Month: September 2008

  • Shoddy Google Ads

    There really are some poor Google Ads kicking about at the moment, and the worst of them seem to be appearing in Gmail (for me at least). Here’s the latest example of something that’s thoroughly misrepresentative on many levels. “Eastenders is Axed”? No it’s not. The link is to a strange site called “just-the-issues.com/eastenders”. If…

  • Audio To Text

    Over the last few years, I’ve tried to look at lots of different ways to turn audio into text – ideally cheaply or even freely. Working for a radio station, even one that largely plays out music, being able to search audio to find when a presenter said or mentioned something would be incredibly useful.…

  • The Emmy Award Winning…

    Sunday night in the US saw the Emmy Awards – theoretically, the most important American TV awards. Now their credibility is obviously nil since the best TV series to emerge from the US (and arguably the English speaking world) has had precisely two nominations in five years and no awards. That’s The Wire. It’s got…

  • Maths on Hole In The Wall

    Hole in the Wall is BBC One’s new Saturday teatime game show. Imported from Japan, it involves two teams of celebrities dressed in lycra space suits and crash helmets trying to form shapes to fit through the holes in a polystyrene wall that heads towards them. If they don’t make the correct shape, then end…

  • Copyright On YouTube

    So David Lloyd is leaving Virgin (soon to be Absolute) Radio today, and in the time honoured fashion, we made a leaving video. The video was edited to a couple of copyright songs – It’s Getting Better by Mama Cass and We’ve Only Just Begun by The Carpenters. I uploaded the video to YouTube. Now…

  • Ray Mears v Bear Grylls

    You know how I love watching Bear Grylls’ programmes – particularly since he had to tone down what he was claiming in his second series of Born Survivor. Back in May, when Ray Mears was promoting his latest series – set in the Australian outback – he laughed off Grylls. Now Grylls is conceding defeat…

  • Newspaper Archives

    It’s an unfortunate coincidence that just days after I’d first used The Times’ archive for a little project that I’m working on, that they announce to registered users that it’ll have a paywall from the end of this week (confusingly, they list the date as Friday 18 September when there isn’t such a day). Still…

  • Steve Penk On Managing Listeners’ Expectations

    As Oldham’s Revolution changes format, owner and breakfast show host, Steve Penk tells anyone unhappy with the changes to try Xfm: “What I don’t want to deal with every day is a bunch of wining whingeing moaning morons clogging up my voicemail because we no longer play alternative music.” They’d be your listeners Steve. Good…

  • Picnic Shelved

    I never knew that it had been given the working title “Picnic”, but it seems that Sky has decided to put the whole venture on ice. Let me explain, 18 months or so ago, Sky suddenly announced that it wanted to take its three current Freeview services – Sky News, Sky Sports News and Sky…

  • Terminal 5 Is Working

    A friend mentioned the other day that when BAA were determining their marketing plans for Terminal 5 at Heathrow, post its opening, “…Is Working” probably wasn’t what they were hoping to use. But following the initial fiasco, that’s what they’re having to do to prove you can fly from there. I wonder if “Planes Still…

  • Sorting Out Your Music

    It’s come to my attention that over the last couple of years, although I still buy and listen to a lot of music, too much of it is through my iPod. Although I’ve got some half-decent Sennheiser earphones (i.e. not the ones that came with the device which are embarrassingly bad), that’s not really the…

  • Voyeur – Tracking You In London

    A nice piece of street art spotted in Soho. It links to www.neoexternalism.co.uk.