Notes from the eSAHM

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I am in Nottingham today, attending the eSciences All Hands Meeting until thursday. It's an interesting meeting, though the scope of it is not really my thing. Any conference that can gather archeologists, astronomers, social scientists, computer scientists and biologists under one roof is bound to be a bit ecclectic. There's some interesting tidbits, but most of it I find uninteresting. I'm here to give a demo on PRIDE/OLS, so basically I'm losing 3 days of useful work time to give a 25 minute presentation and waving the flag a lot. Ah well, thems the breaks.

Getting here was interesting. Taking the train is still a novel experience, especially when it's not a route I'm used to. I'm always worried I'm on the wrong train (this is especially confusing when the trains are identified by their final destination and it's not always obvious you need to take the Norwich train to get off at Ely to then take the Liverpool train to get off at Nottingham). Still, I made it in one piece on time, though at one point I had to disturb a One employee who was busy oogling a rather bust-enhanced page 3 girl.

The hotel I'm staying in is ok, but you'd think I'd be used to differences in classifications and ratings between Canada and the UK. You'd think a 4-star hotel would be a bit more posh than having plastic cups in the loo and small, lumpy beds. Still, it's clean and the food is good.

Speaking of, you'd think I'd know better by now to steer clear of the full english fry-up. But no. I'm stupid that way. I went a bit overboard with the bacon this morning and my body is now voicing a rather harsh opinion that this was indeed a very foolish thing to do. I'm going to be drinking a lot of green tea today to try and bring my GI system back in line. For now, I just hope that my subsonic gas releases aren't disrupting the keynote speakers.

In other news, we're seeing the light at the end of the wedding prep tunnel. We finally heard from our cake decorator last night, and the last things to do are getting Katy's hair cut, the music and the final fittings for the suit hire. yay!

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Yet another weekend update

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In two weeks and a day, I will get married. This is starting to scare the living crap out of me. Not for the decision or the act, but for the fact that I want everything to go well! I have nightmares that our guests will not enjoy the food or the music or will call us cheap bastards for not having a live band or an open bar. This is what I get for reading those bridal magazines.

The last details are starting to fall into place, thank god. We met with the catering chef from Chilford last friday night. He's a lovely man, and is even more paranoid about allergies than I am, which is saying a lot. In a sense though, I'm really happy about that. Even though he can't guarantee that the food will be 100% allergy friendly (mostly because a lot of stuff if subcontracted out), I know that he's going to try his damndest to accomodate everybody. He's going to make a special menu for one of our guests who is lactose intolerant and has IBS. I mean, yay! We didn't expect them to go that extra mile, but they are. Chalk one up for good customer relations! At first, he was worried that we'd have too much food, then later, not enough. In the end, it's going to work out that we're going to have canapes with the toast round, then a buffet, then cake (provided by our cake decorator), then another buffet serving around 7pm.

All in all, we hope to be eating and drinking from 2:30 to 10pm. This makes us happy :)

In other news, Katy's dad has been here since last thursday doing the finishing touches on the painting we'd started over the summer. We hired a stairwell access scaffold tower so we was able to paint the walls in the stairwell, do the bathroom in total and finish off all the woodwork with gloss. The apartment looks really nice, but smells of paint :) The good thing is that the cat is not covered in paint, even though he was trying his damndest to help out. The last bit we want to do this year is to paint our cupboard downstairs and get some shelving done (though that will have to wait until after the wedding).

I'm going to Nottingham for a meeting from tuesday to thursday. I so can't be arsed. I'm leaving for 3 days to give a 25 minute powerpoint presentation and demo. Joy. Ah well, after that, there's only one ore week before people start arriving :D

I can't wait.

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[recipe] Hungarian Goulash

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INGREDIENTS:

* 1 kg beef brisket, cut into 1-inch chunks
* salt and freshly ground black pepper
* tabasco sauce, to taste
* 2 tbsp all-purpose flour
* 3 tbsp olive oil, divided use
* 5 medium sweet onions, sliced and separated into rings
* 1/2 cup sweet red wine
* 1 cup oxo cube broth
* 1 tin chopped tomatoes with juice
* 4 tsp cup sweet Hungarian paprika (see Note)
* 1 cup sour cream

PREPARATION:

Place beef chunks in a large bowl. Sprinkle liberally with salt and freshly ground pepper. Toss with the flour.

Heat a heavy Dutch oven over medium high heat and add 1 tablespoon of the olive oil. Swirl to coat the bottom of the pan. Place beef chunks in a single layer and brown on two sides. Season with tabasco. You will probably need to do this in batches. Do not crowd the meat or it will boil instead of brown. Remove browned beef chunks to a bowl.

Reduce heat to medium-low. To the drippings in the Dutch oven, add the remaining 2 tablespoons of olive oil, onion rings and onions. Toss to coat with the olive oil. Cover tightly and sweat the vegetables, stirring occasionally, until onions are limp but not browned.

Add red wine to the vegetables and cook 2 minutes. Add broth and paprika. Return beef to the pan. Stir until well-combined. Cover tightly, reduce heat, and simmer on low heat for 1-1/2 to 2 hours, stirring occasionally, until beef is fork-tender.

Remove Dutch oven from heat and wait for boiling to subside. Taste and add additional salt if necessary. Stir in sour cream until completely incorporated into the gravy.

Serve Hungarian gulash over hot buttered noodles with chopped parsley or over plain basmati rice.

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Well that's just stupid!

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Mums in burger backlash over healthy eating

TWO mums are organising junk food runs to a South Yorkshire school – because they don't agree with its healthy eating policy.

Julie Critchlow and Sam Walker deliver fish and chips, pies, and burgers to hungry kids at Rawmarsh Comprehensive every day. They say they have started the food runs because pupils are turning their noses up at the 'low fat rubbish' served up at the school and they are angry at a recent ruling by headteacher John Lambert that pupils can't leave at lunchtime to visit the local chippy – and should eat pasta, salads and sandwiches.

[Low fat rubbish? you're overweight and your kid is probably spherical.]

The two mums say demand is so great they have had to start using an old supermarket trolley for their lunchtime deliveries. Sam, of Monkwood Road, Rawmarsh, said: “This is all down to that Jamie Oliver. Well I don't like him or what he stands for – he is forcing our kids to be more picky about their food.”

[No he's not, he's forcing them not to die of a coronary at 23 you dumbass.]

Julie, also of Monkwood Road, added: “Kids need a bit of fat in their diet – there is nothing wrong with burgers and chips. At school they only get chips once a week if they are lucky.

“The school have objected to what we are doing and they have even threatened to call in the police. But we will carry on – the kids just won't eat the food they are given at school.”
But the two mums have angered local healthy eating campaigners who say they are trying to sabotage the school's new healthy menus. Rotherham Council healthy eating campaigner Jill Adams said: “What these two women are doing is shameful. I don't believe they think they are doing the right thing by the kids.

“There have been numerous studies which show that children are not only healthier if they cut junk food out of their diet, but they learn better as well.

“We fought hard to get Turkey Twizzlers, chips and other fatty food off the menu and now we have some parents campaigning against healthy food – it is staggering.”
Headteacher John Lambert said: “All the freshly prepared food now served complies with the government's healthy eating guidelines, and I can't imagine why the children want to go elsewhere.

“The food that these two parents are handing out is not part of that healthy eating diet and on top of that I have to question the morality of delivering it.”

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More pissed off than I should be

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I think I've now fixed all that was broken when my friggin ISP got hacked. I have to say that I am not impressed with their tech support. Getting hacked is bad enough, but that's forgivable. Losing all the backups at the same time, less so. Needing to migrate every user account to a new box, you're starting to suck ass. Then we get to the realms of the truly incompetent: creating my account twice, giving me two sets of DNS server information to update my domain name registration. When asked which one to use, giving me the wrong set.

Finally, everything seems to be back up, with all the content found and only one JPG file lost to the ethers. I can live with that. What pisses me off though, really really badly, is that I lost over two years of access logs!

Now I'm not really vain generally, but I liked to be able to see how my website progressed over time. At it's busiest, I was going over 10GB of bandwidth a month! Craptacular.

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Weekend Update

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Productive weekend. Costly, but productive. Katy was working this weekend but we still managed to get a lot done. Saturday saw us visiting a cattery that's only 5 minutes away from our place and we've found it suitable to board Tolstoy there while we're cavorting in Canada. It seems nice, smells clean and looked busy (therefore popular) while we were there. It's also only £7/day, which is cheaper than getting people to come to our place for one hour and give him some food and a bit of fuss.

Katy and I then went to town (hooyah!) to get some shopping done for makeup, disposable cameras and other stuff. We had to use up a pier discount voucher (or else we'd lose it, and we can't have that!).

It would seem that some time around 3:30 am GMT (10:30 pm EST), I became an uncle. Nat and my still as yet unnamed nephew are apparently doing fine, good good :)

On Sunday, we went to the gym after Katy's shift and I realized just how badly I'd lapsed back into crap shape. That must be seen to! After a bit of lunch, we went to B&Q to get some paint and then to Tesco to do a shop. We are now firmly entrenched in our overdrafts (until the wedding present my folks gave us clears in the bank, a nice and whopping month from now).

it has begun:

The xmas displays are starting to pop up and annoy people. Geez, it's only september and Tesco have their xmas puddings on the shelves. T'is the season to be cynical…

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Back in the UK in one piece, albeit a tired one

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Where to begin.

The flight back to the UK was the most unpleasant one I've ever had. The flight itself was fine. Security was fine (although it seems that while you can bring liquids on the London-Ottawa flight, you can't do so on the Ottawa-London leg) and the flight itself was on time and turbulence free. What made it hell on earth was that there was the ubiquitous Screaming Child™ that was 2 seats to the right of me so I couldn't accidentally give her a good thumping. That kid is the poster child of bad parenting and why there should be muzzle and leash laws for children.

Imagine, if you would, a hyped up 5 year old that is running in the aisles and jumping on the seats. That's always a good start. Then imagine that she starts screaming her blond-tressed head off as soon as the airplane starts taxiing to take off and does not stop. For 5 hours straight. She finally fell asleep about an hour before landing and slept through it. Bitch.

I had earplugs and my ipod headphones crammed in my ears, and still I could hear her. Her parents were completely oblivious to it. Even the stewardesses were commenting (my favourite quote being I've never heard anybody scream for that long, normally they stop after a while).

Anyway, I made it to Heathrow without killing her, for which I am quite proud of myself. I breezed through immigration, got my bags and went to meet Katy and Mel. Fast forward a 2h drive to Leicester, lunch and a 2h drive to Cambridge and there you go. I was home and completely traveled out.

I've been spending the day catching up on my email and trying to get my website up again. I am seriously unimpressed with the tech support of my webhost. It started with having their whole server farm hacked, to then losing the backups and then finally creating two different accounts for me to use to recreate my website (I was given two distinct IPs and two sets of DNS servers to use). Joy. Anyway, the good news is that I seem to have everything back again, with only one or two LJ pictures lost to the ether. The moral of this story is to always make sure you have your own damn backup for your stuff, kiddies.

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We are fucking not amused

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My website hosting provider was hacked a few days ago. All their servers have been wiped and what's worse, all the backups have been deleted as well. The fucking losers. I have a backup of my website on my laptop, but I know that there's some stuff that was only online. It's not mission critical, but it does piss me off. When I'm back in the UK and have a broadband connection to re-upload everything, I'm going to go through the links on my LJ and see what's lost and what I can recreate.

In the meantime, I'm going to put my bookmarks online so I can at least have a copy at hand to go browse stuff.

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