Archive for June, 2008

Bathroom

Saturday, June 28th, 2008

This blog needs a new category.

Forget best, we need worst …

Anyway, this is for Lady E.

In case you were wondering, it’s our bedroom:

.. And the worst thing of all is I haven’t seen my wife for days.

The How and Why Wonder Books

Saturday, June 28th, 2008

Wonderful thing, the internet. Everything is slowly being catalogued and placed online by devoted collectors. When I was a child I owned several books in the How and Why Wonder Books series – devoted mainly to topics in the natural sciences. A person called Rob Storey is collecting these and has put all the book covers online. The one I remember best was the dystopic and frightening The Spoilt Earth, a post-apocalyptic vision of an environmentally degraded world. (Here is another, smaller collection of covers) Now I’ve just got to wait for someone to scan the contents and put those online too. You can’t buy good quality science books for children any more. Instead you get tame nonsense like this, nothing dangerous because of course the publishers might get sued.

Boston 4 – Skywalk panorama

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

Photos from the Boston Skywalk, stitched together into a panorama using hugin in Fedora:

Click to enlarge

Click to supersize me (TIFF image)

Boston 3 – ramen

Sunday, June 22nd, 2008

Gyoza and pork ramen from Sapporo Ramen in a little Japanese mall in Cambridge MA. The noodles were exceedingly good:

This is something they call “bubble tea“, which is a sweet tea with tapioca balls. The one I had here was made with red beans and green tea, but you can have other variations. I think this has probably got about a million calories in it, but it’s pretty pleasant to drink on a very hot day like today:

Boston 2 – food

Sunday, June 22nd, 2008

Clam Chowder, essentially a clam/fish soup with cream, with oyster-flavour crackers. This is a Boston / New England speciality. Pretty good actually:

Smoked salmon:

A more posh clam chowder:

Strawberries covered in chocolate, and cake. The strawberries were very tasty:

Boston 1

Saturday, June 21st, 2008

Red Hat Summit in Boston:

Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox:

Bagels for breakfast:

Da boyz:

Bubble3D

Monday, June 16th, 2008

Today is the 10th anniversary of bubble3d, a screensaver that I wrote while I was very bored and trying out OpenGL for the first time at Orchestream, previously known as INmEDIA Concepts Ltd. I think I left Orchestream only a couple of months after this and because I left just before the peak of the dot-com scam I missed out on millions of pounds of potential wealth (so it goes …)

It feels like a long time ago, maybe not 10 years. One thing I remember about writing this was that the bubbles are actually inside out because of an error in an issue of the OpenGL red book.



The sounds of the Japanese summer

Monday, June 9th, 2008

This is an old From Our Own Correspondent article about the sounds of hot summers in Japan. I wish I could find the original broadcast programme.

  • Shuru shuru shuru doon patchi patchi
  • Hyuu doro doro
  • Goku goku
  • Goro goro pika
  • Kara koro kara koro

Poo-poo bum-bum

Sunday, June 8th, 2008

I was a bit confused by this one, he keeps on saying “shika shika“?

And for the main finale:

N-sama salmon-don

Saturday, June 7th, 2008

Ummaii!

1,104 miles

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008

Our crazy driving holiday around Scotland is now over. I drove 1,104 miles. Here are some photos:

Troooon

Booooat

♫♬listen to the song ♪♫♬

Arran and Lamlash

Home of the worst pub on Arran …

Lunch

Castles and shika

Shikatetsu …

The Lamb and Whisky

The Array Whisky distillery, home of some rather pleasant spirits.

Loch

Maggie the moggie

It’s my bro’s moggie:

Sausages with cranberry gravy

Sunday, June 1st, 2008


These sausages were from the butcher on the high street in High Bentham in the Yorkshire Dales.

They were absolutely delicious. I finished them off with an improvised gravy constructed from the cooking fats, cranberry sauce, sage, rosemary, red wine and water: