Monthly archive: August 2008

A few weeks ago we invited over some friends we went to Sitges with three years in a row, and we cooked a selection of tapas.

The dinner proved to be a success, firstly because of the lovely ladies and lads we invited, whom we do not see as often as we would like to, but also because of the selection of food.

We found out that tapas can be a very good choice for a Friday night dinner party (we had cooked some in advance, and only a little preparation was needed on the night when we came back from work) attended a varied mix of meateaters and vegetarians.

We served the following dishes and it was more than enough for a party of eight:

• Vodka flamed chorizo
• Spanish baked prawns
• Mozzarella peppers with chunky Italian dressing
• Feta and pepper tortilla
• Patatas bravas
• Manchego cheese triangles with quince preserve
• Tapenade
• Pork brochettes
• Spanish flan

All recipes (except the pork brochettes and the flan) are from bbc.co.uk, my favourite source for clear, relatively simple, tried and tested instructions to prepare good food.

We had some jugs of sangria de cava as aperitif, then wine with the tapas and dry fino Xérès with dessert.

It was really important that we got the sangria exactly as they do it at La Pinta, where we have lunch almost every day when we are in Sitges, and we used the following sangria de cava recipe contained in a selection of sangria recipes in PDF format:

• 1 bottle Spanish cava, chilled
• 1/4 cup white grape juice
• 2 tablespoons brandy
• 2 tablespoons simple syrup
• Ice cubes, for serving
• 1/2 cup sliced strawberries
• 8 mint leaves
• Stir cava, grape juice, brandy, and simple syrup together in a pitcher. Serve over ice, garnished with strawberries and mint

1. You can use the Firefox 3 toolbar search as a calculator: type your formula and the tooltip displays the result, no need to leave the page you are on. It works if the selected engine is google.com, not if it is google.co.uk. It probably also works in Firefox 2, possibly IE but I haven't look at it for years.
2. The iPhone headphones button also operates the iPod function as a remote control (play/pause/skip) when not placing calls.
3. The songwriter and lead vocalist in 30 Seconds to Mars is actor Jared Leto (Justin in My So-called Life, Fight Club, Alexander…)
4. Caffeine, theine, guaranine and mateine are all synonyms for the same chemical compound.
5. The youngest Academy Award winner for Best Actress (as of 2008) is Marlee Matlin for Children of a Lesser God (which incidentally was also her debut).
6. 'Random' smart playlists in iTunes do not refresh automagically. You either have to clear and repopulate them, or add some sorting criteria (e.g. 'not played in the last x days') and turn on 'Live updating' if you want them to constantly refresh.
7. When you are in Gmail, hitting the key where the question mark sits places the cursor in the search field.

It took Dr B. two and a half years to convince me to get a cleaner. Two and a half very long years during which I insisted that:

• the flat is small, there's two of us, it should not be necessary to find help
• the flat is uncluttered and quick to clean
• I could not afford it

So Dr B. suggested he paid for the cleaner himself, provided that I carry on doing all the chores I have been regularly doing on my own anyway, such as

• do the laundry
• fold and put away clothes
• load/unload the dishwasher
• shop for groceries and cleaning products
• tidy up and generally put stuff away

while he makes an effort to limit his dust footprint as much as he can.

The cleaner started last Friday, and apart from a couple of misunderstandings (she ironed one of my t-shirts, which goes against one of my core beliefs, and forgot to set the alarm on the way out) we are over the moon with her.

So now I've got a recurrent task in Remember The Milk to remind me to tidy up, wash Dr B.'s shirts and generally ensure that everything is ready for Super Stella to spread her magic on our abode every Friday.

We love it. And I am grateful I have got a very fair deal.

With my three to four gym sessions a week (weight training, abs and a little cardio work) I thought I was fit – until I went for a run with colleagues early last year and was out of breath after a few minutes. So I took up running.

So then I thought I was fit, with my three to four gym sessions and a couple of runs a week – until I played rounders in June and realised I could not sprint as my legs would just jam. So I started high-intensity interval training and added one weights session a week just doing legs weights workouts.

And yesterday I thought I was really really fit, and I played gay rounders again (same rules as proper rounders, but played with so much more style) and yes I could run fast, and stop, and run faster to the next base, and stop, then run even faster all round the pitch – until this morning when I felt a sharp pain at the top of the front of my thighs that makes walking difficult, and crossing my legs virtually impossible unless I lift one leg with both hands. Absolutely nothing broken or pulled, just sore muscles that I had no idea existed.

Compared to the two injuries we had yesterday (my team's captain a player from another team both went for fourth base, met in a mid-air collision and both split their faces open) I was very lucky.

And my team won – by all means not thanks to me, whose greatest achievement yesterday was to manage to bat and hit the ball – twice!

So yesterday I had enough of squinting at Windows Mobile interfaces, felt seduced by the user experience on the iPod Touch I got last February, decided it was time to treat myself (it's been hard at work during the past ten months), got my PAC from T-Mobile and I got myself an iPhone 3G.

I shall spare you the oohs and aahs (yes, I uttered many throughout the day) and skip to one point: I also signed up for MobileMe (two months free, then 59 pounds for one year, and I can unsubscribe before starting to pay) hoping that it would be the final answer to my eternal quest for perfect synchronisation of mail, contacts, calendars, photos across all devices. The idea is that all the data resides 'in the cloud' and is pushed through to all the locations you want to see it.

Well, I am about to unsubscribe to MobileMe after less than 24 hours, not because it does not do what it said it did, but because I was not prepared to change the way I work to comply with MobileMe requirements: to put it simply, I am a heavy Google user and it is not possible to use MobileMe to shadow your Google accounts.

You can read a more detailed account at MobileMe and Gmail: Pick one or expect frustration.

So I guess it's back to Gmail with IMAP (working very well so far), Google Calendar Sync with Outlook, and a simple Contacts sync with outlook via iTunes.

Although since I'm still paying for the Mail2Web Exchange account I used before switching to Gmail, one day I might try and see how that syncs with the iPhone.

1. Stephen 'Tin Tin' Duffy was the original lyricist and singer with Duran Duran. He left the band the year before they signed with EMI.
2. Caffeine relaxes the internal anal sphincter muscles.
3. Safari now has a 'Develop' menu. Among other things, it also emulates other browsers.
4. Ofcom allocates unused telephone numbers for drama purposes. You can spot them because they usually range from 496 0000 to 496 0999 for thirteen main area codes.
5. The lyrics in 'Bleeding Love' do not go 'You cut me up and, and I…' but 'You cut me open and I…' – I only noticed when I heard The Wombat's version of the song on the NME 2008 Awards covers compilation.
6. The price of NHS prescriptions is set to 7 pounds 10 pence (as of 1 April 2008) regardless of how much drugs cost.
7. Radiologists at Shanghai's school of medicine use iTunes to organise medical PDFs so that they can be searched and categorised with ratings and multiple tags.

If you are a heavy coffee drinker as I was, just give up coffee like I did seven weeks ago (I used to spend about two pounds a day on it) and you've got one hundred unspent pounds there looking at you.

But then if you count all the diet coke and coke zero I used to drink too (half a litre a day on average), and the occasional frappuccino (at least once a week) it turns out that in seven weeks I have saved 140 pounds. Twenty pounds a week. A grand a year. Practically a very decent holiday somewhere.

And that's not taking into account the fact that I feel much better, I sleep better and therefore have more energy, and – surprisingly – my blood sugar is now stable: it has been weeks since the last time I experienced food cravings at night, or feeling faint in the middle of the day.

Giving up caffeine was one of the best decisions I have made in the last few years.

Facebook Connect is an authentication methodology to log into third-party websites with your Facebook credentials.

On Monday Facebook launched The Run Around to demonstrate how it works. It is a sample site where you can log your runs and track your progress, and you can sign on by clicking the Facebook Connect button. Once you are logged in, your Facebook friends using the site will already have been added for you.

I find this very interesting and I'd like more of these in the future instead of having to send out invitations and reconnect to friends on multiple social networks. It is probably not fo anyone who is very concerned about privacy, although I would have to see this in action to have a better idea about this.

If you run, and are one of my Facebook Friends, have a play around at The Run Around too and help me see how much is shared.

More info: See What Facebook Connect Looks Like