For the Love of Quinn

The last few days have seen the explosion of a story about Home Secretary David Blunkett allegedly abusing his position on numerous counts from giving train tickets (at the taxpayers' expense) to his mistress to (and this is the potential showstopper) accelerating an application for a permanent visa. "Independent" investigations are under way.

The whole situation is summed up quite nicely in a Register article from yesterday.

It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

Many Happy Returns

Over the weekend <3 and myself took a trip to Pembrokeshire, having been invited to an Arthurian banquet (with a middle-eastern theme bolted on) by an old friend. With some slight trepidation we made the drive across country on the Friday, which gave us most of Saturday in which to act as tourists before the banquet began.

Our tourism exploits basically involved a trip to St. David's, where a small town plays host to a mighty mediaeval cathedral and a partially ruined C14th bishop's palace. We also found an "Xmas Fayre", where fudge and alpaca wool scarves were sold and <3 was introduced to the charms of cawl (Welsh lamb and veg soup).

The banquet was 12 courses of awesome food from "Moorish Venison" to baklava, accompanied by a fantastically friendly welcome which wiped out any last traces of trepidation about our leap into the unknown.

Now there is talk of a Middle Earth banquet (spit roast hobbit, anyone?) in a few months' time. We're looking forward to it...

Fires and Faith

In a slightly surreal passage of our lives, <3 and I spent the evening of Hallowe'en at an Irish funeral. Tragically, the sister of a school friend of <3's died of cancer aged somewhere in her 30's, and as we were in the right country at the time, showing our support seemed the right thing to do.

The general form for Irish funerals is in two main parts: the funeral mass and burial and, generally the evening beforehand, the removal (which is what we attended). Both are usually public events and announced in the newspapers.

We arrived at the funeral home for the removal, which is basically the ritual of moving the body to the church in preparation for the burial. Before this takes place there is a recital of the Rosary (several times) and an opportunity for sympathisers to shake the hands of the bereaved family, which felt rather strange when only one member of the family had ever met me before.

From the funeral home was a procession behind the hearse for some 20 minutes, after which everyone got into cars in order to make faster progress to the church. This reinforced my view of the chimerical nature of Irish culture: devout prayer and Catholic observances, in the middle of which was a drive through the suburbs of a medium-sized town where every second street marked Hallowe'en/Samhain with raging pyres and illegal fireworks.

At the church was a short service to mark the end of this stage of the journey. One of my biggest beefs with high church in general, and Roman Catholicism in particular, is the fundamental obsession with sin and how we are all unworthy. It all seems too hung up on the bad things to realise how great life can be. Strangely, it was in this short service, marking as it was the sad and premature end of a life, that I saw more hope and optimism than I have seen in a long time. Sure, it all relies on the dogmatic "Believe in me and even though you die, you will live on", but for some reason it felt right.

Now if only people could learn to celebrate and treasure life while it is still there, perhaps we would live in a happier world.

Lady Gray and the Great Garage Clear-Out

We had a productive weekend, sorting out assorted domestic chores like mowing the lawn, trimming the hedge and clearing a load of junk out of the garage -- to be rewarded by finding a pair of unopened wedding presents. To be fair, these presents arrived late amongst a pile of stuff brought over from Ireland by the inlaws a few months back, and which we just hadn't got around to sorting through. A nice surprise there.

There is now also yet another batch of wine on its way -- made with Lady Gray tea and a pile of raisins (which apparently improves the end result almost as much as adding grape concentrate). This is currently going through first-stage fermentation in a bucket, which makes for great fun as a loud "THUD!" is periodically heard from upstairs when the lid blows its seal under the pressure of CO2.

It's a Tech's Life...

From a support request today...

The colour laser printer ... has developed a fault. It has said that it is low on black toner for some time, but yesterday it said that it was out of black toner and would not print at all. There is no sign of it being short of toner. I switched it off and back on again. It worked fine, even though it was complaining about being low on toner. This morning it stopped again, complaining of the same thing. After switching off and on again, it is again working, and there is no sign of there being any problem with the print quality. I think it is inevitable that this problem will recur soon.

Indeed. The solution? Replace the toner.

Walk Of Shame

This weekend was the second Cardiff "Bootie Camp", an informal spin-off from STACK UK's annual Boot Camp for aspiring sports kite flyers. I'm not aspiring to compete any time soon, but what little team/pair flying I have done, I have enjoyed greatly, so I persuaded I'll Wager to come along as my partner, and much fun was had -- particularly working on a kite ballet routine to Toccata by Sky, and the "stick precision" competition held due to the fact that the weather conditions were not good enough to fly in at the time.

An excellent weekend marred only by the loss of an item that meant a lot to me. It's more-or-less replaceable, but that particular one was treasured. Nuts.

Of Examinations and Fermentations

Quite a lot to report now...

1. My rosehip wine is now happily bubbling away in a demijohn. It was a pig to strain the fruit pulp from the must, and still a little got through, but it's settling OK and is showing the first signs of thinking about clearing.
2. On an unrelated matter, I had my OU exam this morning. It was a tough exam, with some of the questions on concurrency and OO design finding fuzzy points in my knowledge. I think I did OK, but I'm not confident I hit my target grade. It's possible though. As celebration after the exam I got back to a bit more winemaking...
3. The mead has been clearing and had developed a thick sediment, so I racked it off into a new jar, taking the opportunity to have a taste (not bad!) and try out my new hydrometer. The gravity I measured was pretty much bang on 1000, meaning the majority of the sugar is now alcohol. There's still some more fermentation to go – this is going to be a nice, dry mead, and should be worth drinking by Christmas.
4. I now have a gallon of Ribena wine on the go too (yes, Ribena – why not?). This looks like it should turn out to be a sweet (possibly too sweet -- next time use less sugar!) pink wine. Nice and different to the others I'm making up.
5. PS. Knock me down with a bubble, I got 93% in that last assignment. Just born lucky, I guess.

Assignment: Improbable

So yesterday evening I submitted my final assignment for this year's OU course, M301 Software Systems and Their Development. This course has a rep for being wrought from pure evil, which is not entirely unmerited, and this last assignment fit this profile perfectly. This was probably the most wide-ranging of the year's six assignments, covering cryptography, security, project management, ethics, and various aspects of the use of Java and UML, which made it tough enough, but there were quite a few flaws in the way the questions were worded, which made for some real ambiguities.

Anyway, it's finished and submitted on time, and to keep my grade average up all I need to score is 60% -- fingers crossed. Now it's time to start preparing for the exam, which is in a little over two weeks' time.

Rosehips

So I'd been eyeing up all those rose bushes near our house and watching these big, fat rosehips ripening nicely, and planning the next batch of wine, when some sod went and trimmed all the bushes, leaving naff-all fruit behind.

Luckily, after an hour's wander a little further afield, I'd got myself a bag of hips, only to realise that we were nearly out of sugar. D'oh!

Anyway, last night, after aquiring some more sugar, <3 and I chopped up our kilo of rosehips, stuck them in a bucket with sugar and boiling water, and stirred. The mix is currently being munched on by a dose of pectinol (hopefully breaking down the fruit and destroying pectin that could leave the end product cloudy), so this evening the yeast can go in for a couple of weeks of fermenting in the bucket.

The mead it still fermenting along nicely, after 2 weeks.

First Winemaking Steps

A couple of months ago, a friend convinced me of the worthiness of winemaking as a hobby, recommended a book (First Steps in Winemaking by CJJ Berry) and presented me with a couple of demijohns. The book cost less than a fiver, so I bought a copy and had a read -- it does a good job of explaining the basic theory, describing the essential equipment as well as the less essential but useful kit, and has many dozens of recipes for country wines, from nettle to elderberry. More recently, I decided to give it a go and ordered some equipment, yeast, sterilising powder, and so on from the excellent Art of Brewing, and last week I started my first brew. The first effort is a mead based on a recipe in Berry's book, with 3.5 lb of honey, and my little modification: I boiled some rosemary in with the honey and water, hopefully giving it a more interesting taste. Nearly a week later, we have a steady fermentation, and it's looking good. According to the recipe this should be drinkable by Christmas, which is extremely fast for a homebrew wine. We'll see... The plan is to raid some local rose bushes for rosehips with which to make my next batch -- slightly more advanced than the mead.