Happy New Year

I wish you all the best for 2015.

2014 has been excellent for me. I've been abroad twice, I met a woman, and my acoustic guitar playing has improved noticeably.

The last few days of the year, however, have been dominated by anger at ovenware.

This happens all too often, I ordered pie and chips in a pub, and was instead served a shallow casserole wearing a pastry hat. That's not a pie, a pie has a top crust and a bottom crust, and the gravy is rich and thick from the pastry it has dissolved.

As well as the great pie fraud, I'm furious that cookware is regressing to ironage and stoneage technology

I'm not a great fan of Le Creuset ovenware, it's too heavy and too expensive for practical use, but it is very sturdy. The sheer price of it has lead the pretentious and the fashion concious to associate it with fine dining, and they will happily put a bright orange stove-enamelled cast-iron pot on their otherwise luxurious table. The garish iron peddlers have smelled the money and now sell little items intended for the table. The least practical and most offensive is a heart shaped ramekin. A cast iron, non-circular ramekin FFS.

Worse still: I'm indifferent to a lamb casserole, but if you want to make one, that's fine with me. If you want to use Moroccan spices, be my guest. You can't seriously convince me that it tastes better, or is somehow enhanced for having been cooked in an earthenware dish with a conical chimney stack. Or that bringing its giant scalding chimney to the table is a good idea.

Richard "Rage Against the Tagine" B

Happy Christmas

For all my friends and family. He's a Christmas song that my friends and I recorded with my girlfriend across the Atlantic.

Best wishes for Christmas and the new year.

http://youtu.be/XqluUClZtDE

from

Richard B

Blofeld Costume

This weekend to my great surprise I won a fancy dress competition. I wasn't taking it particularly seriously, but with a little effort and preparation I made a perfectly good Blofeld costume (the party had a James Bond theme).

Blofeld is the villain with a fluffy white cat, a bald head, and the nasty scar. He's got a suit with a mandarin collar, a black and silver sovereign ring, and black shoes (a sure sign of evil!).

I've got little enough hair, so it was no problem to shave it off. For the suit I repurposed my normal "Man from Delmonte" summer suit. I turned the collar and lapels up and held it closed at the throat with a shirt stud and a safety pin.

The ring was made from a 10p piece bonded to a strip of tinplate cut from an old mustard tin. The 10p was "enamelled" with a black scrapyard marker.

The scar was coloured with a dark pink lip-liner pencil and produced with theatrical makeup called Rigid Collodion.

 The most challenging part of the costume, other than being a boy and buying a lip-liner, was the fluffy white cat. I compromised and took a polar bear that I won in a raffle.

See me:

See my makeup:

Richard "Ernst Stavro" B

Old Man

I am old. I have long suspected it, given how young policeman look, that there’s nothing on tv worth watching, how rubbish most of popular music is, and the random aches that my body is subject to. What really hammered home the point was what annoyed me in the supermarket this weekend.

Over the past decade or so there has been an enormous gentrification of the biscuit isle. My tastes are now niche. Who will cater to those of us who like normal biscuits? Who value Crawfords custard creams and bourbons? Who use own label dijo's in cooking? Who see Hobnobs as a luxury? Where will we buy our Garibaldis and our Malted Milks?

Clubs and Penguins should be a biscuit for a special occasion, not a low cost alternative to some pretentious sugary artisan cookie infused with Madagascan vanilla and coated with hand sourced ethically stirred extra virgin Equadorian chocolate.

Richard "Digestives" B

Family Christmas

The Dyson brothers are an unlikely bunch. There's Freeman, the eminent mathematician and physicist who says that any long lived industrialised civilisation will end up completely enclosing its home star with solar collectors and habitats. His younger brother Miles developed an autonomous artificial intelligence which ran amok and overthrew humanity, at least until John Connor's resistance movement sent soldiers and machines back in time to sabotage the development. Two of the brothers are called James. One of them works in Customer Service with a friend of mine, the other developed a bagless Hoover and got a cushy position as a government advisor after he moved all his manufacturing to China.

My favourite is Freeman.

Richard "Maybe they're not actually brothers" B

Planck Time

Because of the uncertainty principle there's only so small a distance that you could ever measure. Because the universe has a strictly enforced speed limit  (the speed of light)  and a minimum feature size (the Planck length) there is a theoretical shortest time that could ever be measured – it's called the Planck time. It's the tick of the fastest clock that the laws of physics would allow. It's vanishingly small.

I strongly dislike JDBC database connections, but it's as nothing compared to my intense burning hatred for Microsoft SQLServer. Like all digital measurements SQLserver timestamps have their own minimum resolution. THE MINIMUM RESOLUTION ISN'T AN INTEGER. When you store a timestamp in an SQLServer database it is rounded to the nearest three-and-a-third milliseconds. When you query it back it is rounded again to the nearest millisecond.

8ms you say? The closest I've got is 6 and two thirds.

That's fine, 6.66recurring will do me.

Yeah I'm sorry about this, but that’s not a whole number, I'll have to give you 7 instead.

7 then.

7ms you say? The closest I've got is 6 and two thirds.

Richard "how do I hate thee, let me count the ways" B