Credit Card Signatures

One of the managers at my place of work had an interesting experience while shopping:

"It happens every day in New Zealand   I was signing the receipt for my credit card purchase when the shop assistant noticed I had not signed my name on the back of the credit card. She informed me that she could not complete the transaction unless the card was signed.   When I asked why, she explained that it was necessary to compare the signature I had just signed on the receipt. So I signed the credit card in front of her.   She carefully compared the signature to the one I had just signed on the receipt.   As luck would have it, they matched."

J-Walk Blog and Veev

John Walkenbach of the J-Walk blog got sent a bottle of Veev for review. He was quite happy with this and was going to try it out while blogging this Friday. However, a marketing shill working for a company hired by Veev to market their spirit left a comment promoting the virtues of the drink in his comments - without identifying his association with the product.

John isn't happy and rightfully so. No review of the drink will be forthcoming.

This post is just me doing my bit to ensure that there are plenty of links to John's post.

http://j-walkblog.com/index.php?/weblog/posts/marketing_to_bloggers/

Barbecued Leg Of Lamb

We had an excellent leg of lamb last night. To prepare it I chopped together a couple of handfuls of italian flat leaf parsley with half a dozen garlic cloves until it was all finely chopped. I then mixed this with a little olive oil and a couple of teaspoons of manuka smoked flaky sea salt (from Prenzel) and freshly ground black pepper. I cut some deep slits in the lamb and filled them with the paste and rubbed the remainder all over the leg (after puncturing the skin with the tip of a sharp knife). This was left to sit for 3+ hours.

I cooked it in a hooded barbecue on the barred grill with indirect heat. The temperature was about 150 degrees. After putting the leg on the barbecue I took the remains of the garlic/parsley paste and mixed it with a little red vincon (also from Prenzel) and used this to baste the lamb every now and again.

It took about 1.75 hours to cook and another 20 minutes standing before carving. Very flavoursome and tender lamb.

My brother, Spike, introduced me to Prenzel when telling me how he prepared a thick venison steak from a recent hunting trip to the South Island of New Zealand.

My newly re-designed website

My newly re-designed website is now up and running at www.thrashcardiom.com. It isn't complete though. I am a procrastinator and what was intended to be a two week long project is already running some months overdue. How slack of me. The bits that are missing are:

1. Most of the section labelled "Thrash Cardiom"
2. The section on Food and Wine is missing anything about wine
3. There is a dearth of links on the links page
4. The section on Orua Wharo homestead has only one page in it.
   

I will complete these sections!

The rest of the site is up and running though.

Drum and Bass live

I have some friends who run a music even a couple of times a year. These are a couple of people who used to play together in a metal band. They took the opportunity during one of the events to have a bit of a jam.