Only Contains Natural Ingredients

I'm always amused by products that “Only contain natural ingredients”. While I think this is a good thing in general, its also a little misleading.

After all, asbestos, deadly nightshade and snake venom are all natural ingredients, just not very good for you.

Calamansi Crazy

As Herring said; we have some calamansi cordial (mostly calamansi juice and honey) and it is very nice.

So here we are, in the cold British evening. It really is cold, because I'm resisting turning the heating on; and don't get me started on the current cost of heating!
Anyway, we want a nice warming drink, so hot toddy seems like a good idea. What do we need? Well honey, lemon... Ah!
*lightbulb goes on*

So here I am sipping a Calamansi Toddy. Whether that's a taste of summer or winter I'm not quite sure, but I'm pretty sure there's going to be a lot more of these.

Ube, Ube, Ube! Oi, Oi, Oi!!

Ever since our trip to the Philippines this summer, there are three things we have really missed:

1. Calamansi
2. Ube ice cream
   
3. Cerveza Negra
4. And the lovely warm weather

Umm. The four things we have missed are:

1. Calamansi
2. Ube ice cream
   
3. Cerveza Negra
4. Buko Juice
5. And the lovely warm weather

The five things we have ... well, you get the idea.

Calamansi is a small green citrus fruit, about the size of a large cherry, that tastes like a curious mixture of lemon and lime. A half calamansi is absolutely fantastic in gin.

Ube is a sort of yam, that has a fantastic purple colour. In the philippines, it's traditionally cooked with lots of sugar and used as a dessert. We have a particular fondness for Ube ice cream.

Well, the reason I'm bringing this up is that a Philippino shop has just opened in Aylesbury and is selling, amongst other things, ube, in lots of forms, including ice cream, and calamansi squash! Sadly no whole calamansi, though I will try asking them next time we're in.

On a cold autumnal day, ube ice cream is like a little bit of (purple) summer and a reminder of the ones we love that are so far away. See you soon!

I got promoted!

For some time now I've been in the odd position of being a system architect on my project but not the system architect. And then the system architect left (the company).

As I'd already been doing some of his job for a while, I simply started picking up more of it, however this was all unofficial at this point. Anyway they offically advertised the post, and I was interviewed on Tuesday. It's been a long week since then, but this lunchtime, I finally got told I've officially got the job.

This is actually quite a big challenge, but it's the chance to do a lot of good stuff, and I'm really looking forward to it. It's a bit scary too, but I guess that's a good thing!

Words

Is it wrong to teach your 5 year old how to say “antidisestablishmentarianism”?

No?

How about telling them to ask their teacher what it means?

My house is a mess

Well that's not really very surprising I know; but currently it's even more of a mess than I was expecting.

We got up this morning, and full of enthusiasm we decided to do some tidying. Now the landing has been full of all our Cropredy kit (tents, chairs, etc) for weeks, and finally we were going to put it back into the roof. Since the roof is full of junk however, we thought it was a good time to finally throw some of it away, and make more room for the things we actually want.

So off I go into the nursery, to bag up all the stuff in there that needs throwing away, and Herring headed up to the roof. Soon he was happily throwing things out of the roof (literally!) and I was walled in by bags of stuff. I say how happy I am that we're finally tidying this lot up, and he says, yes, something normally comes up which stops us getting this done. (Jinx!)

So a bit later he wants to show me something, so I go to look. He is at the top of the loft ladder with something in his hand (small and light, whatever it was). Then suddenly 'Ow, my back!'. He's suddenly incapacitated, and struggles down the ladder. End of tidying!

So now my landing is still full of Cropredy kit AND things destined to be thrown out. Not quite the result I was looking for.

He has assured me he was not deliberately trying to get out of tidying...

Oh why is IE such a time waster?

Well, that's probably not the right question to ask, as its easily answered:
"Internet Explorer is such a time waster as it does not adhere to web standards, and does not provide any sort of helpful error messages."

A better question is why is IE so difficult to work with. The answer to that is probably something along the lines of "Microsoft did not really care about developers who were not using its products."

As you have probably gathered by now, I have just spent the best part of four hours with a Javascript (a rant by itself) error that only appears in IE. What's more, IE provided very little diagnostics about what was actually wrong. So I was basically left with adding lines of code to see if that shifted the error about, so I could gradually narrow down where the actual problem was.

We got there in the end, but it really should not be that difficult. If IE had something like Firebug, it would make the whole thing a lot easier. So would IE adhering to published standards, but I suspect that porcines will be taking off on skis in hell before that happens.