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I came across this fun food meme over at Relly’s blog.

Here’s what you have to do:

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Optional extra: Post a comment here at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

1. Venison (I’m not 100% sure I haven’t actually tried this, but I can’t recall a specific time when I had it on a plate in front of me)
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare (Desperately want to try this, medium-rare GBK burgers just aren’t cutting it any more)
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush (I’ve regretted putting aubergine in my mouth too many times already, and I’m not willing to believe that a different preparation of it is going to make me like it)
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi (Another one I’m convinced I must have had, but can’t be sure when exactly)
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea (Had this for the very first time only a couple of weeks ago, at a lovely little tea room in the historic town of Warwick)
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail (I’m guessing oxtail soup doesn’t count, as it’s probably not even real oxtail)
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin (I thought I was a ‘try anything once’ sort of person, but I’ve just done a quick search online to see what other people thought of this and opinions seemed to be mostly negative, so I think I’ll give this one a miss)
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin (What?? This isn’t even food - it’s chalk!)
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini (All my life I’ve actively avoided caviar. But let me have a few glasses of champagne first and I might be willing to try)
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef (Really want to try this)
86. Hare (Can’t recall if I’ve had this. Have eaten rabbit)
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa (I’m pretty sure I’ve only ever had regular harissa)
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

Earlier today I was logged in to my Facebook account, when I noticed the most recent addition to my News Feed:

6 of your friends joined the group: Facebook Will Be Forced to Shutdown in 7 Days! Join and Save it!

This roused my curiosity (”Facebook might cease to exist? And this is the first I’ve heard of it?”), so I followed the appropriate links to see which ‘friends’ had joined and what was actually going on…

Only a few clicks later, and I learned the history of the case in reasonable depth, found that the dispute between the founders of ConnectU and Facebook ended last month when a judge enforced settlement between the two parties, and that the final hearing took place on July 2.

Today is July 5.

It constantly surprises me - maybe it shouldn’t, but it does - that people frequently associate themselves with things they know nothing about. The information is right there for the taking - it took me less than a minute to unravel the reason behind this group’s creation and to learn that it was no longer relevant (never mind that I still have absolutely no idea how joining the group was supposed to contribute towards “saving” Facebook).

Of the 522,484 members who are (at the time I write this) associated with this group, how many of them, I wonder, have actually taken a moment to read anything about case before joining? And how many of them have joined the group since the case was closed as a result?

There has been such rapid growth in the popularity of social networking and it is becoming an increasingly important aspect of daily life for many of us. The potential it holds for the future of communication is enormous. Even I can see this, as a mere bystander to the local geek crowd, and mostly I welcome it.

But observing the current activity of my fellow Facebook users, I feel that it will be a long time before this potential is realised. ‘Groups’ and ’causes’ are created which have no apparent value, but users see that an opportunity to be part of something is being offered to them and without any consideration - *click* - they accept it. Not to mention the endless barrage of invitations to install yet another application (hands up those who always read the terms and conditions?), so that we can say we’re biting one another, or send each other small pictures of cocktails.

Is this fun? Really?

The conclusion I’ve come to is that with the exception of a very, very small minority, people don’t really like most of the Facebook applications they install. They don’t care for many of the ’causes’ or ‘groups’ they’ve signed up for. But it doesn’t matter what they’re joining in with. What matters is that everyone else is doing it, so they must too. This is probably a primative instinct kicking in, a need to be seen to be the same as their group, and not be picked out (or picked on) for not following the herd. Such instincts probably aided the survival of our ancestors and ensured that the human race stayed at the top of the food chain, so it’s no surprise that evolution has retained these traits and we will feel these desires surface from time to time. However, I would have thought that a developed brain and the capacity for independent and abstract though were also inherent to our current status as the ruling species on planet Earth. What I struggle to understand is why so many people continue to choose ignorance over knowledge, and will respond only to these animal instincts which are surely no longer critical to their survival?

I often find myself frustrated by examples of such behaviour, which makes me sound incredibly misanthropic… I’m really not! I love the human race. The human mind is a complex and beautiful thing.

I believe that the human species is still at the very early stages of its development and that the future holds brilliant scientific discoveries, architectural beauty breathtaking beyond anything we have currently achieved, an end to world hunger, etc etc. However, I’m only going to see a tiny portion of this in my lifetime - which is a bit gutting as I really want to be around to experience as much of it as possible. So I get annoyed with people who are holding back this progression and limiting my experience. Sort of like people who talk on their phones in the cinema, but on a much larger scale.

(PS. I just checked that Facebook group again out of curiousity, about 8000 more people have joined since I started writing…)

I played around with this site a bit over the weekend, so if you’ve been here before you’ll probably notice some changes, to the appearance if nothing else.

I’ve switched from Movable Type to WordPress - for no reason really other than having heard from several people that ‘WordPress is better’. I figured I didn’t have anything to lose, and that a change might prompt me to blog more frequently – this is something I’ve been giving a lot thought to recently, as I want to be more active in developing my creative social network… but more about this another time.

So far, so good - everything prior to this weekend seems to have imported correctly, and although there have been a few headaches getting set up, Iestyn’s been really helpful and has sorted out the things I couldn’t fix (or be bothered to fix) myself. As a designer I feel I should spend some time working on the site’s appearance; I’m currently just using the K2 theme with a couple of very minor tweaks but I expect at some stage I’ll give it a more personal touch. I’m not sure yet what this will entail, as my design career to date has been spent creating stuff for other people, and I rarely give any thought to how I might design something to reflect myself.

One thing I have done since the switch is write a brief profile about myself - K2 comes with an ‘About’ tab as standard, and I felt obliged to use it (the easy option would have been to just get rid of the tab!) - if this is your first visit, or if you’ve known me for a while and have reached that awkward stage where it’s been left too late to ask me questions about who I really am, you’re welcome to come and meet me properly on the About page.

I love the singing dog on the new VW Polo advert.

(I’m sure my rabbit sings too, when I’m out of the house)

Earlier today I was carrying the laptop through the house, tucked under my arm, and I thought to myself: I couldn’t have imagined ten years ago that by today I would have not one but several computers in my own house, and they would be so compact and portable, and so much more powerful and more genuinely useful than what we had access to back then. It made me wonder briefly what technology we would come to take for granted in another ten years from now.

Then only moments later, a friend sent me a link to this video and it was like being hit with a vision of the future.

The way this works actually seems quite simple, and I think it probably would have been commercially available much sooner only we’ve had to patiently wait for advances in technology to make it more accessible and cheaper to manufacture, as tends to be the case with anything new in computing.

I understand the mobile phone industry is expected to move in this direction following Apple’s success with the iPhone, but I see a future where all of our electronic entertainment, computers and communications devices will be controlled in a similar way.

We’ve become accustomed to using a mouse and/or keyboard to control our computers, and using an interface incorporating drop-down menus and folders which mimic a typical office filing system; even my TV with its Sky+ box has a multi-tier menu system and a remote control with 41 buttons, most of them single-use. There are many variations but they’re all based on the same design.

We depend much more these days on being able to share data between different devices and access it no matter where we are. So it’s natural that we should want to be able to juggle this data more rapidly, not just by utilising speedy broadband connections and lots of RAM, but with interfaces that can actually keep up to speed with our thought processes. Face it, that keyboard is just slowing you down (plus, you’re getting RSI from using it all the time).

We’re encouraged to ‘browse’ our computers, which for me conjures an image of wandering around somewhat aimlessly, waiting to spot something potentially useful. I don’t have time to browse, I already know what I want and I’d just like to retrieve it, make use of it, and move on.

I don’t think this ’surface computing’ is another passing trend, this will replace the use of a mouse and keyboard for everyone and will become the next stage in the evolution of human-computer interaction.