I had an interesting letter through the door. The same letter everyone receives when moving into a new home: a threatening missive from the TV licensing people. What's interesting about it is the increasingly hostile tone of these letters. I remember when I moved into my last place, it was all very vague and woolly, saying that I could be subject to fines, and that I could be caught and so forth.

Sometimes, when I'm bimbling about in town of a lunchtime, I feel like getting something new to listen to. Seeing as I usually forget my "to buy" list, it's not unheard of me to buy something completely random from the HMV or Zavvi sale sections. That means that these albums rarely cost more than a fiver, and can be easily ebayed if they turn out to be rubbish.

I thought I'd take stock of what I've bought and see if the not-entirely-random selection process I employ works. Here are a few that I've bought over the last year with tiny, little baby reviews just to say if they're pap or not.


It was a busy week last week. I ended up going to two gigs on consecutive nights in backwater little townlets to see some really quite surprising bands.

First up was Blue Öyster Cult in the tiny village of Holmfirth, made famous by being the setting to Last of the Summer Wine. The venue was certainly peculiar, being as it was a half renovated play house with scaffold and steel fencing supporting half the structure and a peculiar sloping floor. Still, it was a decent enough place and the sound was fine to my ear, so I was ready for some rock.

Given that BÖC released their first album 7 years before I was born, I think they can be referred to as "old school" quite legitimately, and the show reflects this. As Ian (whose idea it was to go to this gig) pointed out, when the band started out a live show actually meant more than just playing a selection of songs from the album and going home. And it shows. 10 or 20 minute versions of classics like "Then Came The Last Days Of May", "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" and "Godzilla", complete with duelling guitars, massive 4 guitar riff fests, drum solos and alternating vocalists. Top stuff.

So after all that, what could follow it? Well, a Friday night in Stocksbridge, steel centre of Sheffield, to see Mostly Autumn on the weekend prior to the release of their new album, Glass Shadows.

After finding possibly the single most distant venue in Sheffield, and standing around for an hour drinking a well kept and surprisingly cheap Farmer's Blonde from Bradfield Brewery, the band took to the stage. They played a good selection of classics and new material, which was great for me. Hearing songs from a new album live before you've even taken the album out of the shrink wrap makes them all the more special, and owning the album 3 days before general release makes it even more so.

Overall, the new album is a bit less proggy, a bit less folky, but definitely Mostly Autumnal. It's a solid release that surpasses the sometimes half-baked Heartful Of Sky, with none of the songs particularly disappointing (although one or two bring out puzzled expressions and exclamations of "What the... ?!", but in a good way) Still, overall a win, and a great couple of gigs. More like that, please.

A recently published memoir tells the woeful tale of a child growing up in a world of gangs, drug runners and gun crime. It has been described as "humane and deeply affecting", and a book tour has been planned to promote it.

Except it's all a lie. The book tour has been cancelled, all copies are being recalled, and the author seems out of favour in the publishing world. The book in question is "Love and Consequences" by Margaret B. Jones, a pseudonym of Margaret Seltzer, but it is not the first life story to have been conjured up in the mind of an author whose life bears no resemblance to that described within.

As the New York Times article discussing the impact of this revelation mentions, two others in recent years have been found to be partially or entirely fictional; "A million little pieces" by James Frey and "Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years" by Misha Defonseca. Why an author would go to such lengths as to pretend to be an entirely different person to get a fictional book published as a factual memoir is a subject for much debate, but I have a theory that it's more related to the sorry state of publishing than character flaws of the author.

It seems that in the publishing world, schadenfreude is the vice of the moment. Were this book put to publishers as a pure fiction, would it have even made it off the slush pile? By touting it as a true story of pain and hardship, by describing in agonizing detail the suffering of a young girl born into a world of hate, it suddenly becomes so much more saleable. It seems that unless somebody really suffered, unless the people mentioned in the book were really living the hell the author describes, then the story just isn't moving. If a reader was moved enough to seriously consider the implications of the book when they thought it was true, then why not when it is revealed as a fiction based on truth?

This is not a new phenomenon, but it is increasingly the case that books are being published just because people like to point and stare. Celebrity biographies, true stories of cursed lives, or exposés of failings and mistakes of people in the public eye are selling by the truck-load and the bovine masses are swallowing it whole, chewing the cud and regurgitating the steaming mass of gossip and misinformation. Look at any magazine rack to see the effect of this unhealthy obsession.

As for Ms. Seltzer, she is in the news at the moment for what most would consider the wrong reasons. However, as the old saying goes, there's no such thing as bad publicity. It's obvious from the initial reaction to her book that she can write a moving, realistic story filled with characters and situations that are immediately believable. Spin that, and sell books on the gritty realism. Cynical, maybe, but no more so than rest of this modern life.

So I was passed a URL today. This one:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7240234.stm

Have a look, then come back. Done? OK. Are you laughing? I know I am.

So they think that accessing illegal content is worthy of a complete internet ban. Well, let's face it, the punishment must fit the crime. Knocking off an 11 quid CD is surely worth a lifetime being left out of the digital revolution, yes? I thought so.

So hyperbole aside, how many of those people who would be kicked off do they think are current or future IT professionals? I'd wager "a lot", or a figure thereabouts. So when the nation's IT workforce isn't allowed to use the internet any more, and the digital dark age upon us, surely we can reflect on that and say "verily and thus, we may be in the digital equivalent of skid row, but at least we have properly recompensed record label execs ... I mean ... artists."

And aside from the ludicrous idea behind it, let's not forget the lack of any method of enforcing such a thing. If a residence gets cut off, can they sign up for another? Does it somehow stick to the individual and follow them around? What about mobile data plans, public WiFi, pay-for WiFi, hotels and the like? Libraries? Companies?

OK, maybe it wasn't worth a whole blog post to rant about this thing because, realistically, there's no way it could ever be enforced. It did give me the best laugh I've had all day, though.

Last Thursday I went with Andy, Ian and Mike to see Dark Tranquillity play Rock City for the second time in five months for the official Great British Fiction tour.

The setlist was excellent, with plenty from the album and quite a bit of older stuff too. They played almost all my favourites off fiction, including Focus Shift, Misery's Crown, Terminus, and The Lesser Faith. They didn't play Nothing To No One, but that's OK. They played plenty of older stuff, including Therein from my favourite feel-good album Projector, and Wonders At Your Feet which is always good to hear live.

However, prior to them coming on there were two support acts. First up was Omnium Gatherum, a death/black metal band from Finland who I've never heard of before. They play some good riffs and I can appreciate the music a great deal, but the black metal screeching from the lead vocalist leaves me cold. As I commented after their set, the best bit was when the mic cut out and we just got the instrumental. If I manage to ahem borrow a copy of one of their studio albums I might grow to like it. Who knows. I did like their T shirts, so that's something. Oh, and the name means "a hodge-podge", if you're interested.

Prior to them, though, was a local band. Insidious. Now, at first I wondered if the sound system was at fault, but that was later proved wrong by the fantastic sound for Dark Tranquillity. Then I thought it might be just me, because I couldn't detect any tune, melody or even rhythm in the wall of noise coming from the stage. The different musicians were apparently just hammering their respective instruments while the lead vocalist (I hestitate to say 'singer') shouted various grunts between looking like he'd forgotten where he was. Mike asked me if I thought DT were ever this bad. I said I couldn't imagine it.

It was certainly an evening of extremes, from the confusing, apparently drug-fuelled, start to the extremely high quality and well performed gig by DT at the end. Dark Tranquillity were on stage for over an hour, by my reckoning, so we got plenty of the good stuff to compensate, and Omnium Gatherum were alright for a change from my normal listening.

Some of you may remember that I bought an Onn SW2411A-DivX 3 months ago from Asda. At the time I was very impressed with the machine for the price, and have used it for watching both DVD and DivX content throughout Christmas. Well, it seems that these cheap gadgets come at a price; a 3 month lifespan. Last week I found that it had stopped reading disks properly. It could take 4 or 5 attempts before it would even spin a disk up, never mind read the content.

Back to Asda we go, then, and get a credit note to the tune of the 30 quid we paid for it. Using this and a little cash injection, it has now been replaced with a Phillips DVP5960 unit. This has basically the same feature set as the Onn with an extra 20 quid on top. However, for that 20 quid you're getting a named brand and a far more polished product. The strange hanging that plagues the Onn from day 1, the intermittent USB connectivity and other little glitches are absent. Indeed, the DVP5960 and its predecessors have had excellent reviews on many technology sites.

Now, I do know that many people come here looking for region hacks for the Onn machine. The funny part is that it doesn't need any. However, if that's why you're here, I would recommend you go with the Phillips machine. It costs a bit more, but I'm already impressed enough to recommend it over the Onn model. If something goes bad down the line I'll be sure to blog about it.

2007 has seen me buy more albums than any previous year. I don't know exactly why this is, but it's been a fun year with lots of new musical experiences. Also a lot of bargains. Here I present my top 5 albums of 2007 in no particular order, followed by 5 "honourable mentions" that didn't make the top 5, but bulk out the rest of the top 10. Again, no particular order. Criteria for inclusion is simply that I purchased (or otherwise acquired) the album in 2007, not that it was released in this year. So, without further ado, the top 5:

So Radiohead did their thing, released In Rainbows, and the internet temporarily went mad for it. Now everybody has their download, what now?

While I am sure that the experiment can be considered a success, I wonder if it would ever be possible to replicate or if any future similar stunts would just be considered rip-offs. Apparently 1.3 million people downloaded the album in the first few days, a third of which didn't pay anything at all for it, and with an average price of about £4. That's a lot of people paying over the odds for something they didn't have to pay for at all. Reports are that some people paid over £20 for 160Kb/s MP3s!

I was in desperate need for a new DVD player after my existing little Cyberhome decided to start throwing up completely blue screens if the action got a little too bright for it. Very irritating. I headed out to Asda because cheap is good, and picked up what I consider a bargain. For 30 notes, I acquired a DVD player, an Onn SW2411A-DivX, that can also play DivX files on disk or, get this, on a USB connected drive. Yes, you read right. There is a USB (1.1 only, sadly) port on the front and you can plug in any FAT32 formatted drive.

At this moment, I have my 60GB portable maxtor drive plugged into it. I have watched my Dr Who AVIs and am now listening to MP3s via the on-screen file browser. It even scrolls the ID3 tags across the bottom. How good is that, for the money!?

update I finally got round to trying a region 1 disk in it. I didn't know what would happen, but I failed to find any region-free hacks for the player. Turns out I should have just tried it; it's region free out of the box.