Category Archives: All posts

Lazy days in France

I have just got back from a fabulous weekend at the Domaine Sainte Rose vineyard with Charles Ruth and Eilidh Simpson, who are producing excellent wine. Another three Simpsons, Andy Moira and Emily were there too, to make it an extra special weekend lazing under the trees in the back of their magnificent property. You can see the

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Lettuce rissotto

I cooked lettuce Risotto last week. Doesn’t sound like it would be very nice, but it was really delicious. You can see the recipe here on the BBC website. They actually have 69 of his recipes here.

Those Internet predictions of 1999 weren’t so far off the mark…

I read an interesting article today in the Investors Business Daily about the maturing of the Internet. Unfortunately, the article is not accessible via the web, but here are the salient quotes:

“The Internet is no differnet from any other industry; it needed time to mature before it could start producing profits, says Perry Boyle, co-head of research for investment bank Thomas Weisel Partners.

“‘What’s changed are the business models and the valuations,’ said Sue Decker, CFO of Yahoo. ‘It was just a matter of time to get the business models working.’

“In 1999, analysts forecast B2B commerce to reach $1.3 trillion in annual sales by 2002. The market is now at $2.4 trillion.

“Analysts may have been overly optimistic about consumer e-commerce [but not by that much!]. Four years ago, they expected online sales of goods to consumers to reach $108 billion by 2002. The amount was closer to £90 billion.

“‘The ubiquity of the Internet is playing out, The ‘crazy’ predictions of the Internet in 1999 have played out pretty close to reality.'”