November, 2013 - cushtie.com - Page 2

Month: November 2013

  • Drowned Hopes

    I’ve just finished Drowned Hopes, the seventh of the Dortmunder series. After what had felt like diminishing quality in some of the later novels, this was a welcome return to form. The location shifts again, from the New York City settings of the previous few stories, to a quiet town in upstate New York – […]

  • Some minor confusions

    This morning my phone gave me a Spanish test. I’ve been using Babbel, which is pretty handy for learning vocabulary, although I’ve not found it any use for grammar or conjugations so far. The other flaw, if that’s how I should describe it, is that it seems obsessed with making me learn the phrase "acostarse […]

  • Hair, here?

    In theory, a barber should enjoy job security, as long as everybody doesn’t go bald there will always be hair to cut. But since most people don’t think cutting hair can be especially hard, and because there are lots of people looking for a way to make money, it’s not as easy a life as […]

  • Patpong – a review for Tripadvisor

    Getting to Patpong was itself quite difficult. Our taxi driver first took us to an alleyway, full of broken tuk-tuks, where a crowd of Europeans were being herded into some sort of industrial facility. After some remonstration with him from the Thai-speaking part of our group, he finally exclaimed ‘Patpong’ with great surprise, as though […]

  • Gin gin gin

    I felt quite proud of myself for running 10k in less than 50 minutes this morning, so this evening I made a start on the gin. Currently we have about a third of a bottle of Oola, a full bottle of Hendrick’s that I picked up in Heathrow duty free in June (and never touched, […]

  • Mouldy bottles

    I’ve got a couple of Polar bottles, lightweight insulated plastic drinking bottles, which should be good for running around Singapore when I don’t want to be sipping tepid water after half an hour. My wife hates these bottles, because the insides are covered in dimples that may contribute to keeping the contents cool, but they’re […]

  • Gravity

    As I sat there in a charmless cineplex, trying not to weep, I reminded myself that this was what I had chosen. (Actually, I might have been in exactly the same cinema where I watched What’s Your Number?, a god-awful rom com, a few years ago, alone, depressed.) Gravity is not exactly a fun and […]

  • Keep rolling

    I kept trying to think of a sufficiently heinous pun to title this with. “Roll model”? “You got to roll with it”? “Roll reversal”? Nothing was quite good enough, nothing could capture the glee, excitement and terror that our child has now inflicted upon us. Felicity has figured out how to roll.

  • A way to avoid some carelessness with postgres

    Part of my day job involves loading data from lots of different files into a database, and one way this can go horribly wrong is if I attempt to load the same file twice. Either the database will get mad at me because I’ll be trying to violate referential integrity, or my end users will […]

  • Laziness

    I’m getting lazier. This evening, after successfully bathing our daughter, instead of making the effort to cook a decent meal, I fried an egg and some vegetarian sausages, drenched them in mustard and wolfed them down. Perhaps through guilt, or fear of salmonella, I fried the egg far too long and far too hot, providing […]