Beware the flying goose… - One of the things that’s difficult for me about living in Germany is the total absence of spicy food. German cuisine is bland. The best they can think of to spice it up seems to be mustard or possibly a dab of horseradish. As someone who likes curries and chilli dishes this just doesn’t challenge the taste-buds enough.
While my Aunt, laments the lack of spicy food in Germany, I can report on my latest curry. As mentioned here I went for a curry last night (Friday) with a load of my sailing friends at The Bulls Head in Old Glossop.

The Bull is unique in being a typically English Pub, friendly and atmospheric, and having an excellent Indian Resturant attached. One the other main advantages for me being that, of course, it is in the close proximity of my home.
Anyway, after a meeting about junior/youth sailing in 2008 at Glossop Sailing Club a small group of us went for a curry at the Bull. Being the only one from the local area in the group, I felt most familiar with the pub,being privately somewhat amused with comments like "mmm, this is nice", when refferring to the poppadoms.
After the appetizing poppadoms we started with a mixed starter to share, instead of my usual Vegetable Samosa.
The mixed starter consisted of a load of starters on a big platter. despite being assured it was 50% vegetarian, I was a little disappointed that the only vegetarian things were onion bhajis and these brightly coloured sort of ash brown things, which tasted very nice. the others then had bits of fish, and random bits of meat dipped in things and spiced. In future, personally I think I would stick to a starter of Vegetable Samosas.
For main course, predictably, I had a Vegetable Bhuna curry with Pilau rice. I *know* I like this curry and I definitely enjoyed it. One noticeable difference from the Rushholme Curryhouses I have encountered recently for #manlug currybeers is that the portion sizes were smaller. Thats not to say it was a bad thing, I certainly wasn't hungry when I left, but I felt they were cutting it a bit fine personally. That said, for most people, who don't tend to have capabilities of putting away lots of nice food, portion sizes should be fine.
Throughout the night I was drinking Lime Cordial.
As is somewhat usual the bill, split equally between us, meant we each had to pay 15 pound, which going on recent experiences in Rushholme is pretty average showing that in this case increased competition on Manchester's legendary curry mile doesn't necessarily result in lower prices.

While in the Bull, I spotted several old friends. my former 3rd Glossop Explorer Scouts leader and his wife, whom had guided my brother and sister and I through the scout system for what must have been long space of time. They were there with the parents of one the former Explorer scout's (whose band I aggregate here.)
Since I haven't seen them in a *long* time, I really happy to see them.

In lieu of my previous post(s) about mentioning going to the Bull, councilor for the Old Glossop ward Ivan Bell, who also happens to be webmaster of The Bulls Head's website contacted me about a broken link. This alerted me to an interesting situation. I mostly Blog via SMS via an RSS feed from TreasureMyText.
My mobile is a Nokia 3310 and obviously doesn't have anything silly like web browsing. Therefore when I blog the URL of sites, I am doing it totally from memory, thus meaning that various iterations of the Bulls head are easy to confuse with each other.
The second problem is that once I have text my post to TreasureMyText, there is nothing I can do to edit it; it immediately gets added to my text stream and the indexed my my feed -> node parser. If I try to remove the post in drupal, It will be restored at the next indexing, within 45 mins. Thus i have found it is actually quite hard to edit bad links etc once pasted to my site. :(

Today I went bowling with a load of friends from my sailing club. I came 3rd, which some what shocked me, with an overall score of 194 over two games.
After that we went to the cinema. Despite my pleas that we watch "Son of Rambow", which seems to have had good reviews and looks quirky, we watched "21", a film about students at MIT making money by counting cards.
If you were thinking of going and seeing it. Don't.
It's rubbish.
My opinion is that it gives a Hollywood polish to everything, and with inherently technical/geeky stuff, it really doesn't work. See Die Hard 4.0 for details.
For instance, in "21", the characters have a large argument about a "chip" (evidently an old chunk BIOS chip) with them throwing the phrases 8k and 16k in nonsensical sentences. In addition there is a scene where source code is passed in a hard copy for someone to admire. Seriously, who prints off source code.
The whole film, especially the bits involving gambling (90%), despite being based on real life antics, is spun in a way to make it totally unbelievable and seem totally Hollywoodised. Even my non-techie friends felt the same way.

I have just found out a way to sync my aged, back from the dead, palm zire 31 with kpilot. Instead of using "/dev/pilot", I should have been using "usb:". Now it works pretty neatly and I have my google calender on my handheld, which is pretty neat.
The only thing to do now is get everything sorted out in kontact and see if I can get calender synchronisation set up with GCAL Daemon.
The other thing I am looking at again is Plucker, which is the neatest bit of Free Software for non-free Palm OS in existence. This should let me to get a load of ebooks on there and browse a few websites offline and in general have a play.

On Sunday (tomorrow), I am racing again at GSC. It should be fun... if there is any wind.

On Tuesday evening, I am going to the Manchester Free Software Group talk by John Leech from Brightbox Hosting and Everyone Loves Eric Raymond.