Monday, August 13, 2007
Techno pain
Took a certain amount of faphphing about to get yesterday's ticket up. Clearly do not qualify as a young person any more. Scanned the thing in without problem - the imaging program cleverly deciding which was the business part of the image - but it winds up as a .pdf file with the image upsidedown which with my version of Acrobat I can't edit and which will not load into Paint. The computer then invites me to upgrade Acrobat to what I thought was an updating version. OK, let's give this a go. After a trouble free update taking about ten minutes I find I still can't update. So time to start again, this time pressing the scan button on the printer rather than the scan button in HP Director. This resulted in a .jpeg file, so we make progress. But now we need to clip the thing to size - the fact that some bit of the scanning process having seemed to understand that this needed to be done not having done the business. The only way I know to do this is to select the image in Paint, then paste it into a new instance and save the result as a new file. All very laborious and we are still left with an irritating white margin on the bottom; but, for a rather crumpled and damp ticket which arrived stuck on a peice of meat, the result is a tribute to the £100 contraption from HP.
Moving on to deciphering the ticket we start the campaign with P C Turner. Google reveals quite a lot of people of this name, quite a lot of them policemen - something that hadn't sprung to mind beforehand. But down on page 3 we learn that a Mr P C Turner had applied back in 2004 or so to convert his abattoir in Farnborough into a block of flats - application which was apparently granted. Adding abattoir to the search criteria gets us to one in North Camp - one which was not, this year, the subject of protests about the ritual slaughter of sheep. So while one could clearly go on and on, not that much further ahead yet. While the Turners presumably did for the cow (or bull or bullock or whatever) in question, we have no idea where it might of come from. The Cheam people have lots of Scotch beef posters.
The beef - having been reduced to fore rib by the order for top rib going astray - itself did very well. 10.5 pounds of it cooked for 3.5 hours at 180C, opening the door twice for inspection. Texture excellent and flavour good. Knocked off about two thirds of it at first sitting. Amongst other things, served with a roasted version of one of the new green pumpkins from Cambridge. Maybe small green pumpkins really are designed for eating, unlike the large yellow ones which have always seemed to me to be fairly useless for culinery purposes, despite valiant efforts by the BH. Just as well because it seems that the small green jobs are going to be prolific.
Interesting memory incident this morning. Had recently purchased a small selection of letters by Marie Antoinette, her mother and others. Earlier this morning, while wondering about whether it was time to rise, was trying to recall the name of the bookshop concerned - a place I visit from time to time in Great Marlborough Street. Renowned in London as a source of foreign language books. But the name would not come to mind. Then Hatchards floated into view, clearly wrong. Then I thought that it was maybe something double barrelled with a C word as the second word. Maybe Butler & Claude. Then, perhaps a minute after this process started, the right answer, Grant & Cutler pops up. Claude Butler was the maker's name of a bicycle that I had about thirty years ago - quite a posh brand at the time - so not clear what brought it up, other than the similarity to the target name, with Butler & Claude conflating neatly to Cutler. And for some other reason I persist in typing 'Butler' as 'Bulter'. Hopefully they have been proofed out.
Moving on to deciphering the ticket we start the campaign with P C Turner. Google reveals quite a lot of people of this name, quite a lot of them policemen - something that hadn't sprung to mind beforehand. But down on page 3 we learn that a Mr P C Turner had applied back in 2004 or so to convert his abattoir in Farnborough into a block of flats - application which was apparently granted. Adding abattoir to the search criteria gets us to one in North Camp - one which was not, this year, the subject of protests about the ritual slaughter of sheep. So while one could clearly go on and on, not that much further ahead yet. While the Turners presumably did for the cow (or bull or bullock or whatever) in question, we have no idea where it might of come from. The Cheam people have lots of Scotch beef posters.
The beef - having been reduced to fore rib by the order for top rib going astray - itself did very well. 10.5 pounds of it cooked for 3.5 hours at 180C, opening the door twice for inspection. Texture excellent and flavour good. Knocked off about two thirds of it at first sitting. Amongst other things, served with a roasted version of one of the new green pumpkins from Cambridge. Maybe small green pumpkins really are designed for eating, unlike the large yellow ones which have always seemed to me to be fairly useless for culinery purposes, despite valiant efforts by the BH. Just as well because it seems that the small green jobs are going to be prolific.
Interesting memory incident this morning. Had recently purchased a small selection of letters by Marie Antoinette, her mother and others. Earlier this morning, while wondering about whether it was time to rise, was trying to recall the name of the bookshop concerned - a place I visit from time to time in Great Marlborough Street. Renowned in London as a source of foreign language books. But the name would not come to mind. Then Hatchards floated into view, clearly wrong. Then I thought that it was maybe something double barrelled with a C word as the second word. Maybe Butler & Claude. Then, perhaps a minute after this process started, the right answer, Grant & Cutler pops up. Claude Butler was the maker's name of a bicycle that I had about thirty years ago - quite a posh brand at the time - so not clear what brought it up, other than the similarity to the target name, with Butler & Claude conflating neatly to Cutler. And for some other reason I persist in typing 'Butler' as 'Bulter'. Hopefully they have been proofed out.
# posted by Jim @ 12:24 AM 
