A picture tells a thousand words

I've been gradually putting photos up on Wikipedia and I now have quite a huge number of photos. It's amazing how many places I've been in the last few years that have supplied photos suitable for Wikipedia. Ranging from the mundane through the historic and technical to the current and topical.

All the photos I've supplied are here. All dual-licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License and the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

New toy: mp3 player

CNMemory mp3 player

Just got my latest toy, a little solid-state mp3 player. It comes with no memory, but has an SD slot so it's infinitely expandable. SD is insanely cheap and getting cheaper all the time, so that's great. Pretty good for £13!

Now I'll just have to do some script hackery to automagically convert Ogg files to mp3 and copy them across, so I can quickly get music ready for my daily cycle commute.

Tennis and football

Lleyton Hewitt and
Mark Philippoussis at Queen's Club

Holly and I went to see Lleyton and The Poo at Queen's Club last night. We get freebie tickets because it's at the end of our street. Was good fun, though the Aussie lads really weren't at their prime and went down in straight sets.

Tonight we're off to see the Australia vs New Zealand football friendly at Fulham. Very much looking forward to this game. Should be a load of fun.

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Week off

I've managed to score a week off in between jobs. Can't wait. Lots of things I need to catch up on, and little projects I've not got around to.

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I made sushi!

Very sticky rice
Not gonna win any awards, but nice
first try
Well it's not going to win any awards, but my first attempt at sushi worked alright. Certainly tasted good. The wasabi I bought turns out to be insanely hot. Nose tinglingly.

Sushi!

Sushi ingredients
Sushi rice

After sushi for dinner last night at the excellent Yoshi Sushi, I realised how much I miss good sushi. It's rare and expensive in this town. Yoshi is probably the best price/quality balance I've found so far. The sushi train places here all serve expensive, dried-out garbage. I used to eat sushi in Sydney all the time.

Solution: make it myself! I'm starting with the relatively easy maki (rolls), using a recipe from Wikibooks. The hard part, of course, is getting the rice right. And if you know me, I'm crap at rice. So this is very much an experiment.

Regrowth Blonde

Just brewed a quick-and-dirty beer for my birthday party keg. Cooper's Canadian Blonde kit, 350g wheat malt, 350g dark malt (what I had already opened in the fridge), 300g glucose, Brupaks Flavapak beer kit enhancer. Haven't used this last one before, it's basically three big teabags with hops and grains to give a little more to your kit.

Should be a nice, light and refreshing brew for a (hopefully) hot summer's day. I love having my birthday in the Northern Hemisphere and thus in mid-Summer. We're hoping to hire out a local bowling green and play lawn bowls in the afternoon, then retire to the flat for a party.

What did we do before eBay?

Just bought a broken laptop of the same model as mine. It's apparently working but has broken screen and no keyboard. I bought it solely for parts as the little cable between the motherboard and screen on mine is stuffed. To buy this part from official channels would end up costing more than the laptop is worth, whereas this cost next to nothing.

The other bonus is I'll get to work out how to pull the sucker apart without destroying my working laptop.