Update
My computer has been broken, hence the lack of posting and podcasting. Everything should be good to go again when I get home from work tonight, so expect new material.
Hooray!
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September 27, 2007
September 16, 2007
Computer Woes
The AC adapter (is that right? AC?) has decided to throw in the towel and call it quits. Do you believe that? So, the reason why there has been no communication and no podcast this week is because the battery is now dead on my computer and I have no way to recharge it.
I am in negotiations with Dell about remedying this situation. (When I say negotiations, really what I mean is that I am waiting for them to call me back.)
I may attempt to put the show together using John's computer and then upload it onto the internet via internet cafe. We shall see.
In other news, I have finally returned to work after my...we'll call it a vacation.... granted to me thanks to Her Majesty's Customs and Revenues and a certain furniture store's policies. I am pleased everything has worked out and that I am back in the world again and out of the house. This couldn't have happened at a better time as I am running out of yarn.
Also, this week I am going to be hosting my friend Melissa on her whirlwind trip to Cardiff (and Bath). I am so very excited about having a guest! Yes.
September 09, 2007
The Fresh Lychee Experience
The other day I went out in search of some fruit and veg to compliment the things I had to eat in the house. I picked up a bunch of grapes and thought it was settled but before I went to pay for the grapes, I gave the stand a walk through, just make sure there wasn't anything I missed (I was having noodles, and sometimes you find random things that would be great with noodles.) And, before I got to the gigantic eggplants in the back I noticed them....Lychees. Now, I've had lychee juice boxes and lychee flavored smoothies and ice cream, but I've never had a fresh lychee. So, I picked up about six of them and went straight to the counter to pay so I could rush home and try them.
A lychee looks a like a gigantic raspberry in armor. They are red and bumpy and hard. The skin almost feels like a crust surrounding the precious fruit inside. When I picked them up, they felt like fresh fruit should feel, fruit yet soft. And, they smelled divine.
A Lychee smells how I would imagine a jungle would smell, floral and humid. Its the sort of smell that when you inhale, you can feel it on your skin. Like humidity, its almost like a pressure but its not opressive. Its tense and mysterious. Of course, I was hooked on the smell.
After I returned home from my impulse fruit shopping, I had to google the lychee because having never eaten a fresh one before, I didn't know how to eat it. I found this entry on WikiHow. It was the first return on the Google search "How do you eat lychees?" I followed the step-by-step instructions. I peeled it. It mentions eating the white/grey fruit. I found this description to be unappetizing. My mind immediately jumped to Halloween parties as a child where Mothers turned out the lights and passed around peeled grapes telling you that you were feeling a bowl full of eyeballs. Now, I understand that this description might put you off the lychee eating, but please don't be put off. The experience is nothing like those childhood parties that make you dread people saying, "Hey, feel this." The lychee is a disconcerting white-ish color but its texture is much firmer than that of a peeled grape.
Since "peeled grape" was the first thing that came to mind when reading about it, I assumed that the experience of peeling it would be similar. I was expecting sticky. It wasn't. Peeling a lychee was similar to peeling an orange, if I had tried I probably could have gotten the skin to come off in one piece. It also reminded me of shelling a peanut with the skin really acting as a protective armor around the fruit. Once you peel it and seed it, all of that milky white flesh is yours.
I say all of that as if there was a lot of flesh in each lychee, but there wasn't. They are bigger than most berries but smaller than an apple. I could probably hold two lychees in one hand and keep a good grip on them. I ate the six of them that I bought on consecutive days, two or so a day. And, the taste. Oh, the taste.
Considering that the smell had me busy constructing mental images of myself relaxing under the high canopy of a lush jungle, fanning myself in the midday heat, I couldn't wait to actually try the fresh fruit. The taste was less intense than the smell. The lychee is juicy. Its flavor was first fruity and then the floral hit. The end of the taste was intense, as if the fruit had condensed down to a floral powder, which I found surprising since the smell of it made me think of humidity. The texture of the fruit was firm with a strong fibre feel to it without being stringy. The feel of it was very self contained, like you really had to bite it because it couldn't be relied upon to fall apart in your mouth. Deliciousorganics.com describes the lychee as "sweet" and "exotic tasting". It also recommends that you eat it right as you peel it so that the fruit does not dry out. I peeled them and didn't eat them right away on the last day I had them, and I didn't find that they dried out. However, I did find that the fruit on the last day wasn't white or grey, but more the color your clothes come out when a red sock inflitrates the whites wash and the bleeds. Of the fruit, this pinkish one was the juiciest. When I bit into it, I got a huge gush of yummy, lychee flavor.
If you see lychee at your veg stand or in your supermarket, I highly recommend that you pick some up. They are tasty and excitingly exotic.
September 08, 2007
Really Simple Syndication
I have to say....there is nothing at all simple about RSS feeds. Nor, does there seem to be anything particularly simple about Yahoo's Site Builder software.
I have been monkeying around with stuff in order to get everything working so I can submit my podcast to iTunes and PodcastAlley and any other number of places because it might be nice to have a few listeners. (Then again, it might be rubbish to have listeners. However, it is nice to occasionally know that you aren't just talking to yourself.) My first problem seemed to be that Yahoo site builder wouldn't let me create anything that was an .xml file. So, I first tried to put the RSS thing up as an .html file. iTunes didn't like that, it kept telling me I had an open meta tag. I looked and could not find any such thing. So, I had to come up with a new plan.
So, I looked around in my online management tools, figuring that somewhere I would be able to upload files without the help of site builder. As it turns out, I'm right. I have a file manager that I can use to upload straight to my site. Plan B involved downloading the .xml files created through Poderator.com and then to upload them straight to my site. At least this way they'd look right, with all the colors correct and in the right place. That's a start, right?
I get that up and done and I go to iTunes to submit the feed to iTunes and I get past the tag business only to find that iTunes can't seem to find any episodes. So, I don't know what I'm doing wrong. But, at least the RSS thing looks right now.
So, I think maybe I've misunderstood something about RSS and that's why it doesn't work for me. Either that, or iTunes doesn't like the format that the episodes are in on the my page. To be honest, I don't really like them that way, either. That's just how they are put up by Yahoo Site Builder. So, I may have to look into changing that.
In short, I feel lied to about this whole "Really Simple Syndication" thing. There hasn't been a simple thing about it yet.
September 07, 2007
Good Word
I just wanted to let everyone know that the word of the day from dictionary.com today is Salient. I found that it be a particularly good word, its fun to say (all those vowels), plus its useful. You can use it in sentences like, "One of his more salient features was his ability to light up a room." to mean, "Its pretty noticeable, I mean, you've met him, right? When the man walks into a room, it lights up. I don't know, there's something wrong with his internal chemistry or whatever that makes him crazily electrical."
Or, maybe you wouldn't say that, but still, you get the picture. According to dictionary.com its synonyms with "important", "striking", "remarkable". And, I might even add "particularly relevant".
Oh, and it has some secondary meanings, too. One about heraldry and one about angles.
This might actually be a word ramble in the future. Hmm.
September 06, 2007
Curiosities Episode 2: Putting the Super! in Superfluous
I'm pleased as punch to say that episode 2 of the podcasterino is live and kickin'!
It can be found here. In this week's episode I expose my ignorance of the Monarchy and there is another Word Ramble and some more discussion of socks! If that interests you, please give it a listen.
As always, please feel free to contact me with any suggestions/problems/questions/or concerns as I hope that the show can only get better!
Also, I am again very sorry about the volume problems and the poor sound quality. I do hope to remedy that with episode three.
Huzzah!
First Impressions
I used to be into reading books about relationships. Some of them were fun because they were really more like lit crit than advice ( for example: Jane Austen's Guide to Dating) and others were more philosophical (for example: If The Buddha Dated) and some of them were more physchological. In that last category, I'm goint to place Mr. Right, Right Now, although I'm sure that as a book it firmly belongs in relationships and dating/ self improvement. It was an interesting book that encouraged reader to be interesting, to be authentic, but above all to enjoy themselves and love what they are doing. It was full of tips for little things that you could do to look your best and little tips of how to treat yourself just a little bit better, but that made it all worth it. There was a bit in the book, and now that I think about it, it was probably based on some of the same research that Malcolm Gladwell's Blink was based on, where the author but forth the notion that the brain makes a snap judgement about a person in the first 30 seconds to five minutes of meeting them. And you then spend all subsequent interactions sort of gathering evidence supporting your initial reaction. That's what makes first impressions so important. They provide the foundation for how a person will view you, barring some outside interaction or something very big happening.
And, if that’s true, for better or for worse my first interaction with the Welsh (and therefore first impression of them)happened in June of 2004. A group of us were queuing for tickets to the opening day of Wimbledon. Just hanging out, having some wine, preparing to sleep on the pavement and eat take out that was delivered right to us on the sidewalk when we met a young Scottish fellow whom we call “Flashy McKilty”. Now, he was a nice enough lad, we chatted and discussed what our plans were while we were on this side of the pond and then Flashy McKilty went off, presumably to scandalize some more foreigners. And, we thought that would be the last of seeing him. Our group was to break up for a couple of days following the opening of Wimbledon, with my sister and some of her friends staying to watch some more tennis and our friend E and I heading off to Wales. So, much later in the night we were pleasantly surprised when Flashy McKilty turned back up with…. Ta Da! Welshmen! (And, while that isn't an exact quote, that is pretty much how he introduced them to us). Apparently on his travels, Flashy had met these fine chaps named Kip and Owain and felt that they needed to be introduced to us so that we could get a real insider’s look at the part of the UK we were headed to. E. once described Kip and Owain as the perfect Welsh comic heroes. Kip would be the swarthy, used-to-work-in-the-fields-and-now-works-in-the-mines-all-the-while-playing-rugby-on-the-weekends representative of Modern Wales while Owain, was tall and lithe and could very likely have stepped out of a tapestry depicting Arthur and his knights of the round table or a tale from the Mabinogion.
The first thing they said it was, “It is untrue that the Welsh are always drunk and singing. However, we are drunk and we may break out into song.”
Fantastic. In my opinion, we couldn’t have had a better introduction to the Welsh because these chaps were amiable, they were a great laugh, they were incredibly pleasant and they suggested all sorts of fun and wonderful things we could do (of course, none of it fit into our plans.) Although, our first impressions of actually visiting the country were pretty incredible as well.
September 02, 2007
Projects
You know how sometimes you finished something, it gets you all fired up to do more? That's how I feel right now, all fired up to knit and podcast about all these different things.
Its a really great feeling.
I have been online drooling over yarn all morning, thinking, "Oh, I can do this for this person's birthday and wouldn't it be nice to do that for Christmas!"
I am very excited. Sadly, most of my shopping will have to wait a few more weeks. However, it doesn't hurt to look, does it?
But, that is just knitting. The podcasting I can get onto right away. I have been working on sorting out the RSS feed for the show, so that I can submit it to iTunes and then you can just download it from there. (If you subscribe to it, every time I put up a new episode, it will download automatically. How cool is that?) A big thanks to John R. for helping me with the RSS feed and for helping find a website to do it for me. Now, if I could just get Yahoo's site builder to fall in line, I'd be sorted.
Now, I will delve back into my research, which I'm hoping will make for some good pieces for my next pod show!