Bah and double bah [entries|reading|network|archive]
simont

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Wed 2005-12-14 19:18
Bah and double bah

I received email today telling me that Coeliac UK is discontinuing the electronic version of their list of safe foods. That's very annoying; I find it much more useful than the book version, partly because I can access it from anywhere I have an Internet connection without having to lug a book about, and mostly because I can grep it for a useful keyword without having to think hard about which of several plausible categories a given product might have been filed under. But apparently the service has been fraught with problems (none of which I've encountered), and so they're discontinuing it on the basis that it's more trouble than it's worth (to everyone but me).

I've mailed them back to express my disappointment and my strong support for their half-hearted intent to try to introduce a replacement service, but I'm not hopeful.

As if that wasn't annoying enough, the same email also linked to an update to the safe foods list in which it transpires that my favourite breakfast cereal EVER, which I used to eat as a special holiday treat when I was a child and have been gleefully stuffing my face with since February after discovering it was one of the few cereals I could still eat, has just been re-tested and turns out not to be gluten-free after all. Bah! And double bah since I'd just stocked up on the stuff. Anyone (well, anyone to whom I can conveniently deliver) want to take some large boxes of Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes off my hands?

I also just played a game of NetHack in which I was granted an early wish and was dead two turns later. This is clearly not my day.

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[identity profile] ex-robhu.livejournal.comWed 2005-12-14 20:43
How did you die?
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[personal profile] simontThu 2005-12-15 09:19
I'd just attained XL 5 as a Valkyrie, and immediately hightailed it to the nearest fountain to acquire Excalibur. On the first two dips my sword just got rustier. On the third, it surrounded me with snakes. I decided to risk one more dip before attempting to escape, and amazingly turned up a water demon who granted me a wish! I decided "sod Excalibur" at that point and wished up Mjollnir instead; unfortunately the snakes then killed me.

Annoyingly, I realised afterwards that I'd had a wand of digging I could have pointed downwards as a means of escape. On the one hand it's kind of encouraging that almost all my recent deaths have been avoidable in retrospect; on the other, it strongly suggests I ought to be paying better attention. I must get out of the "panic now" mindset and cultivate a reflex of instinctively stopping to think, check my inventory, etc. before I do anything irrevocable. Antelope mentality, in fact.
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[identity profile] ex-robhu.livejournal.comThu 2005-12-15 09:30
:-)

Can you dig down when you're on a fountain? Does it not do something bad? I find most things do something bad :-D
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[personal profile] simontThu 2005-12-15 09:32
It takes an XL5 Valk a couple of turns to die of water moccasins, so I could have afforded time to take a step off the fountain first.
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[identity profile] ex-robhu.livejournal.comThu 2005-12-15 09:38
The furthest I've got so far is XL8 and Dlvl8 :-)

It's terribly good fun though... are you playing on alt.org? The Nethack channel on Freenode is quite friendly, and people will watch your game and give advice (if you want it).
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[personal profile] simontThu 2005-12-15 09:53
No, I'm playing on my own machine. It seemed easier (in particular that way I can still play at home when my network connection goes down). I've arranged to record all my games much like alt.org, though.
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[identity profile] ex-robhu.livejournal.comThu 2005-12-15 10:00
Go Team Ant!
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[identity profile] feanelwa.livejournal.comWed 2005-12-14 21:53
Me! Me! I love them!

I think when I was in the health food shop by the Round Church buying Catriona-food, I saw they had gluten free crunchy nut corn flakes. I might be wrong but I'm fairly sure I remember them having gluten free written on the box.
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[personal profile] simontThu 2005-12-15 09:30
Righto, at least one box is yours. (I'll share them out as seems sensible between people who ask. One other person has, but he said "if you're still stuck with them", which suggests you'd appreciate them more!) What's the best way to get big bulky boxes to you? I'm not convinced I fancy bringing them to the Calling, but on the other hand I don't normally see you anywhere else or know where you live.
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[identity profile] feanelwa.livejournal.comThu 2005-12-15 16:53
Weeeell, we could meet up for a cup of tea somewhere and generally catch up. (Especially since there isn't a Calling until the one after the 3rd January.) Do you have a free small-part-of-day at some point? I am busy Saturday afternoon, Wednesday evening and tomorrow evening, but other than that, assume I have no life.
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[personal profile] simontThu 2005-12-15 17:01
That's a terribly good idea, particularly since I'm not at work for the next two weeks and will have TIME for a change, woo. I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing at the beginning of next week because I'm visiting my dad over the weekend and am not entirely sure when I'll get back, but shall we provisionally say some time this Tuesday (20th) afternoon?
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[identity profile] feanelwa.livejournal.comThu 2005-12-15 17:12
Ok, that sounds good. Shall we make it 3 in Borders Starbucks again? I should stop going to chain coffee shops, but if other ones will be either underground, full of clowns or too small to ever find a table, what can you do, eh?
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[personal profile] simontThu 2005-12-15 17:28
That sounds fine to me. It's in my calendar.
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[personal profile] mair_in_grenderichThu 2005-12-15 01:32
stuffing my face with since February

And it's not done any harm?
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[identity profile] stephdairy.livejournal.comThu 2005-12-15 09:08
I think you'd need an endoscope to find that out...

(S)
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[personal profile] simontThu 2005-12-15 09:28
As [livejournal.com profile] stephdairy says, it's hard to tell. I'm an externally asymptomatic coeliac, meaning you can only tell anything's wrong by blood tests and/or poking a tube into my upper intestine and going "ooh look, it's gone all nasty". Sadly, if it remains all nasty then I can look forward to all sorts of fun like bowel cancer.

That said: I was eating a big bowl of CNCF pretty much every day between my diagnosis and my subsequent six-month checkup, and one might conclude that if my blood had gone back to normal after six months of that regimen (which it had) then CNCF clearly wasn't gluteny enough to bother me. On the other hand, there's no point in taking deliberate risks when the accidental ones are more than enough...
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[identity profile] jalbobble.livejournal.comThu 2005-12-15 20:08
Yum.
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