Month: August 2008

Finally, the gadgets are cooperating

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It’s taken a week of blood, sweat and tears, but I am now writing this blog entry on my new toy, an Asus eee PC. It’s half the size of my work laptop, weight just a little more than a kilo and has all the functionality that I want and need, including the 8-hour battery life :)

It does have a bit of a quirky personality though. The linux installation on it is a bit flaky and, though everything works, there is a definite “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” vibe about it. You do not want to start upgrading packages because you can because that way madness – and full disks and factory resets – lie. Otherwise though, I’m really happy about it. It means that I’ll be able to travel and have all the full use of a laptop, without having to carry all that weight around.

The timing is very convenient and it will be tested in anger next week when I go to Amsterdam to give a presentation at HUPO 2008. Since I have crossover and the MS Offfice installed on this thing, I can even hack my presentation in the next few days before I present. It’s at times like these where I really love technology.

Having said that, there are times when it sorely tries my patience. I tried for two days to get some videos to load on my ipod without any success and had to finally give up in disgust.  I’ve also found out that the portable hard-drive that I use as a backup disk doesn’t seem to want to mount on my eee – which is a pain – but I can use SDHC cards to avoid this problem as both our home desktop and laptops have SD card readers. We are geeks and life is good.

In other news, Canada finally seems to have made it in the medals – about time too – and there will be ikea trips in the near future to go buy a cot-bed and other nursery sundries.

And now, fajitas beckon!!!

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One season! Two seasons!! 39 seasons, ah! ah! ah! ah!

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Why ‘Sesame Street’ still counts

This morning “Sesame Street” enters its 39th season, having lost nothing except its newness.

“Sesame Street” is such a part of the culture that to anyone born after 1965, Oscar and Bert and all the others are family. So they rarely surprise us anymore. But they do still delight.

This latest season kicks off with a show featuring “Telly Monster and the Golden Triangle of Destiny,” a spoof of “Indiana Jones.” Many of its younger viewers won’t get the Indiana Jones reference, or the hat. But they’ll have fun, while their parents will find it at worst painless and often charming. That’s probably one reason “Sesame Street” has lasted so long. It doesn’t overreach and aim for blinding brilliance with every line.

While it doesn’t condescend to kids, it also recognizes that’s what they are: kids. Sometimes they just want silly. In one scene, when Texas Telly is looking for the Golden Triangle of Destiny, he gets a hint that it may be underneath something in the Laundromat. An energetic search follows, during which piles of socks and neatly folded shirts are randomly tossed into the air and scattered on the floor. There, they are forgotten despite the pleas of Leela, an Indian-American, the show’s newest cast member, who joins this season.

If “Sesame Street” went strictly by the rulebook, Telly and his cohorts would go back, pick up all that laundry and put it back neatly where they found it. But if doesn’t happen in life, “Sesame Street” figures, maybe sometimes it shouldn’t happen on the show, either. There’s always a little anarchy in the lives of children, however hard parents try to order, coax, plead and pound it out of them, and there’s still a little anarchy on “Sesame Street.”

“Sesame Street” doesn’t shy away from good deeds, of course. When Telly finds the Golden Triangle of Destiny, he decides not to keep it but to donate it to the Museum of Triangular History so everyone can enjoy it. Nor do the writers forget that however endearing we find the cute parts, their show’s core mission is to teach fundamental things like letters and numbers.

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Weekend in review

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Katy was signed off all of last week for doctor recommended R&R. I took the end of the week off – it was my birthday after all – so we made the most of it. We went to see The Dark Knight on Thursday and I can’t be help repeating all that’s been said about the Joker’s performance. It’s a master-class calibre performance and he’s sure to get the Oscar, albeit posthumously.  Katy baked two cakes for my birthday. One was a backup in case something went wrong with the main one. Hold on to your seats folks, she baked me a train cake!

I mean, how cool is that? She made 3 chocolate carriages, 3 lemon one and the rest are plain vanilla sponge. Have I mentioned that Katy rocks recently? Cause she does. Now the picture above isn’t of the actual cake itself – that’s just a promo picture from the tin. The actual cake is currently frozen because, since Pam had baked me a cake as well, we decided to freeze those we’d made to avoid cake overload!

We went to Leicester on Friday. I did a bit of shopping and ran some errands on Friday afternoon while Katy had her haircut. Rita was supposed to come by Katy’s house on Saturday to pick up her birthday present and be social, but that crashed and burned in a rather spectacular fashion. I’m of mixed feelings about the whole thing. On one hand, I’m happy that it happened because it will now mean that Katy won’t be stressing out every time we go to Leicester to try and accommodate Rita. On the other, I’m angry about some of the things she said. The girl is clearly living in her own private reality at times. I’m not the only one who thinks this and Katy’s parents are firmly behind me on this one. But still, it bothered Katy and I don’t like that. Blergh. We saw Stu for the first time in a while and he seems in good spirits and was happy to see us, so that made up for a bit of the emo-ness of the weekend.

Sunday saw us in a church, of all places. Pam, Katy’s friend, had invited us to the christening of her son, Ethan. It was my first Anglican service and I can say that it’s pretty much like a catholic one, except with more singing and a lot more infrastructure. It amused me that I could translate large chunks of the service in my head. It’s amazing how much church stuff I remember from when my mom dragged us to Sunday services when I was younger.

We had a good weekend in Leics. We ate too much true british food: fish & chips on Friday, curry on Saturday and a lunch roast on Sunday :) Having said that though, we were glad to be back home, sleeping in our own bed. The futon in Katy’s room in Leics is very low and she’s starting to be at the point where she can’t easily get in or out of it :)

The cats seemed happy to see us whe we got in. I was a bit worried about leaving them alone for the weekend – especially since Reenie was just getting over a bit of trouble as we were leaving – but Lennart stopped by the house a few times over the weekend and they were acting very catlike in their disdain of his presence :) Tolstoy seemed to be working on a hairball the night we came back but there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with him this morning.

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Lemon custard tart

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Ingredients

One 9-inch sweet pastry shell
4 eggs
4 egg yolks
175ml lemon juice
190g caster sugar
60g butter
icing sugar to decorate

Directions

  1. In a non-stick saucepan, with a whisk or fork, beat eggs and egg yolks until blended. Stir in lemon juice and 150g sugar.
  2. Cook over medium-low heat, stirring constantly, until mix thickens and coats a spoon well (about 15 minutes). Do not boil as mixture will curdle.
  3. Remove from heat and stir in butter until melted.
  4. Pour lemon filling in pastry shell.
  5. Refrigerate tart overnight.
  6. Before serving, sprinkle remaining sugar on top of tart and melt sugar glaze using grill or blowtorch until it just turns brown. If using grill, cover pastry with foil to prevent over-browning.
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Chocolate cream pie

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Ingredients

Biscuit base
120g rich tea bisbuits
120g butter, softened

Filling
50g corn flour
100g + 1tsp caster sugar
90g plain chocolate, chopped
2 egg yolks
1/2 tsp vanilla essence

Topping
150ml double or whipping cream

Directions

  1. Preheat oven to 190oC
  2. Beat biscuits until fine crumb.
  3. In shallow 9inch pie dish, mix biscuits crumbs with softened butter and press mixture on bottom and upside of dish. Bake crust for 8 minutes and cool on wire rack.
  4. In a large, non-stick saucepan mix the corn flour, 100g sugar and stir in milk and chocolate. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly until chocolate mixture thickens and boils. Boil for 1 minute and immediately remove from heat.
  5. In a cup, beat the egg yolks with a fork and stir in a small amount of the chocolate mix. Slowly pour the egg mix back into the chocolate mix, stirring rapidly to prevent lumping.
  6. Cook stirring constantly until the mixture thickens and coats a spoon well. Do not boil otherwise the mixture will curdle.
  7. Stir in vanilla essence and remaining butter until blended.
  8. Pour chocolate filling in the biscuit crust and smooth the top with a spatula.
  9. Press dampened grease-proof paper directly onto the surface of the hot filling to prevent a skin from forming and refrigerate pie for at least 3 hours or until well chilled.
  10. Whip cream with a teaspoon of sugar and flomp on top of pie.
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That was hard work but, BILL BAILEY!

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Woohoo!

It took me an hour, two computers, 4 browsers, 3 credit cards and untold amounts of swearing, but I have finally managed to book 2 tickets to go see Bill Bailey’s Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall, in October!

The show will be featuring a 72 piece symphony orchestra!

Katy is on the BB mailing list and was informed of a pre-registration seat sale for those who knew the magic word (that would be sent by email). It’s been an ordeal, let me tell you. The magical, mystical email was over a week late, but it finally came. The seat sale started today at noon, sharp. People had been advised to go to the Royal Albert ticketing website.

Which, at noon sharp, melted down.

It was chaos, I tell you. I was using both my laptop and desktop to try and get to the flippin’ form to book the tickets. Pages would timeout, the webserver would throw error pages left, right and center. At one point, I was informed that all the tickets had been already sold (about 5 minutes into the chaos). What probably happened is that tickets were reserved for a web session, but then the server failed and all the reservation locks weren’t reset and had to timeout. After about 30 minutes of swearing at both computers, I’d finally gotten to a point where I had 4 tickets in my shopping cart and was ready to checkout. After a few more tense minutes, I had finally gotten to a form where I entered my credit card details.

Except that it wouldn’t validate any of the 3 credit cards I tried, probably because the CC validation server was also melting down.

At which point I gave up and went on the phone. 30 minutes later, I had a woman with a lovely phone voice selling me 2 tickets in no time (and no hassle) at all. We’re 8 rows from the stage, so I should be able to get a good view of the show :)

This makes me happy.

I’ve now informed Katy that, even if she has to give birth at the show, we’re going. Hell, it’s going to be filmed for a DVD so it would probably make the bonus features :D

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A bit of a rough weekend, really.

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Talk about the cure being worse than the disease…

Katy was put on antibiotics last week to get rid of a small boil in her armpit that was very sore. The first round of antibiotics almost, but not quite, got it sorted out so she went back to the docs and they precribed her another round of the same antibiotics. Katy never really reacts well to antibiotics – they tend to make her stomach go completely wonky. Which they did, but to an extent never seen before. She had killer heartburn and it got to the point where she couldn’t sleep on her side at night because the muscles were too tender. She spent Friday night and Saturday night sleeping propped up semi-upright in bed. Suffice it to say, she didn’t sleep well.

We went to the docs on Saturday morning to get something done about the stomach pains. They prescribed something more powerful than the Gavescon she was using up to now. It seemed to help, to a point, until she started having an allergic reaction to it. Nothing too dramatic, just two days of constant itching. Since she can’t take antihistamines, I had to cover her in cold, damp towels during the night to soothe most of the itching. Suffice it to say, she didn’t sleep well.

The midwife came on Sunday morning to check her blood pressure. It’s elevated, but given the weekend she’s had, it’s not as bad as it could be. The midwife thinks that Katy should take the week off and get as much bedrest as she can, so Katy’s off to the docs (again!) to get signed off as sick for the week.

It’s not all bad though. We managed to get a lot done this weekend. We did a good sorting out of the office, I built the last of the nursery furniture that we’d bought last weekend, I did a stupid number of loads of laundry, we sorted out all our clothing and gave away a bunch of unused stuff to charity and I installed Ubuntu on the home laptop while we had a Harry Potter marathon.

I’m at the office right now but I’m just grabbing some files that I need to work from home. I’m going back as soon as they’re burned on DVD.

Hopefully, things’ll start going more smoothly in the near future.

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If this is the land of the free, they can keep it!

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Remind me to never, ever, ever again to to the US. If this is the land of the free, they can shove it where the sun don’t shine.

Federal agents may take a traveler’s laptop or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed.

Also, officials may share copies of the laptop’s contents with other agencies and private entities for language translation, data decryption or other reasons, according to the policies, dated July 16 and issued by two DHS agencies, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“The policies . . . are truly alarming,” said Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), who is probing the government’s border search practices. He said he intends to introduce legislation soon that would require reasonable suspicion for border searches, as well as prohibit profiling on race, religion or national origin.

DHS officials said that the newly disclosed policies — which apply to anyone entering the country, including U.S. citizens — are reasonable and necessary to prevent terrorism. Officials said such procedures have long been in place but were disclosed last month because of public interest in the matter.

Civil liberties and business travel groups have pressed the government to disclose its procedures as an increasing number of international travelers have reported that their laptops, cellphones and other digital devices have been taken — for months, in at least one case — and their contents examined.

The policies state that officers may “detain” laptops “for a reasonable period of time” to “review and analyze information.” This may take place “absent individualized suspicion.”

The policies cover “any device capable of storing information in digital or analog form,” including hard drives, flash drives, cell phones, iPods, pagers, beepers, and video and audio tapes. They also cover “all papers and other written documentation,” including books, pamphlets and “written materials commonly referred to as ‘pocket trash’ or ‘pocket litter.’ “

Reasonable measures must be taken to protect business information and attorney-client privileged material, the policies say, but there is no specific mention of the handling of personal data such as medical and financial records.

When a review is completed and no probable cause exists to keep the information, any copies of the data must be destroyed. Copies sent to non-federal entities must be returned to DHS. But the documents specify that there is no limitation on authorities keeping written notes or reports about the materials.

“They’re saying they can rifle through all the information in a traveler’s laptop without having a smidgen of evidence that the traveler is breaking the law,” said Greg Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology. Notably, he said, the policies “don’t establish any criteria for whose computer can be searched.”

Customs Deputy Commissioner Jayson P. Ahern said the efforts “do not infringe on Americans’ privacy.” In a statement submitted to Feingold for a June hearing on the issue, he noted that the executive branch has long had “plenary authority to conduct routine searches and seizures at the border without probable cause or a warrant” to prevent drugs and other contraband from entering the country.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff wrote in an opinion piece published last month in USA Today that “the most dangerous contraband is often contained in laptop computers or other electronic devices.” Searches have uncovered “violent jihadist materials” as well as images of child pornography, he wrote.

With about 400 million travelers entering the country each year, “as a practical matter, travelers only go to secondary [for a more thorough examination] when there is some level of suspicion,” Chertoff wrote. “Yet legislation locking in a particular standard for searches would have a dangerous, chilling effect as officers’ often split-second assessments are second-guessed.”

The emphasis is mine, but it’s still disgusting. They say that it’s for the good of the people. That’s like saying “only the guilty have something to fear”. All hail Big Brother! It’s in the same vein as killing off all of Usenet in order to get rid of a few hundred binary newsgroups. It’s like using a shotgun to kill a fly – as subtle, as effective and as smart.

Source: Washington Post

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