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I’m pretty anal with my music collection. I like it all to follow a naming convention and album art where possible. I like a lot of the James Bond theme songs of old, just for nostalgic reasons more than anything else. So as I was tiding up “License to Kill” I noticed this gem of a cover. Back in 89 they obviously didn’t have Photoshop. Look at the size of his head!

Next time you think about forwarding me that all so funny email. please apply this decision process - no exceptions, I’m a bitter man.

Came across this website where someone has taken the time to research performing artists real names. Some real classics in there, you can see why they changed their names. Some that I liked:

Bono (U2) - Paul Hewson
Chris de Burgh - Christopher Davison
Alice Cooper - Vincent Furnier
Dido - Florian Cloud de Bounevialle Armstrong
Bob Dylan - Robert Zimmerman
The Edge (U2) - David Evans
Boy George - George O’Dowd
Gary Glitter - Paul Gadd
MC Hammer - Stanley Burrel
LL Cool J - James Smith
Ludacris - Christopher Bridges
Lulu - Marie Lawrie
Marilyn Manson - Brian Warner
Ricky Martin - Enrique Morales
Meat Loaf - Marvin Aday
George Micheal - Yorgos Panayiotou
Moby - Richard Hall
Ozzy Osbourne - Osbourne
Prince - Prince Rogers Nelson
Busta Rhymes - Trevor Smith
Ja Rule - Jeffery Atkins
Shaggy - Orville Burrell (related to Hammer?)
Fatboy Slim - Quentin Cook
Tina Turner - Annie Bullock

Time for me to cast my (overly?) critical opinion on a few things that have caught my eye of late.

Black Cars
My previous car was a white car, not only is white a fantastic colour for a lot of cars right now, but contrary to what you might believe they are actually not that bad for keeping clean. The dirt you generally pick up on the road is a light coloured silt, so all this does to a white car is make it look duller. As long as you wash it once a month it comes up looking gleaming and it’s actually a joy to wash a white car as you can see it coming up nicely.

Another by product of washing cars is micro scratches. Those little thin hair line scratches you inevitably pick up by cleaning the car. These become unnoticeable with white cars so they look brand, spanking new every time.

Water marks on a white car when you wash it on a hot day?….nope.

So with all that said you would think I would have gotten a white car again. Oh but no. This new car isn’t my car, it’s our car and with that I lost all my voting powers when I entered into negotiation with a woman. And so we got a black car.

Haha, ok that’s a bit of poetic license at play, I can’t remember the circumstances that well but I do remember a very limited colour selection for the car we were after. I kind of wanted white but thought it might be better for something different and conceded on the black car because it looks the best out of the other colours… until it sees the cold light of day that is, the light of day that makes it manky!

By god, I’ve never known a car to get so dirty. I spent almost 2 hours cleaning it today, only to take it down the road and for it to look dirty again!

I think we’ve both learnt a lesson with black cars, they look amazing in the show room, they look amazing when you spend 2 hours cleaning them, but in real life they are just a pain in the backside! Get a white car, if not get a lighter colour car, after all Hitler’s motor was black.

Heathrow Terminal 5
I used Heathrow’s new multi billion, all singing, all baggage losing terminal this weekend. I’ve got to say, it’s some place.

Anyone that’s used Heathrow before knows it’s a shambles. It’s hardly any wonder, up until now it’s been a bit of a patchwork quilt of an airport, bolted on terminals, bolted on bus stations, bolted on tube stations, you name it, there’s just never been any coherence at Heathrow since its inception.

T5 is completely different though. I arrived on the Tube, which is directly underneath the terminal. Admittedly, where I was going after I got off the tube wasn’t as intuitive as it could have been (what’s the point in having escalators if you need to use the lifts to get to departures?), but I got there in the end and it wasn’t that far either.

As you get into the check-in area you begin to see what T5 is all about, enormous sections focused on one key thing, keeping the right people in the right places and keeping them moving forward. For example, the check-in area doesn’t have people fresh off of planes hauling luggage out to taxi ranks, nor does it have shops. It has individual check-in booths which have passages to the side of them to encourage you to keep walking forward.

Then it’s onto security. International and Domestic security is the same thing now, not really ideal if you’re trying to get on a domestic flight quickly and stuck in long queues but I can see why they took that decision. I’ve only ever been frisked a couple of times at airports in the past, this time my watch set off the metal detector. I then got an overzealous security guy frisking me a little too much if I’m honest. Sometimes you think common sense would prevail, I’m a UK citizen with a shirt and trousers on and no hand luggage, what am I going to do? Tickle the airport to death?

After the groping ordeal I found myself in the departure lounge. First impressions? SPEND MONEY NOW. Don’t expect to find a McDonald’s here. Gordon Ramsay - yes, Gucci - yes, Harrod’s - yes, in fact it’s like mini Mayfair. This is where BAA obviously intend to make back the money they forked out for T5. Eventually I found a Pret amongst all the glitz and glamour. It was a pricey sandwich and that’s saying something when you are talking about Pret who are already have tasty prices to go with their tasty sandwiches. I ate my lunch and noticed all the seats face towards the shops and not away from them, no coincidence there I suspect.

Almost time for the flight so I make my way to the gate and park my bum just at the side of the gate. As I was reading something on my phone I was subconsciously listening for that familiar call from the BA staff… “British Airways would like to welcome you blah blah blah, and we are ready to start boarding”. But strangely it never came. Instead I noticed a bit of commotion around the gate, looked up and noticed people had reacted to the “Boarding” notice on the electronic boards. I hung back just to confirm I hadn’t missed something but again no calls. Seems they have decided to take the impersonal route and use computers instead of friendly voices. I felt that to be a bit needlessly sterile really. On the flight I went and my first T5 departure was over. Verdict, it’s a little bit sterile and the smell of capitalism is as strong as anywhere in the world but you can see what they are doing with T5 departures, it’s all about human traffic and getting more money out them.

Arrivals on the other hand… Find me a better airport arrivals experience and you can have all the cash in my wallet (all 2 pounds of it). Honestly, I can’t describe how refreshing an experience it was compared to the old Heathrow terminals. The getting off the plane and getting your bag thing is still the same, the notice boards are a little more concise this time round though. But the real winner is after your bags arrive and its time to go home. You enter a hall dedicated to getting you out the place. Ticket machines all the way down, information boards, information desks, travel agents, currency exchange, signs to show you the tube is on the right, and it literally is, coaches one way, car pick up the other and taxi pick up has its own section. Organised, coordinated transport at last.

My choice of travel was the coach on this occasion, off I trotted to the National Express booth, punched in the details, it tells me the next bus is in 10 mins, I buy the ticket and literally walk 100 yards to the bus stop - simple yet perfect. Additionally, T5 has junction access to the M25 which none of the others do… what a difference.

Bad press aside I think you will find T5 to be a more enjoyable experience if you have come to live with the Heathrow way of the past. Those of you who enjoy the luxury of quiet airports might not hate using Heathrow as much now, so everyone’s a winner… except those 300,000 people who lost their bag.

Yvonne’s Amateur Dramatics
The review of Yvonne’s play is in the works. I was going to bash it out tonight but the above content dragged on a bit. Hopefully I will get something up this week. Stay tuned.

I’ve had a month off the blog, but I get that now and again. Without further ado let’s get the show back on the road.

I always like recommending new technology I’ve come across. Here’s two recommendations for you.

iPhone
Cast your mind back to this post from January 10th 2007 where I say “Apple will never take me alive as far as I’m concerned”. Or what about this post from February 9th 2007 where I squaffed at Apple’s claims that the iPhone was “5 years ahead of the game”.

Well you could say that a lot has changed in those 14 or so months, so much so that I now own an iPhone.

Before I explain why I got myself one it’s important to understand why I might be appearing to contradict myself. I don’t like contradicting myself with the majority of things in life but I actually quite like getting proven wrong when it comes to technology. Not so much proven wrong by another person’s opinion on it but when I form a different opinion because the technology evolved and embraced the competition and the things I hated about it in the first place. The Playstation 3 is a good example. I totally slated the PS3 on here on a number of occasions and whilst I still feel the gaming side of the platform lacks depth, the multimedia side is superb. The tipping point there was at the turn of the year Sony updated the PS3 with Divx/Xvid steaming and of course Blu-Ray, rightly or wrongly, won the HD format war.

So I guess the same can be said about the iPhone. When, originally announced it wasn’t an exciting proposition. In fact it was a money maker for Apple, squeeze as much from the Apple loving consumer as possible. After all, you have that iPod, the next easy step was to do away with your phone and combine the two. The concept, whilst good in theory, was sold with a dirty stench of gimmickry from Apple in my opinion.

14  months on and iPhone has evolved to some degree. Apple realised they couldn’t lock down the platform and opened it up to developers, soon hundreds of small useful apps and games started to appear. The nerds cracked the iPhone and made it available to all networks and also allowed customs apps to be installed in some very easy steps. The former is very relevant in the UK as O2 still has the monopoly for the iPhones.

Coupled with the fact that I was using my iPod nano more and more for podcasts and what not, the iPhone was certainly appearing on my radar. In fact, with the new model due for release in June, with new features and 3G, it was very likely going to be my next phone.

But that’s all until last week. At the beginning of the week, on the back of the imminent new model, O2 reduced the price of the iPhone to £169. Fast forward to Wednesday. After some drunken frolics, I find my HTC Kaiser Windows Mobile Phone taking a tumble to the ground and subsequently breaking. I need a new phone.

iPhone for £169. Bobs yer uncle. You might be wondering how I didn’t have to sign up a new contract. Simple. If you go into any Carphone Warehouse, they sell you the iPhone and ask you to sign up the contract with O2 in your own time i.e. the purchase with the Carphone Warehouse is a contract for the phone only, not the mobile tariff. This sounds like suicide from O2 given that the hacks for the iPhone are so abundant. Some have speculated that they undersold the first rendition of the iPhone and are either clearing the decks for the 2nd version, or they don’t have exclusivity for the 2nd one and are trying to cash in the 1st one whilst they can. Either way the consumer wins here. £169 for a mean piece of technology is a win win for me.

I’m waffling a bit here. But let me just summarize by saying the iPhone experience against the Windows Mobile experience is just night and day. In fact going back to the 5 year comment in my blog from Feb 07, at the current rate of Windows Mobile development it DOES feel like I’ve jumped 5 years into the future. Do yourself a favour and cash in on this great deal.

Freesat
Everyone’s bought these fancy “HD-Ready” or “True-HD” tellies recently. It was the biggest scam going for consumer electronic shops in the UK; piggy backing off technology that was evolving in the other parts of the world such as Asia and America where the content was readily available to make use of the technology. In the UK the consumer electronic stores were selling people some kind of High Definition dream when really the only way to experience that from a TV point of view it to buy an expensive Sky HD box and the subscription that comes with that. Cut that out and you are left with some crappy definition blurry Freeview reception.

Well that’s all about to change next month with something called Freesat. Freesat is a joint venture between BBC and ITV, whereby they will offer their own satellite service for free (the clue is in the name I know). It’s the exact same satellites Sky bounce off, so no need to adjust the dish but you need a new set top box. What this will give you is pretty much all the channels that you see on normal Freeview, plus the potential for hundreds more, similar to Sky. Importantly though, there will be a number of HD feeds, so now you can start making use of that HD-Ready TV.

The HD boxes cost £149 and it’s just a plug in and play effort if you have an existing Sky dish. At launch they won’t have the PVR (Sky+ type record features) HD version but that will follow shortly after launch on May 8th.

The Fish Tank(s)
I mentioned a few posts ago we were setting up some fish tanks in the house. I say tanks plural because we do need to maintain a small quarantine tank so that any new fish can’t wipe out the entire big tank with a rogue disease. The small one is also a good learning ground.

Anyway, Von has set up a blog about the processes involved, you can see it over at http://fish-sy.blogspot.com if you are interested in the fishes we are keeping. Hint, we don’t have any fishes yet, just critters.

While we are talking about Von I thought I would just mention that she’s taken up a stage career. Originally she went along to help out a bunch of amateur dramatics and she got roped into a non speaking part, the premiere was tonight. I will give some kind of review when I go to see it on Friday. I don’t know what the demand is for mute actresses but I have high hopes of a Hollywood career and me retiring as a housewife and cutting about wae Posh spice.

Some Facebook Weirdness
I was playing about with Facebook just there, just to reply to a message someone sent me. Anyway, I noticed a few new features they added (they might be old, I only visit if I get the odd infrequent email alert that something has happened on my account). The friend suggestion thing is spookily accurate for me. What it does is gather up a league table of contacts who aren’t on your list but a lot of your contacts have added. Anyway the 3 people it suggested I might know, well I did funnily enough. I don’t like any of them though.

Anyway, after I sent the message and continued to mess about and ended up on some ‘add friends’ screen where you can upload your contact list. So I tried that to see if I’d missed anyone who was on my Outlook contacts list but not linked in Facebook, it chucked up a few, I added them. Good deal.

Then I got thinking. Gmail, which handles my mail, keeps a copy of all my mail transactions. When you reply to someone that emails you it presumes they should be a contact. So I thought, hmmmm this could be interesting. I exported the contacts list, some 240 of them, most of which I didn’t know and uploaded it to Facebook. Up sprang a bunch of matches it had found against email addresses… a few crackpot ex’s to put it mildly, ignored them, but then I started recognising names of people that I had sold items to on eBay. Because I had responded to them by email, Gmail had added them as contacts… it was pretty weird and funny at the same time seeing all these people that had bought stuff off you. Social network stalking is a great past time, I recommend it… oh wait you already do that don’t you?

Anyway, you can do this yourself without notifying them that you are doing it. Alternatively just do something more interesting.

I’ll try not to make the next post as wordy… night y’all.

Life seems to be a bit boring at the moment hence the lack of posts from me…….hoping to have some creative inspiration back soon!

Addiction
Remember I was talking about Irn-Bru in my last post? It’s a vice of mine, apt that I should have a can sitting here right now. But anyway, you might call me an addict. However, there is one thing I think we are all addicted to and don’t even know it - toothpaste. Think about it, you’ll buy the same brand and same flavour of toothpaste over and over. Why? Because that’s the stuff you use, you don’t even question why. Do you think a crack addict questions why he’s buying his next rock? Uh huh.

And do you ever go to bed having forgotten to brush your teeth. You feel dirty, like you need a shot of toothpaste, a compulsion, if you will. Still not addicted?

Then one day you find yourself round at your friends house. What’s this? A different flavour of toothpaste? Yuck it tastes like soggy flour. I need MY gear.

That my friend, is an addiction, your brain conditioning itself to rely on chemicals going into your body.

Just thinking about this more. Why can I still remember the Aquafresh jingle from the 80’s? You know the “Aquafresh is all 3, 3 in 1 protection for your family”.

What are the toothpaste companies doing to us man! I’m away for some coke.

Morrissey
One thing has been raising my anger levels to new heights for the last month. Compounded with the things that anger me in life (which is a lot), every day I’ve been going into the train station and I see the billboard ads. One is particularly getting my back up. It’s some post for Morrissey’s latest album.

I can’t really explain why but it’s just the expression on the poster. I would go as far to say it might actually be the most punchable face I’ve ever seen in my life.

“Ok Morrissey, new album cover, lets get the poses going. Ok can you start off looking like a total twat… perfect.”

Have a look you will see what I mean. Please don’t point out I have anger issues in the comments. I know I have anger issues, without my anger there would be no blog. It’s part of my therapy.

Pingu
I’m currently doing some work in the financial sector at the moment. Anyway in the office I’m based at just now there is a Starbucks. Sure enough most people in the office do the morning pilgrimage for their obscure teas and coffees.

As you wait for your coffee there is a TV at the end of the counter, usually with BBC News 24 on. At that time in the morning it is usually financial news, interviews and stock tickers running on screen… all exciting stuff for a financial based company and its employees you’d think.

Of all the people that go through the Starbucks probably only about 25% of those people actually pay any attention to this TV when it has BBC News 24 on.

But this morning, something was different. I joined the queue which was relatively long but noticed at the end of the queue everyone was engrossed in the telly. After yesterday, with the crazy guy running on to the runway of Heathrow, I expected it must be something serious on the news. Oh but no. As I got down the queue I could suddenly now see the TV. Bloody Pingu.

I kid you not, smartly dressed, very professional looking, business people all encapsulated by a kid on penguin that makes funny noises. Now you know what happened to Northern Rock. Some wise crack in the coffee shop stuck the TV on Nickelodeon and lost the remote. All the bankers got stuck in Starbucks watching Pingu. They went bust. I lost 2 grand.

Pingu you lost me 2 grand you little bastard, I’m going to slap you with a fish if I see you.

The Wiki Game
This is a great game to pass the time and maybe learn something aswell. For those that don’t know it let me explain the rules. You all know Wikipedia, not only the greatest single resource of information on the internet but the single greatest resource of finding obscure nonsense.

You take 2 random articles from Wiki, by using this link.

The first one is your start, the 2nd is your finish.

Now by clicking on the hyperlinks in the content of the Wiki only you need to navigate to the 2nd page in as few clicks as possible.

There are some ground rules:
No pressing back on the browser unless you are backtracking your answer when complete for verification purposes.
The content section of the Wiki only i.e. none of the left menu bar, no search, nothing. From the title of the wiki down the way.
No external links at the bottom.
Any little navigational links or subcontext links at the very bottom in the smaller writing are also invalid links.

Refer here for clarification on the rules

Ok so here goes. I’ll run a competition on 3 of these games see who can come up with the least amount of clicks.

Game 1:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Coalition_against_Censorship
to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_Beverly_Waterway_Canal

Game 2:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salsaton
to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Prescott

Game 3:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopewell_culture
to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_%28magazine%29

I think the trick here is actually to read the ‘goal’ Wiki first then try and figure out what would be an incoming link to the Wiki and some how navigate to it from the content links.

Good luck, I’ll post my score in the comments when I get some time to do it.

C’mon, own up. Some of you must be aspiring artists. “If only I had practiced more”…..”I wish I could set aside some time”. The excuses are endless in your head. I know I do it, not with art, but other things.

But fear not, because I’m here to help (as usual).

If you are going to start out in art seriously, like many things, you start low and work up your way up the proverbial ladder. In the art world the lowest rung is probably a “colouring in” book. You know, get the crayons out and colour in between the lines. We all did it as kids.

I hear you all gasping though. Fear not, however. This is not a children’s colouring in book. Oh no this is more. Much more. So much more you just can’t afford to miss this book. It will change your life.

So thank me down in the comments, I’ve just enlightened your artistic side. Ladies and Gentleman, I give you the colouring in book link and once you’ve done that one feel free to move onto the next level (Not Suitable for Work).

Enjoy and C U Next Tuesday guys.