Eat book. Once that was cooking (takes 1 hour) I began on a spiced apple cake from Cakes & Cake Decorating by Angela Nilsen, Sarah Maxwell and Janice Murfitt! The curry will be ready any minute, then I'll eat that and go bake some biscuits.

I can't wait to go to bed and have a rest!! At least all this exercise has helped my knee loosen up.

Storm

2005-06-24T09:10:00.000+01:00

The weather in the UK has been glorious for the past week. However, due to the weather systems we get over here glorious weather always ends with a bang, and I love it when it does.

Last night was no exception. I was out applying the slug nematodes to our vegetable patch last night and was also admiring the clouds in the sky. There was a layer of alto/cirro-stratus (very high blanket cloud) which the Sun was stuggling through to cast a strange pinky-yellow hue over the garden. Underneath the stratus, cumulus clouds were building. This is pretty unusual and usually signifies a storm, which seemed even likelier considering how humid it was.

Soon after I heard a faint rumble.

"Was that thunder?", I asked Daisy.
"Didn't hear it."

I moved round the house and could see a dark ominous cloud sitting on the horizon. The butterflies in my stomach began to flap. I love storms!

Storm building in the south-west.

Later that evening, as we were off to bed, Daisy was locking up the doors and said "woo scary, lightning". I leapt out of my chair, although I didn't plan on taking photos unless the storm was producing a decent amount of lightning. I quickly headed out the door, and a cloud-to-cloud fork flickered across the sky. Whoooooooaaa. I had to get my camera and stuff.

I gathered my camera and snapped it onto my tripod, flinging the legs out to their fullest extent, as quickly as I could. I rushed outside and began snapping.

Daisy was a bit frightened for me being out in the storm, but it just gives me a massive buzz. There's really nothing like it. Particularly when you know you've just got a good photo. At least I only have to wait a few seconds to find out, and not a week.

Wrath of the gods.

This actually brings me to make an observation about digital cameras, and their night-time exposure capabilities. At the end of a long exposure (that photo above was 20 seconds) the camera has to read all the charge off the CCD and create a picture from it, and this can take a long time. On my D70 this can take about 15 seconds for a 20 second exposure. This means that if you shoot continuously, you're only actually capturing pictures about 60% of the time. This can be important in the situation of a lightning storm! I must've missed about 3 good photo opportunities because my camera was busy flashing "Job nr" at me, as it compiled the previous picture. The solution this this is to have 2 cameras and while one's reading the image, the other can be capturing - although that might be a bit over the top :o)

[Edit 27th June 2005: I've since read that this is due to the noise reduction systems. If you take a 20 second shot, the camera takes another 20 second shot with the shutter closed (effectively a black photo). This shows up any 'hot pixels' on the CCD, which it then subtracts from the original 20 second exposure. It also applied a light median filter to the image. You can get around these by turning the camera off during this second exposure. The camera has already stored the original exposure, so there's no worry about losing your image. I found out this information from Christian Buil's page about D70 astrophotography.]

When it began to rain I went back in (with a little friendly persuasion), but I didn't want to stop taking photos, so I went into the lounge and took some through the lounge window.

Storm watching, undercover

Eventually I got tired and had to retire to bed, but my heart was still pounding with the adrenalin and it was hard to get to sleep, particularly after I asked Daisy why she was in bed fully dressed, and she said to me, "If the house gets hit and burns down I won't be outside in the nude."

Chocolate Chip Peanut Butter Cookies

2005-06-21T21:45:00.000+01:00

Chocolate Chip Peanut Butter Cookies

Tonight, as my leg is getting better enough to walk around on, I decided to celebrate by making some chocolate chip peanut butter cookies. These are super yummy - nice and soft (ideal for those with delicate teeth) and very chocolatey. If you use diet chocolate, diet brown sugar and diet peanut butter you might be able to make them low calorie, but I doubt it.

Ingredients

125g soft margarine
1/4 cup (~60g) of smooth peanut butter
1/4 cup (~60g) of crunchy peanut butter
1 cup of brown sugar
1 egg
1/4 cup of cocoa
1/2 cup of plain flour
3/4 cup of self-raising flour
250g plain chocolate

Method

Preheat oven to 180^oC.
Grease 2 baking trays.
Cream together the margarine, peanut butter and sugar into a large mixing bowl.
Add the egg and mix well.
Combine the plain and self-raising flour with the cocoa.
Chop up the chocolate and mix into the mixture.
Take teaspoons of the mixture and roll into balls. Place them on the baking trays and press with a fork.
Bake for 12-15 minutes until they crack on top.
Leave on the tray for 5 minutes to cool, before placing on a wire rack.

Star Wars Episode III - Revenge of the Sith

2005-06-21T09:25:00.000+01:00

Having witnessed the Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, I was expecting Star Wars Episode III to be subtitled "Revenge of the Shit", however, having seen it on Saturday I was pleasantly surprised.

Despite actually enjoying the film, I do believe the film has some drawbacks. First up, I don't believe the film would make much sense to anyone who hasn't seen either the first film they made (Episode 4), or the last films they made (Episodes I and II). It is very much a part of the larger vision. Also the film is perhaps 80% action, which some people might find boring. Again, I think this is because it's part of a plot that is spread over 6 films, so it loses some of its flow.

However, if you have seen any of the other Star Wars films mentioned above, this film will probably come as a very good suprise. If you saw Episode I or II, you'll enjoy the action sequences which were lacking from the first two. The visuals really are stunning; particularly the cityscapes which contain so much detail that I really just wanted to have a browse around (a screensaver based on these would rock!). If you have seen Episode 4 (the first film they made nearly 30 years ago in 1977), you will suddenly get a fuller picture of how Darth Vader came to be as he is, and how Luke and Leia ended up apart. The cues into the old films, such as the introduction of Darth Vader's generals, was a master stroke. Personally I believe Anakin's turn to the dark side came a bit quickly (Palpatine: Come to the Dark Side, Anakin, and save Padmé; Anakin: Oh ok.), but I guess they wanted to keep this film firmly in the action genre.

After the film I wondered whether it would be worth Georgey Lucas remaking the other Episodes with the same people, but then I realised the only person in the old films, that might look different, was Obi Wan (ignoring minor characters like Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, and potentially the upgraded Yoda), so that was also pretty good foresight on George Lucas behalf.

Dislocation

2005-06-19T17:19:00.000+01:00

It's been a lovely weekend, this weekend. The sun is shining and the temperature touching on 28^oCelcius (82^oFahrenheit). Yesterday my wife ('Daisy') setup a flickr account (her photos here) and so suggested we could get up early (ish - it's a Sunday) and go for a walk at a nearby heathland. This would give her a chance to take some photos to put on flikr, and would potentially give me some food for my currently ravenous appetite for taking photos of bugs (more of those in another post).

So, off we went about 10 o'clock (told you - it's a Sunday!) and we drove up to the local heath, which is about 4 miles away. The car park is set amongst tall pine trees, and paths lead onto the heath and various small woodland areas either side. We walked into one of the woodlands on our bug hunt. Bugs seemed to be few and far between, but we got some nice photos of some fungi and ferns.

Fungi

Sun through the trees

Anyway, I came across this strange area where it looked like there'd been a small bonfire. A circle, a couple of meters across, cleared in the centre of the ferns, and the floor covered in ashes, and growing in the centre a very prickly looking thistle. The underneath of the surrounding ferns was visible - ideal for bugs, surely?

I ventured into the circle, scouring the undergrowth for any discernable movement which could be a bug that I haven't yet taken any photos of. There was a bunch of ants scurrying along in the corner, but no interesting bugs. Daisy had stayed on the main track and was examining some nettles, ten meters away. As I gave up, and headed for the exit of the circle, I decided I would probably tell her that there was no bugs in there, just evidence of an ant's nest near by.

Clearly, my mind was elsewhere, as I walked into the thistle, in the centre. It was VERY prickly, and I was wearing shorts. I spasmed sideways, and clonk, my knee exited from its rightful place and headed sideways. This HURT. I collapsed, screaming, onto the ashes, onto the ants, onto newly growing nettles. I dropped my new, expensive camera!

Although a bit of a blur, I continued screaming. I remember looking down to my knee, and see it looking all wrong - bits sticking out the wrong places. I must have instinctively grabbed it. I pushed it a bit, but it didn't budge. I pushed a bit more, and clonk it snapped back into place. That's a sound I will never forget.

Daisy came rushing around the corner. She held me, and put her leg as a pillow for me. I was still hurting a lot - crying like a wuss. She held my hand. She was shaking.

"Don't shake", I said. I didn't want her to be frightened. I needed her right then.

"It's ok", I said, "it's back in place, now. It'll be ok in a bit." The pain was easing a little, although I still couldn't move my leg from the position it was in. I was desperate to get up, but couldn't.

I lay there a while - maybe five minutes, I guess. I needed to move. I had to get up. Daisy helped me up and we hobbled slowly to the main path. The more I used it the better it became, although I couldn't put much pressure on it. Daisy gave me support.

A lady came along with some dogs and asked if I was ok. I recounted the story, and she kindly offered herself as a second crutch. I declined, as Daisy was doing a sterling job carrying all my camera equipment as well as me. We got back to the car and headed home, where I've been sitting all day.

I'm still hobbling, but it's feeling much better. It didn't swell at all, although the sting that the thistle gave me is still painful.

Something that struck me afterwards was that I have never (before then) screamed for my life. I always wondered what I'd do - how would I react to something bad happening to me? I cried out with a very loud "aaaahhhh" kind of sound, perhaps expectedly. Now I know.

My wife was wonderful too. She helped me so much, and gave me so much confidence that everything was going to be ok. I do love her so.

Knees are not supposed to go sideways. I don't think I will ever forget the clonk, or the mental picture I have of my knee all bent the wrong way. I think I may be working from home this week :o)

Too Young To Be Grumpy

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My Wife Joins Me

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Where did the Long Summer Days go?

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One of *those* evenings

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One of those evenings