Monthly Archives: January 2012

Actually, I’m the old fart on twitter

The new year came about in slightly odd style for me, confined as I was to bed with a reasonably decent hot toddy. Similarly the news that one Rupert Murdoch had joined twitter caused much consternation. Mostly I was just shocked that it either wasn’t a fake or had managed somehow to fake it’s way into being verified. The fact that it has since proven to be real has, I must say, actually given me some respect for the man. Many a senior employee in many a company would do well to engage with the future rather than rail against it.

So, when did I first join twitter? And why? Well it’s almost four and a half years ago now, or 13,639 tweets ago. My friend Ian (@maniacyak) had recently joined and had been mentioning it for some time. I was massively sceptical as to why I would use twitter when the only use I could see for it was updating my FaceBook status. I couldn’t see the use in yet another social network. Here’s my first tweet:

Boring, isn’t it? It drew comments on FaceBook and no response whatsoever on twitter. I duly followed @maniacyak back for snaring me in and then a few of my other friends joined over the coming months, but I hit a problem. I had nothing interesting to say I wouldn’t rather blog or place on FaceBook, and not enough interesting people to say it to or to read things from. I’d log on to twitter.com every so often read the few tweets that had appeared since I last logged on and then leave.
Continue reading →

Six Great Albums of 2011

Another year, another format for my best music of the year. This year, I’m dividing into three parts: my favourite six albums, my favourite tracks and my favourite old music.

So, to kick off here are the six albums from 2011 that I really enjoyed in 2011. There are lots of surprising omissions from this list, as a lot of artists that I really like and even saw live such as St Vincent, Amon Tobin and Devotchka had new albums this year. But, much as I enjoyed a few tracks from each of their albums I didn’t actually get into them as albums. It really was in many ways a year of rather disappointing albums. However, these six are really damn good. None of them are début albums, though some marked new directions whilst others put a level of polish on that made for supremely easy repeat listens. There is an order to this list and I’ll go in reverse order.

Continue reading →