Andy's Blog

I’ve just found that one of the almost unconscious problems of having your musical choices aired in realtime, for all who can be bothered to look, is that you start to not choose the music you like but almost choose the music you think others would approve of!

As mentioned in a previous post I am now subscribed to Last.fm, and it seems I am keeping a bit of a sly eye open as to what others would think of the bands and tracks I choose to listen to, and not those I actually enjoy… which is somewhat daft to say the very least.

I joined last.fm to help me find bands I may not have heard of before but are similar in style to what I listen to now, not what I think others would like – I make a feck awful DJ at the best of times.

Ah well, as I sat back at my appointment and received the unpleasant medicine due to me I tuned my headphones into all those classics that got me bouncing around like an eejit in my oh-so-long ago youth… and stuck a mental two fingers up to anyone who might disapprove of my eclectic choices;  Long may I continue to listen to Genesis, The Jam, Bob Marley, The Specials, ZZ Top, etc…

I’ve just subscribed to last.fm, and am happily sharing my esoteric choice in music with whoever can be bothered to browse my shiney new profile to see what I’ve been listening to… and maybe even currently listening to!

Now whilst being an open embracer of the “social network”, and admittedly connecting all my music playing devices to last.fm; such as MixZing on my android phones and exaile on my linux desktop, the decision was a little more practical than just boring the t’interweb with yet more information on me.

For the past six months I’ve been downloading at least 2-3 new albums per month from Amazon, preferably from artists I haven’t heard of before, or at listened to in any great degree.  Why?  Well most of the music I’ve been blown away by recently has all been blindly stumbled across.  Bands such as Archive and The Goo Goo Dolls.  However recently the “misses” are starting to outnumber the “hits” in this admittedly haphazard way of choosing music.

Enter Last.fm and its ability to look at what I am currently listening to and, from analysing what other people with similar tastes are listening to, come up with recommendations on what I may also like.  This is what social networking should be all about and really starts to be “social”.

…and the results so far? Admittedly it’s only day 1, but I have found two bands I hadn’t heard of before and am currently wearing the proverbial needle down listening to ‘em; Matchbox Twenty and Rob Thomas.

Being the sociable animal that I am, you can now see what I’m listening to by looking at the shiny new column on the right, under the “Listening to..” heading.

See, you can find more on the series of tubes than LOLCats and porn!

Is there a difference between Insomnia and just not wanting to go to bed until the wee small hours of the morning?

It’s not that I *can’t* go to sleep, if I was to put head to pillow I would more than probably drop off pretty quickly.  It’s that I don’t feel like putting the head on the pillow in the first place!

I’ve been a ‘Night Owl’ my whole life, ever since the first time I was able to stay up late.  Of course the flip side to this is the morning after… As has been admitted to in previous posts, dragging my carcass from the horizontal to the vertical is nigh on impossible REGARDLESS of the actual numbers of hours slept.

Not sure if this is just a latent psychotic streak on my part or just some sad loner lifestyle.  There is something to be said for seeing the ‘virtual ship in the night’ when you notice others are also up; the sudden appearance of a facebook update and then silence afterwards, the ping of an email, the flickering of someone coming onto MSN (and then off again just as quickly).

More than anything tis just a time to reflect, chill out to some music, update a website, do some coding… and watch others wander darkly through the internet landscape.. See you all tonight?

Safer with a computerless keyboard?

There is a certain laziness that creeps in when riffing off a quick comment. Unfortunately this laziness when armed with a keyboard is where trouble lurks, awaiting its chance to bite you on the unmentionables.

It seems that my writing skills, and its slovenly attributes, change dependant on where I visit when armed with the aforementioned keyboard;

• Blogging: For some reason I can never seem to post a small snippet of what I am upto quite like the talented Mr Fitchett is able to.  A veritable torrent of letters, words, sentences, bullet points and paragraphs gets splurged onto the computer and then gets edited, re-edited, moved around, edited some more, updated, deleted, polished and buffed to within an inch of its life.

The end result is no more eloquent than when it began, but it does probably reflect more what I was trying to get over in my own unique way… most of the time. There being some notable exceptions apparently.

• Twitter: …and in what can only be considered the extreme opposite end of the scale; being forced to voice an experience or thought in 140 characters or less gets you to consider VERY carefully what you want to say and the best way in which to say it.  Of course, as with all things, this can go somewhat awry.

It seems to be in the ‘little’ area between those two extremes that I come unstuck.  The quick reply often done without thought is where unmentionables get the nibble I spoke about at the beginning of this post (way, way back – I did say I tended to splurge on a bit).

Unfortunately, to a greater extent than I should really be doing, you rely on the person reading these unthought out replies to understand what it is you were trying to get across.  Hence, what you thought was a critique of yourself becomes criticism of another which is on the perverse spectrum of where you wanted to be.

Sometimes when a sentence begins with the word “I”, that is where the heart of the sentence lies.

Time to be less flippant online methinks and begin watching, not so much my P’s and Q’s, but my Q’s and M’s and all the combination of letters between the two (look down at your keyboard to understand).

Awww buggar, t’would seem that the powers-that-be have finally swung their Sauron like gaze towards me and wondered; “WTF does he do?”

So I now find myself, just before Christmas, in the position of having my role officially classed as “at risk”.  As my manager helpfully put it at my 1:1 interview; “It’s not you, but your role that’s at risk”.  I think I feel better.

However, I am taking this rather positively and am not *too* down.  It doth give me the opportunity to see what new adventures are available out there and I have about 6 months in which to do it in (or possibly 12 if you read the rather vague HR document in another way; head slanted at a jaunty 30 degree angle kind of way).

That's me that is..

So I am currently calling upon the mighty powers of Web 2.0, and sacrificing my first born upon its altar (sorry Alex but the Internet is a cruel, yet just, deity) to see what can be found for a jobbing IT Guru without actually getting up from my seat… well actually this blog post comes more from a Pod than a seat, but I’m painting a picture here…

…fin!

*Sigh*

Why is it that an exceptionally good weekend can be so easily spoilt by one person’s stream of abuse over MSN?  I am still unclear as to what started this off originally, I am even more unclear as to why it’s continuing…

…and I am totally unsure as to how I should deal with this in the future!

Am on the countdown, in hours, to the official start of my hols for this year!  Not sure I am going to be able to dial in at all during this little break, as we will be in the back of beyond in Spain – in splendid isolation in the hills around Madrid.

Plenty of grounds to go cycling in, our own private pool to splash around in….. and probably no wifi that I can hack into to be able to check in on my facebook progress or update my blog whilst bored… EEEeeeekk!!  For the more mentally balanced amongst you this may not present any kind of problem, but for this technofreak – it is.  I’ll be like a junky without his fix.

Looks like I should be coming back a wee bit fitter than I left, and finally get the boys and myself fully trained up in Saifa and Bassai-Dai.

I have a daily schedule of news catching up, this usually involves the following;

• Listen to BBC Radio 4 whilst driving to work. I usually find that the ‘Today‘ programme is a few days ahead of the mainstream news.
• Read the BBC News website, to catch up on current events.
• Catch up on some blogs, such as Slices Of A Digital Life and Random Acts Of Reality, to see how blogs should actually be written!
• Read my monthly ‘Time‘ magazone to see how our American cousins view the world.
• Skim through my Digg Feed so that my nerdiness is kept in its peak physical condition (the comments in there are also a joy to read, sometimes more than the article they link to)

However, every so often you read something that makes you wince and wish you hadn’t taken the time to click on a link that made you think “what the heck is that?!”. THIS is definitely an Eeeek! moment and one that has made me walk funny in sympathy.

Happy reading…

When’s the time you would usually use a service like the BBC’s iPlayer? A service that lets you view TV shows shown over the past 7 days? Answer: When you are away and not able to view your usual favourite progs.

…and what has the BBC gone and done? They’ve gone and stopped me ‘cos I am in a country with some ‘Johnny Foreigners’! Don’t get me wrong, Spanish TV is not that bad, but the adverts between can be longer than the program in total.

Time to have words methinks and remind them who pays their wages! I already have had to do this once when they launched the iPlayer and insisted I use Micro$oft Windows instead of my beloved Linux.

Just before I flew out to Madrid for Christmas with the in-laws I got myself a little early Christmas present. As some of you will know I am an avid gadget freak and my latest toy is the Nokia N810, which is the latest version of Nokia’s Internet Tablets (which I now have a full suite of).

Well colour me impressed! I haven’t put the damn thing down all Christmas, much to the annoyance of the wife, and am now fully mobile after installing some of my must have apps;

• Pidgin
• Skype
• XChat
• GPE Calendar with Google Calendar Sync
• Canola

Throw into the mix the pre-installed RSS Reader, which is currently downloading all my BBC podcasts, plus the Internet Radio streaming – you find yourself with one happy Troozers

In fact this article was written using the N810! Which brings me to the new habit… actually updating this ste on a more regular basis. Now I have the ability to do this from anywhere, let’s see if I can keep this particular New Years resolution (and try and update it at least as often as Mr Fitchett!)

Happy New Year Y’awl!