Zorac's LiveJournal

Dear Mr. Sainsbury,
I frequently purchase from your supermarkets small packets of minced beef with which to make my exciting cuisine. Alas, of late, said item appears to be all to often out of stock, reducing me to the lazy-man's option of a ready meal. On the subject of ready meals, You seem to be making more and more of them that are for two people. Isn't that defeating the object of the exercise? Not to mention discriminating against those of us with only one mouth to feed.
Yours Unimpressedly,
zorac

Dear Sandwich Vendors,
Lettuce belongs in salad, and even then requires a nice vinaigrette dressing. It is not nice in sandwiches. Please stop putting lettuce in virtually every sandwich you make, just for the hell of it. And don't tell me to pick it out if I don't like it - even if I do, that limp lettuce taste remains. And don't even get me started on lettuce in with burgers or other hot things...
Yours Frustratedly,
zorac

Dear Apple,
Panther has the best (and most useful) eye candy ever. You rock.
Yours Fanboyishly,
zorac

The weekend so far: Friday and Saturday evenings were taken up by mini!t00b (which I at one time dubbed the anti!t00b on the grounds of having to refer to malachan by his real name instead of calling him Cygnus) with kay_taylor and Cyg's non-fandom, non-LJ friend Peter. On Friday night we started at Hollywood Cocktails - very understated, very pleasant, and very nice drinks - followed by Thai food at Chiang Mai Kitchen, then back to Hollywood for more cocktails (the Cinnamon Daiquiri is highly recommended). Topics of conversation included a brief history of the fandom, including the complete Fall and Fall of Gryffindor Tower and all the associated wank, and a completely unrelated discussion of Crime and Punishment. Much Kudos to Peter for being unfazed by the fandom wankery. Saturday, we met up again, with the addition of olympia_m, to watch Kill Bill (and not for the first time, for some of us), before having dinner at Meltz. There was (naturally) more discussion of fandom wackiness, plus plenty of discussion of movies (including theories for the upcoming Revolutions).

Some time this morning, the clocks went back. The Evil Time clock lived up to its name by being the only one I had to change manually (alarm clock is radio controlled, video picks it up from teletext, computers adjust themselves automatically). Unfortunately, the theoretical extra hour in bed didn't seem to have any actual benefit as I've still managed to feel strangely tired all day. This seems to have contributed to my coder's block - I'm trying to finish off so perl work I've been doing for RS but have been making painfully slow progress. Meh. Time to go and cook steak, methinks.

Amazon.com have a new feature which allows you to search inside books. They don't have the entire stock online (apparently Voldemort only appears in non-fiction :-), although that's down to copyright issues as much as time to scan entire books in. It supposedly allows you to look at the pages on which search results appear, although that doesn't seem to be working for me at the moment.

Well, it appears that my neighbours downstairs have been doing some decorating. I vaguely notice the smell of paint/turps/whatever in the bathroom last night - presumably coming out of the fan vent. This morning I woke up rather early to discover that the delightful scent had spread to the rest of the flat and become rather more pungent. I but the bathroom fan on in the hopes of at least stemming the tide, but it did very little to get rid of what had already come in, and left in running while I trudged off through the icy air to work. This evening I got home to find the situation little different, and facing the choice of freezing or suffocating, I opted to have the windows open for an hour or so while I did shopping and chores. Now it's down to a faint background smell, hopefully enough to allow me to get some sleep tonight. Meh.

It's been so long since I last did a big whopper of an RL update that I've almost forgotten how. Or perhaps not. Here follows a tale of two weekends and many movies.

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Gakked from a mailing list by alnitak. The typos are almost as amusing as the story itself.

Made me chuckle at the dumbness of our trans atlantic fiends

So someone I know works for a company that does property management for train stations. One of the managers has had to go to a meeting concerning Network Rail being sued. Apparently a tourist family from ole US of A went to Kings X to get a photo taken between platforms 9 and 10 where there's a spiffy blue plaque about the Hogwarts Express leaving from platform 9 3/4. So their son grabs a trolley and runs straight at the wall with the predicatble result of going arse over tit and doing himself an injury.

Predictably NW are being sued for not having a sign up saying that it's a brick wall not the entrance to a fictional land.

When Bubba grows up and can do something even dumber, who reckons he's a future winner of the Darwin Awards?

Further discussion on the list considered possible responses. The first was to counter-sue for damage to the wall and trolley. Much better was the suggestion that the injured party prove his magical abilities and show his ticket for the Hogwarts Express - and even that's not necessarily sufficient for the barrier to open - c.f. Chamber of Secrets.

iTunes 4.1 - for Mac OS X and Windows XP/2000

Yup, that would be iTunes - and the iTunes Music Store - for Windows. MusicMatch, WinAmp et al: read it and weep. There are also updates and a bunch of new accessories for the iPod.

T00bage Revolutions: Oxford, 7th-9th November
See Cyg's post for more details.

I can provide accommodation for 5 people on both nights - 2 beds in the spare room and sofa, cushions, etc for 3 in the lounge, and there's plenty of bedding to go around. Let me know if you want to book a space. We can probably fit in a few more if needed, but things would get a bit cramped (and the bedding would run out). I won't be offering the other half of my bed - not least because hermorrine might object...

Sometimes Y!M conversations ramble across the strangest topics. An example is included below for your elucidation:

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So, in case you hadn't guessed from the above, I'm off to the windy city on Friday. Squeee!

So along with the irksome work crises, there have been some upsides in the last couple of days. Somehow I managed to get the spare room cleared out and the flat into some semblance of order before Mum arrived on Friday night. We cooked up a nice steak dinner and watched a DVD. Yesterday, we trundled into town to scour the charity shops, and our luck was in - there was a book sale outside Oxfam HQ in Summertown. Between that and the shops there, we picked up a fair few books, and I garnered an original edition of Trivial Pursuit. Lunch was at Pierre Victoire - their usual excellent deal, £8.90 for a three course meal. After this, we went to the pictures to see Down With Love, then home. After tea, we pursued trivialities until the crises returned once more.

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