Year: 2006
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1,000km of Solitude
Today, I again cycled into work and back. The commute in was fine, albeit pitch black, but on the way home (also pitch black), the heavens opened – and just when I was half a kilometer from the nearest shelter so I couldn’t even take refuge whilst I pulled the rain cover over my CamelBak. Within minutes I was soaked, and slipping all over everywhere in the mud. It was 5degC, and the wind was a force to be reckoned with, almost blowing me off my bike a couple of times – and inexplicably always being against me, regardless of… Read more
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Anyone for a quick game of scrobble?
Ever since I got my iPod I’ve wanted to find a way to list my ‘recently played’ tracks on this Blogsite. There are a few WordPress plugins and widgets that claim to do this, but they all seemed overly-complicated, requiring additional e-mail accounts, modified server permissions, and god knows what else. So what with having a life to live and all, I never found the time to dig into them and get any of them working properly. Then last week a buddy responded to a post of mine in the Music category, mentioning Last.fm which he said tracked people’s listening… Read more
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Best-selling vs. Best
This week another chart/list is published. Television music channel VH1 has compiled a list of the ‘Best-sold UK Albums of All Time’.  Compiling such lists seems to have become a major preoccupation with the music press over the last couple of years – something I can only attribute to lazy journalism (and the main reason I cancelled my subscription to Q after 10 years). VH1 claims their new list has more credibility than most because it is compiled purely from actual sales figures for the past 50-some years. The full chart runs to 100 albums, but for brevity, the top… Read more
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iTunes Saved The Radio Star
Another month, another 10 free downloads from the iTunes Store courtesy of Belgacom. Last month I went for building the perfect compilation from my youth. This month I took a diffferent approach. Regular readers will know that I listen to 3wk Internet Radio quite a lot. Whenever I hear something I really like, I make a note of it on my handheld, and then whenever I’m next in a record store or on Amazon.com and stuck for something to spend my hard-earned moolah on, I’ll whip out the list and pick something from it. Sometimes I hear a couple of things… Read more
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Hangin’ On The Telephone
OK, today’s pet peeve is the piped music you get when you’re put on hold on the telephone. I’m in work, it’s 2:15 AM, and we’re working a serious system issue. There are about two dozen of us, physically located everywhere from Guatemala through USA to Belgium, and several points inbetween, and all on the same conference call. Now some idiot has put the call ‘on hold’ which means that the rest of us get piped music blaring out. And because the cheapo conference call system we have here hands the ‘talking stick’ to one person at a time, and… Read more