Enak Enak

Nancy Lam lives in Colliers Wood. A circumstance that, when I discovered it, made Enak Enak - the Indonesian restaurant that she runs in Clapham - a natural choice for the last Eat Your Way Around the World in London before we shut up shop for the summer and AbbeyFest.


The Profit Burglar and I shared mixed satay and picked vegetables. I followed this with beef rendang and rice, while Paul had a prawn sambal. We drank house white.


Enak enak; yummy yummy.

Follow the links for our real and imaginary destinations as we eat our way around the world in London.

(P.S. I cannot tick Indonesian food off our list without also giving a shout out to the stall that serves it up in Merton Abbey Mills on the weekend. Their spicy lamb with fried rice is my fuel of choice if I ever have to work over the weekend.)

Blair's Blare

I'm not very often moved to comment on politics, but it's difficult not to brood on the democratic deficit as Brown seamlessly succeeds Blair at 10 Downing Street, the governance of the nation apparently having been sorted out over dinner between them thirteen years ago.

Hasn't Tony Blair's performance lately been extraordinary? I wouldn't be surprised to hear that NASA are investigating using his ego to power a mission to Mars next time I turn on the TV.

Back last September we had that leaked memo on the plans for leaving office:

"He needs to go with the crowds wanting more. He should be the star who won't even play that last encore. In moving towards the end he must focus on the future."

For the last few weeks we've endured - and paid for - the continent spanning, glad handing, back slapping Legacy Tour.

Finally - lest he be out of the headlines for five minutes - observe the unseemly haste with which his appointment as the UN Middle East envoy has been engineered and grabbed. A role in which he "faces a challenge winning Arab confidence". Really, you think so? Perhaps the recent halting of an investigation into claims BAE made improper payments to Saudi Arabian officials was a geopolitical master stroke to boost his credentials in the Gulf.

I can't help but wonder if he read the small print on the sin of pride before his flirtation with the Catholic Church?

How can I miss you, if you won't go away?

Normal Service Will Be Resumed

I manage this weblog via Blogger, but host it on a server of my own or, more accurately, my company's own. I run my own hosting service in effect, and in day-to-day operation Blogger updates my server via FTP publishing.

Now that I'm starting to use labels more regularly, I was looking to add some sort of widget that displayed them to my design when I learned:

Blogger Layouts customisation is not supported for blogs hosted on non-Blog*Spot servers. To use Layouts, you'll need to host your blog on blogspot.com
(Blogger's free hosting service) or a custom domain (point your own registered domain name to your blog).

I've often thought that if we were launching the company today rather than a decade ago, we wouldn't invest in any infrastructure at all but would simply build products on industrial scale services hosted in "The Cloud". Looking at Google's plans for Blogger - such as video upload - at Blogger in Draft, I think that this may be a good time to move "A Welsh Born Icon" over to them.

So, how do I go about moving it with as little friction as possible? I want to keep the same address so I will have to create a DNS CNAME record for it, associating nickbrowne.coraider.com with ghs.google.com. This should be simple enough as I manage the coraider.com domain via http://www.no-ip.com/ (another cloud service if you like and a lot less hassle than managing coraider.co.uk).

There's a problem though, when I move from FTP publishing to a custom domain - "computer says no":

Images (or other files) from your server are not copied over to the Blogger servers. If you leave your server up and running, then the image tags and links in your posts will continue to work. Alternatively, you can re-upload your images to Blogger so they're hosted on our servers.

I've got plenty of images, certainly too many to reload, and the odd custom file like http://nickbrowne.coraider.com/world.asp.

The way around this seems to be a missing files host:

If you choose to specify a missing files host, it will be used as a fallback server whenever someone tries to access a file that cannot be found on your blog.

What I will have to do is set up DNS (and IIS) to serve up the blog to date on, say, oldnickbrowne.coraider.com and set that up as the missing files catchall.

There is a further problem with Google Maps though, the API key in the code that I use to generate the maps is only valid for a single "directory", so I will have to update that code when I move the blog.

Today is due to be the last episode of "eat your way around the world in London" before we shut up shop for the summer and go to AbbeyFest instead, so I will get that out of the way and then move the blog next week.

I can always move it back if it goes wrong, but remember service may be a little flaky for a day or so as any DNS change propagates around the globe.

A world without sin

Why when I talk about faith, do you always assume I'm talking about God?

I got a DVD of Serenity for my birthday, and watched it over the weekend. Back when Rob got me hooked on The West Wing, he also gave Chris a boxed set of the TV sci fi series "Firefly", and Serenity is the movie that Joss Whedon the series' creator made as a follow up set in the same universe.

So what did I find when I sat down to watch it? It's an action adventure story set in outer space, but weirdly - and just like some episodes of The West Wing - the plot is driven by theological ideas. Specifically sin and free will.

"The Operative" who is the villain of the piece, wants to create a "world without sin", and accuses his victims of "the sin of pride". The hero is Mal, the captain of the ship, and according to Wikipedia:

Whedon has stated that the most important line in the film is Mal's snarl to the Operative at its climax: "I'm going to show you a world without sin." Whedon's point is that a world without sin is a world without choice, and that choice is ultimately what defines humanity.

This is a sentiment that could have come straight out of St Augustine's Confessions. I'd be tempted to think I was imagining this if it wasn't telegraphed so directly in the script. It's not even an allegory, just as I noted about President Bartlett in "Two Cathedrals", the words didn't get in there by accident.

Isn't it amazing? I'm starting to imagine authors reaching for the Summa Theologica if they're ever afflicted with writers' block. I'll have to watch the Serenity DVD again with Whedon's commentary on to double check I'm not going off my head.

Return of the Geek

My Qosmio seems to have given up the ghost so my mind is turning to the vexed issue of digital media again. We've built an XP Media Center PC that I'm going to take home, and we've got Vista Ultimate Edition running on a 64 bit box in the office.

My Movies won't run on the 64-bit OS, so we've been digging around for a way to play backed up DVDs from the hard disk.

From the SDK, it seems that - from an HTML page registered in Media Center - the call:

window.external.MediaCenter.PlayMedia(4,strUrl);

Plays the passed strUrl as a DVD.

An strUrl encoded as, say "DVD://C:/DVD/DVD1/VIDEO_TS" will play the default opening file on DVD backed up to C:/DVD/DVD1/ on a local hard disk.

This also seems to work with UNC filenames, so using "DVD://SERVERNAME/C$/DVD/DVD1/VIDEO_TS", for example, as the strURL would enable you to play a backed up DVD over a network!

Adding a ? after the URL, enables you to pass parameters:

?2 Plays Title 2
?5/13 Play Chapter 13 of title 5
?6/2-8 Plays Chapters 2 to 8 of title 6
?7/9:05-13:23 Plays title 7, from 9 seconds 5 frames to 13 seconds 23 frames (times specified as hh:mm:ss:ff)

There doesn't seem to be any reason why this technique wouldn't work in the XBOX 360 Media Extender which suggests to me that we might well be able to knock up some code that will give me online access to all my movies via the games machine.

I've created a new label for this type of musing, even though I don't seem to have done much of it lately.

There is nothing like a dame

Difficult as it may be to imagine the fantabulosa fantasy of Shirley Bassey against the mud, the blood and the beer of Glastonbury, that is where Tiger Bay's favourite daughter will be knocking them in the aisles later today.

I hereby officially elevate her to the pantheon of Welsh Born Icons. It is long overdue. Indeed with a Nigerian Dad and a Mum from Yorkshire, La Bassey epitomises my inclusive notions of Welsh identity.

I saw her perform years ago, when I took The Mother Of My Child to the Royal Festival Hall. We had seats at the side of the auditorium and I can vividly remember massed gays politely rushing the stage armed with bouquets and other tokens to present to Dame Shirley. I have an indelible image of them sitting cross legged in front of the stage, looking for all the world like a group of primary school children, after they had been asked to calm down, but were still too pumped to return to their seats.

If he was alive today, I feel sure that the excellent Welsh pirate Bartholomew Roberts would have had a front row seat.

If anyone deserves the title ‘the real pirate of the Caribbean’ it was the Welshman Bartholomew Roberts, who captured an astonishing 400 ships in a brief two-and-a-half-year career between 1719 and 1722 — a figure that dwarfs that of any of his contemporaries. Roberts was living proof that reality is always far, far more intriguing than fiction. He drank tea rather than rum. He organised his ships along strictly democratic, egalitarian lines. A third of his men were black. And he was probably gay.

I am press-ganging him into the icons as well, and I defy you to resist reading more.

Leather on Willow

Perfect Britain - a land where warm beer is served to the distant echo of leather on willow and the tring-a-ling of bicycle bells rung by spinsters on their way to Holy Communion.

Pete - of AbbeyFest and The ColourHouse Theatre fame - organised a social cricket match in the week. Twenty overs for each side, everyone except the wicket keeper bowls two overs, and batsmen retire once they've scored twenty five runs. We fielded first, then - even though I'm useless - I opened the batting. I only got two runs, but the way I figured it once I was out I could get straight on the booze without waiting for the match to finish. This is the stage at which I got Ray to take the photo above with my camera phone.

Britain. .. We've had running water for over 10 years, an underground tunnel linking us to Peru, and we invented the cat.

(As John was gracious enough to point out, the old school Corinthian centre stage above is noticeably slimmer than either The Sin Eater or Hotei circa 2005.)

Update 12:25: Just bumped into Pete who told me that he has arranged another game for mid July. I will need some time in the nets before that. (When I was in Bangalore, I remember Michael telling me that because Indians are all so cricket mad, the only slot his team could book for net practice was 6 am on Sundays.)

Next! Next!

Oh, it was not so tragic
and heaven did not fall
But how much at that time
I hated being there at all, Next! Next!

"Happy Birthday to me" today, and an opportunity to reflect on progress since the annus horribilis of 2005.

I seem to have to have got my brain and body back in reasonable shape.

Concerning the cognitive function, I'm happy with what I think I reveal writing "A Welsh Born Icon". I've been doing it for a while now, and I like what I see on the odd occasion when I look back through the archives. Didn't Chesterton observe something along the lines of "saying that a man shouldn't laugh at his own jokes is like saying that an architect shouldn't pray in his own cathedral"?

Physically, training has done me a power of good. I dropped below 13 stone this week which is more than two stone off my peak. I imagine that I'll be down to my 80kg target by the time of the Swansea 10km run three months tomorrow and getting fit has done wonders for my state of mind as much as anything.

I've also kept and deepened a great relationship with my little boy, and really found out who my friends were. (Thanks if you're reading this and I know that a lot of you do.) Oh, and just to prove that I still keep the salt and vinegar handy, the exit of herself's fag hag cronies from my life has been no bad thing either.

Next year's to do list needs to be prosaic. I took some tremendous financial damage in 2005's meltdown and I imagine that if I ever recover any of those assets - not that I've even tried - it will only be pennies in the pound. And my business - while well established - has really been treading water rather than progressing while my energies and attention have been elsewhere. I need to focus on filthy lucre for a while.