Aquaplanage

Back into the breach

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 20:45:24 GMT

It was a hectic month, with the typical madness at work, loads of house guests and short trips away. Bouncing credit cards at hotel checkout, lost debit cards on the way to airports, forgotten gig tickets, the sorts of thing that can be quite trying even at the best of times. Everything worked out eventually - the kindnesses of friends and strangers as always saved the day in each situation - as it mostly does. I may have gotten a bit snappy on and off, but hey that happens even when everything's cruisy too?

Stuff does happen, and I find myself being fairly calm (but embittered ;-) in the midst of it, but what really narks me off is when people artificially create drama (like unexpected show-stoppers for a project which actually turn out to be structural problems where the complainants had *years* to address the issues which already potentially impact tens or hundreds of thousands of clients) and expect me to pull a solution from where the sun doesn't shine in two days. I can do it, but since I'm already significantly overcommitted, something has to give - normally something where a hard commitment has already been made to someone who has been playing fair, provided good steer and definite scope etc etc. Grr.

In the midst of all this, I ended up starting to get sick last week and took a day off. Everyone except the drama people were very nice about it. I'm still headachy, with a bizarre and unpleasant stomach (cramps as if I'd been throwing up for the last few days have turned into a gentle ache, yay!), but things are now fairly functional with pain-killers.

I came to the realisation that my financial situation, and the uncertainty about what I'll be doing in January, means that I am going to have to miss a wedding that I'd really really like to help celebrate in Perth, and the invitation to celebrate New Year's in Rio isn't going to happen (heh, welcome to the real world, yeah?). It's going to be a cold, quiet, working Christmas this time. I'm kind of looking forward to having a couple of days just to sleep, and an early night to start what might well be a tough new year.

Oh yeah, the one thing cuter and sweeter than Devendra Banhart live is the audience. The friend who dragged me along seemed to be coming down with some kind of bronchitis with (scary) coughing fits after the gig, and we got loads of help and kindness from random strangers. Noice.

Baking tonight for a team meeting tomorrow morning: peach crumble (using gula jawa instead of brown sugar, yum), forest fruit tart with lemon shortcrust and a savoury onion, kalamata and tomato tarte tatin. I'd change career but I suspect that's the best way to destroy a beautiful hobby, laugh.

A weekend of jollity

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:21:46 GMT

I was intending to head off to London to catch up with some friends and celebrate my birthday, but the whole thing became bigger than Ben Hur. Many many meals at fantastic, interesting and fun restaurants were had.

Some of the highlights: the original Wagamama's with Jules, which brought back funny memories of me being a callow youth when it first opened; a relatively improptu and relatively cheap meal at St. John's where the offal was fabulous (but rich rich rich), and more amazingly, the broccoli was too (Christopher was a very happy camper), the wine (Mon P'tit Pithon from Côtes Catalanes, haha) bizarre and tannin-crystally yet fruity-good; a boozy lunch at the wind- and rain-swept Prospect of Whitby with around 40 people who were able to make it from near and far; a spontaneous and slightly tacky tandoori dinner in the West End with a slightly different subset of people; lunch at the Fat Duck (ten very happy diners, including John West as last-minute swap-in number 10, yay!); and a late night drinking appointment followed by a delightful meal in Chinatown (with Mikolaj and Niki).

People all seemed to get on like a house on fire, which was great. My dad had a great time telling embarrassing stories about my childhood (with accompanying photo!) to friends.

I found myself thinking about friends who weren't able to make it along. For those to whom I wasn't able to say it in person, I'd like to record my public thanks for being such a kind, wise, tolerant and all-round wonderful person. I couldn't wish for better friends at all.

Some random photos from the Fat Duck:

Enjoying the menu

Lichen

Mock Turtle Soup, including mushrooms

Wine gums at the Fat Duck

Circus

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 06:12:01 GMT

So the circus is in town, or at least a burlesque/circus group from Australia: La La Parlour. I'm intrigued, and I've been invited along to see the show, so I'll be travelling a few hours into North Holland to see it tonight. Apparently, the Amsterdam Burlesque Festival is also starting in a few days, who knew these things were so popular?

Plans for Saturday are slowly congealing, the big question is where in London to have a pub lunch. A couple of great suggestions, but I need to make a solid decision soon.

In other news, I just got a call from the Fat Duck asking if I could fill another table for the day we've already got booked. The answer was, of course, yes. Logistics are going to be tricky because the tables are seated at different times. Gah, must send emails around.

How fast can you get a burning toaster out of the kitchen?

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 07:13:09 GMT

Fairly fast, although there was no time to take photos during the excitement.

I was making an expresso and thinking about what a weird echo - a sort of popping noise - was coming from the other side of the kitchen. Acrid smoke billowing up from a part of the toaster that has no contact with bread or breadcrumbs was a bad sign.

Poor thing is sitting upside down on my balcony doused in water because the flames deep in the electrical part didn't look like they'd go out without assistance.

Opera, Food and Books in the Pacific Northwest

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 00:00:10 GMT

Mid-morning flights are ok - enough time to faff around with last-minute emails, packing etc, and still make it to the airport with heaps of time to spare. Better than mid- or late-afternoon flights where I'm always tempted to do a few hours of work after an early check-in: those are normally unbelievably rushy, catastrophic days.

One of the nice things about travelling as often as I do, is being able to use the first class check in desks even when travelling (as I mostly do) on deepest darkest economy fares. And normally the people who work at these counters are relaxed, happy and focused on the customer. I had a lovely chat to my check in agent about not knowing postcodes any more because no-one seems to post things any more, and she visibly checked to see if I was on the upgrade list. Of course, being deepest darkest economy, I'm not on those lists, and got a sweet apology about it. No matter, I was planning on sleeping across the Atlantic anyway.

Got to the endless security interview queue and was one of the last to board and was pulled aside at the gate. And got an upgrade anyway. Yay! United Airlines has a much improved business class on their 767s now, although reverse facing seats are a novelty for me. Inflight entertainment is no longer DAT tapes, but something fairly modern (though Windows-based) and with very high compression rates (visible in films with lots of black, like Moon, which I very much enjoyed other than the artifacting). I also saw an episode of 30 Rock, which I'd never heard about, and which was really absurdistly funny, leading to loud guffaws. Ugly Betty was surprisingly sweet and yet quite sharp and with a bizarre oversaturated picture. Long haul travel is great if like me, you don't have a TV and seldom get to the movies. I ate well - really really nice steak (!) - and drank some pretty good Californian wines, and got about 6 hours sleep too, and had a wonderful chat with a very very cool, smart and stylish cabin attendant who'd worked for the airline for 18 years and had a marvellous mid-Atlantic yet oddly European accent in English and spoke wonderfully classy Dutch and German.

I was also pushed to Economy Plus from Chicago and chatted with two older gents about life in Portland. Everyone on the plane was pretty chatty. I was developing a good feeling about Portland.

When I arrived, I was not surprised at not having luggage. The last couple of times through Chicago this has happened too. But the luggage people already had the missing luggage slip filled out when I popped into their office which was pretty cool. They said that my bag would be delivered to the hotel later in the evening.

So I hopped on the local light rail (USD2.30, all those airports which have ridiculously high public transport charges for their segment of the journey, like Sydney, should take note) into town. Clean, quick, and full of chatty friendly people with edgy urban fashion, tattoos, and random piercings. Had a couple of conversations on the way in. Walked the three blocks to the hotel and marvelled at how little the blocks were, how charming the autumn leaves were, and how clean and neat the city is.

Arrived at the Ace Hotel, and was taken aback at the laid-back hipness. The concierge, who I had assumed was a hipster drinking coffee with his mates in the lounge area, wandered up and asked if he could help. Checkin was very casual and cool and when I asked about where I could get a coffee, he pointed me at the branch of Stumptown Coffee off the lobby (also painfully cool, filled with pierced cyclists).

My room has a wall plastered in pages from a very old illustrated dictionary. The bedhead is covered in East German army tarpaulin. The blankets are retro-30's institutional brown and grey. The bathroom is a temple to the clawfooted bath that sits proudly in the middle of the tiled expanse. And it's cheap - some of the rooms are "European-style" too which means shared bathrooms, which must be even cheaper. Loads of people with Apple laptops sitting drinking espresso-based drinks and lugging sound or video equipment with them.

Off to the busy restaurant on the other side of the lobby, Clyde Common, and immediately seated at a common table. Service was swift and friendly. All the staff wear flannel, and almost all the (making assumptions here) guys had beards. Food simple but sharp and elegant. Great flavour balances, lots of local wines and beers on the drinks list. I started listening to the people next to me talk about Cocteau. Eventually they dragged me (kicking and screaming) into their conversation and it turned out that they'd just been to the premiere of an alternative opera I'd been thinking about seeing the next night. Long story short I got instructed to tag along for the evening and I met an interesting cross-section of Portland including people from the Portland Opera who're staging an interesting Philip Glass piece, Orphée. It was fun if a little boozy and late for me.

Took an epicurian walking tour of Portland with a gentle hangover and some tiredness the next day, really really interesting, especially the microbreweries. Went to Powell's (oh my God, why did no one tell me about that bookshop? Vast, diverse, shambolic and very very good) and must now buy more luggage.

The Beggar's Opera performance was excellent: quite exciting, oddly anachronistic while being very contemporary, and with great singing, music and stage presence. As far as I can tell, Opera Theatre Oregon is a semi-professional group which makes the achievement even more impressive. I met the creative director, as she thought she knew me (I must have a doppelgänger here because it's happened a couple of times now).

Had dinner at Higgins and was disappointed - provincial fine dining from the 1980's - it's all very well and good to source locally etc, but not at the price of an unimaginative menu, dishes that were ho-hum etc. My waitron was good, professional, competent, but most of the rest of the people walked around as if in their sleep - perhaps a good metaphor for the restaurant overall.

Today was breakfast at Mother's - overrated but nice - a stroll to the farmer's market at the University, which was really earnestly local, green and tasty. Loads of mushrooms, fantastic local fruit and vegetables, and aggressively authentic bread. Ate a new vegetable for the first time, a tasty, citrussy salad green called Ficoide glaciale. Brilliant.

I've got a day and a half left and still want to catch some films at the Living Room, a cinema complex which is agressively anti-Hollywood (lots of digital short film), head out to the Fine Art museum which is running a Chinese contemporary art show, and perhaps the Oregon Historical Society to learn about Native American culture and colonialisation.

All up, awesome. I should have packed some flannel, and perhaps some cool. But otherwise it's been great and sometimes even dry.

Gratin Dauphinois

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 21:22:54 GMT

I've had a couple of fun dinner parties in the last weeks. Funnily enough, a number of friends who came along have recently embarked on new relationships. When asked if their new squeezes were coming along, it appeared that they weren't even told. I guess I'm the scary friend these days ;-)

Tonight I'm doing yeast pastry stuff for tomorrow and next week - watching dough rise for the white and rye bagels for a party tomorrow, wholemeal and semolina baguettes for next week. If you don't do yeast baking, I really recommend trying it - it's actually not very complicated although there are a couple of tricks to learn, and it's very satisfying, both for the relaxed, slow process and also the yummy results!

There's a decadent (and yet so very simple, it's cream and potato and garlic and an interesting kind of German bacon I found at the market this morning) gratin in the oven, and I expect to eat sometime before midnight. Yay.

I'll be participating in a workshop on Tuesday on improving the customer experience at railway stations this week - never done this kind of thing before but I hope that my enthusiasms (good wine bars at stations, anyone?) will get translated to bricks and mortar, haha.

Wednesday evening is theatre night, and I've rounded up a couple of English-speakers to go and help support a new theatre group who're putting on History Boys.

There's been unexpected small-scale progress on a whole bunch of issues at work. But the emotional cost of pushing people to do their jobs (well, or even just at all) seems a bit high compared to actual results, enough that my management tree has been encouraging me to take at least two or three 'compensation' days off a month. I have been, not unexpectedly, taking them up on this offer.

Late next week I'll be going to Portland in the US Pacific north-west for a long weekend, which will be interesting, not least for the time-gap since I was last there - when flares were in, laugh.

Typically, there's a houseguest arriving while I'm away. Since C has already done this before (and was half of the story of how my current kitchen was unpacked and sorted out without my intervention), I'm sure it's not going to be a problem.

I'll be seeing a few friends and family next month, especially during a bit of a boozy day in London. I'm not normally a birthday person, but it's all getting quite exciting with people planning to rock up from near and far (with a few who were even at the dimly-remembered 21st bash) and an itinerary of dinner and drinks in places ranging from Amsterdam, Barcelona, and Bray to Zwolle (restaurant dinner booked there for more than just reasons of alphabetic correctness).

Delayed by ... stuff

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 21:43:45 GMT

I've decided not to let work get me down.

I was in New York for a long weekend in early September, and had a fabbo night at Terroir in the East Village, ate at Katz's Deli etc.

Ellis Island was more moving than I expected, and an unexpected stuble-across, the African Burial Ground monument and its' memorial that begins "For all those who were lost. For all those who were stolen. For all those who were left behind..." - unexpectedly heart-rending.

Paris a couple of weeks later with Jules was awesome - stunning weather. Far far too much champagne on a hot Saturday led to a scolding from a policewoman for drinking at a cemetery. Breakdancers on the lawn in front of the Eiffel Tower. More champagne. Wonderful company, and a great time. Found time in S & I's crazy crazy itinerary to sit down by a canal and eat cured meat and drink fairly fine Crozes-Hermitage for a couple of hours before scooting back home.

I now officially have a Brazilian cleaner. I realise my kitchen cupboards are white after the first appointment. She said (I think, cos it was in Portuguese) that all guys are shitty housekeepers. It's true for me, at least.

Lots of other awesome that I can't remember.

Oh yeah, I have been curious for years about a disused raised track that seems to run parallel to the Paris-Toulouse mainline near Orléans at Saran for about 20km. Aqueduct? Monorail?

Nope, Aérotrain!

Described as a sort of guided hovercraft. Brilliant. This is the kind of brilliant but whacky that Europe should be doing more of.

No bacon, but mmm lardons and truffles

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 18:33:56 GMT

I've been in southern France this weekend to catch up with my Dad. It was great apart from the expensive train tickets (more expensive than travelling to New York via Chicago!) and the logistic disasters in Brussels which made my train quite late into Paris, made me skip dinner, and just make my connecting train after good luck with the metro, by 4 minutes.

I cooked breakfast of omelettes with truffles (oh! the lardons were even yummier than the truffles) on the first morning, and made dinner of steak and truffles which was a bit of a hit. We chatted, drank wine, went to local markets, picnicked, wandered around and had a very chilled time including lunch with friends (mmm aperitifs in the garden, then rabbit stew for the main!). I am travelling encumbered with four small(ish) raspberry plants, a bunch of garlic chives for my balcony garden.

I am now travelling home on a TGV across northern France - long long shadows from the sunset on the flat plains, with the landscape flickering by at 280km/h. The internet's working well too, just downloaded some documents at 2Mb/s. Shame I've got to work as soon as I pass Brussels.

More bacon and an overdose of butter

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 20:51:28 GMT

Last weekend, I was visiting friends in Haarlem where a pretty big Jazz festival was running, and as you do, we kind of ran out acts we wanted to stand around for and found ourselves in one of my favourite little bars, Briljant, which is tucked away from the main squares and streets but which has a pretty good range of whisky (although nothing like one of my favourites elsewhere with more than a thousand fresh open bottles) and some interesting beers which I've never really got around to trying yet.

Quite how interesting, I was going to discover. Choosing a German weissenbier off the menu, I was disturbed (and secretly pleased) that it tasted of bacon, or more precisely hickory smoke. Mmm. Aecht Schenkerla Rauchbier is the the thing from Bamberg. If you like bacon, you may well like this beer.

A very pleasant evening, although I was burping (in that beer way) baconish flavours for half the night.

The butter overdose was tonight when I trialled a recipe for chicken supreme with mushroom, butter, cream and madeira sauce. The sauce was deadly, but so was the chicken, which wasn't so much fried as poached in hot butter in the oven. Nice but borderline toxic. I've got an oddly pleasant oil overdose feeling and think I'll have an early night.

It's an unseasonally warm night and I've baked another loaf of handmade bread. The last couple of weeks have been really successful on the bread front (if not on too many other fronts, work, sigh) and with houseguests and friends regularly popping by, a nice way to feed people.

(And what a marvellous batch of houseguests it's been, A and her Rock God from Sydney, M & F from Minnesota with all their fabulous news, I & S on their round-the-world sojourn, plus K & R from Melbourne, and a few more who were only here overnight: you're all welcome back any time! Taking visitors around opens your eyes again, and this summer thanks to one group had the unexpected pleasure of seeing a private Rembrandt etching hanging in someone's house, just because we were playing respectful tourists. Awesome!)

Cheese analogue

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 20:11:40 GMT

There I was, idly reading a newspaper on the train in the morning as part of my ~~work-avoidance~~chillout regimen, when I was suddenly struck by a report about a consumer association study on commercially available pizzas in the Netherlands. Six of the twenty-nine pizzas sampled were topped with what the researchers called a cheese analogue - something like cheese that is made of vegetable fats, not milk products.

Weird. I'd not heard of it before. Is this common? Or commonly-known?

Also, in a fit of ~~work-avoidance~~creativity enhancement at work, I stumbled across something quite astonishing. Vegetarian bacon salt, (slogan "everything should taste of bacon"). Who knew?

Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité (and a new word)

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 21:34:35 GMT

Happy Bastille Day, everyone!

I learned a new word yesterday. Schmaltz. It's apparently the name of the fat under the skin of chickens, and is one of the most marvellous things about chicken soup. I'm sure it's good for me, all those yiddish-speaking grandmothers can't be wrong!

A whole chicken went into the pot, and the result has been glorious (and good for me too!). I've been a bit sick lately, probably a bit of exhaustion, really. Early nights after good soup for me!

But awesome self-contained houseguests (hi A and T!), a radical make over of my lounge room and kitchen (read domestic intervention, thanks R and T!) and generally fine weather have been marvellous.

I've got a birthday coming up this year which I'm planning (uncharacteristically) to make a bit special. Plans are firming up for dinner in a small town called Bray, near London in November. Let me know if you think you might be able to make it and I'll do my best to get reservations for a Saturday night, yeah right, but we'll see.

Thoughts on language acquisition

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 20:51:54 GMT

Well I've been home from the epic first part of the Round the World trip for a little more than a week. I can't say that I'm thrilled, but at least the bad weather is noticeably less awful (no blizzards!), with occasional delightful sunny days. Another 8 degrees of the trip will be happening in about three weeks, when I pop to London for a weekend.

I'll post photos from the awesome, fabbo and amazing time I had in Rio (and everywhere else!) later.

But yeah, thinking about language acquisition as an adult. I discovered that I'd love to learn Portuguese (sounds weirdly Slavonic, with a Romance grammar). How should I approach language learning? What is my experience about what works, and what doesn't?

Of the two languages that I speak well enough to be understood (heh, that's a lovely low level of competence), which I've learned as an adult*, I followed two different paths:

1. Random reading, listening, immersion, pub-friends etc plus a semester of a couple of hours a week adult-education classes in Dutch. (In other words, extremely ad-hoc with a leavening of traditional grammar and vocab building that doesn't involve beer or rhyming slang about intimate behaviour). My current level of comprehension (great!) and production (regularly making disastrous grammatical mistakes and using odd and foreign-sounding convolutions) has taken years to reach.

2. One on one teaching, with almost no formal grammar, and constrained vocab in Spanish. Only a few sessions. My current level of comprehension is limited (but is very aware of verb forms, tenses and improving fast) and my production is in the same ballpark - I'm confident that I'm stringing sensible sentences together (useful because Romance speakers seem to drop the ball in the face of poor grammar, which isn't as common - at least in my experience - with Germanic speakers).

Why is approach 2 running so well? It's not much of a stretch to think that random learning isn't particularly efficient, although you do pick up the most appallingly awful and rude slang if you keep an ear open!

But the thing that seems to be working for me is that the focus is not actually on comprehension, but on production of workable phrases, sentences and thoughts. Slowly building up what I can say or write (and therefore understand) by learning production rules in context. The production rules are actually grammar, but fed in bite-sized concrete chunks. [I went through school in an English-language system for much of the time which means my grammatical knowledge is mostly implicit in practical terms.]

Instant feedback helps too.

So, I've been hunting for something like approach 2 online, perhaps automated, and with a language community to practice with. Turns out that the community thing isn't hard to find: italki.com, LiveMocha, and numerous others exist.

But why is so much material on-line focused on grammatical learning and word lists?

Is it because people (other than me, apparently) learn better that way than through learning production rules and extending them fairly naturally, learning idiom and more** along the way?

* I also speak some particularly brutalised infantile Russian due to my convoluted family background, which after hearing my first sentence, Moscow taxi drivers are known to have said "We speak English. Is sensible." The little Bahasa Toraja I maintain is useful for ordering in Indonesian restaurants and feeling comfortable listening to people in Brunei, with precious little comprehension other than when they start talking about food ;-)

** I never realised, but when I speak to English as a second language speakers who clearly have difficulties with idiomatic language in English, I tend down-switch to primary meaning for verbs, for example "go", to mean only the action of going from one place to another (no Australian-tinted "And she goes (said) ...") and tending to drop all the complex am-ing and are-ing with present-participle -ing forms which appear to lead to glazed eyes fairly rapidly.

Because different languages use grammatical features in different ways, I've noticed it helps me if I formulate thoughts using the simplest grammatical forms - in the same way, and possibly for similar reasons as the downshift for people who are just learning English - before I begin running through a production. Why did no one tell me that during French immersion at school?

A beach barbecue (Perth, Western Australia)

Sat, 14 Mar 2009 05:51:15 GMT

Sorry for the awfully late notice.

I'm in Perth for 2 days, leaving late on Sunday evening.

I'll be having a barbecue dinner on the City Beach foreshore (just about 20 metres north of the Oceanus restaurant) at 4pm on Sunday the 15th of March (tomorrow!).

Please come along. Bring food, drink, bathers, sunscreen. I'd love to see you.

Tell people who should know. I've been a bit disorganised and last minute.

My apologies for the crappy organisation; I've been really crazily busy with this around the world holiday thing, and Perth just ... happened.

Seeya!

Huh, penthouse in Rio

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 22:43:15 GMT

It's all becoming a bit too amazing to be true. A friend-of-a-friend who's somewhere else on business has offered his penthouse flat to our group when we're in Rio. His cleaning lady will be there to give me keys when I fly in. Amazing.

This is apparently the view from the beach in front of the apartment.

[http://www.panoramio.com/photo/3325840]

Boggle.

2009 is going well, judging from the first 5 weeks

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 19:21:19 GMT

It's going pretty well so far, except a noticeable sleep-deficit. I'm working long hours, but I'm happy with the results that are being achieved, and even my occasional sanity-preserving-not-able-to-cope-at-all-I'm-going-home-early moments are happening with lots of (emotional) margin to spare.

Fun weekend (tearsxintherain popped by - delightful as always to see her) of cocktail bars (a nice little secret one with a view hatch in the door), museums, chats, outstanding steaks and lamb shoulder at a little restaurant I like, dodgy nightclubbing (having met a significant percentage of the friendly crowd in the queue) - inflatable sex toys everywhere and fairly trashy music, then only a few hours later delightful friends popping by on the Sunday to cook us brunch (I was not the most hung-over person in the house, but more than 5 hours sleep would have been awesome), translating a menu into English for a restaurant I don't much like, and even getting a letter written by one of my friends (a native speaker) for a potential house-cleaner who only speaks Brazilian Portuguese (I could understand a few phrases from my recent studies in the language: "chaotic house", "really needs your help", "disastrous", "danger money" etc ;-), and also booked the ticket between São Paulo and Rio online, which was the last ticket needed for the vacation.

I'm going to the Brazilian consulate to begin the visa process tomorrow - holiday plans are all coming together, yay!

Spinning touchy

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 12:44:08 GMT

I was waiting for a tram a few days ago and I saw two young girls playing a really cool game - I don't know if was unique to them or I just don't remember it from my childhood. Anyway, one of the kids does a twirl while the other rushes forward, but has to be frozen when the other one is facing forward. It's quite competitive, but with a strong rules basis - way cool. And limited contact, which for 5 or 7 year olds is probably a good thing to keep down the aggravation levels.

Their parent/carer of course kept asking them to stop but they had carefully arranged themselves so that coming trams were visible, the shelter was between them an the traffic and they weren't inconveniencing the other people waiting a bit further down. I dunno about you, but I think the kids of today are much better socialised, at least compared to the little savage I was.

On the 26th I spent an hour reading about Australian Aboriginal languages, and quite surprised that I'd never heard of the Pama-Nyungan language family theory - that the Australian continent has a parallel (and possibly more successful in terms of population spread and continental area) to the Indo-European language family.

The theory indicates that much of the successful social and technological developments in pre-European-contact Australia might have been rooted in the Kimberley region of north-western Australia, possibly further enhanced by regular external trade contacts with Macassaran or Bugis traders, and perhaps even broader than that. The non-Pama-Nyungan languages are thought to be mainly in the northern-most part of the Northern Territory, where they may have also had external trading links but for one reason or another weren't sociocultural superpowers across the continental trading routes like the Kimberley people. I wonder if there aren't tipping points for these kinds of soft-power growth patterns, where influence turns into a more "network civilisation" pattern, self-reinforcing, and of a large enough scale to be only incidentally influenced from the outside.

Went to a work function which had surprisingly great buffet food, a bad Elvis impersonator and a cool industrial vibe. Was chatted up by two different lines of the business about becoming a permie with them ;-) Got a bottle of crèmant as a gift (why?) and then had it cadged from me by an attractive woman on the train home. Dragged the colleague I was travelling with off to a cool little student bar near the station, where we got even more stupidly drunk, chatted to loads of people, saw two live acoustic sets and were finally rolled out the door at 2am. The next day at work was all about keeping on breathing :-)

Oh, saw John Malkovich at a local cinema, a couple of weeks ago at the launch party (I was there for free beer ;-) as narrator of a cool/strange film "Bloody Mondays and Strawberry Pies": the film itself is totally stolen by the Berber tour guide in the Sahara, awesome. Just off to the same place to see Gomorrah, brilliant reviews so far...

Thermostat crash

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 16:19:15 GMT

Ha - central heating issue resolved. I think.

The clue was that the actual heating unit seemed to work when put through the test programs, to the extent of heating all the radiators etc for 5 minutes.

The thermostat was indicating all sorts of remote information from the heating element, pumps etc. But what if it was the thermostat that was not working properly, contrary to it's own diagnostics?

Swapped out batteries. Still not working.

Pressed the reset key. Nothing, except now I've lost my daily arrival and departure times and lazy Saturday morning with the paper and a croissant warm period.

Short out the battery leads. Power up. Loud click. Pumps turn on in the utility room, status indicators on heating element indicate warmup cycle beginning, radiators coming up. Yay.

Now I can have sourdough rising in the evening! (And all those other jolly things like not having to wear a parka indoors)

Played Settlers of Katan last night. Until 5 am. Didn't need that at all, but it was otherwise a brilliant evening of endless Surinamese food (think Indonesian merged with Indian, with touches of Chinese, native South American and even some African flavour combinations - think kari ayam in roti with garam masala touches and taro root stuff) and far too much whisky. Ate too much to sleep well, unfortunately, but that does mean that I will be invited back by the lovely cook!

Getting quite excited about planning for Rio! There's a road trip on the cards and everything!

The price of optimism is new challenges

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 14:25:54 GMT

I mentioned that it's become balmy and above-zero here. I was waiting for the bus at 6am yesterday thinking how much more bearable it is at 1C even when the wind is blowing, and quite enjoying the light drizzle.

Well, when I got home at 9pm, the apartment was pretty cold - something really screwy has happened to the central heating. I've reset the different parts of the system, the diagnostics are running fine and the test programs are doing what they should. But the house is not being heated (except for the 5 minute test programs).

It's enough to drive anyone to the warmth of pubs. ;-)

Luckily the hot water isn't impacted by this so I'm not going to be too smelly, but ambient indoor temperatures of 12-15C depending in home server workload and ambient sun during the day means that I'll be taking long baths and drying myself *very* quickly afterwards.

I will also be hosting dinner parties featuring roasts so that the dining room is warm enough for guests... first tryout is tomorrow night, mmm roast lamb.

Pretty busy with work and social things, so I should have time to be at home for the repair sometime in the next few weeks. (Don't worry Jules, it'll be before you pop over!)

Still have to book plane tickets for this year's round-the-world trip but the costumes have been ordered for Carnival in Rio, yay! It looks like the itinerary for Brazil will be pretty full with a road trip and visiting with friends. I expect to be on the west coast of the US in last days of February or first days of March, and will be popping by San Francisco, and then on to Australia in early March for a week or so after a little while on a beach someone in the South Pacific.

Drop me a line if you're interested in catching up...

In other news I'm starting to see the credit crunch in action: payment terms stretched to 90 days (up from 28), some colleagues seeing unilateral 20% pay cuts etc. On the positive side, creditors seem to be accepting payment in terms with far fewer quibbles. I'm starting to ready fall-back plans, centring on the family's lovely cottage in south central France and a vegetable patch, laugh.

Balmy

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 22:19:13 GMT

It's up to -1 C now; getting almost tropical after the last few days of -6 C in the evenings. I've been enjoying the hoar frost on the trees and street furniture in the mornings when I've gotten up to go to work - judging by the (lack of) footprints in the frost I'm one of the earliest risers in my neighbourhood.

I roasted and ground garam masala as my practical gift for friends this year. De-duplicating my kitchen led to boxes of things like mixers, parmesan graters, pots and pans, cutlery and crockery distributed to friends and acquaintances over Christmas in a sort of "it's a gift if you take it away" sense.

Christmas eve was cozy and fun with a few friends over - they brought along a Christmas "orphan" who I've caught up with a couple of times subsequently and he appears to be on a fast track to good friends. Nice.

Christmas day was busy and almost as late a night as the one before. Brilliant food from a world-class chef, lots of wine from my fave Spanish wine region (Ribera del Duero), seasonal movies and loads of laughs.

I had a 36 hour stomach flu which was a fairly fast way to lose a few kilos during the festive season. The fever dreams were excellent, thanks.

New Year's was in the neighbourhood at another new friend's place; she has a freakishly similar professional/project background to what I'm doing now, considering we know each other through a chain of chefs, that's a bit weird. Her apartment had a marvellous view of the park and lake country near us, and all the mad fireworks. Dinner, drinks and crazy Spanish eating of grapes during the televised countdown at the Puerta del Sol in Madrid and conversation until the sun came up were brilliant.

I'm busy drinking my way around Speyside in 2009, but I've not hit anything I like as much as the various Port Ellens and Ardbegs from Islay yet (not entirely true: some bottlers of Knockando do a very fine job, and I'm partial to Macallan sherry-casked whisky too). Early days I suppose.

My wild sourdough culture is doing very well, I've caught a pretty slow sort of yeast (doubling in about 12-20 hours at 20C) but the paired Lactobacillus strain seems quite hyper. The culture can smell quite vinegary only a day after feeding, which of course means that slow-rise white bread is chock-full of yummy flavour components, and the Russian-style rye (khleb) is awesome - I've had to bake about 7 loaves of it during the last weeks alone due to the number of requests.

Horrible horrible horrible

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 16:08:27 GMT

I think I've just had a gruesome month, capping off a fairly grim year. I realised this when I laughed for joy when removing a lamb roast for the oven. I love small pleasures that creep up on you and reset all the silly, nasty or hopeless feelings.

Apart from the low points, I: (re-)discovered the kindness of strangers when locked out of my apartment (one hundred bucks in the hand from an unexpected source while standing on the street, thoughtful telephone calls from across the world, and an exceptionally kind and calm Belgian locksmith, let alone a spare set of keys discovered in the same city, just in time - the other sets were either locked in a house on the other side of the country or temporarily in Osaka). Received an album of Leonard Cohen songs in Frisian/Frisk (the closest language to English where they for example spell bread in the same way but pronounce it in the obvious way: "bre-ad") which is superb, funny and slightly odd. Accepted an invitation to Carnival in Rio, apparently there's a costume that I shall buy too to jump around in for a few hours ;-)

I have a few days at work left to "enjoy" then an orphans Christmas eve dinner at my house, and a fairly chilled week where I will only have to do a bit of consulting work (from home) for a local university.

2008 is going to be much better. Hope yours will be too!

Universal?

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 17:45:52 GMT

It's the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10. What strikes me about the following video is how aspirational it still is, even in fairly free parts of the world. Collectively and individually, we've got a lot yet to do to make the application of human rights universal.

Some (nativist totalitarians) describe this as another aspect of Western cultural imperialism, a Western Declaration of Human Rights. They're wrong: those who suffer from the removal of these rights universally suffer in similar ways; a trafficked sex-slave from China or Singapore suffers in the same way as a Canadian or Swiss does; someone from Congo whose parents were extra-judicially executed suffers in the same way as an Australian. The woman who does not earn the same as her male colleagues for the same work, suffers in the same way whether they are American or someone from the Philippines.

There's been progress in the last 60 years, but there's a lot more needed even in our own back yards.

Wet snow

Sun, 23 Nov 2008 13:47:59 GMT

It's snowing. It may have snowed yesterday but I was asleep.

I've been sleeping a lot, which is nice, but not very productive. About 30 hours so far this weekend.

Maybe it's making up for last weekend - I was in New York for a few days, didn't get much sleep which was just fine. Some lovely friends were able to come along too.

Cocktails at Daniels. Dinner was pretty good too! The dining room is excellent; the staff crisp and knowledgeable; the food elegant, subtle and refined; the wines quite superb and diverse. Not much of a sense of humour though, typically North American fine dining: "Jacket required; tie suggested for gentlemen." Hah. We were the last ones out, pleasantly sloshed, well-dined and in the mood for a leisurely stroll in the cool night air at 2am back to midtown.

We did some walking and art galleries. The Guggenheim was pretty disappointing: the exhibition of Catherine Opie wasn't scintillating. There were only a couple of pieces I liked: the surfbeach/icefishing counterpoint was pleasant but not stunning. The "George W. Bush/Help Us" counterpoint was very funny until it was pointed out that Ms Opie probably didn't mean it ironically - just boringly, straightforwardly politically. The rest: potentially interesting portraits of lesbians, drag-kings and so on was just tedious. Nothing likeable, nothing sympathetic, nothing *intriguing*. Just ... badly framed photos. Bah. It was post-art art. Why bother?

Dinner at Mama's in the East Village was quite different than at Daniel's. Southern soul-food with no table service, a microwave for rewarming and mismatched furniture and cutlery. Utterly charming, and enormously cheap - dinner for three was about the price of a single cocktail the previous night.

We picked up some Pilsner Urquell around the corner at a convenience store and attempted to finish our meals. Awesome. Friendly staff and cool, hip clientele.

Then off to Terroir, one of the new breed of wine bars. Funky, ironic, fun. Many of my preconceptions and biases about wine and Americans were totally destroyed that evening. Delightful.

They even had bottles of Boon Geuze for those with a yen for the champagne of the beer world. A bubbly, charming way to finish the night.

Apart from a very drunken and fun taxi ride back to the Algonquin.

An awesome and fun weekend; thanks Elaine and Jeremy for being there!

Other news: Luxembourg is not going to fly; horrible communication breakdown means that I wasn't informed of a couple of crucial details before the interview. Lovely time though, nice people, something to keep on the back burner.

Exhaustion

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 21:02:59 GMT

I just had my first exhaustion leave for ages. Bah. After sleeping for much of the weekend (apart from a dinner party I couldn't escape that was an emergency re-planning from a rather good Michelin-starred Japanese restaurant booking that fell through, and I made my amazing and fabulous peasant pizzas with the micron-thick crunchy-crisp bases) I'm feeling less headachy and able to re-attend my workplace tomorrow.

Many things have happened there, including cancellation of my amazing and wonderful project, an audit from a very famous telecoms lab which had me doing 24 hours of prep in about 3 days on top of my normal work, and a 6-hour standup presentation. Subsequently the project was restarted from fairly high in the organisation. Very gratifying.

But I'm over it.

Off to Luxembourg hopefully this week for an interview for a very interesting job which might involve site visits to interesting and rather untouristy places.

There's an opportunity in Brussels that I'm hoping will fly - less interesting than the one in L. City, actually a bit more like the current job, but less structured (!) - but Brussels is three hours closer to Paris and London than either L. City or where I am now and is delightful in its' own (grey, politically unstable, fabulous beer, great food, marvelous art deco architecture) right. I need a change. I'd like to work in a Francophone environment again too.

Crazy night out pubbing and clubbing last week. Got very dodgy at moments on sleazy dancefloors and I paid for the drinking the next day. First time out and about for quite a while. I love my tolerant and sweet friends!

One of my clients has offered me a thank you, for services above and beyond the call, of a trip to a football game in Spain, with all of the corporate hospitality stuff. It's definitely worth a day or two off ;-)

I'm going to Bristol in two weeks to see my Dad and the family historian, whom I've never met. Apparently it's going to be a weekend of antique markets or something. I'm hoping for some good pub lunches and some excellent ales to compensate.

New York City is a go in about a month - hoping to see J. and E. and E. and perhaps one or two other people. I'm a sad Dorothy Parker fanboy so I'm booked in at the Algonquin. Hoping to have wonderful dining experiences, and with E. on the case should expect browbeaten staff let us have a table at shortish notice!

My passport is almost expired, and I'm a bit worried about when I can get it replaced between all of this travel. It takes three WEEKS to replace, can you believe it?

Heard from a friend I've not heard from in a year because she mis-dialled her phone - it was delightful once she regained her composure. I lost her number and we kind of drifted apart. She has all my cds in boxes in her attic and has unpacked them and is enjoying my Green Day and Dead Can Dance disks ;-)

Another friend had police break down a mutual friend's door tonight - he's gone awol, no sight no sound for two weeks, phone directly to voicemail etc. We hope he's just away travelling but normally he'd let us know, or at least be in touch with his family who've not heard anything. A bit of a worry. Update: all under control, job interview on another continent ;-)

Goodness and strangeness in equal measure

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 14:15:57 GMT

I've been back about a month, have been to some awesome parties, tried to organise my credit-card situation (which is fine - the fraud's been written off etc etc - except for the continuing lack of an actual working card). I'm told I'll have a new card in the last week of next month. Which means no New York trip for a bit. Sorry, Jem. Gah.

Working very very hard right now, and getting a group of people as excited as I am about our plans; I am very proud and happy about how the process and tooling architecture design is filling out. About EUR6m has been budgeted for all the bits and pieces of my cunning plan, and with about three hurdles more before we go live in April 09, I'm feeling guardedly confident, despite total capex and opex freezes etc etc. It helps that at night I've been prototyping the environment (in production a factory-process of about 1000 people are actually involved in the fulfillment and assurance processes) on my laptop, so I'm seeing issues before the official "detailed design" activities happen (often too late), and steering our approach accordingly.

Last week, one of my awesome friends here, W, who is perhaps in the top few hundred chefs in the world, and who's been having serious work and lifestyle problems, was prepping for a horrible contract renewal conversation with his boss. I did some scope setting work and negotiation coaching with W, but in the end it was totally unnecessary. He's been asked if he'd like to head up his area of cooking for all of the restaurants in his hotel (3 or 4 Michelin stars under one roof) and coordinate the opening of a gastronomic shop in it too. Such fabulous news, so good for his marriage (ie. not going to decide to move to Brazil in 2 months leaving his spouse behind ;-). We went out to celebrate that night, and ate fine oysters, yummy dim sum and shared a rather excellent cidery bottle of '95 Bollinger. Excellent.

The strangeness happened a couple of days later. I noticed I wasn't hungry any more and that coffee had started tasting weirdly not the same. Food too. So, for days and days and days, I've only eaten when I've forced myself. And even that's been a struggle. No real hunger pangs, and weirdly no dizziness or other things either if I forgot to eat for half a day or even a whole day. Totally strange. If it continues for another week I'm going to see a doctor; food and drink is one of the few pleasures I choose to indulge in, and it's weird enough that maybe it's something for an expert.

Made of awesome, filled with win

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 20:28:13 GMT

Part two of the vacation report.

Did I mention that the campsite in Death Valley was located at a place called Furnace Creek. We should have thought about the name before committing to camp there ;-)

Anyway, we moved on from Death Valley to Sequoia National Park to get our introduction to big trees, winding roads and baars. Sorry bears.

I was a bit photod out by this point, after the Valley. I do have a couple of shots. Barnes the Baar also took some good ones.

(General Sherman Tree)

Bear-proof boxes are critical when camping to avoid unpleasant surprises for campers or their vehicles:

(attribution: grfb)

What I didn't expect is the lack of *hush* around the General Sherman Tree. It's nice, I grant you that, but the forest just wasn't what I was expecting. Neatly laid out easy paths (Disney-esque but with the number of visitors I'm not surprised), mixed growth heights, big gaps in the tree cover.

There was an absence of the astonishing "cathedral" feeling of the Karri forests in southwestern Australia - the even high canopy and only low undergrowth that leads to that magical dappled light and the *hush* in a decent Karri grove. Even if Karri's are #2 in the bigness stakes, I think I still prefer them.

Then on to Yosemite. Wow. The thing about it is that it's just ... too much. I guess the scales are a bit smaller than the Grand Canyon, but only just. But because the valley itself is only a few kilometers wide you can see just how vertical the rock faces are, how tall the trees can grow, how far the waterfalls, well fall. The valley floor is full of alpine meadows and forest.

From the valley floor you are amazed by the sheer rock walls.

Clean feet! After no showers since Las Vegas three days before and the heat of Death Valley, this was bliss. Yet also very cold.

I have a tedious love of alpine meadows. You'll see.

The terraforming of the mountain-sides proceeds apace. Apace to geological processes that is. Some of those trees were OLD.

But there's still rather more to go.

We camped that night out at Twin Lakes, past Bridgeport and got to go through the awesome Tioga Pass. Terrifying and amazing. I don't have good photos, but I think Dunc has.

There were lots of mosquitos and we used hyper-strength DEET (like 98% or something!) and were not further bothered. It was bear country so we did the standard car-clean and campground search for anything smelly.

Dunc and I had decided to skip Tahoe and do Yosemite again to see Glacier Point. And then try to get back to SF under our own steam. Almost all by public transport. There was a hiker's bus that ran at 07.20 from Lee Vining, a town near the Tioga Pass near the edge of the terrifically alkaline Mono Lake. Dunc would wake me and Barnes who'd drive us down for the pick up.

Well, at stupid o'clock, Dunc wakes me up. I'm thinking, what the hell? How can this pitch blackness be 0600? Turned on my phone to check the time. Ah. It's 0*4*00 or something. Gah. Back to sleep.

Anyway, we get to the Texaco at Lee Vining and have time to get a sandwich and a coffee before the bus. I grabbed two of the already-made turkey sandwiches and a double espresso. I should have guessed from the signs advertising Italian wine tastings from the Antinori stable that this was no ordinary American gas station. The espresso was the best, medium city roast I've ever had the pleasure drinking in the USA. The sandwiches turned out to be quite extraordinarily good too. Who'd-a-thunk it?

We met our bus driver who advised us to have a godly day and departed for Yosemite Village via Tioga Pass again. Awe-bloody-some.

Having time just to walk through the forest was great.

Checking out nearby waterfalls.

Taking in the views and vistas.

Just soaking the vibes in one of the meadows.

Took a bus up to Glacier Point. It's very very high up. I saw a bear very briefly.

Directly across the valley was the Half Dome. Those are big trees on its lower flanks.

It was squally but good.

Stunning.

Umm. Words?

I can really see why Muir lost the plot about this place.

We also managed to have an amazing lunch down at the Lodge - avoided the queues at the pizza and burger counter of the food hall and had delightful meat-and-three-veg of a superior quality. It's evident that few of the Americans was very comfortable with food that needed utensils to eat, which made it all much more pleasant for us.

Another blog post on our trip out of Yosemite on public transport and a round-up on the rest of the time in SF later...