To sleep, perchance to

At Last

2007-04-24T11:30:00.000Z

It has finally happened. After almost 4 years and countless diss-tractions, the dissertation has been handed in. Now all I have to do is wait until the end of July before I find out if it cuts the mustard and I can graduate at the end of the year.

Just think of all the things I can do without having a guilty conscience because I should be doing my diss. WoW

Keeping it Real

2007-04-17T19:00:00.000Z

As England are being pummeled by South Africa, the best discovery of the tournament has got to be Tom Fordyce, the commentator who types out the Live Text on the BBC website. He has made me laugh throughout the the last month of cricket.

Stand up and be counted

2007-03-01T19:27:00.000Z

I like the idea of the 10 downing street petition website and decided to support one and make my voice heard.

"We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to recognise Jedi Knights as a religion on par with Christianity, Islam and other beliefs.

Amazingly the government sent me an email to explain it's stand on the cause that i felt I had to support:

"The Government has no overarching role in regulating or recognising personal belief or faith. The UK has a long held commitment to freedom of worship and belief, and people are free to form religions and free to follow their own practices and beliefs provided they remain within the law.

May the Force be with you."

White Out

2007-02-01T18:37:00.000Z

One day I'll remember to check my trouser pockets before putting them through the wash.

Almost There

2007-01-18T12:45:00.000Z

The 18,000th word of the dissertation is “the”. I was quite disappointed as this isn’t a very exciting word to finish the diss on and the last sentence doesn’t make much sense, a few hundred more words and I might have managed to give it a proper ending. Unfortunately I don’t make the rules so have to stick to the word limit and finish it there.

The wind is picking up

2007-01-08T18:57:00.000Z

Mad made artichoke soup on Saturday, eating them at the weekend due to their rather windy reputation. It was the first time I’d had artichokes and was very impressed. The tast is very distictive and slightly earthy, and not a bit like parsnip or turnip, which is how I’d always imagined them to be. It proved to be good plan to not eat them on a work night as I might have been banished from the office the next day. They did live upto their reputation.

Diss-tractions

2006-12-06T22:15:00.000Z

Today I had a day off to work on the diss. It has to be handed in around June so I'd better get my skakes on. Sometimes I feel like there's loads to do, other times I think that it could be done by christmas. The truth is that it probably could be done by the 25th, but that would only be the words. I'm sure that there will be a lot of faffing to do with presentation and binding. I guess the sooner that the words are written, the easier it will be.

It is amazing the things that I suddenly have to do now that I have taken time out to study.

Sausages

2006-11-23T21:47:00.000Z

We finally got round to using the mincer/sausage stuffer this weekend. I can honestly say that the sausages were ok, but there will need to be quite a bit of practice before the home made sausages are infliced upon family and friends.This is especially true with the linking. After a couple of attempts, we decided to make large cumberland rings rather that ruin some perfectly good sausage casing.

As it’s Mad’s duty night we fend for ourselves and I decided to go for another culinary first by cooking some tripe for supper. It’ll have to be a pretty special recipe before I try that again.

Shiny, new Japanese/German hybrid

2006-11-16T18:23:00.000Z

After 6 days Comet have come up trumps. My laptop has been scrapped and I'm writing this on a shiny new one. While I was looking for a new geek station, I decided to buy one from a high street store rather than get one more cheaply from the internet so that if it did break, I would be able to take it into a shop, talk to someone face to face and get it fixed. It's worth paying that bit extra to be able to shout at someone without having to be on hold for an hour before hand.
I have to say that I never had to shout at anybody at Comet. They were very polite and helpful about the whole traumatic ordeal.

HP are the Weakest Link

2006-11-01T17:10:00.000Z

So far today I have been waiting on the HP tech support line for over an hour and never managed to get through. All I want them to do is return the laptop back to me unfixed as they have failed to fix it for the last 4 1/2 weeks.
Is there any sort of league table for tech support. In my calculations as to which computer to buy, I would happily pay a bit more if I had the confidence that the support line was of any use.

Back Down To Earth

2006-10-23T16:56:00.000Z

The first day back after a holiday is always rubbish and today is no exception. We were away last week, spending a few days in Devon and then up to the midlands for a few days on the in-laws canal boat. We ate posh food here which was very good and then fantastic seafood here . The seafood was a shellfish platter for two to share and had 3lbs of mussels and 1lb of prawns as well as some clams, cockles, a couple of langoustines and half a lobster. After an hour of picking away and getting very messy we admitted defeat, although there was a very big pile of empty shells. The waiter gave us 8 1/2 out of 10 for effort so we can’t have done too badly.

We then headed north and spent a few days speeding around the midlands in Mad’s parents canal boat. The boat didn’t actually speed but there was a constant attempt to get through the locks in record time.

So after a week of eating and sitting around, work feels like I’ve come back down to earth with a bump. Oh well, only 2 months before I break up for Christmas.

Reunion

2006-10-06T18:18:00.000Z

Having time off with suspected cheese poisoning, my second genuine sick day ever, I have re-read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I had forgotten how much I had enjoyed it the first time around (except for that Professor Umbridge. She's a nasty piece of work).

Jamming

2006-09-06T11:46:00.000Z

Everything has been pretty busy for the last few weeks.
We have moved house, work has been very hectic and the veg plot has demanded a fair amount of attention.
Things are gradually starting to calm down.
The flat has been completely repainted (with help from Amy and Mad’s mum), the new computer system has been live for about a month and most of the glitches are being resolved and a damp August has meant that we haven’t had to go watering every night.

Unfortunately we still don’t have the internet so the amount of geeking in my life has plummeted, but it has had the effect of focusing my mind on making the flat live-inable and spending time in the garden. The flat comes with a big garden that needs quite a lot of work. For the rest of the summer I’ll be cutting back nettles and brambles and getting the lawn into a reasonable condition. During my hacking away I did cut out some of the neighbours Clematis, causing it to collapse back into his garden (It had climbed 10 ft up the wall and was hanging onto the brambles growing on our side).
Whoops.
No lasting damage was done to the plant but we might be off their Christmas card list.

Other excitement has been had during the last month (in no particular order):

We made our own jam for the first time, using Black Currants from the allotment and Elderberries from the garden.

Won second prize for our cabbage in the village show, it was a fine cabbage and unjustly beaten by a sweetcorn.

Bought series 6 of The Simpsons on DVD, the best reason to not do painting we’ve found so far.

Got a new laptop, I haven’t been able to do any true geeking but we have used it to watch lots of episodes of the Simpsons.

Today is E-Day -6

Elasticated Waistbands

2006-07-29T16:18:00.000Z

Once upon a time, if my trousers started to feel a bit tight, the first thing that would enter my head is to cut down on pies and beer.
Now I just think that I should buy bigger trousers.

Is this what married life has done to me?

Home Alone

2006-07-09T12:33:00.000Z

Mad’s in South Africa for the next three weeks and I have the run of the house. So far I’ve made more pork pies and cleaned.

Rock n Roll.

Pie-tastic

2006-07-06T20:13:00.000Z

We made Pork Pies at the weekend. This was very exciting… well I found it exciting. I have been thinking about it for quite a while but it has always seemed a faf to make the filling, hot water pastry and the jelly. When Mad suggested that we give it a go I thought that the challenge was on. It is actually very easy, just takes a bit of organisation to make sure that all the ingredients are in the kitchen at the same time (we did fail to get the pigs trotters for the jelly). The end result was fantastic and tastes much better than any thing from the shops. I liked the fact that it was possible to have control over the texture as well. The filling contained mince, bit of bacon and largish lumps of pork shoulder so the end result had a more meaty texture rather than the piped mince that fills commercial pies.

This may become the summer of pie making.

We also went to Alton Towers. It was the second time I had been and was good fun but there wasn’t much pork pie action.

Old Fashioned Geeking

2006-06-18T17:27:00.000Z

The wedding has come and gone and things are finally starting to get back to normal. It is nice to be able to think about something else for a change. The day was fantastic and I think that everybody had fun. It is also one less excuse I can use to not get on with the dissertation. Curses. To console myself, I have just upgraded the mobile. I now have one with a half decent camera and lots of geeky extras to keep me amused for about 2 days and then I’ll have to amuse myself some other way. A new laptop maybe……

The Big Game

2006-05-01T09:49:00.000Z

I went to my first premiership match on Saturday. Fulham vs. Manchester City. I’m not a massive follower of football but a friend had a spare ticket and it seemed like a good idea. The game was at Man City, so we were in the away supporters end. I never realised how few tickets the away team are allocated, it can't have been more than 700 seats. I spent a lot of the time marvelling at the stadium. It seats around 50,000 and was immense, although the actual pitch does look surprisingly small. The rest of the time was largely spent listening to the fan’s chants, some of which were really funny, but most were just anti-Chelsea. Oh, the obligatory meat pie was very good too.

At long last

2006-04-21T20:05:00.000Z

I've finally done it. After years of promising myself that one day I'd do it, on Wednesday I made up my mind, went a bit crazy and whipped out the credit card. Oh yes. The joy to be had. Today a little package from Amazon arrived, appearing too small to contain the amount of sheer genius that lay within. About 16 years after it was released, the Led Zeppelin box has finally been added to my music collection.

Dogs, Chickens and Ducks

2006-04-17T13:45:00.000Z

Most of this weekend has been spent dog sitting. Sapphire (the dog) is a pretty well behaved black lab and it's been fun, although it really brought home the responsibility of dog ownership. Everything I've done in the last three days has had to fit around a schedule of taking the dog out every three or four hours, and then hang aroud for half an hour trying to talk her into having a pee.

One thing that I managed to do was cook a multi-bird roast. I've been thinking about it for a while but have always been daunted by having to de-bone a chicken and possibly ruin a perfectly good bird. This weekend Mad was away on camp so I thought that it would be a good opportunity to practice.
The process was easier than I thought it would be and I managed to stuff a chicken with a duck and some sausage meat. Once the chicken had been sewn back up, it had pretty much kept it's shape and didn't look as bad as I thought. This did mean that I had a lot of poultry to eat and nobody to help me, so it has been chicken sandwiches or chicken omelets for the last three days. I reckon that it will be finished by Thursday and then I won’t want look at another chicken for at least a month or two.

Eating Pandas

2006-03-22T12:41:00.000Z

Last night we went out for an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet. The range of food was very impressive, including lots of crispy duck and a chocolate fountain, but they also has sushi. I was a bit over excited about the sushi and had a fair few of them . But looking back on it, the little fishy blighters are predominantly rice, so I made mistake of unnecessarily bulking out on carbohydrates. A schoolboy error when it comes to all-you-can-eat deals. Today my mouth feels like a Panda has curled up and died in it, probably from all the salt and msg.

Road to Riches

2006-03-18T23:42:00.000Z

Yesterday I went to the dogs. By the end of the third race I was £2.24 up and should have quit then. Unfortunately there were another ten races and I ended up gaining an insight into the saying “you’ll never see a poor bookmaker”. If only I could develop a system…..

First For Spring

2006-03-01T21:35:00.000Z

Yesterday was the first day of the year that I managed to drive to work without having to put the lights on. Today I drove home without putting them on. As the days lengthen, it really does feel like Spring has almost started to think about springing and it’s very exciting. Even the chilli plants that went in 2 weeks ago have actually started to sprout.

Another first was found in a butchers at Burton market last weekend. They sell cubes of ‘Savoury Duck’. It looked quite interesting and I have never heard of it so bought a couple. It turned out to be some sort of combination of Corned Beef and Brawn, with just a hint of duck. It was fairly salty, suprisingly squidgey and had pockets of jelly. While I like to try new things, I won’t have to try too hard to not buy much more of this.

Butter Me Up

2006-02-12T14:11:00.000Z

Yesterday I tried my hand at making my own butter. I made it using the jam jar method which is really easy and only took about 25 minutes. The only jam jar I had was one that used to have Reading Allotment Chutney, and still smelt of the chutney. Hopefully it won't effect the taste of the butter. Although I like butter and I like chutney so it might not be so bad.

Strong the dark side is

2006-02-08T22:29:00.000Z

After going for a curry, we poped into the local for a sneaky pint on the way home. This ended up with a dilema as neither of us had any money, so the only option was to put it on the plastic, but there is a minimum spend at the bar. The bar lady declined our offer of a drink, but rather than make us buy lots of packets of crisps, she told us we could start a tab. I've never been anywhere long or often enough for them to offer me a tab. It gave me a warm feeling of belonging, but it also feels like I'm being drawn to the dark side.