Cheap agreeable red wine; poultry with coltan endoskeleton

Tesco, a UK grocery store chain, sell a range of wines bearing the Quirky Bird label. We have a red from 2012 blending Shiraz, Mourvèdre and Viognier from South Africa and it's really very drinkable for the low price, fairly dry and smooth. It's not excitingly sophisticated but I am blissful in my ignorance: at wine tastings I'm more likely to make a beeline for the accompanying cheese. Right now I am enjoying a Glenfiddich 14-year-old rich oak whisky which is also quite smooth and simple.

Our meat scissors are no match for our Thanksgiving turkey. For spatchcocking we may have to look into procuring a surgical saw or somesuch for next time!

Ecotricity meter readings and corporate IT

I just had an interesting chat with a polite fellow from Ecotricity. I had expressed surprise that a couple of weeks after submitting meter readings to them I was telephoned by somebody asking me to go and read my meters right then. It turns out that they are obligated to have some third party check the meters from time to time and that they ask them to telephone if they couldn't read the meters in person, which is fair enough, but it turns out that they are not able to make available to this third party the fact that I had recently submitted a reading so that asking for another customer reading is rather pointless.

It was rather irritating that the Ecotricity fellow gave the impression that it would be somewhere between expensive and impossible to have this third party call for customer readings only if there isn't already a recent one on file, especially when he offered the amusing notion that it would be unfair to call only the customers who hadn't already submitted such readings. I got him to agree that it might be good to provide feedback up the chain that this kind of data integration would be welcome but I suspect that this agreement was just to placate me rather than with the intent of actually acting on it. It was also irritating that this was one of the instances of an initial it's a legal requirement collapsing under detailed inquiry that seem annoyingly common in Britain, especially with banks. (Physical meter inspections may be required but that is a red herring.)

Though, Ecotricity is the only business I deal with that still can't manage to get their website to give my Firefox the non-mobile version of their customer portal. I didn't mention to them that part of why I left my previous energy supplier was their dreadful IT system: it regressed so significantly after Oracle stepped in to help that their CEO e-mailed us to apologize; later we received a small compensation payment.

A musical dream

When I awaken I quickly forget my dreams: indeed, if I keep a pen and paper by my bed, I can feel the memory quickly melting as I scribble down the details. This morning when I awoke, in my dream I had been hearing a fictional Christmas song by Billy Joel and I did manage to remember the line of the song from when I woke up. Dreamwidth doesn't seem to support even <svg> tags so I doubt it offers me an easy way to render music but I can provide abc notation that at least approximates the fragment of the song that I managed to recall:

X:1
L:1/8
M:4/4
K:C
G2 | d3 c B4 | d3 c B3 G | c3 B A4 |]
w:We | stole a kiss | un-der-neath the | mis-tle-toe