On our last day out at our current AirBnB, we searched for a takeaway.
Google Maps found me a Chinese takeaway, but it had an unexpected suggestion when I asked for an Indian:
Tag: food
Note #28647
There was no mixing bowl in the house large enough to make enough pizza dough to feed all of the Three Rings volunteers present at this year’s 3Camp, so I just had to pour out all the ingredients onto the surface and work from there.
Food divided by Distance
I was pretty ill yesterday. It’s probably a combination of post-flood stress and my shitty lungs’ ability to take a sore throat and turn it into something that leaves me lying in bed and groaning.
I spent most of the morning in and out of a fitful sleep, during which I dreamed up the most-bizarre application: a GPS tracker app that, after being told your destination and what you were eating, reported your journey progress to social media by describing where you were going and how much of your food was left1.
I should be clear that in the dream, I wasn’t the one that invented this concept; in fact, I didn’t even understand it at first (maybe I still don’t!). In the dream I was at some kind of unconference event with a variety of “make art with the Web” types, and I missed a session by falling asleep2. I woke (within the dream) right before the session ended and rushed in to see what was being presented, and only got the tail-end of the explanation of how a project – this project – worked, after which I felt rushed to try to understand it before somebody inevitably tried to talk to me about it.
But it could work, couldn’t it? If you’re one of those people who routinely tracks and shares their location (like Aaron Parecki, whose heatmapping inspired my own) or journeys (like Jeremy Keith does), it’s a way to add a bit of silliness to that sharing.
I’m probably not going to implement this. It is, in the end, the kind of stupidity that could (should?) only appear in the dreams of somebody who’s got a bad head cold.
But if you manage to take this idea and turn it into something… actually good?… let me know!
Or if you’ve just got a cool, “Web 2.0-ey” idea for the name of an app that tracks both your journey progress and your meal consumption, I’d love to hear that too.
Footnotes
1 Under the assumption that its consumption would be evenly distributed throughout the journey. Because everybody does that, right? Counting the number of steps they make before taking another equal-sized bite. Right?
2 Even in my dreams, I can dream of falling asleep. And, sometimes, of dreaming. A fever probably helps.
A Random List of Silly Things I Hate
So apparently now this is a thing, so here I go:
- Websites that are just blank pages if the JavaScript doesn’t load from the CDN.1
- The misunderstanding that LLMs can somehow be a route to AGI.
- Computer systems that say my name is too short or my password is too long.2
- People being unwilling to discuss their wild claims later using the lack of discussion as evidence of widespread acceptance.
- When people balance the new toilet roll one atop the old one’s tube.3
- Shellfish. Why would you eat that!?
- People assuming my interest in computers and technology means I want to talk to them about cryptocurrencies.4
- Websites that nag you to install their shitty app. (I know you have an app. I’m choosing to use your website. Stop with the banners!)
- People who seem to only be able to drive at one speed.5
- The assumption that the fact I’m “sharing” my partner is some kind of compromise on my part; a concession; something that I’d “wish away” if I could. (It’s very much not.)
- Brexit.
Wow, that was strangely cathartic.
Footnotes
1 I have a special pet hate for websites that require JavaScript to render their images.
Like… we’d had the <img> tag since 1993! Why are you throwing it away and replacing it with something objectively slower, more-brittle, and
less-accessible?
2 Or, worse yet, claiming that my long, random password is insecure because it contains my surname. I get that composition-based password rules, while terrible (even when they’re correctly implemented, which they’re often not), are a moderately useful model for people to whom you’d otherwise struggle to explain password complexity. I get that a password composed entirely of personal information about the owner is a bad idea too. But there’s a correct way to do this, and it’s not “ban passwords with forbidden words in them”. Here’s what you should do: first, strip any forbidden words from the password: you might need to make multiple passes. Second, validate the resulting password against your composition rules. If it fails, then yes: the password isn’t good enough. If it passes, then it doesn’t matter that forbidden words were in it: a properly-stored and used password is never made less-secure by the addition of extra information into it!
3 This is the worst of the toilet paper crimes, but there’s a lesser but more-common offence.
4 Also: I’m uninterested in whatever multiplayer shooter game you’re playing, and no I won’t fix your printer.
5 “You were doing 35mph in the 60mph limit, then you were doing 35mph in the 40mph limit, now you’re doing 35mph in the 20mph limit. Argh!”
Chapattidilla
Wanted a quesadilla. Didn’t have any tortillas, so substituted chapattis.
It went… only okay. The earthiness of the chapatti pairs with mature cheese less-well than the cornflour-sweetness of a tortilla does.
I tried it, so you don’t have to!
Note #28497
A lot of things are hard right now. But I appreciate that Spring has come and I can enjoy a cheese & pickle sandwich and a fake beer for lunch in the sun. All to the sounds of the birds singing… and, somewhere behind me, the dog excitedly demolishing a pile of pine cones.
It could be worse, right?
Flood of cookies
In sympathy for our flood situation, my sister baked and posted us a big batch of her fantastic raisin & oatmeal cookies.
I’ve eaten like six of them already. Turns out I stress-eat. Who knew?
Hollandaise Sauce
If I’m on holiday and a hotel offers me eggs benedict for breakfast, I’ll almost always order it. But I’d never make it at home.
I tell myself that this is because hollandaise sauce is notoriously easy to mess up. That I don’t want to go through the learning process only to make something inferior to what I eat as a holiday treat.
But maybe it’s just that my brain wants to keep eggs benedict as a signifier that I’m on holiday. That I can unplug from the world, stop thinking about work, and enjoy a leisurely breakfast with some creamy eggs and a long black coffee.
Maybe eggs benedict just has to remain “holiday food”, for me.
Who Is the Winking Chef?
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
One of my goals was to uncover the origin of the ubiquitous Winking Chef. We’ve all seen him – the chubby mustachioed man wearing a chef’s hat and often making a gesture of approval with his hand. I dug around as much as I could – searching old magazines and websites looking for the origin of the image. Of course generic chef images go way back in print advertising but I was looking for one image in particular, the one I grew up with on my pizza boxes in New Jersey. Who was this guy? Was the image based on a real person? What’s the deal????
…
There are few people in this world who are more-obsessed with pizza than I, but Scott’s gotta be one of them. Since discovering this blog post of his I now really want to go on one of his pizza-themed walking tours of New York City. But you might have guessed that.
Anyway: Scott – who has a collection of pizza boxes, by the way (in case you needed evidence that he’s even more pizza-fixated than me) – noticed the “winking chef” image, traced its origin, and would love to tell you about it. An enjoyable little read.
67 Bananas
I think my “six seven”-obsessed younger child was in the kitchen with a biro earlier. How do I know, you ask?
Boxing Day Breakfast
Boxing Day breakfast (of champions (of leftovers)).
Note #27806
I asked the younger child to “help” me calculate how much Yorkshire pudding batter to make for this Christmas dinner.
“Well,” he began, “I’m going to want FIVE Yorkshire puddings, soo…”
Ten Pointless Facts About Me
This has been doing the rounds; I last saw it on Kev’s blog. I like that the social blogosphere’s doing this kind of fun activity again, these days1.
1. Do you floss your teeth?
Umm… sometimes? Not as often as I should. Don’t tell my dentist!
Usually at least once a month, never more than once a week. I really took to heart some advice that if you’re using a fluoridated mouthwash then you shouldn’t do it close to when you brush your teeth (or you counteract the benefits), so my routine is that… when I remember and can be bothered to floss… I’ll floss and mouthwash, but like in the middle of the day.
And since I moved my bedroom (and bathroom) one floor further up our house, it’s harder to find the motivation to do so! So I’m probably flossing less. The unanticipated knock-on effect of extending your house!
2. Tea, coffee, or water?
I love a coffee to start a workday, but I have to be careful how much I consume because caffeine hits me pretty hard, even after a concentrated effort over the last 10 years or so to gradually increase my tolerance. I can manage a couple of mugs in the morning and be fine, now, but three coffees… or any in the mid-afternoon onwards… and I’m at risk of throwing off my ability to sleep later2.
I keep a bottle of water wherever I work to try to encourage myself to hydrate, because I’ve got medical evidence to show that I don’t drink enough water! It sometimes works.
3. Footwear preference?
Basic trainers for everyday use; comfortable boots for hiking; slippers for when I’m working. Nothing special.
I wear holes in footwear (and everything else I wear) faster than anybody I know, so nowadays I go for good-value comfort over any other considerations when buying shoes.
4. Favourite dessert?
Varies, but if we’re eating out, I’m probably going to be ordering the most-chocolatey dessert on the menu.
5. The first thing you do when you wake up?
The very first thing I do when I wake up is check how long it is before I need to get up, and make a decision about when I’m going to do so. I almost never need my alarm to wake me: I routinely wake up half an hour or so before my alarm would go off, most mornings. But exactly how early I wake directly impacts what I do next. If I’m well-rested and it’s early enough, I’ll plan on getting up and doing something productive: an early start to work, or some voluntary work for Three Rings, or some correspondence. If it’s close to the time I need to get up I’ll more-often just stay in bed and spend longer doing the actual answer I should give…
…because the “real” answer is probably: pick up my phone, and open up FreshRSS – almost always the first and last thing I do online in a day! I’ll skim the news and blogosphere and “set aside” for later anything I’d like to re-read or look at later on.
6. Age you’d like to stick at?
Honestly, I’m good where I am, thanks.
Sure, I was fitter and healthier in my 20s, and I had more free time in my early 30s… and there are certainly things I miss and get nostalgic about in any era of my life. But conversely: it took me a long, long time to “get my shit together” to the level I have now, and I wouldn’t want to have to go through all of the various bits of self-growth, therapy, etc. all over again!
So… sure, I’d be happy to transplant my intellect into 20-year-old me and take advantage of my higher energy level of the time for an extra decade or so3. But I wouldn’t go back even a decade if it meant that I had to go relearn and go through everything from that decade another time, no thanks!
7. How many hats do you own?
Four. Ish.
They are:
- A bandana. Actually, I own maybe half a dozen bandanas, mostly in Pride rainbow colours. Bandanas are amazingly versatile: they fold small which suits my love of travelling light these last few years, they can function as headgear, dust mask, neckerchief, flannel, etc.4, and they do a pretty good job of keeping my head cool and protecting my growing bald spot from the fierce rays of the summer sun.
- A “geek” hat. Okay, I’ve actually got three of these, too, in slightly different designs. When they first started appearing at Oxford Geek Nights, I just kept winning them! I’m not a huge fan of caps, so mostly the kids wear them… although I do put one on when I’m collecting takeaway food so I can get away with just putting e.g. “geek hat” in the “name” field, rather than my name5.
- A warm hat that comes out only when the weather is incredibly cold, or when I’m skiing. As I was reminded while skiing on my recent trip to Finland, I should probably switch to wearing a helmet when I ski, but I’ve been skiing for three to four decades without one and I find the habit hard to break.6
- A wooly hat that I was given by a previous employer at a meetup in Mexico last year. I wore it a couple of times last winter but it’s otherwise not seen much use.
8. Describe the last photo you took?
The last photo I took was of myself wearing a “geek” hat. You’ve seen it, it’s above!
But the one before that was this picture of an extremely large bottle of champagne, with a banana for scale, that was delivered to my house earlier today:
Ruth and JTA celebrate their anniversary every few years with the “next size up” of champagne bottle, and this is the one they’re up to. This year, merely asking me to help them drink it probably won’t be sufficient (that’d still be two litres each!) so we’re probably going to have to get some friends over.
I took the photo to send to Ruth to reassure her that the bottle had arrived safely, after the previous attempt went… less well. I added the banana “for scale” before sharing the photo with some other friends, too.
9. Worst TV show?
PAW Patrol. No doubt.
You know all those 1980s kids TV shows that basically existed for no other purpose than as a marketing vehicle for a range of toys? I’m talking He-Man (and She-Ra), Transformers, G.I. Joe, Care Bears, M.A.S.K., Rainbow Brite, and My Little Pony. Well, those shows look good compared to PAW Patrol.
I was delighted when our kids graduated from PAW Patrol to My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic because it’s an enormously better show (the songs kick ass, too) and we could finally shake off the hollow, pointless, internally-inconsistent advertisement that is PAW Patrol.
10. As a child, what was your aspiration for adulthood?
This is the single most-boring thing about me, and I’ve doubtless talked about it before. At some point between the age of about six and eight years old, I decided that I wanted to grow up and become… a computer programmer.
And then I designed the entirety of the rest of my education around that goal. I learned a variety of languages and paradigms under my own steam while setting myself up for a GCSE in IT, and then A-Levels in Maths and Computing, and then a Degree in Computer Science, and by the time I’d done all of that I was already working in the industry: self-actualised by 21.
Like I said: boring!
Your turn!
You should give this pointless quiz a go too. Ping/Webmention me if you do (or comment below, I suppose); I’d love to read what you write.
Footnotes
1 They’re internet memes, in the traditional sense, but sadly people usually use “meme” nowadays exclusively to describe image memes, and not other kinds of memetic Internet content. Just another example of our changing Internet language, which I’ve written about before. Sometimes they were silly quizzes (wanna know what Meat Loaf song I am?); sometimes they were about you and your friends. But images, they weren’t: that came later.
2 Or else I’ll get a proper jittery heart-flutter going!
3 I wouldn’t necessarily even miss the always-on, in-your-pocket, high-speed Internet of today: the Internet was pretty great back then, too!
4 Obviously an intergalactic hitch-hiker should include a bandana, perhaps as well as an equally-versatile towel, in their toolkit.
5 It’s not about privacy, although that’s a fringe benefit I suppose: mostly it’s about getting my food quicker! If I walk into Dominos wearing a geek hat and they’ve got pizza on the counter with a label on it that says it’s for “geek hat”, they’ll just hand it over, no questions, and I’m in-and-out in seconds.
6 JTA observed that similar excuses were used by people who resisted the rollout of mandatory seatbelt usage in cars, so possibly I’m the “bad guy” here.
7 From left to right, the single personality traits for each of the pups are (a) doesn’t like water, (b) is female, (c) likes naps, (d) is allergic to cats, (e) is clumsy, and (f) is completely fucking pointless.
Vihreät Kuulat
Second “surprising Finnish confectionary” is Vihreät Kuulat Jaffa Cakes. I ran vihreät kuulat through a translation tool and apparently it means “green balls”, which doesn’t tell me much.
Knowing it was neither lime nor apple (which were also available in the supermarket I visited) I had to try them, but I couldn’t place the flavour. They were tasty, though. We finished eating them before I looked it up.
Turns out it’s pear flavour, which apparently I have a blind spot for (back in 2013 at an “eat mystery food in the dark” restaurant I failed to identify that I was eating poached pears for dessert).
Now I need to be on the lookout for actual green balls.
Finnish Haribo
Buying a bag of Haribo in Finland, I shouldn’t have been surprised (given the country’s love of salmiakki) that the black ones were liquorice flavoured.
And yet somehow, when I chucked a handful onto my mouth, I was.
(Not in a bad way. But definitely in a surprised way.)
