So if you’re in Soho before April 15th and up for something to munch on, take this voucher along to the store and you can get a lovely fresh wrap with a choice of exotic fillings for £2.99 – which is, I’m helpfully told, up to £1.26 (just less than a third) off.

It has something to do with I Love Soho – though what that is – beyond a big bundle of Flash, I’m not entirely sure myself yet.

Oh, and they seem to be infinitely replicable, so do pass them on…

Let me know, if you go for it, what you think of the grub.

Others have covered this more quickly than me, but I thought I’d say something beyond what I said on Seesmic last week – http://seesmic.com/v/6XRvg23fSW

Charlie said he didn’t want samples. I do. I’m much happier with my shower gel and play-doh than with a plastic monster a calendar and a badge in the shape of a vodka bottle. If something that comes in this isn’t useful, it had better be completely, mindblowingly, gobsmackingly beautiful – cereal box shaped like a book? Nah.

While the crayons made of soap are potentially also useful, the thing that made my brain scream more than anything was the lametrocious rubbish written about it:

“A set of crayons that are really soap tell a story about how Nissan’s not what you expect.” which in my very very humble opinion is the biggest load of self-justifying, bollockshite I’ll read in the context of advertising copy this year. God I hope so, I couldn’t bear anything more slimy and contrived.

Like Roo, I like the recyclability of the packaging, but I’m looking forward to much cooler and less wanky stuff next time please.

UPDATE: in the comments on the picture on flickr, mike heath says:

“That is really funny that you got Black and White playdoh in your Sony Bravia promo item. err… ‘Colour like no other’ LOL! That is probably a collectors piece, like a misprinted stamp Bit of a Homer Simpson moment at the packing factory!”

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which was spookily appended to an update from Sarah saying she didn’t like tips either…

not enough data yet to see whether their frequency is related to the frequency of my updates

of course the tip I really want to see is “Reply with ‘Hey Twitter, Don’t be Evil’ to turn off tips”

I remember being interested in their previous (and still going strong) product, mobizines (Scott describes mippin as mobizines on steroids) but was put off by the restricted content available and the java client. These Refresh guys have taken the good idea from it – we want to be able to read cool stuff as easily on the phone as you do on your desktop – but they’ve moved away from the horrors of transcoding a 15″ experience in its entirety down to a variety of small mobile screens and gone for the fact that most sites already produce content in a presentation-independent form – their RSS feed.

As a service, you can look at it two ways – as a “publisher” I get to include my RSS feed in their database, then if I want to I can opt to splice ads into the feed (in the same way that feedburner does) from which Mippin takes a small cut. Bigger publishers will want to customise the way that their feed is displayed and they can do this too.

As a “user” I can subscribe to the feeds I want and I can search for terms (or URLs) to find new stuff – so for example putting the URL for this blog into the search box returns a picture and title and a link for each post. A click on the link takes me to an uncluttered version of the post. Perhaps a little too uncluttered – the links have been stripped. But there is another link there to go to the original post (and you can pass it on by mail, sms or twitter – nice) There’s a kind of history page too so I can go to my regular reads. I see it primarily as an RSS reader for my phone. So of course my feature requests are to make it behave a bit more like an aggregator – I’d like a river of news view. I’d like to be able to define groups of subscriptions and get a river of news from each. I’d also like to be able to turn off ads, oh yes and I’d also like a zeitgeist tagcloud to be able to see what’s hot. Scott was boasting that moving from downloadable client to browser meant that their development times have been slashed, so I expect to see my requests implemented well before Christmas

As an aside, the experience is still dependent on the browser though – I want a really good free browser for my Windows Mobile Smartphone – IE just doesn’t cut the mustard, although I’m also tempted by a Nokia 800 or an iTouch.

Disclosure: I was given two cups of delicious coffee (and offered more). There was cake. Mike Butcher ate some cake, but I stuck to coffee.

I really hope that the ENO has the courage to keep that material up and to carry on with this experiment now and into future – it adds a layer of interestingness before you see the show as well as afterwards – it’s icing on the cake. As I say I haven’t seen the show, so I don’t know if this is an occasion to peel the icing off and give the cake to the dog or whether this is professional critics talking out of their arses again. Now is the time for the Carmen folk to get the conversation really going – fight back or surrender, doesn’t matter which, but say something.

The thing is that critics are part of the problem with opening up performance to a wider audience. The good news is that their power is diminishing as we gain the opportunity to hear people we know and trust talk about what they like and don’t like. I much prefer getting recommendations from my friends and I look forward to seeing some ordinary people’s reaction to Carmen, people who don’t have any prejudice against ENO and don’t already have a fixed opinion about how this opera needs to be done in London today.

I went to a C4 Education screening last night entitled “TV is dead?” My answer – read my blog (two years ago! – funnily enough about the same time as I started thinking about blogging for theatre) The bit in the programme where, if I’d been at home, I’d have been shouting at the telly, was when someone from the Beeb trotted out the old line that in future, as media professionals, they would be the people that we could trust to sift out the crap. NO, BBC, STOP! I don’t want your opinion on what’s crap and what’s not, I want you to make excellent programmes that no one else can make. More “Dr Who”, “Comics Britannia”, “Windscale”, “The Mighty Boosh” (oh God! *More* Storyville, not less!!!!) and fewer animals stuck up trees and celebrities who can’t tap dance.

Phew!

I really liked that younger people were included in the debate in a fairly unpatronising way, though friends and other regular readers know what I think of panel sessions.

Missing from last night was any recognition that the internet is about social interaction not content delivery (just like TV has always been) and so you should be concentrating on making stuff that people want to interact around rather than worrying about how they get it and whether everyone’s paid exactly the right money (whole other rant on that one – tell us straight – how much money gets spent on protecting rights? – how much more or less is it than the amount of money you currently lose to “piracy” – how much more money might you actually make if you weren’t so tight arsed about it all – *hint* watch Radiohead very carefully)

Also missing was any glimmer of understanding that advertising might not work any more. The real question here is “TV Advertising is Dead?” And it comes in two parts – 1. People don’t want to be interrupted or fed commercial information any more, they want it self-service and 2. The current advertising sales model is based on pulling the wool over the eyes of advertisers with extrapolations from sample audiences – what happens when you (and they) start to get real audience numbers in real time based on actual attention data from your viewers/subscribers in a form that makes comparison with other online media forms more like-for-like?

Let me first be clear about the basis on which I took part. I wasn’t paid anything for this, I just got a loan of a new laptop for a week. Toshiba covered the cost of couriering the machine to and from me.

I gave up being nerdy and spec-obsessed a long time ago (well the spec-obsessed part anyway) so I can’t reel off lots of geek-speak about it, and my current laptop is a Tosh Satellite, so that was my main point of comparison. A week really isn’t very long to try it out. I was working hard when it arrived so didn’t have time to play until a few days in. I wish though that I’d taken the time because actually it was so much faster than my Satellite that I could have got things done much more quickly….

The speed comes courtesy of a dual core processor, 1GB of RAM and a 95GB hard drive. Weight-wise, it was like all laptops – heavier than you want it to be. It was wide enough to fit in my social media empire bag but only just and made getting other kit in and out tricky. But the screen did feel pleasantly wide.

It worked fine with everything I do (though for a 1 week trial it was a bore to have to download and install my staples of Firefox, Audacity, SonicStage, The Gimp & Core FTP), and far faster than any of the other machines I have to hand – in fact I was gobsmacked by how quickly video got processed. But without experience of other similarly-specced machines, I can’t say for certain whether this is the *best* choice of dual core/1GB/95GB option.

This really isn’t about this machine, it’s about me. I hanker for something prettier and more out-of-the-box functional and useful for what I do, or else a big change from my usual environment. If I’d had longer, I’d have tried installing Ubuntu – that might have made for a more interesting review, but it might also have ruined my all of my personal and business relationships while I sat engrossed in tweaking device drivers.

They’re at it again. I thought I saw Jason saying nooooo-waaaaay Rosé to this but nevertheless Hugh’s just announced The Stormhoek/Threshers 40% off voucher for getting shitfaced by Easter (well April 1st anyway – uh-oh that date rings alarm bells).

Oh but read the small print: “cannot be exchanged at Main Line stations, Petrol Forecourts, Center Parcs or Student Unions.”

Download the coupon from here and take it to Threshers for 40% off – yes really. Now you know that I don’t drink, but that doesn’t make me a spoilsport – 40% off is, like, a lot.

You don’t need me to remind you what happened last time.

1. What does “only original vouchers accepted” mean in this context? Do I have to dial up my mail on my phone and show the waiter the pic? Or am I allowed to print it out. If I can print it out, what’s to stop me printing out 50 and giving them to my friends? And what, apart from their high ethical standards, is to stop anyone reading this downloading it and using it?

2. does “exclusivley” mean the same as “exclusively” (I’m just guessing here)

3. I didn’t realise I’d signed up to be a wagamamama covent garden member. I don’t know if I like wagamamama’s food as much as I like wagamama’s. AFAIK there are zero wagamamama covent garden members so this is a bit worthless really.