commafruit.co.uk. welcome.

I was surprised when I realised how easy to make salad dressing is. The trouble is, the ingredients tend to be, not obscure, but also not necessarily things you’d have to hand as they’re not used in many other recipes.

180ml Olive Oil
50ml Balsamic Vinegar
tsp. wholegrain mustard
tsp. brown sugar
tsp. thyme
dash of lemon juice

Mix the vinegar, mustard, thyme and sugar together in a bowl. Still stirring/whisking this mixture, pour in the lemon, then the oil until you’ve decided you’ve got a good consistency. As with all things, the exact quantities of the ingredients aren’t critical, which is why I suggest putting the oil in last, so you can work out how much you need.

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I’m always amused by mistranslations, and someone on slashdot reminded me of this:

The name Coca-Cola in China was first rendered as Ke-kou-ke-la. Unfortunately, the Coke company did not discover until after thousands of signs had been printed that the phrase means “bite the wax tadpole” or “female horse stuffed with wax” depending on the dialect. Coke then researched 40,000 Chinese characters and found a close phonetic equivalent, “ko-kou-ko-le,” which can be loosely translated as “happiness in the mouth.”

This site has some other amusing examples, including:

The American slogan for Salem cigarettes, “Salem - Feeling Free,” got translated in the Japanese market into “When smoking Salem, you feel so refreshed that your mind seems to be free and empty.”

Amusing. Much debate has already begun on the subject of the Nintendo Revolution being renamed the Wii, most of it pretty negative. I think it will catch on, especially once people accept that they mean “We” rather than “Wee”. Also, it affords them plenty of opportunity to show off the crux of the thing: those awesome controllers.

One thing is slightly annoying however: “Owners will have the option of equipping a small, self-contained attachment to play movies and other DVD content.” (Gamasutra). What a terrible backward step. Never mind though, it’s not like I (or anyone else) will not have the facility to play DVD’s on other stuff that’s likely to be kept next to the Wii, it just seems like DVD playback should’ve been a built-in feature.

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Just set up photography.commafruit.co.uk, for posting photographs; this is for more polished photos that I’ve taken, rather than the snaps that appear on this page.

I had been going to build a browser in the style of soupisgoodfood, but after playing with F-Spot’s web gallery export feature, I decided to just use that. Check it out…

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Went to Bordeaux with my parents and sister last week. It’s such a nice city, made me wish I’d made more effort to learn French at school when I had the chance. I did try to learn by myself (partly using the excellent BBC Learning site), but it’s hard to maintain interest with other things going on and no real incentive.
Anyway, Bordeaux is a beautiful place, and unexplainably French; it made me realise that in the past I’d been to Paris, and had been willing to think that this meant I’d been to France.

A lot of the landmarks are currently surrounded in fencing, presumably because they’re currently being cleaned, which makes me suspect that the city is preparing itself for an increase of tourism this summer. I hope this does not detract from the atmosphere of the place, I think it would be easy to damage the (apparently) slow pace of life, or the distinctly French nature. Maybe in a few years (when I can afford it, and, maybe, can speak some more of the language) I’ll go back and find out.
Took some photos, not great given how pretty the scenery was, but then the weather wasn’t that great…

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Last week I went with a few friends to stay in Powys, Wales in a friends grandparents cottage (free of charge!), then climbed Cader Idris, second highest mountain in Wales. In many ways, the driving was one of the most exciting parts of the trip (some of these Welsh roads are amazing, just not the most safe ever…) Took a few photos on the way around though, see below.

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