All posts by Armand

Music, Personal

My musical taste

So, I’ve been classified has having ‘teenage boy’ taste in music. Which seems harsh, but is probably a fair reflection – all my fave West coast rock has its origins in sunshine, skateboards, teenage angst, girl problems, punk culture and, well, crazy melodic guitaring.

Happy to be enjoying an East coast band at the moment, and if anyone has any recommendations for music that someone who likes the Offspring, Blink 182, Green Day and Bowling for Soup (as well as RHCP, Foo Fighters, Collective Soul, BNL and lots of less straightforwardly happy rock) — please let me know.

Oh, and I seem to like some Canadian music, too. Where does that place me?

Internet, Personal

Addicted to eBay

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This always happens when I’m busy and have tonnes of things I should be doing… A Sky Digital box that died under the weight of ages (7 years of heavy use!) led to my researching and purchasing a replacement on eBay, or face the prospect of having my wonderful Tivo box lie fallow and cause me to miss critical episodes of Smallville and the like…

And now, I find myself dipping in and out of eBay far more often than I want to – after all, I don’t really need a Fender Telecaster, or a Media Centre PC, or a PDA… Why am I so materially bound? ;)

Ah well. Did resist making bids on any stupid items but instead bought another set of [[Peter Hamilton]] books… which I can in some way justify as a productive purchase, and which the Indian part of me is pleased with for the discount I got by finding them on Amazon marketplace (it’s the Greg Mandel series).

Internet, Meme, Miscellany

Anagramalorious

Sorry for being slightly blog-happy today but Tom points to Sternest Meanings – an anagram chat engine. It’s not a Turing engine (which I thought it was to begin with and very rapidly worked out otherwise) – but is good for a laugh. Apart from anything else, you can type things in like:

I’m Armand David.

And have it say:

Rid avid madman.

Which I think is quite insightful, really.

‘Sternest meanings’, of course, is an anagram of gem transientness. Obviously, I mean d’uh!

Travel

Food, glorious food…

Ok, so I know I probably enjoy food a little too much, but a little on the international cuisine I’ve been enjoying of late.

In Sardinia I had my first truly Italian pasta – spag bol like I’ve never had before – it tasted *amazing*, despite minimal meat – and think I’ve got the knack down on how to get the pasta to taste right (lots of salt in the water…). Sheila’s also acquired some good sauce making skills, so hopefully the pair of talents will result in some good pasta at Casa David.

I also had a steak wrapped in bacon, which reminded me how good things wrapped in bacon are, some very-rosemary-ed up Roast Beef (a local specialty – also v. tasty) and some really interesting wild boar gnochetti. There was more, but those are the ones that stand out. For those curious – wild boar tasts a bit like grainy, salty beef, horse tastes like pungent, salty, beef, and donkey (apparently) tastes like braising steak. Salt seems a dominant theme in Sardinian cuisine.

In America, I had the culinary experience my unhealthy adult life has bred me for: pizzas the size of a BICYCLE WHEEL (only ever had a slice per sitting but they were *so* good and have set a new standard for me), chinese takeaway that was incredibly cheap and reminded me so much of Seinfeld I expected Kramer to walk in and clear out my fridge (and I had an egg roll – something they *always* order on American TV programmes), the hot dogs like they look in the movies (great!) and a Mexican restaraunt Gem and I went to served us a dish of baked cheese and sausages that tasted outstanding. And I use the word advisedly. Key West added some amazing prawns (‘shrimp’) and possibly the best burger I’ve ever eaten (photo below).

Possibly the best burger I have ever had, EVER

It has been a fattening few weeks. But deliciously so :).

Culture, Current affairs, Personal

England vs Ecuador

Anyone who knows me will tell you quite how bad I am at watching or paying any attention to sport, but have been getting into (bits of) this world cup. Never mind that my sweepstake draws were universally appalling (one of my golden boot strikers didn’t even make the squad – Ewerthon) — I have at least been watching the England games when I can. Saw the first one in Sardinia, the second in NYC, read the live commentary to the Sweden match (depressing as it was) on my train back from Heathrow. Today I watched the Ecuador match with friends in West London.

And it was exciting. And I was getting involved. And – its pretty cool. I can’t afford another time-absorbing hobby (and don’t think I’m that interested anyway), but it is fun to kind of share it with my (almost all much more interested in football) friends – although a few of football fans in the room did not appreciate my stating the obvious (“damn, that was close” on the Ecuador shot in the first 20 minutes). Alan Hanson, I’m not.

Anyway, come on my adopted nation, ENG-ER-LAND! Bring on the quarter finals — oh, and don’t worry Daf, I still support Wales for the Rugby ;).

Travel

Holidays – Sardinia

I’ve decided that a ‘what I did on my holidays’ type post would be slightly, well, like a 10th grade school assignment, so thought it’d be worth giving some brief impressions, interspersed with some nice photography. Starting with (click click) Sardi-nia. America will take longer for me to do – a lot more photos, and a lot more things going on, but will hopefully be up soon!

Sardinia was my first holiday away with a group of friends with the intent of doing nothing in, well, ever. Was a completely new experience and the sun and food in Sardinia were a great accompaniment; we were in a private villa with a pool in a bizarre collective of sunbaked pink villas on a hill outside the village of Stintino, on the northwest coast of the island. The weather was astonishing; crystal blue skies, strong (sometimes overly strong!) cooling breezes, the crisp, cold mediterrenean (my first time in that particular sea) and lots of time was spent relaxing, eating, playing bizarre games and having great chat. Oh, and drinking a lot and throwing and/or kicking balls around too. And there were more… exiciting moments.

The full photoset is where it usually is, but here are a selection of images that kind of capture the spirit:

Our favourite bus
The halo is around Rach's head
Rach jumping off the boat Group shot on pier Pob-berg (Zoid-Pob?)
Spex 'p'-ing in the road
Neragga (?) in distance
Three cool amigos
Matt, sillyface #81 DSC01641
James, looking cool on beach

And here’s a list of the the different types of animal we ate whilst there — n.b. this may not be comprehensive!!

    horse
    wild boar
    lamb
    beef
    pig (bacon & ham)
    donkey
    crayfish
    prawns
    squid
    swordfish

…not to mention at least 3 types of cheese. Not too shabby, eh? Was a great trip with a great group of people, and I’m really looking forward to my next visit to the Med. I can say that if the first thing you have to do, having been travelling since about 3am, is descend and then climb 656 steps in blazing heat whilst wearing a rugby shirt (they told me it was quite cold in the evenings, so I came prepared!) — well, then, you might sweat some.

Software, Technology

Digital dilemma

Inspired by Charles’ efforts to improve the performance of his Mac without reinstalling the O/S, and finally fed up with the bloating that my Windows install had taken, I resolved this morning to fix it by whatever means necessary – even considering the possibility of a total reinstall and digging up the OEM Windows CD my Dell came with (this, of course, mocked as ‘Windows approach’ by Mac afficionados everywhere). And it had to be done in time for the football…

So I started – initially just uninstalling the useless freeware that I’ve installed over the last two years (the length of time this Windows install has been active and, erm, “stable”), and gradually started to see improvement. After a couple of major hiccups, I decided I needed to clean the bits of the registry that were beginning to really nark me off (bizarre applications for long-since removed hardware still launching, for example…) – and a manual session with ‘regedit’ followed. But there were still bugs.

Frustrated, and reluctant to reinstall Windows and let the Mac-lovers have their moment of triumph, I found a shareware registry doctor, which I’ve since bought, called Advanced Registry Doctor. It rocks: not only does it actually fix some of the more tedious problems I was experiencing, but it lets you browse the startup entries in your registry — and as well as letting you deselect or delete certain components, it (shock, horror) tells you what they are and if you need them active! Good performance bonus there. It also had a registry defragmentation option, which seems to have immediately improved the performance of my PC.

Having done all that, I’ve upgraded a couple of device drivers and the machine seems pretty stable – my NAS drive has thus far failed to cause the blue screen of death, despite a couple of hours continuous operation (it was pretty bad before). I’m geekily pleased with myself.

Of course, it sounds like Charles sorted out his Mac much more easily, and I’m not really winning and PC vs Mac debates here. And I certainly won’t make a grand defence of the system architecture that causes a PC to experience a hundred years of human aging in a 2 year period — my machine was experiencing some serious moments of senile dementia — but it is good to find a workaround. Recommend the above software to anyone whose machine has started to grunt under the weight of its age and either can’t face the prospect of reinstalling or doesn’t have the necessary knowledge to do so.

P.s. I don’t hate Macs, btw. My relationship with Apple is a bit more complex than that and I may blog about it sometime. Suffice to say that I think there’s a lot of truth in this.

Culture, Personal

Life narrative

I know there are some other [[Scrubs]] fans out there who will, like me, feel considerable empathy for JD’s internal narrative. I certainly spend a disproportionate amount of time gazing into the distance, introspecting about one thing or another.

Not quite this:

It was a dark and stormy night. Armand, clad in a tasteful Cowboy-Bebop style shirt and tan trousers stood on the top of his apartment block’s short set of entry stairs and prepared to brace the biting wind that infiltrated London like the a gust of… well, something cold

But more:

Do I really want to have that tub of Chinese food for lunch today? I’ve resolved to be healthy, I should get a salad. But I’m ill, and it tastes soooooo good. Sod it, Hong Kong café it is…

That said, since I’ve started being more… diligent about transcribing my unique brand of observational humour and insight here, I’ve started blogging in my head. It’s faintly disturbing and probably overwhelmingly geeky, but I quite enjoy the structure this blog gives my thoughts and the outlet for my puns it provides. It’s one of the reasons I carry around a small black notebook (as I’ve mentioned before)…

Is it just me?

Media & Marketing, Technology

Rocket BOOM

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Don’t know how its taken me this long to find out about it (there’s just SO much on this internet thing, I guess) but Robert Scoble pointed me at Rocketboom, which Chris and I decided was a ‘hot geek vlog’. That is, a video log for geeks hosted by a hot chick (as opposed to a vlog for hot geeks) – which, as a bonus, seems really intelligent and professionally put together. Which is hardly surprising, as, according to lots of different sites, it is apparently one of the most popular vlogs on the internet. Check the host, Amanda’s, wikipedia article for more.

And damn, she’s a year younger than me. I want to be famous on the internet (and elsewhere). Wonder if Amanda might at some stage be interested in helping Chris and I our with our new top secret project… (watch this space).

Gaming, Technology

Xbox 360 price drop?

Might be an Amazon specific thing, but they’re doing a 14% discount on the core system, which suggests to me that MS are doing some discounting… either that or Amazon are taking a gamble that you’ll buy a bunch of full priced peripherals to support that.

In any case: stack £180 for an Xbox360 against £425 for a PS3, and factor in the additional 5 months headstart MS still have and what do you get…? Have Sony messed it up big time, this time?

I suspect that I might actually end up getting my first-ever Nintendo console (before I get the new MS/Sony ones) if they can get the WII to work, and give me a decent sports title and hack-and-slash game… we shall see!