We have an egg poacher, which is a good few years old. Probably a number of decades old, in fact:
Our trusty egg poacher
You add water below the four “cups”, grease each cup with a little olive oil before adding an egg and let it boil with the lid on until the eggs are poached. Simple. (The preceding link to Wikipedia shows how real poached eggs should be cooked – too difficult for me first thing on a Sunday morning!) Except that over the years eggs seem to have got bigger. Our local supermarket often only has large sized bio-eggs, and these overflow out of the cups when you crack them. Which makes a horrible mess.
So a couple of weeks ago I bought some microwave egg poaching containers on E-Bay:
The microwave egg poachers (well, two of a set of four)
I have experimented with microwaving the eggs in them at different powers and for different times, but have come to the conclusion that you can’t avoid cooking the yolks before the whites are cooked. Which is fine if you like hard-boiled eggs. But we prefer our eggs runny in the middle.
So for now, it is back to the drawing board. Ruth found something which looks like it might work, at amazon.de. But the price didn’t work for me – 50 Euro for four bits of plastic is too much. However a quick check at amazon.co.uk showed that they were only five pounds for two there (plus postage, but even so the bill is less than 26 EUR for 4, which is still not cheap but a darned sight cheaper than from the German store! Right now, I am waiting for them to arrive.
There have been a numberof reports in the last days of iTunes app developers apparently accessing other iTunes users’ accounts to buy their applications, to increase their rating on iTunes. People have had bills of $100 or more generated for apps and books that they didn’t order.
It is not clear at the moment how the accounts have been hacked – whether Apple has a problem at their end or whether the users affected had weak passwords which have been hacked. However, there a couple of things I have done to reduce the risk of being “stung”:
Changed my passwords to be stronger, by following these suggestions:
Use more characters than the minimum required by Apple
Make sure the passwords consist of a mixture of upper and lower case characters, one or more digits and special characters such as “§ $ % & / ( = ?”
Don’t use a password which is a single word found in dictionary, but where some characters have been substituted with similar digits (i.e. containing Leets, e.g. “pa55w0rd” for “password”). Leet passwords can be cracked with a dictionary attack almost as easily as words in “clear” text.
Deleted all my credit cards and bank details defined as payment methods and replaced them with a pre-paid Mastercard which I recently ordered to pay Ryanair with. This card never has more than a few hundred Euro pre-loaded, often much less. It limits my financial risk and means if I have to have the card cancelled, it don’t affect the rest of my life.
Note that potentially, any credit card or bank account details you have permanently stored in an internet account for a supplier are similarly at risk. Other suppliers where I have updated my password and credit card details are Amazon and Google Checkout. The risk is same in both cases – a crooked employee could copy the credit card details or their server could be hacked from outside. I think although Amazon and Google are both security conscious, it doesn’t hurt to take these relatively simple precautions.
Film from traffic cameras in Moscow. It looks like obeying traffic lights, giving way, and driving in the correct lane are considered optional by a number of drivers in Moscow. (Best to mute the sound, which has been added afterwards…)
Ronald Sherman, the president of the Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade, which represents 28 large fleet owners, said he had seen would-be taxi passengers ignore Chevrolet Malibu or Ford Escape cabs, opting for a longer wait in order to grab the more spacious Crown Vic.
“These minis are ridiculous; passengers do not get into them,” Mr. Sherman said, asserting that the smaller back seat and low headroom made the hybrids uncomfortable and potentially dangerous for riders.
Kevin Healy, another fleet owner, agreed. Of the Volkswagen Jetta, another alternative taxi, he said: “Literally, I can’t get in. And I would need a doctor to get out.”
Here’s the full article from the New York Times. Click on the links in the quote above to see what qualifies as a mini car in the eyes of the New York Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade. No wonder the USA is hungry for gasoline…
We hear a lot about the British health system from our various relatives in the UK, and it is not usually positive. In particular, getting x-rays done seems to involve lots of waiting to get x-rayed and further waiting to get the results. I don’t mean a few hours, but rather, days or more typically, weeks.
So I have to admit to being impressed (again and again) by the efficiency of the system here:
Yesterday I went to the dentist because I have had toothache for the last three or four weeks. Not all the time, but sharp pains that come once or twice a day and disappear within a few seconds. She removed a crown on the tooth I thought was the source of the pain, but couldn’t see anything wrong. She recommended that I get an ultrasound scan of my sinuses to check that there was nothing wrong there. So this morning I called the local ear nose and throat doctor to ask for an appointment.
I was able to see him at about 10:00 am and had the scan and he also looked into my sinuses with an endoscopic camera. Everything was clear, so he called to the local radiological clinic and asked if they could do a CT scan of my sinuses and jaw to check if there was a cyst under one of the teeth. I was able to go straight over and at midday I had the scan, and half an hour later I saw the radiologist who showed me the results – I do indeed have a cyst under the root of a tooth 3 along from where the pain appears to originate.
The red ring marks the cyst immediately under the root of my tooth
He copied the entire 250 MB scan onto a CD for me to give to the ear nose and throat doctor tomorrow morning – he will then discuss the results with him before they inform the dentist of the diagnosis and discuss the necessary work that will need to be carried out.
That is impressively fast, I think. Especially compared to the service times in the UK.
BP has been quite tight-lipped about what is going on at the Deepwater Oil Spill site, so it is difficult as a member of the public to understand the issues about the spill.
There is a web site, The Oil Drum, which has attracted a lot of informed comments about the developing situation in the Gulf of Mexico, which makes disturbing reading. Take a look at this comment made by one of the readers, who seems to know what he is talking about. The main point being made is that BP’s decision to cut off the riser pipe and let the oil flow, capturing what they can, is probably the best course of action that can be taken. Why? Because although BP and the US government aren’t saying much, the evidence points to there being multiple leaks below the seabed, which would be made worse if the pipe was sealed and which are unpredictable and uncontrollable. Think of a garden hose which has been stabbed in several places with a knife – what happens if you close the nozzle at the end?
Here parts of the comment to give you an idea, but you can read the whole comment at the link above:
All the actions and few tid bits of information all lead to one inescapable conclusion. The well pipes below the sea floor are broken and leaking. Now you have some real data of how BP’s actions are evidence of that, as well as some murky statement from “BP officials” confirming the same.
I took some time to go into a bit of detail concerning the failure of Top Kill because this was a significant event. To those of us outside the real inside loop, yet still fairly knowledgeable, it was a major confirmation of what many feared. That the system below the sea floor has serious failures of varying magnitude in the complicated chain, and it is breaking down and it will continue to.
What does this mean?
It means they will never cap the gusher after the wellhead. They cannot…the more they try and restrict the oil gushing out the bop?…the more it will transfer to the leaks below. Just like a leaky garden hose with a nozzle on it. When you open up the nozzle?…it doesn’t leak so bad, you close the nozzle?…it leaks real bad,
same dynamics. It is why they sawed the riser off…or tried to anyway…but they clipped it off, to relieve pressure on the leaks “down hole”. I’m sure there was a bit of panic time after they crimp/pinched off the large riser pipe and the Diamond wire saw got stuck and failed…because that crimp diverted pressure and flow to the rupture down below.
Contrary to what most of us would think as logical to stop the oil mess, actually opening up the gushing well and making it gush more became direction BP took after confirming that there was a leak. In fact if you note their actions, that should become clear. They have shifted from stopping or restricting the gusher to opening it up and catching it. This only makes sense if they want to relieve pressure at the leak hidden down below the seabed…..and that sort of leak is one of the most dangerous and potentially damaging kind of leak there could be. It is also inaccessible which compounds our problems. There is no way to stop that leak from above, all they can do is relieve the pressure on it and the only way to do that right now is to open up the nozzle above and gush more oil into the gulf and hopefully catch it, which they have done, they just neglected to tell us why, gee thanks.
A down hole leak is dangerous and damaging for several reasons.
There will be erosion throughout the entire beat up, beat on and beat down remainder of the “system” including that inaccessible leak. The same erosion I spoke about in the first post is still present and has never stopped, cannot be stopped, is impossible to stop and will always be present in and acting on anything that is left which has crude oil “Product” rushing through it…
…Over the next 2 months the mechanical situation also cannot improve, it can only get worse, getting better is an impossibility. While they may make some gains on collecting the leaked oil, the structural situation cannot heal itself. It will continue to erode and flow out more oil and eventually the inevitable collapse which cannot be stopped will happen. It is only a simple matter of who can “get there first”…us or the well.
We can only hope the race against that eventuality is one we can win, but my assessment I am sad to say is that we will not.
Whilst we have been waiting impatiently for our architect to get back to us with some modifications which we requested to our house plans, we have received a first proposal from the landscape architect who he recommended to us:
View from the N.E.
View from the S.W. (The street is to the left, entrance & driveway is top left)
The main garden plans are too big to post on the blog, but you get an idea from the small sketches above. (The house and garage is not really going to be completely black, but will have dry-stone walls and a conventional roof!)
We are very pleased with the proposal, which is completely in line with our own ideas. It will give us some interesting views from the house, uses indigenous plants and accommodates our request to have some citrus trees in the garden – we like freshly pressed orange juice every morning and it would be great to be able to press fruit from our own trees when it is in season.
I also spoke to the architect today, and he promised us that although he had put us on hold for a couple of weeks to finish another project, we are now his top priority, and he hopes to have everything we need to apply for planning permission completed within the next two weeks, which is also good news.
We have been trying to plan the furniture for the various rooms in our new house – we need to check everything will fit in, and think about how many power points lights and switches we need, where. For the kitchen and some other rooms we have been using the IKEA planning tools which you can download from their site. They allow 3D modelling and will spit out a BOM (bill of materials) listing all the items you need to order from IKEA and the total price. Very handy. However, IKEA doesn’t provide tools for every room in the house, and of course not everything will come from IKEA. The programs only run on PCs however, which is a bit of pain for us (most of the computers here are Macs).
We have played around with Google Sketch-Up, which is very powerful and allows 2D and 3D modelling, but has a correspondingly steep learning curve. But today I stumbled over Roomle, which is a new web-based 2D/3D modelling application, which seems easier to learn (but probably not as powerful). I found it on LifeHacker, which has a short article summarizing its features. I think it could be worth playing with over the next days as it looks like it will allow us to quickly model our remaining rooms.
If you need a temporary mail address to receive a verification mail and send a reply before you can download music or a file from the internet, 10 Minute Mail is a good solution. It will give you a mail address which is active for ten minutes before being automatically deleted.
We got back from Spain last weekend, having driven down and back to avoid the uncertainty of flying while Eyjafjallajökull was still erupting. We broke the journey into 3 roughly equal-sized stretches, and overnighted in Chalon-sur-Saône and Perpignan in both directions. We have found nice restaurants in both towns, and try to always break our journeys there – we are creatures of habit!
The trip was to sign powers of attorney for our lawyer to deal with applying for planning permission for the house and also for him to deal with our tax affairs in Spain. We have to pay council tax each year for the plot of land. In Spain if you don’t pay on time, you immediately get penalty fees added to the tax, and if you continue not to pay, the property can be compulsorily sold to pay the back-taxes, so we wanted to make sure everything is handled correctly and on time.
We also had three meetings with our architect in Valencia and made good progress on the design of the house. We had assumed that it would be a lot cheaper to build a two-story house and had asked him to make sure that when we get older and have mobility problems, a lift or ramps could be added. And that all the important rooms (including the main bedroom) were on the ground floor. He contacted us just before we left, suggesting that a bungalow would hardly be any more expensive, and asking if he should also make proposals for having everything on one level, which we agreed to.
So we actually had several proposals to look at, and have settled on one of his bungalow proposals. We are combining a traditional appearance from the outside with a very open-plan layout inside. The outer walls will be dry-stone walls, like the walls you see in fields, where the stones are piled on top of each other without any mortar holding them together. To ensure good insulation, there will be an inner lining of a conventional brick wall, then insulation and finally plasterboard on the inside. The roof lining will also be well insulated – we will be using a sandwich board construction with a thick layer of insulation between two layers of veneered plywood. The boards look like oversized parquet floor boards and slot together with a tongue-and-groove system, also like the parquet systems.
The main part of the house will between 12 and 10m wide by 16m long having the lounge/dining area down one side, and an office and studio area down the other side. The roof is a simple gable roof having quite a shallow slope to it (1 in 4). In the middle between the rooms along the outside walls will be a bathroom and storage rooms, which will not have walls reaching right up into the apex of the roof, but which will have flat ceilings at the conventional height, leaving the outside rooms (lounge, office etc.) with a view up into the top of the roof. We really liked this idea, which should make for a very light and airy design. The bedrooms will be at the wider end of the house, and will have conventional walls going right up into the roof. At the other end is the kitchen, garage and a partially covered courtyard.
We were able to finalize the layout of the house in our three meetings and now have to define where we want the light and power sockets.
