So Forty saw a couple of minor changes for me.I changed job
(well overdue, and as liberating as I had been telling everyone ELSE it should be)
I changed attitude
(not much, but little steps....)
and I changed life-partners.
I didn't change life-partners in a 'Dave' way (I'm afraid I had to tell Dave, that after 25 years, there's no getting away from the fact that I am actually a Straight man, I'm sorry, that's just how it is.)
My 'girlfriend' and I decided to make it official, and we married on 20-08-2008.
Now most of you will only remember me as loved-up with Anna Moore, the feisty, sweary, lovely heap of woman that I have been with since 1991, but I have to tell you, she has landed herself with a man with history.
in the next post, I'll make a small, and inaccurate, and woefully deficient list, which will attempt to thank the people that have brushed past me and left me with some of their magic.
Oh god.
I sound like Celine Dion.
posted by Ben Hollingsworth @ 12:48 AM
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Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Just as a test, I'm playing with Tumblr for a while. It appears quicker and easier than Blogger (maybe because there are less options!) so I'll be posting there for a while, I reccommend you try it for a bit.
posted by Ben Hollingsworth @ 10:08 PM
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Say what you like about EasyJet, but they have never dumped me at the wrong airport (Heathrow) 3 hours late, 50 miles from my car, and approximately 10 minutes after the last train has pulled out of the station. KLM? They just did....bastards.
posted by Ben Hollingsworth @ 12:52 AM
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OK, where do I get one of these?
posted by Ben Hollingsworth @ 6:15 PM
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So I get on a train after the lovely Sean drops me at East Croydon (bless him and all his progeny) and head for Brighton. I arrive with forty-twelve thousand other people (haven't they got work in the morning dammit, what are they all doing out so late?!) and head toward the Cab rank.A short wait, and I jump into a random and non-descript Nissan or something, and we head off towards home. Now I like chatting with cab drivers, if they have a view (on anything) it is often different from my own, or at least, from a different perspective, and it's rare these days (you know, the days without a 'local' pub and a circle acquaintances drawn from varied work/life backgrounds) that I get exposed to opinions and observations that are far from my own comfortable middle-class inspired surroundings. (Note to grand-children reading this in 50+ years time : variety is the spice of life and cross cultural/class/attitude interactions are most definitely recommended)
So in my ideal cab driver, I enjoy finding a like-minded soul who, whilst has different likes and dislikes from I, can articulate opinions that extend beyond the 'hang 'em high, this generation don't know they're born, blame the bloody government' standard. Tonight was one such encounter, and we discussed many subjects in my short (but Brighton-ly expensive) ride home from the station. Arriving outside my door, the venerable cabby enquired, "you're not Ben, are you?"
Answering in the affermative, I continued by enquiring, "Yeah, are you still reading my book?".
The random cabby reached under his passenger seat and produced the book I had lent him (in a rather 'merry' state, you may know the "....you MUST read this, its marvellous" state....?) displaying the bookmark placed about 50% of the way through the 600+ page tomb.
"You cant have it back yet though..." he said, "...as a mate in another Cab wants to borrow it after me".
Now Brighton has (at 2001) over 249,000+ people living in it, so I wouldn't like to calculate the chances of any particular person, getting in a particular cab, and the driver recognising his passenger out of x thousand of other passengers he has had in the intervening 9 months. But I bet they're quite large.
The lesson I take from this wee diatribe? Never underestimate how much a small act, can impact the rest of the world.
posted by Ben Hollingsworth @ 11:55 PM
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So I'm sitting unwinding tonight, tweaking a blog-post I've been playing-with over the last month or so (fav. albums..I know, who hasn't seen the 'ultimate list', but I figure I have to do one officially). For some background music, I flick to youtube and pick one of the bands I'm writing about (Adams and the Ants).
I start to thinking : youtube is a time machine.
Stay with me here....I, like many others, dangled a microphone in front of the TV speaker (a single, oval piece of iron and cardboard buried behind teak veneer and 5mm of Pledge) in a vain effort to re-listen to a garbled, white-noise flooded mimed rendition of this weeks top tune.
Youtube allows you to see those people playing in early videos, and on fantastic TV shows like The Old Grey Whistle Test'(a show that was always on too late for me to stay up for, and video-recording technology was still several years away from being discovered on a non-officially recognised Alien saucer in Roswell...)
For example, if you thought Devo was a crass late-seventies joke band, take a peek at 'punk-lite' Devo playing 'Uncontrollable Urge'
Now. . It won't make sense otherwise....
Now that will ONLY have been seen by people my Mothers age (probably, ish) and yet it could prove to certain (not mine or yours...)14 year-olds that music DIDN't start with Snoop Dogg, Guns 'n' Roses or even Kylie (but she HAS been going forever, honestly, look at how WELL she's aged, of course, she had that awful thing, you know, the front of Heya magazine where she wasn't wearing makeup, and after all who can blame her, what with that shit of a boyfriend fucking-off with that skinny bird, you know, looks like Courtney Cox after an acid bath...)
*Tip*
Have a search for 'TOTP' and the year you left school....ie 'TOTP 1984'
*Links* - some good vide...
Wall of Voodoo - Back in Flesh
Adam and the Ants - Never trust a man (with egg on his face)
Adam and the Ants - The Idea
Kid Koala - Moon River (Look especially for about halfway through, when he starts re-writing the whole song!)
Dave Gilmour & Robert Wyatt - Comfortably Numb
That should get you started!
I start to thinking : youtube is a time machine.
Stay with me here....I, like many others, dangled a microphone in front of the TV speaker (a single, oval piece of iron and cardboard buried behind teak veneer and 5mm of Pledge) in a vain effort to re-listen to a garbled, white-noise flooded mimed rendition of this weeks top tune.
Youtube allows you to see those people playing in early videos, and on fantastic TV shows like The Old Grey Whistle Test'(a show that was always on too late for me to stay up for, and video-recording technology was still several years away from being discovered on a non-officially recognised Alien saucer in Roswell...)
For example, if you thought Devo was a crass late-seventies joke band, take a peek at 'punk-lite' Devo playing 'Uncontrollable Urge'
Now. . It won't make sense otherwise....
Now that will ONLY have been seen by people my Mothers age (probably, ish) and yet it could prove to certain (not mine or yours...)14 year-olds that music DIDN't start with Snoop Dogg, Guns 'n' Roses or even Kylie (but she HAS been going forever, honestly, look at how WELL she's aged, of course, she had that awful thing, you know, the front of Heya magazine where she wasn't wearing makeup, and after all who can blame her, what with that shit of a boyfriend fucking-off with that skinny bird, you know, looks like Courtney Cox after an acid bath...)
*Tip*
Have a search for 'TOTP' and the year you left school....ie 'TOTP 1984'
*Links* - some good vide...
Wall of Voodoo - Back in Flesh
Adam and the Ants - Never trust a man (with egg on his face)
Adam and the Ants - The Idea
Kid Koala - Moon River (Look especially for about halfway through, when he starts re-writing the whole song!)
Dave Gilmour & Robert Wyatt - Comfortably Numb
That should get you started!
posted by Ben Hollingsworth @ 12:18 AM
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www.flickr.com
This is a Flickr badge showing public photos from benhollingsworth tagged with bj_friend_tag_test_01. Make your own badge here.
I was tickled a couple of years ago when I spotted an active photo-frame (you know, little LCD screens that you can load pictures onto) that had WiFi and a Flickr tag interrogator built-in (This is an example...)
Usually, these devices come with god-awful frames that you simply have to suffer, just so you can have the funky Tech, you must have seen them? Anyway, the groovy thing about this particular model was that
a) It connected to your home WiFi so you didn't need to pull them off the wall to reload the wee SD chips with pics.
b) it could connect to Flickr and display pictures that had ben tagged with a particular word or phrase.
Well, it got me thinking (eventually) about making sure that all my 1200 pictures on Flickr were tagged in such a way that it I wanted one of these frames to display JUST the pictures I posted, I could simply get it to look for a single, (probably) unique ID.
"Why?" I hear you ask...well for example, if I wanted to buy the venerable parents an iFrame (I'm sure that name has gone already!) I could actually CONTROL which pictures they saw, simply by adding or changing tags on pictures. But then, other friends or family could (for example) download a screensaver that looks only for a particular Flickr tag, and view these pictures too.
I have decided to take this idea a step forward, and propose the following:
1) I will tag all interesting pictures that contain friends or families, with the word 'bj_friend_tag_test_01'
2) you (yes, YOU) can tag your own pictures with the same word(bj_friend_tag_test_01) so that my screensaver shows them, randomly and surprisingly.
3) You can download a screensaver or iTunes visualiser, or add an application to your Facebook, or any number of other funky Flickr-enabled applications, and tell it to look for the tag 'bj_friend_tag test_01'. See pictures as I or other friends posty them! he very fastest way is to search Flickr for all paictures with this tag and display them as a slideshow. That would be complicated if I hadn't done the hard work for you... just click here!
I will update this post over the next week or so to include links to applications etc that will do just this...keep coming back!
posted by Ben Hollingsworth @ 9:52 PM
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"The line that is closed
And that has no drinks trolley
Is a useless line"
And that has no drinks trolley
Is a useless line"
posted by Ben Hollingsworth @ 8:19 PM
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For once, it appears that the rest of the world has issues that America has (kinda) solved. Whilst I have not looked deeply into the licensing problems occuring around the world, this letter seems to explain many of the pertinent bullets...
"hi, it's Tim,
This is an email I hoped I would never have to send.
As you probably know, in July of 2007 we had to block usage of Pandora outside the U.S. because of the lack of a viable license structure for Internet radio streaming in other countries. It was a terrible day. We did however hold out some hope that a solution might exist for the UK, so we left it unblocked as we worked diligently with the rights organizations to negotiate an economically workable license fee. After over a year of trying, this has proved impossible. Both the PPL (which represents the record labels) and the MCPS/PRS Alliance (which represents music publishers) have demanded per track performance minima rates which are far too high to allow ad supported radio to operate and so, hugely disappointing and depressing to us as it is, we have to block the last territory outside of the US.
Based upon the IP address from which you recently visited Pandora, it appears that you are listening from the UK. If you are, in fact, listening from the US, and are denied access from Pandora on or after January 15th please contact Pandora Support: pandora-support@pandora.com.
It continues to astound me and the rest of the team here that the industry is not working more constructively to support the growth of services that introduce listeners to new music and that are totally supportive of paying fair royalties to the creators of music. I don't often say such things, but the course being charted by the labels and publishers and their representative organizations is nothing short of disastrous for artists whom they purport to represent - and by that I mean both well known and indie artists. The only consequence of failing to support companies like Pandora that are attempting to build a sustainable radio business for the future will be the continued explosion of piracy, the continued constriction of opportunities for working musicians, and a worsening drought of new music for fans. As a former working musician myself, I find it very troubling.
We have been told to sign these totally unworkable license rates or switch off, non-negotiable...so that is what we are doing. Streaming illegally is just not in our DNA, and we have to take the threats of legal action seriously. Lest you think this is solely an international problem, you should know that we are also fighting for our survival here in the US, in the face of a crushing increase in web radio royalty rates, which if left unchanged, would mean the end of Pandora.
We know what an epicenter of musical creativity and fan support the UK has always been, which makes the prospect of not being able to launch there and having to block our first listeners all the more upsetting for us.
We know there is a lot of support from listeners and artists in the UK for Pandora and remain hopeful that at some point we'll get beyond this. We're going to keep fighting for a fair and workable rate structure that will allow us to bring Pandora back to you. We'll be sure to let you know if Pandora becomes available in the UK. There may well come a day when we need to make a direct appeal for your support to move for governmental intervention as we have in the US. In the meantime, we have no choice but to turn off service to the UK.
Pandora will stop streaming to the UK as of January 15th, 2008.
Again, on behalf of all of us at Pandora, I'm very, very sorry. "
Although services like FineTune are still running, (and in many ways I believe FineTune to be superior to Pandora), I find it disgusting that the Record Distro companies can sit trying to figure out the best way to continue their strangle-hold on the industry, but are still happy to screw the public's enjoyment while doing it.
Tossers.
"hi, it's Tim,
This is an email I hoped I would never have to send.
As you probably know, in July of 2007 we had to block usage of Pandora outside the U.S. because of the lack of a viable license structure for Internet radio streaming in other countries. It was a terrible day. We did however hold out some hope that a solution might exist for the UK, so we left it unblocked as we worked diligently with the rights organizations to negotiate an economically workable license fee. After over a year of trying, this has proved impossible. Both the PPL (which represents the record labels) and the MCPS/PRS Alliance (which represents music publishers) have demanded per track performance minima rates which are far too high to allow ad supported radio to operate and so, hugely disappointing and depressing to us as it is, we have to block the last territory outside of the US.
Based upon the IP address from which you recently visited Pandora, it appears that you are listening from the UK. If you are, in fact, listening from the US, and are denied access from Pandora on or after January 15th please contact Pandora Support: pandora-support@pandora.com.
It continues to astound me and the rest of the team here that the industry is not working more constructively to support the growth of services that introduce listeners to new music and that are totally supportive of paying fair royalties to the creators of music. I don't often say such things, but the course being charted by the labels and publishers and their representative organizations is nothing short of disastrous for artists whom they purport to represent - and by that I mean both well known and indie artists. The only consequence of failing to support companies like Pandora that are attempting to build a sustainable radio business for the future will be the continued explosion of piracy, the continued constriction of opportunities for working musicians, and a worsening drought of new music for fans. As a former working musician myself, I find it very troubling.
We have been told to sign these totally unworkable license rates or switch off, non-negotiable...so that is what we are doing. Streaming illegally is just not in our DNA, and we have to take the threats of legal action seriously. Lest you think this is solely an international problem, you should know that we are also fighting for our survival here in the US, in the face of a crushing increase in web radio royalty rates, which if left unchanged, would mean the end of Pandora.
We know what an epicenter of musical creativity and fan support the UK has always been, which makes the prospect of not being able to launch there and having to block our first listeners all the more upsetting for us.
We know there is a lot of support from listeners and artists in the UK for Pandora and remain hopeful that at some point we'll get beyond this. We're going to keep fighting for a fair and workable rate structure that will allow us to bring Pandora back to you. We'll be sure to let you know if Pandora becomes available in the UK. There may well come a day when we need to make a direct appeal for your support to move for governmental intervention as we have in the US. In the meantime, we have no choice but to turn off service to the UK.
Pandora will stop streaming to the UK as of January 15th, 2008.
Again, on behalf of all of us at Pandora, I'm very, very sorry. "
Although services like FineTune are still running, (and in many ways I believe FineTune to be superior to Pandora), I find it disgusting that the Record Distro companies can sit trying to figure out the best way to continue their strangle-hold on the industry, but are still happy to screw the public's enjoyment while doing it.
Tossers.
posted by Ben Hollingsworth @ 10:28 AM
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Folling an earlier post about the multi-touch screen technology (long before Apple's iTouch and iPhone were released or even speculated-about), Microsoft have jumped on the band-wagon....
posted by Ben Hollingsworth @ 1:49 PM
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