cudddly

Vox

Tue, 01 Aug 2006 15:05:52 GMT

I'm trying out Vox over here...

Languages

Fri, 14 Jul 2006 10:03:27 GMT

Languages can be tricky things. I'm French, living in the UK with Andrea who is German. The first phrase she said to me yesterday while I was barely awake had three words, each of which was in a different language: "Maybe heisst peut-etre"!

ljtalk and meebo

Wed, 12 Jul 2006 12:55:16 GMT

This ljtalk thing is very shiny, but what if I don't have a Jabber client handy? Well, meebo.com comes to the rescue. It's a Jabber client on a web page. Shiny!

Ginger beer

Fri, 28 Apr 2006 15:07:39 GMT

I made some ginger beer a few days ago, mostly according to this recipe. I didn't realise how much lemon is in ginger beer. Okay, so this just a crude approximation to ginger beer - it doesn't undergo full fermentation - but the resulting mixture is nice and cloudy and tasty and when I open the bottle it makes a nice fresh pssssscccchh sound. Easily worth a few minutes worth of your time!

Back

Mon, 03 Apr 2006 16:18:10 GMT

Tokyo is the future! The future has little dangly things attached to your mobile phone. Also, tall buildings. And cherry blossom.

Tokio!

Tue, 21 Mar 2006 16:38:52 GMT

I'm off to YAPC::Asia 2006 Tokyo next week. What should I do there?

Buns buns buns

Sun, 15 Jan 2006 20:17:57 GMT

No, you're right, I haven't posted here in a while. Anyway, today I had some leftover beef and so I made some cha sui buns. I made the dough (this took a long time. pesky dough. i was hungry!), I made the filling (with beef mince instead, and honey and soy and other things I had) then put some egg glaze on top and baked it for 20 minutes. It was leftovers. It was also the tastiest thing I've had in a long time. I've left one for breakfast tomorrow. Mmmmmmmmmm.

C17

Fri, 05 Aug 2005 17:07:19 GMT

One fire truck, one ambulance, three police cars and a night in a hospital waiting for a friend to recover from too much alcohol. Kids, don't do this at home.

Six Apart

Sun, 31 Jul 2005 19:24:26 GMT

This week I've been in San Francisco. I made sure to pass by the Six Apart office to say hi to the gang. What I don't understand is how Six Apart can function with a bright pink sofa in the office...

Pasta

Wed, 13 Jul 2005 19:03:05 GMT

Hello again. I'm making pasta, the flour has gone everywhere.

I took the tube on Sunday. Normally the announcements go along the lines of "delays because of signal blah blah blah", not "delays because of Thursday's terrorist activity". Then I cycled to Old Street, and I had to make two detours at Edgeware Road and Travistock Place because of police lines. I hadn't thought about it that much. London is very much continuing on, though.

I've also decided at the last minute to go to OSCON in Portland in a few weeks. I put in a last minute proposal with many many many buzzwords and somehow it got accepted. So I'll be there to talk to the Perl Posse, and will bring lots of orange tshirts. In fact, I'll be in San Francisco for a week before and a week after, too. I might do touristy things, geek out a little, eat some wonderful food, have an interview and drink silly cocktails.

As for the pasta, I followed a recipe very much like this one. It's dead simple, but just takes a while (all this resting, then drying, you see). You need decent flour, but that's about it. Mamma mia!

Ubiquitous Google Interview

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 17:03:12 GMT

Has anyone not had an interview with Google?

Queen

Sun, 19 Jun 2005 19:01:10 GMT

I saw the Queen. She wore fuschia.

Well, if I were a salad I know I'd be splashing my dressing

Mon, 23 May 2005 22:13:54 GMT

This evening I went to a musical: Guys and Dolls. I like musicals. This one turned out to be excellent. I mean, where else would you see lyrics like the title? The plot was funny, there was excellent dancing, and Ewan McGregor, Jane Krakowski, Douglas Hodge and Jenna Russell were all good in character.

So anyway, we decide to go for a pre-theatre dinner at my favourite sushi place, Taro. I discovered Taro when I was taking Japanese lessons by asking my Japanese teacher where he went to eat sushi. I go there quite a lot. So we pop in for a quich chirashi sushi and guess who's at the next table? Yes, Ewan McGregor and Jane Krakowski. Clearly, we look all casual, while mentioning quietly that Ewan looks like me... He was pretty cute actually.

I love you, a bushel and a peck!

Ow, hot!

Sat, 21 May 2005 21:21:58 GMT

Notice these two facts:

a) I like to cook, I do, honest. I've been cooking quite a lot recently.

b) I like to think that I'm fairly intelligent and can make rational deductions.

Taking these two facts in hand, why is it that this is the third day in a row that I've burnt my tongue while tasting something? Why oh why can I not remember that hot things are hot and that I shouldn't try and put them into my mouth straight away?

Answers on a postcard...

Taraxacum officinale

Tue, 10 May 2005 00:54:56 GMT

Taraxacum officinale is the common dandelion. This weekend, while staying at my friend's house in the country, I flew a kite and bounced on a trampoline. I noticed lots of dandelions in the garden, and made myself a dandelion salad. Important tip: dandelions get bitter as they get older, so go for the small young plants...

Recent photos

Tue, 03 May 2005 21:29:59 GMT

It's not all doom and gloom. Last weekend I was in Bath for Erena and Mark's wedding. We even played some croquet. Don't they look cute? While walking to pottery, I've been taking pictures of Kensington Gardens: elephants, gold, signs, bluebells, my shadow, ducks, geese, swans and crows. Before that, I ate a roast suckling pig (not on my own!). It's been nice to play with my camera, take some macro shots, play with the options, hit "Enhance" in iPhoto (now you know my artistic secret!), and, well, be a bit arty. Which is good, because I'm on my way to pottery, and when I get ther I cover myself in clay and create.

What's my most popular photo? The kitten on a laptop, of course. I quite like blurry iPod shuffle advertising in Taiwan, rocking chairs in Florida, a stone in the sand, parasol and my favourite photo so far this year: parasol and clouds. It is fun taking pictures, and I like instant feedback and bright colours. Mmmm, orange. Enjoy my photos!

Hates-software

Wed, 27 Apr 2005 22:04:34 GMT

I'm a geek. I handle software. You might think that software would just work. Well, I might think it would, I mean, this is the future and everything. However, software just doesn't work. It always breaks. It always does the wrong thing. It always... well, you get the idea. So Richard and Arthur and I got together and created hates-software.com. It's mostly a mailing list, but you can see the archives and thus the hate when I got a little annoyed with computers last year. Think of it as the electronic equivalent of a support group: you tell us we hate software, we tell you we hate it too. Talk about liking software or working around software bugs is off topic. Join us and tell us what software annoyed you today!

Reincarnation

Wed, 20 Apr 2005 08:57:51 GMT

Yesterday my grand mother died. Also, we have a new pope. Coincidence? I think not!

Bridal wear

Wed, 13 Apr 2005 18:39:39 GMT

For reasons that I don't quite understand, this afternoon I found myself in Debenhams on Oxford Street, in the Bridal wear section, offering wedding dress comments. It was quite weird. Don't be shocked dear reader, I'm not the groom, just the bridesmaid's brother...

ps I spelt that "bridalware" first time, hmmm

Chopsticks

Fri, 08 Apr 2005 12:45:01 GMT

I have just realised that for the past two weeks I've used chopsticks for every meal. This might seem odd, but in real life it isn't - I'm just used to picking up chopsticks when I sit down at a table now. It all seems normal. At one point, we were in a restaurant in Taipei and the westerners were using chopsticks to eat the starter salad, while the locals used forks - role reversal indeed.

So now I'm back off to London town, and I suspect I won't have chopsticks at every meal, although I'm tempted to try it just for a week, and carry my own chopsticks around, ninja stylee ;-)

phoots

Wed, 30 Mar 2005 16:35:25 GMT

Phoots: Me during my talk at YAPC::Taipei.
Bunch of us hacking on the metro in Taipei.

Updated: To not link to the same photo, oops

Hualien

Tue, 29 Mar 2005 06:58:22 GMT

Today I'm in Hualien, a town in Taiwan which is by the seaside. I woke up with the sound of waves crashing on the shore. I had congee and fried omelette for breakfast. I'm here with a few Perl hackers, so I did a bit of Perl hacking this morning (somehow Jesse has convinced me that writing a new Perl debugger would be useful). Then the cutest thing of all cute things: a little kitten, decided that my jumper was soft and that she wanted to sleep in my arms. This caused me to stop hacking, but that's not really a bad thing. I'm nice and relaxed now. It's all so calm...

Las Vegas

Mon, 21 Mar 2005 16:19:56 GMT

I passed through Las Vegas a few hours ago. It's really odd, you can actually gamble in the airport terminal, while waiting for your plane. No, wait, what was really odd was that I didn't see any Crime Scene Investigators...

PADI Instructor

Sun, 20 Mar 2005 20:59:31 GMT

I am now a PADI Scuba Instructor! P A R T Y!

Waves

Fri, 18 Mar 2005 21:58:16 GMT

Yes, it was very very wavey indeed. We were out doing our final openwater skill demonstrations, and the waves were huge: 2m or so. Underwater, you notice the waves much less, but there was still a bit of a surge and it was crap visibility. More of a challenge. But here we are, all the PADI instructor candidates. We're all ready and waiting, for this weekend is the PADI Instructor Examination. Two days or seeing whether we're up to scratch. It should be fine, we've done all the work, we've practiced everything, we know what to do - now all we have to do is show it to the examiners!

Fingers crossed!