Alphabetical Order

Ah the joys of alphabetical ordering! Especially when, like iTunes, it is smart enough to disregard words like ‘the’ at the beginning of a name. As a result, in my iTunes library The Village People are next to... Vivaldi.

Fruit and Nut

I love cashew nuts. And when I was in Brazil last year, I was quite confused by discovering there existed a cashew fruit. Since then, I have wondered whether the fruit and the nut were related. Indeed they are, as explained by this entry at Rain Tree. I also discovered in the bargain that the tree is the one we call acajou in French. We never see the fruits in Europe because it is a tree that is native from South America and thus only grows in warm climates. And the fruit is too perishable to ship anywhere. Anyway, even if it could be shipped, I don't think it would be very successful in Europe: its taste is quite subtle and its consistency unusual, a bit pasty. It makes a great substitute for lime in a caipirinha though!

Floated Into Limbo

I Apologise to users of Internet Explorer. I realised on Friday that all pictures and notes I float into the left margin are actually floated so far t the left with Internet Explorer that they disappear from the page. There is also an unexpected amount of white space at the top of the page with IE. I suppose those glitches are due to IE not calculating percentages according to the specs and it is annoying to have to write special IE code but then again I don't want IE users to miss anything. So bear with me, I'll try to get it sorted within the next few days.

Lunch!

Lunch! (pt. 2) by Jimmy_Joe

There are people who do macro photography. And then there's Jim. His close-up pictures are just amazing! I wish I could take that type of shots. I suppose it's a question of patience and practice but still, the results are amazing!

Power Nap

Power nap by Bruno Girin

As promised, here's a sample of the pictures I took a week ago at the London Wetland Centre. The centre is a great place for young and old alike. If you're in London, don't miss it.

I switched back

I had been using Safari since I bought my Mac. But Safari is a pure browser with no extension capabilities and I was really missing some of the extensions I had got used to on Firefox, such as ScrapBook, WebDeveloper, FireFTP, FlashGot or Gmail Notifier. So I downloaded Firefox for my Mac and switched back. One interesting side effect is that Firefox appears significantly faster at downloading and displaying pages. Don't get me wrong, Safari is a great browser, but I find Firefox better.

Cute Birds

It was quite a nice day today, rather warm with the occasional rain shower. So I went to the London Wetland Centre. It is actually quite close to where I live but I had never been. To be fair, I don't think many Londoner realise that they have a waterfowl nature reserve just across the river from Hammersmith. This is why the WWT, who run the centre, have been doing a serious advertising campaign in trains and buses over the past few years. This is something I love about London: it is the largest city in Europe but you have amazing parks and nature reserves virtually in the centre. But I digress. So I went there today, armed with my camera, tripod and lenses to take snaps of cute birds. It was the opportunity to try out features of my camera I had never really tried, in particular the AI-Servo auto focusing mode and the continuous shooting mode. The 100-400mm zoom lens I bought in the US earlier this year is great for that sort of shots. Although quite often I wished I had had a longer focal length as I couldn't really fill the frame. It might be time to invest in a 1.4x or 2.0x extender. The only problem with those is that they reduce the effective maximum aperture of the lens, which is used by the auto-focus mechanism. Considering the smaller aperture my camera can auto-focus at is f/8, which is already the best in the Canon range, and my lens has an aperture range of f/4.5-5.6, I would lose the ability to use auto-focus, let alone AI-Servo, with the 2.0x extender. This obviously would not be good to take pictures of birds in flight. But I digress again. I will get the pictures developed tomorrow and post them online afterwards. Hopefully there will be a few nice shots.

Week-End

It's the week-end and I intend to do some serious relaxation. The past two weeks have been hectic at work and I am happy to be off today and tomorrow. However, in typical Murphy's law fashion, the weather was beautiful all week until today lunchtime. Since then, it has been rainy and grim. The weather forecast says it should be nice tomorrow though so there is still hope.

Cool gazpacho

I just tried the gazpacho I did yesterday and it is just great. This is so simple to do and is so nice. And it has a nice kick to it, thanks to the chilies and habanero sauce. But it's a summer soup so now I just need a few rays of sun to go with it. Come on, it's July, in the Northern hemisphere, it should be possible! Even in London! Ah well, maybe not after all.

This might sound stupid or obvious but, by doing it, I found out what makes gazpacho taste so fresh: the cucumber! So the English had it right all along: cool as a cucumber.

Ice-cream, smoothies and gazpacho

The ice-cream I did yesterday with my new toy turned out great. The only problem is that my freezer is in serious need of defrosting so it was a bit overzealous in freezing the ice-cream which means it was rock hard and I couldn't scoop it. I had to cut pieces with a warm knife. But once it was slightly warmer it was great. I'm sure there are some ingredients I could add to prevent it from becoming rock hard. I shall investigate.

On the smoothies front, I improved the recipe by replacing half the milk with yogurt and using only fruits that have no pips or where the pips are easy to remove, such as bananas and pears. The result is a definite improvement.

I got a bit more adventurous tonight and decided to attempt a gazpacho using an online recipe as a base. Having no celery, parsley or chives I had to simplify the recipe a bit. I also replaced the Tabasco and Worcestershire sauces with a combination of chilies and Habanero sauce, so that it would be reasonably high on the Scoville scale: a real gazpacho needs to have a bit of a kick to it.

And for those who like stats, this is post number 200 in this weblog.