Synergy or Kedgeree?

Synergy is when the result is greater than the sum of the parts. Applied to food it is what cooking is about. You take plums, flour, sugar and butter and mix them together and get plum crumble, with the caramalised juice oozing out at the edges - synergy. Mix oil and parsnips and add some heat and you get something quite different - synergy.

Plum crumble

Mix hard boiled eggs (possibly the worst way of cooking an egg IMHO) with boiled rice and bits of smoked fish and you get kedgeree. In this case the result is somewhat less than the sum of the parts, IMHO. I would frankly prefer the fish on its own, with a little rice to the side, and give the hard boiled eggs to my wife.

Or am I missing something? Jamie Oliver manages to make Kedgeree look and sound quite tempting.  But then he has some additional ingredients and he is Jamie Oliver...

Kedgeree a la Jamie Oliver

Extreme Programming

Apparently that's what 'XP' stands for. And this 8th April 2014 is the day it all comes to an end. Here's what Microsoft told me I would gain by switching to 8.1:

Good - so Windows 8.1 will do the things XP does for me and, good gracious! - it will do even more - but hang on, I don't actually want any of the extra things it will do for me...

The amazing thing is that, for all the wonder of 8.1, not many people are actually using it.  This is the lie of the land according to Wikipedia - a whopping 27% of desktops are still running XP, almost 3 times that running Windows 8! 

There's a good deal of scare tactics abroad - reminds me of Y2000 - for example the Irish Independent has: A NEW wave of computer viruses will target the computers of 300,000 Irish people tomorrow, as the country's third most popular computer system is cut off from security support by Microsoft.  That sudden, really?

Of course, I know I will be forced to migrate to 8.1 (or at least to 7) eventually. But I am hoping to defer this to when I upgrade my computer, rather than experience the misery and expense of upgrading just the operating system.

Finally a bit of nostalgia - you may never see this panorama again...