The Omnivore 100 - from ‘Very Good Taste’
By Martin English | August 18, 2008
Found on the famous Ms Fifikins site… A new meme, all about food, that comes from Very Good Taste which is a great blog about food and stuff!
Here’s what you do:
1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Optional extra: Post a comment here at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.
BTW, the Carob chips were tried once and never will be eaten again by me again. never. ever.
The VGT Omnivore’s Hundred:
1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin - I believe this is what is called Kina in New Zealand
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine Still wondering if it was worth the headache….
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill on a bet 
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant. (This is definitely on my list to do though!)
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake
I do have an issue in that I don’t always remember the name of what I’ve eaten, especially in Yum Cha. Its a bit of pain because when it turns out to be nom nom tasty, it’s a bugger to reorder at a later date !!
Topics: Humour, People, Personal | No Comments »
Is the post 9/11 World Turning against Photography ?
By Martin English | August 11, 2008
Photographer Thomas Hawk was thrown out of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art last week for the crime of taking photos. Normally, this is SOP, due to copyright and privacy issues. The problem this time is that the Museum has posted publicly that it now allowed photography (search for cameras), Hawk had confirmed the rule directly with the museum, and Hawk had subsequently joined as a paid member of the museum due to the open photography policy.
Hawk’s full post here, but the short story is that Hawk was accosted by Simon Blint, Director of Visitor Relations at the Museum and escorted off the premises by a couple of paid goons, despite others in the museum taking pictures. Hawk’s crime may have been the use of a serious camera (a DSLR), but he had gone out of his way to confirm he was ok to take pictures, and had become a paid up member of the Museum. If the policy did indeed prevent DSLR’s (that there would be a split is odd) then this should have been related clearly along the way, when it wasn’t. This leaves leaves no excuse for what happened to him.
However, as Hawk points out, it is not just about museum photography…
Over the course of the past year I’ve heard hundreds of stories where photographers were unjustly targeted for taking pictures. While the “photography steals your soul,” superstition seems to be long gone, a whole litany of replacements have taken it’s place. I’ve seen people branded as pedophiles for shooting at public parks or their neighborhood swimming pool. I’ve seen people claiming 9/11 makes checking photography necessary. I’ve seen train stations and malls and shopping centers and museums and parks and public buildings and architecture increasingly turn against the photographer. And when this happens and when people see something that has happened to them at one point or another happening to someone else it resonates.
Topics: History, People, Personal, Politics, Security | No Comments »
14 Ways Starbucks Has Tried to Revitalize its Brand
By Martin English | August 7, 2008
What I Learned Today - 14 Ways Starbucks Has Tried to Revitalize its Brand
We’re not this young, beloved, entrepreneurial enterprise anymore… We have to do business in a different way
Topics: Australia, History, People, Productivity | No Comments »
Useability: Linux / Unix v Closed Software
By Martin English | August 7, 2008
A tweet from Linda Eastin pointed me at this old blog entry from Daring Fireball on Linux and Spray-on Useability, that takes aim at the Eric Raymond rant on Linux usability (the one where he can’t get CUPS working).
There’s an old engineering adage: “Fast, good, cheap: pick two.” (Where
“fast” regards development time, not performance.) Desktop Linux
software is cheap (free) and fast (release early, release often), but
it’s not good.Or, perhaps one could argue that it is cheap, and eventually it’s going
to be good, but it’s getting there very slowly.Windows and Mac OS, on the other hand, are fast and good. For the sake
of this discussion, it doesn’t matter which is better and which is
improving faster. What matters is that neither is cheap. It’s very
difficult to beat the fast/good/cheap rule.For example, look at how much Mac OS X has improved in the last three
years alone. Even if desktop Linux is improving — and I do think it is
— it’s improving at a much slower pace than Mac OS X.…..
More often than not, you get what you pay for.
Topics: *nix, Code, History, Microsoft, Open Source, Productivity, Web / Web 2.0, software | No Comments »
100 Push Up Challenge :: Join Me And Win
By Martin English | August 6, 2008
100 Push Up Challenge
One Hundred Push Ups is a site dedicated to providing a progressive push up training program that will have you doing 100 consecutive push ups in just six weeks, no matter how many you can do today.
Derek Semmler dot com is running a 100 Push Up Challenge - Join Me And Win.
Topics: People, Personal | No Comments »
Make Gmail the default Firefox 3 Mail Client
By Martin English | August 1, 2008
If you rely on online mail clients such as Gmail then you might like the following tip coming directly from the official Gmail blog that describes how to to make Gmail the default Firefox 3 Mail client (i.e. the mail client that is loaded whenever a mailto link is clicked in Firefox 3.
You’ll need to complete the following steps.
- Head over to Gmail and sign in as usual.
- Once that is done paste the following line of Javascript code into the location bar of Firefox 3 and hit enter. This will add Gmail as one additional protocol handler for the mailto protocol:
javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler("mailto","https://mail.google.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s","Gmail") - A line will appear on top of the screen asking if you want to add Gmail as an application for mailto links. A click on Add Application adds the handler, a click on the X button closes the request and changes nothing.
- Now head over to Tools > Options > Applications in Firefox 3 and filter for the mailto protocol.
- Use the drop down menu on the right side to select Gmail as the default client for mailto links and make sure to hit ok to confirm the change.
Congratulations, you just added Gmail as the default Firefox 3 Mail Client.
Topics: Google, Open Source, Productivity, Technology, Web / Web 2.0, software | 1 Comment »
Free online media file conversion
By Martin English | July 31, 2008
All-in-one style web-based file and unit converter. Quickly convert between:
- measurement units: size, area, distance, time, velocity, mass, etc.
- file formats: documents (.DOC, .PDF, …), images (..JPG, .GIF, …), audio (.MP3, .WAV, .AAC, … ), and video (.WMV, .3GP, .AVI, …) formats.
Topics: TV / Video, Web / Web 2.0, software | No Comments »
10 Reasons Enterprises Aren’t Ready to Trust the Cloud
By Martin English | July 31, 2008
from gigaom…. To summarise,
- It’s not secure. Certain companies and industries have to maintain strict watch on their data at all times, either because they’re legally obligated to or because they’re super paranoid.
- It can’t be logged, required for compliance purposes.
- It’s not platform agnostic. If you need to support multiple platforms, as most enterprises do, then you’re looking at multiple clouds. That can be a nightmare to manage.
- Reliability is still an issue. Even inside an enterprise, data centers or servers go down, but generally the communication around such outages is better and in many cases, fail-over options exist.
- Portability isn’t seamless. The so-called “cloud” is in fact made of up several clouds, so getting your data from one to another isn’t as easy as IT managers would like. The platform issues (above) can leave data in a format that few or no other cloud accepts, and there are bandwidth costs associated with moving data from one cloud to another.
- It’s not environmentally sustainable. As a recent article in The Economist pointed out, the emergence of cloud computing isn’t as ethereal as it might seem. Moving data center operations to the cloud and off corporate balance sheets is kind of like chucking your garbage into a landfill rather than your yard; The problem is still there but you no longer have to look at it.
- Cloud computing still has to exist on physical servers. The data still resides on servers somewhere, and the physical location of those servers is important under many nation’s laws. For example, Canada is concerned about its public sector projects being hosted on U.S.-based servers because under the U.S. Patriot Act, it could be accessed by the U.S. government.
- The need for speed still reigns at some firms, but data in the cloud means problems with latency inherent in transmitting data across the country or globe.
- Large companies already have an internal cloud. Many big firms have internal IT shops that act as a cloud to the multiple divisions under the corporate umbrella. Not only do these internal shops have the benefit of being within company firewalls, but they generally work hard — from a cost perspective — to stay competitive with outside cloud resources, making the case for sending computing to the cloud weak.
- Bureaucracy will cause the transition to take longer than building replacement housing in New Orleans. Big companies are conservative, and transitions in computing can take years to implement. A good example is the challenge HP faced when trying to consolidate its data center operations.
Topics: Enterprise, Hardware, History, Productivity, Security, Technology, Web / Web 2.0, software | No Comments »
Portable On-Screen Keyboard
By Martin English | July 31, 2008
On-Screen Keyboard Portable is a handy way to bring your settings for the Windows’ built-in On-Screen Keyboard with you from PC to PC. It will remember your hover preferences and other options and provides an easy way to launch it right from the PortableApps.com Menu. For earlier operating systems that lack a built-in on-screen keyboard (Windows 95/98/Me) it even includes a simple virtual keyboard that, while lighter on accessibility features, is still useful.
Please note: While on-screen keyboards offer protection against hardware keyloggers, they do not offer protection against software keyloggers (which are far more common). They are primarily intended as an accessibility tool or for alternate means of text entry (pen-based computing, etc).