The US TV show Law and Order is one I watch regularly – and I think I’ve seen every episode of the 22 series of the original show, most of Trial by Jury, most of SVU (although some of it is a bit disturbing). I gave up on Law and Order: Miami, however.
It was entertaining that it spawned Law and Order: UK – and a little disappointing that the first few episodes were retreads of US plots.
Now it seems that the series spin-off from the UK is heading back to the States, and BBC America have produced a handy guide to help translate some of the UK slang. NB, we had to learn the American slang for ourselves the first time around!
Not sure they have the translation of having one’s knackers cut off quite right.
Over the last few days I appear to have stuffed a whole bunch of new things into the “Funnehs” category of my RSS reader – I use Google Reader.
Funnehs is by far the largest single category, although “Nottingham” probably gets the most post, half down to the high amount of traffic in the Nottingham Flickr photos group. I like reading that, because it gives you a flavour of some of the most beautiful bits of the city, as well as some of the most striking for whatever reason. And it’s a great tracker for seasonal events – there are always a flurry of photos showing how Nottingham marks its year, from the winter ice rink in Market Square, through the February big wheel, down to events over the summer and culminating in Goose Fair – a magnet for photographers wanting to show off what they can do with a long exposure in the dark.
But back to the Funnehs – I have a strong liking for sites that take the mickey out of everyday things. It plays well to my extremely sarcastic sense of humour. Several of these links involve swearing.
Why: Ed Miliband, like Cherie Blair, seems to be a difficult person to take a good photo of. There was some suggestion that for a number of years, newspaper editors were deliberately choosing the ones of Cherie that made her mouth look big. Are people deliberately publishing the embarrassing photos of MiliE ?
Why: Don’t you just hate some of these packets that overemphasise their cute homely origins and yet still read like they’ve been in product development with a team of copywriters for months? Yes? So do these guys.
Why: This is the New Yorker cartoon, stripped of its satirical caption and in its place, something more descriptive. The result is weirdly compelling and hilarious.
Why: it’s a regular reminder of the importance of a sense of perspective. When you’ve had your third meeting in a week discussing the content of FOCUS straplines that will be read by few people and digested by even fewer, pop by here to remind yourself what your readers really think.
Interestingly, all of these new blogs use Tumblr, a very simple blog platform that seems to be mainly targetted at people who want to get a lot of photos up cleanly and simply. And what all of them miss is simple “reblogging” buttons – the Cheeseburgr empire always give you free code to reblog their content that automatically links back to their post, thus driving their traffic. The Tumblr blogs don’t seem to do that, unless you’re already a tumblr user.
Well, I never knew that – the theme tune from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was a shortened version of an Eagles track called Journey of the Sorcerer.
I quite like the Eagles. They’re one of a handful of bands I was introduced to during my time in Germany. As part of my degree, I spent six months living at the Otto von Guericke Universität, Magdeburg, in one of the less-visited-by-brits parts of already unvisited East Germany. I was supposed to spend my time productively in quiet reflection and prayer talking to German people and learning the language. Instead, I spent an inordinate amount of time playing Civ on my laptop, reading Usenet in the computer lab and drinking crates of cheap German beer and mixing my own margheritas.
It’s a wonder I ever passed my year abroad, let alone my French/German degree. And yet, bizarrely, all my anxiety dreams about being ill-prepared for exams, which I still get on a regular basis despite having graduated over a decade ago, are always about the French novels I never read ((years later, I was shocked to learn that – spoiler – Mme Bovary dies. Had somehow missed that whilst studying the book)) rather than my frankly appalling grasp on the German language.
Still, of the lasting things that came with me out of my time in Germany were those handful of tracks. I had my radio tuned to Hit Radio Brocken which changed its name shortly before I left and appears to have changed back subsequently. It was one of those commercial radio stations with a short play list, so a number of tracks came up repeatedly, and stuck in my head.
Towards the end of my time there, never quite having understood enough German to hear from the DJs what the songs were, I emailed them to ask. I then hotfooted down Breiter Weg ((literally Wide Way)) (formerly Karl Marx Allee) to Karstadt and bought copies on CD that I could take with me when I moved to Paris.
So, the link to the Eagles? One of the tracks was Hotel California. The CD I bought was Eagles Greatest Hits Vol.2 which had a whole bunch of things on it I really liked and have listened to loads since, particularly Sad Café, New Kid in Town, Seven Bridges Road, and Victim of Love.
Strangely, it wasn’t until years later, when my driving instructor turned out to be a lead guitarist in a Pink Floyd tribute band that dabbled in Eagles tracks, that I even bothered buying Vol.1
. And I’ve never really got into the tracks on that. I’ve never done what I’ve done with other bands over the years, in trying to buy up the back catalogue and find other songs I like, so I never knew it was the Eagles who came up with the distinctive sound that introduces Douglas Adam’s radio masterpiece.
Other tracks in my head that date back to my time in Germany were: Jonny Farnham with the Human League singing the (actually quite creepy when you think about the lyrics) Every Time you Cry:
Surely in any relationship the goal would be to prevent/minimise your partner crying rather than coming up with a bizarre reason why crying is a good thing? Cf Today’s Teardrops. (“yeah yeah yeah!”)
Another song that stuck was the Hollies The Air that I Breathe:
Now the Hollies *were* a band whose back catalogue I bought up. Everything else was shit.
Strange how none of the songs I ended up liking from my time in Germany actually ended up being in German.
When Martin Tod got excited about QR codes a couple of years ago, I got excited too. It looks like an interesting technology that has got to have some fun application that I can do something with ((Newspaper Club is in this category too, but so far, nada))
Martin was initially sceptical that QR codes would ever take off but commenters on his blog attempted to argue him round.
Later, in the general election, Tod produced some posters with a Twitter reference and a QR code in the corner. If I recall rightly, this was more of an in-joke for cognoscenti rather than a large scale production process, and I doubt more than a dozen or so were actually made or displayed. I’m pretty sure far more people will have seen photographs of the posters on the internet than actually saw the posters.
Reading through the list of ten, remembering these are the top ten, all of them seem portrayed as monumental disappointments and missed opportunities for the advertisers who used them. Appearing on ads below ground. Appearing too briefly on TV slots for anyone to scan them. Misunderstanding that any barcode app can read them, not just the Debenhams iPhone tie-in.
Doesn’t that disappointment just vindicate Martin’s original contention that QR codes are never actually going to take off?
It is still a shame, and I’d love to be able to do something funky with them… how about giant posters for Lib Dem Voice at Lib Dem conference…?
So, a few months ago, I wittered endlessly on about needing to replace my phone, laptop and e-reader. I eventually did all those things and am now revelling in a nest of technology. Some of the things I wrote about, but I haven’t said anything about my phone.
After a bit of agonising over whether my first non-Nokia phone in over a decade would be an iPhone or an Android model, I plumped for an HTC Desire, and I am thoroughly enjoying the phone.
Indeed as someone who (eventually) woke up on New Year’s Day, I now totes consider myself vindicated.
Although, having said that, the alarm is one of the many things that have taken some getting used to. The HTC doesn’t appear to turn itself on to ring the alarm, so my old bed time routine of setting the alarm, turning the phone off and plugging it in, for it wake and sound the alarm in the morning has taken some changing.
Now I leave the phone on overnight, albeit plugged in, and I use Locale to realise that it’s night time and turn the sound off, only to turn it back on again just before the alarm is due to sound. This approach is not perfect, as it means I miss late night calls and texts (mostly from Helen Duffett). I could do with an app that lets me tell the phone to silent from now and for the next X hours. Or indeed, I could return to a phone that turns itself on to sound the alarm.
Starting to use the phone was initially a bit of a pain, but got better. In fact, having now used an iPod Touch and an Android phone, I’d characterise the key difference as follows: if you like it to just work, get an iPhone. If you don’t mind – or positively enjoy – tinkering with it a bit to get it just right, then get something Android based. I eventually got the phone’s 7 screens set up something vaguely useful with all the various apps I use. From far left to extreme right they are:
RTM to do list app (not ideal – could do with filling the screen)
Full calendar in month view
Agenda (the next few calendar entries in list form)
(main home) Clock, small agenda, and 4 key icons: camera, gmail, Opera Mini, Foursquare
SMS app
Battery bar, settings button and Mail button for my Council email app
Few more random icons for a few things I use more often
Getting stuff into the phone in the first place had been a bit of a worry. I always used to use Goosync to keep a cloud-based offsite backup of my Nokia as part of my disaster-recovery plan. This meant that behind the scenes, and almost unused by me, Google had my calendar and contacts backed up. As soon as I told the phone the details of my Google Account it started fetching my stuff out of Google and adding it to my phone without me having to do much about it. So thousands of contacts and hundreds of calendar entries are now sitting somewhere in the phone’s memory and bubble up to the surface as and when required.
As I’m with Orange (and have been since 1999 – which is now just about paying dividends in line rental percentage discounts) the phone was pre-loaded with awful Orange apps that are all about making Orange money. It tries to send you to Orange’s own app store and festering pot of expensive ringtones, but eventually I discovered the actual Android Market and installed some apps of my own choosing.
A shout for some of my favourites:
Angry Birds. Fun game that everyone is playing.
Fix My Street – report broken stuff to your local council
Locale – make the phone do stuff automatically based on where it is, like turn silent at work
Our Groceries – lovely, free shopping list app than can be shared by more than one smartphone user to have joint shopping lists.
We were invited to an all-day houseparty for New Year with the same friends I’ve seen the new year in for at least 12 years. Which was like OMG totes lovely.
There are some murmurings about the idea that next year, “we” might like to “go out” for New Year and enjoy dancing and revelry in black tie at a hostelry.
Which is a completely bad idea. It will mean eating expensive mediocre food surrounded by cretins I can’t bear, drinking wine at massively over the normal price. It will also involve dancing. And if that weren’t bad enough we will have to do it rented clothes while the girls get to wear exciting stuff.
No, thanks.
So, anyway, this year. Our hosts borrowed our friend’s Raclette which got switched on and let us cook our own food at various times of the day from midday to midnight. In addition, we all contributed stuff to a buffet. Having been asked to bring savoury stuff, I marinated some chicken breasts slivers overnight in soy, EVOO, lemongrass, ginger, chilli and garlic and then brought it along with a jar of satay sauce. I also took along the leftover turkey and bacon pie I made on the night I forgot I’d agreed to go for a curry, and made some savoury muffins according to this recipe. They were interesting, but not all of them got eaten.
My website has been unreliable for the last year or so.
I host using Dataflame on a shared server. Since this is a small website, as websites go, I share a server with a few other sites. If the software running this site gets out of control, my host steps in and shuts it down, so that the overactive services on my site don’t make the other websites slow down.
Dataflame’s rather unhelpful suggestions have been to update my software (I try and keep my plugins and wordpress installation uptodate anyway) and to optimise my database tables. Logging into the database tool shows there is a tiny potential for optimisation, but I’m sure that can’t have been the cause of the suspension.
So something else seems to be amiss with my website set up. I think the culprit is the Twitter Tools plugin which makes a daily post based on what I tweeted that day. However, sometimes it goes wild and repeatedly posts the same post. Just look back and the New Year’s Day post is there five times.
Twitter Tools do have an online support system, so I have asked them if they have any ideas why I get multiple posts and whether it’s Twitter Tools that’s being a system resource hog.
Meanwhile, if anyone has any suggestions – or if there’s an alternative plugin to do a daily twitter round-up – do let me know.
In the meantime, I think I will set the plugin to run weekly not daily and see if that makes a difference.
which had a whole bunch of things on it I really liked and have listened to loads since, particularly Sad Café, New Kid in Town, Seven Bridges Road, and Victim of Love.
which got switched on and let us cook our own food at various times of the day from midday to midnight. In addition, we all contributed stuff to a buffet. Having been asked to bring savoury stuff, I marinated some chicken breasts slivers overnight in soy, EVOO, lemongrass, ginger, chilli and garlic and then brought it along with a jar of satay sauce. I also took along the leftover turkey and bacon pie I made on the night I forgot I’d agreed to go for a curry, and made some savoury muffins according to 
Niles's Blog 