September 21, 2006
Have been really into the mood of having some wine to go with meals at home lately, particulary Italian dishes that tend to have a lot of cream and cheese. But a bottle between the two of us on a weekday is too much. We only want the wine to accompany the meal, not to get pissed. So it’s always a waste to see a good bottle of wine turns sour after a day and we eventually have to pour down the sink.
Recently I came up with a plan, that was to buy a 3-litre box of wine that come with a tap. Apparently the quality of the wine in such box can be maintained for up to 6 weeks. Wonderful, couldn’t believe that I came across this alternative packaging of wine only as recently as 3 months ago, when my brother in Malaysia opened a box gifted by his aussie friend.
But what I hadn’t realised was, I was told by my French colleague that there’s such thing known as a vacuum wine pump and stopper! Like what’s said on the label, you can extracts the air from the opened bottle using the vacuum pump and reseals it with a special reusable rubber stopper. Doing so slows down the oxidation process, allowing you to enjoy the wine for a longer period, up to a week or two. Brilliant isn’t it.
So looks like our tolerance of alcohol is not in question. This is further confirmed when I had the dinner of my life, so far, in Paris with my work partners few days ago. There were six of us, three French, and we didn’t even finish 2 bottles of wine. But we did however start with Champagne, and finished off with Armagnac to settle the stomach though 
(Have to admit that the French really do take their food and wine seriously.)
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September 17, 2006
I had to bring my laptop back to the office today (Saturday) because it is due to be upgraded. Well, it’s a long boring story as to why I couldn’t leave it in the office so I won’t even go down there save for the fact that it had been a messy trouble.
Anyway, as I don’t want to be taking the train to my office on a Saturday. I have lured my hubby into cycling to the office with me.:) It is approximately 8 miles from my home to the office. Putting it in context, I think it’s about 20 minutes drive with clear traffic. Well, I must say that my muscle was getting rusty and needed a good workout anyway.
Instead of taking the usual scenic cycling path along the river, we have decided to try something different this time. We took the normal tar road which we thought would have been much faster and less bumpy given that I had a laptop to take care of. As it turned out, it was a pretty hairy experience with cars zooming past you by just a few feet away and having to inhale ‘fresh fumes’ from the exhaust pipes. It was of course not very fun as you would have guessed.
Anyway, having dumped the ‘jurassic era’ laptop back in the office, we were rather excited of the journey home as we had decided to stick to the cycle path. We stopped by a wine distributor shop just down the road from my office. We were rather cynical that it would be opened on a Saturday but thought we would give a try anyway. To our pleasant surprise, it was open for business.
We went in to browse around and eventually succumbed to the temptation. We have been into drinking port lately and decided to try a vintage port. It was a Graham’s 2003 vintage port that was sold at cost price because of the damage to the label. Well, we don’t really care about the label, and thought it was a good bargain anyway. The thing that excites us most is that we can try out the crystal decanter that we bought a few weeks back in our trip to Preston. I would have loved to take a picture to post it here but due to sheer laziness, have called off the idea.
I am thinking of inviting one or two friends over to share our latest acquisition and have a fun time. But that will have to be in November at the earliest due to some other commitments and I just can’t wait to open that bottle of port!
We had a fun day out overall. We stopped by a pub by the river along the cycling path on our way home and had a belated lunch. It was such a lovely day although we were rather tired by the end of it.
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September 12, 2006
Looks like the birds are back to my little garden looking for food now that the summer is over and that natural food is becoming scarce. Once I hung a suet ball in the summer and it wasn’t until months later before it was eaten. I was hoping to see how the bird can acrobatically eat that ball, but it was eaten while we were away recently to Lake District!
For the past few days I’ve been spreading bird seeds in my garden, and they have been consistenly cleared up. Apparently many birds are creatures of habit and will probably make a special visit to my garden once they learn there is food there. Which means that once I start feeding, I should continue through the winter. This is because seeds, fruits and insects become harder to find as the winter progresses, and so the food I put out becomes steadily more important. Especially when the weather is bad, a wasted journey can potentially make life even harder for them!
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September 6, 2006
This security device has been given to HSBC customers in the far east (at least Hong Kong and Malaysia) for a while now, at least a year, for more secure online banking. Yet, in a lunch time conversation with my colleagues when we so happened to chat about the different authentication methods used by the banks, none of them are aware of such security system. In fact, HSBC are already rolling out this in the UK, but only to business customers. I know because I’ve just opened a business account with them recently. The way you use this device is everytime you want to log in to your Internet bank account, you need a username, a password and a 6-digit number from the device, which you will get everytime you press the button on the device. That number is time-sensitive, as in it only lasts for a few seconds, after which you will be given a different number when the button is pressed. Presumably the sequence of numbers, which is unique to the device, need to match the same sequence stored in the HSBC authentication server in time. But how this device can be time synchronised to the server is rather intriguing. My initial guess was it must have a very stable clock that drift very little, hence allowing it to remain closely matched to the server’s clock for a long time. But after experimenting a few times, I have to say that this little device is not as sophisticated as I first thought. Although the numbers on the device keep changing every few seconds, it does not mean that the old number are no longer valid for logging in. I would say the number has a useful timeframe of about at least half a minute, althought I haven’t really stretch-test it .
To sum up, rather than relying on customers to change one set of their passwords every so often, this device changes for them periodically, which is certainly a step forward in terms of securing their login details. But I won’t say I’m overwhelmed by this gizmo.
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