Ageing (dis)gracefully!
Archive for September, 2008
Last.fm Annoyances
Sep 15th
On the weekend I visited someones last.fm profile and was somewhat surprised to see that in the space of just a few months, they had racked up nearly 100k scrobbles, 24k of which were for the band Pineapple Thief. Now I am a big fan of the Thief, but how on earth is it humanly possible to listen to them so much in such a short space of time? There are not enough hours in the day to sit and listen? surely?…
Well I asked this person how they managed it (whilst already knowing the answer) and they responded that they leave music playing 24/7 on their computer so that it scrobbles.. They also admitted to leaving one of the new Marillion tracks ‘This Train Is My Life’ on a loop constantly, purely as they like the song and want it to chart highly on last.fms weekly charts… but they were not there to listen!
This sort of thing really does defeat the idea of last.fm it a bit and even though I am a big fan of the bands in question, it just seems wrong to try and ‘fix’ your musical tastes or try and boost a particular bands playcount.
I’ve got just under 30k scrobbles and have been on last.fm for 2.5 years and listen what i consider a lot! (several albums a day) but the thought of scrobbling things I am not even listening to never even occured to me. Whats the point?
There should be a system in place that recognises when someone is trying to cheat the system and flags this to a moderator, as what we could be left with is a completely fixed version of peoples musical tastes, rendering the original point of last.fm a little bit redundant.
They Think They Are So Clever?!!!
Sep 14th
Funny story on the BBC website.
Mass fainting in Tanzanian exam
Junior school pupils in Tanzania experienced a mass fainting fit while taking their final year exams, an educational official has told the BBC.
The 20 girls at Ali Hassan Mwinyi School in Tabora started fainting after finishing their first paper.
“I’m not a specialist but I imagine this was a case of mass hysteria that does happen in some of the schools,” Midemo Paul Makungu said.
He said it only affected the girls, some of whom took 40 minutes to revive.
“There was chaos, crying, screaming, running after that first paper,” Mr Makungu, Tabora’s educational officer, told the BBC News website.
More than 140 Standard Seven pupils were taking the national exam at the school in the north of the country.
He said special arrangements were made so that those who had fainted could finish the other two papers they had that day.
“They eventually finished at 11pm,” he said.
It is not the first such incident at the school – over the last month there have been several mass fainting fits amongst the girl pupils.
“Normally this happens in girls’ secondary schools. It is very common here,” Mr Makungu said.
Now it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that these girls are very likely to be faking this to try and get out of their exams. Lazy bitches!! 
Happiness Is The Road
Sep 13th
The new Marillion album is almost upon us, and if you haven’t yet seen them in the news for their revolutionary new idea of leaking their own album to P2P networks before anyone else can, then where have you been this week? 
Here’s a brief video about the new album. Even if you have never given Marillion a chance before, have a watch of this.
I’ve now listened to the new album 4 times and it really is a return to form. Somewhere Else was good, but a relative let down after the stunning Marbles. This is back up there. Review to follow!
Stamp Duty
Sep 3rd
So the threshold for paying stamp duty has increased to £175k as reported here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7592852.stm
Can I just say – ARRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!
If they had done that 1 year ago when we bought our current house we would have saved £1554 quid!!!!!!!!
