So this morning I happily toasted one of the delicious fruit buns I brought home from Benito's last night. I idly wondered whether the sugar glaze would make a mess inside the toaster, but decided that it should be fine.
Went back to chat with my colleague James on Yahoo, only to smell the telltale burning odour of too thick a slice of bun in the toaster. "If I whip that out quickly it should still be edible and the smoke alarm won't go off..." oops... all that sugar glaze was now molten, and sticky, and pretty much glued to my hand.
Now I'd heard before that when making candy one has to be very careful with the molten sugar. Well, now I know from personal experience - molten sugar is sticky, it keeps on burning, its only redeeming feature is that it's soluble in cold water.
Am I glad that I know that the best first aid for a burn is to put it under running cold water - oh yes I am.
So if there's a moral to this story it could be that one should beware of grabbing hot buns, in case one ends up in a sticky situation and gets ones fingers burned. (sorry, I couldn't resist)
On another note - I read Joel's blog entry on software pricing last night, after it was forwarded to me by a colleague. He goes into some detail regarding demand curves, profit maximisation and price discrimination. It's a good read, and I agree with Joel that studying at least first year microeconomics is a damn handy thing to do, just in case you're a CompSci student wondering what filler subject to take to make up the points. Just don't sweat the daft graphs... you're really not allowed to use trivial algebra to solve the problem, you really do have to draw the four complementary graphs to get full marks on the exam ;)