Reduced Shakespeare Company: The complete word of God (abridged)

So. We went to see RSC do their infamous Bible show, at the Jersey Opera House last night.

It was simply amazing - a very well planned out show, acted by a trio that have obviously done it a thousand times (or more), but who still love the routine -and are so comfortable with it that they are able to ad-lib without the audience really catching on.

I would advise against entering one of their performances late, though - they made last nights latecomers really suffer!

So - if "The complete word of God (abridged)" is on near you - or indeed in the same country - get tickets, get on your bike and go to see it. Best £16 that I have spent in a very, very long time.

Twundling: Digital playground fun

Lets invent a new word. It seems fashionable to twitterise things.. so..

"Twundle" - the twitterquivalent of shouting "Bundle!" and all leaping on someone in the playground (in other words, sparking a mass-follow of them!)

So why not pick a victim and Twundle them today?

You could even pick me or the co-creator of twundling!

Have you received a twundle? Let me know!

Food ideas: Pork with caramelized apple, veggies and mash

Decided to start blogging some of the more interesting things we have for dinner. Last night was:

Pork medallions with caramellized apple rings, vegetables and crushed parmesan potatoes.

First, core, peel and cut into rings a nice softish apple (golden delicious or braeburn work well as they are sweet). Leave it out to brown a bit.

Wash/brush, chop and boil the potatoes - for mashing, but skin-on. Do not peel!

Once they are nearly there, steam some trimmed green beans and baby carrots (don't peel these either - do brush them to take a bit of skin off, though).

Heat a frying pan, splash with olive oil, sear off the pork and move it aside to rest. Chuck a good measure of caster sugar (a couple of table spoons) in, and move around the pan a bit until it starts to form a (sort of) caramel - you should use butter really, but I try to avoid that!

Fry the apple rings until they start to soften, then turn them over and get lots of gloopy caramel on 'em.

Mash up the potatoes, mixing in a bit of butter and some grated parmesan.

Pass the pork back through the pan (off the heat) to coat it in the left-over caramel on both sides.

Serve. Eat. Enjoy!

Einstein vs Vodafone Airtel

OK.

I sent the other half a text message today. It arrived more or less immediately. This is quite good going based on my recent experience with Airtel here, however, the amusing thing was the timestamp on the message when it got to the other end.

Both phones said the same time. And the message apparently was not going to happen for another 15 minutes - yes - it was a quarter of an hour in the future.

Either Einstein (and various others) have made some fundamental errors in their calculations, or Airtel have a TARDIS hidden away somewhere - or - possibly more likely - somebody, somewhere has broken something.

I'm not ignoring you all..

I know - I've been really slack with my blogging this month! Even Rob Wray has said so!

It's a shame, because I've got some really good bits and pieces to blog - some stuff from our trip to London, a few work related things and a couple of good .NET tips to add to the mix (and possibly a recipe or two, even).

I'll get to it soon - as quickly as I can - just have a lot of work to get out of the way first!

Please bear with me.. normal service (Um. Am I normal?) will be resumed as soon as possible..

Ironic soup..

There is something ironic about having a can of "Slow roasted Lamb and Vegetable soup" for lunch - which cooks in approx 5 mins.

It'd be even more ironic if I owned a microwave. Oh well.

So far.. not so good

At airport. Good. In plenty of time, with no queue to check in - also good. Sadly the fire alarm has gone off twice, involving a full evacuation of the building. Currently waiting for the massive queue for security to die down so I can get through to airside - and hopefully onto a plane!

To London, and beyond!

Off to London shortly (well, this afternoon).

Will report back on situation re: snow, et al! Hasn't been terribly snowy here in Jersey, to be fair.

Expect occasional blogs on how things go over there - will be back on the 11th!

January Google Roundup!

So.. lets go for it! I'm going to recount the top four ranking (because a top ten would include pretty much all of them and be really dull to write) topics which brought in the most traffic via google, to my blog, in January 2009!

4. A tie between three subjects with four hits each:

Teamed network cards and the intel proset drivers made the following entries: proset teaming with nlb, software intel proset 12.2, install proset "windows 2003", intel proset for win2003 sp2

The use of HttpHandlers in the App_Code folder popped in here (though I particularly like 'app_code bad' - I do believe that app_code is generally bad, therefore this was quite a fitting addition): ihttphandler web.config app_code, reference httphandler within app_code, app_code bad, httphandler appcode

And the topic of VAT in relation to Jersey: avoid vat in jersey, buying from jersey vat, do jersey pay uk vat, vat jersey blogs - Although the first one tickled me - it's not exactly 'avoiding vat' when you aren't subject to it!

3. In third place, with seven hits each are two more searches (ironically both restaurants):

The WildFire Grill in St Helier made a series of entries: wild fire in jersey c.i, wild fire, st helier, wildfire jersey restaurant uk, wildfire jersey uk, jersey uk wildfire restaurant, wildfire restaurant jersey uk

As did the Diamond Chinese Restaurant: diamond chinese jersey, chinese diamond jersey, diamond chinese in st helier, diamond chinese restaurant jersey, diamond restaurant jersey

I'm a little surprised by the latter - it's been there forever (well a long time), and while I expect people to search for 'trendier' places on the web, I wasn't predicting that one. Maybe it's time to launch that portal site for local restaurants, after all!

2. A techie search, with nine hits. The keyword phrases vary only by use of ""s and fullstops - which to me definitely denotes this as one made by developers (let alone the subject matter): "failed to cocreate profiler", "failed to cocreate profiler.", failed to cocreate profiler, failed to cocreate profiler.

Noone left any feedback on it though, so I don't know if my post(s) are useful enough - someone let me know, since we've run into and solved several permutations of this issue.

So, finally..

1. With ten searches, it's another techie topic: asp.net ajax validationsummary, asp.net updatepanel validationsummary, validation summary + ajax, validationsummary updatepanel, two validationsummary two updatepanel, updatepanel validationsummary, validationsummary in ajax c#, validationsummary in updatepanel

So there you have it. I was hoping that Handmade Crafts would make more of an entry, but it didn't! Perhaps in February?