Author Archives: Leigh

Cooking

Action: "A drop of alcohol will spice up this bolognese sauce." Reaction: It now smells like an accident in a mulled wine factory. Action: Trying to cook bolognese at all. Reaction: My shirt is covered in red spots. Equal and opposite? Not so sure.

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More lunch blogging

Today sees a serious sandwich combination, namely ham and mustard. I recently provided a buffet supper for some friends, and included this classic combination a long with some others, all unashamedly stolen from the Hotel Felix afternoon tea menu: Ham & Mustard Cream Cheese & Cucumber Smoked Salmon Cheese & Pickle (admittedly their combinations were […]

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In Defence of Spam

Nobody could really be surprised when spam emails started appearing. Every other communication medium is filled with advertisements and unsolicited intrusion. Newspapers are filled with adverts, and we are harassed by junk mail, telemarketing and door-to-door salesmen. Two experiences have give me something more to think about when it comes to spam. Some time ago […]

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Lunch blogging

Ham and sun-dried tomato omelette, salad with thousand-island dressing. Maybe I ought to do more of this.

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Leigh’s Backup Strategy Begins…

I’ve never really had a backup strategy. Now and again everything’s turned to toast, but previously it’s not been much of a worry. As one gets older, however, things start to seem more important, and constant nagging focuses the mind as well. Each loss of data eats away at your soul a little bit. Admittedly […]

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What’s in your phone number?

Recently I’ve been entering a lot of phone numbers in a database. This is dull. Phone numbers do, however, open up a load of (slightly) interesting geekery. One of the problems I had was with the London dialling code. Numbers in London tend to start with 0207 or 0208. I decided that this seemed like […]

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Link of the day

MSDN: All print providers must export the initialization function, InitializePrintProvidor. Pointers to all the other functions must be supplied in a PRINTPROVIDOR structure. (Note that these two names are misspelled, but are consistent with the names that appear in the header file, winsplp.h.) Of course, one can’t correct the spelling of one’s functions, else one […]

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Open Source Software – a Chink in the Armour

The collective wisdom of the Internet states pretty categorically that Microsoft is evil, Google is never evil, Macs are cool and Linux is best of all. Of course not all of that is true, and you can’t always believe what you read on the Internet. Google isn’t evil but colludes with dictatorships to oppress freedom […]

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Is the Network Timeout Dead?

Computers are quite good at waiting. My computer spends a substantial proportion of its day in an idle state waiting for me to do something. It also spends time waiting for network resources, and it makes me wait too. When I go to a webpage or request something online the computer needs to download everything […]

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Misinformation on the Internet

Recently I’ve been writing code to produce a database of Alumni in the University’s Architecture Department where I work. Somewhat irritatingly the servers all run on IIS which required me to learn how to talk to SQL Server with ASP. The irritating part being that I’ve only just learnt how to talk to MySQL with […]

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WordPress

I was amused to have finished migrating this blog over to WordPress to read this article on Coding Horror: I’ve been thoroughly impressed with the community around WordPress, and the software itself is remarkably polished. That’s not to say that I haven’t run into a few egregious bugs in the 2.5 release, but on the […]

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Further reading – Godwin’s Law

Having recently discussed the strategy of comparing one’s antagonist’s actions to those of the Nazis, I was amused to notice Dr Crippen referring to a similar technique: Over the years, I have seen far too many women who have been raped. There will be others, patients of mine, who have not sought help from me […]

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Nazi Germany: an argument technique?

Comparisons to the holocaust seem rife today. Any attack on civil liberties is compared to the way the Nazis treated the Jews. Another example crops up today via the UK’s leading anti-vaccine site, JABS (no link love, search for it yourself). The government is considering making vaccination compulsory for children as a way of improving […]

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Shopping Vacuum

Recently Cambridge saw the opening of a substantial extension to the Lion Yard shopping centre – the Grand Arcade. This development features 50 or so largish shopping units as shown in the floorplan. I was somewhat amused to wander round the arcade soon after its opening and discover that many of the units were still […]

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Spam

I migrated this blog in early February – now we’ve reached early April and the comment spam has noticed me. Here’s hoping that WordPress comment spam features work better than Bloglines. In alternative news, there’s an amusing tale at theDailyWTF referring to security at the Halifax. Not too long ago, my HalifaxATM card got deactivated […]

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Success

Despite a long round trip, and waiting a million years for some DNS settings to propagate themselves correctly, I’ve managed to migrate the blog to here, which is nice. Over the next few weeks there’ll be some formatting changes, as I start to build a website at http://www.simpleigh.com/. Aye!

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Blook

They tell me that the latest phenomenon to hit the internet today is a blook. An online book. Not sure why the word book gains an ‘l’ – to me that implies that the word “blog” should be an online bog, which can’t be true… Nowadays you can go straight to Lulu and upload your blook. Anyone […]

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Blog Updates

The cheeky people at Blogger have been updating their engine, temporarily breaking the beast which is Windows Live Writer. No matter, a quick journey to the writer home page, a seamless install and we’re going again. They do tell me that it’s possible to blog from MS Word these days, though I’m quite happy with […]

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Cake

I’d just like to point out that Madeira Cake is very high on the list of greatest cakes known to humanity. It manages to be luxuriously moist, proving far better than many inferior sponge cakes which generally prove to be dry and crumbly. It’s not quite up there with Mille-feuille, of course, which combines several […]

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Smelly

The Question of the Week on B3ta at the moment is all about personal hygiene. It’s full of exciting stories about people who smell really bad. Unfortunately this seems to have coincided with an eczema flare up, and the great sage that is Wikipedia is advising: The first and primary recommendation is that people suffering […]

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