McMinn & Cheese

A sunny day in late December

December 29th, 2012

After two days of torrential rain and winds strong enough to fell trees, woke this morning to bright sunshine and blue skies.

Smoke was pouring from chimneys and drifting down to ground level, where it was meeting steam drawn up from the road by the sun. There was still water pouring down the hill sides, flooding the roadside ditches and the fields, cascading from field to field. Meanwhile the sun was belting down enough heat for it to feel like a warm spring day. The car thermometer reported 10°C, but in the sun it felt more like 20°.

Elodie and I went shopping at the Intermarché in Giromagny. On the way we passed these horses in the field down the road from the house in Auxelles. It was hard to get a decent photo. They were standing in front of the low sun and I could get the blue sky or them and a blown sky. In Giromagny I bought makings for pizza and tarte flambé, and some Hoegaarden raspberry beer (just 3% alcohol, which suits me).

From the soggy garden in Auxelles there was a wondrous view across to the Alps in the distance. The garden is boggy, with a couple of drainage ditches which were today full of fast-flowing water. There are also several sinkholes (or wells), one of which is only covered by a broken pallet. The garden has an extreme slope, and in some places you can see evidence of what used to be ponds – not ornamental, but natural. I don’t do land measurements, but the garden is bloody huge.

After taking the kids for a walk round the village this morning, I spent the afternoon painting the front room with some kind of horrible sticky white paint. When we were talking about it earlier in the year, the idea of painting everything white seemed sound. But I’m already sick of everything being white and would kill for a spot of colour. I’m thinking yellow would be sunny and cheerful in a house that’s been too dark and too stuffy for too long. I’ve been daydreaming about getting one of these, for example. Yellow is an option, but my ideal would be the kind of orange that soaked the sky as the sun set this evening.
The pleasant voices of rock and country

December 27th, 2012

I’ve been thinking about voices lately. It’s bad form to be always categorising, but I’ve been thinking about the stuff I like to listen to and the ways in which my tastes have changed or evolved as I’ve got older.

Macca, of course, was the most versatile vocalist in the Beatles, able to croon, scream, roar, and emote. I guess my musical education started with the likes of him, and Lennon, and even Jagger’s ability to use a falsetto. You can be spoiled by the versatility of some musicians, but I don’t think that versatility should be considered a prerequisite for greatness. In fact, just because you can turn your hand/voice to anything doesn’t mean you actually should. Macca’s downfall as a solo artist was precisely his ability to muck around with unsuitable material. The same criticism can be levelled at Elvis, who made too many shit records.

I don’t like to listen to screamers, most of the time, which is why metal always left me cold, and so too that swaggering I-am-Jesus rock voice that borrows some of Jagger but forgets the country-soul side of his voice. In country there a lot of the female vocs borrow a belting style from Reba. Then there’s the more nasal twang. So Trisha Yearwood can belt them out, and can also croon a ballad or sing the blues. Martina McBride is another belter. Seeing her and Reba try to compete with each other on the CMA awards one time was awkward. Kelly Willis, on the other hand, is more obviously country nasal. Faith Hill was belting on her first two albums but with an untrained voice, which got her into trouble. Vocal rest and singing lessons led to a change of voice for her third and subsequent albums. She has a really good voice now, but I don’t think she can compete with Trisha for control and soul. Faith Hill has what I’d call a pleasant voice. Another belter is Jennifer Nettles of Sugarland. That woman has an amazing pair of lungs, but sometimes vocal pyrotechnics are too much and you want something more like a clear blue sky.

I like having the iPod on alphabetical because it will usually offer some kind of respite after a belter track.

Which is where we came in. I think the most pleasant voice I know has to belong to Alan Jackson. I admire his records for lots of reasons. His style is kind of effortless, his voice somewhere down there in the chest. I guess you’d call him a crooner. He doesn’t do falsetto or screaming, or even much shouting. He knocks out an album a year and keeps the quality high. The great thing about his records is that he flat refuses to participate in the loudness wars. His music has proper dynamics, and often seems quieter than everything else, which means it sounds great if you turn it up. I always welcome his stuff coming on in the car.

Competing with Jackson for the most pleasant voice award is, of course, Vince Gill, who has a sweet and soulful singing style that took me a long time to learn to love. When I first heard it, I just couldn’t reconcile it with country music, because it’s just not typical of that genre. I love it now, but it took repeated exposures over many years until I finally got it. Looking forward to seeing him live at the O2 next year.

One voice I never could stand was Elvis Costello. Very nasal. I can take Dwight Yoakam, who is also nasal, but something about the timbre of Costello’s voice put me on edge. Then there’s that Bono, who is what I’d call a whiner. I’ve never been able to take him seriously, and his bewildering popularity is an example of how millions of people can be wrong.
Country Pile of…

December 26th, 2012

We normally stay in France for around five days at Christmas, heading home around now. Thinking about the Boxing Day shopping crowds and the hours we might have been stuck on the M25 today, it’s probably for the best that we stayed longer this time in order to do some decorating in the house at Auxelles.

I’ve been visiting this place for nearly 20 years, my wife’s great aunt lived there, and I think every time I sort of tried not to breathe too much in the place, which smelled musty and damp, and of cats and chickens and small rodents. But now the place is empty, we have the opportunity to use it as a base for our visits, which beats staying anywhere near my father-in-law.

But it’s a dump, sure enough, and it needs a lot of work to make it work. In the summer, before the old lady had even died, we threw out a lot of stuff: old straw bedding and ancient blankets among other things. My wife painted a couple of the bedrooms in October, and this time we’re tackling the kitchen, bathroom, and other downstairs rooms.

The kitchen cupboards were full of food, purchased in bizarre quantities for one old person living alone. Most of it was out of date. In addition, we kept finding cupboards full of booze, a lot of it home-made. She wasn’t even a big drinker, but they sure did make a lot of hooch from plums, blackberries, and other fruits of the hedgerow harvest. Eight buckets of filthy water later, the cupboards are ready for a coat of paint. The problem appears to be layers of soot from the wood burning range cooker. Don’t get excited: everything in the house seems to have been replaced or updated in the worst possible era for design fashion. The kitchen range looks like a hideous 60s/70s appliance and has no charm at all (see photo above). Its tiny flue leads into a massive (unlined) chimney that hasn’t been swept in years. There’s also an ugly gas bottle cooker. The best thing in the kitchen is a red Formica table, which you can also see above.

Today, I painted the tiles in the toilet and bathroom. In an ideal world, we’d rip the whole lot out and replace, but inheriting* a house like this is a poisoned chalice when you have enough trouble paying for the place you already (don’t) own. I’d like a new Lacanche cooker, but you can’t have everything. There were a lot of ugly, brown-patterned tiles in the two rooms. I’m perpetually bewildered that at some point in history, someone chose to have a brown bathroom suite. Anyway, I completed the undercoating. Tomorrow, or the next day, I’ll paint the top coat, and pray that the brown pattern won’t show through.

I also looked in the cellar, and wished I hadn’t. You can’t unsee the rotten beams being held up by stays, nor the broken concrete covering of one of the many wells on the property. As my daughter helpfully pointed out, the well in the cellar is straight out of Ringu. The place was full of fruit, vegetables, and booze (of course). Most of the wine was the type you’re supposed to drink as soon as you get it home from the supermarket. There looked to be a couple of bottles of champagne, but they were on the other side of *the well*.

The barn next door is full of firewood, and there are more wood piles outside. It would be good to get some kind of wood burning appliance working, if only to avoid invoking the noisy (but quite new) gas central heating boiler in the bathroom. You can see below the charming olde worlde wood burning stove in the front room. But this hasn’t been used in decades. I’d replace it with something newer in a heartbeat. It’s probably worth something, but looks really complicated to use.

*Inherit is the wrong word, it belongs to my mother-in-law. But you get the point.
Techno bubble babble

December 20th, 2012

After ten minutes trying to get my MacBook to wake up from a deep hibernation yesterday, not for the first time, I had a bit of a rant on the Twitter late last night about crap technology.

The MacBook problem is deeply irritating. On the one hand, you can get the black screen of death, which you can only apparently fix after a forced shut down and then a period of mourning before you attempt to start up again. Usually, you have to do this several times. Yesterday’s problem was similar. I was at work till late, and ran the battery down. The computer shut itself off and I had to wait till I got home to plug it in. When I did so, it took a good ten minutes before the trackpad or keyboard would respond to input.

Which got me thinking about all the stuff that irritates me about modern computers. Experience of iOS devices with their stripped down version of multitasking and their solid state storage, are so snappy that working with even a recent laptop with a conventional disk drive is a pain. Worse still, the disk that seemed huge when you bought it soon fills to capacity. And with what? Clearing space on my wife’s hard drive the other day, I concluded it was video and photos. Her iPhoto library was 34GB.

Above you see a detail of a shot I took in the summer. It’s at 100%. I can’t actually see the full image at 100% on my screen. Sure, I can crop down to details like this as a substitute for zooming, but with the pixels squeezed onto modern cameras, if you do that you just become more aware of noise and compression artifacts. For the amount of use the facility to zoom/crop like this is, I don’t think it’s worth it.

My 5 megapixel Minolta camera of 10 years or so ago took excellent pictures, which made great prints, when I printed them. My 12 or 14 megapixel Panasonic or my 8 megapixel iPhone does not do better. I’m convinced that the reason so many raved about the iPhone 4 camera was that it was 5 megapixels, which is the Goldilocks sensor size. Anything more is a waste, and I’m sick of having to spend my life managing fucking disk space. Because, in the end, you can’t trust the hardware. I have a 1TB drive at work that has started to fail. It has loads of really important school work on it, but there’s nothing I can do but watch it die (and my school is so short of money that I seriously doubt it will be replaced).

Seven years on, I’m still waiting for a backup solution at work, but hey, that’s another story.
Taylor Swift, Matraca Berg, Jackson Browne: 3 songwriters, 3 albums

October 30th, 2012

Jackson Browne was 25 years old when he recorded his third album Late for the Sky in 1974. I waited 38 years to buy it, and if you already have it you don’t need me to tell you it’s good. The eight tracks last just over 41 minutes and include the title track, “Fountain of Sorrow,” “For a Dancer”, and the suddenly-topical “Before the Deluge”:

Some of them were angry
At the way the earth was abused
By the men who learned how to forge her beauty into power
And they struggled to protect her from them
Only to be confused

The record sounds great in the way that only albums recorded in the 70s can: piano, guitar, violin, and soft drums that don’t overwhelm the mix. Best of all, it has a wonderful vibe, sounding spontaneous and loose, almost as if they’re making it up as they go along.

Matraca Berg has been the pre-eminent songwriter in Nashville for over thirty years, co-writing hits for the likes of Patty Loveless, Trisha Yearwood, Suzy Bogguss, Deana Carter and Martina McBride. She has a way with a witty lyric and a priceless pop sensibility, but these are sadly absent from her recent solo releases. The latest is Love’s Truck Stop, which follows on last year’s The Dreaming Fields so swiftly you might think her prolific.

The album starts promisingly with its title track, which has a good melody and has been recorded competently, but after track two things descend into the plaintive. The missing pop sensibility is compounded by Berg’s limited voice, which really doesn’t do justice to her own material. You can forgive a weak voice (not everyone can be Trisha Yearwood), but the absence of memorable tunes is an oddity, given her track record. (For evidence that she can bring some jauntiness, I refer you to her 1997 album, From Sunday Morning to Saturday Night.)

Taylor Swift has been accused in the past of having a weak singing voice, but she seems to have found it on her fourth album, Red, which sees her hitting a new peak. I suspect we may look back on Red in decades to come as Taylor Swift’s purple patch. Featuring songs that were written or co-written by Ms Swift, the album alternates between singer-songwriterly numbers in the Jackson Browne/James Taylor vein and pure, exuberant (and horribly catchy) pop-rock, packed full of wit and verve. “And you will hide away and find your piece of mind with some indie record that’s much cooler than mine,” she sings, with a knowing wink to her audience. Yeah, right. There’s nobody on earth cooler than Taylor Swift right now.

She’s been criticised for writing too much about love and relationships, but she’s careful to remind us of her age (“22” neatly updates us from “Fifteen” on Fearless), and it turns out that Jackson Browne wrote a lot of songs about love and relationships too. Actually, she has an extraordinary talent, and like all the best songwriters seems able to pluck words from everyday speech and make them sound musical.

The sounds are modern, it’s all very produced, and every other track is an earworm, like the first single “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”, which we all hated as soon as we heard it, and then couldn’t get out of our heads. This track deliberately evokes the experience of listening to an online stream, or perhaps using an FM transmitter with an iPod and encountering RF interference. Elsewhere there are a couple of trendy duets and a selection of her stock-in-trade looks back at failed relationships. The best of these is “All Too Well,”

Hey you called me up again just to break me like a promise
So casually cruel in the name of being honest
I’m a crumbled up piece of paper lying here
Cause I remember it all all all too well

It’s a good one, Red, album of the year, and in 38 years time some old git will buy it and maybe write a blog about it.
Educational Expectations

October 30th, 2012

Vocational? (Photo credit: Center for Jewish History, NYC)

One of the latest buzzwords used to smite teachers is expectations. We were sent a form to fill in the other day (filling in forms being the response to most of the pressures put on schools) asking what we were doing to “raise expectations of what students can achieve”.

Like most teachers, I’m offended by the suggestion that I set out to teach with low expectations. You really couldn’t get out of bed every morning if you didn’t have some shred of optimism. Sometimes, your students know almost nothing when they first come into your subject, and imparting a little of my extensive subject knowledge is one of the pleasures of my job. My expectations of what the students can achieve are not low, but nor are they unrealistically high. And I don’t believe in sugar-coating the truth when it comes to giving students feedback on their work. You do your best to tell them exactly what they need to do to achieve top grades and beyond. Sometimes, faced with a challenge or a technical obstacle, they do lose their gumption.

Is that my fault? I tend to think that their own expectations are informed largely by their experience at home. I’ve got a student – capable of a B-grade but currently performing well below that – whose mother claims s/he “can’t read and write.” This is not true – I’ve got evidence to the contrary – but you wonder about the effect on his/her confidence of getting that message at home on a daily basis.

When you’re dealing with sneaky lying Tories, of course, the language they use (“expectations”) is code for something else. They don’t really think that teachers have low expectations. What they really think is that only privately educated people are worth anything, and that state schools should be privatised as soon as possible. So they’re deliberately ignoring 80% of what state schools offer – over and above what a private one can – and judging state schools on the core subjects offered by the conservative private sector and the conservative, “elite” universities to which they send their students.

Oh, yes, the elite. What the code means is that I’m a bad teacher because I don’t encourage/push enough of my students to apply to Oxford/Cambridge. It’s true, I don’t. That’s because I teach subjects not recognised by those institutions. In their infinite wisdom, they see no value in vocational or semi-vocational subjects, and they certainly don’t view film and media as worthy of study. So the students I tend to be advising are applying elsewhere.

I also look at those institutions and the graduates they produce, and I look at the way the country is being run by them, and I tend to think that their so-called elite education is over-rated. The people in charge of the BBC during the Savile era (and before)? Largely privately-educated and graduates of Oxbridge. In charge of the banks that fucked the economy? In charge of the government that doesn’t know what to do about the economy? Yeah.

Look around you at the world, who is the most genuinely innovative and successful Briton? Who has designed the devices that millions of people use every day and love? Who works for a company that has grown and made profit by actually selling more products rather than by cutting jobs to cut costs? Apple’s Jonathan Ive was educated at Walton High School, a state comprehensive, and at Newcastle Poly (now Northumbria University).

So, no. I don’t recommend Oxford and Cambridge and their back-to-the-50s classical education to my students. I wouldn’t recommend that route to my own academically gifted children.
First test: G3 Ferrari Pizza Cooker (updated)

October 28th, 2012

UPDATE: 28 November 2013

I’ve had the Ferrari a year now and I’ve gone through a few phases of ownership. Quite pleased with it at first, then a bit disappointed for a time, now I’ve warmed to it again. The key to success is what you do with the dough. I’ve discovered that preparing the pizza in advance and sliding it onto the Ferrari is not necessary. Read on.

Over the months, I’ve come to understand the correct method of using it. I don’t think you really need a pizza peel (as mentioned below) if you use this method. First of all, you let the Ferrari warm up for 5-10 minutes. I set it to “2” and leave it while I knock back the dough and prepare balls ready for rolling out. Then, roll out the first pizza round, keeping it just smaller than the width of the Ferrari. Now you lift the lid.

Place the rolled out dough directly on the hot Ferrari stone and leave it there, with the lid up while you add the toppings. Spread on the tomato sauce, cheese, and whatever else you’re putting on. Don’t burn yourself on the element in the lid, so work quickly and with care. This achieves two things. First of all, the base starts cooking from underneath while you sort out the toppings. Secondly, it allows the temperature of the top element to reduce and the pilot light to come on again. Once the toppings are complete, put the lid down, turn up the temperature to “3” and put the timer on the five minutes.

While the first pizza of a session might need a few extra minutes, by the second one, the temperature is such that the 5 minutes cooking time (with the base getting that bit longer while you assemble the toppings) is perfect. The good news is, even if you leave a pizza ten minutes by mistake, the pilot will go out and it won’t burn. By the way, when you lift the lid and start the second pizza, turn the temperature down to “2” temporarily to ensure that when you turn it back up to “3” it comes straight back on.

======================================================== Original Post:

In the warmer months, I cook my pizza on my gas barbecue, using the granite pizza stone Weber sell for the purpose. This is a great way to cook pizza if you can’t afford one of those fancy pants wood-fired garden ovens (which would be my first purchase on winning the lotto). The barbecue gets good and hot, and the base is crispy, with no soggy bottom.

But once the nights start drawing in, the clocks go back and the weather gets bad (though it’s bad all the time these days), it’s time to bring the pizza-making indoors. Usually, I face a few months of disappointing pizza. Even though my oven has a “pizza” mode, with top and bottom heat, it doesn’t ever really get hot enough, and the pizza comes out with a soft base, or (if you leave it in long enough to crisp the base), burnt on the top.

I have tried the old frying pan method, and this works, but is messy and can set off every smoke alarm in the house.

So when I saw the G3 Ferrari Pizza Cooker on the interwebs, I was very excited, and my wife immediately offered to get one for my birthday. (Yeah, turn that around and make it a man offering to buy his wife a domestic appliance for her birthday!)

So we’ve got kids’ parties coming up and we decided to get it early and have a practice, which you can see in the video above.

This is not as effective as cooking pizza on a barbecue, nor as good as a proper wood-fired oven, but in the winter months, or when the weather’s too bad for a barbecue, this is a better option than a domestic oven on anything other than the pyrolysis setting.

Note that you will need a pizza peel to get your pie onto the Ferrari, and these are not “supplied” as the manual appears to state. The manual is in a variety of languages, but the accompanying recipe booklet is in Italian. But if you’re buying one of these, you already know how to make pizza.

This was the first time I’d used it, and there was a slight whiff of factory coating, which meant that the first pizza was a bit tainted. The following morning I made camembert flatbreads quite successfully, and the factory taint was gone.

One thing to watch out for is the red pilot light. I guess as a safety feature, this cuts out when the oven reaches a certain temperature, but you need it to be ON when you put your pizza in so that the top element is working. So the oven gets pre-heated to get the stone hot, but then you have to open the lid to get the light to come on. I’m not yet used to its ways and found it a bit of a pain this first time. You can see in a couple of shots in the video that the light was out at certain points. I was a bit nonplussed to see that it immediately got steam condensation on its inside.

The timer lasts for five minutes, which is not long enough with the pilot light out. So sometimes you have to get it to come on and then re-set the timer. I’m sure I’ll get used to it, but so far it means that the advertised “5 minutes” cooking time is a bit of a stretch. For me, the length of time is less important than the finished result. What you want is a crispy base and a cooked topping. Five minutes or ten minutes, makes no difference to me. One benefit of the pilot light system is that, if you forget you have a pizza on the go (which I am almost bound to do), it probably won’t burn to a crisp.

You’re advised to avoid spilling toppings onto the stone, which has a porous texture. Personally, I think that for things to be working as they should, your stone should be thoroughly seasoned, and you’ll never keep it perfectly clean. So I wasn’t worried about getting anything on it. Just scrape it off after. In the video above I was using Sainsbury’s sundried tomato paste, which is a lot more liquid than the stuff I usually buy in Waitrose. This led to the slightly oily looking pizza that emerges in the video.
A tale of two phones

October 20th, 2012

Now that the colossal waste of money that was my Vodafone contract is up, I’ve been free to (a) get a new iPhone 5, (b) pass my old iPhone 4 onto my oldest daughter, and (c) get on a SIM-only deal with a network that provides actual, you know, coverage.

By coincidence, it was (d) time for my youngest daughter to get a new phone. She’s far more sociable than the oldest, and her pay-go deal with my old Nokia was getting expensive. So I went looking for a contract that would provide lots of texts and a decent phone for not much money. I considered getting a Nokia Lumia 610, but it turned out when it came to it that the 610 seems to be gone, and the new bottom-of-the-range Windows phone is the Nokia Lumia 710.

Talkmobile, which is the network run by Carphone Warehouse (using the Vodafone network, natch), was offering the 710 free on a £7.50 per month contract.

When you consider what the 710 actually is (a decent little smartphone made by a well-known brand with a 5 megapixel camera, HD video, free music and mapping, the ability to download a limited number of apps/games, and an attractive and beautifully designed mobile operating system), £7.50 a month for 24 months is a bargain. Turn it around, that’s a decent smartphone for £180, with two years of free calls and texts. Data is limited, but I already know that Vodafone’s data network is crap. It’s around the price of an iPod Touch, but with the ability to text and call.

My iPhone 5, on the other hand, cost me in excess of £500 for the unlocked version from Apple, and I’m paying £12.90 a month for an unlimited data plan on Three, on a 30-day contract.

For a 12 year old girl, the Nokia Lumia 710 is just about perfect. She would have liked a hardware keyboard, which we could have got on a Blackberry or some other Nokia, but actually I think she’ll get used to the on-screen one.

Delivery

I waited several weeks for the iPhone, which I was prepared for (and even bargained on, given that my Vodafone contract actually runs out in November). Apple’s delivery estimate never slipped, and they even sent the mail saying it was on its way about a week early. So they lowered my expectations and then delivered early. I got the email on Thursday and the phone was delivered on Friday. No dramas. We weren’t in, so the courier left it with a neighbour (two doors down), who handed it over as soon as we got home.

The Nokia was ordered last weekend, and I got a text and email on Monday saying it was on its way. On Tuesday, we got home to find a card had been left, with a promise to try again the next day. On Wednesday, another card. The delivery service was Yodel. They said you could book a date over the phone, which I tried to do. Their phone system didn’t recognise their own “eight figure code”. Still, I got a call from their customer services, who had detected my failed attempt to book delivery for Thursday. So by talking to an actual person I arranged for the Thursday delivery (my wife’s day off) and also gave authorisation for the package to be left with a neighbour.

Got home Thursday to a frustrated wife who had been waiting in all day to no avail. no delivery, no card. Online tracking seemed to indicate the package was “out for delivery”, but then the message appeared that the “customer could not be reached”. What does that mean? Couldn’t get the van up the hill?

Friday, same story. No delivery, no card, just my iPhone. The online tracking system told the same story as the day before, an the telephone service thing didn’t work, so I spoke to a representative, who told me I could pick it up from the depot, about 14 miles away.

So I drove over there this morning and picked it up. You can tell Yodel are a shit company, because they have a printed warning taped to the counter saying that they don’t tolerate assaults on their staff. Here’s the thing, Yodel. Good companies don’t have to sellotape things like that to their customer services counter.

Opening the Box

The iPhone emerges from the box with an 87% charge. Insert the SIM, power it up, and log in with your Apple ID. It offered to install my apps, music, and data, which it does, over WiFi. Less than an hour after getting home from work and getting the phone from my neighbour, it was switched on, loaded up, and ready to use.

Lumia box is twice the size of the iPhone box. It contains a plug-in charger with a moulded cable, plus a separate USB cable. It does not come fully charged, but with its battery not yet installed. So you have to pull off the back cover, insert SIM, then battery, then put it on charge before you can use it. You then need to set it up, and it helps if you already have a Windows Live ID.

Faff factor

Obviously, if you’re already an Apple customer and already have an Apple ID, life is pretty painless. The downside of this is that your new iPhone doesn’t feel like a new phone for very long. Almost immediately, it even has the same wallpaper and home screen. I had a similar experience with my last new laptop. It just feels like more of the same thing.

If the Nokia arrived with an 87% charge, it would be better. Apple realised this a long time ago: people hate having to charge a battery before they can use their new toys. The interchangeable backplate and complimentary theme is a nice idea, but I don’t like the flimsiness this entails. You can download the Windows Phone connection software from the Mac App Store, and use it to synch music and other stuff. It’s more basic than iTunes but seemed to work pretty well. Only DRM-protected music wouldn’t transfer, but that only applies to older stuff.

The main difference was with the el cheapo delivery service used by Carphone Warehouse. It may be cheaper guys, but it’s a horrible experience for your customers.

In use

The iPhone is an iPhone. I’ve been using Siri on my iPad, and we all know about Apple’s new Maps. Actually, being able to dictate texts and tweets is pretty cool when you can’t be bothered to type, and Siri has so far been almost faultless at transcribing my speech. I was arriving at the supermarket car park and remembered I needed a steak out of the freezer. Siri sent the message to my wife without me having to deal with the always frustrating autocorrect and my clumsy typing, and it did it before I lost network coverage in the underground car park.

The iPhone has the Home button, the volume buttons, the power switch, and the mute slider. The Nokia has Home, Back, Search, a volume rocker, an on-off switch and a separate button for the camera, which makes for two more buttons.

I like the Windows phone interface, and I’m sure my kid will have fun with it. The app marketplace has far fewer apps, but you can get Skype, Twitter, Facebook, Angry Birds, and various camera apps and other games. We know Apple’s app store is chock full of apps, but we also know how hard it is to decide which is the best version of any particular thing. I’ve tried loads different camera apps, to-do apps, and so on, and it’s all a bit of a faff. I’d actually like a more curated experience.

The Lumia also comes with Nokia’s free music streaming service, which is great for teenagers, and Nokia’s maps and route planning, which is based on mapping data from UPS and other parcel delivery services, and is supposed to be pretty accurate as a result.

I did use the Apple Maps route planning to get to the Yodel depot, by the way. It worked pretty well, took me door to door, but the sound quality of the voice instructions was so pathetic I thought the phone’s speaker was actually broken. My verdict on the Maps thing is that it’s a lot of fuss about not very much.

The screen, on the other hand does look a lot greener than my old iPhone’s, certainly up in the blue end of the light spectrum, which will take some getting used to.

Would I recommend the Lumia 710? If you can get one on a similar deal, I think it’s all right. I’ve obviously only used it to set it up and get it working, but I think I could live with it, and I’m sure my daughter will grow to love it. For £7.50, you get the free phone, 100 minutes, 5000 texts and 250MB of data. I’m pretty happy with that.
Tift Merritt – Traveling Alone (Review)

October 6th, 2012

So Tift Merritt has a new album out, which is always welcome news. She’s with yet another in a series of record labels (do we care which one? No), and this time there was a full use of social media to pre-publicise the album. Naturally, this was extremely annoying. From memory, we went from the announcement of the new album in the spring, via an all-acoustic single (Sweet Spot), another single (To Myself), a free sampler download (a different recording of Sweet Spot and In the Way), a load of limited edition ancillary product such as a notebook and playing cards (for the “whales”), and finally the album itself, available in standard, bonus track, and vinyl and probably pottery versions.

There were sneak previews, YouTube videos, online streams, and lots and lots of tweets. By the week before release, I was tweeting back, “Just release it already and stop pissing around with marketing.”

I’m sure I’m not alone in finding such “modern” marketing tactics deeply irritating, and I have to say my reaction upon finally being informed by iTunes that I could actually download the album was a little bit meh.

All this in the absence of a music press that could just carry a, you know, advert. Not that Tift Merritt is the sort of artist who gets much in the way advertising. I mean, it’s nice that a small label can use free social media tools to get the word out, but there is a limit to how much of this you can take.

Author Charlie Stross tweeted the other day that he can’t stand watching commercial television because of the advertising, but doesn’t bat an eyelid about tweeting his own publicity. Fine, I can unfollow, and I could unfollow Tift Merritt, but then I might not hear anything about new records at all. iTunes’ notification service emailed me this morning, whereas the album was available to pre-order a month ago.

I hate, hate, hate the feeling that something has been watched or listened to for me before I get to see/hear it for myself, so all the pre-release streaming and sneak previews just piss me off. I want to listen in my own way and in my own time, thanks, and I especially don’t want to read some critic’s ill-considered instant reaction to a freebie.

(Fucking Faith Hill arranged a Sunday night Twitter listening party for her new single – which of course is not available to UK downloaders. And whose Sunday night, anyway? Mine? Hers? John Paul Getty’s? It’s so irritating when Americans act as if the internet was a US-only thing, and not a global service – across all time zones.)

What nonsense release dates are in the iTunes age! What nonsense the concept of the album is. My iTunes library is now heaving with duplicate tracks, slightly different versions, different “album” titles all to do with Traveling Alone. So as well as the constant irritating teasing and endless grind of tweets, I’ve now got to spend time tidying up my fucking library.

Two years ago, I received Ms Merritt’s previous release See You on the Moon and played it about 20 times in a row. For this album, I put it on my iPod and listened in the car on the way to work (not a great way to hear the quieter acoustic numbers), and then played it in my classroom. I didn’t feel like playing it 20 times in a row, but that’s probably because the whole marketing thing put me in a bad mood.

So is it any good? Yes. I’ll prune it down from its 48 minutes, which is too long, but I’ve already identified a number of early favourites. You won’t care what they are, but I’ll say this: the August-release single “To Myself” is definitely one of the stronger tracks. It seems to me that (if you insist on doing “albums” and “singles”) it would have been smarter to put it out as a single to support the actual album release, rather than two months before it was available. Hey, but what do I know? I’m just a fucking expert.

It seems the sounds range from grungier rockier songs to folk tinged with country. Pedal steel guitar is more evident on this release than it has been on anything since her first album Bramble Rose, ten years ago.
The 5:2 diet – reality check day

September 30th, 2012
Clown trousers (Photo credit: Eleventh Earl of Mar)

Thought I’d give myself a reality check today and try to get into some trousers that I haven’t worn since I tried to convince myself I had a 34 inch waist*. We’ve lived here since 2004, and the trousers up on the top shelf were bought in Costco, Derby, near where we used to live. There’s a couple of pairs of Dockers chinos, a pair of black Levi’s, a pair of black Marlboro jeans, and some old Racing Green trousers I kept in case I did any decorating.

The Dockers and the Levi’s are basically brand new. I obviously squeezed into them, convinced myself I’d “lose some weight”, and then ate a pizza.

I’ve been on the 5:2 since I read about it in the Telegraph on the 16th August. Started on the 18th, I think, and since then I’ve lost 7 kilograms, which is 15.5 lb or 1.1 stone, or 0.00771618 short tons. I missed the Horizon documentary about it, but a lot of people I know saw it.

It works. It not only works, but it’s the “easiest” diet I’ve ever tried. I had some success with WeightWatchers several years ago, and both my wife and I lost a lot of weight, but WW is a horrible cult-like racket designed to shift product, and it all goes back on as soon as you stop. Which is not to say that, were I to stop the “52”, I wouldn’t pile on the weight again – but I don’t feel like stopping.

52 is supposed to help you live longer, and I hope it does. My blood pressure, which was “high normal” even on medication, is now completely regular – so much so, that I’m hoping to at least reduce the number of pills I take. I’m currently 2mph faster on my bike than I was at the beginning of the diet, and my hips and back are no longer screaming in agony by the time I finish. I have some concerns about a lack of calcium and iron in my diet, but I’m aware of these problems because of the app I’ve been using, myfitnesspal, which is a free, and very good, way of keeping track of what you eat and how much you exercise.

Like WeightWatchers, myfitnesspal works by encouraging you to record everything. Unlike WW, you don’t have to pay a monthly subscription. The app’s database of foods is cluttered but comprehensive, and you can use your phone’s camera to scan barcodes to make recording quicker. The time-consuming part is recording home-made recipes, but then you can re-use anything that you put in once.

Twice a week, I restrict myself to 600 calories. Like Dr Michael Mosley, I’ve experimented with this, and think I’ve cracked a formula for one of these days: some OatsSoSimple for breakfast (made with just 100ml of soya milk, because 180ml is too much), followed by either a twice-baked potato or a home-made fish pie for an evening meal. I always do these days in the working week, because I don’t find it hard to skip lunch at work when I’m busy.

I’ve set up myfitnesspal to lose 450g or 1lb per week, though you don’t strictly have to stick to this, because the 2 lean days are what matters. When I reach my ideal weight (I have one in mind), I might put it up to “maintain weight”. Regular exercise, of course, burns calories, and increases your daily allowance. Myfitnesspal records your “net” calories, anyway, so you can always see where you really stand. My bike ride this morning was 58 minutes of “vigorous” cycling (14-16 mph, 22-25 kph), worth 902 calories. This is enough for one of my home made pizza meals. If I lose a few more kilos, I’ll be getting over 16mph, and into a whole new category.

A couple of interesting things about doing 52. First of all, there is a miraculous reduction in appetite. Everyone thinks when they begin that when you do the lean days, you’ll follow by stuffing yourself on the fat days. Not so. In fact, you just don’t feel like eating as much. Success breeds success. You can buy a 100g bar of chocolate, and eat 15 or 30g of it over a few days. At no stage do you feel like scarfing the lot. My youngest is into baking at the moment. She made some lovely chocolate fairy cakes yesterday. I ate one, that’s it. My home made fig rolls lasted over a week.

The second really interesting thing is that your average net calorie consumption is ridiculously low. I’m looking at this week’s stats, and my net consumption is just over 1000 calories per day (I’m still in negative calorie consumption as I write this, because of the bike ride). That’s just over half what you’re allowed when you’re trying to lose 450g a week. And yet I do not feel hungry. This is no fluke: last week: 1250 per day; the week before: around 1400; week before that: 1250 again. So whereas WeightWatchers can leave you insanely hungry all the time, 52 means that the staffroom can be full of cake, as it was on the MacMillan Coffee Morning on Friday, and you don’t bat an eyelid.

I’d been toying, before I started this, with cutting wheat and dairy out of my diet, not because of any specific intolerance, but partly because I kinda, sorta, believe the whole paleo diet argument: that we didn’t evolve to eat wheat and cow’s milk; and partly because I’ve been completely addicted to bread all my life, it’s my achilles heel when it comes to food. I love carbs, but I love carbs from bread more than anything. White crusty loaf with a big hunk of cheese. Drool. But. Standing in the dairy aisle of a typical supermarket, you’ve got to agree: there’s something wrong with this picture.

But 52 is better than paleo. Fact is, my bread craving has reduced along with my other craving. I’m not going to have toast for breakfast when I know that oats will get me through till the evening fish pie. And I’m not going to squander hundreds of calories on cheese when I can have a chicken and tofu stir fry and a Cornetto.

Having to work late the other night, we were fed at an odd time, and the food was terrible. I took one bite of a limp and soggy (and tiny) slice of catering pizza and said, “This is not worth the calories, is it?” (I’ll tell you what is worth the calories, though: Gourmet Burger Kitchen Aberdeen Angus Burgers. Oh my.)

And the trousers? Well, I got into the Marlboro jeans and the Dockers, but the black Levi’s went back on the shelf of shame. A few weeks to go.

I’ll post my recipes for lean day meals another time.

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*34 inches is 86cm, which is why metric never took off in clothes sizing. In France they get around this by having arbitrary size numbering, as for women’s clothes in this country. In France, my 36-inch waist size translates to a “46”, which is much more palatable than “92”.

Related articles
- MyFitnessPal Calorie Counter – The Best Weight Loss App On The iPhone (makeuseof.com)
- The 5:2 diet: can it help you lose weight and live longer? (telegraph.co.uk)