After a strange absence of approximately six months Pret a Manger now stock the Pecan Pie. I asked the manager why it vanished for so long only to return whout a “how do you do”, and he explained that they only sell them during pecan season while pecans are cheap otherwise they are too expensive. There you go.
Monthly Archive for February, 2005
Tasting somewhat like tar flavoured bile, machine coffee is a form of orally administered caffene. It’s sole purpose is to shock you into getting back to work. It is only barely fit for human consumption; an inspiring drink for ‘knowledge workers’.
An artists impression of a coffee room in a regional financial institution…
At the regional financial institution where I work, coffee is provided on each floor by a number of vending machines. The machines do not charge, yet we may be paying a high karmic price for their continued use:
Press a button and the device will offer to dispense any of seven kinds of fluid ranging from insipid tea to acrid coffee. A further button press will allow you to sweeten your beverage. As far as I am aware, nobody ever presses these additional buttons. These drinks cannot be improved by mere sugars.
My usual machine beverage is “Kenco Really Smooth“; an example of wishful-thinking in product naming. The drink is neither smooth nor real. It has the appearance of runny treacle, and becase it is served in a miniture paper cup it goes from scalding to ambient temperature by the time you have got it back to your desk.
I used to drink a lot of coffee: When I used to work from home, I required Two caffatieres full of strong back coffee to overcome my lethargy and attend to the boring affairs of my piffling tight-pursed clients. I require enough caffene to make a gorilla heamorage before I am able to concentrate on anything more productive than reading slashdot.org.
But all that has changed; along wtith the respectability of working for a major financial institution, I have decided to partially kick my drug habit, at least outside the office: I shall not consume any more coffee, except for Starbucks (In the staff canteen), Pret (at breakfast), and the nasty slurry that passes for coffee from machines at work. Now I drink tea at home, and my favourite kind is Green Jasmine tea:
Continue reading ‘Review: Green Jasmine Tea’
Back in ‘99 I was hooked on the mindless blast’em’up simplicity of the Bitmap brothers‘ Xenon 2. This was one of the first PC games to exploit the 256 colour mode of the IBM VGA, however like all games of that era it does not support anything more than the standard PC Beeper.
Xenon 2 is a traditional Japanise style vertical scrolling 2d shooter. The object of the game is to navigate from to to bottom through six levels of natural history, obliterating the delicate life-forms and collecting awesome powerups. Winning the game requires three things:
Continue reading ‘Review: Xenon 2 - MegaBlast’
The other night I was scanning through my digital photo collection, and happened upon this photo of sausages in a wooden bowl. The sausages, four of each variety were bought from a local butchers shop last summer and bar-b-qued for my girlfriend and her sister the very same day. While I have no memory of consuming them, the disvovery of this photo inspired the following poem:
Sixteen sausages,
from the butcher I did buy,
All this meaty goodness,
Too sweet to bake or fry.
Succulent and tasty,
thy fat doth overflow,
atop the blazing charcol,
siziling in its glow.
Oh tragic life, oh mournful pigs,
whose brothers’ ground for meat,
I salute you know, but next chow
this most carniv’rous treat.
A BT payphone observed adjacent to the John Lewis department store on Oxford St, London. It’s Windows based operating system had apparantly just crashed, and some passing samaritan decided to help BT by performing a low-level format on the embedded computer’s hard-disk.
In case you are perplexed, this garishly coloured screen is the BIOS setup utility, it’s available in an almost identical form on just about every PC that has been made in the last 20 years and is intended to boot the system, plus provide some utilities that allow an engineer to perform the initial system setup. As more and more devices require computing power, every-day devices gradually turn into PCs, and as such this kind of thing will become an everyday occurence.
Working with PHP can be a bowel-churning experience; It is one of the most rubbish computer languages ever devised, because it encourages virtually every bad habit a developer could adopt. Its only saving grace is almost ubiquitous integration with Apache server, however there are plenty of other languages with similar levels of popularity.
Re-visiting PHP, I cannot believe that I ever found pleasure in making a living from coding this language. Were it not for the fact that Wordpress is a 100% PHP application I would never, ever go near it again. PHP, thy names are woe and misery.
Despite the aforementioned reservations, I have struggled against my profound fear of PHP to partially re-factor Marc Nozell’s ‘Yet Another Daily Delicious‘ plugin. In it’s original form, the plugin is capable of incorporating links added during the current day to a Wordpress blog.
I have added the following features:
- Tear support - you can limit the number of items that appear on the wordpress home-page. This means that if you go a bit crazy with adding your links, you can ensure that it does not ruin your layout.
- Deferred Publishing - You can make your daily links start off in a non-published state.
- Clickable Keywords - Takes you through to the correct tag page.
- Tidied-Up Layout - Arguably my version is slightly neater than Mark’s original.
My own code can be found on my Subversion, and is released under the same license as Mark’s original software in the hope that it will be of use to the blogging public. Enjoy and please feel free to publish patches against my subversion offering.
Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user salimfadhley on 2005-02-08
- WordPress Plugin Repository —
A Trac based repository of Wordpress pluginsTagged as: blog subversion trac wiki wordpress - The Trac Project —
A web based interface to the Subversion version management systemTagged as: application computing development python subversion trac - SilverCity —
A lexing module for python with lexers for a number of common dev and markup languagesTagged as: SilverCity computing development markup module python xml - Mega64 —
Real Life re-creation of arcade anticsTagged as: action computer dvd game video - Welsh Rugby Nut Hacks Off Testicles —
Sports fan keeps pact with self and performs self-mutilation.Tagged as: bollocks insane news rugby sport testicles wales - YADD no-empties patch —
A patch to Yet Another Daily Del.Icio.Us that prevents days with no links from being blogged.Tagged as: blog daily del.icio.us patch
I spend more than 8 hours a day beneath one of London’s most powerful magnets to terrorism. At least two IRA bombs have exploded in the plaza adjacent to my department’s building, causing millions of pounds worth of damage, and the loss of tens of lives. Yes, people have died not far from where I loose myself in the depths of content management programming.
So anyway, not that I wish any further harm to come to the building whose granite base totally obscures my view of absolutely everything; The department I contract for has been ordered to re-locate to Smithfield in EC1. The new building features ample cycle parking, plus offers all staff the opportunity for their own private locker. I’m now working within a mile of most of my friends, so not only do I have the opportunity to get fit again, but I may also regain an after-work social life.
I may have mentioned on at least 27 previous occasions that I manage an archive of recordings of “Epistaxis Time” and “The Exciting Hellebore Shew“. A few months back, Dot-Alt magazine published this great interview with Dan in which he discusses the art and motivations of a tapedropper:
Dan is brilliantly funny, and while his works can be painful to listen to I feel they are worthwile. Tape dropping is the art of purposefully loosing a recording of strange and unusual music with the intent to provoke a reaction from the person who finds it. You can hear Dan’s show on Resonance FM, on Wednesdays at 3:00 pm.