Dubber recommends...

Things I find interesting, funny, or worth a mention 
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August 15, 2009

Late adopter

This is a bit of a test. Yesterday, after months of wanting one - arguably needing one - I finally managed to get myself an iPhone. And to be honest, now that I have one, I'm not entirely sure how I managed to go this long without. I've only had it around 12 hours so far, and I'm not as fast or as accurate as I'd like to be typing on the touch screen, but I did manage to knock out this blog post on it in just a few minutes. Haven't yet worked out how to link to anything - but the mere fact that I can put together and publish a blog post on my phone is impressive enough for me. I can also take videos, find my way around on the map, listen to music, play games and all that other clever stuff that iPhones can do... But this is the thing that's impressed me most so far.

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August 13, 2009

A day in the country

Weeks ago, before we'd even finished the academic year, Matt Grimes (left) mentioned to Jez (right) and I that we needed to have a meeting about the BA course for next year. A few minor tweaks to the curriculum, and a few bits and pieces to sort out as the course becomes increasingly popular. In fact, one of our classes appears to be oversubscribed by about 60%. So rather than meet up at the university, we decided to descend upon Matt's new country house.

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August 12, 2009

This website will self-destruct...

via news.bbc.co.uk

Interesting idea...

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August 8, 2009

SpotifiTunes

Quite a nice little doohicky for making your iTunes collection a clickable search thing for Spotify. Naturally, it's called Spotifitunes

Go have a look. Not sure if it'll cope with a library as big as my main one - but it was pretty impressive with the current laptop selection. Even found Dark Mean for me.

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August 7, 2009

A Week in Hamilton - part 3: Niagara Falls

I went on that boat. I got wet. Before I left to go to Canada, we had a look on the map to see where things were. Jake was the first to notice that Hamilton was not far from Niagara Falls. "You can't go all that way and not go to Niagara, dad..." And he was right. Mike from Vibewrangler, and Dave from the band Mississippi Kings offered to take me there on a day trip, and it was a really incredible experience. The magnificent grandeur and the spectacle of the falls themselves is brilliantly offset by the most outrageously gaudy, cheesy and Disneylandish tourist trap parade you've ever seen. It's jaw-droppingly awful.

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August 7, 2009

A week in Hamilton - part 2: Jacob Moon

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4vd9OVLO7Q&hl=en&fs=1&] My second day in Hamilton was spent doing a full-day consultancy at the home of singer/songwriter Jacob Moon, whose rooftop version of Subdivisions by Rush has earned him a fair bit of attention - including some positive feedback from the band itself. I arrived at Jacob's place on the Saturday evening. He and his wife Allison had headed south of the border to attend a concert and so I had the place to myself. Lovely place with a separate building out the back for a home studio and office space. The note on the kitchen counter said 'help yourself to anything', but I pretty much headed straight to bed as I'd been on the go for a week, with plenty of late nights out. I was pleased with a comfortable place to crash and a seriously good night's sleep.

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August 7, 2009

A week in Hamilton - part 1: Vibewrangler

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obyglcotNLs&hl=en&fs=1&] When you have one of the worst city tourism ads ever, it's hard to rise above the poor reputation that former steeltown Hamilton Ontario ('the Hammer') is subjected to - but in actual fact, it's an utterly brilliant place. Especially if you like music (despite the evidence above). After the radio conference in Toronto, and a quick wander around the city, I made my way by train to Hamilton - about an hour away - and was collected at the station by Glen - co-owner of Vibewrangler Studio, who had organised a public event and a series of consultancies with local musicians - and in whose house in the country I was staying.

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August 6, 2009

Hamiltron - city of the future

They actually made a poster and put it up around town After a good look around the city of Toronto, I made my way down to Hamilton - a city with more or less the same reputation and the same relationship to Toronto as the New Zealand Hamilton does to Auckland. I was there to do a number of speaking engagements, consultancies and, it turns out, sightseeing. Naturally, the bad reputation is largely undeserved and the city and its people are brilliant. For instance - ask anyone what the music scene here is like, and without exception, they'll say 'It's fantastic.' You don't often hear that. You'll hear that a town has some great musicians, or that it's better than you might think. Sometimes even 'pretty good' - but hardly ever 'fantastic'. And looking around, they're right. It really is.

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July 30, 2009

Radio Conference in Toronto

Every two years (give or take) the Radio Studies Network holds their international conference somewhere in the world. I went to my first one in Madison, Wisconsin in 2003 - and that's where I met Prof. Tim Wall, who was the guy who arranged for me to come to Birmingham in the first place. We were on a panel together. He gave his paper, entitled 'The Political Economy of Internet Radio', and I followed it with my paper, entitled 'There's No Such Thing As Internet Radio'. We got into a debate about it over pizza and beer, and somehow by the end of it I had the promise of a job in Britain. The radio conference after that was in Melbourne in 2005, which I didn't get to - and in 2007, I was at the Lincoln conference. Toronto this year has been pretty good so far, and I've met some really interesting people along the way. You always get some of the same faces, and it's been good to catch up with the people I know and like already - and you add friends each time you go to one. There aren't too many people doing radio studies around the world, so it's good to chat with the people whose work you read and teach from.

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July 19, 2009

Everyone talk about - POP music

Tim, Dr Jazz and Jez in front of our grand hotel in Scarborough It's not quite 'New York, London, Paris, Munich'... but I did spend last week in that many cities - and we did talk about Pop Music. Liverpool I returned from Copenhagen on Sunday, washed my clothes, repacked my bags and set off on Monday morning to a conference in Liverpool to meet up with some of my university colleagues: Tim, Simon, Paul and Jez. It was the big IASPM conference (that's the International Association for the Study of Popular Music), and people from all over the world had gathered to talk about all sorts of interesting things - from the meanings of Hip Hop in Arctic Canada; the use of cassettes during the Chilean military dictatorship; and modes of Islamic representation in Turkish pop music - through to the 'Art within Art' of Gnarls Barkley's 'Crazy'. It was mostly pretty cool - though there's always the dire academic conference presentations where some dull moron has written a 12,000 word esoteric essay, has copied and pasted it in its entirety onto powerpoint slides - and wants to read it to you in a monotone.

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