I recently finished a big jar of pickled jalapeño slices (I use a lot of them on pizza) and didn’t want to waste all that delicious jalapeño-inflused pickle juice. So I finely sliced some white cabbage, grated a carrot, chopped … Continue reading → | Continue reading
“And ‘Nothing’ is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Back in May 2022 — let the record show, 20 months ago — I analysed the cost of the ingredients of an excellent home-made pizza. Based on the costs of bread flour, salt, yeast, tinned tomatoes and extra mature cheddar, I found that the per-pizza cost of ingredients was an satisfyi … | Continue reading
When I first heard about Semantic Versioning, or SemVer, I thought it was one of those ideas that’s so obviously right that we were all going to benefit from someone having just codified it and written it down. In a … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Yesterday’s evening meal: a modified version of the Greek Salad pizza from the day before. As I suggested I might, this time I mashed the feta with some olive oil into a paste, and spread that over the otherwise identical … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Here’s my lunch today: a pizza inspired by Greek salad: Instead of mozzarella, I am using feta. The other toppings are green olives, shredded red onion and sun-dried tomatoes. Looks pretty good, huh? Alas, it was only OK to eat. … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Universal Basic Income (UBI) is the practice of giving regula cash sums to everybody in a population, irrespective of apparent need, as a foundation for their economic lives. It’s one of those idea that sounds crazy when you first hear … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Suppose someone at your place of work asks you to take on some new responsibility. There are three basic reasons why you might agree: They pay you (e.g. overtime for staying late and doing extra work). You enjoy it — … Continue reading → | Continue reading
I was a bit shocked today to realise it’s been nearly three months since I blogged here — very unusual for me. I’ve been much more active over at Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week in that time. This post … Continue reading → | Continue reading
By the Pricking of my Thumbs — Agatha Christie I’ve always had a strange affection for Tommy and Tuppence, Christie’s couple of amateur detective who appear in five books spanning 55 years from 1922 to 1976, and who, unlike the … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Someone asked on Mastodon the other day: why does anyone vote Conservative any more? It’s a legitimate question. The Conservative party in the UK now bears no resemblance to anything that Edmund Burke or indeed Margaret Thatcher would recognise as … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Having watched Ratatouille (the film, not the dish) recently, I was left with two impressions. One is that it’s an absolutely superb film: funny, touching, profound, delightful. If you’ve not seen if, you should fix that, whether or not you … Continue reading → | Continue reading
My wife’s been away for the last week, on holiday with my mum in Spain. That’s left me alone in the house, since all three boys have left home in various directions over the last few years. (The eldest lives … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Many of Isaac Asimov’s classic robot stories — those collection in I, Robot, The Rest of the Robots and other books — are built around his Three Laws of Robotics, which first appeared over 80 years ago in his 1942 … Continue reading → | Continue reading
The Liar’s Dictionary — Eley Williams A book published prematurely, I think. There is an intriguing double premise, with a modern-day story of a young woman working for a traditional dictionary publisher that is fading to nothing in the Internet … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Here is a YouTube playlist of my now-traditional top-ten list of the albums I’ve listened to the most in the previous calendar year. (See this list of previous entries.) I listen much more to whole albums than to individual tracks, so each year … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Fake Law: the Truth about Justice in an Age of Lies — the Secret Barrister A serious and depressing book about how the criminal justice system works — or, more often, does not work — in the UK. The anonymous … Continue reading → | Continue reading
How it started: How it was going: How it ended: (Yes, I sliced my mozzarella instead of tearing it. I know it’s not traditional, but I like the more even covering.) | Continue reading
Even though ChatGPT and similar “AIs” don’t really understand anything, they can still be fun to play with. On a whim, I asked ChatGPT to be my dungeon master for a quick game of Dungeons and Dragons, and it went … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Long-term readers will remember that I am in a very occasional prog-rock band called Crooked End, and that we have a song called Dancing Through the Storm. (As befits a prog band, it’s a multi-part epic.) It occurred to me … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Our various sons were staying with us over Christmas, so I made curries for a family meal before they scattered back to the four winds. The yellow one is chicken korma, the red one is king prawn dupiaza, the green … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Yesterday I read Just Say No, a post by Jeff Geerling who maintains a bunch of popular devops project on GitHub. His position, which I am totally sympathetic to, is that maintaining a project is a lot of hard and … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Like a lot of people, I am aware of the ecological impact of my diet, and for that reason I’m eating a lot less meat now than I did a few years ago. I’ve also moved away from beef specifically, … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Blackjack is card game played with a standard 52-card deck, similar in broad outlines to Uno. (It’s not to be confused with the card game of the same name, also known as Vingt-Un, Pontoon and other names.) There are many … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Blackout (Sam Archer book 3) — Tom Barber A workaday action novel about a counter-terrorism agent and his colleagues surviving a revenge attempt from a group of Albanian terrorists, number 3 in a series. There’s the seed of something here, … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Last Sunday, in a manifestation of the arrogance for which I am known and loved, I entered a painting competition. For a £15 entrance fee, I went with a friend to Pittville Park in Cheltenham, and spent six hours painting. … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Lead — John Greenway, Andy Blacknell and Andy Coombe This the densest and most economical business leadership I have come across. It’s a genre I am not particularly drawn to, and which is ripe for parody, but I read it … Continue reading → | Continue reading
I just got back from Hamburg, a ten day trip that is my first significant travel since the start of the pandemic. Among the many delights of that trip, I count this sushi: It’s from Kōgai Sushi, Valentinskamp 89, 20354 … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Made in America — Bill Bryson The USA-specific counterpart to Bryson’s celebration of the English language, Mother Tongue, it’s about twice as long as the original volume because it also contains an episodic and selective history of the USA, viewed … Continue reading → | Continue reading
The Constant Rabbit — Jasper Fforde This is a novel that tries to get to grips with how things would actually work if there were anthropomorphic rabbits of the kind that turn up in fiction from Alice in Wonderland to … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Career of Evil — Robert Galbraith A re-read of the first Galbraith that I read. Rowling (for it is she) remains as compellingly readable as always. Definitely worth reading. My original comments stand. The Clocks — Agatha Christie A rather … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Back in the 1990s Fiona and I used to do a little bit of watercolour painting, despite not really having any idea what I was doing. Over the last few months, inspired by the not-actually-that-good Channel 5 TV show Watercolour … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Six years ago, I wrote “I do like Adele’s version of Make You Feel My Love, and of all the Dylan songs I know it’s the one I am least unlikely to do myself. Probably not coincidentally, it’s one of … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Since the pandemic started, Fiona and I have basically stopped eating out. We figure that in the risk/reward calculation, spending hours in a roomful of strangers in exchange for more convenient and slightly better food that you can make at … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Our essay-crisis dead-cat government is now planning to appease disaffected Brexit voters by giving them Imperial measurements, in place of the metric that we have been moving towards since the 1960s and which the majority is living UK citizens were … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Like everyone else, I’m aware of the Cost Of Living Crisis — or, “recession” as we used to call it in the old days. (Much as we now say “chumocracy” instead of “corruption” for some reason). We’re fortunate to be … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Since I started making my own pizza, I’ve been doing it a lot. I’ve tried all sorts of variations, and made a lot of discoveries [evidence 1, evidence 2, evidence 3]. Today I want to show you four pizzas I’ve … Continue reading → | Continue reading
Internet service providers are hardly known for their service, but with Now TV Broadband I have hit a new low of incompetence and carelessness that just boggles the mind. The spoiler is that tomorr… | Continue reading
One day as we were driving back home from London, cruising along on the M4, Fiona out of the blue said “I want nachos”. I said fine, we’ll pull over at the next services and buy a… | Continue reading
I love a good risotto, but for years I could never get it to be really good when I made it myself. That changed a few months ago when Fiona and I stayed with our old friend Jon Wensley, who made a … | Continue reading
Here is a YouTube playlist of my now-traditional top-ten list of the albums I’ve listened to the most in the previous calendar year. (See this list of previous entries.) I listen much more to whole… | Continue reading
I got a recommendation from a friend to watch the first three episodes of Wandavision in a block. That suggestion was solid. It’s slllooowww to get going, especially, if you’re not bathed in Americ… | Continue reading
When writing, or indeed speaking, do not begin sentences with any of these phrases. “Let’s be clear” admits that, up to this point, you have been obscure. “To be honest̶… | Continue reading
It was 1990 or possibly 1991, and I was working for System Simulation on an Application for Windows 2 – which at that time was a rather exotic extra that a few adventurous people were running on to… | Continue reading
Last time, I made my first attempt at baking tarte au citron (lemon tart). I made several mistakes, which I documented, so yesterday I had another go, learning my lessons from the first time. Here … | Continue reading
Inspired by watching The Great Australian Bake Off, I found myself wanting to have a go at baking a tarte au citron, or lemon tart if you insist. It is essentially an egg-custard tart with a lot of… | Continue reading
As we approach the end of 2021, I have a pretty good idea of what my top ten albums of the year will be, for my now traditional What I’ve Been Listening To post. And one of them is an album I… | Continue reading
The climactic track of Rainbow’s swords-and-sorcery metal masterpiece Rising (1976), Stargazer tells the tale of a sorcerer whose slaves build a tower so they can watch him fly from it —… | Continue reading