Round Up
Thurs 1 Mar 2007
March already!
I guess the big news of this week is that the Gastronomy course at Adelaide Uni has kicked off. At this stage the on-line content is mostly introductions (everyone is being terribly correct and suitably gushy about how excited they are and how frightening and intimidating the reading list is).
'Discourse' is probably the word of the week on the bulletin boards, which I find rather ironic. Here we are, enrolled in an on-line programme which focusses on the written word ... and yet there's no RSS feeds, no avatars, no emoticons, no profiles ... all a bit mid 1990s. Which is sad on several counts. Firstly, there are 32 students enrolled at $AU5100 a throw - that's $AU163, 200. On the one hand that's a considerable personal investment for most of us and, as so many of the current and emerging web technologies have free APIs, some money probably could have been thrown at the university's computer science graduate students who might have produced something reliable, exciting and new - not to mention cheap! I'd hate to think that any part of my fees was being spent on implementing some old technologies and lining the pockets of consultants ...
Geeky rant over!
But seguing from geekdom to food, blog of the week has to be What Geeks Eat. These geeks take good photos of food (maybe it will happen to me one day) and also sound a bit like hippies (that's a compliment, by the way).
There's a new post (by me) on Paper Palate which reviews Cooking Japanese
, the source of inspiration for our Japanese style meal.
Leeds based news ... Hakuna Matata on Swinegate has closed down. The interior looks almost totally gutted - I wonder what will emerge? Don't quite know when that happened, but also can't pretend I'm devastated. Last time I was there (which was only the second time I'd been - not exactly a regular) it was during happy hour, and even though the group I was with bought some drinks that were under promotion the bar staff didn't bother to tell us.
And while I'm on slightly dodgy service this afternoon I went over to the Royal Armouries with some people from work. The man who served us was bad tempered and abrupt, verging on rude. Actually, not so much 'verging on' as 'crossing the line'. One of the guys ordered a gammon steak for lunch. It was only after the rude man asked how he wanted it cooked that I twigged that his order had been messed up. It was someone else who came, refunded some money and apologised profusely so perhaps his work mates appreciated his lack of people skills?
While not lacking on people skills, some of the staff at my beloved North seem not quite to be as up on their beer knowledge as they should be. This is a terrible shame and the bar manager should try to redress this.
We've got a big, beer focussed weekend coming up: Friday night is a beer and food masterclass at Harvey Nicks, with Richard Fox. We're following that with dinner in the restaurant - and since it won Best Restaurant in Leeds last year the meal is being anticipated with some big expectations.
And then on Saturday we're off to the Bradford Beer Festival!
As if that's not enough to write about, the latest Australian Gourmet Traveller arrived today!
Stumble It!
March already!
I guess the big news of this week is that the Gastronomy course at Adelaide Uni has kicked off. At this stage the on-line content is mostly introductions (everyone is being terribly correct and suitably gushy about how excited they are and how frightening and intimidating the reading list is).
'Discourse' is probably the word of the week on the bulletin boards, which I find rather ironic. Here we are, enrolled in an on-line programme which focusses on the written word ... and yet there's no RSS feeds, no avatars, no emoticons, no profiles ... all a bit mid 1990s. Which is sad on several counts. Firstly, there are 32 students enrolled at $AU5100 a throw - that's $AU163, 200. On the one hand that's a considerable personal investment for most of us and, as so many of the current and emerging web technologies have free APIs, some money probably could have been thrown at the university's computer science graduate students who might have produced something reliable, exciting and new - not to mention cheap! I'd hate to think that any part of my fees was being spent on implementing some old technologies and lining the pockets of consultants ...
Geeky rant over!
But seguing from geekdom to food, blog of the week has to be What Geeks Eat. These geeks take good photos of food (maybe it will happen to me one day) and also sound a bit like hippies (that's a compliment, by the way).
There's a new post (by me) on Paper Palate which reviews Cooking Japanese
, the source of inspiration for our Japanese style meal.Leeds based news ... Hakuna Matata on Swinegate has closed down. The interior looks almost totally gutted - I wonder what will emerge? Don't quite know when that happened, but also can't pretend I'm devastated. Last time I was there (which was only the second time I'd been - not exactly a regular) it was during happy hour, and even though the group I was with bought some drinks that were under promotion the bar staff didn't bother to tell us.
And while I'm on slightly dodgy service this afternoon I went over to the Royal Armouries with some people from work. The man who served us was bad tempered and abrupt, verging on rude. Actually, not so much 'verging on' as 'crossing the line'. One of the guys ordered a gammon steak for lunch. It was only after the rude man asked how he wanted it cooked that I twigged that his order had been messed up. It was someone else who came, refunded some money and apologised profusely so perhaps his work mates appreciated his lack of people skills?
While not lacking on people skills, some of the staff at my beloved North seem not quite to be as up on their beer knowledge as they should be. This is a terrible shame and the bar manager should try to redress this.
We've got a big, beer focussed weekend coming up: Friday night is a beer and food masterclass at Harvey Nicks, with Richard Fox. We're following that with dinner in the restaurant - and since it won Best Restaurant in Leeds last year the meal is being anticipated with some big expectations.
And then on Saturday we're off to the Bradford Beer Festival!
As if that's not enough to write about, the latest Australian Gourmet Traveller arrived today!
Stumble It!
posted by Alex at 6:43 pm
Stumble It!
2 Comments:
Thanks for the linky love. I'm thrilled to have more UK readers. We'll be in London 3/21 - 4/2 and I hope to coordinate a blogger meet-up on a Saturday at Borough Market. Perhaps you can head south for a day?
Oh, I'd love to get down to London but I think that might be pushing it ... I hope to see a good write up of the meet up though!
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