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I made myself a sambar with dosai last night. The dosai(s) (rice & lentil pancakes) were absolutely delicious. The sambar was, well, sambar. Possibly a bit nicer than normal.
The problem with dosai(s) is not that they are difficult to make, but that you have to start with a frying pan that is no more than lukewarm. That means that if you want to make more than one you either need lots of pans (where "lots" = "number of dosai(s) required with a maximum number of pans of five") or a lot of patience.
+++++
I've also spent the weekend setting up the new computer and it is now running. I've bitten the bullet and bought Hold Em Manager 2. Significantly different from HEM 1, but I'm getting used to it. I'm also back to multiple monitors, so I can watch the stats update on one screen while multi-tabling on the other. Office 2010 is running fine, including Outlook (which Vista steadfastly refused to run in 2010 version). Windows 7 is a dream compared to Vista, although perhaps it's "the new Novatech computer is a dream compared to the old Dell".
Dell reported weak results earlier last week (as did HP) and blamed consumer sentiment. Well, yes and no. What they meant was "consumer sentiment against buying new PCs". In my case, I bought a new PC, but declined to buy one from Dell. That is one thing that the CEO (or all the other bean counters) will never admit.
My main prejudice against Dell was not the machine, but all the pre-installed crap. As it happens, Revo did a good job uninstalling McAfee. I have no anti-virus stuff running on the new machine. If by some unusual chance I get hijacked, then I'll probably curse. But I don't think that I will be. On the plus side, everything fires up much quicker, partly because it's a faster machine (running on 64-bit, I think, or whatever the terminology is for people who care about this stuff, which I suppose I do, in passing, but not enough to look it up) and partly because McAfee doesn't poke it's nose in every time you start something up.
I still have Windows automatically updating and warning me that I should restart the machine. That's an irritant I'll get rid of soon.
+++++++
I bought two Jared Diamond books on Amazon and then made the mistake of looking at "People who have bought "The Third Chimpanzee" have also bought.... "
As a result I also have Steven Mithen's "The PreHistory of the Mind", Clive Finlayson's "The Humans Who Went Extinct", Guy Deutscher's "The Unfolding of Language", and David Anthony's "The Horse, The Wheel & Language".
It's strange, but as I have reached (and passed) middle age I have become increasingly less enamoured with fiction (mainly only enjoying writers who can write well such as McEwan, Harris, Boyd, Faulks) and more interested in non-fiction -- not least because the real world has quite enough of interest to make it rather pointless to make things up, and secondly because I want to "know" more stuff, and as one approaches 60 one realizes that time is running out. John Humphreys once mentioned this in passing, but his solution was to "do" more stuff. My solution is more that I want to "learn" more stuff.
If I enjoyed the fiction, I'd carry on, but, as I told Craig this week, I got to page 600 of the second volume of "Fire and Ice", and I concluded that I just didn't really care what happened to these people who were the product of someone else's imagination. I had, in other words, lost my suspension of disbelief. I find that happening more and more often with fiction.
+++++++
I made a post on FB a week or so ago bemoaning this year's fashion in women's shoes. It was, if it was anything bar a light-hearted post, an attack on the fashion industry and the fact that some people fall for it. And the women I know saw it as just that. Curiously, a man saw it as "disrespectful to women", although the post was not made in that thread. Perhaps it was just a bit of a bitchy response to a rather bitchy comment that I had made in another thread. But it was certainly baffling. I wasn't going to lose any sleep over it because, as it happens, I know quite a lot of women and I asked a few about it. They all said that it was obviously (a) humorous and (b) rather true. Women are quite capable of making fun of their own weakness when it comes to shoes, just as men can laugh at their own weaknesses. None of them thought that it was "disrespectful". All a bit odd.
+++++++
I've been trying to catch up with movies (which, I note with a bit of surprise, do not suffer from the fiction/non-fiction dichotomy that I have applied to books) and I watched Angelopoulos's "The Travelling Players", all 3 hours and 42 minutes of it. It's from LoveFilm and I decided to watch it again, now that I had a better idea of what was going on and of the three levels on which it worked. The Birks jury is still out on Angelopoulos. He's been compared with Tarkovsky, but I haven't seen any evidence of it yet. But he's certainly adventurous and willing to take risks. In "The Travelling Players" for example, there are no close-ups. That makes it hard to remember who the hell is whom. It also shifts from 1939 to 1951, with the players in the troupe changing as the film progresses. There is a reason for this - Angelopoulos wants to make it a film about the forces of history rather than about individuals. Does it work? I'm not sure.
I was very impressed by Cosmo Jarvis's "The Naughty Room". Jarvis is clearly a multi-media talent (he's also a musician) and I expect great things from him.
Tetsuya Nakashima's "Confessions" was shown as part of Film Four's "Frightfest". That didn't do it justice. It's a complex work, not a gorefest. It's beautifully shot, well-acted, and asks difficult moral questions of the viewer, whose sympathies fly back and forth, where all victims are also perpetrators and all perpetrators are also victims.
+++++++++
After my stomach illness six weeks ago, I was "well" for two weeks before coming down with another cold. That has lingered for three weeks. I'm just about better now. None of that has done the training any good, although, paradoxically, sticking to just the two sessions a week does seem to have done my muscles some good. Perhaps they need longer recovery throught than Nick and I thought -- instead of 24 hours for the smaller muscle groups and 48 hours for the larger ones, it might be 48 hours and 96 hours respectively.
Certainly when I feel 100% again I'm ready to push to the next level. My best improvement in the past few months has definitely been triceps and biceps. On the downside I've got a tendon-related niggle in the right shoulder. I suspect that rest is what is needed for that.
______________
The problem with dosai(s) is not that they are difficult to make, but that you have to start with a frying pan that is no more than lukewarm. That means that if you want to make more than one you either need lots of pans (where "lots" = "number of dosai(s) required with a maximum number of pans of five") or a lot of patience.
+++++
I've also spent the weekend setting up the new computer and it is now running. I've bitten the bullet and bought Hold Em Manager 2. Significantly different from HEM 1, but I'm getting used to it. I'm also back to multiple monitors, so I can watch the stats update on one screen while multi-tabling on the other. Office 2010 is running fine, including Outlook (which Vista steadfastly refused to run in 2010 version). Windows 7 is a dream compared to Vista, although perhaps it's "the new Novatech computer is a dream compared to the old Dell".
Dell reported weak results earlier last week (as did HP) and blamed consumer sentiment. Well, yes and no. What they meant was "consumer sentiment against buying new PCs". In my case, I bought a new PC, but declined to buy one from Dell. That is one thing that the CEO (or all the other bean counters) will never admit.
My main prejudice against Dell was not the machine, but all the pre-installed crap. As it happens, Revo did a good job uninstalling McAfee. I have no anti-virus stuff running on the new machine. If by some unusual chance I get hijacked, then I'll probably curse. But I don't think that I will be. On the plus side, everything fires up much quicker, partly because it's a faster machine (running on 64-bit, I think, or whatever the terminology is for people who care about this stuff, which I suppose I do, in passing, but not enough to look it up) and partly because McAfee doesn't poke it's nose in every time you start something up.
I still have Windows automatically updating and warning me that I should restart the machine. That's an irritant I'll get rid of soon.
+++++++
I bought two Jared Diamond books on Amazon and then made the mistake of looking at "People who have bought "The Third Chimpanzee" have also bought.... "
As a result I also have Steven Mithen's "The PreHistory of the Mind", Clive Finlayson's "The Humans Who Went Extinct", Guy Deutscher's "The Unfolding of Language", and David Anthony's "The Horse, The Wheel & Language".
It's strange, but as I have reached (and passed) middle age I have become increasingly less enamoured with fiction (mainly only enjoying writers who can write well such as McEwan, Harris, Boyd, Faulks) and more interested in non-fiction -- not least because the real world has quite enough of interest to make it rather pointless to make things up, and secondly because I want to "know" more stuff, and as one approaches 60 one realizes that time is running out. John Humphreys once mentioned this in passing, but his solution was to "do" more stuff. My solution is more that I want to "learn" more stuff.
If I enjoyed the fiction, I'd carry on, but, as I told Craig this week, I got to page 600 of the second volume of "Fire and Ice", and I concluded that I just didn't really care what happened to these people who were the product of someone else's imagination. I had, in other words, lost my suspension of disbelief. I find that happening more and more often with fiction.
+++++++
I made a post on FB a week or so ago bemoaning this year's fashion in women's shoes. It was, if it was anything bar a light-hearted post, an attack on the fashion industry and the fact that some people fall for it. And the women I know saw it as just that. Curiously, a man saw it as "disrespectful to women", although the post was not made in that thread. Perhaps it was just a bit of a bitchy response to a rather bitchy comment that I had made in another thread. But it was certainly baffling. I wasn't going to lose any sleep over it because, as it happens, I know quite a lot of women and I asked a few about it. They all said that it was obviously (a) humorous and (b) rather true. Women are quite capable of making fun of their own weakness when it comes to shoes, just as men can laugh at their own weaknesses. None of them thought that it was "disrespectful". All a bit odd.
+++++++
I've been trying to catch up with movies (which, I note with a bit of surprise, do not suffer from the fiction/non-fiction dichotomy that I have applied to books) and I watched Angelopoulos's "The Travelling Players", all 3 hours and 42 minutes of it. It's from LoveFilm and I decided to watch it again, now that I had a better idea of what was going on and of the three levels on which it worked. The Birks jury is still out on Angelopoulos. He's been compared with Tarkovsky, but I haven't seen any evidence of it yet. But he's certainly adventurous and willing to take risks. In "The Travelling Players" for example, there are no close-ups. That makes it hard to remember who the hell is whom. It also shifts from 1939 to 1951, with the players in the troupe changing as the film progresses. There is a reason for this - Angelopoulos wants to make it a film about the forces of history rather than about individuals. Does it work? I'm not sure.
I was very impressed by Cosmo Jarvis's "The Naughty Room". Jarvis is clearly a multi-media talent (he's also a musician) and I expect great things from him.
Tetsuya Nakashima's "Confessions" was shown as part of Film Four's "Frightfest". That didn't do it justice. It's a complex work, not a gorefest. It's beautifully shot, well-acted, and asks difficult moral questions of the viewer, whose sympathies fly back and forth, where all victims are also perpetrators and all perpetrators are also victims.
+++++++++
After my stomach illness six weeks ago, I was "well" for two weeks before coming down with another cold. That has lingered for three weeks. I'm just about better now. None of that has done the training any good, although, paradoxically, sticking to just the two sessions a week does seem to have done my muscles some good. Perhaps they need longer recovery throught than Nick and I thought -- instead of 24 hours for the smaller muscle groups and 48 hours for the larger ones, it might be 48 hours and 96 hours respectively.
Certainly when I feel 100% again I'm ready to push to the next level. My best improvement in the past few months has definitely been triceps and biceps. On the downside I've got a tendon-related niggle in the right shoulder. I suspect that rest is what is needed for that.
______________
