Sunday Times spellchecker replaces Mitt Romney with a more roomy candidate

27 Jan 2008: Click to enlarge Leafing through this morning’s Sunday Times, I thought for a moment that US presidential candidate Mitt Romney had a new nickname of “Roomy”, which I hadn’t heard before. But it would appear to be that in a tempestuous late night battle at the newspaper, a plucky little Spellchecker had taken on the might of the subs desk and slipped in a classic while they weren’t looking. “Romney? Do you mean Roomy?” it sneakily asked. “Replace All”, they happily clicked. “What, 28 times?”, asked the Spellchecker, nervously…

First Amongst Last Tracks

24 Jan 2008: So Rock Dad alerted me to the Guardian Unlimited debate on the best final tracks on albums. And once you’ve started thinking about that sort of thing, you have to see it through. Obviously. Now, we’re not talking here about looking at the list of your 100 favourite songs of all time and marking which ones happen to be the final track on an album. That would be silly. We’re talking about the tracks which bring an album to a fitting climax, leaving you thinking “Wow!” and perhaps feeling much better disposed towards the body of work than you might have done otherwise. Perhaps they might inspire you to simply let the album play through for a second (or third, [...]

Modern Pop Is Rubbish

11 Jan 2008: So Stuart Maconie reckons the golden age of pop is now, does he? Well, I see his point, but for the first time in many years – perhaps ever – I just haven’t been able to put together a top ten albums of the year, because I can’t find ten I like. My initial conclusion from that is, naturally, that I’ve just become a grumpy old reactionary, but it’s equally possible that 2007 was just rubbish for new recorded music. I went to the best list of lists of top albums of the year and found very little decent stuff which I’d forgotten about. Sure, it was nice to have Bruce back with the E Street Band, but I wasn’t [...]

How to broadcast an event live on the web

9 Jan 2008: So, my God-daughter called me a few months before her wedding in Canada to ask: “Would it be possible to broadcast the wedding live on the internet for the family back in the UK?” And my answer was: “Er… I’ll find out”. Which led me into the fledgling world of live event streaming on the internet. After a short while Googling for appropriate services, I decided the most usable was Ustream.tv, which, incredibly, was also free to use. I set myself up with an account, and made my first broadcast, using my Mac’s built-in camera. It worked fine! I rang up a friend and got him to “tune in” to me waving at the screen, and all seemed well. So [...]

Kevin’s a lucky man

8 Jan 2008: Wow. Just back from the wedding of my God-daughter Mel in Canada. To say she looked pretty would be an understatement. A really nice service and a good send-off for Kevin and Mel in the evening. Of course I wish them all my love and best wishes for the future together.