February 2007 Archives

I picked this up this afternoon in Forbidden Planet since it was, cheap, written by Brian K Vaughan (Y:The Last Man and Deus Ex Machine which are both very good), and I had vague memory if reading that Joss Whedon was going to be taking it over soon.

By the end of last year I had had my phone for 2 years and had been thinking about a replacement. I was quite happy with what I had on the whole - a Sharp GX15 - it was very small, had all the important (and not so important features), like a camera, colour screen, GPRS, bluetooth etc. The main problem with it was terrible battery life - it would only just last a day if I didn't make any calls. This had already led to some difficult times expiring at an important time. Obviously it should run for more than that, but when I'd sent it back Vodafone had taken several weeks to do nothing more than put a sticker on the battery saying it tested OK, without fixing the problem so since then I had just been living with the inconvenience.

I cheerfully admit I was prompted into buying some ELO by watching Love and Monsters on Doctor Who last year. The reason I bought this one was that I've actually got it on vinyl from back when I was in school and picked it up cheap. It's a very sci-fi album, lots of songs about the end of the world, robots, time, etc with synthesizers, vocoders and other high tech (for the mid-70's) music equipment. But all done in the usual ELO (over the top, singalong) style.

A mark of its impact is that the first few times I played it, Joe pretty much ignored it. Then I put it in the CD carousel in the car when we went home at Christmas. It didn't get played then, in fact, but it did a while later when he was on his own and on the way back from Chelmsford and was a big hit. Thinking about it, it is kind of designed for playing in cars, catchy tunes and production that plays well on small speakers and really cuts through the car noise in the way that more delicate music can't.

It suddenly came to my attention recently that DC had been not only republishing the Alan Moore run on Swamp Thing in trade paperback collections again but they had decided to continue on into the Rick Veitch set of stories. The previous set of collections included the first few Veitch penned items that wrapped up Alan Moore's run and brought Swamp Thing back to Earth but then stopped.

Whilst picking up some essentials from Borders yesterday (guide to North Devon for an upcoming short break there) I spotted that they were doing a 3 for 2 deal on the new Torchwood books. So out of curiosity I decided to pick them up. When paying up the guy behind the till offered up "Bet you a fiver the Dan Abnett one's the best" and when I mentioned I didn't have high expectations of them came back with "well they can't be worse than the series, can they?".

I stumbled across a new music download store, MusicGiants HD Music Downloads. It's interesting because they sell you albums in WMA Lossless format. So for once it's a download that says it's CD quality and really is. Unfortunately as always the price does not reflect what you care getting. $15.29 is the average price for a single disc album. Now that's reasonably cheap for us given the exchange rate, although I suspect not that cheap for the US. However against that you have to put the fact that the files come with DRM and so will only play on your Windows PC or a portable player.

Strangely apparently you can burn the files to a CD - which means you can then re-rip in a sensible format (eg FLAC) without any loss in quality. Unless WM DRM downgrades the quality when you burn it, which is quite possible.

So in the end it's still just as easy, and probably cheaper, to carry on buying on CD and ripping as before.