An Update From The Trenches

I have decided to take a few hours off from the giant hamster tread mill that I seem to be on. Time to sit back and smell the roses. It has been quite the week, though in reality it was just another week.

Lets see what I did. Well we had our regular Sunday radio show, and true to form a caller dropped another atom bomb that flew around the internet faster than Obama printing bailout money. So, a good deal of Monday was spent in dealing with the fallout. This is becoming a regular Monday mission.

Somehow, and I am not quite how I managed to read a couple of books this week.

What were they thinking? - this is a look into the world of sports, and the mistakes people make.

Google Speaks - An unofficial look under the skirts of the Google company.

What You Are Turning Me Into - A depressing look at the world of street drugs.

Reinvent Your Enterprise - A look at big business.

Take The E Out Of Ego - A rather curious self help book.

Rumor & Qix - A science fantasy adventure.

Wow, even by my standards six books in a week is a lot! Actually it will be seven, I am most of the way through Cocaine Memoire.

As for music and movies, that is all a blur. I know there were a couple of reviews, and a couple of interviews, but I'm damned if I can even remember who with :)

The one thing that I do know is that everywhere I look I see 'stuff' still in the shrink wrap. The piles are reaching demonic proportions. Even worse, most of it was unsolicited, it just arrives!

The other problem are the cases that Jan and I are following, they seem to eat up great swathes of our time on the phone. Anyone that thinks the world of Journalism is fun needs a psychological evaluation! It is time consuming and frustrating. You find yourself awash in material that for one reason or another you cannot print. Confidentiality and legal aspects all weigh in, it becomes a quagmire in no time at all.

Oh crap tomorrow is Sunday, the cycle repeats........

WTF

Sorry that I have been so delinquent in writing on here, the days just seem to fly by. My wife Jan and I do actually have a life outside of playing. That life somehow has got us involved in three serious court cases. They have consumed our waking moments for several weeks. In fact it got so bad that Jan pointed out that is I didn't get my head out of them we would not be able to pay the bills.

Jan and I live day to day, I'd love to say paycheck to paycheck, but it is not true. We carve out an existence with $50 here and there. Plowing two people into a 16 hour a day investigation for a week has cased a huge problem. We have had to back off a little, just to pay the bills!

So folks, it is not that I have deserted the blog, I have just been more concerned with actual events rather than my idiocy.

Todays Kids.....

It is Easter break, and we are hunkered down. For the most part Jan and I lead a pretty quite life. Yes I review Punk and Heavy Metal, but the volume is always kept down.

We live in a rather spacious duplex, and for most of the time it is peace and tranquility, our neighbors are hard working folks, and whole days go by without even seeing them, they both leave early for work and get home late. They do have a couple of kids, but they never seem to be around. My guess is that the kids spend the weekdays somewhere else.

Well, here we are on the Monday after Easter, we are swarmed with kids in the 3 to 8 range and there is absolutely no adult looking after them.I counted 8 of them. Just running wild, where are the brains of the parents?

The famous joke about telling a kid 'to go play in the traffic' takes on new meaning. Some idiot left them a gas powered childs 4 wheeler. I saw at least 3 close encounters with real vehicles.

This is beyond my comprehension of stupidity!

Simon Hits Brit TV Paydirt

There is not much I I miss about the UK, and I certainly have no intentions of returning any time soon. However I did enjoy some of the TV programs, there are some excellent series that have cropped up over the years. I recently discovered a company here in the US that specializes in packaging these classic and contemporary programs on DVD. The name is Acorn Media.

Some of the recent items I have vied include the classic John LeCarre screen adaptions if Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy, and Smileys People starring Sir Alec Guinness. The rambunctious Gordon Ramsey's Kitchen Night Mares, The Cadfael Collection, and Agatha Christie's Poirot. All great viewing. I liked them so much I have put a banner up for Acorn, check em out, they have lots of great stuff. Just click on the ad.

Oh, and I am too lazy to add links to the reviews, but if you plug 'title' Bloggernews into google you will find them.

My New Best Friend!

I swear that some people have no common sense. We live in a duplex and a family with a couple of young children live next door. They are very nice people, very polite, and about the only bad thing I have to say is that on occasions they play the music a little loud for my taste, but that tends to happen when the parents are MIA. They have a new house guest, I believe it is the ladies younger brother.

About a week ago I spotted something odd early one morning. There was a puppy at the back of the house, it looked well fed, but appeared to be only a couple of months old. It was incredibly shy, and ran away when I tried to get near to it. I guessed that it belonged to someone in the neighborhood and it had somehow got out. The following day I saw the same thing. Now this was really odd!

On day three I noticed a food and water bowl outside my neighbors back door. Later that day I saw the brother with the dog, ah problem solved.

OK, now the damn puppy has adopted me, I can't step outside without getting attacked by this little fur ball. I happen to like dogs so it is not a problem, except getting your toes bitten at 6:30 AM.

Here is the issue though. The property has no fence around it, and these people just leave the critter outside, they are gone everyday from very early, till quite late in the evening. If this puppy is 3 months old I will be amazed, it has no collar, in fact I am quite surprised it has not taken off and got itself run over.

Oh, and our lease specifically states 'no pets'.

All in all I class this whole thing as the very apex of irresponsibility.

These is no doubt that I have spent more time with the darn thing than the owners, after all, I spent several hours outside reading every day.

I don't even know its name, yet I am its best buddy.

I hate to say this, but it is only a matter of time before something bad happens to this cute little puppy. You should only have animals if you are prepared to look after them.

Plane Crash On The Hudson River

I am not usually a fan of those chain mail jokes that do the rounds on the Internet, I generally do not even open the email, I just put it straight in the garbage can. For some reason I did open this one. No words are required!

Simon In Print!

Not in a million years did I expect this....

About a year ago on a slow news day I wrote an op-ed piece about a new Temple that had opened in Canada. It cost $40 million to build, and my contention was that it was a waste of money. $40 could finance a good deal of low cost housing, which would be a lot more useful than an ivory tower of worship. Needless to say this article resulted in an amount of hate mail. This of course was the whole point of the exercise, to create dissension.

Yesterday I received an email from a publisher seeking my permission to use the piece in a soon to be released school text book. Get this, it is for a course on religion!

So as of May/1st a bunch of British school kids will be reading my Perls of wisdom hahahahaha

(Mis)Adventures In Reviewing

Occasionally I venture into product reviews, I don't do it often, and it tends to only be techy type gadgets that have something unique about them. I recently saw a press release for an ultra small external hard drive, the thing was barely bigger than a pack of cigarettes yet could hold 320 gig of data. Better still it appeared to be very flexible, it can be connected via USB, Sata, or Firewire.

I decided that I wanted to play with one, so sent off for a review unit. The PR people were very helpful and told me a unit had been ordered for me and it would be shipping shortly. Fed Ex delivered it on Thursday, and two minutes later I had it in my hot little hands.

The bigest challenge was determining which computer to try it on first. I run a Linux box, and I have had a few hiccups in the past with USB so my first attempt was on an old IBM Thinkpad. I pugged the unit it and absolutely nothing happened! I was not totally surprised, I am pretty certain the Thinkpad is USB 1 and the drive specifically stated USB 2, plus it runs Win 2k, and that may be an issue.

OK, on to the next computer, I decided to hook it up to my linux system and cross my fingers. I plugged it in, and..... absolutely nothing happened. Well once again I was not hugely surprised, I have a IOGEAR media player/hard drive that also does not seem to like Linux.

Oh, don't worry there were still plenty of other computers laying around!

The third attempt would be the proverbial charm, my wife runs a Win XP system with USB 2, this time the unit should bolt right up! So I persuaded Jan to give up her computer for a couple of mins so I could hook up the drive.

I plugged it an and..... nothing happened! Well now I am confused. The company making this gizmo make much of the fact that the unit is easy to open and you can stick in whatever sata drive you want. In fact the box even contains a small screwdriver to get at the ridiculously small screws.

The tech inside me needed to get a peek inside, maybe I could spot the problem of why it wasn't working.

It took no time at all to figure out the problem. There was no damn hard drive in the unit!

I fired off a quick email explaining that it was kind of difficult to review this item, and the following morning a very apologetic company rep called me and told me that a new unit was being sent out asap.

Whats New In Barrett Land?

Actually it has been surprisingly quiet by my estimation, although I am sure that to regular folks what we class as normal would be classed as anything but by regular folks!

As I survey what most people were call their Living Room, you know TV, stereo, couches, etc, I see all of those, plus a large table that is covered on computers, two desktops and a laptop, two portable DVD players, and the worlds most expensive alarm clock! On the floor I see two more computers and monitors, and box after box of stuff in my to do pile.

When we left Canada, I also left hundreds of CD's and DVD's with my daughter, it appears that it is taking me no time at all to amass a new collection. The mail man doesn't even bother with the mail box most days, he just pulls up in front of the house and honks his horn, a sure sign that more stuff has arrived. UPS know me so well that a package was addressed incorrectly, the guy knocked on the door and said, "address is wrong" but I realized it was for you!"

None of this is new, you move 2000 miles and it is all shades of deja vu.

What is interesting though is I have connected with a PR guy who reps a lot of prog bands from the 70's. Prog rock is one of my favorite genres, and I have had some great access to some great bands. In fact in early 2009 I am hoping to get to talk to Ken Hensley (Uriah Heep).

If you want to check out some of the interviews take a look at my profile on BTR.

Got This In The Mail...

The email simply read 'Can You Spot The 44th President'?

Too Funny!

AT & Bloody T

Why can't life every be simple? I suppose it could be argued that that would take the fun out of the whole thing. My latest challenge is our great tecom provider AT&T. I used the phone yesterday morning and everything was fine. I had an interview arrainged with Christian Torres of Los Difuntos scheduled for 1 5pm live radio broadcast, so as usual 15 minutes before we go on the air I dial into New York to get the show staged up, with Christian dialing in 5 minutes later so we can go over the format of the show before we hit prime time.

To my absolute horror I discover a terrible buzzing sound on my damn phone line. In a race to fix the problem I change phone cords, hand sets, and DSL filters. No damn go! Maybe its the DSL modem? So I reboot my computers, the modem, and the router. Still no go. It is now two minutes to air time, poor Christian is sat listening to dead air! I dial back in, and with 90 seconds to spare get the show set up.

Damn humming persists throughout the entire broadcast but luckily it is fairly indistinct on the recorded version.

So I get on the phone with AT&T and after playing twenty questions with the voice activated annoyance system that AT&T employ to dissuade customers from being able to report problems, I finally get a human. This numskull asks the same twenty questions and finally asks me what the problem is. "Can't you hear the damn problem" I ask him. "Oh, all that noise on the line, yeah that would get old" is the helpful reply.

So the unhelpful tech writes up a trouble ticket and drops the bombshell that they likely won't get to it till Monday.

This is just great! We have a one hour talk show scheduled on Sunday!

Airwaves Part Two

I have to admit that doing radio interviews is a whole lot easier than doing the ole phone deal and then having to try and read my scribbled notes to try and piece an article together. Of course there is a downside, you never know if you are going to have a short or long answer guest, so planning is a key. To run out of questions before the 30 minute segment is in the can would be a huge disaster.

Radio really is a fun experience in time management. Trying to get your questions in and keep the interview flowing can be quite a challenge. The major issue is the ending, I get a 90 second, and a 60 second warning, hell that last minute is tough. No time to ask another question, but to much time to wind the show down.

I love a challenge, and I think I have found a good one. Even Jan has risen to the occasion and is helping me as a co-host on a weekly News Roundup.

Simon Does The Airwaves

This not working for a living has some real drawbacks. I have way too much time on my hands and that means time to find trouble to get into. And as you all know, I am really good at that. My latest adventure has been into the world of internet radio.

I love the internet, it makes it possible to do the impossible. I know if I trotted down to my local radio station and said "Hi my name is Simon, and I'd like to host a few shows" they would call security and escort me off the premises. The internet though is different, if you want to do it, you can. Best of all it does not cost a dime. All you need is a telephone and a computer and away you go.

You can check out some of my efforts here.

A Music Industry First And A Good One

I am sure that as most of you that know me, also know that I have some pretty strong views about the music industry, come to think it I have pretty strong views about almost everything except politics.

I do not advocate the piracy of music or video's, to me that is robbing the artist of the few cents on the dollar that he is due for his hard work. Although The RIAA claim the cost per year is in the $billions, I suspect that they are aiming a little high, but certainly there is a $ cost. And certainly the artist, and creator is the one who hurts most. He may only be getting a few cents per CD, but those few cents are what he lives on.

For the longest time I have felt that the Artist is the one getting the short end of the stick.

My opinion about the music world changed yesterday. A couple of days ago I received a copy of Al Stewart's new album Sparks Of Ancient Light. I am a huge Al Stewart fan and couldn't wait to rip the plastic off it and get it on the player.

I had my review written in no time flat. While reading it prior to publishing I realized that it would be so much better if I could embed a track sample, you know, a 30 or 45 second sound byte. So it was off to the world of the internet to see if such a beast existed on Al's web site or the labels web site, alas none was available.

Well I don't give up easy, I am a known entity to Al, his PR folks, and the label, having reviewed most of his now 19 albums at one time or another. So I fired off an email to the record company asking if they has a streaming audio that I could access.

Within minutes, I had my answer, 'no streams available'. But all was not lost. Appleseed went on to say that they had included an MP3 of an entire track, and as long as I promised not to make it available for download I was free to use it in the review. In other words stream it.

In this day and age of RIAA breathing fire over piracy and shared music, I find Appleseed's approach to be a real breath of fresh air.

Oh, and you can read my review here.