Despite my tall and generally stick-like appearance, I can stack on the weight – in fact at this height (6’4″), my weight has varied by 56 pounds (25kg, or the weight of a good sized springer spaniel).  I maintain in fact three ranges of trousers, ‘thin’, ‘medium’, and ‘fat bastard’.  At the moment, after 8 weeks of constant eating in South Africa and the far east, I am in the middle category, moving to fat bastard.  Sadly the usual weight-loss method of going on a trek has not worked in the case of the Otter trail  due to the copious quantities of food and wine consumed (of which more in a forthcoming post).

Scanning the thraiposphere I am possibly therefore more than usually attuned to diet stories, and this one (in the ‘inform’ category) caught my eye the other day.  I am in general not at all sympathetic to diet books or fads despite having followed many myself, and prefer these days, to only take on board properly structured research.  A recent paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, by Mozaffarian et al  falls into this category.

The key chart is shown on the left.  The gist of the study is that a very large cohort (cf 100k US female nurses – NHS, and 22k male health professionals – HPFS) was followed over 20 years, and a detailed study was made of their diet choices.  The interesting conclusion is that despite the common scientific assumption that ‘all calories are the same’, it seems that some foods cause a great deal more weight gain than others.  In particular, from the graph at the left, while potato crisps are unsurprisingly at the top of the list, they are followed by just ‘potatoes’.  And red meats have a powerful impact for men, only just behind potatoes.   On the other side of the line, cheese promotes weight loss, as do nuts, fruits (but not fruit juices), and yoghurt.  Steak and chips out, muesli and yoghurt in!  Think I’ll stay fat then.

Now for the revolting part.  I am not in the habit of buying tinned mushrooms on a regular basis, but I have done so in the past.  Did you know that in the US (and I therefore assume in the UK also) up to 19 maggots and 74 mites are allowed in the tin before it is deemed unacceptable?  This fact and 14 other very troubling ‘gross food’ tidbits are revealed in a great piece on the Rodale web site.  This useful guide also helps you to determine whether your vanilla or raspberry flavoured  drink actually contains Beaver Anal Gland Juice.  This could be helpful if you find yourself starting to wear furry underpants and stacking logs at narrow points on rivers (I may add this to my top tips section as useful furry rodent stories are hard to come by).

I

I mention this only because a number of items on the web tickled me this week, and they all have a technical, or at least abstrusely specific angle. That’s about all they have in common, but I wanted to log them here, and so that’s going to be my taxonomy.  Here they are:

Techeye  Many years ago, in the late ’80s, I handled the marketing in Europe for IBM’s PCs and software.  At that time, a combination of my callow youth, and the novelty of the IBM PC, made the whole area fantastically exciting and the world seemed to be changing incredibly fast.  Part of what I did involved talking to the press – and many of them were as excited as we were at what was happening.  But in the classic style, most of the UK IT journalists were also hard-bitten, cynical, and rather fond of the products of grape and grain.  One of the ones I liked most was Mike Magee, an amiable and interesting cove, who spent most of his working time in one pub or another, but was also a very good journalist.  Later, he founded The Register, or el Reg to it’s fans.  The Register is still one of my favorite sources for IT info, and in Reg Hardware does a very good line in consumer tech reviews. Its real claim to fame however was it’s sarky Brit-tabloid viewpoint (motto: ‘biting the hand that feeds IT’), which while irritating in an actual Brit tabloid, was great for IT reportage. These days however, the Reg is now a little too respectable, and is not as irreverent as it used to be.

The mantle of “best provider of good industry information plus a complete lack of regard for the rich and powerful” has passed instead to Mike’s latest endeavor, Techeye.  In particular Techeye tells it like I think it is in the area of Apple, and it’s patent wars.  For example, this paragraph is from a recent patent story: “The new court case does not make much sense, other than to satisfy Apple’s Steve Jobs’ promise to waste every penny his company has made trying to shut down Google’sAndroid. Jobs, who famously admitting stealing other people’s ideas, thought it was morally wrong that anyone produce anything that looked like the ideas he stole.”  Exactly.

In another piece, Techeye, umabiguously calls the CeO of Nokia a “Microsoft plant” in the company – a completely obvious point, but one that I have never seen written in the tech press.  They also drily describe an interview with him as “an excellent demonstration of executive media training in action“, a particular bugbear – rightly – of cynical UK journos.

Verity Stob.  A number of features still combine to keep the Register an indispensable source of IT info.  One of these is the absolutely excellent Verity Stob column.  The actual identity of VS remains impressively well guarded.  The photo to the left is provided by the Register, noting that while it is not of Stob, it is of  the “prettiest Wikipedian we could find”.

‘Verity’ is a long-time programmer, and has been writing blogs since 1988, first for Dr Dobb’s Journal, and lately for el Reg.  She has a wonderful combination of deep programming knowledge,  erudition, and a bone dry but slightly wondering view of the IT and broader world.  The series of scriptures of the Sons of Khan, of which this is the latest installment, is a great example.  Really only people familiar with programming languages should read this, but it’s very funny.  She also turns her gaze on the English language, with which she has a great facility.  This riff on the latest release of English  (V3.31), is less technical, but will still appeal mostly to those who have experienced endless point releases in the software game.  I particularly like the section on the “emphatic period ” function.

I am fascinated by who VS actually is.  I think she is clearly a lady (no man would write a piece like this on the Roomba vacuum cleaner).  She is clearly highly intelligent, and has been in the business for a long time.  On the other hand she seems to be in shall we say a non-executive position, and has recently completed an Open University diploma.  Why? Possibly actually so she could write this absolutely beautifully illustrated description of the course – one of the most backhanded recommendations of the OU I have ever read.  Anyway, essential reading, and a subtle reminder of what being British actually means.

xkcd.  A favorite of Verity’s, this is a wonk’s cartoon series, self-described as ‘a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language’.  That’s pretty accurate – but it’s also regularly funny, and occasionally brilliant.  One example of real distinction is his electromagnetic spectrum chart.  This is probably only for men with a working knowledge of O-level physics, but it is very funny.  Check out the potato.  If you find that you will also find the other accurate and scatalogical items embedded in this detailed map of the wonk’s frequency range.

Although you can step sequentially through the cartoons, I find the best way is to use the ‘random’ key.  This reveals some cartoons of such deep technicality they remain opaque, or at least to me, but at least 30% of the time, it turns up something that makes me laugh out loud.  OK maybe that’s just me.

Hitler finds out Sheffield United have been relegated.  This is non-technical, but deeply specific about Sheffield United.  Recently a UK politician was demoted for having put satirical subtitles about the Scottish Nationalists on a clip from the celebrated 2004 film ‘Downfall’, which documents Adolf Hitler’s end in the bunker in Berlin in 1945.  Possibly alone, I had not realised that there were numerous different versions of subtitles to this clip, ranging from his rage at finding there will be no camera in the iPod touch, to hearing that Oasis have split up, or my favorite, at the link above, his utter fury at learning that his favorite team have been relegated.  The clip was made in 2007, and I think was the first – certainly for me it’s the funniest.  A comprehensive list of the various versions was provided by the Daily Telegraph here: not all are as good as this one, but there are some gems to be found.

So there you go.  Oh, finally, what of Paul Krugman? He is the wonkish Nobel laureate who writes oped pieces for the New York Times, and who has it exactly right in my view, both politically and economically.  He infuriates many academics and the nut-job libertarian right wing, by being both god-like in his authority on economics matters, as well as unashamedly polemic on Republican and Tea-party politics, as well as being a pretty good writer to boot.  Check him out here.

This first one is of the amazing Blue mansion or Cheong Fatt Tze mansion (the first name from it’s colour, and the second from it’s original owner).

This was taken as a 120 deg pano on the Fuji, and close in it tends to distort excessively, as do most autopano cameras. I have been experimenting with Lightroom 3 (LR3) to correct some of this (using the ‘distortion control in lens corrections), and it can help somewhat, as shown above. In this shot I also used LR3 to balance the tones, which were overexposed on the right hand side, and to lighten the shadows selectively in the porches and window bays. I also took the liberty of cloning out an unsightly couple of new skyscrapers behind the building, which I did with the wonderful wire tool and cloning stamp in Sagelight.  To see the snap at a larger size, just click on it, as with all the shots below.

Here’s another pano, this time of somewhere we actually stayed – the excellent Cameron Highlands Resort, in the mountains north of KL.  I took the shot some way back from the hotel, but despite this there was quite a bit of curvature distortion.  Using the Lightroom corrections, i was able to eliminate almost all of this, and to get much more contrast into a shot taken on a pretty dull and muggy day. Click on the shot to get a better view.

We finally got to sit down at the Chickadee and hubby Mr K’s steakhouse last Friday, and a very pleasant evening it was too, defined by the awesome steaks and other fine food on offer.  Shown above is the 1kg Ribeye on the bone (which served 6 comfortably by the way).  Mr K  takes obsessive care over the details, and it shows in the steak.  For me the essence of a steak is the blackened, almost crispy bits by the bone, with the rest of the meat being at rare to medium.  Achieving this is the quest of every great steak house, and I have eaten at most of them.  The usual USA method, used at Peter Luger’s and Ruth’s Chris, is to have an oven working at incinerating temperatures, typically 700-800F, and to sear and cook very very fast.  It works, but allows little control.  Ril’s uses a different method, with more control, to get an amazing combination of black and red on the steak.  Of course you would not do this with filet, but for the classic ribeye, it’s the only way to go (literally in KL, as there is no-where else doing this).

Of course steak is not the only food available at Ril’s.  The appetizers are of an equal standard -  a modern spin on steakhouse classics, delivered with Ril’s hallmark attention to detail.  I am not going to run through them all – the list is shown here, suffice to say that a) you could eat a great meal on the appetizers alone. Shown below is one of my personal favorites were the Tiger Rasa scallops “seared scallops served in three unique ways, with an intense flavour profile moving from sweet to sour to salty”.

And here is the lipsmacking, classic 70s prawn cocktail with a twist, “served chilled in a martini glass on a bed of peppery greens and drizzled with a revamped marie-rose sauce”.

And of course there are the desserts.  Shown below is the stupendous Salted Gula Melaka Affegato (with espresso on the side), and next to it, the equally amazing Guinness ice cream.  Check out the list to see the whole range – we tried them all including the traditional apple crumble to the chickadee’s recipe, and they were all yum.

A final snap of the joint – on Friday evenings, Neil and some of his friends play gently in the bar. He has an amazing voice, and a wonderful array of Van Morrison, Dylan and Band interpretations as well as stuff that you young people may like. I guess it’s the family influence, but one of the nicest musical accompaniments that I recall eating to, and way better than the throbbing intrusive pap you often get. So overall, Ril’s is the easiest, most comfortable and out and out tastiest place in KL, and I have now tried very many of them.

If you haven’t been yet, give it it a try. Booking now essential at weekends, and a good idea most evenings. You can get the necessary info here.

Were it necessary to reinforce this view, I have recently found myself once again at the end of the long smelly stick that is my Apple experience.  This time it involved the iPad 2, a perfectly nice product, and in some senses, a miracle of technical design, but burdened with classic Steve Jobs obduracy.  A while ago, my mother bought an iPad 2 for my father, and I offered to set it up.  Aware of the problems with having the wrong Apple ID, I set it up with an account I created for him, and then paid for and downloaded many apps for his enjoyment.

Time passed….. until this Christmas, when I wished to set up a few more apps for him – specifically the ability to dial into my Calibre server (Calibre is probably the best ebook software on the planet – I will cover this in more detail in a later post).  After downloading the app that would allow access, I found it didn't work.  At all.  Further investigation revealed that a refresh to the new IOS 5 was needed.  Excellent I thought, that’s a much better OS, and one which takes Apple up to the level of some needed Android function.  Very unwisely, on Christmas day, I started this process on the 500 kbps line (not lighteningly fast, but not outrageously slow either) at my parent’s home.  Four hours later and with my molars ground down to stumps, I retired hurt, and resolved to fight another day.  Two days later, I threw myself again into the fray.  Four hours of further toil, and I had managed to restore the iPad to a working state.  That’s all, no new OS, no new app.  Just working.  I can see no way of ever getting the system upgraded.

How can this shambles have resulted from the wizards of ease of use?  Without going into massive detail, here’s how my problem played out.  Not an unusual situation, but not one that Apple provides any help with either.  The iPad requires that all content is transferred from a PC via iTunes.  That’s what I did, with an account I set up specially in my father’s name, but using my PC of course as the iPad was a present.  Later, when I wanted to upgrade the OS on the iPad for him, I had to use a PC again – but I needed to use his one this time, as it was at his place.  As an OS upgrade wipes out all the iPad data, I needed to have all the data on his PC to sync back again after the upgrade. But that can’t be done in the world of Apple, unless the original PC is used (as I have noted before, Apple will only sync one way – from the PC to the iPad).  In fact even connecting the iPad to his PC required logging in to Apple’s web site, to ‘re-authorise’ the PC, and Apple’s site was down over most of Christmas day for that function at least.

To solve this problem, I had to buy some 3rd party software for $30 to do the transfer back to the PC.  Having done this and also having had to download yet another pointless release of iTunes at 64MB, I was ready to do the iOS upgrade on the iPad.  To my utter amazement, this was a 724MB download.  I mean bl**dy hell!!!!  724MB!!!   On a 500Mbps line that was going to take 8 hours.  We left it running overnight, and of course it timed out.  So I don’t see how we can ever do this.  If I take his iPad back to my place for a faster line, I’ll have to use my PC, and of course I just transferred everything to his PC.  The only way it can be done I think is to physically move his PC to somewhere with faster broadband. This is stone-age stuff.

So in summary I.M.H.O – Apple is currently around the worlds worst for ease of use for trivial operations like giving an tablet as a gift to someone.  They absolutely stink – and I wasted 8 hours of my life – a working day, to solve problems that should never have existed, and that do not exist with Android.  By contrast, my dear friend M**rk received an Asus Transformer tablet from another of our friends as a gift, and in Bali, over a glacially slow internet, I did an OS upgrade, set up dozens of apps, and transferred ownership, all effortlessly, to to his evident delight.

Apple’s famed of ease of use is just marketing spin.  It’s a bad bad system, that is made deliberately difficult for the user, so as to make things easier for Apple – a truly heinous sin in ease-of-use practice in my view.  Maybe the demise of Steve Jobs will change things for the better.  But I don't expect that anytime soon.  Apple will be stuffing it's customers for many years yet – not just here, but in stitching up ebook prices for Apple users and all other customers (more in future posts), and many other areas.

Bali used to be publicly and privately beautiful – a green and open vista of paddy fields and temples, with the occasional villa and hotel tucked away behind the trees.  Now it is largely only privately special.  While the villas remain gorgeous, the paddy fields are being filled in at an alarming rate, by roadside eateries or tat shops, or worse, by concrete villas of a startlingly hideous nature slammed in at random in the fields.  The selling point of these vile compounds is always the paddy field views – but the view is now of a shrunked and isolated series of patches of field separated by the grey concrete walls of these new and often empty bunkers.

Moreover the infrastructure is not just failing to keep up with this development, it is not growing at all.  The same rabbit warren of tiny (and very English) lanes now has to handle ten times the traffic.  And the vast increase in the numbers of workers in the hospitality game has resulted in a rush-hour in the mornings and evenings of epic proportions.  So moving around is more or less not possible during those times, and very time-consuming the rest of the day.  A round trip from Canggu to Jimbaran to buy fish took 4 hours.  It can take 2-3 hours to get to Ubud on busy days.

So a vacation or stay here has to either involve extensive bike usage – not for everyone – or careful choice of location.  There is really only one area to stay now if you want to access the surf, the beach and at least some of the great restaurants of Seminyak and Petitenggit.  I’m not going to say where that is, and in any event, it will be overrun in 2 years again, as the whole monstrous procession grinds its way up the west coast.  North of the island, if surf and haute cuisine are not important to you, its a different story, but all in all, its a here we go again story.  The Balinese are still gentle, patient and lovely, and their island is still unique, but they themselves, the developers, the Western entrepreneurs and restauranteurs and we the visitors are turning it into a choking and ugly caricature of its old self.

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The reason for the hiatus was ludicrously enough for a retiree, not enough time.  My very dear parents reached the age of 90 in late October, and my DLW the age of *0 in November.  both involving celebrations of (for our family and friends at least) some significance.  That period and a very busy stay in Cape Town shunted into a trip to France followed by the urgent need to do my diabolically complicated tax return and then seamlessly lurched into Christmas.

Doing a decent post requires for me at least a couple of days – one to write it, and one to find and add imagery, and then format and post it.  Amazingly, I have not had two successive days when there has been enough time free for either task.  Actually, to be completely accurate, there were a few days when I could have done something, but they were sunny days in Cape Town, and I couldn’t bear to spend them indoors.

However, sitting as I am now on a plane for the next 10 hours or so, there should be enough time at least to explain myself, and to reassure readers that I will be taking up posting again, and have a few items stacked up to cover in the next weeks or so.  The absence has made me understand a few things about web logging, and writing in general however.

One consequence of the interregnum was that after a while I felt guilty about not posting, and then got into the ‘bank statement’ mentality – where bank statements pile up unopened because you cannot bear to learn the very bad news they certainly contain.  Putting up a message explaining the pause at the beginning seemed unnecessary, as I didn’t think the gap would be that long – and at the end I couldn’t even bring myself to look at the site.

Finally, in December, I did log in again, expecting the surprisingly high traffic which had graced it since it’s rebirth to have dropped off to close to zero.  To my amazement, it had continued unabated.  In fact traffic during the times I wasn’t posting frequently exceeded traffic when I was.  I am not quite sure what to make of this.  Are the same people repeatedly reading old articles, or are new people coming by and then moving on?  I am sure that faithful readers will be checking the site now and again, but that can’t explain the pattern of viewing unless, ungrateful wretch that I am, I have underestimated just how faithful some of you are, and that you all check in every day, looking right through the site to see if any activity had by chance occurred in some remote corner.  Unlikely I feel.  But it’s a bit unnerving to find that my readership is apparently the same whether I write anything or not.  Maybe, as at the end of Some like it Hot, there is a ‘nobody’s perfect’ indulgence that allows me to not write or write as I please.

The explanation still eludes me, but let me say here, many thanks to all those of you who tuned in to the same unchanging obelisk-like content, for your indulgence and for keeping stopping by in the face of such extended and egregious inaction on my part.

In my previous post on this subject, I covered the gallery and cafe. The restaurant is now open, and has got a terrific response. Booking is now essential at weekends, and most weeknights, and the combination of great steaks, a quirky, NYC style in the restaurant, and classic dishes with a twist, are all working really well. The estimable Sean of the ‘Eat Drink KL Blogspot’ liiked it so much he did three reviews. The first covers the gallery, the second the steaks, and the third, the rest of the menu.  There are other reviews too, but this one gives the best feel (and the best food pics and descriptions).  Some photos of the restaurant are shown below. 

Ril's Steakhouse

Looking out through the picture windows
Looking out through the picture windows
At night
The Bar
What it looked like before they started

Long delay for these snaps.  The wait has been mainly due to starting with new photo processing software.  I have been using Adobe Lightroom for a few years, on a very powerful quad-core laptop.  With the advent of the Transformer  tablet, I also downsized to a smaller, more portable laptop.  It’s still a full twin-core system, not a netbook, but Lightroom is unusable on it (incredibly slow to export pictures).   In fact I have been finding Lightroom pretty unusable anyway – far to slow to load photographs,  and to save them, and on looking on forums have noticed this is a problem for many users.

Looking around for faster software for raw files, I came across Sagelight.  Long story short – this is amazing software, fast, light, and extremely powerful.  I’ve been experimenting and learning with it, and then working on the raw snaps from the Sony Nex-5, that I used at Angkor.  Work in progress, at the moment.  I’ll be likely reworking the photo’s and adding more, but here are the first 8.  And some time soon I’ll do a post on the software itself.

A word or two about Angkor itself.  There are thousands of temples in the area, most around 1000 years old, from a lost civilization.  Angkor Wat is the famous one, but it also gets a phenomenal amount of tourist traffic.  M*rk, who very kindly was my guide, knows the area very well, and used an excellent strategy of hitting the smaller temples early, before getting to Angkor Wat later, after the masses had moved on.  As a result we wondered round incredibly atmospheric smaller temples almost alone, and were not overwhelmed by tourists even when we hit the big one.

I have to say, that it was the smaller temples that really caught my imagination.  Angkor Wat itself is huge, but possible over-restored, less ornate than the smaller ones, and less mysterious.   Hopefully you will see for yourselves from these snaps why I think that.  I’ll be adding more photos over time, including from AKW itself, so keep checking.  As before, info about the pics can be found by clicking the little ‘i’ button in the top right of the photo box before, and the snaps are best seen in full screen, by pressing the button at the bottom right (esc to get out of full screen)

Angkor area temples

Bakong temple
One of the hideous gargoyles that adorn this templeBakong temple
Wonderful aged sandstone and lateriteBakong temple
Carved elephantsBakong temple
Another hideous gargoylePossibly Preah Ko temple
Possibly Preah Ko temple
With a beautiful moat around the temple wallsPossibly Preah Ko temple
Chess-piece figuring of the columnsPossibly Preah Ko temple
Elaborate doorways and enticing views beyond are a feature of almost every temple - Possibly Preah Ko temple
The intricate carvings above the doorway in the prior shotPossibly Preah Ko temple
Snaggle toothPossibly Preah Ko temple
Snaggle tooth close-up