Conor’s Bandon Blog

I know the whole Twitter thing is still completely alien to a lot of people. How many wondered what the hell the papers were on about when discussing Dan Boyle’s “tweet“?

Here’s a suggestion for dipping your toe in and getting a handle on it all. Karwig Wines in Carrigaline is running the third “Twebt” which is a Twitter wine-tasting competition (Bubble Brothers and Curious Wines ran the first two).

The idea is very simple. You get a bottle of wine from Joe and his gang in Karwig’s and it is wrapped up so you can’t see the label. At an agreed time, 9pm Sunday March 7th, people open the wine and start tasting it and putting their tasting notes up on Twitter.Then they start guessing the country, grape etc and maybe even the exact wine.

It’s a bit of fun and those taking part range from gurus to tipplers and everyone in between.

Full details on taking part are on Brian Clayton’s Blog and on the Karwig’s Blog. If you just want to watch what happens then you can see all the tweets in the run-up and on the night over at http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23twebt.

I know the tech stuff annoys the foodie readers here and vice versa. So last week I started up a new Posterous blog over on conoroneill.net. It is much more high volume than this blog and consists mainly of pointers to interesting tech stuff, opinions thereof and the odd funny bit. So basically pretty much anything except food/Bandon, which will remain here.

I’ll do the odd cross-reference when it makes sense. And hopefully the volume here will improve over the Spring as I get into a gardening groove. next post up is one on Jimmy Doherty’s “From Crop to Shop” which may be one of the most educational programmes about food broadcast in the past ten years.

The idea of relentlessly banging on about weight and fitness here and on Twitter didn’t really work. There are only two people that I follow on Twitter doing it and one of them is my sister. But I have been marking major milestones and today was one of them.

So from Dec 29th to Feb 9th, I have lost 20 pounds.

How? No booze, no snacking, no sweets, normal breakfast, normal lunch, smaller dinner, fruit whenever I’m peckish and a small amount of treadmill Mon-Fri.

My BMI, body fat and visceral fat are all still atrocious but on the way down.

On advice from @adventsparky on Twitter, we invested in a body fat analysis machine (aka tarted up weighing scales) on Amazon. This Omron BF510 Body Fat & Composition Bathroom Scales has both feet pads and handgrips to give a much more accurate analysis of fat by running a small signal through your body.

I then track that in a spreadsheet in Google Docs.

Next major milestone will be the 2 stone mark. I figure about another 2ish weeks for that.

Eventual aim is 4+ stone reduction by mid-late summer. Fingers crossed.

Very very funny.