May 2006

Danzka vodka

by Suw on May 31, 2006

So I bought a bottle of Danzka vodka a while back. I can't actually remember when or where, but it's been sitting in my freezer unopened for quite a long time. Tonight, having recently finished off my mead and some lovely port, we decided to open the Danzka.
Then we wished we hadn't.
It's quite a harsh vodka with an unpleasant burn, and patently needs to be run through a charcoal filter a good half-dozen times, but that's not what perplexes me. I've drunk harsh vodkas before, and the technique for all of them remains the same – swallow, don't sip.
What perplexes me is that it has a really strange taste. It is, theoretically, not a flavoured vodka but instead is a '100% grain neutral spirit'. But it definitely has a taste. It's almost a grassy taste, but it's not at all like Zubrowka, or Bison Grass vodka, which has a delightful summery grassy taste which comes, oddly enough, from the bison grass used to make it. No, this is more like fermented lawn clippings.
Yet even so, that's not the right description. There's something vanilla-y about it as well, something akin not to the yellow vanilla ice-cream of my youth, but of the high-end expensive vanilla-pod hand-made ice cream that you have to take a mortgage out to afford a small tub of.
Yet it's not really vanilla either. I'm not sure what it is. The taste itself is quite nice, or it would be if the vodka wasn't so prickly. But the undertones are a little bitter and the aftertaste moreso. I'm left with a slight impression of mouthwash which is not really all that nice.
So I find myself in the worst of both worlds – sipping the damn stuff, because I am trying to figure out the taste, but I really should be swallowing it to avoid too much of it hitting my taste buds.
Where's that charcoal filter?

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Bank Holiday Syndrome

by Suw on May 29, 2006

As usual for bank holidays, T'Other has to work. At least it was a 12 – 8 shift, so we got to laze about this morning and I could pretend for a few hours that it was going to be a proper bank holiday. But now T'Other is slaving away over a hot radio show, and I am looking at my 'to do' list with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. Oh wherefore art thou, motivation?
I need to be fitter. One of the barriers to getting fitter – other than sheer laziness which is, I'll admit, quite a big barrier – is that my right ankle is rather weak. It has been for years after a spate of twists, sprains and turns left it vulnerable to more twists, sprains and turns. Walking in heels almost always results in a turned ankle now.
So, after learning about wobble boards from my friend Vince, I finally got myself one on Saturday. If you don't know what a wobble board is (or a balance board, as they are also called), then a simple explanation shall hopefully suffice: They are a circular board with a section of a sphere underneath upon which you attempt to stand. The effort at balancing should, in theory, help strengthen ankles – and I'm hoping it will do something nice to my proprioceptors too. I can already feel it making my leg muscles work harder than they normally do (which is, normally, not very hard at all. I mean, how many muscles does it take to slump on a couch?). So, 5 mins every hour on the wobble board for me when working from home.
The thing also came with a DVD that's so awfully hippy-dippy-Californian-looking that I can't bear to watch it, so I am undoubtedly missing out on a whole host of interesting ways to get fit using this new-fangled wobbler.
I also bought an exercise mat so that I can start doing Pilates again.
Less said about that, the better.
Also bought T'Other a set of weights for his birthday. He's now officially a happy bunny, as he is back running again after some considerable time away, and can work out at home again. Thus does he remain the gorgeously buff creature he is, and I get to look at my podge and wonder if I can work up enough emotional oomph to actually start putting a bit more effort in.
See… it's a conflict of interests, really. On the one hand, my 'to do' list is infinitely expansible. On the other hand, the number of waking hours in the day are not. So I spend as much time thinking that I should be doing something as I spend doing it, and any time when I'm not at least even thinking about when I'm going to start doing something seems like some sort of work-ethic blasphemy.
[Ok… time for a 5 min wobble. BRB.]
Right, back… What was I saying? Oh yeah… Procrastination + workload = excuse to be lazy.
It is, of course, a catch 22 situation. The fitter you are, and the more exercise you take, the more energy you have and the more work you get done. But yet, the number and breadth of excuses I can come up with to convince myself that tomorrow would make the perfect start date for any new exercise regime is startling. Strangely, that habit annoys even me. I wish I could be more like T'Other, who positively loves exercise.
Anyway, today is a bank holiday and I refuse to feel guilty for not working. I am absolutely not. Going. To. Feel. Guilty.
Absolutely not.
Not guilty.
Feck.
Bastard 'to do' list.

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Slowing down

by Suw on May 23, 2006

Ok, so I'm back from Xtech and Amsterdam, and glad to be home with my T'Other.
It was a lot of fun being at Xtech – lots of hanging out with geeks and talking about things that are generally outside of my normal realm of experience. I like. I like having my brain stretched a bit. I tried in a few sessions not to take notes, but I seem to have developed a bit of a pathological need to take notes when at conferences, because if I don't write it down, then I don't hear it. They're all on Strange Attractor if you're interested.
So now I'm trying to wind down a bit, and get stuff done. It's all well and good having three weeks of conferences, but it doesn't lead to a shorter to-do list. (Or a smaller laundry pile.) We have a weekend completely clear this weekend, and I am jealously guarding it. Last weekend wasn't quite as relaxing as I would have hoped. Saturday was nice, but Sunday we had Copyfighters and I had a migraine and spent the late afternoon and much of the evening in bed, wishing someone would amputate my head in order to get rid of the pain.
Anyway, maybe I'll have more time to blog now that I'm not spending my time sitting in airports.

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Shakespearean cat fight!

by Suw on May 23, 2006

I love it when my job results in me having to watch things like this.

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Downtime needed

by Suw on May 17, 2006

So at the moment I'm in Amsterdam. Really enjoying the Xtech conference on the one hand, but really struggling on the other. I did something today I have never done before, and I'm feeling pretty crappy about it. I committed to moderating a session, but I complete forgot about it. I hate letting people down and it's even worse when you let them down for reasons as pathetic as 'I forgot'. The session went off fine without me, but it's just a bit more evidence that I really, really need some time to just chill out and mentally unpack, as it were.
The last few weeks have been particularly busy and tense, what with one thing and another, and I feel a bit like I have a huge backlog of stuff that just needs processing so that I can get it out of my head. Next week is slightly quieter, but not quiet enough. I need a holiday. Two weeks offline should do it.
Hmm… When do I get two weeks clear?

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Oh, you tease!

by Suw on May 16, 2006

Sitting at Heathrow, minding my own beeswax when I get a text from T'Other. The new MacBook is out. A replacement for the iBook, it goes five times faster, has at last audio in/out, a built in iSight camera and a whole bunch of other cool stuff. And at a snip of a price.
I just burnt through a chunk of my monthly data allowance on my Treo looking at the mobile browser unfriendly Apple site, and drooling. I really want one. I abuse my iBook so badly – multiple apps with multiple documents open and multiple tabs in FireFox and Camino. I could really do with a CPU that can deal with such behaviour, because there's no way I'm gonna change.
Can't wait to get to online so I can compare with the MacBook Pro.

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Quick change

by Suw on May 16, 2006

Off now to Amsterdam, to the Xtech conference where I am going to be talking about ORG and digital rights. Been a bit of a busy few weeks lately but hoping for a quieter week next week, when I hope to get to write some of the blog posts that have been piling up in my brain.
Meantime… off to Heathrow.

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Warszawa! Warszawa! Tak, tak, tak!

by Suw on May 16, 2006

(Started writing this on Sunday night, but didn't get the chance to finish it yesterday.)
Sitting in the crappy bit of Warsaw airport – Terminal Etiude, where EasyJet fly from – waiting for our flight home. The trip has been just great, excepting a slight bout of sunstroke on Saturday (I'm a fragile little thing), and I'm sad to be going home. Lovely food, good company, nice hotel.
T'Other and I were in Poland for the European Broadcast Union's Radio News Specialised Meeting, which I'll talk more about on Strange Attractor, and decided to stay a couple of extra days to see a bit more of the city than simply the interior of Polskie Radio. The EBU and Polskie Radio put on a guided tour for us on Friday afternoon, which was great. Really good guide who gave us a lot of information about the city that we would have had to dig for online otherwise.
Sadly, I didn't have either my Poland guide book nor my Polish phrase book, both of which ended up getting left in Dorset when I moved to London, just because of a lack of space. We looked for one at Luton Airport, but although the book store there had loads of Swedish guides they had nothing Polish at all. We ended up getting a pan-European phrase book, which covered about a dozen languages in precisely no detail whatsoever. Luckily for us, we stayed mainly in the tourist area, where everyone spoke English and the menus were bilingual.
Warsaw itself is a divided city, with many ugly blocks of flats and office buildings built since the war, and then the charming Old Town, built, as it happens, since the war. Ages ago, I was talking to Maciej Cegłowski and he was talking about how Warsaw has the newest Old Town in the world, and now I see what he means. According to our guide, 84% of Warsaw was flattened by the Nazis, and in the years afterwards, the Poles painstakingly recreated their original Old Town, or at least the building façades.
The Old Town itself takes up quite a bit of the town centre and, after a while, knowing that the vast majority of it is a facsimile, you end up trying to spot which bits are truly old and which bits aren't. In the Royal Castle, you can quite easily tell – the old bits are the dark bits. Elsewhere it's harder to tell. It felt a bit like being in that sci-fi short story (I forget what it was called or who wrote it) where a whole town is re-created on an advertising company's tabletop after a catastrophic disaster kills all the inhabitants. I started to look about me for signs that we were on a tabletop…
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They have some pretty cool new buildings in Warsaw too, with various newly built skyscrapers that bring the centre of town bang up to date. The best one was still being built, and we're guessing it's an atrium. Looked hellish cool, either way, particularly from our hotel window, where you could see it sort of ooze down between the other buildings. Nice bit of architecture, that.
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We stayed at the Novotel Warszawa Centrum, with a fantastic view of the Palace of Culture and Science, which is a pretty impressive building. With 3000 rooms, it would take a long while to go round, although we couldn't figure out which bits of it were open to the public and which weren't so we never made it past the foyer.
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We ate in the hotel once, primarily because of the bizarre menu, which included things like 'cannelloni loves those porky cheeks'. The best one was on the dessert menu, where not only could I figure out what the dessert was, but also figured out the pun in the Polish version ('gin dobry' = dzien dobry = good morning).
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T'Other and I had a really good time looking round Warsaw. It was a shame we weren't there longer, and that I didn't have my proper phrase book. It would have been nice to go into a few museums and explore the city a bit more, not to mention get out of the city into the countryside. Maybe next time. Photos are all on Flickr.

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Neat

by Suw on May 15, 2006

I love ads that riff off other ads. This one is just ace. (Thanks Kevin!)

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Off, off and away!

by Suw on May 10, 2006

So T'Other and I are off to Warsaw today for the EBU Radio News conference. I'm very excited because I've never been to Poland before. However, this trip is not without its ironies. I've let my Polish learning go, so am entirely linguistically challenged and my phrase book is still in Dorset so I am going to have to buy a new one. Still, we have a little time outside of the conference to explore the city, so will make the most of it.
Meantime, access to the internet will be patchy, and will to find access even patchier still. See you… later.

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Making stuff out of glass

May 8, 2006

So T'Other and I had a shitty week last week – if you want to know why, then just read this post at Strange Attractor for an insight. We really needed a break by the time Friday came, so after a lovely dinner out with Michael Tippett from NowPublic (which apparently still gets people visiting […]

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Be sy'n digwydd ar y We Gymraeg?

May 8, 2006

O'n i'n meddwl am yr iaith Gymraeg wythnos diwetha. O'n i'n siarad â'r pobl Global Voices, ac o'n i'n mwddwl bod rhaid inni wneud mwy efo'r we ar gyfer iaith. Ond dwi'm yn gwybod beth sydd ar gael nawr. Felly dw i wedi dechrau tudalen newydd ar fy wici CMC i gasglu gwefannau defynddiol i […]

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Blog-City killed my old blog

May 8, 2006

Blog-City, the blog host I used for the second incarnation of Chocolate and Vodka (after Blogger went all crap) have summarily killed my archives. I have the data, but no way to import it into Blogware, or to make it publicly available, so I am a bit peeved that a chunk of my online past […]

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Quite simply, I must go

May 1, 2006

At the earliest opportunity, I must attend Mr Paul A Youngs Fine Chocolate Emporium. OK, so it isn't actually called an emporium, but it should be. I've never met Paul, but he's a friend of various friends, so I shall be making my way there to taste his very fine chocolate as soon as I […]

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Shout out to ma homies! Yo!

May 1, 2006

Er… or something. It appears that somewhere in the world, the cool hip-hop lovin' kids are impressing their homies by wearing my name emblazoned across their chest/back. Wow, guys, I'm touched! (Not like that, you cheeky little monkeys!) And what's better, you can buy this stuff online! Cool!!

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