Naxxfish

Whenever I went to my Nan’s house, she would always have a large variety of (generally very fatty) home baked goods on offer.  There was one which I could never resist, and this was her bread pudding.  Ever since I got into baking, I’ve been trying to work out what exactly it was and how you’d go about making it.  I didn’t even know what it was called – which made finding a recipe very difficult.  I described it as “a bit like a very moist fruit cake, with sultanas.  More like a jelly than a cake”.

My Nan grew up in a family for whom times were hard, and you really had to make do with what you had.  You couldn’t afford to waste food.  So things like stale bread got turned into something more storable and palatable with what you had on hand.  And, going with that tradition, I have made a slightly different recipe with what I happen to have on hand.  Due to an error of judgement with my milkman, I’ve ended up with a LOT of loaves of bread.  Most of them are frozen, but I don’t get through the thawed ones quick enough, and they go stale before I eat the whole thing.  I also have far too much milk.  Thus, I have been given a perfect opportunity to refine my recipe.

It’s deliciously moist and tasty, hot or cold, and full of flavour, and goes great with tea.

Ingredients

• About 400g of stale (but not mouldy obviously) brown bread, crusts removed
• About 200g of sultanas, or any other dried fruit that you fancy
• 100g of brown sugar (any kind)
• 1/2 tsp mixed spice
• Dash of cinnamon
• 1 tbsp marmalade
• 1 egg
• 1 pint of milk

Method

1. Remove the crusts from the bread.  Eat the leftovers so you grow up to be big and strong – alternatively share with housemates/friends/partners/pets.
2. Put the bread into a bowl, and break up as much as you can by hand.  Great stress reliever.
3. Empty the milk into the bowl, and mix up the bread good and proper.
4. Add the dried fruit and mix it in.  May as well throw in the mixed spice and cinnamon at this point too.
5. Leave this to soak for about half an hour.  Go do some work or something.  Alternatively, cover and put into the fridge and go to work.
6. Come back.  Add the sugar and marmalade, and mix well.
7. Crack an egg into a cup, beat it with a fork.  Empty it into the mixture, and mix it up some more.
8. Get a pyrex dish, or a nice clean baking dish, and cover it in butter (otherwise it’ll stick to the sides).
9. Empty the mixture into the dish, and put it in an oven pre-heated to about 200C/392F/Gas Mark 4 for about 1.5 hours.
10. After an hour and a half, you should find it’s got a nice dark brown crust over the top, and it’s starting to break away from the sides a bit.  Take it out of the oven, and leave to cool for about 30 minutes.
11. Once it’s cool, you can cut it up and serve it – perhaps with some custard.  Or you can leave it to cool completely and put it in the fridge, for a tasty treat any time of the day (I’ve had it for breakfast, but then, I’m a bit strange).

And there you have it.  Delicious and cheap.  Try it!

I’ve been working on my second year project for the last …. 12 hours now.  Most of the backend is done.  It looks like this:

As I snapped this screenshot, I noticed that my BlueJ window was exactly 1337 pixels wide.  That’s surely got to be a good sign, right?

Now, before someone goes off on a rant “Oh, NMEA parsing isn’t hard, I did it in a Python script!”.  I’ve got to do a bit more than just updating Location information.  I have to generically parse all NMEA sentences and check if they’re valid or not, and depending on whether they’re a Proprietary sentence or not I need to switch send the data to the right sort of object.  I’ve got measurements coming in on the stream which gives me Temperature, Humidity, Pressure and vertical acceleration.  I need to be able to dispatch these Measurements to the right places so they can be updated in the GUI. Also, each one of these Measurements needs to be associated with a Location.  I also need to be able to throw Exceptions which can be sensibly handled by the clients. Also everything needs to be completely documented.

It’s not particularly hard, just big and long. The class to turn the GGA sentences into Locations was the easy bit.

Now: I’m going to watch some BSG and go to sleep before my shift in 10 hours.

Bleeeding!

I’ve been in the lab since I finished work 4 hours ago.  I’ve still not managed to get my embedded system board routed.  I’m annoyed with:

• 40 pin TQFP packages
• IDC connectors
• OrCAD’s autorouter
• Having to mix surface mount and through-hole components because I can’t be sure what package certain things are labeled as in OrCAD.

I’m going home now >_<

Campus was closed after 1PM today due to snow.  Which of course means, SNOW FIGHT.

It’s snowing in Canterbury!  Whee.  Lots of dark clouds, and my patio has been turned into a giant natural etch-a-sketch (except with less vibration and more snow).

Also, I decided to buy some Wendsleydale cheese the other week and I’ve been wondering what to do with it.  After Ben did some googling for me, he came up with Rostis!  So, I grated a potato and some cheese, added some thyme, salt and pepper, squeezed it out to get rid of the excess moisture, added an egg and proceeded to fry away.  Had two of them with baked beans, and it was very tasty.  Probably the most complicated thing I’ve cooked in a few weeks.

Afterwards I decided to try Wendsleydale and Rasperry Jam on toast.  Surprisingly, it was very tasty!  I recommend it to anyone who has some Wendsleydale and doesn’t know what to do with it.

On the “how many kittens” front, I’m doing some research into the various parameters including positioning and power output of an average kitten.  It’s starting to become a rather complex problem.

I’ve just finished a big uni project, and I feel like doing something frivolous.  Twig has provided me with something to do:

* Twigathy wonders how many kittens is as noisy as a aircraft taking off >_>

Thank you!

We need some guestimates to start off with.  I’m going to say that an aircraft taking off is about 120dB (from this page), and a kitten’s mew is about 64dB (quite a noisy kitten). Both these figures are dBSPL.

We will say that we have n kittens, and that their mews are incoherant (i.e. at different phases and frequencies – unless they’re exceedingly well trained kittens).  We’re going to assume that they all meow at the same 64dB.  The equation to sum sound pressure levels is:

L_pt = L_ps + 20 log(n)

Where

L_pt = total sound pressure level (dB)

L_ps = sound pressure level from each single source (dB)

n = number of sources

(stolen from Engineering-toolbox.com)

We want to extract the n from the log and make it the subject.

Some algebra later, we get

n = 10 ^ ((L_pt-L_ps) / 20)

If we plug in 120dB for L_pt and 64dB for L_ps.

n = 10 ^ ((120-64) / 20)

n = 630.957

So, there you have it.  It takes 631 kittens all meowing simultaneously to be equivilant to an aircraft taking off.

EDIT: I’ve realised I’ve left a lot of things out, so expect another update with more detail :p

This is the cake to end all cakes.

This is the most ridiculous cake ever.

It has a Malteaser cake as the base (!!), three chocolate sponges flavoured with vanilla and honey, and filled and iced with chocolate fudge icing.

Choctastic

This is a trend I’ve noticed, mostly whilst working in the Library.

I’ve seen people talking on a mobile phone, and actually move the phone away from their ear and in front of their mouths when they speak.  I don’t quite understand what the point of this is – and it kinda spits in the face of telecoms engineers that made the GSM system full-duplex.  They are intentionally limiting their phones to half-duplex (i.e. you can either talk or listen, not both at the same time).  Also, mobile phones are designed such that the microphone is in the right place to pick up your speech at a sensible level when the phone is held to your ear.  Putting it right up against your lips just makes your voice overly loud and makes the signal clip – even when you’re speaking quietly.  Phones have compressers and limiters in them such that your voice is intelligible, regardless of how loudly you’re speaking. 

The other odd thing is that I’ve only ever seen black people doing this.  Not once have I seen any other ethnicity doing this – which in itself is disturbing (just describing it makes me sound racist). 

Most perplexing.

As I was walking home from campus today, the playlist from shuffle mode went like this:

• One – Aimee Man – A song about being lonely
• Alone In Kyoto – Air
• Radio #1 – Air
• Move Along – All American Rejects – I’m not even sure why I have this song
• Northern Birds – Amateur Transplants – an extremely derogatory song about girls from up North.

Just what I needed after a taxing Monday at uni.

I’m watching Countryfile with some pancakes and Colombian coffee (the normal sort of thing you do on a Sunday morning).  They were showing the release of the rare Hazel Doormouse back into the Yorkshire Downs.  They took their mouse and popped it into a little wooden box that they bolted to a Hazel tree.

It occurred to me – surely that’s giving the mouse some confused messages.  Imagine what it’d be like following the mouses children when they go to make their own nests.

“Here we see the young doormouse venturing into the wild to establish his own nest.  After picking a suitable tree with plenty of nuts to eat, he pops off to Homebase to get a sheet of 5 mil ply, a bottle of PVA wood glue and some 20 mil wood screws and raw plugs to build his home – and in the process earning himself 37 Nectar points – which will provide welcome discounts over the cold winter.  ”

Just, no.