Short Reviews: The King's Head, Coltishall, Norfolk

A good gastropub in deepest darkest Norfolk, the King's Head in Coltishall has a fairly standard menu* apart from the fact that about half of it is devoted to fresh and local fish. Make sure you book ahead as I assumed that in a small town in the middle of winter, in the middle of a blizzard no less, there would be no need, but the place was packed and we had to wait until 8:30 for a table, by which time they'd unfortunately run out of the partridge and the lamb. Be careful of the starters, they are huge. After eating my main sized home smoked salmon fillet on guinness "smelt" bread and half the g/f's portion of fried bree? I was already pretty full. On top of that every table gets its own warm loaf**, most of which we took home with us. I thought that prices were quite average for a gastropub, but that would be for London, so I guess it's slightly pricey for Norfolk, the huge starters were around £6, mains started at £10 for pasta and went up to £18 for the steak.

* Not a criticism.
** More of a large bun really. That's not a criticism either.

Short Reviews: Fish Fish, Archway/Highgate

I'm often amazed at how difficult it can be to find a decent chippie; how hard can it be to take a piece of fresh fish, dip it in egg, milk and flour and deep fry it at the right temperature? I was especially disappointed with Toff's on Muswell Hill, which apparently has a good reputation and seems to be shut of a Sunday evening. And so it was an extra special joy to find lovely fresh light golden batter around some tasty fresh fish and good (albeit suspiciously regular) chips about 2/3 of the way to Highgate from Archway on Sunday evening. It's not particularly cheap (£6.95 for take away fish and chips, £11 to eat in) and I was pleased to actuality be able to finish my portion for once, ie, it wasn't a huge portion, small by fish and chip standards.

Short Reviews: Plum Valley, Chinatown

A posh Chinese apparently sanitised for western palettes. The crispy shredded beef was nice and crispy but didn't taste like it had ever seen a chilli, meanwhile I seemed to have ordered the Lancashire hot pot, which I'm not fond of at the best of times. It is possible that we chose badly, our neighbours' set meal looked good, though ours didn't look bad. It was quite pricey too if I remember rightly.

Google Chrome Browser Issues

I've used Chrome a few times since it was released, and it's very fast, but for me, it's just not quite there yet, there are these tiny little niggles:

1. Search as you type. I know I can press ctrl+f, and I know it occasionally mucks up keyboard shortcuts, but I don't care, I want it. Apart from that it makes browsing with the keyboard much easier as you can just hit enter on links, instead of having to hit escape and then enter.
2. Fonts in Linux aren't quite right, see the flickr menu for example, it goes onto two lines.
3. Little website specific bugs, for example, in flickr's organiser, if you press enter after adding a tag to a group of images it seems to hit the cancel button rather than the "thanks" button.
4. I'm getting used to using the history page rather than the missing recently closed tabs feature, but the jury's still out on that one. Ah, there is a recenetly closed list on the new tab page.
5. Would really like to be able to increase the number of thumbnails on the new tab page.
6. While using the debugger, alt+left/right should still navigate back and forward.
7. On Linux it has that same annoying issue that firefox has/used to have: if you kill X chrome thinks that it's crashed and wants you to confirm re-opening your tabs.
8. The spell checker is not as intelligent as firefox's, for example, "exersie" returns no suggestions.
9. The icon is too similar to Visual Studio's, I get confused :)
10. It does not check for a site before googling for what you type into the address bar, eg, if you type "intranet" into the address bar you get google results for "intranet", not your local intranet.
11. The speed boost just doesn't seem as pronounced on Linux.
12. RSS feeds don't seem to show up like they do in Firefox.
13. Chrome seems to "steal" Firefox's saved usernames/passwords and history, which I'm not sure I'm happy about.

I also have an issue with Buzz whereby a Buzz that is in both your inbox and buzz-box doesn't get marked as read in one when you read it in the other. I think that it's just delayed, but it does mean that I click on both boxes to see one message. Also, maybe if you're viewing your buzz-box and a new one comes in it should be marked as read straight away.

AND a couple for gmail: gmail search doesn't split words with underscores and the contact autocomplete doesn't search for words after a period.