All posts by Armand

Food

Eat Soup reviews

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I love Eat Soup. It’s been a major part of helping me get through the last six months of dieting. Studies show that soup fills you up more, for the same amount of calories and I believe this to be true.

There are few other places that do as tasty, healthy soup in my neigbhourhood, and few reviews online to tell you if today’s “Big Bold” tastes of awesome or, erm, the other thing. So I thought I’d do some reviews, as I’m eating it in some form nearly every day.

First one will follow shortly – Eat’s Hungarian Ghoulash.

Incidentally, much as I love the soup, Eat themselves are a bit annoying. Big queues, occasionally surly staff and I’ve been ‘short souped’ there a number of times… I keep hoping that @eat_news on Twitter will notice, but they never do. Needless to say, I don’t eat there for free. *sigh*. Ah well, they’re nowhere nearly as bad as the Soup Nazi…

Update – Eat got in touch today, apologised & offered me some vouchers to say sorry. Thanks guys, you rock! Will take a little extra satisfaction in the soups those vouchers get me, and will no doubt keep on reviewing…

Personal

Stag done

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Amazing stag do. I really do lived a charmed life. Huge thanks gradually going out to everyone. It involved…

LOTSA nice wine
2 races to the sea at night
1 batch of throwing rocks and rocks
2x 5k runs to East Wittering & back (from WW)
1x 13th place ‘Special Award’ in Go-Kart tourney
1x Aston Martin drive
1x Boat drive
1x rubber ring tow behind said boat
1x Morris Minor drive
2x swims in sea (in September, in England)
1x session of dance music in a barn in the middle of nowhere (Thursdays, people)
2x absinthe and some other unspecified alcoholic beverages
12x candles & flame torches welcoming us home at 4am on Saturday
17x superhero t-shirts
LOTSA BACON
Some marmite

And crucially:
18x amazing friends and friend’s parents hosting us.

I may supplement this list as other bits of awesomeness I experienced this weekend resurface in memory…

Gradually getting back to normal today…

Current affairs, Television

Missing a television event

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I didn’t watch Derren Brown’s lottery guessing bonanza last night. I caught a few minutes of it but due to general hecticness sleep was required more than experiencing the event. That said, I knew he was going to manage it and I’m going to be subjected to speculation as to how he did it today…

Sadly it is likely that it was a trick, camera timing, secret headsets etc. – as whilst I have great fait in Derren’s mentalism skills, I do think that actual magic is beyond his beardy face. Sadly. Chris thinks he’s worked it out – frame rate magic – will look forward to the true secret unveiled…

Derren is totally rock and roll, though.

Music, Work

The dangers of collaborative playlists

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Had my work stag do on Friday night. It was awesome, needless to say – I work with good people, and my work best men did an exemplary job in organising the venues.

In the hour or so before we left the office, as is our habit on a Friday afternoon, we kicked off a collaborative playlist on Spotify to get people in the mood. Given my impending marriage, you might expect some cheesey / romantic tunes, and indeed, there were one or two of those. However, it seems that there are some cynics in the house (and even more on Twitter as @qwghlm, @krsjn, @flashboy and @jat45 started kicking in their own contributions). Think Charlie Brooker’s moodkill playlist and you’ll have a sense of what’s on there.

If you want to see how the final playlist shaped up, point Spotify here. Be warned; there are some fairly horrible songs in there :-).

Update

Weekend of awesome

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Done so many wonderful things this weekend with wonderful people at the 10th annual coast party Damian hosts. A few brief highlights (in no particular order):

Spent time talking, singing, dancing and hanging out with some of the loveliest people in the world (the whole wide world)
Drove a Porsche
Ran 12 miles
Tried ‘rock’ fish (Huss, a white fish)
Threw actual rocks at other rocks
Contributed to the construction of a giant sand village (chief Architect: Nicky. Chief Engineer: Pob)
Got bowled out in one ball in a game of beach cricket, sulked
Swum in indoor and outdoor pools
BBQ-ed
DJ-ed for 3 hours
Danced for 3-4 hours
Told many embarrassing story about ‘Banana Oops’ Damian
Got styled as Bowie (check out my current FB profile pic)
Acted out all the moves to ‘I’m on a boat’
Ate fresh apples off a tree
Lost a sprint race
Won a push-up challenge
Failed to ignite a grass-filled moat/trench defence at midnight on Saturday
Learned how to play an exceedingly complex board game designed to halt the rise of Cthulu (Arkham Horror, I think)
Was impressed by Serena’s mad poetry skills.
Failed to play any poker due to an inadvertently early bedtime
Failed to go to bed till morning due to an advertently late bedtime
Referenced FoTC at every possible occasion
Tried to take some good pictures with my recently acquired Nikon D-80 (need to work out depth of field).
Discovered I actually like marmite. Never thought I did.

Amazing weekend. Massive props to all involved. Big up yourselves.

Media & Marketing, Technology

Augmented reality all over the shop

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@tim has a big piece in today’s FT about Augmented Reality and its potential in advertising. In addition to trying out the FT’s AR app, you could also try Intel’s thin laptop app and check out the AR magician on YouTube. The former two require flash, a webcam, printer and miscellaneous plugin. The latter requires flash, headphones and some imagination.

Augmented reality is awesome and full of practical potential – in design, medicine, gaming and no doubt a dozen other fields – but I’m not surprised its kicking off in marketing first. We seem to be a good test bed for this kind of stuff and have a few people willing to take chances on reasonably nascent technologies.

Charlie Stross’ Halting State has a number of interesting applications (Google Maps overlays, WoW overlays, police grid overlays amongst them) and is well worth a read if you’re into the topic (and Sci-Fi).

Music

Offspring @ Brixton – mini gig review

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offspring at brixton In a word, awesome. I didn’t particularly know the support acts (Broadway Calls and Rival Schools), but (despite being alright) they paled in comparison to the 80 minutes of high-paced, high adrenaline action the Offspring delivered. Can’t help but think they deliberately mess up the levels on the support acts to make the headliners sound better.

I persuaded Matt to come with me, and despite the fact he’s not a fan, the Offspring’s 20 years of performing and recording (!!) resulted in enough tunes for him to recognise and nod along to. Having lost some weight I was able to do the jump-up-and-down-headbanging-thing (bouncing? that’s not very rock) without injuring my knee, which was pretty satisfying when they played Self-Esteem.

Huge fun.

Amusing to see Dexter play a song on piano too (vid not mine, but courtesy of YouTube). In a separate note, Noodles (whose chat is pretty awful) was one of the most precise guitarists I’ve seen for a while.

Food, Personal

Having targets

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I’ve talked before about the need to have achievable targets for weight loss, and have set any number of arbitrary goals to help motivate me. There are a few that are coming, metric and imperial, spurious and otherwise.

If I lose 1lbs, I will be below 13 st for the first time in years.

If I lose 2lbs, I will drop below 180lbs for the first time in I don’t know how long.

If/when I lose approx 3.5kg more, I will be a ‘Light Heavyweight‘ for the first time in years. I will also have lost 20% of my body mass this year.

If I lose 4-5kg more, I will happily be in the ‘ideal’ weight class on the BMI scale (pre-wedding target) – no longer overweight!

If I lose 14lbs, I’ll be under 12 stone for the first time in forever.

If I lose 8 kg, I’ll be a super-middleweight.

If I lose 10kg, I’ll be a middleweight.

If I lose 11kg, I’ll be in the middle of my ideal weight band (post-honeymoon goal), and I’ll shift into maintenance gear.

It’s incredibly satisfying to have Wii Fit display the message “you have lost 1 st and 8 lbs”… of course, I haven’t been using it often and I had gained the excess weight to begin with, but gradually getting there…

Cannot tell you how much I am looking forward to no longer being on a diet…

Personal

Bacon

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Many of you know I have a longstanding and abiding love of bacon. I don’t really believe there are (m)any things that aren’t improved by the addition of bacon. I even have a song about bacon, that I sing annually when hungover at Damo’s coast parties. It contains one word… you guessed it, it’s bacon. And so when Flashboy, sensitive to the strictures of the wedding diet I’m on, told me not to look at a link when he posted it on Twitter, I naturally ignored him.

100 ways to use a stick of bacon.

Yum. Thanks, Tom. That’s cheered me almost as much as the arrival of my Lex Luthor-esque wedding suit.