What's been happening?

Well, it has been a while with a big gap in posts - what has been going on ?

The main things that I was going to post on were all to do with gluten free food.
Well my son had a completely GF birthday party a while ago - pictures of food to follow soon - and I went on a course in London.

This London trip was my first big challenge for eating GF since being diagnosed with coeliac disease. Previously I'd been able to 'skip a meal' or to 'just manage', but this was four days and I needed to try and eat properly.

Breakfast wasn't a big problem as the place I stayed had a serve yourself buffet style 'full English'. I'm not particularly sensitive to gluten, so I was Ok with just sticking to the eggs and bacon - I know other people are so sensitive that, for example, if the bacon is cooked on the same grill as the sausages, it would be enough to cause a reaction - I was fine though.
Lunch was more interesting - a standard buffet of sandwiches and sausage rolls etc. However, they knew I was coming and had a jacket potato for me. This seemed easiest so I let them do that each day.
Unfortunately, the evening meal was more difficult, and I resorted to my emergency fall back position of McDonalds ("burger no bun") most nights.
I was very disappointed, though, when I went out with my friend Wulf. We tried many places to find food, starting at a Chinese - usually a good place - but they insisted that everything they served had flour in it. Another place simply replied "no, sorry" when asked about gluten free food - despite things like gammon steak on the menu, which is usually ok. I got the impression that these places were just giving the easy answer, instead of really caring - few even checked, which is also odd as I normally have to explain all about gluten.
We did find one place in this area around Leicester Square - a Wetherspoons - that labeled GF food on its menu. Unfortunately, it was very full and we couldn't get in.
In the end we resorted to McDonalds again, upsetting Wulf so much he wrote about it in his blog! (I'm sure he'll add a link when he reads this).

Anyway, enough for now - it's taken me two train journeys to write this much!

Tim.C

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This missing links...

Wulf's Blog post

Facebook more secure

Well I haven't had chance to check whilst running a sniffer, but a quick check in the address bar and I can say that the url below does use SSL, and so should be much safer than the standard www.facebook.com.
{My normal trick of just adding the s (ie to make https://www.facebook.com) doesn't work with this site - it does with all Google sites though, Hint Hint ;-) }


https://login.facebook.com/login.php

Tim.C

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Facebook - yet more social networking !

Well, I've given in to another one! I've signed up to Facebook as I was getting so many invitations off friends.

I have to wonder though, how long will this one last? There always seems to be a new thing to sign up for, and all the people that invited me - I already know them online through other sites and forums. In a similar way I'm signed up for at least 4 instant messaging services. I joined ICQ a long time ago, then MSN (as everyone joined there), Yahoo (a couple of friends only use that one) and lastely Gmail/Googlemail as I use their email system as well. I seem to spend more time signing up than actually communicating with anyone - I do that by email.

Anyway, one final point before the train arrives at Snow Hill...

Facebook appears to have an insecure login page. It doesn't use SSL to encrypt your details. The trick I'm using to get around this is to use a random wrong username, and then, strangely, the failed login page DOES use SSL!
I'll have a look to see what the login page actually sends insecure, and whether they've secured it some otherway - but that will have to wait for when I'm sat at a real PC again.

Have fun,

Tim.C

Testing 123

Well, I thought that I should get my act together and finally blog again.

So much has been going on, but it's mainly been work that's keeping me busy, not stuff I can blog about.

Anyway, this is a test to ensure eveything is still up and running, and that I can blog whilst mobile. This post is coming from my pda.