Simple Things

I'm working towards my first big deadline of 2012 - the next two are both next week (I start working towards them on Saturday). I can barely calculate when my next quiet work moment will be and so I am demanding non-demandingness of my knitting:



Even this it seems is pretty tricky. I have just spend much of my lunchtime tinking back purl rows... who knew garter stitch could be so tricky?

Doh!

Left. Knitting. On. Aeroplane.

:s

Disaster!

A good word to describe last night's dinner.

Last weekend I bought some handmade burgers from whole foods and froze them. Big, thick burgers with real meat in them. I pulled one out of the freezer on Wednesday night with the plan to have it for Thursday's dinner.

Thursday became Friday when it turned out there was a lunchtime talk on Thursday (the sandwiches I'd brought would never have been eaten otherwise - we always go out to lunch on Friday so I couldn't just carry them over). So... Friday dinner.

I have no grill, so decided to fry the burger and press it on a paper towel to remove the grease before putting it in my burger bun. I figured that just before it was done, I thought I'd drop an egg in the pan and have that too. Got to a point where it looked pretty cooked around all the outsides so I gave it another few minutes for safety then grabbed an egg and gave it another few whilst the egg cooked. All done, I assembled the burger - looking good!

Er, no. Sadly as soon as I bit into the burger it wasn't really as cooked as well as it should be in the middle. Removed the burger from the burger and threw it back in the pan. Turned the heat back on and up a few marks for good measure and then sad down and ate the fried egg sandwich.

Went back, checked on the burger, all was good. It seemed to be cooking nicely, so I picked up the knitting I had been doing earlier and progressed some on that. Turned at the end of the row, had a think about the cooking and decided that I'd go and see how cooked it was at the end of the next one...

About a third of the way through the 'next one' I thought I could smell burning. Now my knitting chair is all of two metres from the oven (max) with no doorways in between and this smell was pretty faint but being the concerned Saffy that I am, I thought I'd check it out straight away. What did I find?

My burger had indeed burnt on the bottom side. About a 2mm layer of charred meat covered the base of the burger - not so good. But that was not all! It turned out, that the spatular I had left in the ban for the purpose of turning the burger had melted a bit. Tiny bit of the handle was stuck to the edge of the pan and a somewhat larger chunk of the spatular itself covered the base of the pan. Ooops!


Having turned the heat off, I sliced off the bottom of the burger and threw it in the bin. Ate the rest in a new burger bun with the salad - a small section of it was still vaguely pink - it didn't taste of tefal but probably should have done :)

Maybe for the other burger I shall try oven cooking?

Dubious Data 2007

Just stumbled across this article for the The Worst Science Stories of 2007: STATS Dubious Data Awards. I'll post one of the stories here, but they're all fairly entertaining.

---

Phthalatophobia, a subcategory of chemophobia (the fear of chemicals), led the media to make all sorts of remarkable claims in 2007, none more ballsy, perhaps, than Time magazine’s decision to advance puberty beyond the bounds of biological plausibility with the claim, in September, that inhaling phthalates from air fresheners could decrease sperm levels in infants.

Perhaps, Time was demonstrating that the mere act of reporting on toxic chemicals can cause mental derangement, as a) infants don’t produce sperm and b), the author of the study on phthalates in air fresheners, Dr. Gina Solomon of the Natural Resources Defense Council, admitted that had no “clear cut evidence here for health effects.” [...] Some phthalates have been shown at very high levels to harm laboratory animals, but then you can make rodents sick if you give them too much of anything. One study has drawn a statistical association between exposure to some phthalates in the womb and borderline changes in genital development. But contrary to the way the media have reported this study, the children were all healthy and had normal reproductive functioning. Even the Guardian newspaper, which is ardently pro green, concluded in its “Bad Science” column (written by an actual doctor) that the data on phthalates was being “overstated.”

As for air fresheners, the NRDC only measured the presence of phthalates inside the product. As to how much evaporated into the air and was likely to be absorbed by a passing human, there was nothing. The Environmental Protection Agency has since turned down the NRDC’s petition to examine the safety of air fresheners, although the agency does note that they are highly flammable – and will likely kill you if you eat one.

So, um, don’t eat air fresheners.

(from the STATS Dubious Data Awards 2007)

iTunes

iTunes has got itself into a terrible muddle. It's been trying to update to a newer version (7.4.1 I assume) for ages now. Software update would pop up and say it had an update, would go away and download it and would then, once the download was completed, seemed to take another look and say that it didn't want to install anything after all. This has been occurring for over a month now I think.

This afternoon, when I opened iTunes it seemed to think it was running a new version and showed me the software agreement. I assumed that it had caught up with itself and didn't bother to think any more about it.

Now, when I open iTunes (I know I said I was going to bed, but I remembered a quick piece of code I could write) it says:

The file "iTunes Library" cannot be read because it was created by a newer version of iTunes.

So it seems that whatever it installed has gone away again. I had a look at version.plist and that says it's currently version 1.3.1 that's installed. As I now can't use iTunes at all I've decided to download a copy of 7.4.1 from the Apple site and hope it'll be all happy again...

On the plus side, my code change was a five minute job so I have achieved something by delaying my sleep some more.

Sleepy Tired

Playing Scrabble for two hours after you've decided you were going to bed is bad. I've only stopped now because the applet won't work for me any more. I suspect this is for the greater good.

I should really go to sleep, I've been all over-tired emotional the last couple of days and still I never seem to go to bed on time. Fool.

Goodnight exciting world of internet!

(Tonight's entertainment was brought to you by... Scrabulous and a collection of people across the world who've invested far too much time in getting to be really rather good at the game (and the letter Q)).

The 2nd Solution

"Dizzy Dolphins" - A triangular jigsaw puzzle thing with hundreds of possibilities but only two correct solutions. It's been under my bed for many years now. Every time I see it, I pull it out and have a go. I've numbered the backs of the pieces and when I first found a solution I wrote it down. Whenever I've solved it since, I've checked my solution against the paper to see if my solution is the same one and it always has been. So today I did the puzzle, checked the paper and got excited. I wrote down my new solution which had a different top piece and decided that I can finally get rid of the puzzle. I came downstairs to record this momentous occasion in my blog and then remembered... a triangle has three sides. This triangle is an equilateral which means its sides are the same length and it looks the same any way up. My solution is a rotation of my other solution. Muppet.

I am Superwoman (girl)

I have just lugged far too many of my belongings over the hill. It's competely my own fault, I over-estimated what could be achieved and repeatedly answered "yes" to questions akin to "are you sure you'll be alright" but I wasn't helped by the bag breaking almost immediately after leaving the house.

Supergirl sounds a bit not as Super as Superwoman but I don't want to be a woman - I shall forever be a girl.

Heroics

Today I have fished a collection of girls out of some "mud" (cow dung). That's my heroics for the day.

Over-Indulgence

Why do we never learn? Too much of a good thing is still too much.

I've finally finished the last packet of Garibaldi biscuits from my desk drawer. Right at this moment I really hope I never have to see one ever again. I did like them, and I had completely forgotten they existed, but not anymore.