All posts by Yvan

General

Mobile Media Ubiquity

Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.

I’m sitting on the train right now watching a bunch of 9 year old boys displaying their flashy mobile phones to each other. Thinking back almost 2 decades ago, when I was 9… change is interesting. If only they didn’t make the things speakerphone capable, I’ve never liked wearing headphones in public places but the alternative these days is listening to kids playing off their favourite pop and hip-hop artists against each other (backed up by constant PSP sound effects). If nothing else, we certainly live in a noisier world now. No music sounds good coming out of these devices with added screech and crackle and truncated range, but this isn’t just about listening to the music of course.

The 9 year olds were just replaced by a bunch of 12 year old boys who’re watching South Park on their mobile phones. Will wonders never cease?

I’m not complaining, I was late to enter the mobile market (2003) but my first mobile phone was an all-bells-and-whistles, touchscreen, 3G, Motorola A920 brick (now a less bricky A1000). I was able to watch videos on my phone before most people I know (and they’re mostly geeks) — back in Sydney I often used it to check out movie trailers before heading to the cinema. It’s not the newness of the tech that’s interesting, geeks have had this stuff for years, it is the sudden ubiquity. These kids don’t even have iPods anymore, they don’t need them.

I’ve noticed more and more people in the gym without iPods too, the same trend applies: they’ve been replaced by phones (it might be a different story in a trendoid gym in a trendier area). What has higher value, the supposed sexiness of an iPod or not having to carry around an additional gadget? Phones are getting sexier anyway. Thus the iPhone? There’s so much potential for wringing money out of these kids. Media/Games/Software … the hard part is getting them to pay rather than just working out how to rip everything off (it only takes one l33t kid to knock 100+ out of the market, and it isn’t hard to be l33t). The answer must be to make paying easier than ripping off, which is easy to say but the hard part is “how?”. The music industry seems to think this can be done by making the ripping-off harder; and they just move from one DRM total-failure to the next.

Produce

Beer and Cheese

Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.

Well, it’s happening — through time I’m finding things in the UK that fill in some of the gaps left from Sydney. One of these gaps is beer; cheese isn’t one, England thrashes Australia on the cheese front (I guess we have to give them a chance somewhere). This Saturday we did one of our trips into Borough Market and discovered some great beer while picking up some excellent cheese.

B33R

Two Beer Girl
Two Beer Girl

After our, now traditional, “three posh bangers in a roll” from the Stoney Street Café we noted the “porter” in “Wright Brothers Oyster & Porter House” for the first time. We had three great beers (two porters, one stout), at a slightly hefty price tag of 5-6 quid per 500ml bottle! Next time we’ll have to try some of the oysters and maybe the deep fried squid. There was a stand next to us, out the front of the premises, where a guy shucked oysters and generated mouth watering aromas by deep-frying squid for passers-by.

With porter on my mind (and in my belly) we wandered into the Utobeer stall in the market. Amongst their excellent range of beer was one of the porters we’d just had, along with as everything from stubbies of VB (hrm) to Chimay Bleu (mmm). We left with a small sample of beers to try, a bottle of the St Peter’s Old Style Porter we’d just had along with it’s Honey Porter and Cream Stout brethren (the oval bottles they use are very distinctive) and an Okell’s Aile Smoked Celtic Porter (because it sounded interesting). The over-the-counter prices for these beers is a rather more palatable ~2.50 each.

The St Peter’s beers, along with the nearby Brew Wharf are now on our “see, the English can make beer” tour of London. St. Peter’s also has a pub with their cask ales: the Jerusalem Tavern, in Clerkenwell (EC1). We’ll be checking it out soon!

Taking a quick detour; far out of London in Alyesbury, I’ve recently been led to Hop Pole (“Aylesbury’s permanent beer festival“). A pub with a great range of cask ales on tap, many from the local area. The Vale Pale Ale and the Grand Union Honey Porter are both excellent. Unfortunately this discovery comes near the end of the time I’ll be in Aylesbury regularly (after more than a year), a bit late! If you ever happen to be there and after a beer, the Hop Pole Inn is the place to go (it’s on Bicester Road, only about a 10 minute walk from the town centre).

CH33S3

Cheese is a different matter. The cheese situation here in the UK was clearly superior to that in Australia from the start. Even in Tesco (like Coles) you can get a great range of local and continental cheese. Sheep, buffalo, goat, even cow. Unpasteurised and pasteurised. Soft, hard, old, and mouldy. That’s just Tesco. My first unpasteurised Camembert was an education in it’s self, and after a year the lesson has only just begun.

As I’ve already covered, we get some great parmesan from Borough Market. As well as the parmesan people there are always many other stalls with great cheese; the luxurious, velvety Comté, the delicate and tasty Caerphilly (sold by authentic hairy Welsh gentlemen), the small stalls with 100s of different cheeses, and then there’s also the slicker Neal’s Yard shop on Park Street.

Cheese & Stout
Cheese & Stout

As well as our usual parmesan purchase we grabbed an exquisite unpasteurised Stilton from one of the stalls. Alas, I cannot remember it’s name, I can remember that it comes from Nottinghamshire (almost a “duh” is seems), can also be found at Neal’s Yard (but isn’t listed on their website), and tastes glorious. We just ate some of it with the St. Peter’s Cream Stout — one last thing to add: ner ner.

All the specialist cheese stalls (stalls which provide just one or two specific cheeses) have bits out for tasting, as does Neal’s Yard, so you don’t have to take my word on any of this. Get yourself to the market and eat cheese!

Uncategorized

InfoSec 2007 – London

Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.

[Written mostly after I left InfoSec on Wednesday, but not cleaned up and posted until Sunday — no rest for the restless.]

Phew, I just escaped from InfoSec. I have serious respect for the sales and business guys who manage to make these conferences a productive experience. I come at these things from a technical perspective and there just isn’t a good mesh between me and the “guys in suits”. Mostly because they want to try and sell me things and as soon as they realise I’m not in the business of buying things and, worse, work for a company that might want to sell them things they squirm. Of course, I’m “just a developer” so I guess I shouldn’t feel bad about this, at least I had some good discussions with people we already know.

In general InfoSec was an interesting show, there’s a heck of a lot to take in there but it’s all very high level (i.e. kindergarten-like talks on rootkits and malware by people I know would like to get into the details but have to tailor for an audience wearing suits). I think that overall the most useful aspect of the show is that you get a very good view on who’s out there, what they do and what their associations are. There’s also a lot of good indicators of what the business-mass is thinking. Right now it seems to be UTMs/Appliances — seriously, every damn company seems to have a range of security appliances these days. If they don’t have their own appliances they line a wall with all the appliances they OEM to. The other thing is a sudden proliferation of web/mail-security-as-a-service businesses. Hosted secure mail solutions everywhere (where we mostly just saw MessageLabs a few years ago). There’s an upwelling of external secure-web-proxy services too — essentially taking the technical overhead of Web/Mail security maintenance away from businesses.

On a work front I met some new developers from companies we’ve had dealings with. In fact, for me this was the most productive element. I learnt some things about people’s first impressions of our stuff, some thoughts worth feeding back to Sydney but nothing we’re not already aware of. It’s also great to meet people you’ve exchanged emails/IMs with but have never met, sometimes just for the surprise of how much they do not match the mental image you have built up! And then there’s the long conversations about search algorithms, and analysis, and similar fodder for geek conversation — something I don’t have as much opportunity for these days. But I must try to remember to keep away from topics along the lines of nuclear powered bicycles and zombies, even most tech geeks aren’t prepared for that stuff.

There were “booth babes” in abundance, so much for PC. The problem is that, while it’s all very well having an attractive woman handing out brochures and the like, it all falls apart if you try to discuss the products/technology with them. Initially I was naive enough to try this (hey, I haven’t been to many of these things), but gave up fairly early on. And what does this lead to? You begin to look at any female at a booth as little more than a pamphlet-stand, most likely including several who are actually sales/tech people representing their companies. I can’t say I have anything against a veritable suffusion of babes, but there is a time and a place for these things and I don’t think a security conference is it. I don’t even think that having to make up for large numbers of fuzzy to semi-fuzzy geeks and large Americans in suits is a good enough excuse.

I was feeling rather drained by about 16:00 so headed out to Seven Dials for a couple of double-espressos at Monmouth… ahh, great coffee. Now we’re having a decent feed at The Wellington on The Strand (they deep fry a good fish, and the Aberdeen Angus burgers are sufficiently meaty though a little plain). After this time to head home, report, then collapse.

Irregularities

Working Holiday -> Dependant Unmarried Partner

Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.

I’m putting this info online because in almost a year of sporadic searching for something definitive I found no useful answer to the question “Is is possible to switch from a Working Holiday visa to a Dependant (unmarried partner) visa whilst within the UK?”.

Note that this info is correct at this time (2007-04-18) but immigration law changes often.

So, the initial situation: I’m in the UK on a 5-Year (expiry in 2011) Work Permit visa sponsored by my current employer. At the time I got the visa Kat, my “unmarried partner”, and I did not have the required 2 years worth of documentation to prove we were partners (not required if you’re married or in a registered civil partnership). Thus Kat got a Working Holiday visa (2 years, work limited to 12 months) and she entered the UK on that, I on my Work Permit visa.

The drawbacks of this situation:

  1. I’m tied to working for the sponsor company (no immediate problem, but I’m planning ahead years).
  2. Kat’s visa is only 2 years and has work restrictions.
  3. After months of effort the Working-Holiday visa has proven a major roadblock to Kat’s attempt to get a decent developer job. One can always work in bars, yay, though the Poms haven’t got around to banning smoking yet (soon!:) so that’s kind of ruled out too. Kat should have trained up as a barista!

The obvious solution is for me to get an HSMP visa (no problem) and Kat to get a dependant visa (we were a bit worried about our patchy documentation, but this was no problem in the end). The main logistical drawback is that, in all our reading and even in phone-advice from the UK Work Permits office, it seemed Kat could only change her visa back in Australia. A process that’d take at least 4 weeks and require my passport (with the only workable solution being: I get my HSMP visa now, Kat stays in .au after our visit later this year, on my return to the UK I post her my passport from the UK, she applies for the dependant visa (AU$225), then gets to the UK ~5 weeks later).

It turns out that all the information we found, and even the initial advice received direct from the Work Permits department helpline, was wrong.

With my HSMP approved (a £315 process) it was time to do that actual visa step FLR(HSMP) to transfer your visa. You do not need to resubmit all the proof documents for (a £335 process — UK visas aren’t cheap). In filling out this form I noticed that there was no clauses that barred me from including Kat as a dependant unmarried partner. Curious about this I gave the Work Permits people another call and asked a more specific question: “I’m in the UK on a Work Permit and my unmarried partner is in the UK on a Working Holiday, can I include her in my FLR(HSMP) as a dependant?”. The answer: YES!

So this is what I did. Posting Work Permits the FLR(HSMP) with our passports and my HSMP docs in one 0.3mm thick folder and the “unmarried partner” proof documents in a 2.5cm thick folder (2 years is a lot of bills and bank statements).

Today, after a tense 4 weeks, our stuff came back complete with fresh UK residency visas (2 year, expiry in 2009, then we can simply get FLR renewals — after 5 years who knows, citizenship?).

One less thing on my worry-list. YAY. And we saved AU$225!

Unmarried Partner Documents

As an addendum the diagram here shows the documentation we provided the Work Permits department with to prove our relationship had “subsisted for at least two years”. We also provided a cover letter that gave a “brief history of us” type of summary.

A chart was knocked up using the Gantt Chart template in Visio, it worked rather well I thought. As much as we like to hate them, Microsoft do good diagramming and spreadsheet software — I have yet to find competitive OSS alternatives to these (though OpenOffice Calc is certainly getting there on the Excel front, I think it’s the charting that’s holding it back at the moment).

HSMP Documents

There isn’t much to say here. The documentation requirements for the HSMP are very clearly spelled out. I submitted original pay slips, ATO tax statements and bank statements for financial proof (and also UK work experience proof, since half the payslips were for the UK). For proof of qualification I submitted my original University of Sydney degree certificate and a letter from the University confirming my degree and also that it was taught in English (it is essential to have the English language proof, if you contact the USyd student services department they’ll look after this for you. Very efficiently in my experience! I assume other Universities will provide similar letters). Given my income, experience and qualification were sufficient for the HSMP this is all I needed, in addition to all the usual identity/age/etc proof.

You need this documentation to get an HSMP approval letter. Then, if you’re already in the UK, you submit an FLR(HSMP) to transfer your visa. You do not need to resubmit all the proof documents for this. However if you’re submitting an FLR(HSMP) for the second time (after your initial 2 year FLR(HSMP) period has expired) then you do need to submit all the HSMP proof documentation (but don’t have to go through the HSMP approval stage again, just the FLR). The FLR(HSMP) forms and guidance all clearly spell out the requirements for this.

Personally I don’t think the, typically rather expensive, services that do the paperwork for you are worthwhile. The most difficult thing is assembling the required documentation (and for HSMP this is simple compared to the unmarried partner proof) and using an agent wont make this part any easier. So you’re paying a lot of money for the services of an experiences form-filler. The main advantage you’ll get is that they’ll do it right and will probably have a clear idea whether or not you really qualify. Since the HSMP consideration fee is £315 and the visa transfer fee is £335 getting something wrong can be rather expensive!

Cooking

Carrot & Tomato Soup with Basil & Tarragon

Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.

Carrot and Tomato Soup with Basil and Tarragon: Output
Carrot and Tomato Soup with Basil and Tarragon

This easy soup is one for the tomato lovers. I’ve used tinned chopped tomato, but be very picky with tinned tomato and don’t just buy the cheapest. The tomatoes I use (Napolina brand) are 70% tomato by weight, in tomato juice with added citric acid (preservative) and that’s the entire ingredient list. It could be replaced with an equivalent weight of blanched and skinned Roma tomatoes and a couple of tablespoons of tomato paste, but I’m after low-effort here.

Use fresh tarragon if you can get it (to taste, maybe 2 or 3 tbsp of packed chopped leaf), and add it with the basil. The last time I bought fresh tarragon from Tesco what I got was not tarragon, I’m 100% certain of this, it didn’t look like tarragon and it didn’t have even slightly the right flavour!

Hunting

Carrot and Tomato Soup with Basil and Tarragon: Input
Input
  • 200g Brown Onion — peeled and diced
  • 25g Unsalted Butter
  • 400g Carrot — peeled, topped, and tailed
  • 10g (small knob) Ginger — skin scraped off and thinly sliced
  • 15g (4 cloves) Garlic — peeled and sliced
  • 1 (10g) Chicken Stock Cube
  • 1200g canned Chopped Tomatoes (in “Rich Tomato Juice”)
  • 3tsp (heaped) Dried Tarragon
  • 2tsp Black Pepper — fresh ground
  • 100ml dry White Wine
  • 25g fresh Basil — chopped

Killing

  1. In a large pot melt the butter and start frying the onion, with the dried tarragon, sliced ginger, and black pepper.
  2. Meanwhile peel/slice carrot as required and place in with softened onion (not browned!).
  3. Toss carrot with onion then pour in wine and let simmer away.
  4. Now add chopped tomato, stock cube melted in 500ml of hot water, and the sliced garlic.
  5. Put on very low heat and let simmer until the carrot is granny-cooked (30 minutes should do), then remove from heat and let cool.
  6. When cool enough that you could eat it without pain it’s time to emulsify!.
  7. First fine-chop the basil and stir through the soup, then blend to a smooth consistency in whatever sized batches fit your emulsifier.

Serving

Heat to desired temperature and eat, or package and fridge/freeze. I’d serve
this with some fresh chopped basil, a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil and a
dollop of natural yoghurt.

Carrot and Tomato Soup with Basil and Tarragon: +Beer!
Beer!

The serve to the right has all this except the basil, there’s a generous grinding of pepper on there though. The small serve (100g) of new potatoes adds a bit of extra fodder to this meal. They’re microwaved for 3 minutes, tossed in EVOO, pepper and a little salt and then browned under an overhead grill. The beer is Innis & Gunn — Oak Aged Beer. It’s taking a long time to find a decent variety of drinkable British beer and this is a new favourite — now if only the Poms sold decent beer by the case like we do in Australia!

Counting

A serving for me is around 300ml and this recipe makes 6 servings, but could probably make 8 if you prefer a less thick soup (add 1.2l of water instead of 500ml). Based on a serving being 1/6th of this recipe with a 2g drizzle of EVOO and a 20g dollop of natural yoghurt I’ve calculated this approximate nutritional information (thanks to gourmet, USDA and a few manual database entries). The essentials and highlights:

Thing Value
Energy 142 Calories
Carbs 20g
Protein 5g
Fat 6g
  Saturated 2g
Sodium 379mg
Dietry Fibre 4g
Calcium 153mg
Iron 2mg
Folate 35µg
Vitamin A 8598IU
Vitamin C 26mg

The potatoes and beer aren’t accounted for here. Around 70Cals for the spuds with 15g of carbs. Beer? That’s just getting daft.

Random

Goth Keating

Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.

I dream more often than I used to, or maybe it’s more that I’ve become better at remembering my dreams. The other night has to go down as the strangest for a long time, seriously strange.

My memory of the dream starts off with some flickering glimpses of some sort of legal proceeding involving Paul Keating and a woman who we know (I’m always intrigued how there often seems to be a taken-as-fact back-story in dreams, knowing things to be the case with no reason or experience of them) is his wife (though in reality this older blond woman certainly isn’t AFAIK, and is certainly unlike Anita, his ex). They’re sitting next to each other behind a simple desk and I think they’re being questioned. The woman is crying in some scenes. That’s about it for that thread.

The scene shifts in a patchwork manner, I think there might be a gap in my memory here but ultimately we come to our namesake. The viewpoint from one side of a busy room, a high-society soirée, women wearing colourful and extravagant gowns and men in three piece suits. The view focuses on the far side of the room and seems to zoom in on one figure — it’s Paul Keating wearing a single breasted suit. But there’s more, our Paul has full white face-paint on, heavy black eye-shadow and mascara, and blood-red lipstick. This is Goth Keating.

Some time passes, I’m not sure if this jumps or something happens — all I have is a sense of time passed.

We see Goth Keating exiting the venue hand on the shoulder of a young tan skinned woman of indeterminate origin. Unlike most of the women in the room she wears a very simple dress, though it has a glittering metallic sheen.

Now a sudden shift of scene.

It’s dark, Goth Keating is being chased by a large hairy man wearing a dirty polo top. We know this is because Paul’s been getting it on with his pursuer’s daughter, presumably the woman we saw earlier but this is not known as fact (no obvious family resemblance either). The scene is outdoors, green grass, low light (dusk I suspect) and some low stone walls reminiscent of the foundations of some ruined monastery.

Scene shift again.

We’re in a building. The architecture is known instinctively, we’re familiar with this building. It is octagonal (or thereabouts) with two, very high roofed, stories. It’s a giant lecture theatre (or something like a parliament of former times?), with a standing podium space in the centre and stadium seating on all sides. Lots of wood and wrought-iron. The second level of the building is a wide circular gallery providing entry to the top tier of seating, there are also small lecture rooms off the second level though I’m not sure how they fit into the physical space (they remind me of the little tutorial rooms between lecture theatres back in the Carslaw building at USyd). The outer wall of the second level features a huge barn door on each edge of the octagon. Why do I know all this about the building?

Immediately, in this new scene, we see Goth Keating running up the stairs to the second level, large hairy man not far behind. At this point things get skewed, there is an effect of the viewer (me) and Goth Keating merging. We’re seeing and experiencing from Goth Keating’s perspective now. We run around the upper level full circle, at some point the hairy man tears some piece of woodwork from a railing and throws it at us — it strikes us hard on the shoulder and we stumble. Next we round the bend of the hall and make for a barn door (is it open already? I don’t know) and leap through — to fall 20 feet to the ground and suffer a jarring impact, the knees and feet hurt considerably.

At a stumbling run we continue into the darkness and it’s at this point that I wake up, or the memory ends.

Analyse that one.

Uncategorized

Win32 Tab Completion

Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.

Here’s a little tip I picked up from a colleague. If you’re stuck in a Win32 world where the cmd.exe completion setting isn’t defaulted to enable tab completion (like on Windows 2000). Look here: CompletionChar.

To cut right to the important bit, run regedit and navigate to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESoftwareMicrosoftCommand Processor in here you’ll find CompletionChar and PathCompletionChar – change both their values to 0x09.

There are equivalent CURRENT_USERS entries too if you prefer not to do it system-wide.

This is probably only Win2k … I’m stuck in the ancient past here. 😉

Uncategorized

Prompt Insanity

Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.

My $PS1 is a creature evolved over the years, it amazes me to consider how much accumulated time I must have spent on this simple little critter. For the last couple of years it’s been pretty stable as the simple “u@h:W$” with some occasional colour. I’ve been through phases of executing commands in my $PS1 to add further data (don’t, it fucks with $?) and I have a custom $PROMPT_COMMAND to issue a terminal control sequence to put similar info in titlebars (where I execute a $(date …) to add a timestamp, this doesn’t bother $? though).

Yesterday I noticed a recurring problem… I keep loosing a $? that I’m interested in. Often because I go to another terminal and do something else while something executes, then I return and do something silly like “automatic ls“. Does anyone else do “automatic ls” I wonder, it’s where you run ls for no particular reason — I tend to do it every time I switch to another terminal, also if I’m just looking at an existing terminal and thinking my fingers seem to have a “background ls” function. It’s like looking around the room I guess.

Anyway, back onto the point. This little problem prompted me to redo my prompt and along the way find a better way to do the terminal title:

    ps1xt='[33[1;35m]$?[33[0m]' # Last exit code, magenta
    ps1us='[33[1;32m]u[33[0m]' # Current username, green
    ps1mc='[33[1;36m]h[33[0m]' # Current hostname, cyan
    ps1wd='[33[0;32m]w[33[0m]' # Current working dir (w is full, W is basename), dark green
    export PS1="[33]0;<$?>u@h:w(t)07]<$ps1xt>$ps1us@$ps1mc:$ps1wd$"

So, no more $PROMPT_COMMAND as the control sequence is embedded in $PS1 now (everything within the first […] group). This gives an added bonus of being able to simply use $PS1 substitutions for all the info. The only real difference between this prompt and what I had before is the addition of the <$?> at the start, so now my exit codes will always been in the terminal backlog! (Until I do something else automatic like a ^L.) Also added the $? to the title bar, which works well since I can see the code when I’m in another window frame this way.

One possible annoyance is the extra length of the prompt, the last thing you want is a prompt taking up overt character width. Two possible reductions would be to” 1) remove the u part, how often are you not sure who you are? 2) Make w a W so the CWD part can’t get too long so easily. Given the colour differences you could also remove the punctuation I guess, save yourself 4 chars. You could also stick a n in before the final $ and make a two-line prompt I guess, I used to have one like that (a long time ago when I first discovered PS1 and put everything but the kitchen sink in there).

A lot of people will hate the colourfulness, I hate it myself sometimes. The main function is that I use different colours for the h on different machines so I can very quickly recognise which machine I’m looking at. The rest of the colour is just for the sake of being garish.

<0>yseth@odysseus:~$ls -e
ls: invalid option -- e
Try `ls --help' for more information.
<2>yseth@odysseus:~$ls -e

“:;”? OR Re: Re: Prompt Insanity

Really, one of these days I might do something about comments.

Sometimes I do get upset at my long and garish prompt and blast it with PS1=’>’.

I hit the good old ‘arg list too long’ fairly often, dealing with very large HTTP corpora. I’m rarely in a corpus directory though so this has yet to break my auto-ls habit.

As for other shells, I’m not diverse enough in my shell usage to consider the world outside of bash. I would have thought that .bashrc’s PS1 setting wouldn’t matter there.

Finally, I pretty soon realised that embedding my usual PROMPT_COMMAND into PS1 has some occasional issues – it isn’t “magically invisible” when you have a console login … so now I have made it conditional in a $TERM case…esac
block.

For the “good” of the web:

    ps1xt='[33[1;35m]$?[33[0m]' # Last exit code, magenta
    ps1us='[33[1;32m]u[33[0m]' # Current username, green
    ps1mc='[33[1;36m]h[33[0m]' # Current hostname, cyan
    ps1wd='[33[0;32m]w[33[0m]' # Current working dir (w is full, W is basename), dark green
    case x$TERM in
    xxterm|xrxvt)
        ps1pc='[33]0;$?:u@h:w(t)07]'
        ;;
    esac
    export PS1="$ps1pc$ps1xt:$ps1us@$ps1mc:$ps1wd$"
Irregularities

Wherever you go, “agents” are the same

Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.

Real Estate Agents I mean.

The “Real Estate” industry is seriously full of turds. What we have is a group of people who’s job function is little better than commission-paid sales floor staff but who have inane delusions of grandeur, I’m sick of stupid yet condescending “agents”. Unfortunately many people in the industry are actually very well off, and I guess that’s all the grandeur you need in this day and age. Just try not to forget that it doesn’t matter who you are, tenant, landlord, buyer or seller, the industry is geared as best it can be to rip you off if you let your guard down.

As in Australia there are fairly standard tenancy agreements here in the UK, though not so standard that there’s a specific form you can expect. Thankfully the language in the contracts is kept in reasonable “plain English” too, no problem understanding it (the one I have is actually clearer than the one in Australia, it covers exceptions/rules with far less detail though). Back in April 2006 I signed a 12 month contract with a 4 month “break clause” for our place in Rickmansworth. What this means is that after 4 months I’m allowed to end the tenancy if I give two months notice — essentially it is a 6 month assured tenancy and very hard for either the tenant or landlord to exit unless exit is mutually acceptable. The following 6 months continue to be covered by the two month notice rule and, in fact, the wording of the contract is that this case continues indefinitely until either the tenant or the landlord gives notice.

Simple enough, strong lock-in periods are not nice and 2 months is a lot of notice but I can live with that.

So, here’s what a letting agency will (and did) try to do when the 12 months draws to a close. They’ll send you a new contract with a renewed assured tenancy period and do their best to communicate the point “you’d better enter a new contract or you’re turfed”. This seems rather ridiculous, seeing as the current protections of the contract continue indefinitely — the letting agent is pushing the assured tenancy period as “safety” (and push this bit or marketing to both parties as a positive, personally I think this lock-in is a negative for both parties, but less so for the landlord). Even more annoying is the fact that the lock-in was 2 months longer in the renewal than in the original contract.

Why bother with all this paperwork? Simple, it’s for the $$$. The money grubbing sales monkeys in the estate agency get dosh for this. I pay 55 quid for processing, which is stuff all — OK. The landlord pays 1000 quid!

Insane. What’s worse is that immediately the agency posts advertising that the place you’re in is available for let — even if you’ve applied for an extension and no 2 month period of notice is in place until the landlord rejects the extension. They’re really pushing the tenant to become uncomfortable and not question anything and just sign the contract ASAP with no consideration. Worse than that? Nearby agencies in the same chain start calling the landlord asking to be able to show the property and informing him that the current tenants (me!) have chosen to leave, a complete lie! A bunch of cats fighting over that morsel of commission.

Unfortunately the landlord isn’t too keen on contracts and isn’t keen on upsetting the agents — agents are scary. Fortunately he’s a good bloke and is more than willing to let the break clause in the contract cover the whole period. End result? The new contract is completely useless since it provides the same continuing protections that we already have. I still pay my 55 quid, the landlord still pays his 1000 quid and the dirty little agents get their commission. I get out of the uncomfortable situation of being very solidly tied to paying the rent for the property for 8 months, so I’m happy enough despite this not being an ideal outcome in my mind (I’d really prefer it if the agents didn’t get the landlord’s money).

I don’t particularly want to move but I consider my job in the UK to be volatile (at core it’s based around a R&D contract with another company) and in this case being locked into a 950 quid PCM tenancy for 8 months is too high a risk — 2 months is bad enough! We have considered moving, but I can’t see how it could fit in with current complexities in my schedule. Moving is hard, the current place is good, and the location is extremely convenient — the only issue is that quality and convenience come at a high price tag which has been difficult with Kat not working.

Down with the agents I say!

Produce

New Zealand Wasabi

Note: This entry has been restored from old archives.

NZ Wasabi powder
NZ Wasabi

Wasabi!

Not long ago, while trawling the web for wasabi, I found New Zealand Wasabi, and with little delay I put in an order. It’s not fresh wasabi unfortunately (which could be a bit of a shipping problem from NZ to the UK! Wasabi might even be a weapon of terror.) The story is that anything other than real, fresh wasabi is just not right — alas I have not had the pleasure of real wasabi’s company and it doesn’t seem overly eager to meet me.

NZ Wasabi goes a long way to bringing you the real thing: “It only contains one ingredient — Wasabia Japonica rhizome.“. I imagine it’d be possible to have fresh wasabi delivered too, but you’d need to come to some sort of commercial arrangement. Our humble buying power only allows access to the snorting-grade powdered goods. Judging from information on their website they’ve put a lot of effort into perfecting the growing conditions; so much so they have patented their growing system. It sounds like a great business they’ve got running there, I hope their success continues.

We eagerly awaited the arrival of our wasabi package, the fateful day came upon us and we were the proud recipients of three small jars (12g) and three medium cannisters (50g) of real wasabi powder. One hiccup did occur, the smaller jars were a bit old and the wasabi powder had a rather disturbing “bruised avocado” colour when mixed with water, while the powder from the larger containers produced a more appetising bright green colour. All is well though, the NZ Wasabi people immediately dispatched replacements along with some bonus chocolate! Not just real wasabi, also real customer service.

Wasabi powder
Wasabi powder

The wasabi is quite a different creature to the tubed horseradish “wasabi” we’re used to. The colour is much the same, as is the nature of the nose-tingling hotness. The flavour is significantly different, the horseradish “wasabi” tastes much like horseradish — the real wasabi tastes like, well, like wasabi I guess. On the matter of “ouch” the fake wasabi initially seemed to have significantly more bite, but we’re discovering that the potential bite of the rehydrated wasabi powder seems to increase with the level-of and time-since rehydration. The wetter and longer-rehydrated the hotter it gets. (Within reason! I’m talking thick paste for 30 minutes, we’re not laying down bottles of watery wasabi to age.)

I recommend giving this real wasabi a go if you’re keen to explore such things, with the buying power of the GBP against the NZD it doesn’t seem too horrific — our 186g of wasabi cost us 18GBP. That’s OK, considering that a 43g tube of very wet wasabi horseradish paste from Tesco costs 89p. I can’t guess exactly how much wasabi powder is used to make a gram of paste, but I think the cost delta wouldn’t be all that terrible with hydration taken into account. Based on our usage so far this supply will last us a good while. However at this price it’d be difficult to consider the cost worthwhile in Australia, where the price would be the same.