Introduction to design thinking
Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net
A guest blog by Fairy Dharawat
While researching for a new topic for today’s writing, I came across the word ‘design’. The word made me curious, curious as to its meaning. Design has always being stereotyped as something beautiful and is often thought of with a limited vision of dealing with everything beautiful; say a pattern in dress, fashion designing; nice interior, interior designing; art, moveable design. But design is much more than a few vocational professions. Design is about planning and execution. (more…)
The Frugal Diet | Meals and Snacks
The stir fry I cooked for dinner has around 250 to 300 calories and so quite good. Counting calories can be confusing because the calorie is a unit of energy. The kilocalorie or kcal is a thousand calories and this has been adopted for diets and expressed as the Calorie with a big C! This is confusing and many foods are now marked with kcal to tell you how many calories they contain. I checked how many calories were in my morning biscuits, 250 kcal; that’s nearly as much as a meal! In fact if I do a salad with a can of sardines, it works out to around 250 kcal and that includes the oven chips! (more…)
How to become an expert winemaker | crystal bright
The hardest part of making wine is clearing it once it’s finished. You add wine finings, the best is isinglass which is a gel derived from sturgeon. I used to use a brand called CWE, but I’m not sure if that is still available. I used the various supplies like pectin enzyme that was produced by Young’s Home Brew and i think their website is worth visiting. You can syphon some wine off into a plastic soft drinks bottle, fill it about half full. Then add your wine finings and shake the bottle to disperse them through the wine. The finings should be kept cool, if they get warm, the gel becomes too liquid. The wine and finings mixture can then be added to the bulk of the wine. (more…)
Writing | Inspiration
Whatever we are writing, we need inspiration. I find my inspiration in all sorts of places. This photo was taken near my home and it’s interesting because the river has a dam across, that acts as stepping stones, but also helps store the water behind it. There is no litter around there, which is surprising, because this is not in the English countryside as you might imagine; but in town. (more…)
Neodigital Art | Colours
This is my photograph taken in Merrion’s Wood last year and was in the finals of a photography contest. I got a certificate from the mayor! You can see that the picture was all green, but the light shining through the trees reflected the different shades of green. The water was still and undisturbed which made the picture fairly unique. I used to Fotosketcher to turn this picture into a watercolour. (more…)
Psychology | hormones
I was reminded of a joke about British bank holidays some time ago. Why are they called bank holidays? Because the banks are closed. Why are the banks closed? Because it’s a holiday! Two things can be inter-dependant and this appears to be the case with our emotions and our hormones. We become stressed and we produce cortisol, but it also appears cortisol makes us feel stressed. It could be that when we become stressed we produce cortisol; that makes us feel even worse and we are then forced to take action. The action can be ‘fight or flight’, to face up to what is making us feel stressed or to run away. (more…)
Shopping with Colours
Image(s): FreeDigitalPhotos.net
A guest blog by Fairy Dharawat
As marketing products plays a pivotal role in garnering profits, our world has seen some interesting marketing strategies to lure shoppers. Until now we have seen some great and not so great marketing gimmicks that have shaped the world of marketing today. All this has but one point to make and one statement to make; to be different and to increase sales. Increasing sales involves buying and buying is done by shoppers. The shopper, when they buy, becomes a consumer. The consumer is what every retailer and brand wants their shoppers to be; loyal consumers. This does not happen often and many theories have been written about this. The whole purpose of marketing is to get the product off the shelf and this is the motive behind the marketing budget planned by the board of directors of huge companies; some get lucky, some do not. What really goes on in the mind of a shopper when they buy? Many theories have been written and today we will discuss one of them. (more…)
The Frugal Diet | Life Style
10,000 years ago, our ancestors ate mostly roots and berries, but also eggs. Not chicken eggs like us but the eggs of water birds like ducks. There was no farming and many of the foods we eat today came later from overseas. Chickens from Asia; turkeys, potatoes and beans from the Americas. We find eggs easy to digest because our bodies are designed to eat them. We haven’t changed physically very much in the last 10,000 years. Some foods that we eat would be impossible to eat if they weren’t cooked. Many allergies and other problems with food appear to be the result of ‘modern’ foods. Dairy foods in particular seem to create problems and many people have allergies. (more…)
How to become an expert winemaker | bulk
If you are following this series of blogs on winemaking, you have probably made your first batch of 5 litres and have enjoyed sharing it with your friends. These wines are ideal for barbecues, although it hasn’t exactly been barbecue weather in England. You know that 5 litres doesn’t go far at a barbecue though and so maybe when you get good at it; you could make 25 litres! (more…)
The Magic of Words
I have started today with a picture of a sign. In a few words it has to convey a message. It can’t go into too much detail, it just assumes you will understand that refreshments are sold and so too is compost; you aren’t expected to consume them both together! The sign leaves something to the imagination and common sense. It gets it’s message across successfully, it’s a farm and it’s open to the public and it describes what they sell and when. (more…)
Neodigital Art | Canals
I have used photos of the canal before with narrowboats, but they aren’t seen too often. We went back to these locks on Sunday and two boats were going through the lock. The light wasn’t very good and it did start to pour with rain. That narrow boat is 57 feet long and they hired it for a few days. (more…)
Influence through blogging.
If you read an article in a newspaper, you have no opportunity to put your views, but on a website you can; you can comment. Do they listen though? We bloggers do listen to comments and try our best to be interactive. Moneysavingexpert.com sold this week for 87 million pounds and so there is hope for this website! I’ve had a WordPress blog on WordPress.com for nearly 2 years and I have posted over 400 blogs. That blog started off slow and I didn’t get any readers hardly for 6 months, this blog is doing much better with 100 posts and has a few readers. The site is only 4 months old and we have readers in 50 different countries, although most readers are in English speaking countries and obviously the top country is usually the UK. (more…)
Changing purchasing habits
A guest blog by Fairy Dharawat
We tend to be tied to our habits and behave habitually. Bad habits and good habits influence the outcome of most of our decisions. Habits are an acquired pattern of behaviour that often occurs automatically. Habits are what make us who we are. (more…)
The Frugal Diet | Size matters
250 calorie – stir fry
I cooked stir fry this week and if you’re trying to lose weight that might seem like a meal that is too fattening. I actually did too much rice again and the size of portions is important. If we have a takeaway Chinese meal we tend to have extras and large portions. I cooked the boiled rice and use about a cup full to a cup full of water and so half that rice is actually water! The pork I used was very lean diced pork. I used a whole chopped onion that was fried with the pork in as little oil as possible in a non stick wok. Then I added even more fibre at the end by adding peas. Most of the flavour came from the dash of soya sauce and the sprinkling of 5 spice. The whole meal came to around 250 calories and although it might not look much served up in a rice bowl; it was filling and I even had a little fruit for desert. (more…)
How to become an expert winemaker | Carbs
Carbs or carbohydrates are sugars and starches. Sugar is fairly easy to understand and the sugar used in wine making is the granulated sucrose that we are familiar with, but there are other types of sugar. There is fructose, otherwise known as fruit sugar, but also found in some vegetables like potatoes and carrots. Fructose is important to mental health and so those foods are important to us. Then there is lactose, that is a sugar that yeast won’t break down and so is sometimes used to sweeten wine after it’s finished fermenting. Artificial sweeteners like aspartame and sucralose aren’t usually used to sweeten wine. There have been accusations that these sweeteners can damage health too. I try to avoid them because although the digestive system doesn’t absorb them, they can be broken down in the large bowel causing gas. Who wants more gas? (more…)
How to write fiction – life inspires art.
Writing a work of fiction is producing a work of art and it needs inspiration. I went out taking photographs again yesterday and ended up at the lake in the picture photographing the wildlife. It hasn’t really inspired me to write but if you read any novel by a famous writer they appear to be inspired by what they see and the people they meet. If I wanted to write a story based in the English countryside, I would certainly spend some time there. I read a novel not long ago set in a Yorkshire village and although I’ve never been to Yorkshire the description of the village was enough for me to imagine what it would be like. The image that the writer projects however is combined in my mind with everything else I know about Yorkshire villages. (more…)
Neodigital Art | White skies
We have had lot of rain in the past few weeks and even when it stops the sky is either grey or we have a white sky. In this shot the sky was white and so it reflected white off the water. In some shots, I have white sky, a band of green where the trees are and then another band of white with the water in the foreground. When I took this shot I put some grass in the foreground and broke up the white sky with a tree in the foreground. (more…)
Psychology | Appropriate behaviour
As we travel through life we have a tendency to believe, what we want to believe. Young girls see the models in magazines who are so slim and beautiful and they think they will be beautiful too, if only they lose weight. But although they are often underweight and anorexic, they don’t look good and don’t feel good. Sometimes people will feel one thing, but their behaviour will hide their feelings. When there is a terrible crime like murder, people are shocked by the crime, but even more shocked to find out who did it. They will often say that the killer seemed so nice! (more…)
The Frugal Diet | Controlling the calories
I had to stick to a strict diet for decades for health reasons. The trick is to make it a permanent thing, a lifestyle choice. It’s a mistake to lust after foods that are bad for you. I’ve used a picture of one of my salads again this week. I have fewer chips on this one. It’s packed full of vitamins and fibre. It’s low fat, fairly low in carbohydrates and above all, it tasted good. I also tried to make it look nice, I could have tried harder! Mixing hot and cold food is a good idea and if you want to lose weight fast, add more lettuce and cut the chips a little. This meal is less than 250 calories and that should be your target for main meals like lunch and dinner. It’s not a good idea to eat less than 1,000 calories a day; everyone can lose weight on 1,000 calories a day. You might want a little snack between meals though and so it’s a good idea to aim for 250 – 300 calories per main meal. (more…)
How to become an expert winemaker | acids
I started this series of blogs on how to become an expert winemaker a few weeks ago, so you can go back and read the first blog. Then two weeks ago I explained how to make your first batch of wine using apple juice. Then last week we went on to clearing and filtering the wine. The more you understand the process and the science bit, the less likely you are to make a bad batch. I chose apple juice for the first batch because it’s cheaper than grape juice and it contains malic acid like grape juice. (more…)
How to write fiction | genres
There are a lot of different genres to choose from when you’re writing fiction. You should always have your readers in mind, regardless of what you’re writing. There is always a demand for books for children and you might think it’s easy to write for children, but keeping it simple can be quite hard. Children can be impatient and won’t like long drawn out descriptions, but they also have vivid imaginations and so just need enough information to see the same imaginary world as you do. The young adult genre is very similar, but far more sophisticated. (more…)
Neodigital Art | Editing techniques
I used Fotosketcher to turn this photo into a ‘watercolour’. First however, I edited with Windows Live gallery and touched the picture up removing goal posts on the field and a sign. I like it! (more…)
What your behaviour says about you
Even relatively minor aspects of our behaviour says a lot about us. My interest in photography, canals, art and history reflects my personality. Behaviour can come across as positive or negative to other people. It can define us as a leader or a sheep-like follower. If you tend to read the most popular newspaper because everyone else reads it. That could define you as a follower. In the UK people often make fun of Sun readers for that reason, but even if you read the less popular Times newspaper, you are still following the crowd. The crowd in that case being others in your own social class. (more…)
The frugal diet | A perfect body
A perfect body or world peace?
On television the other night someone said that in a survey women were asked to choose between bringing about world peace or having a perfect body. Over 40% said they would choose a perfect body! This doesn’t really surprise me, I am constantly amused by the lengths women will go to in an attempt to look good. I saw a woman on television the same night, with thick makeup and false eyelashes that looked as long as the draught excluder on my kitchen door. She was heavier than me and at least 10 inches shorter. Does she really think all that crap on her face makes her look any better, when she has a body like a beached whale? (more…)
