I was in Israel recently for a friend’s wedding. Israel, it turns out, is full of good food. Additionally, as a country with a rather large farming industry, they also have very good fruit and veg. (Side note: I am aware of some of the political implications here. I would rather not get into them right now. This is a post about salad, not politics).

One place this manifests is in their breakfasts. The “Full Israeli” breakfast contains quite a lot of salad. This wasn’t something it had really occurred to me to do before, and I found that I quite liked it, so I’ve decided to have a try at adopting it and make salad my breakfast food for a while and see how it goes.

(Also I figured a bit of a dietary shake up might help take off the most of 2KG I added to my waistline while there. This was less due to the salad breakfasts and more due to the pastries that went with them. The giant lunches and dinners probably didn’t help either. Did I mention the food over there is rather tasty?)

in future I’m planning to pre-prepare some things to use as the base of the salad, but I haven’t done that yet so this morning’s salad was fairly basic. I did novel-ish things with seasoning it though and the result was rather tasty:

• About half a romaine lettuce, quite finely chopped (I don’t like large leaves in my salad)
• About a quarter of a cucumber, coarsely chopped
• A raw yellow pepper, coarsely chopped
• A handful of toasted almonds
• A drizzle of olive oil
• Juice of half a lemon
• A heaped spoon of za’atar

Dressing it was very simple – just added the olive oil, lemon and za’atar on top of the salad and tossed it all together. Didn’t bother to premix anything.

I think it’s more Israel-inspired than necessarily something you would get over there, but the result was both tasty and filling. Also the use of za’atar + lemon as a salad dressing is definitely a winning combination and you should try it.

I ended up setting up an IRC channel for continuing the human readability discussion that had started on twitter. Alas, two of the three participants needed to go to bed so the conversation in question never continued. Still, I had the IRC channel anyway and it did end up spawning an interesting discussion on the subject with someone else entirely.

So I figure I’ll leave this channel around. I’ll be in it for a while, we’ll see who else is. If you want to talk about these issues, come on by.

We’ll be in #againstreadability on Freenode. The channel is publicly logged, and logs will be available here/

I was talking about RPG combat mechanics with my friend Dave Stark earlier. We came up with the outline of a reasonably satisfying one that fit his constraints. That’s not what this post is about.

After thinking about it for a bit I came up with a fairly different mechanic. It doesn’t work for the game Dave is planning, but I think it might be an interesting basis for some sort of dungeon crawl game.

The mechanic is as follows:

Characters have hitpoints which behave fairly normally in the sense that they go down over time and when they run out you die. However they have a much smaller number of them than is usual: 5 would probably be as many as makes sense. They also serve a much more integral role in the game mechanic than just a countdown to death.

The real core mechanic is the injury deck. It is a deck of cards which contain things like:

• Lucky escape – nothing happens
• Leg wound – You suffer a -1 penalty to movement
• Arm wound – You suffer -1 to strength
• A hit! You lose 1 HP

When injured you draw as many cards as you have hit points remaining, possibly modified positively or negatively by the source of the injury. You then choose one and put it in front of you, applying any effects (You put it in front of you even if it has no ongoing effect). The remaining cards are put into a discard pile to be shuffled back as the deck when the deck runs out.

Thing to note: As your hit points run out you become more and more vulnerable to a bad draw. When you’re drawing 5 cards chances are pretty good one of them will be at worst minor. When you’re drawing 1 card the odds are not with you.

Things I like about this mechanic:

• Injury is more interesting than just “I am x% dead”
• Combat becomes increasingly lethal as you get more injured
• Combat becomes increasingly lethal as the game goes on – because you’re mostly choosing the less lethal cards, the deck will become increasingly stacked against you as you pull them out of play
• There are a lot of strategic considerations in how you choose your injuries – do you take the HP loss now or the serious penalty? The HP loss has fewer short term consequences but can potentially screw you over later

I’ve been seeing bizarre problems with my openvpn client (on linux) over the last couple of days. It would connect, and I could access the network, but the VPN would regularly restart itself and connections would be closed, seeing messages like

Tue May 22 13:19:43 2012 [OpenVPN_Server] Inactivity timeout (--ping-restart), restarting
Tue May 22 13:19:43 2012 TCP/UDP: Closing socket

I saw these problems when I tried my profile on several different computers.

I was unable to find anything on the internet about this (possibly my google fu was weak), but we’ve finally managed to track down the problem. I thought I’d put this here in case other people had the same issue.

This seems to happen when you’re running two openvpn clients with the same profile from different computers. I have two computers I use, and I’d left one idle running the VPN client. When I then tried to connect to the VPN from the other computer I would see this behaviour. I then (foolishly) left that computer trying to use the VPN when I went back to the first computer, so now the problem had mysteriously appeared there too.

Anyway, now that I know the issue it’s easy to avoid. Live and learn.

Edit 2: Some further reading and discussion suggests that some of my reasons for caution are not entirely well founded. I still think it needs careful consideration, but now suspect that once I’d done more study my stance would be more along the lines of “careful consideration on how to proceed towards full legalization”. I don’t feel I know enough to have a well thought out opinion at this point. I’m leaving this post here as a snapshot but, while I’m not rejecting it in its entirety, don’t take it as necessarily representative of my point of view.

The policy document I outlined for the department of dancing, getting high and fucking was pretty silent on the question of prostitution. This is partly because it’s a complicated question, partly I considered it contrary to our founding charter of promoting inexpensive social activities at the expense of consumer culture, so I considered it outside my remit. To which pozorvalk responded “dude, you’re the minister for Fucking. Of course prostitution’s within your remit :-)”. So, that’s me told. Here are my thoughts on the subject. They might be unpopular with people who liked my previous post.

What would I change about prostitution laws? Honestly… not much. I don’t think our current ones are that bad. To summarize: In the UK, prostitution is not illegal. There are a whole bunch of related activities which are, in particular running a brothel, but the basic act of exchanging sex for money is not a crime for either party.

I would be very cautious about changing that. The problem with legalizing e.g. brothel ownership is that it likely to increase the incidence of prostitution.

While I think prostitution is (in principle) an entirely ethically acceptable activity (one that makes me a little uncomfortable, but that’s not a good metric of ethics), I don’t like the secondary effects. In particular I’m concerned about the potential for an increase in human trafficking and the effects widespread prostitution may have on peoples’ attitudes.

So, that’s my default position. Do nothing. Possibly be slightly laxer about the enforcement of certain laws in cases where we were sure no harm was being done.

However I would form a team responsible for investigating questions around this. In particular:

• To what extent is human trafficking a real problem in our country and how can we fix that at an earlier stage in the pipeline?
• What is the life of people acting as prostitutes like and what can we do to improve it?
• Are there problems with prostitution that could be fixed by introducing a licensing and regulation scheme?
• What are the actual effects of allowing legal brothels? Initially we’d study other countries, but potentially a limited set of licenses could be issued for this on a trial basis

The goal here would be to determine a sensible set of reforms to the laws which increases the welfare of prostitutes (and their clients) but does not lead to a massive increase in it. I’m not entirely sure what these would look like.

Edit: It’s been pointed out that this appears to ignore the problem of violence towards street prostitutes. I didn’t intend that to be the case. I don’t know what the right solution to it is, and would definitely consider trying to figure out how to end that as part of the “Improve the lives of prostitutes” task. I just don’t want to end up in a scenario where although the lives of the current prostitutes have been significantly improved, the number of prostitutes has significantly increased and most of the new ones are in far worse conditions.