Archive for the 'Personal' Category

A Spanish tasting evening

Ibérico hamWe went to a Spanish food and wine evening last night at Love Saves the Day. Very interesting, with food writer Clarissa Hyman (who’s currently promoting her book The Spanish Kitchen) and Ed Cross from Boutinot. Spanish food is apparently on the up and up again, what Clarissa described as the “second food revolution that the Spanish have led” (the first brought us chillis, chocolate and potatoes).

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Disappearing Photoshop cursors

I’ve had a problem for some time now: my cursors in Photoshop CS3 on OS X are invisible. I’ve no idea why, or how it happened, but it’s really awkward when you can’t see where your mask is going to start, or where you text cursor is going to blink into being.

The solution

After a lot of Googling I came across another person (maybe called Mark, from detective work in his Flickr stream) with a similar problem, which started me off to find a solution. So far the only way I’ve found of solving this is (and this is OS X specific):

  1. Quit Photoshop
  2. In Finder, Go to Folder: ~/Library/Preferences/Adobe Photoshop CS3 Settings/
  3. Delete, or move to another folder temporarily, this file:Adobe Photoshop CS3 Prefs.psp
  4. Restart Photoshop and (hopefully) breathe a sigh of relief…

There must be a better way of doing it, and I still don’t know what triggered the problem, but at least the cursors are back. Cursors! I kiss you!

Contractors and tradespeople

We’ve just had our house done up, and some of the lessons we’ve learned and problems we’ve hit may be useful to others.

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Spiced sweet butternut squash soup

An improvised soup, based on a combination of what was in the cupboard and “Spiced Sweet Potato & Red Onion Soup” from Soup Kitchen; this version is pure butternut squash. That’s the wife’s lunches sorted then.

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A Moroccan-ish Casserole

An improvised casserole, based on what was in the cupboard, with a Moroccan twist. Next time I’d like to try preserved lemons, which seem to be preferred over fresh for Moroccan style cooking. Staying with the MiL at the moment, so I was able to take advantage of her terracotta casserole dish which seemed appropriate (although it was Schlemmertopf, not a tangine.)

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The Government double charges us for data

I’ve just felt sufficiently exercised to write to my MP, about the UK government charging for information they’ve collected with our (the UK taxpayers) money. For example, I’m doing a location based events search for Arts & Kids. The data underpinning this has been collected by OS and the Royal Mail, using tax payers money, and yet the charity is having to pay for it in order to provide a free service to UK citizens.

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Aha

Finally I get around to updating my site to use something more sophisticated than hand written HTML. It’s a start.

Things that were on the left are (probably) on the right now. Oh, apart from Dress-a-Doll which gets it’s own link above.

Steve Johnson’s 40th

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Massive Attack, Bristol, Queen’s Square

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Laura & Jack Wedding Reception, outside

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