Archive for June, 2010

When I lived in Kuala Lumpur, my favourite eating experience was to head down to the Indian area of Brickfields and indulge myself with several pieces of roti bread which were then dipped in a fish curry sauce. Delicious, and best washed down with a glass of teh tarik; tea and condensed milk which is made extra foamy by being poured between two jugs, several times and at an increasing distance.

Today we found a stall selling teh tarik; although here they call it cha chuck, which sounds like a more appropriate name to an English speaker.

I don’t care what they call it, just wish I could find Malaysian quality roti and fish curry here. Any suggestions (other than “move to Malaysia”)?

When I was a lad, I would drag my father to our local racing circuit where he would retire to the beer tent and I would be left to drool over the racing machinery. One car stood out from all the others; the purposefully beautiful, outrageously fast and gorgeously loud Ford GT40.

Photo from ridelust.com

Ford tried to buy Ferrari in the 1960s. When Ferrari declined the offer, Ford decided to take them on at Le Mans. A deal was done with Lola Cars in England, and the end result was the GT40 and four Le Mans wins in a row.

Very few GT40s were made, and an original will cost you big money. This example is probably in excess of five million dollars, a price I would happily pay if I happened to have that amount of spare cash.

There are a some tasty replicas around at more affordable prices, and my son has promised to buy me one when he is rich and famous. Meantime, I have to make do with something smaller.

This is my 1/12th scale model of the car that won Le Mans in 1966:

I also have a 1/43 scale model:

Both of these models are finely detailed, metal masterpieces; but all they can do is sit on a shelf and look pretty, and I already have cats that can do that. I want a GT40 that I can drive.

I am now a regular visitor to Nanotrax. I remain useless at the driving bit; but Q’on and his wife Joom run a great facility and it is always fun to go along and experience being lapped by everyone else. The cars are 1/43 scale; but sadly the available range does not include the GT40. I needed something lighter than my metal model as a basis, so it was off to eBay and a $5 plastic kit was ordered.

Much of my limited pocket money in my younger days was spent on Airfix kits. These were plastic models of aircraft, ships and vehicles which were cheap, reasonably easy to assemble and, under the right conditions, highly flammable. Most weeks I would come home with a plastic something. First step was to throw away the detailed instructions; a boy in a hurry had no need of such things. Then I would open the provided tube of plastic glue which was always nearly, but not completely, adequate to complete the model; probably because most of it ended up up my nose on my fingers.

The glue was really good at sticking to almost anything except the plastic it was meant to be bonding; and the end result of every project was always “vaguely recognisable model with glue trimmings”.

The dubious glue enhancements were irrelevant anyway, because next was the stage I would have called the “total transfer fuck-up embellishment”, had I known the word ‘embellishment’ at such a tender age. Every kit came with a sheet of transfers which were meant to be carefully applied to your masterpiece. You soaked each transfer in water and then gently slid it into position. A gentle dab with tissue paper completed the precision exercise.

At least, that was the theory. My first mistake was not to realise that you were meant to cut up the sheet into individual transfers. I just chucked the whole sheet into a bowl of water; resulting in twenty plus transfers, all simultaneously desperate to leave their backing sheet and stick themselves onto something new. Some did end up on the model; but not where I wanted them. The rest joined the glue on my fingers, the table, and in one memorable incident, my pet hamster’s arse (for some reason I thought that a hamster with a swastika from a Stuka on its bum would look cool).

The end result of a couple of hours of poor model-making was a glue encrusted lump with assorted wrinkly transfers in random places, and several plastic pieces that had missed inclusion in the building process because I didn’t know where to stick them. But this didn’t matter; because I had a friend who built similar quality offerings; and he had access to lighter fuel….

We would convene in his room on a Sunday morning to briefly re-enact mock battles with our new constructions, before converting them to foul-smelling, smoking, melting victims of war. It was pure luck that we didn’t burn down his house. The battles lacked any historical precedent. I recall my squadron of spitfires being condemned to the lighter fuel because The Golden Hind had suddenly been blessed with invisible anti-aircraft guns. Who was I to argue, it wasn’t my lighter fuel.

Fast forward a million years, and my plastic model GT40 arrives, and I set to work. The first whiff of the plastic glue sends me back to my glue-sniffing model building days; and it is still a bastard to work with. Never mind, with a little care I have something almost GT40 like. A couple more hours of fiddling and I have rigged it such that the plastic body will sit on the radio controlled racing chassis. So far, so average.

Things start to go downhill when I try to fix some of the more fiddly bits. I lose a rear light cluster which, in a strange twist of fate, I think became attached to the rear area of one of the cats. I am not sufficiently motivated to rummage around looking for it. I discover a bit that should have been fitted before the front section; after I have fitted the front section (I still don’t read instructions). I am starting to create another mess. The enterprise collapses, as expected, when I get to the total transfer fuck-up embellishment. The meant to be straight stripe down the body becomes a wavy line with holes in it; and my $5 GT40 looks like $1 scrap.

And here it is, with the stripe horrors carefully kept out of shot:

I drove it round the track a few times. It looked like shit and handled like shit.

On my way home I stopped off at a 7/11 for some lighter fuel.

My earliest recollections of accessing the wide wide world of web involved dialing into somewhere in another galaxy; waiting forever for a connection; and then keying in a user name and a password which I kept on a piece of card (which I regularly mislaid). If I could find the card, and make it as far as the keying in step; then I might be rewarded with a steam-powered visit to the web. In those days the web was only available in green (or maybe it was just my monitor), but at least there was only one password to write on the piece of card.

As the web developed, more and more sites required passwords. A growing awareness of security issues, and a lack of sufficient cards, meant that writing down passwords was no longer acceptable. But browsers and operating systems evolved so you didn’t have to remember anything. Call up the screen and your user id and password were filled in automatically. Bliss. You could go for a year or more and never have to enter a password.

This is wonderfully convenient until the day the bastard website decides it doesn’t want to help you any more and asks for your password which by now you have forgotten.

When this happens you enter a little whirlpool of sadness and frustration. There is usually a twenty seven step password recovery process, requiring you to provide snippets of your life which you have previously given as personal data in the event the web page turns into a mean bastard and refuses to spit out your password. Of course you have forgotten these fragments and have to guess at the answers.

What was your mother’s favourite colour?
The name of you second pet turtle?
The cream you used to treat the disease that infected your armpits?

So you make hopeful guesses and, if you are lucky, are told that a new password has been sent to your nominated e-mail address. Which sodding e-mail address, I have dozens? And even if I knew which e-mail it was, I have forgotten the password? It’s a vicious circle and it drives me nuts.

So I decided to do something about it. First of all, I downloaded 1Password, which can sit on the iPhone or the iPad. As the name suggests, you use one password to open the encrypted database, and then store all your log-in data. Then off I went to record all my passwords. Except I didn’t know them because they were just stars on the screen. So I logged on and changed the password; which mainly worked. Facebook, which has to be one of the worst pieces of software in the history of mankind, had other ideas. It required me to enter my existing password before I could set a new one; even though I was already logged in. Wankers. So it was off to the “name the fabric of your grandmother’s curtains” nonsense again.

Then I came to Flickr, the excellent facility which holds all the photos for this site. I had an uneasy feeling about my Flickr access; but as it kept me permanently logged on, I never had to enter anything. So, no worries, I will go and change the password. When I opt to do this, the fucker logs me out and presents me the Yahoo sign-in screen.

Yahoo? Why Yahoo? Then I faintly recall that Flickr is in some way part of Yahoo and I have to sign on as a Yahoo member. Except I have zero recollection of a Yahoo account. After an hour of fiddling I find that spiketennyson works; but it is not related to Pattaya Days. I switch into panic mode and demand a full list of she who must be obeyed’s email log-ins. I then spend the best part of two hours logging into all my accounts and all her accounts trying to find some reference to a new Yahoo account. Nothing. By this time I am swearing like a sweary thing that has just dropped a hammer on his toes, and I am looking for a cat to abuse. In desperation I try tennysonspike, and I am in! A quick trip through the “What’s your highest score at Scrabble” routine, and I have a shiny new password to keep safe.

All this took the best part of a day and was extremely stressful. But eventually I had a secure store of all my internet access data, and the rather long and random 1Password access password written on a small piece of yellow card which I intended to keep in my desk.

The following morning I couldn’t find the card. “Have you seen that small piece of yellow card?” I asked she who must be obeyed, in a voice which I tried to control so it did not seem like an important question.

“I think the maid threw it out yesterday” was the reply, in a voice that indicated it was not considered an important answer.

All I need to do now is remember a randomly generated fourteen character code; or else I am back to square one. Why the hell did I not just use the colour of my grandmother’s curtains?