Short Reviews: Casa Malevo, Argentinian Steak, Marble Arch

Go for brunch, it's good value and they have proper morcilla. Dinner is fine, but not outstanding and quite expensive. Sides are mean, especially the chips. I could happily eat two of their little enamel bowl fulls, which at this price is inexcusable, and perplexing when there is so much meat. The set mixed grill we had the other day was very generous, apart from the tiny cubes of very overdone fillet. The rump was nice but inconsistently done (we had four sets), but maybe that was intentional. Service, and the place itself, is very nice.

Short Reviews: Riverfront Restaurant @ BFI, Waterloo

Before I start complaining, let me just say that the food that we had at the BFI Riverfront was really very good. My smoked haddock fish cakes were nice and strong, complimented by a very good tartar sauce, something that I don't say very often, and the "oat crumb" coating was both crispy and tasty. The g/f's mussels came in a very nice tarragon sauce, which was a bit too thick and creamy for me, but not for her.

No, what I take issue with is the price. At first glance £9.50 - £11 for a main seems quite reasonable, especially for such a prime location, but who has just mussels for a main? You at least need some bread and butter (£2.50). Or just fish cakes and a dollop of boiled broccoli? You'd probably want some chips with that (£3.50). (I have to admit, the single serving of chips was pretty generous.)

Purely on presentation alone the fish cakes were missing something. That dollop of slightly overdone boiled broccoli didn't fill up much of the plate. Besides the cakes, broccoli and shot glass of tartar sauce, a lonely slice of lemon was doing its best to fill up the rest of the space.

Then there is the "discretionary" 12.5% service charge which is automatically added to you bill. Previously it's proved quite hard to not pay the full amount, and I was going to test it on this occasion, but our waitress managed to redeem her rude and brisk attitude at the last minute by giving us two cups with our single pot of tea :) But why oh why don't places like this just add service to the prices on the menu and have done with it?!

So we ended up spending £40 on two mains, one glass of wine and a cake and tea. Not so reasonable.

UPDATE: Apparently VAT is charged on the menu price, but not on added service, hence nowhere includes service on the menu price.

UPDATE: We went back during April 2012 and the food was still very good (we had rarebit, lamb burger and mussels in cider, which were all very good) and an accompaniment was included with each main, all priced around the £12 mark.

Mongol Rally Non-Sponsorship

As you may or may not know, Kai and I are planning to do the Mongol Rally this July. It's a jaunt in the name of charity, but as it's something that I want to do I feel bad asking friends and family to sponsor me do it. So we've come up with something a mite more fun.*

Here's the deal: for every donation that you make you can enter one of our two sweepstakes in which you must guess how far we will travel or how long it will take us. The clock and odometer stop when we either reach the finish line in Ulaanbaatar or fail completely. Our readings are final. Please be as specific as possible, eg, include minutes/metres. Duplicate entries will be disregarded. The prize will be 10% of the value of donations up to a maximum of £50 for each of the two sweepstakes. We'll also see if we can find some exciting artefacts (or tacky souvenirs) to bring back for the winners. All donations will go to charity and the winnings will come out of our own pockets (hence the £50 limit). Clear? Good.

To give you a better chance at estimating: we will be starting at Goodwood, West Sussex at approximately 4pm on Saturday 23 July. We will be travelling in a car that is no older than 10 years and has an engine of less than 1.3 litres, something like a Nissan Micra or VW Polo, possibly a Toyota Rav4 or one of those little Suzukis (if you have a spare one of these or similar hanging around, let us know). There's just one Czech point (haha) which we leave (I think) on 25 July and then the route is up to us. We plan to go south of the Caspian and Black seas, ie, via Turkey and Iran. We also plan to stop off in Odessa.

Using straight lines this is 6,273 miles. Using Google directions it's 6,723 miles to Korday, Kazakhstan where it stops giving directions. When making our visa application we estimated that it would take us 5 weeks. Last year roughly 2/3 of cars made it to the finish line. Feel free to do more research on the Rally:

http://mongolrally.theadventurists.com/

How to enter:

There is a Just Giving page for each of the two sweepstakes. Donate your money and leave an appropriate guess in your comment. I'm afraid we will not be able to correct mistakes, but hey, you can try again.

If you want to guess at the duration of our journey go to:

http://www.justgiving.com/geekoutTime

If you want to guess at the final distance of our journey go to:

http://www.justgiving.com/geekoutDistance

We have yet to decide when we will stop accepting entries.

If you want to donate but not take part there are also two pages for straight donations:

https://www.justgiving.com/GeekoutAmnesty
https://www.justgiving.com/geekout

Donate on either of those pages and you can request slogans to be written on our car, guess when/where Kai and I will have our first argument or who will kill who first and how.

Good luck!

* Fun is not guaranteed.

WSE306: The DIME record should have the following version: 1. Instead, the DIME record contained the following version: 7

Fixing the above error involved altering the Microsoft.Web.Services2 version in the configSections of the web.config file from 2.0.0.0 to 2.0.3.0, matching the version named in the soapExtensionTypes section.

Linux Colour Management and Monitor Calibration (or Do You Really Want a High Gamut Monitor?)

I am writing this purely because a couple of the highest google hits for things like "linux colour management" and "linux monitor calibration" are worse than useless and useless respectively (imho). I won't name their URLs but their domain starts with linux and ends in .com.

Loading default colour profiles (.icc, .icm files) in Linux is a surprisingly simple matter, there's Argyll (see dispwin) and xcalib for the CLI lovers among you and things like gnome colour manager to make things even easier.

I actually found that Argyll and xcalib didn't work for my chosen screen, apparently because the nVidia driver does not properly support XRandR (yet). However the gnome colour manager *did* work, despite it apparently being just a front end for Argyll. Having said that it did apply the same profile to all my screens, so it wasn't perfect, but it was good enough for me, applying the chosen profile to all the important programmes such as eog, firefox and Gimp, the notable exception being flash, which of course is a big deal in a world of flash video and I have to admit to using picnic on flickr an awful lot.

Short Reviews: The Island Queen, Islington

Really lovely staff, a great selection of beers and large portions of good food at very reasonable prices. It's a shame it's so far off the beaten track, but it's worth the trek, highly recommended!

HR

Simply hiring the best and the brightest may not make sense in all circumstances, nevertheless the alignment of our core “Competency Framework” with job descriptions, recruitment, appraisal and training and development program, enables a continuous check on the current availability of human asset capabilities.

One wonders under what circumstances not "simply hiring the best and brightest" would make sense. Maybe that's what Google meant.

UPDATE: A colleague thought of such a circumstance: nepotism.

Utilitarian Incompetence

I'm sure everyone has these sorts of horror stories regarding utility companies, especially when moving, but that doesn't make me feel better. What makes me feel better is ranting. What makes the below worse is the fact that all of them only have 0800, or more commonly, 0845 numbers and I do not have a land line.

npower

I chose npower because uswitch said they'd be the cheapest for us. Perhaps that should have been a warning rather than a recommendation. Our first problem was that they could not accept either of our meter serial numbers, they were apparently wrong, even though I was looking straight at them. Ironically British Gas were very helpful, despite the fact that we were leaving them. (Note that British Gas have raised my ire in the past too.)

We then received a letter from npower saying that the gas had been cancelled and that they were sorry to see us go. I called them and was told it was probably due to the confusion over the meter numbers and not to worry, the gas was going ahead. I thought I better check the electric too while I was on the phone. Oh no, I was told, the electric has been cancelled, due to them not being able to find the address, and that they would have sent a letter out. There is some paradox in there somewhere.

Unfortunately by this time the tariff that I had requested was no longer available. Not to worry, I was assured that they would connect us on Standard and move us over to Sign Online 20 once we were connected. Having heard horror stories about npower's abilities to sign you up for the most expensive tariff I asked for this to be confirmed in writing. A few days later we received a standard letter thanking me for my call and hoping that I was happy. No mention of tariffs. So I called them again and explained that I wanted it in writing. A few days later we received a standard letter thanking me for my call and hoping that I was happy. I called them again and explained the situation. After a few minutes on hold the complaints department picked up, which was a surprise as I hadn't requested the complaints department, but what the hell. I explained the situation and we now have a letter confirming the complaint, but still nothing confirming the tariff switch.

Barclays

A few days after I'd moved I printed out and filled in Barclays' change of address form, including the date on which I moved. They then sent a letter to my old address saying that my signature did not match the one they have on file. Yes, they posted a letter to the address which I had just told them that I had already moved out of. It was only by chance (see below) that I discovered that the change of address had not gone through.

Virgin

I was very impressed with Virgin's service in moving my connection, we only had a matter of hours downtime. My first bill came and all seemed well. But then the second bill came. It should have been £25, but was £80. Eventually it transpired that they somehow had the wrong account number, despite the fact that they'd been charging the same account for the previous 12 months. They had then charged me extra for their inconvenience. I was assured I would have been sent a letter informing me of this. Happily it was rectified quite quickly and they refunded the extra charges made.

UPDATE: Virgin now seem to be doing a 30meg service for less than I am paying for the 20meg service! What's more, new customers are offered free installation, whereas I would have to pay £30 for the upgrade!

O2

Why oh why do 0800 numbers not get included in my monthly minutes? If only I'd known about 0800 Buster a month ago.

British Gas

British Gas have managed to charge me twice for the same, final bill. Not a small amount either.

TV Licensing

When we moved in we found a lot of unopened mail from TV Licensing. We didn't have a TV so I rang them and spoke to a very helpful guy who promised that we wouldn't receive any more mail from them. He was wrong. Not only did we continue to receive their demands and threats, but they got worse. I really object to being spoken to as if my guilt is assumed until I prove my innocence. In fact they weren't even giving us that chance, many of the letters included a leaflet that "might be helpful to you in court." Having got a TV we bought a TV Licence and continue to receive demands to a slightly different address. I am not going to bother replying if they cannot be bothered to check their records, hopefully they will go to the expense of sending someone round.

Installing Windows 7 From a USB Key

Avoid all the stupidly complex instructions out there and download Microsoft's USB tool. Note that if you are trying to create 64bit install media on a 32bit machine you might need to run the 32bit bootsect.exe against your installation media.

Flashing OCZ Vertex 2 Firmware in Linux

• You cannot flash the firmware through USB, the drive has to be connected to a SATA port.
  
• I believe it is necessary to set the SATA mode to AHCI in your BIOS.
  
• Unsurprisingly you cannot flash the firmware of a mounted drive, so you will probably need to boot from a live CD or USB drive. (If you try you do not get a helpful error message.)
  
• The firmware update utility needs an internet connection to download the latest firmware, so keep that in mind when choosing/preparing your boot media.
  
• The first big hurdle is to stop the drive from being "frozen". Apparently most computers set all SATA drives connected at boot to this state as a security measure. Run "hdparm -I" against your drive and have a look at the Security section, you need to get your drive into the "not frozen" state. There are at least two possible ways of doing this. If possible unplug your drive, while the computer is still running, and then plug it back in again. As long as the drive isn't mounted this shouldn't be harmful. I found this crashed my Dell M101z which wasn't so surprising as the drive obviously isn't designed to be removed while the computer is running (it's underneath the keyboard). However, my old Dell M1330 was fine with hot-plugging the drive and this got it into the unfrozen state. The other way I've heard to unfreeze your drive is to suspend your machine. However this also crashed my M101z when booted from USB.
  
• Download and run the firmware tool. There is a thread or directory that you can download from. These might become out of date, but I think that it should always download the most recent firmware regardless.