It’s been a few days since I last blogged, and I must apologise.

I’ve been busy at work building a general neural network, which has taken alot of my time. I don’t, of course, blog during work hours *cough*. A neural network is used for recognising patterns in data, and it’s based on the way the brain works, supposedly. It seems a fairly simple concept, although I have yet to find out whether my implementation (in Java) actually works.

I’m really happy that the pumpkins, that I “only” planted four weeks ago, have germinated and are growing – quite vigourously. I’ve repotted a number of the sunflowers that were also growing madly. My Wife’s tomatos (no, not those) are growing well, and we’ve got some more grow bags to plant up the peppers and chillis. The vegetables in the veg patch aren’t doing so well yet – I guess the slug nematodes we put in a week ago, aren’t working well enough yet. It’s all go in the garden.

This weekend we went back up to Monmouth to see Mother-in-law, with the difference that this time she came back with us. She hasn’t learnt the 2 and a half hour journey well enough yet, so is relying on both a PDA with GPS navigation and my wife to ensure she doesn’t go wrong. We got here with no hitches today.

While up there, Mother-in-law had kept back some articles from the newspapers in the week, as Mother-in-laws are so often prone to doing, and this time the articles are actually pretty amusing.

They are both adverts for books, basically. But they sound good books.

The first is a book by William Poundstone, called How Would You Move Mount Fuji?: Microsoft’s Cult of the Puzzle which is basically a breakdown of the questions that Bill Gates allegedly asks people during their interviews for a position at Microsoft. They apparantly get over 12,000 applicants a month. The questions range from logic questions (“You have 8 billiard balls and one is defective by being too heavy. How do you find it, using a balance, in just two weighings?“) to the bizarre (“How long would it take to move Mount Fuji?”). Here’s a fuller example:

How would you design Bill Gates’ bathroom?
There are two key points to make here: First, what Mr.Gates wants, Mr.Gates gets. Second, he cannot know exactly what he wants otherwise why would he hire a designer? You are supposed to say that you will discuss what he wants, adding in a few ideas of your own. You are supposed to appreciate the fact that this is a man who likes his gadgets: he famously owns a bathtub that can be filled with water of the desired temperature from a radio-controlled device in his car. You will be expected to know that. While money is not a huge issue, you do not get to be a billionaire by throwing the stuff away; so no gold taps!

The book is available at Amazon for £6.99.

The second book is another book of trivia, but it sounds quite amusing. It’s by William Hartstone, and is called What’s What – The Encyclopedia of Pointless Information. From the snippets in the paper, I find it irritating that there is no evidence or background associated with each entry – however, it may be different in the book (after all the Daily Mail isn’t exactly the best for ensuring all their stories carry evidence!). Here’s a couple of snippets:

• One ounce of cress contains enough cyanide to kill two mice.
• The dot over the letter i is called a tittle.
• There is enough energy in the daily flatulent output of a single sheep to power a small truck for 25 miles.
• Upto 58% of the London Underground is not underground.
• After dwarf-throwing was banned in France in 1995, 3’10″ Manuel Wackenhelm objected on the grounds that he lost his livelihood. In 2002, the UN prounounced the ban was just.

…and so it goes on. The book is available from Amazon for £6.99.

Anyway, that’s my update for today. Hopefully I’ll not leave it so long next time, although there’s the Mother-in-law to entertain this week!!

The other day, after work, I was padding around out in the garden with my wife when she noticed another bird had crashed into one of our windows. This time it was dead straight off, and the bugs were already having a go at it. It was a baby great tit. Such a shame for this little bird to have had such a short life.

In better news, however, there are two very healthy, very noisy, and indeed, very insistent baby great tits enjoying the patience of their parent outside in the tree.

Baby Great Tit

For the first time today, I saw one of them hop up onto the peanut feeder and have a go at getting some food of its own. However, as soon as its parent reappeared it was all too happy to let them do the work.

Still getting attention from its parents

Baby great tit being fed

Another long day at work, but when I got home I made the effort to go straight outside, as it was the right conditions to put the slug nematodes into the ground. The packet said to put them in only when it was overcast, as it was tonight.
They came as a powder, that I had to mix into 8 litres of water, and then mix that into 4 8-litre watering cans, and spread it onto the patch. It didn’t take long. Then my wife and I set about planting some of the seedlings that were bursting forth in our cold-frame.

Here’s the final vegetable patch, looking resplendent:

Vegetable Patch

Left to right, top to bottom, we have:

1. Brussel Sprouts,
2. Broccoli
3. Lettuce (only one survived the cold-frame and the snails)
4. Chinese Cabbage
5. Beetroot (foreground)

My fingers will be going green soon. I then came in and, with my wife, made a Weightwatchers turkey and ham pie from the Time to Eat book, which was absolutely delicious. Most recommended.

At 9pm on Channel Five tonight there was an amazing documentary about a savant who was able to do complicated mathematical sums in his head. This in itself is not impossible to learn, but he apparantly did this without having to think; images just appeared in front of him from which he could read-off the correct answer to the sum. What also struck me was how amenable he was to the scientists prodding him and poking him. This is great as he has an amazing skill, and it always annoyed me in that film, Flight of the Navigator, that the little kid wouldn’t let the scientists find out about his brain full of star charts. Perhaps its because I’m a scientist at heart.

On Friday evening my wife and I went to our usual salsa class, except tonight we received our plaques and certificates saying that we were officially passed (with a highly-commended rating) our introduction salsa test. Ann and Pete presented our teachers, Linda and Barabara, with some flowers to say thanks for putting up with us.

Linda and Barbara, our salsa teachers with Pete, a fellow student

Early on Saturday morning, we went off up to Monmouth where my mother-in-law lives. I like going up to Monmouth most of the time, because it gets us away from the usual chores and lets us relax a bit.

It was mother-in-law’s birthday in the week, so we were belatedly celebrating that with her with large amounts of food and even larger amounts of chocolate cake and ice-cream. My wife bought her a Viewsonic VE710 17″ TFT monitor (in silver) for her computer, which was still using an old worn-out 14″ CRT. TFT’s are so cheap now, and I was pretty impressed with it, considering it’s the very cheap end of Viewsonic’s range.

We went to the Savoy Theatre in Monmouth on Saturday evening and saw the film The Interpreter. It was actually a pretty good film, although I did feel that the story played out rather too linearly; There just weren’t enough twists. The theatre has supposedly been recently redone, and the seats were relatively comfortable, however, I wasn’t happy with the quality of the theatre’s cinema system – I’ve got a much better system at home. I’ve been to bad cinemas where the sound was tinny, or the picture small, but the Savoy’s picture was small and the sound was muffled to the point of not being able to understand the speech. I certainly won’t be going to a film there again.

On Sunday we got up late and lazed around. Just what a weekend should be about. We left Monmouth at just gone 7, and have arrived back home and half-past nine.

Clouds near Bath

Despite the relaxing weekend, it’s great to be home again, although not so great that the weekend is at an end and work will re-commence tomorrow.

Playing Music

After the sadness earlier today, I think it’s about time for some happy bouncy stuffage, and that stuffage is music. I wrote this tune about a week ago. It’s called ’30 miles’ and is supposed to evoke the happy bouncy bike ride that we went on; the fact that the 30 mile bike ride made us suffer is entirely engulfed in the artist’s licence used for this tune.

Download the mp3 here:

30_miles.mp3 (2Mb)

PS. When I went back to see if the little greenfinch was still there it was gone – so either it recovered and flew away, or was taken away by a kitty kat.

I’m feeling very sad at this moment. I work from home now and again, and I sit here all day in front of my computer. Behind me, outside, is our garden and the bird feeding ‘station’. I heard a slight kerfuffle. I turned around and a few birds flew out of the tree. BANG! One slammed into the window and disappeared, leaving just a single feather floating to the ground.

I got up and looked to see if I could see if it was ok. I couldn’t see it. I thought I’d go check from the other window in the kitchen.

When I got there I could see a small greenfinch writhing around on its back on the floor. It was tweating like a very quiet seagull. Poor fellow obviously hurt himself – alot. He was looking at me in terror. I turned him over, so he was upright, but he vibrated his wing and ended up back on his back. His neck was turned at a slightly funny angle so I think he must have broken it.

I wasn’t sure what to do. The humane thing to do would have been to put him out of his misery, but I am a soppy git and couldn’t do it, and besides I’m not sure how to do it. I felt so helpless. I picked him up and put him in the dark under a tree. I will check on him later, and bury him if he’s not made it.

I’m very sad. I really don’t like windows.

I’ve been working at home again today, hacking around a paper I’ve been working on. It’s all pretty dull, so in my lunch-hour I went for a wander around our small garden and took a few photographs. It’s a lovely day again, and the Osteospurmums were looking radiant, reaching for their Sun God.

Shiny Happy Faces

Reach for the Sun

In our remaining flower patch the cornflowers are coming out into their strange prickly-looking flower. I caught this bee feasting his face.

Bee on Cornflower

But best of all, was I spotted some damselflies mating. They were flitting around the place and it was hard to get a photo, but I eventually got a couple. Here’s the best one:

Mating Damselflies

The male is the bright blue damselfly on the left, and the female is held at the neck by the male’s bottom, effectively. This tandem position is used both before and after copulation, which occurs by the female swinging up to form a heart shape with the male and take the sperm that he offers at the base of his tail. It’s thought the male may keep hold of the female for a while after the act so that she can’t go off and be promiscuous with another male damselfly. Apparantly, damselflies have a lifespan of something like a week, so I better keep and eye open.

I don’t know what Google/Picasa are thinking. Hello and Picasa really look the part, but there’s some serious flaws with them. One of these is the posting of images into Blogger using Hello. It works well, but there are some things that are terribly unintuitive. One of these is the ability to post multiple images into a single post.

The way you do it is this:

• Select the images you want and send them to Hello (easiest to do with Picasa)
• Enter a caption for a picture but add “||” to the end. This queues the picture to be put into a multiple-picture post. (e.g. “My Picture ||”)
• Do the same for all the pictures you want in the same post, except leave the “||” off the last one.

Da, daaa! How ridiculous is that? What’s all this “||” stuff? [Incidentally, that's the bar symbol - the vertical line on the back-slash (at least on my UK keyboard)]. Why didn’t Picasa just put a checkbox “Part of Multiple Post”, or something? Pfft…

Oh, and incidentally, there is no way to post as a draft from Hello – it has to go live straight away (at least, I don’t think there is – if you know different do let me know). That’s a bit crap too. It means I have to go in and put edits in on a live post, should I wish to change it.

Anyway, thought it may be of interest to someone who, like me, has been posting a single picture, going into Blogger, copying and pasting the link into a different post, and all that rubbish.

Tonight we made another of our regulars. As part of the WeightWatchers diet we’re on, we have to count points that are based on the calorific and fat content of a dish. [As an aside, they have recently changed their "Points" system for another, but we have all the books for the old system, so we're sticking to that] Weightwatchers publish some good recipe books with low fat recipes in them. We often make the open crust chicken and mushroom pie, as we did this evening. We have made a few small changes to the published recipe. Perhaps you’d like to make it?

First you have to make a pastry. It’s pretty easy. You need:

• 110g plain flour
• pinch of salt
• 60g of margarine

Sift the flour and salt into a bowl, and rub in the margarine until the usual breadcrumbs thing happens. Add some water, stirring it in, until a dough forms that’s not too sticky. Stick it in a bag, and bung it in the fridge for 30 minutes.

While that’s chilling, prepare the vegetables:

• 1 onion, chopped
• 1 garlic clove, crushed
• 110g closed cup mushrooms, sliced
• Half a leek, sliced

Perfectly cut vegetables, by The Wife.

Seal the chicken along with the onions and garlic in a large frying pan (about 5 minutes). Add the mushrooms and leek along with the following:

• 1 tin of chopped tomatoes with herbs
• 2 tablespoons of tomato purée
• 1 tablespoon of rosemary
• Salt & pepper seasoning

Cover the pan, and simmer all these ingredients for 15 minutes.

Now is a good time to put the oven on to preheat to about 200 degrees centigrade.

Now, just before the filling is ready, get the pastry from the fridge and roll it out, on a floured surface, to about a 10 inch (26cm) round. This is about the width of one of our baking sheets.

Rolled pastry, with filling simmering in background.

Grease and flour a baking sheet and transfer the pastry to it. Brush some milk over the base, and sprinkle semolina over the milk. This helps to keep the base crisper when the filling is placed on top, although it doesn’t always work.

Now spoon the filling into the pastry leaving a 4cm (2inch) gap around the edges which will be folded up.

Spooning the Filling onto the Pastry

Fold up the edges of the pastry around the filling, and brush the outer edges with milk to allow it to brown off. Bung it in the oven for 30-35 minutes.

When it comes out it will look like this:

The Final Pie!

Although the Weightwatchers book says this serves 6, I think it serves 4 and the points for a quarter of this pie is 6. With a 100g portion of chips (3 points) this makes a 9 point dinner. [For comparison, my wife's daily allowance of points is 20, and mine is 28].

It really is a lovely taste, with the tomatoes and rosemary setting off the chicken wonderfully. Do let me know if you make one, and how it turns out!

Just found (well, my wife did) a new cooking blog that looks really good, with great photos and nice sounding recipes. It’s called Esurientes, which seems to be a latin term for “those that hunger”, so there you go. I mean, you can help but start to salivate at the thought of getting your chops around one of these.