When talking to friends and relatives on the phone, the most common question is 'What's the weather doing?'.
The question, although so very British, is not confined to the people I talk to in Britain — my German friends ask it just as often.

At the moment the question has been refined to 'Have you still got snow?'
The answer is 'No — it's gone.'

To prove it, here are two pictures, taken just ten minutes ago:





You see — no snow, it's gone, almost.

By comparison, here is a picture taken a fortnight ago:



See the difference?
Correct — we have bare patches now, we didn't last week ...

Tag: Mumblings, very definitely Mumblings, today!

If you've made it thus far, today, you are very brave — very brave indeed.
Or you are using an outdated browser ...

My site has been blacklisted by Google, King of the Universe.
Actually, it is very kind of Google to inform me that my web pages have been compromised but, hello-oo, it's the weekend, I get the most traffic at a weekend, you can take that bloody sign down again now!

My site was attacked on Friday afternoon; all of the .html pages on the site were hacked and a Java script inserted. The script contained an iFrame, an invisible frame that, in this case, whisks your computer off to a site in China that distributes malware.
I have been unable to find out, yet, whether it is my hosts server or just my pages that have been hacked.

I spent a couple of hours replacing each and every .html document on this sub domain and the main domain it is hosted on — this blog alone contains 395 .html pages, then there are my galleries etc. — a lot of work, I can tell you.
Anyway, I did my homework and informed Google of the fact.

Google was very quick in putting up the sign to inform everyone that I am actively supplying malware it took them just a few hours. When I informed them that the danger has been removed, I got a message that they will check my site again in due time, but this might take a while ...
... not good, not good at all — this is costing me traffic and a lot of those visitors won't return again!
Please take that sign down ...



Of course, I also had to change all the passwords that allowed people to access my sites and had to check my computers for trojans (to my knowledge there are no confirmed virus for the Mac OS X, last count there were 140'000 or so for that other operating system) or keystroke loggers. There were none, so I must presume that the passwords for access to my web site were too easy to guess.

If you visited this site between 15:00 and 24:00 on Friday and were not warned about doing so, please check your computer for malware!

To be honest with you, it wasn't quite as complicated as I thought it would be ...



It wasn't 36 images after all, it turned out to be 45.
There are a couple of spots with visible double exposures. I left them intentionally because I feel it demonstrates that the pontoon in motion – as were the geese!

This panorama is a little larger than usual: I like the datails.
This means that if your computer and/or your browser were built before The Flood, you might not want to click on the link.

I hope you like it ...

Don't go on holiday with a new camera until you have calibrated it to do what you want it to do!

If you are a regular visitor to this blog, then you will know what one of my hobbies is and for some time now, I have wanted to photograph the Gas Street Basin in Birmingham.

I spent many hours there, with a sketch pad, yonks ago when it was in a in a desolate condition. In the meantime the Birmingham City Council has realised its value. The whole area around Gas Street has been renovated and modernised. Cafés and pubs have been erected and it is well worth a visit.

When I visited at Christmas I took along a camera that had not yet been calibrated for panoramas. The resulting images had to be stitched by hand. The first panorama is now ready to be presented – at long last!



I took a second, 360° panorama, from further along the dock. I'm not sure, yet, that I'll be able to stitch it. It wasn't until I was almost finished taking the 36 shots that I realised, I was standing on a pontoon that was gently rocking while I worked.
I'll take a closer look soon. Watch this space, I might be successful, who knows ...

Since Christmas I've been unable to access our server at work from home.
We got a new firewall at work for Christmas and, even though my firewall is the same brand, they seemed to be unable to communicate with each other.

I mentioned it to one of our techies and he got me to check this and that, experiment here and there and crash my machine a number of times. At long last, after checking both firewalls, he decided it was time to update the software on mine.
"Not a big deal," he said "only takes a couple of minutes."

So, yesterday morning he logged on to my machine – online – downloaded the new software, installed it – and was gone.
No, he wasn't finished, he was just gone.
His supposed update had flushed my firewall's ROM and disconnected me from the Internet.
No Firewall, no techie, nothing. A blank screen, so to speak.
Well, there was nothing else for it but to bundle up my firewall under my arm and take it to Techie.
Luckily I pass his office on my way to work, so it was only a short detour.

Round about 16:00 he phoned to say I could collect my firewall again, newly configured a ready to take me online.
"I've just made a few alterations which mean you'll have to reconfigure your modem."

Of course, there's nothing easier than reconfiguring a modem – I do it almost every day – great, thanks!

So I connected my computer directly to the modem, sorted out its IP-address and password, quickly reconfigured it and re-set-up my account with Swisscom, who, of course, didn't recognise me any more.
It didn't take more than an hour.
But then, I'd got nothing better to do with my Friday evening anyway, had I?
When I was finished, I plugged in the firewall, connected it between the computer and the modem and went online.
Well, at least, I tried to. Nothing; a blank screen.
I sorted out the passwords etc. and logged in to the firewall. There I was greeted by large red letters stating "The firewall has not been configured"!
Not having done it before, it took me about two hours to figure out how a firewall is configured but, in the end, I actually got back online.
As you can see.


This morning Techie phoned and asked cheerfully "Everything all right?"
He can consider himself lucky that he lives in Austria ...

In Zürich recently, I saw sign in a restaurant advertising, if I remember rightly, "Kuddla" which I recognised to be Kutteln – tripe ...

I know that offal is not to everyones taste, but I've eaten tripe in a couple of different countries – and always enjoyed it.

Callos - Spanish tripe (meaning it is probably pork and not that of a Spaniard) with chick-peas, red peppers and pork suasage-meat similar to black-pudding.
Pakal-Pörkölt - A spicy Hungarian stew with tripe and red peppers.
Iskembe - A Turkish tripe dish similar to Swabian kutteln, but with garlic.
Saure Kutteln - A Swabian (Southern Germany) tripe dish soured with vinegar and/or lemon juice.
Trippa alla livornese - An Italian version of tripe with tomato sauce (what else?!) garlic and parmesan cheese.
Trippa alla Romana - Italian again, with – wait for it – tomato sauce, white wine and (who'd have guessed?) permesan.
Tripes - The French version of tripe and onions
'our' own, British version of tripe and onions, of course. And not forgetting:
Haggis which is a Scottish pudding with oatmeal, suet, all sorts of offal, wrapped up in a sheep's stomach and served with turnip and potatoes. (And best washed down with a wee dram!)

I'd never eaten tripe in Switzerland before, so I decided to give it a go.
However, not wanting any surprises, I asked the waiter, who was also the bartender and presumably the owner,
'Wie werden Kutteln ind dieser Gegend zubereitet?'
'How do you prepare tripe in this part of the world?'

He gave me an angry stare at the audacity of my question, and replied:
'So wie Chuddla eben gemacht wäret!' (He almost choked on the 'ch')
'Exactly the way Kutteln are prepared!'

I couldn't quite make up my mind whether to get up and leave or order, so he immediately prompted me
'Wönt ör jetzt öppis, oder nit?'
Do you want to order something or not.

This is the point where I should have got up and left, but, knowing that Swiss hospitality is the same just about everywhere and given that I was hungry, I ordered a beer and Kuddla.

For anyone unsure how tripe is cooked in Zürich – I would say it is somewhere between between livornese and Romana but without the white wine, garlic or parmesan cheese.
To be honest with you I found it rather bland; rather like Swiss hospitality.*

*Disclaimer: I refer here, not to the Swiss in general (although there are unfriendly people all over the world) but to the Swiss gastronomy and hotel business.