Monday, September 28, 2009

Taste Good - Chinese Takeaway

After coming back down from Ardtoe, we couldn't be bothered going to the shops and had no food in the house, so we decided to get takeaway. We didn't have any cash on us, so went for the one takeaway we know where you can pay by card when you order.

Taste Good on Slateford Road is one of the more up market Chineses in Edinburgh and has a sit in restaurant as well as the takeaway section. We ordered duck spring rolls, chicken and sweetcorn soup, Kung-Po King Prawn and Boiled rice. The whole thing came to around £13 and there were no freebies.

The spring rolls were probably the best spring rolls we've had from a Chinese Takeaway so far. 3 of the smaller thin kind, filled with duck, they came with a portion of Plum Sauce for dipping, definitely on to a winner there. The Chicken and Sweetcorn soup was a little tasteless, a fair amount of chicken though.

Finally, the main course, the Kung-Po King Prawn; while they have to be commended for the wide variety of vegetables and a huge portion of peanuts, the sauce itself is not as thick and sweet as we like and could have been a bit spicier. The odd pieces of celery in the dish also makes it a bit of a minefield if you (like me) aren't too keen on it.

Overall, awesome spring rolls but disappointing main course, nothing wrong with it per se, but not entirely aligned with my tastes.

Score: 3/5

Taste Good : 67-71 Slateford Road, Edinburgh : 0131 313 5588

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Sunday, September 27, 2009

Dave Gorman

Comedian Dave Gorman is doing this thing where he is cycling from the most Southern point on the British mainland to the most Northern, taking in the most Eastern and most Western on the way up. On Friday he did a gig in the Sonachan hotel, Ardnamurchan which lies 3 miles away from the most Westerly point. Since Rosie's family's cottage is only 30 miles or so away from the point, we though we'd go up and head along to see the show, camping in a field at the hotel.

I thought it would be fun for Neil and I to cycle out to the point from the cottage, it's a 30 mile journey and was quite tough, definitely on par with the Glasgow to Edinburgh ride despite being 20 miles or so shorter.

Dave's show was excellent, a great laugh throughout with some absolutely hilarious material. I'll not say too much about the content for fear of giving anything away, but if you get the chance to catch the show, I highly recommend it.

Saturday morning we were getting ready to leave and Dave came by in a van and asked if we'd like to ride back with him and his human sat-nav Scot. We figured we'd be struggling to keep up on our mountain bikes with our fat tyres (and lack of fitness), but went along anyway. Luckily we did manage to keep up, the ride back being a bit easier than the ride along. After leaving Dave in Acharacle Scot and he were going on to Glenfinnan, another 30 miles, I'm not sure I could have kept up with them for much longer :)

Anyway, a great weekend away, and I got to cycle 60 miles and see a great comedy show and we got a mention on his blog.

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Monday, September 21, 2009

Samurai-X

I watched the 6th and final episode of Samurai-X tonight, I didn't have a clue what was going on for the whole 6 episodes, very confusing. Nice animation and it was strangely captivating, but none of the plot made any sense to me. Maybe I should have been paying more attention!

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Max von Sydow

Strangest thing ever, I'd never heard of the actor Max von Sydow before about 3 weeks ago when I watched the pretty shonky Stephen King adaptation Needful Things.

I've just written a review of the latest film I've watched, 1957 Ingmar Bergman drama Wild Strawberries and had noticed that it had a cameo from the main character in the last film I reviewed, 1957 Ingmar Bergman drama The Seventh Seal (There's been a lot of Ingmar Bergman in the past couple of weeks). I went to check it was the same actor, and find out that not only was he in Needful Things as well, but he was also in The Exorcist which I watched on Friday.

So in the past 3 weeks I've seen 4 movies which he has starred in and didn't even know who he was or that it was the same actor (the movies were from 1957, 1973 and 1993 so his appearance changed quite a bit between each film).

Anyway, he's a pretty good actor and I must congratulate him on a career in cinema which has spanned such a massive time period and led him to be a part of so many great movies (and Needful Things).

Bizarre!

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Sunday, September 20, 2009

Vane farm photography course


A hoverfly on a holly leaf, originally uploaded by chored.

Just spent the day at a one day Beginner's photography course at Vane Farm near Kinross in Fife. A lot of basic theory was covered which I was pretty much aware of, but where it was really interesting was hearing a professional photographer's hints on how to get great shots (in this case specifically wildlife shots).

We had the opportunity to go and take some photos, there wasn't a huge amount of birds to be seen, but we did get a few good shots and we were forced to shoot entirely manual, so it was good experience of getting to use my camera properly.

Overall, at £30 for the day, it's well worth doing if you are a beginning photographer, although for those well versed in basic theory, it's perhaps less useful.

I did realise how great my A700 is, in the morning session I had the A700 with our Tamron 55-200 and was able to get a range of good shots, some of which are impressively sharp (well at least to my eye). In the afternoon, Rosie had the A700, so I had the A350 with the 18-70mm kit lens and I just didn't get any good shots. Not enough reach for the smaller wildlife and not enough sun for the landscapes and every photo I took was a little soft.

The strange thing is in the past 6 months we've had the Tamron, I've found the kit lens on the A350 to be a much more practical walk about lens, so I don't know if it's just that wildlife photography is a different application to what I'm used to, or if the A700 with the Tamron produces so much better photos that the A350 with the kit looks a bit rubbish in comparison.

Oh well, at least it's a justification for buying the Tamron 17-50 f/2.8 I quite fancy.

Saturday, September 19, 2009

Rob Zombie: String Tribute

This has to be one of the weirder string tribute albums, Rob Zombie String Tribute. Apocalyptica have a lot to answer for!

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Monopoly City Streets is back

Well, Monopoly City Streets is back after the reboot. Can't say it worked out very well for me, they seemed to start again in the middle of the night, so when I logged in at 8:30am all the good streets had gone.

Add to that, a weird issue I had choosing my username and I'm beginning to think the reset is a sign I shouldn't bother at all.

They've also added a really weird tax system which doesn't work in the way of any tax I've heard of before, it basically forces you to limit the number of streets you have. Your first 5 streets are tax free and then for every street you have above that you get charged 3% tax on your total income. So if you have 38 streets you get taxed 100% of your income and won't get any cash. Seems a bit crap to me.

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Derren Brown : Part 2

Derren Brown's show tonight was as disappointing as last week. He claimed he'd use the power of suggestion to glue us to our seats. Well it didn't work for me and the sceptical side of my nature doesn't believe it worked for anyone else. This entire season seems to be a bit of a disappointment.

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1001 Movies you must see before you die

Just got the 2009 edition of the 1001 Movies you must see before you die. As usual, a bit more adding and removing this year, with notable inclusions of The Dark Knight, Wall-E, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and rather randomly, Korean Action adventure The Good, the Bad and the Weird.

Luckily, the changing about means I'm now 4 movies up with a total of 223 viewed in the new book.

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Tuesday, September 15, 2009

South Park Season 4

Well I've worked my way through another South Park box set and I have to say, Season 4 has to be the best season yet. The introduction of Timmy, some great episodes like the South Park one, the Terminator/Akira/2001 spoof episode and the Great Expectations re-telling were all pretty good and even the token Mr. Hankey Christmas episode wasn't too bad.

From what I remember things only get more ridiculous from here on in, so here's looking forward to Season 5.

Score 4/5

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Monday, September 14, 2009

Panaracer Uff Da

I've only ever ridden a Mountain Bike, despite 90% or more of my miles being the 3 miles to work and back. The reason for this is because I think Mountain Bikes are cool, although I like to hide behind the excuse of I can take a Mountain Bike on the road, but I can't take a road bike off-road. An excuse which has more wait to it now that I've been to Glentress a couple of times.

Anyway, that leaves the question of tyres, I've always ridden big chunky off-road tyres to do me 30 miles a week from home to work and back. While in training for the Glasgow to Edinburgh event, I thought it was maybe time I bought something less knobbly.

That's when I saw the Panaracer Uff Da, £10 or so each from Merlin Cycles. They're big and chunky (2.3") tyres designed for urban use (probably more extreme use than my daily commute, but the look pretty cool). Fitting them on the bike, I was surprised how much quieter and smoother they ride on the road than the Maxxis Ignitors that came with the bike. The rode pretty well on the Glasgow to Edinburgh, so look like a good purchase.

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Pedal for Scotland

Yesterday I spent nearly 5 hours cycling 51 miles between Glasgow and Edinburgh as part of the Pedal for Scotland event. It was a pretty amazing day, warm and sunny all the way and although I was quite tired last night, I like to think I could have gone further :)

I can't believe how many people took part, for the whole 51 miles, the roads were packed 4 abreast or more with cyclists. Who says Scotland is the heart-attack capital of the world ;)

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Saturday, September 12, 2009

BM - Chinese Takeaway

The closest Chinese Takeaway to our flat and we haven't ever ordered from there, so last night we put and end to this and gave them a phone. We ordered: Crispy shredded beef, Chicken and Sweetcorn Soup, Spring Rolls, Boiled Rice and two cans of Irn Bru. Total cost £11.40, but no free prawn crackers (maybe a good thing though since me eating an entire bag of prawn crackers is never going to be a good thing).

The spring roll was the first thing that caught our eye, wrapped in a grease soaked paper bag, we unpeeled it from its oily wrapper to be met with something that looked a bit burnt and possibly refried. Taste wasn't much better, a lot of bamboo shoots and a bit of meat (according to Rosie). Also marks off for there only being one and it being one of the big fat ones.

Next up was the Chicken and Sweetcorn soup, it looked a bit funny, but seemed to have a lot of chicken in it. That's about all that was going for it though, it tasted of very little, even the chicken didn't taste of much, we hardly ate any of it between the two of us.

Finally, we opened up the Crispy Shredded Beef. At this point, I wanted to hate it, but to be fair to BM it was actually pretty good. Big chunks of beef with onion and peppers in a fairly spicy sauce (only minor niggle, there could have been more sauce). The beef was crispy rather than chewy and the sauce was very tasty. The main dish saved the meal.

Overall, a bit of a dip after our strong run, avoid the starters, but the mains seem to be ok.

Score: 2.5/5

BM : 193 Balgreen Rd, Edinburgh : 0131 346 1834

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Tonight's TV: Derren Brown The Events

Saw a thing on Boing Boing about Derren Brown's new TV show. I missed it on Wednesday, but apparently he did a thing where he "predicted" all 6 of the numbers in the national lottery. There was a show on Channel 4 tonight purporting to explain how he did it. Boing Boing had an interesting video from someone with an idea of how it could be done and I thought I'd tune in to see if the guy who made the video was right or not, seemed plausible and quite clever.

Big mistake, the show was the biggest waste of an hour of my life ever. It was just lots of crap full of bad maths explained under the mumbo jumbo "Deep Maths" label with a touch more crap about people being able as a group to guess lottery numbers by clearing their mind and writing on bits of paper.

His claim of how he did it was to get 24 people in a room, have them write numbers from their subconscience on a bit of paper and then he created an average of each number and then used them as his results. The whole thing sounds like a load of bollocks and even ignoring my scepticism about the logical improbability of people being able to write lottery numbers via their subconscience; one of his numbers was 2, to get the average for that number to be 2, so many of the members of the group would have to have written a very low numbers.

To me this is just implausible. It didn't help that for the final version, he collected the papers and totalled the numbers and then put them in a sealed tube and no-one saw it until he revealed it live at the end of the lottery show, so there isn't even a semblance of proof that the numbers the group chose averaged out to the numbers he revealed.

To me, this totally ruined the show, half way through I thought it could go one of two ways and either way would be massively disappointing. Way number 1 (which was the case) is that he tries to pass it off with some sort of pseudo-scientific explanation. Way number 2 would have been to fool the audience for 50 minutes and then reveal a camera trick at the end (which would have made any further episodes pretty much unwatchable if he was going to stick to that formula).

I was under the impression that Derren Brown was the kind of guy who spoke out against so called psychics etc. but from this episode of his show, it seems like if he can make money from bombarding people with nonsense then he'll be happy. My only guess is that he might reveal everything at the end of the series, but I doubt I'll tune in to watch that.

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Monopoly City Streets

If you've been under a rock for the past couple of days, you'll have missed out on the launch of Monopoly City Streets. It's basically a giant worldwide game of Monopoly using Google Maps, so you can buy real streets around the world and build houses etc. You start with £3,000,000 and get more each day from rent on your streets and properties.

It was dog slow when it launched, but they've been adding more processing power and it actually runs quite well now and it looked promising. But ... lots of people weren't happy about not being able to get the streets they wanted at launch due to the performance issues, so they're now talking about resetting everything next week.

Hopefully, they'll think about this and give something back to users who have been playing for the past couple of days, otherwise it's completely pointless. If I don't get the streets I want when they relaunch will they reset the system again? Madness.

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Bicycle Parts online

I've been buying quite a few bicycle parts recently and two websites I've used have been really good: Merlin Cycles and UK Bike Store. Both have a pretty good range of products, reasonable prices and pretty swift dispatch and delivery. Merlin offers next day delivery for free and UK Bike Store do first class Royal Mail delivery for not much money. So if you're in the market for any bike parts, give them a try.

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Thursday, September 10, 2009

Computer Woes

Well, my desktop at home is totally stuffed, Windows won't boot, last known good configuration doesn't work and not even safe mode boots. To make matters worse, when I had a look in the crap that came with it to try and find out how the recovery partition works, it says I should run the system restore program (click on Start->Programs... Doh!). It's ok though, you can recover from DVD as well, I just need to insert the DVD I burned with the System restore DVD creator ... oh wait I didn't burn any DVDs. So that's all a bit shit.

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Tuesday, September 08, 2009

Delicious China - Chinese Takeaway

In my bid to sample every Chinese takeaway in Edinburgh, I picked another random one to order from on Sunday night. I used to cycle along Dalry road everyday and there are a fair few takeaways on the mile and a half or so between Haymarket and my flat. Delicious China is one of these, but not one we'd ever ordered from before.

We ordered a fairly standard order (for us), Spring Rolls, Chicken and Sweetcorn soup, Kung Po King Prawn and Boiled Rice. Total cost just over £10 and for that we got a free bag of Prawn Crackers (which is always a bonus because Rosie doesn't like them so I get to eat them all :)

The Spring Rolls were the two big fat kind rather than the skinny kind. I'm not a big fan of these massive Spring Rolls, but the ones from Delicious China were pretty tasty, stuffed with Bean Sprouts and other vegetables. Rosie really liked them.

The Chicken and Sweetcorn soup was sweet and full of chicken, we thought it smelled like Roast Chicken, a winner there.

Finally, the Kung Po King Prawn. No battered Prawns, but a fairly sweet and relatively spicy Kung Po sauce with an assortment of vegetables and some cashew nuts.

The menu is available here and you can even order online.

All in all, another success in the world of Chinese Takeaway. Possibly a little better than Hui which I reviewed last time, but not by much, more vegetables in the Kung Po was definitely a winner.

Overall 4.2/5

Delicious China : 261 Dalry Road, Edinburgh : 0131 346 8383

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Saturday, September 05, 2009

Scottish licensing laws

Well, I've been blogging more and more recently, so I reckon it's time for a bit of a rant. With the recent overhaul of the Scottish licencing laws, a number of changes have been introduced in how alcohol can be sold in Scotland.

Sundays no longer get special treatment with the old no alcohol before 12:30 on a Sunday scrapped and a standard no alcohol before 10am every day. This is a step forward in my eyes, no longer do I have a law forced upon me which was created solely to appease specific religious beliefs. But this is not the focus of my post.

Another change made is the scrapping of happy hours, pubs can no longer change the price of alcohol sold for any period less than 72 hours. I'm pretty ambivalent on this one, but certain newspapers are today reporting on a "Loophole" in the law which means that some pubs are now doing "happy days" where they will do drinks promotions for a period of 72 hours up to 5 days or so and then bump the prices back up at the weekend. One would premuse this is to try and get some more footfall during the week.

This doesn't really seem like a loophole to me, the law says 72 hours, so I don't see how adhering to the law and reducing the price for 72 hours or more is being cheeky or flaunting it in any way. Just more sensational journalism on the subject. Aside from this, neither of these papers even contemplate the fact that maybe the law is designed this way so that we don't encourage people to go out and drink as much as they can in a 1 hour period when things are cheap. The only way I can see pubs could flaunt this rule and break this idea would be if their 72 hour period was set up to end at say 6pm on a Friday, there by encouraging "binge" drinking between 5pm and 6pm straight after work. Although, no pubs seem to be doing this.

I've not read the law in depth, but I think the following is more of a loophole than serving cheap drink during the week. If I was an unscrupulous publican what I would do is buy in e.g. a keg of some cheap lager and sell it at £2 a pint for an hour a day, but don't sell it any other time. I've not changed the price of the drink, it's just only available at certain times and outside of that time you'll have to buy the more expensive stuff.

I don't see how the legislation could protect against this, you could even go one step further and only hold a certain amount of the cheap drink in stock and when it's sold out that's happy hour finished until you get more in stock the next day. After all, the government can hardly demand that if you sell one drink for a price and it runs out that a different, but similar, drink has to be sold at the same price as well, otherwise all pubs would have to sell all their lagers at the same price.

Anyway, that's just my thoughts on the subject.

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The Wire Season 1

We're quite big fans of bug budget American TV, ever since the Sopranos, I've enjoyed watching shows such as 24, Lost, Heroes, The Shield on DVD. The quality of the production is like a film (which lasts for 20hours) and watching them on DVD means I can waste lots of time watching episodes back to back with no adverts and not having to wait a week to see the outcome of the cliffhanger.

But, despite it getting pretty good reviews from pretty much everywhere, we hadn't really seen any of the Wire. We picked up the season 1 box set in Sainsbury's last weekend and a week later we've just watched the last of 13 1 hour episodes.

The show follows Homicide and Narcotics detectives within the city of Baltimore Police. When wise-ass detective McNulty starts investigating a drug dealer responsible for a crime wave including several murders, he talks to a Judge who puts pressure on McNulty's superiors to do something about the case. This doesn't do any favours for McNulty, but a team is assembled to investigate the drug dealer involved.

The Wire is very well produced with a great plot, some excellent characters and is well written with some classic lines thrown about by the main characters. It's like a cop movie which lasts for 13 hours. Highly recommended.

4.5/5

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Airbus A380 at Edinburgh Airport

Caught site of the new Airbus A380, the largest passenger jet in the world as it performed an approach and go maoeuvre at Edinburgh Airport. My in-laws live pretty much at the end of the runway and we were over there for lunch anyway, so hopped into the field behind their house to get some photos. (Taken with my new A700).

Despite the size of this thing, it is massive, the most impressive factor is how quiet it is. It is way less noisy than a lot of the other aircraft which regularly come into Edinburgh.

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Onion Rings


Onion Rings, originally uploaded by chored.

On the way back from a charity ceilidh on Friday night we stopped off at a chip shop and I got a portion of onion rings and a bag of chips. This is the most ridiculously over the top portion of onion rings ever, it was a whole onion battered and deep fried (and we got them out the cabinet, so deep fried again). I'm not sure if this is amazing, or absolutely disgusting.

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