Monthly Archives: January 2007

State of Mane

I wanted to put up some pictures of how large Fudge’s mane has got at this time of year.

January:

fudge

November:

cat and computer

May

06052006(001).jpg

He doesn’t half look strange when he tries to wash it!

As ever, lots of pictures of both cats on Flickr: Fudge, Smudge, and both of them.

A dangerous discovery

Last night whilst idly watching What Women Want out of the corner of my eye, I was using my mobile phone to browse the internet.  I seem to spend most of my leisure time in front of two or three simultaneous stimuli.

And I happened upon Amazon.co.uk from the mobile browser.  The Amazon website scales really well, and that is the dangerous discovery.  Now I can idly browse bookshops from anywhere in the country instead of having to remember what I wanted to look up when I get home.

Second Life – Niles Fratica

I’ve just spent the last three hours playing with Second Life, a pretty cool internet thing where you get a body and you wander around talking to other people.

You create a character for free, and it drops your character on an island that teaches you how to use the engine, and then teleports you to a starter place.

What was going on in the starter place was just bizarre. First time I was there, three people summoned Chthulu, which was rather impressive, until Chthulu started to devour my immortal soul.  (I didn’t know whether it was possible to die, so I was slightly concerned at this point.)  There was also a huge great skeletal dragon thing. The second time back to the starter place, someone had flooded it with bright yellow floaty things that sang “Ring ring ring ring BANANA PHONE!” over and over again, which was a little annoying.

I wasn’t sure what things happen in SL, so searched, erm, ‘gay’ to see what I could find and spent an interesting half hour on a place called Fire Island talking to the people there. One of whom lives only a few miles from me in real life, although the place was populated largely by Americans.

I will be going back, it was certainly interesting.  My character name is Niles Fratica if you want to try and find me there.

Sunday night feast

I was wandering around the supermarket at about 6pm wandering what to have for dinner.  Sherwood’s Co-op supermarket somehow has permission to be open until 6pm, and the Spa is 24 hours, including Sunday night. The newly opened Somerfield is 10-4 on Sundays.

Time to cook, and I needed fresh fruit and veg.  It was too late for Somerfield and the Spa doesn’t seem to have anything fresh at all. Wandering around looking at what was on the shelves, and the meal I came up with was bloody Mary, an oven baked fish steak with a cheese sauce, with carrots, broccoli and bulghar wheat pilaf, and apple crumble.  So, the “5-a-day” portion count?  One for the tomato juice, one for the celery stick.  One for each of the carrots, broccoli and the pepper/onion combo in the pilaf. One for the crumble, and possibly also one for the bulghar wheat itself.

I do like interesting alternatives to the usual staples of rice, potatoes and pasta. The bulghar wheat is one we’ve started having.  I must get around to cooking the couscous we have in the cupboard.
Not too far from home tomorrow, so I may be able to cook again, but it’ll be pizzas and curries by Friday.

My vague, food-related New Years resolutions are:

  • Shop for more than one meal.
  • Eat more fruit and veg – salad especially.
  • Don’t buy F+V then let it rot. (If I am going to let it rot: don’t leave it on the floor or the table where it damages the wood.)
  • Actually eat leftovers instead of finding them in the fridge or freezer long after they have stopped being safe to eat.
  • Take putrescibles to the compost before the putresce.
  • Go to the bottle bank more often

Celebrity death

The news of Magnus Magnusson dying sent me straight… to b3ta.

After almost any celebrity death, the wags on http://www.b3ta.com start doing humourous takes in very poor taste.  They had Saddam bungie jumping within hours.  And you just know that these images and the jokes will be circulating virally in email very soon.  It’s still nice to see them in b3ta first.

Nothing too bad yet – just this, a rather fetching tribute.

Back to Wii

Oh dear. Someone on Cix asked if anyone had a Mii that looked like Tony Blair, for the purposes of Wii boxing, so back to Google it is.

No Tony Blair, but have found a really good John Prescott.

And a site dedicated to sharing Miis through your PC, using a bluetooth dongle and your Wiimote. I just happened to buy a BT dongle this week because I can’t find either of my phone cables.

Apparently Toys’r’us had a stock of Wii.

Free pizza!

We’re close upon a deadline which means long evenings in the office.  Tonight we wanted pizza, but it was my new colleague’s first time at Lambarellis, the excellent local Italian deli, so I popped down the road to pick up a pizza leaflet listing what they had.

Shock, horror, they had no leaflets!  I had to borrow their laminated shop copy to show H the range of pizzas.  Then I noticed the shop copy was in red and black, and our printing machine can automatically take red-and-black originals and reproduce them in two colours.  This was a feature of the machine I hadn’t yet tested, so the pizza shop leaflet went on the printer, and when I went back 40 minutes later to collect our orders, I took 60 two-colour copies of their leaflet with me to tide them over til their own came back from the printer.

They were really chuffed.  Which was nice.  And they let us have the pizza for free. Not bad for a few minutes work.
Mind you, we are very frequent customers at Lambarellis.  Then again, that’s because they’re so good.  Huge range of sandwiches, pizzas, salads, jackets, panini, booze.