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My Favourite Blogs of 2010 (Part 2)

7 Dec 2010: Quite heavily biased towards information and science this year, now that I think about it.

My Favourite TV Programmes of 2010 (Part 1)

6 Dec 2010: Here are the TV comedies I enjoyed most this year. I wonder how many will stand the test of time?

My Favourite Magazines of 2010

5 Dec 2010: The three I subscribed to this year without a second thought were The Word, Which? and Private Eye. Here's why.

My Favourite Albums of 2010

4 Dec 2010: And my one-per-day set of lists for Advent continues, this time with a list of favourite albums released this year. Maybe I’m getting old and I’m just far too comfortable in my musical tastes, but in recent years I’ve found it harder and harder to compile this list. Or perhaps it’s been easier and easier, because the problem is, I don’t seem to like that much new stuff. As a result, I think I’m buying less and less too, despite the ease of buying music online. For several years I’ve really tried – but failed – to get into the critics’ top albums (you know the sort of stuff, Joanna Newsom, LCD Soundsystem, Merriweather Post Pavilion, Bon Iver, etc). Now [...]

My Favourite Tweeters of 2010

3 Dec 2010: I’m currently following over 200 people on Twitter, which really has been the medium of the year. It’s so easy to stop following people (and I do) that I can genuinely say I enjoy reading what nearly all of those 200 people have to say. So for today’s list, part of my series of 24 in 24 days, here are half a dozen of my favourite Tweeters. @twisst Twisst ISS alerts is a service set up by the Twisst website which sends you a Tweet every time the International Space Station is passing overhead. Then you can stand outside at night and point at a big bright light crossing the sky and go “oooo”. Seriously, it’s a very clever mixture [...]

My Favourite Podcasts of 2010

2 Dec 2010: Podcasts are fantastic. They actually make me want to go to the gym or for a long walk, just so I can catch up with what’s new. Some are from radio programmes, others are podcast exclusives. Here’s my list of the ones I’ve most looked forward to this year. 1. The Word: A Magazine, A Website, A Podcast, A Way Of Life These people really do get it. Production values are perfectly adequate, but the emphasis is on just three or four people talking. And of course, if you’re a bloke of a certain age, almost everything they talk about makes for compulsive listening. The choice of guest can be a bit hit or miss, especially when it’s yet another [...]

My Favourite Blogs of 2010 (Part 1)

1 Dec 2010: Every day for Advent, I’m going to make a list of favourite things from this year. Maybe it’ll become an annual event, or maybe I won’t even make it through the next 24 days. Anyway, to start off with, here’s the first of three lists of favourite blogs of the year. This one features the three “non-serious” blogs which I enjoyed the most in 2010. “Serious” blogs and “work-related” ones will follow. My Favourite Non-Serious Blogs of 2010 1. Found Shopping Lists Came and went in a few weeks over the summer. It made me laugh every time, not just because it’s funny seeing photos of discarded shopping lists (which it is), but because of the author’s commentaries. Which is [...]

Hat tip to Nintendo

31 Aug 2010: We’re quick to criticise companies who provide awful customer service, so we should draw attention to those who do something brilliant too. A couple of weeks back my son’s Nintendo Wii, which was about two years old, stopped working. The power light was on, but nobody was at home. I plugged the unit into a neighbour’s TV to check the connections weren’t at fault (they weren’t), and – not expecting much joy – typed “Nintendo Wii repair” into Google. I was surprised to find an official Nintendo site as the first result, so I clicked through to The Nintendo Service Centre for the UK. It still seems too good to be true. They provided a freepost label to return the [...]

Ten Things I Liked About The Folk Festival This Year

2 Aug 2010: Ah, another year, another Cambridge Folk Festival. By our best estimates, our 18th year running, and the 13th of living directly opposite the venue, which is nice. Anyway, here are the 10 things I really enjoyed about this year’s festival. I may have missed things I might have enjoyed even more; there’s always far too much going on. But I shall never know. 10. Having my 9-year-old son enjoy some of the music for the first time We’ve been taking him every year since he was a 5-month-old, and he’s (usually) enjoyed the event as a spectacle and for the excitement. But this year was the first time Alex really sat and listened to some of the music and enjoyed [...]

Half Man Half Biscuit, The Junction, Cambridge review

25 Mar 2010: Pic: @baggieboy61 Great gig. More – much more – at the Half Man Half Biscuit Lyrics Project gig review section. There was at least one song which nobody’s heard live for a long time (Footprints). Plenty of “Save BBC 6Music” flyers (below) in evidence everywhere – big respect to whoever’s had those made. Not a mention of the campaign from the band, but that would be a little out of character, to say the least. Gig review/discussion at the Half Man Half Biscuit Lyrics Project Gig review at Life In The Bus Lane Gig review by Paul Hudson with pics and videos Gig Review at From Nought To Sixty with recording of one song Gig Review at Local Secrets

6Music: get it while it lasts

3 Mar 2010: I don’t hold out much hope for 6Music. David Hepworth quotes Bob Harris as saying: “It’s my experience that when management has decided to do something like this, they’ve thought about it a lot and nothing is going to change their mind.” There doesn’t seem to be much logic in the public arguments from the BBC about why they should close it. Only 0.7 million listeners? Not bad for a station on DAB only, which is available in under 30% of households and about four cars in the whole of the UK. The untouchable Radio 3 has about two and a half times the number of listeners, despite being available to (presumably) three times as many households. The cost? £9M [...]

Cambridge University 800th Anniversary Finale Lightshow

18 Jan 2010: The university lit up two of its most famous buildings this weekend – Kings College and The Senate House – with a lightshow created by Ross Ashton themed around scientific research. On the Sunday night there were several thousand people there, and it was a typically civilised Cambridge event. Alex and I loved it. Here’s the inevitable home movie wot I made:

People don’t read any more

2 Jan 2010: I was disappointed enough that I couldn’t think of a single new album which excited me in 2009. But it was even more alarming to look at the pile of unread books by my bedside and realise that I’d probably read fewer books in 2009 than in any year since I learned to read. But hang on a minute. I’m giving myself more relaxation time at home nowadays than I have for many years, and I’m not a telly addict. So what’s going on? The answer is that I’m reading far more current affairs material than ever before. A lot more. This might be newspapers and magazines (print on paper is certainly not dead in this household), but equally it [...]

I can’t escape (my music in 2009)

1 Jan 2010: Thanks to @borborygmus for reminding me that my musical review of 2009 is constantly being written on my Last.fm page, and whatever I claim to find cool, there’s no escaping from what I actually listened to. And it turns out that what I actually listened to over the course of a year (other than when I was in my car) was about 12,500 songs, which works out at well over 30 a day. Not bad, and something you can probably only achieve if you work from home. However, I rarely choose what I listen to directly. I merge a couple of iTunes smart playlists, one which selects the music from my iTunes library which I haven’t played for over a [...]

My 5 favourite movies of the decade (finally)

26 Dec 2009: At last, you get to discover if it was worth the wait. Frankly, no, it wasn’t. If you missed numbers 10 to 6 yesterday, they were here. 5. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Peter Jackson, 2002) My favourite of the three, if only because of the astonishingly unsettling scene where everyone was waiting before the Battle of Helms Deep. Brrr… Sauron’s forces increase. His allies grow. The Ringwraiths return in an even more frightening form. Saruman’s army of Uruk Hai is ready to launch an assault against Aragorn and the people of Rohan. Yet, the Fellowship is broken and Boromir is dead. For the little hope that is left, Frodo and Sam march on into Mordor, unprotected. [...]
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