I'm currently in the UK for Christmas. Amongst other Christmasy activities I cooked an apple pie. This differed from an American apple pie in one essential way. I used bramley apples.
There can't be any debate. Bramleys make the best apple pies. The American family members with me, who helped eat the pie, agreed.
They are sour to eat and the sourness turns to yumminess when cooked, which is why they are called cooking apples in the UK. For cooking, Granny Smiths pale in comparison.
What I do not understand is how a country like the USA, that considers apple pies to be symbols of Amerincanness, doesn't grow apples that are any good for cooking apple pies.
Some American farmer would make a fortune if they got working on growing bramleys and so made American apple pies taste of something more than muted apple mush. I found a place near San Francisco that claims to do them, but I don't live in San Francisco and apparently they are available only at some market stand in SF at some unspecified time in September and only maybe. I had no problem buying Bramleys in December, in Tescos in the UK.
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
It Works!
Today I got a WiMAX device and it works. So I'm posting this over WiMAX. Wohoo. 6 years of hard slog writing standards, developing chips and generally trying to make this WiMAX thing come to fruition and finally I get to send some packets over it.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Why can't I get nice paper in the USA?
Still on the Japan thing...
In the Motomachi shopping street in Kobe, there is a small stationary store. In there, I found and purchased a pad of paper of the sort I used to get when in college. It was smooth, high quality and with fine graduated graph lines.
I spent the rest of the week doing my job (which is why I was in Kobe in the first place), jotting down my thoughts and designs on this pad of paper.
What occurred to me was that the reason I stopped using paper in that fashion, is not because computers got so much better at taking notes but because the quality of the paper and the nature of the gridlines printed on them has gone dramatically downhill since the early 1990s. Bad paper is no fun to use.
If anyone has a line on a good supply of really nice linear graph, log-lin and log-log paper of the sort available in the Manchester University bookstore circa 1990, without having to fly to Japan, please leave a note here.
In the Motomachi shopping street in Kobe, there is a small stationary store. In there, I found and purchased a pad of paper of the sort I used to get when in college. It was smooth, high quality and with fine graduated graph lines.
I spent the rest of the week doing my job (which is why I was in Kobe in the first place), jotting down my thoughts and designs on this pad of paper.
What occurred to me was that the reason I stopped using paper in that fashion, is not because computers got so much better at taking notes but because the quality of the paper and the nature of the gridlines printed on them has gone dramatically downhill since the early 1990s. Bad paper is no fun to use.
If anyone has a line on a good supply of really nice linear graph, log-lin and log-log paper of the sort available in the Manchester University bookstore circa 1990, without having to fly to Japan, please leave a note here.
Sorry, but Kyoto is not all it is cracked up to be.
In the past week I have spent 2 days in the air, 1 free day in Kobe, 1 free day in Kyoto, 1 free day in Osaka and 4 non-free days working in Kobe.
In the past I've also spent a couple of days in Yokohama, Kumagaya and Tokyo.
Kyoto is the one with the reputation for being the idyllic temple city. Yokohama, Osaka and Tokyo are the big noisy cities. All most people know about Kobe is that it had a really bad Earthquake a few years ago.
However on my trip to Kyoto, I found it to be louder, busier and less pleasant than any of the other cities. It did indeed have the shrines and temples and I visited some. Rather than being idyllic, they were plomped down in the middle of this noisy city with ugly buildings all around.
Yokohama, Osaka and Tokyo are indeed big, shiny cities with much shopping to be had. However Kobe, as a place to stay for a short trip, seemed to be the best of the lot. It's quieter, you can walk the city and for the tourist who doesn't want to try to hard, there is the Motomachi shopping street, the Sannomyia center gai shopping street, the Sannomyia hondori shopping street and few shrines and gardens of its own.
Kobe seems to be so horribly underrepresented on the internet and so if you Google for "Motomachi" you get things about Yokohama and if you Google for "Motomachi Kobe" you get no pictures of a wide convered shopping street with many good stores, which is what it is.
So if you Google for it and this page comes up instead, trust me, it's worth a visit. I got my daughter a Kimono there. Something I never managed to find in Yokohama.
Oasaka has a way better techy store, but techy stores don't make the family happy when you get home with a box of USB sticks for gifts.
In the past I've also spent a couple of days in Yokohama, Kumagaya and Tokyo.
Kyoto is the one with the reputation for being the idyllic temple city. Yokohama, Osaka and Tokyo are the big noisy cities. All most people know about Kobe is that it had a really bad Earthquake a few years ago.
However on my trip to Kyoto, I found it to be louder, busier and less pleasant than any of the other cities. It did indeed have the shrines and temples and I visited some. Rather than being idyllic, they were plomped down in the middle of this noisy city with ugly buildings all around.
Yokohama, Osaka and Tokyo are indeed big, shiny cities with much shopping to be had. However Kobe, as a place to stay for a short trip, seemed to be the best of the lot. It's quieter, you can walk the city and for the tourist who doesn't want to try to hard, there is the Motomachi shopping street, the Sannomyia center gai shopping street, the Sannomyia hondori shopping street and few shrines and gardens of its own.
Kobe seems to be so horribly underrepresented on the internet and so if you Google for "Motomachi" you get things about Yokohama and if you Google for "Motomachi Kobe" you get no pictures of a wide convered shopping street with many good stores, which is what it is.
So if you Google for it and this page comes up instead, trust me, it's worth a visit. I got my daughter a Kimono there. Something I never managed to find in Yokohama.
Oasaka has a way better techy store, but techy stores don't make the family happy when you get home with a box of USB sticks for gifts.
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Isn't Photostitch Nice?
I just tried out photostitch, which is the photo stitching together utility that came with my camera.
The view from my hotel window when panned and stitched together, looks like this.
It is looking at Kobe up the coast North-East ish, with Mount Rokko in the background on the left and the Pacific Ocean on the Right. Zoom into the raise road bit and you can see the same truck twice, because I was panning the camera right to left as it drove right to left.
The view from my hotel window when panned and stitched together, looks like this.
It is looking at Kobe up the coast North-East ish, with Mount Rokko in the background on the left and the Pacific Ocean on the Right. Zoom into the raise road bit and you can see the same truck twice, because I was panning the camera right to left as it drove right to left.
Saturday, September 13, 2008
My Tampopo Omlette Moment
This morning, at breakfast in the hotel, I had my Tampopo omlette moment.
Tampopo in this context is a Japanese film concerning one woman's quest for the perfect noodle. There is a scene where a vagrant breaks into a restaurant and makes her an omlette, with some very deft wrist work to make the thing fold itself into a folded omlette shape, with all the well done skin on the outside and the soft stuff on the inside.
Google, being google, alters its search results based on where you are. Here it is in Japanesse..
http://movie.goo.ne.jp/dvd/detail/D112575708.html
And here it is with subtitles, like nature intended..
http://www.imdb.com/media/rm2539887616/tt0092048
Well there was a guy at the breakfast buffet doing exactly that and he made one in front of my eyes. He made it look easy, but I doubt it is. Wifey will be most dismayed when I get back and go through the eggs trying to recreate the feat.
It tasted yummy by the way, but tomorrow I will be brave and try the fish bits with rice breakfast. It's easy to get it right since it is a buffet and you just copy the Japaneese person in front of you in the line. They seem quite surprised to see a Gaijin wield a pair of chopsticks competently.
In fact they seem quite surprised to see a Gaijin at all. I haven't seen a western face in the place since I got here. There are plenty in Tokyo, but I guess Kobe is a bit off the map for westerners.
Tampopo in this context is a Japanese film concerning one woman's quest for the perfect noodle. There is a scene where a vagrant breaks into a restaurant and makes her an omlette, with some very deft wrist work to make the thing fold itself into a folded omlette shape, with all the well done skin on the outside and the soft stuff on the inside.
Google, being google, alters its search results based on where you are. Here it is in Japanesse..
http://movie.goo.ne.jp/dvd/detail/D112575708.html
And here it is with subtitles, like nature intended..
http://www.imdb.com/media/rm2539887616/tt0092048
Well there was a guy at the breakfast buffet doing exactly that and he made one in front of my eyes. He made it look easy, but I doubt it is. Wifey will be most dismayed when I get back and go through the eggs trying to recreate the feat.
It tasted yummy by the way, but tomorrow I will be brave and try the fish bits with rice breakfast. It's easy to get it right since it is a buffet and you just copy the Japaneese person in front of you in the line. They seem quite surprised to see a Gaijin wield a pair of chopsticks competently.
In fact they seem quite surprised to see a Gaijin at all. I haven't seen a western face in the place since I got here. There are plenty in Tokyo, but I guess Kobe is a bit off the map for westerners.
The Bullet Train Breakfast Cereal Mystery
My post today is heavily influenced by my locale. Kobe, Japan. Things I thunk today are very influenced by my experiences since landing at Narita airport yesterday and will be for the next week while I'm here.
Japan, as a whole is very clean, efficient and non stinky (except for some of the fish). But as I rolled my suitcase towards the Narita Airport train station to get on the Narita express, I came across a musty smell. The smell continued on the train.
I hurried through Tokyo central station, since I had exactly fifteen minutes to get from whatever platform I was on to platform 19 to take the Shinkansen to Kobe. But the smell persisted. It remained on the bullet train. 2 hours 54 minutes later, I was in Shin-Kobe station. I transferred to the subway and the smell persisted. It didn't stop until I emerged from Sannomaya station and walked through town to my hotel.
I spent most of the 2 hours 54 minutes on the bullet train trying to drag up what the smell was. Towards the end of the trip I got it. It was the dry musty smell that you got from a British breakfast cereal I ate in the 70s. It was yellow, shaped like pillows and they don't sell it anymore. But there is no doubt, that it was the smell was. I can't remember what it was called.
So it occurred to me that the reason they don't sell it anymore is because JR (Japan Rail) buys up the stocks of this cereal and uses it to clean the trains and tracks.
That is what I thunk today. Well yesterday, since I was tired and went to bed.
Japan, as a whole is very clean, efficient and non stinky (except for some of the fish). But as I rolled my suitcase towards the Narita Airport train station to get on the Narita express, I came across a musty smell. The smell continued on the train.
I hurried through Tokyo central station, since I had exactly fifteen minutes to get from whatever platform I was on to platform 19 to take the Shinkansen to Kobe. But the smell persisted. It remained on the bullet train. 2 hours 54 minutes later, I was in Shin-Kobe station. I transferred to the subway and the smell persisted. It didn't stop until I emerged from Sannomaya station and walked through town to my hotel.
I spent most of the 2 hours 54 minutes on the bullet train trying to drag up what the smell was. Towards the end of the trip I got it. It was the dry musty smell that you got from a British breakfast cereal I ate in the 70s. It was yellow, shaped like pillows and they don't sell it anymore. But there is no doubt, that it was the smell was. I can't remember what it was called.
So it occurred to me that the reason they don't sell it anymore is because JR (Japan Rail) buys up the stocks of this cereal and uses it to clean the trains and tracks.
That is what I thunk today. Well yesterday, since I was tired and went to bed.
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