Cats got me up at 6:00am today, fighting under the bed, so I’ve spent most of the day yawning and squinting.
And now I’m sharing.
Monthly Archives: January 2009
Peppered Steak
Meat and two veg (one of which is McCain Microwave Chips) is pretty good for my diabetes (not for my heart, take it up with my GP). To complete the lazy-ass setup I get the tesco microwave veg, it’s ok (it’s steamed). My blood sugar is usually around 5 or 6 two hours after any combo of meat, veg and those chips. However, it gets boring quick. I quite like roast chicken, and steak and pork and all the other kinds of meat, but it still gets boring.
I can usually tolerate it for a couple of weeks before getting sick and wanting pizza and other high carb stuff.
Which means I understand why mustard and pepper are so important (and clearly, all the other spices).
Yesterday I had pork smothered in mustard before I cooked it, and today steak with crushed black pepper corns (fresh). Nice change.
Windows 7 Beta – file sharing
I suspect it’s because of how I’m running Windows 7 beta under Sun’s VirtualBox, but I can’t at the moment get file sharing working working between the beta and my XP machine. That’s not an issue in it’s own right (I suspect I know why it doesn’t work), but it does highlight an area that frustrates me. In their effort to simplify the sharing of files on Windows, Microsoft just confuses the hell out of me. Three different types of network connection (Home, Work, Public), different behaviour in each, some new (maybe it was in Vista?) network sharing thing that’s not Workgroups, but it might kinda support workgroups as well.
I just wanted a single network options dialog with clearly explained options I can tick or cross. Where’s the ‘trust me’ option?
Windows 7 Beta in Sun’s xVM VirtualBox
So I never used Vista. I heard too much negative press before it was released and too many negative comments from people who did use it after it was released. Our PC’s came with XP and we were quite happy thank you very much.
But I’m not an out and out Microsoft hater. They get a lot wrong, but on the other hand, XP does what I want it to do. I wish it was more secure, but when you’re a target the size of Microsoft with the install base it has you’re going to be under constant attack anyway. They could be better, but I’m not sure the products are as bad as some haters claim. Yeh, the company has some terrible practices, but the product isn’t the worst.
I was amused at how quickly news about Windows 7 turned up, it really looks like Vista failed, and I wanted to get a look at it and see if it was something I could move to in the future. I managed to nab the public beta this morning, and although I doubted it would work I tried installing it into Sun’s xVM VirtualBox – and lo and behold it works fine.
And despite only having 768MB of memory it’s actually pretty usable. I’d get naffed off if it performed like this all the time on my main machine, but I should imagine given it’s full complement of CPU and another 1.2GB of memory it’ll perform pretty well.
I had one problem installing it into VirtualBox, initially I created the virtual disk as an auto-expanding one and the install crashed half way through (taking out the install, VirtualBox, my machine, three quarters of my desk and creating a small worm hole). Creating the disk at the full size before installing fixed that and it went on pretty quickly. You can install the VirtualBox extensions by running them in XP Compatability mode, and you can install the network by telling Windows 7 to look at the VirtualBox extensions CD. Once the network is up and running, Windows 7 chugs out to the ‘net on it’s own and grabs the sound drivers (as part of windows update). It was pretty slick.
I’m writing this from Firefox running on the Windows 7 VM (Firefox installed fine, regular version). There’s a free version of AVG which runs on Windows 7 which is running (link checker turned off).
Clearly I’ve not had a chance to really use any major applications, or push the OS hard, but I have to say Microsoft may have learned the Vista lesson. I’ll play with it a lot more, maybe see if OpenOffice installs, and let you know.
Eating without thinking
It amazes me what you can convince yourself is ‘nice’ in terms of food and drink. I like beer (english bitter or stout). But honestly, it actually tastes like bitter dish water until you ‘acquire the taste’, which essentially translates to, ‘until you convince yourself that you enjoy it and appreciate the differences in taste’.
I think a lot of food tastes are the same, the question is not ‘do you enjoy this’ it is ‘are you prepared to invest in the effort to learn to enjoy this’. Like blue cheese. The younger you are when you start learning to appreciate these tastes, the more natural they seem.
So, anyway this post is nothing to do with blue cheese or beer. It’s about bread (yes, you guessed it). I like hot buttered toast, sometimes I like a sandwich, I enjoy bacon cobs, I enjoy French bread. But I’m diabetic which means I have to be careful with bread. Eventually I found some tesco’s fresh baked bread (Finest Rustic Multigrain) which I actually liked (didn’t have to acquire a taste for it). It’s nice when it’s fresh and it’s nice when it’s toasted. I still wouldn’t do bacon sandwiches with it (white bread!) but I could picture myself eating ham and peas pudding sandwiches with it. I ate it for a while, I’ve no idea what the GI is, but while eating it my blood checks were fine and my average (Hb1Ac) was excellent, so it was ok.
And then our local tesco changed the recipe, or something and it started tasting like cardboard. Really, it was dry, fine grain inside (instead of fluffy) and just like ash when toasted. I was gutted, so I stopped eating it. I searched for something else which wasn’t bad for my blood sugar and found a couple of seeded loafs from various companies which were ok, I could tolerate them but my sugar wasn’t as good. They were also stocked in pretty low numbers so I was never sure if they’d have any in. Then I found the Bergen stuff (I’ve blogged about it a little bit, search for Bergen or Linseed). It’s low GI, linseed and soya bread.
I ate it. I tried it with sandwiches and I had it toasted. I managed to acquire the taste so that it was ok toasted (if I let it cool). Anything else and it was a bit nauseating to be fair, but I got used to it. Was great for my blood sugar. I liked it even maybe.
Well no I didn’t. Because tesco have switched their Finest Rustic Multigrain back to the old recipe, or the old baker is back, or they changed supplier, or whatever and I got some the other day because I was feeling a bit tired of the Bergen. And it’s delicious. Nice, enjoyable. And I realised I don’t like the Bergen, I was just prepared to tolerate it and had convinced myself the taste was ok.
It’s not really ok. It’s really off-putting.
So I’m happy, the tesco bread is back, they usually have plenty in and as long as this recipe stays consistent I can enjoy fresh bread again.
My epitaph
So I’ve worked out my epitaph.
Here lies that dude, he was easily discouraged.
*Except on points of principal over which he would argue endlessly until everyone else died of exhaustion because he wasn’t sure you really understood the point
I’ll do some more painting once I stop looking at other people’s efforts.
An evening with Kevin Smith
Grete got me a bunch of Kevin Smith stuff for Christmas (I hope he enjoyed the pay cheque, and I hope Joss Whedon enjoyed his pay cheque after I got Grete a bunch of his stuff for her). That included the two ‘An evening with ….’ DVD’s (one, two). I’d seen a couple of short clips on YouTube and then mentioned the DVD’s to her so I knew before I watched them the kind of thing I was going to get. I just finished watching the two discs in the first set and it’s pretty good.
I was expecting Kevin to be funny, vulgar and entertaining and he was. But I wasn’t expecting the audience to be quite so annoying in places. I guess I should have expected it – he visits colleges (or whatever they call them in America) and students the world over are pretty similar. There are fans and there are obsessive fans, and obsessive fans, alcohol and meeting their hero don’t always mix.
When the radio is on in the car, I always turn it over during any bit where real people have to phone in. I’m sorry, but there’s something about the kind of people who phone in to the radio and speak, and the way in which they speak that makes me cringe. During at least half of the questions on the DVD I was cringing, for two in particular I almost had to forward past the speaker because they were embarrassing themselves so much it made me hurt inside. The rest of the time though, the questions were interesting and well presented.
In every case (except the two non-questions), Kevin’s answers were interesting and amusing and in a few instances they were long, detailed, really engaging and stomach-achingly funny. I felt sorry for the girl who asked ‘Do you believe in God and why?’ and got a couple of one line answers (yes, because I have a career). I found the answers funny but you could tell she was hoping for something a little deeper. On the other hand in a few instances what start as simple questions lead Kevin into pretty long stories about his career, how he met his wife, working with Prince and starting a fight of words with Tim Burton.
The DVD is a two disc set, with about 100 minutes on each disc. In the UK it’s released as region 2, but NTCS format. It played fine on our player. It’s filmed in front of college audiences in 4 maybe 5 different colleges and intercut. Kevin is personal, open and honest, and vulgar. If you’ve seen his movies you know what to expect, if not, you probably should know to cover the kid’s ears. I really enjoyed watching the two discs, although I had intended to ‘have them on in the background’ while I did something else, I found myself totally absorbed and unable to do anything but watch, listen and laugh (and cringe).
I recommend them to anyone who likes movies, Kevin Smith, or overweight bearded guys making college nerds feel bad.
The DVD description on Amazon says “DVD Description: Director Kevin Smith hits the college circuit with a series of humorous lectures. Through questions from the audience he discusses the pros and cons of movie making.” which is essentially tosh. It’s “Kevin Smith answering everything from the stupidly inane to the blistering inciteful questions, from fans, stoned college nerds and people who wandered in lost from the cold”.
I LOL’d
First real go at non-drybrush skin
I’ve gotten into the habit of just dry brushing skin tones on miniatures, in fact, dry brushing everything. These three mini’s represent my first serious goes at non-dry brush skin. I picked mini’s with a lot of spare flesh since the aim was to practice flesh tones. The top three are from a female warrior and is the one I’m trying to get most right, the bottom three shots are two Ral Partha mini’s I’m using to test things out on for now.
I’m pretty pleased in general, there’s a lot of scope for much smoother blending, but I’m pleased with the general highlights. I just need to look at more real flesh to work out how it actually looks (I’m going to call it research).
So, what went wrong (or WordPress, Cron and Squid)
Recently my web host (Gradwell) moved to a new hosting platform (Apache 2, php 5.2) to try and bring things up-to-date. In general, the end result worked okay. However, the load balancing they had in front of their web cluster was apparently sub-par. This became entirely apparent when a single customer was able to bring the whole thing to a grinding halt with some kind of chess related website.
Now, I know it’s shared hosting, and you have to take the performance hits every now and then, but there’s a difference between ‘takes 2 or 3 seconds longer sometimes’ and ‘didn’t load’, ‘won’t load’, ‘took 8 minutes’. I raised a ticket on the Friday when the problems got to their worst, but for reasons I’m not sure about, that didn’t get looked at by anyone technical until Monday. So from Friday to Monday all my Gradwell sites were basically unusable between 1pm and 8pm UK time.
Gradwell made some changes on Monday and spoke to the owner of the other site, but it didn’t really fix the problem. Eventually they decided to replace whatever load balancer they were using with a Squid reverse proxy, which had been running ‘fine’ in front of their php4 cluster. They did this Tuesday night and since then the site has been a lot quicker.
However, it broke WordPress. Let me explain.