kierenmccarthy.co.uk

I just got an email from my very old friend Johnny HB (actually it was through Facebook) in which he informs me that he has a new classical trio, a new fancy website, and is looking for bookings from January.

Johnny (cello), Suzanne (his wife and viola) and Kate (flute - although I swear she’s played violin every time I’ve met her) are based in Merida, Mexico but the last I heard they were heading back to London in the new year. Since the new website lists a UK mobile number, I imagine that’s what they’re up to - will have to call in a minute and find out. Anyway, if you are looking for an excellent trio for your bash, I can highly recommend them. I’ve seen them all play on countless occasions (including a few late nights in living rooms) and they fill me equally with awe and annoyance at their skill.

For more information, and the chance to listen to some of their recordings, go to http://www.atlantictrio.net.

I have just discovered how Americans have their bacon the way they do.

I hate the way Americans have their bacon - crisp and brittle. Thin strips that crumble and snap and taste like a bacon crisp (sorry, potato chip). But up until this morning I had no idea how they managed to make it like that. I’ve cooked alot of bacon in my time, have never got close to producing the same texture, no matter what cut I’ve used.

The answer, which you won’t be surprised to hear, is fat. I bought some Oscar Mayer Hearty Thick Cut Bacon. The “hearty” means fatty. Unbelievably fatty. It’s streaky bacon and about two-thirds of it is fat. I fried this without oil and butter, and you would not *believe* the amount of fat that came out of it. Anyway, that’s the thing - cooking this very fatty bacon in a ton of fat is what causes it to crisp up and become brittle. So now you know.

Incidentally, fat is the answer to another food riddle, namely: how do Chinese takeaways get their chicken so squidgy? If you cook strips of chicken normally, they become quite firm but in Chinese food it is soft and almost rubbery. The answer: cook it in a ton of oil.

I wonder where I can buy better cuts of bacon…

I’m leaving the UK today. It’s going to be a dreadful day. Getting to Heathrow and all the hassle that involves; sitting on a plane for 11 hours; arriving and no doubt being quizzed by US immigration; having to go and pick up apartment keys; then finding the apartment and settling in. A very, very long day. And then I’ll wake up, jet-lagged, in California.

What’s odd is that yesterday, while bouncing around London saying goodbye to people, I finally managed to see London as a city. I’ve spent so much of my life in London that I fell out of love with it. I moved out five years ago and although I have constantly visited the city since then, it has always just been London and not remarkable or exciting in the way that other cities are. Yesterday, while wandering around Earl’s Court and Notting Hill and Soho and Ealing, my affection for the place began to return.

The goodbyes were also nowhere near as hard as I thought they’d be. I’ll be back at Xmas anyway. Although I have to confess feeling some trepidation, although a big chunk of that is the enormous amount of work I have already lined up. Moving has taken up most of a week and I have a massive backlog, particularly email. There is an ICANN meeting that will begin in just a week and that will be a huge amount of work; and then the IGF in Rio shortly after that. It’ll be Xmas in a blink.

So these are my disjointed thoughts this morning, Thursday 18 October 2007.

I am having a tough day today. A very painful goodbye at Oxford station, a long walk along the river, and now I am sat in my half-empty flat feeling hollow and a little lost.

My possessions are strewn about. They need to be divided into take-with, put in shipping container, and chucked away. I have nowhere to sit. My chairs are covered in boxes; the sofa’s is in pieces in a recycling skip; the bed I sold last night for £75 to a nice student who loaded it into a large people taxi and drove off. My Mazda was driven off the day before.

I keep feeling hungry but it’s only 11.50am and I know it’s not hunger but stomach knots as the depth of my move, my emigration sinks in. And I keep welling up. Occasionally one manages to break through and pulls with it a few drops down my face. They don’t have enough momentum to get past the cheek ridge so stop there and dry.

I’m hoping that by writing this post I am going to get some clarity, clear my head. I’d been staring vacantly out the window for 10 minutes trying to get a handle on things and failing. The answer my brain eventually came up with was: write. I am starting to feel better already.

Continue reading ‘Saturday night pub fight; Sunday morning huge change dawning’

This morning I received an email from downloadinrainbows@waste.uk.com providing a link to a 48.3MB zipped file. Three minutes later I was listening to Radiohead’s new album In Rainbows. I am listening to it now as I write this.

What is particularly interesting about this is that Radiohead was entirely in charge of the whole transaction. They even extracted five pounds 45 pence from me simply by asking. I could easily have downloaded the album for free this afternoon.

Aside from being one of my favourite bands (no, I don’t find them remotely depressing, which makes me wonder about my base state of mind), Radiohead are an interesting and smart bunch. They are currently outside music industry contracts and so have control of their product. And so they decided on a unique project - they would let people decide how much to pay for their next album. Literally.

Aside from a 45p admin fee, you could type in exactly how much you wanted to pay for the album. It’s a fascinating experiment and I hope Radiohead releases the results so we can see just how people’s behaviour breaks down.

Continue reading ‘Now playing: Radiohead’s In Rainbows’

For those interested in Internet things - and in this case the sexy side of the Internet, Facebook and all that stuff - there is an interesting conference due to start in two hours in Ottawa, Canada.

I know because I’m here and I’m on of two official bloggers. See can see the full agenda here, and the front page to the blog, which I will be updating all day can be found here.

The conference is basically bringing together experts from across the world to discuss what these latest Web2.0 technologies - which the OECD has placed under the banner “the participative web” - mean, what impact they will, what we should do and not do about the societal, business and political changes they invoke and so on. The reason why this is important is because the OECD is one of the full bodies in the world that the world’s most powerful governments listen to.

So check it out. Reply to my blog posts - if they’re pertinent I’ll read em out in the meeting.

Friday, 17 Aug: Bar, Fonteverde Spa, Tuscany

So, I’m in the bar at the Fonteverde Spa having had a lovely dinner next door. As usual, there is only one or two other people in here, plus the long-suffering pianist and the barman who, knowing I’m going to having one of the remaining single malts, has already prepared a glass of distilled water and an empty glass for the whisky.

I had a Bowmore 17 last night which was lovely and tonight, a Lagavulin 16, which to me is like a cross between Laphroaig and Bowmore. Why they pour it in a port glass is beyond me, but it leads to very healthy measures so who cares? But that’s enough boring whisky talk, what about the hairnet-sleepmask-underpants?

Continue reading ‘Tuscan blog: arses and fags’

Thu 16 Aug: Fonteverde Spa, Tuscany, Italy

So I’m at this fancy spa in Italy, failing to communicate constantly with everyone I come across, trying to chill in record time and having hilarious massage run-ins.

Yesterday I got massaged by a man named Nicola, and today I had a “vitalstone” massage which, I have to confess, was, well, really very nice.

I figured out something interesting near the beginning of the massage though that had me nearly chuckling the hot stones off my back. The sleep-mask that I had dismissed casually yesterday when offered it by Nicola (”you sleep?”), I actually took out of its plastic wrapper today when offered it by my next masseuse because I felt maybe a doze was good.

Continue reading ‘Tuscany: Spa holiday, Day Two’

Wed 15 Aug: Fonteverde Spa resort, Tuscany

So I’ve been feeling very tired and grumpy of late. I was also being very apathetic, having to force myself to do stuff. It took a few days but I then recognised I had been here before and the simple answer was that I needed a holiday (I have a tendency to work too hard when I’m enjoying myself and so have to rely on my body effectively breaking down before I realise).

I’ve had a constant low-level illness since my Puerto Rico ICANN conference in July. I worked through that rather than have a few days off - bad idea in retrospect - and then about a fortnight ago I completely lost two days through the kind of fever and exhaustion I haven’t had since I was a kid.

I say all this to explain why I am writing this currently sat in the bar of a very fancy spa in Tuscany. It’s called Fonteverde, it was built by some ancient figure on the site of a natural spa, and it is very expensive.

Continue reading ‘First day in a Tuscan spa: Kieren’s holiday blog’

Kevin Murphy, a British IT journo based in the US, has done a review of my Sex.com book on his blog.

He likes it. Which is nice since he is one of roughly three journalists in the world who understand the domain name system and its history. You can read it all here.

I like the opening line: “This is easily the funnest tech industry book I’ve read in a long time.”

I’m still don’t know where things are at with the US publisher, or this bloke in New York was interested in making a screenplay out of the book, or if I’m ever going to make any money from the book. Still, what does it matter in the wider scheme of things? I managed to write a book and people seem to enjoy it.