my evening meal

[an adaptation of a Rick Stein recipe]

take some organic pork (or wild boar, if you can get it ..). Cube into chunks, and marinate in some decent dark soy sauce for about half an hour.

then remove from soy, drain and pat dry (if you can be arsed), and brown in some vegetable oil in a heavy casserole dish. I use an ancient and well loved Le Creuset one. Remove pork, and dispose of oil.

deglaze the casserole pan with a decent dollop of dry sherry – rice wine is better, but we don’t seem to have any … I blame the staff. Then return the pork to the pan, with the remaining soy from the marinade, a splosh of water, a large, thinly sliced onion. And some slivered fresh ginger, a few cloves of chopped garlic, some dried tangerine peel (you do need to plan ahead a day or so for this), a couple of star anise and about .5″ of cinnamon stick. Oh, and some Sezchuan peppercorns, which you have toasted in your tiny cast iron spice toasting pan, then ground in a mortar and pestle – well, that’s how we do it.

sling all this in the casserole, bring to a simmer, bung in the oven at gas mark 3, and wait impatiently for about one to one and a half hours. Best served with basmati rice and some chopped fresh coriander.

delicious. Or it will be when it’s ready …

don't you just love technology?

just for once, I needed to send an urgent fax.

this G4, Weatherwax, has decided for reasons unknown that she doesn’t have a modem (god knows what that lead with a phone jack on the end of it is, then ..). I really don’t have the time right now to do what needs doing, which is to reformat it, and apply Panther from scratch.

so we found a modem, plugged it into Detritus (linux server), ran a phone extension from the study to the server room. Then fired up Hylafax on Detritus.

then a quick Remote Desktop Connection to Magrat (my old XP box), and load up the Windows Hylafax client, copy the scanned TIFF file from Weatherwax’ desktop to Havelock’s (W2K server) docs directory, double click the file into ACDC, and print to Hylafax.

couple of moments later, Detritus mails me to say its done.

FFS – I’m going out to buy a fax machine tomorrow …

all clear

we have just returned from the vet for Ptep’s check up.

he has been signed off!!! Yay!!

well, he has to have some teeth out, which will happen on 24th November, but other than that he is a Well Cat. I think the vet was surprised to see how much weight he’s put on.

spur of the moment

we decided to go out to eat last night, and sallied forth to the Clifton branch of Budokan.

we consumed mountains of food, including teriyaki duck, some sublime seared tuna with a gingery sauce, tiger prawns, and various japanese nibbly things. And most delicious it all was too.

when you live and work at home together, it’s too easy to turn into hermits, so we have vowed that we shall go out more often. Even though we mostly talked about work stuff, it still did us the world of good to get OUT.

arrogant webmasters

if you try to look at certain pages on this site, using Mozilla on Mac OSX Panther, you will be greeted with www.vistaprint.co.uk/vp/ns/upgrade_ls.asp.

I was so incensed that I was moved to mail the webmaster thus:

“hey wait up!”?

my browser does *not* need an upgrade, thanks. My browser is Mozilla 1.5 running on Panther on a Mac. It’s a damn site more up to date than any offering from Microsoft, and is also standards compliant.

if your site needs some of the “features” of IE (and I accept that some do), then say so properly, and don’t give me twee faux USAnian.

I’m a professional, full time web developer, and I’d be ashamed to put such a page on any site of mine. I use an ActiveX control (which requires IE for Windows to run) for my clients to upload their content into our Content Management System, but I explain properly why they need it, without the patronising bollox to which I’ve just been subjected courtesy of your site.

I also note that your site rejects the very latest version of IE on Mac, so I *can’t* upgrade in order to “work with all your cool features”.

I only wanted the prices, but I’ll look elsewhere – life is too short.

and, to cap it all, my mail returned to me several hours later, with the following message:

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.

Unable to deliver message to the following recipients, because the message was forwarded more than the maximum allowed times. This could indicate a mail loop.

webmaster@vistaprint.co.uk