Forced Significance, Chapter 1

I have decided to take part in NaNoWriMo this year. To push myself to write, (and to fill in the white space in this blog) I will be posting chapters as I complete them. Hopefully I’ll do better than I did last year.

Without further ado, here is the first chapter.

First Time for Everything: Election night I watched completely

Remember way back, when this blog was updated frequently? Yeah, I don’t either, but I’m going to do my best. It’s a hectic time of year, and I’ve got a large amount to do, but let’s roll with it, and see where we’re going with all of this.

I stayed up all of last night, (and well into the morning), watching the US Election trickle through. I feel that the right man won, but as without a vote, my voice matters not. What’s important is what happens now, to the USA and the world.

While we wait, I’ve prepared a few interesting things.

The Beeb is beckoning to Blondon

The BBC is calling. Literally.

I was working in my local St Peter’s Hospice charity shop (link) when my mobile rang. So, when I picked it up, I was shocked to get a call from BBC Factual, asking if I wanted to go over and work on Watchdog. Obviously, this was a little shocking, and I had to initally pant a bit in order to ward off the fictional heart attacks that beset me. I had just accepted that they weren’t going to call, and then suddenly this happens. There’s a first time for everthing, even the BBC calling you when you’re working, to offer you a position.

The strange thing was that initally it wasn’t as good as I had been expecting. When I planned this gap year, back in the day, I didn’t really understand what was important when looking for work, such as time, effort, and the ability to apply to lots of seperate places. So, when I had finally decided to spend a significant amount of time in England, I have to admit, the prospect of moving up to London was a tad daunting.

First of all, I needed a place to stay. London isn’t cheap, I hear. Then there was the revenue loss of not working for a month (even though I’m not working now, I would definitely not be working if I was doing unpaid work for the BBC). So, initally, despite the dream, I was hesitant.

However, I changed my mind after I talked to my Dad. You see, I had forgotten that one of the most powerful resources a person can have is not money, but networks of people, people who are willing to lend an ear, or tell you where to get things, or in this case, give you a place to sleep. There was also the fact I had planned a stint in November with one of my aunts, so this wasn’t a big change of our plans. They’ve let me stay for the month, in exchange for me being a good guest (read: do the dishwasher, help us fix our computers, and cook once in a while).

But of course, life has some irony, because I’m hesitant to accept anything before I know where it is (since I need to know how to commute), and what the hours are (although I’m betting they’re longer on Monday, considering that’s Show Day). So, I’ve left a message on the answering machine, which is the number they gave me, as well as email BBC Jobs.

I’m worried I should have accepted on the spot, and by not being prepared, I’ve missed the chance. But of course, this is that whole “life experience” thing that I went on this gap year for, isn’t it?

Have you checked under the sofa?

Even if you don’t really understand economics, this article from the BBC Magazine is a good read.

Money consists of two main elements.
The first is cash (notes and coins). The total amount of cash in the UK is just over £50bn, with about £43bn circulating outside the banks and £7bn in banks’ safes, tills and cash machines.
But cash is a relatively small proportion of the total amount of money. So what is the rest? (link)

FooGo? FrontGosh? FunGame?

CTRL-Z

CTRL-Z means to suspend a program. For example, you are working with a command and you want to stop it temporary as it is taking too long. To do that, you can use CTRL-Z. You can later restore back the command using the fg command. (link)

These are godsends for us who are just learning the basics of the terminal and all it’s intricasies. Now when I cause my Nethack game to vanish, I won’t fret at all!

Ampersands are underused in my opinion

So, when you work in Linux terminal you might have noticed some essential things that you would like to have in it. Linux terminal is the most powerful application running in Linux. It can do anything that you can ever think of.

But when you start an application like firefox and after that you would like to use another application while still using firefox and would like to start it from Terminal you can do it.

And it is extremely easy too.

Just type the name of the application you would like to start and end it with a space and the ampersand (&): (link)

This is useful when running graphical programs in an X server, while using ssh. It means I can use Firefox, while making sure that privoxy and tor are running. Hurray!

I even cut a lemon in half!

When you sit down in the evening, attempting to work on your pet projects, and are disturbed by a rumbling stomach, you realise that you’re hungry. Your hunger is compounded by the fact that you’re on your own in the house, and thus you are responsible for the food situation.

This is probably what it is like living on your own. I didn’t actually mind it. Since I’m here by myself, for a couple of days, I can do what I like. More enterprising teenagers might organise some sort of “rave” or “party”, or even get some people over for “drinks”. Of course, I seemed to spend my time reading, listening to my music through the stero hifi (which is one of those awesome speaker systems that you can hear the quality difference of mpeg-3 compression, making me smug with my lossless formats), and cooking. Oh yeah, and I may have danced, a bit. But I’m sure most people do that.

Warning, what follows is a very descriptive series of sentences, which may be dull.

So, I found a recipe in Sam Stern’s get cooking (link), for a sausage ragoo, which seems to me a fancy way of saying tomato sauce with sausages. Most of the stuff was in the house, I only had to go to Sainsbury’s for mushrooms, fennel seeds, and small chillis (which they didn’t have, so I got chilli powder instead).

Within the first ten minutes, I knew three things. The first was that chopping onions seriously stings, which I had forgotten, just like how I forgot that stinging nettles seriously sting. The second was that peeling garlic is fiddly, and crushing it without a garlic crusher is incredibly difficult, which is why my fingers now ward away vampires.

The third was that Dad called to tell me he’s in hospital under observation, due to heavy chest pains suggesting an oncoming heart attack. Wow. That’s really difficult to deal with when cooking, you know?

However, in my typical style, I quickly forgot about this when I realised that cooking to music was fun, and that I needed a bigger saucepan, because when the recipie calls for a large saucepan, it means it.

Also, eating raw mushrooms is surprisingly dull. You need to eat a large amount before you get any flavour, and then it’s kind of gross.

Did you know that vegetable stock, or at least the powdered stuff, tastes exactly the same as Cup a Soup? I mean, it’s almost if Cup a Soup is vegetable stock! (My dreams have been crushed.)

However, the dish turned out surprisingly nice, even if the sudden appearance of a duty I had been neglecting did make me compose a long email, which then caused me to forget the pasta, which is why I may have left it simmer a bit long. Although, I don’t think you can really simmer things for too long, I mean, there was still liquid left.

At this point of the evening, it ceased to be evening, and then I was cooking into the wee hours of the morning, because I only started at ten o’clock, because I had forgotten I needed to eat. Eventually, the tiredness, and my Dad’s hospitalisation got to me, and all I could do was stare at the dish for ten minutes, before eating.

Despite my increasing distaste for the world at large at that point, and the sense that I was a miserable failure (no, I didn’t think I was George W. Bush), it was actually a nice meal, and will probably feed at least three of the family when they come back from Cornwall.

Even if I forgot the lemon juice.

This is why you can’t trust Google

The world is officially broken. Broken.

When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you’re really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you’re in the right state of mind? (link)

Then again, all things can be broken. (link)

It’s one of those really tiny ones on the right

Three words.

Hurray. For. Connecticut.

Clip-sized-web-chunks-of-bite #2

A tiger cub given to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin for his 56th birthday.

I thought the things that these two had in common was amusing. Maybe it’s the eyes!