The Chop House

I’ve been quite a few times recently to The Chop House. I’ve always been pleased with the service and the food. It’s nowhere near a top notch restaurant, but the food is always enjoyable, and served with pleasure.

However, recently they surpassed themselves. I was there in a fairly large group (25+). Much (much) wine was drank as well as the full three courses (groan!). Due to ineptitude (and perhaps that excess of wine) both of us paid separately for each other. It was not until a few days later that we realised we’d paid double.

We guessed that by this point we’d had it, however, we rang them up, and sure enough they refunded one card, more or less at our word! Cracking service.

Spider haunt at the Chesterton cycle bridge

The new(ish) cycle bridge at Chesterton is well lit at night with many spotlights along its breadth. After a relatively pleasant evening spent at the Fort St George (all too rare since Greene King took over the place last year and converted it into a cheap rate All Bar One) I was cycling back and had a little trip across the bridge.

Looking at one of the beams in the middle of the bridge, there must have been close to a thousand spiders hanging there. The spotlights illuminate the webs in a very pleasant way.

Cambridge cycle bridge

(Unfortunately my new HTC Hero does not have a flash).

Although I’m sure that the main function of these lights is to make the bridge safe they have a side affect in that they have created an ideal site for webs. These lights draw in flies, moths and other flying insects, and many, many spiders have set up their fly catching homes here.

If you are ever passing after dark then go have a look. Perhaps not alone if it’s too late

Bash shell extension

I came across this cool tip whilst browsing the blog of a fellow storage geek’s who’d posted on the Linux RAID list.

Basically you can insert a variety of characters inside braces to expand them. I guess like a smart shell expansion using the tab. The most obvious usage is a major timesaver for creating a backup of a file (which of course we all should do everytime we edit a config file!).

cp foobar.conf{,.bak}

will work as:

cp foobar.conf foobar.conf.bak

Many more examples are given here.