Chip's Place

Has anyone else (in York) noticed the recent appearance of a large number of (apparently) glass marbles being inset into the pavements? I've seen somewhere around 40 of them around town, in red, blue, white and colourless. As an example, there is one at each of the 4 "corners" of Lendal Bridge, where the pavement crosses over the river edge - one is just to the right of the door of Hartleys.

I don't like unexplained events.
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The derivation of the word "rare" as applied to steaks and other meats - it comes from the Anglo-Saxon word hrere, meaning "lightly boiled," and first appeared in use in the 1700s. As for where that word comes from, I've no idea.

Are there any attractive Scottish famous girls? Kelly Macdonald (for it was she), who starred in Trainspotting, and Daniela Nardini from This Life were the only two we could come up with between 5 blokes. Surely there must be more.

Where do the Barbarians rugby team hail from? Everywhere! In today's match, there were players from South Africa, France, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, Samoa, England, Scotland, Ireland and even Wales. I didn't look very hard, but I couldn't find any rules or criteria for membership of the team - looking at the current structure, I suspect nationality is not a significant factor!

Last night's chat in the 3LM (to which we seem to be able to go once more - it's now mad-woman-free, although we did see Des Bile Bean, who'd popped back from Singapore for a quick pint). One of us was extremely drunk (guess which), but he said a lot of sensible and helpful things. Not sure what to do with them quite yet, but I'm going to have to give them some thought.

Last Friday's ongoing talk with D-Something. Which was just odd.

The holes to be found in certain men's toilets are called "glory holes," and they can be put to a variety of uses, none of which will be further discussed here.

Unrelatedly, I've added a new no. 5 to the restaurant malfunction list. No doubt I'll soon have ten...

I could have added Fiesta Mehicana to the list too (tried to book a table for tonight, wasn't allowed because there were less than 10 of us, bloke said come along anyway, we won't be full at 6.30, went along anyway, they were full) but I'm not sure it really counts. Not a very good one anyway - I'm sure there will be better ones than that in the future!

posted by Chip : 00:09

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Finally got round to posting my Scotland photos last night. Here's my favourite one (although "Bark and Barker," "Somewhere Out There" and "Welsh Wethead" are close second-placers).



It seems I rarely go in for photos of other people (or me!) - I count 5 out of 34 that I took. Which is a much higher ratio than the 5 or 6 out of 370 on holiday though!

I'll find out tomorrow whether anything I've done at work in the past 6 weeks has been of any value. There's one right answer and a million wrong ones. Fingers crossed. At one point today, I even thought I understood something. I was mistaken though.

Eurovision Song Contest this Saturday. Haven't missed a single year since I was 20 - despite rarely actually watching the program, the parties are always fun. Weather permitting, we'll be having a garlic-free barbecue this time, to which I may bring Tsuki and Dom's skewers (if I ask them nicely, or they don't notice I've still got them and haven't given them back yet) so that we have something longer than a cocktail stick with which to toast the marshmallows as we did last time.

We won the OWS quiz last night, by some margin. Our recent rivals, Quiz Teama Aguilera, had a really poor show, whereas several of us were plucking answers out of thin air (Christopher Biggins notwithstanding...), and it's possible my psycho-killer pen-tapping may have put off several of the other teams. Total prize fund of £7.70 each.

I spent some time at the weekend completely rearranging the living room, and I'm much happier with the result. It now means that I have little or no further excuse for not having a home cinema evening of some form, so I'll have to send round some invitations for the Bank Holiday weekend. And think of something to watch that isn't Bad Boys. I believe Battlestar Galactica was suggested...
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Which of the following says "Toilets"?

Ladies

Toilets

Thanks for voting!
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I've finally made it up to 5 items of restaurant malfunctions (after reading the Pulse the other day though, it appears I might have spelled restrawnt wrongly for a long time).

New place which opened up a couple of months ago - Williams Café Bar. Has looked by turns rubbish and interesting - one of the rubbish times was when they were advertising aubergine cooked "in a citrus garlic egg wash," the latter word of which I'm sure shouldn't normally be used to refer to cookery.

Quite surprised to get a table for 8 of us at 9 on a Friday race night, but get one we did. And Friday night is Steak Night at Williams Café Bar!

First off, we ordered our starters and main courses. Then the waitress (who, I should stress, was very good about all of this) came back to apologise but she'd given us yesterday's menu, so some of us would have to re-order. After this, she went off, then came back another few minutes later (still without the water we'd asked for initially) to apologise further that there was only one rack of lamb, so ChinchillaHunter and Iasonas would have to fight over it - unfortunately there wasn't enough room on the table for them to arm-wrestle (my money was on ChinchillaHunter), so they amicably decided to split the rack between them and order another steak to also be split.

Iasonas : But how big's a rack going to be?
Chip : I don't know ... 34D?

The final bit of fun was when the bill arrived. She'd only put 9 items of food on there (having completely missed the Queen's-English Southern-style Naaaaachos, and a couple of others) leaving us with a bill that, split 8 ways, came to less than the cost of several of the main courses alone. So we left an apparently rather large tip, after making it up to what we thought the bill ought to be. Then we fled, pausing only to allow Tom to correct the spelling of tomato on one of the menus with a damp serviette.

I should also state that I really enjoyed the food - very good steak, if not quite blue as I asked for it, it was at least definitely rare. I don't think many of the others were too impressed though.
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...and other sayings of the week.

I'm just off to the toilet to do some pelvic thrusts. See you shortly.

I'm not very good with computers. I've never learnt how to read them.

Tell me what you're doing, I want to learn from you. After all, you're old and therefore wise, and you won't always be around.

It's just like the Matrix. Look, that bit means a cow.

Now I'm pissed off with you, coz you're pissed off with me.

It's like a pyramid scheme, only with goats.

Video footage is only likely to be available to people with high monkey-tolerance levels.

So Britain does need a Foreign Office, because the real line is uncountable.

There are actually a few more animal-related things than I was expecting there. Worrying.

I had another fun night fixing computers last night - Nick's this time. I think I promised D-Something a rant, but I'm feeling a little out of it, so I merely have 3 requests to everyone :

1. Stop using Windows.

I will happily give you a Linux trial disk where the only effort you have to make is to boot your PC off a CD rather than your hard drive. (Unless you don't live in York, or you are a foreign person, in which case you'll also have to make the effort of coming to my house to collect your disk.) If you like it, I'll also happily come round to install it (offer not available to aforementioned foreign people), or even show you how to do it yourself, side by side with your existing Windows. A few people who read this will already have seen how handy Linux can be (I can think of Lint, Bertie and Nick off the top of my head) - think how much more useful it would be if you didn't have to ask me for help with it (see bullet point 3 above!)

2. If you must use Windows, learn to use it.

Know that your PC's not an appliance that requires merely an on switch, no matter how much it's marketed as such. Some basic knowledge is required - Windows Update, firewalls, IE security settings. It might be a little scary, but it's genuinely not hard to learn how to use these things. And perhaps more importantly, learn how not to use Windows - it's not safe to click on anything you see regardless, pop-ups that look vaguely like OS messages aren't always what they seem, so read them before auto-clicking OK, and out of sight is not out of mind - just because Microsoft have done their level best to make sure you can't find certain security settings doesn't mean they're not important.

3. Knowledge is power.

Most people think computers have to work the Microsoft way. Start learning another OS now, and you'll begin to see what hidden assumptions you've made about how computers work. The day will come when Windows will not be the only OS you can use at work. It may be that one day, it won't even be any of the OSs you can use, and maybe not just at work. Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, teach him to use an alternative operating system ... well, that aphorism's too tortured even for me to finish off, but I think the sentiment is probably comprehensible.

Not-quite-rant over. Normal service resumes.

posted by Chip : 20:36

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Thanks to everyone who came up to Scotland with me this weekend. I hope you all had as much fun as I did - I had a brilliant time. Particular thanks to everyone who was involved in the meal on Saturday night (Jaqs, Flic, Tsuki, Dom and Lint that I know about - I'm sure I've missed people out of that list, so I might as well say thanks to everyone else too!)

I was really pleased with the house. The facilities were great - snooker, table tennis, normal tennis, golf, jigsaws, piano, jacuzzi bath, bugle... Bit disappointed I forgot the frisbee. It would have been slightly improved had we been able to join the two houses together, rather than having to walk around the garden to get from one to the other, and I think this created a bit of a psychological "us and them" thing. Unfortunate, but nothing's perfect.

I think I may have prevented quite a few conversations by bringing my Sudoku puzzle books! Still, I also finished the one that's been bothering me for weeks. (I'm sure there must be a better way of solving it than the one I used - not elegant at all.)

It was kind of fun having almost 2 holidays in one. It was a little sad seeing nearly everyone leave on Monday, but Colm, Iasonas and I then had a very different few days. We went to Bladnoch whisky distillery on Tuesday, where I didn't taste any (probably just as well, since the others felt drunk off the single shot they tasted), and then to clay pigeon shooting, at which I surprised myself both by doing a lot better than expected, and by also enjoying. I was particularly pleased with my 2-shot get - pigeons coming from left and right, and I got them both.

We didn't do very much today beyond tidying the house, and a walk up to Loch Eldrig along the riverside and through fields of sheep. The weather was vastly improved yesterday and today over the first part of the weekend - I've got some pretty gorgeous photos of the place we stayed in sunshine.

Other memorable moments from the weekend :

"Pull!" (Verbal, the new name for Iasonas - having previously been scared by several things he's said, this has to be the new title-holder for most spine-chilling!)

"There may be quite a lot of footage of the rabbit." (Colm. Speaks for itself really!)

"A66 Please" (Sign on the A66.)

"So what's the name of this river, again?" (Irritating guy in Bladnoch distillery, named after the river, asked of tour guide who was wearing a coat saying "Bladnoch" on it and holding 2 bottles of Bladnoch whisky.)

"Do you take American Express?" (Guess who, at the same distillery.)

"The character from Peter Pan." (Iasonas, trying to get us to guess Christopher Robin.)

"Yes." (Colm, emphatically, in reply to someone asking him if he was filming Bert climbing over and in the process breaking a stile.)

Lint refusing to vault said stile, breaking a sacred promise he'd made to me and Helen a few days before.

D-Something, the new name for GeeDee.

D-Something's bizarre new fog-based hairstyle, featuring droplets of water at the end of every hair. |(Photo to follow.)

"Dalek", the Dr Who episode on Saturday - both better and worse than I expected, and very unlike traditional Dr Who (in a good way).

Being stalked by a "pheasant" in the forest near the Wells of the Rees.

Tom and Helen's version of Video Killed the Radio Star.

Dom's dancing to I Think We're Alone Now.

The lunch at the Harbour Inn at Garlieston.

Breakfast in Girvan, which I think is the most northerly place I've ever been to. It's not the best place to get a cup of coffee at 7.15am, and not the best place to get a 7.05am train to Glasgow either!

(There are, I'm sure, lots more, and I'll probably add to this as I think of more over the next few days.)

The whole weekend turned out probably a little better than I'd hoped for - definitely glad I went for somewhere much further south than originally planned, as I think an extra 3 or 4 hours journey would have killed us all. Considering how much hard work it was to get myself organised enough to do anything over the last few weeks, I think it turned out OK. I would, however, like to be excused from having to arrange anything again, ever :)

I'll stick a few pictures up tomorrow night when I've found my camera somewhere (I hope!) in all the bags.

posted by Chip : 21:49

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