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Swine flu update

May 5, 2009 | 0 comments

Pig

I’ve had a bit of a cold over the weekend, and so of course everyone is claiming that I have swine flu. It’s possible, I guess – but it’s far more likely to be man flu.

Swine flu, of course, has already claimed as many victims as Bird flu, the Millennium Bug and the Titanic film combined – all equally and preposterously overhyped pandemics.

But I can’t talk at all today – my throat is sore, so I’m taking it easy. Missing the scheduled conference at that ‘other’ Birmingham University; staying at home and writing things instead.

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Top 100 albums of 2008? No idea.

Dec 30, 2008 | 4 comments

DJ collective
David McInerney, Tom Arnott, Adam Regan and me – after a spectacularly successful DJ gig at the Hare and Hounds, Kings Heath

I often do top 10 or 20 lists (and sometimes even top 100 lists) of music from the year gone by. I generally spend quite a bit of time over this, and then I end up agonising about the order I’ve put things in, and the things that it later turns out I forgot to include.

Fortunately (I suppose), this year, the overwhelming majority of the music I listened to was at least 25 years old (I had a bit of a souljazz binge) – so it would be pointless to try and list my top current records, as it’d just be a list of records that I actually happened to hear, rather than a selection of the best out of a larger pile.

So instead, I thought I’d approach things a bit differently this time around. It’s a year in review, without mentioning records that I like.

Instead, here’s a list of a things I thought were pretty cool about 2008 as I experienced it. These are some of the things I got to do, places I visited, projects I’ve been involved in and interesting stuff I encountered.

They’re not really in any sensible and comparable grouping like pop records would be – and so they are in no particular order. And nor is there a nice round number of them.

This list represents my Top Several Things and Stuff of 2008.

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The past decade

Nov 26, 2008 | 2 comments

rioI reflected yesterday afternoon that I’ve now been a university lecturer for 10 years. I started toward the end of 1998, filling in for my friend Bryce for a few weeks at AUT while he went and did something in the radio industry. He never came back.

It also occurred to me that the first portable mp3 player was released in 1998. It could hold 12 songs, encoded at 128k – and it used a serial port to connect to a Windows 95 machine.

It feels like a lot has happened and a lot has changed over the past 10 years.

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