Monthly archive: August 2007

Ebullient vitality and energy. Vigour.

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1. Venice is to have a fourth bridge across the Grand Canal. Parts of it are being installed this weekend, and it will be completed by the end of the year. It was designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. View my pictures of Santiago Calatrava's Olympic Agora in Athens.
2. Madison Avenue symbolises the advertising industry. I had never heard about it but, as it often happens, after encountering the first reference to it in Mad Men, I then kept finding it mentioned twice more during the week (once, for instance, in third paragraph from the bottom up in this Copyblogger article on the dangers of humour).
3. You cannot browse the US version of the Abercrombie & Fitch website from the UK. If you enter any of its URLs from a UK IP address, you are redirected to the British version. Which incidentally is absolutely identical, only with the dollar replaced with a pound sign wherever it appears, so stuff costs twice as much here. A rough and dirty workaround is clicking on cached results of a Google sitewide search: jeans for 79.50 dollars in the US? And then the same Jeans for 80 pounds in the UK. Outrageous.
4. This is perhaps old news for most of you, but I just found out that Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip has been cancelled. Which for me is fantastic news, as I had liked the first three episodes but I stopped watching because I did not have time to follow yet another series for goodness knows how many seasons. Turns out it's just one, so I'll watch.
5. You can quickly and easily decorate an Italian stove-top coffee maker by grabbing it when it's hot with a microfibre dishcloth. The material clings and melts instantly, leaving a lovely glazed grid pattern all over. So it's instant coffee for me from now on then.
6. Plastic does not biodegrade, unless it is incinerated. This means that every plastic bag you have used in your life will exist somewhere, perhaps in tiny polluting particles, long after you are dead.
7. Smintair is the World's first airline re-allowing their guests to smoke. SmIntAir: Smoker's [sic] International Airways.

Starting this morning at 8am, Big Ben is not going to chime for a few weeks while maintenance work is carried out.

I am told that at night we can sometimes hear the bongs from our flat. But at night I am sleeping and don't hear a thing. And how can Dr B. hear Big Ben if he claims I snore so loudly?

• Listen to the chimes of Big Ben
• Watch me snore

A thicket of small trees or shrubs.

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There's this song I've been humming to musically well-read (or should that be 'well-listened'?) friends for a while now, to see if they could help me put a title and performer on it, and to tell me where I might possibly know it from.

Either I'm bad at humming, or my friends are a bit crap, or it's a really obscure track, because so far nobody could help.

Then the other night it was playing in the background on Sugar Rush and I made a note of the only lyrics I could hear under the dialogue:

Looking back [...] on the track
[...] little green bag
got to find just the kind
I'm losing my mind
Outside in the night [...]

And thus spake Google:

• It's George Baker Selection, Little Green Bag (video).
• And I know it from Reservoir Dogs.
• Or possibly this Heineken advert.
• But definitely not from a record handed down to me by one of my brothers, because that would show how ancient I am, and I'm so not.

There seems to be a trend around to persuade people to stop eating reduced-calorie processed food and eat a pretty much everything in moderate amounts. You know it when it get to read about it in Metro (Wednesday's issue, page 11, I'll be damned if I ever manage find a Metro article online to link to). You know it when Channel 4 makes a show out of it: Cook Yourself Thin.

I could not agree more. Last spring I gave up diet coke, sugar free yogurts, light instant chocolate, Weight Watchers desserts, slimline tonic water, reduced-calorie fruit juices, sugar-free candy (at work only, while I allow myself some in the evening). I replaced some of these with their full-fat equivalent, and I lost weight. So much so that my 'skinny jeans' (once only wearable to 'standing-up' dos, and even that, only on an empty stomach) have now become my 'slightly loose jeans I go to work with').

I initially did not do it in order to lose weight (like most people, I thought the idea just did not make sense), but because I was sick and tired of finding that everything I ate had at least ten ingredients, nine of which man-made. Because folks, if you remove sugar and fat, you've got to add sweeteners, enhancers, emulsifiers, stabilisers, aromas and stuff, otherwise you may as well nibble on a piece of cardboard.

Of course I had to watch very carefully what I ate. And of course I had to do just a little more exercise. If you expect not to have to, then sorry mate but you are a bit thick and you deserve to stick to this week's boring diet fad. Oh and by the way, your breath stinks of ketosis.

Last night Dr B. found out his credit card had been used for a value of around five thousand pounds.

He was quickly on the phone with Nationwide who were most helpful and will refund the lot, so no worries really, but he now swears he's never going to use cards in a restaurant again (you never know what they are doing with it when they are out of sight).

So you can imagine he probably did not really go to bed with a peaceful mind.

Add then the phone rang all through the night: Dr B. is now on call for work until Monday, and he kept taking panicked calls from colleagues imploring him to give their failing databases a good seeing to.

I sneaked out of bed at 5am and am planning to be out the door before he gets up. Believe me, you do not want to cross path with a sleep-deprived Dr B.

Oops, spoke too late! As I type this, his work mobile is going off in the other room. Quick, hide under the desk!

A broad, deep, usually covered dish used for serving foods such as soups or stews.

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I recently found out that Facebook should not be used as a platform for work-related interaction.

I was at the gym on my lunch break when a colleague's status update came through on my mobile:

(Name) is wondering why oh why drivers choose the last possible moment to take the J6…

I thought 'computer drivers' (we were at that time indeed fiddling with tech-related stuff at work), so when I got back to the office I asked what the matter was and was met with a blank stare.

Once at home in the evening, I checked my colleague's Facebook profile where I could read the rest of the update:

…turn at Spaghetti Junction – total madness!

My colleague works in Birmingham. I could have figured the rest of the message out myself.

A continuous, even drumming or rapping. To beat out an even rhythm, as with the fingers. To beat or tap rhythmically on; rap or drum on.

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I knew it was a good idea to keep reading the work club newsletter even if, week after week, no item caught my attention. Because finally yesterday there was an offer to try out the work gyms for free for four weeks.

As this comes at a time when I do not have much time to go to my gym (which is one tube stop away) at lunchtime, I bolted out and into the next building and fifteen minutes later I was a member.

I went at lunchtime and although it's just a small room with some cardio equipment, a few weights machines and a handful of dumbbells, I managed to have a good workout. The place was not busy (most people were running, cycling or climbing stairs). I worked out slightly differently because of the different weights, bench angles and machines. But best of all, I went from desk to press bench in a little over three minutes.

I would not have it as my main gym membership (my main workouts are Saturday and/or Sunday, when I have more time), but I might justify paying the additional (and very reasonable) fee in the future so that I can make the most of even a spare half hour at lunch.

A short heavy stick; a club. To beat or strike with or as if with a cudgel.

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I subscribe to 112 RSS feeds (blogs, news, friends' social network contributions), which I guess is about average. I usually manage to go through all of them at least once a day (usually at 6AM for about half an hour).

Of course I do not read them all. So how do I choose?

A lot depends on the post title, at first. However, after a short while familiarity with the writer's style quickly lets me decide whether I will find it worthwhile to read an article or not.

We all have a limited range of topics we are interested in, or have something to say about and need to share. So I might be interested in topics A, B and C. You write about topics B, C and D. She writes about topics C, D and E.

I don't know about you, but I will only read your posts about topics B and C, and only her posts about topics C. Every now and then I check my Google Reader Trends, identify the feeds I have most often let flow through the river of news without clicking through, and prune extensively, aiming at having a manageable number of feeds, which for me is around 100.

I expect my readers to do pretty much the same with this website, and will not take it personally if after the nth post about some ridiculously named new overhyped application you will bide farewell and never visit again.

Don't come to me ranting that this modern way to access information selectively is evil and I am missing out on a lot of things, because that's what people have been doing forever with newspapers. The only difference is the technology that helps us parse via keywords and spare us what we do not want to see.

And anyway, if she ever were to produce a fantastic post about topic E, I am pretty sure I would hear about it somehow.

A curved form, especially a semicircular panel, window, or recess.

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1. The UK bans advertising of promoting infant formula for babies under the age of six months. Glamour model Jordan was this week shown feeding SMA formula to her new-born baby in OK magazine, right next to an advert for SMA formula for older infants. Clever, if hardly legal. Sadly, it is not illegal for Jordan to call her daughter Princess Tiaamii.
2. One of my gay friends was bisexual. But I thought he was gay. And now he's not bisexual any longer. If that's what the Facebook 'Interested in:' tag means. Used to say 'Women, Men', now it only says 'Men'. The same thing on his boyfriend's profile. I guess that's why their status was for both 'In a relationship (it's complicated)'. Now that they have both removed 'Women' they have also removed the '(it's complicated)' bit. Ah, Facebook. Hours of innocent fun at the expenses of the privacy of friends and colleagues. Beats Sudoku any day for me.
3. Lee Jordan (Quidditch commentator)in the Harry Potter films is played by Luke Youngblood (Project Catwalk season 2 finalist). I did not care much for his creations per se, but I appreciate his unbridled imagination, and he did add a dash of colour to the show (and to Oxford Circus tube station ticket hall a few weeks ago, when I saw him strut about sporting a big 'fro and two Japanese friends/testimonials to his wicked fashions.
4. Native MPEG4 decoding is very bad under Vista. I was outputting video in Windows Movie Maker and the lower half of the screen was systematically green. And no, the video was not shot in a park. Bernie Zimmermann has instructions on how to fix the green bar problem in Windows Movie Maker.
5. Facebook is not exactly (or not any longer) the walled garden I thought it was. There is now a Netvibes Facebook widget that displays your notifications and friends' status updates. I was an enthusiastic Netvibes user until I discovered the brilliant simplicity of Google Reader, but I gave the Facebook widget a try anyway this week. Not for me unfortunately, as I already get all that Facebook information pushed out to a Twitter account and thus sent to me by text message anyway.
6. Bratislava (in Slovakia), the only capital in the world that borders two other countries (Austria and Hungary), is only 60 km from Vienna.
7. Someone just decided that it is now illegal for men to kiss in public in Italy. Two gay men were arrested, then released, in Rome for engaging in "lewd acts in public". The pair say they were kissing in a gesture of affection. I guess now I've got one more answer for people who ask me why I've left such a beautiful country: because I had had enough of being treated as a second-class citizen. There you go.

Here are the websites I bookmarked into my del.icio.us account over the past seven days:

• How to Sleep 4 Hours per Night
  Neuroscientists are studying a spot on the skull that they could zap to induce the brain waves characteristic of deep, non-REM sleep. If they could find one that makes me sleep 8 hours per night instead of my average 5, I'd be happier.

• Collagr
  A website that pulls photos from Flickr and converts them into a collage.

• Netvibes Introduces the Facebook Widget
  The new Netvibes Facebook Widget allows users to access their Facebook info on Netvibes and view their Facebook notifications and friends. Facebook does not currently allow outsider providers to access the News Feed though.

To lie in wait for and attack from ambush. See synonyms at ambush. To accost or intercept unexpectedly.

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An improvised substitute for something lacking; a temporary expedient.

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Marked by sternness or harshness; forbidding. Silently ill-humored; gloomy: the proverbially dour New England Puritan. Sternly obstinate; unyielding.

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A decorative framework to conceal curtain fixtures at the top of a window casing.

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I have spent the few spare moments during the last twelve days reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Those were the very moments I would have blogged instead, which explains the lack of posts lately.

I have enjoyed immensely the book itself. I have just put it down and am still feeling a bit emotional after reading the last few pages.

But better than that was lying in bed next to Dr B., each with our own book, TV off, not a sound in the flat, racing each other to who would finish it first, and who would discover more hints on how the story would end.

I think I won the former challenge, and he did the latter.

A Creole dish consisting of rice that has been cooked with shrimp, oysters, ham, or chicken and seasoned with spices and herbs.

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A small mallet used by a presiding officer or an auctioneer to signal for attention or order or to mark the conclusion of a transaction.

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