Delphine drives me to school again this morning; by the time I get to the classroom I’ve already been out of bed longer than I have been for a week. Since I was med-evaced out last week I’ve been doing nothing but lying in bed, being visited by the doctor and a nurse every day.
But missing one week is enough and I need to get back on my feet; tomorrow I’m back at the restaurant for three days – the hotel is opening specially for a group of tourists and it’s me and chef catering three meals a day for 30 people on our own.
And while I feel tired I manage to keep up with this morning’s recipe, “Appareil à Bavarois aux oeufs”. English for ‘Bavarois’ appears to be ‘Bavarois’ – I’m already largely losing my ability to talk in English much of the time. Well, you can call it a ‘Bavarian cream’ if you like, but that probably means less to most people than ‘Bavarois’. Although officially the French acknowledge it as a Swiss – not Bavarian – invention, it was a famous part of the repertoire of Marie-Antoine Carème, the world’s first celebrity chef. Escoffier, the world’s second celebrity chef, reckoned it should more properly be called a Muscovite since – back then – after the mixture was poured into a hermetically-sealed mould it was set by being plunged into a container of ice and salt. Nowadays it’s easy to make such things, but a hundred years ago unmoulding such an item before one’s guests must have been an impressive sight.
You can make two sorts of Bavarois, set either with gelatine or with fruit pulp; frankly, to my inexperienced mind the idea of setting anything vaguely jelly-like with fruit pulp sounds beyond unlikely and our school chef is in agreement for novices such as us; we’re going to be using both fruit pulp and gelatine.
We also get into a discussion about pineapple; apparently you can’t set pineapple anything into a jelly because, well, pineapple jelly doesn’t set. Chef doesn’t know why, it just doesn’t. Later I check this out in the new edition of the magnificent Harold McGee’s ‘On Food and Cooking: The science and lore of the kitchen‘ and it turns out that pineapple contains some sort of enzyme that breaks down gelatine’s setting molecules. Use agar agar if you need to set pineapple jelly (or Bavarois).
We make almond tuiles to go with the Bavarois; these I know already, I’ve been making them by the hundred at the restaurant for the patissier, and having lots of fun with them too. We sometimes make them slightly larger than the standard ‘decoration’ size and slip the burning-hot tuiles straight from the oven into champagne flutes to make them into cornets, which we use to serve the ‘cornucopia de sorbets’ and other desserts. Very pretty and a good way to improve the fire-resistant qualities of your fingers.
Lunch is another unremarkable experience in the student-catered canteen until the return walk across the car park; some complete idiot of a girl careers across the pavement loaded down with a chum riding sidesaddle on the rear of her scooter and smacks straight into me from behind. Smack into my bad leg, in fact, and I go down heavily.
She’s hurt my leg, which is painful, but has also managed to push my whole foot about two centimetres forward in my shoe, crushing my toes against the internal steel toe cap. My foot was already swollen and painful, now I can barely get my shoe off and, when I do, it keeps on swelling.
Good grief.
The school receptionist takes an injury statement while a taxi arrives and ferries me to the doctor and then on home; more bed rest is prescribed. Huh. I need to work tomorrow and the two days after that, so I load my injured limb down with bags of ice and frozen peas and manage to sleep not at all. Brilliant.
Tuesday morning and Delphine drops me off at work. I can walk OK now and my swollen foot has gone down enough to allow me to at least get a shoe on. I don’t say anything to Chef, if I did he’d make me go home and end up trying to do 30 covers all on his own, so that’s not on obviously.
It’s not as bad as it could be, anyway; the party coming in are a cheap bunch of English tourists who are eating for €15 a head. Wine included. Considering that our cheapest menu for three courses is normally €25, we’re not serving them the full gastronomic experience so, while it’s good (we even get a couple of ‘Compliments to the Chef’ messages via the Maitre d’) it’s not what we normally do.
I get a bus home after lunch and another back in the evening, and again the same for the next couple of days before just collapsing back into bed. When I’ve had this illness before it’s laid me up for weeks at a time, so it’s lucky that the restaurant is, mostly, closed at the moment and I can save my energy for going to school.

GWB’s alien overlord spotted watching him in CNN footage – check out
the face behind his right shoulder
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/politics/2007/08/31/bush.sots.mortgages.cnn

http://www.littlegreenstreet.com/ – I may have mentioned this before, but read the information on the website and sign the petition; Camden Council – Camden! – are about to allow a bunch of breadheads to destroy one of London’s few remaining authentic Georgian streets.

Ta.

You shouldn’t believe everything you read on the Internet, apart from this.
I was reading the excellent Cory Doctorow’s Boing Boing yesterday and came across a link to someone wittering on about how great a file server a new Linux distribution called Mint is. It’s based on Ubuntu, don’t you know. And I know the name Ubuntu because Rupert Goodwins has mentioned it. So, what the hell, I now officially hate Windows so let’s have a Linux machine in the house too.
It’s nearly 30 hours later and, right now, Vito – the machine destined to become a Linux file server – is quietly reformatting itself as a Windows XP machine.
Why? Not because Linux/Mint/Ubuntu is uglier than Windows, although it is; not because it lacks usability, because it doesn’t. I could quite happily work on such a machine and do everything I do now on Windows or Mac OSX.
No, Linux is being formatted off Vito because I couldn’t make it work as the one thing I wanted it to – a file server. That means, connect to it from another machine on the home network and see the files on it, copy them, use them, read them, store them.
There is an explanation, from people who wear excruciatingly stupid t-shirts and scorn ‘end users’ as the scum of the Earth that they are; it has something to do with Windows being insecure and file sharing being inherently insecure and who’d want to share files between Windows and Linux (I’m trying to share them with a Mac, but that’s apparently not the point). Anyway, my attention sort of drifted off a while.
Oh, I did a lot of searching on the web and found out about Samba, which is what you need to make Windows and Linux machines play nicely when it comes to file sharing. I found Swat, too. And NFS and SMB and lots of other acronyms. I found lots and lots of people who really, really, really hate Microsoft and truly despise anyone who dares to use Windows (people who, coincidentally, smell funny, wear strange t-shirts, have spots, eat pizza and can’t get a girl/boyfriend. Not that I’m stereotyping or anything, that’s what they’re doing).
Anyway. it all got too ridiculous when the widget that would, promise honest IRQ, solve my problems – didn’t. Instead it undid all the good things I had managed to do so far. And that included three different installations – how nuts is it that you get a choice of interfaces for Linux, none of which look like the screen prints you find on the web (OK freetards, you don’t need to explain that one to me, I understand already). Linux doesn’t look enough like Windows to be obvious, you can’t see your hard discs as C: and E:, you have to mount them (fnar, fnar) but, when you work out how to do that it tells you that you don’t have permission. What?. As one Windows hater I came across put it, Linux is for people who want to spend more time with their computers.
Well, Windows is the same too, and so is the Mac OS now and then as well. But Windows and Macs are enough like each other that it’s not too long before it’s obvious what the answer is to whatever stupid mess you’ve gotten yourself into. Linux isn’t, it reminds me of when I tried to learn Russian at school – it looks vaguely similar but there are too many differences to make it intuitive to someone who has already learned French and Spanish.
And ultimately not worth 30 hours of my life, or at least certainly no more. So Windows XP it is for now.
Not that I’m delighted with it, but all I want to do with the box is have it serve up files to my laptop, store films and music, that sort of thing. Linux, to those who’ve deprived themselves sufficiently of a private life to grep it, may be a better tool for this, but I have a real life to get on with.
So now I’m back to the stupidities of Windows XP. Which, if you install it from a DVD with various versions of Windows XP on it, forgets where it’s stored all its installation files and you have to keep telling it to go look in d:englishwindowsxpspa1. But it’s a comfortable stupidity, a stupidity I’m expecting and understand and which I can work with.
Obviously, if you’re a Freetard, as the nice new name for Linuxen has it, I’m stupid and retarded and whatever. Right. But so what? I have my life back and I don’t care.

** Update **
In the 25 minutes I spent writing this, Windows XP installed and I started on the never-ending Update cycle. And I set up networking on the new Windowed Vito, told the hard discs to consider themselves shareable and connected to them from my Mac. 30 minutes as opposed to 30 hours; I’m not a major geek, but really – the Freetards are STILL making all this too hard and too unfriendly. If you have just one computer, Linux will do it and Linux Mint/Ubuntu seems well up to the task. If you need your machines to play nicely between Linux and other operating systems – well, I hope you have better luck than I did. It seems the situation reflects the attitude of the Linux camp to Windows in real life – they just hate Windows and don’t want anything to do with it.

Just to show that I haven’t completely given up on computers, there’s an all-new Dr Keyboard website online right now. All singing, dancing and, er, blue.

Oh yeah, and it’s FREE. As in beer. No more subscriptions, payments, whatever. Just click on the ads.

Afghanistan opium at record high, says the BBC.

Well, duh.

If you ever need a printer cartridge, do NOT, whatever you do, buy from eBay shop ‘DiscountCityRUS’. Run by the outstandingly rude ‘Norman’, their listings are deliberately confusing and, when you have a question, the only reply is ‘read the description’. Well duh, I did that – I’m asking questions because the description of the item you sold me doesn’t explain why you only sent half my order.
‘Norman’ finished by calling me an idiot. Way to treat your customers, Norman.

She said, “Yes”!