Puss filled purulent imbeciles

When we moved into our current house, I emailed the council and had our council tax account changed form the old house to the new. Great. They emailed back to confirm the address as it didn't quite match what they had, but no matter, it was all sorted and I was assured the direct debit would just start up again in a month or so.

Foolish me for thinking they would do what they said they would.

Cut to me now 6 months on and my landlord emails saying he's been asked to appear in court for non payment of council tax. He explained to them that we were the tenants, and why hadn't they sent demands to us. Their answer: "we didn't know where to send the bill". Now there is a large bill for council tax and (I can only imagine) a fast amount of sundry fees added by the council winging its way over.

Luckily for me, all this was conducted by email and letter, all of which I have copies of - I am going to have a calm little chat with them when they open on Tuesday...

Way to go Kensington & Chelsea Council.

Cunts.

Posted by Alex at 10:32 AM| Permalink | Comments (0)

Blogging Upgrade

Just upgraded to MT 3.2 - it looks prettier without a doubt, however only time will tell if its spam blocking is just as good as Jay Allan's spam plugin (you'd hope it would be, given he now works for Six Apart).

Posted by Alex at 4:39 PM| Permalink | Comments (0)

Derren Brown - Pure Effect

This week, I shall be mostly reading Derren Brown's "Pure Effect". Review to follow!

Posted by Alex at 8:56 PM| Permalink | Comments (0)

Sleight of Mind - Book Review

Having devoured this book during my weekend away, here are my thoughts.

As is normally the case with these specialist titles with small print runs, there are plenty of typos; but that doesn't actually detract from the book.

It has a good mix of background on mentalism in general plus a few "routines" to get you started. It's well referenced so there's plenty of scope for further reading. In fact, I've just bought Derren Brown's book "Pure Effect" off the back of it.

For someone like me who is totally new to the scene of psychological illusion, this is a great book to start with. I have really no intention of performing any of this in front of an audience, but it does give you a great insight into people watching and the awesome talent and showmanship of people like Derren Brown.

Posted by Alex at 2:15 PM| Permalink | Comments (0)

Warsaw Roundup

click for more

Having just spent a weekend baking in the heat of Warsaw, here are some ideas of what to do over there in the summer:

• Lazienki Park
  • Vast park near the centre of Warsaw, very popular. Has lots of cafés an ice cream shops as well as red squirrels. Few toilets though!
    
• Wilanów Park
  • The palace of Wilanów was built in the French style with lots of fussy gardens. It's nice and cool in the summer and has rowing boats you can hire out to go out onto the river with. The best part is the branch of Wedel's café outside the gates.
    
• University Biblioteka
• Why does Imperial not have a library with a roof garden as awesome as this? Go and enjoy then have lunch in their cheap, but excellent, cafeteria. Open to all.

Posted by Alex at 10:39 AM| Permalink | Comments (0)

Windows Vista - Initial thoughts on Beta 1

Yes, ok, it's been out for a little while now, but I thought it would be nice to add my 2p's worth.

The good

•  Virtual folders
  • These are ace - they essentially display the contents of a search pattern you set, so "all pictures" for example. I haven't yet worked out how to define my own criteria so I'm stuck with the defaults for now.
• Searching
  • As it's coupled with the above, you'd expect it to be pretty fast, and it is. When you click once on a file in Explorer, you get a sort of bar at the bottom for you to add metadata to files so that the search works better:
    
• Group Policy
  • There appears to be a new group policy option called "pushed printers". Probably not relevant for the home user, but this is the first time us Windows SysAdmins have been given a decent tool for deploying printer settings.
    

The bad

• Windows shortcut keys
  • Although they've not gone (Windows+E still opens explorer, Windows+R does the run menu), they've changed Windows+L to log out instead of lock computer/switch user. Put it back please!
• Start menu search
  • At the bottom of the start menu is a search box, however it only searches for program names, not the entire computer. It's confusing and annoying.
    
    

The ugly

• The logon screen
  • Well, it's radically different. I'd liken it to a KDE (Linux) desktop or Mac OS X. You don't get any drop down box to pick a domain - you have to type [domain]\[username]. If you don't specify a domain it assumes a local account.
    
    You also have to click a button to "switch user" - it shows you the account of the person who last logged on as per normal, however setting the policy "Do not display last user name" has no effect.
• As Vista is built upon Windows Server 2003 SP1, you would have imagined that they'd finally allowed multiple logins - i.e. one on the console and up to two via remote desktop. Despite the fact that the group policy templates are in for that, and task manager shows the "users" tab in the same way as Server 2003, I've not been able to get that to work. It behaves in the same way as XP it seems.

Posted by Alex at 11:35 AM| Permalink | Comments (0)

New book

I have a new book, and it's going to allow me to mess with people's minds. Or not.

Detailed review to follow.

Posted by Alex at 11:41 AM| Permalink | Comments (0)

Death Smoothie

I'm very concerned - what I assumed to be an exceptionally healthy drink may actually cause me irreparable damage. Curses!

Also, I wasn't aware that Bees made pollen?

Posted by Alex at 10:19 AM| Permalink | Comments (1)

64 bit wget for Windows

Having laboured over this for the past day, I thought I'd post this here.

It's the AMD64 port of wget - it should run on Windows x64 Professional (Intel or AMD architecture) as well as the Windows Server 2003 64 bit versions.

Be warned however, this doesn't contain the SSL libraries so will not work against https sites.

Download file

Posted by Alex at 10:38 AM| Permalink | Comments (0)

London Triathlon

I went to cheer on my friends at the London Triathlon yesterday - the added bonus of (some) pretty boyz in wetsuits and lycra was a happy coincidence though!

Click for more gallery pictures

Posted by Alex at 10:15 AM| Permalink | Comments (0)

Truffles

This evening, my boyfriend had pasta with finely sliced black truffle. To me it smelt like petrol, but the texture was very odd as I risked life and limb in using the mandolin to slice it up.

This tiny pile cost the best part of £5, but apparently didn't taste all that nice. Perhaps he should save up for the ludicrously tasty fresh variety...

Posted by Alex at 7:37 PM| Permalink | Comments (0)

Moroccan Lamb

Another quick recipe for you, a rather splendid spiced Moroccan lamb - alter the quantity of harissa depending on how much of a sadist you are.

Sauté off the lamb in a pan with a little olive oil. Dry roast the cumin seeds in a small skillet over a high flame.

Once the lamb has browned, add the apricots, dates, orange and lemon zest. Add a small quantity of water (50-100ml) along with the roasted cumin seeds.

Stir in the harissa - if you're a pussy like me, you'll need ¼tsp only; if you have no tastebuds like my boyfriend a whole teaspoon will do.

Let simmer for 10 minutes or so, stir in the chopped mint and serve with couscous.

Posted by Alex at 8:01 PM| Permalink | Comments (0)

Leak? What leak?!

BBC NEWS | Technology | Cisco struggles to plug net leak

Was I the only one that thought this headline implied some sort of slow trickling of water into (or out of) a router or something? That would be pretty bad...

Posted by Alex at 9:39 AM| Permalink | Comments (0)

The best chocolate in the world?

Pierre Marcolini have their shop (they call it a Boutique, Daaaahling) just up the road from us on Kensington High Street, so it would have been chirlish not to visit them and purchase some of their wares.

It's really not cheap - £25 for 250gr of little chocolates, however the flavours are broadly worth it. My favourites? Violettes and Jasmine Tea infusion. I'll be back for more!

Posted by Alex at 11:42 AM| Permalink | Comments (0)