Over the past few days I gave myself the luxury of a few unbroken half days to try and get to grips with the machinery underneath this website and to try and revive the Vaviblog. In the process, I've learned a bit about Grav and a lot about me and how I tackle this sort of thing.

The biggest single problem is how easy it is to simply suck it and see. Try something; save it; refresh the browser. Rinse and repeat. I've made a lot of progress that way, but I wouldn't say I have really deepened my understanding too much. I get some of the principles of programming; after all, I started been doing it around 45 years ago, with FORTRAN on an IBM370. The rot set in with my first personal computer, an Apple ][e, a dozen or so years later. Working in BASIC, it just became easier to try things rather than go through all the stages.

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Yesterday I was walking down the street and I almost swooned under the influence of a tree full of orange blossoms. Today, I continue repopulating this website and discover that at around this time of the year, 14 years ago, I almost swooned for the very same reason. In fact, that day was very muc...

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My latest piece for NPR's The Salt went up yesterday: Your Quinoa Habit Really Did Help Peru's Poor. But There's Trouble Ahead. The nice part about it, quite apart from the work I reported and the researchers who gave freely of their time and expertise, is in that one word: but.

The quinoa story is complicated, with lots of twists and turns, and I am really grateful to have been given enough space to explore some of the complications in some depth.

I've been absent from here for over a month, but with very good reason. Work took me to Indonesia, for the first time, and a wonderfully interesting trip it was too. I can't say more than that, or post any photos, at least for now, but it did result in a rambling soliloquy about Indonesian food over at Eat This Podcast and a slightly more detailed post about one of the multitude of crackers in which Indonesia seems to specialise.

And speaking of Eat This Podcast, I was absolutely thrilled and delighted to be nominated again for a James Beard Foundation Award. Maybe this time ...

That will do for now.

A year or so ago, I stopped pirating TV shows and movies. The whole process just became too fraught, what with finding the torrents, watching out for the bad guys, and never quite knowing whether the resulting file would even be watchable. Plus, it was becoming easier to watch legitimately. Last night, attempting to watch London Spy from the BBC made me long to dig out my old eye patch.

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