Whilst reading Rob Sheffield’s Love Is A Mix Tape, I came across this rather cool quote…
The self is a cloister of remembered sounds.
Cool quote …
02 Wednesday Jan 2008
Posted in General
Counting Crows – new album
02 Wednesday Jan 2008
Posted in Music
Counting Crows have finally announced the release date of their next studio album called “Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings” – which is to be March 25th 2008 although this may well be different for us in the UK. The New Counting Crows album is in this month’s Uncut as a much anticipated album for 2008.
More information can be found at http://www.countingcrows.com
More doom & gloom sales reports
21 Friday Dec 2007
Posted in Music
As the crucial period pre-Christmas period for music sales comes to a close we’re starting to already see more doom and gloom reports which will ultimately be blamed on peer-2-peer sites and so on. However these statistics wont be examined within the context of the wider economy – such as a general economic down turn and consumer confidence post credit crunch. The figures that Digital Music released today also point out the number of albums that have gone platinum compared to last year as another indicator. However such indicators need good as many good albums being released each year, and I’d say that this year just isn’t the case.
A final factor in all of this is market competition and prices in relation to inflation. This Christmas not a day goes by without being offered some sort of discount by the likes of HMV, Bang CD and CD Wow, and the prices are the same or cheaper than last year – which means in real terms prices have dropped by 2-3%.
Desktop Wallpapers & Screensavers – National Geographic Photography
19 Wednesday Dec 2007
Posted in Photography
The National Geographic magazine has a reputation for having some stunning 
images. Well the good news is that they’re making some of their images available as Desktop Wallpapers and Screensavers.
del.icio.us tags: National Geographic, wallpapers, screensavers, photos, images, photography, nature
Self Portraiture
18 Tuesday Dec 2007
Posted in Photography
Many photography enthusiasts (myself included) first found our way to behind the camera as a simple act of trying to get out of being photographed and as a result discovered the pleasure of capturing images. Despite this, sooner or later it is good to have a picture of our selves, be it for a website etc. Given our sensitivity to having our picture taken, who better to get the picture than ourselves? Getting a self portrait does present a few problems. Fortunately there are a few websites that provide advice on photography, of those photodoto.com provides a nice page of suggestions on how to capture a good sharp self portrait.
Ike Turner dies
13 Thursday Dec 2007
Posted in Music
Ike Turner accredited with one of Rock n Roll’s first songs (Rocket 88) and vilified former husband of Tina Turner has died today at his home in LA. More information can be seen at BBC NEWS – US soul musician Ike Turner dies.
Glamis Castle
10 Monday Dec 2007
Posted in General
Over the weekend I had a bit of a sort out in our office at home and found slides that I had neither scanned or properly filed away. So yesterday I started to scan them and found some lovely pictures I’d taken of places such as Glamis Castle in Scotland (the childhood home of Queen Elizabeth II).
I’ll be adding more pictures as I slowly work my way through scanning the slides. To see more visit our Flickr site – http://photos.mp3monster.org
Office Move induced quiet
04 Tuesday Dec 2007
Posted in General
I’ve not blogged for the last week or so, as I’ve been immersed in organising and seeing to SeeWhy’s office move from the centre of Windsor to a new better location a couple of miles further out from town. The move has gone near flawlessly thanks to the help of Richard (http://www.redxr.com), and a result our IT network has gone from an inherited patch-up job to a very maintainable, structured solution with expansion capacity and taking advantage of all our resources properly.
So you can see some of the lovely surroundings – the offices are slightly to the left and down of the arrow (try zooming in the image is very well detailed). I also have some photos here.
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, satellite, images
25 Million personal records lost by the government
20 Tuesday Nov 2007
Posted in Technology
The Child Benefit Agency – the UK organization for paying child benefit has managed to loss a couple of CDs containing enough information for various forms of credit and identity fraud to be committed. The BBC NEWS cover the story in more depth.
This in my mind is an illustration of why national Id cards are so dangerously wrong. One of the goals of the Id card is to make it easier to manage people’s Ids. So if the Id data went missing and people rely and trust an Id card as they meant to be ‘safe and secure’ there is huge exposure to fraud and worse.
I’m sure that this story will run for sometime and we will see people blaming the IT, although tragically the problem is actually people, and organizational culture.
Stephen Fry – Getting Overheated
20 Tuesday Nov 2007
Posted in General
The brilliantly funny and hugely intelligent Stephen Fry has started to publish a blog (http://stephenfry.com/blog/). Like Stephen’s other work it is both very observant and literate at a level that makes me feel like a monkey bashing a keyboard.
Stephen’s latest blog (Getting Overheated) entry looks at recent event that occurred whilst filming in America, and from that to the arguments for and against global warming. It is brilliantly reduced to a single point – regardless of which side you fall, are you prepared to gamble the current global climate and the possible risks of climate change to be able to say – told you so? If the climate change predicators are wrong, well egg on face, and we may have made our fossil fuels last a bit longer. If they’re right, well we’re all still here along with hopefully a few other species as well.
Phil (aka MP3Monster)'s Blog 