Come the end of the week, all we had left in the fridge was a bag of mushrooms. We needed dinner... what to do?

I put some penne on to boil, chucked a decent chunk of butter into the frying pan, covered it with tons of garlic puree and lots of ground black pepper, waited for it to melt (mmmm, garlic butter!) then tossed in the mushrooms, cut into chunky slices. By the time the pasta was nearly done, the mushrooms were dark brown on both sides.

Hmm... lacking a little something. I scouted the fridge, and turned up half a tub of cream left over from an experiment into making Swedish cream sauce for meatballs earlier in the week. That went into the pan and bubbled away happily with the mushrooms while I drained the pasta.

Sauce into pasta, stir, turn out onto plates, grab a beer... almost-instant hearty Sunday dinner :)

I'm currently sitting on the couch recovering from two days of drumming, dancing, and general awesomeness.
( Read more... )
PS: just found the Falkirk Herald article about Puff Uproar from a couple of months back :)

Ridiculously hardcore session at the Samba School tonight - two hours, thirteen songs at maximum tempo, no breaks. Ow. I don't think I've ever sweated quite so much before...

I've started warming up properly beforehand - drumming on my steering wheel on the way there, then stretching at the hall, then taking it easy for the first song - and I've found it helps immensely. I finished tonight with none of the usual bruises on my hands, although my lack of stamina did bite me. My muscles tired out halfway through and I started having to exaggerate my movements to get slaps to sound, and apparently this was jarring my wrist because it started hurting to the point where I was drumming one-handed for a while. Not so good.

The no bruises thing is a Good Thing, because I'm heading over to Allendale tomorrow to practise with Puff Uproar - Big in Falkirk is next weekend. It's where I first met the folks from Puff Uproar, so this will mark my first anniversary of band membership (although, since the band took a break for a couple of months, my actual first session was in August-ish) :)

The festival is free, so come along! It runs from noon to 10pm on both Saturday and Sunday, and last year's was seriously awesome. We're playing in the Secret Garden area at 2pm and 5pm both days, and at some point (either after or before the first show, not sure) we're running a Come and Try session in the Fringe Tent for people to try their hand performing with us on one of our songs.

And then after the rehearsal I'll be DMing for my crazy awesome D&D group, then popping down to Bearsden to see my parents on Sunday... it's going to be a busy, busy weekend x.X

What is it with Arnold Clark salespeople? The last time I bought a car, it developed problems after a few months and completely failed its first MOT, requiring £600 of repairs just to bring it up to scratch. I called up to have a word with the salesman, only to be told he'd retired.

This time round, I found when I got back to Falkirk with the car that my V5C vehicle registration transfer form for my old car hadn't been signed by the garage. When I phoned, the salesperson - who had been so new that her business cards still had her predecessor's name on them, crossed out and written over with black marker - asked me to mail her the form so she could sign it and mail it back.

A week later, no returned form. I phoned up and was told that she was no longer with the company and thus my mail - which I'd sent by next-day delivery - had been sitting on a desk for days. Another salesman promised to sign and return it instead.

My previous bad experiences with Arnold Clark notwithstanding, the high turnover of their employees really doesn't inspire confidence in the company.

My car, a 2002 Renault Clio, is a fun car to drive, but it's not exactly been a pain-free experience to own. Due to it being my first car and me not knowing any better, I bought it with an almost-shot clutch and a timing belt that should have been replaced before the car went off the dealer's lot. My first MOT cost £600 to get various items of suspension replaced, and I had a suspicion that the second one - due in one month - was going to be even more expensive. On top of that, the car was filled with little niggles: a leaking sunroof that meant I had to keep towels on the seats any time I wasn't driving, to soak up drips from the ceiling; wipers which would randomly speed up and slow down; odd clunking and whining noises that appeared and disappeared while I drove.

So I finally bit the bullet. Instead of the little silver 2002 Clio sitting outside my flat, I now have a slightly larger dark metallic grey 2007 Clio, with the same 1.2L 16V engine. It's apparently a 'Rip Curl special edition', which as far as I can see means you get a logo on the back, plus some red seat trim.

It's quite shiny. It's also a lot quieter when driving than my old Clio, and - much to my delight - I discovered on the drive home that the previous owner had splashed out and upgraded the radio to one which plays MP3 CDs and has iPod, USB Mass Storage and auxiliary analogue inputs. I had been planning to buy a new radio myself, so that just saved me a bit of cash :)

So... I'm pretty happy ^^

I'm on holiday at the moment - I carried over some spare holiday allowance from last year, and it had to be used up by the end of March, so I'm taking a long weekend. So my mum suggested we go to Rothesay and stay in their little flat for a night or two.

Come ten o'clock this morning, we were packed and fuelled. We'd worked out our route, our ferry times, and the weather (to make sure the ferries would be running). We'd spent ten minutes fiddling with the sat-nav trying to convince it to go via Arrochar and Colintraive rather than Wemyss Bay. We set out into beautiful sunshine.

The sunshine lasted until we got out of Falkirk and drove under the dark grey cloud that had been lurking on the horizon. After half an hour of tiny, windy, potholed country roads, we passed a reservoir where the wind was driving sheets of spray over the reservoir's dam. We wondered why the road had been built so close to the shore, then had our question answered when we spotted the only tree visible on the reservoir side of the road: standing about thirty feet into the newly-expanded reservoir and with most of its trunk underwater. It looked like a very large bush growing out of the water's surface...

Half an hour later, and after some truly nasty potholes where I started to fear for my Clio's suspension, the rain hadn't let up. Nate commented "Well, at least if the ferries aren't running because of the weather, we can just go through Glasgow on the way back and drop off the keys to the flat..." Then there was silence for a few seconds, and then: "Neither of us picked up the keys, did we? I knew we'd forgotten something when we left!"

So we turned round and drove home, and by the time we hit Falkirk again had decided that it was too late and the weather too bad to head back to Rothesay. Shortest holiday trip ever :P

Last samba beginner's course lesson yesterday - gig on Saturday at the Mound in Edinburgh at 1pm :)

Decided that after ten weeks, I could drive there without using my satnav. I almost succeeded, too - got into Edinburgh okay, but two streets away I missed a turn and ended up driving in little circles round the town center for ten minutes before I swallowed my pride and pulled out the satnav.

Decent session - we recapped four of the songs we'd learned for the gig. I hit my hand awkwardly on the timba's edge in the first song and had to finish it playing one-handed, so for the next song I took a beaded gourd shaker to give my hand a rest. I hadn't realised playing shaker was so hard! The shaker itself isn't too heavy, but the dancing around which goes with the role is exhausting - at the end of the song I retreated back to my timba for a breather :P

I've been accepted to join the main samba band - first rehearsal is next Friday. Should be fun :)

Cool day today - not in a particularly special way, just ... cool.

I actually got a proper sleep - fell into bed at 10pm after an exhausting Monday, woke up early to bright sunlight, wandered through to have a proper breakfast and a chat with Nate, then headed to work when I felt like it (which turned out to be a quarter of an hour early). Normally I roll out of bed with just enough time to have a shower and dash out the door, then grab breakfast at work.

After a decent day at work, headed to Samba school and drummed for two hours - Samba Funk this week: such an awesome (almost hip-hop-y, hence title :) ) beat that I ended up bouncing around for two hours and finished the night totally exhausted but grinning. I'm definitely getting better at the timbal - I can play hella loud now, and my hands are only slightly swollen at the end of each session, instead of feeling like I've fractured something, although I still need to build stamina in my arm muscles.

Definitely thinking of joining the main samba band if they'll have me: rehearsals are on Fridays, which is much more convenient than Tuesdays for me in any case.

About the only thing that marred the day was that I'd forgotten to switch my car's ceiling light off on Sunday night - and because I didn't drive Monday, the battery had gone flat. Luckily, my local garage (really local: they're two streets away) drove out within twenty minutes and jump started it for a tenner, so my good mood hardly got dented :3

Ingredients:
Instant mash flakes (I used Tesco's own)
Plain flour
Milk
Vegetable oil
Salt

Chuck some instant mash flakes into a bowl - a few cups' worth (I can't remember exactly how much I put in ^^;). Sift about a cup of flour on top of the mash, then a couple of pinches of salt and a tablespoon of oil. Add milk til the mixture forms a doughy ball.

Heat up a frying pan and oil lightly. Take small balls of the mixture and drop into the frying plan, flattening until they're about 1/4" thick. Flip once they're browned on the bottom, which takes about five-ten minutes.

Enjoy ^_^

Having lots of fun at the moment - I joined the Edinburgh Samba School's beginners course, and I'm still drumming at Puff Uproar in Falkirk.

Puff Uproar tonight was great: we're covering a modified version of Nantes by Beirut. Normally we've got three surdo (bass) drummers, but this week we only had two, so I was covering two parts by using a beater to alter the pitch of my drum. Then the other surdo player left... I ended up strapping on her surdo and playing them like a set of (heavy!) toms. Awesome fun :)

The samba school is interesting. On the one hand, the songs are a lot simpler than what we play at P.U. - there's only one pattern and one fill per song, rather than multiple. On the other hand, with over thirty people playing, it's much more important to be precise, since a mistake that could pass as a syncopated improvisation in a small band sounds out of place when five other people beside you played the right note :)

Since half the people at my work play instruments, and some of them jam together (on headphones) at lunchtime, I'm very tempted to try building one of these homebrew drum controllers plus some piezo hand triggers, and adding some drums to the mix.

So I'm on my three week year-end holiday - had some extra holidays to use up, go me :)

Christmas was fun: had turkey for Christmas for the first time ever, then played the role of "Dr Doris Johnson" in a murder mystery game with the family plus sister's new boyfriend and her flatmate. I certainly have the hair for the role, given that I haven't had a haircut for almost a year...

Had an awesome New Year, too - a repeat of last year's geek-fest at M+M's flat a few streets away. Ten people, two 360s with four controllers and copies of Halo, lots of movies (both great and terrible) on a big TV, lots of interesting bottles of ale (and even some champagne for the bells!), plus two roasts and a huge home-made chicken pie (my contribution :) ) to feed ten hungry people on New Year's Day.

New Year's Resolution: keep the flat tidier. Things had been building up a bit since both Nate and I had had persistent colds in the lead-up to the holidays, but we've blitzed the place clean... all we have to do is keep it that way!

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I'm playing with Google Calendar - very impressed so far, especially with the free SMS reminders. It's very slick. I also downloaded Mozilla Lightning and the Google Calendar plugin, which lets me see my calendar events in an Outlook-style Today Pane, which I've grown to love through using Outlook at work.

Since I was playing around with Google, I decided to Google 'camtarn' out of curiosity, to see how things had changed since I last did it a few years ago. The random short story I found ages ago which featured 'the Camtarn, a race of feline humanoids' has disappeared, to be replaced by a slew of my social networking site profiles. I also found a true blast from the past: The Junkyard, a website I ran way back in the day. Thing is, that page wasn't even the Junkyard as I left it: that's the site as it was when I moved it off GeoCities and onto a subdirectory of someone else's hosting. The last news update is from 1999... one decade ago, when I was fourteen o.O

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I usually Twitter by posting status updates on Facebook, which then gets them to Twitter via some intermediate site that I've forgotten the name of. Unfortunately, Facebook status updates are longer than Twitters, which leads to truncation...

"Andrew had a great office xmas party... curry, beer, cynicism awards, LAN games, Rock Band and ping-pong :3 And nobody photocopied their ..."

:)

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Also played around with Spotify, an ad-supported streaming music site. Very impressed - the interface is really slick, and it's got free-to-stream MP3s of pretty much everything, including one album which isn't on Amazon MP3, and another album which I can't even find a CD version of. I hope this one gets big... I love the idea of just being able to say "I want to hear that song", then having it playing a few seconds later.

(I meant to write a con report, but never got round to it, so here's the condensed version...)

Second Auchi ever... awesome hotel (except stairs were out of order - Nate had to use the lift...!), a bit less chaotic organisation than the last Auchi, another telling of the snake story by Jan Scott-Frazier, a floor-rollingly funny adults-only event (bad porn dubbed live by Jan and Keith C!), sitting up late in the lounge swapping recipes with Jan... lots of fun.

The festival was the Hydro Connect music festival in Inverary - thanks to my dad knowing Alex Kapranos' father, my sister and I got day tickets to the Sunday of the festival to see Franz Ferdinand play. With less than a week's notice, I somehow managed to wangle Monday morning off from work - big props to my manager for giving me that, given that Monday was Launch Day for our work project!
( Report under the cut... )
Despite the chaos and the craziness of sorting out travel plans for four people going to three different destinations in two cars with one week's notice, I wouldn't have missed it for the world. This was my very first festival experience, and it was awesome to have the chance drop into my lap to do something which I normally wouldn't consider doing. I might even consider doing it again - hopefully at a drier festival next time, however!

Life's been pretty crazy, these last few weeks. I've bought a new bed, replaced both my parents' PCs with new ones, attended a music festival, had my car repaired (again), launched a website at work, gone on holiday to London, discovered the joys of Spore, hit lvl 60 in WoW... after several months of nothing much changing day to day, suddenly everything comes along at once.

The new bed was out of necessity - our old divan was never quite the same since we moved it from Dundee, losing the casters along the way, and a month or two ago one of the spars holding it up snapped in half, leaving a large hollow halfway down the bed. The mattress was a bit lumpy anyway, so (with my Mum's help - thanks Mum!) we splashed out and bought a lovely solid wood bedframe, which should be solid enough to last for quite some time, and a mattress so thick that Nate's feet don't touch the ground when he's sitting on the bed. My back is thanking me...

The PCs I picked up from work - we just got new desktops, and we were offered the old ones (Pentium 4s with 2Gb of RAM, dual-head ATI graphics cards and twin HDs) for £50 apiece, with any left over going for charity. I bought two, since my parents were running on PCs which were essentially my old cast-offs - Dad's P450 with 192Mb of RAM was actually the very first PC I'd built myself. The transfer process was made even more fun by the fact that Dad had managed to catch a Trojan, in the form of an email telling him about a £450 charge on his credit card - he was worried enough that before phoning his credit card company, he opened the 'receipt' attached to the email... oops. Lots of cleaning up to do - family tech support is much less fun when you're only home occasionally and all the issues get saved up and dumped on you at once!

The festival and London I'll write about in my next posts...

(I did mean to write a big recap of this, but I never got round to it... so here's a summary version.)

Went to London on holiday! First proper holiday since starting work - decided to go for a cheap but fun holiday, so booked hotel (turned out to be hostel) on lastminute.com and set off on adventure...

Met Emma just in time to see her off to Spain. Had Filipino food for the first time (I had crab... mmm!) Went to pub where she worked, met her friends, had some good chat which ended up going on many hours, and many pints, after closing time...

Woke up next day in our slightly dingy hostel with a hangover. Had cold shower, but surprisingly good continental breakfast (cheese and ham crossiants, yay!). Hung around Westminster Cathedral - just down the street from our hostel - until we felt solid enough to brave the Underground, then spent the day touring the Science Museum (me: OMG, working Difference and Analytical Engines!) and the Natural History Museum (Nate: OMG, huge dinosaur skeletons!). Walked around until legs felt like they were going to fall off, then headed home and ate bagels and noodles from hostel mugs in our room.

Second day, we decided to do as many touristy things as we could: visited Greenwich observatory, walked over Westminster Bridge, visited the Palace (but failed to see a Changing of the Guard, since they weren't doing any... boo!), hung out in Trafalgar Square... lots of Underground travel, lots of walking, extremely sore legs.

Third day... train home, hot shower, mug of tea, and a couple of days to relax before going back to work :)

When I was in fourth year of secondary school, I went shopping and ended up in a random clothes shop on Sauchihall St - I can't even remember which one. I bought a jumper - a comfy wooly turtleneck, an undefinable purple-grey-blue-black with silver-grey thread running through it. We weren't allowed to wear turtlenecks at school, but it was so comfortable that I wore it anyway (and nobody ever pulled me up about it.)

I had that jumper for nearly nine years, through two and a half years of school, five years of university, and exactly one year of work. It defined my fashion sense throughout those years (or at least the winters.) It's been like a wearable comfort blanket, a constant element in my wardrobe as I transformed from awkward, quiet schoolkid into independent adult. I never found another jumper like it - every one I bought was either too thin, too stiff, didn't fit quite right, fell apart too quickly.

Last week I noticed that one of the elbows had worn almost completely through, held together only by single threads of wool - you could see my arm through the holes in the knit. The back of the jumper was heading the same way, rubbed and frayed by my backpack. I decided I needed to find a replacement, or at least learn to knit one. Maybe I could retire my jumper into peaceful obscurity in the back of my wardrobe.

Today I drove to Bearsden to return Mum's car - I'd borrowed it while mine was in the garage, since she was on holiday - and took the train back. I missed my connection to the Falkirk train by minutes, and ended up wandering around Glasgow until the next train arrived. It wasn't due to leave for fifteen minutes, so I sat down, took off my bag and jacket and jumper, and waited.

Five minutes before the train left, the announcer came on and announced the stations the train was going to. My station wasn't among them. I hopped off and asked the driver - turned out I'd misread the board, and while this service visited my stop on its way west, it travelled a different route on the return journey. The train I wanted was the next one over.

Nearly half an hour later, I was on the right train and approaching my station. I reached down, put on my jacket, grabbed my bag, reached for my jumper and ... it wasn't there. I knew immediately where I'd left it: on the train heading to Dunblane.

Just in case I was mistaken, I searched my bag, my seat, the floor. Nothing. It was gone.

I'll probably put in a call to Lost Property in Queen St after a couple of days, just in case, but I don't have high hopes.

I guess it's time to let go.

After about a month or two, the Viewty is starting to annoy me a bit. I've gained a greater appreciation for SonyEricsson's software design - the Viewty's software seems to be put together from several different licensed apps, with only cursory effort put towards making things consistent.

It's very, very patchy - for instance, in some places you scroll by dragging the list up and down, other places have a scrollbar, and yet others have up/down arrows. The calendar supports recurring appointments (which my K750 didn't) but it's incredibly ugly and visually doesn't match any other app in the phone. There's a bitmap editor to tweak, scribble on and annotate photos, but it can only be accessed from the camera mode, not from the file browser. And so on.

It won't get any better, either - it looks like LG have completely stopped development for the Viewty. So, for instance, the baffling omission of any way to edit the T9 dictionary (you can add words to it, but can't remove them - which means that I have 'gr' and '23' stuck as the default entries when I try to type 'is' or 'be') will never be remedied.

The last straw was my discovery that while memo entries can be very long - one thousand characters - you can only have five of them at once. You can only have 300 contacts and 300 texts too. In a phone with over 100Mb of internal memory, per-category storage limits really should be a thing of the past.

In short ... meh. Which is a pity, because the hardware is fairly nice, and I really honestly want to like the phone, especially given that I was planning to keep it for at least three years like my last couple of phones. Instead, I'm being increasingly tempted to save up for an iPhone or even a Windows Mobile smartphone.

The whiteboard at work which we use for Nerf target practise currently has a nice blue IE6 logo serving as the bullseye. I lost three frustrating hours today to that hell-spawned relic of Web 1.0, just trying to get it to add items to a drop-down select box via JavaScript...
( Diving straight into the technical details... )

Just tried Audacity for the second time. The first time I'd tried it was several years ago, when I was trying out Linux and looking for an open source audio editor. I opened it, tried a couple of simple tasks, got irritated at the primitive and ugly interface, and eventually gave up in frustration.

So, a few days ago I was looking at various USB sound peripherals - USB sound cards and USB turntables for my Dad who's looking to digitize his record collection - and noticed that most of them seem to be bundled with Audacity. Hmm, I thought, it must have come a long way since I last tried it, if it's being bundled with products aimed at your average not-particularly-computer-savvy home user.

Today Nate downloaded it to do some audio editing for YouTube, and asked me to give him a hand.

I was wrong: it hasn't changed since I last used it. It's still a fantastic example of why engineers shouldn't do interface design. The LADSPA plugins in particular had me gnashing my teeth - I'm guessing that their simple interface precludes much in the way of sensible GUI, but still... check out the first screenshot in the article, where a dialog cleverly avoids the use of radio buttons by telling the user to select a mode from 0-2, and even provides a huge slider for them to use. Argh.

On a more positive note, at least some Linux audio programs look like they've gotten much better since I last looked - Ardour in particular looks pretty shiny nowadays, and Jokosher (which wasn't even around when I was last using Linux) looks like it has quite a lot of power behind its cute and simple interface.