And a couple of Instagram pictures....
Minggu, 05 Februari 2012
Snow Day Grovelands Park, N14
So just like so many others I slithered my way to the park - the sun wasn't shining but the people who ventured out made the best of deep snow to fulfil that inherent human desire to build things whenever they see snow...
Sabtu, 04 Februari 2012
Winter Supper for Four
This recipe was given me by my friend Cheryl of Mucky Hen fame. We had it at hers one evening and it was so delicious and so easy to pull together I couldn't resist having a go myself. As with all one-pot recipes it can be varied with whatever you have to hand, but here is what I like best.
One Pan Spanish Chicken
You will need:
1 jar of butter beans (580g) or 2 x 410g tins of cannelli beans
2 medium sweet potoatoes peeled and cut into large chunks
3 red peppers again cut into chunks without their seeds
1 pack of chorizo skinned and sliced
1 bulb of garlic
200ml chicken stock
Juice of a large orange plus a few wedges (optional)
2tsp sweet smoked paprika
8 on the bone chicken thighs
Olive Oil
A handful of sage leaves (or dried sage if you can't get them)
Pre-heat oven to 220degrees C, gas mark 7. Arrange the beans, sweet potatoes, peppers, chorizo, and garlic bulb in a large roasting tin. Mix the stock, orange juice and 1 teaspoon of the smoked paprika and pour over the veg. Put the chicken on top of the veg to ensure they crisp up while cooking. Roast for up to 40 mins. Mix some oil with the rest of the paprika and brush the chicken with the oil and dip the sage leaves in the oil and scatter over the dish. I also add a little dried sage to the stock too. Roast for a further 10 mins.
You can serve with a leafy salad and chunks of bread but instead of the leafy salad I made this from Yotam Ottolenghi's Plenty recipe book...
Green Bean Salad with mustard seed and tarragon
You will need:
250g french beans
250g mange tout trimmed
250g green peas (fresh or frozen)
2tsp coriander seeds roughly crushed
1tsp mustard seeds
3tbsp olive oil
1 tsp nigella seeds
half small red onion
1 mild fresh chilli (I leave this out for a mild version)
1 garlic clove crushed
2tbsp chopped taragon
30g baby chard leaves (optional)
coarse sea salt
Blanch the french beans for 4 mins in boiling water then plunge into cold water to perk them up - dry with kitchen towel. Do the same to the mange tout for 20 seconds. Mix both with the peas. Put the coriander, mustard and oil in a small pan and heat up untl the seeds pop. Pour over the vegetables. Toss together with the other ingredients. Just before serving stir in the chard leaves if using. Yum!
One Pan Spanish Chicken
You will need:
1 jar of butter beans (580g) or 2 x 410g tins of cannelli beans
2 medium sweet potoatoes peeled and cut into large chunks
3 red peppers again cut into chunks without their seeds
1 pack of chorizo skinned and sliced
1 bulb of garlic
200ml chicken stock
Juice of a large orange plus a few wedges (optional)
2tsp sweet smoked paprika
8 on the bone chicken thighs
Olive Oil
A handful of sage leaves (or dried sage if you can't get them)
Pre-heat oven to 220degrees C, gas mark 7. Arrange the beans, sweet potatoes, peppers, chorizo, and garlic bulb in a large roasting tin. Mix the stock, orange juice and 1 teaspoon of the smoked paprika and pour over the veg. Put the chicken on top of the veg to ensure they crisp up while cooking. Roast for up to 40 mins. Mix some oil with the rest of the paprika and brush the chicken with the oil and dip the sage leaves in the oil and scatter over the dish. I also add a little dried sage to the stock too. Roast for a further 10 mins.
You can serve with a leafy salad and chunks of bread but instead of the leafy salad I made this from Yotam Ottolenghi's Plenty recipe book...
Green Bean Salad with mustard seed and tarragon
You will need:
250g french beans
250g mange tout trimmed
250g green peas (fresh or frozen)
2tsp coriander seeds roughly crushed
1tsp mustard seeds
3tbsp olive oil
1 tsp nigella seeds
half small red onion
1 mild fresh chilli (I leave this out for a mild version)
1 garlic clove crushed
2tbsp chopped taragon
30g baby chard leaves (optional)
coarse sea salt
Blanch the french beans for 4 mins in boiling water then plunge into cold water to perk them up - dry with kitchen towel. Do the same to the mange tout for 20 seconds. Mix both with the peas. Put the coriander, mustard and oil in a small pan and heat up untl the seeds pop. Pour over the vegetables. Toss together with the other ingredients. Just before serving stir in the chard leaves if using. Yum!
To follow I made what is fast becoming my favourite chocolate pot dessert.
Also try my Lamb Korma - perfect for a winter supper.
Jumat, 03 Februari 2012
Unicode over 60 percent of the web
Computers store every piece of text using a “character encoding,” which gives a number to each character. For example, the byte 61 stands for ‘a’ and 62 stands for ‘b’ in the ASCII encoding, which was launched in 1963. Before the web, computer systems were siloed, and there were hundreds of different encodings. Depending on the encoding, C1 could mean any of ¡, Ё, Ą, Ħ, ‘, ”, or parts of thousands of characters, from æ to 品. If you brought a file from one computer to another, it could come out as gobbledygook.
Unicode was invented to solve that problem: to encode all human languages, from Chinese (中文) to Russian (русский) to Arabic (العربية), and even emoji symbols like
or
; it encodes nearly 75,000 Chinese ideographs alone. In the ASCII encoding, there wasn’t even enough room for all the English punctuation (like curly quotes), while Unicode has room for over a million characters. Unicode was first published in 1991, coincidentally the year the World Wide Web debuted—little did anyone realize at the time they would be so important for each other. Today, people can easily share documents on the web, no matter what their language.
Every January, we look at the percentage of the webpages in our index that are in different encodings. Here’s what our data looks like with the latest figures*:
As you can see, Unicode has experienced an 800 percent increase in “market share” since 2006. Note that we separate out ASCII (~16 percent) since it is a subset of most other encodings. When you include ASCII, nearly 80 percent of web documents are in Unicode (UTF-8). The more documents that are in Unicode, the less likely you will see mangled characters (what Japanese call mojibake) when you’re surfing the web.
We’ve long used Unicode as the internal format for all the text Google searches and process: any other encoding is first converted to Unicode. Version 6.1 just released with over 110,000 characters; soon we’ll be updating to that version and to Unicode’s locale data from CLDR 21 (both via ICU). The continued rise in use of Unicode makes it even easier to do the processing for the many languages that we cover. Without it, our unified index it would be nearly impossible—it’d be a bit like not being able to convert between the hundreds of currencies in the world; commerce would be, well, difficult. Thanks to Unicode, Google is able to help people find information in almost any language.
Unicode was invented to solve that problem: to encode all human languages, from Chinese (中文) to Russian (русский) to Arabic (العربية), and even emoji symbols like
or 
; it encodes nearly 75,000 Chinese ideographs alone. In the ASCII encoding, there wasn’t even enough room for all the English punctuation (like curly quotes), while Unicode has room for over a million characters. Unicode was first published in 1991, coincidentally the year the World Wide Web debuted—little did anyone realize at the time they would be so important for each other. Today, people can easily share documents on the web, no matter what their language. Every January, we look at the percentage of the webpages in our index that are in different encodings. Here’s what our data looks like with the latest figures*:
*Your mileage may vary: these figures may vary somewhat from what other search engines find. The graph lumps together encodings by script. We detect the encoding for each webpage; the ASCII pages just contain ASCII characters, for example. Thanks again to Erik van der Poel for collecting the data.
As you can see, Unicode has experienced an 800 percent increase in “market share” since 2006. Note that we separate out ASCII (~16 percent) since it is a subset of most other encodings. When you include ASCII, nearly 80 percent of web documents are in Unicode (UTF-8). The more documents that are in Unicode, the less likely you will see mangled characters (what Japanese call mojibake) when you’re surfing the web.
We’ve long used Unicode as the internal format for all the text Google searches and process: any other encoding is first converted to Unicode. Version 6.1 just released with over 110,000 characters; soon we’ll be updating to that version and to Unicode’s locale data from CLDR 21 (both via ICU). The continued rise in use of Unicode makes it even easier to do the processing for the many languages that we cover. Without it, our unified index it would be nearly impossible—it’d be a bit like not being able to convert between the hundreds of currencies in the world; commerce would be, well, difficult. Thanks to Unicode, Google is able to help people find information in almost any language.
Bellapierre Cosmetics Eye Pencil
Like most of the universe I love a smoky eye when I'm in the mood to glam it up but often find eye-pencil's unless they are kohl can be too hard and scratchy for my delicate eye area (what a delicate flower I am).
I have recently come across a new eye pencil which is up to my exacting standard by Bellapierre who are known for their mineral make-up and have added new brow, eye and lip pencils to the range.
These are really good colours - they were a tiny bit hard to start with but soon softened down to a deep colour which blended well without dragging my skin. Available in five shades, Snow White, Ebony, Charcoal, Midnight Blue and Chocolate - I've got Ebony which I'll use for those smoky evening looks and Chocolate for a more daytime blend.... The extra great thing is that they are 100% natural including pure mineral pigments and botanical waxes such as jojoba, safflower and vitamin E. Check out Bellapierre Cosmetics for the rest of the range.
I have recently come across a new eye pencil which is up to my exacting standard by Bellapierre who are known for their mineral make-up and have added new brow, eye and lip pencils to the range.
These are really good colours - they were a tiny bit hard to start with but soon softened down to a deep colour which blended well without dragging my skin. Available in five shades, Snow White, Ebony, Charcoal, Midnight Blue and Chocolate - I've got Ebony which I'll use for those smoky evening looks and Chocolate for a more daytime blend.... The extra great thing is that they are 100% natural including pure mineral pigments and botanical waxes such as jojoba, safflower and vitamin E. Check out Bellapierre Cosmetics for the rest of the range.
Kamis, 02 Februari 2012
Rumah Dijual – Segera Kunjungi Kolomrumah.com untuk Solusi Properti Anda!
Dengan adanya internet, pekerjaan kita jauh lebih mudah dan cepat. Banyak yang bisa kita temukan dari mulai dari materi pelajaran, hiburan, berita, bisnis online, bahkan semuanya bisa kita temukan di sini, tidak hanya yang berasal dari dalam negeri tetapi juga dari luar. Bisa dibilang banyak website yang ada di internet tersebut dan masing-masing website tentunya memiliki tema tersendiri. Salah
Mind the Gap: Encouraging women to study engineering
Women make up more than half the global population, but hold fewer than a third of the world’s engineering jobs. In the U.S., female students comprise fewer than 15 percent of all Advanced Placement computer science test takers. Even in high-tech Israel, few girls choose computer science. Not only is this a loss to companies like Google and everyone who benefits from a continually developing web; it's also a lost opportunity for girls.
Beginning in 2008, a group of female engineers at Google in Israel decided to tackle this problem. We established the “Mind the Gap!” program, aimed at encouraging girls to pursue math, science and technology education. In collaboration with the Israeli National Center for Computer Science Teachers, we began organizing monthly school visits for different groups of girls to the Google office and annual tech conferences at local universities and institutes. The girls learn about computer science and technology and get excited about its applications, as well as have a chance to talk with female engineers in an informal setting and see what the working environment is like for them.
Since we started this program over three years ago, we’ve hosted more than 1,100 teenage girls at our office, and an additional 1,400 girls at three annual conferences held in leading universities. These 2,500 students represent 100 schools from all sectors and from all over the country: Tel Aviv, Haifa, Tira, Beer-Sheva, Jerusalem, Nazareth and more; what they have in common is the potential to become great computer scientists.
The results are encouraging. For instance, some 40 percent of the girls who participated in last year’s conference later chose computer science as a high school major.
We encourage people in other countries, at other companies and in other scientific disciplines to see how they could replicate this program. You can read more at the project site. Currently, we are working with the Google in Education group to expand the program to more offices globally and get even more young women excited about computer science. The difference we can make is real: At one of our first visits three years ago, we met a 10th grade student named Keren who enjoyed math but had never considered computer science as a high school major. Last month, Keren informed us that the visit made such an impact on her, she decided to change her major to computer science. “Talking to women in the field helped me change my mind,” she said.
Beginning in 2008, a group of female engineers at Google in Israel decided to tackle this problem. We established the “Mind the Gap!” program, aimed at encouraging girls to pursue math, science and technology education. In collaboration with the Israeli National Center for Computer Science Teachers, we began organizing monthly school visits for different groups of girls to the Google office and annual tech conferences at local universities and institutes. The girls learn about computer science and technology and get excited about its applications, as well as have a chance to talk with female engineers in an informal setting and see what the working environment is like for them.
Since we started this program over three years ago, we’ve hosted more than 1,100 teenage girls at our office, and an additional 1,400 girls at three annual conferences held in leading universities. These 2,500 students represent 100 schools from all sectors and from all over the country: Tel Aviv, Haifa, Tira, Beer-Sheva, Jerusalem, Nazareth and more; what they have in common is the potential to become great computer scientists.
The results are encouraging. For instance, some 40 percent of the girls who participated in last year’s conference later chose computer science as a high school major.
We encourage people in other countries, at other companies and in other scientific disciplines to see how they could replicate this program. You can read more at the project site. Currently, we are working with the Google in Education group to expand the program to more offices globally and get even more young women excited about computer science. The difference we can make is real: At one of our first visits three years ago, we met a 10th grade student named Keren who enjoyed math but had never considered computer science as a high school major. Last month, Keren informed us that the visit made such an impact on her, she decided to change her major to computer science. “Talking to women in the field helped me change my mind,” she said.
Rabu, 01 Februari 2012
Playbook for tackling the Super Bowl with Google
While thousands of lucky fans will brave the crowds at the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Ind. to fill the coveted seats at this Sunday’s Super Bowl, many more in the U.S. will enjoy the game from home—in front of the TV, with mobile phones and tablets at the ready.
As the New York Giants and New England Patriots prepare for kickoff, here are several ways to make the most of the big game with Google—wherever you’re watching. You can explore the full list in our Game Day with Google playbook, a new page on Inside Search that we’ve filled with tips on how to use Google to enjoy the game.
Get the inside scoop
Visit the Giants and Patriots Google+ pages for behind-the-scenes coverage and details on a chance for you to join the Giants pre-game hangout on Thursday for a face-to-face chat with the players. Be sure to leave a comment on their post for a chance to participate.
On Monday, Feb 6 at noon ET, stop by the NBC Sports Google+ page for a Hangout On Air with CNBC sports business reporter Darren Rovell. He’ll chat about the previous day’s game and review the best commercials with fans that drop in. Leave a comment on this NBC Sports post to throw your name in the hat to be one of the lucky participants who will chat with Rovell On Air.
Plan your party
Super Bowl party rivalry is already in full swing with Indiana leading the pack in Google searches for [super bowl party], ahead of both New York and Massachusetts. Despite New York being the home state of the buffalo wing, searches for [chicken wings] are nearly 50 percent higher in Massachusetts.
If you’re looking for a dip recipes, [hummus] reigns supreme, followed by guacamole, queso and bean dip. Use Google Recipe search to find a recipe with the ingredients to make everyone happy. Or, swing by ChefHangout on Google+ to join a cooking class on favorite Super Bowl party foods.
Talking babies or barking dogs? You decide.
It wouldn’t be the Super Bowl without the commercials. We’ve already seen a flurry of pre-game teasers pop up on YouTube and Google+, but which commercial will reign supreme? Our fifth annual YouTube Ad Blitz in partnership with NBC Sports enables you to replay and vote on your favorite commercials online from a laptop, mobile phone or tablet. Tune in to the YouTube Ad Blitz channel or NBCSports.com to watch and rate the commercials.
Watch the Madonna premiere on YouTube
If the halftime show interests you more than counting yards gained and lost, get an early taste of the show with Madonna’s music video premiere for “Give Me All Your Luvin” featuring Nicki Minaj and M.I.A on her official youtube.com/Madonna channel this Friday and on the YouTube Ad Blitz channel pre-game on Sunday. You can pre-order her deluxe album right there in the video description. And make sure to tune in to Madonna’s Google+ profile all week long for her latest news.
May the best team win!
As the New York Giants and New England Patriots prepare for kickoff, here are several ways to make the most of the big game with Google—wherever you’re watching. You can explore the full list in our Game Day with Google playbook, a new page on Inside Search that we’ve filled with tips on how to use Google to enjoy the game.
Get the inside scoop
Visit the Giants and Patriots Google+ pages for behind-the-scenes coverage and details on a chance for you to join the Giants pre-game hangout on Thursday for a face-to-face chat with the players. Be sure to leave a comment on their post for a chance to participate.
On Monday, Feb 6 at noon ET, stop by the NBC Sports Google+ page for a Hangout On Air with CNBC sports business reporter Darren Rovell. He’ll chat about the previous day’s game and review the best commercials with fans that drop in. Leave a comment on this NBC Sports post to throw your name in the hat to be one of the lucky participants who will chat with Rovell On Air.
Super Bowl party rivalry is already in full swing with Indiana leading the pack in Google searches for [super bowl party], ahead of both New York and Massachusetts. Despite New York being the home state of the buffalo wing, searches for [chicken wings] are nearly 50 percent higher in Massachusetts.
If you’re looking for a dip recipes, [hummus] reigns supreme, followed by guacamole, queso and bean dip. Use Google Recipe search to find a recipe with the ingredients to make everyone happy. Or, swing by ChefHangout on Google+ to join a cooking class on favorite Super Bowl party foods.
Talking babies or barking dogs? You decide.
It wouldn’t be the Super Bowl without the commercials. We’ve already seen a flurry of pre-game teasers pop up on YouTube and Google+, but which commercial will reign supreme? Our fifth annual YouTube Ad Blitz in partnership with NBC Sports enables you to replay and vote on your favorite commercials online from a laptop, mobile phone or tablet. Tune in to the YouTube Ad Blitz channel or NBCSports.com to watch and rate the commercials.
Watch the Madonna premiere on YouTube
If the halftime show interests you more than counting yards gained and lost, get an early taste of the show with Madonna’s music video premiere for “Give Me All Your Luvin” featuring Nicki Minaj and M.I.A on her official youtube.com/Madonna channel this Friday and on the YouTube Ad Blitz channel pre-game on Sunday. You can pre-order her deluxe album right there in the video description. And make sure to tune in to Madonna’s Google+ profile all week long for her latest news.
May the best team win!
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