New car
Office/basement before repainting. See here for the after pictures.
The red jumper that Alex's Nana made for him.
Before:
After:
Our gracious hostess, Sarah
At Seward park
First photo taken by Alex
Easter
I have a 70 day blog backlog (at time of writing, 44 at time of posting), meaning that even if I don't write anything for 6 weeks you'll still get a post every day before I run out. So far I have been operating this backlog as a FIFO queue which seems to work pretty well. The only problem is, though, that now if I write something it might be quite out-of-date by the time it's posted. This discourages me from writing about current events. Perhaps I should let the backlog drain (by posting faster than I write if necessary) and then post as articles come into my head like most people do.
Cool Stuff You Can't Find On The Web has been updated:
...there used to be a magazine (I think) which came with a tape which had various childrens stories on it. The one I remember was "The thin king and the fat cook" but there were a few on each tape. I had a couple of tapes, but I've lost them now. Maybe they are still at my parents' house somewhere.
[Update!] - This is what I was talking about. Apparently I had "Story Teller 2" parts 5 and 16 and possibly also "Christmas Story Teller" part 2, because the titles Bored Brenda, Noggin And the Birds, The Snow Bear, The Inn Of Donkeys, Shorty The Satellite And The Brigadier, The Nightingale, Hugo And the Man Who Stole Colours, Mole's Winter Welcome, The Tale of the Little Pine Tree and Grogre and the Giant Nasher seem familiar. I remember very little about any of these except that (as I recall) some of them made me feel quite sad. And there was something about a picnic of bread, cheese and apples in one of them. And people getting swallowed up by a bog. Derek Jacobi's voice still makes me think of these stories to this day. It's quite possible that at least some of these tapes were chewed up by my tape player - it used to do that every once in a while (particularly when I stuck things into it - I was a little scientist).
[Update!] - I got a hold of a digital copy of all of the tapes and magazines, and they are just as good as I remember - extremely well done. I have been playing them for Alexander but he’s a bit young for them at the moment. I look forward to the day when he is old enough to enjoy them. The one with the picnic was “The Snow Bear”, and the sad one was “The Nightingale” (all these stories have happy endings, though). “Mole’s Winter Welcome” still brings a tear to my eye.
There's something very surreal and very wonderful about finding something you remember from a very long time ago in early childhood, and having memories of that time come flooding back. This has happened to me a few times now (mostly because of the internet). Sometimes they things you remember are even as good as you remember them being.
That happened to some extent when I watched The Mysterious Cities of Gold again at university. Some parts (like the butterflies on the approach to the New World, Tao's sadness at the destruction of the Solaris and the first time the Golden Condor flies) were as magnificant as I remember, but some bits seem a bit implausible now and I had forgotten just how destructive those kids were - just about every magnificent ancient treasure and building gets turned to rubble in their wake!
Speaking of MCOG - Oh wow, I just noticed that they're making a movie of it - awesome!
A few times now I've heard the meme comparing carbon offset credits to Catholic indulgences - where one can "buy one's way out of punishment". I think this argument is completely bogus and that the similarities are superficial at best.
Carbon offsetting is an economic solution to an economic problem. Many people want to live a more green life but don't want to change their habits to do so - many of the things that they want to buy or do (like air travel) don't have (more expensive) carbon-neutral equivalents. Perhaps such equivalents are possible but the demand isn't sufficient yet for them to be practical. But just like the invention of money made trades possible that were impractical with the barter system, carbon credits make it possible for some people to be carbon neutral without everybody having to be so at once.
The key here is that the aim of the exercise is to reduce the total amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Doing something which adds CO2 and something else which removes it is just as good as doing neither.
Sin, forgiveness and punishment don't work like that, though - doing one good deed doesn't (and shouldn't) make up for an unrelated sin of equivalent value, because (unlike CO2) the total amount of sin isn't a meaningful concept - everyone just cares about the sins that are made against them in particular.
Also, Carbon credits can have a measurable effect whereas it's impossible to be sure just how long you're going to spend in purgatory. So fraud is more difficult (though still possible - we do need to have some way of ensuring that the money spent on Carbon credits is actually being spent on what it is being purported to instead of being squandered and that that activity is having the desired effect).
I think I finally figured out how to properly center images that are wider than the column (450 pixels). I couldn't seem to get all four cases (image<=450 pixels, image>450 pixels)x(IE, FireFox) working correctly. I finally resorted to using a different image class for wide images, which looks like this:
img.centerwide {
display: inline;
margin-left: -287px;
margin-right: -287px;
position: relative;
align: center;
text-align: center;
}
Of course, I'm sure this breaks every web design rule in the book and probably doesn't work for some of the less popular browsers. Oh well, it'll do for now until somebody complains. I really ought to learn about HTML and CSS properly.
There are a lot of programs I want to write.
Which of these do you, my blog readers, think I should work on? Comment below to vote. I don't promise to abide by your decision, though.
There are also a number of projects I have wanted to work on in the past but which aren't currently inspiring me for various reasons:
This is a post I made on sci.fractals recently (it didn't get any replies there though).
I've been playing about with drawing escape time fractals using different formulae. I've noticed that some formulae give images which seem to have a strange feature - in some places it looks like there are two overlapping images, with one image showing through in areas of the other.
For example, here is an image I made using the formula
z <- (z+1)*(z+c)*(z+i)
Can anybody help me to understand what is going here? Are there really two iterative process going on hidden in one formula or is it an illusion? Does this phenomenon have a name that I could search for to find out more about it?
Among the many programs I'd like to write is a replacement for MESS (and possibly also MAME while I'm at it). Don't get me wrong, I think these are fantastic pieces of software but I do have some problems with them that can really only be solved by starting my own emulation project rather than by contributing to them. In no particular order:
Ready made pre-cooked pastry case. - You should be able to get this and it will save all the hassle of making pastry. I don't know what sizes are available but the following is enough filling for one 18-20cm diameter. If you get a smaller one the right size for say 2 -3 portions, just halve the quantities. You might want to make a full sized one and make it last several days - or invite someone to dinner!
You'll need a grater with a fine grating surface, - looks like a lot of barnacles! Hold the grater onto a plate or chopping board with your left hand and take a lemon in your right. Rub the lemon on the grating surface in a circular motion, turning the lemon as you go, so you scrape off all the yellow zest but none of the white pith underneath. Repeat this with the other lemon. Scrape or brush all the zest off of the grater and the plate/board into a saucepan. Add the water and the granulated sugar and bring it to the boil, stirring from time to time to dissolve all the sugar.
Put the cornflour into a jug. Squeeze all the juice out of the lemons removing the pips and add it to the cornflour. Mix it to a paste (called slaking - don't ask me why!) and stir it into the hot lemony water. Keep stirring until it's thickened or it will go lumpy! Remove from the heat and add the butter stirring `til it's melted. Separate the eggs as I described in the chocolate mousse recipe. Stir the yolks in to the lemony sauce. Pour it into the pastry case.
Put the whites into a clean dry bowl and whisk with your electric whisk until stiff. Turn the whisk to a slower speed and whisk in the castor sugar. You should get a glossy meringue mix you can spread over the lemon filling and fork up into little peaks.
Cook it in the oven at 150°C. Delia Smith says it takes 45 minutes but I don't think it'll take that long - I never time it! I'd guess maybe 20 - 30 minutes. Just watch it `til it looks done.
You can't freeze leftovers so you'll just have to eat it all. What a hardship!
For the weekend's recipes we will turn to desserts (or, as we call them where I'm from, puddings). I haven't made up any pudding recipes so both this one and tomorrow's are from Mum.
This one works best if you pick the blackberries yourself. I've only made it a couple of times myself - the first was in Cambridge and it turned out absolutely perfect. The second was in Redmond and it was inedible (I'm not sure if the blackberries I used were the wrong species or too old, but some of them left streaks of black instead of red in the bowl and tasted awful.)
For the topping:
Put the blackberries in an oven proof dish, sprinkle them with the sugar and lemon juice and dot it with the butter cut into little bits.
If you have a food processor, put all of it except the butter into the machine and whizz it up then pour the melted butter in through the spout. Otherwise:-
Break the egg into a bowl, add the sugar and beat it well to mix. Stir in the milk and melted butter. Sift the flour, baking powder and salt into an separate bowl and them add it gradually into the egg etc beating it to get a smooth batter. Pour it over the blackberries and cook it in the oven 180°C or gas 4 for 30 - 35 mins.