Pineapple peeling paradise

For some reason I've been getting busy with the bloggin this week so here we go again...

Pineapples are the flavour of the month at the moment, helped by the fact that Morrisons have them on offer - truly huge pineapples for a little over one British pound.  I must admit that I have a taste for pineapple, as much as I have a taste for anything fruity, but they are a real bind to prepare.  Sorting out the inedible core and then sorting out the peel generally takes a while and ends up with much juice on worksurfaces, hands and other places that you didn't mean to get juicy (clothes, the floor, etc. etc.).  Sometimes you wonder whether it's worth the effort.

With this in mind AJ noticed that Lakeland are advertising a pineapple peeler in their latest catalogue so she decided that she wanted one.  I looked at it and decided instantly that it probably wouldn't work and wasn't worth the few pounds of outlay.  As usual, she completely ignored this and ordered it anyway alongside a bunch of toilet-related stuff...

Last week the bundle of plastic "goodies" arrived and a pineapple was bought to test it out.  Now, despite the fact that AJ bought this device, it turned out that I was the lucky guinea-pig chosen to test it out.  I did so and was surprised at how well it worked.  So much so that I thought I'd phograph the process and blog it the next time.  So, here we go.

First of all, chop off the top of the pineapple and decide which size of cutter to use (there are 3).  Then attach the handle to the top of the cutter and start on the pineapple.

Pineapple & peeler ready to go

Note that the cutter has two sets of "blades".  One is in the middle - it takes out the core as you cut through the fruit.  The second is on the outside edge of what is a slightly corkscrew shaped part of the device.  The turning action gently cuts into the soft fruit on the outside edge whilst at the same time taking the blade further down into the fruit.

Peeler part way in - a bit wonky but getting there...

So, midway through the process you've dug into the pineapple.  Then comes the clever bit on the user's part...  You have to work out roughly when you're near the bottom of the pineapple.  If you don't then you end up going through the bottom of it and juice will flow out of the bottom of the hole - that's what happened to me the first time.  Not a total disaster but it can be messy.

The finished product

Staying above the bottom of the fruit you then simply lift up the whole device.  This should bring out the pat of the fruit that you want to eat.   

Leaving the waste and juice...

It also leaves the core and some juice inside the pineapple.  I poured the juice into a glass and drank it.  Lovely.

An important part of the process is choosing the right blade of 3 in the first place. Too small a blade leaves edible fruit inside the pineapple, too large means you would have to trim the fruit once extracted (kind of defeating the object of the exercise).  So, pick carefully peelers!  

Inspired parking award

We have these awards in work they call "Inspire" awards.  The idea is that someone does some really good stuff and you can nominate them for this award.  It's a good idea in principal and up to a point.  Someone wins an award at each site every month - except that we don't seem to have had a winner since May.  My guess is that the person who organised it at our site maybe left the company?  Who knows. 

Anyway, that's the background.  The key is that the winner of the award gets two prizes.  One is an extra day's holiday, which is fantastic.  The other prize is a prime parking place right outside the door of our main Head Office building.  The space is marked by a "golden cone".  This is a nice idea assuming two things - firstly that you drive to work, secondly that the parking space is convenient for you.  The office I work in is next door to the main office and some people who won the prize didn't actually use the space because it meant they had further to walk in.  Well done to the competition organisers.

None of this is the reason why I posted today however.  The reason I posted is because someone parked in the space today.  I'm guessing that they didn't actually win the award (because nobody seems to have won it for months) and also that they are a girly.  The picture reveals all - this month's inspired parking award (note the cone).

Lunchtime irony

This is one of the dishes available from our staff "restaurant" today. I couldn't resist snapping it.  I'm not sure whether it contains real vegetarian shepherd or not.  Why they couldn't call it something different I don't know.

They also serve a vegetarian scotch broth sometimes which I think should be renamed "english" broth...

Apologies for the poor picture quality but that's phone cameras for you (well my phone camera).

Jus-rol pizza base and Vuelta on ITV4

I just thought I'd write about these because they have something in common - neither have lived up to expectations so far in similar ways.

I've used Jus-rol stuff before - usually the puff pastry, occasionally the filo and, on one previous occasion the vol-au-vent cases (fancied a blast of 70's past).  Note that I've never used the shortcrust because that's quite easy and quick to make.  Generally this stuff does what it says on the packet and if there have been any usage issues they have been down to my making.  You really do need to keep an eye on puff pastry and I have let it burn in the past...

I had 2 problems with this product - the amount of dough in the packet and it's usability.  The weight on the packet is 600g which, in my mind should be enough dough to make 3 pizzas.  However, some of that weight is a jar of tomato sauce.  The weight of dough, therefore, is probably no more than 300g (I didn't weigh it) which effectively meant  that I had to go straight back out and buy yet more pizza dough if I wanted to make 3 reasonable sized pizzas.

So.  Usability.  One thing I should say about this pizza dough is that I didn't use it as instructed.  The dough is wrapped inside a tin just like a swiss roll so you are supposed to open the tin, unroll the thing and place it on a rectangular baking tray.  That wasn't what I wanted to do.  What I wanted to do was make 3 pizzas and, for me, pizzas are almost invariably round.  So I wanted to reshape the stuff.  Now it may be that there are instructions on the pack telling the baker to under no circumstances try and roll out the dough into a different shape.  But I don't read instructions so... 

I separated the dough into three lots, one lot being a combination of 2 lumps.  Then I tried to make 3 discs of dough using a rolling pin.  This was not a good move.  The dough turned out to be anything but pliable and each disc took a few minutes of rolling and huffing and puffing to achieve a desired size.  The kids are lucky that they didn't end up with drips of sweat on their dough but they certainly got a base combined with mumbled swear words... 

Toppings were applied, the things were cooked and (looking pretty Ok I have to say) served up.  They didn't go down well though.  In fact one, KT's, didn't all go down.  So, on the face of it, that was the first and last time that the Jus-rol dough will be tried in our house.  The only other stimulus to use it again would be if I was similarly time-constrained (busy working mum and all that) and was happy to serve square-shaped pizza.  And another thing - the tomato sauce wasn't that brilliant either but I've got a spare jar of it now that's good until 2013 if anyone wants to put a bid in.

The question you may now be asking after all that blah is how ersatz Italian pizza dough links to a bike race in Spain.  Read patiently and all will be revealed.  ITV4 have been covering the Tour De France for a few years now and they do a pretty good job of it.  They have a travelling studio set up and several people presenting and commenting through the whole series and it's a very good package.  It's no surprise, therefore, that interest is increasing in the race and in cycling in general and the production team (as well as ITV4) can take a lot of credit for this.  They do what they say on the packet as it were.

With all this in mind I was quite interested in watching the Spanish tour, aka Vuelta a Espana.  Unfortunately the coverage of the race has not lived up to the hype in my head.  Firstly, there are no people for ITV out in Spain so everything comes out of a studio.  That, in itself, isn't an issue but the knock on effect is that there's no scope to do "on the plot" extra material that embellishes the programmes, gives more insight into what's going on, and generally brings the tour to life. 

The other issue is the commentary coverage.  They've clearly bought in a service from another station so we've got an Australian guy telling us what's going on.  To be fair, he seems quite knowledgeable and isn't bad but he doesn't give us the same experience as Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwin.  It's great that the race is being covered and it's live every day as well (suggesting that the rights to screen it must have been cheap) so I suppose we should be grateful for that but it's not a quality job and it's a bit of a shame.  The issue I see is that it won't drag enough punters in as an audience and we may never see it back.

To give an idea of how uncompelling the coverage is, CJ isn't even watching the highlights.  He has the option to watch it live in the afternoons (having probably just surfaced by about 2) but he's not doing so.  If ITV4 can't catch him then they're not really trying.  Fair play to Ned and his Gollum-like mate in the studio.  They're doing an OK job but not enough to really bring it up to a compelling show.

Jus-Rol, ITV4, spot the difference.

Paintblog or... gloss paint is runny or... get someone in to decorate

Now then, I was trying to work out how many years I’ve been painting and decorating.  My first recollection of a painting job was when my dad asked me to paint the shed.  I was young and stupid enough to think that it sounded like a fun job and don’t recall asking for any dosh – probably about 11 or 12.  Little did I know…  Still, I took the job and (eventually) finished it.

The suggestion from that little tale is that I have been decorating for the best part of 40 years, so there are a number of lessons that I have learned over that period.  Lesson one is that nearly all paint is quite runny – in fact I even manage to get non-drip paint to run from time to time.  Of the runny paints, gloss is generally the runniest so it’s the one we should take most care with isn’t it.  The second lesson is that you should take appropriate precautions whenever a paint job needs doing.

The job yesterday was to gloss up the garage door, it having been undercoated the previous day. The undercoating went without a hitch so there was no reason to suggest that the gloss leg would be any different.  It was a nice sunny morning and, because I know gloss paint is runny, I put a couple of dustsheets down.

Everything started off well.  I got a brush out to do the edges of the door because the roller doesn’t get into the gaps and seams.  

No problems there – I used the step to stand on for the top of the door then went down one side.  I opened the door a bit to bring the bottom of the door up to painting height and worked along the bottom.  Whilst doing the bottom, however, I took a small step to the left, for whatever reason, and just dinked the paint tin.  I didn’t knock it over but this was a full tin of paint so I hit it hard enough to knock about a saucer full onto the dust sheet.  

Expletives were muttered and I got down and scooped as much paint as I could back into the tin with my brush.  I then checked that the paint hadn’t gone through the dustsheet (old duvet covers being used for this particular job) and found that, unfortunately, a little had.  Garage door up, into the utility room and out with a cloth.  I cleaned up and got back on with the job – no worries.

The door edges were finished so now it was time to get the mini roller out.  This, of course, comes with a small tray.  The first job was to pour some paint into the tray – not too much because gloss is runny and we don’t want it dripping all over the place.  So I poured a bit in.  Then, somehow, I managed to over tip my paint tin the other way (towards me) so that a little paint came out of the “wrong” side of the tin.  I was holding the tin at this point so the paint was now also going over my hands as well.  More expletives – paint tin down, back into the utility room.  White spirit and soapy water came out this time and my hands got cleaned.  I also cleaned up the tin and checked the dust sheets yet again.

The bloody (OK, painty) result of the spills 1 & 2

Now.  Because things clearly weren’t going to plan, and because I’ve learned that precautions are generally a good thing where runny pain is concerned, I did 2 things.  The first thing was to turn the dust sheets around.  The paint I was using is a red colour and the garage floor is also a red colour.  The garage floor is also due for repainting.  So I figured that if any of the previously spilt paint did leak through it would do so onto surface that didn’t matter.  I was also conscious of the distinct possibility that I would tread in a patch of spillage and end up walking red paint all over the place.   

By this point in the story you will doubtless be unsurprised to know that I have managed to do the "paint trodden through the house thing" before as well…

That was the first thing.  The second thing was to place another dust sheet under the first two sheets.  The idea here was that there was every chance that I would spill more paint so I thought a dustsheet belt and braces approach would make sense…

OK.  I started painting the top of the door with the roller.  I was stood on the step and holding the paint tray in my left hand.  The thought then occurred to me that holding the paint tray, given what had already transpired, probably wasn’t the best idea – if I didn’t keep it really flat the chances were that further spillage would occur.  The other thing was that I didn’t need to dab the roller in the tray very often so why hold it? 

So, instead, I put it on the floor next to the step and everything went well.  I got near the end of the top bit of the door and thought I’d spotted a patchy bit where I’d already been, so I stepped sideways off the step to deal with it and went straight into the little tray…   

Paint went over the dustsheets, some went on the driveway, and also on my trainers.  Brilliant.  More expletives and a continually rising blood pressure.  

First thing was to take the trainers off.  Then, YET AGAIN, garage doors up, in for a cloth and white spirit.  I folded the dustsheets back and attacked the drive with the white spirit.  That got most of the spillage up out of the drive but then created a pink slick.  So, it’s back into the utlity for a big bucket of soapy water to dilute the slick and then mop it all up.  

Spill 3 result (to the edge and beyond)

Eventually, I finally cleared all of that up and carried on, except now I had watch my step around the patches of spillage that were left on the dust sheets.  The rest of the job went without a hitch but what was a 30 minute job probably ended up taking about an hour.  It also took a while for the blood pressure to recede.  Some people think painting is a relaxing job (including me – sometimes).   And there’s still at least one more coat of gloss to go!!!

A trainer on the way to the tip

So, folks, don’t ever underestimate the runniness of paint and remember, if you can afford it, that there are plenty of decorators looking for simple jobs like this to pick up from divvs like us.

Still...  It could have been worse

Until the next time

Rant of the week - Morrisons latest version of the self-service till

I'm a regular shopper in Morrisons, primarily because they're the biggest supermarket near home and they are good value without being rubbish.  I'm also a regular user of their self-service tills.  Generally I've had little problem with them and fly through without too many hassles but they've changed the software on them now...


I think every time I've used them on the last half dozen occasions I've had to call for help.  The reason for this seems to be mainly because the scales think something hasn't been put into the bag or is the wrong weight.  The poor assistant has to just reset stuff so it all seems like a waste of time.  I've also found out that you don't now put newspapers into the bag because it confuses the till (sounds like I could get away with a free paper there... people are bound to catch on to that).  Similarly, if you put a bag onto the scale at the start of proceedings and there's already shopping in it the till also gets upset.   More help required.   It didn't use to be this bad...


We were away last week and visited a Tesco and used their self-serve tills.  Absolutely no worries.


Last time I used one at my local branch the whole thing just froze.  The assistants hadn't got a clue and hit random buttons until the till woke up again and carried on.


So... Morrisons... Get your act together with the self-serve scene and sort out that dodgy software.  I can see that you are trying to make sure that shoppers don't rip you off but we shouldn't have to nab assistants every time we do our shopping.  If you don't sort it out you'll just put people off using the infernal devices...


I think I've done well not to swear on this one.  Think I'll probably do a weekly rant which I'll try to make more amusing than  this one

The way we were, or, IT (and office life) in the 20th Century – Part 1 - kit

It’s nearly 30 years since I starting working in IT – a scary thought.  What’s even scarier is that I could face almost another 20 years working life before I get to retire.  Note that I didn’t suggest I would still be working in IT…  These days I sit under the shadow / glare of a 6ft interactive whiteboard which is basically one of the biggest TV’s I’ve ever seen (and the pride of our team). 

Our interactive "whiteboard" - glowing with pride

I get zillions of emails every day, most of which go straight through to my junk mail folder, and I can communicate via video links with people all over the globe at the click of a mouse button.  Generally, “all over the globe” most commonly means Normoss, a suburb of the Greater Blackpool metropolitan area, but it could be India, Australia or the US… Anywhere.  Back in the early 80’s all of this stuff was the work of science fiction and Q from James Bond…

The fact is that our working lives have changed immeasurably compared to the days back in the early 80’s – some, but not all, for the better.  So I thought it would be entertaining to ramble on a bit and mull over the differences between our present 3D reality and the days when phones hadn’t yet become mobile, TV screens larger than 26” were considered infeasibly large, and we’d only just got a 4^th Channel on the tele.  Sky was the cloudy bit above the land and the sea (occasionally blue in the UK) and if Rupert Murdoch was hacking a phone it would presumably be with a knife or an axe…  This blog may not be that interesting for the vast majority of my readership (all 3 of them) but it will entertain me (sad or what?).

There are a lot of places to start this off so I thought I’d kick off with kit – or the lack of it back then.  These days almost every office employee is equipped with a desktop at least.  Some will have a laptop and, as if that weren’t enough, smart-phones and tablet pc’s.  Most of this is essential to our working lives and, for some, ALL of it is.  And that’s fair enough because they make us more productive so we get things done much more quickly.  Actually, I don't even go on holiday without a notebook these days.   But it wasn’t always like this…

First of all though, I just want to make it clear that I don’t go that far back into computing history as far as my working life goes.  So I don’t remember computers like this…

Manchester Uni (Alma Mater) Mark 1 computer

Nor did I ever have to work this this stuff, although we did play with it a bit in my 1^st year of Uni (as a bit of a history lesson)…

Paper tape (as seen on old films)

As a student I did have some short dealings with the following cards but only for a couple of weeks programming Fortran.. (Ithink Fortran 66...)

Good old holorith cards - a staple of the (now) 60+ techy

So, none of that old nonsense.  Back in 1982, and for some time after that, "the desktop" meant the top of one’s desk and nothing more.  For a mere mortal this was generally a veneer of some cheap indeterminate wood, probably chipped and almost certainly stained by spilt, coffee, tea or ink.  More senior people would have their desk topped with a large sheet of glass – not entirely sure why that was seen as a better thing to do but that was the way it worked.  On top of the desk would be various pieces of stationery – paper, pens, pencils, etc.  The ubiquitous desk diary would be lying around somewhere, possibly a photo of the wife and kids (I had neither at the time), and for some people there would be an essential of working life - the ashtray.  Some “busy” people would probably have mounds and mounds of paper on their desks – quite often computer listings.  The one thing that you wouldn’t see on the desk was what we now call a desktop because, although they had been invented, they were very expensive and our applications weren’t designed to make use of them at the time.   

"Kit" generally only lived in “special” rooms.  They were the data centres and, sensibly we were kept away from them.  Our access to the vast computing power was via terminals and these were all housed in the terminal room. 

A typical terminal room, although they were usually smokier than this

Note the apt black and white shot although these places also existed in colour.  Because there were only so many terminals and there were plenty of us coding types, it was necessary to have a terminal booking system.  No surprises to find out that this was a sheet of marked out paper… You could only book 30-60 minutes at a time to give everyone a chance to use the things.  So you got maybe 3 goes on one in an average day.  This was probably just as well because the atmosphere in them wasn't that healthy.  They were generally quite smoky and stuffy but there was an advantage that they were a good place to hide from the boss...

So how , I hear you ask, did we find time to type in all that code?  Well the answer was that we didn’t…  We wrote out our code on 80 character wide sheets of pre-printed stationery.  Those sheets then got taken (I think the typists took them) to the Redifon team (I think Redifon was the agency we used for "data collection" which means people typing stuff in for us) who typed the coding sheets in.  We had special notation to differentiate 1 and I, O and 0 - in fact you still see some old coders put a slash through a 0 in case anyone gets confused.  So, in the course of developing a program, the first you saw of it on a computer system was the version typed in by the Redifon dept.  This was generally not exactly what you had written so job number one was to correct the errors before anything compiled.  And so it went on.  I do wonder now how we ever got things done but, thinking about it, we probably didn’t get THAT much done.  Happy but somewhat unproductive times…

Typical Honeywell terminal which we usede for many happy (?) years

In the mid 80’s we started to get more terminals which were split out by teams – so each team had a couple of terminals.  Just like the one above one… This gave us more terminal time so the coding sheets started to get dropped as we keyed stuff in for ourselves - the beginning of the end for the typists...  We also had basic word processing capabilities on new machines called “PCs”.  A few of these started to appear and some of us got to use them but mainly they replaced the typewriters that the typists used.  So, younger analysts (I was soon to become one) keyed in their design documents and specs on the PCs whilst the older ones continued to hand write them and feed them to typists…  Great fun.

The next leap towards the future was the introduction of the portable computer.  This wasn’t a laptop, yet, as you can see.  These were produced by Compaq and available to buy from about 1983,  I suspect we started buying them 2 or 3 years after that.  Portable was just about plausible.  They weighed in at just under 30 pounds (about 13kg kiddies) so they were as portable as a sack of spuds – the  screens were pretty pathetic as well.  Why they didnt put wheels on them I don't know.  You could book them out to work at home (at evenings and weekends – nobody “worked from home” in those days) but you could really only get them off site if you had a car parked nearby.  No way would they have seen atrain journey home.  Still, they got used and some (very senior) people had them in favour of desktops… 

The dawn of the personal computer as an everyday working tool (as above) was only round the corner and soon things like this appeared on more and more desks – the “workstation” was born and we have never looked back…  Well, maybe occasionally…