Archives for the 'Stuff' Category
Food, glorious food
Whilst idling on the sofa one evening last Autumn I discovered that one of the many special mode settings on my compact camera is ‘food’. Yes, many Japanese stereotypes are based on truth so it’s not surprise that this was a standard feature of the cheeky little Panasonic Lumix.
One of my regional tours towards the end of 2008 offered a chance to put this mode into action. Weeks of travelling and lack of exercise were taking their toll. What if I were to record everything I ate for a week? As well as appealing to the male list-making side of my brain, it might make me think more carefully about snacking and bloating.
So, tenacious reader, this is a visual review of what I consumed in late October last year. Vegetarians may wish to look away now.
[A clearer set on Flickr]
Born anonymous
Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up is a short, entertaining, revealing autobiographical study on his rise to standup comedy fame and why he left it all behind. Yet it raises an important question: where are the stories of the people who aren’t famous? Not just the notables – favourite recent obituaries include the inventor of the roundabout and an aviatrix who raced into her 80s – but those who tried and failed, and those who didn’t even try?
We read only of those who are successful in their chosen field, generally the driven types who achieve recognition for their achievements. What about the men and women who are successful on their own terms, or nearly made it but didn’t, or who never had a hope? A biography of a Blair, a Campbell, a Freud or a Martin serves only to highlight the failures of others in a society where success is judged on celebrity and material wealth. We need books about ordinary lives, and lives less ordinary but also less visible. Most people have had extraordinary moments that punctuate months or years of not a lot. We should be judging ourselves against our peers, not our heroes.
[For the record - this is not necessarily a reflection of my current state of mind. And nor is this occasional blog a solution to this problem...]
Happy Birthday, Boss!
Ma Down was, well, she reached an important landmark last week and we celebrated with some of her friends on a 45′ yacht trip across the Solent to the Isle of Wight for lunch at the Royal Corinthian Yacht Club in Cowes. The weather was stunning which meant that we didn’t get any sailing done, but has a very pleasant day motoring and avoiding the cargo ships.
Here are a few photos of the day. Glad you enjoyed it! (I know she’ll read this). She’s a pretty good sort overall, you know.
(I’m taking bets on how long it will be before the writ is served to remove some of these photos.)
My Mistake
Flashback: a couple of months ago, I thought it would be a good idea to run my Mac’s wireless keyboard under the tap to get rid of the dirt on the white keys. Turns out this was an horrendous mistake and the whole thing became waterlogged. (I now suspect that the claim all keyboards are washed at the end of manufacturing is urban myth, dammit.)
The only way to dry it was to take apart this impressive piece of engineering, dry everything by hand and then try and reassemble it.
Remarkably, this posting comes to you from that kyboraed.
Random conversations
Some of my favourite moments happen in the queue for the checkout. I tend to make an effort to treat the operatives as humans, which seems unusual in this part of South London and leads to some odd conversations. Two from the past week – perhaps you had to be there, but they tickled me so much that I wrote them down.
After a stint in the park, looking rather muddy, and having waited ages for a young male cashier to appear.
Me: How’re you doing?
Cashier: Alright thanks. You?
Me: Fine. Bit muddy…probably a bit of shit on there actually.
Cashier: Oh yeah. Well, it’s good for you.
Me: Really? How?
Cashier: Well, it’s full of nutrients. You get different sorts of dog shit around the world.
Me: …?
Cashier: Because of the diet innit.. Dogs here are well fed, all that rich stuff, so their, you know, dirt is big and rich.
Me: I ’spose.
Cashier: But in the third world they don’t have much to eat, so different stuff comes out and it dries different. Whiter.
Me: Oh.
Cashier: So you’ve got the good shit on you.
Me: Er, thanks
On the way home, wearing my cycle gear, being served by a woman about 40 years old.
Me: Bit quiet in here today
Cashier: Yeah it is baby. So bored… You’re cycling home, right?
Me: Yeah.
Cashier: And you’ve got a wife?
Me: Well, no but working on it.
Cashier: Can I ask you a question?
Me: Sure.
Cashier: So you haven’t got kids?
Me: Not as far as I know [ever the comedian, eh?]
Cashier: But if you-
Me: [Dives straight in] You can get special saddles that stop it being a problem. They have a little gap in the seat
Cashier: [Looks astonished] For real, baby?
Me: For real. So it stops too much pressure on, you know…
Cashier: ‘Cos you don’t wanna be sterile, innit
Me: It would be a terrible waste
You can’t make it up. I’ll leave you to guess which was Sainsbury’s and which was Tesco.
Paint it black
Hello there. Sorry for no posts: I’ve not been this busy for a long time and have been trying to migrate this site to Wordpress. Heck, I’ve not even had TV for a month and survived. I have plenty to say and will get a chance to tell you once I’m back from Munich and Marrakech. And will catch up with the emails then, I promise.
Meanwhile, I’ll leave you with thought: why is it that I have £1,000 of brand new Apple Mac and yet the most useful programme is one that turns it into a green screen typewriter?
(via Lifehacker)
How to make really good coffee
A question posed in the Guardian’s Notes and Queries page a couple of months back — notably, never answered — asked why coffee shops fiddled about with the steam wand to heat the milk. “Why not just have a separate pipe that foams the milk whilst the steam heats it?”
And that’s the problem with coffee in Britain. It’s rubbish.
I first encountered Starbucks in Vancouver back in the late nineties, and was taken by their comfortable cafes and seemingly good coffee. Compared with the black oil dispensed in most places it was a revelation. When the first branches opened in the UK a couple of years later it remained a treat, because it was different. (Although once the men and women of North Kent started serving it at Bluewater soon after, it began to lose its allure.)
There are some things that I continue to admire about the Starbucks approach: they offer a smoke-free, alcohol-free public space in which people can meet without the pressure or discomfort of a table-service cafe. But even I am now concerned at their ability to squeeze independents out of business and increase margins at the expense of suppliers.
More importantly, though, I now realise their coffee is bilious.
A year in New Zealand exposed me to a new standard of coffee and cafe, and I even spent a few months attempting to be a barista with an infamous lack of success. So here’s the secret to the perfect flat white: good milk, no foam.
Cafe L’Affare, driving force behind the coffee revolution in New Zealand, recently published its handbook for How to Make Good Coffee. It’s a concise guide, and proves that a fine drink is quite simple to make — provided you know what you’re doing.
We could talk about the importance of the espresso shot, the fineness of the grind, the quality of the beans or the smoothness of the crema, and there’s no doubt that a bad shot is foul. However, where British baristas (perhaps we should call them ‘operators’) muck up is on the milk. Generally it’s udderly hopeless.
The signs of a well-prepared milky coffee, whether a latte or a cappuccino, are (i) no bubbles, (ii) a glossy sheen and (iii) lightness. It shouldn’t be fluffy, it should’t be foamy, and it shouldn’t look like a Mr Whippy. Think about the top of a really good pint of Guinness: that’s what we’re aiming for.
I’m not a scientist (obviously) but have been told that the purpose of steaming the milk is both to heat it, and to stretch the protein chains. This ’stretch’ gives some of the milk a different ‘texture’ or density. The denser milk makes up the base of the drink whilst the more heavily textured milk forms the cap on a latte or the lighter part of a cappuccino. If you’ve ordered a latte and are given a milky coffee with no top — it’s wrong, wrong, wrong. A cappuccino covered in bath foam — wrong, wrong, wrong again.
L’Affare describe three stages of creating perfect milk. The milk itself really should be the proper stuff, not semi-skimmed and certainly not soy. Eugh. Half fill a metal jug with milk, and place the tip of the wand just under the top of the milk. Turn on the steam and immediately tilt the jug at an angle: this will maximise the swirling vortex and fold in more air.
Once the milk has grown sufficiently, perhaps to near the top of the jug, place the wand deeper in and continue to heat the milk until the jug is too hot to hold the hand to for more than a second. This second stage is purely for heating, not creating more textured milk.
When the target temperature is reached turn off the steam and swirl this jug. This will stop the milk separating. At the same time, if there are any bubbles on the top then tap the jug on the workbench until they come out. Remember, foam is the last thing we want, followed by the pain of separation.
Unless you’re particularly efficient (some of the busiest baristas will create upwards of a thousand coffees a day) then now — and only now — should you pour the espresso shot. Whilst that’s coming through, in no more than 25 seconds please, continue to swirl the jug to keep the milk in peak condition.
Transfer the shots to the cup and complete the final, sometimes most difficult stage of making a good coffee — the pour. On a cappuccino you might be looking for the perfect ring, on a latte a milk cap that is neither too big or too small. As anyone who’s seen my coffee making will tell you, it’s not easy. For me at least.
I think that a café where there’s the sound of jug against bench is probably a reasonably good one, and certainly better than most in the UK. It shows they care about the milk. But who can blame them when no-one trains them? Once again, the British lack of knowledge about good food and drink lowers our expectations and encourages us to go for the largest cup rather than the best sized milk-espresso combination.
The irony is, there’s often nothing I like more than a nice cup of Nescafe instant…
Backup strategies
You hear nothing from me for weeks then I pop up with something dull and technical. Where’s the pleasure in reading this, eh? But it is important, dear small group of readers, so please ponder this scene.
Tomorrow morning you turn on your home computer and the screen stays black (or, worse, you’ve been visited by a light fingered local junkie). The hard drive has been fried and there’s now more chance of cooking an egg on it than recovering the five years of photos and emails that used to live in there.
It’s okay though, as you have a backup from which you can restore everything. You do, don’t you?
Oh.
I’ve become increasingly paranoid about protecting my data. Much of my recent life is found on my laptop: 10,000 emails, 9,000 photos, lots of home movies and endless other personal and business documents. Now that storage is becoming really cheap I think I finally have a reasonable strategy for keeping things safe. Let me share it with you.
(i) All of my emails are auto-forwarded to a Gmail account as well as my laptop. There’s nothing to hide, so I’m happy to store this on a public server
(ii) Many of my recent ‘good’ photos are now uploaded to Flickr, at maximum resolution, and should be accessible from anywhere. Not sure how the privacy thing works on that yet, though
(iii) I finally paid a little money for Super Duper, which automatically backs up my entire laptop hard drive to another disk which can be used to as a boot-up disk if needed. This is, I believe, something Windows can’t do. So if my laptop did need to be rebuilt, I’d have everything I needed, and this is far easier than faffing about with CDs and DVDs
(iv) To cap my paranoia, I regularly back up the back up to another drive, which is kept somewhere away from the house so data remains accessible even if Number 56 is consumed by flame, plague or burglar.
Sure, it’s a dull process, but the day will come when I need it. And so will you. Please, discover your inner geek before it’s too late.
IKEA stock check
It’s a common feeling – having chosen a perfect piece of flat pack furniture, booked the van, checked on the IKEA website to see whether it’s in stock, you finally arrive at the store.
And that coffee table/ironing board/kitchen sink is not there.
After a recent frustrating visit, during which a member of staff actually wandered the whole warehouse to try and find the missing items and introduced me to the complexities of the stock control system (lesson: never trust the website), I was given a handy piece of advice. In Croydon, for example, call the store beforehand, ask for extension 8811 (I think), and ask for a physical stock check. If you’re lucky, someone will go into the warehouse, look at what’s there and tell you if it’s worth the trip.
Worth knowing, I think.
Toilet Humour
Sorting through hundreds of books in preparation for a return to Tooting, I came across my collection of toilet reading – small, flickable items suitable for rapid scanning. Which reminded me how valuable are many of the tips in Esquire’s Things a Man Should Know About Style. For example:
Wearing a suit does not make you a “suit”.
Wearing a bad suit or an incorrectly tailored suit or the same damned striped navy suit every day does.There is no footpain so severe, no dress show so fragile, no commute so arduous as to justfy the sartorial holocause that is wearing sneakers with a suit.
Hats will make a comeback someday.
It is not that day.Women notice shoes.
They also notice nosehair.Never try on shoes in the morning
Far from attesting to vast wealth, a bulging wallet attests to slovenliness.
After all, a really wealthy man lets his accountant settle his bills.Slim fitting clothes are for slim men.
Which means if you’re a thirty-six, you won’t look skinnier shoehorning yourself into a thirty-four. You’ll look skinnier wearing a thirty-six.You are in a car for an hour a day; you are in your clothes from morning to night.
Spend accordingly.“Easy care” is for those who don’t.
When in doubt, ask a woman.
But
To have absolute style is to break absolute rules – sometimes even these.
Quite.
I imagine there’s also a rule that a man should never leave books in his bathroom.
