07.31.08
Posted in randomosity at 9:08 pm by coldclimate
Rarely will these tips be of practical to anyone, but you never know…
- Otters are extreamly quick. You will need the same sort of lenses which are used to capture sports cars, race horses and chavs at Primark sales.
- Otter smell vile. I have been near dead things that smelled better. Last time I was close to otters, I thought my hair was going to rot because of acrid fumes come of the filthy rats.
- Otters are very noisy. Imagine kittens in a slow moving blender, you’re not even close.
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Posted in food at 7:28 pm by coldclimate
So, today I’ve been smoking hard. Smoking trout, smoking salmon, smoking cheese, smoking garlic, smoking onions, smoking everything under the sun.
No ladies and gentlemen, I’ve not completely lost the plot and bought a massive pack of Rizlas, I’m been on one of Smoky Jo’s food smoking course. It’s a one day course, starting with coffee at the very civalised time of 9:45am. The day covered hot smoking (where the cook is cooked and eaten hot directly after) and cold smoking, for both home and commercial purposes.
Smoked Trout (and a sausage)
It was a fantastic day, and I was really lucky to meet Philip Holmes, who started (and runs) a charity called The Ester Benjamins Trust. He and a small band of people are doing some amazing work (watch some of the films on their YouTube channel). I wish him all the luck in the world with his ventures.
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07.22.08
Posted in randomosity at 8:42 am by coldclimate
This week the papers (and indeed the venerable Today Programme) have been talkiong about Princess Anne wearing the same dress to two weddings, 27 years apart. What does it mean? Is she promoting recycling? Is it a fashion faux-pas? Dies it show how in touch with we proles she is and is a nod to the credit crunch? Is it a sign of how far from reality she is? It is fitting for a royal to be seen in public wearing something twice?
Now these are all interesting questions*, but the questions that people should be asking are
- Who gives a flying toss?
- No, really, who cares?
- Do papers really employ people to spot this shit
All I’ve heard form fashionista for the last year is “oh of course, I only wear vintage”. Vintage=old. Vintage=pre-worn. Every learly looking sex and the city wannabe I’ve seen on tv have been rambling on about how wonderful vintage clothes are, so why have they all turned on the Princess? This morning’s radio had a couple of mealy mouthed “fashion experts” having a dig about how it wasn’t “appropriate” or “fitting” or “the done thing”.
Personally, I don’t give a monkey’s about what Princess Anne wears, unless it’s completely ridiculous. I think most Manhatten swilling, coke snorting, Manolo Blahnik tottering “fashion experts” would kill to be able to fit into what they are wearing today in 27 years time, and it shows.
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07.19.08
Posted in ideas, randomosity at 6:15 pm by coldclimate
Somebody please make the following:
* Fabulous Cooking Blog : a photo blog curated by an aging New York socialit, all photos featuring over made-up hands, far too many wedding rings and mis-matched crockery. All measurements in the form of “2 martini glasses full of dried olives”, darling.
* Interviewing actors - can’t get an interview with the Prime Minister? Interview the person who plays him on telly!
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07.16.08
Posted in rant at 9:53 am by coldclimate
Right - straight off the bat, I feel I should say I’m sure this does not apply to all BMW drivers, in fact my friend Adam has a wonderful M3 which he drives with great care, however …
BMW drivers - Stop Driving Like Wankers.
In the last two week I have been cut up, undertaken, tailgated and nearly forced off the road, and all by people driving BMWs. No Volvos, Audis, Saabs or other cars were involved, just BMWs.
When you’re doing 90mph in the outside lane of a dual carriageway (having just overtaken a run of trucks doing 65mph) the last thing you are expecting is for Mr Travelling Salesman in his 325 who came with out on the overtake to put his foot down and undertake. I was about to pull in. I was already doing 25mph ove the speed limit. he was wearing sunglasses and a boxy shaped tie (at 7am).
What i it about owning one of these German penis replacements that makes people drive like a twat? Not that it’s only men I should point out (though I’m not sure what the female equivalent of “penis replacement” is) as the tailgating (again at speed on a motorway this time) was by a manic looking yummy mummy (complete with blond bangs and sunglasses) who sat rammed against the back of my car for a minute before flashing her lights, pulling round me and then cutting me up. Don’t get me wrong, 60mph middle lane sitters deserve everybody’s contempt, but if you are cracking on (and there is an outside lane for these people to overtake in) nearly nudging me from behind is not on.
So - by all means go and buy a Beemer. They’re lovely cars, but there are rules:
Buy a big one; nobody is impressed with your 1 series.
Buy a petrol one; because a 320d just makes me laugh.
Don’t drive like a twat; you have it in your power, and you’re enough muscle under your bonnet to do what you like, but undertaking and tailgating are not cool.
Besides, much like Fried Green Tomatoes At The Whistle Stop Cafe, my care is cheap and easier to fix, and I will drag it down the side of your shiny ego-booster, and make you cry all the way to your renewable office supplies retail middle-management shindig at the Hilton Milton Keynes.
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07.03.08
Posted in interweb, technology at 4:17 pm by coldclimate
So - in the US a judge (who may or may not be a technically savvy person) has ruled that Google must handover 12 terabytes of information about who has watched what on YouTube to Viacom, who are pissed off that lots of their content is available in crap quality on YouTube. Thankfully the judge didn’t grant Viacom access to the source code for YouTube (which Viacom must have had a very weak case to request).
What does this mean? Well, the EFF has an in depth write up, the BBC has a good breakdown of it, but it does raise some questions which I can’t answer:
- Why does Viacom get access to all of the log, not just those pertaining to specific clips (theirs)?
- What would have happened if YouTube didn’t log who watched what (or only kept the log for a short finite period?)
- Why do Viacom get access to the logs of users who are not in the US? This means that a US court ruling affects the whole world.
- What is Viacom going to do with this data? Track down all the people who watched clips, contact their ISPs to find their names and addresses and then server them up bills? I doubt it.
- Why did Viacom get information about the people who watched videos, and not information about those who posted them? As far as I understand it, it is the distribution of the content which infringed copyright, not the viewing of it.
If ever there was one, here is a good case for joining the EFF and in the UK the Open Rights Group
EDIT: it would appear that Viacom are OK with taking anonymised data - it’s all about “how many not who“. Thanks JackP
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07.01.08
Posted in interweb at 7:32 am by coldclimate
Oh Fail Whale, why do we love you so? After all, all you say to me is “Twitter is kanckered again - press press F5 a few times, and go away and come back another time”. I don’t really feel an anamosity towards twitter when it is suffering from tweet overload. There was one very annoying evening when I was waiting for somebody to tweet me where beers were that night and twitter was down, but apart from that, Twitter not being broken is no hardship. Twitter is fun, but my life revolves around it.
So whats so good about fail whale? He’s cute. He’s got a little smile. For no reason he appears to be asleep. I don’t understand what the picture is trying to say. Assuming the little birds are tweet, shouldn’t they be crashing into Fail Whale rather than trying to lift him up? Why does his tail look like a mustashe?
Who knows the answer to these questions, and frankly, who cares. By having an endearing page rather than a black on white corporate styled “There has been a problem, technical staff are looking into it, please speak to your systems administraigtor” borg page, twitter make me more tollerent of their problems.
He’s also created the cult of fail too (or did this exist previously?) Failblog (http://failblog.org/) for example, as well as the huge amount of people twittering “fail” (http://summize.com/search?q=%2Bfail+-whale)
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