Where's Wil?

As much as it doesn't suck to be British, sometimes it really sucks to be British. I'm talking, of course, about the iPhone. Whilst all my buddies Stateside are gearing up - I know that Kevin, Leo and Jason already have at least one each - I'm sat here with, well, a crappy Motorola. If I had an American address, or if I could get one unlocked, I'd have one in a heartbeat. But alas, it is not to be - I am iPhoneless until the UK launch. Dagnabbit. And I'm such anApple fanboy, too - why have ou abandoned me Steve, why??!

While I have a Nikon D50 DSLR for serious photography situations, it's not exactly what you'd call pocketable. Since the good weather is here and I'll be jetting around various places, I thought I'd pick myself up a new pocket camera.

Off the basis of this review at TR, I picked up the Exilim EX-S770. It's really very thin, light, and has a 7MP sensor in it. There's a 3" screen on the back which looks huge, and I love it - from a usability point of view it's quick to turn on, quick to shoot and quick to turn off again. It's at the more expensive end of 7MP portables, but it's so small and snappy it's worth it.

I took this photo of Christchurch, in Oxford, with it (seen here after a little PhotoChopping for colour correction). It works well and it's so easy to slip into my bag I don't even know it's there. I anticipate penty more sneaky snaps going forward, now I don't have to have a DSLR chained round my neck.

Still on the wagon. got up and ran this morning, I'm eating well, and the weight is still coming off. The graph of doom projects that I'll hit 190 on September 1, which would be sweet.

Yesterday was a fairly standard day - muesli for breakfast with some juice (low-calorie, small dose muesli that is), a fruit salad for lunch, chicken club salad for dinner and a few cubes of choccie to tide my over. All in all, once you factor in the Starbucks coffee factor, I hit 1400 cals yesterday and ran for 40 minutes, burning around 250 calories. So, a pretty good day. Aiming for the same thing today.

Starting to get more and more comments from friends who see me about being slender. This is pleasing me.

So I basically had a week off fatblogging last week. I found that I needed a bit of a mental break from the constant pressure on myself to keep the weight loss up, and I wanted to just take a little time to actually enjoy the weight that I had lost instead of focusing on the weight still to shift. I bought a couple of new pairs of trousers, a new top, and ate a little dessert here and there. I even took the exercise easy, just running twice.

It was refreshing. Whilst I love the weight loss and I love the way my body is starting to look, it can be intense some times and its healthy to break out. Today I'm back on the wagon, with scrambled egg for breakfast, soup for lunch and a skinny latte for a snack this afternoon. I'm going to be back out running, assuming the rain holds off, and I'm planning to try and keep up with the 2 pounds a week rate of loss - meaning I should hit my new target, 190, by the end of August. If I can manage that, I'll be super chuffed, and then I'll see about stopping.

Whether or not I stop, I think, will depend on how my body looks. Whilst I definitely look and feel thinner than I did - 4" off my waist proves that - I do still feel like I have a lot of weight left to lose, particularly on my torso if not anywhere else. When Jason and I first started this, our goal was Daniel Craig, and I still have a long way to go to get to that point.

So I'm happy to be back at it today, and to focus the mind and body on staying healthy. Keep checking back, and do leave comments and links to your own progress in the comments.

The dudes over at MacTalk AU have an interview with me up on the site today. Nice bunch of guys, and it's always nice to be pitched as a 'notable' user of anything. I talk about my love of Yojimbo and Bits on Wheels, and reminisce over my first Mac (a Powerbook Ti, FWIW). Apparently most of the communities disagrees with me that iSync sucks, so I guess I can't be always right. We'll see when the iPhone hits.

Talking of which, there's rumours that AT&T will let you buy out the iPhone contract for $175. If someone can work out how to get a new sim card in this thing and unlock it (surely, surely this has to happen - have hackers been beaten yet?) then this could be a good advanced purchase. A 6 month headstart on my continent would rock. We'll see.

I just checked out my photos from today. I am officially pinning this one on my wall. I look thinner than I've ever looked in a photo, ever. This is awesome. So, fatblogging for the win, and here's to the next 20 pounds or so.

I just bought some new jeans. My old ones were 44" waist. These new ones are 38". I also just bought the first clothes in about 10 years that were 'Large', not 'Xtra Large'. WTFBBQ!

I had an awesome day out at Silverstone today. The home of British Formula 1, I spent the day watching Williams do test laps courtesy of Lenovo, which is sponsoring the team.

Great weather, plenty of pit lane action, paddock passes and some face time with Williams' head of IT. Good stuff. I even won a magnum of champagne for this photo, judged the best of the day from the 100+ people there with Williams. Which made me chuffed.

There are some more photos from the day on my Flickr. F1 rocks, and this was a grade A junket. So cheers to Lenovo.

After a short hiatus, I'm on This Week In Tech this episode. It was a hoot to record, as every episode with Merlin is. I think we managed to persuade Steve Gibson to do a Security Now on Mac security, which would be pretty interesting for a lot of people.

Great article from LA Times writer Alex Pham here:

Because it's considered cool among the tech set, blogging is a socially acceptable way for men to approach the subject of weight loss, Harris said.

"I really feel that it is de-stigmatizing the issue of weight for men," he said. "People are realizing that discussing weight can be a good thing for guys, and that it's not girly. It's geeky."

Some more good quotes from me and Jason in the article. Definitely go and check it out.

I wrote this at NMK today. Interesting stuff, I think.

Slimebuckets, pollution, and web conservation Calacanis style.

I enjoyed writing this. I haven't written a long piece in a while now.

I'm at the NMK Forum in London today. If you read the blog, or listen to Twit, or whatever, come say hi. I'll post up my thoughts from the day later on.

So far - lots about social media, since that's the topic of the conference. Lots of people very upbeat about commenting and reader interaction. My question - is social media an excuse to under-fund real journalism? Quite probably.

So I'm sat in the lobby of St Martin's Hotel, when who should walk through but all of Motley Crue, including famed rocker Tommy Lee. Apparently they played Shepherds Bush last night. They looked, well, rock'n'roll.

They had this group of massive security guys with them though. I was thinking, why do rockers who are as hardcore as Motley Crue need security? Then the answer hit me - it's to protect us from them. Probably.

Mental. They had a retinue of blondes in tow which seemed, well, appropriate. Rock on.

Haaaaallelujah!

Haaaaallelujah!

Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Halleeelllluuuuuujah!

To make a vague bastardisation of a very famous refrain.

Today is the day that the scales showed me 210 pounds, thats 15 stones and no pounds bizzotches. When I started on this fatblogging kick at the beginning of February, I was 246 pounds, and 210 was my goal weight - a little lower than my 'dating weight' at college. Today, here I am.

I'm not going to celebrate prematurely. I'm well aware that I might be 211 tomorrow. So I'm going to save the 'buy yourself something nice' reward for the day that I am 210 for the third day in a row. Then I'll know I've arrived.

(By the way, it's totally going to be the new making of Star Wars book).

I'm chuffed right now. I'm off to watch some more West Wing. (I just started watching the first disc of the first series, having never seen it before, and I'm totally hooked).

I'm sure many of you are readers of the excellent Gaping Void blog, which features awesome cartoons and the missives of a new media marketer by the name of Hugh McLeod. And if not, why not?

Through Hugh I was turned onto the joy of Stormhoek wine, which never fails to go down a treat with friends. It's South African, and always tastes delish (especially the Pinotage, check it out). So, when the opportunity arose to win a free bottle (see the site for deets), I jumped at the chance!

Cheers Hugh! This bottle is on, well, you!

Tom @ Beatwax let me know that fans of the Fantastic Four are being asked to contribute to a new Wiki devoted exclusively to the new film, Rise of the Silver Surfer.

Seems to me that the project is symbolic of the increasing importance movie studios are placing on online 'grass roots' marketing. Vertical Wikis are nothing new - Jimmy Wales has started a company devoted solely to them, Wikia - but Who Is The Silver Surfer is perhaps one of the first devoted to just one film.

The Wiki is being pushed as a way for fans of the upcoming movie to 'interact with the brand' and 'personalise' their experience of the film. Personally, I'd be more excited about the chance to interact with comic book babe Jessica Alba, rather than a man from outer space on a surfboard, but I could be in the minority. Over 1000 people have already contributed, so I could be wrong.

Grass roots marketing has many, insipid forms - including the horrendous not-Sony-honest Playstation blog we saw over Christmas and the terrible idea of paying per post. But at least this is up front and attempting to be useful. Beatwax continues to do interesting stuff.

A while back, I wrote an essay on blogging ethics and some of the factors that go into the pot when considering the reliability of an online news source. I got inspiration today for what I think will be my next essay, on globalisation.

I have become interested in the phenomonen for a number of reasons, particularly as they pertain to the tech industry. Number one, over here, it has been ruled illegal to buy CDs from abroad to then import them. Obviously, buying CDs from places like the Far East is cheaper for British consumers, as the cost of sale over there is much lower. Access to the internet has created a global marketplace for goods, and consumers don't want to pay £10 on the high street for a CD when they can import it for £6 or £7. Whilst record companies don't want us buying abroad in this way, they manufacture all their CDs in the Far East for precisely this reason, creating an outrageous hypocrisy.

Second, skills are on the increase everywhere. I saw a study that said the number of first class graduates in English in India will soon outstrip the US, due to the sheer number of people in that country. That's going to create some interesting workforce dynamics. Intel has much of its CPU design done by incredibly clever people in Israel, something that just wasn't really possible as little as a decade ago.

Globalisation has also created an industry in global news, with up to the minute correspondence from around the globe, with the smallest breaking stories spreading like wildfire.

This is all incredibly interesting to me, and I plan to take a couple of trips to do a bit of research. If any company wants to sponsor the feature with a couple of plane tickets, feel free to hook that up. I think it should be a good read. (Interestingly, 279 people have viewed my previous essay on Scribd. I'd like to think they found it informative! However, it is a big gap from the hundreds of thousands of people that used to read my stuff on bit-tech. Oh well.)

Still at 213. That is cool by me. I just rocked over from 212 this morning, so hopefully I might hit that tomorrow.

Have managed to keep the weight loss going by upping the running, and I'm amazed at what I can actually do now. Last month, I was running my 3.5 mile circular route in about 50 minutes, with a minimum of 5 minutes walk in the middle. On Sunday, I did it in just over 35 minutes without stopping. I'm pretty chuffed with that.