Had a fantastic few days with the kids. Maybe i will keep them after all.

My kids have just been singing along to eminem. I'm so proud.

This week's music

So here are my Last.fm stats for this week (and as it's the end of a month, here are the top tracks too).

Artists

1. The Beatles
2. R.E.M.
3. Scissor Sisters
3. Foo Fighters
5. Howard Shore
6. Soundgarden
6. Pixies
8. Coldplay
8. At the Drive-In
8. Interpol

I'm genuinely proud to be married to the employee of the year.

Sun this is legs. Legs - sun. Have you met?

Wonder how kerry feels about her nephew putting her pants in the bin.

The boys saying how much they love Grandma & Grandad - one of few things to bring a tear to my eye.

This week's music

So here are my Last.fm stats for this week (and as it's the end of a month, here are the top tracks too).

Artists

1. The Beatles
2. R.E.M.
3. Helmet
4. The Strokes
4. The Smashing Pumpkins
6. Snow Patrol
6. Scissor Sisters
8. At the Drive-In
8. Jeff Buckley
10. Foo Fighters

Top Tracks

1. Snow Patrol - Open Your Eyes
1. The Beatles - Tell Me What You See
1. The Smashing Pumpkins - The Beginning Is the End Is the
4. Tool - Third Eye
4. The Strokes - Reptilia
4. Red Hot Chilli Peppers - On Mercury
4. Pearl Jam - Go
4. Helmet - Beautiful Love
4. R.E.M. - Sitting Still
4. R.E.M. - Talk About the Passion

Fix You (Live) on LeftRightLeftRightLeft. Wow!

Congratulations Mark. You're not gonna know what hit you.

I'm in love with my new iGrado headphones. Especially cos they're free.

RT @daxboy: If you get an email from the Department of Health telling you not to eat tinned pork because of #swineflu, please ignore it. It's just Spam.

Despite my better judgement, I'm really starting to like DragonForce.

Feeling satisfied. Good day with the boys followed by a nice pot roast. Mmm

Tough year to support both Hull and Boro.

This week's music

So here are my Last.fm stats for this week

Artists

1. The Beatles
2. R.E.M.
3. Soundgarden
4. Pearl Jam
5. Queens of the Stone Age
5. Scissor Sisters
7. Smashing Pumpkins
8. Helmet
9. Nirvana
9. BBC Radio 4

Tired and my meeting hasn't even started yet. Thanks for the 4am wake up call ;)

Reach for the Sky MoFo

So after having an HD-Ready TV for three years and after resisting the temptation for all that time, we finally got Sky HD installed yesterday. There was a huge delay in getting it installed, apparently due to high demand.

So far, I'm very impressed - particularly with Channel 4's output. But I do have a couple of gripes:

1. Audio setup is a bit of a pain when transmitting video to the TV through HDMI and audio to the A/V Amp through the optical output. It's not that it's complicated, just that the difference in the amount of time the two take to decode their signals mean that you have to fiddle to get it synced properly. And anyone who's ever looked too closely at syncing on tv will know that no matter how hard you try, it never seems quite right after you've looked at it too much.
2. Sky doesn't seem keen to transmit aspect ratio info via HDMI. I'm not someone who likes to stretch what I'm watching to 16:9 but rather I like to watch TV in it's native format. Unfortunately, if you decide to set the box to send it's picture as 1080i (the highest my tv can support - it's three years old remember) and therefore upscale normal tv everything is fixed at 1080i - and therefore stretched if it was 4:3 or letterbox. If you set it to auto-detect, then SD broadcasts look really nasty when shown alongside HD. Some channels overcome this nicely (Sci-Fi HD, FX HD, even Sky 1 and Channel 4 HD) by putting their own side-bars down each side but the less technically oriented (or maybe savvy) channels just transmit as is and let the box deal with it. Which is crap, frankly and means you're caught between two compromises. I've stuck with upscaling everything to 1080i and living with a few peoples' heads looking a bit fat.
3. The BBC seems to be uncharacteristically reluctant to embrace HD. This is really odd as they're a technology friendly company. Just look at their websites, their kids on-line games, the interactive tv facilities and the iPlayer. So why have they only got one HD channel? They're really missing a trick as they have done some lovely HD shows in the past. But scouring the BBC HD for HD versions of their SD output is a ball-ache. Maybe they're just waiting for FreeSat HD to take off.

I'm sure some of these niggles are just teething troubles. Some of it will just take some getting used to. Some might get sorted out with new firmware. Some of it could just be a question of waiting for the other broadcasters to fall into line.

None of it detracts from the fact that HD is really what your telly was meant to do. For a TV geek like me it's just what I've been waiting for.

So in sky world, between three and five means quarter past five. I get it now.

Grrrr Sky installer. I'm guessing "between 3 and 5" means "5".

Is still feeling ever so not well. Last time my throat felt like this i still smoked.

Returned from Goole feeling like a zombie. Maybe they spelled it incorrectly.

This Week's Music

So here are my Last.fm stats for this week

Artists

1. The Beatles
2. R.E.M.
3. Pixies
4. The Smashing Pumpkins
5. The The
6. Foo Fighters
7. Scissor Sisters
8. Soundgarden
9. Pearl Jam
10. Goldfrapp

Ok, think i've got the beating of this swine flu now... Ok, cold then.

About to start a presentation on qa. I pity my audience.

Have just experienced the future - a dyson airblade. Wow!

Proud owner of a folding camper. Very chuffed.

This week's music

So here are my Last.fm stats for this week

Artists

1. The Beatles
2. R.E.M.
3. Pixies
4. Pearl Jam
5. The Smashing Pumpkins
6. Soundgarden
7. Queens of the Stone Age
8. Foo Fighters
9. Helmet
10. The The

Just won a pair of iGrado headphones. Lucky, lucky me!