Welcome to Simon Philp's Blog

I am the kind of person that likes to use every pot in my kitchen when it comes to cooking. I love cooking, is kind of therapeutic especially if I've been having a quick game of poker.  No matter if it's just me eating or if I have visitors, pots everywhere.  Last week while doing a little bit of a spring clean in my spare room I came across a book I bought many months ago - Quick and Easy Sushi.

While out at Tesco I came across a section that had the ingredients to make Sushi, rice, seaweed, ginger, wasabi, and soya sauce.I thought what the heck I am going to try this. I love Sushi so really I was already setting myself high standards.

I bought some Scottish salmon, cucumber and avocado and went home to start the mysterious ways of creating sushi.  Following the instructions on the rice packet I boiled the rice and left it. While it was cooking down I started to cut the salmon, cucumber and the avocado into strips.

Once I had drained the rice after it cooling I started putting a thin layer onto the seaweed.  The layer was in place so following the tips in Quick and Easy Sushi I placed the strips of salmon and cucumber/avocado onto the layer of which I then rolled.

After alternating the ingredients I had finished with 3 rolls. Upon trying them by complimenting each roll with ginger, wasabi and soya sauce I was fairly happy with the results. This experience has shown me that it's an art, one that will take a while to master. From ingredients to rolling it's not "that simple" and again this was just the rolls.   The book contains many different recipes which I am going to try. 

If you're looking for a simple sushi recipe and instructions check out the following pages:

• Vegetarian Sushi Squares
• Simple Sushi tuna rolls
• Easy Salmon Sushi
• Quick and Easy Sushi

There is nothing worse than starting to read an article or a tutorial on a website and thinking I should print this out and read it on the train home (I print duplex and 4 pages to 1 sheet of A4, save the trees and all) to then look at the print preview to an absolute mess. Nine out of ten times an article will sit on 2 pages and adverts, comments will take up another 8.This then results in having to cut and past the web page into a document and formatting it so it's readable which can take some time depending on the length of the article.

If your site is marked up properly then making it easier for us and the trees why not use a Cascading Style Sheet specifically for printing?  This isn't difficult to achieve and can be done quite quickly.  Where do I start?

The starting point is setting up a Cascading Style Sheet specifically for printing this is down by adding:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="PrintFriendly.css" media="print" />

This tells the browser to look at this style sheet when printing.  In my print style sheet I have hidden anything that makes the site look pretty and have taken out elements such as my menu, links, archive list etc basically leaving behind the most important thing, Content.  Nothing complicated in this all I have done is assign a display:none; style to the page elements i don't want to show on my print out.

For other style sheet print options check out : http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_ref_print.asp

If you write long posts please consider the environment and your audience and implement a "printer" friendly cascading style sheet.

Everyone has been talking about it, Microsoft trying to buy Yahoo, and by the looks of it won't happen unless Microsoft show them the money.  Yahoo has alot of services under its belt Flickr being one of them.  I have a pro flicker account which I am now beginning to use to its full potential.

Over the last couple of days I was sent a link to a group created on flickr titled "MICROSOFT: KEEP YOUR EVlL GRUBBY HANDS OFF OF OUR FLICKR" now some of the photo's uploaded to the group are very good.

Make sure you check the group out.

Yes it's finally done.  New Journey is alittle late but better late than never.  Some really funky tunes in this mix.

I did enjoy doing it, but as my podcast post mentions I think the jingles are needing a little updated.

•  Si Philp - Podcast Number 5 - New Journey
• Subscribe to my podcast RSS

Today while going through some old bookmarks I came across the website of DJ Ama (pronounced ah-mah).  DJ Ama has been dj'ing since Jan '07 and her sets are not only enjoyable but she's not afraid to experiment alittle with an effect here and there. Currently there are 3 full sets on her website and several short mixes on youtube.

Dj Ama started with only one table which I didn't thoroughly understand until I saw her house/electro quick mix which goes into a little more detail in how she use to do it. Since that mix, which was posted way back in March '07 it would seem she has come leaps and bounds with a full sweet setup.

Make sure you check out her site: 

• http://www.dj-ama.com/ *main site with full mixes
• http://www.youtube.com/user/bamanda2
• http://www.myspace.com/djamamusica