Last week my wife came into work with me and went off into Southampton to spend her Virgin Megastore vouchers (there’s no Virgin Megastores nearer than that!) that she’d been given for her birthday in January, I think it was. When she came back and I asked what she’d got I was a bit concerned that her selection of a box-set of 3 “world cinema” films might not be entirely my cup of tea. We watched one of these – Whale Rider (imdb.com) – on this wondefully lazy holiday afternoon.

It’s been over 20 months since I last used my Dolby Digital amplifier, and it’s one of the reasons I’ve not watched so many films in the last year. It irks me that the sound quality is poor when I listen only through the TV. So I bothered today to slack a few wires across to the speakers. I’d been waiting until we decorated the room to lay them in properly, but decided to just put them up for now.

This certainly increased my enjoyment of the film. However, the film itself was very impressive. I really enjoyed it. It was by no-means your usual Hollywood no-brainer affair. It was romantic, beautiful and heart-warming. The film revolves around the coming together of Maori values and traditions and the pressure of modern life. The lead character, Paikea, was played perfectly by the incredibly talented Keisha Castle-Hughes, backed up by a great perfomance by Rawiri Paratene as Koro the old traditional grand-father.

I think what I liked most about this film was it’s lack of pace and subtle direction. It took me away to a wonderfully photographic part of the world and into another culture, although somehow grounded with modern living. I always wanted to visit New Zealand, and this film has just strengthened that wish. The DVD is good too, with lots of interesting extras, and in a box set of 3 for £14.99, it’s even better value.

At last – it’s seems to have taken ages to come, and now it’s here it’ll rush by in an instant (sounds like sex?) – but I’m at last on holiday!

The talk I did went ok, mainly because no-one much turned up – it is Friday afternoon after all – so it was pretty relaxed. I could sit down, and didn’t have to preach. It was rather off-putting that they were preparing our department’s barbeque and storing the ready-made food in hot-trolley things in the same room. The smell was gorgeous. Perhaps I’d have gone if I’d remembered about it, particularly as we’re not salsa-ing tonight, but there you go.

Ahhhhh.. bliss )

Oh well.. only one hour to go to my presentation. After my presentation I think I’ll slack off and then I’ll be on holiday! Yay!
I hate presentations… the butterflies in my tummy are going.. oh well… think positive and all that…

Some more of my sunflowers have come out. One of them couldn’t have been more pokey if it tried.

Tomorrow I’ve got to do a talk to some summer interns that have been working in my department. They’re only there for about 6 weeks, some of which has already passed, so I’m giving a talk to give them an insight into how the small things they’ve been working on relate to the wider context of what we do. In fact, my talk’s not quite as vague as that, as I’ve just got to talk about the project I worked on for 2 years – what it did, how it was designed and stuff. Still, it doesn’t mean I’m looking forward to it. In fact, giving talks is one of the many things I hate about my job. I’m not good at it, and I don’t like doing it. One good thing is that at least tomorrow is the last day before my 2 week holiday!

Had great fun at the salsa party on Tuesday evening. Turned up on time at 7:30 with all our goodies. As we got there a load of people we didn’t recognise were dancing some strange dance. As it turned out it was our teacher’s daughter and her dance group preparing a dance to show us all. We laid out our wares with much oohing and ahhing from the people who had turned up. The party quickly got started with our teacher making us salsa dancers do a demonstration to all the non-salsa people who seemed to have turned up. Unfortunately only half of our class has yet arrived, so it was rather embarrassing to be up there strutting our stuff on a nearly empty dancefloor. Various other dances were taught and danced, including a cha-cha-cha, a line dance, and even bollywood. I even got to go up the front with teacher and show off my indian head wobble that I studiously perfected when I was watching Jerry Springer immitating the “Speak to the hand girl coz the face ain’t listening”.

As promised here are a couple of pictures of people enjoying my biscuits and Dayzee’s cakes (ooh err missus).

Much food and Wine – Actually everyone’s ignoring our biscuits (just behind the cups) in this picture!

Pete – despite his face, he did enjoy them and now wants to move in with me.

Linda – one of our teachers taking her first bite of paradise.

After “da party” we headed down the pub for a quick pint before flopping into bed rather knackered!

Oh, just trying out a new plugin for the Firefox Greasemonkey plugin that lets me add Technorati tags.

Well, last night my wife and I spent alot of the evening cooking. It was perhaps a little extreme but for tonight’s salsa party, to signify the start of our teacher’s 2 month holiday, I made some biscuits – as requested by Garry and Biscuits (of course) – and Dayzee made some fairy cakes topped with a creamy butter-icing.

The recipes for the biscuits I made are already online, so with a nod to Tim Berners-Lee I figured I should just link to them. Firstly I made Chocolate Chip Ginger Biscuits, from Delia Smith’s Website. Everything Delia puts down as a recipe will work for Mr.Layman in Mr.Layman’s kitchen, and these biscuits are yum-diddly. I’ve made them before, so I haven’t yet tried any of the ones I made last night, despite the temptation to do so. I also made Chocolate Chip Peanut Butter Cookies which are much softer biscuits, and much richer. These are absolutely gorgeous and I’ve made these 5 times now, and can never get enough of them. Dayzee made Fairy Cakes, although unlike this recipe she coated them in a luxurious butter icing from Cakes & Cake Decorating by Angela Nilsen, Sarah Maxwell and Janice Murfitt (I should get commission on sales of this book!). Her visionary plan was to slice the tops off the cakes and place them upright in the icing, so they look like butterfly wings. However, they didn’t rise quite enough and a brave attempt ended in us sharing the mangled masterpiece. The other cakes were content with their white, round toupé.

From left to right: Chocolate Chip Ginger Biscuits, Chocolate Chip Peanut Butter Cookies, Butter-Icing Fairy Cakes

We’ll take them all to our party, tonight, and maybe there’ll be some photos of people scoffing their faces tomorrow.

It’s easily lunch time now, and I’ve only just noticed I’ve been wearing my jumper inside-out.

Doesn’t time fly when it’s the weekend? Why don’t the weekdays fly by in a whoosh of general relaxation too? I really do regret the way that the 5 days from Monday to Friday seems to take an eternity to pass me by, and Saturday and Sunday barely register during a blink.

I spent this weekend busily rewriting the code for the webpage that will be my business. I had written a generic front to it once before but came to my senses last week and realised it looked a bit shit. So, this weekend I went all out and made it look alot nicer. In particular I spent much effort ensuring that the HTML code was “semantic” – that is, the code is simple HTML and contains no more than is necessary to describe the information I’m trying to purvey, and all the “pretty-pretty” is done in the CSS stylesheets. The reason for this is that visually impaired people use thingies known as screen-readers (like JAWS) that will speak the webpage to them. Navigating a badly written page using a screen-reader is probably like trying to navigate the remnants of programs recorded on a VHS tape. I’m making sure my webpage is a DVD.

This was initially spurred on by the fact that I’ve eventually gone and smiled sweetly at various “professionals” at the post-office and bank branches, who have peered at my passport and certified that I am who I say I am. This should allow me to get my business bank account, which means I can get on to the next stage of getting an Internet Merchant Account. It also has the advantage that I can now go to Makro and get our household stuff at decent prices; particularly the gallon drums of ketchup I get through in no time. Actually, they’re about 1/3rd of a gallon, but it wouldn’t have sounded so good.

It’s been a pretty crappy day at work so far, mainly because I’m rather too tired to actually think, and being as that’s what I’m paid to do, being a researcher and all, it’s been pretty unproductive. As I have a dwindling motivation for doing my work, I think I might muster up some interest in doing more to my webpage. The wonder of ADSL means I can work at home from work, as well as working at work from home.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself tonight now the Tour De France has finished. I guess I need to make some cakes or biscuits for tomorrow night’s salsa party.

Damn, I’m unfit. Unfit for exercise, that is, rather than unfit for purpose, whatever my purpose might be.

I made my mate a birthday card this morning and decided to bike it round to his place, about 1.5 miles away. It’s relatively flat, except for the sharp ascent right near their house. So I managed to power my way along to this hill but cracked about half way up it. It’s not a long hill, either. I crawled my way up it in a pretty low gear, dropped off the card and headed back. It was great coming back down the hill, but hitting the flat again, I realised I had expended most of the energy I left with and I trundled along the main road at not much more than 10mph. Strangely I found the long hill heading towards my road easy. Still, I still felt particularly cumbersome and pathetic as I constantly compared myself to the great Lance Armstrong, who’s about to win the Tour de France. Now I’m sitting at home attempting to recover, dizzy and with flickering vision. I think I overdid it.