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Archive for July, 2008

puffin killing!

Thursday, July 31st, 2008

Gordon Ramsay decided on the f-word that puffin killing would be great fun.  This from a man who only made his first trip to a slaughter house a few years ago.  I was shocked that he would decide that Puffins would make tasty things to eat.  Iceland may allow people to cull them, but puffins are iconic birds, famed in Guinness ads.  Kililng them just seems wrong to me.  SK and I have a puffin routine that we enact every time we see a puffin out sailing.   Sightings of them are so exciting.  There is no better thrill than seeing a puffin fly and around here (Dublin) you have to go out to sea to find them.  We have seen puffins once out sailing around the Dublin - Malahide stretch of water.   You also see them down around the Saltees and the Skelligs.  I worship the puffins. I cannot imagine wanting to eat one.

I’m a happy carnivore, I eat rare steak happily, but seeing a puffin caught in a net like a butterfly and then have it’s neck snapped, skin torn off and heart eaten raw surprised me.  I know on the F-word they like shock value, like the time every part of the pig was eaten. (including the anus by Tom Parker-Bowles), but puffins and eating them? Why?  Why eat the puffins? It is so un-necessary.  I hope people have more sense than to go out and try to catch their own.  For one thing, you might fall off a cliff and nearly drown. For another, puffins are protected.

general nonsense, ikea (0)

Cuil it ain’t

Wednesday, July 30th, 2008

New search engine cuil has been released to much fanfare. Nobody seems to have written about whether it is actually any good in what I have been reading about it.  Quite frankly, I think it’s probably the worst search engine I have seen.  Simple queries return all sorts of irrelavant items. Search for “Dublin Hospitals” as a random example.  One can assume that a person entering such a query would like a list of hospitals returned to them.

Google obliges.  On my first page of links I got the following:

A-Z Hospitals in Dublin - Dublin.ie
Beaumont Hospital, Dublin, Ireland - Home Page
The Adelaide and Meath Hospital, Dublin Incorporating the National …
St Vincent’s University Hospital
Irish Statute Book, Acts of the Oireachtas, Dublin Fever Hospital …
St. James’s Hospital
Hospitals - Dublin

Bon Secours Hospital, Glasnevin,

Mater Misericordiae University Hospital-Home Page

Yahoo also obliged apart from the Ohio Health anomoly.

Dublin Hospitals
Welcome to the Dublin Hospital Section, in which we include some basic … Beaumont Hospital. Address: Beaumont Road, Dublin 9. Phone No: 01 8093000 …
www.dublinuncovered.net/hospitals.html - Cached

Hospital Information for Dublin
Dublin Uncovered Hospital Information provides general information on hospitals in Dublin such as their location and the buses that serve them.
www.dublinuncovered.net/hospital.html - Cached

A-Z Hospitals in Dublin - Dublin.ie

Beaumont Hospital, Dublin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Children’s University Hospital Temple Street

OhioHealth - Dublin Methodist Hospital

Archdiocese of Dublin - Hospitals Chaplaincies

Temple Street Childrens Hospital - Home

Cuil on the other hand -

5,449,637 results for dublin hospitals

Beaumont Hospital, Dublin

Dublin Hospitals in Dublin GA Yellow Pages by Yellow …

Irish Statute Book, Acts of the Oireachtas, Dublin …

Irish Statute Book, Acts of the Oireachtas, Dublin …

Susceptibility to antimicrobial agents and analysis …

Home @ The Mid Yorkshire NHS Trust

Dáil Éireann - Volume 79 - 06 March, 1940 - …
Irish Statute Book, Acts of the Oireachtas, Dublin …

Trinity College, Dublin

Dublin Yellow Pages and Dublin CA Guide
dublinca.areaconnect.com/

If I’m looking for information on Dublin Hospitals, I’m really not sure that Dail debates dating from the 1940s are what I’m after.  Cuil only listed one hospital. Beaumont.  Google and Yahoo listed a couple of the actual hospitals in Dublin. I admit google returned information about an oirechtas debate also, but it was one link only, not a couple like cuil sent me. The category returns were also quite odd. I’m searching for hospitals, and cuil thinks the tangent information I am after might include dail debates and TDs. What about Cuil for Irish users - this is the country with pretty poor broadband penetration.  A lot of people still only have modems, a text only search option wouldn’t go astray. Not relevant for a company based in California, except the founders are Irish.

Like Cool?  Frankly? No. It sent me running back to Google.

I like my search the way it is. I don’t want images. If I did want images in my search, then searchme leaves cool for dead. Search is about indexing. Do you get images when you look up a book in a library? No.  Do you get images when you look up a name in a phonebook? No.  Do you get images when you look up a word in a dictionary?  No. Do you want images when you are searching for simple things (cos you are too lazy to go to the golden pages). No.  Especially not when they are random images with no indication of what it is you are looking at. Like the image of the doorway or the image of a company logo.

Also, it needs to learn about inverted commas. Dublin Hospitals can be a search about Dublin and Hospitals which might explain some of the randomness returned, but “Dublin Hospitals” would (to my mind) definitely indicate that I want a concise list of hospitals in Dublin returned to me. No other information. The inverted commas made no difference, save for the fact that the search possibilities decreased to 503,904 from 3,760,623.  Over three million hits for about 21 hospitals in Dublin.  So, throw every possible thing that mentions Dublin and Hospital must be the approach being taken. Maybe I’m just not clever enough to get what Cuil are trying to do.  But that’s fine by me. I like the simple world of Google. I’ll stay there. The privacy doesn’t bother me. Ask users of Google who don’t like their searches being recorded whether they use Gmail. If they do, then what are they worring about search privacy for?

tech (1)

sourdough

Sunday, July 20th, 2008

A while back, I can’t remember when, Karlin Lillington wrote an article for the Irish Times about sour dough and how it was really hard to get good sourdough in Ireland and how the La Brea Bakery breads reminded her of San Francisco sourdough. More recently, Caroline from Bibliocook had two posts about sour dough and making it.

Karlin’s post about sour dough only being nice in San Francisco left me wondering the time she wrote about it. Surely it can’t be that hard to make one in Ireland?

Tonight, after a week of bread in the making, SK and I enjoyed the first fruits of my sour dough labour. Quite frankly, it left La Brea’s for dead. Don’t believe me? Well, here are some photographs of it:

Stage two of my starter left to rise overnight and then bread fresh from the oven.




This bread was delicious. The crust cracked when chewed. We ate it with poached salmon and salad along with salt, balsamic vinegar and oil.

People say sourdough is difficult, an art, a mystery. Well, it is a mystery, the fact that flour and water alone could turn into bread like the bread in the photos.

But sourdough difficult to make? Lies!! It was simple to make. It required patience and a good recipe, but it was so simple to make. So simple, it surprised me. So simple, it only took a week. This sour dough started last monday. And on the seventh day, we ate our bread. Crunchy, chewy, sourdough goodness. The starter is now in the fridge. It will require feeding. I look forward to seeing how much more sour it will get. The less you use the starter, the more sour it becomes.

baking (1)
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