Ein2

I was over for dinner Misetak’s yesterday and the subject of five-spice powder came up. She’d gone to the local store and examined a bottle of Schwartz’s Five-Spice Powder. She quickly put it back on the shelf when she noticed the first ingredient was salt. In our combined, admittedly inexpert, opinion, salt is not one of the classic five spices of five spice powder. We tried to name them off and came up with star anise, cloves, coriander seeds, pepper, and she thought perhaps mace/nutmeg. I knew I had a recipe to make Chinese five-spice powder by hand, so I promised to look it up and share.

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I’ve been experimenting a little (ha!) with microblogging at Twitter. Microblogging is like blogging, except extremely succinct–140 characters to be exact. They call these little updates “Tweets”. The web site allows you to submit new “Tweets” via instant messaging (Jabber), SMS, or the web. Other people can then “follow” you around as you post your updates throughout the day. Some people are following thousands of people. I’m not that ambitious. I’m only following a small group of people, mostly people from Howard Rheingold’s Brainstorms.
If you want to follow my adventures, my Twitter address is @Eingang.

OK, so it’s been a little while since I last updated anything here. The problem with being world-famous <shifty eyes> is that you need to be careful about what you say in public. It may come back to bite you in the butt when you least expect it.
I suppose, however, it would be permissible to give a big update for those who are interested.

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S&M Files, Episode 7: December 30, 1999
“Painted with Anti Climb Paint”

A local house is identified by this sign outside. I never had
the urge until now. I can hardly wait for my rock climbing shoes
to arrive.

Fork Up

In Britain, by law, you must pay more to eat in some place
nice.

A patron at a local Grease & Chips shop had to fork out
more dough between mouthfuls. He apparently sat in the “nice”
seats, where he had access to amenities like cutlery, padded
seats and a table at the right height. If he were clever, he
would have perched against the wall on the stools up front with
the rest of the lepers and common scum. I know I would have. Not
good enough for us lepers, hmm?

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S&M Files, Episode 6: December 23, 1999
Extreme Sports

What a cute notion to fly a kite next to the crashing surf.
But these were not ordinary kites. The kites themselves were
little parachutes, and their masters were decked out in extreme
kite wear. The huge contraptions seemed to take great joy in
launching their captors high into the air and then dragging them
across the beach. As I recall, sandpaper is made from sand.

Fortunately, Brighton does not have sand.

Brighton has pebbles.

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S&M Files, Episode 5: December 12, 1999
Perish the Thought

Food must either go bad faster here, or we North Americans are
used to rancid. The roast chicken is labelled EAT WITHIN 24
HOURS. It’s good for up to an hour unrefrigerated. My grapes
almost expired by the time I got home.

On the plus side, food seems to be less Americanized here.
That is, the ingredient list does not take up two panels of the
cookie box. There is also a lot more organic and vegetarian food
readily available. Well, readily if you are readily rich. Grapes
are $6 a pound. It’s cheaper to fly to Spain for $125 and pick
your own.

Our fridge is small. You might know this, but you do not
understand this. It is SMALL. We have two (2) shelves. Neither is
big enough to fit a 2- litre carton of milk at any angle. The
crisper is the size of a very large hamster. I would kill for the
bar fridge at the office.

In a way, it’s very much like camping out. You carefully pack
and unpack your food each time you need some, taking care not to
create empty pockets. You light your stove with a match. You wear
multiple layers of clothing. It’s the West Coast Trail X 2.5.

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S&M Files, Episode 4: December 6, 1999
Food and Being English

Indian Pizza. Not surprisingly, and more to my delight than
Michelle’s, Indian cuisine is prevalent here. The local Safeway
has a complete Indian dinner for two next to the frozen pizzas.
I’m curious to discover what lies in the “ethnic” foods
section.

Fish and Chips. Still waiting for decent fish and chips. The
local shop downstairs seems to believe in a long soak in grease
followed by a gentle warming.

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I have to confess that I’ve been spending oodles of time finetuning the web site used by my World of Warcraft guild The One. In comparison with some of the web sites for guilds also on the European server Thunderhorn, ours is beautiful to behold and very functional, with a public site and a Wiki/blog portal for the guild to build knowledge.
To support our efforts, last year I secured a non-profit license for Atlassian’s enterprise-level wiki/blogging software Confluence, and it’s on this end of the guild’s web site that I spend the most time. Over the last year, I’ve added polls, group chat, calendars, dynamic tabbed content, and many other features, plus upgraded the backend database and wiki software more times than I can shake a fist at.

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