Rick Hurst - Freelance Web developer. Bristol, England.

anyone looking for any profound meaning in my last post don’t bother - I was merely demonstrating how a desktop blogger works to a friend who was over for dinner - I was trying to answer the questions what is a blog? and OK, so when you’ve posted it, whereabouts will it end up?

here it is rich

what is it about aeroplane food? I don’t get why the airlines insist on serving the bizarre miniturised rubbery stuff, with bendy plastic cutlery and bits of cellophane and receptacles that fly off the tray when you go anywhere near them, even on a short flight when people would probably prefer a baguette or noodles or something. I know I would. Mmm noodles - haven’t had any for a while, and I used to virtually live on them (but only the unhealthy ones full of artificial flavourings and preservatives).

(this rant was written on a train a couple of weeks ago, shortly after eating homemade sandwiches thinking how nice they were compared to what was on offer on the train)

nuff said

I don’t have comments enabled on this main blog (mainly because I never got round to enabling them), but I do on my skate blog, and recently found some anonymous links to some directory site buried among the comments, which really annoys me. I’ve been lucky so far, i’ve heard that this type of spam is rife - I think maybe my obscure blog software has kept me out of the loop to a certain extent. Anyway, the spam was deleted, and if it reappears I may just have to change the comments to "approval only" - i’d been thinking of doing this anyway because I don’t get notified when comments get added and sometimes I miss them.

by default kupu displays the background colour and image that is applied to the body of the page. To overide this I added the following to my ploneCustom.css:-

body.kupu {    background-color: white !important;    background-image: none !important;}

it really annoys me when people append “to be honest…” or “i’ll be honest with you…” to the start of a sentence. This is all wrong. I would like to think that when people talk to me they are being honest by default, and they don’t need to warn me when they are about to start being honest, as this implies that the rest of the time everything they say is made-up (to be perfectly honest etc).

whenever I eat with new people, I end up having to have the "why are you vegetarian" conversation. I try to avoid it, skillfully scanning the menu for the token vegetarian options and just going ahead and ordering so that nobody notices, but often i’ll be offered something, or maybe there’s a set menu, or we are eating at someone’s house and i’ll have to admit i’m a veggie.

People want to talk about it. I don’t. mainly for the reason that i’ve had the conversation literally hundreds of times, I know every argument and counter argument and nothing changes and it bores me.
When I was 16 - 17 years old I was fairly opinionated about it, and I remember once in particular getting in a strop when some previously veggie mates ordered some sausage fritters in a chip shop and I refused to sit with them. "don’t be a twat" one of them said, "come and sit with us". It made sense - I was being a twat - so I climbed down permanently from that particular (vegatable fat) soap box and went and joined them - I ate chips and beans, they ate sausage fritters.

So why did I become vegetarian then? loads of reasons all of them except religion probably. I think my main gripe at the time (16 years ago) was factory farming, but that situation has improved considerably since then. I think that smiths bloke with the quiff and the daffodills that I used to listen to on a daily basis influenced me too and mike vallely. I was also under the impression it made me more popular with hippy chicks

I have no intention of starting to eat meat again unless I move abroad to a non-veggie friendly country where being veggie means eating mushroom omellette and chips every time you go to a restaurant, so until that happens I guess I will have to go through "why am I veggie" pre-dinner routine a few more times.

posted over here in the lab