A few firsts

Here are a few firsts for this month.

I went to Copenhagen over a weekend last month with a couple of friends. It’s not an extremely exciting city in itself but there were some interesting parts (for example Christiania).

I drew a perfect circle. It is nowhere close to the world freehand circle drawing champion though.

I made my first risotto ever ever (with a pressure cooker). It was surprisingly good.

Curtsey to my housemate, we now have probably the nicest gin mix kit available in London. Every bottle you see only contains a single ingredient of gin and you can mix your own with your own quantities (sample flavours are juniper, coriander, nutmeg, etc).

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Apart from that, I attend the ACSAC conference next week in Austin and also should really finish my phd thesis .. submission date is beginning of February..

Coffee Corner

I found the ultimate perversion when it comes to coffee making. Filter coffee which provides a new, throwaway filter for every cup of coffee you make. I had to try it

Another thing I came by. How do you prevent people from pissing in a corner?

Exactly, you remove the corner!

Sipsmith Distillery

On Wednesday, I’ve been to the Sipsmith Gin distillery as part of the London Cocktail Week. The copper pot you see in the background is where every bottle of Sipsmith has been produced in! We also got a taster of different cocktails by mixologist Jared Brown, who has written about 34 or 35 books on cocktails.. he couldn’t remember the exact number.

There’s only one picture of this event .. might be the gin’s fault.

Squatters

An empty flat was occupied by (strange) squatters in our building. Just recently they got evicted and kicked out .. and now they (don’t know who) transformed the flat in what looks like some high-security area ..

Over Under

More and more this develops into a monthly blog! Because of that and because I have a new, nice android phone I might try and change this blog into a picture blog where I upload pictures from my mobile on the go. Me and you will see if I’m going to do that or not.

The picture above is the new Overground line which opened in the last weeks in east London. Funny enough, the overground at this station is below the underground …

With the opening of the Overground another mystery was solved: what the large opening, pictured below, is for. It’s a tunnel opened for that new line .. and we can hear trains passing in front of our house every other minute! But it’s actually not too bad.

I have a lot of new pictures, however they are on the old phone which is archived already! Oh Well.

Jobwise, this wednesday I have a talk at kings college at a workshop on information flow and security.

Some people complained that there’s too many food pictures on this blog, for that reason I end this post with a nice plate of pasta I made recently:

Heron & Bratwurst Sausage

The Heron Tower at Liverpool street is gaining height quickly! There’s a couple of other large, new buildings under construction in central London.

Walkers is producing crisps in all kinds of strange flavours (including yorkshire pudding). Here’s the German Bratwurst Sausage (?) sausage:

Haggis, Secret Cinema

We held a Burns Night last Monday, a celebration for the Scottish national poet Robert Burns. Traditionally, you eat something called Haggis and drink Scotch. Haggis is a strange combination of the internal organs of a Sheep mixed with oats. It smells like the Elephant house in the zoo, but tasted quite ok.

Here’s a Haggis Pizza I created.

Finally, there’s a cool video up of the last Secret Cinema I attended. The topic was 1920s and they showed the classic Bugsy Malone. The whole thing ended with a massive custard fight between all the hundreds of viewers. If you are in London, I definitely suggest you to attend one of the secret cinemas.

Snow

It’s still snowing here. However, snow in London is not as nice as snow somewhere else. It’s muddy and icey.

Google does a lot of advertising for its Chrome browser on the underground. This is quite surprising, as I haven’t really seen any other browser doing a proper, non-online advertising .. Anyway, the people putting up the ad above made a little mistake in sticking together the ad-pieces, so that the URL is displayed as google.co.uk/chrone which is clearly wrong. Google won’t be happy 🙂

Eindhoven, Shibuya etc.

I’m in Eindhoven for the FAST workshop for the next two days. Tomorrow I’ll give a talk on our latest research, which will hopefully go well!

I took the Eurostar because I was a bit fed up with flying. Well not really the flying part, but the security checks and other harassments you have to endure when you take an airplane these days.
The Eurostar lounge at St Pancras is great, very spacious, nice and clean. Unfortunately, the eurostar people mistake their trains for airplanes!  The wagons are very densely seated so that you have not more space than on an airplane. Legroom is for weenies. But it’s probably much better at non-peak time.

The picture above is the reengineered and recently reopened Oxford Circus pedestrian crossing. The British learned some urban design lessons from Japan and took over the crossing from Tokyo’s Shibuya station. At their famous four-way crossing, 5000 people can cross the road with one green light without any jams.

I crossed Oxford Circus yesterday and it was a bit awkward because people, including me, just walked all over, but I’m sure everybody will get properly trained on how to cross the road in the japanese-way within a few weeks 🙂

Speaking of Japan, I got lucky and can tag along with my coworker to travel to Japan in December! We will be going to an information theory security conference in Shizuoka (not too far from Tokyo). Definitely more on that in some later posts.

Conf, Potato Cakes, Fire, etc.

Ignore the post earlier today. Actually, the image upload problem appears to be a firefox problem. I’m not surprised — version 3.5 is a bit of a let down on Macs.

Anyway, here are some pics I meant to upload a long time ago.

In September, we had our Phd conference again.

District 9. A good movie worth watching.

Some homeless people set our garden on fire. It’s surprising how very fast fire spreads, even though it was some meters away from our house, it still filled the flat with smoke.

I called 112 from my mobile to inform the firefighters, it rings twice and then a woman picks up and is talking to someone else and giggling and snickering. I said “helloo??” after she did not start speaking to me, she: “Oh! Hey, hi! Fire or Police?”, me: “Fire!”, she: “Ok” and connected me. That wasn’t very reassuring 🙂 Anyway, they came very quickly (3 minutes or so) and put it out.

I thought about making the picture series “Weird Shit from Tesco”, potato cakes would certainly get a mention. Whenever I make potato cakes, I tell myself “this is not meant to taste like that”.

Our fire alarm when changing batteries: