Our tour of new Soho food places continued when we went to Ryo Japanese Sushi and Noodle Bar for lunch.
Paul and myself had spotted it when we were in The Glassblower across the road the night before, which was good for Something New. You could get anything on the menu as takeaway except the noodles, so I had some tofu, egg and rice as well as some miso soup thrown in.
It was all OK without being particularly memorable, although the 15 minute wait wasn’t really worth it in our fast-paced urban lifestyles.
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We headed back to The Glassblower on Tuesday after work, and I tried a pint of Stella Artois Black for the first time.
Now it wasn’t black, didn’t taste very nice and I felt like sh*t the next day like normal after drinking Stella.
The things I have to do to entertain you dear readers.
I was joining a few jobs on Josie’s website and realised my spacing of a couple of images on the homepage was a bit off in IE9.
Now I’m no HTML or CSS expert, so I fell back onto my tried and trusted <table> tags to align the images. However I couldn’t figure out how best to set the padding and spacing between the cells, but after a bit of searching I learnt about padding styles on cells by using padding-right and the like.
I’m sure there must be better ways of doing it, but I learnt something new and the page looks OK, so I’m happy!
My mom and dad are staying in Hexham next week, so we thought we’d go and see the cottage they’re staying in. What this meant was walking up the steep Causey Hill in Hexham, which was a first for me.
It’s a pretty steep walk up, and the day after my legs are a little stiff. Luckily we didn’t walk right up to Hexham Racecourse at the top, but it took a good 10 minutes longer to walk up than the walk back down. We’ll definitely be driving up when they are staying!
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Following on from my recent culinary experiments, Hilary bought me the “Little Book of Tapas” for more things to try. My first new thing was to try the salty and spicy nuts (insert your own joke here).
As usual they turned out better than they looked. The interesting colour is made by caramelizing sugar in with the spices when frying the pre-roasted nuts, and a combination of paprika, cumin and chilli made them quite spicy too.
We were throwing around ideas at work, and talk got onto how we could integrate IM/Chat into websites. I’d half remembered that Windows Live Messenger had a HTML version, so I thought I’d have a go at getting it working.
After following some useful advice at here I managed to get a very basic demo up and running at http://www.bravelocation.com/chatdemo
However, this wasn’t the easiest of things to do:
- I just checked the page and it’s now complaining about a domain mismatch, even though there isn’t anywhere for me to set that
- I had to remove any Facebook code from the page, as they were interfering with each other in some way
Not a great experience for the developer, and compared to adding Facebook or Twitter code to my site definitely a lot less well thought out. Disappointing really.
Thursday is always a tricky day for me, and this week after being on the lash both Monday and Wednesday and a really busy week at work I was pretty knackered.
Despite the help of my workmates - and I didn’t go with “helping Ross into his chair” - I was at Kings Cross ready to get the train home without reallt anything new.
Anyway, I spotted Cafe Nerd and realised I hadn’t ever got any food from there before, so I bought myself a mushroom and gorgonzola panini, which was really tasty after being toasted.
Not the most exciting new thing for sure, but just enough to keep the streak going - hopefully without too much moaning.
Out for Nick’s birthday, we decided to go (slightly!) further afield than usual and went to The Glassblower on the West end of Brewer Street.
A decent pub with some reasonable beers, nothing fantastic but definitely somewhere I’d go again.
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Where we work in Soho it’s quite near to some “interesting” establishments, although nowhere near as dodgy as it was 6-7 years ago when you’d regularly get accosted on some of the side streets. However I was walking down the usually semi-respectable Brewer Street after a long day at work, and I was approached by a woman offering me all kinds of services.
This was actually a bit off. I don’t mind those things happening if people want to find them out, but it’s not really acceptable to get hassled in broad daylight when you’re just on your way to get something to eat after leaving work down a busy street.
Obviously I refused and went to get some noodles for me tea instead.
Still it was something new, and things have been a bit slow this week (as you’ll soon see!)
I’m doubtful I’ve ever gone for cocktails on a Monday evening before, but for certain I had some new drinks while doing so!
We went to Be@t One in Soho for slightly unknown reasons, and it being happy hour from 5-8 meant we slightly over-indulged. I had a “Fire Starter” (new), “Johnny Cash” (new and totally excellent), an “Old Fashioned” (had before with @pflinton in Bellevue) and a “Manhattan” (probably had before).
They all had pretty big measures of alcohol so we were all a little worse for wear, but it must have been the fruit involved as actually I felt completely fine the morning after. Very strange and welcome!
