This afternoon, Bob Geldof stood in front of a packed press conference and launched Live 8 with the following words:

Still 20 years on [from Live Aid], it strikes me as morally repulsive that people die of want in a world of surplus.

Bloody right. He pointed out that more people die in Africa from hunger every day than die of AIDS, conflict and other major diseases combined. It’s ridiculous, appaling, stupid and disgusting. But we can do something about it, and thousands of people are doing their best to get the message out.

However, in a hideous display of irony, this is a comment on the BBC Website regarding Live 8:

I was 14 when Live Aid was on and donated my pocket money to help. I wont donate anything this time because it’s nothing more than a political racket!

Let me make this clear: Nobody is asking for any money. Live 8 is not asking for your money (the tickets are free). Make Poverty History is not asking for any money. While they could and would be entirely justified in doing so, they are simply asking for our voices. The G8 conference is in Gleneagles on July 8th. The G8 has it within its power to eradicate poverty by 2025. The point of the concert is to draw attention to the Make Poverty History campaign, the aims of which are:

The first two aims are for long-term benefit. Africa currently pays more back in debt than it receives in aid. That’s insane. The third is for the short-term while the effects of the first two are felt.

Incidentally, Bob Geldof and Bono studied under Jeffrey Sachs, a professor of economics, until they gained an understanding of how the international economic system works. They’re not seeking publicity, they genuinely believe in this. Hell, everybody believes in this. It’s just a matter of convincing those in power to act.

Please, please visit the Make Poverty History website. Spend a couple of minutes reading up on their goals and aims. If you agree, and I expect you will, send emails to your MP and Tony Blair. Every voice counts. If you can march in Edinburgh on the 8th, brilliant. I want to and am going to try. It’s not marching against anything or anybody. It’s not politically biased or based on complaint. It’s for the greater good, the betterment of humanity, of standing up for what we know to be morally right.

This is no hollow cause, no political racket, no publicity stunt. Just imagine what we could do.

Back in yonder days when I started copying all my CDs to the computer, I decided to maximize the quality by encoding them at 320kbps. Teeny bit of overkill there. Is it reasonable to try to recompress them to a lower bitrate? Or will that lower the sound quality too much? Admittedly I could just try it, but I thought I’d ask instead

Earlier this evening, while watching TV:

Channel 4 announcer: And now, Paris on ER.
Mum: Is that Paris Hilton?
Dad: I assumed it’d be set in Paris.
Me: Huh, I thought it’d be that guy from Voyager guest starring.

So I don’t know what that says about us all

I’m not very good at walking around towns. Whether it’s shopping or just sightseeing, my legs and shoulders start to hurt after a while (much worse if it’s hot) and I get irritable soon after. I don’t know whether this is a common problem, but I guess there must be other people afflicted. I’ve been trying to figure out ways around this recently, and I think I’ve nearly solved the problem. Here’s what worked for me.

• Stretch before leaving the house. It sounds silly, but this has had by far the greatest impact for me. I don’t know the names of the muscle groups, but I stretch the back of the lower leg, the front and back of the thigh and roll my shoulders. If you feel yourself tightening up again then stretch while you’re out. If you’re uncomfortable doing this in public, do it in the changing room while trying on some clothes While you’re there, yell ‘Er, I’m out of toilet paper’. Ok, don’t do that.
• Breathe properly. I realised that I was taking fairly shallow breaths while walking around (probably because crowds make me nervous). No need for hyperventilation, but making yourself take normal breaths can really help.
• Have enough to drink. Carry a bottle of water, or regularly stop at cafes.
• Don’t get too hot. By all means take a coat if you’re worried it’ll get cold, but do take it off and tie it around your waist if you start to feel uncomfortable. For whatever dumb reason I didn’t do this for years. I must have been attention-seeking or something
• Start looking for somewhere to eat as soon as you start to feel hungry. Sometimes it can take a while to find the right place, and I always get very irritable when I haven’t had enough to eat.
• Related to #5 - carry a small Mars bar or similar to tide you over and boost your sugar levels. It’s amazing how a burst of sugar can help!
• If you’re carrying a bag or anything that you hook over one shoulder (a camera, in my case) swap shoulders fairly frequently. This eases the pressure and can stop one particular shoulder hurting.
• If you’re driving, park somewhere that gives you a ticket that you pay on your return. This stops you having to rush around, and you can have drinks etc. when you feel like it, without having to worry about what time the parking expires.

If you were to walk out of Millions without a huge smile on your face, I’d be very, very surprised. It’s completely saturated with wonder. Infested with it. The film grains are leaking the stuff. Wonder as a metaphor for itself, you could say. Just go see it
And when you’re done watching, go here, and let people know what you think.

If you have a digital camera and want to put your photos online then I strongly recommend Flickr. It’s just so easy that it’s a joy to use. Whenever I take any photos, I copy them onto the computer, edit them if necessary, email them to a special Flickr email address with subject = title and body = description, and that’s it - it’s published and ready to view. I can then go in and add tags and notes if I want, but that’s entirely optional - all the imporant work is done already. Incidentally, that email address means that if you’ve got a cameraphone you can use a Flickr account even more easily than people with separate digital cameras, since you don’t have to transfer anything to the computer first.

If you were to ask me why Flickr is better than other online galleries I’ve used I’d probably have trouble telling you. It Just Is. It’s neat, well-organised, everything works so very well, and there’re all kinds of small things that come in extremely handy on rare occasions. For example, if you go to ‘All Sizes’ for your photos, they provide the HTML needed to link to that particular photo. Sure, it’s easy enough to get the photo URL and write the code yourself, but having it right there and available saves 7 seconds or so, is surprisingly helpful and stops the process feeling like a fuss. The previous post was extremely easy to put together using the HTML links, but I could have just hit the ‘Blog This’ button and had Flickr link into my blog and produce a post for me - that’s exactly what happens with moblog shots from my phone, I email them to Flickr with ‘2blog’ at the end of the address, and it does everything else on its own.

Cripes, it’s nearly 1800! How did that happen? There doesn’t seem to be much on TV this evening so I may nip into town and see Millions. Nobody else seems very interested, but I think it looks great!

The weather was great for walking around Stratford, and lunch at the basin was great. Chadds, my favourite baguette shop, was closed, but I grabbed a bacon and egg baguette and sat on the grass in front of the theatre, people-watching. The street entertainers and buskers were out for the bank holiday weekend:

The basin was fairly busy:

Although this particular crowd was mainly due to people watching the boats pass in and out of the lock from the Stratford canal onto the Avon. We’ve had the experience of hundreds of onlookers a fair few times (we used to take the boat down to Stratford and back over the May bank holiday weekend) and I do remember one time in particular in which everybody watched me struggling with the lock gate for a minute or so - I was about 10 at the time - until finally a guy came to help just as I’d started it moving.

[the ice cream van just came by again, so I’m typing this while eating a ‘99]

[yum]

I wandered around town looking at what had changed since I worked there, as well as taking photos of anything interesting.

Sadly I wasn’t able to get a shot of the three guys, who looked like they were on the way to see their parole officer, pushing unicycles across the main bridge. This is possibly my favourite shot of the day:

You can almost hear the inner dialogue of the kid. Incidentally, this was taken at full zoom and is still a large crop, so the perspective is fairly flattened. How old do you think the girls on the (far) right-hand-side are? I first saw them while cropping the photo and thought they looked pretty, then realised they could easily be any age from 14-22 and I should really stop thinking that!

I had a fun afternoon, and without spending large amounts of money either

I’ve been wanting a man-bag for a while, now. With summer coming up I don’t really want to be wearing my coat, but I still need to carry around all my bits and pieces. A simple bag with an across-the-body strap would be great, but I’d rather it didn’t look particularly girly. They’re surpisingly difficult to find. Most shops have laptop cases (which are *nearly* there, but are excessively heavy and bulky for general use) and the next step up is a small rucksack, with maybe some briefcases too.

Earlier this week I remembered that my uncle had a cool bag when we were in Paris, so I emailed him to find out what type it was. Turned out to be one of these, which seems pretty much perfect. I had a look at their retailers, and the closest store is Beatties in Solihull. I know that they don’t have this particular model, however, as I was looking at their stock last week. The other major chain was Rohan, the easiest of which for me is in Stratford. So I had a trip out today to pick one up. But, I’d forgotten one thing.

It’s Sunday.

Rohan was closed. Most other shops in the town centre were open, but no other outdoorsy type shops. Damn the church. So after wandering around, taking some photos and picking up a couple of other items I was after, I headed home. On the way out of Stratford I spotted the small retail outlet area next to Tescos, and figured it was worth a look. It had a Matalan, which was a possibility. Actually, though, it was the large Next store that had one of these, which I bought straight away. At

If this isn’t one of the coolest pictures ever taken with a 35mm + telephoto lens, I’m a penguin.

52 / 70. Hmmm. I did take the test via WAP originally, but it went a little wrong. The idea is that you go to a WAP site via your phone and do the questions in time with the TV show. You press the ‘Start’ hyperlink when it tells you to on the tv, and the website automatically gives you the correct amount of time for each question. After a few problems involving a combination of digital cable introducing a 2 second delay, muppetry on my part for pressing ‘Start’ a couple of seconds early, a timing mistake on the live show and a whole batch of question answers not uploading correctly, I was given a score of 46/70. So I did it on the internet instead, and gained a massive 6 points. Worth it, I think you’ll agree

Just watched the conclusion to last week’s Doctor Who, and thought it was superb. The excellent Russell T. Davies is the main writer on the series, but if Steven Moffat’s name doesn’t appear again on the credits I’ll be very surprised. His double episode managed the rare feat of having a completely self-contained, coherent and surprising plot. There were no ghosts in the machine or unlikely coincidences. Every problem’s resolution was foreshadowed (there’s a technical term for this, but I’m damned if I can think of it just now) such that it made sense, but was subtle enough that you didn’t figure it out in advance. It was also dramatic without being silly or over-the-top, as well as rather touching. The dialogue was wonderful, too:

“Back to your room!” says the Doctor, which temporarily disperses the attacking aliens (which sounds silly, but made perfect sense in the context of the story)
“I’m so glad that worked, those would have been terrible last words.”

If I ever write something that succeeds in all areas as well as this episode, I’ll be very proud.

When you go around to Nod’s house for a games evening with a newly purchased iPod microphone, there’s only really one thing to do. And that’s record the first wongaCast! For the uninitiated, a Podcast is a downloadable audio show. This is not worthy of the word ‘Podcast’. If, by any chance, you’ve happened across this page searching for new Podcasts, you’re unlikely to understand a word of what’s going on unless you know me. It’s about one minute long and can be heard, in full and unedited (as will become apparent), here:

wongaCast #1 - 27/05/05

I should point out that the guessing game involves me acting out the word in question. Also, the word ‘inaugural’ appears much more than it should do. What can I say, I was excited

Parked outside the registry office, must be an interesting story…This was taken while sitting in a queue, which promptly started moving as I was composing

This child-proof cap has now defeated everybody in the house. I would venture that it’s just proof.

Here’s what I did today.

I woke up, convinced it was Saturday, and got up about fifteen minutes later, at 9:15ish. It was at this point that I started thinking. Had I simply carried on with my usual morning routine of acting grumpy until I’ve had breakfast and then being cross with myself for getting up so late, I’d have saved myself a lot of money. But with the two-pronged attack of my life coaching making me happier, and another technique making me more organised (I’ll blog about that soon), I have much more time to think and I’m learning not to use it to find more things to worry about. So what was I contemplating?

Well, Megan’s getting increasingly manic during the day. It used to be that a run around the garden would tire her out, but no longer. As I posted earlier, she fell into the pond and lay against wet paint just this morning. She’s just becoming a little difficult to deal with. Also I need more exercise than I’m getting, and given that summer’s just around the corner anyway it’d be pleasant to get into the open air. So a solution presented itself to me: I shall take Megan for a daily walk down to the park.

I know myself, and know that such projects often dwindle and die within a few weeks. So, I thought, how can I ensure that I get into a regular routine? What is it that would stop me taking Megan for a walk? Aside from awful weather (which Megan would likely balk at anyway), I decided that I’d probably get bored. There are only so many routes around here, after all. What could I do to stop this happening? Well, when I used to drive to York every fortnight I got into the habit of listening to audiobooks, which I really enjoyed. I listened to a good few Michael Connelly novels in this way and it was great. So audiobooks seemed like a good solution. They’re pricey, however. Then I thought: “ooh, lots of radio shows are in downloadable formats now, aren’t they. What’s that called again?”

Can you see where this is leading?

Podcasting. It’s a great thing. All over the internet (and, increasingly, the media) people are putting their own audio shows up for download. There are a wide variety of topics and subject areas to choose from. From science to education to literature to pop culture to the audio equivalent of blogs, there’s enough out there to keep me busy for a long time. Great! That sounds like exactly what I need.

There’s a problem, though. Sure, it’ll be interesting making the audio CD the first couple of times, but that’ll get old real quick. I could maybe use a CD-RW to save on media, if I could find a decent enough portable CD player. And they do stutter. And they’re bulky.

No. No, what I need is an MP3 player.

Easy enough, I thought. I shall have a look around and find something small and with a fair bit of space. Once the eBay iPod challenge comes to fruition, I’ll use that. So I had a look at MP3 players and it quickly became apparent that to have enough space would cost a fair bit. To have a decent number of songs and podcasts available on hardware that isn’t going to fall over in six months isn’t all that easy. So I found myself hanging around the Apple website, looking at the iPod feature list.

And what a feature list it is. It’s just so damned easy. You plug in the iPod and it synchronizes all of your music. If your music is all rated and categorised in iTunes already, as mine is, then it’s a piece of rather lovingly decorated cake. I’ve played around with iPodder before, and it can check for new Podcasts automatically, download them and then interface with iTunes to add a playlist. So, podcast-wise, all I’d need to do is find shows I like and iPodder + iTunes + iPod synchronization would do everything else for me. What else can the iPod do, I asked? Well. It has a built-in calendar and contacts, but big deal, I always have my phone with me (although that’s a damn site harder to synchronize than the iPod). It also has a few games, but again, I’m not all that bothered. But what’s this? You can use the iPod as a portable hard drive? Swanky. And I can record voice notes, admittedly with an adapter? Hmmm, that could come in handy. It can charge itself from the USB 2.0 port, you say? Well, that really would be convenient.

So the iPod seemed to have a lot going for it. I started to consider getting an iPod mini. But a quick check on Amazon showed that the iPod 20gb was only