Cooking With Richard

This prompted a small WTF moment when I was in the supermarket today:

Jeyes Fluid “Kills bird flu”. Well I’m sure it does. So does bleach, or probably washing up liquid.

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.

The sooner we can get rid of these stupid government monopoly/cartels, the better. Read more and even more and for the geeks …

Yearn to be able to spell the word RHYTHM? Look no further than this easy to recall mnemonic: Russian Hippies Yearn To Have Money[*].

Currently, there are no hits on Google. So as far as I know, this was invented by someone at my school. I don’t know his name, but this aide-memoire has helped me on many occasions.

(Unfortunately Oxidation is Loss, Reduction is Gain (OILRIG) which was also claimed by a classmate of mine, turns out to be rather more commonly known.)

[*] It made a bit more sense in the 80s when (we assumed) Russian hippies suffering under communism were really rather poor.

Paul Smye-Rumsby, who lives in Dover, said: “It was about 08.15 when suddenly the bed shook violently. “I thought my wife had got cramp or something but then I saw the curtains were moving and the whole house was shaking. It lasted about 1.5 seconds..

When I was in Aomori four years ago there was a really huge earthquake near Sendai which shook the whole place for a minute. Screen capture from the TV:

Quite scary ….

Instant onigiri!

I don’t believe it …

Sign the official petition to save Oriental City which is due to be “redeveloped” (turned into a B&Q superstore of all things) without any consideration except for profits.

Links

• Petition
• If-else blog
• BBC Inside Out programme describes the “real Chinatown”
• Developer’s website describing the work

Quiche Lorraine, named so it seems after the Lorraine region of France is a delicious, fatty quiche with lardons, onions, cheese, eggs and cream:

I am officially a Nerd God.

In no particular order …

Scotch eggs and Irish stew at The Peddler’s Daughter in Nashua, NH. The food was pretty good.

It’s a geek joke:

Freedom to destroy the planet:

They have the Antique’s Roadshow in the US, which I was quite impressed about. However they seem to have a lot less of the old fuddy presenters handling crockery with shaking hands, and a lot more about how many thousands of dollars everything is worth:

While I was walking along the bay, an eagle flew past holding half a pigeon. It dropped its meal on the ice and then sat in a tree while I grabbed my camera and took some pictures. This was (unfortunately) the best one:

A 16th century graveyard:

Cheeky squirrel:

The squirrel was next to this ice-rink in the main park in central Boston:

Carl Zeiss Planetarium at the Boston Museum of Science:

Some street scenes from the old quarter:

The office is in fact in Westford, MA which is miles away from Boston itself:

The Red Hat office:

Some typical lunches. I had to go a long way to find those fruits:

You get these daft warnings on everything. We went to a sushi restaurant and they were warning about food poisoning. Strangely enough they don’t warn about how you’ll die of a heart attack if you keep eating the junk above.

Cameron shows how gutless he is.

I’d respect him a great deal more if he just came out and said that he did it, and we should all be permitted to smoke dope.

This is only barely one step above a “Cat stuck up a tree” story.

See also the Framley Examiner.

Some of them are a little bit uncanny actually.

I’m a bit sausaged out at the moment because I’ve just come back from Munich.

Update

Wurst für den Hund means “sausage for [your] dog”.

… of this.

Update

Eh-to-ne?

Who’s-it?

Grrraaarrrr:

This is not code:

This is code:

Remember in Independence Day when whatshisface-math-guy writes a virus that works on both his apple laptop AND an alien mothership? Bullshit! If real life were like film I’d be able to port wordpress to my toaster using a cat5 cable and a bag of glitter.

The old saw is that you should always check your oven temperature with an oven thermometer because oven settings themselves are very inaccurate. This is true, but if you buy an oven thermometer, how do you know it’s accurate either?

I went out and bought a very cheap (£10) oven thermometer. This one uses a bi-metalic strip and so it works the same way as the thermostat in the oven itself.

It’s not too accurate either.

If you take the reading on the oven thermometer and the oven’s own dial, they agree to within 10-15°C, at least between 60 and 140°C where I did my testing. Unfortunately when I added a small glass of water to an oven which was supposedly at 130140°C and left it there for 30 minutes, the water didn’t do very much. So either I have found some magical water which can be super-heated, or else both my oven and my oven thermometer are wildly inaccurate.

This is not just theoretical. I was hoping to cook a chicken tomorrow for 4½ hours at 60°C to obtain a succulent “perfect chicken”, but that’s not too clever if all my guests get food poisoning. (Chicken has to be raised to 60°C for 15 minutes or so to guarantee to kill nasties like salmonella. If the temperature is less than that, the salmonella have a little party).

Companies which sell oven thermometers compete, it seems, on two things: price and the supposed range of temperatures (eg. “our oven thermometer costs just £4 and covers 50-350°C!). Great. Well no, not great. I want to know how accurate the thermometer is, and that doesn’t just mean that it tells me the temperature is 123.45, but that it really is. The nearest degree would be fine — I don’t need to know about the point-four-five.

I don’t really have an answer to this. Is this £80 digital thermometer worth 80 quid? Perhaps I should spend £60 instead. Or is £15 enough?

How do I tell?

Edit

That photo is for real, no GIMP, really!