After returning from our recent trip to America, Leanne decided that what she really wanted for her birthday was a Grand Canyon cake.

Not one to shy away from a challenge (and not like I had much choice, after Leanne had invited people to a “Come and eat Grand Canyon cake” party), I was determined to pull it off.

“No problem!” I thought, “A quick search for ‘grand canyon cake’ will tell me exactly how to make one”.

How foolish I was.

Every single one of Google’s reference to Grand Canyon cakes seemed to be about cakes that had gone wrong and collapsed - “It fell apart, oh how we laughed!” - apart from one made intentionally, an incredibly ornate affair that I could have custom made by a bakery in Las Vegas.

I felt like I was looking for something somewhere in the middle of those two extremes. With the internet proving no help whatsoever, I was going to have to work out how to do this by myself.

And that I did. And here I present a behind-the-scenes look at how it was done, just in case you find yourself in a similar cake-based predicament one day.

Ingredients

• 3 x rectangular sponge cakes (3 eggs each)
• Jam
• 700g buttercream icing
• Red and yellow food colouring
• Sour Blue Raspberry Gel Pop (the Colorado River)
• Nestle Munchies and Milkybar Moments (boulders)

Assembly

Done.

LOVEFiLM have had a bit of a redesign recently, and one of the features that has been given more prominence is the chart for each film that shows the ‘Average rating breakdown’ (highlighted below).

Well, except for the fact that it doesn’t.

What it actually shows, is for each rating (on a scale of half a star, to five whole stars), the percentage of users who awarded it that rating. Which isn’t an average by any definition I’ve ever heard of.

Lack of basic maths aside, it’s also a pretty poor way of presenting ratings, which fails to make the best use of the given screen estate. Allow me to explain.

Because the whole range from zero to one hundred percent is used along the horizontal axis, there’s always going to be a lot of empty space. There would have to pretty much unanimous agreement on the exact rating of a film, down to the precise half-star, to get anything even resembling a spike. And because of the very personal nature of ratings (two people could both say they absolutely loved a film, but one would give it a four and the other would give it a five), this ain’t gonna happen. This leaves the graph looking a little, well, limp.

Even for films generally held in high regard, such as The Dark Knight (pictured), which 77% of LOVEFiLM viewers awarded 4 stars or over, the graph doesn’t look particularly impressive.

A better way to present this would be to dynamically adjust the maximum value of the horizontal axis based on the highest percentage. So in the case of The Dark Knight, the majority percentage of 37% would cause the scale to be from zero to forty percent, allowing the graph to fill up the space nicely.

IMDB understand averages. They give you the arithmetic mean AND the median. Rock.

Remember that 100gb Mozy backup I started about 4 months ago? It’s finished!

If you’ve bought a DVD in the last couple of months you may have noticed an interesting change in the tactics employed to stop you from turning into an evil video pirate. Rather than accusing you of being a criminal straight off, you’re now congratulated for purchasing a genuine DVD with a nice big thumbs up.

Which is nice. Shame this doesn’t carry through to the disc itself - on pressing play I’m forced to sit through the usual watching films is stealing nonsense.

<shameless plug>

</shameless plug>

I seem to be a very lucky person indeed, as after having been entrusting the safety of my photos, music, etc to the whims of my computer for about the last fifteen years, I’m yet to have a hard disk fail on me.

I’ve decided that I must be due a catastrophic failure any time soon, so I’ve finally got my butt in gear and sorted out an actual backup procedure. I’ve had an external hard disk for a while now (a 250gb Red Lacie Brick if you’re interested), but beyond remembering to copy over my photos every six months or so there’s not much of a system there. And I take a lot of photos. Plus, if the house burns down then the external hard disk is probably going to be reduced to a pool of red goo. So I’ve decided to go for online backup.

After reading some good reviews I’ve opted to give Mozy a try. Mozy comes in two flavours - 2gb of storage for free, or unlimited storage for $4.95. Seeing as my photos currently take up around 100gb, I’ve opted for the unlimited option. Plus, if you pay for a whole year at once you get a month free, or three months if you pay for two years up front.

Sign up and installation are quick and easy. When Mozy first runs you make you backup selection from from a list of predefined sets (photos, movies, documents, etc). You can also add custom sets of your own choosing.

My first backup is now underway. With over 100gb it looks like it’s going to take a while - the “Time to finish” dialogue says “unknow” - I reckon at least three weeks! I’ll keep you posted.

After being rather disappointed with the service we’ve been getting from the Sainsbury’s online store lately, we decided to give a couple of their competitors a shot. First up, Asda.

Asda

The folks at Asda seem to have decided that the tried and tested concept of logging into a website with a username and password is far too dull, and so have instead opted to go for the no-chance-of-remembering-this eight digit “customer ID”, and a super secure four digit “PIN number”.

So, in we go to the online store. Products are organised by an “aisle” methaphor, listed down the left hand side.

Not sure what the colour coding means here. Does it mean that Bakery & Cakes, etc are all in stock, but they’re all out of Baking, Deserts & Spreads, etc? Who knows.

Right, first on the shopping list, chicken pies.

A search for “chicken pies” and I’m informed that “Your search for chicken pies returned more than 50 products”.

Wow, that’s a lot of different types of chicken pie. I like pie. Let’s have a look at those results.

Hmm, Indian and Chinese cuisine aren’t exactly famous for their chicken pies. I obviously wasn’t looking for chicken pies when I typed “chicken pies” into the search box, so I’ve been given what looks like the search results for chicken OR pies. I really can’t be bothered to look through all those just to find some pie shaped goodness.

Finally I noticed the title of the page - “ASDA @t home”. As we all know, @ is shorthand for “at”, so the site is called “ASDA at t home”. That’s the final straw, I’m out of here!