Keys Corner

Two weeks ago it started snowing – it hasn’t stopped (for long) since. The snow is piled up everywhere and as you can see, it started snowing again when we went out for a walk this afternoon. The snow on our roof has found it’s way inside since it started piling up and we have a leak – actually, several leaks – into our bedroom – fortunately not onto the bed, which happened to our neighbours in the other side of our semi-detached house a couple of years ago.

The houses in our little cul-de-sac all have had problems with leaking roofs at some time or another – they have lots of strange angles, flat areas and curved roofs over dormer windows – the architect was a Greek and the style of the houses is very mediterranean – light and airy, but totally unsuitable for the raw, windy, wet climate in the hills north of Frankfurt. Still, it keeps the local roofing specialists in business!

If you ever start cooking, only to discover that you are missing a vital ingredient, or the ingredient called for doesn’t seem to be available locally, then The Cook’s Thesaurus is the place to turn to. Lets say you don’t have any endives (chicory, if you are British), this is what the Cook’s Thesaurus has to say:

Belgian endive = French endive = witloof = witloof chicory = chicory (in Britain) = Belgium chicory = blanching chicory = Dutch chicory = green-leaved blanching chicory = chicon

Notes: These crunchy, slightly bitter leaves are often used to make hors d’oeuvres, but they can also be chopped and added to salads, or braised to make an exquisite (and expensive) side dish. Select heads with yellow tips; those with green tips are more bitter. Their peak season is the late fall and winter. Substitutes: radicchio (similar flavor) OR arugula OR watercress

Here’s someone who probably lives in Brighton (which still, just, has two piers):

I’m using Vlans in my network as a way of preventing pier to pier communication…

Found here in the Eggcorn Database, which collects unusual spellings of a particular kind, which have come to be called eggcorns. Typical examples include free reign (instead of free rein) or hone in on (instead of home in on).

Ruth got a phone call from T-Com (the local PTT) on Friday – our regular 6-monthly applications for a DSL line have born fruit and we can now have a 1 Mbit/s 384 kbits/s connection. Other locations can get 3 Mbit/s, but even one Mbit/s 384 kbit/s is much faster than ISDN and the main advantage is that we can now get a flat rate. That was previously impossible because T-Com, doesn’t offer flat rate on ISDN and their competitors, who do ISDN flat rates, don’t do Schmitten.

The bearer of the good news promised to fax us the details (T-Com doesn’t give its marketers e-mail, it seems) but didn’t. However a bit of research at the weekend confirmed that he was telling the truth and we have signed up for a DSL connection and flat rate. Now all we need is the DSL-splitter, which should arrive within the next week or so, and then we can try it out.

If things look a little different at the moment, it is because I’m upgrading to WordPress 1.5 – normal service will be resumed as soon as I’ve mastered the new style sheets.

Until then, you may have major problems navigating using Microsoft Explorer. You can help yourself in the interim by using a modern web browser which conforms to the web standards, such as Firefox, Mozilla or Safari…

Update (2005-02-21): Upgrade is finished. there are few minor things to tidy up, but I think the styles now work with all the major browsers. MS Explorer for Mac has a problem with the text body being displayed too wide, but I’m not aware of any other problems. If you spot something, add a comment here.

Oh dear, Worcester Sauce, a great British food tradition (almost on a par with Marmite), falls from favour spectacularly this week:

Fresh and canned foods, ready meals and cooking sauces were removed from sale on the orders of government food watchdogs after the chance discovery in Italy 11 days ago of an illegal, potentially cancer-causing dye ingredient in a bottle of Crosse & Blackwell Worcester sauce…

...The alert relates to 357 products with Worcester sauce flavouring, and the figure may rise. It follows 18 months of more low-level warnings involving 200 products – including pickles, cooking oils and sauces – to consumers, retailers, manufacturers and importers over the inclusion of the dye, which is banned in Europe.

An article in the latest Economist highlights a problem with the biometric passports that the USA has been insisting be implemented by October 2005.

I was aware that the new passports would carry data such as digital photographs or finger prints of the owner, which could be read out a chip integrated into the passport, but not that the technology to be used would be radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags containing unencrypted data which can be read out over a distance of several meters.

The original idea, apparently, was that using unencrypted data would make international interoperability easier, and encourage airlines, hotels and car rental companies to also scan the data – thus making it easy to track the movement of suspect persons. Belatedly, the authorities have realised this may not be a very good idea – terrorists and criminals can also read the data, making it easy to target specific nationalities if they wish and increasing the ease of identity theft. Right now, confusion reigns, as the various national authorities scramble to come up with (different national) solutions to this problem.

As the Economist says: Perhaps it is time to go back to the drawing board. (Luckily, my passport doesn’t run out until 2009, so they have plenty of time to fix the little glitches resulting from an over-hasty implementation.)

The EU is planning to shake up the mortgage market (worth 4 trillion Euro, or 40% of EU GDP) by making it easier to get cross-border mortgages. At the moment, only 1% of mortgages are financed from a different country to that where the property is located. Ideally, the reforms will harmonise the legal requirements and the handling of deeds in the member countries. Doing this would reduce the complexity of cross-border financing and thus make the market more efficient, benefiting consumers in the EU and creating about 600 000 new jobs in the process.

Unfortunately, the Guardian reports that the terrible two, France and Germany, are taking a protectionist stance and blocking the reform.

A bad move, Herr Schröder, given the lame German economy and the highest unemployment in Germany since the Weimar Republic.

Dear Mr. Architect:

Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.

Keep in mind that the house I ultimately choose must cost less than the one I am currently living in. Make sure, however, that you correct all the deficiencies that exist in my current house (the floor of my kitchen vibrates when I walk across it, and the walls don’t have nearly enough insulation in them)...

Yes, you might have seen this before, but if not, it bears reading – continued here.

We had thunder and lightning last night, after a couple of days of torrential rain, so we were a bit surprised to discover a good 10 cm of snow on the ground this morning. Above are a couple of views of nearby houses in the woods behind our house, taken with a camera-phone on a walk this afternoon.