S*T*U*F*F* Reloaded

Is there any other sport apart from snooker where the winner can just keep going when they’ve already won?

I’m up late, waiting for an emergency gas engineer to come round. I called them at midnight, supposedly to have someone round within one hour, but calling them again at 2am, I was told it wasn’t in the system. If the house explodes, someone sue them please.
I hope it doesn’t come to that. But there [...]

So am I the only one who was disappointed by the MacWorld keynote speech by Steve Jobs of Apple? Well, I suppose its not every year you can release the iPhone, but seriously, releasing the MacBook Air, something that is thinner, smaller and lighter than anything else is more like average Japanese manufacturer marketing material. [...]

Correct me if I’m wrong, but we’re all led to believe that this symbol means “recyclable” - am I right?

Well, it doesn’t. And I was shocked to find that out. Check this out - from the site Valpak which controls the “Green Dot” symbol in the UK:
“The UK Green Dot® is not a recycling symbol [...]

The Flow is what happens when your creativity starts to work. Take for example a little tiny piece of music that I wrote in Australia four years ago, maybe more. Just a high acoustic guitar thing with a foot tapping. I kept coming back to it as I liked the groove and the chord sequence, [...]

It makes me laugh that people still look at the feature list on the iPhone and say that its just not as chock-full of goodies as some other Nokia or Sony Ericsson device… if you have tried one, you’ll realise that this completely misses the point - its the interface and the way it reacts [...]

I have always enjoyed writing complaint letters. In fact, if the truth be told, I think I have a real penchant for this activity. There are few occasions in life when one gets a chance to use grammatically complex English to convey a simple point, but when those chances arise, I believe it is our [...]

No, I’m not trying to get search engine hits with the post title… I am just getting increasingly upset with the tendency of reporters to throw a horrific or shocking statement into their pieces on television.
*** Please don’t read the next bit if you don’t want to be disturbed in the way I was [...]

Saturday morning, and a right stormy one it is too. I love these northern skies, especially with the view from my mum’s house where you can look right out over the town and the sea… Christmas is over, and I always feel a bit weird in the days that follow - like no-one quite knows [...]

Now, I am an Apple fan - not one of the obsessives, but I’ve used their computers and software for a long time now. And I will never go to that slice of ugliness known as Windows. But I have a problem - the new hardware sucks. I’m now into my 4th day of sitting [...]

Back in London after what was really a most excellent tour. What a year - touring with Air… it sounds almost surreal to me to write that. Their music has been a massive inspiration and I’m now keen to get some more music going, having realised a few home truths about where I am happiest [...]

I downloaded the Radiohead record last night. What did I pay for it? Nothing. I thought to myself, “I’ll check it out, and if its good, I’ll pay something at a later date.” And I will - I’ve been working this way with shareware for a while now and have honoured my self-made agreements with [...]

After an initial burst of frantic anger at losing my MacBook Pro on Friday night, I managed to get all the data off it on Saturday thanks to my wonderful neighbour letting me use his computers pretty much all day. I toast the existence of SuperDuper! - an amazing backup app that just works so [...]

My bastard MacBook Pro has died. Logic board gone. One minute its fine, I’m just opening Safari to check the news, next minute the display is scrambled and an enormous beard starts sprouting from my face. I can barely imagine (hot on the heels of my post on the spiral of misery that any single [...]

I had another hat on last week - presenting Guitar Rig for Native Instruments and helping Apple show the amazing new Logic Studio at a couple of workshops. I say workshops… that was something of a misnomer, as demonstrated beautifully in Liverpool, when a poor kid came up at the end and said, “I brought [...]

That was a great little expedition… a whirlwind of a tour where something seemed to be happening every minute of every day. From the magic of a North Beach Italian restaurant with Nick Phillips of the Imaginary Foundation (home of my favourite T-shirts) to chatting to Beck backstage at the Greek Theatre LA about being [...]

OK, so you know I’m an Apple fan. So try and imagine the moment when, during lunch with Jonathan Ive, the designer of the iMac, iPod and all the beautiful magic of Apple, I said, looking at his iPhone - “Ah, an iPhone… I’ve been dying to have a play with one of those” to [...]

“Toddler stabbed to death in East London flat”
“Teenager stabbed to death in street fight”
“Man beaten to death outside his house for trying to stop youths from vandalising cars”
Its just too depressing, and it really does have an effect on me. I’m looking at my little boy, playing on the floor and watching “Maisy”. laughing and [...]

Situation at this point:
Its 22:15 in Trencin, Slovakia. I’m sitting outside a very strange hotel that has just opened for us - not really ready for guests. By that I mean such delights as no phones, and a large plank of wood where the door to the swimming pool should be.
Our truck has broken down [...]

Call me pretentious but I think I’m finally getting a handle on why French wine is superior to New World wines… its like true beauty and the mystery of attraction versus plain pumped-up glamour.
I opened a bottle of Bouchard-Finlayson “Hannibal” 2004 last night - a South African recommended to me when I took a recent [...]