Another article from the BBC on the ‘miracle’ properties of Broccoli, or more accurately one of its consistuents: sulforaphane.

Lead researcher Professor Paul Thornalley said: “Our study suggests that compounds such as sulforaphane from broccoli may help counter processes linked to the development of vascular disease in diabete”s.

Hooray for Broccoli!

Having left T-mobile and joined three, I have been trying out my new phone. It is a Nokia 6120 and I am pretty impressed with it, although I have found the complaints about battery life and heating up to be true. But I guess that is what you get in a small 3G smartphone. The other problem with 6120 is that the directional button is made of plastic and it has cracked, which is a pain as it looks like it may drop off, especially as my old Sony Ericsson w810i took several drops without any damage and this phone has cracked just from normal use.

The contract I have is with 3 (Hutchinson Three UK) and as part of my contract I pay £5 extra per month for unlimited Internet, email and some other features in a package called X-series Silver. The email is provided by an application called Mobile Mail and it is a push email server and supports and email provider that allows IMAP access (it may work with POP3 but I have not tried).

The email was easier to setup but is fairly basic, even URLs entered in plain text cannot be clicked on, which is frustrating when you get sent a link to an Internet newsletter. However, the phone has no trouble downloading and opening picture files, excel or word files, as long as they are less than 250kB in which case it refuses to deal with it. According the help files, this is to save on data access charges, but I would prefer to make that choice myself. I could use the Googlemail app as it will run on this S60 phone, but I would need to configure Gmail to work with my domain, which I do not want to do at present.

In conclusion I am happy with Three’s web surfing and coverage but less happy with the email application. And I will look more carefully at the next phone I get to check battery life and durability as failure on these fronts makes any special features redundant.

The forums on food and British Chinese websites always have plenty of discussion on what the top Dim Sum eateries are in the UK and in particular London. In 2006 dimsum.co.uk listed what they considered the best and now they have updated the list: Top Dim Sum Venues in London 2008.

Make sure you read the comments as they are sure to bemoan restaurants left off the list and criticise those included.

This post was edited as the link changed on the website.

I have come to the end of my 18 month contract on T-mobile (UK) and was hoping to renew, keeping the same phone (a reliable SE W810i) and take a reduced line rental package.

I currently pay £20 per month on the lowest Flext plan. They have offered to reduce it to £15 per month, but this does not include a new phone.

However new customers are offered the same tariff for £15 per month and they get a new phone.

Each month my phonebill is over £20 due to data access charges, so I am not a terrible customer, but I am very disappointed on what has been offered.

So I shall be leaving T-mobile this week.

There is an excellent article on Dim Sum about Chinese Dining Etiquette.

I wish the people at work would read this before going out for a Chinese!

It’s really frowned upon to suck or lick your chopsticks, then help yourself to more food from the shared dishes! This is unhygienic and will put fellow diners off their food. Chinese people are really particular about food hygiene.

Our son brought home a reading book, and peering out from the pages was a picture of Michael Rosen, although it did not say so any where in the book.

Apparently he has just become children’s laureate:

Michael Rosen, who was today appointed children’s laureate, set out his stall for the two-year stint with a pledge to fight to bring back into classrooms a love of reading for pleasure.

The above book scan comes from the ‘Oxford Reading Tree’, see his comment about it:

“It’s taken a long time for my daughter to bring a picture book home from school because she’s been bringing home the Oxford Reading Tree day after day, week after week. The idea that that’s what the school provides to children in her class who might not encounter other books horrifies me. We don’t care about lists of words. We care about the Gruffalo. So why aren’t kids bringing home The Gruffalo?”

Anyway, belated congratulations Michael.

Everyone is raving about slating the new logo for the London olympics in 2012, so I thought I would design a quick logo to see if I could do better.

Clearly, I have gone with web-ready version, as you can never be too sure about whether certain colours can be rendered on certain systems. Also, why be imaginative, when you can use Helvetica as your chosen typeface?

Obviously it cost a little less than £400k, so if Seb Coe and the others are interested, I would be more than willing to provide my services.

When Friends Reunited first took off, it was blamed for bringing together old schoolmates together, and leading to the breaking up marriages as people tried to relive the past. But that just seemed like loose morals to me.

However, I have been using Facebook this last couple of months and I think this is having a different effect on me.

But the effect is borne of jealousy. When I see old school friends and it says they work at BarCap or UBS, or they are living in New York or Singapore. Or that they are self-emplyed, I feel a little insignificant working as an employee at a small local business.

Instead of looking back on your life at 70 and having regrets and thinking of what could of been. People linking up with friends from 10 years ago are looking back sooner, at a point when they can do something about it.

Looking back and taking action now, so as to live life without regrets or false ideas of what could have been.

Try Feed the Head, for some weird fun.

It has amused and bemused in equal measure in my office.

The Lambda sensor on our car has failed, causing the EML (engine maintenance light) to come on. So the car is going to the garage today to be repaired. We know it is the lambda sensor, because the EML light came on before we had it serviced 2 weeks ago, and after repairs it went off. But not before a car computer diagnostic revealed a problem. The garage said that if it came on again, we would need to get it fixed.

Although the car is not behaving strangely, we are going away for a long weekend to the west country, and we don’t want to have any problems when we are down there.

But what is the lambda oxygen sensor?

The exhaust gas oxygen sensor (EGO or O2), or lambda sensor, is the key sensor in the engine fuel control feedback loop. The computer uses the O2 sensor’s input to balance the fuel mixture, leaning the mixture when the sensor reads rich and richening the mixture when the sensor reads lean.