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Sorry, I have to share this… I’m generating random domain names for a benchmark/test scenario and the first one my script spat out was:
gynecological-sweetbread.com.au
Heh!
(My /usr/share/dict/linux.words file seems to be a Yank.)
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Well, I’d say that that moving to the UK has become a certainty. As originally planned I’m still heading to the US in April – but that visit is now shortened to a week. Then back to Sydney for a couple of weeks – dead busy organising our “moving out” of the country. A week visiting family in WA then bounce back through Sydney to the UK.
So much to organise! We’ve been looking at areas to live in in the UK and I must say that my favourite is Oxford – it’s an attractive place with plenty going on in the evenings. It is well placed for my own movements and the rent there isn’t too unreasonable. However I fear that it isn’t the wisest practical choice for Kat, since the IT job market in Oxford isn’t exactly huge and it is an hour long train ride just to get from Oxford to Marylebone station – ruling out commuting to London.
My practical nature will probably win, and at the moment a more sensible place to live looks like Rickmansworth. It is only a 30 min train ride to London, rent there is good and it is convenient for my own movements (I spend most of my time at a location outside of London).
Fun fun!
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The other day when I logged into the system at the gym I found an unusual message waiting for me from “Mark” – I have never met this Mark. It read, in summary:
Congratulations, you have lifted 250,000kgs – that’s the equivalent of 70 elephants!
Very strange… so I spent the rest of the day thinking about 70 elephants chopped up into various pieces ranging from 40 to 110kg in size. These pieces being tied to the lifting cables of the gym equipment or being spiked onto either end of an iron bar.
The great thing about benchpressing elephant chunks is that once done you could have a tasty spit-roast – mmm, protein.
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Cous cous is the ultimate low latency feed. This is a “wet” cous cous recipe.
Ingredients:
Put everything except for the cous cous into a saucepan and bring to the boil, let simmer for a couple of minutes. Ensure that the salmon is broken up to the desired degree and that the stock cube is entirely dissolved (if one was better prepared 3 cups of stock rather than water would remove the need for a stock cube).
Turn heat to very low and tip in the cous cous. Stir until cous cous is entirely wet.
Put lid on saucepan and leave to stand for five minutes.
Remove lid and drizzle about 2 tbsp of olive oil over the cous cous then fluff the cous cous with a fork.
Serve drizzled with a little olive oil.
This recipe made me a nice bowl of cous cous for my dinner as well as two packs for lunches.
Dinner and packed lunches in 10 minutes flat!
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I just knocked together a dip I’m quite happy with, just using some stuff I had lying around:
Throw it all in a bowl together and crush to desired consistency. I think I’d prefer it with a squeeze of lemon juice, no lemons on hand though.
Goes down well with celery sticks and some wholemeal pocket breads (almost stale in my case) toasted to crispyness and split.
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Just down the road from the office in Notting Hill on Westbourne Grove is a place called Gourmet Burger Kitchen (unfortunately the daft fools have their individual location maps only viewable by clicking a javascript link, it’s the Bayswater one), it’s the closest thing I’ve found to Global Burgers back in Sydney. But it isn’t as good. They get points for having a much larger menu than Global Burgers but they loose very important points by comparison on the actual burger engineering. Their burgers just don’t taste as good as Global Burgers burgers, and they’re less structurally sound as well (i.e. very sloppy to eat with your hands – and as far as I’m concerned that’s the only way to eat a burger. When I see some ponce eating their burger with a knife and fork I get a very nearly irresistible urge to grab their fork and stab them in an eyeball with it. This gbk place is full of ponces asking for forked eyeballs! All in all gbk is a pretty decent place for a quick meal and you can get a reasonable feed there for 10 quid (burger and chips).
This evening I had a chicken and camembert with cranberry sauce burger and some chips. Their chips are good, nice and crisp. But they seriously lack the tasty rosemary or Cajun salt that Global Burgers has, and no cholesterol packed aioli either! (actually that’s a lie, I just spotted Garlic Mayo on their menu.)
I recommend the Angus beef with blue cheese burger, very tasty.
Poncey busted eyeball with a tasty vitreous and blood sauce anyone?
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I don’t know if birdflu is as much of a news item back home as it is here in the UK. The UK is in the position of being at the far west of Europe and watching the gradual westward spread of birdflu. Media scaremongering is high.
My observations of the news here leave me with one important point to make: Birds have wings you fucking twats. You know, they’re kind of known for their ability to fly. Never heard the phrase “as free as a bird”?
I don’t know who I’m directing that to, probably some government officials who are feeding a prepared statement to the media when they ask “what are you doing about this?”. Quarantining turkey farms? There are swans flying around with birdflu.
Time for swan-radar and depleted uranium swan eliminating rounds on jets. Surface to swan missiles?
Look, this is just the ecosystem’s way of killing off the weak. Get over it, or die.
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I went on a touristing trip to Bath last weekend with a German guy I met over here, Tobi.
Bath is attractive town with a very long history.
The Romans took control of the area something like 2000 years ago, and there is evidence of it being a popular place long before then (as far back as stone age flints – some 7000 years).
Bath is the site of three hot springs, seen as a gift from some god or another by several civilisations through the centuries, these days we rather boringly see it as a place where heated water is pushed up from the mantle along a fault line. Before the Romans came along it would have appeared as just a few hot billabongs near a river, unsettled because the valley is flooded every year. The Romans were not daunted by mere flooding, they built an encircling wall to keep the waters out and on the site of the largest spring built a public bath and a temple to the goddess Minerva (later Sulis Minerva, taking the name of the local god who was previously worshipped there – a PR stunt on the part of the Romans).
For centuries the Romans and the locals bathed and worshipped at the site. They oiled up in the saunas to get clean, they had several degrees of sauna and you started off in the cooler one and worked your way up to the ones that were too hot to stand in without shoes. After their oil treatment they had a good rinse in one of the smaller baths near the saunas before finally hitting the main bath. There were strictly adhered to guidelines on bath etiquette!
They prayed and sacrificed to their gods, using the altars at the temple provided for this purpose and also tossing valuable trinkets into the main spring. They wished ill upon those who had wronged them! Writing curses on sheets of tin which they then rolled up and threw into the spring hoping that Minerva would execute their curse upon the deserving wrongdoer (the cursers went as far as providing the names of those who they felt might be responsible, trying to make Minerva’s job easier I guess).
Eventually the Roman empire went into decline, Romans left their conquered lands including their beautiful Bath and through time the Roman structures were part demolished and buried by the eroding winds of civilisation. By the 1700s the entire Roman history of the area was forgotten until in 1775 the town engineer had to work out why someone’s basement was flooding with warm water, his men dug down and eventually reached the 6 inch thick sheet Romans and lined the main bath with. Not long after the town council had bought all the houses above the site and the excavation started.
There was much enthusiasm for the baths (the town had never stopped being a bath town) and the site was rebuilt and brought back into service. New structures were built around the bath complex, in what they considered to be a Roman style, so they could partake of some Roman decadence. It became popular with Royals and thus all the Royal hangers-on had to go there too and the town exploded in size. Many a distinguished person “took the waters” at bath in the hope of some healing for soul or body, or often just to partake in some extra-marital shenanigans.
Much of the current architecture of Bath was designed in the Georgian and Victorian periods, predominately by the famous John Wood and his son (John Wood the Younger) during the 1700s. Before the redevelopment in Georgian times the site was a row of houses, and prior to that the grounds of a monastery – the beautiful and imposing Abbey of the monastery still stands adjacent to the baths (it is actually on top of the site where the Minerva’s temple was located). There are plenty of other attractions in Bath that are worth a good look, just walking around and taking in the architecture is worthwhile, there is the historical costume museum and the Jane Austen museum is located in one of the houses in which she lived. The site of the bath its self is now a museum and will cost you 10GBP to visit, but it was worth it. Unfortunately bathing is strictly prohibited!
There is a spa house nearby that is nearing completion and is scheduled to open some time this year. Somehow I don’t think it will be quite the same thing.
I took a few photos of Bath of course.
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As mentioned in the previous posting I made a trip out to Wales on Monday to go for a bike ride, my destination was The Black Mountains (Y Mynyddoedd Duon in Welsh). I had done a bit of reading about riding in Wales and chosen a few published routes that interested me, in the end I picked route from MTB-Wales.com for The Black Mountains as by this time this was the only OS Landranger map that had arrived from Amazon (it’s cheaper to get the maps from Amazon). The route is amusingly called Mynydd How You Go ! (ho ho!), in case you haven’t picked it the word mynydd is Welsh for mountain. The exact spot I parked the car at and the trail starts is marked on this map, note the nearby town of Bwlch it’s name basically just means pass in English (as in mountain pass).
The ride was good fun and after looking at the map closely and realising that the stretch around Mynydd Troed was fairly flat I regret cutting it short. After getting to the bottom the “Very Technical” descent and wading through mud I’d decided that it was time to loop back. Now I know what “Very Technical” means, I can’t believe people would ride down that (I can really, but it was quite a nasty path). I went down a little way but a combination of expecting I was going to fall off and roll down the hill and the horrible noise my brakes were making convinced me that walking down was a better option.
The disc brakes on my bike are great for stopping really quickly, but they’re painful for checking your speed on a descent. When I hold them on while going downhill they make a terrible moaning noise, I was ashamed to be upsetting the peace of the hillsides. I must find out if there is something I can do about the noise, it really is pretty awful.
I was hoping to also have another ride on a section of the Taff Trail that runs along the east side of the Talybont Reservior but didn’t have the heart for it after cleaning all the mud off myself and my bike so we could get back in the car. I’ll reserve that ride for next time. I’m looking forward to the arrival of my Brecon Beacons, Elan Valley & Builth Wells and Weston-super-Mare, Bridgwater & Wells (not in Wales) maps.
Things I’ve learnt about my bike:
I think I should read up a bit on bike maintenance.
Photo-by-photo details of the ride starting here.
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On Monday I finally got to go for a ride in Wales. It was good fun. I have a journal entry of sorts for the ride in the form of the photo descriptions, new album up here.
I’ll write more on this topic later.
