Offmessage

Here’s an idle thought…. Spot Fixing is alledgedly prevalent in Pakistani cricket.

How’s this for a theory?

Darrel Hair knew about a particularly large bet (and a related fix) on a specific period of the now infamous 4th Test between England and Pakistan (the Ovalgate test), and deliberately blew the bet by adding the 5 penalty runs for ball tampering; the only way he could stop the fix going ahead, and explaining the huge overreaction from the Pakistani team.

Like I said, just a thought

[youtube www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_eEfP-3GjM]

Ouch for Microsoft, at least. Dell gives the go ahead for Linux.

I love Indian Food. Which British male does not, I wonder? Really weird ones, I reckon. Anyway. Like most men in their mid-thirties I have recently realised that I am a phenomenal cook. Who knew? My piece de resistance is indian food. Not only do I pillage at will from Madhur Jaffrey’s excellent Curry Bible but I’ve strayed as far afield as Floyd’s India (try the vindaloo recipe – once) and Hansa’s Gujarati Cookbook (some of the finest vegetarian food you will ever taste).

While Floyd is pragmatically English in his choice of ingredients both Madhur and Hansa use a huge variety of names for the ingredients, many of which are only available from Indian supermarkets (which we don’t have in York, because we don’t look beyond the city walls, thank you /very/ much). It is with this in mind that the Cook’s Thesaurus is absolutely invaluable. It means that you can actually find out what it is that you’re supposed to be buying, and what you can substitute it for if you can’t find it…

Today’s ingredient? From the fabulous Sailu’s Kitchen blog – JAGGERY.

jaggery Pronunciation: JAG-uh-ree

Notes: This is a tan, unrefined sugar that is common in India. It’s made from the sap of palm trees or sugar cane and is much more flavorful than granulated sugar. It’s often sold in solid cakes, but it should crumble when you squeeze it. Look for it in Indian markets.

Substitutes: Mix 1 C dark brown sugar + 2 teaspoons molasses OR palm sugar OR piloncillo OR brown sugar OR maple sugar OR date sugar

OK, I’m becoming obsessed…

Makka Pakka,
Akka Wakka,
Mikka Makka moo!

Makka Pakka,
Appa yakka,
Ikka akka, ooo

Hum dum,
Agga pang,
Ing, ang, ooo

Makka Pakka,
Akka wakka,
Mikka Makka moo!

You can all join in.

Monty just sent me this link from this year’s Isle of Wight Festival blog:

100 tickets will be on the Ticketmaster website at 9am tomorrow to be auctioned and sold to the highest bidder. We are aware that a lot people haven’t been able to purchase tickets as we sold out so quickly. We are able to sell another 100 tickets, rather than putting them on sale in the normal way and them end up in the hands of touts, we decided this was the fairest way to do it.

…rather than putting them in the hands of touts…we thought we’d just act like touts ourselves…

Angel skis

[youtube www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFqQOlYE4EE]

I am very slow. I had heard them take the piss out of our Dave’s webcameron project on the radio, but I hadn’t actually bothered to look. Oh. Dear. Lord. Apparently he’s in beta. b3ta more like. And he has a youtube channel. What a twat. I mean really, who sold him that load of old toot? (And it’s ASP.NET so he’s likely paying through the nose for it as well).

Stalin says you will be punished!

So. People have been nagging me to add commenting to this blog. A long story cut very short is that the current software (of my own very early creation) is so unmaintainable that I can’t.

I’ve tried moving to Movable Type a few times, and for reasons too many to mention I have been unable to. My rather unprofessional opinion of MT is that it sucks. Sorry, but that’s just my impression over the few blogs that we run on it and my own attempts to use it for my own purposes.

So, I’m trying WordPress. First thoughts….

Importing is a bitch. They don’t specify a generic import file format, so you have to frig your data into one from another blogging platform (4 hours). They can only handle import files of 2MB (apparently arbitrary code limit, v. bad); offmessage in my chosen format is somewhere in the region of 5MB, so I had to chop it up into 3 files. They don’t tell you that their import routine is very memory hungry and that you should up your php.ini memory_limit from the default 8MB to somewhere more like 64MB to get your paltry 2MB file to import.

All that said, it’s actually going rather well, and so far I’m pretty pleased. And it certainly knocks MT into a cocked hat.